The Morning After: Thursday, 23 February 2017
The final frontier.
Good Morning After. NASA's big announcement could offer us a future among the stars, Apple's own 'spaceship' gets a boring name and another Instagram feature you might never notice.
NASA discovers multiple, possibly inhabitable, Earth-sized planets
At a news conference in Washington, DC, NASA revealed that, using the Spitzer Space Telescope, they've found seven new Earth-sized planets orbiting a star just 40 light years away from us. What's more, three of those exist within the "Goldilocks zone," which means they could be habitable. This news comes at an exciting time in the search for planets beyond our own solar system. Since the start of just this year, researchers have discovered the presence of water on a planet just 50 light years away, the Keck Observatory's exoplanet imager has come online and a team of researchers from a compendium of universities has released a trove of observational data from the Keck's HiRES imager spanning more than two decades.
Apple's spaceship campus will open in April
Steve Jobs announced plans for a second Cupertino campus way back in 2006, and in April, the building will finally open for business. Dubbed Apple Park, the company's new 175-acre HQ features a 2.8 million-square-foot ring-shaped main building powered entirely by renewable energy. The campus also features the 1,000-seat Steve Jobs Theater, a 20-foot tall glass cylinder with a carbon fiber roof. Employees will move in over the next six months, while the rest of us can plan a stop by the visitor's center and its requisite Apple Store.
Why YouTube and PewDiePie are stuck with each other
After YouTuber Felix Kjellberg (aka PewDiePie) posted videos with anti-Semitic "jokes," he quickly lost deals with Maker Studios and YouTube itself. Of course, his channel is still on the service, and serving up ads, just without new episodes of his YouTube Red show or Google Preferred's promotional push.
So does this mean their relationship will come to an end entirely? Probably not. Without a bigger or more profitable platform to jump to, Kjellberg has carried on uploading videos, and as they continue to pull in millions of views, YouTube will keep letting him do it -- for now.
At least it's not ripping off Snapchat this time?
Instagram's new feature: slideshows
The latest update for Facebook's photo service recognizes that sometime it takes more than one picture to properly crush the 'gram. Seriously, sometimes users want to post everything from an event without spreading photos across their followers' (algorithmically-sorted) feeds, and the new carousel-style photo sets make that easy, holding up to 10 photos or videos per post.
T-Mobile pushes forward with LTE-U and Verizon plans 5G wireless tests
Faster wireless service is coming one way or another. While we wait for 5G to become a reality, carriers like T-Mobile are planning to roll out LTE-U as a way to get gigabit wireless connections cracking. The FCC just approved the first devices that can tap into the 5GHz frequency band for extra capacity and speed, which T-Mobile plans to launch this spring. Looking further out, Verizon will follow AT&T with next-gen 5G wireless tests in 11 cities by mid-2017.
