Intel announced layoffs of about 24,000 employees (roughly one-quarter of its workforce) as new CEO Lip-Bu Tan cuts projects and halts planned mega-fab factories in Germany and Poland. AMD released the Ryzen Threadripper 9980X, a Zen 5-based CPU with 64 cores and 128 threads that reaches up to 5.4 GHz and costs $4,999, with shipping…
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Delta Aquariids peak on the nights of July 30–31 with rates up to 15–20 meteors per hour in the Southern Hemisphere and fewer than 10 per hour from mid-northern latitudes, under a slender 25–30% lit Moon that sets early. Alpha Capricornids peak around July 30–31, averaging 2–5 meteors per hour, but delivering slow, bright fireballs…
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Perseid Meteor Shower peaks on the night of August 11–12 (into the pre-dawn of August 13), with up to about 100 shooting stars per hour under dark skies, though the August 9 full Sturgeon Moon at 84–90% illumination will wash out many dim meteors. On the morning of August 10, a rare six-planet parade will…
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SpaceX launched 28 Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral, Florida at 11:37 p.m. EDT on July 29, 2025, and the Falcon 9 first stage landed on the drone ship “Just Read the Instructions,” marking the booster’s 26th flight and pushing Starlink to over 8,000 active satellites. SpaceX marked its 96th launch of 2025 on July 29,…
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Solar PV costs have fallen about 90% over the last decade. Modern home solar panels often exceed 20% efficiency, with typical residential systems of 5–10 kW. In the United States, over 4 million homes had solar panels by early 2024. Global rooftop PV adoption could reach about 100 million households by 2030. In the United…
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Grok 4 was unveiled on July 9, 2025 in a live stream on X, with Elon Musk calling it “the smartest AI in the world” and claiming it is “postgrad-level in every subject.” Grok 4 can use tools natively, perform autonomous web searches, run Python code, and access real-time information, removing the fixed knowledge cutoff.…
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Gemini Ultra achieved 90.0% on the MMLU benchmark, the first AI to exceed human expert performance. GPT-4 Omni (GPT-4o) was introduced by 2025, handling text, images, and audio with about 232 ms response times and powering the free ChatGPT tier in mid-2025. Claude Opus 4 is billed as the world’s best coding model, achieving 72–73%…
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By mid-2023, fixed fiber passed over 92% of Portuguese homes, with end-2023 FTTH/B connections totaling 3.24 million households versus about 1.3 million on cable. By June 2023, 5G coverage reached about 98.1% of households (low-band), and rural 5G coverage jumped to 87.5% by mid-2023 from 20% in 2022. As of June 2023, 97.6% of households…
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Venice’s historic center is effectively a no-fly zone that requires explicit ENAC and local authorities’ authorization, with the D-Flight map marking Venice in red as prohibited. The EU/ENAC altitude limit is 120 m (400 ft) above ground level, but in Venice’s restricted zones the practical limit without a permit is 0 m. Drones must stay…
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By early 2025, Starlink was available in over 100 countries across every inhabited continent. In the past year, Starlink launched in 42 new countries and territories and surpassed 6 million active customers worldwide. In the United States, the standard Starlink plan costs about $90 per month with a $599 equipment kit. SpaceX added about 2,300…
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