TECHNOLOGY BRIEFS
Uber available across all of Oklahoma, company says
Uber said Monday that its app-based ride-hailing service now is available throughout the state of Oklahoma.
Starting Wednesday, Oklahomans can request a reliable ride in minutes with the tap of a button in the Uber app, Uber said.
Uber attributed the statewide expansion to “consistent statewide regulations that help make it easier to expand the service across the state.”
Uber, Lyft suspend driver who livestreamed passengers
Uber and Lyft suspended a driver over the weekend who secretly livestreamed hundreds of passengers onto the video platform Twitch, according to a report.
Nearly all of the driver’s roughly 700 rides in the St. Louis area were recorded online, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Several passengers contacted by the newspaper said they did not know their rides had been livestreamed, the Post-Dispatch reported, and they said they would not have given the driver permission to record them if they had known.
Lyft said in a statement to The Washington Post that “the safety and comfort of the Lyft community is our top priority, and we have deactivated this driver.”
The driver, Jason Gargac, 32, streamed his videos on Twitch under the username “JustSmurf,” according to the Post-Dispatch, but his channel no longer contains videos.
OMRF wins grant for research on aging
The Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation has received a $600,000 grant from The Mary K. Chapman Foundation to support aging research.
The grant will help fund age-related disease research and help OMRF recruit a pair of new scientists to its Aging and Metabolism Research Program, which takes a comprehensive approach to studying diseases of aging, including age-related muscle loss, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and arthritis.
“Aging is the number one risk factor for a number of debilitating diseases that affect our growing elderly population,” said Aging and Metabolism Research Program Chair Holly Van Remmen, Ph.D. “This gift will allow us to expand and extend our work to better understand basic mechanisms of aging and how they impact age-related diseases, such as heart disease, arthritis, age-related muscle loss and neurodegenerative diseases.”
Mary K. Chapman established her foundation upon her death in 2002 as a way to continue supporting causes associated with her personal interests. Chapman, an Oklahoma native and University of Tulsa graduate, made many of her gifts in Oklahoma and Colorado, where her late husband, oilman and philanthropist H. Allen Chapman, was born.
As a result, said Chapman Foundation trustee Donne Pitman, the foundation is devoted to continuing Chapman’s legacy of giving to health and medical research. “The hope is that these new investigators can generate new ideas and approaches to diseases of aging, like Alzheimer’s and dementia,” said Pitman. “These are devastating and common diseases that impact not only the individual, but also everyone around them. Aging research is a critical need for public health, and we want to be a part of the solution.”
Boeing faces a setback with spacecraft
The spacecraft Boeing plans to use to fly NASA astronauts to the International Space Station suffered a significant setback when, during a test of its emergency abort system in June, officials discovered a propellant leak, the company confirmed.
In a statement to The Washington Post, Boeing said it has “been conducting a thorough investigation with assistance from our NASA and industry partners. We are confident we found the cause and are moving forward with corrective action.”
The leak is likely to delay its launch schedule and is another setback for a program that has faced a number of problems. The trouble also comes as Vice President Mike Pence is expected to announce the crews for the first missions during a ceremony in early August at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Along with SpaceX, Boeing is under contract from NASA to fly astronauts to the space station. The “Commercial Program” would restore NASA’s ability to fly humans from the United States — a capability that was lost when the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011. Since then, the space agency has had to rely on Russia to fly its astronauts to space, at a cost of more than $80 million per seat.
German students win third SpaceX competition
A team of engineering students from the Technical University of Munich won the third SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition on Sunday. Teams were tasked with building a prototype transport pod that would run on a Hyperloop test track at SpaceX headquarters.
Teams were told that the competition would be decided based on two criteria: The pod must be self-propelled, and the fastest pod wins. Students from the United States, Europe and Japan entered the competition.
The pod built by the Munich team, WARR Hyperloop, reached a top speed of 290 mph, according to the team’s website. The team had taken home the top prize at each of SpaceX’s previous Hyperloop competitions. This year’s winning team had 45 members from 16 countries and seven disciplines.
Teams were required to advance through two initial rounds based on the quality of the design schematics before the three finalists were invited to SpaceX’s Hawthorne, Calif., headquarters to run their pods through the test track. Twenty teams from 29 universities competed in the challenge.