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S&P Dow Jones Indices, a division of financial data provider S&P Global Inc, said on Thursday that it will launch cryptocurrency indices in 2021, making it the latest major finance company to enter the nascent asset class. Reuters reports: The S&P DJI-branded products will use data from […]

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Carmakers have sold more than 500,000 battery electric cars in Europe during 2020, a milestone in the automotive industry's move away from fossil fuels. Sales of all plug-in cars, including hybrids, have surpassed 1m during the year in the UK […]

"The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Pfizer is planning to cut their shipment of Covid-19 vaccines for 2020 in half due to supply-chain problems," writes Slashdot reader phalse phace. Axios (non-paywalled source) reports: The U.K. government has ordered 40 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech's […]

Timnit Gebru, one of the best-known AI researchers today and co-lead of an AI ethics team at Google, said she was fired Wednesday for sending an email to "non-management employees that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager." VentureBeat reports: She said Google AI employees who […]

According to Bloomberg, Google is set to win conditional European Union approval for its $2.1 billion takeover of Fitbit this month. From the report: The deal could be approved as soon as next week after national competition authorities give their opinion, said the people who asked not to be named […]

An anonymous reader shares a report from Techdirt: Last last week, a report out of the UK topped the trending news items at Hacker News. The report found that U.S. broadband speeds -- historically the poster child for mediocrity -- jumped roughly 90% during the COVID-19 lockdowns. The improvements […]

China's Chang'e spacecraft has lifted off from Oceanus Procellarum at 10:10 EST Thursday, carrying with it the first fresh lunar samples since 1976. Space.com reports: Six minutes later, the ascent spacecraft achieved lunar orbit, marking a huge milestone in the Chang'e 5 mission to return lunar […]

Iwastheone shares a report from The Verge: Today, the National Science Foundation (NSF) released shocking footage of the collapse of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The video, captured on December 1st, shows the moment when support cables snapped, causing the massive 900-ton structure […]

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The government has interpreted a high-profile provision of the Patriot Act as empowering F.B.I. national security investigators to collect logs showing who has visited particular web pages, documents show. But the government stops short […]

YouTube is taking new steps to weed out bullying, hate speech and other kinds of nasty comments. From a report: The company introduced a new feature that will remind users to "keep comments respectful," when its automated systems detect a comment may be offensive. The change is rolling out now on […]

Residents of Shenzhen saw truly driverless cars on the road today. From a report: AutoX, a four-year-old startup backed by Alibaba, MediaTek and Shanghai Motors, deployed a fleet of 25 unmanned vehicles in downtown Shenzhen, marking the first time any autonomous driving car in China tests on public […]

The Trump administration has sued Facebook, accusing the social-media company of illegally reserving high-paying jobs for immigrant workers it was sponsoring for permanent residence, rather than searching adequately for available U.S. workers who could fill the positions. From a report: In a […]

When Warner Bros. announced that "Wonder Woman 1984" would land on the streaming service HBO Max on Christmas, the same time it debuts in theaters, many expected it to be an isolated case in response to an unprecedented pandemic. From a report: Instead, the studio will deploy a similar release […]

PC maker powerhouse Dell announced today a flurry of new enterprise security solutions for the company's line of enterprise products. From a report: The new services can be grouped into two categories, with (1) new solutions meant to protect the supply chain of Dell products while in transit to […]

AstraZeneca and Oxford University have given conflicting accounts of how they came upon the most effective dosing pattern for their COVID-19 vaccine, a rare instance of public dissension between major institutions collaborating on a pivotal project. From a report: The discrepancy, reported for the […]