ISS “Firestation” to Explore the Tops of Thunderstorms

Sometimes, Earth mimics a supernova, producing a Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flash from the tops of thunderstorms. A new lightning sensor on the International Space Station could solve the mystery of these energetic bursts.

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US colleges train students in drone warfare as job opportunities beckon

A growing number of US universities now offer degree programs for students hoping to study the military technology of the future: drones. Flying an unmanned aerial device is now a viable career in a world of growing surveillance and fewer job options.

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida became the first American university to offer postgraduate education in drone warfare this autumn, opening a program that promises students job security right after school – when many of their friends could be moving back in with their parents.
Drones are most often in the headlines for eliminating suspected terrorists in Yemen and regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and more controversially for inadvertently killing civilians in those countries. But the technology has also become increasingly popular with police patrolling international borders, environmentalists studying oceanic regions, and meteorologists observing hurricane patterns.
Students who complete the six-month training program at Embry-Riddle will graduate with a master’s degree and job prospects offering a starting salary of US$150,000 a year.
“We’re trying to prepare our students so they’re ready to operate at the highest levels,” Dan Maccharella, department chair of aeronautical sciences at Embry-Riddle, told AP. “It’s going to take off like a rocket. We had students go through the program as fast as they could to get out there.”
Other schools, while not offering a master’s program, do offer drone training classes. Drone pilots can earn anywhere between $50,000 and $120,000 a year, said Jeb Bailey, who trained at Northwestern Michigan College. He told The Daily that for a student who is approaching graduation and swimming in college loans, the job often comes down to simple math.
“The idea of going to Afghanistan and paying off all my loans – that’s very attractive,” Bailey said. “In an airlines career path you don’t expect to make a whole lot until you’ve been in the industry 20 years.”
A spokesman for Unmanned Applications Institute International, an aerial technology advocacy group, said the “pilotless aircraft industry” is expected to create more than 23,000 American jobs over the next 15 years.
Congress and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) have yet to approve laws that would allow private drones to fly freely over American soil – but if and when they do, drones proponents say the job market will explode.
“I didn’t get into flying airplanes to do this, but I fell into it because it was lucrative,” John Bounds, a 2006 graduate of Embry-Riddle who now serves as a flight instructor, told AP. “The salary this experience offered was competitive with what I could make as a pilot with 15 years of experience.”

NASA Admits Alcubierre Drive Initiative: Faster Than The Speed Of Light

NASA is currently working on the first practical field test toward the possibility of faster than light travel. Traveling faster than light has always been attributed to science fiction, but that all changed when Harold White and his team at NASA started to work on and tweak the Alcubierre Drive. Special relativity may hold true, but to travel faster or at the speed of light we might not need a craft that can travel at that speed. The solution might be to place a craft within a space that is moving faster than the speed of light! Therefore the craft itself does not have to travel at the speed of light from it’s own type of propulsion system.
It’s easier to think about if you think in terms of a flat escalator in an airport. The escalator moves faster than you are walking! In this case, the space encompassing the ship would be moving faster than the ship could fly, keeping all the matter of the ship intact. Therefore, we can move faster than light, in a massless cloud of space-time.
What is the Alcubierre Drive? It’s actually based on Einsteins field equations, it suggests that a spacecraft could achieve faster-than-light travel. Rather than exceed the speed of light alone in a craft, a spacecraft would leap long distances by contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind it. This would result in faster than light travel (1). Physicist Miguel Alcubierre was the first that we know to identify this possibility. He described it as remaining still on a flat piece of space-time inside a warp bubble that was made to move at “superluminal” (faster than light) velocity. We must not forget that space-time can be warped and distorted, it can be moved. But what about moving sections of space-time that’s created by expanding space-time behind the ship, and by contracting space-time in front of the ship?
This type of concept was also recently illustrated by Mathematician James Hill and Barry Cox at the University of Adelaide. They published a paper in the journal proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical and Physical Sciences (3).
It was once believed that Einsteins theory of special relativity means that faster than light travel is just not possible. This is a misconception, special relativity simply states that the distance you travel depends on how fast you move, for how long you’re moving for. So if you are driving at 70 mph you will have covered 70 miles in one hour. The confusing part is that, no matter how fast you are moving you will always see the speed of light as being the same. It’s similar to sound, if you close your eyes and imagine that the only sense you have is hearing, you will identify things by how they sound. So if a car is driving at a rapid speed and honks its horn, we know that the horn is always tooting the same tone, it’s just the car’s motion that made it appear to change.