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Microplastics—small pieces of plastic less than 5 millimeters in length—are becoming ubiquitous ecological pollutants. Research has shown that these tiny particles are potentially harmful in their own right, and it’s unclear what effect they have on the pollutants attached to them. Now, researchers report in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology Letters that UV filters in […]

Construction on the world’s largest radio astronomy observatory, the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), began this week and is expected to be completed by 2028. The SKA, to be built in Australia and Africa, will collect radio signals from celestial objects and promise to provide clues to some of the most mysterious questions in astronomy, such

Thunderbird recently merged with K-9 Mail, an open source mail client for Android, and plans to turn K-9 Mail into Thunderbird For Android in the summer of 2023. Developers are testing the K-9 Mail beta version, gradually introducing new changes that will be included in future official versions. It added swipe actions last week, and

As the Arctic warms, American beavers are moving north. Beaver populations are increasing in the tundra of Alaska and Canada today. It’s not yet known what this means for the Arctic’s ecosystem. Beavers are known as “natural dam engineers” and can use materials such as branches, shrubs, stones, and soil to build dams and cabins

Russian security firm Kaspersky has disclosed CryWiper, a malicious program that pretends to be ransomware but is actually designed to destroy data — named after the .cry extension that the malicious program uses to destroy files. The malware targeted Russian courts and mayor’s offices, but further details are unknown. Kaspersky claims that CryWiper does not

3D printing construction company ICON has won a $57.2 million contract from NASA to develop 3D printers to build infrastructure on the lunar surface, such as landing sites, roads and homes. The printer will use lunar-native materials such as moondust and rocks. Shipping raw materials from Earth to the moon is very expensive, and the

AIDS is a global public health problem, a chronic, potentially life-threatening disease caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Because HIV mutates rapidly into new strains, developing a vaccine is difficult. An experimental HIV vaccine produced antibodies in 97 percent of participants, according to a study published in the journal Science. Of 36 trial participants

The Archaeological Society of America has published an open letter calling on Netflix to classify Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse as a work of fiction rather than a documentary. Graham Hancock is a best-selling author of historical archeology, much of his work revolves around ancient myths and megalithic structures, and the new Ancient Apocalypse is about

According to a report from Zhuhai Gongbei Customs, a woman pretended to be a pregnant woman to smuggle Intel CPUs. According to the report, on the afternoon of November 25, Zhao, a woman from the mainland, was wearing a yellow dress and entered the country through Gongbei Port. The woman claimed to be 5 to

Non-profit hoster and cloud computing service provider Fosshost hosts several well-known open source projects for free, including GNOME, Armbian, Debian, and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) — GNOME and Debian don’t depend on Fosshost for their core infrastructure. The Fosshost website fosshost.org issued an announcement that it will be offline soon, expressing its deep

Google has announced that its Android messaging app, Messages, will begin a public beta of end-to-end encryption for group chats in the coming weeks. Messages is the default short message application of the Android system. Google has been testing end-to-end encryption since 2020, and users will see a lock icon representing encryption in the speech

Kristi Noem, the Republican governor of South Dakota, signed an executive order Executive Order 2022-10, prohibiting the installation of TikTok on state-issued devices. The reason was national security concerns. TikTok’s parent company is China’s ByteDance, which has more than 1 billion users worldwide, including 135 million users in the United States. The executive order expresses

OpenAI released ChatGPT, a prototype of a general-purpose chatbot, which can start conversations with users on various topics. ChatGPT is based on OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 model, which can talk fluently like humans, showing the great progress of chatbots in the past few years. It also demonstrates the flaws of chatbots, presenting false or false information as