Pepsi paid millions to paint a Concorde in its iconic blue livery. But the passengers who paid first class fares to fly the iconic jet got a much slower and shortened ride as the blue paint heated the jet so much it was allowed to fly at Mach 2 speed for a mere 10 minutes. //
In the spring of 1996, one of the most ambitious and unusual marketing projects in aviation history took to the skies. Air France’s Concorde F-BTSD, known as “Sierra Delta,” was temporarily repainted in a vivid cobalt-blue Pepsi livery as part of Pepsi’s global “Project Blue” rebrand. The aircraft, instantly recognizable for its sleek, needle-like shape, now carried the bold Pepsi logo across its fuselage and tail. For several weeks, it toured major cities in Europe and the Middle East, hosting media and VIP flights. It was a spectacular sight and a daring collaboration between engineering prestige and consumer branding. Yet behind the beauty of the blue jet lay a technical limitation that few outside the project knew: this Concorde could not safely reach its full Mach 2 cruising speed. //
Dark colors absorb far more heat than they reflect, and when tested on Concorde’s aluminum skin, this quickly became a problem. The engineers at Air France Industries and Aérospatiale calculated that sustained flight at Mach 2 with the blue paint would raise surface temperatures dangerously close to the structural tolerance of the fuselage, as pointed out by Avions Legendaires. https://www.avionslegendaires.net/2025/10/actu/quand-le-concorde-se-muait-en-avion-sandwich-pour-pepsi/ //
To further protect the aircraft, a clever compromise was made. Only the fuselage received the dark blue finish, while the wings remained white. This was not a matter of design balance but thermal management, as the wings housed fuel tanks that acted as heat sinks during high-speed flight. Even with this precaution, engineers observed that the blue-painted panels heated up faster and cooled down more slowly than expected. The short-lived experiment confirmed once again that Concorde’s reflective white finish was essential for safe operation at its top speed. ///
So why did the SR-71 work better with black paint, but the Concorde had to have white paint to avoid overheating? Is it the difference between the titanium skin vs the aluminum skin and at the higher temperature of the SR-71, black paint is more effective at radiating heat and the white paint of the Concorde is more effective at reflecting heat at the lower temps?
KW64
3 hours ago edited
OTH, I came from farm country. I remember reading that in 1900 80% of the workforce worked in the agriculture chain. Now it is 4% yet we produce even more food. Those people who left that business found other jobs as unemployment there is low. Also, I keep hearing that we are not having enough babies. Perhaps some of these 600K workers can fill the vacancies in Fire Departments or Police Departments or even, become agricultural workers to prevent our food supply from "rotting in the fields!" unpicked. As non-citizens who choose not to work depart, some social workers may also get surplused and can fill these vacancies as well. Free markets reallocate resources to where they are most useful. Labor is not exempt from that. //
MeanDeb
2 hours ago
Why is this surprising? Machines replaced hand weaving. Automobiles & trains replaced horse drawn carriages. Telephone operators are a thing of the past. On & on as tech advances. Automated container on docks run by a few people w multiple computer screens are unbelievable. US longshoremen unions fighting like crazy to get them banned in US.
Starlink not allowed in Myanmar, but scammers reportedly use it “on a huge scale.”. //
Octavus Ars Scholae Palatinae
19y
1,200
For those that don't know the details of the technology, both the space vehicle and ground terminal must know and accurately report their information in order for both sides to properly compensate for the Doppler effect.
This isn't fully true, the terminal needs to know the satellite's position and velocity but the satellite does not need to know the terminal's location. All the Doppler and time delay compensation happens on the ground side. The terminals transmitter compensates for Doppler and time delay so the signal at the satellite is at the correct frequency, otherwise different terminals would interfere with each other as they will not be frequency and time aligned at the satellite.
From the down link prospective the satellite broadcast to a spot/cell which corresponds to a location on Earth. The satellite does not compensation as even terminals within the same cell will require slightly different frequency shifts and time delay shifts, which the user terminal compensates for.
Now I don't work for Starlink but do work for one of their largest competitors and having the user terminal do all the compensation is by far the easiest method. Our terminals report to a server their GPS XYZ position so we still know where they are located, but for receiving a signal from them the terminals only need the satellite's positional information and the satellite only needs to know the spot ID.
From humble beginnings just after the second World War to the largest airline in Africa, Ethiopian Airlines now connects more people with more aircraft throughout Africa and beyond than ever before. //
On December 21st, 1945, almost 80 years ago, Ethiopian Air Lines (EAL) was founded, beginning operations on April 8th, 1946, with its first flight Addis Ababa – Asmara (Eritrea) – Cairo (Egypt) and vice versa provided by Douglas C-47 Skytrains. During its early days, this was its only route, performed on a weekly basis.
Ethiopian Air Lines, managed by the Ethiopian government and Trans World Airlines (TWA), expanded its operations in Northeast Africa and Central Africa, launching its first long-haul routes in the 1950s. With the arrival of the first jet aircraft in the 1960s and 1970s, Ethiopian further developed its network, adding new services to Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
It would be somewhat understandable that Autopilot stops working because Eight Sleep’s backend is down but not being able to even adjust the temperature locally is ridiculous and completely unacceptable for such a high-end (and expensive) product.
A person on X wrote: “Would be great if my bed wasn’t stuck in an inclined position due to an AWS outage. Cmon now.” //
Eight Sleep users will be relieved to hear that the company is working to make their products usable during Internet outages. But many are also questioning why Eight Sleep didn’t implement local control sooner. This isn’t Eight Sleep’s first outage, and users can also experience personal Wi-Fi problems. And there’s an obvious user benefit to being able to control their bed’s elevation and temperature without the Internet or if Eight Sleep ever goes out of business.
For Eight Sleep, though, making flagship features available without its app while still making enough money isn’t easy. Without forcing people to put their Eight Sleep devices online, it would be harder for Eight Sleep to convince people that Autopilot subscriptions should be mandatory. //
mygeek911 Ars Scholae Palatinae
14y
858
Subscriptor++
“AWS ate my sleep” wasn’t on my Bingo card.
From the opening pages, Navarro makes it clear he didn’t enter federal prison as a criminal, but as a patriot defending the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution. His “crime”? Upholding executive privilege on behalf of President Donald J. Trump — the same principle dating back to George Washington. Yet under Joe Biden’s Justice Department, that once-sacred doctrine became grounds for shackles and a cell. Navarro’s prosecution, as he points out, was the first of its kind in American history — the first time a senior White House adviser has ever been imprisoned for contempt of Congress after asserting executive privilege. //
By the end, Navarro’s book becomes more than a memoir — it’s a warning. It shows how easily justice can be weaponized, how quickly America’s legal institutions can morph into tools of political retribution. His ordeal mirrors Trump’s: biased juries, radical Democrat judges, and media-driven show trials masquerading as due process. The parallel is unmistakable and chilling. When Navarro writes, “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference now between the courts in Communist China and the good ole U.S. of A.,” it’s hard to disagree. //
His message to America is simple: stand up, or lose your country. His story is a mirror held up to a nation on the brink — and a reminder that freedom requires more than words; it demands courage.
"I Went to Prison So You Won’t Have To" is a must-read for anyone who still believes that justice should be blind and that loyalty to the Constitution should never be a crime. It is a love letter to freedom, a eulogy for due process, and a siren warning about what happens when Democrats weaponize the courts to destroy political opponents. //
His book stands as both testimony and prophecy — a call to action ahead of the coming election. Because as Navarro’s ordeal proves, when the government can jail a man for serving his president, the republic itself hangs in the balance. //
Laocoön of Troy
3 hours ago
This reads like a replay of Émile Zola and "J'Accuse".
Good! America needs to look deeply into the face of bureaucratic injustice and vicious political perversion of it. Tyranny.
In May 2025, the European Parliament changed the status of wolves in the EU from “strictly protected” to “protected,” which opened the way for its member states to allow hunting under certain conditions, such as protecting livestock. One of the arguments behind this change was that the “tolerance of modern society towards wolves” led to the emergence of “fearless wolves” that are no longer afraid of people.
“Regulators made it clear, though, that there is no scientific evidence to back this up,” says Michael Clinchy, a zoologist at Western University in London, Canada. “So we did the first-of-its-kind study to find out if wolves have really lost their fear of humans. We proved there is no such thing as a fearless wolf.” //
To figure out if wolves really were no longer afraid of humans, Zanette, Clinchy, and their colleagues set up 24 camera traps in the Tuchola Forest. //
When sensors in the traps detected an animal nearby, the system took a photo and played one of three sounds, chosen at random.
The first sound was chirping birds, which the team used as a control. “We chose birds because this is a typical part of forest soundscape and we assumed wolves would not find this threatening,” Clinchy says. The next sound was barking dogs. The team picked this one because a dog is another large carnivore living in the same ecosystem, so it was expected to scare wolves. The third sound was just people talking calmly in Polish. Zanette, Clinchy, and their colleagues quantified the level of fear each sound caused in wolves by measuring how quickly they vacated the area upon hearing it. //
Compared to the control sound of birds, hearing people was twice as likely to make wolves run, and it made them run twice as fast. Comparison to dogs also ended up in our favor: The wolves found humans roughly 20 percent more threatening. The same pattern held true for deer and wild boars, typical prey of wolves, which also got caught in the camera traps.
“These results track with basically the same experiment we did in Africa, where we tested the entire savannah mammal community,” Clinchy says. In that work, Clinchy and Zanette found that leopards, hyenas, and many other animals feared humans more than lions. //
The question, though, is whether we really have reasons to fear such encounters just as much as wolves fear them. “There have been no fatal wolf attacks in Europe in the last 40 years or so,” Clinchy says. In Poland, a wolf bit an 8-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy playing outside in 2018, and a pack of wolves circled two forest workers for about 20 minutes in 2021 without attacking them. That’s about all there is in the Polish big bad wolf files. //
nooneofconsequence Smack-Fu Master, in training
11y
66
Subscriptor
It's 10 year old data but USDA says vultures kill more calves than wolves do. Purdue data says over 2% die in feedlots before slaughter. Last year in Colorado lightning killed more cattle than wolves. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/colorado-cattle-death-lightning-jackson-county-b2552447.html //
rhavenn Ars Tribunus Militum
23y
1,721
Subscriptor++
Moose kill more people yearly, but because they're "delicious", not "scary", and don't predate on farm animals no one gives a shit. Bears and wolves want nothing to do with you, the human. 90%+ of the time you won't even know they're there unless they want you to if you're out hiking or they don't care.
take a deep butt breath….
Ig Nobel-winning research could one day be used to treat people with blocked airways or clogged lungs.
Last year, a group of researchers won the 2024 Ig Nobel Prize in Physiology for discovering that many mammals are capable of breathing through their anus. But as with many Ig Nobel awards, there is a serious side to the seeming silliness. The same group has conducted a new study on the feasibility of adapting this method to treat people with blocked airways or clogged lungs, with promising results that bring rectal oxygen delivery one step closer to medical reality.
, thanks to having lots of capillary vessels in its intestine. The technical term is enteral ventilation via anus (EVA).
Would such a novel breathing method work in mammals? The team thought it might be possible and undertook experiments with mice and micro-pigs to test that hypothesis. They drew upon earlier research by Leland Clark, also of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, who invented a perfluorocarbon liquid called Oxycyte as a possible form of artificial blood. That vision never materialized, although it did provide a handy plot point for the 1989 film The Abyss, in which a rat is able to “breathe” in a similar liquid.
And Oxycyte was ideal for the group’s 2021 Ig Nobel-winning efforts. The experiments involved intra-anally administering oxygen gas or a liquid oxygenated perfluorocarbon to the unfortunate rodents and porcines. Yes, they gave the animals enemas. They then induced respiratory failure and evaluated the effectiveness of the intra-anal treatment. The result: Both treatments were pretty darned effective at staving off respiratory failure with no major complications.
One company, a California-based startup named Muon Space, is partnering with SpaceX to bring Starlink connectivity to low-Earth orbit. Muon announced Tuesday it will soon install Starlink terminals on its satellites, becoming the first commercial user, other than SpaceX itself, to use Starlink for in-flight connectivity in low-Earth orbit. //
Putting a single Starlink mini-laser terminal on a satellite would keep the spacecraft connected 70 to 80 percent of the time, according to Greg Smirin, Muon’s president. There would still be some downtime as the laser reconnects to different Starlink satellites, but Smirin said a pair of laser terminals would allow a satellite to reach 100 percent coverage. //
SpaceX’s mini-lasers are designed to achieve link speeds of 25Gbps at distances up to 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers). These speeds will “open new business models” for satellite operators who can now rely on the same “Internet speed and responsiveness as cloud providers and telecom networks on the ground,” Muon said in a statement. //
Live video from space has historically been limited to human spaceflight missions or rocket-mounted cameras that operate for a short time.
One example of that is the dazzling live video beamed back to Earth, through Starlink, from SpaceX’s Starship rockets. The laser terminals on Starship operate through the extreme heat of reentry, returning streaming video as plasma envelops the vehicle. This environment routinely causes radio blackouts for other spacecraft as they reenter the atmosphere. With optical links, that’s no longer a problem.
“This starts to enable a whole new category of capabilities, much the same way as when terrestrial computers went from dial-up to broadband,” Smirin said. “You knew what it could do, but we blew through bulletin boards very quickly to many different applications.”
Two Falcon 9 rockets lifted off from spaceports in Florida and California on Sunday afternoon, adding 56 more satellites to SpaceX’s Starlink broadband network.
The second of these two launches—originating from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California—propelled SpaceX’s Starlink program past a notable milestone. With the satellites added to the constellation Sunday, the company has delivered more than 10,000 mass-produced Starlink spacecraft to low-Earth orbit.
The exact figure stands at 10,006 satellites, according to a tabulation by Jonathan McDowell, //
The Starlink network surpassed 7 million global subscribers in August, primarily beaming Internet connectivity to homes and businesses. SpaceX is now aggressively pushing to broaden its service direct to smartphones. //
SpaceX is decommissioning aging and obsolete Starlink satellites as the company adds to the fleet. The retired satellites reenter the atmosphere, where they’re designed to burn up without any debris reaching the ground. Taking into account all the reentries, here are McDowell’s numbers for the Starlink fleet as it stands Monday, October 20:
8,680 total Starlink satellites in orbit
8,664 functioning Starlink satellites in orbit (including newly launched satellites not yet operational)
7,448 Starlink satellites in operational orbit //
Sunday’s SpaceX launches weren’t just noteworthy for Starlink. The first of the two missions, departing from Florida’s Space Coast, marked the 31st launch of the company’s most-flown Falcon 9 booster. The rocket landed on SpaceX’s recovery ship in the Atlantic Ocean to be returned to Florida for a 32nd flight. //
SpaceX engineers are now certifying the Falcon 9 boosters for up to 40 flights apiece.
The season of records isn’t over. SpaceX is expected to set another one later this week. The company’s launch log for 2025 currently stands at 132 Falcon 9 missions, tying the total number of Falcon 9 flights last year. SpaceX also launched two flights of the more powerful Falcon Heavy in 2024, bringing the 2024 mark to 134 missions by the Falcon rocket family.
The mysterious impact of a United Airlines aircraft in flight last week has sparked plenty of theories as to its cause, from space debris to high-flying birds.
However the question of what happened to flight 1093, and its severely damaged front window, appears to be answered in the form of a weather balloon.
“I think this was a WindBorne balloon,” Kai Marshland, co-founder of the weather prediction company WindBorne Systems, told Ars in an email on Monday evening. “We learned about UA1093 and the potential that it was related to one of our balloons at 11 pm PT on Sunday and immediately looked into it. At 6 am PT, we sent our preliminary investigation to both NTSB and FAA, and are working with both of them to investigate further.”
WindBorne is a six-year old company that seeks to both collect weather observations with its fleet of small, affordable weather balloons as well as use that atmospheric data for its proprietary artificial intelligence weather models.
Dry coarse-grained sand may be used as a substitute for the insulation required by code in a buried pipe situation. The sand should have a maximum particle size of ¼” and a moisture content of 1% or less. The thermal conductivity, K, of coarse, dry sand varies between 0.15 – 0.25 W/mK. Converting to Imperial units = 1.7 Btu.in/ft2.oF.hr. R-value is the reciprocal of conductivity, therefore, the R-value of coarse dry sand = 0.58 ft2.oF.hr/Btu.in.
1-inch of fiberglass insulation with a conductivity of 0.27 has an R-value of 3.70. Conversely, 6″ of dry coarse sand has an R-value of 3.46; 12″ would have an R-value of 6.92.
In addition, some provisions need to be made to keep the insulating sand as dry as possible.
"Hoist the Colours", also written as "Hoist the Colors", was a haunting sea shanty known by all pirates across the Seven Seas. The song was related to the action of hoisting of a pirate's flag, though it was mainly used as a call ... //
Lyrics by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio
Music by Hans Zimmer and Gore Verbinski //
Hoist the Colours was first mentioned in the 2007 reference book Pirates of the Caribbean: The Complete Visual Guide,[1] prior to its first appearance as "an old pirate song" in T.T. Sutherland's junior novelization for the 2007 film Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.[2][3] In addition, "Hoist the Colours" would be heard in full in the film's soundtrack as well as the film itself.[6][3] "Hoist The Colours — The Story Behind The Song" was a bonus feature for the various DVD/Blu-ray releases for the film, "The tale of house this haunting shanty was created. An anthem for pirates across the seven seas". //
Here's exactly what made this possible: 4 documents that act as guardrails for your AI.
Document 1: Coding Guidelines - Every technology, pattern, and standard your project uses
Document 2: Database Structure - Complete schema design before you write any code
Document 3: Master Todo List - End-to-end breakdown of every feature and API
Document 4: Development Progress Log - Setup steps, decisions, and learnings
Plus a two-stage prompt strategy (plan-then-execute) that prevents code chaos. //
Here's the brutal truth: LLMs don't go off the rails because they're broken. They go off the rails because you don't build them any rails.
You treat your AI agent like an off-road, all-terrain vehicle, then wonder why it's going off the rails. You give it a blank canvas and expect a masterpiece.
Think about it this way - if you hired a talented but inexperienced developer, would you just say "build me an app" and walk away? Hell no. You'd give them:
- Coding standards
- Architecture guidelines
- Project requirements
- Regular check-ins
But somehow with AI, we think we can skip all that and just... prompt our way to success.
The solution isn't better prompts. It's better infrastructure.
You need to build the roads before you start driving.
I've always been a scaredy-cat. Horror movies were my kryptonite, the kind of films that left me sleeping with the lights on and checking under beds like a paranoid child. So this newfound ability to chuckle at cinematic terror felt like discovering I could suddenly speak a foreign language.
As I reflected on this mysterious transformation, three influences kept surfacing in my memory, all carrying the same powerful message: fear loses its grip when you laugh at it. //
The first was Stephen King's IT, specifically the scene where the Losers Club finally confronts Pennywise. These kids, terrorized by an ancient cosmic horror, make a crucial discovery: the creature that feeds on fear becomes pathetically small when mocked. They literally bully the bully, turning their terror into ridicule. "You're just a clown!" they shout, and suddenly this omnipotent force becomes just another playground antagonist.
The second was from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Professor Lupin teaches his students to defeat boggarts, creatures that manifest as your worst fear, with the Riddikulus spell. The magic isn't in complex incantations; it's in forcing yourself to imagine your fear in something ridiculous. Snape in your grandmother's dress. A spider wearing roller skates. Fear transformed into comedy. //
All three sources delivered the same revolutionary idea: laughter is fear's kryptonite. //
This shift represents something profound about how we consume media. Stories don't just entertain us; they literally rewire our neural pathways, teaching us new ways to interpret and respond to the world. Every hero's journey we follow, every coping mechanism we witness, becomes part of our own psychological toolkit.
One simple AI prompt saved me from disaster.
Not fancy security tools. Not expensive antivirus software. Just asking my coding assistant to look for suspicious patterns before executing unknown code.
The scary part? This attack vector is perfect for developers. We download and run code all day long. GitHub repos, npm packages, coding challenges. Most of us don't sandbox every single thing.
And this was server-side malware. Full Node.js privileges. Access to environment variables, database connections, file systems, crypto wallets. Everything.
If this sophisticated operation is targeting developers at scale, how many have already been compromised? How many production systems are they inside right now?
Perfect Targeting: Developers are ideal victims. Our machines contain the keys to the kingdom: production credentials, crypto wallets, client data.
Professional Camouflage: LinkedIn legitimacy, realistic codebases, standard interview processes.
Technical Sophistication: Multi-layer obfuscation, remote payload delivery, dead-man switches, server-side execution.
One successful infection could compromise production systems at major companies, crypto holdings worth millions, personal data of thousands of users. //
If you're a developer getting LinkedIn job opportunities:
Always sandbox unknown code. Docker containers, VMs, whatever. Never run it on your main machine.
Use AI to scan for suspicious patterns. Takes 30 seconds. Could save your entire digital life.
Verify everything. Real LinkedIn profile doesn't mean real person. Real company doesn't mean real opportunity.
Trust your gut. If someone's rushing you to execute code, that's a red flag.
This scam was so sophisticated it fooled my initial BS detector. But one paranoid moment and a simple AI prompt exposed the whole thing.
Despite technological and regulatory hurdles, Amazon remains convinced that small modular reactors (SMRs) are the answer to the cloud titan's power woes.
Last fall, the house of Bezos announced a $500 million investment in SMR startup X-Energy. On Thursday, the e-tailer revealed that X-Energy's Xe-100 SMR designs would eventually supply Washington State with "up to" 960 megawatts of clean energy.
"Eventually" is the key word here as construction isn't expected to start until the end of the decade and the plants won't begin operations until sometime in the 2030s.
The highest altitude recorded for a bird is 11,300 m (37,000 ft) for a Rüppell's vulture (Gyps rueppellii), which collided with a commercial aircraft over Abidjan, Ivory Coast on 29 November 1973. The impact damaged one of the aircraft's engines, causing it to shut down, but the plane landed safely without further incident. Sufficient feather remains of the bird were recovered to allow the American Museum of Natural History to make a positive identification of this high-flier, which is rarely seen above 6,000 m (20,000 ft).
On November, 29 1973 a bird strike occurred at an altitude of 11,300 m over Abidjan. The engine was shutdown during the collision, and was not restarted.
Altitude
The altitude is that recorded by the pilot shortly after the impact, which damaged one of the aircraft’s engines and caused it to be shut down. The plane landed safely at Abijan without further incident.
Backblaze is a backup and cloud storage company that has been tracking the annualized failure rates (AFRs) of the hard drives in its datacenter since 2013. As you can imagine, that’s netted the firm a lot of data. And that data has led the company to conclude that HDDs “are lasting longer” and showing fewer errors. //
Biffstar Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
2y
152
My 320mb (megabyte) IDE IBM hard drive from 1994 still boots Win3.1 and loads Doom II just fine.
Who says older drives are unreliable?