AirPods Are a 'Runaway Success', Says Apple CEO Tim Cook

Apple CEO Tim Cook fielded questions during a tour of New York Stock Exchange with his nephew on Wednesday, and he provided a non-answer around the initial success of AirPods.

Asked by a CNBC reporter of the early response towards the product, and how they were unavailable in most places around New York, Cook called AirPods “a runaway success” and added that Apple is “making them just as fast as we can” to refill stocks and meet demand from holiday buyers.

John Glenn, first American to orbit Earth, dies at 95

John Glenn, who became one of the 20th century's greatest explorers as the first American to orbit Earth and later as the world's oldest astronaut, and also had a long career as a US senator, died in Ohio on Thursday at age 95.

LHCb observes two new baryon particles

Today the collaboration for the LHCb experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Colliderannounced the discovery of two new particles in the baryon family. The particles, known as the Xi_b'- and Xi_b*-, were predicted to exist by the quark model but had never been seen before. A related particle, the Xi_b*0, was found by the CMS experiment at CERN in 2012. The LHCb collaboration submitted a paper reporting the finding to Physical Review Letters.

Like the well-known protons that the LHC accelerates, the new particles are baryons made from three quarks bound together by the strong force. The types of quarks are different, though: the new X_ib particles both contain one beauty (b), one strange (s), and one down (d) quark. Thanks to the heavyweight b quarks, they are more than six times as massive as the proton. But the particles are more than just the sum of their parts: their mass also depends on how they are configured. Each of the quarks has an attribute called "spin". In the Xi_b'- state, the spins of the two lighter quarks point in the opposite direction to the b quark, whereas in the Xi_b*- state they are aligned.

App helps drone pilots avoid no-fly zones

An app that tells drone owners if they are flying in or near restricted airspace has been created by the UK's National Air Traffic Control Service. The "drone assist" app gives pilots an interactive map of their surroundings and will warn if they are near airspace used by commercial aircraft. The map also shows if a drone is being flown near places, such as schools, where there could be privacy issues. The app will be available on Android and iOS app stores from 3 December.