Mark Zuckerberg saw the Amos-6 satellite as the first step in Facebook’s plan to provide satellite internet access to underserved regions of the world.
“As I’m here in Africa, I’m deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post (of course).
This weekend’s scheduled launch of the Amos-6 telecommunications satellite on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket would have marked the first step in Zuckerberg’s vision of providing low-cost internet access via satellite for millions if not billions of people in underserved regions of the world.
Video from Kennedy Space Center shows smoke rising from a SpaceX launch pad blast. (Credit: NASA)
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and a telecommunications satellite supported by Facebook were destroyed today in a launch-pad explosion at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, during preparations for a pre-launch static fire test.
No injuries were reported.
The explosion occurred at 9:07 a.m. ET (6:07 a.m. PT), the Air Force’s 45th Space Wing said in a tweet. USLaunchReport captured the scene in a dramatic video that showed the Falcon 9’s upper stage exploding. A huge fireball engulfed Launch Complex 40, sending up a pillar of black smoke.
Experts say human intelligence and artificial intelligence are likely to work together in the decades ahead, and that will pose a challenge for public policy. (Credit: Christine Daniloff / MIT file)
A 100-year project conceived by Microsoft Research’s Eric Horvitz to trace the impacts of artificial intelligence has issued its first report: a 28,000-word analysislooking at how AI technologies will affect urban life in 2030.
The bottom line? Put away those “Terminator” nightmares of a robot uprising, at least for the next 15 years – but get ready for technological disruptions that will make life a lot easier for many of us while forcing some of us out of our current jobs.
That assessment comes from Stanford University’s One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence, or AI100, which is Horvitz’s brainchild. Horvitz, a Stanford alumnus, is a former president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the managing director of Microsoft Research’s Redmond lab.
Horvitz and his wife, Mary, created the AI100 endowment with the aim of monitoring AI’s development and effects over the coming century. The 2030 report represents a first look at AI applications across eight domains of human activity.
“This process will be a marathon, not a sprint, but today we’ve made a good start,” Russ Altman, a bioengineering professor who is AI100’s Stanford faculty director,said today in a news release.
Crew members at the Santa Clara Abel Santamaría International Airport in Cuba welcome JetBlue Flight 387, the first commercial flight to Cuba from the U.S. in 55 years. (Credit: Business Wire)
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 city of Santa Clara marked the first regularly scheduled commercial flight between the two countries since 1961.
The chill in air travel began after Cuba’s communist revolution, and warmed up last year when a deal was struck to let U.S. carriers make up to 110 daily round-trip flights to Cuban cities. Since then, the Transportation Department and U.S. airlines have been laying the groundwork for service to Cuba.
Detectors for the RATAN-600 telescope form a wide ring in this fisheye view. (Credit: SAO-RAS)
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.
The signal spike at 11 GHz was detected by the RATAN-600 radio telescope in the southern Russian republic of Karachay-Cherkessia in May 2015, during a campaign that’s part of the worldwide search for extraterrestrial intelligence (a.k.a. SETI).
The detection didn’t come to light until last weekend, but once news started circulating, it touched off parallel observations by the SETI Institute and the Breakthrough Listen Initiative. Those groups focused on the same area of the sky that was the target of the Russian observation: a sunlike star known as HD 164595 in the constellation Hercules.
An artist’s conception shows a view of the surface of the planet Proxima b, with the red dwarf Proxima Centauri near the horizon. (Credi:t: M. Kornmesser / ESO)
The alien planet orbits a red-dwarf star at a distance that puts it in a zone where liquid water could conceivably exist. The fact that such a world circles the sun’s nearest stellar neighbor, 4.2 light-years away, puts it on top of the list of potentially habitable planets beyond our solar system.
Barnes, however, emphasizes the word “potentially.” During a lecture at Seattle’s Pacific Science Center, set for 7:30 p.m. tonight, the UW astronomer will delve into the opportunities and obstacles for life on Proxima Centauri b.
“We’re looking at a 15- to 20-year time frame before we can answer this question of whether it’s habitable,” Barnes told GeekWire in advance of the talk.
Savanna elephant populations are dropping dramatically. (Credit: Great Elephant Census)
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 were “deeply disturbing.” The tally was laid out today at the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s World Conservation Congress in Honolulu.
Allen spent more than $7 million to fund and manage the survey and make the results available online.
“Armed with this knowledge of dramatically declining elephant populations, we share a collective responsibility to take action, and we must all work to ensure the preservation of this iconic species,” Allen said in a statement.
The two-year project took advantage of sightings from the ground and from the air, as well as standardized data collection and verification methods, to come up with a baseline for future surveys. The project’s leaders figure that they counted more than 93 percent of savanna elephant populations across nearly 600,000 square miles of savanna.
IBM’s Watson AI software selected creepy moments for a trailer touting the AI thriller “Morgan,” including this close-up of the Morgan AI. How meta! (Credit: 20th Century Fox / IBM)
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 with a scary trailer for “Morgan,” a thriller about a genetically modified, AI-enhanced super-human.
GeekWire’s crack team of movie critics gave “Morgan” an average grade of C – but I have to say Watson’s trailer gave me the creeps. Maybe it’s the way short cuts are spliced together to create a sense of ominousness without revealing what the heck is going on. Maybe it’s the eerie music. Or maybe it’s just knowing that a faceless piece of software helped create it.
Boeing engineer Joe Sutter, the “Father of the 747,” takes a turn in the pilot’s seat. (Credit: Boeing file)
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 announced online by Ray Conner, president and chief executive officer of Boeing Commercial Airplanes. The cause of death was not mentioned.
Sutter’s role in creating Boeing’s biggest passenger jet earned him the title of “Father of the 747.” His 4,500-member team came to be known as “the Incredibles” for putting the plane into production 29 months after it was conceived.
“It remains a staggering achievement and a testament to Joe’s ‘incredible’ determination,” Conner wrote.
A drone hovers near an AT&T cellular tower for an inspection. (Credit: AT&T)
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, who heads AT&T’s drone program and serves as director of national mobility systems, told GeekWire in an interview.
That may sound like a bold statement – but Pregler is just reinforcing what John Donovan, AT&T’s chief strategy officer and president of technology and operations, said last month at the company’s Shape conference in San Francisco.
Long before Amazon gets its drone delivery fleet in operation in the United States, AT&T will be deploying fleets of robo-fliers across the nation, thanks to regulatory changes that took effect this week.
Because of those changes, AT&T is now able to use unmanned aircraft systems to inspect cellular towers and check cellphone reception in urban areas – including the University of Washington’s Husky Stadium, where the procedure is being demonstrated this week.
