TLDR 2020-11-04

Ant Group's world record-setting initial public offering has been suspended. Its controller, executive chairman, and CEO were summoned and interviewed by regulators in China. The company later reported significant issues that prevented it from listing. New draft rules for online micro-lending were issued on Monday by the Chinese central bank and regulators. The company was planning to raise just under $34.5 billion in a dual listing in Shanghai and Hong Kong on Thursday. It will continue to work through regulatory concerns with the Hong Kong and Shanghai stock exchanges.

Linux Mint now has its own version of the Chromium web browser. Maintaining Chromium was a significant time investment for the Ubuntu Desktop Team, so they switched to using Snap to distribute Chromium. This resulted in security issues that Mint developers felt they needed to fix. In June, Mint cut Snap and the Snap-based Chromium from their distro. Up-to-date builds of Chromium are finally now available for Mint users. There was a delay as Mint needed to automate the process of detecting, packaging, and compiling new versions of the browser.

Most flying cars are just small airplanes, but the Klein Vision AirCar is an aircraft that looks and functions like a car. A video is linked in the article that shows the AirCar successfully completing a flight and driving around. It is a road-ready car that can transform into a plane with a touch of a few buttons. The vehicle is powered by a 1.6-liter BMW engine and the startup claims that it has a flying range of 620 miles and can reach a top flying speed of 124 mph.

Voyager 2 has been in space for 43 years and it is now 125 astronomical units away from Earth. In 1989, scientists ordered Voyager 2 to fly in a trajectory that resulted in it only being able to communicate with a radio antenna facility in Canberra, Australia. The facility had to be refurbished in March, with work completing in February next year. To test the new hardware at the facility, Voyager mission managers sent a series of signals to Voyager 2, which it responded to. It was the first time since March that NASA has been able to communicate with the spacecraft.

When animations in CSS conflict, only one of them will occur. The Web Animations API allows developers to mix up animation behavior using the composite option. This article discusses how to create composite animations in CSS by adding a little bit of JavaScript.

PRESENTA Lib is a JavaScript library for building web presentations from config objects. It focuses on letting people work on content while allowing customizations. Full documentation is linked.

This video will show you how to build an artificial sun that looks unbelievably realistic. There are two builds in the video, a larger one that uses a satellite dish, and a smaller one for those who can't source a satellite dish. The artificial light features parallel rays, meaning that shadows don't change size no matter how far you are from the light, and a blue sky effect. The resulting light makes it look like it is bright and sunny indoors even when it is night time or raining outside.

Scientists have discovered that platypus fur glows in the dark when exposed to ultraviolet light. Biofluorescence is rare in nature, but the scientists were inspired to look for it in platypus after it was found in the fur of New World flying squirrels while studying lichens with a blacklight. Monotremes branched off from the marsupial-placental lineage more than 150 million years ago. The presence of biofluorescent fur in platypus shows how deep in the mammalian tree the trait of biofluorescent fur is.