By the end of 2016, the San Diego SeaWorld will end its signature orca show, replacing it in 2017 with an exhibit in a more natural setting.
The One Ocean show in San Diego, and other 'Shamu' shows featuring orcas performing tricks in front of large crowds was a historically a big draw for SeaWorld theme parks across the country. But those shows in particular have come under fire in recent years from activists who protest the treatment of orcas (also known as killer whales) at the SeaWorld's theme parks.
SeaWorld has been under increasing scrutiny and pressure since 2013 when the documentary Blackfish premiered. The film generated significant negative publicity for SeaWorld, and two years later, the organization is still scrambling to recover.
The status of other One Ocean shows in Florida and San Antonio remains unclear. The particular shutdown may be localized to California for the time being due to political pressures in that state, but that could soon change.
Last month, California approved SeaWorld San Diego's plan to double the size of the orca habitat but added a caveat--the park would no longer be permitted to breed any of their 11 orcas. SeaWorld pledged to fight the ruling but got dealt another blow last week when California Congressman Adam Schiff announced that he was introducing a federal bill that would prohibit captive orcas from performing in shows.
The Orca Responsibility and Care Advancement (ORCA) Act proposed by Schiff would make it illegal to breed captive orcas and would also prohibit anyone from taking an orca from the wild to be put on display.
Properly built, railguns could be a world changing weapon. Electromagnetic forces accelerating projectiles at high speeds means powerful guns could one day again line the decks of ships. And the Navy has taken note. It is investing in railguns for the future, and is already building ships that would someday carry the sophisticated weapon. This 250 pound railgun, built by YouTube user Ziggy Zee, though, is not that kind of a tool. Zee’s craft built, muzzle-loading single shot circuit-frying railgun is very much not that. Here’s the gun’s first shot:
The first test showed that the gun worked, but the voltage fried all circuit connections and even dislodged the wires from the railgun itself. The team behind the railgun set to work to further refine the design. For test number five, the railgun was powered by 27,000 Joules. Here it is firing a shot into a block of ballistic gel (slowed down for dramatic effect):
Further tests see the railgun destroying smartphones, pumpkins, ceramics, and even, in a video released yesterday, a piggy bank.
The railgun is the result of two years of work, with videos for at least 12 firing tests from the past month. The railgun itself is only half the system, with 56 400-volt capacitors providing the electrical power that makes the whole machine work. While it’s presented in the form of instructions, even the gunmaker attaches this rather explicit disclaimer to the project:
I am providing information on how I created this project, but I cannot recommend anyone to try this, EVER. High voltage capacitors are extremely dangerous. High speed projectiles are dangerous. 9-volts are dangerous. Nothing in this project can be made absolutely safe.
DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!
Looking back just after flying past Pluto, the New Horizon's spacecraft captured this shot of the informally named Norgay mountains and the large, flat Sputnik Planum. Pluto's surface is much more diverse than scientists expected. Maybe its interior is, too.
After the New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past Pluto on July 14, scientists were stunned at what it sent back. Photos show the dwarf planet dotted with icy mountains and smooth plains of ice, suggesting the surface may be younger than expected. If Pluto was the dead world everyone thought it was, it probably would have been flatter and pockmarked with craters.
Sometime in the past 100 million years or so, some force appears to have been building up those mountains and smoothing out craters, but scientists aren't entirely sure what. It could simply be ice melting and refreezing, sublimating and getting re-deposited. Or, the New Horizons team speculates, the changes could be driven from inside Pluto--perhaps the tiny planet was still geologically active in recent times.
In a study presented yesterday at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society, scientists from Purdue University propose a way that the frozen world could have a moving interior.
On Earth, the continents and oceans float on a layer of molten rock. As the hottest magma from the Earth's core heats up, it rises--just like the bubbles in a boiling pot of water--while cooler magma sinks. That motion shifts the tectonic plates, building mountains and smoothing out craters.
A planet's geological activity is caused by heat left over from the formation of the solar system, as well as radioactive decay in the planet's interior. Pluto, because it's so small, was expected to have cooled off by now. But one thing Pluto has is antifreeze: ammonia, when added to water, lowers the temperature at which the water freezes, so the dwarf planet could potentially have liquid water existing at temperatures below 32 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Purdue scientists modeled how a mantle made of water and 5 percent ammonia might flow. “The ammonia lowers the viscosity of water ice by a factor of 100,000," said graduate student Alex Trowbridge in a press release . "This would allow for the geologically active and vigorous Pluto seen in the New Horizon images.”
The findings fall in line with other recent work that suggests Pluto's ice mountains may actually be frozen volcanoes that spew out a slushy mix of icy water, nitrogen, methane, and ammonia.
If Pluto does indeed have a slushy mantle, it still requires a hot core to make that mantle heat up, circulate, and reshape Pluto's surface. How or why Pluto's core might have remained active for so long remains a mystery.
A new app called Plot Guru lets you challenge your friends to a trivia game based on your favorite shows.
While Netflix allows you to binge watch your favorite shows however often you want, a new app called Plot Guru wants to be your Netflix companion app: a way to showcase your trivia knowledge of your favorite shows and movies while competing alongside friends and strangers. Since you already (think you) know everything about "Breaking Bad,""The Office," or whatever your go-to binge show is, why not prove it?
Plot Guru is, essentially, a quiz app about trivia. It’s a simple user interface that asks multiple choice questions having to do with plot, characters, and general show-related trivia while you binge from your couch. The app just launched November 2, but it already has 17 shows and 2,000 users and while it's iOS/iPhone only, it has plans (and thousands of signups) for an Android version in early 2016.
Plot Guru challenges users to trivia questions based on popular television shows.
However, the app’s creators aren’t looking to become just another Trivial Pursuit-type game, nor are they planning to limit the app to just one or two shows. Not in the long run.
We’ve all seen trivia games based on cult classic shows, and the shear abundance of “which X character are you?” and “how well do you know X?” quizzes gobbling page views on the internet definitely confirms the presence of a market. But instead of focusing on one show, Plot Guru plans to cover any and every show, movie, and eventually live event that it can.
Plot Guru plans to expand its trivia to more shows soon.
The small team’s big goal is to add more shows, according to founder Justin Key. “Right now our content team is finishing up season one of 'Orange is the New Black', 'Breaking Bad', and 'The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,'” he says. “We're also writing content for a couple movies. The general plan is to release new shows and/or seasons every week or two. Going forward we're also going to tailor our new releases around what our users are watching and what they're asking for.”
Key says the team plans to use its users to help determine where the new content should appear. “For our initial launch we tried to pick a broad selection of shows across different genres. Going forward we're going to let our users play a big part in informing us what we should develop next, both using data on what shows are people played in Plot Guru, and what users had written as requested. Early data shows it will be a mix of popular shows and series and cult favorites.”
Other features are coming, too. Key says there will be a digital currency rewards system at some point, and live games will be hosted by the Plot Guru team in real time for live broadcasts of sports events or award shows. They hope to extend that feature to users as well, which could lead to things like phone-based trivia night interfaces, or just a fun drinking game for adults.
They’ve also got plans to expand beyond the iOS interface. Key says, “Android will be our first priority, but a web version is in the works too. We want users to be able to play Plot Guru on any and every 'second screen' platform they use while watching TV.”
The biggest question you might have is whether the pre-loaded trivia questions will favor players who are already hardcore fans of the show. But Key says that the Plot Guru team has worked to balance the experience, so no one has a huge advantage.
“Our content development team makes sure to mix in the logical [and] thematic content with more off-the-wall trivia and challenging questions," he explains. "Fanboys (and girls) will sometimes have an edge if they’re playing Plot Guru along with a show they’ve seen a bunch of times, but we make sure to include trivia and other content that even the most hardcore fans will find interesting.”
So yes, you’ll be able to show off your dominance in obscure knowledge without your friends getting bored. And now maybe you have finally found an excuse to start "Breaking Bad" from the top. Again.
In the age of screens, technology lacks a certain tactile edge to it. What if, instead of watches with screens, we instead wore on our wrists robotic snakes? Or perhaps, instead of rectangular slabs for phones, we held up to our heads robotic snakes? Want a lamp to stay in the right place while reading? Why not attach a lightbulb to the body of a robotic snake. Instead of transferring files through emotionless cords, what if the files traveled through robotic snakes, which undulated as they passed.
Does this seem like too many uses for a snake robot? Don’t get yourself in knots over it.
LineFORM is a robot from MIT’s Tangible Media Lab, which takes a snake-like robot and turns it into a physical interface. The robot does all those things mentioned above and more, functioning as a smart ruler, a physical extension of a digital model, a touch pad, and more. The machine is the interface and the display. It sounds silly, but we can’t deny the aesthetic appeal of its movements, especially when a mundane task like transferring a file suddenly takes on physical form:
This snakebot is the art school cousin of rescue-orientedserpents. A linear series of motors give it mobility, and shape detection means the robot knows where each segment is in relation to one another, while stiffness changing keeps it from flopping like a wet noodle. A sock-like covering hides all the robotic guts, so it doesn’t look like a cyborg tentacle trying to strangle humans.
It’s unlikely we’ll see snakebot phones-and-nightstands any time soon. LineFORM doesn’t appear to be about a particular market goal. Instead, it simply wants to explore the serpentine shape of what’s possible in design.
The Apple Music Android app release date has finally arrived. The music service meant to compete with Spotify, Tidal, and the growing number of streaming options can finally be had by Android users. Apple rarely brings apps to Google’s rival smartphone OS but, like iTunes’ release on Windows back in 2003, Cupertino has ceded in the name of bringing music to all. Android transfer apps aside, this is Apple’s first real application on Android.
Users of Apple Music on iOS will see many similarities between their version of the company’s streaming service and this new one. The interface of the 29MB app is largely the same, save for the hamburger menu button in the top left and the Android navigation menu buttons on the bottom. With many of Google’s iOS apps not supporting universal iPhone-like gestures such as swipe from the left edge to go back, it will be interesting to see if Cupertino will adopt general Android UX language in their app or force Google users to do things their way. Judging by the small differences in user interface from the Apple Music Android app screenshots, it seems Tim Cook and co. are willing to play by Android’s rules on this one.
The Price
Like most music streaming services, Apple’s offering will cost you. Unlike Spotify, Apple Music has no free tier. But users on iOS and now Android can access a three-month free trial to try before they buy. Following the three-month demo period, users are asked to pay $9.99 per month or $14.99 a month for the family plan (for up to six users).
Apple’s app-specific radio station, Beats 1, can be accessed even without paying for the service, though Apple requires users to log in with their Apple ID (which, even without purchasing anything, generally requires you to attach a credit or debit card).
The launch of Apple Music has been eventful. Not only has the service smoothed things over with Taylor Swift, but the Beats 1 station has seen some interesting exclusive premieres—ranging from Drake and Future’s collaborative tape, to Mary J. Blige’s new radio show and even Justin Bieber leaving Zane Lowe with unreleased tracks off his upcoming album. Apple’s embrace of popular artists may translate to a more popular app. And with Cupertino calling a truce with Google to better take on Spotify and Tidal, more users might just be music to their ears.
Apple Music on Android requires Android 4.3 and higher.
Back in 2010, Stanford University mathematician Joseph Keller noticed that ponytails swing from side to side, even though runners' heads bounce up and down. He was able to create a mathematical model for this motion. Flash forward to 2012, when another group of scientists led by Raymond E. Goldstein were able to model how hair stiffness, weight, variable curvature, and gravity come together to form that distinct ponytail shape.
Incidentally, this wasn't Keller's first IgNobel. He shared a prize in 1999 for his work in figuring out why water sometimes runs down the bottom of the tea pot instead out just out the spout. A true hero.
The next Magic Trackpad is here for $130. Here's how to buy it for cheaper
Apple’s Magic Trackpad is one of the best ways to use Mac OS X. A large surface area and multitouch gestures, combined with the addition of Force Touch pressure sensitivity in the Magic Trackpad 2 and apps like BetterTouchTool only lend to the gray and white slabs' usefulness. But the $130 price tag can be a steep admission price for many potential swipers and tappers. Here’s how you can get your fingers on the glass touch surface for cheaper.
If you can’t justify spending over $100 on a mouse, there is another option. Apple allows buyers to throw $50 towards a Magic Trackpad 2 upgrade. But only if they’re in the process of buying a new iMac.
The desktop computer comes with Apple's Magic Mouse 2, but you can swap it out for the Magic Trackpad 2 for just an extra $50, instead of having to pay the entire $130 for the trackpad and then end up with a spare mouse you may not need.
Those hoping to buy the Magic Trackpad 2 for use with their existing setup will unfortunately still have to fork over the full price.
Magic Trackpad 2
The Magic Trackpad doesn't come with any of Apple's iMacs by default
Apples’s second Magic Trackpad offers Force Touch, Apple’s pressure sensitivity technology. Pushing harder into the trackpad allows you to reveal hidden functionality like word definitions in the browser or quick adding of events. Force Touch has been a part of Apple’s desktop operating system since the release of the new Macbook and now it comes to the desktop.
Unless you’re running OS X Yosemite or below. Using the Magic Trackpad 2 with El Capitan gives access to the entire feature set, while pairing it with a Yosemite device or lower makes the trackpad much less useful—even disabling the two-finger scrolling gesture.
The choice is yours in deciding if you should go with the Magic Trackpad 2 or settle for last year’s model (which you might be able to find for cheaper). If you can do without Force Touch or the rechargeable battery, it may be worth it for you to stick with the original trackpad. Those wanting to use the Force with their desktop Mac and ditch the double-A life for good can now do so. While $130 may be steep for some on a budget or those saving up for the coming iPad Pro, the $50 upgrade is definitely worth considering if you’re planning on buying Apple’s 4K computer anyway.
Now let’s hope Apple allows us to buy the gen 1 Magic Trackpad on the cheap—iPhone style.
In time for the holiday season, the Oculus experience is getting one of its most anticipated headsets yet: one that piggybacks on an existing mobile device to provide a self-contained and portable virtual gaming experience.
A lighter-weight version of the developer models is already out in the world. Gear VR enhances a (Samsung-only) smart-phone experience. You’ll be looking at the phone’s screen and using its processor for the games and videos you play and watch, but the headset itself is built with more sensitive and responsive motion trackers than the phones are really capable of housing.
With a phone, it makes for a self-contained unit—and a fairly streamlined one at that.
The $99 price tag for preorder doesn’t come with a phone; you’ll need one of the brand’s own devices, which includes the Galaxy Note 5, Galaxy S6 edge+, S6, and S6 edge. Games aren’t included either.
Of course if you’re dedicated to buying one, you may be asking what exactly there is to play on the new headset. Gear VR will have dozens of titles in the coming months, including one that’s available now. And if last year’s success is any indication, one of the most promising titles of the year is coming out this week.
“Land’s End” is a VR-centric puzzle solver from the same folks that created the successful iPad puzzle game, “Monument Valley,” which was the 2014 Apple iPad game of the year. While “Monument Valley” uses touch screens to lead players through increasingly intricate and aesthetically pleasing puzzles, “Land’s End” uses head-rotation tracking, much the same way you’d use a mouse on a standard PC, to solve environmental puzzles.
Gear VR ships on Friday, November 20, and is available for pre-order online from Amazon, Best Buy, and Samsung.com.
They spend inordinate amounts of time grooming themselves, and while that might seem a bit excessive to us filthy humans, they've got cause. A new study finds that if you spread out all their skin and hair (insert many ways to skin a cat pun here) those adorable balls of allergens fluff have roughly the same surface area as a ping pong table.
Researchers from Georgia Tech were trying to figure out how animals of different sizes manage to stay clean, so they looked at 24 studies and measured 27 different mammals and insects. By measuring the surface area of different animals, they could determine exactly how much covering each one had to keep clear of dust and dirt. Some animals have way more surface area than others.
Surface Area
Georgia Tech
So why care about how animals keep themselves clean? Because keeping dust and dirt off the surfaces of machines is hugely important, especially when humans can't be there to maintain the system. Keeping spacecraft and landers free of dust can mean the difference between a machine functioning for months or years. The key is finding the most efficient way to remove dirt from different surfaces, and some animals are better at this than others. Fruit flies, for example, have to put a lot of effort into staying clean. They propel dust away from their heads "at accelerations of up to 500 times Earth’s gravity,"according to Guillermo Amador, one of the study authors.
While that might be an impressive feat for such a small insect, it's not really useful for machines, since we want to use as little energy as possible to keep them clean. Future researchers might prefer to mimic biological features such as eyelashes, which are structured to keep dirt away from eyes without any extra work, or the spines of cicadas, which the authors note can 'pop' bacteria, puncturing their defenses like a balloon.
Eventually, America’s beloved rugged close-air support warbird A-10 "Thunderbolt" will have to retire. But not today: in fact, the A-10 likely got a life extension when the commander in charge of the Air Force’s combat deployments suggested retirement might be pushed back a few years.
This is welcome news for troops on the ground, who associate the distinctive “brrrrrrrrrt” of the A-10’s vulcan cannon with battlefield salvation, and bad news for those who find themselves on the receiving end of the A-10’s attacks. For a few more years, the Thunderbolt will stay in the skies, hunting America’s foes. But it has to retire someday.
Beloved as it is, the A-10 is an old plane. Designed to hunt Soviet tanks in a potential European war, it entered service in 1975 and it's remained active ever since.
Numbering the A-10’s days is the F-35, America’s brand-new stealthy multi-purpose jet. Designed as a versatile, multi-role plane, the F-35 is built to serve in many roles, and it serves none of them worse than close air support. Instead of the A-10’s large 30 mm cannon with 1,350 rounds, the F-35 fires a 25mm gun with either 181 or 240 rounds, depending on the model. (Both planes can carry roughly the same payload of bombs or missiles).
The F-35 only just started entering service this year, and they haven’t seen combat yet, so we don’t know for sure how it will actually perform as an A-10 replacements. There’s no other plane quite like the A-10, but here are three possible (and one definite) replacements.
Space is a vast and terrifying place, and humans have only ventured into a very small portion of it. Most crewed space missions have gone smoothly, but every once in a while, an astronaut will come across a situation where they are in grave danger. They've been trapped outside the safety of the space station, forced to make detailed calculations as their vessel spins out of control, and survived disastrous re-entries. It's like the movie Gravity, but in real life.
A new show on the Science Channel, Secret Space Escapes premieres tonight at 10 pm, and features astronauts and cosmonauts detailing their brushes with disaster in their own words.
In the first episode, noted Canadian astronaut (and musician) Chris Hadfield tells the story of his first spacewalk when he was blinded by a substance getting into his eye. He lived to tell the tale (which he's told before at TED talks), but it's an amazing story to see as well as hear. Watch part of tonight's episode in the clip above.
Time to dust off your favorite Xbox 360 games--well, some of them--because Xbox One will finally support them with a new update that goes live November 12.
The first 104 games include previous Halo, Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty,Gears of War, and Fallout titles, as well as some late-to-the-party games like South Park: The Stick of Truth.
Starting tomorrow, discs on all of the approved titles will be recognized in your current-generation console, and digital downloads will be accessible through your download queue. Xbox One will launch a 360 emulator app to support these games, and it’s free to download both the emulation update and any titles you already own.
Microsoft fans have long anticipated this move, especially those who will now be able to stream live 360 gameplay to Twitch and Youtube Gaming without a peripheral PC. But compatibility might also be part of a more desperate strategy by Microsoft to compete with Sony’s PlayStation 4, the main competitor of this particular generation.
Sony’s sales are nearly double what Xbox One has done since the consoles were released two years ago, and one of the complaints along the way has been that PlayStation’s library of games both old and new is significantly better stocked. (PlayStation 4 has several hundred more games available than Xbox One at the moment.)
So adding backwards compatibility technically beefs up the game library significantly, especially if Xbox eventually adds the entire catalog of over 1,000 titles.
But that’s business. As a console owner, here’s what you need to know:
If you own a hard copy of a game, all you’ll need to do is pop the disc in your console and do a download/update. The console will take it from there.
For digital titles, anything you purchased on a previous console will appear as an option to download in your queue on your current-gen console. Just download it and the emulator will boot up right in the Xbox One interface.
You won’t be able to get achievements a second time, but any you haven’t unlocked will be added to your gamerscore as you unlock them on Xbox One. Finally you can tie up all of those loose ends.
If you are playing a game on Xbox One and your friend is playing it on 360, you will be able to play together in multiplayer. So that friend still back on Halo: Reach multiplayer won’t be so lonely if you can scrounge up your disc.
Your save points will also be available, so long as they’re saved to the cloud from the previous console.
Here’s a complete list of games available in the first wave. Yes, we’re waiting for Skyrim to be added to the list, too.
Inside these tiny machines is a colony of hungry bacteria, yearning to eat. The row-bot, as this charming little device is named, paddles about on the surface of water, funneling waste and pollution into its bacteria-rich stomach and receiving electrical power in return. It’s a self-sufficient cleaner on a tiny scale, made to bob in the sea and eat tiny bites of waste until there’s nothing left.
Presented last month at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in Hamburg, Germany, the paper “Row-bot: An Energetically Autonomous Artificial Water Boatman” by a team of academic researchers in Bristol, details the design and development of the tiny garbage-eating machines. The initial goal was to create a machine that could forage, like a wild animal, so it wasn’t dependent on humans to constantly recharge and reenergize itself. Inspired also by the water boatman insect, the robot they created is a tiny, hungry, buoyant surface skimmer.
For flotation, the machine has four little stabilizers. To move, there are two paddles in the middle of its body, which have flexible flipper joints to make sure they move efficiently and minimize drag. Powering the row-bot is a bacteria-filled fuel cell. In the cell, bacteria digest organic waste, and produce carbon dioxide as a by-product, as well as the protons and electrons needed to get the electrical circuit in the cell flowing. In this design, the row-bot generated more energy than it needed to keep refueling itself. That’s huge, and it means in the future, the answer to waste in the water might be sprinkling robots into the stream, and waiting until they eat all the garbage.
The easiest way to detect nuclear material is typically when it's already too late. By the time seismographs, infrasound sensors, and radiation readers pick up on a blast, it’s already happened. Catching a nuclear weapon before it goes off is a lot trickier, which might be why the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is looking at some rather unconventional ideas. The latest: a small, wearable radiation detector. Think of it like a FitBit, only instead of telling its user about calories burned, it lets them know if they’re close to any nuclear weapons.
Huban Gowadia, Director of the DHS’s Domestic Nuclear Detection office, last Thursday blogged that the Department has awarded a multimillion dollar contract to develop such a device. The DHS is calling it the “Human Portable Tripwire.” She writes:
The award is for small, wearable radiation detector devices that passively monitor the environment and alert the user when nuclear or other radioactive material is present. Known as the Human Portable Tripwire (HPT), this device has the capability to identify the source of radiation and allow personnel to take appropriate action. The technology can also locate the source of the detected radiation and includes communication features that allow the user to easily seek additional technical assistance from experts if needed. These devices are a critical tool for personnel who operate in the maritime environment, at land and sea ports of entry, and within the United States.
The device will be used by the Coast Guard, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and the TSA. The project has been in the works for a while; the DHS posted the first notice of the contract in June 2014. The original solicitation called for a system “capable of detecting and identifying radiation/nuclear threats, storing the identification results, and communicating those results in real-time (wired and/or wireless)” to ReachBack, a chemical and radiation threat analysis center. In September, the DHS awarded the $24 million contract to FLIR Detection.
Now Lloyd and others like him in the tech innovation space are also seeking forever change transportation using the Hyperloop— high speed pods that levitate off tracks, offering an “on-demand” method of transportation. The goal: a system that could send people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in just 30 minutes.
In 2013, Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, posed the idea of the Hyperloop. Back then, it sounded like something out of "The Jetsons." But today, just two years later, transportation innovation companies are racing to make that dream a reality. And Hyperloop Tech is leading the way.
At Web Summit, I sat down with Lloyd, who is the former president of Cisco, to discuss the future of the Hyperloop. When Lloyd joined Hyperloop Tech in September, he became a part of an all-star team, consisting of former SpaceX engineer Brogan BamBrogan and Shervin Pishevar, a venture capitalist, angel investor and strategic advisor and board observer at Uber Technologies, among others.
Lloyd says that the science for Hyperloop transportation exists today. The challenge his company faces, he says, is creating the best architecture to carry it out. He says the goal is to build an environment in a tube at an extremely low pressure, and then create a pod—“think of an airplane without wings,” he says—that can move through that area without wheels at up to 750 mph. With the low pressure, and because there’s no friction such as wind or wheels to slow it down, the pod requires little energy to move at a high rate of speed.
“We’ll be about two to three times the speed of high speed rail,” says Lloyd. He adds that, unlike airplanes, there will be no turbulence, weather delays or interference, and unlike high-speed rail, the system will be able to travel under water in a controlled environment. “That controlled environment allows us to go much faster and in a much safer fashion than any other form of transportation,” he says.
The startup company Hyperloop Tech describes its "Levitation Rig" as a "unique test stand" measuring 18 cubic meters (approximately 635 cubic feet). The company plans to use it to test the magnetic levitation system for its high-speed train cars.
He predicts that Hyperloop will have far reaching impacts. With high-speed travel available, people could live farther away from their jobs, often in more affordable communities. Ports, which take up large amounts of waterfront space, could move inland and transport shipments via Hyperloop, at the same time freeing up the waterfront areas for people to enjoy, while also diminishing the traffic ports inevitably draw.
And then there’s the green aspect. “It’s very efficient in energy, it’s all green, it’s all electric,” says Lloyd. He says the system could hold fiber optics, solar panels and other items. “And the land required to do this is a fraction of what’s required to put in a traditional high speed rail,” says Lloyd.
It’s quickly becoming a reality. Lloyd says his company has ordered steel and construction will begin in January on a two-mile test track in California, as Hyperloop races against other companies to have the first system in place. “We are building an open-air test that will be going 400 miles per hour,” he says. The tests will begin at the end of 2016.
Lloyd says the company is also on the lookout for three sites that will be a good fit for the first Hyperloop systems. “We will go first where governments support us. Where regulators give us the ability to create a right of way. Where capital can be formed and where people want change.”
He predicts that in less than five years, Hyperloop will have its Kitty Hawk moment. “I’m very comfortable by 2020 you and I will be sitting beside each other in a Hyperloop taking the first ride, and it’ll probably be 100 to 150 kilometers,” Lloyd says. “I’m very confident that’s going to happen.”
You can catch the full audio of the conversation with Rob Lloyd on Katie Linendoll’s podcast at http://www.Katie.show.
Because mosquitoes carry diseases like malaria and dengue fever, and irritate us, humans do a lot to avoid them. In most places people have to fend for themselves against the pests by sleeping under mosquito nets or using repellant. A number of new repellant formulas have hit the market in recent years, many with questionable efficacy. Researchers at New Mexico State University decided to compare the effectiveness of different repellants and perfumes, according to a study published recently in the Journal of Insect Science.
The researchers tested eight commercially available repellants, two fragrances, and a vitamin B patch that reportedly keeps the mosquitoes at bay, on two different species of disease-carrying mosquitoes. To test the efficacy of each, the researchers put a mosquito at the long end of a Y-shaped plastic tube. One of the researchers who is particularly attractive to mosquitoes placed her two hands at the ends of both forked tubes—one hand was untreated, the other treated with the chemical being tested. If the mosquito avoided the tube with the treated hand by staying still or moving towards the untreated hand, the researchers determined that the repellant worked.
The researchers found that, among repellants, those that contained the tried-and-true ingredient DEET were most effective in warding off the mosquitoes. A few others, such as Cutter Lemon Eucalyptus Insect Repellent, worked almost as well, while most of them (including the vitamin patch) didn’t make any difference.
While those findings weren’t unexpected, the researchers were surprised to find that Avon Skin So Soft Bath Oil repelled the mosquitoes for about two hours. Another fragrance, Victoria’s Secret Bombshell perfume, also repelled the mosquitoes and lasted even longer.
That overturned the previous understanding about how mosquitoes interpret scents. “There was some previous literature that said fruity, floral scents attracted mosquitoes, and to not wear those,” said Stacy Rodriguez, a research assistant involved in the study, said in a statement. “It was interesting to see that the mosquitoes weren’t actually attracted to the person that was wearing the Victoria’s Secret perfume – they were repelled by it.”
The takeaway for the researchers is that the repellants with DEET were as a whole more effective than those without, which is useful information to consumers. They don’t speculate as to why the fragrances might have worked so well. But since each bottle of Victoria’s Secret perfume costs $52, you might be better off buying the DEET to keep mosquitoes away.
The lines along Mars' moon Phobos may indicate that it is getting pulled apart.
You'd think that something as solid as a moon would be around forever. But Mars's moon Phobos has an expiration date.
Scientists recently presented a theory that the moon is slowly being pulled apart by Mars's gravity, and could cease to exist within the next 30-50 million years. The research was presented at the Meeting of the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society.
The researchers posit that the long linear grooves on the moon's surface are indications that the moon is slowly coming apart. Previous theories held that the lines were a result of a huge meteorite hitting the surface, or smaller impact craters. Now, these scientists believe that the moon is not solid, but instead a pile of rubble coated with a thick layer of dust that makes it appear solid. In the next several million years, the moon could get pulled apart completely.
“The funny thing about the result is that it shows Phobos has a kind of mildly cohesive outer fabric,” Erik Asphaug, a co-investigator on the study said in a statement. “This makes sense when you think about powdery materials in microgravity, but it's quite non-intuitive.”
Phobos only orbits about 3,700 miles above the Martian surface, roughly the distance from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean. That's closer than any other moon in the solar system, and it's getting pulled 6 feet closer to the surface every century. For comparison, Earth's moon, which is solid, is 238,900 miles away.
Of course, the only way to really determine what's going on with Phobos would be to take a closer look. Russia attempted to send a probe to Phobos in 2011, but the Phobos-Grunt spacecraft never left Earth's orbit. Japan plans to launch a probe to Phobos around 2022. If all goes well, we might get a better look at the moon well before it meets its ultimate demise.
The ozone hole over Antarctica is now larger than North America, nearing record-size set in 2006.
Legislation and restrictions have reduced ozone-depleting chemicals like chlorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere, and the ozone layer is starting to slowly repair its holes. But those chemicals still concentrate around the poles during spring and summer (it's currently summer in Antarctica), eating a seasonal hole in the ozone layer every year. As of October, the ozone hole over Antarctica was roughly 10 million square miles in size, slightly smaller than it was nine years ago when it was 10.42 million square miles across.
In this animation from DLR (Germany's space agency) you can watch this year's ozone hole being formed. Scientists think that unusual air currents carrying warm air towards the south pole are responsible for its current size.
On the ground, ozone is very harmful. It's the main ingredient in smog, and is produced by burning fossil fuels in power plants or vehicle engines. In the atmosphere, however, it forms a protective barrier, reflecting harmful radiation from the sun.
The hole in September 2006 was the largest and deepest ozone hole ever recorded. It remains to be seen whether this year's will top that record. Studies suggest that the ozone hole won't completely disappear until 2040 or even later.
It’s easy to forget, in our world of ever-present GPS directions, that it’s still possible to get lost on this little planet. Then the ocean swallows an entire airliner, and then it does it again, and the world suddenly seems vast and unknowable again. Fortunately, technology exists that can track planes, and not just as hypothetical future designs. Today, the United Nations set aside a small part of the radio spectrum for better tracking of airplanes from space.
Previously, airplanes were tracked by both the radar signals they sent out, and by passive transponder responses to radar signals they receive. This is a great system for tracking airplanes over ground and near radar stations, but doesn’t do much for airplanes flying over oceans, which cover about 71 percent of the Earth’s surface.
To track planes over the ocean, it’d help if they could send signals to and receive signals from satellites, which aren’t bound by the limitations of ground radar. The technology for planes to communicate with satellites like they do with radar stations already exists. Using a special ADS-B transmitter (ADS-B stands for automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast), planes could transmit their GPS coordinates not to ground stations but to satellites in space. Today’s UN deal sets aside the 1087.7-1092.3 MHz radio frequency so planes can use these transponders. Some planes are already equipped with these transponders, and more may soon follow.
Implementation is expected in 2017, which leaves only a couple of years for airplanes to get lost at sea the normal way. After that, planes looking to disappear will have to resort to black holes and science fiction.
