Lifeboat Foundation

Apple’s quietly building a small army of virtual reality developers, and has been working on a headset for several months, but it’s been typically vague about its plans with the public. And on Friday, company representatives confirmed it’s made yet another another acquisition.

“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” Apple told Tim Bradshaw of the Financial Times, confirming its buy of Flyby Media, a company that “is dedicated to building new technology that can elevate, rather than replace, our real-world experiences.”

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The Francis Crick institute will genetically edit the leftover embryos from from IVF clinics.

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Windows 95 just won’t die. The older it gets, the more versatile it becomes. We’ve seen it running on smartwatches, tablets, and handheld consoles — and now you can run it right inside your web browser in an instant.

Andrea Faulds, a 19-year-old developer from Scotland, has been able to get Windows 95 running in almost any web browser using emscripten, an emulator that converts C++ code to JavaScript in real-time. It requires no downloads, plugins, or any special software.

The emulator takes a minute to load up, but once you’re inside it, it’s surprisingly snappy. It provides you with a full Windows 95 operating system and everything you’d expect to get with it — including classic games like Solitaire and Minesweeper — and it runs incredibly well.

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A Japanese firm said Monday it would open the world’s first fully automated farm with robots handling almost every step of the process, from watering seedlings to harvesting crops.

Kyoto-based Spread said the indoor grow house will start operating by the middle of 2017 and produce 30,000 heads of lettuce a day.

It hopes to boost that figure to half a million lettuce heads daily within five years.

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As solar power becomes a bigger and bigger part of the overall energy landscape, engineers around the world are busy working out how to build plants that are large and efficient enough to keep up with demand. Now Japanese electronics giant Kyocera is starting construction on what it says will be the largest floating solar power plant (in terms of overall capacity) in the world.

It’s the fourth such floating plant Kyocera has worked on so far, but this one promises to be the most impressive yet: the facility is going to be built on the Yamakura Dam reservoir to the south-east of Tokyo in Japan, and will pump out 13.7 megawatts (MW) of power once it’s completed in March 2018. Some 51,000 photovoltaic panels will be stitched together to cover around 180,000 square metres (about 44.5 acres) of space.

That’s roughly the same area as 18 soccer pitches, so you get a sense of the sort of scale we’re talking about here. Kyocera says the new plant will provide enough power for 4,970 average households and offset around 7,411 tonnes of CO₂ emissions every year that it’s in operation (equivalent to 19,000 barrels of oil).

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Discover & Share this Sin GIF with everyone you know. GIPHY is how you search, share, discover, and create GIFs.

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This collision-proof drone can go to the world’s most dangerous places.

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Cool!

Stardrive, ISEP, Internet Science Education Project.

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Do we owe our existence to Jupiter? That used to be the standard paradigm in planetary theory, but now theorists routinely debate the merits of such a gas giant planet parked out at a 12 year orbit in our own solar system. However, one thing is clear; solar systems like ours with Jupiter analogs are pretty scarce.

Solar systems like ours, in which Jupiter-like planets orbit their parent stars at Jupiter-like distances, remain scarce in the local stellar neighborhood, says an Australian-led team of astronomers.

The team who report their findings in The Astrophysical Journal, analyzed the latest results from an ongoing planet detection survey of more than 200 solar-type stars mostly within some 300 light years of Earth.

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