Research has shown that the Earth trails an asteroid barely a kilometer across in its orbit about the Sun – only the second such body to have ever been spotted. It goes around the Sun on average two months ahead of the Earth, dancing around in front like an excited herald of our coming. This object, known as 2020 XL₅, was first spotted in December 2020 using Pan-STARRS telescopes on the summit of Haleakala on the Hawaiian island of Maui. But the determination of its orbit required follow-up obse
Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, guides, and advice on how to easily get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and other stuff. If you were asked to name the worst thing about the internet, you may select cyberbullying, hacking, or information warfare. You would be wrong. The worst thing about the internet is in-app browsers. These ghastly creatures emerge when you click on a link in countless apps. Instead of opening the page in your choice of external browser, they cruelly launch a b
Read enough about Bitcoin, and you’ll inevitably come across people who refer to the cryptocurrency as a religion. Bloomberg’s Lorcan Roche Kelly called Bitcoin “the first true religion of the 21st century.” Bitcoin promoter Hass McCook has taken to calling himself “The Friar” and wrote a series of Medium pieces comparing Bitcoin to a religion. There is a Church of Bitcoin, founded in 2017, that explicitly calls legendary Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto its “prophet.” In Austin, Texas, there ar
In the summer of 1956, 10 scientists met at Dartmouth College and invented artificial intelligence. Researchers from fields like mathematics, engineering, psychology, economics, and political science got together to find out whether they could describe learning and human thinking so precisely that it could be replicated with a machine. Hardly a decade later, these same scientists contributed to dramatic breakthroughs in robotics, natural language processing, and computer vision. Although a lot o
Google Chrome has a new logo, which was recently rolled out with the latest developer builds of the browser. Behold, the dramatically modified icon that will soon grace your devices: Whoops. I must’ve uploaded the wrong image. Let me try again. Enhance! Hmm. Types away at keyboard. Okay, that is new-chrome-logo-2022.png. For reference, this is old-chrome-logo-2014.png: So yeah, it’s Chrome’s first new logo in eight years, but not that much has changed. Not to say that’s a bad thing, really. Th
Tesla is recalling nearly 54,000 vehicles in the US, as a recent Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta update allows its cars to perform a “rolling stop.” This means the vehicle doesn’t come to a complete halt at a stop sign, instead moving slowly through it. Unsurprisingly, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has issued a safety recall of the feature, which it deemed dangerous: Failing to stop at a stop sign can increase the risk of a crash. Thanks for that, NHTSA. The background:
Let’s get this straight: NFT is pronounced “nay-fey-tay.” That’s all there is to it. You might have read Corin Faife at the Verge claiming it should be said as “neft” — but they’re wrong. It’s nay-fey-tay. Forever and ever, nay-fey-tay. I can see where Faife is coming from, I really can. “Neft” is an elegant solution to saying those three letters. As it doesn’t appear NFTs are going anywhere, this pronunciation approach would save us all a lot of time. But here’s my issue: why should we have an
Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, guides, and advice on how to easily get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and other stuff. Back in 2019, Twitter introduced a feature called Topics to bring you tweets related to your areas of interest, without having to follow more people. On paper, it’s a great idea to keep your core timeline the same while getting updates about topics you might be interested in. But it’s a bit tricky managing your feed so you’re not overwhelmed by all those sugge
The “metaverse” seems to be the latest buzzword in tech. In general terms, the metaverse can be viewed as a form of cyberspace. Like the internet, it’s a world – or reality, even – beyond our physical world on Earth. The difference is that the metaverse allows us to immerse a version of ourselves as avatars in its environment, usually through augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR), which people are and will increasingly be able to access using tools like VR goggles. While it all seems ve
If cats can be simultaneously dead and alive, can space aliens exist and not exist at the same time? It might sound like the kind of thing you’d ask while sitting around a campfire with two kinds of smoke lingering in the air, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an important question. At the center of our capacity for scientific inquiry lies a simple query: are we alone in the universe? For millennia we’ve gazed at the skies with a binary perspective. Either they’re out there and we haven’t found the