Category Archives: Futurism

"You're sound asleep, safe, you think, in your bed, and you can get taken out by a meteorite, apparently."Meteorite Hit

Golden, British Columbia native Ruth Hamilton was woken up by her dog barking and seconds later, she says, a roughly two-pound rock smashed through her roof, landing inches from where she was sleeping.

And as it turns out, it wasnt some dangerous prank. The rock was a chunk of actual meteorite, Canadian broadcaster Global News reports, which had lit up the night sky earlier that night.

The finding was later confirmed by a team of experts from Western University in Ontario, Canada.

Everything about the story was consistent with a meteorite fall, and the fact that this bright fireball had occurred basically right at the same time made it a pretty overwhelming case, Western astronomy professor Peter Brown told the CBC.

Ive never been so scared in my life, Hamilton told the broadcaster. I wasnt sure what to do so I called 911 and, when I was speaking with the operator, I flipped over my pillow and saw that a rock had slipped between two pillows.

The first known person to actually get hit directly by a meteorite was Ann Hodgens, a woman from Alabama. In 1954, a 8.5-pound meteorite crashed through her roof and struck her on the side of her hip, according to Insider, which she survived with heavy bruising.

Hamilton is planning to keep the rock after Brown and his team have a thorough look a keepsake of a very strange and unique night.

I was shaking like a leaf, Hamilton told the CBC. Youre sound asleep, safe, you think, in your bed, and you can get taken out by a meteorite, apparently.

READ MORE: Ive never been so scared in my life: Golden, B.C. woman nearly hit by meteorite [Global News]

More on meteor showers: NASA Puzzled by Five Fireballs Over America in One Night

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Woman Almost Smashed by Meteorite That Crashed Through Ceiling and Landed on Her Bed - Futurism

Meteorologists may have finally found a culprit.Whodunnit

The sound of an earth-shattering boom rocked New Hampshire while the ground shook on Sunday morning, in a statewide incident that left both state residents and experts baffled.

Now, meteorologists think they finally know what caused the boom, The New York Times reports. Satellite imagery suggests that a meteor could have sailed over New Hampshire before exploding, causing the loud blast that rattled eardrums and shook the earth across the state. If thats the case, then it would finally provide an answer to a mystery thats caused rampant online speculation among confused New Hampshirites.

As Futurism previously noted, the U.S. Geological Survey didnt find any evidence of an earthquake in the area within the seven days leading up to the event. And while its possible that an earthquake happened and simply didnt get picked up, that seemed to rule out the most obvious explanation.

But an exploding meteor also makes sense. Both the Orionids and Draconids meteor showers are ongoing at the moment, the NYTnotes, making this a busy time of year for flybys. So meteorologists at the National Weather Service (NWS) started to look for bolides, which are the fireballs that are caused by a meteor exploding and fragmenting in the air.

Sure enough, there was a little blip there right around the time that folks started calling and reporting about the sound, NWS meteorologist Greg Cornwell told the NYT.

Of course, just like the possibility of a phantom earthquake, the meteor hypothesis isnt a sure thing. The satellite that picked up on the explosion may have made an error, or it could have been a coincidence. But for now, it seems to be the best explanation experts have.

Now there have been cases where these sort of exploding fireballs or bolides will cause a false positive, Cornwell told the NYT. It showed up in the data, and its kind of a hunch.

READ MORE: Did a meteor explode over New Hampshire? That may explain the boom [The New York Times]

More on New Hampshire: Residents Heard an Earth-Shattering Explosion and Experts Have No Idea What it Was

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Meteor May Have Caused Huge Explosion Over New Hampshire, Scientists Say - Futurism

In 2013, Wang Yaping became the country's second female astronaut. Tomorrow, she's going back.Crewed Up

China has unveiled the crew for its Shenzou 13 mission to the countrys brand new Tiangong space station, including the first female astronaut to venture to the outpost, the South China Morning Post reports.

Wang Yaping will spend six months on board the space station the countrys longest crewed mission to date alongside astronauts Zhai Zhigang and Ye Guangfu. She could also become the first female Chinese astronaut to complete a spacewalk.

After eight years of relentless effort, I am going back to space again, Wang told reporters on Thursday, as quoted by SCMP. Students, let me know what you want to learn this time. I will prepare a great lecture for you in orbit.

Yaping became Chinas second female astronaut to go to space during her stay on board the Shenzhou 10 spacecraft. The small capsule orbited the Earth in 2013 and docked with the Tiangong-1, an early prototype space station.

The countrys first female astronaut was Liu Yang, who traveled to space as part of the Shenzhou 9 mission in 2012, eight and a half years after Chinas first-ever crewed mission.

Zhai trained with the European Space Agency and is fluent in English. That makes him an important part of the countrys efforts to host other countries on the Tiangong space station, SCMP reports.

The crew will be tasked with working on other modules of the space station and carrying out scientific experiments.

China has big plans to finish the construction of its Tiangong space station. Next year, the countrys space agency is planning to complete six missions, including two crewed missions and the addition of two new modules housing laboratories.

The team will also have a reason to celebrate. The astronauts on the upcoming missionwill be the first Chinese astronauts to celebrate Lunar New Year in space, according to SCMP.

READ MORE: China unveils Shenzhou 13 crew for next mission to Tiangong space station [South China Morning Post]

More on Chinas space program: The Bunks in the Chinese Space Station Are Absolutely Enormous

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China Is Sending the First Woman Astronaut to Its Brand New Space Station - Futurism

Humor seems to be a valuable tool for schoolchildren.Clown School

According to scientists, that class clown from seventh grade may have been the brightest kid in the room.

It turns out that humor ability and overall intelligence are tightly linked in middle-school-aged children, according to research published in the International Journal of Humor Research.

We were particularly interested in the quality of humor made by children but evaluated by adults, lead study author and Anadolu University researcher Ugur Sak said in a press release. Parents and teachers should be aware that if their children or students frequently make good quality humor, it is highly likely that they have extraordinary intelligence.

Also interesting about the study is the revelation that children seem to use humor for different purposes than adults do.

While humor is frequently used for entertainment by adults, children use it mostly for peer acceptance, Sak said in the release. Therefore, the nature of adult and child humor differ.

In order to determine which students were funnier and smarter, the researchers arranged for experts to rate the captions that 217 middle school kids wrote for a series of ten cartoons. The experts, who the paper describes as cartoonists and humor education instructors, judged the cartoons for comedic value and relevance, finding that the students with greater verbal reasoning skills as well as more generalized measures of intelligence also happened to be the funniest.

Perhaps its not surprising that the better wordsmiths were able to conjure up better jokes, but the study does seem valuable as a way to measure students progress in school and find ways to improve their education.

READ MORE: Class act: Clever children tell better jokes [De Groyter]

More on humor: 10 of the Most Futuristic April Fools Jokes So Far

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Scientists Find That "Class Clowns" Are Actually the Smartest People in Class - Futurism

The organizer claims there was foul play.Raining Drones

In an eerie bit of imagery, drones literally started raining from the sky in Zhengzhou, a city of 10 million people in the Chinese province of Henan.

Videos shared on social media show a constellation of drones starting to quickly lose altitude before clattering down on the ground. Onlookers can be seen jumping out of the way to avoid getting struck by the small drones.

The incident involved about 200 drones which were up in the sky forming the name of a nearby shopping mall, according to Vice. Spectators then started shouting, warning of the falling drones as the scene descended into chaos.

More and more drones came off, a spectator told Vice. Some flew very far away, and some hit the trees.

While the exact cause of the failure has yet to be confirmed, rumors are now swirling that a rival drone maker was interfering. The shows organizer reported the incident to local police, alleging a competitor was at fault, causing the drones to fall out of the sky by overwhelming their navigation systems using transmitters, according to Drone DJ.

Its not the first time drones rained down from the skies. In October 2018, 46 drones plummeted from the sky during a display over Victoria Harbor in Hong Kong. Officials at the time suspected somebody was using radio jammers from the ground to force them to crash, according to the South China Morning Post.

READ MORE: This Is What Happens When a Drone Light Show Fails [Vice]

More on drones: Check Out This Awesome Drone Footage From Inside a Hurricane

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Light Show Goes Wrong When Drones Start Plummeting Out of the Sky - Futurism

At one point, he received a letter that opened with "a puff of powder."Abuse and Harassment

A new National Geographic documentary sheds light on the abuse topUS infectious diseases specialist Anthony Fauci has had to endure since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

These fucking dark web people are really, really getting bad, he told AIDS activist Peter Staley last year in the documentary, as quoted by Insider. I mean, theyre really, really harassing Chris, referring to his wife Christine Grady.

Even his daughters were constantly targeted, according to Fauci.

The documentary paints a grim picture of the most recent chapter in US history, a time when misinformation and extremist beliefs flourished and those who furthered trustworthy and scientifically accurate information became the scapegoat.

Things got so bad last summer that Fauci and his entire family were assigned personal security. Far-right extremists and conspiracy theorists were making serious threats while the Trump administration was actively attempting to undermine him.

One of them called up with violent threats like eight times today on [Christines] cell phone, until she figured I gotta just change my cell phone,' Fauci said in the documentary.

Fauci was even sent a letter that opened with a puff of powder.

It was on my shirt, my tie, my pants, my hands, and my chin, Fauci recalled. The first thing I thought of was holy shit, why did I open up this letter?'

As a precaution, Fauci had to get naked and get hosed off, though the powder ultimately turned out to be a hoax.

Fauci has dedicated his entire career to furthering the truth but hes had to pay a steep price as a result.

READ MORE: Fauci rails against dark web people harassing his wife and daughters with violent threats [Insider]

More on Fauci: Fauci Wants To Know Why Three Virus Researchers in Wuhan Got Sick

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Fauci Says People Are Threatening His Wife and Daughters With Violence - Futurism

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A man who was hospitalized and placed on a ventilator for COVID-19, and whose wife later filed suit to force the hospital to treat him with ivermectin, has died.

The man, Jeffrey Smith, was first admitted to the intensive care unit at West Chester Hospital in July. In August, his wife sued the hospital to force it to treat then-intubated husband with ivermectin, a horse dewormer thats become the new hydroxychloroquine: a drug favored by the far-right and anti-vaxxer crowds that doesnt actually seem to help coronavirus patients whatsoever.

Specific details on Smiths death are few and far between, but his attorney told the Fox News affiliate station Fox19 that he passed away in late September. By then, the court order to enforce a prescription from a doctor named Fred Wagshul to treat Smith with ivermectin again, a drug that doesnt effectively fight the coronavirus had been reversed.

Wagshul is the founding physician of a questionable group of doctors called the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, which touts ivermectin as a silver bullet against COVID and, as MedPage Today reports, actually argues that it would be unethical to wait for a clinical trial to show that the drug works.

As the ABC News affiliate network WSB-TV notes, a judge reversed the ivermectin order earlier in September, just two weeks after it was issued, because Wagshul had never actually seen Smith and because Wagshul does not have privileges at West Chester Hospital.

The whole saga is unfortunate, but doctors are using it as an opportunity to remind patients that the best protective measure that we have against COVID is to get vaccinated.

Its the best treatment option that any of us can think of, Ohio Department of Health director Bruce Vanderhoff told Fox19. Actually, a therapeutic preventative, but nevertheless the best medical intervention that weve come up with.

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Wife Sues Hospital to Treat Husband With Ivermectin, Then Husband Dies - Futurism

"Blue is kind of lazy compared to SpaceX," a Blue Origin exec said in 2018.Corporate Retreat

In late 2018, leadership at Jeff Bezoss spaceflight company Blue Origin was so concerned about falling behind Elon Musks SpaceX that they hired management consultants to figure out what they were doing wrong.

The consultants gave a briefing to about a dozen senior leaders Blue Origin, and some of those executives notes were recently obtained by Ars Technica. They show that the company was obsessed with figuring out where SpaceX was beating them areas like talent acquisition, low-cost launches, and design so they could catch up.

But, given SpaceXs utter dominance in the commercial spaceflight industry and the fact that Blue Origin has never launched an orbital flight, it seems that the briefing didnt work.

The notes suggest that Blue Origins focus was on emulating SpaceXs success in no small part by trying to copy its business strategy. For instance, consultants identified that SpaceX was claiming a bigger chunk of the market by offering drastically cheaper launches and by putting more stock in customer satisfaction than was typical for the industry.

They have a customer focus, a Blue Origin executive wrote at the time, according to Ars. We should too. In many cases we view the customer as a nuisance. This is the case with LSA (Launch Services Agreement, or the US Space Force), satellite launch for NG (satellite customers for the New Glenn rocket), and astronauts for NS (New Shepard). We need to change this culture.

One key problem identified by briefing was that the consultants and Blue Origin leadership felt that their employees werent delivering as much as SpaceXs were.

Blue is kind of lazy compared to SpaceX, one executive wrote, according to Ars. I often work off-hours and weekends, just the nature of the business. Blue is a ghost town on weekends, and Im sure people are working, but I do think we have quite a bit of heroic high performers picking up the slack too often.

Ultimately, the briefing clearly didnt solve the companys problems. The gap between SpaceX and Blue Origin is far wider now than it was in 2018 so either Blue Origin moved in the wrong direction, or SpaceX simply continued to outpace it.

READ MORE: Revealed: The secret notes of Blue Origin leaders trying to catch SpaceX [Ars Technica]

More on Blue Origin: Jeff Bezos Grits Teeth To Congratulate Elon Musk, Who Makes Fun of Him Constantly

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Leaked Documents Show That Blue Origin Was Obsessed With SpaceX - Futurism

The Starliner crew is hitching a ride with SpaceX instead.Getting Impatient

NASA gave a routine astronaut assignment announcement on Wednesday. But reading between the lines, it seems that the space agency is throwing some serious shade at one of its top contractors.

Astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada were reassigned and will now serve as commander and pilot, respectively, of the Crew-5 SpaceX launch next year, according to NASA. Thats routine enough, but the duo had already been assigned to crewed missions with the Boeing Starliner and, simply put, NASAseems to have decided that the problem-riddled spacecraft was just taking too long.

Mann and Cassada previously were assigned to missions on NASAs Boeing Crew Flight Test and NASAs Boeing Starliner-1 mission, respectively, reads the announcement. NASA decided it was important to make these reassignments to allow Boeing time to complete the development of Starliner while continuing plans for astronauts to gain spaceflight experience for the future needs of the agencys missions.

In short, the Starliner is so behind schedule that its started to create problems for NASAs commercial crew program.

For years, development of the Starliner has been plagued by delays, failed launches, and mysterious problems. The problems have been so bad that even Roscosmos started to mock Boeing by offering to help repair a Starliner spacecraft that broke during a preflight test.

Mann and Cassada will still fly with the Starliner crew in addition to their new SpaceX assignments if it ever gets off the ground. But as NASA noted in the announcement, it wouldnt be fair to them or good for NASA to deny them valuable flight experience until whenever it is that Boeing figures out how to build a working spacecraft.

READ MORE: NASA Announces Astronaut Changes for Upcoming Commercial Crew Missions [NASA]

More on the Starliner: Starliner Launch Delayed Capping Off NASAs Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Week

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NASA Quietly Signals That Boeing's Spacecraft Is Going Nowhere - Futurism

They're not even getting work emails right now.Rotten Day

Facebook is having an absolutely rotten day.

The platform is down due to an apparent issue with its DNS servers. That means its missing out in untold millions of dollars in revenue. The company was down almost five percent in share values Monday morning, according to MarketWatch. Its the companys worst outage since 2008 and we have no idea what caused it.

Even Facebooks internal communications tools were knocked out, leaving employees scrambling. Worse yet, some employees reportedly couldnt even physically get to work because the companys computer systems had failed on such a basic level.

Was just on phone with someone who works for FB who described employees unable to enter buildings this morning to begin to evaluate extent of outage because their badges werent working to access doors, The New York Times reporter Sheera Frenkel wrote in a tweet.

Employees also struggled with making calls from work-issued cellphones, according to Frenkels report, and more cant access conference rooms that are also on the companys computer system.

And Workplace, Facebooks internal communications platform, is also down, meaning that its effectively a snow day for much of the company, according to the Times.

Its been a tough couple of weeks for the company, which was already facing a mountain of scrutiny before the outage hit. Facebook has been under fire by lawmakers after the company announced plans to launch Instagram Kids, a highly controversial new product aimed at minors.

The news also comes a day after Frances Haugen, a former Facebook manager and whistleblower behind the leak of a gigantic cache of documents, came was interviewed by CBS.

For now, all we can is wait for Facebook to make its eventual return. According to a tweet by New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac, Facebook has dispatched a small team to one of its California data centers to try and manually reset its servers in an attempt to fix the problem.

Its an unusually quiet day on the internet but it certainly not for Facebooks crisis response team.

More on the outage: Fact Check: Is Facebook Down Because 1.5 Billion Users Data Was Stolen?

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Facebook Employees Have Reportedly Been Locked Out of Company Offices - Futurism