Going on Vacation? Hi-Tech Suitcase Aims to Solve Lost Luggage and Security Problems – Newsweek

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An Israeli company has developed a so-called smart suitcase that fictional British superspy James Bondknown for his love of quirky gadgetsand high tech hardwarewould surely snap up.

The case, currently seeking financial backers on crowdfunding siteKickstarter, is madeof analuminum alloy that includes titanium, magnesium and zinc, similar to materials used to make airplanes.

Several brands in the luxury luggage sector make aluminum cases as it is lightweight but very strong. Itprotects contents from high and low temperatures, and usually costs upwards of $600.

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The Samsara suitcase as shown in a promotion video. The suitcase is designed to be made of the same materials as an aeroplane, it is fireproof and comes with LED lights to see in the dark. Samsara

Samara's main claim to offer "the world's first smart case" rests on the tech its suitcase contains.

Similar to other smart cases, Samara's has the ability to charge amobile phone using a portable power bank and also has USB portbut it will also have the ability to notify the owner via an app if someone else opens the case, or if the luggage is moved away from the owner, within a certain preset distance.

The company only had a $15,000 target on crowd-funding site Kickstarter but its project now stands at $177,000, far surpassing what they initially required. The company expects to ship in November.

The global travel industry is worth over $7 trillion dollars according to analysis by the World Travel and Tourism council. Europe receives the most tourists each year, and estimatessay that globally the number of tourists arriving worldwide will rise from 1.19 billion in 2015 to over 1.8 billion by 2013.

Luggage firms are increasingly looking to innovateto meet the wants and needs of these millions of travelers. In 2016, a group of women formerly at eyewear brand Warby Parker launched Away, with a range of casesbilled as "your home between homes." The smart luggage brand offersiPhone chargers and casesthat allow users to squeezein more clothes without creasing them.

Kickstarterhas also been the source of other innovations.Fravel, dubbed the "world's cutest suitcase" has raised more than $78,000. It looks like a cat, arrives with a range of colors and has ears that move.

As investors continue to back new luggage ideas, it looks like the era of the smart suitcase is upon us.

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Going on Vacation? Hi-Tech Suitcase Aims to Solve Lost Luggage and Security Problems - Newsweek

Travel ban hangs over Scranton’s World Refugee Day celebration – Scranton Times-Tribune

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TRISTA CARPENTER / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER From left, Ellen Saporito and Grazia Saporito, both of Avoca, Jack White of Scranton and Ushu Mukelo of Congo discuss their heritage and ancestry during World Refugee Day at Nay Aug Park in Scranton on Sunday.

TRISTA CARPENTER / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER Anas Allouz of Syria, left, and Moustafa Almeky of Egypt perform a Syrian dance at World Refugee Day.

While Bhutanese dancers in traditional clothes circled hypnotically around a lone drummer, Sylvain Oredi watched quietly from the shade of a tree.

Everyone around him at Nay Aug Park was celebrating World Refugee Day on Sunday.

But Oredi, a refugee himself who only settled in Scranton a month ago with his wife and four children, stood with his back to a picnic table. His young son leaned against him.

There is no peace in the Congo, he said through a translator. There is no hope for a better life.

World Refugee Day was Tuesday, June 20, and the Diocese of Scranton and its refugee resettlement program team celebrated Sunday. Amid dancing and ice cream cones, a somber mood hung in the air.

Following President Donald Trumps executive order banning refugees from entering the United States, resettlement program Director Sonya Sarners office got quiet.

The diocese had to lay off two full-time employees.

Three full-time case managers and two part-time employees had once staffed her office. Now she has just one full-time manager and two part-time employment specialists, she said.

Sarner described a precarious time for refugees living in the Scranton area, people who fled places like Nepal, Syria and Congo, who had been working to bring family members along behind them.

Although the refugee ban has twice been shut down by separate federal courts, the matter has created uncertainty and many are canceling or pausing their plans indefinitely.

Travel papers for refugees take months to prepare but eventually expire, and many people who had been ready to go will have to restart their clearances, Sarner said.

The U.S. Supreme Courts decision on whether to allow the travel ban to be enforced is expected this week.

Speaking at Sundays celebration, Bishop of Scranton Joseph C. Bambera said believers are driven by a higher calling to offer safe harbor to the oppressed.

Catholics believe, Christians believe, that every person is created in the image and likeness of God, and has inherent dignity, value and worth, the bishop said. And every individual has the right to be in an environment in which he or she can care for themselves in an appropriate way and care for their families.

Ravaged by years of civil war and unrest, violence continues to threaten the Congolese people who choose to stay.

Oredi said he and his family fled first to neighboring Tanzania, then left the African continent altogether to come to Scranton.

In just the four short weeks he has been here, he already has found work at a distribution center in Pittston Twp.

I was welcomed, and Im happy, he said.

Contact the writer:

joconnell@timesshamrock.com;

570-348-9131;

@jon_oc on Twitter

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Travel ban hangs over Scranton's World Refugee Day celebration - Scranton Times-Tribune

Butcher review – ThisisXbox (press release) (blog)

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Butcher is essentially a fast based 2D side scrolling bullet hell shooter from Transhuman Design and published by Crunching Koalas. Originally released on the PC last October, Butcher is a very hard game; indeed the games own tagline is The Easiest Mode is Hard. Beyond that is Harder, Hardest and then Impossible. So is it really as difficult as it seems?

You are a cyborg charged with exterminating the last of humanity. This most reductivist plot equates to shooting everything that moves, and everything that moves is shooting at you. The pixelated visuals deliberately evoke the likes of Duke Nukem and DOOM as does the just keep moving and shoot gameplay itself. Controls are a bit tricky to begin with and important to master, with the right stick and right trigger aiming your reticule and firing, whilst the jump button is on the left trigger. Movement is on the left stick with down allowing you to drop through most floors. Clever level design adds a lot of verticality meaning you are always leaping about on the move from the constant threat that the many enemies bring. As the difficulty levels ramp up, they take away a third of your health and there are no longer any medkits or armour drops, as if it wasnt already tough enough.

Each level comprises of 4 progressively longer and more difficult grim and grimy stages. Quite often you will get locked into a room and wont be able to progress until you have cleared out all of the grunts and dive bombing jet pack wearing enemies. Youll pick up old faithful weapons like assault rifles, shotguns, rail guns and of course, chainsaws to tear through and obliterate the waves of enemies. You will paint the screen crimson with their bloodied entrails as they scream in agony. A loud throbbing industrial metal soundtrack again reminds us of those early 3D shooters, and it does capture the spirit of DOOM. This game is hardcore and it is tremendous fun.

You only get one life to complete a level, the health bar drops quickly on damage and often one false move means youll have to start over again. You can certainly clear the early levels in just a few minutes, but after a while, as the levels in the stages get longer and more complex, the red mist and controller rage begins to seep in, and I find at that point its best to walk away for a bit. This is definitely a game where you will need to Git Gud. I found I was not particularly Gud and I will admit I laughed when the repeat a single level 10 times achievement popped. Before any others had. I should add that if youre prepared to sacrifice your self respect, a casual mode has been included. This whacks your health up to 400% and doubles the values of pick ups. Apparently

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Twin Peaks recap: ‘The Return: Part 8’ – EW.com

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Subscribe to A Twin Peaks Podcast: A Podcast About Twin Peaks on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts to unwrap the mysteries in EWs after-show every Monday during the Showtime revival.

Let it be weird.

No need to explain it. No need to figure it out. No need to tame it with reason or theory.

Just let it be weird. For now.

Part 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return was the David Lynch on heroin wed been promised. For the most part, it was a mesmerizing rush of pure-cut WTF, albeit one that made a certain amount of sense for those versed with the shows symbol system and Lynchian motifs. Still, I officially gave up trying to make sense of everything during my first viewing right about the time the eyeless transhuman entity known as Experiment started barfing foamy ejaculate containing speckled (Easter?) eggs and a creamed corn glob of BOBs face. I quit taking notes, quit pressing PAUSE so I could Google things like The Manhattan Project, quit sweating that I wasnt getting it. I decided to accept Gotta light? as an act of pure Strangelove. I stopped worrying about it and just enjoyed all the crazy bomb drops.

This is not to say we wont be trying to understand it in this recap. We will! We should! Part 8 was this shows version of Losts Across the Sea episode a big bang creation myth for the evil that haunts and poisons Twin Peaks America and gave rise to abominable mutants and brought otherworldly cosmic horror to a fallen world; it was Lynchs version of a 50s sci-fi/horror movie. (From this perspective, you could see the episode as a big bang creation myth for pop culture.) Still, everything I have to offer in the way of being Mr. Explainer is mostly speculation, and the last thing I want to do is confuse you more than you might be. So Ill try to be disciplined in my theories. I do hope Lynch and Mark Frost will offer some illumination for what we saw here in the episodes to come, especially since some of it was actually hard to see; this was a dusky, dim episode, appropriate for a story about spiritual darkness, but some images were hard to make out. Example: the shot of the BOB embryo harvested from the chest of Dirty Cooper. But for now, Im okay to just let it be weird, and delight in that weirdness. Also, its my girlfriends birthday, and I promised Id celebrate her with an energetic, attentive presence unimpaired by a recap-broken brain. Priorities, people.

Part 8 opened with Dirty Cooper and Ray, newly sprung from prison, traveling by yellowy rental car at night to a place Ray liked to call The Farm. Fitting for a creature from the deep web of Black Lodge space, Dirty Cooper used one of his dark devices some kind of black magic cell phone full of cheat codes for techno-reality to exorcise the vehicle of three tracers and/or cast them upon a truck. (Poor hexed scapegoat truck!) He then threw the phone out the window, the big litterer. The earth cried from mans indifference to the environment, and not for the last time in this episode.

Tension between these two criminals: palpable. Dirty Cooper knew that Ray had accepted a $500,000 contract to rub him out. But he needed to extract some information from his treacherous associate before he made him say hello to his little friend hidden in the glove compartment. (No, not Ike the Spike a gun!) What Dirty Cooper didnt know was that Ray was pretty hip to all this. He had no intention of giving up whatever it was that he knew a string of numbers; coordinates, I believe unless the man he called Mr. Cooper wished to pay for them, or so he intimated; I think Ray has no intention of giving Dirty Cooper anything he wants. Ray also knew all about the concealed weapon, and he wasnt worried abut it for a few reasons, including the fact that he had a revolver of his own, courtesy, we might assume, of the warden whom Dirty Cooper blackmailed last week. Truly, there is no honor among thieves and their corrupt jailers.

Dirty Cooper directed Ray to exit the highway and take a smaller road to their final destination. This led to some long, Lynchian shots of Cooper and Ray driving in silence or shots from their point of view of the car following highway lines and directional markers and pushing into darkness across rough, uneven, unpaved terrain. In retrospect, Lynchs filmmaking choices foreshadow the protracted odyssey to come: This was an episode that basically departed from the shows main narrative (such as it) to go off-roading into the wilderness of Twin Peaks mythology.

Ray stopped the car in the woods because he had to take a leak, because by now, it just wouldnt be an episode of Twin Peaks without someone peeing. (The shows biggest whizzer, coffee-chugging Dougie, was MIA this week.) Perhaps Dirty Cooper could smell the bulls on Ray. He retrieved the gun, checked the chamber, and demanded that Ray cough up the digits in his head. Ray spun around with a gun of his own. Dirty Cooper was the first to pull trigger but the gun didnt fire. Click-click-jammed! Tricked you, fer, quipped Ray, who then put Dirty Cooper down with two bullets in the chest.

And thats when s got weird. (Recap continues on page 2)

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Twin Peaks recap: 'The Return: Part 8' - EW.com

IBM, US Air Force Are Building a Neuromorphic Supercomputer … – ExtremeTech

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IBM and the US Air Force have announced that theyre teaming up to build a unique supercomputer based on IBMs TrueNorth neuromorphic architecture. The new supercomputer will consist of 64 million neurons and 16 billion synapses, while using just 10W of wall power.

Its common, when discussing CPUs, to compare them with the human brain. Superficially, the two seem similar brains, like CPUs, receive inputs, perform calculations based on those inputs, and then return a result. But while brains and conventional CPUs may seem similar at an extremely high level, that similarity disintegrates as soon as you start examining either system in any detail.

Transistors are binary (theyre either on or off), and they can only change the behavior of other transistors that theyre directly connected to. Neurons, in contrast, have both an analog and a binary aspect. The dendrites the receiving arms of a neuron have analog function in that they give a little electrical ripple called a graded potential whenever they get a ping from an upstream neuron. If they send enough graded potentials to the cell body, the latter then sends a binary off/on pulse train down the axon. The axon of a nerve sort of speaks in binary, even though it has to accommodate both binary and analog input.

Scientists have spent decades creating software models that more closely resemble the way brains process information. But theres an enormous efficiency gap when attempting to simulate something as different as a brain on modern silicon. While modern CPUs may be millions of times faster at certain calculations than any human, the human brains power efficiency is orders of magnitude better than the most efficient conventional CPU we can build.

IBMs TrueNorth project is an attempt to build a neuromorphic, or brain-like CPU directly in hardware. The goal is to design superior neural nets and create artificial intelligence in power envelopes that could conceivably operate outside of data centers or fixed installations.

IBM isclaiming that the TrueNorth Neurosynaptic System (thats the official moniker) can convert and process data from multiple sources in parallel, while simultaneously pairing with more conventional processors to analyze the data.

The US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) was the earliest adopter of TrueNorth for converting data into decisions, said Daniel S. Goddard, director, information directorate, U.S. Air Force Research Lab. The new neurosynaptic system will be used to enable new computing capabilities important to AFRLs mission to explore, prototype, and demonstrate high-impact, game-changing technologies that enable the Air Force and the nation to maintain its superior technical advantage, he said in a statement.

The new system will fit in a 4U standard server rack with 512 million neurons in total per rack. IBM claims this represents an 800-percent annual increase over the last six years, as the first systems contained just 256 neurons.

Now read:How neuromorphic brain chips will begin the next era in computing

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IBM, US Air Force Are Building a Neuromorphic Supercomputer ... - ExtremeTech

Sympathy for the Supercomputer – Splice Today

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Courtney Maums Touch and the inevitability of a technological singularity.

Ray Kurzweil says that a technological singularity will occur around 2045.He said earlier this year that the process has already begun: By 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence putting them inside our brains, connecting them to the cloud, expanding who we are. Today, thats not just a future scenario Its here, in part, and its going to accelerate.

So how do we bide our time for the next 12 years? Everyone hates being on Facebook. I hate this website has been a common refrain on Twitter lately, overused and then appropriated and cycled in and out of abyssal irony. So even though Kurzweil and Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son are convinced that the singularity will occur in the mid-2040s,its easy to imagine people unplugging or going off the grid (pick your clich) in the next couple of years. I could see flip phones coming back and a mass exodus from Facebookhowever temporary, people are eager to reclaim something vague they feel was lost in the last decade.

Facebook feels like a prison: you have to be on your best behavior, or your grandmother might not be happy, or your old boss or your ex or that friend you havent seen in ages and would like to keep it that way. Writing a Facebook status is so formal and airlessits where you go to talk about your engagement, your crises, and cancer diagnosis. Mothers and Fathers Day are the worstcompletely unusable, youre just bombarded by earnest posts and old photos and hopeless laments of loss and people thatll never be the same. Its beyond information overload: its a sneak peek at the impending merger of all of humanity into one super-consciousness, totally zen and spaced out and floating in some Kubrickian cosmic womb.

But were not quite there yet. The valley is not yet canny. Its all still pretty messy. Touch, Courtney Maums second novel, follows trend-forecaster Sloane Jacobsen, fortysomething tech wizard with a pseudo-supernatural ability to see where the cultures going and what people will want in five or 10 years (most famously, she invented the ubiquitous swipe on tablets and smartphones). Shes bogged down by her bumbling husband Roman, an oblivious and unintentionally hilarious Frenchman whos taken to wearing skintight Zentai suits and caused a minor sensation: Traipsing about town in his metallic gold one, riding the metro, contemplating the Seine. The alleged elegance and nonchalance with which Roman appropriated fetish custom thrilled the bougie masses. Overnight, his Instagram account became supercharged. Two hundred thousand, four hundred thousand: Sloane had stopped checking before she saw it reach five.

Meanwhile, Sloane struggles with her latest project of predictions: she sees people reproducing less, with products marketed toward singles and couples that de-stigmatize remaining childless. Shes brought on to work at a typically sexist tech company called Mammoth run by an idiot caricature named Daxter (hed fit right in at Uber). Sloanes gut and gift drift away from the childless and impersonal to the exact opposite: forgoing smartphones and social media accounts in favor of hug hotspots and greater interpersonal interaction as revolution against phone zombies. Everyone feels too connected today, but for a myriad of reasons (family, work, addiction), maintaining a Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter account remains a necessity. Totally trapped, unable to do anything about Mark Zuckerbergs pathetic attempt at being a politician and the very real possibility that he could be a presidential nominee in the next 15 years.

Eventually this is all realized: Roman writes an op-ed on spec called After God Goes Sex about the death of penetrative sex: I have a theory that were entering a period that is post-sex. People want beyond that, yes? They want moreit is too simple, the I-put-this-into-you, you-enter-me, the pounding? So many people are finding their virtual sex lives so much richer than their real ones. Having recently been fucked properly by a younger co-worker Jin (her first vaginal orgasm in ten years), Sloane is horrified by her doofus husband and his tacit acknowledgment of their frigid relationship. Then the op-ed gets picked up by The New York Times on spec, goes viral, and Sloane about loses her mind, finding comfort in one of the novels more endearing and sweet characters: her loyal, driverless company car Anastasia, a piece of AI thats actually functional and emotionally intelligent unlike Siri, who seems stillborn, introduced the same month that Steve Jobs died.

Sloane has her own moment via an admittedly overused device: she goes off in a Mammoth board meeting in front of Daxter and all of her co-workers, defiantly quitting and promising that Romans neo-sensualist bullshit is a flash in the pan, and that people will soon cut as many cords as they can and go out into the world and talk and touch and be touched.

Its a pipedream, and Maum gives Sloane one paragraph of doubt: Maybe she was wrong, and humanity would never right itself, leaving machine and Homo sapiens to meld into one, tourists now preferring to visit the Grand Canyon virtually because they were too consumed by social anxiety to go that far away. (Again, the shadow of Infinite Jest looms above.) Touch is a Pollyanna fantasy sent into the world right before the deluge hits and were all cyborgs with nanobots running through our blood. Sloanes predictions mirror similar delusions about the severity of climate change: But maybejust maybepeople were more ready to than she thought to shove off the shackles of psychosomatic loneliness. Maybe the revolution could come earlier, if they bucked the trends.

I think we all know that the levees are about to break on both fronts. The question is which comes first? Apocalyptic floods or the transcendent super-consciousness? Wheres that thing going to be stored? Even the arctic seed bank has been compromised. What if we reach a glorious singularity only to be fried by the tide? No one left to put us in a bag of rice overnight. Lets hurry up and jump into the matrix and avoid the ashen misery of The Road. Dont forget to bring a friend.

Follow Nicky Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER1992

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Sympathy for the Supercomputer - Splice Today

Where Will Future HPC Leaders Come From? – TOP500 News

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In the recent ISC17 conference in Frankfurt, Germany, the HPC communitys attention was inevitably focused on big supercomputers, new processors, and other technologies. Of course, there were a number of voices also calling for attention to the non-hardware aspects of HPC, especially software and people. However, most of those discussions centered on programmers, sysadmins, and researchers using HPC, as is customary in the HPC community.

Source: TACC

In a similar manner, training courses at HPC centres are almost exclusively aimed at programmers and new users. Many people reading the title of this article might think of the future leading computational scientists, that is, users, or computer science/technology researchers.

But, there are many people whose primary role is running HPC centres, fighting for funding, architecting and delivering HPC services to users, to enable that computational science and engineering output. Most of these HPC leaders have evolved into the role from a background as a user or as service staff. Unfortunately, the development and training opportunities to help future HPC service managers learn essential skills are scarce.

A number of HPC leaders in industry have recognised this problem, and have called for an opportunity for their HPC systems and computational sciences staff to learn about the business processes required to deliver a successful HPC environment. They believe this training will be essential in developing future HPC leaders and improving the collaboration with the researchers they support.

Some readers will know that the author of this article has been actively trying to address this issue for several years, with tutorials (e.g., SC13, SC16, OGHPC17) webinars and conference talks. Due to this demand from the HPC community, TACC and NAG have combined to create the first HPC for Managers training program in Austin Texas, September 12-14. Topics covered will include strategic planning, technology options, procurement and deployment, people issues, total cost of ownership, performance measurement, and more. A broad scope of HPC is covered from department scale clusters to the largest supercomputers, and consideration of cloud.

This training is a major step forward in professional training for HPC managers and developing the future leaders in the community. Registration is open now. Details and a full agenda can be found at: https://www.tacc.utexas.edu/education/institutes/hpc-concepts-for-managers

Andrew Jones can be contacted via twitter (@hpcnotes), via LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewjones/), or via the TOP500 editor.

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Where Will Future HPC Leaders Come From? - TOP500 News

HPC Capacity Doubles on Irish Supercomputer List – insideHPC

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The 8th Irish Supercomputer List was released last week, featuring two new Top500-class machines. The new entrants, from an undisclosed software company, feature at spots 196 and 197 on the 49th Top500 Supercomputer List, each with a Linpack Rmax of 819.16 TFlop/s. This more than doubles the Irish HPC capacity, up from 1.46 PFlop/s to 3.01 Pflop/s.

Ireland has ranked on the Top500 list 29 times over a history of 23 years with a total of 18 machines. Over half of these machines (11) and rankings (18) have been in the last 6 years, representing Irelands increasing pace of HPC investment.

The software company that owns the machines, known as Software Company M on the Top500 list, occupies 6 of the 7 top ranks (1-5 & 7) on the current Irish list. All six are HP Cluster Platform family installations. These are the 2nd and 3rd highest Irish Top500 rankings of all time, the top Irish Top500 performer being Stokes, the ICHEC (Irish Centre for High-End Computing) machine which was ranked 117 on the Top500 in November 2008. Stokes also holds the Irish Top500 longevity record, ranking on four consecutive Top500 lists, with a performance of 25.11 Tflop/s. This is 3.1% of the Rmax performance of the new machines. The current number 6 machine is Fionn, maintained by ICHEC, with a performance of 140.4 Tflop/s.

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Texas gives green-light for experimental stem-cell therapies – LifeNews.com

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The government of Texas will allow clinics across the state to market unapproved stem-cell therapies, in a move that has met with criticism from bioethicists.

Last week Governor Greg Abbott signed off on the new legislation that allows clinics to by-pass FDA approval for investigational stem cell treatments for patients with certain severe chronic diseases or terminal illnesses. Like right to try laws in other States, the Texas legislation will give desperate patients access to therapies that provide hope after traditional medical treatments have failed.

Currently, most patients wishing to have stem-cell therapy have to travel out of the country to receive it. The new law will allow people with severe chronic or terminal illness to be treated at a clinic that purports to isolate therapeutic stem cells from adult tissuesuch as a patients own fatif their doctor recommends it after considering all other options, and if its administered by a physician at a hospital or medical school with oversight from an institutional review board (IRB). It also requires that the same intervention already be tested on humans in a clinical trial.

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The law sanctions a much broader set of therapies than federal rules, which already exempt certain stem cell interventions from FDAs lengthy approval process, provided the cells are only minimally manipulated and perform the same function they normally have in the body.

Bioethicists have expressed their concern at the move, which they say puts patients at risk of the effects of dangerous, untested therapies.

University of Minnesota bioethicist Leigh Turner said he was sceptical about whether the clinics would be adequately monitored, while NYU Langone Medical Center bioethicist Beth Roxland said it was insufficient to have the therapies tested in clinical trials while by-passing FDA approval. You could gain access to something [as long as its] being studied in a human somewhere on the planet, Roxland told Science, which in the stem cell area makes it really very scary.

LifeNews Note: This appeared at Bioedge.org and is reprinted with permission.

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5 signs you are out of touch with your spirituality – Fort Leavenworth Lamp

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By Mayra Coln, FamilyShare

Fort Leavenworth - Fort Leavenworth, KS

By Mayra Coln, FamilyShare

Posted Jun. 22, 2017 @ 7:11 pm

By Mayra Coln, FamilyShare

Fort Leavenworth - Fort Leavenworth, KS

By Mayra Coln, FamilyShare

Posted Jun. 22, 2017 @ 7:11 pm

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5 signs you are out of touch with your spirituality - Fort Leavenworth Lamp

Why I abandoned my frantic pursuit of spiritual enlightenment – Bellingen Courier Sun

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26 Jun 2017, 8:05 a.m.

My so-called spiritual life was at risk of becoming my whole life, yet I was no closer to enlightenment.

Being "spiritual" is all the rage, which can only be for the greater good but not when our quest for wholeness is driven by a far more shallow desire to be in the cool gang. Photo: Stocksy

At one point I was juggling my meditation teacher, kinesiologist, hypnotherapist, psychotherapist and chiropractor (who also practises NLP). I had a clairvoyant's number in my phone and took a friend's recommendation on a "spiritual healer". I meditated twice a day, did a course onA Course in Miraclesand occasionally made it to yoga.

My tower of self-help books teetered precariously close to my pile of crystals atop my Angel Cards in a room that had been "cleansed" by burning sage. My so-called spiritual life was at risk of becoming my whole life, yet I was no closer to enlightenment.

It was a scatter-gun approach, hoping that one thing might pay off and deliver me eternal happiness.

Not that I would admit to any of that. That was a time when personal growth was seen as self-indulgent and flaky, putting your faith (and cash) in rogue charlatans, while you were taken for a blatant ride. Worse, it was an overt admission of vulnerability and fallibility that was no one's business but your own.

Oh, how we've evolved. It's chic to be conscious. Mindfulness and meditation are as much a part of many people's days as an acai chia berry smoothie after pre-dawn bikram.

Being "spiritual" is all the rage, which can only be for the greater good but not when our quest for wholeness is driven by a far more shallow desire to be in the cool gang.

In our mad rush down the path to enlightenment as we strive to fit in positive affirmations and mantras, while spreading the love and paying it forward we can lose sight of the end goal. The ashtanga and juice detoxes become more obligation than organic, and still we're not feeling the love.

And that's because we're looking in the wrong place.

"I have meditated, I have prayed, I have found Jesus, I have found him again," said author Danielle LaPorteon her recent packed-out Australian tour. "I have juiced, I have consciously uncoupled, I have sat at the feet of a Buddhist monk called Mark, and I have hashtagged it all."

LaPorte says we've become "hoarders of spiritual accoutrements", which she realised was getting her nowhere. She stopped meditating ("It was stressing me out") and yoga. She even ditched her $100,000 crystal collection and "took a permanent break from the esoteric", only to return with a fresh outlook. "I came back on my own terms, when it was no longer a chore."

LaPorte adds, "We buy into the lie of inadequacy, that someone outside of ourselves knows what's best for us."

Someone like Liz Gilbert. After sharing her story of personal transformation inEat Pray Love,shehad to issue a warning to readers not to try to replicate her experiences, as hordes of women were treating her memoir like a guidebook to happy endings.

"I've been reminding people that they don't need to get divorced and move to India, just because I did," she posted on Facebook. "For a journey of self-discovery to work, your path must be your own. Don't do what I did. Ask what I asked."

I admit, sheepishly, that I once sought out Gilbert's healer in Ubud, but bailedwhen I saw the queue of desperate seekers in the dusty heat, waiting not so patiently for their names to be called.

Vedic Meditation teacher Jo Amor says that we must carve our own path to inner peace and not rely on searching outside ourselves. "We believe if we can just acquire more stuff there will be this moment when we have everything we need and we'll be fulfilled. But this moment is never going to come.

"If we put the demand on the outside world for our happiness and spiritual fulfilment, then ultimately we will find we still have to come back to ourselves for that and all the while it was there."

I, too, have pared back on the frantic search for meaning. I still meditate and get to yoga if time permits, and I do love my kinesiologist. But not as if my life depends on it.

Jacinta Tynan. Photo: Nic Walker

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Catching Waves With A Mission – Island Eye News

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By Mimi Wood, Island Eye Staff Writer

(l-r):Charlestons Catholic Surfing Ministrys Justin Gaeta and Christian Gaeta, Peter McMillian and Director of Youth Ministry for St. Clare of Assisi Fernando Cartagena. (Photo by Mimi Wood)

Waves come in sets. Sometimes you get caught on the inside of a set. The waves just keep pounding and pounding you, but if you just keep paddling, pointing in the same direction, you will eventually get to the break, where the water is calm.

Life has its ups and downs, like the waves. And sometimes it gets really hard, like you are caught on the inside. But by remaining steadfast in your faith, and pointed in the right direction, you will ultimately come to a place of inner peace and joy.

Such is one of the analogies that Christian Gaeta shared with a group of high schoolers, in concluding a day long Surf Retreat that he and his brother Justin, conducted on the Isle of Palms on June 6, 2017.

Participants in the June 6 surf retreat at Isle of Palms. (Photo by Mimi Wood)

The Gaeta brothers were born and raised on the Isle of Palms. Justin, the elder at 29, began surfing when he was 10. I literally trash picked my first surfboard; an old Sunshine that someone was throwing out, he confesses. When his older sisters short-lived interest in surfing waned, he quickly nabbed the new board she had bought for herself.

(Photo by Mimi Wood)

Three years later, his mom and younger brother got the bug. My mom held the board steady, so I could balance, recalls Christian.

Their passion for their faith began to parallel their passion for surfing. Whenever I experienced discomfort or unrest, Justin confides, I found peace in both my faith, and in surfing. As they grew older, the brothers grew closer, and looked to each other as spiritual role models, as they do to this day.

The idea of turning their love of surfing into service work started when Justin entered college, and Christian was still in high school.

They dreamed of how they could bring their love for surfing and their love for their faith together.

Their dream was realized five years ago, when they reached out to Catholic Surfing Ministries, an organization thats been around since 2001, but had begun to lose momentum.

We came on board as directors, remembers Justin, and pivoted the floundering ministry with the idea of offering free, one-day surf retreats to existing youth groups up and down the east coast.

Taking time off from their sometimes 60- hour/week jobs, the brothers supply everything needed for a day of surfing, from boards and wax to shade tents and rash guards, not to mention spiritual enlightenment. 100 percent free of cost.

Mackena Roe, a rising senior at Oceanside Collegiate Academy, attended the recent retreat on Isle of Palms. It was so much more than a surfing class, she related. I felt connected to God outside the setting of a church. I felt like I could see Him in the power of the ocean.

J.W. Kaiser is the President of Christian Surfers, international organization active in 38 countries, ironically based in Charleston. Ironic, Kaiser notes, because the largest surf ministry in the world is headquartered in a city not exactly notorious for its waves.

I see what Justin and Christian are doing as cutting edge. I applaud their efforts within the Catholic community, encouraging more youth friendly activities, states Kaiser, a longtime friend of the Gaetas.

The team from Catholic Surfing Ministries was amazing, enthuses Fernando Cartagena, Director of Youth Ministry for St. Clare of Assisi on Daniel Island, for whom the retreat was conducted.

They gave each person the confidence to surf, encouraging and cheering us on every step of the way. Most importantly, they centered our hearts on what is most important: Gods presence that is always with us, added Cartagena.

The brothers stress the importance of family and following your passion. We followed our passion, and found a way to apply it in terms of service to others. It was there we found joy, concludes Justin.

More information may be found on Instagram,@CatholicSurfingMinistries or online at CatholicSurfingMinistries.org. Additionally, Christian Surfers is looking for volunteers to help with their ministry east of the Cooper. For information check out christiansurfers.com, or email jw.kaiser@christiansurfers.com.

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Domesticity Rocks – Weekend Pursuits – HuffPost UK

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Me and my lovely fella walked into Seaton Delaval Hall in Northumberland a couple of weekends ago.

We proudly flashed our shiny new National Trust membership cards and, in that moment, everything changed. And it felt so good.

We became part of something. A new tribe. The National Trust membership crew. We reached the gold standard in weekend pursuits and we're seriously buzzing about it. #SquadGoals

But we're not alone in this realisation that domesticity rocks.

I grew up wanting to be punk rock (in reality, I was as close to anarchy as Trump is to reason) and it seems my punk rock idols were actually early adopters of domestic bliss.

John Lydon started hanging out in tartan pyjamas and spreading Country Life butter on his toast. And these days, Kelley Deal is as famous for her knitted bags as she is for playing lead guitar in The Breeders. So I'm following in some pretty impressive footsteps when I declare my love for cosy pyjamas, garden centres and early nights.

I think I started feeling the draw towards comfort over chaos back in my late 20s, when going for an early morning run with my good friend Jon on a Sunday morning, breathing in the fresh air, hearing the birds sing, feeling alive and, at the same time, feeling incredibly smug.

We were happily pounding the pavements in our Nike trainers while last night's dregs were lugging their hungover corpses into Jackson's supermarket for a packet of fags, some Nurofen and a can of Red Bull. (Yes, we were smug tossers. What of it?)

"My rapidly growing gardening club card points, National Trust membership and diverse collection of slippers are taking me on a journey in a definite direction. And I'm bloody loving it."

I asked my 18 year-old stepson recently what he thought of the fact that me and his dad, Chris, enjoy visits to stately homes, long walks and nights in with a pizza and the latest episode of Homeland. "I can see the merit in it. It's just... I like to live a bit more," he said.

He's just gone out clubbing. Before leaving he dyed his hair - again. I rolled my eyes and said, "You're dyeing it AGAIN?" As I reminded him to clean the dye off the sink afterwards, he repeated it in unison with me.

I then asked if he was going to take a coat with him. The look on his face said it all. I have turned into my mother.

Back when I was his age, I was often found tottering around the cold streets of Hull in open-toed heels and a PVC miniskirt. By the time he goes out, I'd have already probably puked up a cheap cocktail from Spiders nightclub, topped my levels back up at the bar, and then washed it down with a dirty hamburger from the dodgy van parked outside in the industrial estate.

My hair usually sported the remnants of five different packets of Shaders and Toners, and always felt like straw thanks to the endless bottles of Sun-In I bought from Superdrug.

So I should really thank my lucky stars that our boy is more sophisticated than we were at his age and give him a break. His idol is Chris Martin, not Courtney Love or both of Altern8 (sorry husband: I've outed your love of 90s commercial rave).

He's definitely more stylish than I ever was, can take his drink better than I ever did and - as far as I know - behaves much better too.

But THANK GOD I don't feel the need to go through all that again. Leaving the house at 10pm? I'm already tucked up in bed when he goes out.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad I have some fun (if that's the right word) times to look back on, but it's incredibly soothing knowing that I can find spiritual enlightenment by taking a mindful walk under a clear blue sky rather than a dodgy mix of chemicals in a dirty pub toilet (the 90s made me do it).

Once upon a time, it was getting Glastonbury tickets through the door that made my eyes light up. Today, it's the quarterly Wyevale garden centre vouchers that I excitedly check the post for - and it's a bonus if they throw in a 2-4-1 on cream tea.

"We became part of something. A new tribe. We reached the gold standard in weekend pursuits and we're seriously buzzing about it."

After our visit to Seaton Delaval Hall, we drove further out into the countryside. We have a shared dream that in five years' time, we will live in a beautiful little village in the country, with nothing but a quaint little church, a snicket and a post office.

We'll have a little summerhouse where we can write, or curl up with a good book and one of our cats. Our hens will be free range and we'll be so far out in the sticks we might even get them a cockerel for company.

And that's just the outdoors. Inside there's cushions and candles, fairy lights and fresh flowers. These days, I even take the time to arrange them carefully in a nice vase instead of hurriedly plonking them in the sink along with old discarded tea bags.

Socialising is different too. When we get together with friends (with three weeks' notice, of course) it's usually for a cuppa and a piece of cake, a pub quiz or a board game.

I've yet to let go of my youthful rebelliousness in its entirety though. We'll choose Cards Against Humanity over Trivial Pursuit and I still can't quite cope with Radio 2 on a weekend (Show tunes? Never).

But my rapidly growing gardening club card points, National Trust membership and diverse collection of slippers are taking me on a journey in a definite direction. And I'm bloody loving it.

I'm heading into a new era of cool. Hygge and wholesomeness. Nature and nirvana. Slippers and... nah, I don't need to dress it up. I don't need to be 'on trend' or part of a Danish movement. Cos I don't really care any more.

Who's joining me for a cuppa and a bourbon?

Originally published on Standard Issue

Check out my blog, The Sky is Falling In for more musings and mutterings.

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Domesticity Rocks - Weekend Pursuits - HuffPost UK

Gardening in Microgravity: How Space Plants Are Adapting (Video) – Space.com

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A new NASA video explores the science of space gardening and what researchers are learning about plants in space.

In 2015, astronauts aboard the International Space Station ate the first produce ever grown in space. During Expedition 44, NASA astronauts Scott Kelly and Kjell Lindgren, as well as the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Kimiya Yui, chomped down on red romaine lettuce that was grown in the station's Veggie plant growth system in August of that year.

It was a big moment, and a necessary step toward NASA's goal to travel to Mars someday. [Plants in Space: Photos by Gardening Astronauts]

As the new video from the agency's video series "Science at NASA"explains, the ability to grow both edible and nonedible plants in space is essential for deep-space travel and the establishment of dwellings. Plants provide both a food source and the ability to recycle air and water, Anna-Lisa Paul, a University of Florida professor who researches how plants grow in extreme environments, said in the video.

While it was a major step toward someday being able to grow gardens on Mars, the lettuce taste test was nowhere near the end of this endeavor. Scientists aboard the space station and here on Earth continue to test how plants adapt to harsh environments.

Paul and her colleague Robert Ferl, also at the University of Florida, first launched plants into space in 1999, on space shuttle Columbia, and have been studying plant growth in space ever since.

The roots of plants grown on tilted soil on Earth grow in a slanted direction, which scientists call "skewing," according to the video.

Through their research, Paul and Ferl discovered that gravity doesn't actually affect the direction in which roots grow, as Charles Darwin had previously hypothesized. Darwin believed that skewing was partially due to gravity's effect on the roots, but Paul and Ferl discovered that plants grown in microgravity exhibit the same behavior, meaning that roots don't need gravity to seek out necessary nutrients.

Growing in microgravity did, however, change the plants' genetic response, according to the video.

"When living organisms are faced with environmental change, their response almost always involves a change in genetic expression," Paul said in the video. "To cope, they switch on and off certain genes."

The genes that changed are associated with the cell walls of plants, according to the video, though Paul and Ferl aren't yet sure what purpose this serves. They plan to conduct experiments to study this effect as well as other ways plants adapt to microgravity, and scientists aboard the space station will also continue to study plant growth in an effort to help people survive on Mars and beyond.

Follow Kasandra Brabaw on Twitter @KassieBrabaw. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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Bread’s Done! This Company Wants to Help Astronauts Bake in Space – Space.com

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This proof of concept shows the front plate of an oven that can bake bread in microgravity.

A team of engineers and scientists may have just found a way for astronauts to enjoy fresh bread in space.

Currently, astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) rely on tortillas as their "bread" because they have a long "shelf life" and don't produce crumbs. But now, a team of engineers and scientists in Germany is developing an oven that works in microgravity, as well as space-grade dough that's suitable for baking bread in orbit, so that astronauts may one day be able to bake and enjoy fresh bread on the job.

Germany-based startup Bake In Space also plans to develop a made-in-space sourdough brand based on yeast cultivated at the International Space Station.

According to Sebastian Marcu, founder and CEO of Bake In Space, the idea came from his friend, spacecraft engineer Neil Jaschinski, who had been struggling to find a better solution to what he says was poor-quality bread in the Netherlands, where he works.

"Bread is a big topic in Germany," Marcu told Space.com. "We have 3,200 variations of bread, with a bakery pretty much on every street corner. In the Netherlands, most Germans would complain about the quality of bread." [Space FoodEvolution: How Astronaut Chow Has Changed (Photos)]

Spacecraft engineer Neil Jaschinski poses with Bake In Space's prototype microgravity oven.

Jaschinski have overcome the lack of good bread by learning to bake his own at home. However, he and Marcu realized that their fellow German, ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst who is slated to command the ISS in the second half of 2018 would have no choice but to survive his six months in space on NASA-approved tortillas.

"I have heard from several former German astronauts that they really missed bread" while in space, Marcu said. "Everything on the space station has to have [a] long shelf-life. And fresh produce, freshly baked products that's something they really miss."

Former German astronaut Gerhard Thiele has joined the project as well.

'We need to take care of the human beings that we are sending [to space], of their wellbeing, and food, as well as the environment, is an essential part of this," commented Thiele, who spent 11 days in space in 2000 aboard Space Shuttle mission STS-99

To have something fresh, whether it is bread or whether it is vegetables, it would be wonderful.

Bread has been a staple in human diet for thousands of years but replicating the art of bread making in orbital conditions presents multiple challenges. Microgravity, Marcu said, is only one of them.

"We have to comply with a whole set of safety regulations that we have on the space station," Marcu said. "We have to make sure that none of the surfaces [of the oven] becomes hotter than 45 degrees Celsius [113 degrees Fahrenheit]. This means that we cannot preheat the oven; we cannot open the oven in the middle of operation."

On Earth, bread needs to be baked at a temperature of about 400 degrees F (200 degrees C). Once its done, the bakers remove it from the heated oven. But that would not be possible in space. Processes such as thermal convection, which helps to mix up air on Earth, don't work in space. If a bubble of air that hot were to escape from the oven in orbit, it could stay floating inside the station for quite a while, posing a serious health risk to the astronauts,Marcu said.

Marcu said the team has found a way to overcome this challenge.

"We basically put the baking product, the dough, inside the cold oven and start heating it up," he said. "Once it's almost done, we start cooling it down. But at that time, any product will start to get dry, and that's why we need to design the oven so that some water is added during the baking process."

The oven also needs to be able to operate with only 270 watts of power about one-tenth the power used by conventional ovens on Earth. Marcu said the team hopes to have a prototype ready by the end of this year. [The International Space Station:Inside and Out(Infographic)]

Mastering the process of baking is only one step toward making the space-grade bread. Crumbs could damage the station's equipment, or astronauts could accidently inhale them. Marcu said he hopes the combination of the new baking process and a carefully designed dough will solve the problem.

There are further challenges when it comes to the dough, Marcu added. While the ultimate goal is to make bread in space from scratch, he said, the engineers will launch a premade bread product to the space station as a first step. But as with all space food, this bread product will have to have an extremely long shelf life and survive without a fridge or a freezer.

"At the moment, we are testing out different dough recipes, doing longevity storage tests, keeping them at ambient temperature and making sure that nothing grows inside that is not wanted that could contaminate the space station," Marcu said.

Separately, Bake In Space will send a yeast culture to the space station that the astronauts will use to create sourdough, which will be delivered back to Earth to establish a line of made-in-space bread.

Sourdough is a traditional type of bread dough that people used before the industrialization of bread making. It uses naturally occurring yeast and bacteria that ferment the dough and provide it with its typical mildly sour taste.

"Sourdough basically takes up the bacteria from its near vicinity and the person that has his hands in the bread, and that's how the special taste of the bread is developed," Marcu said. [Can You KeepKosheror Halal inSpace?]

"Wherever you are on Earth, sourdough has a unique taste, whether it's created in San Francisco or India," he added. "It will be interesting to see what the flavor will be when we cultivate it in space."

Marcu said the made-in-space bread could be one small way to improve the quality of life in space before space tourism and deep-space exploration fully take off. Although the diversity of space food has improved greatly, it can still be rather dull compared Earth-based fare.

"On Earth, bread has always been a symbol of quality of life," Marcu said. "Bread always stands for friendship and well-being, and that's what drives our project. If we want to go further into space, we need to create quality of life, and that's why bread is really a stepping stone for human exploration of space."

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Satellite Bulletin June 2017: The Queen’s Speech – Securing Spaceflight in the UK – Lexology (registration)

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"My government will work to attract investment in infrastructure to support economic growth. Legislation will be introduced to ensure the United Kingdom remains a world leader in new industries, including electric cars and commercial satellites".

The space industry welcomed this announcement in the Queen's Speech on 21 June 2017. The aim is to place the UK in a market-leading position to compete in the rapidly growing global space market. It is even more important for the UK to distinguish itself in the run up to Brexit.

The Foreword to the UK Space Industry Bill (previously the Draft Spaceflight Bill) comments that:

"As we prepare to leave the European Union and so refine our place in the world, we must ensure that the decisions we take now put the UK in a position to build a strong, resilient, well balanced economy that works for everyone."

The UK Government are committed to getting the regulatory framework right to take advantage of the multi-billion pound opportunity presented by the growing space market and recognise the urgency with which legislation like the Space Industry Bill is required.

The UK seeks to be the first country in Europe to provide a hub for the low cost launch of small satellites, "We want to see UK spaceports enabling the launch of small satellites from the UK, as well as sub-orbital spaceflights and scientific experiments" the Foreword continues.

The UK is a world leader in the development and manufacture of small satellites. The Government seeks to encourage this by ensuring a UK sovereign launch capability; thus providing end to end capability for small satellites. This is aligned with the Government's ambitious efforts to grow the UK's share of the global space market to 10% by 2030.

Low cost access to space will be a game-changing technology which will open up the market and commercial opportunities for small sats. The UK Government intend that licences for launch and sub-orbital activities will be granted by 2020 and offer grant funding of around 10 million to kick-start activities.

Through the Bill the UK needs to balance long term risks and liabilities with encouraging innovation, commercialisation and sector growth, and keeping those involved as safe as possible.

To do so, it will use tools such as: risk assessments; third party liability and launch insurance requirements; unlimited indemnities to the Government; and liability caps for operators. Such requirements need to be transparent, proportionate and reasonable. It is vital that the UK Government works with industry to draft the implementing regulations under the Bill detailing how such tools will be used effectively.

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Satellite Bulletin June 2017: The Queen's Speech - Securing Spaceflight in the UK - Lexology (registration)

NASA eyes close-up mission to Uranus, Neptune – Fox News

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New NASA mission ideas would study the gassy environments of Uranus and Neptune, two planets on the edge of the solar system that spacecraft have visited only once.

The agency has several potential mission concepts on the table, including flybys, orbiters and even a spacecraft to dive into Uranus' atmosphere, agency officials said in a statement.

NASA released a study of potential future missions in support of the forthcoming Planetary Science Decadal Survey, a publication of the National Research Council that is used to help determine what missions NASA should pursue. The next survey covers science priorities from 2022 and 2032. [Auroras on Uranus Dazzle in New Hubble Telescope Views]

"This [NASA] study argues the importance of exploring at least one of these planets and its entire environment, which includes surprisingly dynamic icy moons, rings and bizarre magnetic fields," Mark Hofstadter, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in the statement. Hofstadter was one of the two co-chairs of the science team that produced the report.

"We do not know how these planets formed and why they and their moons look the way they do," added fellow co-chair Amy Simon, senior scientist of planetary atmospheres research at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. "There are fundamental clues as to how our solar system formed and evolved that can only be found by a detailed study of one, or preferably both of these planets."

Both planets have been visited by a single spacecraft, Voyager 2, which flew by Uranus and Neptune in 1986 and 1989, respectively. Voyager 2 was tasked with viewing the largest planets of the outer solar system and took advantage of a rare planetary alignment to visit Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune on the probe's way out of the solar system. (The spacecrat's twin, Voyager 1, studied Jupiter and Saturn and entered interstellar space in 2012.)

Since then, however, telescope technology has improved enough so that scientists can perform some studies of Uranus and Neptune from the ground. Researchers using the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, for example, have tracked giant storms appearing and disappearing on Uranus in recent years. However, no concentrated long-term program is possible on the ground, because telescope time is competitive and spread among several targets.

Studies suggest that Uranus and Neptune both have liquid oceans beneath their clouds, making up about two-thirds of their mass, NASA officials noted in the statement. It's a different environment from the much bigger Jupiter and Saturn (which are about 85 percent gas by mass) and smaller, rocky planets such as Earth or Mars, which are almost 100 percent rock.

"It's not clear how or where ice giant planets form, why their magnetic fields are strangely oriented, and what drives geologic activity on some of their moons," NASA added in the same statement. "These mysteries make them scientifically important, and this importance is enhanced by the discovery that many planets around other stars appear to be similar to our own ice giants."

You can view the full 529-page study at the Lunar and Planetary Science Institute's website.

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Massachusetts School to be Named After NASA Astronaut Sunita Williams – NBCNews.com

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Astronaut Sunita L. Williams was selected as an astronaut by NASA in 1998, has spent a total of 322 days in space, and previously served in the Navy. Courtesy of NASA

Williams was born in Ohio, but grew up in Needham and attended public schools in the town. She considers it her hometown.

Williams is one of two Asian Americans in NASAs astronaut corp, which currently consists of 44 active astronauts, Brandi Dean, public affairs specialist at NASA, told NBC News. She was

Williams said that having an elementary school in her hometown named after her as humbling and overwhelming.

I hope this will be a new spark and addition to the town. Im excited for the future of the students there and I hope it opens up their eyes to even greater possibilities than what was obvious from when I was there, she told NBC News.

Williams was one of two candidates after whom Needham Public Schools considered naming the new school. The other, Leslie Cutler, was the first woman selectman in Needham in the early 1990s. She also served in the Massachusetts state legislature.

We felt that [Sunita], along with Leslie Cutler, truly were both pioneers and role models, Black said.

In Needham, no school building is named after a woman, Black said. The first will be named after Williams.

Shes a woman of color and we felt she really encapsulated all the values of the school and our community, and we wanted to acknowledge that, Black said.

The new school is scheduled to officially open its doors in September 2019, at which point Williams plans on visiting if she is not in space.

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NASA and Lockheed Martin hope you don’t hear this supersonic jet coming – Fast Company

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Update: A spokesman for the TSA has shot down the rumor that the agency would require passengers to remove books, saying a private airport security company was experimenting with the procedure.

"This is the rumor that doesn't want to die At no time has the removal of books been TSA policy, nor are we considering making it policy. Now there are times when a TSO may ask a passenger declutter their carry-on bag in order to make it easier to screen. We do this because our xray machines may have trouble screening overstuffed bags."

The TSAis reportedly testing new safety procedures that could require airline passengers to remove books from their carry-on bags when going through security lines, as The Hill reported. The TSA has been testing this program since at least early May, although the agencytold the Wall Street Journal thattests in Kansas City "didn't go well" and were halted after a few days.

We reached out to the TSA for comment about implementation of this new rule. As frequently flying bookworms may be aware, the TSA has already been plucking people out of line to search through their carry-on bags for books, because apparently books can look like plastic explosives when they are sent through the X-ray machine. (That's what the TSA agent told me last time I was pulled out of line for packing hardcovers in my carry-on.)

However, the ACLU is sounding the alarm on the grounds that this could be a way for TSA agents to unconstitutionally scrutinize reading material, citing a case they took on of a man handcuffed and detained for hours for merely carrying a set of Arabic-language flash cards and a book critical of U.S. foreign policy. "[B]ooks raise very special privacy issues," the ACLU's senior policy analyst Jay Stanley wrote in a recent blog post. "There is a long history of special legal protection for the privacy of one's reading habits in the United States, not only through numerous Supreme Court and other court decisions, but also through state laws that criminalize the violation of public library reading privacy or require a warrant to obtain book sales, rental, or lending records." While the ACLU is clearly on it,for now, maybe don't pack Conquered by Clippy on your next flight.

[Photo: Skyler Smith] ML

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