Politicians are bickering and NASA is tinkering, but first: a cartoon tackling the problem of robot discrimination.
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Today’s Headlines
The GOP raid put national security at risk
Earlier on Wednesday, House Republicans barged into a secure area called a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, known as a SCIF, where the House Intelligence Committee was scheduled to hear a deposition as part of its Trump impeachment inquiry. While Republicans may have felt like bold advocates for transparency, all they really accomplished was bringing their easily hackable smartphones into an area that hosts sensitive national-security information.
NASA wants to send a probe to the hellish surface of Venus
With all the recent talk about exploring Mars and the moon, it’s easy to forget about the other planets worth exploring, like Venus. But that’s in part because doing so is so difficult: The longest a spacecraft has survived on Earth’s “evil twin” is just 127 minutes. Now NASA is trying to change that with a craft called the Long-Lived In-situ Solar System Explorer—a probe designed to withstand the planet’s harsh conditions for 60 days.
Fast Fact: 1 in 100,000
Those are the chances that a video from an extremist group will be recommended to you on YouTube after watching a video from the mainstream media. The statistics, found in a new study published by Penn State political scientists, gives pause to the theory that it is YouTube’s algorithm that radicalizes viewers.
WIRED Recommends: Microsoft Surface Pro 7
If you’re looking for a laptop-tablet hybrid, the Surface Pro is one of the best you can get. If you’ve already got one you probably don’t need to upgrade, but the latest model is faster than ever before and has a USB-C port to boot. It scored an 8/10 from our reviewers.
News You Can Use
Here are a couple of Wi-Fi routers that will keep your internet fast and secure.
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