Jeff Wise – Page 8

New York: The Floating Speck That Promised to Change the World

The video is subtle. A small, regular chip of stonelike material as wide as the end of a ballpoint pen rests on a flat metal surface. But it’s not resting, exactly: While one end touches the metal, the other end floats above the surface, and when pushed it bobs like a cork. It’s levitating.

If the physical scale of the phenomenon was small, the response by science enthusiasts was anything but. “Today might have seen the biggest physics discovery of my lifetime. I don’t think people fully grasp the implications,” a former Princeton physics undergraduate named Alex Kaplan tweeted. The tweet has since been viewed 30 million times.

The video was attached to one of a pair of papers published by a team of researchers from South Korea on July 22 on the Arxiv preprint server, a site where scientists can post papers that haven’t yet been through the peer-review vetting process. They described the results of experiments conducted with LK-99, a lab-made substance containing lead, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur. (The name derives from the initials of its inventors and the year they created it.) The levitation could be explained by the Meissner effect, a characteristic of materials that are superconducting, meaning they carry electrical current without any resistance. The authors made no bones about what they thought they’d found, titling one of their reports “The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor.” This was no modest claim; scientists have spent decades searching for a substance that is superconducting under normal, day-to-day conditions, and finding one would have a revolutionary impact on a wide range of industries. “Our new development will be a brand-new historical event that opens a new era for humankind,” the authors concluded.

The story spread far and wide, from Twitter, Tik Tok, and Twitch to every mainstream publication. One of the science influencers touting LK-99’s incredible potential was San Francisco–based applied physicist Andrew Cote, who tweeted, “if successful LK-99 would be a watershed moment for humanity easily on-par with invention of the transistor.” His tweets, too, received millions of views.

As the news spread, so did optimism. For a time, one online betting market was posting better-than-even odds that the superconductor claims would pan out.

But would the findings prove replicable?

New York: Could Trump Get Tossed Off 2024’s Ballots?

Donald Trump’s indictment on charges relating to his attempt to overturn the election, which led to the January 6 insurrection, represents not just a major legal hazard for the former president but also a potential political risk. The Constitution states officeholders who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States are unable to hold office. Already, anti-Trump advocates plan to use the charges tying Trump to the coup attempt to get him removed from the 2024 ballot.

The two main groups behind the effort to bar Trump’s candidacy are Free Speech for the People, a nonprofit aimed at fighting corruption and political inequality, and the watchdog organization Citizens For Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Both are likely to start filing multiple challenges in dozens of states this November after states have set their primary rules. “We are focused on bringing the strongest case possible against Donald Trump,” says Donald Sherman, CREW’s senior vice-president and chief counsel. “This is not a messaging exercise. We are bringing a case to win.”

New York: The Airstocracy: Six things to know about flying with the superrich

It was all quite serene, at first. Out on a gated-off section of taxiway at Geneva Airport in May, a row of private jets (PJs, to fans) gleamed under the warm spring sun: Bombardier Challengers, Dassault Falcons, and Gulfstreams stood in a line beneath the distant verdure of the Alps. The display was part of the European Business Aviation Convention and Exhibition, a yearly confab that brings together manufacturers and service providers with their ultrarich customers in a politically neutral safe space. Velvet ropes and red carpets separated the curious onlookers from the VIPs being escorted aboard to tour the cabins and cockpits with swiveling leather club chairs, walnut veneer, and, in at least one case, a stateroom with an extra-long seat belt stretching across a full-size bed. The vibe was discreet, calm, befitting an environment designed to cosset the fortunate as they wafted through the upper reaches of the stratosphere.

Then, a hubbub of shouting and a rumble of footsteps. A hundred young climate protesters wearing orange vests like airport workers had broken through the fences and were racing toward the aircraft, juking past the employees who were trying to fend them off. Not all the manufacturers’ employees fought with equal vigor. “You really found out where people’s loyalties lay,” one told me later. “Some ran forward, and some cowered.” Amid the confusion, a few protesters managed to handcuff themselves to some of the planes’ landing gear, where they chanted and held signs reading “Private Jets Burn Our Future” and “Fuel Inequality.” In the end, police hauled off the protesters, and the trade show went on, albeit with a slightly shaky, post-traumatic skittishness.

The skirmish encapsulated the tensions that have begun to grip private aviation. At a time when income inequality has reached dizzying extremes, there has never been so much money pouring into an industry that’s become a byword for extreme luxury, nor has flying private enjoyed so much cultural resonance: stealing scenes in Succession and BlackBerry, infiltrating news headlines about Supreme Court justices, inspiring rap lyrics, and obsessing thirsty TikTokers. At the same time, it’s come under withering attack as a proxy for the self-destructive obliviousness of the megarich and become a symbol of how unfair and unsustainable their privilege is. With regulations tightening in several European countries and pressure building for more, it’s entirely possible that private flying’s sudden cultural ascendancy could help pave the way for its ultimate demise.

New York: The Titanic Sub Passengers Probably Died Days Ago

The Coast Guard announced at a press conference on Thursday that debris from the submersible Titan was found on the seafloor near the Titanic, confirming the deaths of the five crew members onboard.

While searching an area of flat seabed approximately 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic, a remotely operated vehicle discovered “five major pieces of debris that told us it was the remains of the Titan,” said undersea expert Paul Hanken, including the front end of the pressure hull. “That was the first indication that it was a catastrophic event.”

New York: Deep-Sea Search Expert Is Aboard Missing Titanic Submersible

Rescuers are racing against the clock to find a submersible that has gone missing near the Titanic wreckage with one of the world’s most knowledgeable deep-ocean search experts currently onboard. Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, was piloting the minivan-size submersible Titan on Sunday with four passengers aboard. It lost contact with the surface an hour and 45 minutes after its descent and has not been heard from since. At a press conference on Tuesday, a U.S. Coast Guard spokesman said the Titan had about 40 or 41 hours of oxygen left.

Dubbed “Mr. Titanic” by the media for his frequent dives to the wreck of the doomed liner, Nargeolet is a world-renowned underwater-search authority who helped locate a French aircraft that went missing in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in 2009.

New York: What Wildfire Smoke Does to the Human Body

The wildfire smoke that turned Manhattan skies blood orange on Wednesday topped out at an air-quality index (AQI) of 352, the worst ever recorded in the city. The danger level was color-coded maroon, or “hazardous,” the most severe rating. The air looked and smelled apocalyptic, but how hazardous is “hazardous,” actually, for your health?

The short answer: It’s bad, but don’t panic.

New York: When Flying Private Kills

As it took off from Dillant-Hopkins Airport in Keene, New Hampshire, on the afternoon of March 3, the Bombardier Challenger 300 business jet provided an apt illustration of why private flying is so popular among those who can afford it. Dana Hyde, a 55-year-old Beltway lawyer who had served in the Obama White House, had flown up from Virginia the day before with her husband, Jonathan Chambers, and their son Elijah to visit colleges in New England.

The three passengers were able to spread out in a cabin that accommodates up to 16. The trip, which would have taken more than eight hours by car, would be less than an hour, with no hassles at airport security, waiting in line to board, or juggling their schedules to match the airline’s — they just told the pilots when they wanted to go, where they wanted to go, hopped on, and left. After a brief delay due to an aborted takeoff attempt, the plane lifted off from Keene at 3:36 p.m., according to publicly available location data. It was a good day for flying: Winds were calm, the temperature a seasonally mild 44 degrees. Given the jet’s cruising speed, the family could expect to be on the ground at Leesburg Executive Airport by 4:30 p.m. From there, it would be a 30-minute drive to their home just across the state line in the affluent riverside village of Cabin John, Maryland.

A two-day private jet trip like this costs about $25,000 to book from a charter company, but the family had the plane at its disposal because Chambers is a partner in Conexon, the consulting company that owns the plane. A onetime Republican staffer for the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, Chambers had joined the Federal Communications Commission in 2012 and assisted in rewriting the rules for how the government helps subsidize telephone and cable services in rural communities. In 2016, he left government service and co-founded Conexon to help cable companies take advantage of the rules he had written.

Hyde had an even more impressive résumé. Born to a single teenage mother, she grew up in rural eastern Oregon, then attended UCLA and got her law degree at Georgetown. From there, her star rose quickly. She worked as a White House special assistant during the Clinton administration, then served on the 9/11 Commission. After a spell at the State Department, she was picked by the Obama administration to head the Millennium Challenge Corporation, an independent agency set up during the Bush years to fight global poverty by funding projects in countries that follow free-market economic policies. Having come from modest means herself, “working to fight global poverty” was important to her, Hyde said at her Senate confirmation hearing, but so was efficiency. “I believe in data-driven, cost-effective policies. I want the American people to always get their money’s worth from anything their government does on their behalf,” she testified. Confirmed unanimously, she steered the agency and its billion-dollar budget from 2013 until 2017. She thereafter worked as a partner at a Jerusalem-based venture-capital firm and was co-chair of the Aspen Partnership for an Inclusive Economy.

A gentle breeze was blowing from the south as the plane rose from the 6,000-foot runway. It banked to the left as it climbed over the foothills of the White Mountains, then leveled its wings to follow the course of the Connecticut River southward. What happened next can be pieced together from a report released a month later by the National Transportation Safety Board.

New York: Why Elon Musk’s SpaceX Doesn’t Mind Its Rocket Blew Up

It was not, as they say in the space-launch business, nominal. Four minutes into Thursday’s launch of the giant SpaceX Starship, the unmanned rocket blew up at an altitude of 18 miles. The 390-foot-high launch vehicle, the largest and most powerful anyone has ever attempted to launch into space, has long been a lynchpin of Elon Musk’s ambitions to someday colonize Mars, and its failure interrupted what had been a remarkable string of successes for SpaceX. Yet, as the fireball ballooned across the sky the mood on the ground was anything but somber, as the crowd that had gathered to watch erupted in whoops and cheers. “Congrats @SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship!” Musk tweeted in the aftermath. “Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months.”

Sydney Morning Herald: Everyone will sound like a conspiracy theorist unless we find MH370

When news broke in 2014 that a Malaysia Airlines 777 had gone missing, no one imagined that, nine years later, we still wouldn’t know what became of flight MH370.

It once looked like closure was imminent. Soon after the plane vanished from radar screens, scientists at the UK-based satellite communications company Inmarsat announced they had found recorded signals automatically transmitted from the plane. By using some complicated mathematics, they were able to work out where the plane must have gone into the remote southern Indian Ocean.

They turned over their findings to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), which was entrusted with the search because the flight’s presumed end point was within Australia’s marine jurisdiction.

All that remained was for ships to scan the seabed and collect the wreckage. Yet when the seabed was scanned in the area the scientists had calculated, the plane wasn’t there. Still optimistic, officials expanded the search area. But it wasn’t there either. Finally, they threw in the towel.

Then, to everyone’s surprise, a previously unknown private company came along and continued the search on their own dime. Still no plane. In the end, an area the size of Great Britain was scanned but the plane was nowhere to be found.

In the years that followed, the world mostly forgot about MH370. But not everyone. For the family members of the disappeared, the nightmare has never ended. They remain stuck in a shadowland, unable to grieve or to hope, as several of them compellingly describe in the recent Netflix documentary MH370: The Plane That Disappeared, which I was a part of.

But it’s not just the family members for whom we need to solve this jumbo-sized mystery. The flying public need to know they can get on a plane and not vanish. We can’t close the books on MH370. We must begin again, from square one, and persevere until we find the answer. If science can find a Higgs boson, it can find a 70m-long airplane.

The question is where to start, and the answer comes down to the issue of why the search has failed so far. Did the official investigation just get unlucky? Or did they make a big mistake?

Businessweek: Paris’s Air Taxi Stations Could Be Ready Before the Taxis Are

Alongside the tarmac at the Pontoise Aerodrome on the outskirts of Paris stands a sleekly modern building the size of a coffee shop with floor-to-ceiling windows. This is the Re.Invent Air Mobility test bed: Europe’s first flying-taxi airport, or vertiport. To mark its inauguration in November, a shiny white electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft with an armature of 18 whizzing rotors lifted up, flew around under the guidance of its test pilot and then touched down again. With a little luck, a network of sites like this will anchor the world’s first commercial flying-taxi service, shuttling passengers between Paris’s international airports and the venues of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games.

Or maybe a lot of luck. The Volocopter Volocity 2X flown at the ceremony in November is certified to fly only on an experimental basis. The entire vertiport plan relies on the aircraft achieving full certification, which would make it the first eVTOL to be certified to carry passengers anywhere in the world. “It’s on the ambitious side of what is possible,” says Duncan Walker, co-founder and chief executive officer of Skyports, the UK-based company that’s developing the project with Groupe ADP, the operator of Paris’s international airports.