NASA’s next Mars mission almost didn’t happen. A slow leak in the vacuum container surrounding the seismometer instrument on the InSight Mars lander — which launches no earlier than Saturday (May 5) — forced mission managers to call off its initially scheduled launch more than two years ago, in March 2016. And fixing the problem […]
Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk acknowledged on Friday that it was “foolish” of him to snub analysts on a conference call earlier in the week, but further needled Wall Street with a series of accusatory tweets. In a post-earnings call on Wednesday, Musk refused to answer questions from analysts on the electric […]
It’s that time of the year again. On Saturday, Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A, +2.30%) shareholders will pile into an arena in Omaha that holds 18,300, where they’ll watch Berkshire CEO Warren Buffett and Vice Chairman Charlie Munger for about five hours. It’ll be ample time for the investing titans to cover a broad swath of topics, […]
Scientists think they’ve stumbled upon a newly discovered mechanism that could explain why some people’s hair turns gray and others become afflicted with patches of unpigmented skin, a rare, stigmatized condition called vitiligo. Their research, published Thursday in PLOS Biology, suggests a gene that regulates the natural pigment melanin also keeps our immune system from […]
Australia is set to announce the country’s first space agency. Although the emphasis will apparently be on the commercial utilization of space, researchers are hoping there will be purely scientific efforts as well. The government plans to provide AU$38 million in “seed money” to get the agency up and running, Australian media reported today. Officials […]
Twitter wasn’t hacked, but it still really wants you to change your password. On Thursday, the company announced it had found and fixed a “bug” that stored user passwords internally without adequate security. Twitter played down the incident and said there’s no evidence any passwords were used for nefarious purposes. But it appears to be […]
A federal grand jury has indicted ex-Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn and five other former company executives on felony charges of conspiracy, wire fraud and violation of the Clean Air Act for their alleged involvement in the diesel car scandal that has engulfed the automaker. The indictment, unsealed in Detroit, details the plot to fraudulently rig […]
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported this week that illnesses from tick, mosquito and flea bites have tripled over the past several years. More than 640,000 patients came down with diseases transmitted by bites from these three types of insects between 2004 and 2016. Dr. Lyle Peterson, the report’s lead author, fears […]
Reality may be made up of multiple universes, but each one may not be so different to our own, according to Stephen Hawking’s final theory of the cosmos. The work, completed only weeks before the physicist’s death in March, paints a simpler picture of the past 13.8 billion years than many previous theories have proposed. […]
Tesla Inc investors gave a rare rebuke to iconoclastic Chief Executive Elon Musk on Wednesday after he cut off analysts asking about future profit potential, sending shares down 5 percent despite promises that production of the troubled Model 3 electric car was on track. Tesla’s future depends on the Model 3 and the company said […]
CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA, THE embattled data firm that worked on President Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, has told employees it is shutting down, along with its UK counterpart SCL Elections. The move, which impacts all offices of both companies worldwide, comes amid recent revelations that the company harvested the data of up to 87 million Facebook users […]
An engineer in California has an invention that she hopes will someday help people with damaged lungs breathe easier. Stanford University’s Annelise Baron has developed a synthetic version of something called lung surfactant. Lung surfactant coats the tiny air sacs in the lung. Without it, every breath would be a struggle, like blowing up millions […]
