Geek Weekly: Our top weird tech stories for 7 May 2015

Technology Decisions’ weekly wrap of IT fails, latest tech, new must-have gadgets, ‘computer says no’ moments and more.

Google’s year of living dangerously. Google guru Urs Holzle, the company’s eighth employee and the man responsible for designing its data centre structure, told an audience recently that the company came within 12 months of failing for lack of funds during the dotcom bust in the early 2000s. “We made it fine, but I think it was within a year of not working,” Holzle said. “Had we taken one more year, it might not have worked out.”

Don’t forget to reset your Boeing. Just when you thought you’d heard it all, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been forced to issue an airworthiness directive (AD) to operators of the Boeing 787, telling them to ensure they regularly reset the aircraft’s electrical power system to avoid a weird kind of fault. We quote: “This AD requires a repetitive maintenance task for electrical power deactivation on Model 787 airplanes. This AD was prompted by the determination that a Model 787 airplane that has been powered continuously for 248 days can lose all alternating current (AC) electrical power due to the generator control units (GCUs) simultaneously going into failsafe mode. This condition is caused by a software counter internal to the GCUs that will overflow after 248 days of continuous power. We are issuing this AD to prevent loss of all AC electrical power, which could result in loss of control of the airplane.” Well, the design engineers can’t think of everything, can they?

The machine that goes bing (when the door is open). For years, radio astronomers had been mystified by odd bursts of radio waves at high frequencies. The bursts resembled those that come from neutron stars as they turn into black holes. Now, the mystery has been solved - and it has a very down-to-earth explanation. It seems that microwave ovens are the culprit; or, rather, the astronomers who have been using them. When something is cooking and an oven’s door is closed, there’s no problem. But it seems that impatient astronomers have been opening the oven door before the heating cycle has finished, and for a fraction of a second the microwaves have leaked out. That’ll teach them - use the stove next time.

Underwater robot swarms. We’ll let this video speak for itself - a group of CoCoRo (Collective Cognitive Robotics) project self-propelled underwater robots that swarm together. For some reason or other most of them are called Jeff, and the others are called Lily. And no, we don’t know why.

New rocket takes to the skies. Jeff Bezos was the founder of Amazon.com. These days, he has turned his attention to space. His company, Blue Origin, has just conducted a test flight of its manned space vehicle, New Shepard (named in honour of the first US astronaut, Al Shepard). Great rocket, but shame about the shape.