In January last year, astronomers definitively observed, for the first time, a black hole swallowing a dead star, like a raven devouring roadkill. Then 10 days later, they saw the same act of scavenging happen again in a different, distant sector of the cosmos. From a report: Those triumphs, reported in a paper published on Tuesday in Astrophysical Journal Letters, are the latest in the still nascent field of gravitational astronomy, which is detecting the literal stretching and scrunching of space-time caused by some of the most cataclysmic events in the universe. "It's the first time that we've actually been able to detect a neutron star and a black hole colliding with each other anywhere in the universe," said Patrick Brady, a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who serves as the spokesman for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. Further reading: For the first time, astronomers see a black hole eating a neutron star.

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Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan helped turn Google into an ad giant. Now they're starting over with a service whose only customers are its users. From a report: A new search engine? One that people have to pay to use? At first blush, it may seem like a textbook example of a startup idea destined never to get anywhere. By definition, any new search engine competes with Google, whose 90 percent-plus market share leaves little oxygen for other players. And we've been accustomed to getting our search for free since well before there was a Google -- which might make paying for it sound like being expected to purchase a phone book. But Neeva is indeed a new search engine, officially launching today, that carries a subscription fee. Though it's extremely similar to Google in many respects -- with a few twists of its own -- it dumps the web giant's venerable ad-based business model in the interest of avoiding distractions, privacy quandaries, and other compromises. It's free for three months -- long enough for users to grow accustomed to it without obligation -- and $4.95 a month thereafter. Apps for iPhones and iPads, and browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and Brave, are part of the deal. Neeva may have a certain whiff of improbability about it, but its cofounders, Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan, are the furthest thing from naifs. Two long-time Google executives with more than a quarter-century of experience at the web giant between them, they have an insider's understanding of how it operates. Moreover, about 30 percent of the roughly 60-person staff they've assembled at Neeva consists of ex-Googlers, including Hall-of-Famers such as Udi Manber (a former head of Google search) and Darin Fisher (one of the inventors of Chrome). They've also secured $77.5 million in funding, including investments from venture-capital titans Greylock and Sequoia.

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Some day all Americans will understand that our ancestors were slaves.

The web still could be a fantastic writing environment.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When Kevin Modzelewski and his colleagues at Dropbox set out to create Pyston in 2014, they had a very simple objective: to lower the costs of running Python code on Dropbox's servers, by making the code itself faster. "We were growing exponentially, so our server cost was growing exponentially," Modzelewski tells TechRepublic. "If we could get Python running faster, we would spend less money running Python." The original cost reduction initiative at Dropbox snowballed into a bigger project for Modzelewski when the company moved away from Python in 2017 and cancelled the Pyston project. He had realized while working on the language that there was a strong demand for faster Python among the developer community, and while there were plenty of tools around for improving the performance in smaller applications, there were none designed for big, business logic-type applications such as Dropbox. "There's a lot of tools out there for helping you run Python faster, but there weren't any that were a good fit for Dropbox's use case," says Modzelewski. "This was an area of the Python market where a lot of money was being spent, but not very many tools were being developed for helping. It was under served." Fast forward to today and Pyston is now in version 2.2, and has been open-sourced, with Modzelewski and fellow developer Marius Wachtler now leading the project as co-founders. The latest implementation promises a 30% performance improvement over Python 3.8.8, with a key benefit being that developers can simply drop their Python applications into Pyston and get going, without having to rewrite their code. It's also a "completely separate thing" to what Modzelewski and fellow developers built for Dropbox some seven years ago.

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Intel has delayed production of its next-generation Xeon Scalable CPUs, code-named Sapphire Rapids, to the first quarter of 2022 and said it will start ramping shipments by at least April of next year. From a report: The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company disclosed the delay in a Tuesday blog post by Lisa Spelman, head of Intel's Xeon and Memory Group, who teased the CPU's new microarchitecture as well as two features that will be new to the Xeon lineup: the next generation of Deep Learning Boost and an acceleration engine called Intel Data Streaming Accelerator. Spelman said Intel is delaying Sapphire Rapids, the 10-nanometer successor to the recently launched Ice Lake server processors, because of extra time needed to validate the CPU.

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Scientists piece together clues from "patient zero", who likely caught the plague from a rodent.

Elon Musk said on Tuesday that total investments in Starlink would reach between $5 billion and $10 billion before the satellite internet venture achieves positive cash flow. From a report: Over the lifetime of the project, total investments could run to $20-$30 billion, the Tesla CEO told the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. "It's a lot, basically," Musk said in a video interview from California.

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Microsoft plans to broaden its legal and corporate affairs unit by 20 percent in the coming fiscal year as it prepares for what it sees as a years-long wave of tech regulation across the globe, Microsoft president Brad Smith told Axios. From the report: Smith individually, and Microsoft as a company, have plenty of experience with tech regulation -- most notably, from a decade-long fight with regulators on both sides of the Atlantic over antitrust issues beginning in the late '90s. The hiring spree will continue beyond the current fiscal year, which starts July 1, because the company will need more people than it can hire in a single year, Smith said.

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When MIT and Harvard University started edX nearly a decade ago, it was touted as a nonprofit alternative to for-profit online course providers. Today, the universities announced that they are selling edX to one of those for-profit providers for $800 million. From a report: edX had fallen behind rivals like Coursera, a similar platform founded by Stanford University professors, in fundraising and reach, though it still boasts 35 million users and more than 3,000 courses. Leaders of edX cited the pandemic as a factor that led to the sale. "Covid drove an explosion in remote learning, which spurred huge investments into edX's commercial competitors," wrote MIT's president L. Rafael Reif, in an open letter today. "This put edX, as a nonprofit, at a financial disadvantage. This new path recognizes this reality and offers a solution that allows edX to continue to support and maintain the key aspects of its mission." What happens now is a bit complicated. 2U, a so-called Online Program Management company that helps traditional colleges start and run online degree programs, says it will operate edX as a separate subsidiary that will be structured as a public benefit corporation. That means it will be for profit.

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John McAfee's death last week in a Spanish prison complicates the U.S. government's intent to recover millions of dollars it says the software tycoon owed in taxes and allegedly ill-gotten gains from promoting cryptocurrencies. From a report: McAfee, who decades ago founded the anti-virus company that bears his name, was found dead in his cell just hours after Spanish courts approved his extradition to the U.S. to face charges of tax evasion. U.S. prosecutors accused McAfee of not filing tax returns from 2014 to 2018 even as he earned millions from "promoting cryptocurrencies, consulting work, speaking engagements and selling the rights to his life story for a documentary," according to an indictment last June in a U.S. court in Tennessee, where he once lived. Spanish court documents released last week alleged he owed the U.S. government more than $4.2 million in taxes. Separately, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission claimed McAfee promoted investments in initial coin offerings without disclosing he was paid more than $23 million to do so. The U.S. Department of Justice has a similar case against him. According to the indictment, McAfee managed to avoid paying taxes by routing his payments through bank accounts and cryptocurrency accounts set up in other people's names and hiding assets like real estate, a vehicle and a yacht also under the names of others. Such a complex money trail could keep lawyers busy for years.

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Olivia Colman, John Nettles and Joanne Harris are among dozens of high-profile artists calling for a portion of gadget sales revenue in the UK to go into a fund for performers and creators. From a report: In a letter in Tuesday's Times newspaper, they claim a centralised "Smart Fund" could generate up to $415m per year for the UK's creative sector. The levy would be between 1% and 3% of the overall price of a device. However, critics say it would amount to "a new tax" on consumers. It would apply to everything that can "store and download creative content." This includes laptops, PCs and smartphones, said a group of artist industry organisations behind the idea. There are no official proposals for such a scheme, but the artist Yinka Shonibare described it as "a no-brainer. " "Currently there isn't any effective way for creators to be recompensed when their work is downloaded and stored by audiences," he said. However, Tech UK, a network for the country's tech sector, said it sounded like a "new tax" on consumers. "It is an arbitrary tax on consumers that is hugely bureaucratic to manage, and with no transparency on how funds are disbursed and spent," said a spokeswoman.

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Microsoft has released a visually "refreshed" version of its Office desktop apps for both Windows 10 and 11. Microsoft officials said this new Office refresh will "shine" on Windows 11 but still work on Windows 10. Microsoft also is releasing its first publicly available test build of 64-bit Office for Windows on Arm today. From a report: The updated Office uses Fluent design across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access, Project, Publisher, and Visio. The updated apps are meant to look similar to the Windows 11 OS, design-wise. Via the updated Office interface, Office is set to match users' Windows themes, including black (Dark Mode), white, colorful, or dark gray. The Quick Access toolbar is hidden by default in the name of simplifying the interface. The refreshed Office is available to Office Insider testers running Beta Channel builds. Those who don't want it can turn off the "Coming Soon" feature at the top right hand corner of the menu. Testers can toggle between the new and existing interface to move between the current and newly updated Office apps.

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An outline of my tweets for the last few days, with threads properly represented. I think this is a good way to have tweet streams flow into an outliner. Since it's entirely OPML and uses GitHub in a public repo, any outliner can be part of the network.

Sam Altman has a new startup that intends to give a special type of cryptocurrency to every person on earth. But first, it wants to scan everybody's eyeballs. From a report: Altman, the former head of the Silicon Valley business incubator Y Combinator, is one of three founders of the company Worldcoin. Among the many parts of its plan, Worldcoin has designed an orb-shaped device that would scan a person's iris to construct a unique personal identifier. The company is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital arm of Coinbase Global Inc., LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Day One Ventures. It recently raised about $25 million from investors. Altman, 36, said in an interview that he conceived the idea in late 2019. The intention was to use cryptocurrency to spread money around equitably, inspired by the trendy economic theory known as universal basic income. Altman was the first investor in Worldcoin but said he has no role in day-to-day operations and mainly serves as an adviser to the company when needed. "I've been very interested in things like universal basic income and what's going to happen to global wealth redistribution and how we can do that better," Altman said. "Is there a way we can use technology to do that at global scale?"

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