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Russia now has an ‘inspector satellite’ that could chase down or destroy other orbiting spacecraft

Russia now has an ‘inspector satellite’ that could chase down or destroy other orbiting spacecraft

Back in December 2013, Russia launched a trio of Rodnik military communications satellites, and a fourth unknown object, on board a Rokot/Briz-KM rocket. At the time, Russia didn’t acknowledge the presence of the fourth object — known only as Kosmos 2499 — but for obvious reasons launches are very closely watched by foreign governments and civilian satellite observers. The US military originally thought it was just a piece of debris, but one independent observer — Robert Christy — had seen this “debris” fire its engines to carry out some maneuvers. Eventually, in May 2014 Russia told the United Nations that there had actually been four satellites on board the rocket — though it still declined to say what that fourth satellite was actually doing.

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Google’s Brain-Inspired Software Captions Complex Images

Google’s Brain-Inspired Software Captions Complex Images

Researchers at Google have created software that can use complete sentences to accurately describe scenes shown in photos—a significant advance in the field of computer vision. When shown a photo of a game of ultimate Frisbee, for example, the software responded with the description “A group of young people playing a game of frisbee.” The software can even count, giving answers such as “Two pizzas sitting on top of a stove top oven.”

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Spy on Perez Hilton's texts

Spy on Perez Hilton's texts

The free messaging and call service (which was bought by Japanese Internet giant Rakuten for $900 million last spring) launched a new feature called Public Chats on Tuesday. Public Chats will let the Average Joe tap into multimedia conversations (including text, photos, audio, video, stickers and hyperlinks) happening between celebrities and public figures in real-time.

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