Day: October 22, 2018

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

October 21, 2018 at 04:42PM

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

October 21, 2018 at 07:42PM

Up in the remote northeast of Scotland, residents of the Orkney Islands use small island-hopping aircraft to commute around the archipelago. The longest flight in the area is 15 minutes, traveling 33 miles from the city of Kirkwall to the island of North Ronaldsay. The shortest flight takes an average of 80 seconds to travel 1.7 miles between the islands of Westray and Papa Westray. That flight holds the Guinness World Record as the shortest commercial flight route in the world.

Now, Scottish airline Loganair and aircraft modifier Cranfield Aerospace Solutions are working together in the hopes of turning the Orkney Islands’ 10 inter-island routes all-electric, perhaps even establishing the world’s first all-electric commercial flight routes.

Electric planes are still something of a pipe-dream for environmentalists and technologists. Jet fuel is extremely energy-dense compared to batteries, and flight requires a lot of energy at little additional weight. Electric flight startups are either developing hybrid battery/jet-fuel planes or banking on the continuous improvement of batteries to make their visions viable years down the road. While the most optimistic see the advent of lithium-air batteries and engine efficiency improvement as a path to commercial electric flight, others have focused on decarbonizing jet-fuel synthesis.

But flights as short as those in the Orkney Islands don’t need the same kind of energy efficiency as long-haul flights do. Cranfield told Scotland’s Press and Journal that it believed it could simply modify the eight-seater Britten Norman Islander planes that Loganair already uses among the islands instead of designing an electric plane from scratch. Paul Hutton, CEO of Cranfield, said that he believed it would only take £10 million to create and safety test these specialty-use battery aircraft. Cranfield is seeking a grant from the UK government to support the project.

Loganair CEO Jonathan Hinkles told the Press and Journal that a three-year timeline is possible if grant funding is found for the project. That would make 2021 the earliest that all-electric commercial flights could be put into service.

Hutton told the BBC that the added benefit of electrifying the Orkney Islands flights is that there’s an abundance of renewable energy, especially wind energy, already on the grid in the area. Charging a battery between flights is easily the greener option compared to burning jet fuel.

Local council likes this plan

Loganair operates the inter-islands flights on behalf of the Orkney Islands Council, which subsidizes transportation between the sparsely populated islands. Orkney Islands Council Leader James Stockan told the BBC that the council supports electrifying its inter-islands flights if they can be proven safe, because it could help save money on expensive jet fuel. “This is a community with a strong track record when it comes to innovation, and I am pleased that this pioneering project looks set to be developed in Orkney,” Stockan said.

Though replacing the jet fuel burned by small island-hopping planes in a remote part of the world may seem like a drop in the bucket in efforts to reduce emissions, starting small is often a path to thinking big. If the shortest flights in the world can be flown successfully, gradually longer and longer commercial electric flights may someday be attempted.

A small group of unlikely supporters of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) — a party whose members have been accused of racism and downplaying the Nazis — has launched a new association. It’s called “Jews in the AfD.”

Just 19 members turned up to its launch event in the city of Wiesbaden last month, but the development has unsettled many in Germany’s Jewish community.

According to police statistics, anti-Semitic attacks are on the rise in Germany. One incident caught on camera late last year shows a German man shouting abuse at the owner of Feinberg’s, a well-known Jewish restaurant in the Berlin borough of Charlottenburg. The man rants “what do you want here? You belong in the gas chambers. Nobody wants you here with your stupid Jewish restaurants,” until a police officer shows up.

Mike Samuel Delberg, a restaurant regular and friend of the owner, posted the footage online to show others what he says he and other Jews have to put up with. Anti-Jewish aggression like this has become more brazen since the rise of the AfD, he says, so the very idea that fellow Jewish citizens would vote for the party is baffling.

“A lot of the people who are members of the party are anti-Semitic, are racist, and saying unbelievable things about minorities, about Jewish people, about Muslim people,” Mike Samuel Delberg says. “How can a Jewish group form itself within a party like that?”


Delberg is vice president of the Jewish Students Union of Germany, which recently organized a demonstration against the group Jews in the AfD. He warns that the AfD is exploiting what he sees as token Jewish members.

“The AfD tries to come over as very pro-Jewish, very pro-Israeli,” Delberg says. “It’s not because they like the Jews, it’s not because they like Israel very much. But because they hate the enemies of Israel so much that they think that they have a strong partner within the Jewish community to fight those people. But we don’t let [them exploit us with] these tactics.”

Wolfgang Fuhl, 58, was an AfD candidate in Baden-Württemberg, a state in southwest Germany, in last year’s federal election. He is Jewish and a founding member of Jews in the AfD. He scoffs at the idea of being used by his own party.

“Believe me, I’m not being exploited by anybody,” Fuhl says. “I’m a conservative person and I’d like to continue to live in Germany. We’re roughly 140,000 Jews in this country; it would only take a week for us all to leave. And we’d be leaving not because of the AfD or the right-wing extremists, but because of Islamic anti-Semitism.”


Police figures show that more than 90 percent of anti-Semitic hate crimes in Germany last year were committed by members of the far right. But Germany’s anti-Semitism commissioner, Felix Klein, says the figures don’t include incidents that weren’t reported as other types of crimes.

Delberg says he understands Fuhl’s fear of anti-Jewish hatred from parts of Germany’s much larger Muslim population. But “choosing a party that is racist won’t solve the problem,” he says. Delberg adds that anti-Semitism is deeply rooted in the middle of German society among people of all faiths.

Fuhl says a wide variety of issues motivate Jewish citizens to vote for the AfD and he believes it would be discriminatory to expect Jews to think and vote in any particular way.

“Merkel has divided this country and the political split runs through families and communities, including Jewish communities,” Fuhl says. “Why should Jewish citizens be any different from the rest of Germany?”


Fuhl claims the AfD has more Jewish members than any other party but is unable to give exact numbers because political parties don’t collect data on their members’ religious affiliation. He considers 19 members a good start and is optimistic more will join the association.

Fuhl says the AfD is the only party willing to stand up to “imported anti-Semitism,” which, he says, has become an issue since the influx of mainly Muslim refugees in 2015.

Melanie Amann, who reports on the AfD for the German magazine Der Spiegel, says that fear about reported anti-Jewish sentiment within the Muslim community may drive Jewish AfD membership. But she believes the party doesn’t care one way or another about Germany’s Jewish community.


”I believe that the organization Jews in the AfD is merely a tactical instrument to be used against the Islamic community in Germany,” Amann says. She argues that, despite Holocaust revisionist rhetoric from some members, the AfD is first and foremost an anti-Islam party.


Amann says she sees a lot of parallels between anti-Semitism in the Nazi era and the anti-Islam sentiment within the AfD today. “From a lot of AfD leaders you hear derogatory, aggressive general accusations towards the Muslims that can be comparable to the way the Nazis treated the Jews, for example, [seeing] them as enemies of the German people.” Amann adds AfD members have also used language comparing Muslims to “animals” or “bacteria.”

Back at Feinberg’s, Delberg sees the same parallels, but he doesn’t agree that the AfD is ambivalent about the Jewish community.

“Maybe [the AfD] is standing by our side right now,” says the Jewish Students Union member. “But when they, let’s say, ‘solve’ the first problem,” Delberg continues, referring to how the AfD views Muslims, “we are next.”

“We just have to look back in our history to see what we are doing when we are supporting a party like that.”

Put simply, he adds, Jews in the AfD just aren’t kosher.

Technology continues to grow closer and closer to our bodies, from the phones in our pockets to the smart watches on our wrists. Now it’s getting under some people’s skin.

In Sweden, a country rich with technological advancement, thousands have had microchips inserted into their hands.

The chips are designed to speed up users’ daily routines and make their lives more convenient — accessing their homes, offices and gyms is as easy as swiping their hands against digital readers.

They can also be used to store emergency contact details, social media profiles or e-tickets for events and rail journeys within Sweden.

Proponents of the tiny chips say they’re safe and largely protected from hacking, but one scientist is raising privacy concerns around the kind of personal health data that might be stored on the devices.

Around the size of a grain of rice, the chips are typically inserted into the skin just above each user’s thumb, using a syringe similar to that used for giving vaccinations. The procedure costs about $180.

So many Swedes are lining up to get the microchips that the country’s main chipping company says it can’t keep up with the number of requests.

More than 4,000 Swedes have adopted the technology, with one company, Biohax International, dominating the market. The chipping firm was started five years ago by Jowan Österlund, a former professional body piercer.

After spending the last two years working full time on the project, he is currently developing training materials so he can hire Swedish doctors and nurses to help take on some of his heavy workload.

“Having different cards and tokens verifying your identity to a bunch of different systems just doesn’t make sense,” he says. “Using a chip means that the hyper-connected surroundings that you live in every day can be streamlined.”

Many early adopters come from Stockholm’s thriving startup scene. Erik Frisk, a 30-year-old Web developer and designer, says he was really curious about the technology as soon as he heard about it, and decided to get his own chip in 2016.

“It’s just completely passive, it has no energy source or anything. So when you tap it against a reader the chip sends back an ID that tells the reader which chip it is,” he explains.

“Swedes are very pragmatic and the chip is useful … and since a lot of people know each other in the tech community — it’s very tight — [the trend has] been spreading and people have seen the benefits,” Frisk says.

When Frisk moved into a shared house earlier this year, he organized a chipping party for his new housemates. Now they can access the 16th century building they share in Stockholm’s Old Town by tapping their hands on a digital reader by the door.

“The chip basically solves my problems,” says Szilvia Varszegi, 28, who also uses it to get into her coworking space.

And she uses it to share her LinkedIn details at networking events, avoiding the need to spell out her name. She simply touches other another attendee’s smartphone and the information is transferred. “When another phone reads the chip, they see the [link] and they can open it in the phone browser,” Varszegi explains.

Sweden’s largest train company has started allowing commuters to use chips instead of tickets and there’s talk the chips could soon be used to make payments in shops and restaurants.

“I see no problem for [it] becoming mainstream. I think it’s something that can seriously make people’s lives better,” Varszegi says.

Österlund believes there are two key reasons microchips have taken off in Sweden. First, it has a long history of embracing new technologies before many other countries and is quickly moving toward being a cashless society.

In the 1990s, the Swedish government invested in providing fast Internet services for its citizens and gave tax breaks to companies that provided their workers with home computers. And well-known tech names Skype and Spotify have Swedish roots.

“The more you hear about technology, the more you learn about technology, the less apprehensive you get about technology,” Österlund says.

Only one in four people living in Sweden say they use cash at least once a week. And, according to the country’s central bank, the Riksbank, the proportion of retail cash transactions has dropped from around 40 percent in 2010 to about 15 percent today.

Österlund’s second theory is that Swedes are less concerned about data privacy than people in other countries, thanks to a high level of trust for Swedish companies, banks, large organizations and government institutions.

Swedes are used to sharing personal information, with many online purchases and administrative bodies requiring their social security numbers. Mobile phone numbers are widely available in online search databases, and people can easily look up each other’s salaries by calling the tax authority.

Österlund says personal microchips are actually more difficult to hack than many other data sources, since they are stored beneath the skin.

“Everything is hackable. But the reason to hack them will never be bigger because it’s a microchip. It’s harder for someone to get to, since you put it in you,” he says.

There are few vocal critics of Sweden’s microchip trend and there is currently no national legislation regulating the growing industry.

However, Ben Libberton, a British scientist based in southern Sweden, is among those starting to campaign for lawmakers to keep a closer eye on developments.

“What is happening now is relatively safe. But if it’s used everywhere, if every time you want to do something and instead of using a card you use your chip, it could be very, very easy to let go of [personal] information,” he says.

Libberton, a trained microbiologist now working in science communication, says one of his main concerns is how the chips could be used to share data about our physical health and bodily functions.

“Because it’s implanted in your body, when more health-related information starts being used and incorporated into the chip and being transmitted — that could create an extra layer of privacy that we really need to look at and take care of before it’s widely used,” he says.

Despite these concerns, there seems to be no letup in the trend. One coworking space and innovation hub in Stockholm is holding a large implant party this month where a tech startup, DSruptive, is promising to reveal “the next generation consumer-level implant.” The device will include 2 KB of memory, double that of earlier implants, a range of new functions and an LED light designed to improve privacy by blinking if someone tries to read or access an implant.

Österlund says the tougher data privacy rules that came into effect across the European Union earlier this year, as part of the General Data Protection Regulation, could also help the microchip trend spread more rapidly beyond the Nordics.

“It’s the heaviest set of laws protecting individual integrity ever,” he says of the rules, which affect any organization handling personal information linked to EU residents.

But Österlund says the fact that this kind of regulation does not exist on a global level could delay the microchip trend elsewhere.

“I have a hard time seeing the rest of the world following GDPR any time soon. But at least all of Europe — I mean one continent — it’s a good beginning,” he says.

Hi! We notice you’re using an ad blocker. Please consider whitelisting Autoblog.

We get it. Ads can be annoying. But ads are also how we keep the garage doors open and the lights on here at Autoblog – and keep our stories free for you and for everyone. And free is good, right? If you’d be so kind as to whitelist our site, we promise to keep bringing you great content. Thanks for that. And thanks for reading Autoblog.

Hey again!

You still haven’t turned off your adblocker or whitelisted our site. It only takes a few seconds.