and 2 inches thick

ABCNews
Submarine found in Pacific Ocean with $165 million in cocaine, Coast Guard says
By Matt Zarrell
Sep 24, 2019, 12:10 PM ET

WATCH: Catch up on the developing stories making headlines.
A submarine in the Pacific Ocean was found with over 12,000 pounds of cocaine worth over $165 million dollars, officials said.

The vessel was intercepted by officials with the U.S. Coast Guard, who arrested four suspected drug smugglers, the Coast Guard said in a statement announcing the apprehension.

Crew members aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Valiant, along with members of the Coast Guard Pacific Tactical Law Enforcement Team, launched two small boats to board the 40-foot self-propelled semi-submersible ship on Sept. 5.

Officials recovered 1,100 pounds of cocaine which was offloaded to the Valiant during operations, the Coast Guard said. The remaining cocaine could not be safely extracted because the submarine was unstable.


Bales of cocaine seized from a suspected smuggling vessel in the Eastern Pacific lie on the deck of the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Valiant in September 2019.
"There are no words to describe the feeling Valiant crew is experiencing right now," said Cmdr. Matthew Waldron, the ship’s commanding officer, in the statement.



The drug bust is one of several the U.S. Coast Guard has made this month.


Members of a U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Valiant boarding team transfer narcotics between an interceptor boat and a suspected smuggling vessel in the Eastern Pacific in September 2019.
The Coast Guard Cutter Seneca offloaded more than 12,000 pounds of cocaine on Sept. 20 in Miami.

Two other Coast Guard vessels, the Tahoma and the Midgett, were responsible for seizing over 9,000 pounds of the drug earlier this month.

"These down range counter-drug operations are a vital component to the Coast Guard and Department of Homeland Security’s mission and our national security," commander of the Seneca, John Christensen, said in a statement.

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AN ENDEARINGLY DORKY COUNTERPOINT
THE SLATEST
The Strangest Details From Travel Company Thomas Cook’s Sudden Shutdown
By MOLLY OLMSTEAD

SEPT 23, 20192:57 PM

The closed Thomas Cook check-in desks at London Gatwick Airport in Crawley, England, on Monday.
Tolga Akmen/Getty Images
Thomas Cook, the world’s oldest travel company, suddenly collapsed on Monday, stranding hundreds of thousands of passengers across the world.

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The British company, which has been operating since 1841 but in recent years has been struggling under $2 billion in debt, entered liquidation after failing to secure a deal with creditors and being denied a government bailout. All of its flights were canceled, and thousands of employees found themselves without work.

The chaotic scenes did not come at British airports—passengers who had not yet left were warned not to show up—but from airports abroad, where as many as 500,000 customers (at least 150,000 of whom were British residents) were stranded without a return trip home. The result: The British government is now conducting what is being called the country’s largest ever peacetime repatriation effort.


On Monday, the U.K.’s Civil Aviation Authority began organizing for British tourists to be flown back. The CAA said it expects to run 1,000 flights from 55 destinations to retrieve the British passengers. Some passengers are still waiting for guidance and worried about the possibility they may not recoup the cost of their vacations. (Thomas Cook operated its own airline, hotels, and resorts, but it also booked hotels and other travel amenities from third parties in its popular vacation packages). Many customers are guaranteed their money back under a British financial protection scheme that safeguards most package holidays sold by British businesses. Non-British travelers may have other aid from their home countries or travel insurance.

Here are some of the other strange details from Monday’s chaotic airlines news.

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Some vacationers were reportedly temporarily held captive at one hotel.
Customers who booked hotels but not flights through Thomas Cook learned on Monday that they would have to pay the full price themselves. Several vacationers who stayed at one hotel in Tunis reported that when they tried during the weekend to head out for their flights home, the hotel barred them from leaving the property, demanding they pay fees they said they were owed by Thomas Cook.

One man described it as a “hostage” situation with four security guards holding the gates closed to prevent anyone leaving, according to the BBC. Two people recalled that one elderly woman had to pay the hotel more than $2,500 in fees on top of the full cost of her stay. The vacationers said the British Embassy got involved in the dispute, and the hotel eventually allowed them to leave. Thomas Cook said on Twitter that it had refunded customers who paid extra fees with credit cards, and the CAA has reassured hotels with Thomas Cook customers that they would be paid through the British financial protection plan for travel.


According to Reuters, authorities in the country have said that Thomas Cook owes Tunisian hotels $66 million for stays booked in July and August. There are still about 4,500 Thomas Cook customers in the country.

A couple was promised a “special surprise” for their wedding.
A 29-year-old man named Thomas Cook booked his wedding package with the company last year. He told reporters that the operator who booked his trip promised him a “special surprise” because of his shared name.

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Now Cook and his partner, Amelia Binch, are unsure what will happen without the company that organized their ceremony. They are scheduled to be married on Friday on the Greek island of Rhodes, but many family and friends who planned to get there on Thomas Cook flights no longer can. Cook and Binch also have not received information about the flowers, decorations, cake, and entertainment that were part of the package they bought. The couple is stuck in Rhodes, unsure if they’ll be able to get married at all.

Thousands of tourists are stranded on Greek Islands.
Cook and Binch were not the only customers to be left stranded in Greece. The country’s tourism ministry said about 50,000 tourists were stuck there, mainly on its islands.

Spain, Turkey, and Tunisia also have large numbers of people in need of transport. The immediate concern is getting home stranded passengers, but those countries are expecting a financial hit in the longer term from the loss of British tourism. Turkey’s hotels expect to lose more than 600,000 tourists annually, according to Reuters.

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NEWS
NASA joins final core section of its first Space Launch System rocket
Posted Sep 23, 2019

NASA has joined the final section to its first Space Launch System rocket marking a milestone in the big new rocket’s construction. Next comes adding the engines and a final series of tests.
By Lee Roop | lroop






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NASA has connected the last of the five sections of the core the Space Launch System marking a major step in the big rocket’s completion.

“Now, to complete the stage, NASA will add the four RS-25 engines and complete the final integrated avionics and propulsion functional tests,” SLS stages manager Julie Bassler said. “This is an exciting time as we finish the first-time production of the complex core stage that will provide the power to send the Artemis I mission to the Moon.”


The last piece added was the engine section located at the bottom of the 212-foot-tall core stage. NASA said it is one of the most complicated pats of the rocket including systems for mounting, controlling and delivering fuel from the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellant tanks.

“Boeing expects to complete final assembly of the Artemis I core stage in December,” said Jennifer Boland-Masterson, Boeing operations director at MAF. “After we deliver the stage, NASA will transport it on the agency’s Pegasus barge from Michoud to NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, for Green Run testing.

During Green Run testing, engineers will install the core stage into a vertical test stand for a series of firing tests ending in a firing of all four engines. That will test the engines, fuel lines, valves, pressurization system and software needed for a successful launch.

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https://observer.com/


A Lunar Space Elevator Is Actually Feasible & Inexpensive, Scientists Find
By Sissi Cao • 09/17/19 8:30am


The concept of a lunar space elevator isn’t new. Vladimir SmirnovTASS via Getty Images

From NASA and ESA (the European Space Agency) to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, it’s every space institute’s and tech billionaire’s dream to take return to the moon during this century. But while government agencies and space entrepreneurs all focus on building a spaceship to transport humans between Earth and the moon, a pair of young scientists from Columbia University have a distinctly sci-fi-esque idea that may actually work and cost far less than a rocket-spaceship system.

In a paper published on the online research archive arXiv in August, Columbia astronomy students Zephyr Penoyre and Emily Sandford proposed the idea of a “lunar space elevator,” which is exactly what it sounds like—a very long elevator connecting the moon and our planet.

SEE ALSO: SpaceX Is Now One Step Closer to Sending Humans to Mars


The concept of a moon elevator isn’t new. In the 1970s, similar ideas were floated in science fiction (Arthur C. Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise, for example) and by academics like Jerome Pearson and Yuri Artsutanov.

But the Columbia study differs from previous proposal in an important way: instead of building the elevator from the Earth’s surface (which is impossible with today’s technology), it would be anchored on the moon and stretch some 200,000 miles toward Earth until hitting the geostationary orbit height (about 22,236 miles above sea level), at which objects move around Earth in lockstep with the planet’s own rotation.

Dangling the space elevator at this height would eliminate the need to place a large counterweight near Earth’s orbit to balance out the planet’s massive gravitational pull if the elevator were to be built from ground up. This method would also prevent any relative motion between Earth’s surface and space below the geostationary orbit area from bending or twisting the elevator.


These won’t be problems for the moon because the lunar gravitational pull is significantly smaller and the moon’s orbit is tidally locked, meaning that the moon keeps the same face turned toward Earth during its orbit, therefore no relative motion of the anchor point.

After doing the math, the researchers estimated that the simplest version of the lunar elevator would be a cable thinner than a pencil and weigh about 88,000 pounds, which is within the payload capacity of the next-generation NASA or SpaceX rocket.

The whole project may cost a few billion dollars, which is “within the whim of one particularly motivated billionaire,” said Penoyre.


Future moon travelers will still have to ride a rocket, though, to fly up to the elevator’s dangling point, and then transfer to a robotic vehicle, which would climb up the cable all the way up to the moon.

More From Observer
How Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos Will Help NASA Land Humans on the Moon in 5 Years
Did Jeff Bezos Just Cash Out $1.8 Billion of Amazon Stock to Fund His Space Dream?
SpaceX Just Got One Step Closer to Sending Humans to Mars—Here’s What Happens Next
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☰ 

French start-up launches solar engine
The invention converts the energy produced by PV cells directly into mechanical motion without the need for batteries or power electronics. Its developers claim the robustness of the solar motor can drive water pumps and ventilation turbines for more than 20 years without the need for maintenance.

SEPTEMBER 10, 2019 BENEDICT O’DONNELL
COMMERCIAL & INDUSTRIAL PV
COMMUNITY
ENERGY MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
TECHNOLOGY AND R&D
FRANCE

The family start-up employs three generations of the Coty family.

Image: Saurea

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From pv magazine France.

Auxerre-based start-up Saurea has unveiled an electric motor technology that converts solar energy directly into mechanical rotation.

The company’s first product provides rotary motion able to draw water for agricultural irrigation and to supply fresh air to ventilate buildings.

“It’s the first solar engine in the world,” said Isabelle Gallet-Coty, one of Saurea’s founders. “It revolves entirely around renewable energy and has the particularity of never breaking down.”

Perpetual motion

Unlike conventional electric motors, Saurea’s technology directly converts solar energy to rotary motion without the need for power conversion components, giving the solar engine unusual resilience.

“Electronic power conversion components often need to be replaced,” said Gallet-Coty. Saurea claims it can guarantee maintenance-free operation of its first product for 20 years.

According to the start-up, that will offer financial savings to customers and make the engine particularly well suited for use in isolated areas. The innovative nature of the product has attracted the attention of the EDF Pulse jury, which selected Saurea as one of the finalists in the Sustainable Territories category of its annual competition – the public vote is open until September 26.

Family start-up

The solar engine is the result of research and development work spanning three generations. Inventor Alain Coty has filed five technology patents during his lifetime. His daughter-in-law Isabelle and his son took the product to market and their daughter, Louise, is in charge of business development.

The family business, officially founded three years ago, assembles the solar engines in a workshop in Burgundy in central France and is establishing a distribution network.

Isabelle Gallet-Coty said the sale price of the solar engine is €2,500-3,500, depending on the application. Saurea also offers to deliver the integrated product to pumps assembled by its partners and the start-up intends to expand its product range.

“Right now we are launching our first 130 W mechanical solar engine for pumping air and water applications,” added Isabelle, “for example, to water green walls or power city foggers [which issue clouds of spray and are widely used to combat mosquitoes]. But it’s our intermediate engine. Currently, two more are developed with powers of 50 W and 250 W.”

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BENEDICT O’DONNELL
Benedict joined pv magazine in September 2018. With a PhD in photovoltaics and a taste for technology, he has been reporting on markets and the energy transition since 2013.
More articles from Benedict O’Donnell

benedict
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