Remember that jetpack video I showed you a couple of months ago? The people who made that jetpack—JetPack Aviation—are running a contest where you could win a jetpack test flight. ? We aren’t involved in this contest, but come on, jetpack! The winner gets a test flight in Los Angeles with the JetPack Aviation JB-10, dinner with the founders, and $1,000 in travel vouchers. If you win, you gotta tell us all about it. Below is a video of some demo flights the company did in New York City.

Extraterrestrials arrive. They don’t appear hostile, but the DoD has no idea what they want or how to communicate with them. That’s the premise behind the intelligent, highly praised movie Arrival. Amy Adams plays an expert linguist who’s called upon to assist with communication with the visitors.  In this interview, Dr. Kiki Sanford (who was recently on TMO’s Background Mode), chats with the actual linguist/consultant to the movie, Dr. Jessica Coon, an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics at McGill University. You’ll want to see the movie, and this interview sets the stage.

Check this out: Apple has apparently added some intelligent storage management to the iOS update process. Mac Geek Gab listener Paul sent in this screenshot of his 16GB iPhone upgrading from iOS 10.1 to iOS 10.1.1. It’s a message telling him that he doesn’t have enough room to run the update. Once upon a time, he’d have been on his own to do something about that. But, iOS is offering to delete Excel from his iPhone, run the iOS update, and then reinstall Excel for him. All automatically. That is seriously cool. [Update: David Nelson pointed me to an article at MacRumors showing this feature was introduced in iOS 9. I missed it back then, and I’m guessing others did, too. One way or another, I like it.]

Until October 14, 1947, no human had piloted an aircraft faster than the speed of sound in level flight. At the time, some believed that it was a true barrier, hence the name, making it technically impossible. Others thought it might be possible, but aerodynamic forces would quickly break up the aircraft. And then, Chuck Yeager proved them wrong in the rocket propelled Bell X-1 on that glorious October day. (Jet engines were not yet powerful enough.) We learned a lot about supersonic flight in the coming years: the “area rule” concept, the advantages of a swept wing, and the all-flying tail. Here’s a very cool story of how it all happened by Popular Mechanics, a reprint from a 40th anniversary article. (Image credit: NASA)