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A piece of the Wright brothers’ first airplane is on Mars. NASA’s experimental Martian helicopter holds a small swatch of fabric from the 1903 Wright Flyer, the space agency revealed this week. The helicopter, named Ingenuity, hitched a ride to the red planet with the Perseverance rover, arriving last month. Ingenuity will attempt the first powered, controlled flight on another planet no sooner than April 8. It will mark a “Wright brothers’ moment,” noted Bobby Braun, director for planetary science at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Carillon Historical Park in Dayton, Ohio, the Wrights’ hometown, donated the postage-size piece of muslin from the plane’s bottom left wing, at NASA’s request. The swatch made the 300 million-mile journey to Mars with the blessing of the Wright brothers’ great-grandniece and great-grandnephew, said…

Stock trading app company Robinhood said this week that it has submitted a confidential plan to go public later this year. The company based in Menlo Park, California, filed the paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission while at the center of a battle between online activist retail investors and institutional investors over companies such as GameStop and AMC Entertainment. Robinhood had to restrict trading of those companies earlier in the year, and has been subject to congressional investigations. Robinhood did not disclose the size of its initial public offering, or where it plans to trade its stock. CNBC reported earlier this year that the company was planning on listing on Nasdaq and that Goldman Sachs is the lead investment bank advising it on its plan to go public. Robinhood…

A fire at a plant owned by Japanese chipmaker Renesas could deepen the ongoing global semiconductor shortage that has especially hampered automobile production. The company, which makes chips for Toyota, Nissan and Honda, expects production at one of the buildings at its Naka Factory in Hitachinaka to be halted for a month. Shares in all three automakers fell this week. Tokyo-based Renesas said the fire started when some equipment overheated and ignited, though it wasn’t known what caused it to overheat. There were no casualties or damage to the building. Renesas said two-thirds of the products made in the building could be produced elsewhere, although “due to the recent increase in demand for semiconductors, the situation does not allow for all products to be immediately produced alternatively.” Separately last week,…

The cyberattack crested just as finance officials from across Latin America were descending on Washington to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Inter-American Development Bank. On Sept. 24, 2019, requests from more than 15,000 internet addresses throughout China flooded the bank’s website, knocking part of it intermittently offline. To unclog the network, the bank took the drastic step of blocking all traffic from China. But the attackers persisted, and as officials gathered for a day of conferences with athletes, academics and celebrity chefs the bombardment intensified. Details of the attack, which has not been previously reported, are contained in an IDB internal document. News of the attack is surfacing just as the bank’s new president, Mauricio Claver-Carone, seeks to leverage his hawkish views on China from his time in the…

Justice Justin Bieber Justin Bieber has revealed that while creating Justice, his often thoughtful, reflective and romantically-tinged sixth studio album, his intention was to “make music that will provide comfort; to make songs that people can relate to, and connect to, so they feel less alone.” FIVE FACTS: 1. In a statement published by Rolling Stone , Bieber explained the album’s title: “I want to continue the conversation of what justice looks like so [the world] can continue to heal.” 2. The album itself has arrived only just over a year after the artist’s fifth studio album, Changes. 3. Chance the Rapper collaborates with Bieber on the new album’s lead single “Holy”. 4. In September 2020, months before the album’s release, Chance called the album “groundbreaking” and compared it to…

Regal Cinemas, the second largest movie theater chain in the U.S., will reopen beginning April 2, its parent company, Cineworld Group, announced this week. Regal had been one of most notable holdouts in the gradual reopening of cinemas nationwide. For nearly half a year, its 7,211 screens and 549 theatres in the U.S. have been dark. Doors will open early next month with attendance limited to 25% to 50% capacity in about 500 locations. Cineworld also agreed to a new multi-year deal with Warner Bros. Beginning next year, the studio’s releases will have a 45-day exclusive window at Regal cinemas, roughly slicing in half the traditional period. That doesn’t apply to Warner releases this year, which are streaming simultaneously on HBO Max when they open in theaters. “We are very…

Nearly half of U.S. elementary schools were open for full-time classroom learning as of last month, but the share of students with in-person instruction has varied greatly by region and by race, with most nonwhite students taught entirely online, according to a Biden administration survey. For the White House, the results of the national survey released this week mark the starting line for President Joe Biden’s pledge to have most K-8 schools open full time in his first 100 days in office. But they also show that he never had far to go to meet that goal. Among schools that enroll fourth graders, 47% offered full-time classroom learning in February, while for schools that teach eighth-graders, the figure was 46%. The results suggested that at least some students weren’t opting…

Facebook says it is working on a version of its Instagram app for kids under 13, who are technically not allowed to use the app in its current form due to federal privacy regulations. The company confirmed an earlier report by Buzzfeed News, saying it is “exploring a parent-controlled experience” on Instagram. The move came after Facebook announced a slew of new measures intended to keep teenagers safe on Instagram — but that announcement made no mention of the plan to build an Instagram for kids. Critics raised concerns immediately, saying a kid-friendly Instagram is just a way for Facebook to expand its user base and condition children into using its products so it can later make money off of them. “Facebook poses one of the biggest threats when it…

Intel announced this week it will build two new factories in Arizona and outsource more of its production as a new CEO looks to turnaround the struggling chipmaker. The California-based company says the Arizona expansion will cost about $20 billion and create 3,000 permanent jobs as Intel builds a foundry business to provide chips for other firms. More construction in the United States, Europe and elsewhere could be announced over the next year, CEO Pat Gelsinger said in a video outlining his vision for the company’s transformation. “The unprecedented demand for technology has created even more need for the innovative products Intel creates,”Keyvan Esfarjani, Intel’s senior vice president of manufacturing and operations, told reporters outside the company’s plant in Chandler, Arizona. Intel dominated chipmaking for decades but has stumbled lately…

The $113 billion deal to telecast NFL games through 2033 is head-swimmingly large — until you consider that the very survival of broadcast networks as we know them may depend upon it. The deal announced by the NFL and media companies spreads professional football content broadly, with CBS, NBC, Fox, ABC, ESPN and Amazon all getting pieces, and locks it in at a time little else can attract such a wide audience. “If you think of the future of network television, there is nothing more important to it than the NFL,” said Rich Greenfield, a media analyst for LightShed Partners, an industry research firm. During the current television season, the eight most-watched recurring programs are football: the game “windows” on Sunday afternoon and Sunday or Thursday nights, the Nielsen company…

Apple announced on March 10, 2021, that it had given a straight-to-series order for a new TV show titled Lady in the Lake. The series itself is a mystery still, but we have gathered all the available information about the show here and we are going to present it to you in today’s article. Based on what we know, Lady in the Lake might be a real hit for Apple TV+, whose roster is becoming better and better with each new announcement. Now, Lady of the Lake is a TV show based on Laura Lippman’s bestseller of the same name, which was a New York Times bestseller once it came out in 2019. The official synopsis for the novel is described as follows: “In 1966, Baltimore is a city of…

The new Cold War film “ The Courier ” about a Soviet whistleblower and the British businessman who helped transport information to Western intelligence agencies is both based on real events and people and also is very much the product of a screenwriter’s imagination. That’s not to criticize the film written by Tom O’Connor (“The Hitman’s Bodyguard”) and directed by Dominic Cooke (“On Chesil Beach”). It’s simply to say that it is more historical fiction than it is history. The whole truth of this extraordinary chapter has likely died with the principal characters and/ or been obscured and distorted by the people who write these things down. What we know is that there was indeed a Soviet official named Oleg Penkovsky, played in the film by Georgian actor Merab Ninidze,…

No sleepovers with popcorn and Disney movies. No dance recitals or holiday pageants, let alone any Grandparents’ Day for visiting the kids’ classrooms. No hugs. The first 12 months of the pandemic represent a lost year for many in the largest group of grandparents in U.S. history. Most of the nation’s some 70 million grandparents are in the fourth quarter of their lives, and the clock has kept running. “Working with older adults, I’m seeing a lot of depression, a lot of increases in loneliness,” says Nick Nicholson, a nursing professor and researcher on aging at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. “It’s been really difficult... the anxiety, the despair, the social isolation. Over time, there are so many adverse effects. The sooner we expand the bubble, the better, so people…

President Joe Biden has chosen a former senator from Florida who flew on the space shuttle right before the Challenger accident to lead NASA. Biden on Friday announced his intent to nominate Bill Nelson as the space agency’s administrator. If confirmed by the Senate, Nelson will become NASA’s 14th administrator, succeeding another former member of Congress, Jim Bridenstine, a Republican from Oklahoma. Nelson currently serves on the NASA Advisory Council. Nelson promised, if confirmed, to “help lead NASA into an exciting future of possibilities.” The space agency is working to send astronauts back to the moon this decade and counting more than ever on private U.S. companies and even other countries to get that job — and others — done. “Its workforce radiates optimism, ingenuity and a can-do spirit,” Nelson…

A congressional effort to bolster U.S. news organizations in negotiations with Big Tech has supporters hoping that third time’s the charm. The bill, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, was introduced in March for the third time since 2018. Its odds of passage may have improved in a Democrat-run Congress that’s working on overhauling antitrust laws. Australia and other countries have started pushing mechanisms to support news publishers against Facebook and Google, which dominate online advertising. Publishers argue that Big Tech squeezes news organizations out of digital ad revenue and exerts undue control over who can see their journalism. The bill would offer a four-year antitrust exemption to publishers so they can negotiate as a group with “dominant online platforms.” Facebook and Google get the majority of online ad dollars…

As Samsung Electronics warns that it’s grappling with the fallout of a “serious imbalance” in semiconductors, the technology world could be about to enter its own ‘lockdown’. From the PlayStation 5 to the new Tesla Model S, virtually every device maker could be forced to temporarily halt production, caught off guard and causing delays to 2021 product pipelines. THE GREAT 2021 CHIP SHORTAGE Though Samsung might be one of the world’s largest makers of chips and consumer electronics, the company was the latest to voice concerns in its latest business quarter update, where co-Chief Executive Officer Koh Dong-jin revealed that the company was even contemplating skipping the release of its Samsung Galaxy Note to streamline its lineup. Some of the biggest players in semiconductors, including Continental AG and Renesas Electronics…

A tool designed to help businesses protect themselves from further compromises after a global hack of Microsoft email server software has been downloaded more than 25,000 times since it was released last week, the White House’s National Security Council said this week. As a result, the number of vulnerable systems has fallen by 45%, according to an NSC spokesperson. The one-click Microsoft tool was created to protect against cyberattacks and to scan systems for compromises and fix them. It was developed after a massive hack affecting an estimated tens of thousands of users of servers running Microsoft’s Exchange email program. The breach was discovered in early January and was attributed to Chinese cyber spies targeting U.S. policy think tanks. Then in late February, five days before Microsoft Corp. issued a…

Happily Tom (Joel McHale) and Janet (Kerry Bishé) have enjoyed years of happy marriage, but this bliss comes under strain when a mysterious stranger called Mr. Goodman (Stephen Root) shows up, setting in motion a chain of disturbing events culminating in a very tense vacation. FIVE FACTS: 1. The involvement of McHale and Bishé in this film was confirmed in February 2019. 2. The film was scripted and directed by BenDavid Grabinski, who also wrote the screenplay for a proposed feature adaptation of the Nickelodeon TV horror series Are You Afraid of the Dark ? That film has yet to emerge, having later been removed from Paramount Pictures’ schedule. 3. Actor Jack Black is credited as one of the producers of Happily. 4. Principal photography for Happily began in Los…

“How did we find this place, anyway?” Wait, where have we heard that before? Actually, it’s a familiar line in a new genre of thriller that’s emerged the last few years: Airbnb horror films. There are a few constants: Attractive millennials, lots of good booze, a gorgeous weekend rental. And then something scary happens, and finally someone says: “Wait, how did we find this place?” Oops! Suddenly everyone realizes that the house actually chose THEM. By then, it’s too late to escape. By the time “Happily,” an ambitious, sometimes compelling but wildly uneven debut feature by BenDavid Grabinski, gets to this point, it’s already lost us a bit, and started feeling like yet another slick hipster horror film — you know, for those who like their millennials attractive and their…

Pandemic-weary Americans starved for human interaction and physical touch are taking advantage of a growing wellness option once reserved for Hollywood actors, rock stars and elite athletes: boutique stretching. “It’s like a workout, but you feel way more flexible,” a masked Kelly O’Neal, 51, said as her leg was being pulled across her body during a recent session at a newly opened StretchLab studio in Centerville. “I get plenty done after I get done here because you just feel like you’ve warmed up really well.” She said her legs and feet ache after her shift at a grocery store in southwest Ohio — often plus overtime because of COVID-19 demands. Others cite some intangibles offered by assisted stretching during the coronavirus. “It’s really nice to be touched. It is,” said…

Twitter has announced it will establish a legal entity in Turkey in order to continue operating in the country, which passed a controversial social media law last year. In a statement, the social media company said it had reviewed the amended internet law and made the decision to comply with, it but promised to continue “defending open, public conversation and ensuring our service is available to people everywhere.” Turkey slapped advertising bans on Twitter, Periscope and Pinterest in January. Those bans were the next step in a series of measures to force social media companies to maintain legal representatives in Turkey to manage content complaints. Companies with more than 1 million users that refuse to designate an official representative are subjected to fines, followed by advertising bans. The next penalty…