Storm Isha creates flight diversion chaos - Tech & Science Daily podcast

All the stories from Monday's episode of the Tech & Science Daily podcast.
A Ryanair Stansted to Newquay flight was diverted to Malaga due to strong winds from Storm Isha.
PA Wire
22 January 2024

After Storm Isha brought gusts of up to 99 mph in parts of the UK on Sunday night, people on social media have been posting about the bizarre flight diversions as a result of those winds.

Some of the extreme diversions carried out by the likes of Ryanair include a flight that was due to go from Stansted to Newquay, being diverted to Malaga in the south of Spain, as well as a flight due to travel from Manchester to Dublin which was apparently diverted to France because the plane was unable to land in the Irish capital.

As well as travel chaos, the storm also caused a metal roof to fall off a building in North Lincolnshire, and thousands of UK homes were left without power.

A customer service AI chatbot for parcel delivery firm DPD has called the company the 'worst delivery firm' and swore to a customer.

30-year-old Ashley Beauchamp was able to make the bot swear and write a poem criticising the parcel delivery company, after struggling to get answers from it about a missing parcel.

He told Sky News that after getting frustrated with all the things the bot couldn’t do, he played around with it, and was able to make it swear as well as call itself a "useless chatbot that can't help you".

That limit is a key target of the Paris Agreement made in 2015, but the Met Office forecasts that CO2 levels will peak at 426.6 parts per million in May, higher than at any point in the last two million years.

It said that without plants and oceans absorbing CO2, the increase in atmospheric levels would be almost twice as much.

Whatsapp is getting ready to offer a new way of sharing pictures, videos and audio with people nearby.

An unreleased file-sharing feature, similar to Airdrop on iPhone or QuickShare on Android, has been found by WABetaInfo in a beta release of WhatsApp’s Android app.

A screenshot shared by the site suggests that sharing is end-to-end encrypted, just like messages on the app, and your phone number is hidden for privacy.

Also in this episode:

UK scientists helping roll out world’s first routine malaria vaccine programme, why Japan’s space agency still has hope for its probe on the moon, surgeons develop 3D-printed liver models to plan complex cancer surgery, and are Google searches getting worse?

Listen above, find us on Apple, Spotify or wherever you stream your podcasts.

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