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It was the eyes that drew Denis Villeneuve to “Dune.” Long before he’d decided to become a filmmaker, he was just a teenager browsing a bookstore when he spotted the cover of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel. But it wasn’t a hard sell for the biology obsessed 14-year-old who had already learned that science fiction was a way to dream on a grand scale. Then he read it and was mesmerized by the poetic, atmospheric story of a young man’s heroic journey that dealt with religion, politics, destiny, heritage, the environment, colonialism and giant space worms. “It became an obsession,”Villeneuve, 54, said. And it was just the beginning of a decade-spanning dream that is finally coming to fruition as his own version of “Dune” makes its way to North American theaters.…

The company behind a digital token called Tether has agreed to pay $41 million to settle charges that it misled investors by claiming the token was fully backed at all times by U.S. dollars and other fiat currencies. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission said it charged Tether Holdings Limited with making untrue or misleading statements and omissions in relation to its claims. Specifically, the U.S. regulator found that since launching the token in 2014, Tether Holdings represented that its was a “stablecoin” with its value pegged to fiat currency, including U.S. dollars and euros. A stablecoin is a digital currency backed by real-world assets such as national currencies or other commodities. Unlike Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, stablecoins are designed to not fluctuate wildly in value. However, the CFTC determined that…

Love cryptocurrencies or hate the very idea of them, they’re becoming more mainstream by the day. Cryptocurrencies have surged so much that their total value has reached nearly $2.5 trillion, rivaling the world’s most valuable company, Apple, and have amassed more than 200 million users. At that size, it’s simply too big for the financial establishment to ignore. Firms that cater to the world’s wealthiest families are increasingly putting some of their fortunes into crypto. Hedge funds are trading Bitcoin, which has big-name banks starting to offer them services around it. PayPal lets users buy crypto on its app, while Twitter helps people show appreciation for tweets by tipping their creators with Bitcoin. And in the latest milestone for the industry, an easy-to-trade fund tied to Bitcoin began trading on…

Gina Raimondo only wears watches made by Bulova — a company that laid off her scientist father, closed its Rhode Island factory and moved production to China in 1983. The watches give Raimondo, the U.S. commerce secretary, a sense of mission as President Joe Biden’s de facto tech minister, a responsibility that is focused on adding the kinds of cutting-edge factory jobs that are now abroad. “It’s been a tribute to my dad,” Raimondo said of her watch choices in an interview, “and a reminder to me that we need to do more to get good manufacturing jobs in America.” Biden has tasked Raimondo, a former Rhode Island governor, with ensuring the United States will be the world leader in computer chips. America’s place atop the world as an economic…

Optimist FINNEAS Summary: This might be Finneas O’Connell’s first full-length album as a solo artist, but he has long established himself as an influential figure in music, having extensively produced and co-written material for his sister Billie Eilish. Now, he steps up to the microphone to sing his own songs. FIVE FACTS: 1. “It’s very hard to prioritize your own music, because it’s more excusable to let yourself down than to let other artists down,” O’Connell recently explained to Apple Music. 2. He added that, with Optimist, “I’m not trying to please anybody with it except myself.” 3. O’Connell is a native of Los Angeles, and bought a home in its Los Feliz neighborhood in 2019 . 4. He has also had numerous acting roles, including as a student in the…

If so inclined, an NBA player could now test himself for the coronavirus and get results on his phone in no more than 20 minutes. And the league is convinced those tests are both fast enough and accurate enough. It’s a high-tech answer to the issue of waiting for test results. The NBA has partnered with a company called Cue Health, which is providing the league with technology that allows anyone to essentially test themselves for COVID-19. A person applies the swab to the inside of their nose, places it in a reader — roughly the size of two decks of cards — connected wirelessly to their smartphone and gets the results back much faster than most other alternatives can deliver. The NBA, based on a study done by the…

Chinese astronauts began last Saturday (16) their six-month mission on China’s first permanent space station, after successfully docking aboard their spacecraft. The astronauts, two men and a woman, were seen floating around the module before speaking via a live-streamed video. The new crew includes Wang Yaping, 41, who is the first Chinese woman to board the Tiangong space station, and is expected to become China’s first female spacewalker. “We’ll co-operate with each other, carefully conduct maneuvers, and try to accomplish all tasks successfully in this round of exploration of the universe,”said Wang in the video. The space travelers’Shenzhou-13 spacecraft was launched by a Long March-2F rocket at 12:23 a.m. Saturday and docked with the Tianhe core module of the space station at 6:56 a.m. The three astronauts entered the station’s…

Walgreens will begin flying packages by drone to residents in a pair of Texas cities in partnership with Google’s drone-making affiliate, Wing. The companies said they will begin testing the service next week in the city of Frisco and neighboring Little Elm, two fast-growing communities north of Dallas where road traffic is “probably the biggest complaint we get,” said Frisco Mayor Jeff Cheney. “Every delivery made by drone is taking a delivery vehicle off our roads,” Cheney said. It will be Wing’s first commercial expansion in the U.S. after years testing the concept in a Virginia town and parts of Australia and Finland. The drone company is a subsidiary of Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet. “We’ve gradually moved into denser and denser environments,” said Jonathan Bass, Wing’s head of marketing and…

After what feels like a lifetime of waiting, Apple has finally unveiled its next-generation MacBook Pro line-up, bringing the power of M1 and stepping it up a gear. The new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips bring Apple’s vision for a world beyond Intel to life, no doubt sparking the interest of creatives around the world. Apple has finally put the Pro back into the MacBook. MINDBLOWING CAPABILITIES There has been much speculation about the new MacBook Pro range, and though Apple took a little longer to give its 14-inch and 16-inch models the same love as the Mac mini and iPad Pro, the wait has undoubtedly been worth it. Rather than putting the standard M1 chip into the new Pro range, Apple has taken things to a whole new…

House lawmakers are threatening to seek a criminal investigation of Amazon, saying the tech giant has a “final chance” to correct its executives’ previous testimony on its competition practices. The lawmakers sent a letter this week to Amazon President and CEO Andy Jassy saying they were giving the company until Nov. 1 to “correct the record” and provide new documents and evidence. The missive marks an escalation in the bipartisan battle against Amazon by the House Judiciary Committee panel that has investigated the market dominance of Big Tech. The letter says the antitrust subcommittee is considering referring the case to the Justice Department for criminal investigation. It accuses the world’s biggest online retailer of at least misleading Congress and possibly outright lying. It cites recent media reports detailing Amazon’s alleged…

After struggling to hire workers for its outlet store in Dallas, Balsam Hill finally opened on Sept. 1. But the very next day, the online purveyor of high-end artificial holiday trees was forced to close after four of its five workers quit. The main gripe for three of them? Working on weekends. So they found jobs elsewhere with better hours. Balsam Hill reopened weeks later with nine workers, hiking the hourly pay by $3 to $18 per hour. But more importantly, it changed its approach: Instead of only focusing on the needs of the business, it’s now closely working with each employee to tailor their schedules based on when they want to work. “We’re working against people who have the choice of wherever they want to work,” said Kendra Gould,…

The piercing traumas of school shootings, when they’ve made it into the movies, have seldom carried quite the right tone. Even the best intentions in wading into such tragic horrors can come off as insincere, even exploitive. “Mass,” Fran Kranz’s meditative chamber piece, is a sober and wrenching exception. Kranz’s film, the veteran actor’s first as writer-director, is about two sets of parents who meet, cautiously and with still raw wounds, to talk six years after a school shooting that brought their families together. Gail (Martha Plimpton) and Jay (Jason Isaacs) lost their son in an attack by the son of Richard (Reed Birney) and Linda (Ann Dowd, ), who also died that day. Their meeting, in a nondescript church across from a broad field and snow-dusted mountains, makes up…

Amazon’s audiobook service Audible and phone apps for reading the holy books of Islam and Christianity have disappeared from the Apple store in mainland China, the latest examples of the impact of the country’s tightened rules for internet firms. Audible said that it removed its app from the Apple store in mainland China last month “due to permit requirements.” The makers of apps for reading and listening to the Quran and Bible say their apps have also been removed from Apple’s China-based store at the government’s request. Apple didn’t return requests for comment. A spokesperson for China’s embassy in the U.S. declined to speak about specific app removals but said the Chinese government has “always encouraged and supported the development of the Internet.” “At the same time, the development of…

Nippon Steel Corp. is suing Toyota Motor Corp. over a patent for a technology used in electric motors in a rare case of legal wrangling between Japan’s top steelmaker and top automaker over intellectual property. Tokyo-based Nippon Steel filed the lawsuit in Tokyo District Court, demanding compensation for damages totaling 20 billion yen ($177 million). Also named in the lawsuit is Baoshan Iron & Steel Co., or Baosteel, a Chinese steelmaker that produces and supplies the steel that allegedly violates the patent. Toyota said it learned of the lawsuit “with great regret,” stressing it had checked on possible patent conflicts with Baosteel. Toyota sees Nippon Steel as an “important business partner,” supporting the Japanese auto industry for years, the maker of the Prius hybrid and Lexus luxury models said in…

Facebook said it plans to hire 10,000 workers in the European Union over the next five years to work on a new computing platform that promises to connect people virtually but could raise concerns about privacy and the social platform gaining more control over people’s online lives. The company said in a blog post that those high-skilled workers will help build“the metaverse,”a futuristic notion for connecting online that uses augmented and virtual reality. Facebook executives have been touting the metaverse as the next big thing after the mobile internet, though their track record is spotty on predicting future trends. Expectations that CEO Mark Zuckerberg made four years ago of taking virtual vacations with faraway loved ones via a headset or using a smartphone camera to improve an apartment virtually have…

An obstacle to large-scale bitcoin mining is finding enough cheap energy to run the huge, power-gobbling computer arrays that create and transact cryptocurrency. One mining operation in central New York came up with a novel solution that has alarmed environmentalists. It uses its own power plant. Greenidge Generation runs a once-mothballed plant near the shore of Seneca Lake in the Finger Lakes region to produce about 44 megawatts to run 15,300 computer servers, plus additional electricity it sends into the state’s power grid. The megawatts dedicated to Bitcoin might be enough electricity to power more than 35,000 homes. Proponents call it a competitive way to mine increasingly popular cryptocurrencies, without putting a drain on the existing power grid. Environmentalists see the plant as a climate threat. They fear a wave…

Netflix posted sharply higher third-quarter earnings thanks to a stronger slate of titles, including “Squid Game,” the dystopian survival drama from South Korea that the company says became its biggest-ever TV show. The company has ramped up production, rebounding from pandemic-induced delays in the first half of the year. It’s also looking beyond movies and TV and said it plans to fund “new growth opportunities” such as video games, which are being tested in some markets. “It remains very early days for this initiative and, like other content categories we’ve expanded into, we plan to try different types of games, learn from our members and improve our game library,” the company said. And as it faces saturation in the U.S. market, Netflix is focusing on growing its international subscriber numbers.…

Don’t Breathe 2 Plot Summary: Norman Nordstrom (Stephen Lang), otherwise known as ‘the Blind Man’, is living in an isolated woodland cabin with his young daughter Phoenix (Madelyn Grace). When Phoenix is kidnapped, Nordstrom goes to extreme, violent lengths in a bid to rescue her. Bank teller Guy (Ryan Reynolds) lives a perfectly ordinary life – one where he falls in love with the no-nonsense Molotov Girl (Jodie Comer). However, in his attempt to woo her, he increasingly realizes that he is a non-player character in an open-world video game. FIVE FACTS: 1. This is the sequel to the 2016 horror-thriller film Don’t Breathe. 2. However, while that film was directed by Fede Álvarez and co-written by him and Rodo Sayagues, the latter directs the sequel, which is nonetheless also…

It’s not even the busiest time of year for travel yet, and 2021 has already been chaotic — even for the most seasoned travelers. Among the 2021 travel fiascos: — Spirit Airlines underwent an operational meltdown, with 2,800 flights canceled between July 30 and Aug. 9 due to a combination of bad weather, staffing shortages and technical problems that left passengers stranded. — Some vaccinated travelers have unexpectedly tested positive for COVID-19 during international trips, finding themselves required to isolate abroad due to U.S. travel restrictions. — COVID-related rules can change last-minute, meaning you might abruptly need to quarantine upon arrival, even if vaccinated — as was the case when the Netherlands suddenly tightened travel restrictions in September. — And while booking travel through the sharing economy is becoming increasingly…

China said its launch of a new spacecraft was merely a test to see whether the vehicle could be reused. The launch involved a spacecraft rather than a missile and was of “great significance for reducing the use-cost of spacecraft and could provide a convenient and affordable way to make a round trip for mankind’s peaceful use of space,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said. China’s space program is run by its military and is closely tied to its agenda of building hypersonic missiles and other technologies that could alter the balance of power with the United States. “China will work together with other countries in the world for the peaceful use of space and the benefit of mankind,” Zhao said. Zhao’s comments on the test conducted in August came…

Plans for North Dakota’s first carbon dioxide storage project are moving forward. State regulators granted several approvals Tuesday for the underground storage of carbon emissions from Red Trail Energy’s ethanol plant near Richardton. “This is a landmark day,” State Mineral Resources Director Lynn Helms told the state Industrial Commission. Gas from the plant will be compressed and injected into a 6,400-foot well, then form a plume within the underground rocks that make up the Broom Creek formation. The commission’s approvals are for underground storage below Red Trail’s proposed injection site in Stark County. North Dakota officials are promoting the state’s geology for additional carbon storage projects. Researchers say the state’s rocks could store as much as 250 billion tons of carbon dioxide. Red Trail produces a fraction of that amount…