You would think people would read the room, and learn from the tragic and fatal implosion of the Oceangate submersible in July, yet there’s already plans for another trip down to the Titanic wreckage next year – and the US government doesn’t want it to go ahead. Two months after the Titan sub crushed underwater, killing five people, officials are trying to stop Georgia-based firm RMS Titanic Inc. (RMST) from trying to recover further historical items from the wreckage to add to its collection of artifacts it exhibits. While RMST owns the salvage rights to the doomed liner which infamously struck an iceberg and sank in 1912, the US government is drawing attention to both federal law and an international agreement which classes the shipwreck as a hallowed gravesite. According to the Associated Press, the government states in court documents filed on Friday that RMST is “not free to disregard” the “validly enacted federal law” mentioned above, but it nonetheless is “its stated intent”. “[The shipwreck] will be deprived of the protections Congress granted it,” its lawyers argue. RMST, meanwhile, says it looks to take images of the entire site, including areas where “deterioration has opened chasms sufficient to permit a remotely operated vehicle to penetrate the hull without interfering with the current structure”. Provided the objects are not “affixed to the wreck itself”, artefacts recovered could include items from “inside the Marconi room” – that’s the room where the ship’s wireless radio was used to communicate with other vessels and those on the shore. RMST also insists they do not plan to cut into or detach any part of the wreck “at this time”, but that they don’t plan to seek a permit from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) – something the US government says it needs in order for the firm to move forward with its plans. The NOAA oversees the public interest in the Titanic, and on its website accepts it “may be in the public’s interest to salvage some artifacts” from the wreckage. “NOAA therefore balances this value with the Congressional intent to manage the wreck site as a maritime memorial consistent with the International Agreement, which proclaims that the Titanic shall be recognized as a memorial to those who perished. “NOAA has concluded that the recovery of many of the artifacts from the debris field (with certain exceptions) is consistent with the NOAA Guidelines and the International Agreement, including the in situ preservation policy. “However, NOAA has also determined that recovery of artifacts from within either of the two hull sections is not consistent with the purposes of a maritime memorial.” It’s not the first time the US government and RMST have had a legal battle over the ship, as back in 2020 a similar case concerning a planned expedition made its way to the courts, before the coronavirus pandemic scuppered proposals and the issue didn’t go any further. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

(Corrects year-on-year comparison in penultimate paragraph to a loss of 624 million euros, not a loss of 467.2 million euros)

Bennett Hollstein created a solution that enables TikTok users to view their recent app usage habits

BELLEVUE, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 26, 2023--

'The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom' topped 'Hogwarts Legacy' and its predecessor in boxed sales.

BRONX, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 14, 2023--

California regulators gave approval Thursday to two rival robotaxi companies, Cruise and Waymo, to operate their driverless cars 24/7 across all of San Francisco and charge passengers for their services.

Nasa has received a signal from a spacecraft 10 million miles away. The message, delivered using a distant laser, could “transform” communications with spacecraft, the space agency has said. It represents a successful test of Nasa’s Deep Space Optical Communications or DSOC experiment. It is also the first time that data has been successfully relayed through a laser from further away than the Moon – and marks a rapid increase, at more than 40 times the distance from the lunar surface. At the moment, almost all communications with craft in deep space is achieved through radio signals, sent and received from vast antennas on Earth. They have proven reliable but their bandwidth is limited, meaning that it is slow or impossible to send large files such as high-definition photos and videos. Nasa’s work on DSOC is an attempt to use optical communications through lasers instead. The technology could improve data rates by as much as 100 times, the space agency says. The first attempt to test the technology beyond the Moon left the Earth on Nasa’s Psyche mission, which left Earth last month on a mission to study a distant asteroid. The spacecraft is carrying a laser transceiver than can both send and receive laser signals in near-infrared. Last week, that equipment locked onto a Nasa laser beacon in California. Nasa says that “first light” breakthrough is one part of a host of experiments that they hope will prove the laser technology can work. “Achieving first light is one of many critical DSOC milestones in the coming months, paving the way toward higher-data-rate communications capable of sending scientific information, high-definition imagery, and streaming video in support of humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans to Mars,” said Trudy Kortes, director of technology demonstrations for the Space Technology Mission Directorate at Nasa Headquarters in Washington. Nasa likens the precision pointing of the laser signal to trying to point a light at a coin from a mile away. What’s more, the laser and its target are constantly moving: in the 20 minutes it will take for the light to travel to Earth from Psyche’s furthest distance, both the planet and the spacecraft will have moved significantly. The team will now work to refine the systems that ensure the spacecraft is pointing its lasers in the right direction. When that happens, Nasa will try an experiment to demonstrate that the spacecraft is able to maintain high-bandwidth data transfer at different distances from Earth. It will do so by breaking the data into bits that can be encoded in the photons of light sent by the spacecraft. That light then arrives at the telescope on Earth and can be reassembled into images or other important data that will be sent by spacecraft – and perhaps humans – in the future. Read More SpaceX hints next Starship launch attempt could be soon SpaceX to launch world’s biggest rocket again after first attempt ended in explosion Nasa spots collection of shocking materials on distant planet

These days, our laptops and phones rattle around in our bags like a set of loose keys. The reverence we once had for our pricey electronics seems to be long gone — now we treat them as if they were the ones responsible for our ever-growing email count. (Who even remembers laptop sleeves anymore?) Maybe it’s time we start considering this crucial three-to-seven pound commute companion with a little more care, starting with purchasing a laptop bag.

CHARLOTTE, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 12, 2023--

The Finals is very different from other FPS games currently available: Here's how to adapt and become a better competitor.

Observing Andrew Tate's endorsement of this controversial viewpoint, a multitude of users felt compelled to voice their opinions