FedEx jets might soon pack defensive weaponry. NBC News and Reuters report FedEx has asked the Federal Aviation Administration for permission to equip an upcoming fleet of Airbus A321-200 aircraft with an anti-missile laser system. The proposed hardware would disrupt the tracking on heat-seeking missiles by steering infrared laser energy toward the oncoming projectiles.
The courier service pointed to “several” foreign incidents where attackers used portable air defense systems against civilian aircraft. While there weren’t specific examples, NBC pointed to Iran shooting down a Ukranian airliner in January 2020 (reportedly due to mistaking the jet for a cruise missile) and a Malaysian flight brought down by Russia-backed Ukranian separatists in July 2014.
FedEx first applied for the laser system in October 2019. The FAA is open to approval, but has proposed “special conditions” before lasers could enter service. The system would need failsafes to prevent activation on the ground, and couldn’t cause harm to any aircraft or people.
The concept of including countermeasures isn’t strictly new. Some American commercial aircraft have used anti-missile systems as early as 2008, and FedEx helped trial a Northrop Grumman countermeasure system around the same time. Israel’s El Al has used anti-missile systems since 2004. FedEx’s plans would be significant, though, and rare for a courier company. It wouldn’t be surprising if more commercial aircraft followed suit, even if the risks of attacks remain relatively low.
The “mommy and me” construct reinforces the myth that mothers have “magical bonds” with children, putting all the pressure on mothers for caretaking duties.
The murmurs of an iPad Pro with wireless charging are growing louder. 9to5Macsources claim Apple is moving forward with an update to its pro tablet that would include MagSafe wireless charging, but not necessarily how you’d expect. Rather than using a previously reported all-glass back (like most recent iPhones), the new iPad Pro could instead charge through an enlarged glass Apple logo built into a metal back. It would charge more quickly than an iPhone (expected given the iPad’s added power draw) and carry stronger magnets to keep the charger in place.
The refreshed iPad Pro would include some more universal improvements, including a larger battery and an iPhone 13-style camera array. There would also be a “brand new chip” 9to5 presumed would be the M2 also expected for a new MacBook Air. Earlier rumors suggested the M2 would have eight cores like the M1, but would run them faster and tout more graphics cores.
There was no mention of a specific timeframe for the iPad Pro update. While talk has circulated of a spring event, there are no guarantees Apple will launch any new iPads in that time frame. Don’t be shocked if there is a new Pro, though. The M1-based iPad Pro was as much a chance for Apple to flex its silicon prowess as it was a functional upgrade — an M2 sequel would keep that momentum going, and MagSafe support would help tie the Pro into Apple’s wider ecosystem.
Back in October, FX on Hulu canceled Y: The Last Man just a few weeks before the end of its first season. Based on Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerra’s 2005 Vertigo comic, the post-apocalyptic series starred Ben Schnetzer as Yorick, the last surviving cis male on the planet and his pet monkey as they travel the new world…
Google may have to rethink its non-disclosure agreements following a long-running lawsuit from an anonymous worker. According to The Washington Post, a California Superior Court judge has ruled that Google’s employee confidentiality agreements violate state labor laws. Terms banning the employee from discussing his job with potential employers amounted to a non-compete clause and were thus illegal in the state, the judge said.
The internet company originally persuaded a judge to toss out most of the worker’s claims in the belief federal law overrode California legislation. An appeals court overturned that decision, however, noting that state laws did more to protect free speech rights that included work experience. Google has declined to comment on either the verdict or any plans to appeal.
The outcome wouldn’t let Google employees discuss trade secrets if it was upheld. It would let people discuss work experience, though, and could make it easier for job-seekers to switch roles without fear of lawsuits. It might also provide more opportunities for sexual assault and harassment victims to discuss their reasons for leaving a company, although California legislation has already tackled non-disclosure agreements that bar victims from talking about incidents.
This ruling might also have wider repercussions for California’s tech sector. QH Law partner Ramsey Hanafi told the Post that many large tech companies have similar gag rules. Like it or not, Silicon Valley firms might have to revamp their agreements and accept that it will be easier for staff to leave or identify toxic work cultures.
If the efforts of the 10,000-plus people who developed and assembled the James Webb Space Telescope are any indication, the age of the independent scientist are well and truly over. Newton, Galileo, Keppler, and Copernicus all fundamentally altered humanity’s understanding of our place in the universe, and did so on their own, but with the formalization and professionalization of the field in the Victorian Era, these occurences of an amatuer astronomer using homebrew equipment all the more rare.
In his new book, The Invisible World: Why There’s More to Reality than Meets the Eye, University of Cambridge Public Astronomer, Matthew Bothwell tells the story of how we discovered an entire, previously unseen universe beyond humanity’s natural sight. In the excerpt below, Bothwell recounts the exploits of Grote Reber, one of the world’s first (and for a while, only) radio astronomers.
Oneworld Publishing
Excerpted with permissionfrom The Invisible Universe by Matthew Bothwell (Oneworld 2021).
The Only Radio Astronomer in the World
It’s a little strange to look back at how the astronomical world reacted to Jansky’s results. With hindsight, we can see that astronomy was about to be turned upside down by a revolution at least as big as the one started by Galileo’s telescope. Detecting radio waves from space marks the first time in history that humanity glimpsed the vast invisible Universe, hiding beyond the narrow window of the visible spectrum. It was a momentous occasion that was all but ignored in academic astronomy circles for one very simple reason: the world of radio engineering was just too far removed from the world of astronomy. When Jansky published his initial results he attempted to bridge the divide, spending half the paper giving his readers a crash-course in astronomy (explaining how to measure the location of things in the sky, and exactly why a signal repeating every twenty-three hours and fifty-six minutes meant something interesting). But, ultimately, the two disciplines suffered from a failure to communicate. The engineers spoke a language of vacuum tubes, amplifiers and antenna voltages: incomprehensible to the scientists more used to speaking of stars, galaxies and planets. As Princeton astronomer Melvin Skellett later put it:
The astronomers said ‘Gee that’s interesting – you mean there’s radio stuff coming from the stars?’ I said, ‘Well, that’s what it looks like’. ‘Very interesting.’ And that’s all they had to say about it. Anything from Bell Labs they had to believe, but they didn’t see any use for it or any reason to investigate further. It was so far from the way they thought of astronomy that there was no real interest.
After Jansky had moved on to other problems, there was only one person who became interested in listening to radio waves from space. For around a decade, from the mid-1930s until the mid-1940s, Grote Reber was the only radio astronomer in the world.
Grote Reber’s story is unique in all of twentieth-century science. He single-handedly developed an entire field of science, taking on the task of building equipment, conducting observations, and exploring the theory behind his discoveries. What makes him unique is that he did all of this as a complete amateur, working alone outside the scientific establishment. His job, designing electric equipment for radio broadcasts, had given him the skills to build his telescope. His fascination with the scientific literature brought him into contact with Jansky’s discovery of cosmic static, and when it became clear that no one else in the world seemed to care very much, he took it upon himself to invent the field of radio astronomy. He built his telescope in his Chicago back garden using equipment and materials available to anyone. His telescope, nearly ten metres across, was the talk of his neighbourhood (for good reason – it looks a bit like a cartoon doomsday device). His mother used it to dry her washing.
He spent years scanning the sky with his homemade machine. He observed with his telescope all night, every night, while still working his day job (apparently he would snatch a few hours of sleep in the evening after work, and again at dawn after he was finished at the telescope). When he realised he didn’t know enough physics and astronomy to understand the things he was seeing, he took courses at the local university. Over the years, his observations painted a beautiful picture of the sky as seen with radio eyes. He detected the sweep of our Milky Way, with bright spots at the galactic centre (where Jansky had picked up his star-static), and again towards the constellations Cygnus and Cassiopeia. By this time he had learned enough physics to make scientific contributions, too. He knew that if the hiss from the Milky Way was caused by thermal emission – heat radiation from stars or hot gas – then it would be stronger at shorter wavelengths. Given that Reber was picking up much shorter wavelengths than Jansky (60 cm, compared to Jansky’s fifteen-metre waves), Reber should have been bombarded with invisible radio waves tens of thousands of times more powerful than anything Jansky saw. But he wasn’t. Reber was confident enough in his equipment to conclude that whatever was making these radio waves, it had to be ‘non-thermal’ – that is, it was something different from the standard ‘hot things glow’ radiation we discussed back in chapter 2. He even proposed the (correct!) solution: that hot interstellar electrons whizzing past an ion – a positively charged atom – will get sling-shotted around like a Formula 1 car taking a tight corner. The cornering electron will emit a radio wave, and the combined effect of billions of these events is what Reber was detecting from his back garden. This only happens in clouds of hot gas. Reber was, it turns out, picking up radio waves being emitted by clouds containing new-born stars scattered throughout our Galaxy. He was, quite literally, listening to stars being born. It was a sound no human had ever heard before. To this day, radio observations are used to trace the formation of stars, from small clouds in our own Milky Way to the birth of galaxies in the most distant corners of the Universe.
In many ways, Reber’s story seems like an anachronism. The golden age of independent scientists, who could make groundbreaking discoveries working alone with homemade equipment, was hundreds of years ago. With the passing of the Victorian era, science became a complex, expensive, and above all professional business. Grote Reber is, as far as I know, the last of the amateur ‘outsider’ scientists; the last person who had no scientific training, built his own equipment in his garden, and through painstaking and meticulous work managed to change the scientific world.
Tesla has once again quietly pushed back its Cybertruck’s release to next year, according to Reuters. The automaker will reportedly begin the electric truck’s production by the end of the first quarter of 2023 instead of this year. While Tesla has yet to formally announce the delay, the Cybertruck’s order page removed a previous reference to production in 2022. The design section of the page previously read “You will be able to complete your configuration as production nears in 2022.” Now, the sentence ends after the word “nears.”
Back in November, somebody on Twitter asked company chief Elon Musk for an update on the Cybertruck. Musk responded that Tesla has been grappling with a “supply chain nightmare,” and that he’ll provide more updates during the company’s next earnings call scheduled for January 26th.
Oh man, this year has been such a supply chain nightmare & it’s not over!
I will provide an updated product roadmap on next earnings call.
According to Reuters‘ source, Tesla will have a limited production of the Cybertruck at first before increasing its output. The company unveiled the Cybertruck in 2019 at a big event, wherein Musk said that production was slated to begin in late 2021. During the company’s January 2021 earnings call, he said Tesla only expects a few deliveries in 2021 and for volume production to start in 2022. Later that year, though, the company delayed the vehicle’s release to 2022.
Delays with Tesla releases don’t come as a surprise anymore, seeing as Musk is known for announcing timetables that are a bit too optimistic. Supply chain and component shortages brought about by the pandemic may have also contributed to the delay, if Reuters‘ report turns out to be true. We’ll find out for sure when Tesla reveals its updated product roadmap before the month ends.
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