Earlier this week, a hydrogen-powered delivery drone managed to make a one-hour, 43-minute ocean crossing. New Atlas reports: The exercise was the result of a collaboration between Texas-based drone development company Guinn Partners, Georgia-based Skyfire Consulting, the U.S. Department of Health, and drone manufacturer Doosan Mobility Innovation — the latter supplied the aircraft, a hydrogen fuel cell-powered DS30 octocopter. Utilizing its…
Tag: testing
SpaceX Successfully Tests Crewed Dragon Launch Abort Engines
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ExtremeTech: SpaceX has cleared a major hurdle on the way to launching manned missions with its Dragon spacecraft. The company had to push back its launch plans after the stunning explosion of a Crew Dragon capsule during testing earlier this year. Now, SpaceX has successfully tested the engines without incident, paving the way for…
AMD Launches 16-Core Ryzen 9 3950X At $750, Beating Intel’s $2K 18-Core Chip
MojoKid writes: AMD officially launched its latest many-core Zen 2-based processor today, a 16-core/32-thread beast known as the Ryzen 9 3950X. The Ryzen 9 3950X goes head-to-head against Intel’s HEDT flagship line-up like the 18-core Core i9-9980XE but at a much more reasonable price point of $750 (versus over $2K for the Intel chip). The Ryzen 9 3950X has base and…
Image: Aircraft nose dome assessed in ESA Hertz chamber
ESA test facilities can test more than just space hardware: here, the 2.0m-diameter nose of an Airbus A340 aircraft is seen in ESA’s Hertz chamber, undergoing radio-frequency testing. Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-11-image-aircraft-nose-dome-esa.html…
Study Reveals How Two Strains of One Bacterium Combine To Cause Flesh-Eating Infection
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A new study by a team of scientists that included researchers from the University of Maryland and the University of Texas Medical Branch used genetic analysis to reveal how two different strains of a single species of flesh-eating bacteria worked in concert to become more dangerous than either one strain alone. The study…
Reactions To the News That Microsoft’s Edge Browser Is Coming to Linux
“Microsoft is bringing Edge to Linux, for all the Microsoft fans running Linux,” jokes the headline at the Inquirer. (“We can just imagine the amount of bunting and party poppers that the Linux community has just ordered. After all, why wouldn’t you want a browser from the company that you joined Linux to get away from?”) And the headline at Liliputting…
Security Researchers Exploit Amazon Echo’s Chromium Bug, Win $60,000 Bounty
An anonymous reader quotes TechCrunch: Two security researchers have been crowned the top hackers in this year’s Pwn2Own hacking contest after developing and testing several high profile exploits, including an attack against an Amazon Echo. Amat Cama and Richard Zhu, who make up Team Fluoroacetate, scored $60,000 in bug bounties for their integer overflow exploit against the latest Amazon Echo Show…
‘Microsoft Defender ATP’ Antivirus is Coming to Linux
Microsoft is planning to bring its Defender antivirus to Linux systems next year, reports ZDNet: Microsoft announced the brand change from Windows Defender to Microsoft Defender in March after giving security analysts the tools to inspect enterprise Mac computers for malware via the Microsoft Defender console. Rob Lefferts, corporate vice president for Microsoft’s M365 Security, told ZDNet that Microsoft Defender for…
The World’s First Gattaca Baby Tests Are Finally Here
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Anxious couples are approaching fertility doctors in the US with requests for a hotly debated new genetic test being called “23andMe, but on embryos.” The baby-picking test is being offered by a New Jersey startup company, Genomic Prediction, whose plans we first reported on two years ago. The company says it…
NASA’s Mars 2020 heads into the test chamber
In this time-lapse video, taken on Oct. 9, 2019, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, bunny-suited engineers move the Mars 2020 rover from a high bay in the Spacecraft Simulator Building into the facility’s large vacuum chamber for testing in Mars-like environmental conditions. Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-11-nasa-mars-chamber.html…