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Countless people – from fussy babies to Tim Burton – report feeling more emotional 35,000 feet up. Why is it so easy to cry during a flight? Tech Insider producer Abby Tang explains with the help of author Stephen Groening.

See more from Stephen Groening: https://www.amazon.com/Cinema-Beyond-...

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Following is the transcript of the video:

Abby Tang: I've cried on every plane I've ever been on. Countless people – from fussy babies to Tim Burton – report feeling exceptionally emotional 35,000 feet above Earth’s surface. "50 First Dates" is the same mediocre romcom in the air as it is on the ground. (Sorry, Adam Sandler...) So, why did it make me (and, admit it, probably you) blubber like a baby on a recent flight?

Crying in transit is nothing new or surprising. Bereaved people often grieve on the go. They save their sobs for the car because it gives them uninterrupted time to think and the privacy to feel. So it’s not surprising that airplanes might make us feel the same way. 

Virgin Atlantic started issuing “weepy warnings” before particularly sad movies after a Facebook survey revealed people were more likely to reach for a tissue on flights. 41% of male respondents said they had “buried themselves in blankets to disguise their tears from other passengers,” and “women were more likely to pretend they had something in their eye.” And Gatwick Airport found 15% of men and 6% of women said they were more likely to cry watching a film on a flight than they would if they saw it at home.

But what actually causes people to join the Mile Cry Club? One possible explanation is altitude hypoxia – when high altitudes cause a decrease in oxygen in our blood. Diminished air pressure on flights is similar to what you’d experience at 8,000ft, which can reduce blood/oxygen levels by as much as 25%. This can cause fatigue, confusion, euphoria, inability to concentrate, and impaired decision-making. It can also mess with your ability to deal with emotion.

And the design of the in-flight entertainment system could be making your mile-high meltdowns even worse.
Inflight entertainment systems make you feel cocooned in an intimate environment.

Stephen Groening: "You're looking at a screen that is really close to you, maybe a couple of feet, and it's right at your eye level. So it's almost as if you're looking at another person in the eye for 3, 4 hours, 6 hours depending on the length of the flight. And in addition, you have these headphones and the sound, the dialogue from all these films is as if the actors are speaking directly to you, only to you in your ear – like whispering in your ear. So it creates this zone of closeness and familiarity that I think also intensifies these emotional responses."

Abby Tang: In other words, the free headphones the flight attendant gives you before takeoff literally and emotionally connect you to the screen. There doesn't seem to be any cure for those of us who suffer from crying while flying. Adam Sandler will always have the power to make me weep when I'm up 35,000 feet in the air.
But adding Kleenex to your carry on should be enough to treat the symptoms.

An airport in Norway has been cleared of snow by completely autonomous snowploughs, and it could help reduce airport delays.

The technology uses 4G communications and GPS to allow retrofitted machines to navigate around runways. The 5.5 metre wide vehicles are capable of clearing 357,500 square metres an hour, and can work in formation with several other snowploughs at once, further increasing their efficiency. 
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This machine can mow around signposts. It's called the LSM 740, and it's made by Dücker.

It uses two mower disks, each controlled by a sensor. It automatically turns the mower when near a post in order to cut around it without damaging it. This makes mowing roadsides much easier.

Dücker also makes a range of flail mowers, which use a large spinning drum to cover a wide area. The mowers are all mounted onto a hydraulic arm, which can hold a range of attachments.

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Latvian company Aerones created the machine, which - according to the company - can fly up to 984 feet, compared to 100-foot-height that firefighter ladders can reach. The drone is fitted with a water hose from a fire truck, and is controlled by a pilot on the ground remotely. However, the drone does suffer from low battery life, providing only 30 minutes flight time from a 90-minute charge. It's still in development, but Aerones hopes to use the machine for real-life operations soon. 

See more from Aerones: https://www.aerones.com/eng/

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Earth's magnetic field is what protects our planet from harmful space radiation. However, our protective shield might soon go into a transformation that could threaten the lives on Earth. This video shows what will happen when Earth's magnetic poles flip.

Special thanks to Alanna Mitchell: https://www.amazon.com/Spinning-Magne...

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A home like this can be built in less than 24 hours at a cost of only $4,000. The secret? 3D printing. And they could help families living in poverty and unsafe conditions. New Story, a housing charity organization, and ICON, a construction tech company, have partnered together. Their goal is to end global homelessness. 

Alexandria Lafci: So having strong, sturdy walls, having a door that we can close at night — it's something that we take for granted. Being able to lock our door and be safe. For many of these families, for years, sometimes even a lifetime, they don't have that opportunity to have a safe shelter. So when they move into a New Story community, when they move into a safe home, families lives are transformed.

An entire community of these 3D printed homes will be constructed in El Salvador. The ultimate goal is to get costs down to $4,000 per house with a build time of fewer than 24 hours. 

This prototype house was built in Austin, TX. The home measures 650 square feet. Mortar was printed layer by layer. Human workers installed windows, doors, plumbing, and electrical systems. Here's what's inside: A living room. Small office space. One bedroom. One bathroom. ICON staff will use the home as an office to test the durability.

Evan Loomis: Our first product is a 3D printer that can print a house in 24 hours for half the cost. Phase one for News Story and for ICON is a proof of concept house and the good news is we've done it. We printed the first home in the United States that's going to be permitted and for us, this is just the beginning. The real kind of home run for us is to be able to do what we've done here in Austin, Texas in the developing world and we're doing that in what we call phase two which is in El Salvador. We are going to be printing an entire village for people that don't have homes.


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Whenever you enter a restaurant, you're putting your health in someone else's hands. Thousands of people get sick from food poisoning each year. But thankfully chefs can take steps to minimize the risk. One of those ways? Boiling lobsters alive. Turns out, those unusual tanks of live lobsters in restaurants isn't just there so you can have a plate of fresh lobster.

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If you walked into a kitchen and saw a pig cooked alive on the stove, you’d probably be horrified and lose your appetite. Yet, this is how millions of lobsters meet their fate in American kitchens each year. Some people even relish choosing which lobster’s time is up at restaurants or markets across the country. But is a lobster really any different from other animals we eat? Why do we boil lobsters alive? And why do places even sell live lobsters? Turns out, this seemingly barbaric way of cooking lobsters could actually save your life.

Humans were boiling lobsters alive thousands of years ago. The first recorded case came from recipes attributed to the famous Roman Cook Caelius Apicius in the first century. American chefs later adopted the process by 1880, when they discovered that the dish looks and tastes better when the animal is boiled alive. It wasn’t until later that we realized this also reduces the risk of severe food poisoning. That’s all because of these little guys. They’re a type of Vibrio bacteria. And they thrive on the decaying flesh of lobsters and other shellfish. If a lobster dies, you only have a few hours before these bacteria show up to the party. And once they’re in, it’s nearly impossible to get rid of them. Even cooking the lobster meat won’t kill all of the bacteria. So it’s safer to just keep the animal alive right up until you serve it.

If Vibrio bacteria end up in your system, it’s not pretty. You can experience abdominal cramping, nausea, vomiting, fever, chills, and sometimes even death. Luckily, there’s a pretty good way to tell if that meat has gone bad. Just smell it. You can easily smell the ammonia that is released when the body starts to decompose.

So boiling lobsters alive save us from a world of pain, but what about the lobsters? For starters, lobsters don't scream when you boil them. In fact, they lack lungs and don’t even have the proper biological equipment to form a scream. What you hear is air and steam escaping from the shells of their simmering suppers. In any case - we don't do this to chickens or pigs because it’s pretty obvious that they can feel pain. For lobsters, it’s less clear if their primitive nervous systems and brains even know what pain is. When a lobster thrashes around in the pot does that mean it’s in agony? Or is it simply a reflex response to the boiling water, but not a conscious action? No one really knows, so more research is needed.

Regardless, some say this uncertainty is exactly why we should think twice.

Anil Seth: With lobsters, we just don't know if they can feel pain. There’s a thing in ethics that we call the Precautionary Principle, when not knowing we should err on the side of caution. If there is the potential for something to have the ability to suffer, we should treat that possibility very seriously. So boiling lobsters, not a very good idea.

New Zealand and Switzerland certainly agree. They’ve gone so far as to make it illegal to boil lobsters alive. Should America follow suit?

Fake news has been a problem swamping the internet. Now there is a way to make fake videos with nothing more than your laptop. FakeApp can be used to make fake videos of people using images or other videos of them. Several social media platforms are filled with these deepfakes. While the technology still needs works, it's been used to put celebrities into pornographic films. What would happen if world leaders became digital puppets?

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Steve Kovach: You've probably seen this Snapchat filter before. It's called Face Swap. It's an augmented reality feature that takes someone else's face and puts it on your own. But it turns out this fun technology is becoming easy for anyone to use. And not just in Snapchat.

This is called a deepfake. They're shockingly easy to make. And for the most part, people use them to make goofy videos. But there's a darker side to this. It used to be you had to be a world-class film editor to get this effect. But now anyone can do it with just a simple app. FakeApp is a free PC program based on Google's opensourced machine learning technology. Since it's opensourced, anyone can have access to this technology to make fake videos. Think of it as an advanced version of their Snapchat lenses. You feed the program hundreds or thousands of images, and it spits out a fake video.

Deepfakes have already started spreading through many online communities. Most are harmless, but they have crept into the darker parts of the internet too. Of course, a lot of these are silly and goofy. This deepfake shows Nicholas Cage as Lois Lane in a Superman movie. But some have used it for malicious reasons. Like taking celebrity images and putting them in pornographic videos. Gal Gadot and Taylor Swift were some of the many victims of this trend. Twitter, Reddit, and some adult sites have already promised to ban deepfake videos. But the problem doesn't end there. Some are worried that as technology gets better, it can be used to spread hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and fake news online.

Senator Mark Warner: The next wave of technology will be able to have your image with words coming out of your mouth that may not be said, or your face put on somebody else's body in terms of next wave of technology.

Kovach: Could you imagine making a digital puppet out of Barack Obama, or Donald Trump, or Vladimir Putin? Researchers at Stanford University already did this. Imagine someone making a video like that to make a world leader declare war on another country. It's a scary proposition. In the digital age, we've even seen governments use tools like Photoshop to spread propaganda, and with deepfake videos, it's going to take the problem to a whole new level. Social networks are designed to promote content with shock value and shareability. Companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter have done little to prove that they can handle fake news.

Anchor: Facebook is the most important mechanism facilitating the spread of fake news.

Anchor: Facebook just allows us to quantify that more. How real do you think the fake news problem is?

Guest:  It's a real problem.

Anchor: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg today finally speaking out. Admitting mistakes and vowing to correct them.

Kovach: But if they already have a problem weeding out fake news articles, how are they going to handle fake news videos? Congress hasn't shown that it's willing to regulate the tech industry, and it's unlikely someone else will come in and fix it before the problem gets worse.

The best advice to avoid deepfake hoaxes is the same advice to avoid all fake news and conspiracy theories. Stick to trusted news sources, that you know deliver reliable information. For now, deepfake technology isn't that great. But we should focus on it today, because tomorrow this could look pretty real.

President Trump: Eight billion. Net worth, not assests, not liabili--, a net worth.

Meet SoFi, the little robotic fish that could help change the way we study the ocean. Created by researchers at MIT, SoFi is capable of swimming alongside real fish without any disturbance, this is due to the robots appearance and movements mimicking that of marine life.

SoFi is powered by a smartphone battery and controlled remotely - using ultrasonic signals to communicate. A hydraulic pump moves its flexible, soft silicone tail, allowing it to move nimbly in the water. 

The robot is still in development, and the team plan to improve its swim speed and design, eventually including technology to allow SoFi to swim autonomously.

See more from MIT CSAIL: https://www.csail.mit.edu/

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The Samsung Galaxy S9+, the iPhone X, and the Google Pixel 2 XL all claim to take incredible photos. But we wanted to know which one was the absolute best — here's what we found out.

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So, I have the top three smartphones you can buy right now. Got the Google Pixel 2 XL, which has an amazing camera. Got the Galaxy S9+ with a dual lens camera. And got the iPhone X or iPhone 10, which has also a dual lens camera.

Let's start off with the office environment at the BI offices. This is mixed lighting there's some of the artificial lights up top, there's some light coming through the windows, so this is a good test for a smartphone camera. And I gotta say in this one, it was the Pixel 2 XL that really won out. The Pixel just offered the best color, it was the most accurate color. It's what I see when I look at it through my own eyes.

Now for a look at how each phone handles colors in an indoor lighting environment. So, taking a look at these flowers with indoor lighting, it's kinda warm, yellow lighting. Colors on the S9 photo kinda looks washed-out. The Pixel and the iPhone did really well here, with the iPhone winning out for colors in indoor lighting.

Alright, let's take a step outside to check out how these photos do with HDR, High Dynamic Range. That's basically how a camera handles super bright spots when there's also like a darker spot in the photo as well. So here we have these tall Manhattan buildings, and then just the super bright sky in the middle with the clouds. So that's perfect test for HDR. And here I'm gonna call the Pixel on this one. Again, the HDR on the Pixel kinda won out on the others. That's not to say that the others looked bad. The iPhone looks good also, it's just a little yellow.

So, here's a really tough one for smartphone cameras. This is a dark, reflective surface. That means that the camera has to deal with this dark surface, but also these super bright spots on this dark surface that are reflecting off it. So that's really tough for smartphone cameras, and honestly, a lot of cameras as well. But here, I gotta say, the iPhone won out here for sure. And actually, the Pixel just totally blew this one.

Next up, we have the Statue of Liberty taken from Lower Manhattan, and here I gotta say it's pretty clear to me the iPhone or the Pixel did the best. The S9 again did this thing where it just homogenizes the whole photo. It kinda just looks grayish. So, I couldn't leave it there, especially with the Statue of Liberty being so far away. This was a perfect test for the 2X zoom lens on the iPhone X, or 10, and the Galaxy S9+. The Pixel is not part of this test here, because it doesn't have a zoom lens. I think the iPhone looks better here. It just has this sort of deeper contrast, which we've seen in a lot of the previous photos. S9 again kinda does it's thing, where it's just sort of like makes things a little too bright, washes out some colors.

Now we go into Galaxy S9 territory, Samsung territory: low lights. So I took this photo here of this painting at home. The Galaxy S9 does incredibly here. I am just amazed and still shocked how good Samsung's cameras are at low light situations.

I guess it's time to call it. Which one is the best? This is a tough one, guys. I gotta say, I think the Pixel 2 is still the best smartphone camera you can find right now. That's not to say that the S9 and the iPhone are bad, it's just the Pixel just edges them out a little bit overall, and that's what we're gonna see for the foreseeable future. We might see something with the Galaxy Note 8 in a few months time, maybe Red's special crazy camera phone will hold some surprises for us. We'll have to see. But, for the foreseeable future, and for a little under a year now, the Pixel 2 still has the best smartphone camera.

Abhishek Singh created an augmented reality version of Street Fighter that can be played "in real life." Using his experience as a UX engineer at a self-driving startup, Abhishek made a game development engine that allows you to place objects in the real world.

See more from Abhishek Singh: http://shek.it/

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When you share earbuds, do you ever think about the bacteria that could be on them? We tested 24 pairs of headphones to see what might be lurking on them. After they incubated in the lab for a few days, we went back to check out the results.

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