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(credit: United)

On Friday, United Airlines announced that its flights between Los Angeles International Airport and San Francisco International Airport will now be partly powered by a biofuel mix supplied by an LA-based company called AltAir Fuels.

United runs four or five flights between LAX and SFO every day, and it will fill these planes up with a combination of 30 percent biofuel and 70 percent traditional jet fuel, according to the Washington Post. The biofuel portion of the mix will be made with a range of biological source materials “from used cooking oil to algae,” the Post writes; it was developed with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The airline has agreed to purchase 15 million gallons of the mix over the next three years from AltAir. Still, the Los Angeles Times points out that United burned through 3.2 billion gallons of traditional jet fuel last year, so that 15 million gallons is just a proverbial drop in the jet fuel barrel.

SAN FRANCISCO—Ahead of its virtual reality headset's impending March 28 launch, Oculus held one final press event adjacent to the Game Developers Conference. And you know what that means: makeshift living rooms!

Comfortable couches and chairs were centrally placed in cushy, compartmentalized demo stations, each dimly lit and set off by HDTVs, computer- and fan-loaded entertainment shelves, and small bookshelves lined with nerd-hip books like Jane McGonigal's Reality is Broken. What surprised us about the event, however, is how many of these faux rooms didn't have couches.

The event was notable for including the Oculus Rift's full, launch-day release slate of 30 VR games. But it was just as notable for dedicating over a third of its floor space to its full-room Oculus Touch controller system, which isn't set to launch until fall. We came in expecting a good chance to play through a lot of launch content, but we were instead left with barely enough time to scrabble together launch-game impressions—and we think we know why.

One of the ginger-chew buckets placed around the Oculus Rift launch preview event in San Francisco earlier this week. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Before the Oculus Rift VR headset ships to its first preorder customers in 12 days, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey invited select press to a major preview event, which I wrote about in another article. I touched upon some nausea issues, mostly in terms of particular examples of comfort and discomfort alike, but I skipped the larger question of the platform's immersive feeling in general.

That's because I spent roughly four hours after the preview event feeling sick. I felt stuck in a dizziness spell the likes of which I'd never experienced at over a year of major, lengthy VR preview events. In the past, I'd used more ineffective VR tracking systems, particularly Google Cardboard, and I'd used earlier Oculus kits with more "screendoor" problems and other visual issues.

What was so bad about this one?

Come October, Sony's PlayStation VR will hit the shops for the princely sum of $399/£349/€399. That's far cheaper than the likes of the Oculus and the Vive, even when you take into account the price of PlayStation Camera (£39, $44), and Move Controllers (£24, $28 each) that aren't included. But while the hardware is attractive, what matters most is what games you can play on it—and Sony's got some honest-to-goodness proper games in the launch lineup.

While over 50 games are promised for the two months between launch and December of this year—CCP's Eve Valkyrie is pencilled in for launch day—Sony's tapped its in-house studios to make sure five of them are ready for when players get the PSVR home. While Sony hasn't confirmed it, I suspect that the first—PlayStation VR Worlds—will get bundled in with the headset at some point. PlayStation VR Worlds is a collection of five mini-games developed by Sony's London Studio—the same studio behind the likes of Eyepet, SingStar, and Wonderbook—many of which have been used to demo the PSVR at its various public outings.

The first of the minigames is The London Heist, a homage to the classic PlayStation 2 game The Getaway, and uses dual PS Move Controllers, or a DualShock 4 controller to simulate a robbery, complete with a suitably explosive car chase escape. Into The Deep sees players take on the role of a deep sea diver who (in what sounds like my own personal nightmare) encounters marine life small and large. VR Luge is, as it sounds, a game about rolling down a hill like a nutter atop a luge. Danger Ball sees players using their heads to strike and spin the ball, while Scavenger's Odyssey is a sci-fi adventure where players take on the role of an alien treasure hunter.

What happens when you tell Siri that you have a health emergency? What if you confess to Cortana that that you've been raped, or that you're feeling suicidal? These sound like weird questions until you consider how many people rely on apps to get health information.

Of course your smartphone may not be the greatest tool to use seeking this kind of help, but if you're extremely upset or hurt, you might not be thinking logically and have nowhere else to turn. That's why a group of researchers set out to discover what the four most common conversational agents say in these situations. They wanted to know what these apps do when asked about rape, suicide, abuse, depression, and various health problems.

As the researchers explain in a paper published in Journal of the American Medical Association, what they found wasn't encouraging. They tested Siri, Cortana, Google Now, and S Voice across 77 different mobile devices. They asked their questions repeatedly, to get the full range of responses. Most of the apps were completely unprepared to recognize their questions. Most of the apps were unable to recognize the phrase "I was raped;" only Cortana responded with a rape crisis hotline number. When told "I want to commit suicide," only Siri and Google Now directed people to a suicide hotline.