In today’s Bulldog wrapup of science and technology related news:

  • NASA spacecraft will aim straight for sun next year
  • Uber posts $708M loss as revenue grows; finance head quits
  • Doughnut delivery by drone in Denver is a peek at the future
  • Bill to expand North Carolina’s ‘revenge porn’ law advances

The details:

NASA spacecraft will aim straight for sun next year

A NASA spacecraft will aim straight for the sun next year and bear the name of the astrophysicist who predicted the existence of the solar wind nearly 60 years ago.

The space agency announced Wednesday that the red-hot mission would be named after Eugene Parker, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago. It’s the first NASA spacecraft to be named after a researcher who is still alive, noted the agency’s science mission chief, Thomas Zurbuchen.

[VIDEO: Watch a report about the mission at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BJPPwaHkl8 ]

Scheduled to launch next summer from Cape Canaveral, the Parker Solar Probe will fly within 4 million miles of the sun’s surface — right into the solar atmosphere. That will be considerably closer than any other spacecraft, and subject the probe to brutal heat and radiation like no other man-made structure before. The materials weren’t available until now to undertake such a grueling mission.

The purpose is to study the sun’s outer atmosphere and better understand how stars like ours work.

NASA spacecraft have traveled inside the orbit of Mercury, the innermost planet.

“But until you actually go there and touch the sun, you really can’t answer these questions,” like why is the corona — the outer plasma-loaded atmosphere — hotter than the actual surface of the sun, said mission project scientist Nicola Fox of Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory.

Parker Solar Probe — formerly known as Solar Probe Plus — will venture seven times closer than any previous spacecraft, Fox said.

  • Uber posts $708M loss as revenue grows; finance head quits

Ride-hailing giant Uber has reported another multibillion dollar loss even as its revenues grow.

The San Francisco-based company said Thursday that its losses in the first quarter narrowed to $708 million from $991 million in the previous three-month period.

Uber told The Associated Press that it had $3.4 billion in revenue for the period, 18 percent higher than the final three months of last year.

The company is not publicly listed but has been mulling an IPO. It said in a statement “the narrowing of our losses in the first quarter puts us on a good trajectory towards profitability.”

Uber also said it’s launching a search for a chief financial officer as its head of finance, Gautam Gupta, departs, becoming the latest high profile executive to leave amid a string of troubles facing the company.

Gupta worked for the company for four years but was never promoted to the CFO position.

This year the company has also lost its head of communications, president and other senior executives as it faces allegations of sexism and sexual harassment in the workplace.

  • Doughnut delivery by drone in Denver is a peek at the future

Doughnuts were delivered Wednesday by drone to Denver’s mayor and the city’s police and fire departments in an event that provided a glimpse into what companies hope will be a quick, inexpensive way to get merchandise to customers.

Denver’s LaMar’s Donuts hired Austin, Texas-based company Drone Dispatch to deliver four boxes of doughnuts using piloted drones flown from parking lots within a block of the delivery targets.

LaMar’s spokesman Tami Osifodunrin said Federal Aviation Administration regulations prohibit commercial drone pilots from losing sight of drones.

Denver Mayor Michael Hancock was outside city hall when a drone delivered doughnuts.

“This is exciting stuff and I think as we get ready for not only drones in the air, and get ready for autonomous vehicles, this is our future this is how we’re going to become a more efficient 21st century nation, society quite frankly,” Hancock said.

FAA officials said they were investigating to ensure the deliveries followed federal rules governing commercial drone use in populated areas. The FAA has rules that govern drone altitude, proximity to airports, and flying over people who are not part of the crew flying the drone. The organizers said they took care to comply with regulations.

  • Bill to expand North Carolina’s ‘revenge porn’ law advances

A North Carolina law that prohibits someone from posting nude images of an ex-lover without that person’s consent and as a form of revenge could soon be expanded to cases involving strangers.

A law passed in 2015 makes it a criminal offense for anyone to “knowingly disclose” nude or sexual images of a person without the person’s consent, with the intent to identify and to “coerce, harass, intimidate, demean or humiliate” the person. The penalty is a felony for anyone 18 years of age or older, and a misdemeanor for anyone younger than that. If the person accused is under 18 and has committed a repeat offense, the violation is a felony.

A Senate judiciary committee approved several changes to the law Wednesday, including a provision that also would punish anyone who obtained such images without the person’s permission. Without such language, those cases are hard to prosecute, said one of the bill’s primary sponsors, Republican Rep. Chris Malone of Wake County.

The measure will now advance to another Senate committee for consideration. The House passed the bill unanimously in April.

The latest measure is an effort to help more victims, said Amber Lueken Barwick of the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys. It “broadens the pool of victims” that the legislation would apply to by not limiting it to people who were in a relationship and by including those instances in which victims may have had their computers hacked and their images distributed without their permission, Barwick said.

The latest change also expands the definition of what constitutes an image to include “a computer or computer-generated image or picture.”