Are we alone in the Universe? Billions of dollars are being spent trying to answer that simple question. The implications of finding evidence for life beyond Earth are staggering. The “before and after” mark would punctuate human history. Mars is currently the most popular exploration target to search for evidence of life elsewhere. Yet little is known about its early history. Our research on a Martian meteorite provides new clues about early surface conditions on the red planet. Windows into th
Apple has finally explained how it will allow Dutch dating apps to use alternative payment systems. The headline is this: Apple will take a 27% commission from these purchases — down from the 30% it collects through the App Store. Developers across the world are mad at this nominal discount from the iPhone maker, and rightly so — especially when the new directive is incredibly complex. We’ll get into all this, but first, here’s a refresher of what has happened so far. How did Apple get here? Las
It’s no big secret that the US tech hubs of yore – San Francisco, New York, and Silicon Valley – have been facing increasingly stiff competition over the past decade when it comes to attracting the hottest new tech startups and scaleups. While the relative contribution of those cities in terms of newly created unicorn companies peaked in 2014, the rest of the US steadily accumulated more VC funding, leading to faster growth of new tech hotspots. All over the continent and the globe, new tech hub
Meta made a chilling statement in its annual report: Facebook and Instagram may shut down in Europe if the company isn’t able to store and process data from the union’s users on US-based servers. Now, this piece isn’t looking into the background of this event — or the fact Big Zuck has made this threat before. Instead, it’s just a simple thought experiment where we imagine what the world would look like without Facebook and Instagram. And, in my mind? It’ll be probably be something like this: If
Can black holes become white holes? – Remy, age 9, Wangaratta, Victoria Hi Remy! Thank you for this great question. The short answer, unfortunately, is no. White holes are really just something scientists have imagined — they could exist, but we’ve never seen one, or even seen clues that one may exist. For now, they are an idea. To put it simply, you can imagine a white hole as being a black hole in reverse. So if time was running backwards, black holes would look like white holes. But time does
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