Boeing 787 Makes First Transatlantic Flight on Sustainable Fuel

TRANSATLANTIC

In a move toward curbing the impacts of pollutants from air travel, Virgin Atlantic completed the first long-haul flight of a passenger plane powered by alternative fuel. In November, a Boeing 787 flew from London to New York exclusively on sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). SAF is made up of a combination of sources including household waste and cooking oil, which still emits greenhouse gases but releases 50 to 80 percent less carbon than standard jet fuel. While commercial flights won’t soon be powered by SAF — there’s currently not enough of it for all the world’s airlines — some carriers are beginning to use some portion of it in their fuel blends.
Source: Quartz

22.9 Pb/s

The Internet just keeps getting faster: The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan has set a new data transmission record of 22.9 petabits per second (Pb/s) through a single optical fiber. For comparison, NASA only transmits data at 0.046 Pb/s. A petabit is 1 million gigabits, so this new method is enough to transmit all traffic online 22 times over — with bandwidth to spare.
Source: New Atlas

WEATHERVANE

AI is giving meteorologists a run for their money. GraphCast, a machine learning weather prediction program from Google DeepMind, can predict weather changes over 10-day spans in under one minute. The tool uses “the two most recent states of Earth’s weather,” which include data from the time of the test and from six hours earlier, to predict the weather six hours later. A study found that the AI outperformed standard meteorology tools 90 percent of the time, including predicting Hurricane Lee’s November landfall in Long Island, N.Y., 10 days ahead of time.
Source: Engadget

$1,000

That’s the price tag for two cards that store data on DNA that could potentially keep information intact for hundreds of thousands of years if stored properly in a cool, dry place. The molecular computing system from Biomemory converts digital data into the elements that make up DNA — adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine — and stores it on a card. To get the data out, users need to send the card to a lab, which will then send them a string of DNA that can be decoded on Biomemory’s website. But lest we get too excited about this futuristic tech, currently one DNA storage card only holds
about 1kb of data, which is about the length of a short email.
Source: The Verge

This story originally appeared in the January/February 2024 issue of Government Technology magazine. Click here to view the full digital edition online.