VoidLink includes an unusually broad and advanced array of capabilities.

for many years, American Airlines had actually spurned the Boeing 737, choosing instead to build its entire hub-and-spoke operation around the McDonnell Douglas MD-80. For the better part of three decades, their glistening, polished metal bodies with the distinctive T-tails were the predominant aircraft at the airline's hubs across the country. But why did American choose the MD-80 over the 737, and what caused it to eventually return to Boeing? //

American's flight operations director, David Clark, commented on the MD-80 upon its retirement.

"It is very old school, there aren't any modern computer screens affixed to the controls. The steering columns are connected to a cable that goes directly to the flight controls. You can feel it give and pull throughout each flight, and it is a totally thrilling experience that pilots trained on newer aircraft may never experience."

The test flight was planned by Douglas test pilot William Magruder and was set to take off from Edwards Air Force Base (AFB). As flight test engineer Richard Edwards, told to Air & Space Magazine, the idea was to “get it out there, show the airplane can survive this and not fall apart.” The DC-8, which at the time was competing with the Boeing 707, had been used by commercial carriers for about three years. Even though the DC-8 wasn’t designed to go supersonic, the bragging rights of being the first to do so were worth making the attempt.

In order to reach Mach 1, the jet had to be in a dive. According to Mentalfloss.com, this meant taking it up to 52,000 feet, which was also a record for altitude.

As Edwards tells Air & Space Magazine: “We took it up to 10 miles up…and put it in a half-a-G pushover. Bill maintained about 50 pounds of push. He didn’t trim it for the dive so that it would want to pull out by itself. In the dive, at about 45,000 feet, it went to Mach 1.01 for maybe 16 seconds, then he recovered. But the recovery was a little scary.”

The stabilizer in fact was overloaded and the plane stalled when Magruder tried to pull it back.

“What he did, because he was smart, is something that no other pilot would do,” explains Edwards. “He pushed over into the dive more, which relieved the load on the stabilizer. He was able to run the [stabilizer] motor…and he recovered at about 35,000 feet.” The crew successfully turned a mass-produced airliner into the world’s supersonic commuter jet. (Right by their side the entire time? Chuck Yeager, the first person to ever go supersonic in 1947. He escorted the DC-8 during its test in an F-104.)

“That’s an unofficial supersonic record, payload record, and of course an altitude record for a commercial transport,” Edwards points out.

CursorWrap is a standout utility from the recent PowerToys release (v0.97, to be precise). It turns your linear, multi-screen array into an infinite circle and eliminates the dead ends of your desktop in no time.

President Trump awarded two very belated Medals of Honor to two highly deserving Americans on Wednesday.

The first went to Army Staff Sergeant Michael Ollis, unfortuantely this was a posthumous award. //

The second story is much more uplifting.

Elmer Royce Williams was born April 4, 1925, in Wilmot, South Dakota. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy shortly after Pearl Harbor as an aviation cadet and completed flight training in August 1945. Williams chose a career as a career officer and eventually flew the Navy's first jet carrier fighter, the Grumman F9F Panther. //

In his efforts, Williams expended all of his ammunition and shot down four, very likely five, of the seven Soviet MiG–15s, setting the American aviator record for MiGs shot in a single sortie and the only naval dogfight over water in the Korean War. //

Williams was told the MiGs were not flown by North Koreans, or Chinese, but by Soviet Naval Aviation pilots flying out of Vladivostok. He was also told never to speak of the incident to anyone—his squadron mates or even his wife.

Slow Launch System

“You know, you’re right, the flight rate—three years is a long time.”

jack1983 Smack-Fu Master, in training
12y
93

The Lurker Beneath said:
Do it on a windy day?
There are risks with too high wind speeds as well. High airflow causes static buildup and turbulence. Hydrogen requires very little ignition energy (well below 1mJ at stoichiometric conditions). So even a gust of wind can set off a combustible mixture.

Cryogenic hydrogen is an absolute nightmare to work with.

paulfdietz Ars Scholae Palatinae
7y
1,168
Using hydrogen as the fuel in the first stage was never a good idea. The density is just terrible, making the first stage much larger. Because the first stage is disposed of so quickly, Isp is less important; what's more important is "density impulse" (density x Isp), and LoX/LH2 is inferior to LOX/hydrocarbon by that metric.

Low density also makes the engines more expensive, as more pumping power is needed for a given thrust. //

paulfdietz Ars Scholae Palatinae
7y
1,168

pokrface said:
Right, but the "first stage" of SLS (and STS) is properly the SRBs.
It's more like the first "half stage". What matters for the argument is the velocity at which a stage is done. Even with the SRBs there, that's not that high (although higher than say the Falcon 9, which ends the stage 1 burn at an unusually low velocity so it can be recovered.)

The SRBs do allow the thrust of those LH2 engines to be somewhat lower, since they don't have to lift the fully fueled stack off the pad themselves. By the time the SRBs drop some propellant is gone. This ameliorates to some extent the relatively poor thrust/weight ratio of the engines (73.1 vs 184 for the Merlin 1D.)

Salomon Jadassohn
Concerto pour piano et orchestre no 1 en ut mineur

1. Introduction quasi recitativo (Allegro appassionato) - Andante -
2. Adagio sostenuto -
3. Ballade (Allegro patetico) - Molto più mosso

Jason Cohen 🇺🇸 @JasonJournoDC
·
🚨NEW: CNN's Harry Enten: "A photo ID to vote is not controversial in this country. It is not controversial by party — and it is not controversial by race. The vast majority of Americans agree with @NICKIMINAJ."

@DailyCaller

Nicki Minaj @NICKIMINAJ
What sensible forward thinking cutting edge leading nation is having a DEBATE on whether or not there should be VOTER ID?!?!!!! Like?!?!? They’re actually fighting NOT to have ppl present ID while voting for your leaders!!!!! Do you get it?!?!!!! Do you get it now?!?!!!
9:57 AM · Feb 3, 2026

Enten said support for voter ID has been "north of 75 percent" for years. Indeed, in 2025, it was 83 percent. I don't think you have 83 percent agreement on almost anything, so that's phenomenal support.

Democrats also largely support it, he explained, polling at 71 percent. Republicans are at 95 percent.

Even if you break it down by race, the majority still support it, with white people at 85 percent, Latinos at 82 percent, and black people at 76 percent.

So the only people who don't seem to agree with voter ID are Democrat politicians. //

anon-297t
2 hours ago
There's a very specific way to couch this argument. Every vote counted from an ineligible voter disenfranchises an eligible voter. The balance of harms is not on, 'can we find one eligible voter who, for some reason, can't obtain an ID,' but instead, which option disenfranchises fewer people? Does a lack of voter ID allow more ineligible voters to cast a ballot than eligible voters that a voter ID requirement would prevent? There are data-backed arguments that that is the case.

1. Creates Instant “Professional” Art With Zero Skill Required

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-Amanda S.

Early Saturday morning the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department SWAT team, assisted by agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, executed a search warrant at a home in northeast Las Vegas owned by Jia Bei Zhu, the CCP-linked Chinese citizen who ran an illegal biolab in Reedley, California. After finding multiple refrigerators and freezers containing vials, bottles, and jugs of unknown liquid substances, and laboratory equipment in the garage of the home, FBI scientists and a specialized investigation team collected over 1,000 samples from the garage; that evidence has been transported to the National Bio-forensic Analysis Center in Maryland for examination.

Welcome to the Mirror Services infrastruction site by BOINC Team Belgium. On here, you will find software mirrors of various Linux® and UNIX®-like operating systems distributions. The mirrors sync once an hour (or once per 2 hours for ISO mirros) using rsync with a Tier 0 or Tier 1 mirror

Note: This page serves as an introduction and quick overview of SPF mechanism syntax. For the complete and definitive picture, please see the specification.

They’re living the good life.

Although the housing market may be showing signs of improvement, there’s no denying that things are still wildly expensive out there.

So one innovative couple took it upon themselves to purchase a school bus for $5,000 — a bargain, one might say — and completely gutted it to transform it into a stunning beach home on wheels.

One-eighth teaspoon of garlic powder is equal to one standard-sized garlic clove. If you’re using this garlic powder to clove ratio, make sure the powder you’re using is pure garlic and not garlic salt, which requires a different substitution ratio.

How Many Cloves of Garlic In a Teaspoon of Garlic Powder?

If your recipe calls for garlic powder and you’re out or would rather use fresh garlic, you can substitute 8 fresh garlic cloves for one teaspoon of powdered garlic. Make sure to mince and add fresh garlic cloves earlier in the process so they have time to cook.

“Selfishly, a little bit, we built Shield for ourselves,” Bell told Ars Technica. “We actually wanted a really good TV streamer that was high-quality and high-performance, and not necessarily in the Apple ecosystem. We built some prototypes, and we got so excited about it. [CEO Jensen Huang] was like, ‘Why don’t we bring it out and sell it to people?’” //

“Early on when we were building Shield TV, we decided we were going to make it for a long time. Jensen and I had a discussion, and it was, ‘How long do we want to support this thing?’ And Jensen said, ‘For as long as we shall live.’”

In 2025, Nvidia wrapped up its tenth year of supporting the Shield platform. Even those original 2015 boxes are still being maintained with bug fixes and the occasional new feature. They’ve gone all the way from Android 5.0 to Android 11 in that time. No Android device—not a single phone, tablet, watch, or streaming box—has gotten anywhere close to this level of support.

What everyone agrees on is that NASA needs a new spacecraft capable of relaying communications from Mars to Earth. This issue has become especially acute with the recent loss of NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft. NASA’s best communications relay remains the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has now been there for 20 years.

Congress cared enough about this issue to add $700 million in funding for a “Mars Telecommunications Orbiter” in the supplemental funding for NASA provided by the “One Big Beautiful Bill” passed by the US Congress last year.

Anecdotal reports pitched microdosing as a kind of psychedelic Swiss Army knife, providing everything from increased focus to a spiked libido and (perhaps most promisingly) lowered reported levels of depression. It was a miracle for many. Others remained wary. Could 5 percent of a dose of acid really do all that? A new, wide-ranging study by an Australian biopharma company suggests that microdosing’s benefits may indeed be drastically overstated—at least when it comes to addressing symptoms of clinical depression. //

This means, essentially, that a medium-strength cup of coffee may prove more beneficial in treating major depressive disorder than a tiny dose of acid.

Anecdotal reports pitched microdosing as a kind of psychedelic Swiss Army knife, providing everything from increased focus to a spiked libido and (perhaps most promisingly) lowered reported levels of depression. It was a miracle for many. Others remained wary. Could 5 percent of a dose of acid really do all that? A new, wide-ranging study by an Australian biopharma company suggests that microdosing’s benefits may indeed be drastically overstated—at least when it comes to addressing symptoms of clinical depression. //

This means, essentially, that a medium-strength cup of coffee may prove more beneficial in treating major depressive disorder than a tiny dose of acid.

For anyone who has actually examined the evidence, MH370 is not especially mysterious. Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah hijacked his own aircraft, incapacitated everyone on board by depressurizing the cabin, and then deliberately flew the Boeing 777 into the southern Indian Ocean. The evidence supporting this conclusion is not circumstantial or speculative. It is overwhelming, methodical, and points unambiguously to that single explanation.