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  SpaceX quietly introduced a new Standard Starlink terminal that’s slimmer and simpler than the previous version, with a 10 percent broader field of view and no motor for setting up — instead, it comes with a kickstand; to orient it, you simply move it. A Starlink support page says the kit is available “by invitation only to a small group of early customers in the US.” SpaceX bumped its weather resistance rating up from IP54 to IP67, meaning it should be totally dust-proof and can be submerged in one meter of water for as long as 30 minutes before potential damage. Starlink’s specifications page says it can operate in winds over 60MPH. Speaking of which, the company will sell mounts in case you’d rather secure it in place. It’s otherwise roughly the same size as the previous Standard terminal (now called Standard Actuated). Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt, who posted about the new terminal Friday morning, shared the quick start video for it. The Wi-Fi router has been redesigned and now

  Users on Reddit and Hacker News are complaining that YouTube seems to have inserted an intentional five-second delay before video pages will load in Mozilla’s Firefox and occasionally some other browsers. YouTube tells The Verge that these users are right about the delay, but the browser has nothing to do with it — it’s part of the company’s efforts to quash ad blockers across all platforms. “In the past week, users using ad blockers may have experienced suboptimal viewing, which included delays in loading, regardless of the browser they are using,” YouTube communications manager Christopher Lawton wrote in an email. Lawton wrote that disabling the ad blocker should resolve the issue, though users “may still experience a temporary delay in loading” until their browser has refreshed. Lawton also said that users will keep seeing issues like this as YouTube’s ad-blocker detection methods improve. The issue was initially reported as targeting Firefox users, but users online have said the

  Newborn babies respond differently to their mother tongue, suggesting that exposure to language in the uterus may provide the foundations for learning. Experiments with newborn babies suggest they can already recognise their mother tongue, hinting that language learning may begin before birth. “We’ve known for a while that fetuses hear towards the end of gestation,” says Judit Gervain at the University of Padua in Italy. “[Newborn babies] can recognise their mother’s voice and prefer it over other female voices, and they can even recognise the language their mother spoke during pregnancy.” To investigate further, Gervain and her colleagues studied the brain activity of 49 babies with French-speaking mothers aged between one and five days old. Each newborn was fitted with a small cap that contained 10 electrodes placed close to regions of the brain linked to speech perception. The team then played recordings that began with 3 minutes of silence, then 7-minute excerpts from the story G

  One big question is whether the program should expand beyond students already bent on a scientific career to reach the much larger population of students indifferent to science or lacking the opportunity to realize their potential. “It’s an elite program. That’s their brand,” says longtime observer Russell Moore, an integrative physiologist and provost at the University of Colorado (CU) Boulder, one of four U.S. universities that host SSP students every summer. “And it’s a remarkable program for those students.” “But it could also be remarkable for other types of students,” says Moore, who confesses that he “never would have gotten into” SSP as a teenager. “And $200 million opens up a lot of possibilities.” SSP’s newfound wealth comes from Franklin Antonio, a 1969 SSP graduate who co-founded chipmaking giant Qualcomm and died last year at age 69. Deciding how to spend it falls to Frank Steslow, a veteran science museum administrator who became SSP’s chief executive in January. Steslo

  In a world first, U.K. regulators yesterday approved a therapy that uses the gene-editing technique CRISPR. The approach treats two inherited blood disorders, including sickle cell disease, which afflicts mostly people of African ancestry, by modifying a patient’s blood stem cells in the lab and returning them. In sickle cell disease, a defect in the oxygen-carrying protein hemoglobin, found in red blood cells, causes the cells to form a sickled shape that clogs blood vessels, leading to severe pain and sometimes strokes and organ damage. The new treatment from the companies Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics is designed to replace these malfunctioning proteins with working versions encoded by a hemoglobin gene that is normally active in a developing fetus. After harvesting a patient’s blood stem cells, scientists use CRISPR to disable the genetic switch that normally turns off this fetal hemoglobin gene early in development. The cells are then reinfused into the body, wh

  Robyn Roberts, a 63-year-old grandmother of 33 and great-grandmother of 12, solidified the idea of education as a lifelong pursuit this weekend by receiving a diploma from Southern New Hampshire University. "I have finished something I started that is absolutely amazing, and I feel amazing," Roberts said in an interview with the university that was shared with "Good Morning America." Roberts said the idea to pursue a college degree was spurred by a challenge from her grandson, who told her in high school, "I'll do it if you do it," according to Roberts. The competition then escalated to a GPA contest, a match Roberts said she won. Roberts, who graduated with a degree in business administration, turns 64 next month and plans to attend law school, after which she hopes to provide support to survivors of abuse, according to the university. "64 is the year of new beginnings," she said. "If all goes well, by the time I turn 67, I'll be

  North Korea told neighboring Japan that it will make a third attempt to launch a military spy satellite in the coming days, Japanese officials said Tuesday, after the two previous launches failed. Japan’s coast guard said North Korea notified Tokyo of its plan to launch the satellite sometime between Wednesday and Nov. 30. The notice identified three maritime zones where debris from the rocket carrying the satellite may fall. Two are in the waters between the Korean Peninsula and China and the third in the Philippine Sea, Japanese coastguard spokesperson Kazuo Ogawa said. Ogawa said the areas are the same as North Korea identified for its earlier satellite launches in May and August, implying the third attempt would have a similar flight path. North Korea gives Japan the launch information because Japan's coast guard coordinates and distributes maritime safety information in East Asia. The North's notification came a day after rival South Korea warned it to cancel its launch

The U.S. military is flying unarmed MQ-9 Reaper drones above Gaza to assist with efforts to locate the more than 240 people taken hostage by Hamas  during the Oct. 7 attack,   according to a U.S. official.  The acknowledgement comes after reports this past weekend that unmarked aircraft had been detected flying above the Gaza Strip by open-source flight tracking services. A U.S. official told ABC News that the U.S. military has been flying unarmed MQ-9 Reaper flights over Gaza as part of the hostage recovery efforts, but declined to provide any context about whether the flights are helping in recovery efforts for U.S. hostages only or for all of the hostages taken by Hamas. An estimated 240 people were taken hostage by Hamas fighters on Oct. 7 and U.S. officials have said it is possible that some of the 10 Americans unaccounted for from the events of that day might be among the hostages. The official would only confirm that the flights began after Oct. 7 and would not provide further d

A diver who spotted something metallic not far from Sardinia's coast has led to the discovery of tens of thousands of ancient bronze coins. Italy’s culture ministry said Saturday that the diver alerted authorities, who sent divers assigned to an art protection squad along with others from the ministry’s undersea archaeology department. The coins dating from the first half of the fourth century were found in sea grass, not far from the northeast shore of the Mediterranean island. The ministry didn't say exactly when the first diver caught a glimpse of something metallic just off shore Sardinia, not far from the town of Arzachena. Exactly how many coins have been retrieved hasn’t been determined yet, as they are being sorted. A ministry statement estimated that there are at least about 30,000 and possibly as many as 50,000, given their collective weight. “All the coins were in an excellent and rare state of preservation,” the ministry said. The few coins that were damaged still h

President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden visited Maine to grieve with a community reeling from a mass shooting that left 18 people dead and 13 others wounded. The Bidens arrived in Lewiston on Friday afternoon, where they met with survivors, families of the victims and first responders. They were greeted upon their arrival by Governor Janet Mills, Lewiston Mayor Carl Sheline and other local officials. Their first stop was Schemengees Bar, one of the locations of last week's mass shooting. Biden carried a bouquet of white flowers in one hand and held the first lady’s hand in the other as they stopped at a memorial placed outside the bar with candles and signs, and held a moment of silence. Biden then delivered remarks at the bowling alley where the gunman first stopped on Oct. 25. There, he took a moment to pay respect to the victims and renew his call for greater gun control measures. "No pain is the same but we know what it's like to lose a piece of our soul, and the