The University of Alabama is taking an extraordinary, Orwellian step to reward students who attend games — and stay until the fourth quarter — by using location-tracking technology from students’ phones to see who skips out and who stays. If students stay until the fourth quarter, they will be rewarded with improved access to tickets to the SEC championship game and…
Tag: airplane
US Air Force’s Mysterious X-37B Space Plane Sets New Record For Time In Space
“An Air Force X-37B spaceplane just completed its 718th day in orbit, making it the longest mission yet for a secretive military test program,” reports CNN: The US military has launched five uncrewed X-37B spaceplanes into orbit over the past decade, and each flight has been longer than its predecessor… What is known is that the military is using the planes…
Businesses Are Using VR To Learn How To Best Fire People
McGruber shares a report: Today, the dream of goggle-wearing masses has deflated, and investment in the tech has dwindled. But VR companies like Talespin have found a growing market in simulating the least entertaining content imaginable: our jobs. Consumers may not yet feel the pull of visiting fantasy worlds in their free time, but for businesses that need to train their…
A Growing Community Called Randonauts Believe That Journeying To Random Locations Can Help Put Us in New Realities
A small but quickly growing online community believes that transforming randomly generated numbers into clusters of location data could help us tunnel out of reality. Their name for themselves: Randonauts. From a report: It’s a sad truth that most of our lives are pretty boring, geographically speaking. Live in one place long enough and you will develop routines, walking the same…
Eerie ‘Fire Cloud’ Floats Like Alien Structure Over Washington
A photographer on a NASA airplane captured a rare and spectacular shot when flying through a fire cloud, a type of thunderhead that forms above a wildfire’s smoke plume. Source: https://www.livescience.com/firecloud-flythrough.html
IAU approves 2nd round of names for Pluto features
New Horizons provided what will be the only close-up images of Pluto many of us will see in our lifetimes. The new feature names from the International Astronomical Union recognize the mission’s forerunners in Earth and space mythology and history. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/iau-approves-new-pluto-feature-names-2019…
A Boeing Code Leak Exposes Security Flaws Deep In a 787’s Guts
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Late one night last September, security researcher Ruben Santamarta sat in his home office in Madrid and partook in some creative googling, searching for technical documents related to his years-long obsession: the cybersecurity of airplanes. He was surprised to discover a fully unprotected server on Boeing’s network, seemingly full of code designed to…
Airlines Are Finally Fixing the Middle Seat
An anonymous reader shares a report: “There’s no justice in air travel,” an airline industry insider once told me. A third of passengers on planes get stuck with a middle seat, getting smushed for hours at a time in a chair that costs exactly the same ticket price as a window or aisle. That just stinks. But what if we could…
Former astronaut helps break flight record over poles
A former astronaut is back at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center after helping to shatter a pair of records for a round-the-world airplane flight over the North and South poles. Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-07-astronaut-flight-poles.html…
South American solar eclipse on July 2
A total eclipse of the sun is coming to the South American countries of Chile and Argentina in the late afternoon hours on July 2, 2019. Source: https://earthsky.org/tonight/south-american-solar-eclipse-on-july-2…