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Hypersonic passenger jet aims to fly from New York to London in 90 minutes
The Hermeus Corporation recently received seed funding to begin building a hypersonic jet that would travel twice the speed of the now-retired Concorde.

- The Hermeus Corporation, an Atlanta-based startup, said it'd take about 10 years to build its hypersonic jet.
- The era of commercial supersonic transport came to an end in 2003 when the Concorde was retired.
- Recently, many companies and nations have started investing in supersonic research, possibly signaling the return of the technology in commercial flight.
A U.S. aerospace startup company has secured a round of funding to develop a jet with the ability to fly from New York City to London in about 90 minutes.
The Atlanta-based Hermeus Corporation said it aims to build a jet with a cruising speed of 3,300 mph – more than four times the speed of sound. At that rate, it would take about 90 minutes to cross the Atlantic Ocean, while currently flights often last more than seven hours. If successful, Hermeus' aircraft would fly twice as fast as the now-retired Concorde, which could complete transatlantic flights in about three-and-a-half hours.
"We've set out on a journey to revolutionize the global transportation infrastructure, bringing it from the equivalent of dial-up into the broadband era, by radically increasing the speed of travel over long distances," AJ Piplica, Hermeus' co-founder and CEO, said in a statement on the company's website.
The company — whose four co-founders previously worked together at Generation Orbit, where they led the development of the Air Force's X-60A hypersonic rocket plane — said it would take about a decade to develop the aircraft.
"We have a ton of flying to do in that time – we'll have at least two smaller iterations of aircraft that we'll build, test, and learn from in that time," Hermeus co-founder and CEO AJ Piplica told CNN. "The main challenge is integrating the core technologies together and testing them. It's really difficult to recreate the Mach 5 environment on the ground, which calls for a rethinking of how we develop vehicles that operate in this environment. That means you have to fly. We have to build a lot of hardware and fly it early so we can learn and iterate quickly."
Hermeus said it expects a flight aboard its jet to cost about $3,000.
The return of hypersonic transport
The era of commercial hypersonic flights came to a close in 2003 when the Concorde was retired. It seemed supersonic transport was just too costly to justify, considering it took relatively massive amounts of fuel to propel jets at speeds of 1,350 mph. What's more, fewer passengers wanted to fly on the Concorde in the years following the crash of Air France Flight 4590.
But hypersonic transport seems to be making a comeback. In recent years, several big names in the aviation and aerospace industries have made strides to begin developing hypersonic aircraft:
- In 2019, Boom Supersonics plans to test fly a half-size prototype of its supersonic commercial jet, which the company says will be "history's first independently developed supersonic jet and the fastest civil aircraft ever built."
- In 2018, Lockheed Martin won a $241.5 million contract from NASA to build a supersonic plane that wouldn't produce a supersonic boom during flight.
- Also last year, Boeing unveiled a passenger-carrying hypersonic aircraft concept.
Why the renewed interest? One reason is that technology is breaking down prohibitive barriers in hypersonic transport: Engineers are working on ways to eliminate the sonic boom produced by hypersonic aircraft (a problem which had restricted the flight routes of the Concorde), and they've also made strides in building engines that can withstand the high temperatures produced by supersonic-capable engines.
The recent investments in hypersonic technology also signal that companies believe there's a market for hypersonic transport. After all, these aircraft could someday make it possible to attend a meeting on the other side of the planet and make it home for dinner.
Octopus-like creatures inhabit Jupiter’s moon, claims space scientist
A leading British space scientist thinks there is life under the ice sheets of Europa.
Jupiter's moon Europa has a huge ocean beneath its sheets of ice.
- A British scientist named Professor Monica Grady recently came out in support of extraterrestrial life on Europa.
- Europa, the sixth largest moon in the solar system, may have favorable conditions for life under its miles of ice.
- The moon is one of Jupiter's 79.
Neil deGrasse Tyson wants to go ice fishing on Europa
<div class="rm-shortcode" data-media_id="GLGsRX7e" data-player_id="FvQKszTI" data-rm-shortcode-id="f4790eb8f0515e036b24c4195299df28"> <div id="botr_GLGsRX7e_FvQKszTI_div" class="jwplayer-media" data-jwplayer-video-src="https://content.jwplatform.com/players/GLGsRX7e-FvQKszTI.js"> <img src="https://cdn.jwplayer.com/thumbs/GLGsRX7e-1920.jpg" class="jwplayer-media-preview" /> </div> <script src="https://content.jwplatform.com/players/GLGsRX7e-FvQKszTI.js"></script> </div>Water Vapor Above Europa’s Surface Deteced for First Time
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="9c4abc8473e1b89170cc8941beeb1f2d"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WQ-E1lnSOzc?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span>We have a new word for that feeling when travel makes everything new
A tourist generally has an eye for the things that have become almost invisible to the resident.
Drinking coffee while pregnant alters the fetal brain
A large new study puts caffeine-drinking moms on alert.
- Neuroregulating caffeine easily crosses the placental barrier.
- A study finds that the brains of children born to mothers who consumed coffee during pregnancy are different.
- The observed differences may be associated with behavioral issues.
A large study of nine- and ten-year-old brains
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<p>For the study, its authors analyzed brain scans of 9,000 nine and ten-year-olds. Based on their mothers' recollections of their coffee consumption during pregnancy, the researchers found that children of coffee drinkers had clear changes in the manner in which white brain matter tracks were organized. These are the pathways that interconnect brain regions.</p><p>According to Foxe, "These are sort of small effects, and it's not causing horrendous psychiatric conditions, but it is causing minimal but noticeable behavioral issues that should make us consider long-term effects of caffeine intake during pregnancy."</p><p>Christensen says that what makes this finding noteworthy is that "we have a biological pathway that looks different when you consume caffeine through pregnancy."</p><p>Of children with such pathway differences, Christensen says, "Previous studies have shown that children perform differently on IQ tests, or they have different psychopathology, but that could also be related to demographics, so it's hard to parse that out until you have something like a biomarker. This gives us a place to start future research to try to learn exactly when the change is occurring in the brain."</p><p>The study doesn't claim to have determined exactly <em>when</em> during development these changes occur, or if caffeine has more of an effect during one trimester or another.</p><p>Foxe cautions, "It is important to point out this is a retrospective study. We are relying on mothers to remember how much caffeine they took in while they were pregnant."</p><p>So as if being pregnant wasn't difficult enough, it sounds like the most conservative and safe course of action for expectant mothers is to forgo those revitalizing cups of Joe and switch to decaf or some other uncaffeinated form of liquid comfort. We apologize on behalf of science.</p>Could playing video games be linked to lower depression rates in kids?
Can playing video games really curb the risk of depression? Experts weigh in.
