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A significant force of U.S. Navy craft is making their way towards the Korean Peninsula and is set to arrive in days. The force held routine exercises with Japanese craft in the Philippine Sea this week.
France is holding the first stage of its national election. Of five candidates, the two who receive the most votes will proceed to the next stage of the election to be chosen through another vote.
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Much talk about the most recent Islamist attack in Paris and how that might swing the vote towards the Right and anti-immigration Marine Le Pen. In the attack, a gunman opened fire on police and killed one before being killed by police fire.
A Tennessee teacher who fled weeks ago with a 15-year-old student across state lines was found at a cabin in Northern California.
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She “showed no signs of elation” when the police arrived to rescue her and charge the man, according to authorities.
There was talk of scientists running for U.S. government offices.
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Some attended information sessions on the practical ins and outs of running for office, motivated by a sense that Trump is antagonistic towards independent research-based science, particularly when it involves climate change.
Millennials Owe Record Debt
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The group owes around $1.1t of the America’s $3.6t in consumer debt, and consumer debt it getting closer to 20% of GDP.
Where is the debt coming from? A lot comes from rising student and auto loans.
In addition to the economic risk involved in this kind of debt, it also has effects on psychology and behavior: A large portion of Americans reportedly worry about defaulting on loans in the next 12 months, and over 50% of those worriers are millennials. The group, aged 21 to 34 in 2017, are also changing spending habits by doing more searching and more waiting for lower prices before buying smaller items. Analysts are concerned that this trend will be the same when the group, entering the age where people usually buy homes and start families, shop or hold off shopping for large purchases.
These Tiny New Satellites
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So these tiny satellites being sent up into space in bundles …
The buzz company is called Planet, and they started in 2010 with a team of ex-NASA scientists.
They recently launched 88 new little imaging satellites in one go from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota, India.
Their satellites are called Doves, and they’re shoebox-like machines weighing around 11 pounds. They take a lot of pictures: right now, they can capture 58 million square miles per day, the equivalent of the land on our planet.
The company also recently bought Terra Bella, another imaging company, from Google (for an undisclosed amount, and in a deal that included Google buying data back from Planet). That added 7 better-quality camera satellites to their flock. They can now use their lower-res satellites to build a large picture of Earth and look for changes, and use the 7 Terra Bella units (which have 4 – 6x better resolution) to get details.
They also bought another satellite company that gave them an archive of satellite images dating back to 2008, as well as some more satellites.
Planet doesn’t have a monopoly in the field, though. While they have the lead in whole-Earth imaging, other companies that have better resolution, like DigitalGlobe, provide other services. DigitalGlobe’s resolution exceeds Planet’s: they can make make images from orbit in which they can resolve a laptop screen into a pixel.
Chinese Investment in U.S. Tripled Last Year
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140,000 Americans are now employed by 3,200 Chinese companies operating in the U.S., according to Chinese state media organization Xinhua.
The 140k is 9 times the 2009 number. And the dollar figure for investment, $46b, is three times what it was a year earlier.
Trump Invites Philippines’ Duterte to White House
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According to the White House, the President invited the president over the phone this week, but didn’t give further details about a meeting. The White House also said the two leaders talked about concerns about North Korea on the phone.
Trump is also scheduled to visit the Philippines in November.
Robots for Fruit-Picking Jobs
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Fruit may join the large number of U.S. crops that are harvested by machines.
Robotics companies like FFRobotics and Abundant Robotics are working on building machines to harvest delicate fruits.
FFRobotics is developing a 4- to 12-armed machine that has three-fingered grips to grab fruit and twist or clip it from a branch — at a rate of up to 10,000 apples an hour. The machines would leave about 10 or 15% of the fruit on the trees that humans would have to pick.
Abundant Robotics’ machine uses a vacuum to pull off apples.
The goal is to have these bots working in a couple of years, and analysts think they can do it.