Nearly every aviation nabob out there will tell you that the next time we see supersonic air travel, it will more likely be aboard a business jet than aboard a commercial airliner. Aerion Corporation, a leader in supersonic jet development, caused a stir in the private jet world with a bold announcement back in 2004 seeking to create a joint venture to design and build a new supersonic business jet. After a great deal of interest, the original aircraft was revisited and upgraded to the current Aerion AS2 proposed project in 2014: An 8-10 passenger, natural laminar-flow winged aircraft that will be designed to blaze a trail in the skies at 1.4 Mach (um, that’s over 1,000 mph) over a minimum planned range of 4,750 NM (about 5,466 statute miles, besting the range of a subsonic Gulfstream G500).
Category: News and Views
Covid: Who will have the Pfizer vaccine first and when can I get it? | BBC News
The vaccine trains the immune system to fight coronavirus.
It is a new type of jab called an RNA vaccine and uses a tiny fragment of the virus’s genetic code. This starts making part of the virus inside the body, which the immune system recognises as foreign and starts to attack.
The genetic material is encased in a tiny protective bubble of fat to get it into cells.
The exact ingredients of the vaccine have not been made public, but other vaccines can contain other ingredients, like aluminium, to make them stable or more effective.
The vaccine is given in two doses – three weeks apart – and offers up to 95% protection against Covid-19.
Stimulus Talks Brighten With a New White House-Approved $916 Billion Aid Package | Inc.com
The chances for a badly needed stimulus bill getting passed as early as next week have improved for the first time since the election.
On Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin unveiled a $916 billion stimulus plan that would reauthorize the Paycheck Protection Program, the crisis-era small-business refundable-loan program, and issue $600 stimulus payments to individuals. It also offers increased liability protections for businesses and funding for state and local governments–yet it fails to offer any support for supplemental unemployment benefits.
Mnuchin announced the plan, which was approved by both the White House and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in a telephone call with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). She quickly decried the plan for its absence of unemployment funding but cheered the offer as a cause for optimism.
Facebook hit with massive antitrust lawsuit from 46 states | TechCrunch
A huge collection of states filed an antitrust lawsuit Wednesday accusing Facebook of suppressing its competition through monopolistic business practices. Forty-eight attorneys general across 46 states, the territory of Guam and the District of Columbia are behind the lawsuit, with only South Dakota, South Carolina, Alabama and Georgia declining to join.
The lawsuit, which looks at Facebook’s actions throughout the company’s history, alleges that the company bought competitors “illegally” and in a “predatory manner” in order to grow and preserve its market power. The suit cites Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp as prominent examples.
Uber Gives Up on the Self-Driving Dream | WIRED
IN 2015, THEN Uber CEO Travis Kalanick pulled off a bold talent raid when he poached some 40 roboticists from the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon. The move reportedly left the world-class engineering university reeling, and it seemed to signal that the world’s hottest startup was on the cusp of making self-driving cars a reality.
Now, that self-driving unit is no more, and the estimated timeline for robotaxi domination has extended well into this decade. Uber said Monday it would sell off the self-driving unit that was the result of that raid, the Pittsburgh-based Advanced Technologies Group. The 1,200-person unit will be acquired by the self-driving-tech developer Aurora. Uber will invest $400 million in Aurora as part of the deal, bringing Aurora’s valuation to $10 billion and tripling its workforce. Uber’s current CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, will also take a seat on Aurora’s board.
Here are the most downloaded iOS apps of 2020 | Mashable
Year after year, the same old social media apps have gotten the top spots on Apple’s annual list of most downloaded apps. But not this year, my friends!
Drumroll please. The most downloaded free app of 2020 in the U.S. was…ZOOM Cloud Meetings! Pop that bottle of quarantine isolation champagne, because it’s a truly astronomical rise that shows how different 2020 was from past years thanks to the pandemic. Zoom did not even crack Apple’s chart of the top 20 most downloaded free apps last year.
Southwest warns 6,800 employees they could lose their jobs | CNN
New York (CNN Business)Southwest Airlines warned 6,800 employees Thursday they may be furloughed in the spring, the airline told CNN.
If the layoffs do take place, they would be the first in the carrier’s nearly 50-year history.
The total includes 2,551 ground crew members who handle baggage, cargo, and restocking planes, as well as 1,176 customer service agents, 1,500 flight attendants and 1,221 pilots. The airline said the cuts would take place on March 15 or April 1 for different groups of employees
The Alps are growing taller | Live Science
The Swiss Alps are going through a growth spurt, according to a new study suggesting that part of the mountain range is lifting upward faster than it is eroding.
The finding goes against the conclusions of two previous studies, which suggested that the Alps were neither growing nor shrinking.
However, an international team of researchers has now found that isn’t the case, after analyzing different isotopes, or versions of an element, in the sand from hundreds of rivers in the European Alps. One particular isotope — beryllium-10 (10Be) — revealed information about erosion rates in different parts of the Alps, the team said.
Walmart beat Amazon on Black Friday by one important metric | Fast Company
Volumes of future marketing analysis will surely be written about this year’s unprecedented holiday shopping season, but for now we’ll have to make do with industry reports that reveal people’s pandemic-era spending habits in dribs and drabs.
The latest drib (or drab?) comes from analytics firm Sensor Tower, whose new dispatch shows a record surge in new downloads of shopping-related mobile apps. Black Friday alone saw more than 2.8 million first-time installs of shopping apps, the largest ever in a single day, according to Sensor Tower’s preliminary estimates. Year-over-year growth, the report says, was about the same as last year at 8%, but it was more substantial when you look at the entire month of November—with 59.2 million shopping app installs compared to 51.7 million for the same period last year.
It’s Official: Salesforce Buying Slack For $28 Billion, Taking On Microsoft With Benioff’s Biggest Deal Yet | Forbes
After nearly a week of speculation, Salesforce confirmed its intent to acquire popular workforce chat platform Slack in a deal valued at $27.7 billion on Tuesday, marking the enterprise cloud giant’s largest-ever acquisition and positioning it to compete more forcefully with the nation’s second-largest tech firm by market capitalization, Microsoft.
Dispatches From The Front 