Author: Devin Coldewey

This little translator gadget could be a traveling reporter’s best friend If you’re lucky enough to get travel abroad, you know it’s getting easier and easier to use our phones and other gadgets to translate for us. So why not do so in a way that makes sense to you? This little gadget seeking funds on Kickstarter looks right up my alley, offering quick transcription and recording — plus music playback, like an iPod Shuffle with superpowers. The ONE Mini is really not that complex of a device — a…

Twin astronaut study suggests interplanetary travel may not be a health risk The human body “remains robust and resilient” after almost a year in space, according to a long-term, multi-institutional study of twins, one of whom lived aboard the International Space Station for 340 days while the other remained on Earth. These heartening results remove a potential barrier to crewed interplanetary missions — and just in time for us to start planning them. The study, conducted by NASA and its partners on the American astronauts Scott and Mark Kelly, minutely…

Israel’s Beresheet spacecraft is lost during historic lunar landing attempt Israel’s SpaceIL almost made history today as its Beresheet spacecraft came within an ace of landing on the surface of the Moon, but suffered a last minute failure during descent. Israel missed out on the chance to be the fourth country to make a controlled lunar landing, but getting 99 percent of the way there is still an extraordinary achievement for private spaceflight. Beresheet (“Genesis”) launched in February as secondary payload aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, and after a…

Vector, Virgin and a mystery team will compete in DARPA’s M launch challenge DARPA wants to be able to launch anywhere, any time, and several times in a row. Is that too much to ask? Not for Vector Space, Virgin Orbit, and an unnamed startup that just qualified to take place in the agency’s Launch Challenge, which will push their responsive and mobile launch capabilities to the limit. In the challenge, the teams will be notified that they need to launch a payload to orbit from a given location only…

The first research book written by an AI could lead to on-demand papers The amount of research that gets published is more than any scholar can hope to keep up with, but soon they may rely on an AI companion to read thousands of articles and distill a summary from them — which is exactly what this team at Goethe University did. You can read the first published work by “Beta Writer” here… though unless you really like lithium-ion battery chemistry, you might find it a little dry. The paper…

Amazon’s entry-level 2019 Kindle is let down by a sub-par display Amazon’s Kindle is of course the brand most think of when they consider buying an e-reader, but competition does exist and the truth is it makes the company’s newest entry-level device look like a poor bargain. The price may be low, but this budget reader just doesn’t meet the bar. The most basic current device in the e-paper Kindle lineup, the plain old “Kindle” (as opposed to Kindle Voyage, Kindle Paperwhite, etc) has in this 2019 iteration gained a…

Flying taxis could be more efficient than gas and electric cars on long-distance trips Flying cars definitely sound cool, but whether they’re actually a good idea is up for debate. Fortunately they do seem to have some surefire benefits, among which you can now count improved efficiency — in theory, and on long trips. But it’s something! Air travel takes an enormous amount of energy, since you have to lift something heavy into the air and keep it there for a good while. This is often faster but rarely more…