NASA is on the verge of finally launching the first Space Launch System (SLS) rocket after years of development. The Artemis 1 mission won’t have a crew onboard, but by the third launch, the SLS will be taking astronauts back to the moon for the first time in 50 years. Before that happens, needs to decide where on the lunar surface to send them. The agency has now identified 13 candidate regions near the moon’s south pole. The Apollo Program decades ago clustered the landings closer to the equator, far from the polar regions. However, NASA believes there’s a lot to be learned from the poles, which have more extreme terrain, with areas that are permanently illuminated or in shadow.
The age of dinosaurs lasted 165 million years, but that changed 66 million years ago. Scientists have long known that a large object smacked into the region we now know as the Yucatan Peninsula, resulting in a mass extinction that ended the reign of dinosaurs on Earth. Following the discovery of a second impact crater off the coast of Africa, we might have to rethink the end of the Cretaceous period. Scientists are calling the potential impact structure the Nadir crater. They say it was formed at roughly the same time as the famous 100-mile-wide Chicxulub crater in the Gulf of Mexico.
If you’re like most people, you have a multi-function fax/print/scan device that you use for scanning, or you just use your smartphone. If you’re a little more serious, maybe you also have a flatbed. That combination was good enough for me until I needed to scan a couple of shoeboxes of inherited photos. After some research, I bought an Epson Photo FastFoto FF-680W ($559 on Amazon). Its performance has blown me away. Epson bills it as “the World’s Fastest Personal Photo Scanner,” and after using it I have no reason to doubt that claim. Epson FastFoto FF-680W by the Numbers
If you want to find something online, you’re probably going to search . The search giant’s search architecture gets frequent updates in an effort to return more accurate and relevant results, but sometimes Google takes aim at a specific issue. In the next big search algorithm update, which will roll out in the coming days, Google says it’s targeting clickbait. Although Google doesn’t use the term “clickbait,” that’s what it’s going after. Google calls this the “helpful content update,” and it will prioritize pages that produce original, high-quality content. Meanwhile, pages that are built simply to rank highly with so-called search engine optimization (SEO) will be demoted.
(Photo: Alexander Grey/Unsplash)Sugar substitutes are widely loved for the flexibility they offer. Whether managing a medical condition or trying out a new fad diet, people have long turned to stevia, Splenda, Sweet ‘N Low, and other substitutes to sweeten up their food and beverages. The idea, of course, has always been that these sweeteners circumvent the health risks normally associated with sugar—but now choosing which packet to dump into your iced tea doesn’t appear so simple. Researchers from the US, Germany, and Israel have teamed up to conduct a study on the effects of artificial sweeteners, or non-nutritive sweeteners (NNS), on the human body.
(Photo: Stephen Andrews/Unsplash)Engineers at MIT have devised a flexible “electronic skin” that communicates wirelessly—without a single chip in sight. As wireless sensors become more affordable and accessible, people are increasingly looking for ways to use them to monitor their biology. Smartwatches and fitness bands routinely update users on their heart rate, blood oxygen levels, and exercise statistics, while certain body-mounted sensors give doctors insight into a patient’s vascular, endocrine, and even neurological function. But there’s one caveat to the way these sensors are made: semiconductor bulk. The sensors typically communicate via Bluetooth using chips powered by miniature batteries, and these configurations take up a great deal of space.
Europe is in search of new sources of energy as increasing tensions with Russia threaten to reduce the availability of natural gas. Two new consulting reports envision a future in which Europe gets much of its power from space-based solar arrays. Deploying such a system would be enormously expensive, but understanding the scale of this undertaking is the first step in getting it done. The European Space Agency (ESA) commissioned reports from UK and Germany-based consulting groups to determine how viable space-based solar arrays would be. Those reports are now complete and . With the reports done, it will be up to the 22 member states of the EU to decide if they want to move forward with these projects, but ESA head Josef Aschbacher has been working to build support for the plan, known as Solaris, across the continent.
(Photo: Mobile Pixels)Move over, side-by-side setups: Stacked screens are in. Or, at least, they’re trying to be. Mobile Pixels, creator of the folding portable external monitor, has launched a Kickstarter campaign for what it calls Geminos: a stacked pair of 24-inch screens that fold together like a laptop. So far, the campaign has done very, very well. Despite Geminos’ clamshell design, it’s meant for a desktop setup rather than a quick coffee-shop laptop session. As it’s opened, Geminos slides up on a central stand until it’s open at an angle (again, like a laptop) or flat, imitating two desktop monitors stacked on top of each other.
Previous leaks have tipped an “unlimited power” mode for Raptor Lake. This mode lets the CPU consume enough power to run a small village. However, it was assumed that was a manual unlock, so it could work on any motherboard. New reporting indicates instead it’s actually a new feature that will only be available only on 700-series motherboards. This could convince some overclockers to pony up for a new mobo, instead of buying an older 600-series. Raptor Lake will work on both 600-and-700 series motherboards, so this could be an incentive for power users to upgrade. Reports of this new feature are via a Hungarian tech site, via .
