Canada didn't live up to its values on immigration in recent years, Carney saysFeature Sitting in the hangar of Lockheed Martin's famous Palmdale, California Skunk Works facility is one of the oddest aircraft ever to take shape: the X-59 that's looking to revive supersonic travel over land. The X-59 is a very strange looking bird. It's 99.7 ft (30.4 m) long with a 29.5 ft (9 m) delta-style wingspan – but the first third of the aircraft is all nose. That elongated proboscis is designed to pierce shockwaves created when aircraft top the speed of sound, and by doing so reduce sonic booms to a more muted sonic thump that won't deafen folks on the ground. X-59 aircraft (pic: Lockheed Martin) Earlier this month, NASA fired up the X-59's engines for the first time ahead of next year's test flights. The Register caught up with the project’s head of propulsion, Ray Castner, and test pilot James L Less – aka "Clue" – to learn more about this amazing aircraft. The Register: James, I have to ask about your call sign. Where did you get it? Less: I've been Clue since my first squadron in the Air Force over 20 years ago. I walked in, they took a look at my name, and they just said, "OK, we've got to come up with something good." The Register: It seems like you're basically taking an F-18 engine, F-16 undercarriage, and then the rest of the plane is custom-built. Is that correct? Castner: That's true. It is a fully new aircraft with parts from all kinds of other airplanes, mostly to save budget and cost. If you can get anything you can reuse, that saves money. The Register: Does that go for the lack of a forward windscreen? It's got to be unusual relying on cameras alone. Less: The cockpit of the X-59 is designed around the rear cockpit of a T-38 Air Force trainer. So we didn't have to develop it all from scratch and test it. The canopy, canopy jettison mechanism, and then the ejection seat are all things that, if we had to do those from scratch, would be a lot of development. So we just used what's in the T-38 – they took the blueprints for that rear cockpit and then built a whole plane around it. This is not the first airplane that you couldn't see straight forward out of – Charles Lindbergh had to hang his head out the window to see where he was going. We didn't want to have to do that. So this camera system will actually make it – in theory – just like looking out the front window. We have a big high-definition TV monitor right in front of us, and the picture is nearly what they call "conformal." If I were looking through a transparent window right there, that's what I'd be seeing. The Register: The design of the craft is most unusual – the extended nose and tail in particular. How does that help with sonic booms? Castner: I've sat through countless meetings about the sonic-boom design. And actually, before the X-59, we'd done some wind tunnel testing on what would be a next-generation supersonic transport. The whole concept for aircraft shaping for sonic booms is about managing the volume of the airplane and the lift – because sonic booms are all about lift and volume. So if you can manage that energy, then the human ear will hear that sound as a softer sound. And it's really all based on advances in computational technology. We have all these supercomputers that can analyze thousands of designs in a month. And they can basically optimize the shape of the aircraft, and that's really the secret sauce, how boom optimization works. Less: The nose of the airplane and the tail of the airplane put out the strongest sonic shocks normally. And that's the boom that you hear. And then there's a whole bunch of smaller shocks along the whole length of the airplane. And as those all travel to the ground, they kind of merge together into the front and the back, and that's the loud boom that you hear. The point of the long, straight, new nose, skinny airplane is to spread all those little shocks out so that they don't merge together as they go to the ground. And as Ray was saying, it's energy. It's the same amount of energy in the sound, but it's spread out over the length of the airplane instead of into two short sections: nose and tail. The Register: Is this design practical for commercial aircraft? Castner: NASA is pretty confident. Right before we designed X-59, we've done both computational and wind tunnel tests on vehicles that would be scaled up towards 60-passenger aircraft. NASA feels confident that that technology can be scaled up to a full scale commercial supersonic aircraft – but the X-59 is needed to demonstrate that and to collect that data. The Register: So when's the first flight? Less: From a flight test standpoint, we mainly just have to make sure we're safe. So I won't say how many flights, but we will fly fairly quickly, and assuming we keep moving through that envelope, we will get supersonic without too much delay. That's obviously the goal. So we're hoping to do the first flight early next year. The Register: So assuming a successful flight, what happens to the data for this? Is this shared with the industry? Less: One is the human response to the public survey data. When we're done testing this airplane we're going to go fly around the country and get people's response to the sonic thump. That data will go to the Federal Aviation Administration and any international regulatory boards to show them that we've got the data saying you can change your rules. Instead of being a hard speed limit, the limit will be based on sound. The other set of data we're going to get is all those computer tools that Ray was talking about that were used to design this. We're going to go and measure the results and go back and refine those tools even more based on real-world results. And then those tools are available to any US manufacturer that wants to try to use it and make a low boom aircraft. ®College Football Playoff betting guide: First-round odds, title favorites
The stock indices close week. For the day, the Dow and Russell 2000 rose solidly, the S&P and the Nasdaq less so. Dow industrial average rose 426 points or 0.97% at 44296 S&P index rose 20.63 points or 0.35% it 5969.34 NASDAQ index rose 31.23 points or 0.16% at 19003.65 Russell 2000 rose 42.65 points or 1.80% at 2406.67 For the trading week: Dow Industrial average rose 2.0% S&P index rose 1.7% NASDAQ index rose 1.74% Russell 2000 surged by 4.52%A VR headset could make a great gift for the gamer in your life, and now you can pick up one of our favorites at a killer price. Sony’s PlayStation VR2 is on sale for $350 right now in a bundle that includes the critically-acclaimed spin-off Horizon Call of the Mountain . That’s $200 off the bundle’s regular price and one of the best Black Friday deals on VR headsets we found this year. We enjoyed this headset and gave it high marks in our official review . The OLED displays are excellent, so the graphics are on point. The headset’s fit is comfortable and it includes built-in haptics for increased immersion. Haptics for your head? That’s a pretty novel concept. Sony PlayStation VR2 Call of the Mountain Bundle $349 $550 Save $201 This is a record low price for the headset and comes with a game. $349 at Amazon The headset also includes eye tracking technology and ships with two dedicated controllers, one for each hand. The company’s Sense controllers are eerily similar to Meta Quest controllers, with a large tracking ring, analog sticks, face buttons, triggers and grip buttons. As for Horizon Call of the Mountain , it’s a new entry in the beloved Horizon franchise, only in VR. There’s a whole lot of climbing, as indicated by the title, but also a refined bow and arrow mechanic that feels just right in virtual space. We hesitated to recommend this headset to everyone at its original price of $550, but it’s a no-brainer at $350. This deal is also available through Sony , if Amazon isn’t your bag. So what’s the catch? There’s only one. This isn’t a standalone headset. It requires a PS5 to work, though Sony did recently release an adapter that lets it connect to a PC . Interested in the headset but don't have a PS5 yet? Luckily the PS5 Slim is also on sale right now for $75 off. It's Black Friday deals drop the console to $375 for the digital-only model and $425 for the disc-based version . Check out all of the latest Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals here.Syrian President Bashar Assad has reportedly sought refuge in Moscow after rebels seized control of Damascus, effectively ending more than 50 years of Assad family rule. Russian agency reports confirmed Assad's arrival in Moscow, although official verification remains pending. Jubilant Syrians filled the streets, echoing scenes from the early Arab Spring, as the rebels announced a new curfew and release of prisoners from the infamous Saydnaya prison. International observers express growing concern over Syria's future stability amid newly ignited power struggles. Ex-al-Qaida leader Abu Mohammed al-Golani, now leading the largest rebel faction, visited key sites in Damascus and addressed citizens, emphasizing a commitment to pluralism. Meanwhile, global diplomatic efforts are intensifying, with Russia pushing for a UN Security Council emergency session. (With inputs from agencies.)
British-Canadian computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton and co-laureate John Hopfield are set to receive the Nobel Prize for physics on Tuesday in Stockholm. The pair landed the accolade because they used physics to develop artificial neural networks, which help computers learn without having to program them. These networks form the foundation of machine learning, a computer science that relies on data and algorithms to help artificial intelligence mimic the human brain. Hinton and Hopfield’s path to the Nobel began when Hopfield, who is now a professor emeritus at Princeton University, invented a network in 1982 that could store and reconstruct images in data. The Hopfield network uses associate memory, which humans use to remember what something looks like when it’s not in front of them or to conjure up a word they know but seldom use. The network can mirror this process because it stores patterns and has a method for recreating them. When the network is given an incomplete or slightly distorted pattern, the method then searches for the stored pattern that is most similar to recreate data. This means if a computer was shown, for example, a photo of dog where only part of the animal was visible, it could use the network to piece together the missing part of the image and recognize it was depicting a dog. Hinton, who was working at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in 1985, used the Hopfield network as the foundation for a new network he called the Boltzmann machine. Its name came from the nineteenth-century physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. The Boltzmann machine learns from examples, rather than instructions, and when trained, can recognize familiar characteristics in information, even if it has not seen that data before. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which gives out the Nobel, likens this to how humans may be able to identify someone as a relative of one of their friends, even if they’ve never met this person before, because of they share similar traits. The Boltzmann machine works in a similar way, classifying images or creating new examples based on the patterns it was trained on. This kind of technology can help suggest films or television shows based on a user’s preferences and past viewing history The Hopfield network and Boltzmann machine are considered to have laid the groundwork for modern AI. Hinton, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, went on to win the A.M. Turing Award, known as the Nobel Prize of computing, with fellow Canadian Yoshua Bengio and American Yan LeCun in 2018. He is often called the godfather of AI. This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 8, 2024. Tara Deschamps, The Canadian PressNoneMetformina vuelve a faltar en farmacias; CCSS promete distribuir medicina esta semana
Sunday's inaugural 12-team College Football Playoff bracket reveal officially set the stage for the most anticipated postseason the sport has ever seen. Eight more spots in the playoff field have created two extra rounds to determine a national champion, which could come from the Big Ten, the Southeastern Conference or even the Mountain West! Javascript is required for you to be able to read premium content. Please enable it in your browser settings. Scenes from Georgia's victory over Texas in the SEC Championship Game at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta on December 7, 2024. (Photos: Jim Blackburn) Click for more. PHOTOS: Georgia Defeats Texas for SEC ChampionshipPresident Trump 2.0: Mass deportation programme and oil drilling on first day in officeNone
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Former Registrar, National Business and Technical Examinations Board, Prof. Olu Aina, has urged the Federal Government to provide necessary wherewithal for polytechnics to begin awarding bachelor and post graduate degrees in technology-related programmes. The ex-NABTEB boss, who demanded immediate abolishment of the Higher National Diploma, noted that the polytechnic education in Nigeria was going through travails. The don stated this on Wednesday, while delivering the convocation lecture of the 8th combined convocation of the Osun State College of Technology, Esa-Oke, Osun State. Delivering a paper titled ‘Revitalising Polytechnic Education in Nigeria: From Challenges To Opportunities,’ Aina said the National Board For Technical Education has not fulfilled its obligations. He noted that the failure of the NBTE to cope with her regulatory functions has led to the lagging behind of polytechnics in Nigeria when compared to their counterparts in other parts of the world. Related News Corruption denying Nigeria quality education, healthcare- Reps speaker [ICYMI] How Dele Farotimi defamed me – Afe Babalola Almajiri rising due to parents abandoning responsibilities, says commission He said, “All the polytechnics in Nigeria to retain their designations as “polytechnics” but statutorily empowered to offer degree programmes at Bachelor, Masters and Ph.D level. Polytechnics should be allowed to run B.Tech, MTech and Ph.D degrees in technology-related programmes. “To this end, only the National Diploma should be allowed to continue while the Higher National Diploma should be abolished. However, there should be a moratorium of at least five to six years for the transition to allow academic staff with lower qualifications to upgrade to the minimum requirements. “The new National Diploma should be three years with six months apprenticeship after the first semester of the first year and another 6 months apprenticeship after the first semester of the second year, and the last two semesters to be in school. “NBTE today is notably part of the problems of Polytechnic rather than agent of the solution. The NBTE, as currently structured, cannot effectively deliver on the mandate of Polytechnic in Nigeria. Therefore, an entirely new commission for Polytechnics should be established.” Aina, who said the country would need a tertiary education system with capacity to propel the twin engine of development – technology and entrepreneurship, particularly to enhance overall competitiveness as a nation in a dynamic and globalized world.
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With Black Friday sales in full swing, there are still plenty of terrific deals to take advantage of. It’s the perfect time to shop for expensive electronics, including TV’s. Until Cyber Monday, you’ll be able to snag a high-end TV at a nice discount. Several top brands are offering huge deals on their best models. We’re seeing fantastic discounts on Samsung, LG, Sony and Hisense TVs. Whether you want a big-screen TV or something smaller for casual viewing, there are many options to consider getting during this sale event. Last updated on Nov. 30, 2024, at 2 a.m. ET. In this article: Samsung 55-Inch Class QLED 4K The Frame Series Smart TV , LG 77-Inch Class OLED B4 Series Smart TV and Hisense U6 Series 65-Inches ULED 4K Smart TV . The cool thing about this smart TV is that it features an Art mode you can enable, which displays modern and classic art pieces whenever you’re not watching. The color volume is fantastic, the matte film reduces light glare and the frame is customizable with multiple color bezel options. If you’re looking for an affordable 4K smart TV, this 65-inch LED model won’t disappoint. Motion Xcelerator reduces blur and lag, and object tracking delivers impressive 3D surround sound. It supports HDR and Mega Contrast to minimize the difference between light and dark areas. This Roku TV offers a sharp 4K resolution and supports HDR10+ technology, which enhances color, contrast and brightness. The home screen is customizable with shortcuts to your favorite apps, and the voice remote lets you effortlessly search for paid and free content. Are you looking for a solid TV for casual viewing? This 40-inch Amazon Fire TV has plenty to offer. The Fire TV platform provides quick access to live TV, video games and music, and the remote has a dedicated Alexa button for launching apps, searching for content and controlling smart devices on your network. This TV boasts Quantum Dot technology for reproducing stunning visuals and bright colors. When mounted, its AirSlim design allows it to blend seamlessly with your wall. The advanced processor automatically transforms non-UHD content into 4K and improves sound. You’d be hard-pressed to find a better TV for your home entertainment hub than this 77-inch LG smart TV. OLED technology produces accurate colors and deep blacks, and the a8 AI processor automatically fine-tunes the picture quality based on what you’re watching. Plus, it features NVIDIA G-Sync, AMD FreeSync Premium and VRR for improved gaming. This high-end smart TV boasts advanced OLED HDR+ technology, which enhances image brightness and clarity. Dolby Atmos and Object Tracking Sound Lite produce excellent sound quality, and the 144-hertz refresh rate delivers ultrasmooth motion for gaming and live sports. Plus, the smart Tizen OS offers streaming and gaming access. If you want a cheap smart TV for a smaller room in your home, this 42-inch Insignia Fire TV is the one for you. It’s a full HD TV with a 1080p resolution and a built-in Fire TV interface for streaming content from apps such as Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+. The Alexa voice remote makes it easy to find your favorite movies. This Hisense 65-inch TV features advanced Mini-LED technology for reproducing dark blacks and vibrant colors. Dolby Vision delivers superior picture quality, and the dedicated game mode provides a variable refresh rate for smooth gaming. The voice remote is convenient for finding content, and the smart TV interface is intuitive. If you have the space in your home for this massive TV, you’ll love the cinematic experience it offers. QLED technology delivers dazzling visuals and rich colors, and HDR Pro+ boosts contrast, brightness and clarity no matter what you watch. It has an integrated Google TV interface and is compatible with Alexa. Amazon Fire TV 43-Inch 4-Series 4K UHD Smart TV 38% OFF Amazon Fire TV 65-Inch Omni QLED Series 4K UHD Smart TV 25% OFF Amazon Fire TV 50-Inch Omni Series 4K UHD Smart TV 31% OFF Sony 75-Inch 4K Ultra HD Google TV Bravia TV 28% OFF Samsung 55-Inch Class QLED 4K Q80D Series Quantum HDR+ Smart TV 33% OFF LG 86-Inch Class UHD Smart TV 23% OFF LG 55-Inch Class QNED85T Series LED Smart TV 13% OFF Prices listed reflect time and date of publication and are subject to change. Check out our Daily Deals for the best products at the best prices and sign up here to receive the BestReviews weekly newsletter full of shopping inspo and sales. BestReviews spends thousands of hours researching, analyzing and testing products to recommend the best picks for most consumers. BestReviews and its newspaper partners may earn a commission if you purchase a product through one of our links.
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