DB Cooper Case Could Close Soon Thanks To Particle Evidence

It’s one of the strangest unsolved cases, and even though the FBI closed their investigation back in 2016, this may be the year it cracks wide open. On November 24, 1971, Dan Cooper, who would become known as DB Cooper due to a mistake by the media, skyjacked a Boeing 727 — Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 — headed from Portland to Seattle.

During the flight, mild-mannered Cooper coolly notified a flight attendant sitting behind him via neatly-handwritten note that he had a bomb in his briefcase. His demands were a sum of $200,000 (about $1.5 M today) and four parachutes once they got to Seattle. Upon landing, Cooper released the passengers and demanded that the plane be refueled and pointed toward Mexico City with him and most of the original crew aboard. But around 30 minutes into the flight, Cooper opened the plane’s aft staircase and vanished, parachuting into the night sky.

In the investigation that followed, the FBI recovered Cooper’s clip-on tie, tie clip, and two of the four parachutes. While it’s unclear why Cooper would have left the tie behind, it has become the biggest source of evidence for identifying him. New evidence shows that a previously unidentified particle on the tie has been identified as “titanium smeared with stainless steel”.

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Another Chance To Revive Your Nabaztag

The early history of home internet appliances was replete with wonderful curios as a new industry sought to both find a function for itself and deliver something useful with whatever semiconductors were available nearly two decades ago. A favourite of ours is the Nabaztag, a French-designed information appliance in the form of a cute plastic rabbit whose ears would light up and move around as it delivered snippets of information.

The entity behind the Nabaztag folded and the servers went away years ago of course, but the original designer [Olivier Mével] never gave up on his creation. Back in 2019 he created an updated mainboard for the device packing a Raspberry Pi Zero W, which has been released in a series of crowdfunding campaigns. If you have a Nabaztag and haven’t yet upgraded, you can snag one now as the latest campaign has started.

We took a look at the Nabaztag back in 2020, at the time with out bricked original unit. Happily a year later we were able to snag one of the upgrades, so it’s now happily keeping us up to date with the time, weather, and other fun things. The upgrade motherboard is designed to slot into the same place as the original and mate with all its connectors, and even comes with that annoying triangle screwdriver. If you want to stand out against all the Alexa and Google Home owners, dig out your cute rabbit from the 2000s and give it this board!

Two researchers, a white woman and dark-skinned man look at a large monitor with a crystal structure displayed in red and white blocks.

AI On The Hunt For Better Batteries

While certain dystopian visions of the future have humans power the grid for AIs, Microsoft and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) set a machine learning system on the path of better solid state batteries instead.

Solid state batteries are the current darlings of battery research, promising a step-change in packaging size and safety among other advantages. While they have been working in the lab for some time now, we’re still yet to see any large-scale commercialization that could shake up the consumer electronics and electric vehicle spaces.

With a starting set of 32 million potential inorganic materials, the machine learning algorithm was able to select the 150 most promising candidates for further development in the lab. This smaller subset was then fed through a high-performance computing (HPC) algorithm to winnow the list down to 23. Eliminating previously explored compounds, the scientists were able to develop a promising Li/Na-ion solid state battery electrolyte that could reduce the needed Li in a battery by up to 70%.

For those of us who remember when energy materials research often consisted of digging through dusty old journal papers to find inorganic compounds of interest, this is a particularly exciting advancement. A couple more places technology can help in the sciences are robots doing the work in the lab or on the surgery table.

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