December 2020
- Arecibo Falls Silent the Same Day China Lands on the Moon
Arecibo Observatory's dish platform collapsed today, ending 57 years of service, hours after Chang'e 5 touched down at Mons Rümker.
- Salesforce Buys Slack for $27.7 Billion — And the Cloud Wars Get Real
Salesforce announced a $27.7 billion deal to acquire Slack, one of the biggest software acquisitions ever, right as AWS wrapped re:Invent.
- Snapdragon 888 Lands as Samsung Starts Pushing Android 11 to the S20
Qualcomm's new flagship chip lines up 2021's Android phones while Samsung begins rolling One UI 3.0 out to the Galaxy S20.
- China Just Launched a Rocket From the Moon
Chang'e 5's ascent vehicle lifted off from the lunar surface with soil samples aboard, a first for China's space program.
- Money Is Pouring Into No-Code, and It's Not Slowing Down
Unqork, Starburst, and OneTrust all landed huge rounds this month as VCs bet big on tools that let non-engineers build software.
- Good Luck Building a PC Right Now: RTX 3080s and Ryzen 5000s Are Ghosts
Nvidia's RTX 3080/3090 and AMD's Ryzen 9 5900X/5950X are effectively unbuyable, and AMD says the chip crunch could last into mid-2021.
- SpaceX's New Cargo Dragon Makes Its Debut on CRS-21
SpaceX launched the first of its upgraded cargo Dragon capsules to the ISS on a Falcon 9, carrying 3.2 tons of supplies on the CRS-21 mission.
- Python 3.9.1 Lands as Developers Get Comfortable With the New PEG Parser
Python 3.9.1 shipped as a bugfix release, giving developers their first patch cycle since October's parser and typing overhaul.
- The PS5 Scalping Economy: Bots, Bundles, and a $30 Million Payday
A month after launch, PS5 and Xbox Series X restocks still sell out in minutes, and resellers are walking away with tens of millions in profit.
- Hubble Catches One of the Most Perfect Einstein Rings Ever Seen
ESA/Hubble share a striking image of a near-complete Einstein ring, a gravitational-lensing effect that bends a distant galaxy's light into a circle.
- Cyberpunk 2077 Launches to Record Numbers and a Rocky Start
CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 broke concurrent-player records on launch day while console versions buckled under bugs.
- DeepMind Says It Cracked the Protein-Folding Problem
AlphaFold2's CASP14 results put it near experimental accuracy on protein structure prediction, a 50-year grand challenge in biology.
- SpaceX Quietly Launches Another Satellite, and That's the Whole Story
A Falcon 9 carried SiriusXM's SXM-7 broadcast satellite to orbit on December 11, and the routine nature of it is the actual news.
- SolarWinds: How a Trusted Software Update Became a Backdoor Into the US Government
FireEye's disclosure of a compromised SolarWinds Orion update exposes one of the most consequential software supply-chain breaches yet.
- Apple's $549 AirPods Max Land, Mesh Case and All
Apple's over-ear AirPods Max ship today at $549 with adaptive EQ and spatial audio, aiming squarely at Sony and Bose.
- Chang'e 5 Comes Home: China Delivers the First New Moon Rocks Since 1976
Chang'e 5's return capsule landed in Inner Mongolia with about 1,731 grams of lunar material, the first fresh Moon samples since Luna 24 in 1976.
- The Day Your Google Login Just... Stopped Working
A 45-minute Google Cloud authentication failure on December 14 knocked out YouTube, Gmail, and sign-ins for third-party apps like Discord.
- iOS 14.3 Quietly Turns the iPhone 12 Pro Into a RAW Camera
Apple's iOS 14.3 update adds ProRAW support for the iPhone 12 Pro line, plus AirPods Max pairing, Fitness+, and new App Store privacy labels.
- A New, Faster-Spreading Coronavirus Variant Turns Up in South Africa
South African officials flagged a new SARS-CoV-2 variant, 501.V2, that appears more transmissible, days after a similar UK variant was reported.
- Firefox 84 Ships as the Last Browser to Say Goodbye to Flash
Mozilla's Firefox 84 drops native Apple Silicon support and wider WebRender rollout, while quietly becoming the final Firefox release to carry Flash support before its industry-wide death.
- Tesla's $625 Billion Entrance Into the S&P 500
Tesla joined the S&P 500 today in one giant leap, entering as the sixth most valuable US company after a roughly 700% run-up in 2020.
- SpaceX Wraps Its Busiest Year Ever With a Satellite Nobody Will Ever See
SpaceX closed out a record 26-launch year on December 19 with the classified NROL-108 mission for the National Reconnaissance Office.
- Kubernetes Won. Now the Fight Moves Up a Layer
With Kubernetes now the default for container orchestration, 2020's cloud-native attention is shifting to service meshes and developer-experience tooling.
- Christmas Eve and the Gifts Nobody Can Actually Buy
PS5s, Xbox Series X consoles, and RTX 30-series cards remain scarce at MSRP on Christmas Eve, with resellers cashing in on the gap.
- The Best Present From Space Won't Arrive for Another Three Years
OSIRIS-REx is cruising home with a sample from asteroid Bennu so large it jammed its own collector — but Earth won't see it until 2023.
- SolarWinds Has Everyone Staring Hard at the Software Supply Chain
In SolarWinds' wake, package registries and security researchers are pushing code-signing, provenance, and MFA for publishing to the front of the conversation.
- One Month In, the M1 Mac Reviews Aren't Cooling Off
A month after launch, the M1 MacBook Air and Pro are still surprising owners with battery life and fanless performance that upends ARM-vs-x86 assumptions.
- A 5,700-Year-Old Piece of Gum Just Gave Up a Full Human Genome
Scientists sequenced a complete ancient human genome from chewed birch pitch, the first time DNA has been recovered from something other than bone or teeth.
- 2020 Was the Year AI Stopped Being a Demo
A look back at GPT-3 and AlphaFold, the two AI stories that made 2020 the year machine learning stopped feeling like a lab trick.
- 2020 in Hardware: The Year Everything Sold Out
A look back at how nearly every major hardware category — consoles, GPUs, CPUs, and even Macs — ended 2020 impossible to buy.
- New Year's Eve, and Flash Finally Flatlines
Adobe officially ends support for Flash Player today, closing out decades as the web's default plugin for video, games, and animation.