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Hoverbikes, Hyperloops and sub-orbital hijinks: Yes, the ‘3rd, 4th and 5th Dimensions of Travel’ are coming soon
No, no time travel…
We were disappointed that the sixth dimension of travel did not get a mention, namely the sitting in one’s underwear at home and swearing loudly at Teams or Zoom or whatever recalcitrant remote-working tool has been recommended by IT.
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We spent billions building atom smashers – and now boffins think nature’s doing the same thing for free?
The cores of massive binary neutron stars are crushed under such immense gravitational pressures, the particles inside split apart to create a hot soup of quark matter, according to a study published in Nature Astronomy this month.
(Imagine the cheese you could make from that Quark…)
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DevOps from above! US Air Force says upcoming B-21 stealth bomber will run Kubernetes
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Boffins step into the Li-ion’s den with sodium-ion battery that’s potentially as good as a lithium cousin
The world’s mobile electronics, from phones to cars, largely run on batteries containing lithium, which is relatively expensive. Sodium-ion batteries are cheaper to make, but they rapidly wear out compared to their Li-ion cousins.
Now scientists in America and China have created a sodium-ion-based battery that can potentially perform at close to the levels of Li-ion, paving the way for a cheaper, commercially viable alternative to lithium.
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An all-electric commercial aeroplane made its first test flight, heralding advances in propulsion and battery technology alike.
The modified Cessna Grand Caravan, a single-engined cargo/passenger aircraft used on short distance hops, was test-flown in the US on 28 May with a 750hp electric motor fitted in place of its gas turbine engine.
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Staff in a huff, personal call with Trump, picking fights with Twitter, upsetting civil-rights groups – a week in the life of Facebook’s Zuckerberg
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As Twitter blocks white supremacists posing as anti-fascists, FBI appeal is flooded with images of cop violence
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$5bn+ sueball bounces into Google’s court over claims it continues to track netizens in ‘private browsing mode’
Google has been sued for billions of dollars in a proposed class action alleging the adtech company identified and tracked users who adopted its browser’s incognito mode to avoid such tracking.
The complaint, filed in Northern California yesterday [PDF], claims that through a combination of means ranging from “Google Analytics, Google Ad Manager, and various other application and website plug-ins”, the adtech company has identified individuals’ IP addresses, “what the user is viewing, what the user last viewed, and details about the user’s hardware” while they were in incognito mode.
It also accuses Mountain View of trying to make itself a one-stop shop “for any government, private, or criminal actor who wants to undermine individuals’ privacy, security, or freedom.”
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The app, published by Indian developer OneTouch AppLabs, advised Android users of the nation of origin for all apps installed on their smartphone and offered to delete them. The company says the app was downloaded a million times in ten days, a fact supported by its cached Google Play page. But OneTouch AppLabs said Google took issue with the app and it’s no longer available.
Magic Box?
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Australian Prime Minister holds press conference about housing stimulus initiative; is told (literally) “get off my lawn.”
Still a dick.
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A dick who is able to back down, politely.
You have no idea how much I look on that with envy right now.
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Oh, I fully recognise how lucky we are - not just the normal human decency, but also living somewhere where the PM can just rock up to a new suburb, do a press conference (probably with one discrete plain clothes cop as security) on a lawn and be told off because “I’ve just reseeded that!”
He and all the state premiers, regardless of political orientation have worked together amazingly well in responding to CD-19, listening to the science and (with some luck too), we’ve done comparatively well with just over 100 deaths in a population of 25 million. This is the first time in years I’ve felt the tide turning against bullshit.
I just wish he’d do the same on climate change and hadn’t been a partisan dick during the fires. He gets no free pass from me on anything else.
But yes, increasingly by Anglophile standards, we’re extremely lucky.
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Smart fridges are cool, but after a few short years you could be stuck with a big frosty brick in the kitchen
Signal goes Gaussian to take privacy to the next level: All your faces don’t belong to us
Amid nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd, secure comms biz Signal has deployed a blur tool in its messaging and calling app to allow users to obscure faces in app-captured snapshots.
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Mortal wombat: 4 generations of women fight for their lives against murderous marsupial
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