Amazon aims to capitalize on the Prime Day momentum by continuing to provide great discounts across a wide range of products.

The Bond Touch 4 bracelet lets you send “touches” to loved ones, and the updated version includes better ‘touch sensitivity.’

It'll let you change your screen to BnW, disable always-on display, dim the wallpaper, and enable dark mode.

The FBI created a cryptocurrency as part of an investigation into price manipulation in crypto markets, the government revealed on Wednesday. The FBI’s Ethereum-based token, NexFundAI, was created with the help of “cooperating witnesses.” As a result of the investigation, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged three “market makers” and nine people for allegedly engaging in schemes to boost the prices of certain crypto assets. The Department of Justice charged 18 people and entities for “widespread fraud and manipulation” in crypto markets. The defendants allegedly made false claims about their tokens and executed so-called “wash trades” to create the impression of an active trading market, prosecutors claim. The three market...

Federal Communications Commission chair Jessica Rosenworcel rejected former President Donald Trump’s call to revoke CBS’s broadcast license on Thursday, calling it a familiar threat that “should not be ignored.” Trump called for the license to be revoked after the network shared two different edits of a recent 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump criticized the interview as “a giant Fake News Scam” in a Truth Social post on Thursday and claimed the network replaced her answer on a question about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “in order to save her or, at least, make her look better.” Trump shared a compilation of two versions of Harris’ answer to the question, with one labeled “actual answer” and the...

Anime has far more to offer than shonen battle anime, and Dan Da Dan is proof of that.

Yet another wave of green and purple auroras will shimmer in the night sky tonight and Friday evening over parts of the continental United States, likely visible as far south as Washington state, Iowa, and New York after a strong geomagnetic storm struck Earth at 11:15 am ET. It’s the latest display in an already rambunctious year for space weather. NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center issued a geomagnetic storm watch for October 10, noting that the storm has reached G3, or “strong,” strength, and could become “severe.” That’s the level at which power systems at high latitudes could set off high-voltage alarms, navigation instruments will have to account for interference, and spacecraft may need to make adjustments to stay aloft. The wave of solar wind will also extend the reach of auroras.  pic.twitter.com/AyOHxM91E4 The current wave of celestial activity began on October 8, 93 million miles away at a huge sunspot on our friendly neighborhood star. Sunspots are patches of the sun’s surface with unusually strong magnetic fields and they appear as dark spots. The boundaries of these spots are ripe for storms that trigger solar flares, large eruptions of radiation. They also foment coronal mass ejections (CME), bursts of magnetized plasma from the sun’s corona, its outermost layer.  The sunspot set off a massive flare and a CME that sprayed the solar system with high-energy particles. “This is a very speedy CME,” said Shawn Dahl, a space weather forecaster at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center, during a press conference this week. The CME is traveling 2.5 million mph, the “fastest CME that we’ve really measured” pointed toward Earth in the current sunspot cycle, Dahl added. When these particles collide with the Earth’s atmosphere, they create a phenomenon similar to how neon lights work, exciting gasses in the atmosphere and making them glow, creating auroras.  They typically cluster near the Earth’s poles (hence “northern lights”), but if enough energetic solar particles charge up the sky, auroras can reach much closer to the equator, which is why we’ve been seeing them all over the globe lately. This year, the sun is at the peak of its activity cycle. Roughly every 11 years, the sun’s magnetic poles reverse and as that flip approaches, there tends to be much more magnetic activity and thus more sunspots at the surface.  Anticipating how this activity will ripple toward our home planet is an important task, not just so we Earthlings can get our cameras ready and ooh and aah at the nighttime colors; space weather can create problems for communication, navigation, and the power grid.  Michael Wiltberger, deputy director of the High Altitude Observatory at the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Atmospheric Research, noted that predicting space weather is a lot like forecasting terrestrial weather. The weather we typically experience on the ground is driven by heat, moisture, and wind while space weather is driven by the electromagnetism of stars and planets. But both space and terrestrial weather emerge at the confluence of short- and long-term drivers playing out over a variety of different regions. While we don’t usually experience space weather on the ground, it generates a constant burbling mix of subtle and severe influences on the tools of our modern world.  “There’s stuff going on all the time that affects a wide range of things from radio communications to lifetimes of satellites to radiation risks to astronauts in space,” Wiltberger said.  And like your local TV weather experts, scientists studying space weather draw on a variety of instruments and models to generate useful forecasts with bulletins and visuals. On its website, the Space Weather Prediction Center produces predictions for “essential space weather communities” like aviation, emergency management, satellites, and space weather enthusiasts.  The key tools for space weather forecasting are spacecraft that monitor the flow of solar wind and the direction of the magnetic field. “It’s important because if it’s aligned in the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field, we’re not going to get a lot of energy dumped into the system,” Wiltberger said. “But if it’s in the opposite direction then the magnetic fields can interact and get more energy and more direct coupling during these geomagnetic storms.”  These measurements are then coupled with readings from ground-based cameras and magnetometers and fed into models to figure out how a rowdy sun will light up the Earth. Right now, one of the main goals is to extend the lead time for forecasts of how disruptive a geomagnetic storm will be. While scientists can see coronal mass ejections days before they start to impact Earth, they can’t easily figure out the strength and direction of the magnetic field, which, again, is the key factor in how much energy the Earth suddenly absorbs.  Even small hits from the sun can be impactful. GPS, for example, relies on timing signals between satellites to pinpoint locations on the ground. A geomagnetic storm can create delays in these signals, throwing off critical measurements. “If you’re driving your car, probably not a big deal,” Wiltberger said. “But if you’re doing precision agriculture and you’re trying to use it to tell you where to put the water on the seed that you just planted and you need really good accuracy, it’s a concern.” Satellites can be vulnerable to solar storms in other ways as well. On February 3, 2022, SpaceX launched 49 Starlink internet satellites into low Earth orbit, but a geomagnetic storm struck the next day. The storm increased the density of the atmosphere, creating unexpected drag and forcing most of the satellites to re-enter and burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere. The company said the nearly 6,000-strong Starlink satellite fleet weathered the recent storms just fine.  One of the biggest concerns is what a strong solar storm could do to electricity systems. Wiltberger said one could imagine a gargantuan, fast-moving coronal mass ejection that hits the Earth just 24 hours after leaving the sun.  If the magnetic field in this ejection happens to line up in the opposite direction of the Earth’s, it will create a big shift in the Earth’s magnetic field. A changing magnetic field, you may recall from your electromagnetism classes, can induce a current in a conductor, like, say, power transmission lines. That can then disrupt power delivery or cause parts of the grid to trip offline. Still, even a severe coronal mass ejection is unlikely to trigger a civilization-stopping blackout. “We’re probably not going to lose the power grid, but the power grid may actually have to take steps to bring more power generation capability online, defer maintenance, do those types of things,” Wiltberger said.  And perhaps losing a few lights on the ground for a while isn’t such a bad thing when the night sky lights up.  Update, October 10, 1:50 pm: This story was originally published on May 14, 2024, and has been updated to include details about aurora visibility following another geomagnetic storm.

Is a deal really a deal? Amazon’s ChatGPT competitor, a chatbot it calls Rufus, will now answer some user questions on price changes.

Amazon's fall Prime Day sale is over, but these deals are still going strong.

You can still save nearly $400 on a 4TB SSD so you can play even more games without deleting the old ones.

FEMA employees scrambling to respond to the devastation caused by hurricanes Milton and Helene are facing a new, unexpected challenge: violent threats on social media. TikTok posts either calling for violence or applauding unverified claims about physical attacks against FEMA personnel have garnered millions of views, according to a report yesterday from nonprofit Media Matters for America. X has also been fertile ground for threats of violence against FEMA, says another analysis published yesterday by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD). “This content is reaching millions of people and, in some instances, poses a credible risk to public safety,” ISD says. Social media misinformation has fed distrust in FEMA, which officials warn...

Russian state media and right-wing influencers on X helped share disinformation about Disney.

Marriott agreed to pay a $52 million settlement to 49 states and Washington, DC, over a series of data breaches that occurred between 2014 and 2020, affecting more than 334 million customers. As part of a separate agreement, the Federal Trade Commission is also requiring Marriott and its subsidiary, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, to implement an information security program to settle charges over the data breaches. “Marriott’s poor security practices led to multiple breaches affecting hundreds of millions of customers,” Samuel Levine, the director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement. “The FTC’s action today, in coordination with our state partners, will ensure that Marriott improves its data security...

Not even an infinite number of alternate realities can help most versions of Harry Kim get a promotion, it seems.