Boeing has come under increasing pressure following a number of safety incidents involving its aircraft.
The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) on Thursday issued “urgent safety recommendations” regarding the rudder systems on certain Boeing 737 aircraft, highlighting a risk of jamming.
It came after a February 6 incident involving a Boeing 737 MAX 8 operated by United Airlines, whose rudder pedals were “stuck” in the neutral position while on the tarmac after landing at Newark airport in New Jersey.
None of the 155 passengers and six crew members were hurt, the NTSB said, with the captain using the nose landing gear controls to steer the plane.
Boeing has come under increasing pressure following a number of safety incidents involving its aircraft. It did not immediately respond to an AFP request for comment.
The cause of the February incident was found to be the rollout guidance actuator, one of the rudder control components, with tests revealing it was susceptible to moisture which could “freeze and limit rudder system movement,” the NTSB said.
The faulty actuator was manufactured by US company Collins Aerospace, it added.
“Collins notified Boeing that more than 353 actuators that Collins had delivered to Boeing since February 2017 were affected by this condition,” the NTSB said.
The part is installed in the tail of some Boeing 737 NG and 737 MAX airplanes.
The Federal Aviation Authority said it would convene a corrective action review board on Friday based on the NTSB’s recommendations to determine next steps.
Boeing has been under close regulator scrutiny since an in-flight incident involving an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 aircraft in early January.
That event saw a door plug blow out mid-flight, leaving a hole in the side of the aircraft.
Boeing’s quality control and production processes had already been called into question after the crashes of two 737 MAX aircraft in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people.
In March, the US aviation giant reshuffled its leadership, with new boss Kelly Ortberg taking over on August 8.
Ortberg had headed Rockwell Collins, the company which later became Collins Aerospace, from 2013 to 2018.
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A group of startingly colorful specimens from Indonesia were among the handful that New Zealander John McArthur couldn’t bear to part with.
A New Zealand enthusiast spent half a century amassing one of the world’s largest private butterfly collections. As death nears, he has handed this life’s work of 20,000 specimens to a museum.
Wheelchair-bound and ravaged by multiple sclerosis, 68-year-old John McArthur vividly recalls the first time he saw a butterfly.
He was 10 years old and it was a shock of yellow and black, a swallowtail butterfly flitting among the zinnia flowers in his mother’s New York garden.
“I was mesmerized,” McArthur says, recounting the first step of a journey that would take him from the Amazon to the Himalayas, the Andes back to his native New Zealand.
Over nearly 60 years, he collected more than 20,000 specimens, a kaleidoscope of color and life that he painstakingly pinned into hundreds of boxes that lined the walls of his home.
McArthur also remembers the last time he caught a butterfly.
It was during a 2008 visit to the achingly beautiful Cobb Valley, in New Zealand’s South Island.
He happened across a boulder copper butterfly. Quickly slinging aside his crutches, he dropped to his knees to scoop up the diminutive wonder.
Soon enough, that kind of effort would be too much.
By that time, he had already felt a tingling sensation in his spine. Doctors diagnosed multiple sclerosis, an incurable disease of the central nervous system.
John McArthur, a longtime butterfly collector now living with multiple scleroris, told AFP it was ‘humbling’ to find his collection a home at London’s Natural History Museum.
“A specialist told me I would probably need a walking stick within 15 years,” McArthur remembers. “But six months after the diagnosis, I was in a wheelchair.”
The disease has now robbed McArthur of the use of his hands and legs, and his speech is labored.
But his mind remains sharp, recalling specimen names and locations where he found his favorite butterflies.
High price
Faced with his own mortality, McArthur resolved to find the thousands of beloved butterfly specimens a new home, somewhere they could find a new life after his death.
He ruled out donating to a New Zealand museum: “They just don’t have the facilities” he said.
“You need climate control, very rigorous pest control. Accepting a large collection has quite a price tag.”
Instead, he chose the Natural History Museum in London, paying to ship his collection from Wellington to London this April.
“I had mixed emotions—sad to see it go, but absolutely thrilled that it was going where it would be useful.”
Javan butterflies from McArthur’s collection.
His Lepidoptera were merged into the museum’s vast collection, which contains about 13.5 million butterflies, housed in 80,000 drawers.
Some of McArthur’s favorites are now kept alongside specimens studied by Charles Darwin, the 19th-century naturalist who popularized the theory of evolution.
“For a collector, that’s quite a big deal. It’s humbling,” McArthur added.
Deadly viper
The walls of the room that once housed his butterflies have now been torn down and the space converted into a laundry.
“I never went in there again once they were gone. It felt like a black hole,” he said.
All that remains are a handful of butterflies he couldn’t bear to part with.
They include a box of startlingly colorful specimens from Indonesia, a riot of orange, red, yellow, neon blue and bone white
McArthur disliked killing the butterflies—harming the thing he loved.
James Hu (L), McCarthur’s husband and caregiver, opens a drawer with a collection of butterflies at their house in Karori, a suburb of Wellington.
“It’s never nice”—and the best method was crushing the thorax where the wings join the body—”they die instantly”.
“If I enter Buddhist hell, I’m sure I’ll end up with thousands of pins through me,” he said.
But the New Zealander’s eyes light up when discussing some of the mischief his collecting caused.
As a child, he once cut the lining of his mother’s gown to make a butterfly net.
“I didn’t catch anything. The material was too stiff, but she was understanding of my passion.”
Eventually, he followed in his father’s footsteps becoming a diplomat, allowing exploration in several continents.
In the Peruvian rainforest, he had a dangerous brush with a bushmaster viper—one of the world’s most venomous snakes.
His greatest find—a white female Hypsochila—which lives only in the high Andes also came with trouble.
After netting the rare specimen, he was questioned by Chilean police, who accused him of consorting with smugglers.
While collecting Peruvian butterflies (pictured), McArthur had a close call with a bushmaster viper, one of the world’s most venomous snakes.
“They said the person who took me up there was a gun runner. The police let me go, but that was a pretty close call.”
His husband and now caregiver James Hu, who McArthur met in the 1990s when posted in Shanghai, became an accomplice on hunts.
With a chuckle, Hu recalled how he once nervously kept watch for monks from a Buddhist temple while McArthur scoured a nearby field for Chinese peacock butterflies in the foothills of the Himalayas.
If he had his time again, McArthur said he would rather help protect, not collect, butterflies.
“I’d be more interested in breeding—doing whatever it might take to enhance the protection of their habitat.”
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Ailing New Zealand butterfly collector gives away life’s work (2024, September 27)
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Stelios Haji-Ioannou is fighting to protect the ‘easy’ brand through court action.
Daring to prefix a company or even a pop group’s name with “easy” could land you with legal action, as the founder of British airline easyJet relentlessly tackles alleged trademark breaches.
Greek-Cypriot tycoon Stelios Haji-Ioannou, whose easyGroup still has links with the carrier, has set out to protect the “easy” brand by threatening court action against anyone deemed to be profiting from the name.
A formal complaint made by the man simply known as Stelios recently forced British indie pop band Easy Life, which also adorned posters with an aircraft showing a likeness to an easyJet plane, into changing its name. It chose Hard Life.
‘Easy come, easy go’
“The problem with small brand thieves if they are left unchecked is that they become profitable and they grow,” an easyGroup spokesman told AFP in relation to numerous ongoing lawsuits.
“Most of these cases never come to open court as the brand thieves realize that they are in the wrong and make changes to the satisfaction of easyGroup,” he added.
Hard Life still gives a nod to its past, with the band’s account on X carrying the title message “easy come, easy go”.
Ahead of releasing a new song in June it wrote on the social platform: “Safe to say the last nine months haven’t been easy.”
EasyGroup and Stelios, who lives in Monaco, insist that their actions are in the interest of the consumer, to avoid confusion and preserve the company’s image.
The spokesman added that “most of easyGroup’s profits” go into the Stelios Philanthropic Foundation.
The easyGroup model sees it receive royalties from licensing its brand to third parties. It receives, for example, 0.25 percent of easyJet’s revenue, while the Haji-Ioannou family still owns 15 percent of the carrier.
Around 1,200 official “easy” brands exist, from gambling business easyBet to easyGym, easyHotel and dating site easyWoo—many of which exhibit the same typeface and orange/white color scheme.
‘David and Goliath’
Unofficial “easy” companies contacted by AFP cited colossal legal fees as the reason for backing down and changing their names when pursued by easyGroup.
“As a small business it was incredibly hard to keep up financially with solicitor fees so for me I am happy to leave this behind me,” said Jozsef Spekker, owner of Stoke Jetwash.
The driveway-cleaning business was known as Easy Jetwash until August.
The new name takes the name of the city where his small business is based in central England.
An intellectual property law specialist at the London School of Economics, Luke McDonagh, described such cases as “David and Goliath battles”.
“Some people call this trademark bullying, where essentially Goliath takes a case against a David, a small company that really has no resources and cannot fight back,” he told AFP.
“It’s not just easyGroup, it would be wrong to single them out, a lot of big companies do this,” he added, citing Apple, L’Oreal and television broadcaster Sky as prime examples.
McDonagh believes easyGroup, whose branding extends to cruise company easyBoat and household-products firm easyCleaning, “has been going too far in taking so many cases against these small entities”.
“The purpose of trademark law is not to give an unlimited monopoly on a word. It might be different if it was an entirely made-up word, but ‘easy’ is such a common word in the English language that other companies need to be able to use it in a reasonable way.”
‘War of attrition’
EasyGroup has enjoyed “many legal (trademark) victories over the years”, the spokesman said, but setbacks have arisen, including one this month.
The High Court in London ruled in favor of online platform easyfundraising, which is hoping to recover around £1.0 million ($1.3 million) in legal fees, despite an appeal hanging over the company.
“It’s like a war of attrition, and they just hope that ultimately companies give in, because it’s too long, it’s too much hassle, it’s too expensive,” easyfundraising chief executive James Moir told AFP.
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EasyJet founder makes life hard for ‘brand thieves’ (2024, September 27)
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Monopoles of orbital angular momentum (OAM) are a tantalizing prospect for orbitronics because OAM is uniform in all directions. This would mean that information flows could be generated in any direction. Credit: Paul Scherrer Institute / Monika Bletry
Orbital angular momentum monopoles have been the subject of great theoretical interest as they offer major practical advantages for the emerging field of orbitronics, a potential energy-efficient alternative to traditional electronics. Now, through a combination of robust theory and experiments at the Swiss Light Source SLS at Paul Scherrer Institute PSI, their existence has been demonstrated. The discovery is published in the journal Nature Physics.
Whereas electronics uses the charge of the electron to transfer information, technology of the future with less environmental impact might use a different property of electrons to process information. Until recently, the main contender for a different type of ‘tronics’ has been spintronics. Here, the property used to transfer information is the spin of the electron.
Researchers are also exploring the possibility of using the orbital angular momentum (OAM) of electrons orbiting their atomic nucleus: an emerging field known as orbitronics. This field holds great promise for memory devices, particularly because a large magnetization could potentially be generated with relatively small charge currents, leading to energy-efficient devices. The million-dollar question now is identifying the right materials to generate flows of OAMs, a prerequisite for orbitronics.
Now an international research team led by scientists from Paul Scherrer Institute PSI and Max Planck Institutes in Halle and Dresden in Germany have shown that chiral topological semi-metals, a new class of materials discovered at PSI in 2019, possess properties that make them a highly practical choice for generating currents of OAMs.
Chiral topological semi-metals: a straightforward solution for orbitronics
In the search for suitable materials for orbitronics, steps forward have already been made using conventional materials such as titanium. Yet since their discovery five years ago, chiral topological semi-metals have become an intriguing contender. These materials possess a helical atomic structure, which gives a natural ‘handedness’ like the DNA double helix and could naturally endow them with patterns or textures of OAM that enable its flow.
“This offers a significant advantage to other materials because you don’t need to apply external stimuli to get OAM textures—they’re an intrinsic property of the material,” explains Michael Schüler, group leader in the Center for Scientific Computing, Theory and Data at PSI, and assistant professor of physics at the University of Fribourg, who co-led the recent study. “This could make it easier to create stable and efficient currents of OAM without needing special conditions.”
The attractive but elusive prospect of orbital angular momentum monopoles
There is one particular OAM texture, hypothesized in chiral topological semi-metals, that has captivated researchers: OAM monopoles. At these monopoles, OAM radiates outwards from a center point like the spikes of a scared hedgehog curled into a ball.
Why these monopoles are so tantalizing is that OAM is uniform in all directions: i.e. it is isotropic. “This is a very useful property as it means flows of OAMs could be generated in any direction,” says Schüler.
Yet despite the attraction of OAM monopoles for orbitronics, until this latest study, they have remained a theoretical dream.
Hedgehogs hide between theory and experiment
To observe them experimentally, hope has lain with a technique known as Circular Dichroism in Angle-Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy, or CD-ARPES, using circularly polarized X-rays from a synchrotron light source. Yet a gap between theory and experiment has in the past hindered researchers from interpreting the data. “Researchers may have had the data, but the evidence for OAM monopoles was buried in it,” says Schüler.
In ARPES, light shines on a material, ejecting electrons. The angles and energies of these ejected electrons reveal information on the electronic structure of the material. In CD-ARPES, the incident light is circularly polarized.
“A natural assumption is that if you use circularly polarized light, you are measuring something that is directly proportional to the OAMs,” explains Schüler. “The problem is, as we show in our study, this turns out to be a somewhat naïve assumption. In reality, it’s rather more complex.”
Rigor plugs the gap
In their study, Schüler and colleagues examined two types of chiral topological semi-metals at the Swiss Light Source SLS: those made of palladium and gallium or platinum and gallium. Determined to reveal the OAM textures hidden within the complex web of CD-ARPES data, the team challenged every assumption with rigorous theory.
Then they took an unusual, and crucial, extra experimental step of varying the photon energies. “At first, the data didn’t make sense. The signal seemed to be changing all over the place,” says Schüler.
Meticulously unpicking how different contributions complicated calculations of OAM from CD-ARPES data, they revealed that the CD-ARPES signal was not directly proportional to the OAMs, as previously believed, but rotated around the monopoles as the photon energy was changed. In this way, they bridged the gap between theory and experiment and proved the presence of OAM monopoles.
Doors open to exploring orbital angular momentum textures in new materials
Armed with the ability to accurately visualize OAM monopoles, Schüler and colleagues went on to show that the polarity of the monopole—whether the spikes of OAMs point inwards or outwards—could be reversed by using a crystal with a mirror image chirality. “This is a very useful property, as orbitronics devices could potentially be created with different directionality,” says Schüler.
Now, with theory and experiment finally united, the wider research community are equipped with the means to explore OAM textures across a variety of materials and optimize their applications for orbitronics.
More information:
Controllable orbital angular momentum monopoles in chiral topological semimetals, Nature Physics (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41567-024-02655-1
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Orbital angular momentum monopoles discovery propels orbitronics forward in energy-efficient tech (2024, September 27)
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Advertising revenue — the lifeline of news publications — has dried up in recent years.
From disinformation campaigns to soaring skepticism, plummeting trust and economic slumps, the global media landscape has been hit with blow after blow.
World News Day, taking place on Saturday with the support of hundreds of organizations including AFP, aims to raise awareness about the challenges endangering the hard-pressed industry.
‘Broken business model’
In 2022, UNESCO warned that “the business model of the news media is broken”.
Advertising revenue—the lifeline of news publications—has dried up in recent years, with Internet giants such as Google and Facebook owner Meta soaking up half of that spending, the report said.
Meta, Amazon and Google’s parent company Alphabet alone account for 44 percent of global ad spend, while only 25 percent goes to traditional media organizations, according to a study by the World Advertising Research Center.
Platforms like Facebook “are now explicitly deprioritising news and political content”, the Reuters Institute’s 2024 Digital News Report pointed out.
Traffic from social to news sites has sharply declined as a result, causing a drop in revenue.
Few are keen to pay for news. Only 17 percent of people polled across 20 wealthy countries said they had online news subscriptions in 2023.
Such trends, leading to rising costs, have resulted in “layoffs, closures, and other cuts” in media organizations around the world, the study found.
Eroding trust
Public trust in the media has increasingly eroded in recent years.
Only four in 10 respondents said they trusted news most of the time, the Reuters Institute reported.
Meanwhile, young people are relying more on influencers and content creators than newspapers to stay informed.
For them, video is king, with the study citing the influence of TikTok and YouTube stars such as American Vitus Spehar and Frenchman Hugo Travers, known for his channel HugoDecrypte.
Growing disinformation
The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) has renewed concerns about disinformation—rife on social platforms—as the tool can generate convincing text and images.
In the United States, partisan websites masquerading as media outlets now outnumber American newspaper sites, the research group NewsGuard, which tracks misinformation, said in June.
“Pink slime” outlets—politically motivated websites that present themselves as independent local news outlets —are largely powered by AI. This appears to be an effort to sway political beliefs ahead of the US election.
As part of a national crackdown on disinformation, Brazil’s Supreme Court suspended access to Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter.
The court accused the social media platform of refusing to remove accounts charged with spreading fake news, and flouting other judicial rulings.
“Eradicating disinformation seems impossible, but things can be implemented,” Reporters Without Borders (RSF) editorial director Anne Bocande told AFP.
Platforms can bolster regulation and create news reliability indicators, like RSF’s Journalism Trust Initiative, Bocande said.
Alarming new player
AI has pushed news media into unchartered territory.
US streaming platform Peacock introduced AI-generated custom match reports during the Paris Olympics this year, read with the voice of sports commentator Al Michaels—fueling fears AI could replace journalists.
Despite these concerns, German media giant Axel Springer has decided to bet on AI while refocusing on its core news activities.
At its roster, which includes Politico, the Bild tabloid, Business Insider and Die Welt daily, AI will focus on menial production tasks so journalists can dedicate their time to reporting and securing scoops.
In a bid to profit from the technology’s rise, the German publisher as well as The Associated Press and The Financial Times signed content partnerships with start-up OpenAI.
But the Microsoft-backed firm is also caught in a major lawsuit with The New York Times over copyright violations.
‘Quiet repression’
With journalists frequently jailed, killed and attacked worldwide, “repression is a major issue,” said RSF’s Bocande.
A total of 584 journalists are languishing behind bars because of their work—with China, Belarus and Myanmar the world’s most prolific jailers of reporters.
The war in Gaza sparked by Palestinian militant group Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel has already left a “terrible” mark on press freedom, Bocande added.
More than 130 journalists have been killed by Israeli airstrikes since October 7, 2023, including 32 while “in the exercise of their duties”.
She said a “quiet repression” campaign is underway in countries around the world, including in democracies—with investigative journalism hampered by fresh laws on national security.
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‘Broken’ news industry faces uncertain future (2024, September 27)
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