SpaceX founder Elon Musk wants to know if Tongan residents would like him to save them from their potentially month-long internet blackout. The small pacific island nation was the site of a horrific volcanic eruption last weekend that caused mass evacuations, widespread electricity loss, and a nationwide internet…
Source: Gizmodo – Elon Musk Uses Internet to Ask the People of Tonga If They’d Like Help With Their Internet
Returning to exercise after any physical setback is tough. You trust yourself to listen to your body, but it’s also tempting to get back out there before you’ve fully recovered. However, jumping back into your fitness routine too soon can cause more harm than good—and this is especially true if you’re dealing with the …
Source: LifeHacker – When Can People With Long COVID Return to Exercising?
The Batman’s trailers have given us plenty of chances to hear those swelling horns and the sinister beat of the film’s main theme. But it turns out the full piece for Robert Pattinson’s dark knight isn’t all ominous gloom—it’s surprisingly stirring.
Source: Gizmodo – The Batman’s Main Theme Is Here, and It’s Surprisingly Hopeful
Soon after adding Banjo-Kazooie to Switch Online’s Expansion Pack, Nintendo is preparing to bring another classic game to the service. In February, The Legend Of Zelda: Majora’s Mask will join the lineup.
Save Termina before it’s met with a terrible fate!
The Legend of #Zelda: Majora’s Mask comes to #NintendoSwitch for #NintendoSwitchOnline + Expansion Pack members in February! #Nintendo64pic.twitter.com/WN2Q0Wqc8Q
— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) January 21, 2022
It’ll be interesting to see whether Nintendo has resolved the emulation issues many players had with Ocarina of Time, the predecessor to Majora’s Mask, on Switch. Majora’s Mask is one of the most highly regarded Zelda games, so it’d be disappointing if the full experience of the N64 title isn’t properly replicated on the handheld console.
Nintendo announced Expansion Pack, a higher tier of Switch Online that includes Nintendo 64 and Sega Genesis games, back in September. It said at the time Majora’s Mask was one of the games in the pipeline for the service. Other N64 titles on the way include F-Zero X, Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, Mario Golf and the original Pokémon Snap.
Source: Engadget – ‘The Legend Of Zelda: Majora’s Mask’ joins Nintendo Switch Online in February
Greater than three-fourths of US commercial fleet have been cleared for landing at airports where wireless companies have deployed 5G C-band, the Federal Aviation Administration has announced. The expanded approvals (up from less than two-thirds earlier this week), which now include some regional jets, comes on the heels of an open letter
Source: Hot Hardware – FAA Quells Pilot Panic By Clearing 78 Percent Of US Airlines For Safe Landing In 5G Hotspots
Enlarge / Sébastien Loeb (FRA) and Isabelle Galmiche (FRA) of team M-Sport Ford World Rally Team are seen performing during the World Rally Championship Monte Carlo in Monte Carlo, Monaco, on January 20. (credit: Jaanus Ree/Red Bull Content Pool)
The 2022 World Rally Championship got underway on Thursday with the first night stages of the Monte Carlo Rally. It’s a year of big change in the WRC with the introduction of all-new Rally1 cars—the most powerful vehicles to compete in the sport since the demise of the flame-spitting Group B cars in 1986.
For some time, WRC cars have used turbocharged four-cylinder 1.6 L engines, and that standard continues for Rally1. The engines drive the front and rear wheels via prop shafts and differentials, as you might expect, but there’s no center differential between the front and rear axles, just a fixed 50:50 distribution of torque front to rear.
And the engine isn’t the only thing that sends power and torque to the rear differential; there’s now a hybrid unit behind the fuel tank that has its own shaft to that differential. This is a spec component, supplied to all the teams by Compact Dynamics, a subsidiary of Schaeffler, which worked closely with Audi’s Formula E program.
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Source: Ars Technica – Meet 2022’s World Rally cars: Much more power, much more sustainable
Thirty-four quality assurance testers at Raven Software, the Activision Blizzard studio in charge of its massively popular battle royale, Call of Duty: Warzone, announced today that they are unionizing after weeks of striking over recently announced layoffs in their department. Calling themselves the Game Workers…
Source: Kotaku – Call Of Duty QA Testers Form Activision Blizzard’s First Union
Mysterious Russian shortwave radio station UVB-76, known as The Buzzer, normally broadcasts nothing but indecipherable beeps and numbers. But recently it has started to take music requests and post memes, after hackers seemingly took control of the channel for their own purposes. “Aboba” a voice repeatedly said over…
Source: Kotaku – Hacker Hijacks Military Numbers Station, Proceeds To Rickroll Everyone
OpenLiteSpeed ??is a free open-source lightweight HTTP server that can handle hundreds of thousands of simultaneous connections with low resource usage. In this tutorial, I will guide you step-by-step through the installation and configuration of OpenLiteSpeed and PHP on Ubuntu.
Source: LXer – How to Install OpenLiteSpeed and PHP on Ubuntu
OK, who put “Turkmenistan is going to attempt to extinguish the eternal fires of the Gateway of Hell” on their 2022 bingo card? Anyone? No? Right then.
Source: Gizmodo – How to Close the Gateway to Hell
schwit1 writes: The mandatory smartphone app that athletes will use to report health and travel data when they are in
China for the Olympics next month has serious encryption flaws, according to a new report, raising security questions about the systems that Beijing plans to use to track Covid-19 outbreaks.
Portions of the app that will transmit
coronavirus test results, travel information and other personal data failed to verify the signature used in encrypted transfers, or didn’t encrypt the data at all, according to the report by Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto cybersecurity watchdog. The group also found that the app includes a series of political terms
marked for censorship in its code, though it does not appear to actively use the list to filter communications.
And Olympic Athletes will be punished if they engage In Wrong Speak.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Security Flaws Seen In China’s Mandatory Olympics App For Athletes
If you have a grill that runs on propane, there will come a time when you need to deal with the empty tank. Depending on how old the tank is, there are a number of options available to you, from refilling or recycling to disposing of it entirely.
Source: LifeHacker – What to Do With Your Empty Propane Tank
X-planes are a class of experimental aircraft designed to test and demonstrate new innovations in flight—some were created for NASA, others for DARPA or the U.S. military. The first X-plane, X-1, was flown by Chuck Yeager in the 1940s and was the first craft to fly faster than the speed of sound. Over the decades,…
Source: Gizmodo – 11 of the Weirdest X-Plane Designs
The United Launch Alliance (ULA) is set to launch its USSF-8 mission today for the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command (SSC). The mission is set to launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 2pm EST.
Today’s launch will include two identical Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP) satellites (GSSAP-5
Source: Hot Hardware – Watch Live As Atlas V Rocket Makes Its Maiden 511 Voyage For US Space Force
Anybody who upgraded to the recent Rust 1.58.0 release will probably want
to move on to Rust
1.58.1; among other things it contains a fix for a security
vulnerability in the standard library. “We recommend all users
to update their toolchain immediately and rebuild their programs with the
updated compiler“.
Source: LWN.net – Rust 1.58.1 released
IDW Publishing became the fifth-most popular comic book publisher in America on the strength of adaptations of beloved franchises like Star Trek, Ghostbusters, Orphan Black, and CSI. But now two of its most popular series are being taken away: The company will lose both the Transformers and G.I. Joe licenses at the…
Source: Gizmodo – IDW Loses the G.I. Joe and Transformers Comic Licenses
Video games are a lot like years: They start coming, then they don’t stop coming, and they don’t stop coming, and they…yeah. Then you’ve got the games industry’s tectonically shifting release calendar, defined by an endless march of delays and cancellations. Even if you’re the most avid gamer, it’s a lot to keep…
Source: Kotaku – Here’s Every Upcoming 2022 Video Game Release Date
For many years, I had a Keurig. I loved my Keurig and its compact pods with their promise of just enough coffee to make the perfect cup without ever needing to measure. But every time I casually tossed one of those plastic pods in the trash can: guilt. They’re neither recyclable nor biodegradable, and tossing the…
Source: LifeHacker – 9 Inventive Ways to Reuse K-Cups
As part of an effort to regain its position as a leading maker of semiconductors amidst a global chip shortage, Intel is committing $20 billion to build a manufacturing mega-site in New Albany, on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, the company told TIME. From the report: The chip maker says it will build at least two semiconductor fabrication plants, or fabs, on the 1,000-acre site, where Intel will research, develop, and manufacture its most cutting-edge computer chips, employing at least 3,000 people. Construction will begin this year and the plant should be operational by 2025, the company said. Intel’s announcement is the largest private-sector investment in Ohio history and a bright spot in what has been a dismal few decades for manufacturing in Ohio and the Midwest. Big employers like General Motors laid off thousands as factory jobs relocated to the U.S. South and overseas. But as automation drives efficiency in factories, creating technical, rather than assembly-line jobs, Ohio is trying to mount a manufacturing comeback. “Our expectation is that this becomes the largest silicon manufacturing location on the planet,” Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger told TIME; the company has the option to eventually expand to 2,000 acres and up to eight fabs. “We helped to establish the Silicon Valley,” he said. “Now we’re going to do the Silicon Heartland.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Intel Reveals Plans for Massive New Ohio Factory, Fighting the Chip Shortage Stateside
Enlarge (credit: Vidal et al 2022)
The oldest known Homo sapiens fossil is about 36,000 years older than previously thought, according to a recent study. Volcanologists matched a layer of ash above the fossil skull to an eruption of southern Ethiopia’s Shala volcano 233,000 years ago. Their findings seem to line up well with other recent research about when our species’ branch of the family tree split from that of our nearest hominin relatives, the ancestors of the now-extinct Neanderthals and Denisovans.
Finding the oldest member of our species hasn’t been easy for paleoanthropologists. There’s only a handful of sites in Africa where early Homo sapiens fossils—anything older than about 100,000 years—have turned up, and some of the samples have been nearly impossible to pin a precise date on. At other sites, the fossils don’t quite have all the features that distinguish our skulls from those of our now-extinct hominin cousins: things like a high, round cranium (the round part of your skull that holds your brain) and a chin.
One fossil, a skull found near the Omo River in southern Ethiopia, does have all the hallmarks of anatomically modern humans; among other traits, Omo I has a chin and a tall cranium. The skull was buried (probably not on purpose) in a layer of sediment that was later covered by ash from at least one volcanic eruption. In theory, that ash should make it easy to measure the fossil’s minimum age.
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Source: Ars Technica – Researchers date the oldest known human skull at 233,000 years
