31826607
submission
Cazekiel writes:
In January 2011, an Air Canada Boeing 767 carrying 95 passengers and eight crew members was on route to Zurich from Toronto when its First Officer, fatigued and disoriented from a long nap he'd taken, panicked in seeing what he believed to be a US cargo plane on a collision course with his aircraft. The panicking F.O. pushed forward on the control column to make a rapid descent, only it wasn't an aircraft he'd been looking at, but Venus. According to the article:
"The airliner dropped about 400 feet before the captain pulled back on the control column. Fourteen passengers and two crew were hurt, and seven needed hospital treatment. None were wearing seat belts, even though the seat-belt sign was on."
The only danger in this situation had been the F.O. napping for 75 minutes instead of the maximum 40, as the disorientation and confusion stemming from deeper sleep was the culprit in this mix-up. However, the Air Canada Pilots Association, quote, "has long pressured authorities to take the stresses of night flying into account when setting the maximum hours a pilot can work," taking into account that North Atlantic night-flights are hardest on an already-fatigued pilot.
31515493
submission
Cazekiel writes:
Sticking a mug in your freezer to ensure a cold beer may be made obsolete, if the Japanese brewing giant Kirin has anything to do about it. How? Kirin came up with a creative, delectable way to create frozen beer foam, dispensed the way you would a soft-serve ice cream cone.
Gizmag gives us the details:
"To make the topping, regular Ichiban beer is frozen to -5 degrees Celsius (23 degrees Fahrenheit) while air is continuously blown into it. It's kind of like when a child makes bubbles in their drink, except inside a blast freezer. Once the topping is placed onto regular, unfrozen beer though, it acts as an insulating lid and keeps the drink cold for 30 minutes."
31449501
submission
Cazekiel writes:
Observing the primordial sound waves created 30,000 years after the Big Bang, physicists on the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) have determined our universe's most precise measurements: 13.5 billion years old.
This article detailing the study reports:
“We’ve made precision measurements of the large-scale structure of the universe five to seven billion years ago – the best measure yet of the size of anything outside the Milky Way,” says David Schlegel of the Physics Division at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), BOSS’s principal investigator. “We’re pushing out to the distances when dark energy turned on, where we can start to do experiments to find out what’s causing accelerating expansion.”
31422109
submission
Cazekiel writes:
If you think your boss is a fearless, miserable beast whose only worries lie in how well his company or business competes, think again. The 'Business Video Behavior Project' survey conducted by Qumu reveals that those in-charge are growing more and more paranoid about something the Average Joe fears just walking down the street nowadays: employees who will "secretly film him with his metaphorical pants down and then post the footage for public delectation.", as this article describes. It would seem that it doesn't matter if you're powerful, wealthy and lording over hundreds of cubicles; they know the internet exists, everyone has a cell phone camera and thick wallets don't make discarded banana peels magically move out of their path.
31340611
submission
Cazekiel writes:
The sense of taste for astronauts is dulled by microgravity, but four high schoolers, participating in the Spirit of Innovation Challenge have come up with a solution: Flavor Strips. They put a little more kick into space-food; from simple salt-and-pepper to Asian spices, astronauts get to add more taste to their meals without the space traveler, as Myra Halpin, a chemistry and research instructor at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics says of one tale told to her, "spinning himself around to get the hot sauce out of the bottle." Never mind taste buds--hot sauce in the eyes? I'll pass.
