A flying car that anyone can use will soon go on sale | Inside FTX’s All-Night Race to Stop a $1 Billion Crypto Heist | To avert climate disaster, what if one rogue nation dimmed the Sun?

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A flying car that anyone can use will soon go on sale - The Economist

Electrically powered vertical-take-off-and-landing (eVTOL) aircraft—flying cars, to the layman—are an idea whose time has not quite yet come, but is fast approaching. Many firms are jostling with each other, offering designs that range from scaled-up multirotor drones, via things which resemble rigid spiders’ webs, to fixed-wing/helicopter hybrids. None of these, however, will be Jetson-like family saloons with dad (or even mum) at the controls. Those flying them will require a pilot’s licence. Most will probably be used initially as sky-going taxis.

One company has, by contrast, stuck to its guns and carried through its original project to create something which people can purchase and pilot themselves. Helix is a single-seat vehicle, so “flying motorbike” might be a more accurate appellation. It has, however, been carefully crafted by its maker, Pivotal, based in Silicon Valley, to be within America’s rules for microlight aircraft. That means anyone, pilot’s licence or not, can fly it over non-built-up areas. As a result, from next year those with $190,000 stuffed down the back of the sofa will be able to order one for personal use—though they will not be able to take delivery until June.

It has been a hairy ride. Pivotal, known as Opener until October 5th, the day Helix was announced, was founded by Marcus Leng, a Canadian. Mr Leng is a mechanical engineer. In 2011, having built up and sold a manufacturing company, he found himself at a loose end. He had, he says, always been interested in flight, and some back-of-the-envelope calculations he made suggested that electric lift-off of a human-carrying craft, using motors powered by the lithium-ion batteries that were then becoming fashionable, ought to work.

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Inside FTX’s All-Night Race to Stop a $1 Billion Crypto Heist - WIRED

By the evening of November 11 of last year, FTX's staff had already endured one of the worst days in the company's short life. What had recently been one of the world's top cryptocurrency exchanges, valued at $32 billion only 10 months earlier, had just declared bankruptcy. Executives had, after an extended struggle, persuaded the company's CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, to hand over the reins to John Ray III, a new chief executive now tasked with shepherding the company through a nightmarish thicket of debts, many of which it seemed to have no means to pay.

FTX had, it seemed, hit rock bottom. Until someoneâa thief or thieves who have yet to be identifiedâchose that particular moment to make things far worse. That Friday evening, exhausted FTX staffers began to see mysterious outflows of the company's cryptocurrency, publicly captured on the Etherscan website that tracks the Ethereum blockchain, representing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crypto being stolen in real time.

"Holy shit," one former FTX staffer, who asked not to be named because they weren't authorized to speak about internal company matters, remembers thinking. "After all this, we're being hacked?"

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To avert climate disaster, what if one rogue nation dimmed the Sun? -

What if climate change became so intense that one country broke with international protocol to protect its people? In fiction, that scenario has already played out. Kim Stanley Robinson's 2020 novel Ministry for the Future opens with a catastrophic heatwave in India sparking a climate disaster of unmatched scale: 20 million people die as extreme temperatures take a horrific toll. Unwilling to let such a threat recur, the country's leaders decide to take drastic action: by unilaterally dimming the Sun.

Day after day for seven months, fleets of India's planes pump vast plumes of aerosols into the stratosphere. From there, the mix of sulphur dioxide and other chemical particulates slowly spread across the northern hemisphere and "eventually everywhere".

By reflecting sunlight back into space, the particulates act as a planetary parasol, mimicking the effect of large-scale volcanic eruptions. The sky turns whiter, sunsets redder and the planet cools. The contentious move flies in the face of international law, as the book imagines it, and risks disrupting monsoon rains – but it also reduces global temperatures by "one degree, for three years".

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The greatest reality TV show never made -

It started with an advert. In 2002, a new British reality TV show was about to be launched. The prize? £100,000. The concept? Unclear. The wannabe contestants? People who thought of themselves as "characterful, resourceful and energetic". All they knew was that they would have to give up their lives for a whole year. They didn't even know what channel the secret show was going to be on, but that didn't matter. Hundreds applied.

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Jane Marshall was one of them. She was 21, and living with her parents in Manchester at the time. The show seemed like an exciting way to escape her life, where she was doing ordinary things like working a nine-to-five job and spending her weekends clubbing with friends. There must be a bigger and better reality out there for her. Maybe this was it? "I just knew it was going to be so exciting and challenging," she tells BBC Culture.

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