secretive

St. Helena, Calif. —  Highway 29 winds along the floor of the Napa Valley through Yountville and St. Helena and up into Calistoga, passing by vineyards that produce some of the most celebrated and expensive wines in the world.The road, lined with rows of grapevines planted along sun-dappled hills, is justly famous for its stunning beauty — and the stunning number of Michelin-rated restaurants, spas and boutique inns that have popped up among the vineyards.And lately, for locals anyway, it is also the source of a…

Seemingly benign yet insidious, the Hindutva pop playlist includes songs set to hypnotic beats with lyrics that hint at an Islamic takeover of India, or which claim to tell the truth about India’s freedom struggle. Some of these are filled with conspiracy theories and historical inaccuracies meant to stoke communal tensions. In H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars, journalist Kunal Purohit begins by conducting a post mortem of a riot in Jharkhand. A truck with loudspeakers blaring vitriolic songs targeting…

A stealth startup led by ex-Blue Origin leaders, focused on harvesting resources from the moon, has quietly closed a sizable new tranche of funding, according to regulatory documents. Interlune, a startup that’s been around for at least three years but has made almost zero public announcements about its tech, has raised $15.5 million in new funding and aims to close another $2 million. A representative for Interlune declined to comment on this story.    This is the first public indication that the company has closed…

The magic carpet is supposed to show how great flying cars will be in the future, but it’s unclear how this air-mobile vehicle will reduce pollution.Gif: Kyle Barr / GizmodoCES is no stranger to some supremely extravagant booths, but this year’s convention might take the cake (in one case, quite literally). The Consumer Technology Association, the group that runs the event every year, was hoping to have 130,000 attendees strolling around Vegas in search of the latest and greatest the tech world has to offer. Being there…

SpaceX's powerful Falcon Heavy rocket lofted a secretive space plane for the US Space Force on Thursday evening from Florida, the first time the rocket was used to send the Boeing Co.-built experimental spacecraft to orbit.The launch, which lifted off at 8:07 p.m. local time, marked the start of the seventh mission for the Space Force's secretive spaceplane, the X-37B. Shaped like a mini-space shuttle, the X-37B is an uncrewed and reusable experimental test platform that the Defense Department deploys in orbit, sometimes…

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Human rights advocates hoped to show this was not just a one-off incident, but a systemic issue ignored by the local government. In fact, Fengxian, the county where the woman lived, has long had an infamous reputation for allowing women to be abducted and sold to men looking to procreate.  By searching CJO, advocates found at least two previous cases in which abducted women filed for divorce in Fengxian and were denied; they also found that people who were prosecuted in the county for human trafficking received minimal…

In an unexpected turn of events, the eagerly awaited Monday night launch of the U.S. military's covert X-37B robot spaceplane has been postponed for a minimum of 24 hours, according to SpaceX.The mission, marking the seventh journey into orbit for the mysterious spaceplane, was poised for a historic moment as it was set to embark on its inaugural flight atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. However, the launch was abruptly called off just 25 minutes before the anticipated liftoff. The targeted launch window, initially…

Alan Wake 2 developer Remedy Entertainment has completely rebooted its multiplayer project, with plans to take the project in an entirely different direction. In an official press statement Remedy announced that it’s planning a “reboot of its cooperative, free-to-play multiplayer game project codenamed ‘Vanguard’, hereafter ‘Kestrel'”. Project Vanguard was first announced in December of 2021, and Remedy was reportedly hoping to get a ‘proof-of-concept’ finished by the end of this year. However, that won’t be the case,…

Humane, the startup launched by ex-Apple design and engineering duo Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, today revealed details about its first product: The Humane Ai Pin. It’s been a long time coming. Humane has kept its work more or less under wraps since 2018, its founding year, unveiling no products but bringing on dozens of ex-Apple employees responsible for the iPhone’s touchscreen keyboard, elements of Apple’s industrial design and infrastructure for Apple services like iCloud, Apple Pay and Home. Humane’s…