There was movement in the “AM Radio in Every Vehicle Act” last week, with the bill advancing out of the US House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee and heading to a full floor vote. For those not playing along at home, auto manufacturers have been making moves toward deleting AM radios from cars because they’re too sensitive to all the RF interference generated by modern vehicles. The trouble with that is that the government has spent a lot of effort on making AM broadcasters the centerpiece of a robust and survivable emergency communications system that reaches 90% of the US population.
The bill would require cars and trucks manufactured or sold in the US to be equipped to receive AM broadcasts without further fees or subscriptions, and seems to enjoy bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate. Critics of the bill will likely point out that while the AM broadcast system is a fantastic resource for emergency communications, if nobody is listening to it when an event happens, what’s the point? That’s fair, but short-sighted; emergency communications isn’t just about warning people that something is going to happen, but coordinating the response after the fact. We imagine Hurricane Helene’s path of devastation from Florida to Pennsylvania this week and the subsequent emergency response might bring that fact into focus a bit.
The US Geological Survey and NASA bid goodbye to Landsat 7 this week, 25 years into its five-year mission to watch the planet. Launched in 1999, the satellite’s imaging instruments were witness to many Earth changes, both natural and man-made. Its before-and-after images, like this look at New Orleans around the time of Hurricane Katrina, are especially striking. Despite suffering instrumentation problems within a few years of launch that degraded image quality on some of its sensors, Landsat 7 sent a wealth of geophysical data down to Earth, enough that it has over 210,000 citations in the scientific literature. The aging satellite was moved to a lower orbit in 2021 to make way for its newer cousins, Landsat 8 and 9, which put its polar sun-synchronous orbit out of sync with mission requirements. Despite this, it kept on grabbing images right up until May 28, 2024, when it grabbed a picture of Las Vegas that shows the dramatic increase in the size of the metro area over the last 25 years, along with the stunning decrease of Lake Mead.
How much do you enjoy captchas? If you’re anything like us, you’ve learned to loathe their intentionally fuzzy photos where you have to find traffic lights, stairs, motorcycles, or cars to prove you’re human. Well, surprise — just because you can (eventually) solve a captcha doesn’t make you a human. It turns out that AI can do it too. A security research group at ETH Zurich managed to modify YOLO to solve Google’s reCAPTCHAv2, saying it wasn’t even particularly hard to get it to pass the test 100% of the time within two tries. Think about that the next time you’re wondering if that tiny sliver of the rider’s helmet that intrudes just a tiny bit into one frame counts as a square containing a motorcycle.
We’re not much into cryptocurrency around here, but we do love vaults and over-the-top physical security, and that makes this article on a Swiss Bitcoin vault worth looking at. If you’re perplexed with the need for a physical vault to keep your virtual currency safe, we get it. But with people investing huge amounts of effort in excavating landfills for accidentally disposed hard drives containing Bitcoin wallets worth millions, it starts to make sense. The vault in this story is impressively well-protected, living deep within the granite of a Swiss mountain and protected from every conceivable threat. Ah, but it’s the inconceivable threats that get you, isn’t it? And when you put a lot of valuable things together in one place, well — let’s just say we’re eagerly awaiting the “based on a true story” heist film.
And finally, YouTube seems to be the go-to resource for how-to videos, and we’ve all likely gotten quick tutorials on everything from fixing a toilet to writing a will. So why not a tutorial on changing a fuel filter on an Airbus A320? Sure, you might not need to do one, and we’re pretty sure you’ll be arrested for even trying without the proper certifications, but it’s cool to see it down. All things considered, it doesn’t look all that hard, what with all the ease-of-maintenance features built into the Pratt and Whitney PW1100G engine. As we’ve spent many hours on a creeper in the driveway doing repairs that would better be done on the lift we can’t afford, we found the fact that the mechanic has to lie on his back on the tarmac to service a multimillion-dollar aircraft pleasingly ironic.