If today’s aviation advances aren’t moving fast enough for you — tray table technology hasn’t budged in decades — you’ll want to check out the futuristic visions of Spanish industrial designer Oscar Viñals.
The Flash Falcon is a future concept jetliner powered by portable fusion reactors. That technology isn’t here yet, of course, but Viñals kind of specializes in “what if?” scenarios.
Tasty Tech Eye Candy Of The Week (May 15)
Privacy is practically a joke anymore.
A hacker known as “Peace” is selling what is reportedly account information from 117 million LinkedIn users. The stolen data is said to include email addresses and passwords, which a malicious party could use to gain access to other websites and accounts for which people used the same password.
LinkedIn says it has about 433 million members worldwide, so this data could represent 27% of its user base.
The hacker says the credentials were obtained during a LinkedIn data breach in 2012 that saw 6.5 million encrypted passwords posted online, according to Motherboard. But the leak now appears to be much larger than was thought at the time. Peace is selling the data for about $2,200 (5 bitcoin) on the Dark Web, the part of the internet accessible only with a special browser that masks user identities.
This story originally appeared on Time.com.
An idyllic Thai island has been so despoiled by tourists that local authorities are being forced to close it to prevent further damage.
Koh Tachai in Thailand’s Ranong Province was rated last year by specialist website beachmeter.com as Thailand’s most beautiful island. However, according to the Bangkok Post, the tourist-ravaged beaches of Koh Tachai will have to close indefinitely from Oct. 15.
A new study released by NASA on Tuesday shows that oceans on Europa, one of Jupiter’s 67 known moons, might have a lot in common with our own oceans, including a chemical balance capable of harboring life.
Scientists have been eyeing the mysterious water world as one of the most promising places to find alien life for a while now, and this study suggests they’re on the right track.
The moon, which is only a quarter the size of Earth, is covered in a thick shell of ice. But there is strong evidence that there could be a salty ocean deep beneath its surface.
About ten years ago scientist Dave Bacon, now at Google, presented that a time-travelling quantum computer could rapidly solve a bunch of problems, known as NP-complete, which mathematicians have lumped together as being hard. The problem was, Bacon’s quantum computer was travelling around ‘closed timelike curves’. These are paths through the fabric of spacetime that loop back on themselves. General relativity lets such paths to exist through contortions in spacetime identified as wormholes.
Why send a message back in time, but lock it so that no one can ever read the contents? As it may be the key to resolving presently intractable problems. That’s the claim of an international collaboration.
Friends have been asking me to write something on space exploration and my campaign policy on it, so here it is just out on TechCrunch:
When people think about rocket ships and space exploration, they often imagine traveling across the Milky Way, landing on mysterious planets and even meeting alien life forms.
In reality, humans’ drive to get off Planet Earth has led to tremendous technological advances in our mundane daily lives — ones we use right here at home on terra firma.
I recently walked through Boston’s Logan International Airport; a NASA display reminded me that GPS navigation, anti-icing systems, memory foam and LED lights were all originally created for space travel. Other inventions NASA science has created include the pacemaker, scratch-resistant lenses and the solar panel.
