According to Professor Doug Drury, the Head of Aviation at Central Queensland University in Australia, yes. Though the recent spate of flight incidents related to Boeing aircraft earlier this year may be a cause for concern, Drury says we shouldn't ring too many alarms over them.

Although the quality assurance protocols at Boeing will need to be investigated and carefully checked, the recent incidents that have happened, according to Drury, are not all completely Boeing's fault.

In fact, the five incidents wherein an engine caught fire, a tire fell off after takeoff, a plane skidded over grass, and rudder pedal was stuck, were mostly maintenance issues which would land outside the scope of the manufacturer's control.

The Alaska Airlines flight in which the door accidentally got ripped from the plane was most likely the fault of Boeing's manufacturing and quality assurance protocols. However, it was apparently a subcontractor, Spirit AeroSystem, who did not install and bolt the door properly causing the accident mid-flight.

Still, that is not to absolve Boeing of all responsibility over these incidents. The FAA will monitor Boeing's processes closely which should bring its priority back to quality over profit, a paradigm that shifted when Airbus became a major competitor in the early 2000s.

Moreover, since many employees had been laid off during the pandemic, the company is currently training new blood who will be replacing those who were retrenched. And it's going to take time to train this new staff of engineers and maintenance personnel.

At the moment, Boeing is in the midst of correction and a transition period. So, as Professor Drury states, there is no need to panic over Boeing planes as we can hope to see changes effected. Of course, for one's own safety, people can still choose not to fly on Boeing planes, which will be a sign to the company that they need to reconsider their policies and priorities.

(Image credit: Etienne Jong/Unsplash)

Unless your glasses have thick, dark rims, you might want to skip buying sheets or bed covers with a busy pattern. Redditor hexafocal looked for his glasses for three hours before he found them -a task we all know is harder when you aren't wearing your glasses. He posted this image to the subreddit AccidentalCamouflage to show us how hard it was to find them. I had to enlarge the picture twice to find them, and I'm wearing my glasses! This is one reason I keep an older pair around for emergency use. To be fair, hexafocal would have found them faster if he'd remembered that he left them on the bed, then at least he could have felt around with his hands. If you decide to give up the hunt, here they are with the ever helpful red circle. Even then, you might need to put on your glasses to see them. -via Digg

At the very least, that's what a research conducted by the Global Consciousness Project tried to determine. They wanted to know if collective thought and sentiment, expressed prior to a negative event, may actually point to the fact that a wider swathe of the population have a premonition about future, unpredictable events. Can we sense the future?

Presentiment or the "predictive physiological anticipation" effect is a phenomenon described by the way our bodies react before a certain unpredictable event happens. If there is any scientific basis to say that such an ability exists, then we might have to probe into the connection between human consciousness and the world around us.

We know that certain animals have a sense about them of impending danger, since they are able to notice changes in the environment, vibrations within the earth, or they have some kind of instinctive mechanism in their physiology that tells them that something wrong is about to happen.

Usually, such senses are felt moments before the actual event happens, and by then, it might be too late. So, the researchers at the GCP wanted to see if public sentiment days or weeks before a negative unpredictable event happens would correlate. And if so, then it might be a possible predictor for future events.

To be able to remove any biases that could distort the data, the team isolated incidents or events that were significantly more negative than other days, and separated events which come immediately after another negative event since they might have been affected by the first event. Also, they evaluated the events to see if they were truly unpredictable, and then compared tweets from two days to two weeks before the chosen events happened.

From their analysis, they found that preceding the events, general sentiment had followed a negative trend, which then culminated in the unforeseeable negative events. Now, whether these meant that humans could feel that an impending negative event was about to happen, much like animals could sense natural disasters, is uncertain at best.

There's a possibility that the downward trend in sentiment may not be related to any future events happening, but it could just point to the social or political climate at the time. This would require the selection of events to be truly independent of other factors that could have influenced people's sentiment for the results to be truly significant.

But the researchers believe that the study may suggest that the collective mood of society at present may be affected by the emotional reactions to a future event, in a sort of backwards ripple effect. Whether or not this is truly the case, we cannot say for certain.

(Image credit: Ivan Lapyrin/Unsplash)

Culture can be defined as the set of learned behaviors, customs, or norms, that have been passed on through observation or instruction within a social group. Through thousands of years of iteration and incremental progress, humans have gone a long way in developing culture, passing it on from one generation to the next, and also changing parts of culture to keep up with the changing times.

Animals have been observed to have the capacity for culture as well, mostly seen in Japanese macaques, crows, and even sheep. But these are mostly vertebrate animals, and it was unthinkable or rather, it was assumed that this capacity was not present in invertebrates. It was thought that the behaviors exhibited by invertebrates like bees were innate or instinctive. However, a research has shown that there is a possibility that invertebrates like bees may have the capacity for culture.

It's the first step toward determining whether bees can develop their own culture. The first thing that the researchers needed to do was to design an experiment in which bees would have to solve a complex two-step puzzle. To any humans, such a feat may be simple, but to a bee, it is considered extremely difficult.

The experiment was designed by UK behavioral ecologist Alice Bridges who was curious about the concept of culture in invertebrates being innate. She wanted to see if there was a possibility that bees could learn socially how to solve this complex problem by observation and demonstration.

First, they had to train some bees to solve the problem, which admitted required a lot of time for trial and error. It required several intermediate rewards so that the bees may figure out the solution. But in time, it became like clockwork for the trained bees.

The next step was to put another bee, which hadn't seen the puzzle and hadn't been trained to solve it, along with the trained bee. This was when the social gears of bees starting turning, and their team found that the bees had the ability to learn and pass on information in similar fashion as other animals that exhibit a capacity for culture.

However, the only issue for bees is that they have a relatively short lifespan, and so being able to pass on knowledge or information may be difficult if, after one generation is born, the previous one dies out right away. Then, it would be quite challenging to develop culture that lasts more than one generation.

Bridges and her team are hopeful, however, that this proves that this kind of socially learned behavior and culture is not exclusive to humans or vertebrates, but that invertebrates may also have the capacity.

(Video credit: nature video/Youtube)

That's right. You read that correctly. Perrikaryal has successfully been able to beat video games with just her mind. She's neither a psychic nor a telepath. She uses Emotiv's EEG headset to record her brain activity and programmed the patterns being picked up by the interface to certain actions or commands.

Originally, the Twitch streamer's dream was to perform stand-up, but because facing a crowd of people on stage was a bit daunting, a friend suggested that she try out streaming first which is akin to a performance but in front of your monitor. And having a master's in psychology, most of the games she played initially were those that had a unique psychological perspective like Superliminal, The Closing Shift, and Detroit: Become Human.

Later on, she was able to buy an Emotiv EEG, which gave a depiction of what was happening inside her brain while she played certain games like horror titles with jumpscares. But as she continued with this gimmick, she discovered that the device had an interesting feature to it.

She found that she could program the interface to detect certain brainwaves or patterns and associate those with command inputs. But it wasn't an easy thing, as she recounts how it took a massive amount of time for trial and error to figure out which specific visualizations could be used for certain actions.

At some point, it took her 600 to 700 times in order to program a certain command input only to find out in the end that it was unreliable, so she had to start all over. However, with enough patience and effort, she was able to map out the right visual prompts to consistently churn out certain commands, and she found herself beating games without using a controller.

First, she practiced with Minecraft, and she found that there were certain visualizations and thought patterns that could be reliably used to make characters do certain actions. Then, she amped up the complexity by trying out different games that have more difficult controls.

That led her to Elden Ring, which is infamous for being one of the most difficult games to beat. But she spent a lot of time training the EEG's interface, and with enough game time, she was able to beat the first boss of the game, Margit the Fell Omen.

She continued upping the complexity and training the interface until such time that she was playing hands-free and beating the hardest bosses of the game, eventually even toppling the most agonizing one, Melania Blade of Miquella.

Since then, she has tried out playing other games like Palworld, Smash Bros., and even Pac-Man, by just simply using her brain as the controller with the help of the EEG.

Not everybody thinks she was actually playing with just her mind, but that encouraged her because she believes that these negative comments only happen because people don't understand the technology and the processes behind her playstyle. But once the information began to spread and people learned more about it, people's perspectives started to shift.

This can be a great means for accessibility in the future. People who may not be able to play using traditional controllers or peripherals will have a chance of playing even the most complicated games through the EEG device or even voice commands and eye-tracking. It's only the beginning.

(Video credit: Perrikaryal/Youtube)

Whether you believe or not in the existence of psychic powers, paranormal experiences, or ESP, we cannot deny that there are certain things that, as of yet, we do not have the capability or technology to explain.

Many people claim to have supernatural abilities or encounters, and we generally dismiss them as being insane or fraudulent. Certainly, we have come to the belief that anything which cannot be scientifically proven or tested, must be fake, a hoax, or nonexistent. And that's just the effect of culture veering away from the mythical to the natural.

But there are people out there who are determined to unravel the truth behind these claims through scientific methods and rigorous experimentation. If those who claim to have psi abilities vehemently stress the reality of such paranormal events, then there must be some way of finding out the truth behind it.

Scientific research is often characterized by three things. They have to be observable, measurable, and replicable. It's the foundation of empirical methods which is what modern science is founded on. And with regard to parapsychology and the supernatural, some scientists have focused on designing methods and experiments that can truly test such claims from psychics, mediums, and espers.

People like Professors Dick Bierman and Suitbert Ertel have worked on the fields of physics and psychology, respectively, for most of their lives and have also looked into the subject of parapsychology and psi phenomena.

And they have approached James Randi, the stage magician and skeptic who was famous for his Million Dollar Challenge which aimed to test the claims of psi-gifted people, as Ertel calls them. Dr. Dean Radin, an educational psychologist and investigator of parapsychological phenomena, also applied for the challenge.

Much controversy has surrounded James Randi's Million Dollar Challenge as well as the organization that conducts it, the JREF (James Randi Educational Foundation), as many who have looked at the rules of the challenge point out that the rules are heavily disadvantageous to applicants, and can be seen as a crusade and polemic against the subject of parapsychology and any who seriously research it.

Instead of a sincere curiosity and interest in learning about the truth of the matter, and looking for scientific analysis of robust data and rigorous experiments that can advance such efforts, proponents say that James Randi's challenge is simply designed to ensure that any applicants fail in order to protect the prize money. It's no earnest quest of testing whether there is some truth to the claims of the existence of psi phenomena.

In this, Mitch Horowitz, a historian and writer of metaphysical themes, criticizes James Randi's brand of skepticism, citing sociologist Marcello Truzzi who called it a form of pseudoskepticism, the objective of which is to lambaste any serious attempt at a scientific inquiry of psi phenomena.

Though there are con artists and frauds who claim they can see the future or communicate through telepathy, there are those with more valid claims and are willing to undergo experimentation to prove them. The research of people such as Radin, Ertel, Schwartz, and Bierman, aim to understand the true nature of these claims, what their connections are to reality, and whether they are replicable.

It has been three years since the death of James Randi, and the Million Dollar Challenge was discontinued in 2015. But as Horowitz says, in today's world, there is a need for healthy skepticism and for the restoration of sound practices when it comes to dealing with contentious topics in science or any field. - via The Daily Grail

(Image credit: James Randi Education Foundation/Wikimedia Commons)

Subscribing to a high-speed internet plan may be all well and good, but it won't matter that much if there are places in your house where you can't get any WiFi signal at all. WiFi behaves similarly to radio or light waves which means obstructions like walls or floors can affect the strength of the transmission as well as its reach.

Generally, to boost your WiFi signal, your ISPs might suggest buying a WiFi extender which will increase the coverage of your WiFi. However, those devices aren't cheap, and if you have a big space, you may need to fork out a significant amount of cash to reach every nook and cranny of your home.

Now, there is this nifty tech hack which may solve your WiFi problems without having to hurt your wallet. Some tech experts suggest using aluminum foil to direct your WiFi signal and increase its signal strength to those areas of your home which the WiFi cannot reach.

The setup is simple. You get a sheet of aluminum foil, curve it so that it looks like a C-shape, and then place it behind your router. Make sure that the shiny side of the aluminum foil faces inward toward the router as it will be the part that reflects the WiFi signal's beams. Point it toward the direction of the dead zone in your home, and see the tech magic unfold.

Apparently, aluminum foil isn't the only material that can have this effect. James McQuiggan, a tech expert, suggests that you can also use soda cans and beer cans as well as other metals like copper baking sheets. As long as the curved, shiny part of the material is faced toward the direction you want to boost the wireless signal, it should work.

You might be wondering if this is a myth or not, and that's understandable. Researchers from Dartmouth University actually tested the hack, and they found that it helped boost their wireless signals by up to 55.1% in certain spots. Just as much as the aluminum foil hack boosted the signal toward the direction it was pointed, it also reduced the signal strength by up to 63.3% in the areas where the signal was redirected from.

Granted, the Dartmouth experiment was in a controlled environment, and they were able to match the specifications of the router and aluminum foil to the size of the room. So, results may vary for much less controlled environments. Things like the size of your space, the number and type of obstructions, as well as your internet plan can affect the effectiveness of this hack.

(Image credit: Mykola/Kolya Korzh; Misha Feshchak/Unsplash)

I don't know a lot about figure skating, but 19-year-old Ilia Malinin of Reston, Virginia, is very good. They tell us that it is nigh impossible to jump in the air and spin around four times, but he does it over and over, six times in all in this routine that won him the world championship in figure skating Saturday night in Montreal. On top of that, this routine received the highest score ever in the sport. Malinin comes by his talent honestly, by having two champion skaters as parents and training since he was six. It still stings to see someone born in 2004 becoming the world champion of anything, but that's the way time works. Malinin's performance is only five minutes; the rest of the video is replays and everyone talking about how great it was. -via Digg

The nature of reality is explored in the movie The Matrix, which turns 25 years old this month. Do we really know what reality is, or are we forever doomed to think of reality as only what we experience? It's not a new question, as it was posited in a story related in Plato's Republic. Along with a setup in which peoples' experience is limited, both stories have characters who prefer their limited life to reality because it's more comforting.

Back in 1999, The Matrix seemed far fetched, but in the 25 years since then, we've seen the rise of the world wide web, and then social media, and then smart phones. Each development drew millions more people into the artificial world of the internet, until it that world became our major source of communication, social life, entertainment, news, and for some of us, even employment. There's no doubt that the internet has improved the lives of many millions of people, but it also seems to be replacing the world around us. As the reality of our screens take over our time, is the world of The Matrix slowly creeping up on us? Maybe not so slowly. Read about the question of experience vs. reality and how our modern world resembles The Matrix in an article reposted from The Wall Street Journal. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Jamie Zawinski)

Climate change has come to Washington, DC. The National Cherry Blossom Festival opened over the weekend and will run until April 14. However, the blossoms reached their peak on March 17th, the earliest on record, due to warm winter weather. The star of this year's festival is a tree named Stumpy, which has become a viral sensation. This tree has lost most of its branches, and the trunk has become hollowed out, yet it stubbornly blooms every year. This year is Stumpy's last hurrah, as it is one of 140 cherry trees to be cut down and made into mulch for a seawall reconstruction project. The mulch will be used to nourish the remaining trees, and Stumpy's branches will be rooted to produce new trees. When the seawall is completed, 277 new cherry trees will be planted.

Tourists visiting Washington for this year's cherry bloom are paying tribute to Stumpy. Continue reading to see some of them.

The Course des Cafés is a traditional race in Paris in which professional waiters must briskly walk 2 kilometers in uniform while carrying a glass of water, a cup of coffee, and a croissant--a traditional French breakfast--on a tray without spilling them. The race was first held in 1914.

The Guardian reports that the winners of this year's race were, for the men's competition, Samy Lamrous at 13:30 and for the women's competition, Pauline Van Wymeersch at 14:21. They each received as their prizes a gold medal identifying them as the fastest waiters and a stay for a night at a luxurious hotel.

-via Dave Barry

When we hear Antarctica, we probably think of igloos, glaciers, and blizzards. It's a cold and vast wilderness, but it's also a very important location for scientific research. At the moment, there are about 18 countries that operate in Antarctica all throughout the year.

During the Antarctic summers, there can be as many as 10,000 scientists and support staff working there and doing research. In the winter time, that number drops down to about 1,000. Currently, the Rothera Research Station, the largest British facility in Antarctica, is undergoing a construction project to upgrade their runway facilities.

The first thing on their to-do list was to upgrade the runway lighting so that it will be more energy efficient. Then, they proceeded to increasing the length of the runway which was initially at 17m to now 903m. They even added a turn pad. Apart from this, they also adjusted the curve of the runway's surface, to allow for water runoff once the snow thaws.

Despite the extreme weather conditions in Antarctica, scientists say that life can actually be quite comfortable. With the help of accurate weather forecasts, they can know when the snow comes, so that they can prepare for it, and adapt to the changing environment. Once the skies have cleared and the weather lightens up, they can go outside for some snowboarding or boat trips around the continent.

Jimmy Bellis, an engineer and lead project manager for the air infrastructure project with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), says that there's a lot of things they can do for leisure to pass the time when it's impossible to go out as well. They have great food, a library, and board games.

For Anna Jones, an atmospheric chemist who has spent 30 years doing research on the interactions between the atmosphere, snow and ice, and is currently the director of science at BAS, Antarctica is a key element in understanding the earth's climate.

They do several projects on Rothera, like the Defiant project, which conducts experiments on measuring sea ice thickness, and the Southern Ocean Clouds project, which focuses on understanding cloud formation especially over the Antarctic.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

It would be nice to be able to travel to the past if only to experience what it was like to live in an era completely different than the one we're living in, but time-travel is mostly confined to the realm of science fiction. But there is one quite famous 20th-century story about two respected Oxford professors who claimed that they traveled back in time to late 18th century Versailles.

Those two professors published a book titled An Adventure which came out in 1911, under pseudonyms Elizabeth Morison and Frances Lamont. They recounted how, on a holiday from England, they went to the Palace of Versailles, and found themselves exploring a place unfamiliar to them, where they saw people wearing old-fashioned clothes and the locations of buildings apparently shifted.

They even claimed to have seen the Queen Marie Antoinette. It was such an extraordinary experience that the book became a sensational hit. However, due to the nature of their experience, they chose to hide their true identities. Despite that, people were still able to find out who they were, because they told their students about their experience.

Those two professors were Eleanor Jourdain and Charlotte Moberly of St. Hugh's College, University of Oxford. At the time, such claims of supernatural experiences had been examined, investigated, and perhaps, even debunked by an organization called the Society for Psychical Research. The main directive of the organization was to understand events and abilities commonly described as psychic or paranormal.

The SPR is dedicated to conducting scholarly research and are very thorough in scrutinizing any claims of supernatural events. However, when they were presented with Moberly and Jourdain's seemingly time-traveling exploits, the body never reached a consensus on its legitimacy. The skeptics proposed several possible explanations from a garden party to heat exhaustion, and even, double madness.

So, given the university's conservative leanings at the time, the women chose to keep their identities secret. The book stayed a hit and the professors continued with their careers. Several years later, Moberly retired as principal and Jourdain replaced her. Things weren't as smooth for Jourdain as she faced backlash from younger fellows who disliked her strictness.

Later on, many teachers resigned when Jourdain fired one of their fellows, with which the teachers disagreed. Jourdain would later suffer from a heart attack and die on April 6, 1924. Thirteen years later, Moberly also passed away. The two women both have massive portraits displayed at the college, although their book is rarely mentioned, if ever, on the St. Hugh's website.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Many whales are endangered, and the gray whale in particular was believed to have been extinct from the Atlantic for more than 200 years. So, the sighting of one by a group of aquarium scientists off the coast of New England, Massachusetts came as a surprise and may be a sign that the gray whale population in the Atlantic might one day recolonize.

After being hunted for a long time, the gray whales' presence vanished in the 18th century leading people to believe that they have gone extinct. But the emergence of this gray whale may be more than just a hopeful sign, as the reason why it appeared in the Atlantic waters after more than two centuries could be because of climate change.

Normally, gray whales would be drifting along the Pacific Ocean. It was quite rare to see one swimming in the Atlantic or Mediterranean seas. Only five have been sighted over the past 15 years. One of those included the one sighted off the coast of Florida last December, and the scientists believe that the one they sighted off New England is the same one.

It is possible that due to climate change, the Northwest Passage which connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans has become ice-free, and so paving the way for gray whales to travel to the other side. Although this is a good sign that the Atlantic will once again be populated with gray whales, scientists think it will be gradual.

Despite this sighting, however, scientists still consider the gray whale to be extinct in the Atlantic, as a lone whale is not enough to change its status. There needs to be evidence that a breeding population is present before scientists can say that the Atlantic gray whale is no longer extinct.

(Image credit: New England Aquarium/X)

Bread is often recommended to be eaten at most within a week after baking, since exposure to air and moisture would cause the growth of molds. If you plan on eating bread beyond a week, it is best to keep it sealed in an airtight container and refrigerated. However, that drastically reduces the freshness and taste, so it's best to eat it right away.

Although bread can be kept from spoiling by refrigerating it, I doubt it would last more than a couple weeks or even a month. So, to discover well-preserved residues of what seems to be bread or some kind of bread-like substance is quite a finding indeed.

That's what archaeologists working at the Cumra district of Konya, Catalhoyuk, in Türkiye found while they were excavating the area called "Space 66". From a Neolithic-era structure which resembled an oven, they found an artifact comprising traces of wheat, barley, and pea seeds.

Analysis of the spongy residue revealed that the substance might have been leavened bread which was left unbaked. Usually unbaked bread wouldn't even last for such a long time, but they found that the residue had fermented which preserved the starches.

Whether the specimen can actually be called bread is up for debate, since it's unbaked, and one can only speculate that the traces of ingredients found in it point to the substance having been in the process of becoming bread. Nevertheless, the researchers believe that there is a high possibility that the artifact is, in fact, bread, and they are considering it possibly the world's oldest piece of bread.

(Image credit: Murat Özsoy/Wikimedia Commons)