Air Force's X-51A hypersonic aircraft sets record during its final test

U.S. Air Force

The U.S. Air Force's sleek, light-colored X-51A Waverider hypersonic vehicle can be seen tucked under the wing of a B-52H Stratofortress for this week's test launch.

By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

The U.S. Air Force's $300 million, nine-year test program for a hypersonic plane ended on a high note this week, when the last of its X-51A Waverider vehicles made the longest flight of its kind. The success was made sweeter by the fact that it followed last year's high-profile failure.

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"I believe?all we have learned from the X-51A Waverider will serve as the bedrock for future hypersonics research and ultimately the practical application of hypersonic flight," Charlie Brink, X-51A program manager for the Air Force Research Laboratory Aerospace Systems Directorate, said in a news release.

The 14-foot-long (4.3-meter-long), scramjet-powered vehicle hit a top speed of Mach 5.1 during just over six minutes of flight on May 1, the Air Force said. That's the longest of the Boeing-built X-51A's four test flights, and the longest air-breathing hypersonic flight ever.

Hypersonic scramjet propulsion has been widely touted as eventually opening up the way for flights between London and New York in less than an hour. But in reality, the first?application?is more likely to come in the form of super-fast cruise missiles.

Scramjet is a short way of saying "supersonic combustion ramjet." There have been?many?efforts?through the years?to perfect hypersonic aircraft?? that is, vehicles that travel at speeds beyond Mach 5. But the Air Force says the X-51A is unique primarily because it used hydrocarbon fuel rather than hydrogen fuel. Without any moving parts, the fuel is injected into the scramjet's combustion chamber, where it mixes with the air rushing through the chamber. The fuel is ignited in a process that's been likened to lighting a match in a hurricane. ? ? ?

This week's experiment followed the flight profile used for the X-51A's earlier tests: A B-52H Stratofortress took off from California's Edwards Air Force Base, flew 50,000 feet over a Pacific test range, and then released a solid rocket booster with the plane attached. When the cruiser reached Mach 4.8, the X-51A separated from the booster and lit up its scramjet engine. The scramjet exhausted its fuel in 240 seconds. The sleek vehicle coasted for another couple of minutes and splashed down into the ocean as planned. The X-51 traveled more than 230 nautical miles and yielded 370 seconds of data, the Air Force said.

"This success is the result of a lot of hard work by an incredible team.? The contributions of Boeing, Pratt and Whitney Rocketdyne, the 412th Test Wing at Edwards AFB, NASA Dryden and DARPA were all vital," Brink said. ?

From 2012: ITV's Lawrence McGinty talks about the X-51A Waverider hypersonic vehicle in advance of its third test. That test ended in failure, but this week's test was successful.

All this is a huge improvement over the previous test, which ended in failure last August. During that flight, the X-51A veered off course less than a minute after launch and crashed, due to a problem with one of its control fins. The issue was resolved after a months-long investigation. The first X-51 test was?successful in May 2010, resulting in a 200-second flight, but the second test in June 2011?was a disappointment.?

There's no immediate successor to the X-51A, but the Air Force has pledged to continue with hypersonic research. It says the lessons learned during the X-51A program "will pay dividends to the High Speed Strike Weapon program" at the Air Force Research Laboratory.

More about supersonic flight:

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Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the?Cosmic Log?community by "liking" the log's?Facebook page, following?@b0yle on Twitter?and adding the?Cosmic Log page?to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space,?sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out?"The Case for Pluto,"?my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

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Lindsay Lohan: In Rehab at Betty Ford ... But For HOW LONG?!

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Stocks stall on tepid US economic growth

In this Tuesday, April 16, 2013, photo, Specialist Michael O'Mara, left, and trader Fred Demarco work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. World stock markets fell Friday April 26, 2013 after Japan faced an unwelcome drop in consumer prices. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

In this Tuesday, April 16, 2013, photo, Specialist Michael O'Mara, left, and trader Fred Demarco work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. World stock markets fell Friday April 26, 2013 after Japan faced an unwelcome drop in consumer prices. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

NEW YORK (AP) ? The stock market stalled Friday after the U.S. economy didn't grow as much as hoped and earnings from a handful of big companies failed to rev up investors.

The economy grew at a 2.5 percent annual rate in the first three months of the year, the government said. That was below the 3.1 percent forecast by economists.

The shortfall reinforced the perception that the economy is grinding, rather than charging, ahead. Investors have also been troubled by reports in the last month of weaker hiring, slower manufacturing and a drop in factory orders. Many economists see growth slowing to an annual rate of around 2 percent a year for the rest of the year.

U.S. government bonds, where investors seek safety, rose after the report.

"There are some concerns as we head into the summer," said JJ Kinahan, chief derivatives strategist for TD Ameritrade. "In the last three weeks, we've seen numbers that weren't exactly what you'd love to see."

Corporate earnings this week have also contained worrisome signs. Many companies missed revenue forecasts from financial analysts, even as they reported higher quarterly profits. For example, Goodyear Tire slipped 3.3 percent to $12.51 Friday after revenue fell short of analysts' estimates, hurt by lower global tire sales.

Of the companies that have reported earnings so far, 70 percent have exceeded Wall Street's expectations, compared with a 10-year average of 62 percent, according to S&P Capital IQ. But 43 percent have missed revenue estimates. Just over half of the companies in the S&P 500 have reported quarterly results.

The S&P 500 index dropped 2.92 points, or 0.2 percent, to close at 1,582.24.

The Dow rose 11.75 points, or 0.1 percent, to 14,712.55. The index got a big lift from Chevron. Profit for the U.S. oil company beat expectations of financial analysts in the first quarter, pushing shares up 1.3 percent to $120.04.

Three stocks fell for every two that rose on the New York Stock Exchange.

Both indexes were up for the week and remain slightly below their all-time highs reached April 11. The Dow index rose 1.1 percent this week while the S&P gained 1.7 percent.

The market has been bolstered by the Federal Reserve's easy money policy. The disappointing growth figure for the economy will ensure that the Fed sticks with its stimulus policy, providing support for stocks, said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at Rockwell Global Capital.

"The economic data that we've been getting points to no early exit for the Fed's stimulus," Cardillo said.

The Nasdaq composite fell 10.72 points to 3,279.26, a decline of 0.3 percent. The index is 2.3 percent higher this week.

The tech-heavy index has lagged the Dow and the S&P 500 this year, but it led the way higher this week, boosted by Microsoft. The software giant, which makes up 5.3 percent of the Nasdaq, recorded its biggest weekly gain since January of last year ? up 6.8 percent. It reported earnings April 19 that beat Wall Street expectations. The company also began an aggressive push into the computer tablet market.

Apple, the largest stock in the Nasdaq, also had a good week. The stock rose 6.8 percent to $417.20, its best weekly gain since November, despite posting a decline in quarterly profit Tuesday. Apple accounts for 7.6 percent of the Nasdaq composite.

Among other big names investors focused on:

Amazon.com fell 7 percent to $254.81 after the company warned of a possible loss in the current quarter. The online retailer also reported lower income for the first quarter as it continued to spend heavily on rights to digital content.

Expedia fell 10 percent to $58.56 after the online travel company reported a quarterly loss.

Homebuilder D.R. Horton surged 8.7 percent to $26.66 after its income nearly tripled thanks to a continuing recovery the housing market. The results handily beat the forecasts of financial analysts who follow the company.

J.C. Penney jumped 12 percent to $17 after the billionaire financier George Soros disclosed that he had taken a 7.9 percent stake in the struggling company.

In government bond trading, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note slipped to its lowest rate of the year, 1.67 percent, from 1.71 percent the day before. The yield has fallen from 2.06 percent six weeks ago as traders move money into lower-risk investments.

The dollar weakened against the euro.

The European currency bought $1.3029 at the end of day, compared with $1.3002 the day before. The ISE dollar index, which measures the U.S. currency against a group of other world currencies including the Japanese yen and the euro, dropped 0.3 percent, to 82.48.

Associated Press

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Research aims to settle debate over origin of Yellowstone volcano

Apr. 15, 2013 ? A debate among scientists about the geologic formation of the supervolcano encompassing the region around Yellowstone National Park has taken a major step forward, thanks to new evidence provided by a team of international researchers led by University of Rhode Island Professor Christopher Kincaid.

In a publication appearing in last week's edition of Nature Geoscience, the URI team demonstrated that both sides of the debate may be right.

Using a state-of-the-art plate tectonic laboratory model, they showed that volcanism in the Yellowstone area was caused by severely deformed and defunct pieces of a former mantle plume. They further concluded that the plume was affected by circulation currents driven by the movement of tectonic plates at the Cascades subduction zone.

Mantle plumes are hot buoyant upwellings of magma inside Earth. Subduction zones are regions where dense oceanic tectonic plates dive beneath buoyant continental plates. The origins of the Yellowstone supervolcano have been argued for years, with sides disagreeing about the role of mantle plumes.

According to Kincaid, the simple view of mantle plumes is that they have a head and a tail, where the head rises to the surface, producing immense magma structures and the trailing tail interacts with the drifting surface plates to create a chain of smaller volcanoes of progressively younger age. But Yellowstone doesn't fit this typical mold. Among its oddities, its eastward trail of smaller volcanoes called the Snake River Plain has a mirror-image volcanic chain, the High Lava Plain, that extends to the west. As a result, detractors say the two opposite trails of volcanoes and the curious north-south offset prove the plume model simply cannot work for this area, and that a plates-only model must be at work.

To examine these competing hypotheses, Kincaid, former graduate student Kelsey Druken, and colleagues at the Australian National University built a laboratory model of Earth's interior using corn syrup to simulate fluid-like motion of Earth's mantle. The corn syrup has properties that allow researchers to examine complex time changing, three-dimensional motions caused by the collisions of tectonic plates at subduction zones and their effect on unsuspecting buoyant plumes.

By using the model to simulate a mantle plume in the Yellowstone region, the researchers found that it reproduced the characteristically odd patterns in volcanism that are recorded in the rocks of the Pacific Northwest.

"Our model shows that a simple view of mantle plumes is not appropriate when they rise near subduction zones, and that these features get ripped apart in a way that seems to match the patterns in magma output in the northwestern U.S. over the past 20 million years," said Kincaid, a professor of geological oceanography at the URI Graduate School of Oceanography. "The sinking plate produces a flow field that dominates the interaction with the plume, making the plume passive in many ways and trapping much of the magma producing energy well below the surface. What you see at the surface doesn't look like what you'd expect from the simple models."

The next step in Kincaid's research is to conduct a similar analysis of the geologic formations in the region around the Tonga subduction zone and the Samoan Islands in the South Pacific, another area where some scientists dispute the role of mantle plumes.

According to Kincaid, "A goal of geological oceanography is to understand the relationship between Earth's convecting interior and our oceans over the entire spectrum of geologic time. This feeds directly into the very pressing need for understanding where Earth's ocean-climate system is headed, which clearly hinges on our understanding of how it has worked in past."

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Rhode Island, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. C. Kincaid, K. A. Druken, R. W. Griffiths & D. R. Stegman. Bifurcation of the Yellowstone plume driven by subduction-induced mantle flow. Nature Geoscience, 07 April 2013 DOI: 10.1038/ngeo1774

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

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London School of Economics denounces BBC tactics

LONDON (AP) ? The renowned London School of Economics has denounced the BBC for using a student-organized trip to North Korea as "cover" for a reporting trip to the secretive communist country.

The LSE said in a statement Saturday the BBC put students at risk by having at least one of a team of three journalists pretend to be affiliated with the university to gather material for a TV program set to be broadcast Monday.

The university says it has tried and failed to persuade the BBC not to air the program. LSE blamed BBC for not being forthcoming about its reporting plans in North Korea, where foreign reporting crews usually have to operate under strict supervision.

The BBC's John Sweeney, who LSE officials say posed as a post-graduate LSE student, said Sunday it was "entirely wrong" for the university to try to prevent the broadcast from going forward.

LSE student union general secretary Alex Peters-Day said the students were lied to and that at least one of the students on the trip was not told in advance of the journalists' participation.

"This is a student welfare issue," she said. "We don't know what could have happened to those students and, truthfully, neither does the BBC. It's absolutely disgraceful that he (Sweeney) put students in that position. It's incredibly reckless."

BBC News Head of News Programs Ceri Thomas said on a BBC News program Sunday that the students were given the information needed to give informed consent to the increased risk of traveling with journalists who did not have authorization to work in North Korea.

He said, however, that the students were told roughly a month before the trip that there would be "a journalist" traveling with them but were later told, once they were already en route to North Korea, that there would be three journalists who would be conducting undercover filming for TV.

He said the students may have been under the impression that a print journalist, not a three-person TV crew, was going to be involved.

Thomas said BBC would air the documentary despite LSE's concerns because of high public interest in the show.

"It is disappointing for us that LSE has chosen to make this public," he said. "We would have kept them out of this altogether. They could have avoided the publicity and we think that would have lowered the reputational risk."

He said BBC executives felt that if the deception was discovered the students likely would have been deported, but he admitted he could not "categorically" rule out the possibility that their lives might have been at risk.

In an email sent to staff and students, the university complained that the BBC "Panorama" program was "produced using as cover a visit to North Korea which took place from 23-30 March 2013 in the name of the Grimshaw Club, a student society at LSE."

It said the group included Sweeney and journalists Alexander Niakaris and Tomiko Sweeney.

"In advance of the trip, it was not known to the rest of the party that they were three journalists working for or with the BBC," the email said. "Their purpose, posing as tourists, was to film and record covertly during the visit in order to produce the 'Panorama' program."

The BBC has faced intense criticism in the last year for its handling of an investigation into alleged sexual abuses committed by the late Jimmy Saville, one of its star presenters.

A BBC statement released Sunday indicated that the students "were all explicitly warned about the potential risks" of traveling to North Korea with journalists as part of this group. It said they were warned that the might face "arrest and detention."

The statement said BBC recognized it was raising the risks to the students by adding a journalist to the group.

Sweeney also defended the BBC on one of its programs Sunday morning. He said the LSE's version of events is not accurate.

A BBC story about the trip says Sweeney and a two-person crew that included his wife spent "eight days undercover" in North Korea.

Associated Press

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Mother of Newtown victim delivers emotional weekly address in Obama's stead (Washington Post)

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Comedian Jonathan Winters dies at 87

By Anna Chan and Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, TODAY

Getty Images file

Jonathan Winters at the TV Land Awards in 2008.

Jonathan Winters, who earned laughs playing everyone from an alien baby to a crotchety grandma, and who inspired numerous comedians in the field of improvisational comedy, has died of natural causes at age 87.

Winters' agent told NBC News that the actor died Thursday night at his home in Montecito, Calif., while surrounded by family and friends.

Winters was born in Dayton, Ohio, on Nov. 11, 1925. His career kicked off when his wife, Eileen, encouraged him to enter a talent contest, which he won. That performance led to a DJ job at WING-AM in Dayton in 1946, and he eventually moved to New York and became a performer at Manhattan's Blue Angel nightclub.?

Winters became known for his numerous classic comedy characters and routines, including sharp-tongued Maude Frickert, whom the comic said he based on a large, humorous but bedridden relative.

?I decided, having seen a lot of older people, that many of them even today are shelved,? Winters told the Archive of American Television. ?I decided to get a hip old lady.? Johnny Carson was inspired by Frickert to create his own version, Aunt Blabby, who appeared frequently on Carson's "Tonight Show." His other popular recurring characters included countryish Elwood P. Suggins, wealthy B.B. Bindlestiff, football coach Piggy Bladder and?Princess Leilani-nani, the world's oldest hula dancer.

Winters' improvisational comedy inspired a generation of funny men and women. In a classic 1964 clip from "The Jack Paar Program," host Paar hands Winters a stick and the comic launches into four minutes of off-the-cuff prop humor, switching from an all-American fisherman to an Austrian violinist to a Spanish bullfighter.

Winters worked as an actor in more than 73 movies and television shows, and currently has two projects in post-production: the voice of Papa Smurf in "The Smurfs 2," due to be released in July, and a character named Dayton in "Big Finish," which is scheduled for late next year. His many movies included "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" and "The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming."

Everett Collection

From left, Robin Williams, Jonathan Winters and Pam Dawber on 1980s sitcom "Mork & Mindy."

One of his most popular roles was that of Mearth, Mork (Robin Williams) and Mindy's (Pam Dawber) child, who was hatched -- as a fully grown adult -- from an egg Mork laid. The character was introduced during the show's fourth and final season in the hopes of improving the sci-fi comedy's ratings. Winters had previously made a guest appearance on the show in season three as Mindy's uncle Dave.

Winters won an Emmy in 1991 for his work as the goofy father of Randy Quaid on the short-lived sitcom "Davis Rules." He also won two Grammys and the second-ever Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

Winters also voiced multiple commercials. Among his most popular ads were the ones he did for Hefty garbage bags, in which he played a garbageman dressed to the nines in a spiffy white suit.

Comedians took to Twitter Friday morning to remember the comic and his body of work.

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Winters' life wasn't always easy. Before he finished high school, he enlisted in the Marines and served during World War II. In 1959 while performing in San Francisco he suffered a nervous breakdown and eventually stopped touring with his comedy shows. He battled alcoholism and manic-depression, and spent eight months in a mental hospital. But he didn't lean on his experience for sympathy.?

The Associated Press quotes him as saying, "If you make a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year and you're talking to the blue-collar guy who's a farmer 200 miles south of Topeka, he's looking up and saying, 'That bastard makes (all that money) and he's crying about being a manic depressive?'"

On his birthday in 2011, Winters posted on Facebook, "I can't thank you enough for all the birthday wishes. The only thing I can imagine worse than being 86 is being 96."

The actor is survived by his two children and five grandchildren.

How will you remember Jonathan Winters? Tell us on Facebook.

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