More than 800 airport hospitality workers walked off the job this morning, demanding better wages. It’s all happening on one of the busiest and most stressful travel days of the year. Millions of people will pass through LAX this Thanksgiving weekend.

One of the major US airlines is changing its boarding process to make it faster. But it could be even faster

Nothing drives away the holiday spirit -- and drives up blood pressure -- quite like a crowd of people trying to board an airplane, stow their carry-ons, and slide past each other to their middle seats before their flight takes off. A new boarding method that United Airlines rolled out last month has people thinking about all that lost time in new, excruciating detail. And while United claims their new boarding method will ease frustrations, a physics professor in Las Vegas says he has an even more efficient way.

NASA published new research detailing a distant system of planets, and one of the authors is UNLV astrophysicist Jason Steffen. This work provides a deeper understanding of our solar system’s history and adds to the existing catalog of known planets with richer detail. It has enabled astrophysicists to gain a better understanding of a distant planetary system of seven planets.

WILMA is no longer just a cartoon character from “The Flintstones.” In aviation circles, it’s shorthand for Windows, Middle and Aisle, United Airlines’s newly released passenger boarding system for flights on its single-aisle aircraft, mainly Boeing 737s, 757s and Airbus A320-type twin-engine jets.

Never arrive at your seat on the plane annoyed again or argue about the storage space for your luggage? A dream idea! Jason Steffen actually spends his working life unraveling the deepest secrets of the universe. He is an astrophysicist and studies exoplanets orbiting distant stars. In his free time, the super brain also occupied himself with another impenetrable mystery of the galaxy. What is the best way to board a plane? You can read his formula here.

Most near-Earth-sized planets travel around their host stars on nearly circular orbits, and the more small planets there are orbiting close to a star, the more nearly circular their orbits are. These are just two of many findings based on a major new analysis of data from NASA’s retired Kepler space telescope that focused on detailing exoplanet — planets beyond our solar system — characteristics. The new catalog includes almost 4,400 planets and strong planet candidates, which are still awaiting confirmation, and includes more than 700 systems with multiple planets.

Jason Steffen is a physics professor at UNLV, and formerly at Northwestern. He came up with a method for boarding airplanes efficiently but it hasn't been adopted by an airline. Still, with United Airlines new boarding scheme, the whole concept is fascinating.