How to see what is hidden from view
Using walls as mirrors lets cameras look around cornersMar 17th 2021IN A locked room in a busy city, some terrorists are holding a hostage. The curtains are mostly drawn, cutting off any direct line of sight for those outside. In a building across the street, a team of engineers are set a task: they can…
Small, cheap spy satellites mean there’s no hiding place
Mar 17th 2021LAST SUMMER, Ecuadorians watched with concern as 340 foreign boats, most of them Chinese, fished just outside the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) around their country’s westernmost province, the Galapagos Islands. The law of the sea requires such vessels to carry GPS-based automatic identification systems (AIS) that broadcast where they are, and to keep…
America’s banks have too much cash
Mar 16th 2021WHEN BOND markets seized up in the spring of 2020 the problem was a shortage of cash. A global dash for dollars caused bond yields, which move inversely to prices, to spike. It sent the greenback soaring in currency markets. And it caused trading in Treasuries, usually the world’s most liquid market, almost…
Alex Trebek Told Kenan Thompson He Liked ‘Black Jeopardy’
Recently, Kenan Thompson appeared on the YouTube show Hot Ones and spoke about Alex Trebek‘s take on ‘Black Jeopardy.’The late Alex Trebek, the beloved host of Jeopardy, was supportive of most of the parodies about him and the TV show, and evidently, that backing stretched to the SNL sketch Black Jeopardy with Thompson. Prior to…