Vast longitudinal dunes up to 330 feet (100 m) in height in the equatorial deserts of Saturn’s moon Titan are the Solar System’s most monumental surface structures, but the chemical composition of their dark organics remains a fundamental, unsolved enigma, with acetylene ice detected near the dunes implicated as a …

Google is testing its Duplex technology internationally for the first time, the company announced on Tuesday. The service will be used to confirm holiday operating hours for a pilot group of New Zealand businesses. The test. “Businesses in this pilot group will receive an automated call from Google asking to …

Joe Hill’s one of those authors that might have slipped past you without you noticing. Over the years he’s written some great speculative fiction though, such as Horns, NOS4A2 and Heart Shaped Box, as well as 20th Century Ghosts and Strange Weather. The latter two are collections of his shorter …

WeWork, once valued at $47 billion, will be worth as little as $7.5 billion on paper as SoftBank takes control of the struggling co-working business, CNBC reports. SoftBank, a long-time WeWork investor, plans to invest between $4 billion and $5 billion in exchange for new and existing shares, according to …

  Despite owning the most popular mapping app in the world, Google acquired Waze for almost a billion dollars in 2013. Google did not shut down the app as many had feared, but it has slowly integrated Waze’s crowdsourced driving features into Google Maps. Google is adding a raft of …

  After over 40 years, the Strategic Automated Command and Control system (SACCS) no longer runs on venerable 8-inch floppy drives from circa 1972. As of this past June, the entire system has moved to a “highly-secure solid-state digital storage solution.” That’s according to Lt. Col. Jason Rossi, commander of …

  It’s good times to be in the foundry business — at least if you are TSMC. The firm has announced plans for much higher capital expenditures than it originally forecast for this year. Originally, TSMC expected to spend ~$11B on CapEx improvements for 2019. Now, the company will spend …

  This year, for the first time since it launched the Surface product family back in 2012, Microsoft debuted a design from an x86 CPU manufacturer other than Intel. While the company has built non-x86 Surface machines before, the ARM-derived variants in the family exited the market after the Surface …

An international team of ornithologists led by by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History has discovered and scientifically described a new species of flowerpecker from the island of Borneo. The spectacled flowerpecker (Dicaeum dayakorum), an adult female, on March 31, 2019 at the Lanjak Entimau Wildlife Sanctuary, Sarawak, …

Physicists using the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility have created a new compound of plutonium (Pu) with an unexpected, pentavalent oxidation state — Pu (V). The new compound is solid and stable, and may represent a transient phase in radioactive waste repositories. A plutonium dioxide nanoparticle. Image credit: Kristina Kvashnina. One …