Latest news with #Gizmodo
Gizmodo
a day ago
- Business
- Gizmodo
Start Your WordPress Site and Slash Hosting Costs by $1,020: Here's How!
Managed WordPress hosting offers the convenience of easy setup and includes essential WordPress maintenance. Luckily, you don't need to overpay. Hostinger offers premium hosting at a very affordable price. While all plans are discounted by at least 71%, Hostinger lets you add another 15% discount. This results in staggering savings of up to $1,020, depending on the chosen plan. Below is all you need to know — you don't want to skip this. Claim Your Extra 15% Discount Now Unlock an Extra 15% Off with This Exclusive Hostinger Promo Code Gizmodo has teamed up with Hostinger for an exclusive, eye-watering offer. Namely, you can save 75% on its Premium plan, as well as 71% on Business and Cloud Startup plans. These are the resulting prices: Premium — $2.99/mo for 48 months + 3 free months — $2.99/mo for 48 months + 3 free months Business — $3.99/mo for 48 months + 3 free months — $3.99/mo for 48 months + 3 free months Cloud Startup — $7.99/mo for 48 months + 3 free months If the price still sounds unattractive, there's a nifty little GIZMODOSPECIAL coupon code available for all 48-month plan. All you have to do is click any of the blue buttons, select the plan you deem fit, and click the 'Have a Coupon Code?' hyperlink on the right. In the empty textbox, paste the Hostinger coupon code from above and press Apply. You'll that the discounted price has been slashed again by 15%. So, instead of $1,343.52 for Cloud Startup, you'll spend only $325.99 for 51 months. Premium and Business plans come with considerable discounts, too. The former lets you save $453, while the latter's savings reach $508. Don't forget that a free domain with WHOIS privacy is included, as well, so this is your only initial investment. Starting a website is cheap — you have to agree. Why Choose This Web Host? You might be wondering why Hostinger came up with the offer in the first place. Is it some kind of trick? We'd say it's because it can — there's no trickery. Users who apply the coupon code will be shocked with what they'll get. A free domain is only the tip of the iceberg. Hostinger includes a free trial of its email hosting, too. Plus, you can host from 25 to 100 websites on 25 GB SSD to 100 GB of NVMe storage. A free website migration is available. This means you can change from another host in virtual minutes. Hostinger's AI website builder is a nice addition, but there's also LiteSpeed caching for excellent speed across the board. As said, you get managed WordPress. With this feature, Hostinger manages updates and optimization for you. It also includes a free CDN, and the Business plan offers daily website backups for more hosting security. We nearly forgot a 30-day money-back guarantee. It's a nice way of letting you know you're loved and cared for. With it, you can test Hostinger for free for a month and get a refund if you don't like it. However, very few dislikeable things are there — you have to be a nitpicker to find them. Unlock Massive Savings on WordPress Plans
Yahoo
2 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Scientists Startled by Discovery of Small Star Swimming Through Outer Layers of Another Larger Star
A team of researchers in China have discovered a stunning binary system in which a stellar object known as a pulsar orbited inside the outer layers of its companion star — which it accomplished after stripping its host's innards and dispersing them into space. The findings, detailed in a new study published in the journal Science, are an incredibly rare example of a "spider star" that preys on its companion, so-named because of the female arachnids that devour males after mating. And tantalizingly, the grisly scene is some of the best evidence yet of a stage of stellar evolution called the common envelope phase, which has never been directly observed by astronomers. Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars, the incredibly dense stellar cores that are left over in the aftermath of a supernova. Everything about neutron stars exhaust superlatives — their gravity most of all. They are so tightly packed, containing more mass than our Sun inside a form just a dozen miles in radius, that all their atoms and their constituent protons and electrons have been crushed into neutrons, with just a teaspoon of this improbable matter weighing trillions of pounds. Their powerful magnetic fields, billions of times stronger than Earth's, unleash beams of radio waves into space along their poles. Further beggaring belief, some neutron stars become pulsars, which spin up to hundreds of times per second after siphoning material from a stellar companion, if it has one. Their sweeping beams of radiation, like cosmic lighthouses, look like a repeating signal to observers. The newly discovered pulsar, PSR J1928+1815, intrigued the astronomers because its radio pulses suggested that it was extremely close to its host, completing an orbit every 3.6 hours. They also noticed that for one-sixth of that orbit, the pulsar would vanish from view, indicating that the host was eclipsing it. "That's a large part of the orbit," coauthor Jin-Lin Han, a radio astronomer at the National Astronomical Observatories in Beijing, told Gizmodo. "That's strange, only a larger companion can do this." Over four and a half years, Han's team closely observed the system using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) in southern China, the largest and most powerful single-dish radio telescope in the world. Their observations revealed that the host star was between one to 1.6 times the mass of our Sun, while the pulsar was more likely 1.4 stellar masses. Determining the make of the host star, however, took some additional sleuthing. Its tight orbit and the fact that it was only detectable in radio wavelengths, Giz noted, ruled out its being a Sun-like star. And since it was large enough to eclipse the pulsar, it had to be something larger than a stellar remnant like another neutron star. That pointed to something altogether more spectacular: a helium star, created after the pulsar, when it was still an ordinary neutron star, tore off its host's layers and created a huge common envelope, a cloud of hydrogen gas that swallows both the stars. In this case, the poor star under attack managed to cling on to its evacuated innards for just 1,000 years — a blink in a stellar lifespan — before the whole, mighty envelope fell apart. Fleeting as it was, its impact is lasting: the friction exerted by the gases gradually nudged both stars closer together. Common envelopes are rare because the process of a neutron star stripping its companion, which causes it to spin and graduate to a pulsar, usually results in all the siphoned material being devoured. But if the companion is massive enough, much of it survives. The discovery marks the first spider star found orbiting a helium star. While the astronomers didn't get to witness the envelope in action, this is some of the most convincing evidence to date that this long-theorized stage of stellar evolution exists. In all, the team estimates that there're just 16 to 84 star systems like this one in the entire Milky Way — and, against all odds, we got to see one. More on space: Scientists Puzzled by Mysterious Motion in Atmosphere of Saturn's Moon
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
David Lynch Estate Auction Features Items From TWIN PEAKS, DUNE, and More
It's been several months now since we lost one of America's greatest filmmakers, David Lynch, at the age of 78. The world of film will never be the same without him. And soon, many of Lynch's personal items will go up for auction, which we've learned about via Gizmodo. For serious fans of Lynch's filmography like us, there are many items in this collection that we'd love to own. These gems are from his nearly 50-year career, with pieces from Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks, Dune, and his first feature film, Eraserhead. You can check out some of the items from Julien's David Lynch auction, which goes live on June 18, below: Click To View Gallery Some of the items in the David Lynch estate auction include the menus from Winkie's, the Denny's stand-in with a terrifying being that lives behind it in Mulholland Drive. There's Lynch's personal 35mm print of Eraserhead, the film that put him on the map. And there's quite a bit from the world of Twin Peaks. Lynch's original script from the series, when it was called Northwest Passage, as well as Fire Walk With Me, are among the auction items as well. The framed photo of the atomic bomb test that was in Gordon Cole's office in Twin Peaks: The Return? It was also part of Lynch's personal collection. Which is fitting, since he played Gordon Cole in the series. One of the coolest items is Lynch's personal version of the red curtains and zigzag patterns, Twin Peaks' most iconic image. But the Holy Grail in this auction is Lynch's actual director's chair with his name on it. Whoever gets these, we honestly hope they donate them to a museum. There are 444 lots in this auction, and some of them are just common household items, like coffee makers. But if you're a diehard David Lynch fan, you'd probably want a Lynch-owned coffee maker more than almost any other item in this auction. To check out all the items yourself, head on over to the official Julien's Auctions site.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Elon Musk Just Ghosted a Huge Company Meeting
Elon Musk is doing his very best to rehabilitate his damaged image. DOGE and all that government twaddle is behind him, he insists. He's going to be working closely at his businesses again, instead of chainsawing federal agencies and getting screamed at by Trump cabinet members. He's done with politics — or spending loads of money on it, anyway. There's robotaxis to roll out and Mars-settlement-shaped bridges to sell. But if this is his comeback tour, it's started in pretty much the worst way possible. On Tuesday, Musk was nowhere to be seen at a highly anticipated talk he was supposed to give about SpaceX's plans for colonizing the Red Planet, Gizmodo reports, leaving legions of his fans and spaceflight nerds — not to mention the thousands of SpaceX employees gathered at the company's Starbase headquarters in Texas for the occasion — hanging. No explanation was given (though he did fire off some tweets in the interim, albeit at nowhere near his typical spambot levels of frequency). But his truancy might have something to do with his Starship megarocket — an indispensable part of Musk's grand vision of "making life multiplanetary" and spreading his seed across the cosmos — exploding for the umpteenth time during its latest flight test that same day. Musk's pontification sesh was originally scheduled for 1 PM EST. Then it was pushed back to 1:10 PM, and then to 1:15, and finally, 9 PM, according to Gizmodo, with that last time block coming in after Starship's flight test, which was slated for 7:30 PM that evening. When Musk announced that his speech was postponed until after the Starship test, noted science communicator Scott Manley asked in the replies, perhaps presciently: "Is this going to have contingency elements that depend on the outcome of the flight?" Looks like the answer to that was, "no." To be fair to the centibillionaire multi-hyphenate, his plans quite literally blew up — or experienced a "rapid unscheduled disassembly" — in his face. It's understandable why he wouldn't want to wax about his future interplanetary dominion when his rocket that's supposed to make that happen lay in ruins. (Before the launch, Musk boasted that there's was an "80 percent chance" that his engineers had solved key issues related to the spacecraft's heat shield tiles.) In actuality, the Starship prototype, dubbed Ship 35, spun out of control and broke apart as it made a nasty, uncontrolled reentry into the Earth's atmosphere. Then, in an all too familiar final act, the Starship exploded somewhere over the Indian Ocean, putting it out of its misery. Around 40 minutes earlier, the Starship's Super Heavy booster also blew up before it could complete its landing burn. "Lot of good data to review," Musk wrote in a tweet made at the near-exact time he was supposed to be giving his talk after the several delays. A new date for the Mars talk hasn't been announced. More on Elon Musk: Elon Musk Just Got Some Horrible New Sales Data About Tesla Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Gizmodo
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
This DIY Lightsaber Proves That Spinning is Indeed a 'Good Trick'
A new version of the most picture-perfect replica of a lightsaber is drawing even closer to what we want to see from Star Wars' most iconic weapon. The new rendition of this YouTuber's DIY laser sword achieves a beautiful effect that's most reminiscent of the original trilogy of films. That's because the device is constantly spinning internally through a series of motors. Not only does this saber look the part, but it brings it closer to how both the lore and original movie makers envisioned it. YouTuber Jacob Uy's latest video shows off the entire build process for his second edition lightsaber that he originally created with a few friends from college. Just as before, this device uses a magician's cane and LED strips attached to a motor to simulate the automated extension and retraction—along with the prototypical plasma-like glow—you see in the films. There were several issues with the original design. First, the hilt was too bulky to accommodate the motor and rolled-up LED strip. Plus, the DIY lightsaber would release far slower than they did in the movies. The single lighting array created a dead area in the center of the blade, an effect more akin to the Darksaber than other laser swords powered by a kyber crystal most fans are used to. Uy previously told Gizmodo of his plans for his homemade lightsaber sequel, and—judging by the video—the new rendition has made good on those back-of-the-napkin designs. The second edition DIY device contains an extra LED strip, which, combined with a special motor inside the weapon's outer hilt that spins a new inner hilt, generates a glow that looks both dangerous and beautiful. A custom bearing over the top of both inner and outer shells keeps the entire device from flying apart. The visual effects artists at Industrial Lights & Magic created the lightsaber effect by using a hilt attached to rods covered in a reflective tape. The VFX team then rotoscoped the glow onto each individual frame and added the classic swishing, twanging sound effects in post-production. Those rods were also attached to motors that spun at high speeds, which helped generate that pulsing glow in the final movie that's now so iconic to the franchise. Uy said the spinning actually creates a gyroscopic effect in-hand—something that fans of deep Star Wars lore may find especially interesting. Sure, a blade made of plasma would ostensibly seem weightless, but the extended universe of Star Wars lore describes how the blades' constant motion makes them feel more physical than they appear. The fiction describes how this sense of mass requires no small amount of physical strength or connection to the Force to wield. There is a fair amount of extra engineering work that went into this blade compared to the YouTuber's first version. The device now includes a clutch that can engage or disengage the gears that hold the magician's cane in place. This means the device can extend far faster than before and still maintain its ability to retract. There's a separate motor that can control the tension of the LED strips and engage that clutch. It all combines into a blade that looks and acts closer to what the average Star Wars fan expects. To boot, it's far more accessible than that Disney-made extending blade the media giant showed off four years ago at the now-defunct Galactic Starcruiser experience. Uy said the next version of the lightsaber will include a full metal hilt, plus he plans to fix the issue that creates friction and slows down the retraction mechanism. You can make one yourself if you want to buy the files from the HeroTech site with a subscription. However, the YouTuber mentioned he may make the next rendition more simplified. Eventually, you may not need much mechanical expertise to create your own perfect extending DIY lightsaber.
