In Spring of 2018, Microsoft's Project Natick team deployed the Northern Isles datacenter 117 feet deep to the seafloor off the coast of Scotland's Orkney Islands. Earlier this summer, marine specialists reeled up the shipping-container sized datacenter from the seafloor in order to study it and confirm their hypotheses regarding the viability of underwater datacenters. The team hypothesized that a sealed container on the ocean floor could provide ways to improve the overall reliability...
I’ve been saying for awhile that I wanted to get some surveillance cameras for the outside of my house. I keep putting it off (that money could be used for board games , after all!), but an incident on Tuesday finally is forcing my hand and I’ve started researching some options. What happened on Tuesday, you ask? Oh, nothing gouda. No...that's not a post-it note. Yep, you’re seeing that right. It is, indeed, a slice of cheddar cheese pressed snugly ont...
In a statement issued on Sunday, Microsoft posted on its corporate blog saying that it will continue discussions for a potential TikTok purchase in the United States. For the unfamiliar, TikTok is a video-sharing and social networking service based out of Beijing, China founded in 2012. TikTok allows users to create short dance, lip-sync, comedy, and talent videos and share them with thousands of other users on the platform. The app currently holds worldwide popularity, and TikTok has glo...
The Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft roll to pad 39A during its first test flight in February. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky Today, American astronauts will launch on a rocket from American soil to the International Space Station, marking a new era of human spaceflight. NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley, chosen for their experience on several previous missions on the space shuttle and extensive test pilot and flight experience, will fly on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon ...
What started out as a mission to gather sediment from an Antarctic ice shelf ended in a bit of a surprise when researchers discovered an array of strange creatures on the footage when they began to review it. Back in 2016, a team of scientists from around the world sought to learn more about the mysterious ecosystems under Antarctica's vast ice shelves - specifically, the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf. The trip turned into a disaster, with the research team drilling through half a mile of ice o...
This week, in "science is cool," we have a new rocket launch from aerospace firm bluShift . Founded in 2014, this Brunswick, Maine based start-up company has devoted its research and development to creating a unique line of rockets powered by bio-derived fuels. Their goal has been to integrate multiple innovative technologies into a single motor for the first time ever, and also to use a sustainably farmed fuel that increases performance and mitigates impact on the environment. In additio...
Seasons Greetings, everyone! All of us here at Stardock are wrapping up our work for 2020 as we prepare to go on our holiday break next week, but that doesn't mean we haven't made sure to fit some festivity into our days. Normally, we'd be a'wassailing at our holiday party together right now, but for obvious reasons, we're skipping that this year. Instead, we decided to share some cheer from our home offices by displaying our merriment in the form of ugly sweaters. Here are the results:...
By the time I publish this, it'll probably be "old news" and, oh, I don't know, maybe the aliens will have landed by then, but seriously: what the heck, 2020!? The monolith discovered out in the middle of Utah's Red Rock Country about a week ago disappeared on Saturday. Heck, for all we know, it disappeared before then, but Saturday is when the federal Bureau of Land Management's Utah office announced that the monolith had been removed by an "unknown party." Unknown party, huh? I'm just ...
Everyone loves a good mystery, and officials in Utah recently stumbled upon a doozy . On November 18, the Utah Department of Public Safety discovered a shiny metallic monolith in a remote rural area of the Red Rock Country while surveying herds of big horn sheep by helicopter. The monolith is eerily similar to the one found in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey , though it doesn't come with its own iconic background music track. Officials have no idea who may have ...
Nearly fourteen years ago, long before I arrived here at Stardock, some of my colleagues arrived to the office on a chilly morning. Tied to a post in the parking lot was a small poof-ball of a puppy, a little Shih Tzu mix, who would eventually come to be called Sophie. Sophie, in all her little floofy glory, not long after she was adopted by Pat Pretty much everyone here at Stardock is a major animal lover, so there wasn't any chance of Sophie being left out in the cold. Our manager ...
Image: NASA/JPL-CalTech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA Another Thursday, another blog, and once again I find myself back to discussing really cool space discoveries. For the record, I’m 100% good with this. I always enjoy when new space discoveries take me back “off world,” so to speak. In fact, one of science’s newest discoveries is about Ceres, a dwarf planet I spent quite a bit of time learning about back when we released The Ceres Initiative for Offworld Trading...
Image credit: NASA Last week, NASA announced a new launch date for the James Webb Space Telescope (sometimes called JWST or Webb). This orbiting infrared observatory was designed with longer wavelength coverage and improved sensitivity in order to complement and extend the discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope (which is now 30 years old!). Described as the "premiere observatory of the next decade," Webb's launch will occur from French Guiana on October 31, 2021. It will "...
A lot of new shows and movies were showcased this past Sunday during the Super Bowl. From Amazon Prime's upcoming The Lord of the Rings series to Marvel's Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness , I almost gave myself whiplash when I was catching up on everything I'd missed! I'm not much of a sports fan and I don't have cable, so I opted to have dinner and play board games with friends instead of tuning in - but hey, that's what YouTube is for, right? Her...
I first learned about Wordle on Facebook when I started seeing all these strange-patterned images show up on my feed. You would think that, with me being a word person, I'm inherently good at games like this, but the truth is...I'm not. I am routinely trounced in Scrabble. I may have an absolute lexicon of words floating around in this head of mine, but ask me to scramble limited letters around to make one and I come up dry, apparently! If you're unfamiliar with the game, it's a daily wo...
I have plenty of fond childhood memories of building things out of LEGO bricks with my family. Even in my adulthood, I find that I still enjoy building the occasional set - but it's a lot less freeform than I remember! I prefer to follow instructions and create what's laid out for me; I never had enough creativity or visual foresight to build incredible things from scratch without a guide. Fortunately, there are plenty of people who exist out there who don't have my problem, and build incredi...