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“We estimate that in the distant universe, for every 1,000 quasars, there is one double quasar. So finding these double quasars is like finding a needle in a haystack,” Dr. Yue Shen of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, explains. These newly-recognized pairs are the oldest of the 100 or so quasar pairs currently known to astronomers. The quasar pairs examined in this study are seen as they were the distant past, less than four billion years after the Big Bang....

An investigation from the Wall Street Journal revealed that the company gathered users’ device MAC addresses without informing them, or even Google. The report notes that the short video app collected this data for 15 months, up until last November when an app update was released. TikTok also used an additional layer of encryption to mask the data it captured. It’s standard practice to apply encryption on your internet traffic to prevent snooping....

The autonomous vehicle whizkid, Anthony Levandowski, has now been handed an 18-month prison sentence for theft of those trade secrets, TechCrunch reports. The judge hearing the case said it was the “biggest trade secret crime [they] had ever seen.” [Read: Rallycross is going electric in 2021 with a chaotic new race series across Europe] US district attorneys working the case originally proposed a 27-month-long prison sentence, claiming that Levandowski had operated on ego or greed, and was still a wealthy man despite being sued for $180 million....

Beginning in 2013, many students at universities in the United States began demanding that their lecturers do just that and provide ‘trigger warnings’ ahead of any potentially upsetting content. For instance, one student at Rutgers University in New Jersey highlighted the potential harm that The Great Gatsby might cause, with its ‘variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence’. As you might have noticed, the use of trigger warnings has since spread beyond US universities to educational institutions around the world, and further: into theaters, festivals, and even news stories....

The social microblogging platform has updated, reorganized, and shortened its regulations in an attempt to make it clear for users to understand what is and isn’t acceptable on the service. “We’ve gone from about 2,500 words to under 600. In 280 characters or less, each rule clearly describes exactly what is not allowed on Twitter,” wrote Del Harvey, Twitter’s VP of trust and safety, in a blog post announcing the changes....

I’ve been using the device for less than two days, and it has left a good impression in a lot of areas, including the camera. Before I talk about all that, let’s look at the specifications of the device: Specifications: Screen: 6.56-inch full HD screen with a 90Hz refresh rate Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G RAM: 8GB Rear camera: 48-megapixel gimbal-supported main sensor + 8-megapixel super-wide-angle sensor (120-degree field of view) + 13-megapixel bokeh sensor + 8-megapixel telescopic sensor (for 5x optical zoom) Front camera: 32-megapixel Internal storage: 256GB Battery: 4,315mAh Charging: 33W fast charging...

According to EV charging infrastructure trackers, Zap-Map, the UK now has 4,000 rapid chargers installed. In a tweet posted earlier today, Zap-Map declared that it’s now tracked the rapid chargers, which are installed at 2,667 locations. Zap-Map classes a rapid charger as anything capable of delivering more than 50 kW DC of power to an EV. For comparison, according to Nederland Elektrisch, the Netherlands — which has 1/3rd the population of the UK — has over 1,850 EV fast-chargers installed at the start of this year....

The sales, a first for UK police, occurred across two unreserved auctions that were finalized on September 26 via Irish firm Wilsons Auctions. In total, 62 lots of cryptocurrency were sold, which included Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, and Bitcoin Satoshi Vision. Data shared with Hard Fork reports Wilsons Auctions fielded 7,500 bids from across the world, including Brazil, Australia, Dubai, Canada, Singapore, and the USA. On average, 1 BTC sold for £6,798....

For many women, during the pandemic and associated lockdowns, closed Facebook groups have been a place to do just that. These groups offer a chance to escape the house virtually and spend time with like-minded souls, sometimes chatting, often venting, and seeking solidarity in virtual sisterhood. Mental health issues, chronic illness, domestic violence, children’s illnesses, and issues, divorce, death, infidelity: these are just some of the issues discussed in these groups, along with the more mundane minutiae of life....

This time, the US, the UK, and Australia are making a case against end-to-end encryption (E2EE), calling on Facebook to delay its plans to implement the privacy feature across its messaging apps until “there is no reduction to user safety and without including a means for lawful access to the content of communications to protect our citizens.” A “means for lawful access to the content” effectively amounts to providing law enforcement with a backdoor intercept, a request Facebook has consistently opposed citing security concerns....

That’s been the cycle since March 2020. The past couple of years have been hard on all of us, in different ways. I have a lot of work to do on myself, and I intend to get help and do that work. We all should. But I wager more than a few people reading this article are traveling along their own personal good/in-between/bad spectrum. And because we’re living through a real-world disaster, and not a movie disaster, we all need to keep doing our jobs in the meantime....

We’ve covered the launch of the first Escobar foldable phone (and analyzed the horrendous marketing campaign that went alongside it), but we never actual got our hands on one. Until today. And best of all? We did this whole thing in glorious moving picture form, something you can watch at the top of the page. [Read: The Canvia digital art frame is gorgeous, expensive, and flawed] So… what are you doing?...

A survey from Swedish micromobility firm Voi has found that incorporating e-scooters into the public transport ecosystem can help boost ticket sales at key city locations. The study, carried out in the German city of Stuttgart, found there was a 35 percent increase in rail tickets purchased by Voi users who ended their journeys at Bad Cannstatt station – one of the largest train stations in the city – when compared to other locations....

They can be taught in the real world, or in the virtual world using simulations. Companies like Tesla, Waymo, and Nuro use real-world testing to expose their AI systems to more driving scenarios. The theory goes that the more scenarios an AI experiences, the better it will be at predicting the erratic nature of our roads and highways. Testing in the real-world comes with a host of safety concerns about what happens if a self-driving car gets it wrong, the virtual though doesn’t come with the same concerns....

Some loved it, some hated, but almost all of us had no idea whether it was even legal. Based on information we uncovered at SHIFT, we resolved that it probably wouldn’t make it into production. All publicly available regulations suggested that steering wheels have to be round and complete to be legal in the US. However, Road and Track contacted the National Highway Transport Safety Administration, which, with a bemused look on its face, declared that it didn’t actually know if the “yoke steerer” is legal or not....

Tipper was developed by Nick Bild, a serial creator who seems to have an unquenchable thirst to create and innovate. He makes apps, trains neural networks, and literally has a gold badge in ‘problem solving’ on HackerRank. He says he was inspired to build Tipper while sitting idle in traffic, pondering the world from an engineer’s point of view. Here’s how Tipper works, according to Bild’s GitHub page: Bild told us that he thinks Tipper could be used for good, he envisions a use-case where the AI helps batters get better: A convolutional neural network running on an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier rapidly classifies these images against a model that was built during the training phase of the project....

Earlier this week, local reporters in California got another look at Elon Musk’s 1.5 mile long, $52 million, Las Vegas “Loop” that was supposed to be a total transport revolution, and it turns out that it’s still nothing more than a really expensive hole through the terra firma in which humans drive cars quite slowly. I have nothing more to say about that. At least The Boring Company is living up to its name....

New academic research, spotted by ZDnet, has found that crypto-jacking is way less efficient at generating website revenue when compared to traditional web-based advertising. The researchers say a website that includes three adverts can make five and a half times more money than a website that uses crypto-jacking to generate income. The figure is based on the average time a user spends on a website. Cryptojackers would have to keep users on their websites for nearly six minutes to be profitable....

So before we go predicting, pontificating, and prognosticating about what all those drones and robots and VR headsets are going to do for us next, it seems appropriate to look back at the decade gone by and what marketers can learn from it. Let’s return to the world of ten years ago, at the tail end of the aughts. President Obama has recently moved into his new house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue....

In its latest research, Select Car Leasing has revealed the tech-heaviest car brands and models on the market, analyzing how many tech features are advertised by the most popular automakers for each of their cars. So are you ready to see the results? The top 10 cars Yep, BMW models not only make up 60% of the list, but also occupy the first three places. Specifically, the BMW 5 series advertises the largest amount of tech features on the market, with a total of 59....