Tag: author_name|Andrew Tarantola

Hitting the Books: NASA’s Class 8 broke color barriers and glass ceilings alike

America’s first astronauts from the 1960s were all pulled from the highest ranks of the nation’s military. As such, NASA’s first few classes tended to conform to a rather specific demographic theme — white, male, flattop haircut you could set a watch too. By the mid-70’s however, the space agency…

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ChatGPT is suddenly everywhere. Are we ready?

For a product that its own creators, in a marketing pique, once declared “too dangerous” to release to the general public, OpenAI’s ChatGPT is seemingly everywhere these days. The versatile automated text generation (ATG) system, which is capable of outputting copy that is nearly indistinguishable from a human writer’s work,…

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Columbia researchers bioprint seamless 3D skin grafts for burn patients

The science of grafting skin has come a long way from the days of scraping it off one part of a patient's body and slapping it back on somewhere else to cover a nasty burn or injury. These days grafts are commonly bioprinted like living inkjets using the patient's cultured…

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Hitting the Books: High school students have spent a decade fighting Baltimore’s toxic legacy

There was a time in the last century when we, quite foolishly, believed incineration to be a superior means of waste disposal than landfills. And, for decades, many of America’s most disadvantaged have been paying for those decisions with with their lifespans. South Baltimore’s Curtis Bay neighborhood, for example, is…

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The 2024 Polestar 2 will have better range, stronger motors and a SmartZone sensor suite

If you just bought a 2023 Polestar 2, hoooo boy are you about to be mad. The company on Tuesday showed off some of the, ahem, numerous updates that the upcoming 2024 model year PS2 will sport, including next-generation motors, a slew of new standard equipment, a more potent battery…

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Hitting the Books: That time San Francisco’s suburbs sued the airport for being too loud

San Francisco has long sought to square its deeply-held progressive ideals with the region’s need for tangible, technological progress. SFO international airport, which opened for business in 1959 and has undergone significant expansion and modernization in the years since, is a microcosm of that struggle. On one hand, the Bay…

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