TLDR 2022-04-11

Elon Musk made a series of tweets on Saturday night, raising questions about the platform and the future of the company. He noted that the most popular accounts on Twitter are not very active and that bots were skewing Twitter's active user numbers. Musk suggested that Twitter Blue subscribers should get an authentication checkmark and be excluded from seeing ads. He also suggested that Twitter's home base be converted to a homeless shelter. More about Twitter's past, its current state, and what the future may be like for the company, is available in the article.

SpaceX launched the first fully private mission, Axiom-1, to the International Space Station on Friday. The team will conduct studies involving an air filtration device, cellular biology, and a swarm of robotic tiles. The tiles are designed to self-assemble and are capable of sealing to create a pressurized environment. They could be used in the future to create habitats in space. A video showing how the tiles are designed to work is available in the article.

Scientists from the Babraham Institute in the UK have reset human skin cells to a more youthful state in terms of certain molecular measurements. Previous research found that it was possible to turn normal cells into stem cells, but these cells would lose their specific identity. The new technique stops before the stem cell state is reached, allowing the cell to retain its original identity and function. The mechanism behind the technique is not fully understood. The technique still needs to be tested on other types of cells in the body and assessed for safety before it can be used in clinical trials.

At least 10 firms in Europe and the US are developing variations of kites to capture airborne wind energy. Airborne wind is the wind that can be found 200 meters or more above the ground. Kite power technology is still in its infancy. Most companies are working on small pilot projects and none have scaled their technology to the range that would make them comparable to conventional wind turbines. This article talks about several approaches to kite power that companies are currently experimenting with and discusses the potential for the technology.

There's no guarantee that an in-process HTTP request will be successful when a page is terminated in the browser. Sending data on page termination can be very unreliable, which can be an issue when creating logs for data-sensitive business decisions. This article looks at why this happens and ways to make in-process HTTP requests more reliable.

RisingWave is a cloud-native streaming database that uses SQL as the interface language. It consumes streaming data, performs continuous queries, and updates results dynamically. RisingWave can collect and transform data from streams, create materialized views for data, and perform data queries. Everything in RisingWave is done via Postgres-compatible SQL.

Primeval Foods plans to cultivate and sell a range of exotic meats, including zebra, lion, elephant, and tiger. The lab-grown meat company uses small samples of tissues from healthy wild animals to create its meat. The animals are not killed in the process. Primeval Foods will preview its meats at a couple of Michelin-starred restaurants in London. Other startups, like Orbillion Bio, are also trying to create more novel types of lab-grown meats.

Google and Samsung have agreed to provide spare parts for their phones. The US made it legal to open up many devices for the purpose of repair last October. France's repairability scorecard system, which rates devices on how repairable they are, has had a significant effect on consumer choice. Studies on the system have shown that consumers are willing to give up on their favorite brand for products with a higher repairability score. Some types of repairs may still need to be done through the manufacturer.