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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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The war between Google, Apple, and Amazon has started.

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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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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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Following is the transcript of the video:

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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In 1995, Nintendo tried to cash in on the virtual reality craze... sort of. That year, the company released the Virtual Boy console, which didn't technically count as virtual reality. It offered gamers a 3D experience they couldn't get on TV screens or handheld devices. Unfortunately, the Virtual Boy didn't click with customers, and it was discontinued less than a year after its debut. With around 770,000 units sold, it remains Nintendo's worst-selling console of all time. 

We got our hands on a vintage Virtual Boy at the retro video games store VideoGamesNewYork in Manhattan's East Village to get a better idea of why the system stumbled out of the gate, existing as a bizarre blemish on Nintendo's otherwise impressive record. To learn pretty much everything there is to know about the history of the Virtual Boy, we highly recommend visiting the Planet Virtual Boy website, where you'll find an exhaustive, comprehensive library of almost everything ever written or researched about the Virtual Boy.

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