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Perseid Fireball and Persistent Train Before local midnight on August 12 , this brilliant Perseid meteor flashed above the Poloniny Dark Sky Park, Slovakia, planet Earth. Streaking beside the summer Milky Way, its initial color is likely due to the shower meteor's characteristically high speed. Moving at about 60 kilometers per second , Perseid meteors can excite green emission from oxygen atoms while passing through the thin atmosphere at high altitudes . Also characteristic of bright meteors, this Perseid left a lingering visible trail known as a persistent train , wafting in the upper atmosphere. Its development is followed in the inset frames, exposures separated by one minute and shown at the scale of the original image. Compared to the brief flash of the meteor, the wraith-like trail really is persistent. After an hour faint remnants of this one could still be traced, expand...

We finally have our first look at Alfonso Cuarón's first Netflix feature and his first film after Gravity back in 2014. The streaming platform has released a trailer for the black-and-white flick ROMA , which was inspired by Cuarón's childhood (specifically the women who shaped it) back in the '70s. ROMA tells the story of a young Mixteco domestic worker who faces a devastating news while caring for the children of a middle class family, as well as the mother of the children who's dealing with her husband's extended absence. According to the film's synopsis , the characters try "to construct a new sense of love and solidarity in a context of a social hierarchy where class and race are perversely intertwined" at a time (1970s) and "country (Mexico) facing confrontation between a government-backed militia and student demonstrato...

Google CEO Sundar Pichai and co-founder Sergey Brin have addressed the controversy over "Dragonfly," reportedly an effort to re-enter the Chinese market with a news and search product, in an all-hands meeting with employees. Pichai described the effort as "exploratory" and in the "early stages," according to a transcript obtained by Bloomberg . "We are not close to launching a search product in China," he told employees. "And whether we would do so or could so is all very unclear." The Dragonfly project would reportedly involve censoring information in accordance with the Chinese government's demands, which has prompted some employees to protest the company's secrecy over the matter. "I think there are a lot of times when people are in... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts ht...

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It can be tough buying the right auto parts online unless you're a pro or a very experienced DIYer. According to eBay , 49 percent of consumers mistakenly pick up components that are either not compatible with their vehicles or are just plain wrong. To make it simpler for everyone, eBay Motors has launched the ability to shop by diagram, which allows you to find parts using your vehicle's schematics. You'll need to know the year, make, model, trim level and engine type of your car, truck or motorbike and then add all those information to the upgraded My Garage portal. But once that's done, you can simply choose your vehicle from My Garage and then select a category to narrow things down to bring up interactive diagrams you can explore. When you choose a specific part from the diagram, eBay will only surface items for sale that are compatible with your v...

Animals Elephants are bringing a genetic gun to a cancer knife-fight. Elephants are some of the biggest mammals who roam the Earth, so mathematically they should be hounded by cancer at 100 times the rate of humans. Yet death by cancer… via Popular Science "https://ift.tt/2MSAryc"

Good news for the more than 1 billion WhatsApp users out there: starting this November , you won't need to sacrifice valuable Google Drive storage space to back up your messages. Until now, any WhatsApp data that was backed up onto Google's Drive counted toward the space you had available in the cloud. But the Facebook-owned company cut a deal with Google to make those backups completely free, even while staying inside your personal account. It's a handy way to keep tabs on all of your messages if you lose or break a phone that you use for messaging on the regular. WhatsApp is a little different from other texting apps that store messages on their servers: it requires users to back up their messages to another company's cloud service to... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts https://ift.tt/2wc51LR ...

Kenya Barris, writer and director of the Emmy-nominated ABC show Black-ish and its Freeform spinoff Grown-ish , has signed a multi-year deal at Netflix. It's the latest coup for the streaming giant, which lured away blockbuster show creator Shonda Rhimes a year ago and Glee producer Ryan Murphy back in February. This is another feather in Netflix's cap and proof it might be more and more attractive a platform than traditional networks or cable, especially considering Barris had three years left on his contract with ABC that he cut short weeks ago -- ostensibly, so he could join the streaming titan. Details were scarce, according to Vanity Fair , but Barris will remain executive producer of his ABC shows while producing new series for Netflix. It might be awhile before we hear what he'll be making -- it was almost a year before we learned in July that...

Technology Our guide for how to choose the right tech for the moment. How to find the right rain jacket for the weather. via Popular Science "https://ift.tt/2BoDz3k"

A new Necurs botnet campaign targets thousands of banks with a malicious file dropping the FlawedAmmyy remote-access Trojan. via Dark Reading: https://ift.tt/2BidSBB If New feed item from http://www.darkreading.com/rss/all.xml , then send

Accessibility is a critical consideration for manufacturers when they're building devices. Around 466 million people have disabling hearing loss, according to the World Health Organization, and that number is projected to grow to 900 million by 2050. Finding ways to help people who contend with hearing loss to get the most out of their devices is an important challenge for tech companies now and in the decades ahead. With that in mind, Google has released an open specification to stream audio directly from Android phones to hearing aids . The company hopes to help manufacturers add native support for the phones using its Bluetooth low energy spec, which is called Audio Streaming for Hearing Aids (Asha) . Google worked with GN Hearing to develop Asha, which is said to offer low-latency, high-quality audio with minimal impact on battery life. GN is the first ma...

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