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Brilliant Red Auroras Cover US Skies After Geomagnetic Storm; Pictures Surface

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Red auroras were photographed in several states in the United States after the latest eruption on the Sun. The charged particles expelled by the Sun last week reached Earth today, causing a geomagnetic storm. This storm triggered auroras which extended from the polar regions down south to many U.S. states, a majority of them bordering Canada.

Several eruptions of solar flares coupled with coronal mass ejections (CME) were captured by solar observatories since early October prompting scientists to issue warnings about severe geomagnetic storms. Solar flares are intense bursts of energy which can affect power grids and radio communications on Earth while CMEs are expulsion of charged particles, which when interact with Earth’s atmosphere create auroras.

Many photographers posted pictures of the brilliant red auroras caused as a result of the geomagnetic storm.

“Easily the deepest reds I’ve ever seen in the aurora! Still going!!” posted Alex Resel on X from Watertown, South Dakota.

“Never seen colors like this on camera. Was briefly visible to the naked eye,” said Peter Forister posting a picture of the aurora from Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia.

ALSO SEE: Sun Unleashes Strongest Solar Flare In 7 Years Toward Earth, It Could Trigger Widespread Auroras

While many images flooded social media, experts said the aurora activity wasn’t as intense as expected considering the strong solar eruptions that recently occurred. The solar flare eruption on October 3 was the strongest since 2017, said British astrophysicist Ryan French.

“Auroral activity continues to fluctuate thanks to some sustained energy in our magnetosphere, but overall the magnetic field structure of the solar storm is starting to wane. With time the aurora will do the same,” said space weather forecaster and meteorologist Sara Housseal.

“We have possibly the last large substorm of this #solarstorm causing #aurora to brighten and drop as far south as Missouri, USA! catch the shows while you can, as it looks like the storm might wane for a while after this settles down,” space weather physicist Dr. Tamitha Skov said on X.

The National Ocean And Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) space department, earlier today, warned about a moderate level geomagnetic storm.

ALSO SEE: Geomagnetic Storm Triggers Stunning Auroras After Intense Solar Explosions; Pics Surface

(Image: X/@forecaster25/@aresel_)





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OpenAI acquired Chat.com | TechCrunch

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OpenAI bought Chat.com, adding to its collection of high-profile domain names.

As of this morning, Chat.com now redirects to OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the acquisition via email.

Chat.com is one of the older domains on the web, having been registered in September 1996. Last year, it was reported that Hubspot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah acquired Chat.com for $15.5 million, making it one of the top two all-time publicly reported domain sales.

The domain name doesn’t appear to have changed hands since it sold last year, indicating that OpenAI isn’t hosting ChatGPT on Chat.com — so this probably doesn’t represent a brand change.



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MoradaUno wants to make it easier to rent apartments in Mexico

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Renting in Latin America is restrictive. Most landlords require three months of rent as a deposit and a guarantor that owns property in the same city to co-sign the lease. Santiago Morales, the co-founder and CEO of proptech MoradaUno, said this dynamic makes 40% of prospective renters ineligible. His company wants to get more tenants into rentals by underwriting their risk.

“That’s the largest pain point in the industry today,” Morales told TechCrunch. “People not being able to rent where they want, or they have to, like, rent with roomies, roommates or basically can’t rent. So we said, let’s go fix that. Let’s go solve that problem.”

The result was MoradaUno, a Mexico City-based company that looks to upfront tenant risk for landlords. The company works with real estate brokers by screening and underwriting potential tenants and agreeing to take on their rent payments if the tenants stop paying. Morales said the company’s thorough vetting process, which includes background checks and income verification, weeds out a lot of bad actors from the start. MoradaUno also provides additional optional broker services like legal and home insurance.

The company decided to target brokers, as opposed to landlords themselves, due to the fragmented nature of Mexico’s rental market, Morales said. Unlike in U.S. cities where there is a concentration of large landlords that manage a ton of units, in Mexico, it’s the opposite. Most landlords only own one property.

“It’s all mom and pops, like 97% of the market is mom and pops,” Morales said. “They really depend on this income. So they’re like, ‘Oh, who am I renting to? What happens if they don’t pay?’ There’s a lack of trust there. We say, we can help solve that or bridge that lack of trust with technology.”

The MoradaUno founding team knows the LatAm real estate market well. Morales said he moved to Mexico in early 2020, right before the pandemic, because he was working with proptech Loft, the LatAm marketplace for buying and selling real estate. He was supposed to help them expand into the country but when COVID-19 hit, those plans dried up.

The experience gave him a good foot in the door to LatAm’s real estate challenges and introduced him to Ines Gamboa Sorensen and Diego Llano, his now co-founders. MoradaUno was formed in 2020 and formally launched its product in 2021. MoradaUno has since worked with more than 4,500 brokers and helped close more than 20,000 rentals. Santiago added that the company is processing about 1,000 leases a month and wants to hit 3,000 leases a month by next summer.

The company just raised a $5.6 million Series A round to help with that. The round was co-led by fintech-focused Flourish Ventures and Cometa, a VC firm focused on backing companies building for Spanish-speaking populations. Clocktower Ventures, Picus Capital and Y Combinator also participated. Morales said the capital will be used to help with expansion.

The proptech startup market has been growing in LatAm. There are a few other startups looking to tackle rentals too. Aptuno is one that helps people find and apply for apartments online that is based in Bogota and has raised $7 million in venture funding. Houm is another that looks to bypass the region’s tough rental market by acting as a digital broker. Houm has raised more than $44 million in VC money.

MoradaUno is currently live in four cities in Mexico, but the company wants to boost that by adding six more cities in the near future. Morales added that underwriting tenants is just the beginning and in the future they’d like to be able to offer fintech services like advanced rent payments or even build an AI model for brokers.

“It’s really cool to be able to give access [to] people that otherwise would have not been able to rent,” Morales said. “Now you’re giving them an option. That’s very powerful and exciting. That kind of fuels us every day. And we’re also making the lives of thousands of real estate agents better because they have better tools and more efficient technology.”



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Spacecraft watches lonely Earth and moon fade into the distance

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Earth is a profoundly isolated rock.

The European Space Agency’s Hera craft, en route to an asteroid, recently captured footage of our planet and the moon, set against the black ether of space. The two objects gradually shrink as Hera journeyed from some 860,000 to 2.4 million miles (1.4 to 3.8 million kilometers) away in October.

“As #HeraMission sped away from its homeworld it witnessed the Moon orbiting Earth,” the agency posted online.

For reference, the moon is located about 239,000 miles from us.

Our greater solar system is extremely isolated, too. There are huge distances between the stars. “In fact, if you were to shrink the sun to the size of a sand grain, the distance to the nearest star would be measured in miles,” Sally Dodson-Robinson, a planetary scientist at the University of Delaware, previously told Mashable. The nearest solar system is Alpha Centauri, located 25 trillion miles from Earth.

Mashable Light Speed

The car-sized Hera spacecraft, however, isn’t traveling too far — in cosmic terms. The mission will rendezvous with the asteroid Dimorphos in December 2026, at a distance of some 121,167,000 miles, or 195 million kilometers, from Earth. It’s a planetary defense expedition: Hera will use a slew of cameras and instruments to survey the impact site of NASA‘s successful asteroid-deflection test, which proved humanity can alter the path of a potentially menacing asteroid. Dimorphos, which is no threat to Earth, is about the size of a stadium, at 525 feet (160 meters) across.

The asteroid Dimorphos, on right, after impact by NASA's DART spacecraft in 2022. Dimorphos orbits the asteroid Didymos as part of a binary asteroid system.

The asteroid Dimorphos, on right, after impact by NASA’s DART spacecraft in 2022. Dimorphos orbits the asteroid Didymos as part of a binary asteroid system.
Credit: ASI / NASA

“By gathering close-up data about the Dimorphos asteroid, which was impacted by NASA’s DART spacecraft in 2022, Hera will help turn asteroid deflection into a well understood and potentially repeatable technique,” ESA explained.

To prepare for all sorts of future contingencies — such as a colossal asteroid or one that surprises us — researchers are also investigating the potential of detonating a nuclear device near an asteroid to change such a menacing rock’s trajectory.

Although there’s no known threat from an asteroid for at least the next century, it behooves us to be prepared, even if the odds of an impact are exceedingly small.

“You wouldn’t want to take chances on an asteroid the size of a city,” Nathan Moore, a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories, previously told Mashable.





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