Airbus Working on Hypersonic Plane; Facebook Patents Friend List Creditworthiness

Airbus appears to be developing a hypersonic jet that would fly from London to New York in just one hour. For comparison, the Concorde needed three and a half hours to travel the same distance, and regular commercial flights need seven to eight hours for the trip. The hypersonic plane just take three hours to get you from San Francisco to Paris or from Tokyo to Los Angeles. Businessinsider.com says the new Airbus jet, described in a recently discovered patent application, would reach speeds as high as Mach 4.5, or four and a half times the speed of sound. Comparatively, the Concorde reached top speeds of Mach 2 in its glory days.
It would use a variety of engines that would serve different purposes, and power would be provided by various forms of hydrogen stored aboard.
Two turbojets under the fuselage and a rocket motor in the rear would be used during takeoff. The Airbus would lift off the runway vertically like the Space Shuttle, and the turbojets would be shut down and retracted into the belly of the plane right before it reached the speed of sound.
The rocket motor would then be used to climb to a cruising altitude of more than 100,000 feet. Then that engine would be shut down and retracted into the fuselage, and the ramjets on the wings would push the Airbus to a top speed of Mach 4.5.
The bad news is that the hypersonic jet might be extremely expensive. Airbus says the aircraft can be used for both military and commercial applications. In the latter version, the airplane would have enough room for just 20 passengers.

-0-

Facebook has been awarded a patent that could help filter spam emails and offensive content, improve searches and, according to thenextweb.com, allow lenders to use your social habits to determine a credit approval. Under the process described, if you apply for a loan, your lender could potentially check out the credit rating of your Facebook friends. The average credit rating of your friends collectively needs to be at least a minimum credit score for your loan to be approved. Do you know your friends’ credit scores? Yeah, I don’t either. Scary stuff!