Month: September 2016

(credit: Getty Images)

Amazon UK Services Ltd has been fined £65,000 for attempting to ship dangerous goods on passenger planes, including lithium-ion batteries and aerosols.

The retailer was found during sentencing at Southwark Crown Court last week to have breached four UK civil aviation rules for the offence of "causing dangerous goods to be delivered for carriage in an aircraft."

The offending items included spare batteries for mobile phones or tablets, as well as a can of Dove deodorant and a hair mousse made by Tresemme, which were sent on a mixture of domestic and international flights, according to the Press Association. Each item was intercepted by staff working for Royal Mail or UPS during routine screening between January 2014 and June 2015, before they could be transported.

Enlarge (credit: Stefan Marjoram )

On Monday morning, the Zhejiang Geely Holding Group—which owns Chinese car brand Geely as well as Volvo and the London Taxi Company—announced that it is now the main sponsor and official automotive partner of the Bloodhound SSC land speed record project. The three-year deal includes both financial and technical support for the project, as well as an extension of Bloodhound SSC's STEM in schools promotion across China.

Richard Noble, the main driving force behind Bloodhound SSC (and both previous land speed records) said "We could not have a better partner than Geely: not only are they an international technology company with tremendous vision and capability, they share our passion for innovation and education. Their support, both technical and financial, means we can now plan next year’s record-breaking challenge with confidence. It also means we can take our STEM inspiration message to a vast new audience, which is great for science and engineering but also for promoting Great Britain.”

The head of Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, Li Shufu said "Since day one we have been committed to breaking technology barriers at Geely and working with Project BLOODHOUND will help further our mutual technology breakthrough to an international audience. It also means we can tell millions of young people, in China and around the world, about the opportunities presented by studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics. That is what makes this ‘Engineering Adventure’ so special and why we wanted to be part of it."

SpaceX founder Elon Musk continued to drop tidbits about his "Interplanetary Transport System" on Twitter early Monday morning, sharing two photos of SpaceX's Raptor engine during a test fire at the company's facility in MacGregor, Texas. "SpaceX propulsion just achieved first firing of the Raptor interplanetary transport engine," he tweeted.

Musk released the photos on the eve of a much-anticipated speech Tuesday at the International Astronautical Congress, in Guadalajara, Mexico. During his speech Musk will lay out the elements of his vision for humanity to colonize other worlds. As Ars has reported Musk will likely offer an inclusive message, reaching out to potential partners. This is because SpaceX cannot self-fund colonization and will need help from the government and industry.

In subsequent tweets early on Monday Musk provided a few details about the Raptor engine, which he said has a thrust of about 3 million Newtons in the upper atmosphere. This is about three times more powerful than the company's existing engine, the Merlin 1-D, nine of which power SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. Additionally, with these specs the Raptor would be slightly more powerful than a space shuttle main engine, and in the same class as Blue Origin's BE-4 rocket engine, which has not yet undergone a full-scale test.

Adobe's Creative Cloud, once optional, is now the only way to get access to the latest versions of the company's software. (credit: Adobe)

ATLANTA—Microsoft and Adobe announced today a new partnership that will see the two companies use and promote each other's cloud services.

Under the new partnership, Adobe will be using Azure for its Marketing Cloud, Document Cloud, and Creative Cloud services. Microsoft in turn will make Adobe Marketing Cloud its preferred marketing service for customers of its new Dynamics 365 Enterprise edition.

Dynamics 365 combines Dynamics CRM and Dynamics ERP into a single cloud service. Microsoft is also integrating its Power BI and Cortana Intelligence Suite capabilities to give Dynamics users greater data analysis capabilities. With the Adobe partnership, that analytic power will be able to reach into Adobe's Marketing Cloud to allow marketers to better understand the reach and effectiveness of their campaigns.

Enlarge / Behold, the stentrode. (credit: University of Melbourne)

Australian neurologist Tom Oxley was on vacation in the US in November 2010 when he decided to do a bit of work. So he pitched an electrode array for reading brainwaves to the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s (DARPA) Military Prosthetics program. Instead of requiring invasive surgery to implant directly into the brain, Dr. Oxley’s electrode array could be threaded into a vein passing through the brain.

Oxley was surprised to get a response straight away, inviting him to discuss his device in person. At his meeting with DARPA’s Colonel Geoffrey Ling, Oxley got a bigger surprise still. Here’s how Oxley describes the encounter:

[Col. Ling] leaned back in his chair and said, “Well that’s interesting. No one has been doing that at DARPA. Why don’t you go home and put a team together, and we’ll give you a million dollars to build this thing.”

Easier said than done. As a neurologist, Oxley didn’t have the engineering know-how to build a complicated electronic device that could be compressed into a sub-millimeter catheter and still retain its signalling abilities. And he didn’t know who could; he wasn’t an academic with years of research collaborations and connections behind him. “It was surreal,” Oxley told one interviewer. “All of a sudden I’d started my Ph.D. and had several million dollars to work with and a whole area to start my own lab.”