New York Faces Invasion of Hand-Sized Flying Spiders - but They Should't Worry

Oprah is in shambles. | Photo by Valerie Macon / AFP via Getty Images Apple has announced that Reese’s Book Club has found an official home within Apple Books. The Hollywood star has amassed a strong following of readers who vibe with her tastes, the likes of which can send featured titles into the stratosphere. It’s the latest partnership her media company Hello Sunshine has inked with Apple, which also produces Apple TV Plus original series like The Last Thing He Told Me. You can follow Reese Witherspoon’s monthly reading interests in audiobook format directly within the app, which now has a dedicated portal that makes it easy to find and purchase her latest recommendations. Reese’s Book Club has proven wildly popular, with her influence quickly outpacing the likes of Oprah’s. With more than 3 million... Continue reading…

Illustration by Laura Normand / The Verge Bill Gates has written a memoir, covering the days of his childhood all the way until he formed Microsoft in 1975. The book, called Source Code: My Beginnings, doesn’t go on sale until February 4th, 2025, but it’s available for preorder now. In a post on his blog, Gates says the book goes over “the tougher parts of my early life, including feeling like a misfit as a kid, butting heads with my parents as a rebellious teen, grappling with the sudden loss of someone close to me, and nearly getting kicked out of college.” It also covers Gates’ decision to co-found Microsoft with the late Paul Allen. My upcoming memoir Source Code is all about the lessons and experiences that laid the foundation for everything in my life that followed. h... Continue reading…

But first, here is an image of Jensen Huang not signing a women’s chest. | Photo: Getty Images Well, here’s Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, signing a woman’s chest in a crowded booth at Computex. In the video below, you can see he asks whether this is a good idea before he eventually signs the woman’s top. He then returns to signing more traditional fare. This isn’t an unusual sight when it comes to actors or musicians. But can you imagine Tim Cook doing that after an iPhone event? Or Sundar Pichai after Google I/O? Yet those men also cultivate very different public images than Huang. Instead of hoodies, double polos, thousand-dollar T-shirts, or business suits, he’s typically decked out in some kind of leather jacket. What he wants you to know from that sartorial choice is clear: he’s not like regular CEOs. He’s a cool CEO.... Continue reading…

Image: The Verge AT&T and Verizon are dealing with an outage causing dropped phone calls across the US. In a post on X, AT&T confirms “there is an issue that is impacting completing calls between carriers” and that the “carriers are working as quickly as possible to diagnose & resolve.” Verizon spokesperson Kevin H. King tells The Verge that the network is “operating normally” but notes that customers primarily in the Northeast and Midwest “are experiencing issues when calling or texting with customers served by another carrier.” We’re aware of reports that consumers in multiple states are unable to make wireless calls and we are currently investigating.— The FCC (@FCC) June 4, 2024 We still don’t know exactly when the outage started or what caused... Continue reading…

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., announced on Tuesday a "three-pronged approach" to curb the Justice Department's authority following the conviction of former President Donald Trump on multiple felony charges last week.

For a small, lumpy chunk of rock that barely reflects any light, Mars’ Moon Phobos draws a lot of attention. Maybe because it’s one of only two moons to orbit the planet, and its origins are unclear. But some of the attention is probably because we have such great images of it. Phobos is the largest of Mars’ two moons, the other one being Deimos. Scientists are uncertain about their history. They could be a pair of captured main-belt asteroids, two lobes of what once was a binary asteroid until capture separated them, or a second-generation object formed after Mars had already formed. Or they could be surviving fragments from an ancient collision between more massive objects. Phobos isn’t very large. It’s about 26 km × 23 km × 18 km and not massive enough to be rounded. Studies of its density show that it’s a rubble-pile body loosely held together by its own gravity. When the ESA launched its Mars Express Orbiter in 2003, its mission was to study Mars. One of its instruments is the High-Resolution Stereo Camera, a German contribution that produces colour images with up to two meters resolution. The instrument also has a black-and-white mode, and the original image of Phobos was black-and-white. Andrea Luck is a skilled image processor from Glasgow, Scotland, with a healthy enthusiasm for space images. He decided the original B&W image, which he describes as epic, needed to be updated to colour. “I was kinda tired of seeing this epic photo online only in black and white, so I decided to jazz it up with some colours!” he wrote on his Flickr page. It’s interesting to note that it’s a single image, not a composite. Here’s the original B&W image. This is the original image from the High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft. It caught Phobos over Mars’ limb on March 26, 2010. The waviness of Mars in the background is a by-product of HRSC’s line-scanning operation. Image Credit: ESA / DLR / FU Berlin (G. Neukum) The HRSC’s mission is to take stereographic images of Mars’ surface, capturing geological and morphological details. The goal is to map as much of the surface as possible. But at the bottom of its list of objectives are images of Phobos and Deimos. The HRSC captured this image of Phobos in 2017. It shows the Stickney Crater, Phobos’ largest impact crater, and the unusual grooves on the moon’s surface. Mars Express images helped scientists conclude that the grooves are likely from impact ejecta. Image Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin. CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO Images of Phobos have helped scientists better understand the odd moon, but they’re not enough to reach solid conclusions. Fortunately, a mission to Phobos and its sibling Deimos will be launched in a couple of years. JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, is launching the MMX mission in 2026. MMX stands for Martian Moons Exploration. Its goal is to understand the origins of Phobos and Deimos. MMX will also return a sample from Phobos in 2031. Once in Earthly labs, those samples should reveal a lot. But for now, we can enjoy this processed image of Phobos, which captures its nature as a fast-moving, rubble-pile moon with uncertain origins. The post How Mars’ Moon Phobos Captures Our Imaginations appeared first on Universe Today.

Six-string legends shared the stage in 2002. Continue reading…