With a drop in passenger numbers because of coronavirus travel restrictions, the Boeing 747 jumbo jet is meeting its end earlier than we expected. Many airline operators are deciding to permanently ground their 747 fleets sooner rather than later in a bid to reduce operating costs. But they’re not retiring without sending us a little goodbye. Australian operator, Qantas’ last ever 747 flight took to the skies yesterday afternoon bound for Los Angeles....

If you believe the experts, we’re heading towards the worst crisis in the history of… financial crises. That sounds gloomy — and it is. You can look at the news and the state of the world and be excused if you’d want to hide under your pillow until it’s gone. It’s all awful, and we’re royally fucked. But… what else is new? When I grew up, I remember vividly first learning about the possibility of nuclear war....

That takes makes it the 11th investment in Jio Platform this year, with the Indian company raising $15.2 billion to date. With that, Jio has achieved a notable record: it has raised more money than all Indian tech startups combined in 2019. According to data from research firm Tracxn, Indian startups raised $14.5 billion last year. Jio’s investment spree started in April with Facebook pumping in $5.7 billion in exchange for 9....

In an exclusive interview with Reuters, employees from the US car making titan revealed that the company is working on a whole host of electric vehicles — at least 20 of them — for release over the next three years. [Read: Germany orders all fuel stations to provide electric charging points] Suppliers to GM said that commercial vehicles are some of the most profitable product lines and, as such, well-known automakers don’t want to “leave the door open for Tesla....

Apple already uses 120Hz displays in its iPad Pro, a feature it calls ProMotion, and can dynamically adjust the refresh rate depending on the content on screen. The new iPhones Pro will reportedly come with a similar feature, catching up the wealth of 90 and 120Hz displays on Android phones over the past few years. Other reported features include better FaceID, 3x optical zoom (as opposed to the not-actually-telephoto 2x on current devices), 5G support, and a LiDAR scanner like the one introduced in the recent iPad Pro....

The approximately six billion people on Earth whose recent ancestry is not from Africa will have inherited between 1% and 2% of their genome from our closest but now extinct relatives: the Neanderthals. East Asians and Oceanians have also inherited a small amount of ancestry from the Denisovans, another close relative of Homo Sapiens. Now a new study, published in Science Advances, suggests that early humans living inside Africa may also have interbred with archaic hominims....

Researchers from New York’s Binghamton University designed the system to detect Soviet PFM-1 landmines — nicknamed “butterflies” due to their wing-like shape. Their small size and largely plastic construction make them hard for humans to spot and almost invisible to the metal detectors used in landmine clearance. More than a million of these mines have littered Afghanistan since military helicopters dropped them across the country during the Soviet-Afghan War in the 1980s....

Ring sells indoor and outdoor security cameras that you can monitor from anywhere via a cloud-based interface, which means you can see what’s going on inside and around your house in real time, watch archived footage, see the residential address you registered your account with, and even remotely talk to people indoors. Naturally, you’d expect such a system to be tightly secured. But Motherboard’s investigation found that Ring doesn’t check when a login from an unknown IP address is the actual owner of the account, or display a history of logins so you can figure out if hackers may have popped in for a look....

The service had been blocked since April 2018 due to the company’s refusal to share its encryption keys with Moscow’s secret services — a requirement of Russia’s anti-terrorism laws. However, the service had remained widely available and popular throughout the ban. Kremlin critics cast the U-turn as an admission of defeat, but telecom watchdog Roskomnadzor said it was lifting the restrictions because the company had shown a willingness to tackle terrorism and extremism on the platform....

— Ishan Agarwal (@ishanagarwal24) July 1, 2020 The device was first spotted by Russian YouTuber @1garri (via Ishan Agarwal). While it’s not totally certain the device is supposed to be the Note 20 Ultra, several details point to this being the case. — Garri (@1garri) July 1, 2020 For one, the device appears to sport a periscope lens like the existing Galaxy S20 Ultra. For another, it matches the shake posted by leakster Ice Universe — who also mentioned the phone would come in a copper color....

Now we know. At a smaller scale ‘Unpacked Part 2,’ the company revealed its latest and greatest folding phone will be available on September 18 for a cool $1,999.99. That’s just 20 bucks more than the original Fold launched at, so it’s nice to see there isn’t too much of a price hike this time around — although one would hope so given the price eclipses some high-end laptops. So what do you get for your extra $20 bucks?...

Welcome to another edition of Bitcoin Today, where I, Satoshi Nakaboto, tell you what’s been going on with Bitcoin in the past 24 hours. As Rousseau used to say: If you love yourself, you won’t do drugs! Bitcoin Price We closed the day, September 8 2019, at a price of $10,441. That’s a minor 0.73 percent decline in 24 hours, or -$76.82. It was the lowest closing price in one day....

Welcome to another edition of Bitcoin Today, where I, Satoshi Nakaboto, tell you what’s been going on with Bitcoin in the past 24 hours. As Marcus Aurelius used to say: If you love yourself, you won’t do drugs! Bitcoin price We closed the day, July 12 2020, at a price of $9,276. That’s a minor 0.38 percent increase in 24 hours, or $35. It was the highest closing price in one day....

Welcome to another edition of Bitcoin Today, where I, Satoshi Nakaboto, tell you what’s been going on with Bitcoin in the past 24 hours. As Albert Einstein used to say: Let’s whip up a knowledge omelette! Bitcoin price We closed the day, April 16 2020, at a price of $7,116. That’s a decent 7.17 percent increase in 24 hours, or $476. It was the highest closing price in six days....

OpenAI said in a blogpost that the system is a 12 billion parameter version of the landmark GPT-3 language model: DALL-E — a portmanteau of the names of surrealist artist Salvador Dalí and Pixar’s robot WALL-E — was trained on a dataset of text-image pairs extracted from the internet. This allows it to create entirely new pictures by exploring the structure of a prompt — including fantastical objects combining unrelated ideas that it was never fed in training....

The big idea here is all about giving artificial intelligence agents more agency. According to the researchers: Basically, there’s something other than just algorithms and architecture that makes our brains tick. According to the researchers, this “dark matter” is social interactions. They argue that AI must be capable of “subjective awareness” in order to develop the necessary neurological connections required to display advanced cognition. Per the paper: Making an AI as smart as a human isn’t a simple matter of building bigger supercomputers capable of running faster algorithms....

We say probably because, based on all the evidence, it would be weird if it didn’t. Scientists have long thought Europa, a small icy moon about a quarter the size of Earth, might contain life. After all, it’s supposedly got everything you need to sustain biology as we know it: oxygen, water, and nutrients. But there’s always been one hitch: Europa’s oxygen and its water are separated by a thick sheet of ice....

With the number of devices we all carry with us each day continuing to grow, it’s no surprise that we’re still trying to work out the whole charging thing. Each device often comes with its own charger, but nobody wants to carry all those around. On the flip side, few of these chargers are compatible with each other, compounding the irritation. So it stands to reason the charger of the future will be a compact, ultra-versatile battery that also happens to host enough power to comfortably keep all of your devices up and running, preferably at once....

This is excellent turn of events for Huawei. Just a few weeks ago, it faced oblivion. The embargo was an existential threat for the company, preventing it from sourcing chipsets, mobile modems, and even the underlying ARM instruction sets used by its HiSilicon Kirin processors. Now, it’s able to resume as it previously did. Huawei doesn’t emerge entirely unscathed, however. It’s suffered tremendous reputational damage, which will take years to reverse....

As noted by sleuths on Reddit, once you install the update, Siri will ask you for a default music service to choose when you request a song. Until now, if you had to play music on Spotify, YouTube Music, or any other service, you had to ask “Hey Siri, play WAP on Spotify.” When iOS 14.5 rolls out, you might not have to worry about it. Currently, this feature is available in iOS 14....