Authored by Bryan Jung via PJMedia.com,
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy declared the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) campaign to recruit video gamers as air traffic controllers "wildly successful," after over 6,000 applicants submitted forms within the first twelve hours of the program's launch.
The FAA is reporting thousands of applicants applied after its unconventional new recruitment initiative launched on April 17, with the application portal reaching its cap at 8,000 candidates.
The Trump administration is currently looking to address a persistent nationwide shortage of air traffic controllers, as many of the most experienced have retired in recent years.
“To reach the next generation of air traffic controllers, we need to adapt,” Duffy said in a statement.
“This campaign’s innovative communication style and focus on gaming taps into a growing demographic of young adults who have many of the hard skills it takes to be a successful controller.”
The recruitment drive features a high-energy promotional video and messaging that frames job requirements as “mission objectives," which is designed to appeal to Gen Z applicants.
Duffy said that skills common among gamers, such as rapid decision-making, sustained concentration, and the ability to manage multiple inputs simultaneously could be applied to directing air traffic.
“If you think about what gamers are doing on screens, they’re talking, reacting, and managing a lot at once — that’s very similar to what happens in a control tower,” Duffy said during remarks in Washington.
The push comes as the FAA confronts a shortfall of roughly 3,500 air traffic controllers, a gap that has developed over the past decade amid rising demand for air travel.
Federal data shows the number of controllers has declined even as flight volume has increased, placing additional strain on existing personnel and raising broader concerns about system resilience.
To attract candidates, the agency is highlighting the role’s long-term earning potential, noting that certified controllers can earn more than $155,000 annually within three years, but stress that certification remains highly selective and rigorous.
Applicants must be U.S. citizens under the age of 31 and fluent in English, while those who accepted face a multi-stage evaluation process, including the Air Traffic Skills Assessment, medical examinations, and security clearances.
Even then, only about 2 percent ultimately complete the training pipeline, which can take between two and five years.
Industry stakeholders have largely welcomed the campaign as a creative way to broaden the applicant pool.
The air traffic controllers union has expressed support for the program, citing the need to bring in new talent amid ongoing staffing pressures, but cautions that it is not a quick fix due to the significant time required to complete training and certification.
Some aviation experts caution that the influx of applicants will not immediately resolve the shortage, as the lengthy training process and high attrition rates mean that even a successful recruitment effort may take years to translate into fully certified controllers in control towers and radar facilities.
The initiative arrives at a time of heightened scrutiny of aviation safety and operations, with recent incidents drawing attention to a decline in highly trained personnel.
While aviation officials maintain that the system remains safe, they acknowledge that staffing remains a critical issue.
For now, the FAA’s gamer-focused outreach appears to be achieving its immediate goal: capturing the attention of a new generation of potential recruits.
Whether that interest translates into a sustained expansion of the controller workforce will depend on the agency’s ability to guide candidates through one of the most demanding training pipelines in the federal government.
Tyler Durden Sun, 04/19/2026 - 19:50A U.S. appeals court on April 17 put on hold a lower court order that had halted construction of the White House ballroom, allowing the project to proceed for now.
Previously, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon issued a preliminary injunction blocking above-ground construction of the ballroom but allowed “below-ground” construction of national security facilities to continue.
Leon had said the project cannot continue without authorization from Congress.
But now, as Aldgra Fredly reports for The Epoch Times, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on April 17 blocked Leon’s injunction and scheduled a June 5 hearing to decide on whether the project should be halted.
The Epoch Times reached out to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which filed the lawsuit last year, but did not receive a response by publication time.
The White House first announced the project in July 2025, saying it would span 90,000 square feet.
The construction phase began in September 2025, and the ballroom is expected to be completed before President Donald Trump’s presidency ends in early 2029, according to the White House.
The National Capital Planning Commission approved the ballroom project on April 2.
In December 2025, the National Trust for Historic Preservation filed a lawsuit alleging that construction of the White House ballroom is unlawful and requested that the court halt the project.
Leon ruled in favor of the National Trust for Historic Preservation on March 31, ordering that “the ballroom construction project must stop until Congress authorizes its completion.”
The judge later clarified in an April 16 ruling that below-ground construction, including “the construction of any ‘top-secret excavations, bunkers, bomb-shelters, protective partitioning, military installations, and hospital and medical facilities,’ as well as such above-ground construction strictly necessary to cover, secure, and protect such facilities” may proceed.
Trump criticized the judge in a Truth Social post on April 17, calling his ruling “a mockery to [the U.S.] court system.”
“Everybody knew that it was planned, and going to be built. This highly political Judge, and his illegal overreach, is out of control, and costing our Nation greatly,” he wrote.
“The Ballroom is deeply important to our National Security, and no Judge can be allowed to stop this Historic and Militarily Imperative Project.”
The project is expected to cost about $400 million, all of which is expected to be funded by private donors.
According to a list provided by the White House to The Epoch Times, donors contributing funds to the new ballroom include Amazon, Apple, Google, Caterpillar Inc., HP Inc., Lockheed Martin, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Palantir Technologies, and the Union Pacific Railroad.
Tyler Durden Sun, 04/19/2026 - 19:15Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,
A prominent physicist has put forward a striking proposal: our universe may not be limited to the four dimensions of space and time we experience every day. Instead, it could operate with seven dimensions in total, with three compact extra layers folded so tightly they remain invisible.
This idea emerges not from science fiction, but from an attempt to resolve one of modern physics’ most enduring puzzles—the black hole information paradox first highlighted by Stephen Hawking in the 1970s.
Richard Pinčák, a senior researcher at the Slovak Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Experimental Physics, leads the team behind the new model. The work, published in the journal General Relativity and Gravitation, explores how extra dimensions arranged in a specific geometric structure could prevent black holes from fully evaporating.
Stephen Hawking's theory of black hole evaporation clashes with the laws of quantum mechanics. A new paper finds a way around this paradox, provided that the universe has seven dimensions. https://t.co/NR5a0HoFXQ
— Live Science (@LiveScience) April 16, 2026The four dimensions we know—three of space and one of time—form the basis of everyday experience and Einstein’s general relativity. But Pinčák’s framework adds three more.
“We experience three dimensions of space and one of time — four dimensions in total,” Pinčák explained. “Our model proposes that the universe actually has seven dimensions: the four we know, plus three tiny extra dimensions curled up so tightly that we cannot directly perceive them.”
These hidden dimensions take the form of highly symmetrical G?-manifolds. In this geometry, a property called torsion creates a twisting effect in spacetime. At the extremely small scales reached as a black hole shrinks through Hawking radiation, this torsion generates a repulsive force.
The proposal directly confronts the information paradox. Hawking showed that black holes emit radiation and slowly lose mass, eventually evaporating completely. Yet quantum mechanics insists that information cannot be destroyed—only scrambled.
“Imagine you throw a book into a fire,” Pinčák said. “The book is destroyed, but in principle you could reconstruct every word from the smoke, ash, and heat — the information is scrambled, not lost.”
In a completely evaporating black hole, however, the information about everything that fell inside appears to vanish forever, creating a fundamental conflict between general relativity and quantum theory.
Pinčák’s seven-dimensional model offers an escape. As the black hole approaches its final stages, the torsion-induced repulsive force acts like a brake.
“This repulsive force acts as a brake, halting the evaporation before the black hole vanishes completely,” Pinčák noted.
What remains is a stable microscopic remnant, roughly 10 billion times smaller than an electron in mass. This remnant can encode the lost information through subtle oscillations known as quasinormal modes.
The same geometric structure also connects to particle physics. The torsion field in the extra dimensions produces a potential energy landscape that mirrors the one responsible for giving mass to the W and Z bosons via the Higgs mechanism.
“The same torsion field… generates a potential energy landscape that is identical in form to the one responsible for giving mass to the W and Z bosons — the carriers of the weak nuclear force,” Pin?ák said.
This suggests that particle masses could have a geometric origin tied to the hidden dimensions themselves.
The researchers emphasize that their approach does not pretend to solve quantum gravity outright. Semiclassical approximations break down near the Planck scale, where full quantum-gravity effects dominate.
“As the black hole shrinks toward the Planck scale, all existing models — ours included — must eventually confront the transition into the deep quantum-gravity regime,” Pin?ák acknowledged.
“What distinguishes our approach is that we do not claim semiclassical evaporation operates all the way down to the remnant mass,” he added. “At that point, a new physical effect … takes over and stabilises the configuration.”
The model makes testable predictions, such as the expected masses of hypothetical Kaluza-Klein particles associated with the extra dimensions—far beyond current accelerator reach but potentially falsifiable in principle.
“The important point is that the predictions are concrete — the model can be wrong, which is what makes it scientific,” Pinčák said.
While direct experimental confirmation lies well in the future, the idea builds on concepts familiar from string theory and M-theory, where extra dimensions play a central role in unifying forces. It also ties into earlier work by Pinčák’s team exploring G? geometries and their implications for symmetry breaking and particle properties.
For now, the proposal stands as a creative theoretical bridge between gravity, quantum mechanics, and particle physics. It invites fresh thinking about the hidden architecture of reality and whether the universe’s deepest secrets might be woven into dimensions we have yet to perceive.
Whether future observations of primordial black holes, gravitational waves, or high-energy particle collisions lend support remains to be seen. But the elegance of deriving both black hole stability and particle masses from the same geometric framework offers a compelling new lens on long-standing mysteries.
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Tyler Durden Sun, 04/19/2026 - 18:40