"Boeing's troubled 737 MAX planes — which have twice crashed, killing 346 people — have experienced at least six mid-air emergencies and dozens of groundings in the year after an extensive probe cleared them to fly," reports Australia's public broadcaster ABC News:
The incidents, pulled from U.S. government air safety databases, are among more than 60 mid-flight problems reported by pilots in the 12 months after the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) recertified the plane's airworthiness in late 2020. Former employees of both Boeing and the FAA characterised the reports — which includ[...]
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Back in the day, my Little League coach used some techniques one might expect to see in The Bad News Bears, like holding batting practices at an amusement park instead of on a baseball field, giving each kid a roll of coins and sending them into the batting cages to experience faster pitching than they'd see from 9-12-year-olds (it was surprisingly effective training).
So how might kids improve their hitting in the era of AI, ML, and Data Science? Well, as part of their data literacy initiatives, SAS worked with North Carolina State University's sof[...]
Tuesday Ars Technica reported that "after more than a decade and more than $20 billion in funding, NASA and its litany of contractors are very close to declaring the 111-meter tall rocket ready for its debut launch." Long-time Slashdot reader added "It seems silly saying SLS will launch 'in just two months' for a rocket that was supposed to have first flown in 2016, but here we are."
From Ars Technica's report:
On June 20, NASA successfully counted the rocket down to T-29 seconds during a pre-launch fueling test. Although they did not reach T-9 seconds, as was the original goal, the agenc[...]
Slashdot reader thegarbz writes: In 2019 Maastricht University in the Netherlands was hit with a ransomware attack which locked 25,000 staff and students out of their research data. The university agreed to pay a ransom of €200,000 to unlock the encrypted data, reports German broadcaster DW. It seems that a small part of the ransom has been recovered, but with a twist.
As part of an investigation into the cyberattack, Dutch police tracked down a bank account belonging to a money launderer in Ukraine, into which a relatively small amount of the ransom money — around €40,000 worth of Bitcoi[...]
Photosynthesis "is very inefficient, with only about 1% of the energy found in sunlight ending up in the plant," according to a new announcement from the University of California, Riverside. But now scientists at the school and the University of Delaware "have found a way to bypass the need for biological photosynthesis altogether and create food independent of sunlight by using artificial photosynthesis."
The research, published in Nature Food, uses a two-step electrocatalytic process to convert carbon dioxide, electricity, and water into acetate, the form of the main component of vinegar. F[...]
Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: GM plans to spend $35 billion on EVs and autonomous vehicles by 2025 (and produce a whopping 400,000 EVs). Jeep's parent company Stellantis will invest $35.5 billion in electrification and software, producing 25 all-electric vehicles by 2030. And Ford will spend even more — $50 billion on electrification — by 2026, while producing two million electric vehicles annually.
These are the statistics in the Detroit News, the top newspaper in America's top car-making city. They predict that by 2026 there'll be 180 different "crossover nameplates" in the electric[...]
Long-time Slashdot reader waspleg shares a thought-provoking article from Popular Mechanics:
Does reality exist, or does it take shape when an observer measures it? Akin to the age-old conundrum of whether a tree makes a sound if it falls in a forest with no one around to hear it, the above question remains one of the most tantalizing in the field of quantum mechanics, the branch of science dealing with the behavior of subatomic particles on the microscopic level.... Now, scientists from the Federal University of ABC (UFABC) in the São Paulo metropolitan area in Brazil are adding fuel to the [...]
"What little is left of Meta's once-ambitious cryptocurrency project is limping to an end," reports CNET:
A pilot program for Novi, the social media giant's money-transfer service that uses a cryptocurrency wallet of the same name, will cease operating on Sept. 1, according to a notice on its website. The Novi pilot served Guatemala and parts of the US when it launched in October 2021. "The Novi pilot is ending soon," according to the notice, which was reported earlier by Bloomberg News. "We've made it easy for you to get your remaining balance and download your Novi information." Another pag[...]
Bug bounty platform HackerOne has "a steadfast commitment to disclosing security incidents," according to a new blog post, "because we believe that sharing security information far and wide is essential to building a safer internet."
But now they've had an incident of their own:
On June 22nd, 2022, a customer asked us to investigate a suspicious vulnerability disclosure made outside of the HackerOne platform. The submitter of this off-platform disclosure reportedly used intimidating language in communication with our customer. Additionally, the submitter's disclosure was similar to an exi[...]
93-year-old Peter Higgs was awarded a Nobel Prize nine years ago after the Large Hadron Collider experiments finally confirmed of the existence Higgs boson particles he'd predicted back in 1964. "This discovery was a seminal moment in human culture," says physicist Frank Close, who's written the new book Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass .
But Scientific American reports there's more to the story:
For years, the significance of the prediction was lost on most scientists, including Higgs himself. But gradually it became clear that the Higgs boson was not just an exotic si[...]