Archive for April, 2019
Reaction Engines Testing Successfully Proves Precooler Capability at Supersonic Heat Conditions
April 11th, 2019Via: Reaction Engines: A key element of the revolutionary SABRE™ air-breathing rocket engine successfully passes the first phase of high-temperature testing. Precooler technology will enable a wide variety of high-speed flight and advanced propulsion systems. Reaction Engines’ precooler heat exchanger successfully achieved all test objectives in the first phase of high-temperature testing designed to directly […]
Toxic Air Kills 100,000 Americans Per Year, Costs Economy Billions
April 11th, 2019Via: ZeroHedge: Air pollution is poisoning Americans: A new study links air pollution spewed from industrial factories, motor vehicles, and farmlands to approximately 107,000 premature deaths each year. The report, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said the economic toll of air pollution costs taxpayers $866 billion per year.
Austria Considering Requiring User Identities for Online Platforms
April 11th, 2019Via: The Local: Austria said Wednesday it was considering a law to make it mandatory for big internet platforms to register their users and deprive those behind hate posts of anonymity. “Unfortunately there have been an increasing number of clear violations, denigrations and humiliations online in the past under the cover of anonymity. That’s why […]
U.S. Prisoners Have Lost a Combined 20,000 Years of Life to False Convictions
April 11th, 2019Via: Reason: In 2018 alone, wrongly convicted prisoners lost more than 1,600 years of life behind bars. That’s a new record, according to the annual report from The National Registry of Exonerations, which tracks all exonerations from 1989 onward. In 2018, 151 people were freed from serving sentences for crimes they did not commit. They […]
China: Gene-Editing Techniques Make Monkey Brains More Humanlike
April 11th, 2019You’ll love this one. Via: Futurism: For the first time, scientists have used gene-editing techniques to make monkey brains more humanlike. The monkeys, rhesus macaques, got smarter — they had superior memories to unaltered monkeys, according to recently-published research that’s kicked off a fiery debate among ethicists about how far scientists should be able to […]
Tesla and Panasonic Freeze Spending on $4.5 Billion Gigafactory
April 11th, 2019Via: Nikkei: Tesla and Panasonic are freezing plans to expand the capacity of their Gigafactory 1, the world’s largest EV battery plant, as concerns mount on Wall Street about weakening demand at Elon Musk’s car company. The partners had planned to raise capacity by 50% by next year, but financial problems have forced a rethink, […]
Russia Revamps Arctic Military Base to Stake Claim on Region
April 11th, 2019Via: AP: Missile launchers ply icy roads and air defence systems point menacingly into the sky at this Arctic military outpost, a key vantage point for Russia to project its power over the resource-rich polar region. The base, dubbed Severny Klever (Northern Clover) for its trefoil shape, is painted in the white, blue and red […]
Julian Assange Arrested by British Police at Ecuadorean Embassy
April 11th, 2019Via: Reuters: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested on Thursday by British police and carried out of the Ecuadorean embassy, where he has been holed up for nearly seven years to avoid extradition to Sweden over a sexual assault investigation. A video posted online showed an agitated, frail-looking man with white hair and a white […]
U.S. Budget Deficit Running 15% Higher Than a Year Ago
April 10th, 2019Via: AP: The federal government reported a $146.9 billion deficit in March, causing annual debt to rise 15% for the first half of the budget year compared to the same period in 2018. The Treasury Department said Wednesday in its monthly report that the fiscal year deficit has so far totaled $691 billion, up from […]
Amazon Workers Listening to the Inane Ramblings of Alexa Users to Train AI
April 10th, 2019Via: Bloomberg: One worker in Boston said he mined accumulated voice data for specific utterances such as “Taylor Swift” and annotated them to indicate the searcher meant the musical artist. Occasionally the listeners pick up things Echo owners likely would rather stay private: a woman singing badly off key in the shower, say, or a […]
