High-resolution observations from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft of mysterious bright spots (faculae) in Occator crater on the dwarf planet Ceres suggest the existence of a brine reservoir — which is about 40 km (25 miles) deep and hundreds of km wide — that emerged to the surface through long-lived cryovolcanic activity …

  Credit: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images It’s a “good news, bad news” situation for Huawei. The Chinese electronics giant just surpassed Samsung to become the world’s largest smartphone maker, but it might be running out of steam. Huawei CEO Richard Yu has told investors that the company will have to stop …

Chinese Hackers Infiltrate Taiwanese A presentation at the Black Hat (virtual) Security Conference this week revealed details of a number of hacking operations aimed at the Taiwanese semiconductor industry. The Taiwanese security firm CyCraft presented details of its investigation at the conference. At least seven Taiwanese companies were penetrated in …

How connected TV measurement proves its A lot has been written about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the world of advertising. Budgets were decimated and marketers scrambled to find other ways to do more with less. One of the less talked about themes, however, has been how the …

Apple Won’t Allow Cloud Gaming like xCloud and Stadia on iOS Complaints about the Apple App Store are as old as the App Store itself, but that doesn’t make the latest development any more aggravating for gamers. Despite extensive beta testing, it looks like Microsoft will be unable to launch …

In a virtual machine There are a lot of practical reasons to set up an OS like Windows 10 in a VM rather than using it as a native installation. If you have to deal with files you can’t trust, need to test multiple OS installations on the same system, …

So Excel Won’t Reformat Them as Dates Microsoft Excel is an incredibly powerful program that’s just as essential in a laboratory as it is in the average office. However, scientists have had just about enough of Excel renaming genes as if they were dates. It didn’t seem likely anyone would …

99-Million-Year-Old ‘Hell Ant’ Paleontologists have found trapped in a piece of Burmese amber a unique scene of a prehistoric ‘hell ant’ (subfamily Haidomyrmecinae) attacking a nymph of Caputoraptor elegans, an extinct cockroach relative. The ancient encounter presents some of the first direct evidence showing how the newly-identified hell ant species, …

May Form Ammonia-Water Hailstones A new study suggests that during Jupiter’s violent storms, hailstones form from a cooled mixture of water and ammonia gas, similar to the process in Earth’s storms where hail forms in the presence of supercooled liquid water; growth of these Jovian hailstones, dubbed ‘mushballs,’ creates a …

Vast Areas of Mars’ Night Sky Pulse in Ultraviolet Using new data from the Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph (IUVS) on NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) spacecraft, scientists have found that the atmosphere of Mars pulses in ultraviolet three times per night, and only during Martian spring and fall. The …