A view of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef from low Earth orbit (shown at 8x normal speed). gif: NanoAvionics/Gizmodo Proprietary space-grade cameras are expensive, limited, and a pain to develop. Smallsat manufacturer NanoAvionics recently sidestepped any development issues and opted for something off the shelf instead. The company used a GoPro Hero 7 mounted to a … Read more
It doesn’t matter if an album was created in the world’s most advanced recording studio, mixed by a master engineer, and distributed to fans as high-resolution audio files. If you’re listening to it on a pair of wireless earbuds, you’re introducing lots of compression that’s going to diminish the experience. Bluetooth has its limits, but … Read more
An illustration of the Mars Express spacecraft which launched in 2003.Drawing: ESA The days of dial-up internet, AOL Instant Messenger, and Myspace may be over on Earth, but on Mars, the early years of the internet still live on. A Martian spacecraft has been running on software designed more than 20 years ago in a … Read more
For the past 10 years, the Curiosity rover has traveled across the Martian terrain, looking for clues to the planet’s potentially habitable past. Recently, the car-sized robot drove through a transition zone, going from an area that may have once hosted lakes on the surface to one that signifies drier conditions for the Red Planet. … Read more
The Apollo 13 Saturn rocket being rolled out to the launch pad in 1970.Photo: NASA For millennia, our species looked at the Moon as a place that would forever be beyond our reach, but 20th-century technologies finally made our natural satellite accessible to probes, landers, and even human explorers. Despite these achievements, however, the Moon … Read more
Photo: CHRIS DELMAS/AFP (Getty Images) If the story of Netflix’s ongoing financial issues were one of their shows thrown onto its streaming platform, most audiences would already find the whole thing was getting pretty repetitive. Following multiple rounds of layoffs this past spring, this latest episode in Netflix: When Number No Longer Goes Up has … Read more
Musk visiting the Tesla ‘Gigafactory’ outside of Berlin on September 3, 2020.Image: Maja Hitij (Getty Images) You’re here plants in Germany and Texas are burning money. Not literally of course, but these factories are losing “billions of dollars,” according to CEO Elon Musk in a recent interview. Elon Musk says that Tesla’s massive factories in … Read more
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who last year proclaimed himself the “Dogefather,” wants you to know that he never told people to invest in cryptocurrency, sparking confusion among those familiar with his enthusiasm for the subject. Speaking on Tuesday at Bloomberg’s Qatar Economic Forumthe richest man in the world stepped away from his past bullishness on … Read more
Photo: KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP (Getty Images) Eventually, Google and other big tech companies want to dispense with passwords entirely, but until that day comes, a Google Password Manager feature called on-device encryption might be your best bet for protecting your precious codes. Though it quietly came out earlier this springsince you can now easily access Google … Read more
An illustration of Demodex folliculorum. Photo: Shutterstock (Shutterstock) Scientists have finally unraveled the genetic secrets of humanity’s coziest roommates: Demodex folliculorum, also known as the skin mite. Among other things, the findings confirm that these moths actually do have uses, contrary to previous speculation. They also indicate that the microscopic animals may not be as … Read more
