Sony has had a rough few days. The Japanese tech giant has lost a whopping US$14 billion (£10 billion), or about 9% of its total value, since rival Microsoft’s announcement that it is purchasing popular videogames maker Activision Blizzard for nearly US$70 billion. While some of Sony’s loss is arguably due to short-term panic selling across the wider market, the company is clearly in a corner. PlayStation is Sony’s largest, most profitable, and fastest-growing business, and the loss of a key sup
It’s not often that the sudden appearance of a new impact crater on the Moon can be predicted, but it’s going to happen on March 4, when a derelict SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will crash into it. The rocket launched in 2015, carrying Nasa’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) probe into a position 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth, facing the Sun. But the expended upper stage of the rocket had insufficient speed to escape into an independent orbit around the Sun, and was abandoned without an
Can you believe Makayla was dropped from Bama Rush? Do you think Couch Guy was cheating? Did you see Gabby Petito’s last post before she went missing? If you don’t spend much time online, you may not recognize these names. But on TikTok, their stories became sensationalized, memeified, hashtagged and rehashed. The most recent is “#WestElmCaleb.” Women took to TikTok to share their experiences of being peppered with affection, strung along and ultimately ghosted by a New York City-based designer
The only difference between science fiction and science is patience. Yesterday’s mainframes are today’s smartphones and today’s neural networks will be tomorrow’s androids. But long before any technology becomes reality, someone has to dream it into existence. The worlds of science and technology are constantly in flux. It’s impossible to tell what the future will bring. However we can make some educated guesses based on recent breakthroughs in the fields of nuclear physics, quantum computing, r
The runaway anti-work train had a brutal crash on Fox New this week. The driver of the mangled vehicle was Doreen Ford, a moderator of the wildly popular r/rantiwork subreddit. The sub had exploded from 180,000 subscribers in October 2020 to almost 1.7m this month. That growth was dramatically stalled by Ford’s appearance on Fox. The interview was an obvious setup. A right-wing network had found an ideal target to denigrate a leftist movement: a 30-year-old dog walker who works 20 hours a week a
Nissan, Renault, and Mitsubishi just announced their common Alliance 2030 roadmap — we’re talking about 35 new EVs, fresh factories, and eye watering investments. But there’s one bit of news that’s more important than the rest. And you guessed it: there’s gonna be an electric Nissan Micra. I can barely compose myself. The 2008 Nissan Micra is the best car ever — and I can’t wait for the new one. No, you’re crying. I bought mine back in 2013, when the Harlem Shake was still a thing. My uni social
We all cried and whined when we discovered Apple’s Face ID system wasn’t compatible with face masks. And while the company introduced a few workarounds, it’s now ready for the real deal: Face ID that works with a mask on*. You might ask why there’s an asterisk sign? It’s not a typo. It’s there because this new system will only work with iPhone 12 and above. BOOOOOOO! Apple’s reasoning behind this is that the feature requires “advancements in the TrueDepth camera system.” And apparently, the pleb
Let’s face it: wrapping your head around EV charging infrastructure can be confusing. And actually waiting while your car gets filled with juice? No thanks. But what if you didn’t have to charge your vehicle at all? What if there was another way? And what if that way was battery swap stations? Way back in 2013, Tesla proposed the idea of a 90-second battery swap shop. Two years later, Tesla quit the effort. It switched its strategy, focused on the Supercharger network, and declared that battery
“Holy sharks, Batman, it’s periodic!” I exclaimed on Slack. It was the first lockdown of 2021 in Perth, and we were all working from home. And when astronomers look for something to distract themselves from looming existential dread, there’s nothing better than a new cosmic mystery. In 2020, I gave an undergraduate student, Tyrone O’Doherty, a fun project: look for radio sources that are changing in a large radio survey I’m leading. By the end of the year, he’d found a particularly unusual sourc
In recent weeks, a web-based word puzzle called Wordle has become a popular daily distraction. Suddenly, millions of people are focused on their vocabulary of five-letter words, and are newly aware of concepts like letter frequency and letter position as they strategize about the best opening words and faster solutions. For these people, Wordle is captivating. Previous research can help us understand how our brains respond to word games, and why we love them. Wordle is a single-player puzzle tha