Boom Supersonic's plans to launch its Overture passenger jet by 2029 are facing growing doubts as the company pivots toward manufacturing natural gas turbines for AI data centers. Ars Technica reports: One of the company's first customers, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, has expressed doubts about Boom's original plan to deliver the first Overture supersonic airliner in 2029. Kirby's latest frank assessment came during an interview with the Office Hours: Business Edition podcast that appeared on October 28, 2026. "'29 is their official timeline," Kirby told podcast host Monica Langley. "It's not going to happen in '29 -- it's going to take longer."
[...] Much of Boom's recent focus has been on developing natural gas turbines to power AI data centers as an additional revenue stream. On October 22, the company unveiled another factory in Centennial, Colorado, dedicated to producing a 42-megawatt natural gas turbine called Superpower for data centers. [...] Boom described its new Superpower factory as making turbine parts while still undergoing construction. It aims to deliver the first gas turbines to AI data center customers in mid-2027 while ramping up annual production to 25 turbines in 2028 and 50 turbines by 2029.
[...] Still, Boom has characterized the development of a gas turbine for data centers as being synergistic with its design of the Symphony engine for the Overture airliner. During the October announcement, it also described having completed a prototype turbine core, called Sprint Core, that is intended to eventually power both the Superpower gas turbine and Symphony engine for the airliner. That turbine core is set to undergo testing at the Colorado Air & Space Port, with Boom planning to fire the turbine for the first time before Thanksgiving. That would be a concrete development milestone, but the company still has much to do in proving it can get both its AI data center and supersonic airliner ventures off the ground.
3rd over: Australia 14-2 (Head 9, Green 1) Brave of Green to leave the ball outside off. Similar spot to the one that got Marnus, a touch fuller perhaps. He gets moving from the fifth ball, knocks a single into the off side.
2nd over: Australia 13-2 (Head 9, Green 0) Well, I said that Australia needed Head to take a bite out of the chase first, but wasn’t anticipating that he would lose two partners in the first over. He decides to do his part anyway. Defends three balls from Jansen, then lets loose as he sees width. Misses his first flail, connects cleanly with his second one along the ground, and connects dirty with his third, in the air through the cordon but safe. Two boundaries, but if I were South Africa, I’d happily feed that shot a few times looking for the mistake.
Days away from a national verdict on Trump 2.0, we check in with nine midterm voters across the US and the political spectrum
US voters will soon deliver a national verdict on the second presidency of Donald Trump. On 3 November, millions of Americans will vote in midterm elections to decide control of the House of Representatives and Senate, as well as the governorships in 36 states and state legislatures across the country. The results could have a huge impact on Trump’s final two years in office.
Our reporters have interviewed nine voters across the country and the political spectrum about extremism in US politics, their confidence in the US voting system, what they hope Congress will tackle first and their views of the president’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth.
It was very cold and the young smoker was barelegged, barefoot and wearing a fur coat … How could the photographer resist?
This Margate shop is now an ice-cream parlour, but back in 2014 it was a vintage clothes store. Mark McEvoy, who had relocated from London the previous year with his partner and baby daughter, approached the young woman to ask permission to take this shot.
“I remember it being a very cold October day, so I was surprised she was barelegged and barefoot,” he says. “My guess is that she was working in the shop, or maybe a friend of someone working there. The fur coat may even have been for sale inside, just something she put on to keep warm during a cigarette break.”
A mile beneath the Black Hills, scientists are building giant detectors to analyse neutrino particles – and possibly find the answer to existence
For more than a century, the mining town of Lead, in the Black Hills of South Dakota, attracted workers with a taste for gold. Now, a flagship experiment being built in the old mine is drawing scientists in search of more intriguing riches: answers to the deepest mysteries of the universe.
Construction of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (Dune) in the former Homestake mine is due to start on Monday. Engineers will begin assembling four giant detectors inside caverns blasted from rock a mile underground.
Defence secretary says value for money and modernisation key for spending to ‘fight the wars ahead’
The defence secretary, Wes Streeting, says he started stockpiling food and water weeks ago in case of a national emergency, as he talked up the threats to the UK and said his department had already begun ramping up its spending in response.
Polen is een land van tegenstellingen, of, zo u wil, van tegenpolen. Wie in ieder geval tegen Polen is, is volgens rechts-conservatief PiS-volk Donald Tusk. Die probeerde afgelopen weken volgens de oppositie het constitutioneel hof naar zijn hand te zetten door allemaal pro-Tusk-rechters te installeren. Tusk maakte het ook wel erg bont; als je eigen 'rechterhand' een van de nieuwe grondwetsrechters is, dan is de schijn van onafhankelijkheid ver te zoeken. President Karol Nawrocki weigerde mee te werken aan het installeren van een deel van de Tusk-rechters, voorzitter van het constitutioneel hof Bogdan Swieczkowski (net als de president behoorlijk PiS-gezind) weigerde de rechters te erkennen toen ze alsnog plaatsnamen en uiteindelijk sloeg de vlam definitief in de pan toen rechter Anna Korwin-Piotrowska op eigen houtje (of die van Tusk) besloot om Swieczkowski en zijn ondervoorzitter te schorsen. De duizenden demonstranten die sindsdien het constitutioneel hof omringen slaagden er vooralsnog niet in de boel te bestormen maar president Nawrocki deed dat wel, al moest hij zich eerst fysiek langs Korwin-Piotrowska en de haren wurmen.
In de loop van de nacht verklaarde kamp-Nawrocki dat de rechtsorde hersteld was en een globalistische coup afgewend, maar kamp-Tusk en rechter Korwin-Piotrowska zijn het daar vermoedelijk totaal niet mee eens. De stand-off duurt nog altijd voort. De premier lijnrecht tegenover de president, constitutionele rechters lijnrecht tegenover constitutionele rechters en het volk lijnrecht tegenover de ME. Nawrocki voert vanmiddag gesprekken met verschillende fractieleiders uit het parlement en wat Tusk doet is vooralsnog ff onduidelijk. Bij grote vlam in de Poolse pan zijn we hier LIVE.
Premier Burnham staat ervoor open om excuses aan te bieden voor het Britse slavernijverleden, maar noemt herstelbetalingen in een open brief in The Guardian ”niet het juiste antwoord”. Zijn brief wordt gematigd positief ontvangen.
Welcome back to the Abstract—and Happy Halloween! Here are the studies this week that smashed into Earth, put aliens on ice, drank mummy wine, and hugged it out.
First, a century-old theory that comets enriched Earth with the stuff of life is upended by new models of ancient impacts. Then: the case for life in extraterrestrial sea ice, a Halloween-coded medieval concoction, and a scientific embrace.
Carl Sagan eloquently said that we are all made of “star stuff,” but just how much of us is really comet vomit? This is a hotly debated question in science due to the popular theory that comets delivered essential ingredients for life to Earth during impacts more than four billion years ago, paving the way for the curious emergence of Earthlings.
But scientists have thrown cold primordial water on this idea in a new study that challenges “the long-held assumption that cometary impacts played an important role in the origins of life on Earth.” By running more than 100,000 advanced simulations of comet impacts, the team found that key prebiotic molecules found in comets, such as hydrogen cyanide, would be smashed to smithereens during impacts with Earth’s ancient surface in most cases.
Moreover, while Earth was pummeled by these snowballs during its youth—relatable!—this bombardment doesn’t neatly line up with the timeline of abiogenesis, the term of the origin of life. For these reasons, it’s much more likely that life assembled from earthly molecules that leaked out from our planet’s interior, according to the study.
“The most probable timing of successful cometary impact is in the early Hadean…more than 100 [million years] earlier than the estimated emergence of the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) at 4.2 [billion years ago],” said researchers led by Richard Anslow of the University of Cambridge.
“Taken together, the rapid decline in Earth’s cometary impact bombardment and the efficient destruction of fragile cometary organics indicate that the successful delivery of prebiotic feedstock molecules was an exceedingly rare event,” the team added.
The researchers didn’t rule out the possibility altogether, but concluded that any impact that had a direct influence on abiogenesis would be an edge case. That said, comets might serve as prebiotic wellsprings on other planets, such as Mars, where key molecules might have faced better odds of survival upon impact due to the red planet's smaller mass and thin atmosphere.
“Mars would have been the more favourable target for the cometary delivery of prebiotic feedstock molecules” which “strengthens the possibility that life could have emerged on Mars,” the study concluded.
While we’re on the topic of prebiotic feedstock molecules—a household conversation, no doubt—let’s speculate about their accumulation on weird exoplanets. In a new study, scientists suggest that these molecules might build up in sea ice on a variety of extraterrestrial ocean worlds, providing a pathway to the emergence of aliens.
“Water worlds with potential deep oceans are at the forefront of currently observable exoplanetary habitability,” said researchers led by Edouard Barrier of the University of Cambridge. “Here we outline a location where nutrients could be concentrated in sufficiently high quantities to make abiogenesis possible—at the interface between the open ocean and the surface ice shelf.”
The team studied the dynamics of sea ice on Earth, and modelled how similar features might form on a range of different exoplanets, including hypothetical “Hycean” planets. These are worlds more massive than Earth, but smaller than Neptune, making them part of the “sub-Neptune” class of exoplanets.
The results revealed mechanisms that “may plausibly provide concentrated chemical feedstock for prebiotic chemistry” on many of these exoplanets, suggesting they could be a substrate for the emergence of alien life. This “rich avenue of research…has the potential to significantly advance our understanding of aquaplanet habitability, and particularly to improve the prospects of abiogenesis on sub-Neptunes,” the team concluded.
What a week for the prebiotic feedstock beat! Taken together, these studies point to multiple onramps for life on worlds like Earth, Mars, exotic sub-Neptunes, and more, upping odds that life exists elsewhere in the universe—regardless of whether we ever find it.
To celebrate Halloween, here’s a trick and a treat all wrapped up in one delightfully grotesque story about mummies. Roughly 700 years ago, someone had the interesting idea of grinding up parts of Egyptian mummies, mixing the residue with wine or other liquids, and prescribing it as a medicinal elixir for people to drink.
This resulting product, known as Mumia vera aegyptiaca, circulated in Arabic and European markets for centuries, but its exact composition and pharmacology remain unclear. You know what that means: It’s time to do science on the medieval mummy cocktails.
Two historic apothecary vessels of Mumia vera from Hamburg Museum (left) and Deutsches Apothekenmuseum Heidelberg, Germany (right). Images: Christoph Braun and Bullenwächter
Researchers analyzed historical Mumia vera products, mummified body parts, embalming residues, bandages, and two mummified skulls. The team discovered a wide range of formulas for this medicine, including one powdered product that appears to have been derived from a mummified head.
The results demonstrate that “an apparently uninformative powdered material can be chemically linked to a specific mummified head,” said researchers co-led by Tim Berger and Amira Naimi of Marburg University. “This study shows that linking historical texts, material culture, molecular composition, and bioactivity, can open new routes for decoding historical medicines and reconstructing the material biographies of human remains and museum objects.”
So if you are really committed to the spirit of this season, break out some Mumia vera aegyptiaca to pair with your Halloween candy and witches’ brew. Bottoms up—or more accurately: mummified-heads up.
What better way to close out this chilling spooky season than with the warm embrace of science? So come on, bring it in for a hug—or, in this case, roughly 15,000 of them.
Hugging is an incredibly common form of affection among humans, and even some other animals, including Halloween favorites like vampire bats. But little is known about “how individual differences shape the remembrance of such experiences,” according to a new study.
To fill this cuddly gap, scientists analyzed survey responses from 15,049 adult participants in the United Kingdom who were recruited in a public broadcasting campaign that included the BBC. The volunteers reported that their most memorable hugs were “for comfort, support, and understanding” and there was a noticeable gender split, as men were more likely to remember hugs that were “arousing” than women.
“Regarding hugs, men have shown different lateralisation and arm crossing patterns when hugging other men compared to women,” said researchers led by Anna Lena Dueren of the University of Bristol. “Furthermore, women were found to experience a stress buffering effect of hugs that was absent in men.”
And for anyone who considers themselves not a “hugger,” you are not alone. Plenty of participants expressed that they found hugs difficult or unpleasant. So whether you love bear hugs or cannot bear hugs, this study has something for you.
There's a ridiculously simple test you can use to figure out whether AI mandates at a given company are well-considered, or are being shoved out the door by out-of-touch buffoons: What happens when an engineer documents that AI made a task worse? Are they taken seriously, or are they marginalized and eventually managed out? Conveniently, this week Amazon published a treatise by Terk Terkowitz, a VP/Distinguished Engineer/Final Boss of Their Independent Contributor Technical Career Track, on the role of the developer in the age of AI. It was originally an internal missive sent to their software engineers and their managers back in September, which is an interesting lag for a document that sounds this confident. It also maps exceedingly well to what other organizations are struggling with. I think it's a good document, but I can't help but view it with a somewhat cynical eye. I see it as an attempt to make the future of the profession of software engineering feel less bleak. And it's feeling mighty bleak for a lot of folks right now. What's the context? This treatise comes at a time of dramatic upheaval. Tech as an industry is no stranger to change (usually at 3AM, heralded by the pager), but something about the current AI-ification of the world strikes many of us as fundamentally dissimilar from previous revolutions. Folks are scared about their career prospects. "Should I give up tech and get into farming?" is a sincere question multiple people have asked me. I don't know! Tech is already a goat rodeo, so you've got a leg up if you do? This anxiety isn't theoretical. In May, Amazon wisely shut down KiroRank, an employee-built cash incineration leaderboard that ranked people by token usage, after the obvious thing happened: people spun up junk tasks to climb the ranks. This is now called "tokenmaxxing," and the Terkowitz treatise specifically calls it out as being at odds with "frugality." Meta did the same thing with "Claudenomics" and 85K employees that same week. And Amazon reportedly announced another 250 job cuts this week. I can't tell you that these things are related. But I can tell you that every engineer who read the memo assumes that they are. What's the thing say? This document contains a lot of great stuff. I have a tremendous level of respect, both personal and professional, for Amazon's Principal Engineering community; I'm led to understand that that respect may not be reciprocated, but that's okay. I am, by their standards, a lapsed engineer who ran away to join the circus as one of its lesser clowns. Terkowitz's memo emphasizes customer outcomes and engineering judgement, two things I would absolutely not delegate to AI any time soon. (Note: I am writing this in October of 2026, with the full understanding that previous comments on the capabilities where AI falls short tend to age like fine milk.) It documents work that (today) AI tools aren't improving. That's way better than assuming that every objection to AI inherently comes from some self-interested Luddite who's scared of being replaced. It also says something smart about measurement: look at the 90th percentile of AI adoption, at those teams burning the most tokens, and check whether their delivery actually went up commensurately. This is great! Shout it from the rooftops; we should all be doing such things. But still, I wonder. The memo says “If your work does not benefit from current AI tooling, that is a finding, not a failing.” Document it, bring it to your manager, work through the problem. I agree with every word of that! The question is whether anyone's promo doc is gonna survive citing it. Here's what happens next. The memo concedes that input metrics are "deeply flawed," but then in the next paragraph says to go ahead and use them anyway, carefully. It then warns that non-adopters are falling behind. Those are three different positions within three sentences and they're not at all aligned with one another. That's not muddled; I think it's cover. A manager can cite "a finding, not a failing" when a strong engineer skips the AI tool, and then cite "falling behind" when it's time to PIP someone. Both are congruent with their stated policy; you get to decide which interpretation you want to go with in a given situation. How will managers handle justified AI non-use? Are promotion and performance decisions being made in a way that rewards these long term outcomes? Or are they instead taking the easy weasel way out, optimizing for what's cheap to measure, and rewarding tool activity? Because if you give me a metric, I will turn it into a target. So will an overwhelming majority of employees. When that happens, everyone loses — it's how KiroRank happened in the first place. Everyone's selling tokens — including Amazon I write this after two days of attending GitHub Universe, where they talked about how agents start roughly 40% of PRs now. And yet, Jay Parikh’s keynote argument was that useful output wasn't "more code," but rather completed outcomes: features shipped, bugs fixed, security issues addressed, loudmouth columnists silenced, etc. The problem here is that their entire business model cuts against that; they're billing in a model that charges customers on a consumption basis, not an output basis. There's nothing, today, that ties "AI spend" to "output that was worth the effort." Which brings us back to Amazon. The memo says tokenmaxxing is at odds with frugality, and for Amazon’s internal cost line, it is. Meanwhile AWS bills Bedrock and Kiro customers by the token. Inside the building, tokenmaxxing is a problem to be stamped out. Outside it, it’s the revenue plan. ®
Je doet de laatste aangifte inkomstenbelasting voor je overleden
vader en ziet een vinkje bij “ cryptobezittingen”. Wat is dat nou, daar heeft hij nooit
iets over gezegd. Notarissen komen deze situatie steeds vaker tegen,
zegt notaris en docent Notarieel Recht aan de Radboud Universiteit Lucienne van der Geld tegen Margriet.
Het probleem: crypto komt nooit vanzelf naar je toe. Zonder de
digitale sleutel is het “slechts een waarde in de cloud waar niemand
toegang toe heeft”, weet Van der Geld. Zo raakt een deel van een erfenis
voorgoed kwijt.
Kan de notaris er niet gewoon
bij?
Nee. Een bankrekening kun je terugvinden en de bank geeft erfgenamen
een overzicht. Bij crypto bestaat zo’n loket niet. “Ook de notaris heeft
geen superpower om toegang te ontsluiten, helaas”, zegt Van der
Geld.
Joël Verbaken, specialist nalatenschapsplanning bij adviesbureau Grant
Thornton, vat het kort samen: “Bij crypto geldt: wie de sleutels
niet heeft, heeft het geld niet.”
Nederlandse huishoudens hadden eind juni voor 3,2 miljard euro aan
crypto bij Nederlandse platforms als Bitvavo, meldde WEL eerder op basis
van nieuwe
cijfers van DNB. Crypto in een eigen wallet telt daarin niet mee, en
juist die is na een overlijden het lastigst te vinden.
Waar kan de crypto zitten?
Er zijn grofweg drie plekken:
Op een handelsplatform. Dit is het gunstigste
geval. Weet je bij welk platform de overledene zat, dan kan de
klantenservice je soms op weg helpen.
In een wallet op de laptop. Een wallet is een
digitale bewaarplaats. Zonder de code van de laptop en de wallet kom je
er niet in.
Op een usb-stick of hardware wallet, een apparaatje
waarop je crypto offline bewaart. Weet niemand waar die ligt, dan is het
geld onbereikbaar.
Een veelgemaakte fout is om crypto zó goed te beveiligen dat niemand er meer bij kan.
Moet de code in je testament?
Niet de code zelf, wel waar hij ligt. Van der Geld raadt aan om de
vindplaats van de toegangscode in het testament op te nemen. Je kunt de
notaris ook een aantekening in de kluis laten bewaren, over de code of
over de plek van de usb-stick. Denk ook aan het wachtwoord van je
laptop.
Verbaken waarschuwt om wachtwoorden of de herstelzin van een wallet
niet letterlijk in het testament te zetten. Wachtwoorden veranderen, een
testament aanpassen kost geld en medewerkers van het notariskantoor
kunnen de gegevens zien. Zet erin dát je crypto hebt en waar de toegang
ligt. Hoe een erfenis verloopt zonder testament, lees je in wat
er gebeurt als je geen testament hebt.
En als je
niet bij de crypto van een overledene kunt?
Meld het aan de Belastingdienst als je de aangifte voor de overledene
doet. “Meestal is er coulance”, zegt Van der Geld. Achterhouden raadt ze
af: dat komt uit zodra je de crypto verzilvert.
Wat gebeurt er bij een
scheiding?
Daar speelt hetzelfde probleem. Er komen steeds meer rechtszaken van
ex-partners die hun deel van het digitale vermogen willen, zegt Van der
Geld. Is de ex niet eerlijk over wat hij of zij bezit, dan kan ook de
rechter vaak weinig. Een overzicht opvragen zoals bij een bank kan
niet.
Haar advies: regel het in goede tijden. Ga je trouwen of samenwonen,
neem dan de waarde van digitale bezittingen op in de huwelijkse
voorwaarden of het samenlevingscontract en houd die jaarlijks bij.
Wat je nu al regelt
Maak een lijst van je munten, platforms en wallets, en bewaar die
apart van de codes.
Leg vast waar de codes liggen: in het testament, of als aantekening
bij de notaris.
Zorg dat iemand de code van je laptop kan vinden.
Vertel minstens één erfgenaam dát je crypto hebt; Verbaken raadt aan
om erfgenamen al vroeg bij de techniek te betrekken.
Bewaar je hardware wallet of usb-stick op een vaste plek, zoals een
kluis.
Marvin Beekhuijzen (40) zat als tiener in een sociaal isolement, maar vond via het spelen bordspellen toch een gemeenschap waar hij zich thuis voelde. Als organisator van de Nationale Spellenweek wil hij nu heel Nederland aan de tafel krijgen.“Je hoeft het tijdens een bordspel niet over zware onderwerpen te hebben en kan gewoon plezier maken.”
Iedere maand laten we exclusief in De Speld Krant een clubcoryfee leeglopen over zijn of haar club. Deze maand is het de beurt aan Ruud Gullit, die ‘zijn’ HFC Haarlem niet meer herkent.
Als klein jongetje ging ik al naar het Haarlemstadion. Ik glipte door de poortjes zodat ik geen kaartje voor vijf gulden hoefde te kopen. Kon ik mooi een zakje snoep kopen bij Ome Bep in de rust. Het was de tijd van Barry Hughes, dát was nog eens een echte karaktertrainer. Je kon met hem lachen - zo is hij een keer over een jeugdspeler heen gereden met een grasmaaier - maar hij kon je ook een schop onder je donder geven. En nu? Nu mist HFC Haarlem zo’n type trainer. Sterker nog, het mist überhaupt een trainer. Doodzonde.
Juist omdat ik de club een warm hart toedraag, doet het me pijn om te zien dat de huidige generatie het echte HFC Haarlem-gevoel totaal niet meer uitdraagt. Nog maar tachtig jaar geleden werd de club landskampioen, maar in een vloek en een zucht is de hele boel in elkaar geklapt. De club mag dan niet meer bestaan, maar dan kun je nog wél wat karakter tonen. Schuim op die bekken. Dat zie ik totaal niet meer.
Vorige week zat ik nog op de Kick Smit-tribune, nou, dan weet je niet wat je meemaakt hoor. Wat je nu over het gras van het Haarlemstadion ziet lopen, doet niet meer denken aan de jongens van vroeger, zoals Abe van den Ban, Joop ‘Klinkhamer’ Böckling en Bennie Blikslager. Tegenwoordig loopt er alleen soms een kraai of een verdwaalde kikker over het veld. Moet je horen: het kan me geen reet schelen of je nou een amfibie of een linksback bent, je moet gewoon voor de volle 110 procent inzet tonen en de clubkleuren met trots dragen.
Ik mis de beleving, de vitaliteit. Heeft de huidige generatie voetballers nog nooit van VitaePro gehoord ofzo? Ik neem het altijd voor soepele botten en gewrichten. Hierin onderscheidt een topclub als Ajax zich dus van het totaal ingedutte HFC Haarlem. In zo’n topsportklimaat denken ze tenminste aan het aanvullen van het topsportdieet met voedingssupplementen zodat ze zich in balans voelen. Maar nee, daar hoef je anno 2026 niet meer mee aan te kloppen bij de HFC. Dood- en doodzonde. Vind je het gek dat HFC Haarlem-fans niet meer naar het stadion komen?
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