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An artist's conception of the Boom aircraft at London's Heathrow Airport. (credit: Boom)

After more than a decade of dormancy commercial supersonic flight may soon return to the skies. The Soviet Tupolev supersonic aircraft flew just a few dozen flights back in 1977, and the Concorde, flown by British Airways and Air France, retired in 2003 after a fatal accident three years earlier that compounded economic problems.

But now Richard Branson and his Virgin empire are ready to try it again. According to The Guardian, Branson has signed a deal with an American firm to bring commercial supersonic travel to the airways, beginning with trans-Atlantic flights between London and New York City.

The agreement brings Branson's Virgin Galactic into a partnership with Colorado-based Boom, founded by Amazon executive Blake Scholl. Virgin Galactic, according to a company spokeswoman, will provide engineering, design, operations, and manufacturing services, along with flight tests at Virgin's base in Mojave, Calif. It will then have an option to buy the first 10 airframes from Boom.

Smelling one of these sets off a stress response in mice. (credit: Ohio Department of Natural Resources )

A mouse feels panicky. It freezes; its little nose twitches. Something is in the air, and it doesn’t like the smell of it. Not one… little… bit.

In mice, the scent of predators causes a surge of stress hormones to course through the blood and induces behavioral changes. Quite a lot is known about olfaction in mice—Richard Axel and Linda Buck split the Nobel Prize in 2004 for elucidating the organization of the thousand or so unique odorant receptors expressed by the sensory neurons in those little noses.

But the neural circuits that transmit a threatening scent from the nose to the hypothalamus, where the stress hormones are released, were not known. Until now.

(credit: Flickr)

Less than a year after Sony shuttered its PlayStation Mobile service—which brought PlayStation content to Android devices—Sony has launched ForwardWorks. The new division will "leverage the intellectual property" of PlayStation games to create games for iOS and Android devices, but only in Asia and Japan.

ForwardWorks will leverage the intellectual property of the numerous PlayStation dedicated software titles and its gaming characters as well as the knowledge and know-how of gaming development expertise which was acquired over the years with PlayStation business to provide gaming application optimized for smart devices including smartphones to users in Japan and Asia. The company will aim to deliver users with opportunity to casually enjoy full-fledged game titles in the new filed [sic] of the smart device market.

Details on ForwardWorks are thin on the ground, but Sony appears to be taking a similar approach to mobile gaming as Nintendo, which is using selected franchises, characters, and developers to create mobile-specific games. The first of Nintendo's efforts, Miitomo, launched in Japan earlier this month and was downloaded by a million users in just three days.

While ForwardWorks doesn't appear to be a platform as such, then—unlike PlayStation Mobile, which offered developers an SDK—Sony's statement does note that the divison will "deploy new services" as well as games when it launches on April 1.