Degrees aren’t a metric unit, actually. Gradians were an attempt to make a metric unit for angles, but nobody uses those so it didn’t really work.

The people who designed and will use this telescope will be using “steredians”, which is square radians. That’s the unit which astrophysicists use for describing an area of the sky

They’ll still be reporting about the white house, they just won’t be propping up trump’s soapbox quite so much

A VPN can absolutely protect you from hostile software elsewhere on the network, so long as you don’t accept traffic from any source other than the VPN. Doing that correctly is a fairly sophisticated thing to do though, and a sufficiently sophisticated threat might find a way to attack you still.

It all depends on your own technical ability and whether you’re protecting yourself from a script kiddie or palantir.

No, the wires do not become less dense.

There is a virtual force acting to separate each part of the chain from each other part, but locally that force is orders of magnitude less than the bonding forces holding it together. The structure and density of the chain is therefore dominated by electromagnetic forces, rather than the expansion of space.

At large enough scale the expansion force will grow to become comparable to, or exceed, exceed the binding forces. That will cause the chain to stretch, but the electromagnetic forces will still exist and still be applying a restorative force trying to contract the chain again.

I’m pretty sure this requires many light-years of chain though, unless the acceleration of the universe is accelerating (in which case this same principle will eventually tear apart all matter, of any size), and I very much doubt that physics allows a material with the necessary properties

snag bites of the apex predators

I don’t think the author knows what “apex predator” means