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NOAA Predicts Its Third Warm Winter in a Row

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This year, government scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are placing their bets on a warmer-than-average winter. In the East and southern two-thirds of the country, temperatures will be higher than normal, while Southern California, Texas, and Florida will be drier than usual. At first glance, this pattern looks a lot like the […]

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The Vatican Hosts a Hackathon

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In recent years, organizations have used hackathons to find code-enabled solutions for everything from the opioid crisis to gerrymandering. It's hard to imagine a field where a hack day hasn't been utilized to solve one problem or another. But tomorrow a group of budding entrepreneurs, developers, and technologists will be making hackathon history: participating in […]

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Cantina Talk: That Big Solo Cameo Was a Last-Minute Decision

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So. Solo: A Star Wars Story underperformed pretty substantially at the box office during its opening weekend, to the point where experts are saying the movie might lose money, making the prospect of a second standalone Han Solo movie pretty unlikely. For a sign of how much the movie flopped, experts are projecting that it’s […]

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A Mysterious Galactic Glow Hints at Hidden Pulsars

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In 2009, Dan Hooper and his colleagues found a glow coming from the center of our galaxy that no one had ever noticed before. After analyzing publicly available data from the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope, a satellite launched a year earlier, the team concluded that the center of the Milky Way was radiating more […]

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Genre, Genre, Everywhere: the Netflix Effect Spreads

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Late in an early episode of Castle Rock, the show chooses a humorless moment to poke a little fun at the audience. Henry Deaver (Andre Holland) sits in halting conversation with a mysterious young man (Bill Skarsgård), their bodies separated by glass and their voices joined by jailhouse phones. Or Deaver's voice, at least—the young […]

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Tomorrow’s Mini Medical Robots Could Squirm Like Maggots

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Conventional pharmaceuticals aren't always the best way to treat an ailment. Drugs are often imprecise, unpredictable, or come along with tricky side effects. Medicine is always trying to move on to more targeted treatments. And soon, robots will be one of those options: small and mobile, they could theoretically deliver pharmaceuticals right where they’re needed, […]

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Should I Delete My Tweets?

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Q: Should I delete my tweets? A: Tweets, by design, suffer from context collapse, the phenomenon by which the common understanding that existed when something was created dwindles and vanishes over time. Perhaps it would be better to erase your history than face the possibility of being misunderstood. Such functionality is not currently built into […]

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Love, Death & Robots and the Rise of NSFW Netflix

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If you haven't figured it out by the time you see a young Hitler being fellated by a Viennese sex worker, Love, Death & Robots isn't your average Netflix show. Of course, if you haven't figured it out, you probably haven't been paying attention: "Alternate Histories," which features said act being performed upon said icon […]

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How Will Houston Handle the Deluge of Hurricane Harvey?

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This story has been updated as of 4:45 pm EDT on Tuesday, August 29. Hurricanes are classified according to their wind speed. But a truer measure of their destructive potential would also include their moisture level. Just before making landfall on Friday night, Hurricane Harvey jumped up to become a category 4 hurricane, with sustained […]