BELLEVUE, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 17, 2023--

Microsoft Corp.’s once seemingly doomed $69 billion bid for Activision Blizzard Inc. gained more momentum on Monday after

CORAL GABLES, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 17, 2023--

Wall Street’s top regulator says the proliferation of artificial intelligence means governments will probably have to overhaul regulations

A rare iPhone has sold for almost $200,000. The phone was an original 2007 model of the iPhone, still factory sealed in its box. It is rare even among those elusive first versions of the iPhone, since it has only 4GB of storage. When the iPhone was released, more than 15 years ago, Apple originally offered it in a 4GB or 8GB storage options. The former proved unpopular and Apple struggled to sell it, with most customers instead opting to pay $100 for the extra storage – and it was soon discontinued, just two months after the phone was first released. That means that it has become a “Holy Grail” among collectors of iPhones. Its price reflects that status: original, factory sealed models of the model with larger storage have sold for $40,000 and $63,000 in recent months. The phone came from a member of the original engineering team at Apple when the iPhone first launched, according to to LCG Auctions, which sold the device. The box has never been opened and the phone has never been activated. “Collectors and investors would be hard pressed to find a superior example,” it wrote in the listing. “Relevance and rarity comprise a winning formula for this red-hot collectible.” The company had estimated that the phone would sell for $50,000 to $100,000. In the end, it attracted 28 bids and sold for $190,372.80, LCG Auctions said on its website. The 4GB iPhone had originally sold for $599 when it went on sale at the end of June 2007. Even that eventually proved too much, and Apple dropped the price of the 8GB model to $399 when it discontinued the 4GB version. As well as its 4GB of storage, the phone offered a 12 megapixel camera and 128MB of RAM. Released around 15 years later, the current iPhone 14 Pro comes with up 1TB of storage, a 48MP camera and 6GB of RAM. Read More Apple’s next iPhone may include new battery technology, report suggests Apple launches huge new payment upgrade for iPhone You can now download the huge new iPhone update – if you dare

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SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 17, 2023--

A new technique is a dramatic breakthrough in the search for alien life, astronomers say. Researchers at the Breakthrough Listen project based at the University of California, Berkeley say they have developed a new way to be sure that any potential signal is really coming from space – and not from something more boring. Astronomers spend vast amounts of time looking for radio signals that might have come from alien civilisations as part of work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. But they have in the past been fooled by very human technology, such as cellphones, microwaves and car engines, that can produce a blast of radio signals that look as if they have come from distant worlds. One way to check whether signals are really alien is to point the telescope elsewhere and then repeatedly return to the same spot, with the hope of seeing the signal again and ensuring that it is not a false alarm. But that is not foolproof – and only works if the signal sticks around. Some of the most promising radio signals might only be detectable once. The so-called “Wow!” signal, for instance – a radio signal detected in 1977 that was so shocking the astronomer who found it wrote the exclamation on a printout – has not been detected since, and astronomers still do not know whether it was an alien message or just a mistake. Now scientists have devised a new test that can be used to see whether a signal has really passed through interstellar space, which should help show that it is not from elsewhere on Earth. It works by looking for “scintillation” – the changes in amplitude of a signal as it is affected by the cold plasma of space. “The first ET detection may very well be a one-off, where we only see one signal. And if a signal doesn’t repeat, there’s not a lot that we can say about that. And obviously, the most likely explanation for it is radio frequency interference, as is the most likely explanation for the Wow! signal,” said Andrew Siemion, principal investigator for Breakthrough Listen and director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center, which operates the world’s longest running SETI program. “Having this new technique and the instrumentation capable of recording data at sufficient fidelity such that you could see the effect of the interstellar medium, or ISM, is incredibly powerful.” Dr Siemion called the breakthrough “one of the biggest advances in radio SETI in a long time” and said that it would be the first time researchers would be able to differentiate a real signal from a false alarm, even if it was only detected once. The technique can only be used for signals that have travelled 10,000 light years or more to Earth, researchers note. If it was closer to us, the scintillation effect cannot be seen because they are not travelling through enough of the interstellar medium, or ISM. The research is described in a new paper, ‘On Detecting Interstellar Scintillation in Narrowband Radio SETI’, published in The Astrophysical Journal. Read More Battery breakthroughs are about to trigger a transport revolution Huge asteroid nearly crashes into Earth – and is only spotted days later ChatGPT rival with ‘no ethical boundaries’ sold on dark web

Microsoft and British regulators sought more time from a court Monday as the U.S. tech company uses a rare second chance to overcome opposition to its $69 billion bid for video game maker Activision Blizzard

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 17, 2023--

Wall Street is drifting, as stocks worldwide stall following the latest signal that the world’s second-largest economy is flagging