I didn't miss the jr. high "figure out what g is" stuff in the beginning of the book. I was kinda bummed at how much the selective breeding was glossed over as they had to cram a line into the movie to explain the disaster at the end. But a the same time the movie is two and a half hours long. While there are a handful of other cuts I think they could have gotten away with (the extended Karaoke scene maybe), there wasn't a ton of fat to trim to keep the runtime reasonable.

I don't think Xenonite is made of Xenon exclusively, but it is strange enough that handheld spectrometers can't deal with it. Maybe it offgasses xenon when bombarded by charged particles? One thing the movie glossed over is how Rocky's species is in many ways much less technologically advanced than Humans. Their materials science is outstanding due to the hellish nature of their home world, but they don't have electronics. Their math and science are back in the early 20th century. They went interstellar before discovering relativity. Mostly due to the fact that the astrophage is basically magic. In the book one background character mentions offhand that the astrophage is a miracle that will solve countless problems and everybody just glares at him angrily because even though he is right it's also killing them. On the other hand, while reading the book I had thoughts of an interstellar ferry service that collects astrophage and brings it back to Earth where it is tricked into releasing its energy into the atmosphere to warm the planet and light up cropland. Spin drives open up the entire solar system to exploitation and the astrophage is the perfect energy storage medium.

FWIW, he had several opportunities to voice a denial in court, and did not do so.

For me self-checkout is just the new express lane. I like using it if I only have a few items but only if there is not a line at the self-check. One caveat is that when people are slow at self check, they are extremely slow. If a line has formed it is not worth it, just go to a regular checkout instead. The bagging area is also too small to handle more than an express-lane sized load as well, and the machines will freak out if you remove a loaded bag to make room for a new one.

So in 2023 in April the burnt area was 50% higher than 2012-2022 average.

Then came floods and burnt area went down,

This kind of whiplash weather... scorching heat waves breaking records, and heavy rains breaking records is exactly what the papers on climate change predict.

Records were broken in 1920s and the 19th century too. you can look at the the data. But what we see is records being broken every year or every alternate year. That has never happened before in the last 200 years or so (or even before looking at ice core data, though that data is limited)

I remember seeing this the very next day it washed ashore on reddit, and the top comment correctly identifying it from a ISRO PSLV!

From the summary :

Deaths from fungal infections are increasing, due in part to growing populations of people with weakened immune systems who are more vulnerable to severe fungal disease, public-health experts said. At least 7,000 people died in the U.S. from fungal infections in 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said, up from hundreds of people each year around 1970. There are few effective and nontoxic medications to treat such infections, they said.

Look at the last sentence... Few nontoxic medications

Not for reasons of any limitations in predicate logic or complexity or any appeals to supernaturalism or anything like that. But instead because I think it more likely that the ability of human society to advance technologically is going to collapse (either because the ecosystem itself has collapsed, or because of nuclear war on a planetary scale, or biocrises, or whatever) before getting there.

This /. story uses symbols for "News" and "Technology" at the top. Back in the long ago days, didn't /. have a symbol to use for stories having to do with Mindstorms? Back when they were a lot more frequent?

While I am no fan of privacy violations, I wonder, from a legal standpoint, is it different than restaurants putting cameras inside the their estabilishments.
I guess the difference is that this type of online wiretapping is not disclosed to the user.

It depends what you see a stock as. If you think it is a distributed measure of the value a company can bring to an economy then meme investors are wrecking your engine of economic growth. However, if you think stocks are a way for people to make money without having to produce a product or service themselves, then this is just average joes butting in on a rich person game.

Making a self driving train is far less technically involved than making a self driving car. Considering the huge cost of a train, AI for self driving will be chump change over it. It makes sense to have automated trains, yet there are so few of them!

it was part of the British Empire, India wasn't an independent country then. The headline makes it appear as if India scrapped daylight saving now

India has never had DST. Clocks are not shifted at all. Entire country follows one time (IST) throughout the year (GMT + 5h 30m )

When PERM is filed, salary has to be published. you can download from DOL website