One of the greatest luxuries of flying in business or first class is the ability for passengers to lay back and stretch their legs out on long journeys. Those with economy tickets could also soon enjoy this benefit with Air New Zealand’s Economy Skynest.

Potential game-changer

According to a press release, the flag carrier of New Zealand has been working on a prototype that provides six full-length lie-flat sleep pods

The airline has been working on this initiative for three years, with the help of over 200 customers in Auckland. Now, it is one step closer to becoming a reality. This is because a patent has been filed and a trademark application been made.

Air New Zealand Chief Marketing and Customer Officer Mike Tod shared how his company wants to offer greater comfort for economy passengers. He recognizes that long-distance flights are primarily a struggle for these customers.

Good timing

One of the key routes that the pods will be appreciated on is the upcoming Auckland-New York service, which launches in October 2020. Passengers traveling between New Zealand and the United States on this flight will have to endure 17 hours 40 minutes one way. Therefore, this is the perfect route to test the Economy Skynest on.

Nikki Goodman, the carriers’ general manager of customer experience also shared her excitement about the project. She said that feedback from customers and cabin crew during the final phase of development had been fantastic. Goodman also sees other airlines following Air New Zealand’s approach and predicts that others will license the product from the firm.

What’s included?

Each pod will hold a length of 200cm, with the width at the shoulder area measuring at 58cm. Ultimately, the carrier plans to have a full-sized pillow, sheets, and a blanket included in each pod.

Furthermore, there will be earplugs, ambient lighting and a curtain for privacy. Additionally, the company is looking at other features such as reading lights, ventilation outlets, and USB outlets.

Simple Flying reached out to Air New Zealand for comment on the introduction of the Economy Skynest into operations. A spokesperson shared that since this is a prototype, the company will make a final decision on whether to operate it next year after it has evaluated the performance of its first year of Auckland-New York services.

Altogether, this project will definitely be welcomed by several passengers that struggle to catch some sleep in the air.

Several reports coming from Japan are announcing that Tesla and Panasonic are ending their solar cell production deal at Gigafactory New York ahead of Elon Musk holding an event at the factory.

Back in 2017, Tesla made another manufacturing agreement with Panasonic to accelerate the production of solar products at the factory it inherited from SolarCity in Buffalo following the acquisition of the company.

They called the factory Gigafactory 2 because they aim to produce over 1 gigawatt of solar products at the factory, which also happens to work under a similar deal as Gigafactory 1, where Tesla and Panasonic manufacture batteries.

Panasonic invested in the production of solar cells at te factory, which has recently been renamed Gigafactory New York, and Tesla agreed to buy those cells to put inside the solar roof tiles, now called Solarglass, that it itself manufactures at the location. Panasonic is also separately producing solar modules at Gigafactory New York, for Tesla’s solar retrofit business.

The deal hasn’t panned out exactly as planned.

Tesla hasn’t been buying a lot of solar modules from the plant and its solarglass production ramp has been extremely slow.

Furthermore, Tesla has reportedly been using solar cells from other manufacturers in its solar roof tiles.

Now reports from Reuters and Nikkei both states that Tesla and Panasonic are ending their solar cell production deal at the factory in New York.

Nikkei reported today

“Tesla and Panasonic are scrapping their partnership in producing solar cells after years of struggling to ramp up output at the Gigafactory 2 in upstate New York.”

The deal at Gigafactory Nevada to produce battery cells for Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y is reportedly intact. The report also states that Tesla is considering bringing new production to Gigafactory New York and they are not expecting to have issue fulfilling their employment requirements with the state, which paid for the factory.

We contacted Tesla about the reports and we will update if we get more information.

The news comes soon after Elon Musk announced a ‘Tesla April company talk’ to be held at Gigafactory New York and it is expected to be related to Tesla’s previously announced ‘Battery Investor Day’, which should involve a new battery announcement.

When announcing the event, Musk also said that Tesla will be expanding solar roof installs internationally and that it will become an important product for the company.

A major effort to expand development of Canada’s oil sands has collapsed shortly before a deadline for government approval, undone by investor concerns over oil’s future and the political fault lines between economic and environmental priorities.

Nine years in the planning, the project would have increased Canada’s oil production by roughly 5 percent. But it would have also slashed through 24,000 acres of boreal forest and released millions of tons of climate-warming carbon dioxide every year.

Some Canadian oil executives had predicted that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet would approve the project by a regulatory deadline this week, though with burdensome conditions. But in a letter released Sunday night, the Vancouver-based developer, Teck Resources, declared that “there is no constructive path forward.”

The unexpected withdrawal relieves Mr. Trudeau of a choice that was sure to anger environmentalists or energy interests, if not both.

Conservatives were quick to blame Mr. Trudeau for the loss of a project that they said would have created thousands of jobs and given an economic lift to the western province of Alberta, the hub of Canada’s energy industry, which has suffered from low oil prices over the last five years. They suggested that the government felt pressure from weeks of protests by Indigenous groups opposing a natural gas pipeline, even though some Indigenous groups supported the Alberta project, known as the Frontier mine.

“It is what happens when governments lack the courage to defend the interests of Canadians in the face of a militant minority,” Alberta’s premier, Jason Kenney, said in a statement.

The chief executive of Teck Resources, Don Lindsay, said in a letter to federal officials that global capital markets, investors and consumers were looking to governments to put “a framework in place that reconciles resource development and climate change, in order to produce the cleanest products” — something that he said “does not yet exist here.”

While environmental concerns were part of government and company calculations, there was no guarantee that the Frontier project would have gone forward even if it gained final regulatory approval. Mr. Lindsay had said the company needed a deep-pocketed partner to help pay for the project, and higher oil prices.

Canada supplies nearly six million barrels of oil a day, making it the world’s No. 4 producer and the biggest source of American imports. The oil sands contribute over 60 percent of that output and are vital to the west’s economy. Canadian output continues to grow because of investments made when global supplies were tighter.

The oil sands are a watery mixture of sand and clay soaked with a dense, viscous form of petroleum known as bitumen. But in addition to being a fossil fuel, bitumen is difficult to extract and energy-intensive to process.

And when Teck Resources proposed the Frontier project, the energy world was very different. The American shale-drilling frenzy was in its infancy, and the Keystone XL pipeline was seemingly going to deliver the oil-sands output to the American market.

Now the United States has an abundance of relatively cheap oil, prodigious deposits are being tapped in Brazil, Norway and Guyana, and the Keystone project is still awaiting completion. Delays in pipeline approvals have prompted the Alberta government to mandate production cutbacks over the last two years to drain a glut of oil in storage.

Kevin Birn, a vice president and oil-sands expert at the consultancy IHS Markit, estimated that for a project like Frontier to break even, the price of West Texas intermediate oil, the North American benchmark, would need to average $65 a barrel over a decade or more of operations. That is roughly $15 above the current price, and other analysts put the break-even figure at $80 to $85.

But until Sunday night, despite a regulatory review that cost it hundreds of millions of dollars, Teck Resources refused to give up. The company argued that its project, at a cost of 20.6 billion Canadian dollars ($15.5 billion), would create 7,000 construction and 2,500 operational jobs and eventually generate more than 70 billion Canadian dollars in local and national government revenue.

Andrew Leach, a professor of energy economics at the University of Alberta, said some might read the project’s demise as a fatal blow to oil-sands development, but he interpreted Teck Resources’ decision as a pragmatic one.

“Teck was clear that it does not want a situation where one project has to answer for all of Canada’s climate policies and climate commitments,” he said. Moreover, he added, “global investors are not prepared to help a company the size of Teck to build a multibillion-dollar project. The global market was not prepared to be part of the political football.”

No new oil-sands mine has opened since 2018, but more than a dozen proposals are awaiting regulatory approval or investment decisions. Mr. Leach said some of those were economically and environmentally more viable than the Frontier project.

But resistance to new pipelines and high production costs have steadily reduced investments in oil-sands fields. There has been an exodus of international oil companies, including ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell and Equinor of Norway.

At the same time, there are questions about the market outlook. While world demand is roughly 100 million barrels a day, a figure that increases by 1 percent every year, the International Energy Agency projects that growth will begin to slow considerably in 2025. The agency says demand could fall to 67 million barrels a day in 2040, especially if governments increase regulation and electric cars become commonplace.

Reduced demand would focus production on places where it is cheapest, like Saudi Arabia.

“Companies like Teck are realizing that global capital markets are changing rapidly,” said Simon Dyer, executive director of the Pembina Institute, a leading Canadian environmental research organization. “There was never an economic pathway for this project under global demand scenarios consistent with the Paris climate agreement.”

A federal-provincial panel that reviewed the project, he said, “didn’t properly assess the climate impacts.” The national parks agency also raised concerns about the possible effect on a national park downstream that is a UNESCO world heritage site.

The Alberta Energy Regulator wrote in July that “there will be significant adverse project and cumulative effects on certain environmental components and Indigenous communities.” Nevertheless, it approved the project after finding it in the public interest.

Two federal officials — Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson and Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan — issued a joint statement welcoming Teck’s decision. “A strong economy and clean environment must go hand in hand,” they said.

NASA’s InSight lander has detected hundreds of “marsquakes” on Mars, including about 20 tremors that were relatively significant. Compared to quakes here on Earth, the marsquakes were pretty puny, but the new data could provide planetary scientists with more information about the interior of Mars.

The initial results of the mission were published on Monday in the journals Nature Geoscience and Nature Communications. The lander, which touched down on Mars via supersonic parachute in 2018, detected its first possible marsquake in April 2019.

Many of the quakes that InSight detected were small enough that they probably wouldn’t be felt if they happened on Earth, Philippe Lognonné, principal investigator for one of the lander’s instruments, said in a press conference. “Mars is a place where we can probably say the seismic hazard is extremely low,” Lognonné added. “At least at this time.”

The 24 largest quakes discussed in the paper only reached a magnitude 3 or 4, which on Earth, might be powerful enough to be felt as a rumble on the ground but usually aren’t strong enough to cause serious damage. But unlike on Earth, where quakes can happen closer to the surface, it appears that the marsquakes InSight detected tended to originate far deeper in the planet (30 to 50 kilometers). The deeper the quake, the less shaking is felt on the surface.

The researchers had hoped to register larger quakes, which would have given them a more detailed look at the interior of the planet — and even potentially the core — but that hasn’t happened yet.

“The general cause of marsquakes is the long-term cooling of the planet,” Bruce Banerdt, InSight principal investigator, said in a press call on Friday. The interior of Mars, like Earth, has been cooling down since it was formed. As the planet cools down, Banerdt says, it contracts and the brittle crust of the planet cracks, causing the surface to shudder.

That’s the general outlook, but the specific cause of each quake is still unknown. “The details of the particular mechanisms for these quakes is still for us a mystery,” Banerdt says. “We don’t have any conclusions of the mechanisms on any individual quakes yet.”

They may not know what drives each quake, but they’ve measured a lot of them. In the papers, the authors discuss data from 174 marsquakes collected before September 30th, 2019. Since then, the instrument on board InSight that measures quakes has detected about 450 rumblings. NASA says the “vast majority” of these are probably quakes.

Other sensors were also working while InSight’s seismometer was registering quakes. One detected thousands of whirlwinds near the lander, while another recorded strong magnetic signals coming from underground rocks. Another instrument, a self-hammering probe that was supposed to measure the interior temperature of Mars, hasn’t been as lucky. It was supposed to burrow into the surface, but it encountered trouble last fall when it popped back out of the planet. As a last-ditch attempt to salvage this part of the mission, NASA plans to try to push the probe into the surface in late February and early March.

InSight’s mission lasts for nearly another year, and the team here on Earth will continue to gather more data about the inner workings of the Red Planet until then.

At least a few executives at major automakers have indicated that electric cars are the way of the future, and several of them are making big bets on battery-powered vehicles.

But at least in the United States, the market seems to belong almost entirely to Tesla.

The California carmaker’s Model 3 midsize sedan far outstripped sales of any other competitor in 2019. The next best-selling model that year was the Chevrolet Bolt, which sold a mere 16,000.

The success of both Tesla cars, and Tesla shares, have baffled many in the automotive industry, who point to the company’s small size; precarious financial history; and repeated struggles with manufacturing delays; and customer complaints about long waits for orders and difficulty obtaining parts and service.

Meanwhile established automakers with brands that play at practically every price point and in every segment have been promising and slowly releasing their own stabs at a viable electric vehicle. But none have so far proven to be Tesla killers.

A slew of new models are scheduled for release starting in early 2020, and many are starting to offer specs competitive with what buyers can find on Tesla models. For example, Ford’s Mach-E Mustang electric crossover promises 300 miles of range in one configuration, close to the 322 miles on the long range version of the Model 3 sedan.

But relatively few buyers in the United States seem interested in battery electrics, and industry watchers think many buyers are early adopters buying Teslas out of an interest in the brand or an interest in cutting edge technology, rather than out of an interest in owning an electric car.

Radio telescope in the Netherlands captures habitats of planets outside our solar system.
A team of scientists using the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope in the Netherlands has observed radio waves that carry the distinct signatures of aurorae, caused by the interaction between a star’s magnetic field and a planet in orbit around it.

Radio emission from a star-planet interaction has been long predicted, but this is the first time astronomers have been able to detect and decipher these signals. The discovery paves the way for a novel and unique way to probe the environment around exoplanets — planets that orbit stars in other solar systems — and to determine their habitability.

Notably, follow-up observations with the HARPS-N telescope in Spain ruled out the alternate possibility that the interacting companion is another star as opposed to an exoplanet.

The work appears in articles in Nature Astronomy and Astrophysical Journal Letters (ApJL).

The breakthrough centered on red dwarfs, which are the most abundant type of star in our Milky Way — but much smaller and cooler than our own Sun. This means for a planet to be habitable, it has to be significantly closer to its star than the Earth is to the Sun.

Red dwarfs also have much stronger magnetic fields than the Sun, which means that a habitable planet around a red dwarf is exposed to intense magnetic activity. This can heat the planet and even erode its atmosphere. The radio emissions associated with this process are one of the only tools available to probe the interaction between such planets and their stars.

“The motion of the planet through a red dwarf’s strong magnetic field acts like an electric engine much in the same way a bicycle dynamo works,” says Harish Vedantham, the lead author of the Nature Astronomy study and a Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) staff scientist. “This generates a huge current that powers aurorae and radio emission on the star.”

Thanks to the Sun’s weak magnetic field and the larger distance to the planets, similar currents are not generated in the solar system. However, the interaction of Jupiter’s moon Io with Jupiter’s magnetic field generates a similarly bright radio emission, even outshining the Sun at sufficiently low frequencies.

“We adapted the knowledge from decades of radio observations of Jupiter to the case of this star,” says Joe Callingham, ASTRON postdoctoral fellow and co-author of the Nature Astronomy paper. “A scaled-up version of Jupiter-Io has long been predicted to exist in star-planet systems, and the emission we observed fits the theory very well.”

To be sure, the astronomers had to rule out an alternate possibility — that the interacting bodies are two stars in a close binary system instead of a star and its exoplanet. The team searched for the signature of a companion star using the HARPS-N instrument (High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher) on the Italian Telescopio Nazionale Galileo on La Palma, Spain.

“Interacting binary stars can also emit radio waves,” notes Benjamin Pope, NASA Sagan Fellow at New York University and lead author of the ApJL paper. “Using optical observations to follow up, we searched for evidence of a stellar companion masquerading as an exoplanet in the radio data. We ruled this scenario out very strongly, so we think the most likely possibility is an Earth-sized planet too small to detect with our optical instruments.”

The group is now concentrating on finding similar emission from other stars.

“We now know that nearly every red dwarf hosts terrestrial planets, so there must be other stars showing similar emission,” observes Callingham, also a co-author of the ApJL paper. “We want to know how this impacts our search for another Earth around another star.”

“If we find that most red dwarf planets are blasted by intense stellar winds, this is bad news for their habitability,” Pope, part of NYU’s Department of Physics and Center for Data Science and a co-author of the Nature Astronomy paper.

The group expects this new method of detecting exoplanets will open up a new way of understanding the habitat of exoplanets.

“The long-term aim is to determine what impact the star’s magnetic activity has on an exoplanet’s habitability, and radio emissions are a big piece of that puzzle,” says Vedantham, also a co-author of the ApJL paper. “Our work has shown that this is viable with the new generation of radio telescopes and put us on an exciting path.”

Eat up! A new study says enjoying a big breakfast in the morning can actually help you burn more calories throughout the day.

The new research published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism studied a group of healthy young men with a normal body mass index and found the number of calories burned was much higher when they ate a bigger breakfast and a small dinner.

Test results showed they burned more than twice as many calories than those who ate a small breakfast and a large dinner.

Scientists concluded “diet-induced thermogenesis,” the amount of energy it takes to process a meal was higher in the morning than at night.

Although the study showed more calories burned, researchers say this only accounts for about 15% of the total daily calories burned.

Those who are looking to lose weight must also watch what they eat, not just when they eat.

NASA images show a new side of Antarctica, an almost ice-free side. The images show a breathtaking view, and not in the sense that one would have when looking at something beautiful. I am sure it is beautiful, but for our planet, that melted ice has to go somewhere. Just a few days after we wrote about it being warmer in Antarctica than Louisiana, the highest temperatures ever recorded at Argentina’s Esperanza research station arrived: 65 degrees Fahrenheit. The gif image below tells a chilling story that is just heating up.

20% of the snow on one ice cap in Antarctica melted in the heatwave between February 4th and 13th. These images were courtesy of the Operational Land Imager on Landsat 8. They show a drastic before & after visual. Eagle Island was nearly covered in snow on February 4th. By the 13th, you can see that most of the snow has melted, revealing larges amounts of the landmass. In that second photo, you also see a few light blue portions. These represent areas that are now turned into ponds due to the snowpack being saturated with water caused by the melting. The ponds soak up heat more than snow, which accelerates the melting process.

Mauri Pelto, a glaciologist at Nichols College, said, “I haven’t seen melt ponds develop this quickly in Antarctica. You see these kinds of melt events in Alaska and Greenland, but not usually in Antarctica.” This may soon change, since warm temperatures are happening more and more often in Antarctica. The National Snow and Ice Data Center shows that some parts of the area have warmed up 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the ’50s.

“And this temperature increase, people talk 2 degrees or 3 degrees — it’s important to appreciate just how sensitive the climate actually is to temperature. It’s important to look at it in terms of absolute temperature, not in degrees Celsius relative to zero. We need to say, what is the temperature change relative to absolute zero. That’s how the universe thinks about temperature. That’s how physics thinks about temperature. It’s relative to absolute zero. So, small changes result in huge effects.”

Elon then gives an example — a visual for those who don’t understand terms such as absolute zero or how it would affect our day to day life. He uses New York City as an example. “So, New York City under ice would be minus 5 degrees. New York City under water would be plus 5 degrees. But looked at as a percentage relative to absolute zero, it’s only a plus/minus 2% change. The sensitivity of the climate is extremely, extremely high. We’ve amplified this sensitivity by building our cities right on the coastline and most people live very close to the ocean.” The reality Elon was pointing out, applied to the case in Antarctica, is that 4.5 degrees of change have a huge impact on the climate.

Pelto gives us a warning of what is to come: “If you think about this one event in February, it isn’t that significant. It’s more significant that these events are coming more frequently.”

Topline: After hitting the market on February 18, Oreos designed by Supreme, the highly in-demand streetwear brand, were quickly gobbled up by fans⁠—not to eat, but to resell, with a three-pack of the crimson cookies going for over $88,000 on eBay as of Friday afternoon in the latest showing of Supreme’s commanding grip on “hype culture.”

• The Supreme Oreos went on sale Thursday at $8 per pack, with intrepid buyers snapping them up and then immediately listing the cookies on eBay.
• Supreme teamed up with Nabisco, Oreo’s maker, as part of its Spring/Summer 2020 collection, which also featured faux fur varsity jackets, a Nike sneaker, Nalgene water bottles, Ziploc bags and a rolling Mac Tools chest. 
• Other Supreme Oreo packs are listed at lower prices that are still significantly higher than the $8 retail price, ranging from $56 to the pack going for $88,400—which had 93 bids as of Friday.
• According to the listing history, the $88,000 pack is being sold from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and started bidding at $20 Thursday, with bids jumping into the tens of thousands by Friday afternoon and nearly nine days left for the auction.
• Some are not buying the hype: Daquan, an Instagram influencer with over 14 million followers, shared a meme saying “No one’s paying $250 for some Oreos.” 
• Supreme, eBay and Mondelēz International, Nabisco’s parent company, did not respond to requests for comment from Forbes. 

Big number: $1,000,000. That’s how much a Champion jacket designed by Supreme is going for on StockX, a streetwear resale site⁠—which has zero listings of the Supreme Oreo. Supreme is known for creating its own versions of everyday objects, such as baseball bats, matches, bottle openers and bike locks, along with more high-end products like an off-road Honda dirt bike.

Key background: Supreme began as a skateboarding brand in 1994, located in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood. The brand has exploded in popularity over the decades, with its hotly anticipated releases of new products, called “drops,” causing fans to wait for hours outside the brand’s flagship stores. Reportedly, the Supreme Oreo will drop in Japan on Saturday, and be available for online sales beginning February 27.

Tangent: Netflix’s Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj dedicated an episode to Supreme and its influence on “hype culture,” defined as obsession with the next big thing. 

T-Mobile US Inc. and Sprint Corp. agreed to new terms for their pending merger that take account of the slide in Sprint shares since the transaction was first agreed, putting the industry-altering deal a step closer to completion.

T-Mobile owners will get roughly 11 shares of Sprint for each of their stock, the companies said Thursday. That’s an increase from a ratio of 9.75 previously and is more favorable for T-Mobile’s German owner Deutsche Telekom AG.

The equity value of the amended deal is about $37 billion compared with the original agreement of $26.5 billion, according to Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Erhan Gurses. The higher valuation partly reflects the 62% gain in T-Mobile shares since the all-stock transaction was announced almost two years ago, despite the deterioration in Sprint’s business.

Getting one of the biggest U.S. wireless mergers ever over the finish line would be a boon for Deutsche Telekom as it will reduce its reliance on Europe, where carriers are struggling to grow amid fierce competition. T-Mobile makes up more than half of Deutsche Telekom’s sales, up from about a third in 2014. A completed deal will also benefit Sprint owner SoftBank Group Corp. by allowing its chairman, Masayoshi Son, to better focus on his technology investments and the $100 billion Vision Fund.

The combined company, which will operate under the T-Mobile name, will have a regular monthly subscriber base of about 80 million — in the same league as AT&T Inc., which has 75 million subscribers, and Verizon Communications Inc., which has 114 million.

When the transaction closes, which could happen as soon as April 1, Deutsche Telekom is expected to keep 43% of the merged entity, while SoftBank has 24%. The rest will be held by public shareholders.

Deutsche Telekom shares fell 1.3% to trade at 16.41 euros in Frankfurt. Sprint shares were up 5% to $9.96 at 11:01 a.m. in New York, while T-Mobile was down 1.8% to $97.73.

The original accord, which united the third- and fourth-largest U.S. wireless carriers, was forged in April 2018. That pact lapsed on Nov. 1, and the companies didn’t initially renew the terms while they fought for government approval. When a federal judge rejected a state lawsuit to block the transaction earlier this month, that put the talks on the front burner.

Along the way, Sprint’s condition has worsened. That added pressure to redraw the agreement so that it was more favorable to Deutsche Telekom.

SoftBank agreed to surrender 48.8 million T-Mobile shares that it will acquire in the merger to the combined company immediately after the transaction closes. But those shares could be reissued to SoftBank by 2025 if the new company’s stock stays above $150 for a period of time.

That arrangement — having SoftBank relinquish the stock after the deal closes — was structured so that the deal wouldn’t have to go before another shareholder vote.

Sprint investors other than SoftBank will still get the original ratio of 0.10256 T-Mobile shares for each Sprint share — the equivalent of about 9.75 Sprint shares for each T-Mobile share.

Sprint’s monthly churn — a closely watched measure of how many customers leave — has risen to nearly 2%. That means roughly a quarter of its subscriber base is quitting the carrier each year. And the company isn’t making up for the decline by charging more: Average revenue per customer has fallen 5% since the deal was announced.

Analysts such as LightShed Partners’ Walt Piecyk said the merger’s exchange ratio should be closer to 12, given Sprint’s deteriorated business.