SATURDAY, 12 JUNE 2021, 21:41
Bids in 10-minute auction started at $4.8m for 20 July trip on Blue Origin spacecraft with Bezos and his brother.
Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin has sold the spare seat of the company’s 20 July New Shepard space rocket blast-off for $28m, the company announced on Saturday.
Related: Rocket men: Bezos, Musk and Branson scramble for space supremacy
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Bitcoin’s Taproot upgrade, the most anticipated upgrade for the largest cryptocurrency since 2017, has enough mining support to lock in activation.
Back in 2009, then-governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger requested $4.7 billion in federal stimulus money to help build an 800-mile bullet train system from San Diego to San Francisco. “We’re traveling on our trains at the same speed as 100 years ago,” the governor said. “That is inexcusable. America must catch up.” Nearly 12 years later, “a $929-million federal grant for the California...
A new extension for Microsoft’s code-editing tool, Visual Studio Code, “allows you to open, edit, and commit back to source-control repos without having to clone them on your local machine,” explains a new video. A Microsoft blog post calls it “a new experience that we’ve been building in partnership with our friends at GitHub to enable working with source code repositories quickly and safely...
McDonald’s equiped 10 of its restaurants in Chicago with automated speech-recognition for their drive-through windows. Now they’re facing a potential class-action lawsuit. Long-time Slashdot reader KindMind shares this report from the Register:McDonald’s has been accused of illegally collecting and processing customers’ voice recordings without their consent in the U.S. state of Illinois… The...
South Africa’s plans to tap emergency power from vessel-based plants faces another hurdle.
G7 summit hears move would slash the cost of jabs and accelerate the rollout of programmes across the developing world
Britain and Germany were last night under intense pressure to drop their resistance to proposals that would slash the cost of Covid-19 vaccines, following accusations that an agreement at the G7 summit to fund a billon doses will give the world’s poorest countries “crumbs...
Today is Record Store Day, an annual event celebrating the culture of independently-owned record stores. And music industry players have said they actually got more money from the sale of vinyl records than they do from YouTube. But is that changing? The New York Times reports those figures are from a time when YouTube was only selling ads on (or beside) music videos and then sharing that cash...
The prime minister has a host of problems to weigh up before deciding to remove all legal restrictions on social contact
Coronavirus – latest updatesSee all our coronavirus coverage
The key issue is the extent to which infections of the Delta variant first detected in India will lead to hospitalisations and deaths. The problem is that it’s too early to say. Because of the lag between cases...
The F.B.I. scored two major victories, recovering a Bitcoin ransom and tricking lawbreakers with an encryption app. But criminals may still have the upper hand.
The neuroscientist, broadcaster and author on the evolution of the brain, the mystery of consciousnesss, and why the next generation will be much smarter than us
David Eagleman, 50, is an American neuroscientist, bestselling author and presenter of the BBC series The Brain, as well as co-founder and chief executive officer of Neosensory, which develops devices for sensory substitution. His area...
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: The Biden administration launched an initiative Thursday aiming to make more government data available to artificial intelligence researchers, part of a broader push to keep the U.S. on the cutting edge of the crucial new technology. The National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Task Force, a group of 12 members from...
We tested the Apple AirTag and Galaxy SmartTag to see which would be easier to find if an item it was attached to was stolen. Here is what we found.
Plus: A Colonial Pipeline update, inside details of the FBI’s Anom caper, and more of the week’s top security news.
Prime minister stresses importance of being cautious, as cases of Delta variant continue to rise
Coronavirus – latest updatesSee all our coronavirus coverage
Boris Johnson has dropped a heavy hint that the final lifting of lockdown restrictions in England will be delayed by up to a month, as the government prepares to make a final decision over the weekend.
The prime minister, who is hosting...
How realistic are Metal Gears and Titans anyway? WIRED asked industrial design and robotics pros how they’d operate.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE News: California has unleashed an army of goats to munch away at overgrown brush and grass throughout the state in hopes of reducing the risk of wildfires this summer. State agencies have deployed the animals to roam, eat, and wipe out highly flammable vegetation. Recently, in an area near Lake Oroville in Northern California, between 350 and 400...
Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccines intended for South Africa remain suspended following a U.S. ruling.
Picking the right phone has become increasingly difficult. This breakdown of Apple’s lineup will help.
An effort to bring wild buffalo to the Great Plains aims to restore one of the world’s most endangered landscapes and increase climate resilience.
Whether it’s a graphics card or the PS5, delays and stock shortages seem to be the norm. The reasons involve the pandemic, politics, and … crypto?