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...
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...
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...
Happy 2021, everyone! Now that the holidays are over, it's back to accidentally writing the wrong year on everything for at least two weeks before everything starts to normalize and feel like routine again. Anyone have any major New Years resolutions? This is a little delayed, since it came out about a week ago, but I just couldn't stand the thought of people missing out on some dancing robots to ring in 2021. Boston Dynamics , who have become known over the last several years for their r...
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 ...
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...
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 "...
One of my favorite things to do (although it baffles me on a regular basis) is to witness concepts and technologies emerge that humans only dreamed about 40 or 50 years ago. Sometime last year, a company called Space Perspective announced their plans for a state-of-the-art luxury "space balloon" that would take people on a calm ascent into space. Last year, the Florida-based company began taking reservations for the coveted trips, which last 6 hours and come with a price tag of...
An eventful weekend at Kennedy Space Center in Florida delayed tests for the wet dress rehearsal of NASA's Space Launch System. In addition to dealing with multiple lightning strikes and malfunctioning ventilation fans, mission managers also found a problem with the gaseous nitrogen system. At dawn on Monday, the decision to resume the tests was made. NASA Ground Systems said that the launch director would soon give the "go" for tanking and that the weather would not be a problem. The 322-...
Sony announced new versions of its PlayStation Plus subscriptions yesterday. This is, apparently, a response to the Xbox Game Pass, and I would suppose many other subscription services for games out there. The PlayStation Plus sub plan is a combination of Sony's two current subscription services, PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now. Two new options will now include access to multiplayer gaming alongside a catalog of select PlayStation games to install or stream. Now, first and foremost,...