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Monthly Archives: August 2016
U.S. flights to Cuba begin; Alaska Air gets set
Seattle-based Alaska Airlines today won the federal government’s formal approval to fly between Los Angeles and Havana, on the same day that JetBlue made a historic flight to Cuba. JetBlue’s Flight 387 from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to the central Cuban … Continue reading
Was SETI signal from aliens? Russians say ‘nyet’
Russian astronomers acknowledge that they picked up an “interesting radio signal” in the course of their search for alien transmissions, but that the signal was most probably a case of terrestrial interference. “It can be said with confidence that no … Continue reading
Why it’ll take years to see what Proxima b is like
University of Washington astronomer Rory Barnes says Proxima Centauri b is the biggest discovery in 20 years for planet hunters like himself, but it could take another 20 years to find out just how livable it is. The alien planet orbits a … Continue reading
Posted in GeekWire
Tagged Astrobiology, Exoplanets, planets, Proxima Centauri, Space
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Elephant census confirms catastrophic decline
A first-of-its-kind census of African savanna elephants reveals that populations have declined by as much as 30 percent over the course of just seven years. The backer of the Great Elephant Census, Seattle software billionaire Paul Allen, said the findings … Continue reading
IBM’s Watson makes AI trailer about AI movie
Experts may reassure us that artificial intelligence won’t take over the world anytime soon – but they just might invade the multiplex. At least that’s the plot developing at IBM, where the Watson artificial-intelligence team programmed a computer to come up … Continue reading
Posted in GeekWire
Tagged Artificial Intelligence, Bot or Not, IBM, Movies, Technology
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R.I.P.: Boeing’s Joe Sutter, ‘Father of the 747’
Boeing engineer Joe Sutter, who led the engineering team for the 747 jet in the mid-1960s and played a role in the investigation of the Challenger shuttle disaster in 1986, died this morning at the age of 95. His passing was … Continue reading
AT&T focuses on down-to-earth drone strategy
When you think of the up-and-coming players in the commercial drone market, you might think of Amazon, or Google … but how about AT&T? “AT&T is going to be one of the biggest users of drones in the United States,” Art Pregler, … Continue reading
Still no aliens: Lessons learned from SETI signal
Fifteen months after an intriguing radio signal was picked up from a sunlike star in the constellation Hercules, follow-up observations over the past couple of days have so far yielded nothing notable. That shouldn’t be too surprising. It’s the way things … Continue reading
NASA spotlights cloud app for citizen scientists
One of NASA’s longest-running citizen science programs isn’t just for kids anymore: A newly released app called GLOBE Observer can turn any smartphone user into a cloud researcher. And we don’t mean “cloud” in the computing sense. A program called … Continue reading
Posted in GeekWire
Tagged Apps, Citizen science, Climate change, NASA, Science, Space
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Hunt for Planet Nine leads to mini-worlds
The hypothetical world known as Planet X or Planet Nine hasn’t yet been found, but thanks to the search, astronomers have discovered smaller worlds on the solar system’s edge. Mapping such objects could lead to the big discovery: a planet that’s thought to … Continue reading
