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Alaska Airlines breaks up with Delta

Alaska-Delta graphic
A graphic from happier times touted the partnership between Delta Air Lines and Alaska Airlines. (Alaska Airlines Graphic)

Breaking up with old flames is part of getting married, and that’s what Alaska Airlines and Delta Air Lines are doing in the wake of Alaska Air’s acquisition of Virgin America.

Effective May 1, Alaska and Delta will sever their frequent-flier and codeshare partnerships. After April 30, customers who belong to Delta SkyMiles won’t be able to redeem their miles in Alaska’s Mileage Plan, and vice versa.

Seattle-based Alaska said it’s making some enhancements in its mileage program, including lowering the bar for award travel and bumping up earnings for flights in business or first class. Also, starting today, Alaska Mileage Plan members can earn and redeem miles on Virgin America flights, and vice versa.

Part of the motivation for the Delta breakup has to do with the Alaska-Virgin America combination, but only part. This split has been in the works for quite some time.

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Elon Musk says he’s serious about tunnels

Bertha boring machine
The Bertha tunneling machine’s passage has been anything but boring. (WSDOT Photo via Flickr)

Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, insists he’s really going to build a tunnel-boring machine to do something about road traffic. But should he?

Never say never when it comes to Musk doing something about the things that bug him. He founded SpaceX, a company that’s revolutionizing the rocket business, when he couldn’t find a cheap ride for a mission to Mars.

Three years ago, he came up with the Hyperloop concept for near-supersonic land travel out of frustration with California’s costly plan for a rapid-transit system that’s not that rapid.

Now it’s tunnels.

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Strobe tweet sparks seizure for Trump critic

Seizure graphic
A flashing graphic can cause people with epilepsy to suffer seizures.

Yes, flashing online images can set off an epileptic seizure – and Newsweek senior writer Kurt Eichenwald, a frequent critic of President-elect Donald Trump, says he’s planning legal action after just such an attack.

This isn’t the first time Eichenwald, who has epilepsy, has been hit with a griefing GIF. He reported facing a similar threat back in October when someone tagged him in a tweet showing a flashing online image of Pepe the Frog, a cartoon character that has been appropriated by extremists.

Strobe lights and rapidly flashing graphics can be epileptogenic – that is, capable of inducing seizures or other health effects for those with photosensitive epilepsy. One infamous case involved a Pokémon TV cartoon that sent hundreds of Japanese children to hospitals in 1997. (Mass hysteria may have played a role.)

In 2008, malicious Internet users posted hundreds of epileptogenic graphics to an online message board run by the Epilepsy Foundation, causing some patients to suffer headaches or seizures.

The causes of photosensitive epilepsy are poorly understood, but the phenomenon appears the primary visual cortex. In vulnerable people, the neural networks that handle rapid changes in imagery may be overly excitable, leading to sensory overload.

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Star Wars fans turn out in Force for ‘Rogue One’

Margaret Urfer as Jedi knight
Software engineer Margaret Urfer strikes a Jedi knight pose after a “Rogue One” showing at Lincoln Square Cinemas in Bellevue, Wash. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

“Rogue One” may not have a Roman numeral in its name, but Dec. 15’s debut nevertheless brought out costumed Jedi knights and other Star Wars fans in droves.

Most of them went back into the night with smiles on their faces. And at least one of them, Makenna Hoffard, thought it was better than VII.

“I was expecting not to like it,” Hoffard, a recent graduate from the University of Washington, said after the 10:30 p.m. showing at Lincoln Square Cinemas in Bellevue, Wash.

She knows the ins and outs of the Star Wars canon, based on myriad spin-off books as well as the movies, and she said the latest film “upheld the story” even though it’s a stand-alone film and not officially part of the nine-episode big-screen masterwork.

“They made it modern and funny, like a Marvel movie kind of vibe,” she said.

Hoffard couldn’t say the same for last year’s Episode VII, “The Force Awakens,” which she faulted for taking too many liberties with the canon. “I cried after the seventh movie, and not in a good way,” she said.

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Water, water everywhere on dwarf planet Ceres

Hydrogen on Ceres
NASA’s Dawn spacecraft determined the hydrogen content of the upper yard, or meter, of Ceres’ surface. Blue indicates where hydrogen content is higher, near the poles, while red indicates lower content at lower latitudes. (NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA / PSI Photo)

Readings from instruments aboard NASA’s Dawn orbiter support the view that a treasure trove of frozen water lies just beneath the surface of the dwarf planet Ceres.

Researchers reported those findings today at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting San Francisco, as well as in two papers published by Nature Astronomy and Science.

The findings are based on hydrogen readings from Dawn’s gamma ray and neutron detector, or GRaND, as well as from the spacecraft’s cameras and infrared mapping spectrometer.

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‘Rogue One’ and more: 10 movies to watch for

Felicity Jones in "Rogue One"
Felicity Jones stars in “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” (Disney / Lucasfilm Photo)

Tonight’s the first chance most of us will have to see “Rogue One,” the latest addition to the big-screen Star Wars saga, but we already know it’s the best film of the batch. Or one of the worst.

That’s based on the reviews from fans and critics that have come out since the previews started rolling out over the past few days.

Unless you’ve been locked up in a slab of carbonite, Han Solo-style, you already know that “Rogue One” is a standalone story in the Star Wars oeuvre, The movie is about a band of rebels who take on the Galactic Empire in the stretch of time between Episode III (“Revenge of the Sith”) and Episode IV (“A New Hope”), when Darth Vader was digging the Dark Side.

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Hurricane-watching microsatellites go in orbit

Rocket deployment
A photo taken from a NASA F-18 chase plane shows Orbital ATK’s L-1011 Stargazer jet deploying a Pegasus XL rocket to launch eight CYGNSS satellites. (NASA Photo / Lori Losey)

After several days of delays, a squadron of eight microsatellites was sent into orbit by a rocket launched from a high-flying airplane. Their mission? To study the winds that power the heart of a hurricane.

The launch was originally scheduled for Dec. 12, and then for Dec. 14. Each time, technical glitches forced a postponement. But today, it was all systems go as Orbital ATK’s Lockheed L-1011 Stargazer jet took off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Fliroda.

An hour after takeoff, the airplane released a three-stage Pegasus rocket from an altitude of 39,000 feet. The Pegasus fired up its rocket engines and deployed the eight suitcase-sized satellites into low Earth orbit.

“The deployments looked great,” said Southwest Research Institute’s John Scherrer, a project manager for the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System, or CYGNSS. “Right on time.”

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Undersea volcano’s rumblings revealed

Deep-sea octopus
A deep-sea octopus explores lava flows that erupted at Axial Seamount in 2015. At the time, this was probably the youngest seafloor on the planet. (NOAA / Oregon State University Photo / Bill Chadwick)

An underwater seismic network pioneered by the University of Washington and other institutions is revealing how thousands of tiny shocks can herald huge eruptions.

Results from the Ocean Observatories Initiative’s Cabled Array, published today by the journal Science and Geophysical Research Letters, focus on the buildup of seismic activity in advance of a 2015 eruption at Axial Seamount, the most active submarine volcano in the northeast Pacific Ocean. The release of the results was timed to coincide with this week’s American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

“Instruments used by Ocean Observatories Initiative scientists are giving us new opportunities to understand the inner workings of this volcano, and of the mechanisms that trigger volcanic eruptions in many environments,” Rick Murray, director of the National Science Foundation’s Division of Ocean Sciences, said in a news release. “The information will help us predict the behavior of active volcanoes around the globe.”

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Buzz Aldrin on his health scare and John Glenn

Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin check out the engines on a Saturn V rocket at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. “I’m feeling better and my rocket is ready to launch,” he tweeted. (Buzz Aldrin Photo via Twitter)
Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin check out the engines on a Saturn V rocket at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. “I’m feeling better and my rocket is ready to launch,” he tweeted. (Buzz Aldrin Photo via Twitter)

Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin made light of what some might consider a close brush with death during an interview that aired today on NBC’s “Today” show – but he made a serious point as well.

A medical emergency at the South Pole forced Aldrin’s evacuation from the South Pole during a tourism trek on Nov. 30. “I got out of breath,” the 86-year-old told interviewer Al Roker at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. “You know, that’s nothing new, except it’s a little more concentrated.”

Aldrin suffered from respiratory problems associated with Antarctica’s cold temperatures and high altitude. “Not much air to breathe up there,” he said. He was airlifted to a hospital in Christchurch, New Zealand, for a week of recuperation.

It didn’t sound as if he had any regrets.

“When turning back is about as difficult as pressing on, you press on, because you’ve got an objective,” Aldrin said. “Especially when they tell me that I just set a record – the oldest guy to the South Pole. See, now it was worth it, really!”

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Delivery drones take small steps toward big deal

Amazon drone
Amazon’s delivery drone comes in for a landing over an English field. (Amazon via YouTube)

Amazon’s multimillion-dollar effort to deliver goods via drone currently has just two customers in the English countryside, but this could well be the way a multibillion-dollar industry gets started.

The current state of Amazon’s Prime Air project came to light today in an online announcement and video from the Seattle-based company, plus a tweet from CEO Jeff Bezos. The first delivery to an actual customer, identified only as Richard B. of Cambridgeshire, occurred on Dec. 7.

In the coming months, Amazon expects to expand the customer base from the current two to dozens of folks living within several miles of a specially designed drone fulfillment center near Cambridge. Hundreds more will be added as time goes on.

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