Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge’s UFO research organization has signed an agreement with the U.S. Army in which it will help the military study and develop advanced materials for the purposes of develpoing “active camouflage, beamed energy propulsion, and quantum communication” for use on military vehicles. Motherboard reports: On October 17th, To the Stars joined forces with the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development…
Tag: testing
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope clears critical sunshield deployment testing
The sunshield for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has passed a test critical to preparing the observatory for its 2021 launch. Technicians and engineers fully deployed and tensioned each of the sunshield’s five layers, successfully putting the sunshield into the same position it will be in a million miles from Earth. Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-10-nasa-james-webb-space-telescope.html…
40% Of America’s Schools Have Now Dropped Their SAT/ACT Testing Requirement
“A record number” of U.S. schools are now accepting nearly all of their students without requiring an SAT or ACT test score, reports the Washington Post: Robert A. Schaeffer, public education director of FairTest, which opposes the misuse of standardized tests, said the past year has seen the “fastest growth spurt ever” of schools ending the SAT/ACT test score as an…
Project Trident Ditches BSD For Linux
Project Trident is moving from FreeBSD to Void Linux, reports Its FOSS: According to a later post, the move was motivated by long-standing issues with FreeBSD. These issues include “hardware compatibility, communications standards, or package availability continue to limit Project Trident users”. According to a conversation on Telegram, FreeBSD has just updated its build of the Telegram client and it was…
Forbes Raves Upcoming Linux Desktop Will ‘Embarass’ Windows 10 and macOS
Forbes senior contributor Jason Evangelho dedicated a whole article to a coming update for one Chinese-domestic Linux distribution: If you haven’t been paying attention to a little Linux desktop distribution called Deepin, it’s time to put it on your radar. Nevermind that Huawei chose Deepin to ship on their MateBook laptop lineup. Nevermind that Deepin Cloud Sync [for system settings] is…
Mars 2020 unwrapped and ready for testing
In this time-lapse video, taken on Oct. 4, 2019, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, bunny-suited engineers remove the inner layer of protective antistatic foil on the Mars 2020 rover after the vehicle was relocated from JPL’s Spacecraft Assembly Facility to the Simulator Building for testing. Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-10-mars-unwrapped-ready.html…
The Water Crisis Cities Don’t See Coming
Aging water treatment systems, failing pipes and a slew of unregulated contaminants threaten to undermine water quality in U.S. cities of all sizes. Still, with only a handful of exceptions, “water systems aren’t designed to focus on health, they’re focused on cost-containment,” says Seth Siegel, whose book “Troubled Water,” released this month, examines the precarious state of water infrastructure in the…
In New Headache, WeWork Says It Found Cancer-Causing Chemical in Its Phone Booths
Cash-strapped WeWork, the office-sharing company that is trying to negotiate a financial lifeline, has a new problem that may prove costly. From a report: It has closed about 2,300 phone booths at some of its 223 sites in the United States and Canada after it says it discovered elevated levels of formaldehyde. The company, which abandoned plans for an initial public…
Harley-Davidson Stops Electric Motorcycle Production Due To Charging Problem
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Harley-Davidson has temporarily stopped making and shipping its first electric motorcycle, LiveWire, due to a problem with the bike’s charging equipment, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The company told the Journal that LiveWire bikes are still safe to ride, but it’s asking the first few customers to only charge…
Can A New TED-ED Video Series Teach Students To ‘Think Like A Coder’?
An anonymous reader writes:
TED Conferences has its own educational YouTube channel (now with 10 million subscribers and over 1.5 billion views). Two weeks ago it launched a 10-episode animated series about computer programming, and its first episode — The Prison Break — has already been viewed nearly a quarter of a milllion times. In the 7-minute video, a programmer wakes up…