BAE Systems has bought a 20% stake in a company developing a radical engine that could propel aircraft into space.
BAE is paying £20.6m for the stake in Reaction Engines, which is developing a hybrid rocket/jet engine called Sabre.
Reaction
says the technology would allow the launch of satellites into space at a
fraction of the current cost and allow passengers to fly anywhere in
the world in four hours. The British government is also investing £60m in the company.
It is based at the Culham Science Centre near Abingdon in Oxfordshire.
The firm hopes to have a ground-based test engine working by the end of this decade and begin unmanned test flights by 2025.
Reaction Engines' design concept for a space launch vehicle.
Rocket mode
According
to Reaction, an aircraft using such engines could take off from a
runway and accelerate to more than five times the speed of sound, before
switching to a rocket mode which would propel the aircraft into orbit.
A dig in Jersey has yielded
a stash of hunter-gatherer artefacts from the end of the last Ice Age,
including stone pieces criss-crossed by carved lines.
They are
similar to engravings found from the same period in continental Europe,
but are the first of their kind in the British Isles.
Archaeologists are in the early stages of analysing the finds, but estimate them to be at least 14,000 years old.
This places the camp among the earliest in northern Europe after the freeze.
It would also mean that the markings pre-date the earliest known art in the UK, which was found carved into stone walls and bones at Creswell Crags in Derbyshire in 2003.
However, the team wants to study the engravings more closely and hopefully find more of them, before making any grand claims.
Dr Chantal Conneller is co-director of the Ice Age Island
project, which for five years has been working on the Les Varines site
in the south east area of Jersey. She told the BBC: "We're feeling
reasonably confident at the moment that what we've got fits into this
broader idea of non-representational Magdalenian art."
The
Magdalenians were one of several hunter-gatherer cultures which
gradually re-colonised Europe as the ice retreated, 16,000 to 13,000
years ago.
Archaeologists have been working at the Les Varines site for five summers
Stone
fragments like these, apparently from smashed-up larger tablets covered
in repeated lines, are known from Magdalenian camps in France and
Germany.
Image caption
The app tempted downloaders with alluring images
A malicious Android app that held people to ransom has been found by US security firm Zscaler.
Adult Player appeared to offer pornography, but secretly took pictures of users with the phone's front-facing camera. The app tempted downloaders with alluring images
It then locked the user's device and displayed a demand for $500 (£330) which was difficult to bypass.
Smart Sheriff, a popular app in South Korea for monitoring children's online activities has been pulled.
The
Korea Communications Commission (KCC) has removed it from the Google
Play store and is advising existing users to find alternatives.
South Korea mandated in April that all children's phones must be monitored.
However,
the regulator said the decision to suspend the app had been made prior
to the release of a damning report about its security.
The KCC told news agency AP that the decision had been made because of the abundance of free apps now available.
T-Mobile has announced
a new 4G LTE CellSpot that broadcasts a low-power 4G LTE signal,
providing an average 3,000 square feet of full-bars LTE coverage. The 4G
LTE mini-tower works in areas where a broadband internet connection and
T-Mobile wireless spectrum are available, for personal and business
use.
The 4G LTE CellSpot connects to a broadband internet connection to
deliver a "strong, reliable wireless 4G
watched with interest last week's Republican
debate and realized very quickly that whatever that was on my TV, it
sure as hell wasn't an actual debate. The idea is for us to be able to
compare the qualifications and positions of a variety of candidates and
then make a more informed choice -- but if every candidate is asked a
different question, then how do we compare the answers?
Also, wouldn't the best debate require having all of the candidates
on stage? It often seems that the candidates are all debating folks from
the other party who aren't in the same room they are.
The British government is also investing £60m in the company.
