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XAI has its sights set on creating the world’s largest supercomputer and, according to a recent announcement, the Elon Musk-founded artificial intelligence company has selected Memphis for its site. The Greater Memphis Chamber revealed the southwestern Tennessee city had landed the planned project on Wednesday, saying it will be the "largest capital investment by a new-to-market company in Memphis history." The supercomputer will be called the "Gigafactory of Compute," the group said. Musk said it's "true" in a reply to an X post that contained footage of the Greater Memphis Chamber’s press conference announcing plans for Memphis to get the...

Retired American astronaut William Anders, who was part of the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, has died after his small plane crashed into Puget Sound in Washington State. The 90-year-old died after the small aircraft he was piloting crashed near Orcas Island on Friday, resulting in a fireball as the plane hit the water. Officials with the United States Coast Guard Pacific Northwest said the crash happened just before 11:45am on Friday. Video footage shot on the Sound shows the plane flying high in the sky before it plummets as it begins a dive. Just before the plane began to...

resident Joe Biden’s top climate adviser said he understands young activists’ impatience with the slow progress on combating climate change — but warned that the president’s political rivals are preparing a “U-turn agenda” that would reverse all the administration’s progress. White House national climate adviser Ali Zaidi’s comments Wednesday at the POLITICO Energy Summit come as the youth-led environmental group Sunrise Movement signaled it is withholding its endorsement of Biden, who has struggled to draw support from the young voters who were crucial to his election four years ago. Zaidi said the administration needs to communicate the stakes of the...

Explanation: Blown by fast winds from a hot, massive star, this cosmic bubble is huge. Cataloged as Sharpless 2-308 it lies some 5,000 light-years away toward the well-trained constellation Canis Major and covers slightly more of the sky than a Full Moon. That corresponds to a diameter of 60 light-years at its estimated distance. The massive star that created the bubble, a Wolf-Rayet star, is the bright one near the center of the nebula. Wolf-Rayet stars have over 20 times the mass of the Sun and are thought to be in a brief, pre-supernova phase of massive star evolution. Fast...

Technical personnel work at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center in Beijing, on Sunday. China's Chang'e 6 touched down on the far side of the moon and will collect samples from the surface. Photo by Jin Liwang/EPA-EFE June 2 (UPI) -- After a month-long journey, a Chinese spacecraft has landed on the far side of the moon, the China National Space Administration said. Chinese space administration officials have said they intend to collect rock and soil from this notoriously difficult-to-reach region of the lunar surface for the first time in history, the CNSA said. "Everyone is very excited that we might...

A team of scientists has created an ultra-thin coating that can provide high-efficiency night vision to any glass surface, including ordinary reading glasses. Designed using something called a non-local metasurface, the plastic-wrap-thin coating also lets through all of the visible light, allowing users to see perfectly during daytime or at night. Some previous efforts using a non-local metasurface to create a night vision coating have shown limited success. However, those efforts have suffered from severely limited image quality. The inventors of this newest coating say they have broken through that barrier, resulting in a high-definition image visible light image that...

Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall – Proverbs 16:18 This proverb has been until recently, a prophetic warning. In today’s America it is a news item. We are already in a great fall from grace. It raises the question – what will we do about it? Here is what the present administration is doing, along with the medical community, and the rest of sleepy overindulgent America.

A 29-year-old woman in Hidalgo, Mexico is dead after attempting to take a selfie with a train bound for Mexico City, but got too close to the tracks. The woman, who has not been identified, was part of a crowd to witness the final leg of a Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC) 1930 Empress 2816 steam locomotive's journey, which departed from Calgary in Alberta, Canada on April 24. Last year, the cross-continental Final Spike Steam Tour became the first ever steam-powered passenger train in North America to traverse across Canada, the United States, and Mexico in a single trip. In...

The best beers in the world are easier to get than ever before. Forty years ago, customers strolling through grocery stores would only find endless variations on the easy-drinking domestic lager. Care for a Busch? Miller High Life? Bud Light? If you were lucky, you might find an imported Irish beer like Guinness, a beach-y Mexican beer such as Corona, or perhaps even Foster’s, that Australian beer sold in the oversized can. Today’s hopheads can pick from tens of thousands of the best beers that deliver every conceivable flavor and alcohol level. Hazy double IPAs are now sold alongside zippy...

Explanation: Magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 4565 is viewed edge-on from planet Earth. Also known as the Needle Galaxy for its narrow profile, bright NGC 4565 is a stop on many telescopic tours of the northern sky, in the faint but well-groomed constellation Coma Berenices. This sharp, colorful image reveals the galaxy's boxy, bulging central core cut by obscuring dust lanes that lace NGC 4565's thin galactic plane. NGC 4565 itself lies about 40 million light-years distant and spans some 100,000 light-years. Easily spotted with small telescopes, sky enthusiasts consider NGC 4565 to be a prominent celestial masterpiece Messier missed.

When astronomers turn our radio telescopes out towards space, we sometimes detect sporadic bursts of radio waves originating from across the vast expanse of the universe. We call them “radio transients”: some erupt only once, never to be seen again, and others flicker on and off in predictable patterns. We think most radio transients come from rotating neutron stars known as pulsars, which emit regular flashes of radio waves, like cosmic lighthouses. Typically, these neutron stars spin at incredible speeds, taking mere seconds or even a fraction of a second to complete each rotation. Recently, we discovered a radio transient...

In a pioneering study, a team of researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital have identified a brain network essential for human consciousness. Aided by advances in ultrahigh-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology, researchers discovered previously unknown pathways connecting various brain regions, forming what they termed the “default ascending arousal network” (DAAN). In findings published in Science Translational Medicine, researchers propose that this brain network plays a pivotal role in maintaining wakefulness and integrating arousal with awareness in the resting human brain. The discovery could be a significant breakthrough in understanding a range of neurological disorders while shedding...

Jared Isaacman @rookisaacman · 4h Unreal SpaceX team.. great job. You just brought the most powerful booster in the world one step closer to reusability.

The Jovian moon Io as seen by the New Horizons spacecraft. The mission's camera caught a view of one of this moon's volcanos erupting. (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio) The Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), located on Mount Graham in Arizona and run by the University of Arizona, is part of the next generation of extremely large telescopes (ELTs). With two primary mirrors measuring 8.4 m (~27.5 ft), it has a collecting area slightly greater than that of a 30-meter (98.4 ft) telescope. With their resolution, adaptive optics, and sophisticated instruments, these telescopes are expected to probe deeper...

SpaceX is targeting 8:50 am EDT, 7:50 am CDT for Starship Flight Test 4. Didn't see where a live thread had been started, so thought I would do it. Link above goes to https://www.spacex.com/launches which will redirect to X.com You can also watch on Nasa Space Flight's Youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhJRzQsLZGg

Prehistoric engravings of giant snakes along South America's Orinoco river are among the largest examples of rock art we know of anywhere in the world, with some stretching for more than 40 metres.The Orinoco is one of the world's largest rivers, flowing through Venezuela and along its border with Colombia. "There's an outstanding record of rock art along the Orinoco, especially on the Venezuelan side," says José Oliver at University College London. "Usually, they are paintings found in rock shelters."Engravings are common in many open-air sites along the river, he says, but not all of them have been officially recorded...Since...

Explanation: What if you saw your shadow on Mars and it wasn't human? Then you might be the Perseverance rover exploring Mars. Perseverance has been examining the Red Planet since 2021, finding evidence of its complex history of volcanism and ancient flowing water, and sending breathtaking images across the inner Solar System. Pictured here in February of 2024, Perseverance looks opposite the Sun and across Neretva Vallis in Jezero Crater, with a local hill visible at the top of the frame. The distinctively non-human shadow of the car-sized rover is visible below center, superposed on scattered rocks. Perseverance, now working...

Here is a live stream of the latest attempt to get Starliner off the ground from Nasa Space Flight's youtube channel. Launch is scheduled for 10:52 EDT. This is an instantaneous launch window. If they have any delay it will be scrubbed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rInMeY7m4vA I tried to find the betting odds on it actually getting off the ground today, but couldn't find anything. My bet is 50%. Tomorrow SpaceX is launching Starship Flight Test 4. Launch window starts at 8 am EDT. I give SpaceX 90% chance of getting it off the ground.

An international team of researchers studying a 4,000-year-old Egyptian skull that had signs of cancer say they have found evidence that ancient Egyptian medical practitioners knew about and potentially even tried to treat the deadly disease...While previous studies have revealed that Egyptians from these periods were able to identify, describe, and treat diseases and traumatic injuries, build prosthetics, and even place dental fillings, this study is the first to show that these surprisingly advanced ancient people may have tried to treat cancer around the same time they were building the pyramids...To conduct their analysis, the researchers were able to procure...

There are plenty of contenders for the top 10 deadliest insects. Forget great white sharks and grizzly bears, insects are actually the most dangerous group of animals in the world to humans. This is in a large part due to their proficiency at carrying and spreading deadly diseases, from malaria to the black death. Many species of insect feed on vertebrate blood, putting them in a prime position to carry nasty bacteria, viruses, and parasites from victim to victim, and often from animal to human.