The major growth in Amazon's advertising unit means its revenue contribution is now 2.4 times larger than Snap, Twitter, Roku and Pinterest combined, and it's growing 1.7 times as quickly, according to Loop Capital. CNBC reports: Amazon's "Other" unit, which is primarily made up of advertising but also includes sales related to other service offerings, grew revenue a whopping 77% year-over-year to more than $6.9 billion in the first quarter, the company reported last month. "Performance ads on the ecommerce sites fueled by Amazon's high-intent traffic and unparalleled user insights are providing significant value for sellers and brands," Loop Capital analysts wrote in the Monday note.

They also cited the company's presentation at the recent IAB NewFronts that discussed the company's efforts in the streaming space. Amazon said early this month its ad-supported streaming video content now reaches more than 120 monthly users every month, driven by platforms like Twitch. Amazon generated $22.4 billion in ad revenue in the past 12 months, up 65% year-over-year, according to Loop. That was 2.4 times the $9.3 combined revenue total of middle-cap ad platforms Snap, Twitter, Roku and Pinterest, which grew by 38% over that same timeframe.

A group of Redditors came together in a bid to archive over 85 million scientific papers from the website Sci-Hub and make an open-source library that cannot be taken down. Interesting Engineering reports: Over the last decade or so, Sci-Hub, often referred to as "The Pirate Bay of Science," has been giving free access to a huge database of scientific papers that would otherwise be locked behind a paywall. Unsurprisingly, the website has been the target of multiple lawsuits, as well as an investigation from the United States Department of Justice. The site's Twitter account was also recently suspended under Twitter's counterfeit policy, and its founder, Alexandra Elbakyan, reported that the FBI gained access to her Apple accounts.

Now, Redditors from a subreddit called DataHoarder, which is aimed at archiving knowledge in the digital space, have come together to try to save the numerous papers available on the website. In a post on May 13, the moderators of r/DataHoarder, stated that "it's time we sent Elsevier and the USDOJ a clearer message about the fate of Sci-Hub and open science. We are the library, we do not get silenced, we do not shut down our computers, and we are many." This will be no easy task. Sci-Hub is home to over 85 million papers, totaling a staggering 77TB of data. The group of Redditors is currently recruiting for its archiving efforts and its stated goal is to have approximately 8,500 individuals torrenting the papers in order to download the entire library. Once that task is complete, the Redditors aim to release all of the downloaded data via a new "uncensorable" open-source website.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: Now that Jeff Bezos's space flight company Blue Origin has lost a multibillion contract to Elon Musk's SpaceX, Congress is prepping the ground for Bezos to win a contract anyway, ordering NASA to make not one but two awards. The order would come through the Endless Frontier Act, a bill to beef up resources for science and technology research that's being debated on the Senate floor this week. An amendment was added to that legislation by Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., to hand over $10 billion to NASA -- money that most likely would go to Blue Origin, a company that's headquartered in Cantwell's home state.

Cantwell's amendment is no sure bet though: Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., introduced a last-minute amendment Monday to eliminate the $10 billion. "It does not make a lot of sense to me that we would provide billions of dollars to a company owned by the wealthiest guy in America," Sanders told The Intercept Tuesday. Cantwell's measure wouldn't rescind the grant to SpaceX but would create an additional contract that Bezos's company would be in line to win. A third company, Dynetics, had also bid for the moonshot, but the author of the new amendment offers a strong suggestion of which company it's likely to benefit. The measure has been attached to the Endless Frontier Act as part of a manager's amendment and authorizes $10.032 billion through the year 2026 for the moon program. Authorization alone does not fund the program, and Congress would still need to appropriate the money, or the executive would need to find other appropriated funds.

Big under-the-hood changes are coming to Google's original Nest Hub, even if most users won't ever be aware of what's happening. From a report: Starting today, the open-source Fuchsia OS will start rolling out to first-gen Nest Hub displays, according to 9to5Google. In the works since 2016, Fuchsia will land first on Nest Hub devices enrolled in Google's Preview Program, before arriving more widely on non-Preview Program displays. Don't expect the user experience to change much, though. 9to5Google notes that the look and feel of Fuchsia OS-powered Nest Hubs will be "essentially identical" to what it was before.

OK, so what's the big deal about Fuchsia, then? It's a new, open-source OS that's decidedly not based on the Linux kernel, as Android and Chrome OS are. Instead, Fuchsia is based on Magneta, which (as we described it back in 2016) is "combination microkernel and set of user-space services and hardware drivers" with a "physics based renderer" that can power graphical user interfaces. Because it's an open-source project, Fuchsia's existence has been well publicized over the years, although its purpose has been harder to fathom; "out in the open" yet "shrouded in mystery" is how we aptly put it. With its arrival on the original Nest Hub, Fuchsia is taking its first tentative steps out of the lab and into the hands of actual users, even if those users aren't aware of the new OS.

Peloton said Monday it will invest $400 million to build its first factory in the United States to speed up production and delivery of its popular cycles and high-end treadmill machines. CNBC reports: After vetting a number of locations, it selected a 200-acre site in Troy Township in Wood County, Ohio, to construct more than 1 million square feet of manufacturing, office and amenities space, the company said. Peloton expects to break ground later this summer on the project, which should bring more than 2,000 jobs to the area. The facility should be up and running by 2023.

Potential customers will be able to visit the Ohio facility to view its products or schedule tours to see the cycles and treadmills being made, the company said. The site will also have a fitness center for its workers. According to Foley, the extra space also means Peloton will have room to manufacture additional products in the years ahead.

The space-news web site NASASpaceFlight writes: While organic compounds have been confirmed on the Martian surface and near-surface areas since 2018, new Earth-based experiments point to a potentially tantalizing series of signatures from Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument that could indicate the presence of organic salts at the rover's Gale Crater location. What's more, the new research from a team led by J. M. T. Lewis, an organic geochemist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, points to further potential evidence that organic salts might be prevalent across the Martian terrain. The hard part is conclusively detecting them.

For decades, scientists theorized that organic compounds were almost certainly to have been preserved to some detectable degree in the Martian surface environment. In 2018, Curiosity's instruments allowed Eigenbrode et al. to conclusively prove that they were in fact there. In turn, if organic compounds were present at one time, their by-products — organic salts — would still be around as well, even given the harsh radiation environment of Mars compared to Earth.

While organic compounds and organic salts can form from the presence of microbial life, they can also form from geologic processes. Though not confirmed, organic salts would be further evidence that organic matter once existed on Mars' surface, and, if they are still present, could support hypothetical microbial life on Mars today, as some life on Earth uses organic salt as food/energy.

"60 seconds of rocket burn, straight into space," Virgin Galactic tweeted today, sharing a video of their historic launch.

CNN reports: Virgin Galactic's rocket-powered plane, carrying two pilots, soared into the upper atmosphere on its third mission to reach space Saturday morning. The success cues up Virgin Galactic to begin launching paying customers within the next year as the company works to finish its testing campaign at its new headquarters in New Mexico.

Spaceplane VSS Unity reached an altitude of 55.45 miles, according to the company. The U.S. government recognizes the 50-mile mark as the edge of space. The company tweeted Saturday morning that the spaceflight carried technology experiments for NASA's Flight Opportunities Program...

Saturday's flight comes after Virgin Galactic's last spaceflight attempt ended abruptly when the rocket engine that powers the space plane, called VSS Unity, failed to ignite, setting the company's testing schedule back by months. Virgin Galactic, founded by British billionaire Richard Branson in 2004, has spent years pledging to take groups of customers on brief, scenic flights to suborbital space. But the company has faced a series of complications and delays, including a 2014 test flight crash that left one pilot dead.

Nonetheless, Virgin Galactic has already sold tickets for $200,000 to $250,000 to more than 600 people.
The company said it also collected data "to be used for the final two verification reports that are required as part of the current FAA commercial reusable spacecraft operator's license." Virgin Galactic's CEO called it "a major step forward for both Virgin Galactic and human spaceflight in New Mexico. Space travel is a bold and adventurous endeavor, and I am incredibly proud of our talented team for making the dream of private space travel a reality."

In fact, this was the first ever spaceflight from Spaceport America, New Mexico, making it the third U.S. state to launch humans into space. New Mexico Governor Lujan Grisham said proudly in the company's statement that "After so many years and so much hard work, New Mexico has finally reached the stars." To commemorate the moment, the flight carried New Mexico's traditional green chile seeds, and featured the Zia Sun Symbol from the state flag on the outside of the spaceship. "The crew experienced extraordinary views of the bright, blue-rimmed curvature of the earth against the blackness of space," reads the statement from Virgin Galactic, adding that New Mexico's White Sands National Park "sparkled brilliantly below."

And pilot-in-command CJ Sturckow now becomes the first person ever to have flown to space from three different states.

Quoting the Google Developers blog: Developers around the world are constantly creating open source tools and tutorials but have a hard time getting them discovered. The content published often spanned many different sites - from GitHub to Medium. Therefore we decided to create a space where we can highlight the best projects related to Google technologies in one place - introducing the Developer Library.

The platform showcases blog posts and open source tools with easy-to-use navigation. Content is categorized by product areas; Machine Learning, Flutter, Firebase, Angular, Cloud, Android, with more to come.

What makes the Developer Library unique is that each piece featured on the site is reviewed, in detail, by a team of Google experts for accuracy and relevancy, so you know when you view the content on the site it has the stamp of approval from Google.
The "Dev Library" web site describes itself as "a showcase of what developers like you have built with Google technologies."

New submitter StellarThoughts writes: Scientists analyzed the second ever known interstellar object, a comet known as 2I/Borisov, and found some very unlikely results. Molecules of nickel and iron were being vaporized and drifting from the surface. Typically, nickel and iron vaporize when comets streak near the sun or aim directly for it, reaching temperatures exceeding 800 degrees Fahrenheit. And instead, this comet was a toasty -135 degrees F.

Comparing data with 20 other comets of varying chemical composition within the solar system, they spewed nickel and iron much like 2I/Borisov. Scientists have a few theories, including: "One possibility is that harsh ultraviolet light from the sun might break apart nickel-containing molecules in the comets." Scientists believe these traces were missed for so long because of the supposed unlikelihood of gaseous metals at such a low temperature.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Much as a smoke detector gives only a vague idea of where a fire is, current methods to detect smuggled nuclear materials are slow and imprecise. But a new technique that images nuclear materials based on the neutrons and gamma rays they shed can locate these dangers in record time, scientists report. The new technique -- neutron-gamma emission tomography (NGET) detection -- relies on detectors that emit light when struck by either a neutron or a gamma ray and measure the time of arrival with nanosecond precision. Suppose two detectors sit face to face, separated by 1 meter or so, and that a nucleus decays and emits a neutron that hits one detector and a gamma ray that hits the other. The difference in the arrival times, when accounting for the detailed physics of the nuclear decay process, defines a fuzzy, somewhat spherical shell in space in which the nucleus could have been. Timing many neutron-gamma ray pairs with several detectors produces a set of probability shells that should intersect at a point -- the location of the source. The ability to pinpoint a source may offer a "paradigm shift" in nuclear safeguards, the researchers say. NGET detectors might also be shrunk to fit on a drone. That offers "a really fascinating possibility" of quickly mapping radiological contamination at disaster sites like Fukushima or Chernobyl, they say. The findings appear in the journal Science Advances.

After years of seasonal pop-ups, Made by Google is finally opening a retail store for its hardware division. The first physical Google Store will be in Chelsea directly under one of the company's New York City offices. 9to5Google reports: At the Google Store, you'll be able to "browse and buy an extensive selection of products made by Google," including Pixel phones, Nest products, Fitbit devices, and Pixelbooks. You'll also be able to pick up online orders. The company says this is "an important next step in our hardware journey of providing the most helpful experience of Google, wherever and whenever people need it." "Throughout the store, visitors will be able to experience how our products and services work together in a variety of immersive ways, which we're excited to share more about when the doors open."

Besides shopping, there will be product support help from troubleshooting to cracked screen repairs and installations, as well as how-to workshops: "It doesn't matter whether you're a longtime Pixel user, are curious about our Nest displays or want to participate in one of the how-to workshops we'll offer throughout the year -- our team will be able to provide you with help that's specific and personalized to your needs." The first-ever physical Google Store will open this summer, with the company saying it will "explore and experiment with the possibilities of a physical retail space and build upon the experience."

A giant slab of ice bigger than the Spanish island of Majorca has sheared off from the frozen edge of Antarctica into the Weddell Sea, becoming the largest iceberg afloat in the world, the European Space Agency said on Wednesday. From a report: The newly calved berg, designated A-76 by scientists, was spotted in recent satellite images captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission, the space agency said in a statement posted on its website with a photo of the enormous, oblong ice sheet. Its surface area spans 4,320 square km (1,668 square miles) and measures 175 km (106 miles) long by 25 km (15 miles) wide. By comparison, Spain's tourist island of Majorca in the Mediterranean occupies 3,640 square km (1,405 square miles). The U.S. state of Rhode Island is smaller still, with a land mass of just 2,678 square km (1,034 square miles). The enormity of A-76, which broke away from Antarctica's Ronne Ice Shelf, ranks as the largest existing iceberg on the planet, surpassing the now second-place A-23A, about 3,380 square km (1,305 square miles) in size and also floating in the Weddell Sea.

China has released the first photographs taken by its Zhurong rover, which touched down on Mars late on May 14 as part of the country's Tianwen-1 mission. Space.com reports: The China National Space Administration (CNSA), which runs the mission, has released two Mars photographs taken by the rover: one in color and one in black and white. Both images show parts of the rover and its lander against a backdrop of Utopia Planitia, the expansive northern plain that Zhurong will explore during its mission.

The color image shows a view looking to the rear of Zhurong from a navigation camera above the rover's main deck. Solar arrays are visible, as are some surface rocks and features. The black and white image is from an obstacle avoidance camera at the front of the rover. It was captured with a wide-angle lens that also revealed a view of the Mars horizon in the distance, as well as two subsurface radar instruments on the rover itself. In addition to the photos from the surface, CNSA also released two short videos of the orbiter and Zhurong rover's landing capsule separating during Friday's maneuver. Both videos come from cameras on the orbiter and show the capsule pulling away.

Microsoft is launching the personal version of Microsoft Teams today. After previewing the service nearly a year ago, Microsoft Teams is now available for free personal use amongst friends and families. From a report: The service itself is almost identical to the Microsoft Teams that businesses use, and it will allow people to chat, video call, and share calendars, locations, and files easily. Microsoft is also continuing to offer everyone free 24-hour video calls that it introduced in the preview version in November. You'll be able to meet up with up to 300 people in video calls that can last for 24 hours. Microsoft will eventually enforce limits of 60 minutes for group calls of up to 100 people after the pandemic, but keep 24 hours for 1:1 calls. While the preview initially launched on iOS and Android, Microsoft Teams for personal use now works across the web, mobile, and desktop apps. Microsoft is also allowing Teams personal users to enable its Together mode -- a feature that uses AI to segment your face and shoulders and place you together with other people in a virtual space. Skype got this same feature back in December.

RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) writes: For a number of years the administrative process for giving asteroids names has had a worsening logjam. Important or "interesting" bodies (such as `Oumuamua, the first definitely interstellar object identified) would still get names rapidly assigned, but in the background myriads of unspectacular objects would persist with "names" based on their discovery date like "1981 GD1". Which is adequate for managing databases, but less than satisfactory for most humans.

A new publication from the "Working Group for Small Body Nomenclature", combines what used to be several steps into one stage. So now one can easily find that "1981 GD1" has the name "Rutherford", to commemorate one of the major scientists of the 20th century.

No doubt there will be complaints of an over-concentration on figures from Classical legend (22 of 179 names assigned), but eventually that mine will play out. Professional and amateur astronomers (34 and 30 names) are, unsurprisingly, the largest groups commemorated. Other scientists get a good showing (16, Rutherford included), along with memorials to teachers, observatories and universities. One architect and one astronaut (there isn't a bar on memorialising living persons) also get mentions, and modest numbers of sports stars, musicians and other cultural figures pad out the list. Chinese, Japanese and Taiwanese contributors have a significant input to this batch, along with a number of South American contributions and a fair number from smaller countries (Paul Erdos, for example, in the {dead+ white+ mathematical eccentrics} category). And one entry which I can only class as a joke — 1990 QX19 gets a name which should have been used years ago. Obviously you'll need to RTFA to see the joke, but RTFA-ing is an un-Slashdot activity.

Future numbers of the Bulletin will publish new batches of assigned names, and work away on the backlog. You still need to be the discoverer of a "small body" to submit a name proposal, but that step of the process is also under review. With about 22,000 of the currently-recognised million-plus objects with well-characterised orbits, there is no realistic prospect of running out any time soon — they are being found faster than they get named. But eventually you too could name a pathetic little mudball for someone you despise. Won't that be fun?

Slashdot reader boudie2 writes: Maritime Launch Services has secured financing it says will allow it to begin construction on a spaceport facility this fall and get its first launch off the ground in 2022. The first Cyclone 4M medium-class launch vehicle would take off in 2023.

The company wants to construct a rocket-launching site in Canso, Nova Scotia to send satellites into orbit for use in near-earth imaging, communications and scientific experiments. President and CEO Steve Matier stated the company has been approached by small satellite launchers, and MLS is considering hosting one of them for a first flight to orbit from the launch site as the facility scales up its operations. The company is expecting additional funding for the project will be secured through equity, debt and launch contracts.

Space startup Rocket Lab "lost a pair of satellites as the second stage of one of its Electron rockets failed to make it to orbit Saturday," reports CNET: After a successful liftoff from the company's New Zealand launch facility, something went wrong after the first stage booster separated from the smaller second stage carrying two satellites for Earth imaging company BlackSky. A live feed from the second stage showed that after it separated, it appeared to go into an uncontrolled tumble.

Commentators on the company's livestream reported that telemetry from the second stage had been lost and later the Rocket Lab Twitter feed confirmed the mission failure.

"An issue was experienced during today's launch, resulting in the loss of the mission," the company tweeted. "We are deeply sorry to our launch customers BlackSky and Spaceflight. The issue occurred shortly after stage two ignition..."

Rocket Lab reported that the booster made a successful parachute-assisted splashdown in the Pacific and a specially modified ship was en route to try to recover it.
"Rocket Lab has mostly been successful so far, with 17 of its missions reaching orbit," writes Engadget. Or, as CNET puts it, "This is the third failure out of 20 Rocket Lab launches and the second loss of mission in the past year."

In a statement, Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck said "We will learn from this, and we'll be back on the pad again."

Which country will shoot the first movie in outer space? Russia is now "in a race with the United States to claim the achievement," reports NBC News.

36-year-old actress Yulia Peresild and 37-year-old director Klim Shepenko will complete Russia's cosmonaut-training program, ultimately taking two of the three seats aboard the October launch of Russia's Soyuz mission to the International Space Station: The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, announced Thursday that it had selected its crew to headline the film, which will be called "Challenge..."

Very little is known about the plot, which in many ways seems secondary to the spectacle. When Russia announced the project last year, Konstantin Ernst, the head of Russia's Channel One — which is working with Roscosmos on the film — said that it would not be a science fiction film, but a realistic depiction of near-term space travel. "It's a movie about how a person in no way connected with space exploration, due to various reasons and personal debt, ends up a month later in orbit," Ernst said in a September 2020 interview. "That's all I can tell you...."

The decision to fill the October Soyuz flight with a movie crew comes at an uncertain time for Russia's space program... In October, NASA paid for its final flight aboard Soyuz... Russia is now left to look for other means to help subsidize launch costs. One of those obvious sources — beyond funding from the state television network Channel One — is space tourism. Another Soyuz will launch in December, and rather than fill those seats with Russian cosmonauts, Moscow announced Thursday that two Japanese space tourists will take the ride.

China just successfully landed its first rover on Mars, becoming only the second nation to do so. Space.com reports: The Tianwen-1 mission, China's first interplanetary endeavor, reached the surface of the Red Planet Friday (May 14) at approximately 7:11 p.m. EDT (2311 GMT), though Chinese space officials have not yet confirmed the exact time and location of touchdown. Tianwen-1 (which translates to "Heavenly Questions") arrived in Mars' orbit in February after launching to the Red Planet on a Long March 5 rocket in July 2020. After circling the Red Planet for more than three months, the Tianwen-1 lander, with the rover attached, separated from the orbiter to begin its plunge toward the planet's surface. Once the lander and rover entered Mars' atmosphere, the spacecraft endured a similar procedure to the "seven minutes of terror" that NASA's Mars rovers have experienced when attempting soft landings on Mars.

A heat shield protected the spacecraft during the fiery descent, after which the mission safely parachuted down to the Utopia Planitia region, a plain inside of an enormous impact basin in the planet's northern hemisphere. Much like during NASA's Perseverance rover landing, Tianwen-1's landing platform fired some small, downward-facing rocket engines to slow down during the last few seconds of its descent. China's Mars rover, called Zhurong after an ancient fire god in Chinese mythology, will part ways with the lander by driving down a foldable ramp. Once it has deployed, the rover is expected to spend at least 90 Mars days (or about 93 Earth days; a day on Mars lasts about 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth) roving around on Mars to study the planet's composition and look for signs of water ice. Utopia Planitia is believed to contain vast amounts of water ice beneath the surface. It's also where NASA's Viking 2 mission touched down in 1976.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Humanity's enormous emissions of greenhouse gases are shrinking the stratosphere, a new study has revealed. The thickness of the atmospheric layer has contracted by 400 meters since the 1980s, the researchers found, and will thin by about another kilometer by 2080 without major cuts in emissions. The changes have the potential to affect satellite operations, the GPS navigation system and radio communications.

The stratosphere extends from about 20km to 60km above the Earth's surface. Below is the troposphere, in which humans live, and here carbon dioxide heats and expands the air. This pushes up the lower boundary of the stratosphere. But, in addition, when CO2 enters the stratosphere it actually cools the air, causing it to contract. The shrinking stratosphere is a stark signal of the climate emergency and the planetary-scale influence that humanity now exerts, according to Juan Anel, at the University of Vigo, Ourense in Spain and part of the research team. "It is shocking," he said. "This proves we are messing with the atmosphere up to 60 kilometers."

The study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, reached its conclusions using the small set of satellite observations taken since the 1980s in combination with multiple climate models, which included the complex chemical interactions that occur in the atmosphere. "It may affect satellite trajectories, orbital life-times, and retrievals [...] the propagation of radio waves, and eventually the overall performance of the Global Positioning System and other space-based navigational systems," the researchers said.