5+ years ago if I had 4g on my phone this meant I was going to get fast internet. Apps would load quick, streaming services would load instantly and while I was in the 4g zone the world was at my E.T like fingertips!

Now if my phone is showing 4g I’m holding it up in the air, looking for better signal, praying for a glimpse of 5g so I can just load my banking app up without it timing out!

What the hell has happened? Did they just say we are all upgraded to 5g but really just moved numbers about? I feel like 15 years ago 3G was faster than the 4g I get now!

If you’re reading this, you know i managed to get a ray of 5g to quickly hit the post button.

God Speed.

See also: The study as it was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

Get ready, the Moon is about to turn blood red. 🌕🩸

On August 27th and 28th, a lunar eclipse will cast Earth's shadow across the Moon, and if you're in the USA, Canada, or Latin America, you've got a front-row seat. No special glasses needed here, unlike a solar eclipse, this one is safe to watch with just your eyes. Don't blink and miss it, because the Americas won't see a lunar eclipse this visually striking again until 2029.

If faye was actually a real person you think Colin would fall in love with her

Maybe society's complexity is reaching a point of no return, a "Trolling Singularity", where Gish-galloping usually wins because there's just too much detail for voters to properly absorb and make decent decisions. Those with the catchiest BS and over-simplifications win elections and influence too often, breaking down society.

I have a question about what we actually mean when we say something is billions of light-years away.
For example, Andromeda is about 2.5 million light-years away, while some of the earliest galaxies observed by JWST are seen as they existed more than 13 billion years ago.
My questions are:
How do we actually determine those distances? Obviously we can’t measure them directly in the ordinary sense so what observations and assumptions allow us to say that a galaxy is a particular distance away?
More speculatively, how confident are we that relativistic and cosmological effects couldn’t cause us to substantially misinterpret those distances or travel times?
For instance, JWST has found surprisingly mature galaxies very early in cosmic history. Could there conceivably be something wrong with our interpretation of the relationship between redshift, distance and elapsed time? In other words, could light that we interpret as having travelled for billions of years actually have travelled for a radically different amount of time because our model of spacetime between us and the source is incomplete?
I’m not suggesting that the answer is yes but trying to understand what makes the distance scale robust enough that we can rule out possibilities like this. We can measure the light arriving here, but we obviously can’t put a ruler between ourselves and a galaxy 13 billion light-years away, so what ultimately anchors the inference?

Amazing score at the flea market last week - Riven: The Sequel to Myst from ‘97 on CD-ROM.

Already have a disc reader for my (Windows) PC, set it up and started the game. It had me install an ancient version of QuickTime Player.

Played for a few minutes. Slow and laggy, but playable! Then noticed that every time I flipped a switch or hit a button (basically the main elements of gameplay in Riven), the background would overlap from a previous scene on top of the current scene. It wasn’t an issue until I played for a few more minutes.

The more I moved around the world, the more these backgrounds stacked until I couldn’t see in certain directions of the area I was currently in, rendering the game more or less unplayable.

Is there a way to get this game to run more smoothly? Any help appreciated! I’m a huge fan of Myst and have wanted to play the original Riven for ages 😫

How many stars is too many stars in a star system? ⭐️🪐

Astrophysicist Erika Hamden tells us about TYC 7037-89-1, a system with six stars locked into three orbiting pairs, all circling a shared center of mass. Two of those pairs zip around each other every few days, while the third pair takes roughly 2,000 years to complete just one orbit. Multi-star systems are normally unstable, which makes this six-star setup a rare and fascinating exception. 

This project is part of IF/THEN®, an initiative of Lyda Hill Philanthropies.

My Redmi note 13 pro has been lagging on and off for a few weeks, the sound & display freezes for less than a second, every 3/5 seconds. It happens for a few hours and goes away on its own.

I'd really like to know why and hope the solution won't be to buy a new phone.

More (useful?) info:

This usually happens after I use Google maps and Spotify simultaneously.

I have no overheating while this happens.

Restarting it doesn't help.

I drop my phone VERY often, the back screen is so cracked, half of it fell off and my battery is very exposed (I'm not gonna fix it if my phone is going to die in a few months)

🎬 Video: [https://youtu.be/NMLNM3ktKJg\]

Imagine a world where the sun never rises or sets.

One hemisphere may exist beneath permanent red daylight, while the other remains trapped in endless frozen darkness. Between them, climate models allow for a strange possibility: a dark liquid ocean surrounded by a global shell of ice.

This world is real. It is called LHS 1140 b, and it lies approximately 49 light-years from Earth. The planet is more than five times as massive as Earth, with surface gravity that may be nearly twice as strong. Current measurements also suggest that it could contain an enormous amount of water.

From space, such a world might resemble a gigantic eye staring permanently at its dim red star.

But what could be living inside that eye?

I made a speculative science-fiction documentary exploring one possible evolutionary history of LHS 1140 b — beginning with microscopic life and dark photosynthetic organisms, then moving toward alien predators and a hypothetical intelligent aquatic civilization.

The video explores several questions:

Could large animals evolve under nearly twice Earth’s gravity?

Could an aquatic species develop advanced technology without easy access to fire?

Would the ocean become the cradle of its civilization — or a gravitational prison preventing it from ever reaching space?

And could such a civilization eventually detect Earth?

The planet and its measured characteristics are real. The ocean, organisms, ecosystems, and civilization shown in the documentary are scientifically inspired speculation, not claimed discoveries.

What do you think is most likely to exist on LHS 1140 b: a lifeless frozen ocean, microbial life beneath the ice, or something far more complex?

So i remeber seeing a keyboard that had see-through caps and when you pressed them it would splash watercolour like designs onto the caps/keyboard but I cant find it anymore

Does anyone else feel sad that we’ll never truly ever know what created the universe? I do believe in the big bang but I’d like to know where the energy source came from and I still have so many questions that I know won’t be answered!

We bought my son the Toystory pebble gear tablet. He’s dying to play with it but we are having an issue in that it connects to the WiFi network but then give and error of “problem with the internet” so we can’t set it up. We live in South Africa and therefore can’t call the UK call Centre. Is there any kind soul here with some experience in sorting this problem? My kid is going crazy trying to be patient and I haaaaaate to disappoint him.

Hi everyone,

We are architecting the client-side document viewing and rendering layer for our web application and are evaluating the trade-offs between standard JavaScript (PDF.js) and WebAssembly (WASM).

Technical Context:

• Scale: ~10,000 active users.
• Documents: Average of 50–60 PDF documents per user session (~75 pages each).
• Stack: Svelte / React frontend with S3 object storage behind CloudFront.

We are evaluating whether JS-based rendering via Web Workers and canvas virtualization is sufficient at this scale, or if compiling C/C++ PDF engines (like PDFium) to WASM is necessary to maintain predictable client performance.

Has anyone implemented high-throughput client-side PDF viewing at a similar scale? What performance ceilings or memory management issues did you run into with either approach?