Boston, Massachusetts, defined by its prestigious universities and vibrant young startup scene, has maintained a reputation of excellence and entrepreneurial American spirit since its first epic Tea Party in 1773. At the forefront of excellence and prestige is the Boston-based non-profit,MassChallenge, which bills itself as “the world’s largest startup competition”. MassChallenge is a very special kind of accelerator, as it is both an independent non-profit and does not take equity. Now, in its second year, MassChallenge is incubating 125 companies in its Boston waterfront offices, and each team is competing for $1 million in prizes....

Researchers looking to build technologies that will find their way into the next generation of music apps have received a huge leg up today with the launch of a vast database of information about one million songs by 44,745 artists. The Million Song Datasetis a collaboration between Columbia University in the USA and music data serviceThe Echo Nestthat we previously coveredhere. Designed for non-commercial use only, the Dataset is an enormous 300GB download containing all sorts of incredibly detailed information about all one million songs....

The Sun isn’t the only star to produce stellar flares. On April 21, 2021, a team of astronomers published new research describing thebrightest flare ever measured from Proxima Centauri in ultraviolet light. To learn about this extraordinary event – and what it might mean for any life on the planets orbiting Earth’s closest neighboring star – I spoke withParke Loyd, an astrophysicist at Arizona State Universityand co-author of the paper. Excerpts from our conversation are below and have been edited for length and clarity....

Microsoft’s stock price has been a problem for the company over the past decade. The reason? Nothing. That’s exactly what the stock has effectively done. Since the first tech bubble exploded, Microsoft has been trading between $20, and $30 a share. This has gone on for almost adecade. There was one period of exception in late 2007, in which Microsoft managed to break the $30 dollar mark, but the stock quickly declined in 2008 and fell back into its range....

Forging a new career or gaining a promotion in the information technology sector can be a challenge as there are so many different systems and networks to try to understand. But you can immerse yourself in many of them with thisUltimate Kubernetes and Cloud Certification Training Bundle. You’ll get more than 114 hours of instruction and well over 800 lessons in a variety of IT fields as you learn about Google Cloud, CompTIA, AWS, Microsoft and Kubernetes....