Elon Musk’s first Hyperloop tunnel in California is gone

The Hyperloop tube hosted student competitions in 2018 and 2019. | Photo by Pauline Acalin for The Verge Elon Musk’s first prototype Hyperloop tunnel is no more. Bloomberg reports that the roughly one-mile-long white steel tunnel running along Jack Northrop Avenue near SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, has been removed and will be replaced with…

OpenAI opens up AI text-to-image generation to businesses with launch of DALL-E API

An example of DALL-E’s “outpainting” function, which generates imagery outside an initial starting frame. | Image: OpenAI OpenAI is making its image generation software DALL-E much more widely available to businesses with the launch of an API in public beta. The API will make it easier for companies to add DALL-E’s text-to-image functionality to their…

Patent Filings Roundup: Old IP Edge Filings Explode; No New Discretionary Denials Again; Fortress-Backed DivX Rolls On

It was a return to form this week in the district courts, with 115 new patent filings (led by more than 40 new IP Edge complaints) to just 23 new Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) filings—the latter number being bolstered by a number of challenges to patents held by Raymond Anthony Joao subsidiary Beteiro,…

Part of lost star catalog of Hipparchus found lurking under medieval codex

Multispectral imaging revealed hidden original text from St. Catherine’s Monastery over the top of faint tracings on the Codex Climaci Rescriptus palimpsest. (credit: Museum of the Bible/Keith T. Knox/Emanuel Zingg) The Greek astronomer Hipparchus is often called the “father of astronomy.” He’s credited with discovering the Earth’s precession (how it wobbles on its axis) and…

Dams are hurting this enigmatic Australian species

A platypus swimming. Deposit Photos Australia’s famed platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) is one funky animal with a bit of an identity crisis. They have a pretty unique combination of characteristics: they can lay eggs despite being classified as mammals, the males have venomous spurs that they likely use to compete during mating season, they use electroreception…

StretchSense built an actually comfortable hand-motion capture glove

New Zealand-based StretchSense, a maker of hand motion capture technology, believes virtual and augmented reality are going to replace the smartphone as the dominant way we interact with digital worlds and each other. And when that happens, we’ll need natural ways be immersed in those spaces, which means being able to touch and control virtual…