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San Francisco’s first tech boom wasn’t about silicon, but steel. Steel cable that triggered a revolution in urban transportation. Scotsman Andrew S. Hallidie, an experienced maker of wire rope (steel cable), employed his expertise to invent the cable car on Clay Street in San Francisco, with the first run on August 2, 1873. Hallidie said he wanted to surmount hills in the City too steep for horse-drawn streetcars.

Not only read more

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A star is born: On its one-year anniversary, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope published an image capturing the formation of 50 young stars in vivid detail, including some that indicate the development of future planetary systems.

The new Webb image features the closest star-forming region to us, at roughly read more

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(CNN) – A geometry problem that has been puzzling scientists for 60 years has likely just been solved by an amateur mathematician with a newly discovered 13-sided shape. Called “The hat” because it vaguely resembles a fedora, the elusive shape is an “einstein” (from the German “ein stein,” or “one stone”). That means it can completely cover a surface without read more

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“Hi, Joel? It’s Marty Cooper.” Engineer Martin Cooper cradled a bulky object to his ear, listening. The gray device had two rows of numbered buttons between the ear and mouthpiece. An antenna poked from the top, reaching skyward to pick up invisible signals from the city’s jangling atmosphere. Next to the sidewalk, cars and taxis zipped down read more

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SAN FRANCISCO, March 24 (Reuters) – Intel Corp (INTC.O) co-founder Gordon Moore
, a pioneer in the semiconductor industry whose “Moore’s Law” predicted a steady rise in computing power for decades, died Friday at the age of 94, the company announced. Intel and Moore’s family philanthropic foundation said he died surrounded by family at his home in read more

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You probably wouldn’t win a staring contest with it, though you’d be hard pressed to look away. Taller than a mailbox, with an eight-foot wingspan, the shoebill is quite a kick to observe! This hefty bird with its lesson-in-gray plumage is endemic to swamps and wetlands of Central and East Africa. Solitary in nature, even when paired with another, the birds like their space and will feed at opposite ends of their read more

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Meta Trained an AI on 48M Science Papers. It Was Shut Down After 2 Days
Galactica was supposed to help “organize science.” Instead, it spewed misinformation.

In the first year of the pandemic, science happened at light speed. More than 100,000 papers were published on COVID in those first 12 months — an unprecedented human effort read more

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Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (14 September 1769 – 6 May 1859) was a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science. He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). Humboldt’s quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography. read more

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See the James Webb Space Telescope’s Dazzling New Photo of the Cartwheel Galaxy
Located 500 million light-years away in the Sculptor constellation, the galaxy got its unique wagon wheel-like shape from a cosmic collision
Several hundred million years ago, astronomers believe the Cartwheel Galaxy collided with another smaller read more

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A Chess Robot Broke a Kid’s Finger
And the child is being blamed for violating safety policies.

Chess isn’t typically a contact sport. At the Moscow Open earlier this month, however, a robot broke a seven-year-old player’s finger because he moved too suddenly for the robot’s liking.

The Guardian reports that a video of the July 19 incident, which the newspaper read more

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This Week’s New Space Images From The Webb Telescope And More Will Make Your Jaw Drop
Webb’s ‘Cosmic Cliffs’
A close-up of the Carina Nebula—a nursery 7,600 light-years distant—shows apparent ridges, valleys and pillars of hot dust and gas. Like all of Webb’s first targets it’s in the southern hemisphere’s night sky—that just happened to be where Webb was pointed during July 2022.

The read more

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Meet the world’s largest plant: A single seagrass clone stretches 180 km in Western Australia’s Shark Bay
Next time you go diving or snorkeling, have a close look at those wondrously long, bright green ribbons waving with the ebb and flow of water. They are seagrasses—marine plants which produce flowers, fruit, and seedlings annually, like their land-based relatives.

To read more

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Gif inventor Stephen Wilhite ‘helped shape the modern world’
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a gif is worth millions. The image file format has been a defining element of internet culture for decades, with glass-raising DiCaprios and mic-dropping Obamas facilitating self-expression in a faceless digital world. And we have one man to thank for all the jokes, snark read more

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Magpies have outwitted scientists by helping each other remove tracking devices
When we attached tiny, backpack-like tracking devices to five Australian magpies for a pilot study, we didn’t expect to discover an entirely new social behaviour rarely seen in birds.

Our goal was to learn more about the movement and social dynamics of these read more

bigfin squid

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Man Who Found World’s Deepest-Dwelling Octopus and Jellyfish Scores 3-of-a-Kind, With Deepest-Dwelling Squid
There’s a dynamic duo of divers out there that can’t seem to keep to stop finding tentacled animals in the deepest of undersea zones, where pressure and temperature prohibit the vast majority of ocean life from surviving.

Whilst read more