A dark and mysterious ‘rogue planet’ has been discovered — and it looks a lot like Earth Gravitational lensing Anything with mass bends space and causes light to deflect from a straight path. The result is that an object with mass focuses the light from a source behind it – amplifying it like a huge magnifying glass. This is calledgravitational lensing. It was predicted by Einstein’sgeneral theory of relativityand wasfirst verifiedwhen stars were seen to be displaced from their usual positions when viewed close to the Sun while it was perfectly eclipsed by the Moon in 1919....

Rock, Paper, Shotgun haspublished a fascinating accountof a day in the office at massively multiplayer online role-playing game developer Heatwave Interactive. The article covers the operations of a regular day, but there’s a lot of interesting observations about how game developers and designers work. After Scrum, I spot Phil, the producer, grabbing Jeremy to talk to one of the external contractors about the collision failures in the Estate. They talk quickly, agree on tactics, and are in done in 15 seconds....

Many of us vaguely remember the word “hacktivism” from a decade ago. This was a time before seriousransomware attacksdominated current cybersecurity concerns, when certain hacking techniques were being used to send political messages to governmental and corporate entities. Hacktivism has sinceretreatedas a form of protest, in part due to theprosecutionof prominent hacktivists, sometimes with what appear to be disproportionatelysevere sentences. But with the ongoing pandemicrestrictingphysical protestsglobally, andnew billsbeing drawn up to curb offline protest, it looks as if hacktivism may be set for a return....

The following track titled “Thank You Steve” is a dedication to Steve Jobs made completely of sound-bytes from the man himself and sounds sampled from Mac products including: Mac I, Mac II, PowerMac, Apple II, Mac Quadra, Mac Pro and the iPhone. Audio engineerAzRfrom Ridgefield, CT writes: I made this song using only sounds from Apple products and Steve’s 2005 Stanford commencement speech. Every instrument, including drums, has been sampled from a Mac product, tuned by ear, and replayed in the context of the song....

I had the opportunity to speak with Henry Kim, Co-Founder and President of the social shopping sitesneakpeeqtoday to discuss their upcomingFacebook Open Graph initiatives. sneakpeeq is a shopping site that, in Kim’s words “mimicks the hustle and bustle of offline shopping”, something not many e-commerce sites have been able to replicate in the past. The company background that is the most intriguing is Harish Abbott’s, Co-Founder and CEO, who is credited with having a big hand in conceiving and building the shipping infrastructure that Amazon has become famous for....