Our Blog

Jet pack paramedics could soon be a reality, after a successful test flight took place over the Lake District.
Gravity Industries has been testing the capabilities of its jet pack-suit in emergency situations in Cumbria, which can travel at speeds of up to 32mph (51kmph), alongside the local air ambulance service.

Footage of the test flight shows the pilot seemingly flying over the Lake District with ease to rescue a patient in 90 seconds, with devices attached to his arms and legs.

‘A little similar to using a motorbike’

“There are two patient types who we think can benefit from this,” director of operations at the Great North Air Ambulance Service (GNAAS), Andy Mawson, told Sky News.
“The first is those who need the helicopter, but those we can get to a little bit quicker.

Advertisement

“Also patients that don’t require critical care that might have a more simple injury like a broken ankle or a broken arm that may still wait an hour for a mountain rescue team, and we can be by their side in a matter of minutes, giving them some strong pain relief, making them comfortable in lieu of the mountain rescue teams arriving.”

Rather than carrying medical equipment on their backs, users will take the kit, including a ventilator, to the top of the mountain using pouches on their legs, stomach or chest.

More from Cumbria

Despite the test across the Lake District, Mr Mawson says GNAAS is not yet at the stage to rollout the technology, as Gravity Industries are still tweaking the suit and collecting data.
However, he added that a flight training programme would focus on safety, and initial footage shows that users would not necessarily have to fly quickly or high up to use the suit effectively.

Image: A flying paramedic has taken to the skies above the Lake District. Pic: Gravity Industries

Image: The technology could be used to help stranded walkers. Pic: Gravity Industries
Richard Browning, the test pilot and founder of Gravity Industries, said following the flight: “It was wonderful to be invited to explore the capabilities of the Gravity Jet Suit in an emergency response simulation and work alongside the team at GNAAS.
“We are just scratching the surface in terms of what is possible to achieve with our technology.
Emergency response is one of the areas Gravity are actively pursuing, alongside launching a new commercial training location at the world-renowned Goodwood Estate.”

After more than a decade of electoral failures, the Pirate Party UK (PPUK) is holding a ballot to dissolve. It seems likely that, when voting closes on Sunday 4 October, the party will be scuttled.
Speaking to Sky News, current and former members described a party which perhaps lacked political will and professionalism (in one infamous incident, members of its national executive faced being summonsed to the High Court), but a party which also lacked the toxic internal conflicts that can tear idealistic movements apart.
“A serious party with a silly name,” as former members describe it, the Pirate Party was never a truly significant political insurgency in British politics. At its height in 2015 the party had 766 members, six of whom ran in the general election, collecting just 1,130 votes. In comparison the Monster Raving Loonies – a silly party with a silly name – ran 27 candidates, receiving 3,898 votes.
If the Pirate Party is to sink as a political entity it will do so having fallen well short of the shores of electoral success, and without leaving much of a ripple in the turbulent seas of Westminster. But its demise is a reminder that at some point over the past 10 years a particular era of the internet quietly passed away too.
It’s hard to imagine today, but a decade ago the general sentiment regarding the internet was that it was a fundamentally democratising force. From the Arab Spring through to the open-source-software movement, there was an optimism that the self-propagating values of an open society would spread anywhere that information technology would allow them access to.
The Pirate Party even crowdsourced a general election manifesto on social media, without any fears of astroturfing from hostile trolls. It campaigned on a platform of radical copyright reform – reducing copyright terms to 10 years so society could enjoy its own cultural products. It demanded internet access for all, an infrastructure question which major parties have subsequently adopted.
In particular PPUK was formed in response to the last Labour government’s Digital Economy Act (2010), a law that introduced controversial powers to disconnect individuals’ internet connections if they were suspected of downloading copyright-infringing material.

Image: Loz Kaye was PPUK’s leader from 2010 to 2015. Pic: Andy Halsall
Loz Kaye, who served as the party’s leader from 2010 to 2015, told Sky News that the Digital Economy Act was what “galvanised me to act politically, rather than just writing a letter or appearing on a phone-in on the radio,” something he laughed about doing.
If the party’s core supporters were easy to stereotype as nerds hunched over laptops, Mr Kaye couldn’t have been more different. A handsome and outgoing professional music composer, active in Manchester politics, he brought a focus on social justice to a party which was generally focused on technology issues.
“Loz is not the person anybody expects when you’re talking about the Pirate Party,” Andy Halsall told Sky News. Mr Halsall, a British Army veteran turned IT professional, served as the party’s campaign manager during the first three years of Mr Kaye’s leadership and its greatest growth in membership and finances.
Mr Halsall, who joined the party because his brother-in-law was standing, told Sky News how the leadership team pulled information on how to run a political campaign “from Wikipedia and everybody else’s election manuals” and then attempted to convince activists they needed to put in work on the ground instead of just building websites.
“It’s very hard when people have the expectation that a digital-only campaign will sway people to actually vote for you – when they think that having the right ideas and the right position can win an election, when obviously that isn’t the case,” he said.

Image: Activists initially focused on digital-only campaigning
The party itself was essentially pluralist and a few former members who remain active in party politics are now members of the Conservative Party, Labour and the Liberal Democrats. “We were generally anti-authoritarian,” said Mr Kaye.
“What united us all was not feeling very comfortable in the demonstrated political clothes. I hate the socialist cosplay of Corbynites, I abhor the flag-waving numptyism of the current Tory party. I think all of those ways of demonstrating politics or political place are just fatuous,” he told Sky News in a phone call.
Despite this growth PPUK never quite matched the successes of pirate parties in Germany, Iceland and the Czech Republic.
In a way PPUK’s pluralism stands in contrast to the most successful pirate party, the Czech Pirate Party, which retains the third largest presence in the country’s lower house of parliament and functions as a liberal third party to the country’s populists and eurosceptics.
“I think if we were honest with ourselves, we never particularly saw becoming an MP as a short-term prospect,” Mr Kaye said, attributing this to the first-past-the-post system in Westminster, noting: “It’s not like say the Netherlands, where you can have a Party for the Animals and get into parliament.”
For onlookers such as Jim Killock, the director of digital rights organisation Open Rights Group, the Pirate Party failed to focus on the limited number of chances it had for electoral success – specifically the devolved assemblies in Scotland, Wales and London, and two seats in the European elections in the southeast England and London.
“In my own view, I saw too much political naivety for them to really grasp the chances that they had,” Mr Killock said.
Andy Halsall recollects: “Standing for elections was what political parties did, so there was a default position of ‘if we’re a political party, that’s what we do – otherwise we’re just a bunch of activists talking about it’.”
But converting its geographically dispersed support into votes in a national campaign was difficult on such a small policy platform.
As Mr Kaye recollected, voters who he met on doorsteps and at debates often expressed an appreciation for the party’s copyright policies, but had other issues too: “What are you going to do about the bins, Palestine, and all the rest of it?”

Image: The NEC almost ended up fighting a lawsuit in the High Court
Despite the struggle to establish itself as a national entity on par with the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, or Labour, for a six-month period the Pirate Party website was not only the most popular political website in the UK, but one of the most popular of any at all receiving more than 50,000 hits every hour.
Nobody who spoke to Sky News remembers who really started it, but just before Internet Service Providers in the UK implemented a court-ordered block on the website Pirate Bay for copyright-infringement, PPUK began to host a proxy service allowing people to access the site.
“I don’t know who kicked it of, at some point we simply had a proxy running for the Pirate Bay on party kit that we were managing, and that was it,” said Mr Halsall, who described the incident as one of the issues with professionalising the party and ensuring that when actions were being made and decisions taken they were overseen.
“We wanted to change the law, not circumvent it,” Mr Halsall added.
Loz Kaye, who was leader at the time, told Sky News he’d talked very little about the incident before. He said: “Essentially the point was if you start blocking sites you start out on a slippery slope and hand powers that perhaps you might want to think twice about to governments.
“The question was also about free access to culture, so that was the thinking – but it also then proved ridiculously successful.
“Because it was linked to our website, the Pirate Party website became the most popular political website in the country. We were in the top hundred sites in the country, ahead of major banks, so not surprisingly this came to the attention of the BPI.”
He added: “I don’t mind admitting we were a little bit naive, but I think we were all surprised by what happened.”
What happened was this: Six months after the proxy went up, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the trade association for record companies, targeted the individual members of the Pirate Party’s national executive committee (NEC) with legal threats to take the proxy down. They initially said no.
“Behind the scenes it was very hard for us to get legal representation,” Mr Kaye said. “It was hard to find lawyers, even though some were keen, but any firm with any knowledge of intellectual property would also potentially have conflicts of interest as they may have acted for potential litigants.
“We were days away from being summonsed to the High Court and the lawyers we had pulled out. That was possibly the most stressful thing that has ever happened to me,” he said.
Eventually replacement lawyers were found, but the proxy was taken down.
Although the party membership generally considered that the proxy was justified, as NEC members were being personally targeted by a potentially very expensive court case, Mr Kaye said: “I didn’t think it was fair to push it too far.”
It was an ignominious end for an action driven by a political cause that was sincerely believed in, but without the political will to be seen through. Many years later, a similar fate looms over the party as a whole.

Image: Pirate Party UK’s leadership proposed closing it down
In its proposal to close Pirate Party UK, the current leader and the chairman of the board wrote it was “with great sadness that we have reached the conclusion that PPUK has run out of steam”.
Members who are considering voting “no” to dissolving the party were instructed to only vote that way if they themselves were determined to help run the party, and not simply because they thought that somebody should do so.
In the case the ballot concludes that the party will be dissolved, members’ personal records will be destroyed and the Electoral Commission will be notified that the party has ceased to be.
Outstanding debts will be settled and any remaining funds will be split between two charities, the National Museum of Computing and Privacy International, fitting locations for the vestiges of PPUK.

New evidence has been revealed of an enormous salty lake of liquid water buried beneath the ice of the Martian south pole.
New radar data from a European Space Agency spacecraft suggests a large body of liquid water, as well as three smaller lakes, are spread out over 75,000 square kilometres – an area roughly the size of Scotland.

There is potential that the liquid water – if that is what it is – could harbour life. However, its extreme salinity could also make it uninhabitable.

Image: Liquid water can’t exist on the surface of the planet
Scientists who conducted the study used techniques that have been used on Earth to identify subterranean lakes in the Arctic and Antarctic.
It was led by researchers from Roma Tre University in Italy, who previously co-authored a paper based on initial observations suggesting a lake was present in 2018.

Advertisement

Liquid water cannot exist on the surface of Mars due to the lack of any substantial atmosphere to raise the surface pressure.

However, there is evidence of flowing water from when the planet had an atmosphere billions of year ago.

More from Mars

Scientists have suspected that water could still exist trapped beneath the surface and this has been hotly debated ever since the initial discovery back in 2018.
At the time, scientists said their ground-penetrating radar found a lake about a mile beneath the southern ice cap.
They proposed that salts in the lake had kept it from freezing, despite the -68C (-90F) temperature.

Image: Canals on the Martian surface show where water once ran
Lakes on Earth with a salinity about five times that of seawater can still support life, but there are limitations on how salty water can be for life to thrive.
There are briny sub-glacial pools in Antarctica where water has a salt content 20 times that of seawater, but there isn’t much life there.
Some scientists dispute that the reflective material the researchers found was liquid water and think it is more likely a kind of slush or sludge.
One potential investigation that could shed more light is the Chinese mission Tianwen-1, which means “quest for heavenly truth”, that launched in July.
Tianwen-1 will take seven months to reach Mars and plans to search for underground water and evidence of possible ancient life forms.
The tandem spacecraft – with both an orbiter and a rover – is expected to enter the planet’s orbit in February and is aiming for a landing site on Utopia Planitia.
NASA detected possible signs of ice at the site, according to an article in Nature Astronomy by chief engineer Wan Weixing, who died in May from cancer.
The latest Martian study is also published in the Nature Astronomy journal.

Apple’s share price has been steadily increasing over the past week as rumours about the iPhone 12 continue to grow.
A launch event held earlier this month did not announce a new product in its flagship line of smartphones – and instead, the Apple Watch and iPad stole the limelight.

The next-generation iPhone, and Apple’s first 5G device, is expected to be unveiled in October.

Image: The Apple Watch Series 6 dominated the company’s September event
Investors seemed to be spooked when the iPhone wasn’t mentioned at the launch event, with Apple’s share price tumbling to a low of $106.84 (£83.12) on 18 September.
However, it has now climbed to $114.96 (£89.44) as speculation builds about the new range.

Advertisement

Here’s what those rumours say – although the only official word we’ve had from Apple so far is that the iPhone release would be “a few weeks” later than usual.

Apple is expected to unveil the iPhone 12 range on 13 October, with the devices themselves being available for consumers on 23 October.

More from Apple

It is rumoured there will be four devices in three different sizes. The smallest devices will measure 5.4in corner to corner, two will measure 6.1in, and the largest one will have a mammoth 6.7in screen size.

Image: Apple is expected to unveil the iPhone 12 range on 13 October
The larger smartphone and one of the 6.1in models are expected to be Apple’s higher-end devices, potentially called the iPhone 12 Pro range, and feature the latest technology that the company has developed.
These Pro models are expected to retain the triple-lens housing which debuted with the iPhone 11 Pro, while the regular and smaller iPhone 12 models will have a dual-lens set-up for its rear cameras.
It isn’t clear what the smaller iPhone 12 will be called, but there have been some suggestions it might be named the iPhone 12 mini.
Apple is rumoured to have added a new distinctive metal frame reminiscent of that used for the iPhone 4 and the newest iPad Pro models too to differentiate the devices from the iPhone 11 range.
The design is expected to align with that of the iPad Pro, with the stainless steel frame giving the device a square-edged look – although for most consumers these design features tend to be hidden by protective casings.
For months it has been rumoured that the iPhone 12 will be sold without headphones, a charger or a plug adaptor in the box.
The best features are rumoured to be packed into the 6.7in device, including a rear camera system which will use lasers to calculate depth information for the immediate environment – opening up a range of new photography and augmented reality features.
Whether all this will be enough to bring Apple shares back to their 1 September high of $134.18 (£104.12) is yet to be seen.