Congressional Leaders Work To Pass Stimulus Before Presidents' Day

People who appreciate good astrophotography will no doubt be familiar with the work of Don Pettit, a veteran NASA astronaut who is closing in on having lived 500 days of his life in space. Pettit is now in the midst of his third stint on the International Space Station, and the decade he had to prepare for his current stay in orbit was put to good use.

Amazon is gearing up to relaunch its Alexa voice-powered digital assistant as an artificial intelligence “agent” that can complete practical tasks, as the tech group races to resolve the challenges that have dogged the system’s AI overhaul. The $2.4 trillion company has for the past two years sought to redesign Alexa, its conversational system embedded within 500 million consumer devices worldwide, so the software’s “brain” is transplanted with generative AI. Rohit Prasad, who leads the artificial general intelligence (AGI) team at Amazon, told the Financial Times the voice assistant still needed to surmount several technical hurdles before the rollout.

DirecTV is launching a package aimed at viewers who watch mostly sports. The MySports skinny bundle was announced on Tuesday and will feature 40 sports and broadcast channels. It will launch in 24 markets with those in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and the San Francisco Bay Area (Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose) able to receive their local ABC, NBC and Fox affiliates. “We’ve been at this journey for what amounts to maybe even a little bit more than a year, trying to figure out what it is that consumers would want, what would resonate most with them, and then translating that work into negotiations with the likes of Disney, Fox, Warner Bros.

On any given day, SpaceX is probably launching a Falcon 9 rocket, rolling one out to the launch pad or bringing one back into port. With three active Falcon 9 launch pads and an increasing cadence at the Starbase facility in Texas, SpaceX's teams are often doing all three. The company achieved another milestone Friday with the 25th successful launch and landing of a single Falcon 9 booster.

If you’re having trouble sleeping at night, have you tried to induce total existential dread by contemplating the end of the entire Universe? If not, here’s a rundown of five ideas exploring how “all there is” might become “nothing at all.” Enjoy. Read full article Comments

The live co-editing feature has been years in the works and highly requested by Photoshop users, Adobe confirmed to CNET.