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If you feel like everyone around you has the flu, it’s not your imagination.As of January 9, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that at least 15 million people have contracted the flu this season. Of these, 180,000 people have been hospitalized and 7,400 people have died from the flu, including 17 children.These numbers make the current flu season one of the worst in decades in the United States. Shira Madad, an epidemiologist at Harvard University’s Belfer Center and chief biological preparedness officer at New York City Health + Hospitals, who publishes weekly analyzes of respiratory virus…
If you’re even remotely concerned about your privacy, the rise of AI personal assistants may seem alarming. It is difficult to use personal information held by a model’s parent company without sharing it. OpenAI is already testing ads, so it’s easy to imagine the same data collection that fuels Facebook and Google creeping into chatbot conversations. A new project launched in December by Signal co-founder Moxie Marlinspike shows what a privacy-aware AI service could look like. Confer is designed to look and feel similar to ChatGPT and Claude, but with a backend configured to avoid data collection and an open…
“All I desire is an income of 20,000 sesterces from a safe investment,” declares a character in a poem by the Roman poet Juvenal (1st-2nd century AD).Today, 20,000 sesterces are approximately [Australian] Interest from investment is $300,000. Anyone would be happy with this much passive annual income.Just like today, ancient people understood that by investing their money, they could strengthen and expand their wealth.The Roman novelist Petronius (1st century AD) once wrote:Those who have money sail on favorable winds and control their wealth as they wish.So how exactly did ancient people invest their money?A noble house that hides silverIn ancient…
On January 11, 2026, I watched anxiously at California’s tightly controlled Vandenberg Space Force Base as an awe-inspiring SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted NASA’s new exoplanet telescope, Pandora, into orbit.Exoplanets are worlds orbiting other stars. From Earth, they are very difficult to observe because they appear as very dark spots right next to their host star, millions to billions of times brighter and drowning out the light reflected from the planet. The Pandora telescope will join and complement NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in studying these distant planets and the stars they orbit.I’m a professor of astronomy at the University…
Astronomers have gotten a rare glimpse of four baby planets in the process of growing. And something surprising was revealed. It’s that these toddlers’ worlds are getting brighter with age.The quadruplets orbit in a tightly packed orbit around the young star V1298 Tau, which is only 20 million years old (compared to the Sun’s 4.5 billion years), located about 350 light-years from Earth. A new analysis based on 10 years of observations shows that the planet is surprisingly light and sparse. In fact, it was so swollen that researchers likened the planet to Styrofoam.The researchers said the discovery provides a…
simple factsWhat is it: Westerlund Cluster 2Location: 20,000 light years from Earth in the constellation Carina.Share date: December 19, 2025Surrounded by clouds of orange and brown gas and dust and filled with twinkling stars, this new image from the James Webb Space Telescope appears to mark the entrance to a cosmic wonderland.In fact, this photo includes a prominent star cluster known as Westerland 2, located within a star-forming nebula known as Gum 29. The entire scene takes place within the Milky Way galaxy, 20,000 light-years from Earth.According to the European Space Agency, this brilliant cluster is compact, measuring between 6…
We’ve all experienced the inconveniences of a spotty internet connection, from access interruptions at work to your favorite shows buffering at the most tense moments. Years of major outages have served as a reminder that the internet can also face broader problems, bringing daily operations to a halt. But could the entire internet around the world go down?The Internet is often referred to as a “network of networks,” including those that link devices across homes, businesses, public spaces, and more. Therefore, for the entire Internet to go down, a lot of infrastructure would have to be affected within a short…
For those who have been watching the exodus of billionaires from California with some confusion, here’s what’s really causing concern: It’s not the 5% rate. As the New York Post highlighted on Friday, the proposed wealth tax would be taxed on shares that founders have voting rights in, rather than on shares they actually own. Let’s take Larry Page as an example. He owns about 3% of Google, but controls about 30% of the voting power through dual-class stock. Under the proposal, he would be liable to pay taxes on 30% of that. For a company worth hundreds of billions…
At a technology conference in Italy in October, Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos predicted that millions of people will be living in space “within the next few decades,” but said that “mostly” because they want to do it, and because robots are more cost-effective than humans when it comes to doing the actual work in space. That’s no doubt why my ears perked up a few weeks later at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco when I found an on-stage prediction by Will Bruey, founder of space manufacturing startup Varda Space Industries, so shocking. Rather than having robots do…
Although CRISPR ushered in a golden age of genetic research, there are hundreds of similar systems in nature that hold untapped potential for gene editing. Scientists have now made significant progress in explaining how a mysterious system called SPARDA works.The CRISPR system allows scientists to edit genetic information more easily than ever before. Although CRISPR is best known for its use in gene editing, it is actually a bacterial immune defense system that has been repurposed for human use.A recent study published in the journal Cell Research focused on another bacterial defense system known as SPARDA (short prokaryotic argonaute, DNase-related),…