First James Webb Space Telescope image shows ‘deepest’ view of the universe ever

After 14 years of development and six months of calibration, the James Webb Space Telescope is finally ready to embark on its mission to probe the depths of our cosmos. On Monday, NASA and President Joe Biden shared the first colored image from the space telescope, showcasing a look at the early days of the universe.

According to NASA, “Webb’s First Deep Field” represents the sharpest and “deepest” image of the distant universe to date. What you see is a snapshot of a cluster of galaxies known as SMACS 0723 as they appeared 4.6 billion years ago. The combined mass of all the galaxies pictured acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying the much more distant celestial bodies seen in the background. Some of the galaxies have never-before-seen features that astronomers will soon study to learn more about the history of our universe. NASA notes Webb’s First Deep Field doesn’t represent our earliest look at the universe. Microwave telescopes like the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) captured snapshots closer to the Big Bang but did not offer a view of stars and galaxies like the one captured by Webb.    

“Mr. President, if you held a grain of sand on the tip of your finger at arm’s length, that is the part of the universe that you’re seeing,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson told President Biden during Monday’s briefing. “Just one little speck of the universe.”

Getting to this historic moment has been a long road for NASA. When the JWST was first announced, the agency’s plan was to launch the telescope in 2007. After a redesign in 2005, NASA finally completed work on the project in 2016 and said the spacecraft would be ready to launch by 2018. In 2019, NASA completed assembly of the telescope, but then the pandemic hit, leading to further delays in testing and shipping. All told, those delays eventually led to the JWST project costing $10 billion. 

NASA’s decision to name its most advanced space telescope ever after former agency administrator James Webb has also been a source of controversy. Before Webb oversaw the Mercury, Gemini and early Apollo programs at NASA, he worked at the US State Department during a time when the agency fired hundreds of gay and lesbian personnel. In September, NASA said it would not change the name of the JWST. 

The image Biden shared today is only the first of a handful of photos NASA plans to share this week from the JWST. The rest of the initial slate will arrive tomorrow morning at 9:45PM ET when NASA hosts a press conference with Webb leadership. Live coverage of the event starts at 10:30AM ET on NASA TV, YouTube, Twitter and Twitch.

Meta made a fact-checking AI to help verify Wikipedia citations

In 2020, the Wikipedia community was engulfed in scandal when it came out that a US teen had written 27,000 entries in a language they didn’t speak. The episode was a reminder that the online encyclopedia is not a perfect source of information. Sometimes people will attempt to edit Wikipedia entries out of malice, but frequently factual errors come from some well-intentioned individual making a mistake.

That’s a problem the Wikimedia Foundation recently partnered with Facebook parent company Meta to address. The two set their sights on citations. The problem with Wikipedia footnotes is that there are almost too many for the platform’s volunteer editors to verify. With the website growing by more than 17,000 articles every month, countless citations are incomplete, missing or just plain inaccurate.

Meta developed an AI model that can automatically scan citations at scale to verify their accuracy. It can also suggest alternative citations when it finds a poorly sourced passage. When Wikipedia’s human editors evaluate citations, they rely on common sense and experience. When an AI does the same work, it uses a Natural Language Understanding (NLU) transformation model that attempts to understand the various relationships of words and phrases within a sentence. Meta’s Sphere database, consisting of more than 134 million web pages, acts as the system’s knowledge index. As it goes about its job of checking the citations in an article, the model is designed to find a single source to verify every claim.

To illustrate the capabilities of the AI, Meta shared an example of an incomplete citation the model found on the Wikipedia page for the Blackfoot Confederacy. Under the Notable Blackfoot people section, the article mentions Joe Hipp, the first Native American to compete for the WBA World Heavyweight title. The linked website doesn’t mention Hipp or boxing. Searching the Sphere database, the model found a more suitable citation in a 2015 article from the Great Falls Tribune. Here’s the passage the model flagged:

In 1989 at the twilight of his career, [Marvin] Camel fought Joe Hipp of the Blackfeet Nation. Hipp, who became the first Native American to challenge for the world heavyweight championship, said the fight was one of the weirdest of his career.

What’s notable about the above passage is that it doesn’t explicitly mention boxing. Meta’s model found a suitable reference thanks to its natural language capabilities. The tool could one day help with Facebook’s misinformation problems. “More generally, we hope that our work can be used to assist fact-checking efforts and increase the general trustworthiness of information online,“ the model’s creators said. In the meantime, Meta hopes to build a platform Wikipedia editors can use to verify and correct footnotes systematically.

Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick reportedly saw violence against drivers as a tool for growth

A new trove of leaked documents has shed an unfavorable light on the early days of Uber. Dubbed the Uber Files, the leak consists of approximately 124,000 internal company documents, including more than 83,000 emails and text messages exchanged between former CEO Travis Kalanick and other executives, that date to a period between 2013 and 2017. The latter marks the year Kalanick stepped down as CEO of Uber amid mounting controversy.

Working with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), The Guardian shared the trove with 180 journalists at 40 outlets across 29 countries. The documents show a company willing to do things many of its own executives thought were “f***ing illegal.” 

In 2016, for instance, Kalanick reportedly ordered French employees to encourage local Uber drivers to counter-protest the taxi strikes that were underway in Paris at the time. When one executive warned Kalanick that “extreme right thugs” were part of the protest, the former CEO pushed back. “I think it’s worth it,” he said. “Violence guarantee[s] success. And these guys must be resisted, no?”

One former senior executive told The Guardian that Kalanick’s response was consistent with a strategy of “weaponizing” drivers and a playbook the company returned to in other countries.

Another selection of documents details the lengths the company went to escape regulatory scrutiny. In at least 12 instances, Uber ordered staff at local offices in six countries, including France, the Netherlands and India, to employ the “kill switch,” an internal tool the company developed to protect its data.

“Please hit the kill switch ASAP,” Kalanick wrote in one email shared by The Washington Post. “Access must be shut down in AMS,” he added, referring to the company’s Amsterdam office. In two cases involving Uber’s Montreal office, authorities entered the building only to see all the computers and tablets before them resetting at the same time. The company told The Post “such software should never have been used to thwart legitimate regulatory actions,” and that it stopped using the system in 2017.

“We have not and will not make excuses for past behavior that is clearly not in line with our present values,” said Jill Hazelbaker, Uber’s senior vice president of marketing and public affairs, in a statement the company issued after The Guardian published its findings on the Uber Files. “Instead, we ask the public to judge us by what we’ve done over the last five years and what we will do in the years to come.”

In a statement published by the ICIJ, Travis Kalanick’s spokesperson said any suggestion the former executive “directed, engaged in, or was involved” in “illegal or improper conduct” is “completely false.”

“The reality was that Uber’s expansion initiatives were led by over a hundred leaders in dozens of countries around the world and at all times under the direct oversight and with the full approval of Uber’s robust legal, policy, and compliance groups,” they added.

Asteroid NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission landed on had a surface like a ‘pit of plastic balls’

Nearly two years ago, NASA made history when its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft briefly “tagged” 101955 Bennu to collect a regolith sample from the surface of the asteroid. While the mission won’t return to Earth until late next year, NASA shared new information about the celestial body. In an update published this week (via Mashable), the agency revealed OSIRIS-REx would have sunk into Bennu had the spacecraft not immediately fired its thrusters after touching the asteroid’s surface.

“It turns out that the particles making up Bennu’s exterior are so loosely packed and lightly bound to each other that if a person were to step onto Bennu they would feel very little resistance, as if stepping into a pit of plastic balls that are popular play areas for kids,” NASA said.

That’s not what scientists thought they would find on Bennu. Observing the asteroid from Earth, the expectation was that its surface would be covered in smooth, sandy beach-like material. Bennu’s reaction to OSIRIS-REx’s touchdown also had scientists puzzled. After briefly interacting with the asteroid, the spacecraft left a 26-foot (8-meter) wide crater. In lab testing, the pickup procedure “barely made a divot.” 

After analyzing data from the spacecraft, they found it encountered the same amount of resistance a person on Earth would feel while squeezing the plunger on a French press coffee carafe. “By the time we fired our thrusters to leave the surface, we were still plunging into the asteroid,” said Ron Ballouz, a scientist with the OSIRIS-REx team.

According to NASA, its findings on Bennu could help scientists better interpret remote observations of other asteroids. In turn, that could help the agency design future asteroid missions. “I think we’re still at the beginning of understanding what these bodies are, because they behave in very counterintuitive ways,” said OSIRIS-REx team member Patrick Michel.

Apple’s 10.2-inch iPad is back on sale for $299

Amazon’s annual Prime Day sale may not begin until next week, but you can already find a handful of deals on electronics like the 10.2-inch iPad. This weekend, the retailer has discounted both the 64GB and 256GB variants of Apple’s entry-level tablet. …

Apple Watch Series 7 is on sale for $284 right now

Ahead of its annual Prime Day sale next week, Amazon has discounted the Apple Watch Series 7. As long as you don’t mind buying the wearable in green, you can get the 41mm model with GPS connectivity for $284. The $115 price drop represents a nearly 30 percent discount from the usual price of Apple’s latest smartwatch. And if green is not your color, some of the other models are available for $329 or less.

Buy Apple Watch Series 7 at Amazon – $284

Engadget gave the Series 7 a score of 90 last fall. Apple may have not dramatically redesigned the wearable, but the changes it did introduce were impactful. Deputy editor Cherlynn Low found the move to a roomier screen made the Series 7 easier and more enjoyable to use thanks to there being more space the UI. She also appreciated the fact the Series 7 could charge faster than its predecessor.

If you’re on the fence because the Series 8 is right around the corner, most recent reports suggest you won’t miss out on much. The one big feature that’s reportedly on the way is a body temperature sensor that will warn you when you’re running a fever. Otherwise, the Series 8 is expected to feature the same design and performance capabilities as its predecessor. For that reason, you’re probably better off picking up a discounted Series 7 now rather than waiting to buy the new model at full price.

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Blizzard won’t release any more new content for ‘Heroes of the Storm’

Blizzard is ending development on Heroes of the Storm. In a brief blog post published on Friday, the studio said it plans to support the MOBA “in a manner similar” to games like Starcraft II. Moving forward, Blizzard said fans can expect the company to…