Apart from their nasty stings, army ant colonies are often known for their stunning, intricate architectural feats using their own bodies. When worker ant hunting parties encounter obstacles such as fallen tree branches, gaps in foliage, or small streams, the tiny insects will join forces to create a bridge for the remaining ant brethren to traverse. It’s as impressive as it is somewhat disconcerting—these are living, crawling buildings, after all. But one research team isn’t studying the coordination between miniscule bugs to benefit future construction projects; they are looking into how army ant teamwork could be mimicked by robots.

“Army ants create structures using decentralized collective intelligence processes,” Isabella Muratore, a postdoctoral researcher at the New Jersey Institute of Technology specializing in army ant building techniques, explains to PopSci over email. “This means that each ant follows a set of rules about how to behave based on sensory input and this leads to the creation of architectural forms without the need for any prior planning or commands from a leader.”

[Related: These robots reached a team consensus like a swarm of bees.]

Along with engineers from NJIT and Northwestern University, Muratore and her entomologist colleagues developed a series of tests meant to gauge army ant workers’ reactions and logistical responses to environmental impediments. After placing obstacles in the ants’ forest paths, Muratore filmed and later analyzed the herds’ subsequent adaptations to continue along their routes. Utilizing prior modeling work, the team also tested whether the ant bridges could withstand sudden, small changes in obstacle length using an adjustable spacing device.

Muratore and others recently presented their findings at this year’s annual Entomological Society of America conference. According to their observations, army ants generally choose to construct bridges in the most efficient locations—places wide enough to necessitate a building project while simultaneously using the least number of ants possible. The number of bridges needed during a sojourn also influences the ants’ collective decisions on resource allocation.

David Hu, a Georgia Institute of Technology engineering professor focused on fire ant raft constructions during flooding, recently likened the insects to neurons in one big, creepy-crawly brain while speaking to NPR on the subject. Instead of individual ants determining bridge dimensions and locations, each ant contributes to the decisions in their own small way.

[Related: Robot jellyfish swarms could soon help clean the oceans of plastic.]

Muratore and her collaborators believe an army ant’s collaborative capabilities could soon help engineers program swarms of robots based on the insect’s behavior principles and brains. Ants vary across species, but they still can pack a surprising amount of information within their roughly 1.1 microliter volume brains.

Replicating that brainpower requires relatively low energy costs. Scaling it across a multitude of robots could remain comparatively cheap, while exponentially increasing their functionality. This could allow them to “flexibly adapt to a variety of challenges, such as linking together to form bridges over gaps of different lengths in the most efficient manner possible,” Muratore writes to PopSci.
Robotic teamwork is crucial to implement the machines across a number of industries and scenarios, from outer space exploration, to ocean cleanup projects, to search-and-rescue efforts in areas too dangerous for humans to access. In these instances, coordinating quickly and efficiently not only saves time and energy, it could save lives.

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After three years of construction and limited operations, the next-generation Hyundai Motor Group Innovation Center production facility in Singapore is officially online and fully functioning. Announced on November 20, the 935,380-square-foot, seven-floor facility relies on 200 robots to handle over 60 percent of all “repetitive and laborious” responsibilities, allowing human employees to focus on “more creative and productive duties,” according to the company.

In a key departure from traditional conveyor-belt factories, HMGIC centers on what the South Korean vehicle manufacturer calls a “cell-based production system” alongside a “digital twin Meta-Factory.” Instead of siloed responsibilities for automated machinery and human workers, the two often cooperate using technology such as virtual and augmented reality. As Hyundai explains, while employees simulate production tasks in a digital space using VR/AR, for example, robots will physically move, inspect, and assemble various vehicle components.

[Related: Everything we love about Hyundai’s newest EV.]

By combining robotics, AI, and the Internet of Things, Hyundai believes the HMGIC can offer a “human-centric manufacturing innovation system,” Alpesh Patel, VP and Head of the factory’s Technology Innovation Group, said in Monday’s announcement. 

Atop the HMGIC building is an over 2000-feet-long vehicle test track, as well as a robotically assisted “Smart Farm” capable of growing up to nine different crops. While a car factory vegetable garden may sound somewhat odd, it actually compliments the Singapore government’s ongoing “30 by 30” initiative.

Due to the region’s rocky geology, Singapore can only utilize about one percent of its land for agriculture—an estimated 90 percent of all food in the area must be imported. Announced in 2022, Singapore’s 30 by 30 program aims to boost local self-sufficiency by increasing domestic yields to 30 percent of all consumables by the decade’s end using a combination of sustainable urban growth methods. According to Hyundai’s announcement, the HMGICS Smart Farm is meant to showcase farm productivity within compact settings—while also offering visitors some of its harvested crops. The rest of the produce will be donated to local communities, as well as featured on the menu at a new Smart Farm-to-table restaurant scheduled to open at the HMGICS in spring 2024.

[Related: Controversial ‘robotaxi’ startup loses CEO.]

HMGICS is expected to produce up to 30,000 electric vehicles annually, and currently focuses on the IONIQ 5, as well as its autonomous robotaxi variant. Beginning in 2024, the facility will also produce Hyundai’s IONIQ 6. If all goes according to plan, the HMGICS will be just one of multiple cell-based production system centers.

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A litany of issues has plagued Formula One’s highly anticipated (and derided) Las Vegas Grand Prix race for months, but the event’s most recent issues are perhaps its most ridiculous yet—the cars on-average 212 mph speeds are too fast for the Vegas Strip.

F1 racers can’t bolt down any standard roadway—they require specialized, carefully laid pavement. America’s other two F1 venues in Austin, Texas, and Miami, Florida, were both built specifically for the high-speed races, but the Las Vegas Grand Prix circuit presents a wholly different challenge, as it is located within the city itself. To prepare for this weekend’s competition, workers first removed the route’s top 5-to-10 inches of asphalt before replacing it with 60,000 tons of a base layer followed by another 43,000 tons of intermediate and top layer pavement.

Speaking to The Washington Post on Thursday, Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority chief executive Steve Hill estimated the new circuit pavement would last 6-10 years, and only need piecemeal maintenance without requiring extensive road closures.

But according to event organizers on November 16, F1 drivers’ first, late evening practice run barely lasted eight minutes before abruptly being forced to end. Near the track’s final corner, racer Carlos Sainz suddenly stopped, reporting apparent damage to his Ferrari’s flooring. A quick investigation of the track revealed that the race car’s speed and accompanying force put too much stress on a drain cover’s concrete framing, causing it to protrude and significantly damage the Ferrari’s chassis—the main frame to which its engine and suspension are attached. If that weren’t enough, racer Esteban Ocon’s car received a similar blow from the dislodged debris shortly after Sainz.

[Related: How the Formula races plan to power their cars with more sustainable fuel.]

This isn’t the first time grates proved to be an F1 car’s Achilles heel—another vehicle suffered a similar fate at a practice during the 2019 Azerbaijan Grand Prix. In that instance, however, F1 organizers welded shut the track’s coverings—a solution unavailable to last night’s crew members since it’s illegal to do so under Nevada law. Instead, repairers raced (so to speak) down the Las Vegas track, applying quick-setting concrete to the remaining 20-to-30 coverings.

It was 2:30am local time before racers could return for a second practice run. By this point, they raced past attendee stands devoid of any fans. Labor laws prevented security workers from continuing to staff the event. Those who attempted to stick it out to see the racers return were forced to leave for the night around 1:3gett0am. The competitors completed their trial runs without further incident.

Both drivers and their team members haven’t minced words since the evening’s debacle. Belgian and Dutch racer Max Verstappen described the Vegas Grand Prix as “99 percent show and 1 percent sport,” while Ferrari boss Fred Vasseur called the incident “unacceptable.”

“The situation is we damaged completely the monocoque, the engine, the batteries. I’m not sure this is the topic for me today,” Vasseur told reporters at the time. “We had a very tough [first practice], it cost us a fortune, we fucked up the session for Carlos.”

Mercedes chief Toto Wolff, however, defended the race and described the issue as a “black eye,” but nothing else. “This is nothing… they’re going to seal the drain covers and nobody’s going to talk about that tomorrow morning anymore,” Wolff continued.

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Hindsight is not quite 20/20 for NASA’s historic Apollo missions. For instance, the Apollo 12 lander successfully touched down on the moon at exactly 6:35:25 UTC on November 19, 1969. What happened to the lunar environment as astronauts touched down, however, wasn’t recorded—and exact details on the reactions between nearby rocks, debris, and lunar regolith to lander engines’ supersonic bursts of gas aren’t documented. And physically replicating Apollo 12’s historic moment on Earth isn’t possible, given stark differences in lunar gravity and geology, not to mention the moon’s complete lack of atmosphere.

This is particularly a problem for NASA as it continues to plan for astronauts’ potential 2025 return to Earth’s satellite during the Artemis program. The landing craft delivering humans onto the lunar surface will be much more powerful than its Apollo predecessors, so planning for the literal and figurative impact is an absolute necessity. To do so, NASA researchers at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, are relying on the agency’s Pleiades supercomputer to help simulate previous lunar landings—specifically, the unaccounted information from Apollo 12.

As detailed by NASA earlier this week, a team of computer engineers and fluid dynamics experts recently designed a program capable of accurately recreating Apollo 12’s plume-surface interactions (PSI), the interplay between landing jets and lunar topography. According to the agency, the Pleiades supercomputer generated terabytes of data over the course of several weeks’ worth of simulations that will help predict PSI scenarios for NASA’s Human Landing System, Commercial Lunar Payload Services, and even future potential Mars landers.

[Related: Meet the first 4 astronauts of the ‘Artemis Generation’]

NASA recently showed off one of these simulations—the Apollo 12 landing—during its appearance at SC23, an annual international supercomputing conference in Denver, Colorado. For the roughly half-minute simulation clip, the team relied on a simulation tool called the Gas Granular Flow Solver (GGFS). The program is both capable of modeling interactions to predict regolith cratering, as well as dust clouds kicked up around the lander’s immediate surroundings.

According to the project’s conference description, GGFS utilizing its highest fidelities can “model microscopic regolith particle interactions with a particle size/shape distribution that statistically replicates actual regolith.” To run most effectively on “today’s computing resources,” however, the simulation considers just one-to-three potential particle sizes and shapes.

[Related: Moon-bound Artemis III spacesuits have some functional luxury sewn in.]

The approximation of the final half-minute of descent before engine cut-off notably includes depictions of shear stress, or the lateral forces affecting a surface area’s erosion levels. In the clip, low shear stress is represented by a dark purple hue, while the higher shear stress areas are shown in yellow.

Going forward, the team intends to optimize the tool’s source code, alongside integrating increased computational resources. Such upgrades will allow for better, higher fidelity simulations to fine-tune Artemis landing procedures, as well as potentially plan for landing missions far beyond the lunar surface.

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To call soft robotic hands “complex” is a bit of an understatement. These designs consider a number of engineering factors, including the elasticity and durability of materials. This usually entails separate 3D-printing processes for each component, often with multiple plastics and polymers. Now, however, engineers working together from ETH Zurich and the MIT spin-off company, Inkbit, can create extremely intricate products with a 3D-printer utilizing a laser scanner and feedback learning. The researchers’ impressive results already include a six-legged gripper robot, an artificial “heart” pump, sturdy metamaterials, as well as an articulating soft robotic hand complete with artificial tendons, ligaments, and bones.

[Related: Watch a robot hand only use its ‘skin’ to feel and grab objects.]

Traditional 3D-printers use fast-curing polyacrylate plastics. In this process, UV lamps quickly harden a malleable plastic gel as it is layered via the printer nozzle, while a scraping tool removes surface imperfections along the way. While effective, the rapid solidification can limit a product’s form, function, and flexibility. But trying to swap out the fast-curing plastic for slow-curing polymers like epoxies and thiolenes mucks up the machinery, meaning many soft robotic components require separate manufacturing methods.

Knowing this, designers wondered if adding scanning technology alongside rapid printing adjustments could solve the slow-curing hurdle. As detailed in their new paper published in Nature, their new system not only offers a solution, but demonstrates 3D-printed, slow-curing polymers’ potential across a number of designs.

Instead of scraping away imperfections layer-by-layer, three-dimensional scanning offers near-instantaneous information on surface irregularities. This data is sent to the printer’s feedback mechanism, which then adjusts the necessary material amount “in real time and with pinpoint accuracy,” Wojciech Matusik, an electrical engineering and computer science professor at MIT and study co-author, said in a recent project profile from ETH Zurich.

To demonstrate their new method’s potential, researchers created a quartet of diverse 3D-printed projects using soft-curing polymers—a resilient metamaterial cube, a heart-like fluid pump capable of transporting “liquids” through its system, a six-legged robot topped with a sensor-informed two-pronged gripper, as well an articulating hand capable of grasping objects using embedded sensor pads.
While refinements to production methods, polymers’ chemical compositions, and lifespan are still needed, the team believes the comparatively fast and adaptable 3D-printing method could one day lead to a host of novel industrial, architectural, and robotic designs. Soft robots, for example, offer less risk of injury when working alongside humans, and can handle fragile goods better than their standard, metal robot counterparts. Already, however, the existing advances have produced designs once impossible for 3D printers.

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To understand how electric cars work, it helps to keep in mind the ways in which they’re similar to regular gas-burning vehicles. They’re cousins from different generations, not machines from different universes. If you drive, you know the drill: Press down on the pedal with your right foot to get moving, point the vehicle where you want to go, maybe put on some music, and try not to crash. 

“An EV has four wheels,” says Chad Kirchner, the founder of evpulse.com, a news and information site about electric vehicles. “There’s a start button, there’s an accelerator pedal, there’s a brake. In a lot of ways, an EV—and the EV driving experience—is identical to a gas-powered experience.” 

That said, there are key differences in engineering, design, maintenance, and performance between electric cars and internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles.   

Electric car battery system 101

To begin with, an ICE vehicle relies on a tank of gasoline or diesel to get the energy it needs. An EV, on the other hand, requires a battery system, which consists of a multitude of individual cells. And just like a gas tank, the battery cells store energy. 

“But [a battery cell] also produces power—and the power is a result of the voltage of that particular cell, and the current it’s able to output,” says Charles Poon, the global director of Electrified Systems Engineering at Ford, which makes the Mach-E, the F-150 Lightning, and the E-Transit electric vehicles. He describes the battery as the car’s heart.

Battery design in EVs will differ between automakers, and one of the main ways is the shape of their cells. To make things a bit more tangible, consider the Mach-E, an electric car that descends from a famous line of gas-burning vehicles that gave birth to the term “pony car.” The cells in the Mach-E are in pouch form, whereas other batteries in the market have cylindrical cells (Tesla uses those) or prismatic cells. A Mach-E battery system has hundreds of cells. 

[Related: This giant bumper car is street-legal and enormously delightful]

The lithium-ion-based electric car batteries can also have slightly different chemistries. For example, a Mach-E can come with nickel, cobalt, and manganese (NCM) batteries or lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries. The former are known for being able to hold power for longer and performing well in cold temperatures, while LFP batteries are less expensive and can charge up faster. 

How do electric motors work? 

The term AC/DC is not only the name of an Australian rock band, but also describes two forms of electricity: alternating current (AC) and direct current (DC). Both types of power are important for electric cars to work.

The electricity coming out of your wall outlet at home is in AC form, but batteries store their energy in DC form. Because of this, electric cars have a component known as a charger that takes the AC power flowing into the vehicle and switches it to the more battery-friendly DC. A quicker way to charge up one of these cars is by using a DC fast charger, which provides the car with juice in DC form, so the car doesn’t have to convert it. 

“It bypasses the AC charger [in the car], and goes directly into the battery,” Poon explains. 

[Related: What an electric vehicle’s MPGe rating really means]

So the batteries store power in DC form, but there’s a twist: electric motors work with AC power. This means the vehicle has to transform electricity yet again, which it does using a traction inverter that converts the DC back into AC. “And then that is what actually ends up spinning the electric motor, producing power,” Poon adds.  

There are two key components in an electric motor: a stator and a rotor. The rotor sits inside the stator and rotates using the wonders of magnetism that kick in when AC power hits the motor. 

“We send what we call three phases of alternating current through a stator that has wires that are wound radially, sequentially, around the stator,” he explains. “And we are able to create a rotating magnetic field—so the magnetic field rotates, and it pulls the rotor along with it.” 

And voilá! After passing through some gearing, that rotation turns the wheels on your electric vehicle. 

While an ICE car has one engine, Kirchner, from evpulse.com, notes that electric vehicles in the market can have as many as four motors. For example, the rear-wheel drive version of a Mach-E uses one motor, while the all-wheel drive version uses two—one for the front and one for the back. At the other end of the spectrum, a Rivian R1T can have as many as one motor per wheel. 

[Related: Electric cars are better for the environment, no matter the power source]

The pros and cons of driving an electric vehicle

Could you imagine if taking your foot off the gas pedal in an ICE vehicle magically made more gasoline appear in the tank? Something like that happens in an EV.

This cool trick is called regenerative braking, and allows drivers to start slowing down not by pushing the brake pedal as in regular cars, but by taking their foot off the accelerator. Don’t worry—that brake pedal is still there when you need it. In one-pedal or regen mode, things happen in reverse: the wheels turn the motors so they act like generators and send power back to the batteries. 

“You are actually taking the vehicle momentum and putting it back in as chemical energy into the battery,” Poon says.

Mach-E Chief Engineer Donna Dickson says one-pedal driving still remains an unfamiliar technique for drivers, but notes that it helps prevent wear on the brakes while also adding battery charge.

The power source is not the only difference between electric cars and ICE vehicles. There are other details that set the two apart. For example, Kirchner says that while combustion engines have to rev a little to make torque, EV motors make all of their torque from a complete standstill. This results in great acceleration. “Around town, even electric cars that you would not consider sporty by looking at them feel very quick, which makes them excellent city cars,” he continues. 

Another benefit of driving an electric vehicle is that they need less maintenance. There’s no need for an oil change, although their heavier weight means their tires experience more wear and tear. 

On the downside, you can’t charge up the batteries as rapidly or as easily as gasoline goes into a tank, but if you can charge at home, you have a unique perk: “You start every morning with a full tank,” says Kirchner. But that doesn’t always come as easy as it sounds. 

[Related: How does a jet engine work? By running hot enough to melt its own innards.]

“If you are an EV owner, it’s pretty much imperative at this point to have someplace to plug in and charge overnight,” says Paul Waatti, manager of industry analysis for AutoPacific. However, “there’s a good portion of America that doesn’t live in a single-family home.” People residing in condos, apartments, and other residential setups will have a more challenging time finding a charger to plug in their cars overnight. As for public chargers, Waatti says those networks are “very far off from being seamless at this point,” meaning there are too few and many don’t work properly.

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If you live in and around Gulkana, Alaska and recently saw some eerie lights in the sky—don’t worry; they were all part of a science experiment. Earlier this week, researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and several other US institutions created artificial auroras by sending radio pulses into the Earth’s ionosphere using HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) transmitters on the ground. The frequencies of these transmissions were between 2.8 and 10 megahertz. 

These transmitters act as heaters that excite the gasses in the upper atmosphere. When the gasses “de-excite,” they produce an airglow between 120 and 150 miles above ground, according to a notice about the project issued by the HAARP team. This is similar to how charged particles from the sun interact with gasses in the upper atmosphere to create natural auroras; the charged particles are steered by the Earth’s magnetic field to the north and south poles to form aurora borealis and aurora australis. Compared to those light displays, the artificial auroras are much weaker. 

So why did the researchers do all this? Studying this artificial airglow may provide insights on what happens when real aurora lights appear.

If you noticed a faint red or green splotch in the sky above Alaska between November 4 and November 8, chances are good that you saw the experiment in progress. HAARP also notes in its FAQ that these ionosphere-heating experiments have no detectable effects on the environment after 10 minutes or so. 

[Related: Why NASA will launch rockets to study the eclipse]

Additionally, the team also wants to understand how these superheated gasses in the ionosphere interact with each other. Insights into these dynamics could inform collision detection and avoidance features for satellite systems. Gathering more intel on auroras and other upper atmosphere phenomena like it can help scientists see how weather and particles from space are interacting with the environment around Earth, and how energy is transferred during these events. 

Disturbing the ionosphere is not the only way to study auroras. Launching rockets into the ionosphere, which sits just at the edge of space, is another popular approach. 

The goal of HAARP is to research the physical and electrical properties of the Earth’s ionosphere as it pertains to surveillance, military and civilian communications, as well as radar and navigation systems. Outside of studying auroras, HAARP has used its antenna array to peer inside a passing asteroid, observe solar storms, and conduct other tests related to space physics. Beyond the Earth, the team’s ambitions extend to the moon and to Jupiter. 

HAARP has had an interesting history. Despite conducting serious science, around 2014, controversy and conspiracy brewed around the program’s mysterious antenna field, then run by the US military, prompting scientists to host open houses with the public explaining what they can and can’t do with their technology. Its image problem remains despite the changes in ownership over the years. 

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This week, LTA Research revealed Pathfinder 1, a prototype electric airship, to the public. According to TechCrunch, the company founded by Sergey Brin will spend the next year putting its airship through airworthiness testing at Moffett Field, home of NASA’s Ames Research Center, and out over the seas of the southern San Francisco Bay. If all goes well, airships could one day be used for climate-friendlier air travel, cargo transport, and humanitarian aid missions. 

Pathfinder 1, LTA Research’s first prototype, is 400 feet long and 66 feet wide. That’s more than 150 feet longer than an Airbus A380, and is apparently the largest aircraft to take to the skies since the ill-fated Hindenburg in the 1930s. (Though, at over 800 feet long, the Hindenburg would dwarf Pathfinder 1.) 

Instead of explosive hydrogen, Pathfinder 1 uses helium as its lighter-than-air lift gas. The airship has 13 rip-stop nylon gas bags inside its rigid carbon-fiber and titanium frame that are continuously monitored using LIDAR to ensure the airship is properly balanced, buoyant, and performing well. LTA is obviously angling for nothing to go wrong, but just in case, the surface of the airship is coated with Tedlar, a laminated, strong, lightweight, and, crucially, non-flammable material.

[Related: The biggest hot air balloon in the US was built to carry skydivers]

While the helium gets Pathfinder 1 in the air, it moves around thanks to 12 electric motors that are powered by diesel generators and batteries. The motors can drive the airship at up to 75 mph and can rotate from +180º to -180º to allow it to maneuver carefully. The pilots steer using a joystick and fly-by-wire system that automatically integrates with sensor feedback data to control all the motors. 

Despite its massive size, Pathfinder 1 will only be able to carry a relatively small amount of cargo. Depending on how tests go and the specific requirements of the situation, LTA expects the airship to have a payload of between 4,400 and 11,000 pounds. By contrast, a C-17 Globemaster can carry almost 180,000 pounds. The advantage of an airship, then, isn’t so much in what it can do, but in what other aircraft can’t. 

LTA Research highlights the humanitarian angle. As its FAQs explain, “airships will have the ability to complement, and even speed up, humanitarian disaster response and relief efforts, so that many more lives can be saved. Airships do not require aviation infrastructure like airstrips and landing zones, allowing them to deliver food, equipment, supplies, and other life-saving aid to areas impacted by natural disasters.” It also suggests that if cell towers are knocked down, airships could hover in the area equipped with the necessary radio equipment and get service back online.

[Related: RIP Loon, Google’s balloon-based cellular network]

For now though, Pathfinder 1 has much simpler objectives: get through flight testing. The FAA’s airworthiness certificate mandates that it is tethered to a mobile mast for ground testing, before conducting low-level flights at up to 1,500 feet. If all goes well in California, it will then be taken to the historic Goodyear Airdock where LTA Research is already developing Pathfinder 3, another prototype that, at 590 feet long, will have even more potential for carrying humanitarian aid. 

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After over half a century of loyal service, the world’s last remaining Super Guppy aircraft continues to dutifully transport NASA’s gigantic rocket parts in its cavernous, hinged cargo bay. On Tuesday, the Huntsville International Airport posted a video and accompanying images to social media of the rotund plane arriving from Kennedy Space Center. Perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, it sounds like a prop plane of that size can make a huge, rich racket on the tarmac.

[Related: Artemis II lunar mission goals, explained.]

Aboard the over 50-ton (when empty), turboprop plane this time around was the heat shield that protected last year’s Artemis I Orion spacecraft. The vital rocketry component capable of withstanding 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit resided in the Super Guppy’s 25-foot tall, 25-foot wide, 111-foot long interior during a nearly 690-mile journey to the Alabama airport, after which it was transported a few miles down the road to the Marshall Space Flight Center. From there, a team of technicians will employ a specialized milling tool to remove the heat shield’s protective Avcoat outer layer for routine post-flight analysis, according to NASA.

The Super Guppy is actually the third Guppy iteration to lumber through the clouds. Based on a converted Boeing Stratotanker refueling tanker and designed by the now defunct Aero Spacelines during the 1960s, an original craft called the Pregnant Guppy was supplanted by its larger Super Guppy heir just a few years later. This updated plane included an expanded cargo bay, alongside an incredibly unique side hinge that allows its forward section to open like a pocket watch. A final Super Guppy Turbine debuted in 1970, and remained in use by NASA for over 25 years. In 1997, the agency purchased one of two newer Super Guppy Turbines built by Airbus. This Guppy is the current and only such hefty boy gracing the skies. With its bulky profile, the Super Guppy’s travel specs are pretty impressive—it’s capable of flying as high as 25,000 feet at speeds as fast as 250 nautical miles per hour.

[Related: NASA’s weird giant airplane carried the future of Mars in its belly.]

Last PopSci checked in on the Super Guppy’s journeys was back in 2016, when it transported an Orion crew capsule potentially destined for a much further trip than the Artemis missions’ upcoming lunar sojourns—Mars. According to Digital Trends, the Super Guppy’s next flight could occur sometime next year ahead of NASA’s Artemis II human-piloted lunar flyby.

“Although much of the glory of America’s space program may be behind it, the Super Guppy continues to be one of the only practical options for oversized cargo and stands ready to encompass a bigger role in the future,” reads a portion of NASA’s official description.

Until then, feel free to peruse the official, 74-page Super Guppy Transport User’s Guide.

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To put it very simply: the Rimac Nevera electric hypercar is very, very fast. With 1,194-horsepower, a top speed of 256 MPH, and the ability to accelerate faster than an F1 racer, it’s not just one of the most powerful EVs in the world—it’s one of the most powerful cars, period. The $2.1 million Nevera has dashed past so many world records at this point that its makers are now forced to get creative in setting new ones. And they certainly have, judging from a new video released on November 7.

In addition to all its other feats, the Rimac Nevera is apparently now also the Guinness World Record holder for the “fastest speed in reverse.” How fast did it take to earn yet another laurel? 171.34 MPH—certainly an intense speed in any direction.

[Related: Behind the wheel of the bruisingly quick Rimac Nevera hypercar.]

On Tuesday, Nevera chief program engineer Matija Renić revealed that the new stunt actually began as a joke during the hypercar’s development stage.

“We kind of laughed it off,” Renić said via the company’s announcement. Renić noted its cooling and stability systems, not to mention aerodynamics, simply weren’t engineered for putting the pedal to the floor while in reverse. “But then, we started to talk about how fun it would be to give it a shot.”

Simulations indicated a Nevera likely would top 150 MPH while driven backwards, but there was no way to be sure just how stable it would remain while blazing down the road. “We were entering uncharted territory,” Renić added—an understatement if there ever was one.

But as these multiple videos attest, the Nevera is certainly up to the task should it ever improbably become necessary. According to the company’s record-setting test driver, pulling off the stunt “definitely took some getting used to.”

“You’re facing straight out backwards watching the scenery flash away from you faster and faster, feeling your neck pulled forwards in almost the same sensation you would normally get under heavy braking,” Goran Drndak said via Rimac’s November 7 announcement. “You’re moving the steering wheel so gently, careful not to upset the balance, watching for your course and your braking point out the rear-view mirror, all the while keeping an eye on the speed.” Although being “almost completely unnatural” to the car’s design, Drndak said the Nevera “breezed” through the stress test.

It’s hard to imagine what’s left for the Nevera to achieve, but if the latest record is any indication, chances are Rimac designers will think of something.

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A billionaire-backed Silicon Valley company says it now owns enough land to move forward with the next phases in creating a high-tech, utopian “city of yesterday.” In a recent email to PopSci, California Forever CEO Jan Sramek says he hopes “residents [will] keep an open mind [and] hear what we have to say,” while promising “we’ll do the same in kind.”

The news marked a turning point in the secretive, years-long campaign costing over $800 million, alongside a recently dropped $510 million lawsuit against local landowners. According to the project’s website, the group intends to build a new, green smart municipality from scratch atop its 53,000 acres. But despite promising “novel methods of design, construction and governance,” the project’s details remain vague.

[Related: Silicon Valley’s wealthiest want to build their own city outside of San Francisco.]

Founded by Sramek, a 36-year-old former Goldman Sachs trader, California Forever has quietly bought up tens of thousands of acres northeast of San Francisco since at least 2018. Investors include prominent venture capitalists, LinkedIn’s co-founder, as well as Lauren Powell Jobs, billionaire philanthropist and wife of the late Steve Jobs.

After years spent flying under-the-radar, Flannery Associate’s parent company finally launched a public-facing website in September featuring conceptual renderings and CGI walkthroughs of an idyllic townscape. The official site’s FAQ section argues the stealth campaign was “the only way to avoid creating a rush of reckless short-term land speculation.”

In a separate statement provided to PopSci on Monday, a Flannery spokesperson relayed the company “does not anticipate making any additional purchases” once it finalizes the “few remaining properties” under contract in the coming weeks. It is unclear if the final properties under contract differ from those recently purchased from local Solano County farmers following the contentious legal battle. Flannery filed its $510 million lawsuit in May 2023 against a group of local landowners, citing antitrust violations.

Speaking with PopSci last week via email, Flannery’s spokesperson contended this “small group” of residents engaged in a “targeted campaign” of slander, but denied that the company was suing local farmers for simply refusing to sell. The spokesperson cited an alleged incident from July 2022, when a farmer offered his property to Flannery for $32,000 per acre—nearly 10 times “fair market value” at the time, claims Flannery. After company representatives refused to buy at that price point, the farmer allegedly engaged in a “secret conspiracy” alongside fellow landowners to agree upon a standard selling price “so [Flannery] cannot play owners against owners,” the spokesperson said.

“Flannery has been reasonable when settling the case with many of the defendants, and has been willing to negotiate generous settlements with the remaining defendants,” the spokesperson concluded last week. On November 3, Bloomberg Business revealed the lawsuit’s defendants have since agreed to sell their remaining land to Flannery Associates for $18,000 per acre.

Critics, however, continue to voice concerns over the project’s logistical, legal, and governmental vagaries. Earlier this year, Rep. John Garamendi (D-CA) argued to a local California news outlet that the area’s proximity to Travis Air Force Base meant “[foreign] spy operations or any other nefarious activity could take place” there. Rep. Garamendi added such issues “could detrimentally impact the [base’s] ability…  to operate in a moment of national emergency,” and criticized Flannery’s then-ongoing lawsuit against locals. PopSci has reached out to Rep. Garamendi’s office for comment, but did not receive a response at the time of writing.

“Travis Air Force Base is critical to both our national security and to Solano County. We fully support its mission and always will,” reads a portion of California Forever’s FAQ page.

[Related: Why the tech billionaires can’t save themselves.]

In August, Solano County residents began receiving text and email opinion polls regarding a potential future ballot initiative. The messages at the time described an urban project including “a new city with tens of thousands of new homes, a large solar energy farm, orchards with over a million new trees, and over 10,000 acres of new parks and open space.” In an interview with local Bay Area news outlet ABC 7 in September, Sramek also said he envisions it to be “one of the most walkable places in California, probably in America” while possessing a “very traditional feeling to it.”

“The idea of building a new community and economic opportunity in eastern Solano seemed impossible on the surface,” Sramek wrote to PopSci last week. “But after spending a lot of time learning about the community, which I now call home, I became convinced that with thoughtful design, the right long-term patient investors, and strong partnerships… we can create a new community,” Sramek said at the time.

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Studying the ocean is a daunting task. It requires machines that don’t corrode in the seawater, and are able to withstand the escalating, crushing pressures as they dive down. While robots have become better at surviving these challenging environments since they became part of the crew embarking on deep-sea explorations, animals like elephant seals and weddell seals do it naturally with ease. As a workaround to keep the tech expenses low but the science quality high, a group of researchers had the idea to attach trackers and basic measurement tools detecting temperature, salinity, and depth to these seals to learn more about their massive marine habitat. 

The tracker looks like a funny little hat, but don’t let its appearance fool you. It has proven to be conducive to serious science. 

Earlier this summer, the team of international scientists working on the Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science (ACEAS) project published a report in the journal Communications Earth and Environment in which the seal divers wearing these satellite-paired, glued-on trackers revealed that the bottom of the sea in some areas is deeper than what’s stated on current maps. The seals also helped uncover a hidden underwater canyon in Antarctica’s seas that was then confirmed with other tools, Scientific American recently reported. 

This study is just one of the many planned projects for these blubbery, flippered research assistants. According to ABC Australia, the tracker-adorning seals are part of a 20-year project to understand the grooves and depths of the East Antarctic continental shelf and the seafloor below it. Turning the seals into effective free-roaming sensors can fill in gaps in data related to some of the most hard-to-get-to parts of the Antarctic ocean, as the seals are “tweeting” small packets of information they’ve collected to a satellite every time they surface. 

[Related: Tagging along with sharks to the ocean’s twilight zone]

Seals may know secret spots, too, that humans have never ventured to before, and they’re still actively exploring, diving down to the seafloor to forage, even when blankets of ice prevent ships and other human devices from accessing certain regions of Antarctica.  

This science is happening for an important reason. Getting a more accurate picture of the labyrinthic world under Antarctic ice is key to making predictions about how and how fast melting occurs as a result of climate change. The seals are definitely not the only tool scientists are deploying. Submersible robots like Boaty McBoatface and Icefin are also on a similar mission. 

There are many lacunas in the reams of scientific data regarding how the ocean is structured, and how its inhabitants traverse it. Part of the shortcoming is because researchers are approaching the task from a human perspective, and not seeing the environment the way an animal living there would. This could be why there are so many remaining mysteries around phenomena like, for example, where eels reproduce. Using an inside source, or an inside marine animal so to speak, may not be the worst idea to spy on their world. 

The method is already yielding results. Other than the seals, a team of scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have tagged sharks to study the quirks of the ocean’s twilight zone, and another team tagged turtles in the Indian Ocean to gather data that could be used to predict cyclones.

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One of the most ubiquitous sights on the road is an 18-wheel truck. These large, loud vehicles are a prolific presence on America’s interstates, and are made up of two big components: the tractor, which does the pulling and is where the driver is, and the trailer, where the stuff goes. 

In an effort to clean up the relatively large emissions that come from this part of the transportation sector, some companies are working on electric tractors that can pull trailers: Freightliner has a model called the eCascadia, Tesla has its Semi, Volvo its VNR, and others are working on it, too. But a relatively new company called Range Energy is focusing on the trailer itself, equipping it with batteries, a motor, and other intelligence. The trailer can be paired with a tractor burning diesel, or an electric one, like one of those eCascadias. 

Currently, there are about 3.5 million trailers in the United States, according to a company called ACT Research.

Range Energy is led by Ali Javidan, an early Tesla employee and veteran of Google and Zoox, the autonomous car company now owned by Amazon. Javidan also brings something else to the table: experience towing things. “I’ve always been around equipment, cars, trucks, stuff like that,” he says. “A few of my uncles had car dealerships, mechanic shops, lots of land in Sacramento. And so growing up, one of my first experiences driving was towing cars from the dealership to the service center, or moving boats around the farm, or things like that.” 

So while he points out that he has “very, very limited time in a class-8 tractor trailer,” which is a big 18-wheeler, he adds that he has “lots of towing empathy.” 

[Related: Futuristic aircraft and robotic loaders dazzled at a Dallas tech summit]

Range’s RA-01 product looks like a regular trailer—typically a big, boxy, and boring presence on the road—but has some key changes. There’s a motor that turns one of the axles at the back of the trailer. That motor gets the power it needs from an onboard battery pack, which isn’t inside the trailer (where it would interfere with cargo space) but is below it. There’s also what Javidan refers to as “smart kingpin.” A kingpin on a big 18-wheel truck is the point where the trailer connects to the tractor. What makes the Range Energy kingpin different from a regular kingpin is that it senses what the tractor is doing. “It’s a real-time measurement of how hard the tractor is pulling,” Javidan says.

Because it gathers this information, the trailer can be “kind of like an obedient dog on a leash,” he says, with the goal of making the trailer feel “essentially weightless” for the tractor. The trailer wouldn’t ever push the tractor, though. 

The result, according to Range, is that if this trailer is paired with a diesel-burning tractor, that tractor could get around 35 to 40 percent better fuel efficiency. And if it were paired with an electric tractor, it could add about 100 miles of range or more. 

Another benefit potentially arises from what happens when a truck towing a Range trailer goes downhill. That’s because of regenerative braking, which uses the motion from the wheels to charge the battery back up and simultaneously slow the whole rig down. That means that the truck’s brakes get less wear and tear, too. “The second-biggest maintenance item on a trailer is brakes,” he says. (Tires take the top slot.) Plus, Javidan says that the system has a stability boost going downhill, “because we’re dragging from the trailer.” 

The most obvious negative tradeoff that comes with electrifying the trailer is weight. “It adds about 4,000 pounds to the total system,” Javidan says. (A tractor-trailer rig has to stay below 80,000 pounds in total, although an electric tractor gets an additional 2,000 pound allowance.) For trucks hauling something heavy, like soda, this could affect the amount of goods they can transport in one load. But many trucks carrying stuff have “cubed out,” Javidan says—meaning that the truck’s interior space fills up before hitting the maximum weight limit. (Just think about an Amazon box filled packaging around something small, like toothpaste, and you get the idea.) 

Javidan says that they’ll start beta testing next year, with deliveries to customers planned for 2025. “You will start seeing these trailers on the roads in real volumes starting in 2026,” he predicts. 

There’s good reason for regulators and companies to work on cleaning up this transportation sector, both from a climate-change perspective and a public-health one. If you consider buses and medium- and heavy-duty trucks, those big rigs make up just 6 percent of vehicles on the roads in the US, but account for sizable portions of greenhouse gas emissions and nitrogen oxides (NOx). In other words, they are “disproportionately emitting emissions,” says Stephanie Ly, the senior manager of eMobility Strategy and Manufacturing Engagement at the World Resources Institute. 

The NOx emissions have “major public health impacts,” she says. Exposure to this diesel-heavy industry has serious ramifications for people, with repercussions like “years of life lost” as well as “asthma, cancer, infertility, and so many other negative effects, particularly for those that live nearest to high-traffic truck centers,” she says. And these groups, Ly adds, “are primarily communities of color, and communities that are lower income, or have less access to different types of employment, so they’re especially vulnerable.”

With Range Energy’s plan to electrify the trailer, Ly notes that “it’s absolutely fascinating what they are proposing.” That said, just as there are multiple companies working on creating electric tractors that do the pulling, other firms also are working on electrifying the trailer, too. ConMet eMobility, ZF, and Einride all represent potential competitors for Range. 

“I will say in the trucking sector, there’s quite a bit of brand loyalty within the supply chain,” Ly adds. In other words, any new player might have something of a long haul ahead of them as they try to pull onto the highway, get into the right gear, and travel down that open road.

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The wind energy company Ørsted has officially shuttered plans for two New Jersey offshore wind farms, citing rising inflation, interest rates, and supply chain problems. The blow to US green energy infrastructure arrives less than two weeks after the Danish wind industry giant promised to pay the Garden State a $100 million penalty if its Ocean Wind I turbines weren’t online by the end of 2025. But although the company’s plans off the coast of Atlantic City are canceled, similar projects are still underway across the US as the country transitions towards a sustainable energy infrastructure.

“We are extremely disappointed to have to take this decision, particularly because New Jersey is poised to be a US and global hub for offshore wind energy,” David Hardy, Ørsted Group EVP and CEO Americas, said in an October 31 statement. “I want to thank Governor Murphy and NJ state and local leaders who helped support these projects and continue to lead the region in developing American renewable energy and jobs.”

[Related: Atlantic City’s massive offshore wind farm project highlights the industry’s growing pains.]

According to the Associated Press on Tuesday, however, NJ Gov. Phil Murphy had strong words for the company, citing Ørsted’s recent statements “regarding the viability and progress of the Ocean Wind I project.”

“Today’s decision by Ørsted to abandon its commitments to New Jersey is outrageous and calls into question the company’s credibility and competence,” added Gov. Murphy per the AP. He also hinted at impending plans to pursue an additional $200 million Ørsted reportedly pledged for the state’s offshore wind industry. In the meantime, Gov. Murphy reiterated New Jersey’s commitment to offshore wind infrastructure, and said the state will solicit a new round of project proposals in the near future.

Both Ocean Wind endeavors had faced intense scrutiny and pushback from both Republican state legislators and locals, who criticized the farms’ alleged ecological impacts, ocean horizon views, as well as the millions of dollars in subsidies granted to Ørsted. Earlier this month, Ørsted received a lawsuit filed on behalf of an environmental group called Clean Ocean Action alongside multiple seafood and fishing organizations. In May 2023, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management released an over 2,300 page Final Environmental Impact Statement on Ocean Wind 1, which deemed it responsibly designed and safe for the region’s ecological health.

If completed, Ocean Wind I would have included nearly 100 giant turbines roughly 15 miles off the southeast coast of Atlantic City, New Jersey. Once online, the farm would have annually generated 1.1 gigawatts of energy—enough to power over 500,000 homes. Ocean Wind II was slated for construction next to its sibling wind farm, and would have offered similar energy outputs.

[Related: Watch a heavy-lifting drone land a perfect delivery on an offshore wind turbine.]

While the Danish company’s plans in New Jersey are dashed, America’s wind farm buildup is still progressing elsewhere—and Ørsted remains a part of that trajectory. The same day as its Ocean Wind announcement, the company confirmed it is moving forward with a $4 billion project, Revolution Wind, off the coast of Rhode Island. If completed, the offshore wind farm will supply clean energy for residents in both Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Meanwhile, a utility company called Dominion Energy received crucial federal approval on Tuesday for plans to construct 176 turbines over 20 miles off the coast of Virginia. Dominion claims the project is the largest offshore project in the US, and will generate enough energy for nearly 660,000 homes upon its estimated late-2026 completion date. According to a 2015 report from the US Department of Energy, wind farms could supply over a third of US electricity by 2050.

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An autonomous drone with the wingspan of an albatross is now trialing cargo restocks for a giant offshore wind farm in the North Sea. Overseen by the Danish wind power company Ørsted, the 128-pound unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)—roughly the weight of “a large baby giraffe”—is meant to cut down on time and costs, while also improving overall operational safety, and is billed as the first of its kind in the world.

“Drones mean less work disturbance as turbines don’t have to be shut down when cargo is delivered,” Ørsted’s October 30 announcement states. “They avoid risk, making it safer for personnel working on the wind farm and minimize the need for multiple journeys by ship, reducing carbon emissions and climate change impacts.”

In a video posted to the social media platform, X, the hefty drone is shown launching from a cargo ship’s deck while towing a large orange bag suspended by a cable beneath the UAV. From there, the transport soars over a few hundred feet of North Sea waters to hover above one of Hornsea 1’s 7-megawatt wind turbines. Once in place, the drone carefully lands its cargo on the platform before releasing its tether to return to its crew transfer vessel, where human pilots have overseen the entire process.

While Ørsted didn’t name its drone partner in the project announcement, additional promotional materials provided by the company confirm it is a Skylift, a UK-based business focusing on offshore wind farm deliveries.

[Related: Atlantic City’s massive offshore wind farm project highlights the industry’s growing pains.]

“[W]e want to use our industry leading position to help push forward innovations that reduce costs and maximize efficiency and safety in the offshore wind sector,” Mikkel Haugaard Windolf, head of Ørsted’s offshore logistics project, said via the company’s October 30 reveal, adding that, “Drone cargo delivery is an important step in that direction.”

Ørsted’s Hornsea 1 wind farm consists of 174 turbines installed across over 157-square-miles in the North Sea. Generating roughly 1.7Gw of power, the farm’s electricity is enough to sustainably power over 1 million homes in the UK.

Despite the company’s multiple Hornsea wind farm successes, Ørsted has encountered significant setbacks during attempts to expand into the US market. Earlier this month, local officials in Cape May County, NJ, filed a lawsuit attempting to block construction of a 1.1 gigawatt project involving nearly 100 turbines off the coast of Atlantic City, citing regulatory sidesteps and environmental concerns. In an email to PopSci at the time, the American Clean Power Association’s Director of Eastern Region State Affairs described the lawsuit as “meritless,” and reiterated that offshore wind energy production remains “one of the most rigorously regulated industries in the nation.”

According to a 2015 report from the US Department of Energy, wind farms could supply over a third of the country’s sustainable electricity by 2050.

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Virtual and augmented reality headsets are currently focused on visual experiences, but for a truly immersive environment, designers will need to integrate additional sensory inputs such as touch. Companies like Meta and HaptX are already testing iterations of VR/AR devices with haptic feedback support, but they currently remain clunky, heavy, and tethered to external power sources. There’s also the issue of price points: Meta’s Haptic Glove is estimated to cost around $15,000, while HaptX’s G1 sets owners back $6,000 alongside a $500 per month support fee.

But what if VR/AR systems could include a lightweight, form-fitting haptic glove that only requires lightweight batteries, all costing roughly two months’ of a G1 subscription? Fluid Reality is trying to make just such a device, well, a reality.

[Related: What’s the difference between VR and AR?]

The startup—spun out of the Future Interfaces Group at Carnegie Mellon University—unveiled their new device today, and hopes to offer a completely new approach to providing realistic haptic sensations for AR/VR environments. While many existing gloves rely on pneumatic designs to simulate touch, Fluid Reality’s wearable instead utilizes low-profile, self-contained motion-generating actuators that clip onto a user’s fingertips, all without the need for tubing or wiring connected to an external device. The entire array of components including a wireless controller, drive electronics, and rechargeable battery pack are strapped to the user’s hand and wrist, thus eliminating the need for a wired power source.

To simulate tactile sensations, the finger pads use liquid-like “pixels” powered by tiny electroosmotic valves—pumps controlled via the electric stimulation of fluid pressure and flow. The device is a solid state design, thus containing no moving components apart from the valve “pixels” themselves. Because each actuator is just 5mm thick, the pads are incredibly slim and far less bulky than existing haptic glove options.

In demonstration videos, wearers are shown manipulating 3D-simulated objects like a basketball, various shaped blocks, a water bottle, and a rock alongside the haptic finger clips’ responses. Depending on angle, pressure, and speed of movement, the electroosmotic-powered pixels can be seen inflating and deflating in realtime to approximate the real-life sensations.

Even with such seemingly precise responses, Fluid Reality’s prototype gloves are considerably smaller than options like the Meta Haptic Glove, both in terms of overall physical dimensions and pricing. According to the team, a Fluid Reality glove weighs less than half-a-pound, and could cost less than $1,000 per unit. In the designers’ research paper, the team concedes additional refinement is needed before the gloves can arrive on the market. Going forward, they hope to increase the density of haptic arrays on each finger pad, while also miniaturizing their drive electronics. Given humans’ entire hands are often employed in manipulating objects, Fluid Reality also wants future versions of the glove to include sensational abilities for regions such as the palms.

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Since 3D printers debuted in the 1980s, the devices have been used to build meat, chocolate, human organs, clothing, cars, and houses. It’s more mainstream than ever, and you can buy a machine for less than $200.

Also called additive manufacturing or rapid prototyping, 3D printing has many advantages over the more traditional subtractive manufacturing methods, where you start with a hunk of metal or wood and remove material using mills, drills, and other tools. The two main benefits are that 3D printers produce a lot less waste and can do a better job creating objects with complex shapes. Instead of an involved assembly process, everything can be made in one place.

“Mass manufacturing methods, almost all of them are quite fixed,” says Diana Haidar, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. “You can only remake the exact same parts over and over again. But people also want custom parts. That’s where 3D printing has a niche.”

So how, exactly, does a 3D printer work?

What is 3D printing?

Consider the type of printing most people are very familiar with: Printing with ink on paper. This is 2D printing, because there’s an area with an x-axis and a y-axis, so there are two degrees of freedom. With 3D printing, there’s a third dimension: height. The files you feed into 3D printers are 3D images that a software program then slices into horizontal layers.

“The idea is that I have a 3D object, and I’m going to slice it into many individual layers. We use slicer software for that,” Haidar explains. “Then there’s usually a two-axis head that will move around and build a singular layer. Then either the head goes up or the bed [that the object is being built on] will drop. But there is a z-axis change so we can build up one layer at a time.”

Popular methods for 3D printing

One of the most common types of 3D printing is fused deposition modeling, or FDM. “It’s the cleanest with regards to space,” says Haidar.

With this method, there’s a spool of winding filament (usually plastic or polymer) that is fed into the machine’s head. Inside the head, there’s a heating unit that melts the polymer. Polylactic acid (a type of plastic) is one of the most commonly printed 3D materials, because it’s cheap and has a fairly low melting point of around 180 degrees Celsius (350 degrees Fahrenheit). When it’s used as a feeding material, engineers usually set the 3D printer to around 200 Celsius (390 Fahrenheit) to make sure the material is going to be melted as it’s extruded from a little nozzle, but can then harden back into form. The smaller the nozzle, the more resolution there is in the printed object. 

The third most popular 3D printing method is called laser powder bed fusion. This technique works well for printing or compressing together metals. To start, there is a big, flat bed of metal powder, and a laser carves out a shape, melting together the desired forms. Once a layer is complete, the bed drops, and a roller distributes a new fine layer of powder across the surface. 

When specialized machines print organs (such as a heart), multiple nozzles can be prefilled with syringes to inject different types of cells. Instead of a spool, the machine injects into a hydrogel. 

How much are 3D printers?

The cheapest 3D printer on the market is around $200, and those machines are the ones used by engineering students to make quick mockups. But spending less money on a machine like this comes with trade-offs. The cheap ones tend to be more finicky and break down more often. They’re also not as consistent at producing the same object over and over again. For example, the polymer, or plastic building material, can warp if there’s too drastic a change in temperature from the inside of the nozzle to the external environment. “You don’t see that as much in the big machines because they have clearly enclosed environments that are temperature-controlled, and they might even have a cooling cycle,” Haidar explains.

A midrange desktop machine for FDM printing will usually go for $3,000, and this price includes software packages. A more high-end machine that can manufacture bigger objects with a more durable starting material can cost $200,000. Spending all that money comes with big benefits down the line. “Your maintenance cost is quite a lot lower. It’s easier to print materials that the little machines would struggle with,” says Haidar. “Those machines give you the closest thing to a professionally manufactured part.” 

The fanciest machines print using metal, like aluminum. The metal 3D printers can cost up to $1 million, since they have to be operated in a room that’s very well-controlled, ventilated, and has the ability to suppress explosions (if they happen).

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When humans finally return to the moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program, they’ll arrive with a bevy of high-tech equipment to capture new, awe-inspiring glimpses of Earth’s satellite. But cameras have come a long way since the Apollo missions. In 2023, some incredibly advanced options are already almost moon-ready right off the shelf.

According to a recent update from the European Space Agency, engineers collaborating with NASA are finalizing a Handheld Universal Lunar Camera (HULC) with real-world testing in the rocky, lunar-esque vistas of Lanzarote, Spain. While resilient enough to travel to the moon, HULC’s underpinning tech derives from commercially available professional cameras featuring high light sensitivities and cutting-edge lenses. To strengthen the lunar documentation device, researchers needed to add a blanket casing that is durable enough to protect against ultra-fine moon dust, as well as the moon’s extreme temperature swings ranging between -208 and 250 degrees Fahrenheit. At the same time, the covering can’t impede usage, so designers also created a suite of ergonomic buttons compatible with astronaut spacesuits’ thick gloves.

[Related: Check out this Prada-designed Artemis III spacesuits.]

So far, HULC has snapped shots in near pitch-black volcanic caves, as well as in broad daylight to approximate the lunar surface’s vast spectrum of lighting possibilities. According to the ESA, HULC will also be the first mirrorless handheld camera used in space—such a design reportedly offers quality images in low light scenarios.

Even with the numerous alterations and adjustments, the HULC is still not quite ready for the Artemis III mission, currently scheduled for 2025. The ESA reports that at least one version of the camera will soon travel to the International Space Station for additional testing.

“We will continue modifying the camera as we move towards the Artemis III lunar landing,” Jeremy Myers, NASA lead on the HULC camera project, told the ESA on October 24. “I am positive that we will end up with the best product–a camera that will capture Moon pictures for humankind, used by crews from many countries and for many years to come.”

Images of Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong striding across the lunar surface during the Apollo 11 moonwalk instantly became iconic photographs in 1969, but they were only a preview of many more to come. Over the next three years, 10 more astronauts documented their visits to the moon using an array of video and photographic cameras. When humans finally return as part of the Artemis program, HULC will be in tow to capture new, awe-inspiring glimpses of Earth’s satellite.

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Have you ever left the house without a jacket on a balmy day, only to regret overestimating your chilly weather tolerance? Instead of dashing back home for your coat, there may come a time in the near future when you simply use an app to control your clothing’s level of insulation.

Created by researchers at MIT, FibeRobo is a cheap, programmable, shape-changing smart fiber reliant on a liquid crystal elastomer (LCE). Among their many uses, garments imbued with their new LCE fiber could adjust their structure to become more insulated in colder temperatures, and vice versa for warmer weather. With an additional ability to combine with electrically conductive threads, a wearer could directly control their FibeRobo clothing or medical wearables like compression garments via wireless inputs from a controller or smartphone.

[Related: The US wants to dress military in smart surveillance apparel.]

As detailed in a recent institute profile, LCEs are composed of molecules possessing liquid-like properties that can also arrange into periodic crystal formations once cool and inert. Importantly, the team’s new synthetic LCE can morph between its phases at safe, comfortable temperature levels—an industry first.

The result is a fiber capable of contracting when exposed to heat, and self-reversing as temperatures drop without any external sensors or interwoven components. What’s more, FibeRobo is flexible and strong enough to use within traditional manufacturing methods like embroidery, weaving looms, and knitting machines.

To make the new threads, engineers first designed a glue gun-like machine that slowly excretes heated LCE resin through a nozzle. The fiber is then cured for the first time using UV lights, submerged in oil, then cured once again using even stronger UV rays. After its manufacturing is complete, the LCE thread is spooled and dipped in a powder to make it easier to install textile production machines. According to MIT, the team can produce roughly a kilometer of usable fiber within a single day.

As proof of concepts, the MIT team used an industrial knitting machine to weave a Bluetooth-controlled compression dog jacket to help with anxiety, then tested the vest on one of the researchers’ pets. Another prototype served as an adaptive sports bra, with FibeRobo embroidery that tightened the fabric as its user began to exercise.

Going forward, the team wants to fine-tune their LCE’s composition to make it either biodegradable or recyclable, as well as simply the overall design.

“At the end of the day, you don’t want a diva fiber,”  Jack Forman, an MIT graduate student and paper lead author, said in a statement. “You want a fiber that, when you are working with it, falls into the ensemble of materials—one that you can work with just like any other fiber material, but then it has a lot of exciting new capabilities.”

While many current smart textile projects are trying to reinvent how a person can interact with their clothing–from interwoven sensors that interpret health data to “SMART ePANTS” that aid in surveillance and security–these apparel ventures perhaps may one day expand the number of garments in your closet. Meanwhile, this newest iteration may actually downsize your wardrobe.

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Chicken feathers, much like human hair and fingernails, are composed mostly of a tough protein called keratin. And like with your own hair and nails, the birds produce a lot of feathers over the course of their lives. Generally speaking, this isn’t a big issue—but it’s another matter for the food industry. Each year, approximately 40 million metric tons of chicken feathers are incinerated during the poultry production process, releasing harmful fumes like carbon and sulfur dioxide.

Finding a new use for all those feathers could dramatically cut down on food waste and pollution, and a team of researchers may have figured out what to do with them: turn feathers into a vital component of green hydrogen fuel cells.

[Related: Why you should build a swing for your chickens.]

As detailed in a new paper published via ACS Applied Materials & Sciences, scientists from ETH Zurich and Nanyang Technological University Singapore (NTU) have developed a method to extract feathers’ keratin and spin it into thin fibers called amyloid fibrils. From there, these fibrils can be installed as a hydrogen fuel cell’s vital semipermeable membrane. Traditionally composed of highly poisonous “forever chemicals,” these membranes allow protons to pass through while excluding electrons. The blocked electrons are then forced to travel via an external circuit from negative anodes to positive cathode, thus creating electricity.

“Our latest development closes a cycle: [we took] a substance that releases CO2 and toxic gasses when burned, and used it in a different setting,” Raffaele Mezzenga, a professor of food and soft materials at ETH Zurich, said in a recent university profile. “With our new technology, it not only replaces toxic substances, but also prevents the release of CO2, decreasing the overall carbon footprint cycle.”

According to researchers, the keratin-derived membranes are already cheaper to produce in a lab setting than existing synthetic hydrogen fuel cell membranes, and hope similar savings will translate to mass production. The team has applied for a joint patent, and is now looking for partners and investors to make the product publicly available. Still, a number of hurdles remain for the fuel cells to become truly viable renewable energy sources. While hydrogen cells’ only emissions are heat and water, the power that actually helps generate their electricity still largely stems from natural gas sources like methane. Such a reliance arguably undercuts hydrogen fuel cells’ promise of green energy.

But even there, chicken feathers could once again come to the rescue. The keratin membranes reportedly also show promise in the electrolysis portion of hydrogen energy production, when direct current travels through water to split the molecules into oxygen and hydrogen.

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“I always build things,” says Dan Hryhorcoff. 

Case in point: Hryhorcoff has constructed an absolutely delightful giant bumper car, a project that he says began during the pandemic. The rest of us may have baked bread as COVID came down the pike, but Hryhorcoff, who lives in northeastern Pennsylvania and has also built a submarine, constructed an enormous blue bumper car. It gets its propulsion from a repurposed Chevrolet engine and is street-legal. 

Before he constructed the big bumper car, Hryhorcoff had made a different vehicle, starting on it around 2013 or so. “When I retired, I decided I kind of wanted to build a car,” he recalls. For that project, he chose to focus on a 1950s pedal car for children called a Murray “sad face.” “I decided to copy that and make a large one.” (Those Murray models have a front that does indeed look like a sad face, but anyone who sees Hryhorcoff’s work will probably smile.) 

Creating that big red vehicle provided him with further experience working with fiberglass, a material he had also worked with when building the submarine. “I had a lot of fun with that [Murray car] at car shows and things, and it got a lot of attention from a broad audience,” he says.

“Then COVID hit,” he adds. He wanted a new project. His thinking? “Another car project would be good.” 

Building the big bumper car

He settled on a bumper car. To get the source material he needed for the project, he turned to an amusement park in Elysburg, Pennsylvania called Knoebels, and the bumper cars they have there. Specifically, he focused on the 1953-model bumper car that was made by a company called Lusse. He liked that it had a “Chevrolet pickup truck sorta look” from the 1950s. 

“I decided to copy one of those,” he says. Spending some eight hours at Knoebels gave him the chance to get the information he needed. “I measured, and took photos, and made templates, and whatever I needed to, to copy the car as well as I can.” He chose to make his version of the car double the size of the base model. As the Scranton Times-Tribune noted in a story about Hryhorcoff in July, the bumper car ride at Knoebels dates back to the immediate post-World-War-II era.

[Related: This Florida teen is making a business out of rebuilding old-school auto tech]

Inside, the big bumper car’s power plant comes from a Chevrolet Aveo. “I took the front of the Aveo, and chopped it off, and put that in the back of the bumper car,” he explains. “And the front of the bumper car is a motorcycle wheel.” That single wheel up front means it can turn very sharply. The exterior is made out of fiberglass. All told, it measures 13 feet long, 7 feet wide, and 5.5 feet tall, making it twice the size of a regular bumper car. A pole in the back mimics the way actual bumper cars get their electricity, except this one connects to nothing. 

A project like this would likely be a bumpy ride for anyone without the experience that Hryhorcoff, 72, brings to the table. “I learned to run a lathe when I was 13 years old, with my dad, and he was kind of a jack-of-all-trades,” he recalls. (A lathe is a tool for forming metal into a round shape, and a wood lathe is the kind of equipment you could use to make a baseball bat.) He built a go-cart, tinkered with lawn mowers, and learned about auto repair in a garage. His interest, as he describes it, was “all around mechanical.” 

He spent four years after high school in the Navy in the early 1970s, where he worked stateside and repaired radios for F-4 jets, and then studied mechanical engineering at Penn State. After working for a drilling company, he started his own machine shop called Justus Machine. 

Always diving into something new

The submarine he built came from plans for a K350 model purchased from George Kittredge, and is called Persistence. “I knew I was building something that wasn’t gonna kill me, if I build it correctly,” he says. (Watch a video of the sub in action here.) That sub has gone as deep as 540 feet with no one on board, Hryhorcoff says, and he’s taken it down himself to about 150 feet deep. 

[Related: How does a jet engine work? By running hot enough to melt its own innards.]

Hryhorcoff describes himself as an engineer, not an artist, and prefers to follow plans and undertake projects in which he knows any challenges he might face are surmountable. “Any project I’ve ever chose was a project that I knew I can get through it, but I had something new to learn in the process,” he says. “There were always some unknowns.” But those unknowns, he adds, were within the realm of doable for him and his equipment, even if he had to learn new stuff along the way.

“I’d rather big projects, rather than a dozen little ones,” he adds. 

Watch a short video about Hryhorcoff and this project, below:

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On October 10, the Royal Fleet Auxiliary dedicated a ship called the Proteus in a ceremony on the River Thames. The vessel, which looks like someone started building a ship and then stopped halfway through, is the first in the fleet’s Multi-Role Ocean Surveillance program, and is a conversion from a civilian vessel. 

In its new role, the Proteus will keep a protective eye on underwater infrastructure deemed vitally important, and will command underwater robots as part of that task. Before being converted to military use, the RFA Proteus was the Norwegian-built MV Topaz Tangaroa, and it was used to support oil platforms.

Underwater infrastructure, especially pipelines and communications cables, make the United Kingdom inextricably connected to the world around it. While these structures are hard to get to, as they rest on the seafloor, they are not impossible to reach. Commercial vessels, like the oil rig tenders the Proteus was adapted from, can reach below the surface with cranes and see below it through remotely operated submarines. Dedicated military submarines can also access seafloor cables. By keeping an eye on underwater infrastructure, the Proteus increases the chance that saboteurs can be caught, and more importantly, improves the odds that damage can be found and repaired quickly.

“Proteus will serve as a testbed for advancing science and technological development enabling the UK to maintain the competitive edge beneath the waves,” reads the Royal Navy’s announcement of the ship’s dedication.

The time between purchase and dedication of the Topaz Tangaroa to the Proteus was just 11 months, with conversion completed in September. The 6,600-ton vessel is operated by a crew of just 26 from the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, while the surveillance, survey, and warfare systems on the Proteus are crewed by 60 specialists from the Royal Navy. As the Topaz Tangaroa, the vessel was equipped for subsea construction, installation, light maintenance, and inspection work, as well as survey and remotely operated vehicle operations. The Proteus retains its forward-mounted helipad, which looks like a hexagonal brim worn above the bow of the ship.

Most striking about the Proteus is the large and flat rear deck, which features a massive crane as well as 10,700 square feet of working space, which is as much as five tennis courts. Helpful to the ship’s role as a home base for robot submersibles is a covered “moon pool” in the deck that, whenever uncovered, lets the ship launch submarines directly beneath it into the ocean.

“This is an entirely new mission for the Royal Fleet Auxiliary – and one we relish,” Commodore David Eagles RFA, the head of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, said upon announcement of the vessel in January.

Proteus is named for one of the sons of the sea god Poseidon in Greek mythology, with Proteus having domain over rivers and the changing nature of the sea. While dedicated on a river, the ship is designed for deep-sea operation, with a ballast system providing stability as it works in the high seas. 

“Primarily for reasons of operational security, the [Royal Navy] has so far said little about the [Multi-Role Ocean Surveillance] concept of operations and the areas where Proteus will be employed,” suggests independent analysts Navy Lookout, as part of an in-depth guide on the ship. “It is unclear if she is primarily intended to be a reactive asset, to respond to suspicious activity and potentially be involved in repairs if damage occurs. The more plausible alternative is that she will initially be employed in more of a deterrent role, deploying a series of UUVs [Uncrewed Underwater Vehicles] and sensors that monitor vulnerable sites and send periodic reports back to the ship or headquarters ashore. Part of the task will be about handling large amounts of sensor data looking for anomalies that may indicate preparations for attacks or non-kenetic malign activity.”

In the background of the UK’s push for underwater surveillance are actual attacks and sabotage on underwater pipelines. In September 2022, an explosion caused damage and leaks in the Nord Stream gas pipeline between Russia and Germany. While active transfer of gas had been halted for diplomatic reasons following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the pipeline still held gas in it at the time of the explosion. While theories abound for possible culprits, there is not yet a conclusive account of which nation was both capable and interested enough to cause such destruction.

The Proteus is just the first of two ships with this task. “The first of two dedicated subsea surveillance ships will join the fleet this Summer, bolstering our capabilities and security against threats posed now and into the future,” UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said in January. “It is paramount at a time when we face Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, that we prioritise capabilities that will protect our critical national infrastructure.”

While the Proteus is unlikely to fully deter such acts, having it in place will make it easier for the Royal Navy to identify signs of sabotage. Watch a video of the Proteus below:

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Back in 2015, the US Department of Energy estimated wind farms could supply over a third of the nation’s electricity by 2050. Since then, numerous wind turbine projects have been green-lit offshore and across the country. However, when it comes to building, it can get tricky, like in the case of a planned wind farm 15 miles off the southeast coast of Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Danish wind farm company Ørsted recently promised to cut New Jersey a $100 million check if the company’s massive Ocean Wind 1 offshore turbines weren’t up and running by the end of 2025. Less than a week after the wager, however, officials in the state’s southernmost county have filed a US District Court lawsuit to nix the 1.1 gigawatt project involving nearly 100 turbines, alleging regulatory sidesteps and ecological concerns.

[Related: The NY Bight could write the book on how we build offshore wind farms.]

According to the Associated Press, Cape May County government’s October 16 lawsuit also names the Clean Ocean Action environmental group alongside multiple seafood and fishing organizations as plaintiffs. The filing against both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management claims that the Ocean Wind 1 project sidestepped a dozen federal legal requirements, as well as failed to adequately investigate offshore wind farms’ potential environmental and ecological harms. However, earlier this year, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management released its over 2,300 page Final Environmental Impact Statement on Ocean Wind 1, which concluded the project is responsibly designed and adequately protects the region’s ecological health.

An Ørsted spokesperson declined to comment on the lawsuit for PopSci, but related the company “remains committed to collaboration with local communities, and will continue working to support New Jersey’s clean energy targets and economic development goals by bringing good-paying jobs and local investment to the Garden State.”

[Related: A wind turbine just smashed a global energy record—and it’s recyclable.]

Wind turbine farm companies, Ørsted included, have faced numerous issues in recent years thanks to supply chain bottleneck issues, soaring construction costs, and legal challenges such as the latest from Cape May County. Earlier this year, Ørsted announced its US-based projects are now worth less than half of their initial economic estimates.

Other clean energy advocates reiterated their support for the New Jersey wind farm. In an email to PopSci, Moira Cyphers, Director of Eastern Region State Affairs for the American Clean Power Association, described the lawsuit as “meritless.”

“Offshore wind is one of the most rigorously regulated industries in the nation and is critical for meeting New Jersey’s clean energy and environmental goals,” Cyphers continued. “Shore towns can’t wait for years and years for these projects to be constructed. The time to move forward is now.”

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There used to be a joke that if Microsoft made cars, your car would crash twice a day for no reason at all. But the reality of software-defined cars (that is, vehicles in which clever coding has as much say as masterful machining in determining a car’s characteristics) is demonstrated by the 2024 Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray, whose smart software lets the car’s new electric motor deliver supplemental power to the front wheels so imperceptibly that the driver would have trouble guessing that the latest version of America’s sports car has all-wheel drive.

That’s because the Corvette’s signature 6.2-liter, overhead-valve, LT2 small block V8 is still roaring, powering the rear wheels with its 495 horsepower, just like in the base Stingray model. But now there’s that 160-hp electric motor up front, running off a 1.9 kilowatt-hour array of LG lithium-ion batteries deftly tucked into the car’s central tunnel.

This $104,295 vehicle is a regular hybrid-electric, with no external power plug, so the battery is small and gets its juice entirely from the gas engine and from regenerative braking that turns the electric motor into a generator when the car slows. Having that extra 160 hp and 125 lb.-ft. torque on tap is “like having a nitrous oxide tank that fills itself,” remarked chief engineer Josh Holder, referring to the “NOS” gas made famous by The Fast and the Furious movie franchise for giving combustion engines a burst of extra power.

The quickest Corvette ever

But rather than the explosive power delivery from NOS, the E-Ray’s omnipresent electric motor “torque fill” just makes the car constantly more muscular. This power, combined with the traction of all-wheel-drive, makes the E-Ray the quickest Corvette ever, with a 0-60 mph acceleration of 2.5 seconds and a 10.5-second quarter mile time.

Those times are achieved using the E-Ray’s Performance Launch mode, which uses the car’s various software-controlled systems to optimize power delivery from the gas and electric motors to deliver the fastest possible acceleration.

The driver can keep the E-Ray’s battery topped off so that it is ready to deliver that boost by pressing the Charge+ button. If you ever watch Formula 1 races, you’ll see a car’s rear light flashing when the driver is building the state of charge in its battery in preparation for a passing attempt on a car ahead. The E-Ray’s Charge+ button on the center console, down by the driver’s right thigh, ensures that the battery’s virtual NOS tank is fully topped off with electrons.

The Corvette Z06 we tested last year is nearly as quick, but that car produces its power with more noise and drama. The E-Ray appeals to the enthusiast who wants a comfy ride that also happens to be ludicrously fast. And if you need to sneak out of your neighborhood in the morning without annoying the neighbors, let the small block V8 sleep late and cruise out on electric power alone using Stealth mode to reach speeds as high as 45 mph.

Other driving modes with pre-set performance parameters include Tour, Sport, Track, and Weather. Each of those optimizes the car’s sound, power delivery, stability control, traction control, and dynamically adjustable magnetic suspension damping to match those conditions. Additionally, drivers can select their own preferences in My Mode and Z Mode.

Driving the Corvette E-Ray on and off the track

The E-Ray rolls on the same wide wheels wrapped in meaty Michelin rubber and enclosed by the same 3.6-inch wider fenders as the Z06, but the rubber on those wheels is Michelin’s Pilot Sport all-season tire to make the E-Ray compatible with rain and snow. I didn’t encounter those conditions on the roads around Denver or during my track drive at Pikes Peak International Raceway, but I could feel the E-Ray’s stability and surefootedness.

In addition to the all-weather tires, the E-Ray is also available with the same Michelin Pilot Sport 4S summer tires as are used on the base Stingray version. And as on that car, these excellent tires provide the consistent grip, comfort, and durability drivers want in everyday driving. And as I found track testing the Stingray, these tires are really not at home on the track, where they quickly turn hot and greasy compared to true track tires, losing their grip after thrashing through just a few hard corners.

No matter, that’s not the E-Ray’s purpose. Yes, it is fast, but the similarly priced Z06 ($111,295) is the weapon of choice for track rats. The E-Ray is for drivers who want that kind of speed in a car they can enjoy every day in comfort.

Even with its all-wheel-drive traction, the E-Ray is not penalized by sluggish steering response on corner turn-in, as is typically the case with cars that route power through the front wheels. That’s because the computer is smart enough to know when and how much power to send from the electric motor to the front wheels.

It can even let the driver induce a drift in corners, spinning the rear wheels without the front-drive power interfering with the sideways-sliding fun. That car-straightening front power is welcome when driving home from work in bad weather, but it can spoil the fun on the track, so the E-Ray knows when to have the electric drive step back and let the V8 do the work.

A weighty issue 

Just as the E-Ray rolls on the same wide wheels as the Z06, it also packs the same Brembo carbon ceramic brakes inside them to help slow the car. This is in addition to the E-Ray hybrid-electric regenerative braking, which does much of the car’s stopping. 

But the big brakes are important, because while the hybrid system adds braking power, it also adds mass. Chevrolet says the E-Ray weighs 3,774 pounds as a coupe and 3,856 pounds as a convertible, which means that it is about 350 pounds heavier than the Z06 and 400 pounds heavier than the Stingray.

This is in spite of a huge effort by the car’s engineering team to minimize the weight penalty of the electric motor and battery pack. “We put the highest bounty on weight of any car we’ve ever done,” recalled Holder. Even with that effort, electric motors and batteries are still heavy. “It is the heaviest Corvette we’ve ever done,” Holder acknowledged, adding, “but it is the lightest hybrid we’ve ever done.” 

The E-Ray matches the slower Stingray’s EPA fuel economy rating of 19 mpg in combined driving, with a score of 16 mpg city and 24 mpg highway. The Z06’s rating depends on the exact equipment, but it is either 14 mpg or 15 mpg in combined driving. City driving in either case is a dismal 12 mpg.

The added mass is low in the chassis, with the electric motor between the front wheels and the battery pack in the central spine running between the seats in the cockpit, so the center of gravity is low. Engineers mask that weight with savvy chassis control with the magnetically controlled adaptive dampers and the aforementioned massive brakes, so the E-Ray never feels heavy on the road.

As with the seamless power delivery, credit the brainy calibration by the Corvette team’s programmers in creating the reality of their choice rather than the one suggested by physics. It turns out that software-defined vehicles are far better than the old Microsoft joke predicted.

Take a look at my track drive, below:

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Despite decades of innovation, solar powered cars remain comparatively expensive and difficult to mass produce—but that doesn’t mean they aren’t starting to pack a serious punch. At least one prototype reportedly handled an off-road sojourn across the world’s largest non-polar desert at speeds as fast as 90 mph.

Designed by a team of 21-to-25-year-old  college students at the Netherland’s Eindhoven University of Technology, their Stella Terra recently completed a 620 mile (1,000 km) test drive that began in Morocco before speeding through portions of Tangier and the Sahara. While miles ahead of what is currently available to consumers, the army green two-seater could be a preview of rides to come.

[Related: Sweden is testing a semi-truck trailer covered in 100 square meters of solar panels.]

As highlighted by The Guardian on Monday, the aerodynamic, comparatively lightweight (1,200 kg) Stella Terra can travel at least 440 miles on a clear, sunny day without recharging. This is thanks to the car’s solar converter designed in-house by the students, which turns 97 percent of its absorbed sunlight into an electrical charge. For cloudier situations, however, the vehicle also includes a lithium-ion battery capable of powering shorter excursions. For comparison, the most efficient panels available today only sustain roughly 45 percent efficiency, while the vast majority measure somewhere between 15 and 20 percent. According to The Guardian’s rundown, Stella Terra’s panels actually proved a third more efficient than designers expected.

In a September project update, Wisse Bos, Solar Team Eindhoven’s team manager, estimated Stella Terra’s designs are between 5 and 10 years ahead of anything available on the current market. But Bos also stressed their ride is meant to inspire similar experimentation and creativity within the automotive industry.

[Related: Swiss students just slashed the world record for EV acceleration.]

“With Stella Terra, we want to demonstrate that the transition to a sustainable future offers reasons for optimism and encourages individuals and companies to accelerate the energy transition,” Bos said at the time.

While the innovative, army green off-roadster is unlikely to hit American highways anytime soon, the students believe larger auto manufacturers’ could look to Stella Terra to help guide their own plans for more sustainable transportation options. Speaking with CNN on Monday, the team’s event manager, Thieme Bosman, hopes companies such as Ford and Chrysler will take notice of such a vehicle’s feasibility. “It’s up to the market now, who have the resources and the power to make this change and the switch to more sustainable vehicles,” Bosman said.

And if off-roading isn’t your thing, don’t worry: Solar Team Eindhoven’s previous teams have also designed luxury vehicles, self-driving cars, and even mobile tiny homes powered by the sun.

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Niobium can be found in steel, particle accelerators, MRI machines, and rockets, but sourcing it is largely limited to a handful of countries including Brazil and Canada. Earlier this month, however, Chinese news outlets announced the discovery of a never-before-seen type of ore deposit in Inner Mongolia containing potentially vast amounts of the superconductive rare earth element. According to Antonio Castro Neto, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the National University of Singapore speaking with the South China Morning Post, the new resource trove could even be so large that it would make China self-sufficient in its own niobium needs.

The ore found in Inner Mongolia—dubbed niobobaotite—also contains large quantities of barium, titanium, iron, and chlorine, according to a statement from China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) earlier this month.

Discovered in 1801, niobium is named after Tantalus’ daughter Niobe in Greek mythology due to its chemical relationship to tantalum. Almost 85-to-90 percent of all mined niobium in the world goes towards iron and steel processing production. Adding just 0.03-0.05 percent to steel, for example, can boost its strength by as much as 30 percent while adding virtually no extra weight. That prized performance enhancement is comparatively difficult to obtain, however. The element only occurs within the Earth’s crust at a proportion of roughly 20-parts-per-million.

[Related: New factory retrofit could reduce a steel plant’s carbon emissions by 90 percent.]

In addition to its many current uses, niobium is of particular interest to researchers hoping to further the development of niobium-graphene and niobium-lithium batteries. Lithium-ion batteries are currently the most widespread rechargeable power sources, but remain restricted in terms of charge times and lifespans, as well as safety concerns. Earlier this year, researchers working on improving niobium-graphene batteries estimated future iterations of the alternative could fully charge in less than 10 minutes alongside a 30 year lifespan—approximately 10 times longer than current lithium-ion options.

As promising as the discovery may be for China, labor concerns will almost undoubtedly be an issue for outside observers. The nation has a long and troubling history of exploitation within the mining industry. Rare earth mineral mining also generates a wide array of pollution issues.

Brazil is by far the world’s largest exporter of niobium, with Canada trailing far behind in second place. China currently needs to import about 95 percent of its niobium supplies, but the newfound deposits could dramatically shift their sourcing to almost complete independence. Meanwhile, the US is currently working towards opening the Elk Creek Critical Minerals Project in southern Nebraska, which when opened will be the country’s first niobium mining and processing facility.

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On May 30, Canadian defense company Roshel Defence Solutions officially launched its new armored troop transport, the Senator model Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle. Part of the launch was surviving a series of tests to prove that the vehicle can protect its occupants. 

The testing was conducted by Oregon Ballistic Laboratories and done to a standard called NATO “STANAG 4569” level 2. (STANAG means “standard agreement,” and 4569 is the numbering of that agreement.) What that means in practice is that the Senator MRAP is designed to withstand a range of the kinds of attacks that NATO can expect to see in the field. These include bullet fire from calibers up to 7.62×39mm at roughly 100 feet (30 meters). Why 7.62×39mm caliber bullets? That’s the standard Soviet bullet, which has outlasted the USSR itself and is common in weapons used across the globe.

In addition, STANAG 4569 dictates that the vehicle must survive a 13 pound (6 kg) anti-tank mine activated under any of the vehicle’s wheels, as well as survive a mine activated under the vehicle’s center. Beyond the bullets and mines, the vehicle also has to withstand a shot from a 155mm high explosive artillery shell burst landing 262 feet (80 meters) away. 

All of this testing is vital, because a troop transport has to advance through bullet fire, keep occupants safe from mines, and travel through an artillery barrage. That NATO standards are designed to withstand Soviet weapons is a convenience for any equipment exports aimed at Ukraine, but also means the vehicles are broadly useful in conflicts across the globe, as an abundance of Soviet-patterned weaponry continues to exist in the world. 

To showcase the Senator MRAP in simulated attack, Roshel released two videos of the testing. The first, published online on May 29, features a bright green checkmark in the corner, “all tests passed” clearly emblazoned on the video as clouds of destruction and detonations appear behind it.

A second video, released June 16, shows the Senator MRAP in slow motion enduring a large TNT explosive hitting it on the side. The 55 lbs (25kg) explosive is a stand-in for an IED, or Improvised Explosive Device. IEDs were commonly used by insurgent forces in Iraq against the United States, and in Afghanistan against the NATO coalition that occupied the country for almost 20 years. While anti-tank mines tend to be mass-produced industrial tools of war, IEDs are built on more of a small scale, with groups working in workshops generally assembling the explosives and then placing them on patrol routes.

It was the existence of IEDs, and their widespread use, that prompted the United States to push for, develop, and field MRAPs in 2006. Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles were not a new concept. South Africa was one of the first countries to develop and field MRAPs in the 1970s, putting essentially a V-shaped armored transport container on top of an existing truck pattern. The resulting “Hippo” vehicle was slow and cumbersome, but could protect its occupants from explosives thanks to the V-shaped hull deflecting blasts away. 

MRAPS did not guarantee safety for troops on patrol, but they did drastically increase the amount of explosives, or the intensity of attack, needed to ambush armored vehicles.

“The presence of the MRAP also challenged the enemy, since the insurgents had to increase the size of their explosive devices to have any effect on these more survivable vehicles. The larger devices, and longer time it took to implant them, increased the likelihood that our troops would detect an IED before it detonated,” Michael Brogan, head of the MRAP vehicle program from 2007 to 2011, told the Navy’s CHIPS magazine in 2016.

The Senator MRAP features, like its predecessors, a V-shaped hull. It also benefits from further innovations in MRAP design, like mine-protected seats, which further reduce the impact of blast on their occupant. Inside, the Senator can transport up to 10 people, and Roshel boasts of its other features, from sensor systems to weapon turrets. For as long as IEDs and mines remain a part of modern warfare, it is likely we can expect to see MRAPs transporting soldiers safely despite them.

Watch one of the tests, below:

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This week, the US Food and Drug Administration gave the green light to a device that uses ultrasound waves to blast apart tumors in the liver. This technique, which requires no needles, injections, knives, or drugs, is called histotripsy, and it’s being developed by a company called HistoSonics, founded by engineers and doctors from the University of Michigan in 2009. 

According to a press release, this approval comes after the results of a series of clinical trials indicated that it can effectively destroy liver tumors while being safe for patients. Now hospitals can purchase the device and offer it to patients as a treatment option. The machine works by directing targeted pulses of high-energy ultrasound waves at a tumor, which creates clusters of microbubbles inside it. When the bubbles form and collapse, they stress the cells and tissues around them, allowing them to break apart the tumor’s internal structure, leaving behind scattered bits that the immune system can then come in to sweep up. 

Here’s the step-by-step process: After patients are under anesthesia, a treatment head that looks uncannily like a pair of virtual reality goggles is placed over their abdomen. Clinicians toggle through a control screen to look at and locate the tumor. Then they lock and load the sound waves. The process is reportedly fast and painless, and the recovery period after the procedure is short.

Through a paired imaging machine, clinicians can also see that the sound waves are targeted at the tumor while avoiding other parts of the body. A robotic arm can also move the transducer to get better aim at the tumor region. In this process, the patient’s immune system can also learn to recognize the tumor cells as threats, which prevented recurrence or metastasis in 80 percent of mice subjects.

While the approval of the device is a big step for broadening the options for cancer treatments, the use of sound waves in medicine is not new. Another platform called Exablate Prostate by Insightech was cleared by the FDA for human trials in prostate cancer patients (although clearance is not quite the same thing as an approval). Nonetheless, the results have been encouraging. The histotripsy technique is being applied in many preclinical experiments for tumors outside of the brain, such as in renal cancer, breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, and musculoskeletal cancer. 

Beyond tumors, a similar technique called lithotripsy, which uses shock waves, has been a treatment for breaking apart painful kidney stones so they become small enough for patients to pass. 

Watch the device at work below:

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An annular “ring of fire” eclipse is always a bewitching event. This year, timed just right to herald in spooky season, the October 14th solar spectacular will cut a path of near darkness in the Western hemisphere through Oregon, Texas, Central America, Colombia, and northern Brazil. 

Eclipses can be more than just emotionally stirring. Solar eclipses, when they happen, create waves of disturbances across electrically charged particles in the Earth’s ionosphere—a layer of the upper atmosphere that plays an important role in radio frequency communications. Here, the heated and charged ions and electrons swirl around in a soup of plasma that envelops the planet. 

To understand the effect that eclipses have on this plasma, scientists from NASA are planning to shoot a series of 60-feet-tall rockets up to collect information at the source.

The ionosphere sits between 60-300 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, which is roughly 37-190 miles up. “The only way to study between 50 kilometers and 300 kilometers in situ is through rockets,” says Aroh Barjatya, director of the Space and Atmospheric Instrumentation Lab and principal investigator on the upcoming NASA sounding rocket mission, which is called Atmospheric Perturbations around the Eclipse Path. By in situ, he means quite literally in the thick of it. 

[Related: A new satellite’s “plasma brake” uses Earth’s atmosphere to avoid becoming space junk]

“Satellites, which are flying at 400 kilometers, can look down, but they cannot measure in the middle of the ionosphere. It can only be doing remote sensing,” he adds. “And the ground-based measurements are also remote sensing.” Rockets are a relatively low-cost way to get right into the ionosphere.

Along with the rockets, the team will be sending up high-altitude balloons that will measure the weather every 20 minutes. These balloons will cover the first 100,000 feet, or about 19 miles, above the ground. Then come the stars of the show: three sounding rockets fitted with both commercial and military surplus solid propellent rocket motors. The trio are designed to give a view of the changes in the ionosphere over time, and they will be launched directly into the shadow of the eclipse from a site at the White Sands facility in New Mexico. One of the rockets will be sent up right before the eclipse, one during, and one after. Because they’re sounding rockets, they will go up to the target height, and come back down, which means that they’re equipped with a parachute recovery system. 

“If you think of a big orbital vehicle sending a satellite up, they’re going to reach 14,000 miles/hour when they get into space. So they’re going to reach that orbital escape velocity and put their payload into orbit, and it’s going to stay up there for a long time,” Max King, deputy chief of the Sounding Rockets Program Office at NASA GSFC, Wallops Flight Facility, explains. “Ours are what we call suborbital. So they go up, but by the time we’ve gotten into space, we’ve slowed down to zero, and start falling back into the atmosphere. Over that curved trajectory, we get about 10 minutes in [the ionosphere] where we can take measurements and conduct science.” 

[Related: We can predict solar eclipses to the second. Here’s how.]

Ten minutes may not seem very long. But a lot of data can be gathered during that time. As the rockets reach the ionosphere, electrostatic probes will pop out, measuring plasma temperature, density, as well the surrounding electric and magnetic fields. There’s a telemetry system that sends data back to the ground continuously. 

The main objective of the mission is to study the plasma dynamics during the eclipse that can impact radio frequency communications. Any sort of unexpected turbulence can disrupt signals to a satellite, GPS, ham radio operators, or over-the-horizon radar that the military uses. “Ionosphere is the thing which bounces radio frequencies, and all of the space communications go through the ionosphere,” Barjatya says. 

After the October mission, they’ll search the desert for the fallen parts of the rockets and refurbish the remnants of them for a second set of launches in April 2024 during the next eclipse, just so they can study its effects on the ionosphere a bit further out from the direct path. Getting more details about what happens to the ionosphere when the sun is suddenly blotted out will give researchers insight into what radio frequencies get affected, and how widespread the disturbance is. It will allow models to better prepare for these potential disruptions in the future. 

NASA has launched quite a few rockets during eclipses. The last big campaign that NASA did was in 1970, where they launched 25 rockets in 15 minutes. “In 1970 the eclipse went right above the Wallops facility [in Virginia],” Barjatya says. But those rockets were mostly meteorological rockets. Today’s rockets each contain four small payloads filled with scientific instruments. “One rocket launch gives me five measurements at the same time,” he adds. “So one rocket of today is actually equal to five rockets of 1970.” 

These rockets are not specialized for only glimpsing at the sky during eclipses. In fact, NASA uses them in about 20 missions a year, worldwide. “We go where the science is,” King says. Sounding rockets can be used to launch telescopes for spying on celestial bodies, supernovas, star clusters, or even flares and emissions from our own sun. 

The main launch sites in North America are at the Wallops facility in Virginia, and the White Sands facility in New Mexico. Outside of the US, Norway is also a big launch site. There, scientists are using them to observe Northern lights and other auroral phenomena. Or, they could be used to take a gander at something called the cusp region, the closest portal in the sky to near-Earth space. “The cusp region is where the magnetic field lines all come into the same point,” King notes. “The only way you can really study that is to shoot a rocket through it.”

The agency will be live-streaming the launches, which you can watch here.

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The 2018 winner of PopSci’s annual Best of What’s New continues to impress. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is still edging closer to the sun than any other spacecraft has ever achieved, and it’s setting new speed records in the process. According to a recent status update from the space agency, the Parker Solar Probe has broken its own record (again) for the fastest thing ever made by human hands—at an astounding clip of 394,736 mph.

The newest milestone comes thanks to a previous gravity-assist flyby from Venus, and occurred on September 27 at the midway point of the probe’s 17th “solar encounter” that lasted until October 3. As ScienceAlert also noted on October 9, the Parker Solar Probe’s speed would hypothetically allow an airplane to circumnavigate Earth about 15 times per hour, or skip between New York City and Los Angeles in barely 20 seconds. Not that any passengers could survive such a journey, but it remains impressive.

[Related: The fastest human-made object vaporizes space dust on contact.]

The latest pass-by also set its newest record for proximity, at just 4.51 million miles from the sun’s plasma “surface.” In order not to vaporize from temperatures as high as nearly 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, the Parker Solar Probe is outfitted with a 4.5-inch-thick carbon-composite shield to protect its sensitive instruments. These tools are measuring and imaging the sun’s surface to further researchers’ understanding of solar winds’ origins and evolution, as well as helping to forecast environmental changes in space that could affect life back on Earth. Last month, for example, the probe raced through one of the most intense coronal mass ejections (CMEs) ever observed. In doing so, the craft helped prove a two-decade-old theory that CMEs interact with interplanetary dust, which will improve experts’ abilities in space weather forecasting.

Despite its punishing journey, NASA reports the Parker Solar Probe remains in good health with “all systems operating normally.” Despite its numerous records, the probe is far from finished with its mission; there are still seven more solar pass-bys scheduled through 2024. At that point (well within Mercury’s orbit), the Parker Solar Probe will finally succumb to the sun’s extreme effects and vaporize into the solar winds— “sort of a poetic ending,” as one mission researcher told PopSci in 2021.

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Officials from the US Coast Guard confirmed on Tuesday that a salvage mission successfully recovered the remaining debris from the OceanGate Titan submersible. The 22-foot-long vessel suffered an implosion en route to the Titanic almost four months ago. Five passengers died during the privately funded, $250,000-per-seat voyage intended to glimpse the historic tragedy’s remains, including OceanGate’s CEO and Titan pilot, Stockton Rush.

According to the Coast Guard’s October 10 press release, salvage efforts were underway via an agreement with the US Navy Supervisor of Salvage & Diving following initial recovery missions approximately 1,600-feet away from the Titanic wreckage. Searchers discovered and raised the remaining debris on October 4, then transferred them to an unnamed US port for further analysis and cataloging. The US Coast Guard also confirmed “additional presumed human remains” were “carefully recovered” from inside the debris, and have been sent for medical professional analysis.

[Related: OceanGate confirms missing Titan submersible passengers ‘have sadly been lost’.]

OceanGate’s surface vessel lost contact with the Titan submersible approximately 105 minutes into its nearly 2.5 mile descent to the Titanic on June 18. Frantic, internationally coordinated search and rescue efforts scoured over 10,000 square surface miles of the Atlantic Ocean as well as the North Atlantic ocean floor. On June 22, OceanGate and US Coast Guard representatives confirmed its teams located remains indicative of a “catastrophic implosion” not far from the voyage’s intended destination.

Submersible experts had warned of such “catastrophic” issues within Titan’s design for years, and repeatedly raised concerns about OceanGate’s disregard of standard certification processes. In a March 2018 open letter to the company obtained by The New York Times, over three dozen industry experts, oceanographers, and explorers “expressed unanimous concern” about the submersible’s “experimental” approach they believed “could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry.”

“Your [safety standard] representation is, at minimum, misleading to the public and breaches an industry-wide professional code of conduct we all endeavor to uphold,” reads a portion of the 2018 letter.

Although salvage efforts have concluded, the Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation (MBI) plans to continue conducting evidence analysis alongside witness interviews “ahead of a public hearing regarding this tragedy.” A date for the hearing has not yet been announced, although as The Washington Post notes, the Coast Guard could recommend new deep-sea submersible regulations, as well as criminal charges to pursue.

OceanGate announced it suspended “all commercial and expedition operations” on July 6.

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“Are you drinking enough water?”

The question is so ubiquitous that it’s become meme canon in recent years. But what may be an annoying reminder to one person is often a logistical challenge for people dealing with mobility issues like cerebral palsy (CP). After learning about the potential physical hurdles involved in staying hydrated, two undergraduate engineering students at Rice University set out to design a robotic tool to help disabled users easily access their drinks as needed. The result, appropriately dubbed “RoboCup,” is not only a simple, relatively easy-to-construct device—it’s one whose plans are already available to anyone online for free.

According to a recent university profile, Thomas Kutcher and Rafe Neathery began work on their invention after being approached by Gary Lynn, a local Houstonian living with CP who oversees a nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness for the condition. According to Kutcher, a bioengineering major, their RoboCup will hopefully remove the need for additional caregiver aid and thus “grant users greater freedom.”

[Related: How much water should you drink in a day?]

RoboCup was by no means perfect from the outset, and the undergraduates reportedly went through numerous iterations before settling on their current design. In order to optimize their tool to help as many people as possible, Kutcher and Rafe spoke to numerous caregiving and research professionals about how to best improve their schematics.

“They really liked our project and confirmed its potential, but they also pointed out that in order to reach as many people as possible, we needed to incorporate more options for building the device, such as different types of sensors, valves and mechanisms for mounting the device on different wheelchair types,” Kutcher said in their October 6 profile.

The biggest challenge, according to the duo, was balancing simplification alongside functionality and durability. In the end, the pair swapped out an early camelback version for a mounted cup-and-straw design, which reportedly is both aesthetically more pleasing to users, as well as less intrusive.

In a demonstration video, Lynn is shown activating a small sensor near his left hand, which automatically pivots an adjustable straw towards his mouth. He can then drink as much as he wants, then alert the sensor again to swivel the straw back to a neutral position.

Lynn, who tested the various versions of RoboCup, endorsed the RoboCup’s ability to offer disabled users more independence in their daily lives, and believes that “getting to do this little task by themselves will enhance the confidence of the person using the device.”

Initially intended to just be a single semester project, Kutcher and Neathery now intend to continue refining their RoboCup, including investigating ways it could be adapted to people dealing with other forms of mobility issues. In the meantime, the RoboCup is entered in World Cerebral Palsy Day’s “Remarkable Designa-thon,” which promotes new products and services meant to help those with CP. And, as it just so happens, voting is open to the public from October 6-13.

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NASA’s Artemis III astronauts are apparently going to look incredibly fashionable walking the lunar surface. On October 4, the commercial aerospace company Axiom Space announced a new collaboration with luxury fashion house Prada to design spacesuits for the upcoming moon mission currently scheduled for 2025.

According to Wednesday’s reveal, Prada’s engineers will assist Axiom’s systems team in finalizing its Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) spacesuit while “developing solutions for materials and design features to protect against the unique challenge of space and the lunar environment.” Axiom CEO Michael Suffredini cited Prada’s expertise in manufacturing techniques, innovative design, and raw materials will ensure “not only the comfort of astronauts on the lunar surface, but also the much-needed human factors considerations absent from legacy spacesuits.”

[Related: Meet the first 4 astronauts of the ‘Artemis Generation’.]

NASA first unveiled an early prototype of the AxEMU spacesuit back in March, and drew particular attention to the fit accommodating “at least 90 percent of the US male and female population.” Given the Artemis mission has long promised to land the first woman on the lunar surface, such considerations are vital for astronauts’ safety and comfort.

In Wednesday’s announcement, Lorenzo Bertelli, Prada’s Group Marketing Director, cited the company’s decades of technological design and engineering experience. Although most well known for luxury fashion, Prada is also behind the cutting-edge Luna Rossa racing yacht fleet.

“We are honored to be a part of this historic mission with Axiom Space,” they said. “It is a true celebration of the power of human creativity and innovation to advance civilization.”

Despite Prada’s association with high fashion, the final AxEMU design will undoubtedly emphasize safety and function over runway appeal. After all, astronauts will need protection against both solar radiation and the near-vacuum of the lunar surface, as well as ample oxygen resources and space for HD cameras meant to transmit live feeds back to Earth. According to the BBC earlier this year, each suit will also incorporate both 3D-printing and laser cutters to ensure precise measurements tailored to each astronaut.

Although NASA’s first images of the AxEMU in March showcased a largely black-and-gray color palette with blue and orange accents, Axiom Space’s newest teases hint at an off-white cover layer more reminiscent of the classic Apollo moon mission suits. It might not be much now, but you can expect more detailed looks at the spacesuits in the coming months as the Artemis Program continues its journey back to the moon.

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Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, is getting a new supercomputer, Aurora, which its scientists will use to study optimal nuclear reactor designs. As of now, the lab is using a system called Polaris, a 44-petaflops machine that can perform about 44 quadrillion calculations per second. 

Aurora, which is currently being installed, will have more than 2 exaflops of computing power, giving it the capacity to do 2 quintillion calculations per second—almost 50 times as many as the old system. Once the unprecedented machine comes online, it’s expected to lead the TOP500 list that ranks the most powerful computers in the world. It was expected to start running earlier, but has had delays due to manufacturing issues. 

A more powerful supercomputer means that nuclear scientists can simulate the fundamental physics underlying the reactions with as much detail as possible, which will allow them to make better assessments of overall safety and efficiency of new reactor designs. Reactors are the heart of a nuclear power plant. Here, a process called fission happens, leading to a series of nuclear chain reactions that produce incredible levels of heat, which is used to turn water into steam to spin a turbine that then creates electricity.

“Anyone out there that’s actively designing a reactor is going to use what we call ‘faster running tools’ that will look at things on a system-level scale and make approximations for the reactor core itself,” Dillon Shaver, principal nuclear engineer at Argonne National Laboratory, tells Popsci. “[At Argonne] we are doing as close to the fundamental physical calculations as possible, which requires a huge amount of resolution and a huge amount of unknowns. It translates into a huge amount of computation power.”

Shaver’s job, in a nutshell, is to do the math that prevents reactors from melting down. That involves a deep understanding of how different types of coolant liquids behave, how fluid flows around the different reactor components, and what kind of heat transfer occurs. 

[Related: Why do nuclear power plants need electricity to stay safe?]

According to the Department of Energy, “all commercial nuclear reactors in the US are light-water reactors. This means they use normal water as both a coolant and neutron moderator.” And most active light-water reactors have a fuel pin geometry design, where large arrays of fuel pins (large tubes that contain the fuel, usually uranium, needed for fission reactions) are arranged in a rectangular lattice.

The next generation of reactor designs that Shaver and his team are investigating include wire-wrapped liquid metal fast reactors. The reactors are placed in a triangular lattice instead of a rectangular one, and are also layered with a thin wire that forms a kind of helix around the fuel pin. “This leads to some really complicated flow behavior because the [liquid metals like sodium] has to move around that wire and usually causes a spiral pattern to develop. That has some interesting implications on heat transfer,” Shaver explains. “A lot of time it enhances it, which is a very desirable thing” because it’s able to get more power out of a limited amount of fuel.  

However, with the advanced designs like the wire wrap, “it’s a little bit more complicated to pump the fluid around these wires compared to just an open model,” he adds, which means that it could take more input energy too.  

Another popular option is called a pebble bed reactor, which involves a series of graphite pebbles about the size of a tennis ball being embedded with the nuclear fuel. “You just randomly pat them into an open container and let fluid flow around them,” Shaver says. “That is a very different scenario compared to what we’re used to with light-water reactors because now all of the fluid can move through these random spaces between the pebbles.” Such a system has many benefits for low-energy cooling. 

With the newly proposed designs, the goal is to ultimately generate more power while putting less in. “You’re trying to enhance the heat transfer you get from it, and the price you pay is how much energy it takes to pump it,” says Shaver. “There’s an interesting cost-benefit there.” Some of the tradeoffs can be significant, and these supercomputer simulations promise to give more accurate numbers than ever, allowing upcoming nuclear power plants to work with reactors that are as efficient and safe as possible. 

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It took eight years and the collaborative efforts of over 600 interdisciplinary undergraduate students, but Estonia’s second satellite is finally on track to launch later this week. Once in orbit thanks to a lift aboard one of the European Space Agency’s Vega VV23 rockets, the tiny  8.5 lb ESTCube-2 will test an elegant method to potentially help clear the skies’ increasingly worrisome space junk issue using a novel “plasma brake.”

Designed by Finnish Meteorological Institute physicist Pekka Janhunen, the electric sail (E-sail) technology harnesses the physics underlying Earth’s ionosphere—the atmosphere’s electrically charged outer layer. Once in orbit, Estonia’s ESTCube-2 will deploy a nearly 165-foot-long tether composed of hair-thin aluminum wires that, once charged via solar power, will repel the almost motionless plasma within the ionosphere.

[Related: The FCC just dished out their first space junk fine.]

“​​Historically, tethers have been prone to snap in space due to micrometeorites or other hazards,” Janhunen explained in an October 3 statement ahead of the mission launch. “So ESTCube-2’s net-like microtether design brings added redundancy with two parallel and two zig-zagging bonded wires.”

If successful, the drag should slow down the tiny cubesat enough to shorten its orbital decay time to just a two-year lifespan. Not only that, but it would do so without any physical propellant source, thus offering a lightweight, low-cost alternative to existing satellite decommissioning options.

“It is exciting to see if the plasma break is going to work as planned… and if the tether itself is as robust as it needs to be,” Carolin Frueh, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Purdue University, tells PopSci via email. “The longer a dead or decommissioned satellite is out there, the higher the risk that it runs into other objects, which leads to fragmentation and the creation of even more debris objects.”

According to Frueh, although drag sails have been explored to help with Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites’ end-of-life maneuvers in the past, “the plasma brake technology has the potential to be more robust and more easily deployable at the end of life compared to a classical large solar sail.”

After just seven decades’ worth of space travel, junk is already a huge issue for ongoing private- and government-funded missions. Literally millions of tiny trash pieces now orbit the Earth as fast as 17,500 mph, each one a potential mission-ender. Such debris could also prove fatal to unfortunate astronauts in their path. 

Although multiple international efforts are underway to help mitigate the amount of space junk, even the process of planning such operations can be difficult. Earlier this year, for example, an ESA space debris cleanup pilot project grew more complicated after its orbital trash target reportedly unexpectedly collided with other debris. On October 2, the Federal Communications Commission issued its first-ever orbital littering fine after satellite television provider Dish Network failed to properly deorbit a decommissioned, direct broadcast EchoStar-7 satellite last year.

“As satellite operations become more prevalent and the space economy accelerates, we must be certain that operators comply with their commitments,” Enforcement Bureau Chief Loyaan A. Egal said at the time.

Estonia’s second-ever satellite is scheduled to launch on October 7 from the ESA’s spaceport in French Guiana.

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A crewed submarine is, at its most elemental level, a machine designed to preserve a bubble of air underwater and keep the rest of the ocean out. The complexities of submarine design— everything from propulsion to sensors to controls—have to be designed with this overriding purpose in mind. Because the whole of the submarine needs to maintain this careful containment at all times, what might otherwise be a nothing part, like a deck drain assembly, is crucial to the longer-term viability of the submarine. On September 25, shipbuilders General Dynamics Electric Boat, along with Huntington Ingalls Industries, announced that they had successfully used additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, to create a part for the Virginia-class submarine Oklahoma.

The part printed is a deck-drain, and it was manufactured on land out of copper-nickel. The part still needs some machining to refine it before it is installed, but the printing of a replacement piece is a big step forward towards easier, on-demand parts for submarine repair in the future.

“This collaborative project leverages authorizations made by the Navy that streamline requirements for low-risk additive manufacturing parts. It is possible due to the foresight and longer-term development efforts by our engineers to deploy additive manufacturing marine alloys for shipbuilding,” said Dave Bolcar in a release. Bolcar is the vice president of engineering and design at the Newport News Shipyard, the Huntington Ingalls Industries division that worked on the 3D printed part.

[Related: An exclusive look inside where nuclear subs are born]

Additive manufacturing has appeal and utility across the hobbyist, commercial, and industrial spaces for a host of reasons. The ability to rapidly prototype parts, and then produce physical approximations to refine, is useful. It’s still a major step to go from exploring a part through a printed design to a printed part being up to the task required of a completed piece.

Printing parts on land for repair allows naval suppliers to prove the technology is workable, and apply it to immediate needs.

On a ship, and on a submarine more than most other kinds of ships, every part needs to fit precisely, within set parameters so that the vessel can continue to remain watertight and airtight where it needs to be. Ships are also deeply constrained in space on board, so the availability of spare parts stockpiled for emergency or even just routine repair is finite and based on estimates before vessels embark. Onboard printers would allow repair underway, while printers at ports can ensure new parts are ready for docked vessels.

Just print it out

The Navy operates in confined spaces and on a global stage. With bases and ports scattered across the globe, managing the resupply of ships and planes means overseeing supply chains in places as far apart as Spain and Guam, and ports in-between. For the past decade, the US Navy has explored 3D printing as a way to ease that logistical load.

The premise of 3D printing is straightforward. If the raw material for many parts can be stored in undifferentiated form, and then produced as needed for repairs, that raw material and printer becomes far more flexible than having already assembled pieces stockpiled. Printers can produce errors in manufacturing, so the Navy has spent years working on how to create stuff with a minimum of error.

“We’re at the front end of this. There are parts that require airworthiness for approval and the non-air worthiness, the non-airworthiness are easier to do,” Lieutenant General Steven Rudder of the Marine Corps told USNI News in 2018. “You’re going to see additive manufacturing, both in industry and in our FRC’s [Fleet Readiness Center]. The Air Force is ahead of us on metal printing; you’re going to see that really take off. That’s just at the beginning of stages.”

The Navy also explored not just having 3D printers at ports of call, but also having printers onboard ships, ready to print spare parts while under way. 

In 2021, the Navy tested a large, almost room-sized, 3D printer from Xerox, which could create parts in aluminum at a base on land. In 2022, the Navy also installed an identical printer on board the USS Essex, a ship that in any other navy would count as a full-sized aircraft carrier, but for the US is classified as a Landing Helicopter Dock. The parallel trials of printers at sea and on land was to see if the conditions of being on the ocean, with the humidity and rocking waves, would produce different results than the same parts made on land. (Xerox ultimately sold its 3D printing division to another company in the additive manufacturing space.)

When it comes to printing parts for the submarine, space is already at a premium, even more so than on a surface vessel. Making the drain parts by additive manufacturing shows that, while submarines may not be able to print their own parts, the small, mundane yet vital pieces needed for ship operation can still be made to order. Every part of a ship seems mundane until it doesn’t work and needs to be replaced, and then suddenly it becomes crucial.

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Five mech suits capable of morphing between robotic and vehicular modes are now available for pre-order from a Japanese startup overseen by 25-year-old inventor Ryo Yoshida. At nearly 15-feet-tall and weighing in around 3.5 tons, one of Tsubame Industries’  “Archax” joyrides can be all yours—if you happen to have an extra $3 million burning a hole in your pocket.

News of the production update came courtesy of Reuters on Monday, who spoke with Yoshida about their thought process behind constructing the futuristic colossus, which gets its name from the famous winged dinosaur archaeopteryx. 

[Related: Robotic exoskeletons are storming out of sci-fi and onto your squishy human body.]

“Japan is very good at animation, games, robots and automobiles so I thought it would be great if I could create a product that compressed all these elements into one,” he said at the time. “I wanted to create something that says, ‘This is Japan.’”

To pilot the steel and iron-framed Archax, individuals must first climb a small ladder and enter a cockpit situated within the robot’s chest. Once sealed inside, a system of nine cameras connected to four view screens allows riders to see the world around them alongside information such as battery life, speed, tilt angle, and positioning. Depending on a user’s desire, Archax can travel upwards of 6 mph from one of two setups—a four-wheeled upright robotic mode, and a more streamlined vehicle mode in which the cockpit reclines 17 degrees as the chair remains upright. Meanwhile, a set of joysticks alongside two floor pedals control the mech suit’s movement, as well as its controllable arms and hands

Unlike countless other robotic creations on the market, however, Archax currently isn’t designed for rigorous real world encounters. It’s currently meant to be, per the company’s own description, “cool.” 

But that doesn’t mean Yoshida and his team at Tsubame aren’t hopeful to build future Archax models better equipped for real world uses. According to the inventor, he hopes such pilotable robotic suits could find applications within search-and-rescue operations, disaster relief, and even the space industry. For now, however, Tsubame sounds perfectly satisfied with its luxury toy status.

“Arcax is not just a big robot that you can ride inside. A person can climb into the cockpit and control the vehicle at will. Each part moves with sufficient speed, rigidity, and power,” reads the product’s description.

“And it’s cool,” Tsubame Industries reiterates.

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This week, Google announced a new transatlantic subsea cable that will connect the United States to Portugal via Bermuda. Dubbed “Nuvem,” after the Portuguese word for “cloud,” the new cable is expected to enter operation in 2026 and Google says it is intended to help “meet growing demand for digital services” and “improve network resiliency across the Atlantic.”

Despite all the talk of data being stored “in the cloud,” the internet mostly runs underwater—at least, internationally. Around 95 percent of international data transmission—and 99 percent of transcontinental data transmission—is sent through one of the subsea fiber optic cables that crisscross the planet. Whenever you visit a website hosted in another country or send an email to a friend who’s overseas, that data is almost certainly sent via one of these underwater cables. 

According to TeleGeography, a site that tracks subsea cables, there are more than 550 active or planned subsea cables. The number is constantly changing as old cables are replaced and new cables—like Nuvem—enter service. In total, they believe there are nearly 870,000 miles of underwater cabling connecting North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world. Some, like the CeltixConnect cable between Ireland and the United Kingdom, are less than 100 miles long, while others extend for more than thousands of miles. The Asia-America Gateway, for example, is more than 12,000 miles long and crosses the Pacific connecting Thailand, China, Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines, Guam, and Hawaii to the United States. Only the smallest, most isolated islands and Antarctica are out of the loop—anyone at the South Pole is stuck using slow satellite internet. If you want to see them all, TeleGeography has a fascinating map that shows just how many cables cross major oceans like the Atlantic and Pacific.

Understandably, these cables have incredible bandwidth. More than 5 billion people use the internet, and there are just a few hundred cables to transmit data between continents. For example, the MAREA cable, owned by Meta, Microsoft, and telecommunications company Telxius, transmits data in speeds measured in terabits between Virginia Beach in the United States and Bilbao in Spain and even set a speed record back in 2019.

Google has already invested in a number of subsea cables, including Dunant, which connects Virginia to France; Firmina, which will connect South Carolina to Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay; and Equiano, which connects Portugal, Nigeria, and South Africa. Nuvem will “add capacity, increase reliability, and decrease latency for Google users and Google Cloud customers around the world.” It’s all part of the search giant’s plan to “create important new data corridors connecting North America, South America, Europe, and Africa” that will allow it to transmit ever growing amounts of data. 

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Nuvem is that it passes through Bermuda. According to Google’s announcement, over the past number of years the Atlantic island’s government has “undertaken significant efforts to attract investment in subsea cable infrastructure and create a digital Atlantic hub.” These efforts included passing new laws and streamlining permitting to make things easier for tech companies. As a result, Nuvem will be the first subsea cable to connect Bermuda directly to Europe. 

In the announcement, Walter Roban, Bermuda’s deputy premier and minister of home affairs, said, “Bermuda has long been committed to the submarine cable market, and we welcome the Nuvem cable to our fast-growing digital Atlantic hub.” 

So, come 2026 when the cable is due to go live, your Google data might be passing through Bermuda on its route between the United States and Europe. That, or it will pass through one of the other 12 cables that cross the Atlantic.

Correction (October 2, 2023): The story previously stated that there are nearly 870 million miles of underwater cabling. It should be 870,000 miles.

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The Environmental Protection Agency is releasing guidelines to more clearly define what is considered a truly “zero-emission” building. Unveiled on September 28 at the Greenbuild International Conference and Expo, the nation’s largest annual gathering for sustainable architecture, the EPA’s new outline is reportedly based on a “three pillar” approach. These pillars include no on-site emissions, the use of 100 percent renewable energy, and adherence to strict energy efficiency guidelines.

The news, first revealed via White House National Climate Adviser Ali Zaidi speaking to The Washington Post on Thursday morning, arrives as the Biden administration attempts to standardize concepts for an industry that generates nearly a third of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions every year.

“Getting to zero emissions does not need to be a premium product. We know how to do this,” Ali Zaidi said during the interview. “It just has to get to scale, which I think a common definition will facilitate.”

[Related: Power plants may face emission limits for the first time if EPA rules pass.]

A truly “zero-emission” building is actually harder to define than it may first appear. Currently, the global green standard is generally considered Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification. Developed by the US Green Building Council, an environmental nonprofit, and currently in its fifth iteration, LEED certification provides a comprehensive, tiered rating system for neighborhood developments, homes, and cities. However, it lacks the authority that could be granted by a major US federal department such as the EPA.

Lacking concise federal regulations, the US currently includes countless state and local benchmarks to meet their own ideas of eco-friendly urban planning—from California’s “zero net energy” standard for all new constructions by 2030, to reduced emission targets for 2030 and 2050 in New York. For California, a zero net energy project is defined as an “energy-efficient building where, on a source energy basis, the actual annual consumed energy is less than or equal to the on-site renewable generated energy.” Meanwhile, New York’s Local 97 law from 2019 sets carbon emission caps based on building sizes, along with multiple avenues to offset such emissions.

Although the EPA’s new definitional framework is not legally binding, the standardization could still prove incredibly attractive for real estate developers involved in projects across multiple states seeking a streamlined process.

“​​A workable, usable federal definition of zero-emission buildings can bring some desperately needed uniformity and consistency to a chaotic regulatory landscape,” Duane Desiderio, senior vice president and counsel for the Real Estate Roundtable, explained via WaPo’s rundown of the reveal.

Multiple projects in recent years have attempted to improve upon sustainable building practices in order to meet climate change’s steepest challenges. One such promising avenue is creatively incorporating recycled materials, such as diaper materials, to actually strengthen concrete mixtures for low-cost housing alternatives.

Meanwhile, termite mounds—the world’s tallest biological structures—are beginning to inspire eco-friendly cooling and heating systems, while fungi growth is providing the architectural underpinnings for a new generation of durable and sustainable building materials.

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Solar sails that leverage the sun’s photonic rays for “wind” are no longer the stuff of science fiction—in fact, the Planetary Society’s LightSail 2 practical demonstration was deemed a Grand Award Winner for PopSci’s Best of What’s New in 2019. And while countless projects continue to explore what solar sails could hold for the future of space travel, a new study demonstrates just how promising the technology could be for excursions to Earth’s nearest planetary neighbor, and beyond.

According to a paper recently submitted to the journal Acta Astronautica, detailed computer simulations show tiny, incredibly lightweight solar sails made with aerographite could travel to Mars in just 26 days—compare that to conventional rocketry time estimates of between 7-to-9 months. Meanwhile, a journey to the heliopause (the demarcation line for interstellar space where the sun’s magnetic forces cease to influence objects) could take between 4.2 and 5.3 years. For comparison, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes took a respective 35 and 41 years to reach the same boundary.

[Related: This novel solar sail could make it easier for NASA to stare into the sun.]

The key to such speedy trips is the 1 kg solar sails’ 720g of aerographite—an ultra-lightweight material with four times less density than most solar sail designs’ Mylar components. The major caveat to these simulations is that they involved an extremely miniscule payload weight, something that will most often not be the case for major interplanetary and interstellar journeys.

“Solar sail propulsion has the potential for rapid delivery of small payloads (sub-kilogram) throughout the solar system,” René Heller, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and study co-author, explained to Universe Today earlier this month. “Compared to conventional chemical propulsion, which can bring hundreds of tons of payload to low-Earth orbit and deliver a large fraction of that to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, this sounds ridiculously small. But the key value of solar sail technology is speed.”

Another issue still that still needs addressing is deceleration methods needed upon actually reaching a destination. Although aerocapture—using a planet’s atmosphere to reduce velocity—is a possible option, researchers concede more investigation will be needed to determine the best, most efficient way to actually stop at a solar sail-equipped spacecraft’s intended endpoint. Regardless, the study only adds even more wind in the sails (so to speak) for the impressive interstellar travel method.

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As I’m riding through the wilds of southwest Colorado, up through Cinnamon Pass at over 12,000 feet in altitude, I’m thinking about the suspension on the Polaris Xpedition UTV (utility task vehicle) I’m piloting.

Yes, of course I’m also intently focused on the dirt road as we navigate across narrow cliffside paths and splash through mud puddles. But the premium Fox shocks in this off-road vehicle keep my tires planted as they flex with the ground beneath me, absorbing the dips, bumps, and rocks at an impressive rate. The all-new Xpedition, launched this May, seems to eat rocks for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Here’s how it does that. 

Machined shocks 

Outdoorsy people—those who like camping, fishing, hunting, hiking, biking, and more—occupy Polaris’ sweet spot. The company says the 2024 Polaris Xpedition is best described as an “adventure side-by-side” as opposed to the utility vehicles used on ranches and farms or the recreational vehicles you might see tearing across sand dunes in California. Side-by-side in this case means it has at least two seats, which you don’t see in some all-terrain vehicles like quad bikes or snowmobiles.

This vehicle has a flat roof made for carrying kayaks, fishing poles, traction boards, and rooftop tents, all available as accessories. After driving the Xpedition all day and then testing out the rooftop tent to camp out next to a waterfall, I concur that it checks all the boxes. When carrying just two people, the vehicle’s second row can be folded down to hold even more stuff, or the Xpeditioncan accommodate five people and less cargo. It’s also now available as a completely-enclosed UTV with both warm and cool climate control, the only side-by-side on the market to do so.  

“We started from the ground up with a one-piece frame, which is going to make it a lot stronger,” Polaris sales manager Eric Borgen says. “Our older products had frames that would bolt together in the middle; having that one piece frame is obviously going to make it a lot more rigid, which is also going to help make sure that our roll cage doesn’t flex.”

Layered into the new frame, the FOX Podium QS3 shocks are one of the key factors for a smooth ride. The shocks use “position sensitive spiral technology,” and that means two things. One, the equipment uses damping force, which controls vibration; and two, spiral grooves inside the shock body allow fluid to flow around the piston assembly, refining the movement.

“If you look inside of the actual shock body and you take it apart and you look down the barrel, it’s very similar to what people do to rifles,” Borgen explains. “They’ve machined a groove—a corkscrew—in the body. So when the piston is going up and down inside the shock body, it allows the fluid to bypass the valving.”

What that means is when driving 20 miles an hour through rocky trails, or over a washboard road, a typical passenger vehicle would toss your head around inside the cabin uncomfortably. With these shocks, the ride in the Xpedition is smoothed out in a noticeable way. Instead of a handful of zones that get progressively stiffer, the UTV’s shocks are machined for a consistently composed ride for the passenger at various speeds and road conditions. Indeed, the only time I felt a significant impact across 100 miles in the San Juan mountains was when a rock got loose under me and hit the underside. The Xpedition crunched along and left it in the dust.  

GPS off the grid

One thing that can strike fear into the heart of a new off-roader is getting lost. As more and more people explore the great outdoors (the trend has ticked noticeably upward in the last several years) they’re looking for ways to do it safely, and Polaris’ contribution to that is its Ride Command technology. 

Ride Command provides a built-in GPS navigation and wayfinding system that works even if you’re out of cell coverage zones. It includes a million-plus miles of verified trails and allows riders to plan a route before heading out. Even more importantly, it can be set up as a group ride so the vehicles can band together and see each other on the map as a color-coded dot. 

As Borgen, a desert-racing champion himself, led our group on a pre-established route, I could see at a glance on the map display in front of me how far ahead he was and what speed he was going. As a result, if I saw that he was slowing way down to let vehicles pass from the other direction (riders going uphill have the right-of-way on the trails) I could adjust even before I could see him through my windshield.  

There is one thing Borgen tells our group before we set out, and it’s the most important thing we need to know above and beyond all of the technology and engineering: how to be a considerate off-road driver. Some drivers have sparked animosity by going too fast on the trails and creating an uncomfortable environment for others, squarely placing a spotlight on the industry. 

The Polaris representative stresses the magnitude of being a considerate consumer, watching out for those who don’t like the noise and the dust off-highway vehicles carry with them. In that vein, the company is working toward more electric vehicles, like its new 2024 Ranger XP Kinetic. 

“Hikers are trying to enjoy the public land too,” he says. “So slow down; don’t dust ’em out, please. We don’t want to ruin our places to ride, because even though Jeeps and dirt bikes and side-by-sides are all different, we’re all doing the same thing and we all need to work together to maintain our lands.” 

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A new high-tech surveillance drone developed by a California-based startup Skydio will include infrared sensors, cameras capable of reading license plates as far as 800 feet away, and the ability to reach top speeds of 45 mph. Skydio hopes “intelligent flying machines”–like its new drone X10–will become part of the “basic infrastructure” supporting law enforcement, government organizations, and private businesses. Such an infrastructure is already developing across the country. Meanwhile, critics are renewing their privacy and civil liberties concerns about what they believe remains a dangerously unregulated industry.

Skydio first unveiled its new X10 on September 20, which Wired detailed in a new rundown on Tuesday. The company’s latest model is part of a push to “get drones everywhere they can be useful in public safety,” according to CEO Adam Bry during last week’s launch event. Prior to the X10’s release, Skydio has reportedly sold over 40,000 other “intelligent flying machines” to more than 1,500 clients over the past decade, including the US Army Rangers and the UK’s Ministry of Defense. Skydio execs, however, openly express their desire to continue expanding drone adoption even further via a self-explanatory concept deemed “drone as first responder” (DFR).

[Related: The Army skips off-the-shelf drones for a new custom quadcopter.]

In such scenarios, drones like the X10 can be deployed in less than 40 seconds by on-the-scene patrol officers from within a backpack or car trunk. From there, however, the drones can be piloted via onboard 5G connectivity by operators at remote facilities and command centers. Skydio believes drones like its X10 are equipped with enough cutting edge tools to potentially even aid in stopping high-speed car chases.

To allow for this kind of support, however, drone operators are increasingly required to obtain clearance from the FAA for what’s known as beyond the visual line of sight (BVLOS) flights. Such a greenlight allows drone pilots to control fleets from centralized locations instead of needing to remain onsite. BVLOS clearances are currently major goals for retail companies like Walmart and Amazon, as well as shipping giants like UPS, who will need such certifications to deliver to customers at logistically necessary distances. According to Skydio, the company has already supported customers in “getting over 20 waivers” for BVLOS flight, although its X10 announcement does not provide specifics as to how. 

Drone usage continues to rise across countless industries, both commercial and law enforcement related. As the ACLU explains, drones’ usages in scientific research, mapping, and search-and-rescue missions are undeniable, “but deployed without proper regulation, drones [can be] capable of monitoring personal conversations would cause unprecedented invasions of our privacy rights.”

Meanwhile, civil rights advocates continue to warn that there is very little in the way of such oversight for the usage of drones among the public during events such as political demonstrations, protests, as well as even simply large gatherings and music festivals.

“Any adoption of drones, regardless of the time of day or visibility conditions when deployed, should include robust policies, consideration of community privacy rights, auditable paper trails recording the reasons for deployment and the information captured, and transparency around the other equipment being deployed as part of the drone,” Beryl Lipton, an investigative researcher for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells PopSci.

“The addition of night vision capabilities to drones can enable multiple kinds of 24-hour police surveillance,” Lipton adds.

Despite Skydio’s stated goals, critics continue to push back against claims that such technology benefits the public, and instead violates privacy rights while disproportionately targeting marginalized communities. Organizations such as the New York Civil Liberties Union cites police drones deployed at protests across 15 cities in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd.

[ Related: Here is what a Tesla Cybertruck cop car could look like ]

Skydio has stated in the past it does not support weaponized drones, although as Wired reports, the company maintains an active partnership with Axon, makers of police tech like Tasers. Currently, Skydio is only integrating its drone fleets with Axon software sold to law enforcement for evidence management and incident responses.

Last year, Axon announced plans to develop a line of Taser-armed drones shortly after the Uvalde school shooting massacre. The news prompted near immediate backlash, causing Axon to backtrack less than a week later—but not before the majority of the company’s AI Ethics board resigned in protest.

Update 09/26/23 1:25pm: This article has been updated to include a response from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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Here’s a fast fact you may not know: the Brits have dubbed driving 100 mph “doing the ton.” So it is perhaps appropriate that the British supercar-maker McLaren provided me with the opportunity to go two tons—yes, that’s 200 mph—in the company’s Artura hybrid-electric V6 model.

You remember the Artura from my test drive; it’s a $289,000 mid-engine supercar with 671 horsepower and 531 lb.-ft. torque. McLaren says it’ll accelerate to 60 mph in 3.0 seconds and through the quarter-mile in 10.7 seconds. For reference, if a car can do that run in less than 10.0, drag strips require a protective roll cage.

But when people look at a supercar and ask, What’ll it do? they mean top speed. Could the Artura reach the two tons of 200 mph?

It is hard to achieve top speed because, well, it is illegal on public roads outside portions of the German autobahn, and most race tracks don’t have straights long enough to achieve terminal velocity.

Enter the Sun Valley Tour de Force. This is an annual fund-raising charity event in Idaho’s Sun Valley ski region. With a hiatus for Covid, this year’s event was the sixth running of the Tour de Force, which, in exchange for a $2,950 entry fee, lets drivers take a blast along about a mile and a half of state route 75 just north of Ketchum to see how fast they can go. GPS transponders provide official results. The organization raised $1,000,000 this year for the benefit of The Hunger Coalition in Idaho.

I don’t know about you, but when I envision top speed runs, I think of the vast, desolate salt flats in Nevada and Utah. That’s not this. Route 75 is a rural two-lane highway, the sort that adventurous travelers seek out when avoiding the monotony of interstate driving.

[Related: An inside look at the data powering McLaren’s F1 team]

The road is relatively narrow and has little in the way of a shoulder on either side. The surface is old and uneven. The route isn’t even straight. Or flat!

Instead, the cars launch from a start line and drive about half a mile up a slight hill into a fast, gentle left turn that ends with a quick blind crest and then a drive onto the slightly downhill mile straight that is called Phantom Hill to the finish line. The checkered flags marking the finish are in a place called Frostbite Flats, which sounds like where your game piece goes for punishment in Candyland.

The prospect of driving faster than I’ve ever gone before in this setting is daunting. However, the event’s speed record is 253 mph, set by a driver in a Bugatti Chiron, so it is possible to go very fast on this road.

It is the sort of drive I’ve long since decided I wouldn’t do. Cars tend to become like aircraft with no control surfaces at speeds higher than about 150 mph. A generation ago, Car & Driver magazine senior technical editor Don Schroeder was killed during a 200-mph run on a test track, maybe due to a blown tire or seized wheel bearing.

I’ve briefly touched 180 mph at the end of the front straight at Estoril, former site of the Portuguese Grand Prix, in a McLaren Senna and a Lamborghini Aventador SVJ. Both of those cars have thoroughly sorted aerodynamics that kept them stable and on the ground at those speeds. The McLaren engineers were similarly thorough with the design of the Artura, which gave me confidence that the car wouldn’t take flight. This, and the chance to hit 200 mph, sealed the deal. I’d do it!

There is no practice run, though I did have the chance to drive on the highway the day before to scout the lay of the land and the condition of the asphalt. Talking it over with retired Formula 1 driver Stefan Johansson, who McLaren has brought in to drive another one of their cars, I set the powertrain mode to “Track” and put the suspension model on “Comfort” for compliance on the bumpy two-lane highway.

Event organizers station spotters along the route to watch for wildlife or spectators getting too close to the route and provide me a radio for reports of any trouble ahead. The police close off the road at both ends of the course long enough for each run. Mine will take 52 seconds.

Sliding into the Artura’s driver’s seat, I realize the benefit of gull-wing doors, which open the space above the seat when the door is open so it is easier to get in and out while wearing a helmet. I struggle to get my helmet-clad noggin under the roofline, but I’m comfortable once inside.

I’ve made sure to drive the car in the battery regeneration mode on the way to the event, so the hybrid-electric drive system’s battery pack stands at an 80 percent state of charge for the run. As a plug-in hybrid-electric, the Artura’s battery pack could have been fully charged ahead of time, but I couldn’t get a place to plug it in in the hotel’s garage. The ambient temperature is 50 degrees, perfect for making maximum power from the combustion engine.

Sitting behind the wheel, I can see spectators watching from the boundary 100 yards back from the road. In the tall grass, they look like wildlife photographers on the African savanna. By tradition, the first car away is the fellow with the vintage Volkswagen Rabbit pickup truck. He gets close to 90 mph every year and keeps coming back for more.

Next away is a woman in a modified McLaren 720S, whose 218-mph top speed proves to be the fastest time of the day, as warmer temperatures later prevent her father, the car’s owner, from topping her speed.

Then is Johansson, in the brand-new McLaren 750S. He hits 200 mph on the official scoreboard. Two tons!

Then it is my turn. Officials wave me off from the start line, and the Artura squirms, fighting for traction on the launch. It is at triple-digit speeds almost immediately and I ease off the gas as I bend into the left turn, looking for a clear view when I top the peak of the blind crest.

As I clear the hilltop and mat the accelerator pedal, I can’t even make out the finish line flags in the distance, out there on Frostbite Flats. But I do steal a glance at the speedometer: 172.

That seems like a solid foundation for building speed over the next mile. In the cockpit, the Artura sounds great. A hundred yards away from the road, McLaren Houston general manger Pablo Del-Gado is watching. After my run he excitedly reports that from the sidelines, the Artura’s 120-degree V6 was the best-sounding car of the day.

Now at serious speed, I place the Artura in the center of the road. Fortunately, as an arid area, Idaho builds very little water-draining crown into their roads, so there is no concern about getting too far from the centerline and having the car tug its way toward the ditch.

The Artura’s suspension absorbs the bumps and the steering tracks true, with the car going exactly where I want, but things have gotten busy. The drive plays out like a scene from the original Mad Max, when budget-limited director George Miller sped up the film for dramatic effect.

Modern sports cars are programmed to deliver maximum performance for the situation, so I’ve left the transmission in fully automatic mode. Most cars do not achieve their top speed in top gear because that takes the engine rpm out of the peak of the power band. I didn’t realize the Artura would shift to top gear when my foot was on the floor, seeking more speed, so in retrospect, I wish I’d shifted manually and left it in sixth gear rather than letting it upshift to seventh.

Hammering down the straight, the Artura pulled quickly from 172 mph to 199 mph on the speedometer. And stayed there. Thanks to what felt like time dilation in my situation, the digital display seemed to sit maddeningly near 200 mph for minutes. Finally, “199” flickered to “200.”

The speedometer stayed at 200 mph all the way through the finish line. That seemed sufficient to ensure the official results captured that outcome.

Coasting down from 200 mph, previously ludicrous speeds now seem pedestrian. Organizers have warned us to make extra effort to shed speed so that when we approach the parking lot at the end of the run, we are at a speed that is actually safe rather than one that seems safe to a driver who is pumped up on adrenaline and whose perception is distorted by having recently hit two tons.

I get to the parking lot, where attendants point me to my parking slot. Heading over to the official timing and scoring display, I get crushing results from the GPS: 194.98 mph. Not two tons. Dammit. Apparently, the Artura’s speedometer is slightly optimistic. By 2.5 percent, it looks like.

But the in-car GoPro captured the dashboard display, which shows “200.” I have photographic proof of having achieved that speed, even if it comes with a really big asterisk.

Weeks later, organizers whimsically sent me an official-looking speeding ticket from the Blaine County Sheriff’s Office, citing me for my official top speed of 194.98 mph. It is the first time I’ve ever wished for a bigger number on a speeding ticket.

Watch a video of my drive, below:

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At first glance, everything seems solid. Then, a small rip begins to spread across the middle of the structure as its siding expands. The module suddenly bursts apart, spraying debris in every direction as engineers cheer on from the safety of their control room. The sudden destruction—and the fifth such explosion—of a module intended for the International Space Station’s successor may not sound like the desired outcome, but, scientists say, it’s all part of the plan.

In Sierra Space’s September 20 progress update, the Colorado-based company released video of the explosion. The company aims to supply habitat spaces for Orbital Reef, Blue Origin’s NASA-backed space station project. During a recent Ultimate Burst Pressure (UPB) test, the engineering team essentially amped up the pressure within a one-third-scale LIFE module prototype until it popped. Said “pop” is certainly a sight to behold:

Unlike ISS construction materials, the LIFE modules are largely composed of “softgoods” such as Vectran, an incredibly strong and durable synthetic fiber spun from liquid-crystal polymers. When inflated, the LIFE module’s softgood design becomes rigid enough to withstand the low-earth orbit’s extreme environmental stresses. According to Sierra Space, the latest results offered a 33 percent margin over a full-scale LIFE module’s certification standard, nearly 20 percent better than the previous test design.

What makes the most recent UPB test especially impressive is that it was the first module prototype to include a steel “blanking plate” that acted as a cheaper stand-in for essential design features like windows.

[Related: NASA is spending big on commercial space destinations.]

“Inclusion of the blanking plate hard structure was a game-changer because this was the first time that we infused metallics into our softgoods pressure shell technology prior to conducting a UBP test,” Shawn Buckley, Sierra Space’s Senior Director Engineering and Product Evolution, said in the company’s announcement. “With this added component, once again, we successfully demonstrated that LIFE’s current architecture at one-third scale meets the minimum 4x safety factor required for softgoods inflatables structures.”

As Space.com notes, this marks the third UPB test for the module prototypes. Sierra Space has also overseen two “creep tests” in December 2022 and February 2023, during which the LIFE designs were subjected to higher-than-usual pressures for extended periods of time. With the latest success, Sierra Space says it’s now ready to move onto the next development phase—testing on full-scale LIFE module prototypes. If all goes as planned (a big “if,” given such endeavors’ complexities), future LIFE module iterations will be some of Orbital Reef’s central structures. Orbital Reef is currently intended to start construction in 2030.

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At the DSEI international arms show held in London earlier this month, German defense company FFG showed off a tank-like vehicle it had already sent to Ukraine. The Mine Clearing Tank, or MCT, is a tracked and armored vehicle, based on the WISENT 1 armored platform, designed specifically to clear minefields and protect the vehicle’s crew while doing so. As Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine continues well into its second year, vehicles like this one show both what the present need there is, and what tools may ultimately be required for Ukraine to reclaim Russian-occupied territory.

The current shape of the war in Ukraine is largely determined by minefields, trenches, and artillery. Russia holds long defensive lines, where mines guard the approaches to trenches, and trenches protect soldiers as they shoot at people and vehicles. Artillery, in turn, allows Russian forces to strike at Ukrainian forces from behind these defensive lines, making both assault and getting ready for assault difficult. This style of fortification is hardly unique; it’s been a feature of modern trench warfare since at least World War I. 

Getting through defensive positions is a hard task. On September 20, the German Ministry of Defense posted a list of the equipment it has so far sent to Ukraine. The section on “Military Engineering Capabilities” covers an extensive range of tools designed to clear minefields. It includes eight mine-clearing tanks of the WISENT 1 variety, 11 mine plows that can go on Ukraine’s Soviet-pattern T-72 tanks, three remote-controlled mine-clearing robots, 12 Ahlmann backhoe loaders designed for mine clearing, and the material needed for explosive ordnance disposal.

The MCT WISENT 1 weighs 44.5 tons, a weight that includes its heavy armor, crew protection features, and the powerful engines it needs to lift and move the vehicle’s mine-clearing plow. The plow itself weighs 3.5 tons, and is wider than the vehicle itself.

“During the clearing operation, the mines are lifted out of the ground and diverted via the mine clearing shield to both sides of the lane, where they are later neutralized by EOD forces. If mines explode, ‘only’ the mine clearance equipment will be damaged. If mines slip through and detonate under the vehicle, the crew is protected from serious injuries,” reports Gerhard Heiming for European Security & Technology.

One of the protections for crew are anti-mine seats, designed to divert the energy from blasts away from the occupants. The role of a mine-clearing vehicle is, after all, to drive a path through a minefield, dislodging explosives explicitly placed to prevent this from happening. As the MCT WISENT 1 clears a path, it can also mark the lane it has cleared.

Enemy mine

Mines as a weapon are designed to make passage difficult, but not impossible. What makes mines so effective is that many of the techniques to clear them, and do so thoroughly, are slow, tedious, time-consuming tasks, often undertaken by soldiers with hand tools. 

“The dragon’s teeth of this war are land mines, sometimes rated the most devilish defense weapons man ever devised,” opens How Axis Land Mines Work, a story from the April 1944 issue of Popular Science. “Cheap to make, light to transport, and easy to install, it is as hard to find as a sniper, as dangerous to disarm as a commando. To cope with it, the Army Engineers have developed a corps of specialists who have one of the most nerve-wracking assignments in the book.”

The story goes on to to detail anti-tank and anti-personnel mines, which are the two categories broadly in use today. With different explosive payloads and pressure triggers, the work of min-clearing is about ensuring all the mines are swept aside, so dismounted soldiers and troops in trucks alike can have safe passage through a cleared route. 

The MCT WISENT 1 builds upon lessons and technologies for mine-clearing first developed and used at scale in World War II. Even before the 2022 invasion by Russia, Ukraine had a massive mine-clearing operation, working on disposing of explosives left from World War II through to the 2014-2022 Donbass war. The peacetime work of mine clearing can be thorough and slow.

For an army on the move, and looking to break through enemy lines and attack the less-well-defended points beyond the front, the ability of an armored mine-sweeper to clear a lane can be enough to shift the tide of battle, and with it perhaps a stalled front.

The post This massive armored vehicle has a giant plow for clearing Russian mines appeared first on Popular Science.

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Humans have altered the natural environment in incredible and terrifying ways. They’ve been able to refine and harness elements of nature, creating new types of living spaces and usable objects in the process. Some of these innovations come at a cost. 

The way cities are built, and the makeup of materials that permeate everyday life have become detrimental to the health of animals and ecosystems alike. While whole-scale change is slow, two new exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism, and Life Cycles: The Materials of Contemporary Design, are highlighting how architects, engineers, and designers are reimagining ways to transform natural resources and materials to address growing concerns around human impact on ecology and the environment. Here are some of our favorite projects.

[Related: The ability for cities to survive depends on smart, sustainable architecture]

Solar Sinter

Cow dung lamps

Algae-based biopolymers

Liquid-printed lights and bags

Thermoheliodon

The National Fisheries Center and Aquarium project that never was

Emilio Ambasz’s green architecture

Life Cycles: The Materials of Contemporary Design is on view until July 07, 2024. 

Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism is on view until January 20, 2024.

The post In pictures: 7 things from MoMA’s new design and architecture exhibits that made us go ‘wow’ appeared first on Popular Science.

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On September 5, Swedish defense giant Saab announced a new feature for its existing camouflage netting. This netting is thrown over military positions, like artillery equipment or spots where soldiers are waiting in a forest, to conceal them from detection by hostile forces. Modern nettings are designed to hide not just the appearance of what’s underneath, but the radar signatures and radio signals, too, although that can make sending out communications hard. Saab is taking a stab at solving that problem with the “Frequency Selective Surface technology” for its Barracuda Ultra-lightweight Camouflage Screen. The netting, as promised, lets people underneath send out low-frequency radio signals, while preventing them from being seen on radar.

Camouflage is the technique of hiding in war. Netting is among the most basic forms, and it works along the same general principle as kids making a blanket fort in the living room—only instead of an opaque sheet concealing both occupants and outsiders from each other, the looser material of the netting, along with the way fabric and other material is hung off it, allows those inside to look out, and watch without being seen.

Initial camouflage netting was a response to visual observation by eyes and cameras, using the visual light spectrum. Radar, which sends out radio waves and then discerns where objects are located by how those radio waves are reflected back, can see through netting designed only to conceal visually. Infrared cameras, looking at heat instead of reflected visible light, can also see through netting.

Multispectral approaches

Newer solutions designed to take these sensors into account are called multispectral camouflage netting.

“Multispectral camouflage is a counter-surveillance technique to conceal [an] object from detection along several waverange of the electromagnetic spectrum,” reads a NATO study of multispectral nets published in 2020. “Traditionally, military camouflage has been designed to conceal an object in the visible spectrum. Multi-spectral camouflage advances this capability by contra measure to detection methods in the infrared and radar domains.”

Hiding from sensors is an evolving science—part of the constant interplay between defensive and offensive tactics and tools in military science. Militaries have interests in developing both better ways to conceal their own forces, and tools for revealing hidden enemies.

One major limit of existing multispectral netting is that, while it can protect people hiding underneath it from detection, the same netting interferes with communications sent out. Soldiers waiting in ambush, or artillery crews concealed and waiting to strike, would prefer to be in communication with their allies. Having to leave the netting to relay commands undermines the point of the netting itself.

Here’s where Saab’s solution comes into play. “Thanks to our expertise within signature management, we are taking camouflage to the next level with this novel feature. It changes how soldiers communicate while keeping multispectral protection, and so introduces a new era of tactical communication flexibility, offering unparalleled capabilities,” Henning Robach, head of Saab’s business unit Barracuda, said in a release.

To facilitate this communication, the Frequency Selective Surface technology “allows selected radio frequencies to pass easily either way through the camouflage net, while protecting against the higher frequencies of electromagnetic waves used by radar systems.”

Those facilitated frequencies could still be detected, but they represent a much less likely slice of the electromagnetic spectrum for foes to monitor, and it rules out entire categories of other sensors used today. The point of camouflage is not perfect concealment, though that certainly would be nice. What it needs to do to work in battle is confound enemies, confusing them about where the threat really is, and thus encourage foes to make mistakes or target incorrectly.

The roots of camouflage

While camouflage as a technique is so ancient it is regularly found in nature, the word itself was so new to English that Popular Science ran an article in August 1917 entitled “A New French War Word Which Means “Fooling the Enemy.””

The term gained familiarity and widespread use thanks to the hurdles of describing combat in World War I. (The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the first use of the word that it knows about occurred in the 1880s, and traces its first usage in a military context to around 1915 or 1917.) Here’s Popular Science on the popularization of the term.

“Since the war started the Popular Science Monthly has published photographs of big British and French field pieces covered with shrubbery, railway trains ‘painted out’ of the landscape, and all kinds of devices to hide the guns, trains, and the roads from the eyes of enemy aircraft,” read the article. “Until recently there was no one word in any language to explain this war trick. Sometimes a whole paragraph was required to explain this military practice. Hereafter one word, a French word, will save all this needless writing and reading. Camouflage is the new word, and it means “fooling the enemy.”

The article went on to describe a specific use of camouflage, wherein a dead horse was dragged out of the no-man’s-land between British and German trenches, and then replaced by an imitation horse with a soldier inside, allowing him to spy on and fire at the enemy from what had been just a grim feature of the terrain.

In July 1941, before the United States had formally entered World War II, Popular Science covered the work of camouflaging industrial plants from the possibility of bombing. A July 1944 story on artillery illustrated a 4.5-inch gun dug into a foxhole and covered with netting. In 1957, Popular Science showcased a Matador cruise missile under camouflage netting, concealing the weapon and its 50 kiloton nuclear warhead (more potent than both atomic bombs dropped on Japan combined). And an August 2001 story on hyperspectral imaging titled “Nowhere to Hide” showcased how satellites could see through camouflage, thanks to the different wavelengths at which actual vegetation and decoys reflected light. 

At present, it’s the tension between powerful sensors and advanced concealment techniques that make multispectral camouflage important for militaries. In the meantime, ensuring that the people under the netting can communicate with allies outside of it is a boon.

Watch a video about Saab’s camouflage netting below:

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The biggest hot air balloon in the United States is designed to fly to an altitude of 35,000 feet or higher, carrying seven people in its rattan basket over New Mexico. Five of those people are then planning to jump out of it (wearing parachutes), plunging from an icy altitude where airliners typically fly but balloons rarely travel. Update on September 28: The team successfully carried out the jump.

Hot air balloons do not typically float up to such great heights. “Balloons don’t normally fly above 18,000 feet,” says Andrew Baird, the general manager of Cameron Balloons US, the balloon-making company behind this specific vessel. In fact, he notes, riding a hot air balloon up to 30,000 feet represents a special kind of milestone for anyone who does it. “It’s hard on the body,” he says. “You have to approach the mission scientifically, and with great caution.” 

Flying up to 30,000 feet in a balloon may be rare, but carrying so many people when doing so and even hitting 35,000 feet is “extremely unusual, let alone jumping out of the aircraft.” The purpose of the jump (which aims to break a world record) is to raise money for an organization called the Special Operations Warrior Foundation. 

Here’s what to know about the balloon that will carry these people to such a lofty place, by the numbers.

560,000 cubic feet

This specific balloon is known as the A-560, with the 560 standing for 560,000 cubic feet. That’s the volume of the fabric part of the balloon. 

The fabric that it’s made out of is a kind of nylon known as Hyperlast, and it’s coated on both sides with silicone, says Baird. That silicone keeps the material from being porous.

[Related: The US military’s tiniest drone feels like it flew straight out of a sci-fi film]

“The purpose of a balloon fabric obviously is to trap air—we want to trap all that hot air because that’s what generates the lift,” he says. “We want it to be lightweight and flexible, but we also need it to be rugged, and slightly elastic.” 

“It’s the biggest balloon that Cameron Balloons US has ever made,” he says, although “a few” bigger ones exist in Europe. The company says it will measure about 113 feet tall when it’s inflated all the way.

1,069 pounds

All of that fabric and other related gear weighs more than 1,000 pounds, a figure that doesn’t include the weight of the basket and its burners. And of course, creating that fabric portion takes careful engineering and construction. A hot air balloon is not made out of one piece of fabric, but hundreds. One key component is called a gore, and these segments run longitudinally up and down the balloon. (This page has a helpful image.) “A gore is kind of like a segment of an orange—slightly bulbous, thin at the top, wider in the middle, and thin at the bottom again,” he says. This balloon has 20 gores. “And each one of those gores is made up of a number of panels that run horizontally.” 

The hundreds of panels comprise a type of “jigsaw puzzle,” Baird says.

“You have to know where each piece goes, you have to know which way up it goes, you have to know which way around it goes, and then you have to sew all of those together,” he adds. That sewing is done by people operating industrial sewing machines and joining the segments together with nylon thread, using a special seam. After the panels come together to form a gore, the team will begin to join the gores to one another. 

4 burners

A hot air balloon needs burners to make the air in the fabric nice and toasty. This specific balloon has four. Two of those are “absolutely standard,” he says, and the other two have been “modified specifically for high-altitude operation.” If you want to float up to around 30,000 feet, the standard burners could do the trick, but going north of that altitude demands the special burners. 

The air in the fabric needs to be hot, of course, because that’s the reason the whole thing can fly. The process of launching a balloon starts with just regular air, on the ground, propelled in with fans. 

“Then we turn the burners on, and we heat that air up, and that air expands,” he continues. “And because the balloon is a fixed volume, as the air inside the balloon expands, some of it is forced out of the mouth—and the mass of air that’s forced out of the mouth is exactly equal to the lift that you generate.” An airplane gets its lift from its wings, a helicopter from its spinning top rotor, and in this case the lift comes from burning propane to heat the air. The less dense air in the balloon is lighter than the surrounding air. 

The basket that hangs below the balloon is made from rattan, and the floor of the basket is constructed out of a kind of synthetic plywood. He says it also has a “jump platform.” 

“They will congregate on this platform; they will link up, and they will all go out together,” he says. The initiative is called the Alpha 5 Project and the jump could happen towards the end of this month, although the window for the flight technically spans September 15 to October 15, and, of course, requires nice weather. 

1,000 feet

This special jump involves traveling up very high. But when it comes to regular hot-air ballooning, Baird says that the magic number for having fun is much lower: “The fun way to fly is 1,000 feet or less—once you get above 1,000 feet, everything looks the same, just smaller.”

Being close to the ground in an open basket makes for a special kind of flight. 

“From a sightseeing perspective, the fun way to fly in a balloon is to be down low—if you’re out in the countryside, to come low, to dip down, get your feet wet in a lake, brush through the tops of the trees,” he adds. “Ballooning is unlike any other form of aviation, in that you are really part of the environment.” 

Update: The team successfully pulled off the jump on September 28. Watch a video of the plunge from the balloon, below.

The post The biggest hot air balloon in the US was built to carry skydivers appeared first on Popular Science.

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A tiny racing car completely designed and driven by university students has set a new Guinness World Record for fastest acceleration in an electric vehicle. Earlier this month, the miniscule speedster rocketed from 0 to 100 km/h (roughly 62 mph) in just 0.956 seconds, traveling a total distance of 12.3 meters (40.35 feet). The new benchmark time is over a third faster than the previous record set almost exactly a year ago in September 2022 by a team of student designers at Germany’s University of Stuttgart.

Months of design work and testing took place thanks to the members of Academic Motorsports Club Zurich (AMZ), a student organization that has built a new race car every year since its founding in 2006. After three vehicles running on internal-combustion engines, AMZ switched over to completely electric designs in 2010. They’ve adhered to the eco-friendly alternative ever since.

“Working on the project in addition to my studies was very intense. But even so, it was a lot of fun working with other students to continually produce new solutions and put into practice what we learned in class,” Yann Bernard, AMZ’s head of motor, said in the team’s announcement on September 12. “And, of course, it is an absolutely unique experience to be involved in a world record.”

[Related: How Formula E race cars are guiding Jaguar’s EV future.]

The AMZ team’s newest iteration, dubbed mythen [sic], were entirely designed and optimized by the university students. Among its many impressive attributes, mythen boasts a carbon and aluminum frame that keeps the vehicle’s entire weight at just under 309 pounds. Specialized four-wheel hub motors alongside a novel powertrain combined to boost the race car via around 326 hp.

From an aerodynamic standpoint, mythen is so fast and lightweight that it even needed some backup additions to keep it on the race track. Two wings—one in both the front and rear—helped push the car towards the ground. Students meanwhile also designed and installed a “kind of vacuum cleaner” to help hold the vehicle on the road via suction, according to the team’s announcement.

“[P]ower isn’t the only thing that matters when it comes to setting an acceleration record,” said Dario Messerli, AMZ’s head of aerodynamics in a statement, “Effectively transferring that power to the ground is also key.”

Before this month, AMZ set the world acceleration record for electric cars twice already—once in 2014, and two years’ later in 2016. Given how quickly these cars seem to run, as well as how frequently they are redesigned and tested, it stands to reason that the team will probably be fending off competitors in the very near future.

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On August 31, the Air Force announced that a California company called Oklo would design, construct, own, and operate a micro nuclear reactor at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska. The contract will potentially run for 30 years, with the reactor intended to go online in 2027 and produce energy through the duration of the contract. Should the reactor prove successful, the hope is that it will allow other Air Force bases to rely on modular miniature reactors to augment their existing power supply, lessening reliance on civilian energy grids and increasing the resiliency of air bases.

Located less than two degrees south of the Arctic Circle, Eielson may appear remote on maps centered on the continental United States, but its northern location allows it to loom over the Pacific Ocean. A full operational squadron of F-35A stealth jet fighters are based at Eielson, alongside KC-135 jet tankers that offer air refueling. As the Department of Defense orients towards readiness for any conflict with what it describes as the “pacing challenge” of China, the ability to reliably get aircraft into the sky quickly and reliably extends to ensuring that bases can have electrical power at all times.

“If you look at what installations provide, they deliver sorties. At Eielson Air Force base they deliver sorties for F-35 aircraft that are stationed there,” Ravi I. Chaudhary, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Energy, Installations, and Environment, tells Popular Science via Zoom. “But if you think about all that goes with that, you’ve got ground equipment that needs powering. You’ve got fuel systems that run on power. You’ve got base operations that run on power. You’ve got maintenance facilities that run on power, and that all increases draw.”

And it’s not just maintenance facilities that need power, Chaudhary points out; the base also houses communities that live there, go to school there, and shop at places like the commissary.

While the commissary may not be the most immediately necessary part of base operations, ensuring that there’s backup power to send the planes into the air, and take care of families while the fighters are away, is an important part of base functioning. 

But in the event that the base needs more power, or an independent backup source, bases often turn to diesel generators. Those are reliable, but come with their own logistical obligations, for supplying and maintaining diesel generators, to say nothing of the carbon impact. As a promotional video for the Eielson micro-reactor project notes, the military is “the nation’s largest single energy consumer,” which understates the outsized role the US military has as a producer of greenhouse gasses and carbon emissions. 

This need is where the idea of a small nuclear reactor comes into play.

“When you have a core micro reactor source that can provide independent clean energy to the installation, that’s a huge force multiplier for you because then you don’t have to rely on more vulnerable commercial grids,” says Chaudhary. These reactors would facilitate a strategy Chaudhary called “islanding,” where “you take that insulation, you sequester it from the local power grid, and you execute operations, get your sorties out of town and deploy.”

The quest for a modular, base-scale nuclear reactor is almost as old as the Air Force itself. In the 1950s, the US Army explored the idea of powering bases with Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One, or SL-1. In January 1961, SL-1 tragically and fatally exploded, killing three operators. The Navy, meanwhile, successfully continues to use nuclear reactor power plants on board some of its ships and submarines.

In this case, for its Eielson reactor, the Air Force and Oklo are drawing on decades of innovation, improvement, and refined safety processes since then, to create a liquid-metal cooled, metal-fueled fast reactor that’s designed to be self-cooling when or if it fails.

And importantly, the Air Force is starting small. The announced program is to design just a five megawatt reactor, and then scale up the technology once that works. It’s a far cry from the base’s existing coal and oil power plant, which generates over 33 megawatts. Adding five megawatts to that grid is at present an augmentation of what already exists, but one that could make the islanding strategy possible.

If a base can function as an island, that means attacks on an associated civilian grid can’t prevent the base from operating. This works for attacks with conventional weapons, like bombs and missiles, and it should work too for attempts to sabotage the grid through the internet, like with a cyber attack. Nuclear attack could still disrupt a grid, to say nothing of the resulting concurrent deaths, but Chaudhary sees base resilience as its own kind of further deterrent action against such threats.

“We’ve recognized in our national defense strategy that strong resilient infrastructure can be a critical deterrent,” says Chaudhary. “Our energy is gonna be the margin of victory.”

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Origami has inspired yet another robot—in this case, one that dynamically changes its shape after dropping from drones in order to glide through the air while collecting environmental data. As detailed via a new study published in Science Robotics, researchers at the University of Washington relied on the traditional Miura-ori folding method (itself inspired by leaves’ geometric patterns) to underpin their new “microfliers.”

According to study co-senior author Vikram Iyer, an UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering, the microfliers first fall “chaotically” from drones in an unfolded, flat state, much akin to an elm leaf’s descent. Using tiny onboard pressure sensors to measure altitude, alongside timers and Bluetooth signals, the robots then morph midair to change airflow’s effects on its new structure. This allows it a more stable descent such as those seen within maple leaves.

[Related: Foldable robots with intricate transistors can squeeze into extreme situations.]

“Using origami opens up a new design space for microfliers,” Iyer said in the University of Washington’s announcement. “This highly energy efficient method allows us to have battery-free control over microflier descent, which was not possible before.”

Because of the microfliers’ light weight—about 400 milligrams, or roughly half as heavy as a nail—the robots can already span the length of a football field when dropped from just 40 meters (131 feet) in the air. Battery-free, solar-fueled actuators kick into gear at customizable times to control how and when their shapes interact with surrounding air, thus controlling directional descents. Researchers believe unfurling the bots at different times will allow for greater areas of distribution, and at just 25 milliseconds to initiate folding, the timing can be extremely precise. Although the current robots only transition in a single direction, researchers hope future versions will do so in both directions, allowing for more precise landings during turbulent weather.

The team believes such microfliers could be easily deployed as useful sensors during environmental and atmospheric surveying. The current models can transmit air temperature and pressure data via Bluetooth signals as far as 60 meters (196 feet) away, but researchers think both their reach and capabilities could be expanded in the future.

Origami is increasingly inspiring new, creative robots.  Earlier this year, researchers at UCLA developed flexible “mechanobots” that can squeeze their way into incredibly narrow environments. Meanwhile, the folding art’s principles are showing immense potential within engineering and building advancements, such as MIT’s recent developments in origami-inspired plate lattice designs for cars, planes, and spacecraft.

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A new wormy robot could help with jet engine inspections at GE Aerospace, according to an announcement this week. Sensiworm, short for “Soft ElectroNics Skin-Innervated Robotic Worm,” is the newest outgrowth in GE’s line of worm robots, which includes a “giant earthworm” for tunneling and the “Pipeworm” for pipeline inspection. 

Jet engines are complex devices made up of many moving parts. They have to withstand factors like high heat, plenty of movement, and varying degrees of pressure. Because they need to perform at top speed, they often need to undergo routine cleaning and inspection. Typically, this is done with human eyes and with a device like a borescope, which is a skinny tube with a camera that’s snaked into the engine (technically known as a turbofan). But with Sensiworm, GE promises to make this process less tedious and that it could happen “on wing,” meaning the turbofan doesn’t need to be removed from the wing for the inspection. 

Like an inchworm, Sensiworm moves forward on its own using two sticky suction-like parts on its bottom to squish into crevasses and scrunch around the curves of the engine to find areas where there are cracks or corrosion, or check to see if the heat-protecting thermal barrier coatings are as thick as they should be. 

It comes with cameras and sensors onboard, and is attached through a long, thin wire. In a demo video, this robot showed that it can navigate around obstacles, hang on to a spinning turbine, and sniff out gas leaks. 

These “mini-robot companions” could add an extra pair of eyes and ears, expanding the inspection capabilities of human service operators for on-wing inspections without having to take anything apart. “With their soft, compliant design, they could inspect every inch of jet engine transmitting live video and real-time data about the condition of parts that operators typically check,” GE Aerospace said in a press release. 

“Currently, our demonstrations have primarily been focused on the inspection of engines,” Deepak Trivedi, principal robotics engineer at GE Aerospace Research, noted in the statement. “But we’re developing new capabilities that would allow these robots to execute repair once they find a defect as well.”

Flexible, squiggling robots have found lots of uses in many industries. Engineers have designed them for medical applications, search and rescues, military operations, and even space ventures. 

Watch Sensiworm at work below: 

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Decontaminating water is as vital an endeavor as ever as pollution issues continue to flood the planet. Knowing this, researchers at the University of California San Diego just created the latest mind-bending tool to aid in future clean-up projects: a 3D-printed “engineered living material” made of seaweed polymers and genetically altered bacteria that breaks down organic pollutants in water.

As detailed via a new paper published in Nature Communications, the remarkable creation comes courtesy of a team working within the University of California San Diego’s Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC). According to the project announcement, the team first hydrated a seaweed-derived polymer known as alginate. Meanwhile, the researchers genetically engineered a waterborne, photosynthetic bacteria called cyanobacteria to produce laccase, an enzyme capable of neutralizing organic pollutants like antibiotics, dyes, pharmaceutical drugs, and BPAs. The ingredients were then combined and passed through a 3D printer to produce a grid-like design whose surface area-to-volume ratio allowed the bacteria optimal access to light, gasses, and nutrients.

[Related: The US might finally regulate toxic ‘forever chemicals’ in drinking water.]

“This collaboration allowed us to apply our knowledge of the genetics and physiology of cyanobacteria to create a living material,” School of Biological Sciences faculty member Susan Golden said in a statement. “Now we can think creatively about engineering novel functions into cyanobacteria to make more useful products.”

To test their creation, the engineers introduced their decontaminator to water polluted by indigo carmine, a blue dye often used within denim textile manufacturing. The team’s grid-like, living tool managed to safely and effectively decolorize the water solution over the course of multiple days.

However, that still leaves the alginate-cyanobacteria mixture within the water. Replacing one foreign pollutant with foreign, synthesized bacteria doesn’t necessarily solve the larger problem of contamination. To solve this, the UC San Diego team further engineered their version of cyanobacteria to adversely respond to theophylline, a molecule similar to caffeine found in many teas and chocolates. Whenever the decontamination substance comes into contact with the molecule, the bacteria subsequently produces a specific protein to break down and destroy its own cells, thus getting rid of the substance.

“The living material can act on the pollutant of interest, then a small molecule can be added afterwards to kill the [cyanobacteria],” Jon Pokorski, a professor of nanoengineering and research co-lead, said in the announcement. “This way, we can alleviate any concerns about having genetically modified bacteria lingering in the environment.”

As useful as this living filer could already be in decontamination projects, the team hopes to eventually take their substance a step further by designing it to self-destruct without the need for additional outside chemicals.

“Our goal is to make materials that respond to stimuli that are already present in the environment,” Pokorski explained.

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One of the quietest places in New York City is a 520-cubic-foot room at the edge of East Village. Tucked behind a heavy, suctioned door, this tiny space is decorated on all sides with wacky wedge-shaped fiberglass protrusions. Instead of a hardwood or carpeted floor, there is a thin metal mesh that visitors can walk on—under which are more wedges of fiberglass. It’s a full anechoic chamber, and it’s the only one in the city. There are no secrets to be found inside, only silence. The word anechoic itself means “no echo.” It’s the perfect place to study the science of sound. 

Standing inside the room feels like living within a massive pair of noise-canceling headphones. Speech sounds softer, rounder, quieter. Some people’s ears even pop when they enter the chamber. And while it’s silent to me, Melody Baglione, a professor of mechanical engineering at The Cooper Union’s Albert Nerken School of Engineering proves to me that we’re not experiencing absolute silence. As we stay still and hushed, the sound level meter she’s holding drops to around 18 decibels (dBA). When we made the same type of measurement outside in the Vibration and Acoustics Laboratory, the ambient sound level was around 40 dBA. The unit that the meter is measuring is sound pressure in decibels, but weighted towards the frequencies that the human ear is more sensitive to. 

Sound, as we experience it, is a pressure wave propagated by a vibrating object. The wave moves particles in surrounding mediums like air, water, or solid matter. When sound waves enter human ears, they pass as mechanical vibrations through a drum-like membrane and to hair follicles that then send electrical signals to the brain. Hearing loss happens when those hair follicles get damaged. The higher-frequency hair follicles are at the very end of this pathway, and they tend to go first. 

“The higher frequencies have wavelengths that are shorter, so higher frequency sound waves interact with the wedges in the anechoic chamber more so than lower frequencies,” says Baglione. “The lower frequencies have larger wavelengths, and they are harder to absorb. You need a bigger room.” There’s human error too—sometimes students drop things through the floor, and that imperfection causes a way for the sound to reflect. 

[Related: A look inside the lab building mushroom computers]

Real estate in New York is at a premium, so this chamber falls on the smaller side when compared to ones at an Air Force base or testing facilities for carmakers. A wide variety of projects have undergone tests in The Cooper Union’s anechoic chamber. Students have characterized drone noises in order to figure out how to cancel those sounds out. They’ve compared the sound quality of a traditional violin versus a 3D-printed one. They’ve tested an internal combustion engine in order to inform muffler designs, sound localization for robots, and even virtual reality headsets. Baglione says that new proposals for using the chamber are always coming in. 

How do anechoic chambers work?

Noise, reverberations, and echoes are all around, all the time. To engineer a space that can eliminate everything except for the original sound requires a crafty use of materials and deep knowledge about physics and geometry. 

“Sound quality is often very subjective. Sound is as much a matter of perception and our experience and our expectation,” says Paul Wilford, a research director at Nokia Bell Labs. “In our work, largely through the anechoic chamber, we’ve learned that the sound we hear directly from a source may be actually at a lower level than the sound that’s coming from bouncing off of walls or being reverberated through a room.” The chamber he’s referring to is the one in Murray Hill, New Jersey, which is the first of its kind. Originally constructed in 1947, the room is currently undergoing renovations. 

As a communications company, sound is a big part of what Nokia does. And they needed a way to quantify sound quality so they could design better microphones, speakers, and other devices. “What the anechoic chamber was conceived to be is a powerful environment, a measuring device, an acoustic tool where you can make high-quality, reliable, repeatable, acoustic measurements,” Wilford explains.  

[Related: A Silent Isolation Room For Satellites]

Sound can either be reflected, absorbed, or transmitted through a medium. By studying the physics of how sound propagates through the air, the researchers at Bell Labs came up with wedges that are made of foam-based fiberglass encapsulated in a wire mesh. The impedance of that material is matched to the incoming sound waves so it can absorb it rather than reflect it. The sound waves hit these five-foot-deep cones and get trapped. Wedges are the standard design choice for anechoic chambers. 

“What that means is that if you’re standing in that room, and there’s a source that’s emitting sound, all you hear is that direct source,” Wilford says. “In some sense, it’s the pure sound that you hear.” If there were two people in the room, and one of them turned around and spoke to the wall, then the other person would not be able to hear them. “There are other anechoic chambers around the world now, and because of these properties, these results are repeatable from room to room to room,” he adds. 

What anechoic chambers are used for today

There are lots of ways to analyze sound in this type of echoless room. Scientists can characterize reverberation by timing how long it takes for a certain sound to decay. At Bell Labs, there are high quality directional microphones that are strategically placed in the room along with localization equipment that pinpoints where these microphones are in 3D space. They can use audio spectrum analyzers that look at the frequency response of these microphones, or move a speaker in an arc around the microphone to see how the sound changes as a function of where it is. They can also synchronize sounds and measure interference patterns. 

[Related: This AI can harness sound to reveal the structure of unseen spaces] 

Since its creation, the anechoic chamber has paved the way for many innovations. The electret microphone, which replaced older, clunkier condenser microphones, was invented at Bell Labs. The testing of the frequency response, the performance, was done in the anechoic chamber. A product from AT&T that improved voice quality in long distance phone calls was made possible by understanding sound reflections that were occurring in the network and developing the math needed to cancel out noise signals. 

Recently, the chamber in New Jersey has been used a lot for work with digital twins, Wilford notes, a tech strategy that aims to map the physical world in a virtual environment. Part of that faithful recreation needs to account for acoustics. The anechoic chamber can help researchers understand spatial audio, or how real sound exists in a given space, and how it can change as you move through it. After updates, the chamber will have better localization properties, which will allow researchers to understand how to use sound to locate where objects are in IoT applications. 

Before I visited the anechoic chamber at The Cooper Union, Wilford shared that being in the room “retunes your senses.” He’s become increasingly aware of the properties of sound in the real world. He could close his eyes in a conference room, and locate where the speaker was, and if they were moving closer or further away, just from how their voices change. The background noises that his mind blocked out suddenly became apparent. 

After I stepped outside the lab in lower Manhattan, I noticed how voices bounced around in the metal elevator, and how the hum from the air conditioner changes pitch slightly as I turn my head. The buzz and chatter of background noise on the streets became brighter, louder, and clearer. 

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Researchers at MIT have designed a new underwater communication system that employs 70-year-old technology while also requiring one-millionth the energy needed for existing arrays. Not only that, but the team’s design allows for transmissions that can travel 15 times farther than current devices.

“What started as a very exciting intellectual idea a few years ago—underwater communication with a million times lower power—is now practical and realistic,” Fadel Adib, director of MIT Media Lab’s Signal Kinetics group and an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, said in a September 6 announcement. “There are still a few interesting technical challenges to address, but there is a clear path from where we are now to deployment.”

The key to their long-range, efficient Van Atta Acoustic Backscatter (VAB) can be found within the system’s name. As The Register explains, Van Atta arrays, first designed over seven decades ago, are composed of connected nodes capable of both triangulating and reflecting signals back towards their source instead of simply reflecting them outwards in all directions. This makes them not only more efficient, but capable of making much farther transmissions.

[Related: Why the EU wants to build an underwater cable in the Black Sea.]

Backscattering, meanwhile, refers to what occurs when signals such as sound waves reflect back to their point of origin. The phenomenon underpins technology such as ultrasounds, as well as mapping sea floors. Configure Van Attay arrays to boost backscattering capabilities, and you get the MIT team’s new VAB technology.

“We are creating a new ocean technology and propelling it into the realm of the things we have been doing for 6G cellular networks,” Adib said, via MIT’s announcement. “For us, it is very rewarding because we are starting to see this now very close to reality.”

With additional refinement and experimentation, researchers hope their VAB will soon be able to “map the pulse of the ocean,” reports Interesting Engineering. According to one of the team’s forthcoming studies, installing underwater VAB networks could help continuously measure a variety of oceanic datasets such as pressure, CO2, and temperature to refine climate change modeling, as well as analyze the efficacy of certain carbon capture technologies.

“Our design introduces multiple innovations across the networking stack, which enable it to overcome unique challenges that arise from the electro-mechanical properties of underwater backscatter and the challenging nature of low-power underwater acoustic channels,” reads a portion of one of their studies’ abstracts. “By realizing hundreds of meters of range in underwater backscatter, [we present] the first practical system capable of coastal monitoring applications.”

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In Overmatched, we take a close look at the science and technology at the heart of the defense industry—the world of soldiers and spies.

YOU MAY NOT HAVE HEARD of the National Reconnaissance Office, an intelligence organization whose existence wasn’t declassified until 1992, but you have perhaps come across some of its creepy kitsch: patches from its surveillance-satellite missions. Consider the one that shows a yellow octopus strangling the globe with its tentacles, with the words “Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach” stitched beneath. Yikes.

The office, known as the NRO, is in charge of America’s spy satellites. The details of its current capabilities are largely classified, but we, the people, can get hints about it from public information—like the fact that the NRO donated two telescopes to NASA in 2012. The instruments were obsolete as far as the spies, who point their scopes at Earth instead of space, were concerned, but they were more powerful than the space agency’s Hubble.

But how the NRO came to build such capable watchers isn’t just the story of a secret government organization; it’s the result of that secret government organization’s collaboration with academics and corporate engineers—a story that Aaron Bateman, assistant professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University, lays out in an article published in June 2023 in the journal Intelligence and National Security called “Secret partners: The national reconnaissance office and the intelligence-industrial-academic complex.” 

Although the phrase military-industrial complex has become common since Dwight D. Eisenhower coined it in 1961, academia’s role in that same complex often gets left out. So, too, does the intelligence side of the shiny national-security coin. 

That gap in the historical literature is what made Bateman decide to dig into the National Reconnaissance Office’s early connections to scholars and private companies. And while the collaborations he traces are decades old, they echo into today. Companies, universities, and colleges all still contribute to intelligence agencies—the latter’s needs sometimes shaping the trajectory of scientific inquiry or technological development. Wonky advances from academics and corporate types, meanwhile, still make spies lift their eyebrows in interest. 

California and the Corona project

The story Bateman tells begins in Sunnyvale, California, a town in what is now, but was not then, Silicon Valley. In the 1950s, as the country was looking toward orbit, Lockheed—today Lockheed Martin, the world’s biggest defense contractor—took notice of the government’s gaze. “Lockheed already had considerable presence in aerospace but wanted to carve out a space for itself—no pun intended—in space,” says Bateman.

Lockheed execs began contemplating what they would need to do to make that happen. Number one, carving out that space in space required…well…space. “During the 1950s, the Bay Area was full of just unused land that was fairly cheap,” says Bateman. But it wasn’t just the area’s wide-openness that appealed to Lockheed. “Most importantly, Stanford University was located there,” he continues. The defense contractor could siphon smart engineers from the school. Those variables locked down, Lockheed set up its Sunnyvale shop a few years before the NRO was founded, and it had won an Air Force satellite design contract by 1956.

This Bay Area facility soon became key to the NRO’s aptly named National Reconnaissance Program. Within big Bay Area buildings, Lockheed snapped together the components for the Corona project—the first satellite program to take pictures from space—and other nosy spacecraft. Once satellites were in orbit, industrial-academic collaborators helped the government operate and troubleshoot them. The feds couldn’t handle those tasks on their own, not having made the spacecraft themselves. 

Importantly to the development of these eyes in the sky, there was also “a free flow of knowledge,” according to Bateman’s research, among Stanford, Lockheed, and the people in trenchcoats who worked for the government.

Starting in the late 1950s, Stanford created the Industrial Affiliates Program, through which Lockheed employees taught university courses—ensuring students’ education would benefit future intelligence-industrial contributors—and also attended university classes, so they could stay up on the latest developments. 

Stanford grad students, meanwhile, waxed poetic about their research in presentations to the corporate suits. Lockheed recruited students whose work had relevance to their Secret Squirrel pursuits. 

The school also ran the Stanford Electronics Laboratory, a location fit for collaboration. Its academic environment supported a riskier, more experimental mindset than a deliverables-driven office might. For instance, a laboratory employee once installed a radar receiver in a Cessna plane and flew around San Francisco just to prove the instrument would work at high altitude—a “told you” that led to a satellite instrument that mapped the USSR’s air defense network. 

What developed on the East Coast 

Not to be left behind, the eastern part of the US had its own members-only meetings with the government. In Rochester, New York, Kodak created film that could survive the inhospitality of space, so it could be used to snap shots up there from a satellite. The film then fell back down through the atmosphere to Earth, where it was, incredibly, caught midair by a plane. 

The film had to capture clear pictures even as the camera peered through the entire atmosphere, survive the cosmic vacuum, and not break apart during the shaky, vibrating ride between here and there. 

Creating such kinds of film pushed photographic science along. As Bateman’s paper points out, “Technology is not just ‘applied science.’ Rather, technological needs can also lead to scientific advances.” 

In this case, those advances included not just image-taking but image analysis. And for that, the NRO turned to the Rochester Institute of Technology—where, by virtue of it being next to Kodak, photographic-science scholars had amassed. Amping that up, a CIA organization dedicated to image analysis, the National Photographic Interpretation Center, started a grant program at the university, funding projects whose results would curve the path of scientific inquiry in a favorable direction for spies. One project, for instance, proposed new ways to pick up camouflage in photos. Scientists who got grants were then sometimes recruited into full-time espionage-focused employment.  

But it’s not as if the government and academia were peaceful partners all the time. “There’s widespread opposition on college campuses across the United States to any kind of classified research,” says Bateman. But in the late 1960s, the negativity was “fairly extreme” at Stanford, where “students tried to break in and vandalize facilities that were actually doing classified work for the National Reconnaissance Program.” They tossed rocks into the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. The Stanford Electronics Lab was occupied by protestors for nine days. 

“In New York, it’s kind of a different story,” says Bateman, speaking of the same era in the Northeast. “There isn’t really this wave of anti-government sentiment.” Partly, perhaps, because the Rochester Institute of Technology trended more conservative, and partly, Bateman’s work posits, because “the intelligence community offered photographic science students access to some of the most advanced technologies in their field.” That’s a pretty tasty carrot. 

After the general wave of opposition, Stanford ceased its super-official classified work, but progress continued just outside the school at a place called the Stanford Research Institute. 

Surveillance and scholarship

The intelligence-industrial-academic triad is alive and well today, says James David, curator of National Security Space at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. Many military and intelligence organizations, for instance, have scientific advisory boards made up of scholarly experts. 

And just look at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he says—a NASA center that’s managed by Caltech and does classified work alongside its more press-releasable development of rovers for Mars. Both kinds of missions require commercial contractors. 

Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, meanwhile, was designed to do classified work on behalf of the school, which itself prohibits secret projects. The Draper Laboratory, formerly housed by MIT, announced a separation from the school in 1970 when the university tried to separate itself from military work. Now, though, the lab offers the Draper Scholar Program to fund the work of masters and PhD students. The MIT Lincoln Laboratory, meanwhile, is still under the university’s umbrella, and has an entire “intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance” research division. 

“It’s just continued to this day,” says Davis. 

But Bateman does see a big difference between past and present: “The level of openness,” he says. Whereas the NRO did not acknowledge its own existence when Stanford kids were throwing rocks, the spy agency now has an Instagram account. 

The agency’s reps show up at conferences too. “They go to universities and they talk about what they can do,” he says. 

The openness goes both ways: Companies in the commercial space industry reach out to spies and say, “‘Hey, I’m doing this thing over here,’” imitates Bateman, “‘and we think you might be interested in that.’ And sometimes the government says, ‘Yeah, actually, that’s really interesting. That could be a good thing for us, so we’re going to throw money your way.’” 

Previously, it wasn’t so. “If I can be a little reductive and Hollywood-esque here,” Bateman continues, describing the way it used to be, “guys in trenchcoats show up and knock on the door and say, ‘Hey, we’re from the US government. We’re not gonna tell you where, but we’d like to collaborate with you.’”

These days, collaborations like those still happen, just minus the trenchcoats. 

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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The Department of Energy is providing a nearly $400 million loan to a startup aimed at scaling the manufacturing and deployment of a zinc-based alternative to rechargeable lithium batteries. If realized, Eos Energy’s utility- and industrial-scale zinc-bromine battery energy storage system (BESS) could provide cheaper, vastly more sustainable options for the country’s burgeoning renewable power infrastructure.

According to the DOE’s recent announcement, Eos Energy’s project could annually produce as much as 8 gigawatt hours (GWh) of storage capacity by 2026—enough to instantly power over 300,000 US homes, or meet around 130,000 homes’ annual electricity requirements.

Because renewable sources like wind and solar produce power intermittently, storage solutions are necessary to house the energy for later use. For years, lithium battery systems’ prices have decreased as their efficiencies increased, but the metal’s comparative rarity presents a challenging hurdle for scaling green energy infrastructure.

[Related: How an innovative battery system in the Bronx will help charge up NYC’s grid]

Unlike lithium-ion and lithium iron phosphate batteries, alternatives such as the Eos Z3 design rely on zinc-based cathodes alongside a water-based electrolyte, notes MIT Technology Review. This important distinction both increases their stability, as well as makes it incredibly difficult for them to support combustion. Zinc-bromine batteries meanwhile also boast lifespans as long as 20 years, while existing lithium options only manage between 10 and 15 years. What’s more, zinc is considered the world’s fourth most produced metal.

Per MIT, Eos’s semi-autonomous facility in Pennsylvania currently produces around 540 megawatt-hours annually, although it doesn’t operate at full capacity. The DOE’s conditional commitment loan—disbursed only after certain financial, technical, and other operating stipulations are met—could boost the Eos’ factory towards full-power.

[Related: How the massive ‘flow battery’ coming to an Army facility in Colorado will work]

“Today’s energy storage market is nascent but rapidly growing and is dominated by lithium-ion and lithium iron phosphate battery technologies, which typically serve short-term duration applications (approximately 4 hours),” the DOE explained in its announcement. “… Eos’s technology is also specifically designed for long-duration grid-scale stationary battery storage that can assist in meeting the energy grids’ growing demand with increasing amounts of renewable energy penetration.”

The DOE also notes that “over time,” Eos expects to source almost all of its materials within the US, thus better insulating its product against the market volatility and supply chain issues. While the DOE previously issued similar loans to battery recycling and geothermal energy projects, last week’s announcement marks the first funding offered to a manufacturer of lithium-battery alternatives.

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Travelers within Lagos, Nigeria, can finally board a light-rail line connecting two busy regions of the world’s worst metropolis for traffic. Although construction on Lagos’ Blue Line Rail began in 2009, years of funding issues delayed officials’ intended 2011 launch date by over a decade. Now, however, an estimated 150,000 commuters each day will be able to travel the 8-mile route in under 25 minutes—a stark improvement from the sometimes three hour long journey the same distance takes on Lagos roadways.

With over 24 million residents, Lagos has long suffered from notorious traffic issues. The Nigerian city’s infrastructure problems, greenhouse emissions, and overall dissatisfaction with roadways repeatedly earned it the moniker of the world’s worst region to travel—even when compared to similarly congested cities such as Los Angeles and Delhi.

[Related: A high-speed rail line in California is chugging along towards 2030 debut.]

According to Quartz, aspirations for a light rail line within Lagos date as far back as 1983, but decades of funding and civic issues prevented the project from moving forward. Meanwhile, the Lagos-based Danne Institute of Research estimates traffic congestion annually results in a loss of over $5.2 billion due to lost work hours from commuters spending a cumulative 14.1 million hours on the road per day. The World Bank estimates Lagos residents spend more of their household budgets on transportation costs than any other major African city.

Construction for the $132 million endeavor finally completed earlier this year, with official service starting on August 4. For the first two weeks, the Blue Line Rail will run 12 trips per day before upping the daily total to 76. A separate phase of the line will extend the total track line to roughly 17 miles, while Lagos intends to complete a Red Line Rail connecting eastern and western sections of the city by the year’s end. According to Lagos Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu speaking via Bloomberg, the second line is already 95 percent ready.

“A mega city cannot function without an effective metro line,” said Adetilewa Adebajo, chief executive of Lagos-based CFG Advisory, told Bloomberg on August 5. “However, Lagos needs not just the metro line. It has to develop waterways too, being a coastal city. It needs an integrated transport system. Those are what will be able to relieve the congestions in the city.”

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An ongoing smart apparel project overseen by US defense and intelligence agencies has received a $22 million funding boost towards the “cutting edge” program designing “performance-grade, computerized clothing.” Announced late last month via Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the creatively dubbed Smart Electrically Powered and Networked Textile Systems (SMART ePANTS) endeavor seeks to develop a line of “durable, ready-to-wear clothing that can record audio, video, and geolocation data” for use by personnel within DoD, Department of Homeland Security, and wider intelligence communities.

“IARPA is proud to lead this first-of-its-kind effort for both the IC and broader scientific community which will bring much-needed innovation to the field of [active smart textiles],” Dawson Cagle, SMART ePANTS program manager, said via the August update. “To date no group has committed the time and resources necessary to fashion the first integrated electronics that are stretchable, bendable, comfortable, and washable like regular clothing.”

Smart textiles generally fall within active or passive classification. In passive systems, such as Gore-Tex, the material’s physical structure can assist in heating, cooling, fireproofing, or moisture evaporation. In contrast, active smart textiles (ASTs) like SMART ePANTS’ designs rely on built-in actuators and sensors to detect, interpret, and react to environmental information. Per IARPA’s project description, such wearables could include “weavable conductive polymer ‘wires,’ energy harvesters powered by the body, ultra-low power printable computers on cloth, microphones that behave like threads, and ‘scrunchable’ batteries that can function after many deformations.”

[Related: Pressure-sensing mats and shoes could enhance healthcare and video games.]

According to the ODNI, the new funding positions SMART ePANTS as a tool to assist law enforcement and emergency responders in “dangerous, high-stress environments,” like crime scenes and arms control inspections. But for SMART ePANTS’ designers, the technologies’ potential across other industries arguably outweigh their surveillance capabilities and concerns. 

“Although I am very proud of the intelligence aspect of the program, I am excited about the possibilities that the program’s research will have for the greater world,” Cagle said in the ODNI’s announcement video last year.

Cagle imagines scenarios in which diabetes patients like his father wear clothing that consistently and noninvasively monitors blood glucose levels, for example. Privacy advocates and surveillance industry critics, however, remain incredibly troubled by the invasive ramifications.

“These sorts of technologies are unfortunately the logical next steps when it comes to mass surveillance,” Mac Pierce, an artist whose work critically engages with weaponized emerging technologies, tells PopSci. “Rather than being tied to fixed infrastructure they can be hyper mobile and far more discreet than a surveillance van.”

[Related: Why Microsoft is rolling back its AI-powered facial analysis tech.]

Last year, Pierce designed and released DIY plans for a “Camera Shy Hoodie” that integrates an array of infrared LEDs to blind nearby night vision security cameras. SMART ePANTs’ deployment could potentially undermine such tools for maintaining civic and political protesters’ privacy.

“Wiretaps will never be in fashion. In a world where there is seemingly a camera on every corner, the last thing we need is surveillance pants,” Albert Fox Cahn, executive director for the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, tells PopSci.

“It’s hard to see how this technology could actually help, and easy to see how it could be abused. It is yet another example of the sort of big-budget surveillance boondoggles that police and intelligence agencies are wasting money on,” Cahn continues. “The intelligence community may think this is a cool look, but I think the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.”

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Historically, the process of designing vehicles could take years. Starting with initial sketches and ending with the final product, the timeline has included making life-size clay exterior models, doing interior modeling, conducting tests, and more.

During the lockdowns of the global pandemic beginning in 2020, General Motors teams found themselves in a new quandary: moving forward on projects while working remotely, and without physical representation of the vehicles in progress to touch and see. GM had dipped a big toe into using virtual reality to accelerate the development process for the GMC Hummer EV pickup, which launched in October 2020. That gave the team a head start on the Zevo 600, an all-electric delivery van.

Developed by BrightDrop, GM’s breakout business dedicated to electrifying and improving the delivery process, the Zevo 600 went from sketch to launch in January 2021 in a lightning-quick 20 months. A large part of that impressive timeline is due to the immersive technology tools that the team used. The modular Ultium battery platform and virtual development process used for the Hummer EV greased the wheels. 

Here are the details on the virtual tools that helped build the electric delivery van. 

What does it mean to design a vehicle this way?

BrightDrop says it considers itself a software company first and a vehicle company second, and there’s no question it’s pushing the envelope for GM. Bryan Styles, the head of GM’s immersive technology unit, sees the impetus behind this focus as coming from the industry’s increasing speed to market.

“The market continues to move very quickly, and we’re trying to increase the speed while still maintaining a high level of quality and safety at this pace,” Styles tells PopSci. “Immersive technology applies to design space up front, but also to engineering, manufacturing, and even the marketing space to advertise and interface with our customers.”

Working remotely through technology and virtual reality beats holding multiple in-person meetings and waiting for decisions, which can be very challenging as it relates to time constraints. 

“GM’s Advanced Design team brought an enormous amount of insight and technical knowledge to the project, including our insights-driven approach and how we leveraged GM’s immersive tech capabilities,” says Stuart Norris, GM Design Vice President, GM China and GM International, via email. “This enabled us to continue to collaboratively design the vehicle during the COVID-19 pandemic from our offices, dining rooms and bedrooms.”

The project that led to BrightDrop started with a study of urban mobility; the GM team found “a lot of pain points and pinch points,” says GM’s Wade Bryant. While the typical definition of mobility is related to moving people, Bryant and his team found that moving goods and products was an even bigger concern.

“Last-mile delivery,” as it’s often called, is the final stage of the delivery process, when the product moves from a transportation hub to the customer’s door. The potential for improving last-mile delivery is huge; Americans have become accustomed to ordering whatever strikes their fancy and expecting delivery the next day, and that trend doesn’t appear to be slowing down any time soon. In jam-packed cities, delivery is especially important.

“We traveled to cities like Shanghai, London, and Mumbai for research, and it became very apparent that deliveries were a big concern,” Bryant tells PopSci. “We thought there was probably a better design for delivery.”

Leave room for the sports drinks

Leveraging known elements helped GM build and launch the Zevo 600 quickly. As Motortrend reported, the steering wheel is shared with GM trucks like the Chevrolet Silverado, the shifter is from the GMC Hummer EV Pickup, the instrument cluster was lifted from Chevrolet Bolt, and the infotainment system is the same in the GMC Yukon. 

Designing a delivery van isn’t like building a passenger car, though. Bryant says they talked to delivery drivers, completed deliveries with the drivers, and learned how they work. One thing they discovered is that the Zevo 600 needed larger cup holders to accommodate the sports drink bottles that drivers seemed to favor. Understanding the habits and needs of the drivers as they get in and out of the truck 100 or 200 times a day helped GM through the virtual process. 

The team even built a simple wooden model to represent real-life scale. While immersed in virtual technology, the creators could step in and out of the wooden creation to get a real feel for vehicle entry and exit comfort, steering wheel placement, and other physical aspects. Since most of the team was working remotely for a few months early in the pandemic, they began using the VR tech early on and from home. As staff started trickling into the office in small groups, they used the technology both at home and in the office to collaborate during the design development process even though not everyone could be in the office together at once.

The Zevo 400 and 600 (each referring to the van’s cargo capacity in cubic feet) is the first delivery vehicle that BrightDrop developed and started delivering. So far, 500 Zevo 600s are in operation with FedEx across California and Canada. The first half of this year, the company has built more than 1,000 Zevo 600s and are delivering those to more customers, and production of the Zevo 400 is expected to begin later this year.

Maserati did something similar  

GM isn’t alone in its pursuit of fast, streamlined design; Maserati designed its all-new track-focused MCXtrema sports car on a computer in a mere eight weeks as part of the go-to-market process. As automakers get more comfortable building with these more modern tools, we’re likely to see models rolled out just as quickly in the near future. 

It may seem that recent college graduates with degrees in immersive technology would be the best hope for the future of virtual design and engineering. Styles sees a generational bridge, not a divide. 

“As folks are graduating from school, they’re more and more fluent in technology,” Styles says. “They’re already well versed in software. It’s interesting to see how that energy infuses the workforce, and amazing how the generations change the construct.” 

Where is vehicle design going next? Styles says it’s a matter not necessarily of if automakers are going to use artificial intelligence, but how they’re going to use it.

“Technology is something that we have to use in an intelligent way, and we’re having a lot of those discussions of how technology becomes a tool in the hand of the creator versus replacing the creator themselves.” 

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This week, a major water main break in Times Square, New York created waves of disruptions at the city’s busiest subway station. Sheets of water dramatically cascaded down onto subway tracks below—an urban underground waterfall. The culprit was a 127-year-old cast iron pipe that was a few years past its expected lifespan, according to AP. 

Although the event precipitated a mad scramble to dig, scoop, find and fix the mess, not to mention cleaning and pumping up the aftermath, water main breaks are actually not that uncommon. A 2021 report from the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that there is a water main break every two minutes in the US. The cost for replacing all the pipes in the country before they reach the end of their life will be over $1 trillion. 

There were around 400 water main breaks in New York City last year, and the metropolis has been spending more than $1 billion to upgrade its approximately 6,800 miles of aging infrastructure, including water and sewer lines. New York isn’t an anomaly either. Los Angeles has also rolled out a $1.3-billion plan to gradually replace the deteriorating pipes that run beneath the major city. 

So what causes a water main to rupture? A variety of factors. Changes in temperature, water pressure, soil conditions, climate change, a stray tree root, as well as ground movements due to construction, earthquakes, and wear and tear can all play a role. The material that makes up the water mains doesn’t matter as much as the age. Existing water mains can be made of iron, cement, and even wood. 

The number one reason that water main breaks happen so often is the age of the US’s water infrastructure. “Imagine putting anything 120 years old and assuming that it’s going to function the way it did 120 years ago with the demands we put on it now,” Darren Olson, vice chair of the 2021 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure and a water infrastructure expert from Chicago, tells PopSci. “When these water mains were put in 120-plus years ago, nobody envisioned what New York would be and the types of stresses on these systems, especially that we’re facing recently with climate change.”  

[Related: How ‘underground climate change’ affects life on the Earth’s surface]

Extreme weather like droughts or floods can create wild fluctuations in the water levels at treatment plants. The swings in temperature, such as the increasingly crazy freeze-thaw cycles in the colder seasons, can cause pipes to expand and contract more dramatically, making them more susceptible to damage. 

“They estimate that 6 billion gallons of treated water is lost each day in the US. That’s like 9,000 swimming pools of water that we just lose due to leaks or water main breaks,” says Olson. And these breaks can cause a ripple of secondary problems. “A water main break can not only flood something, but imagine the businesses that are relying on that water. It could be a manufacturing plant, it could be a restaurant,” he adds. “An estimated $51 billion of economic loss for water-relevant industries occurs each year because of water main breaks.” 

One pipe going down can affect the whole water distribution system. “If you lose pressure in that water system, that pressure is still critical in a water distribution system because it’s forcing the water not only to go to our faucets, but it’s not allowing things to get into the water system,” Olson explains. “Once you have a water main break, and that pressure no longer exists, you can have boil orders on water because there’s not enough pressure on the system to guarantee that you’re keeping other things out of your water supply.” 

To fix a broken pipe, crews have to locate the leak, excavate the segment, isolate it, reroute the water, do the necessary repairs, put it back in service, then put everything else back in order. Water systems are usually looped, meaning there are a number of pathways for water to flow through. Water valve vaults that are stationed throughout the systems allow engineers to shut off a certain section of the system and still keep the unaffected parts in operation.

Small water main repairs could take a couple of hours. For the large water transmission mains, it could take much longer than that. 

[Related: Our infrastructure can’t handle climate disasters. We need to build differently.]

This whole process sounds like a daunting task, and there are so many at-risk pipes. But city engineers are learning to get smart about prevention. One method is using asset management, which is a way of tracking where all of the underground pipes are located, and considering historical issues with them, along with the size, diameter, and material of the pipes. “When you start to look at all of those in a more comprehensive way, you’re able to plan and use the dollars that we have more effectively to replace the oldest, most critical first. And that can help a city better manage their system,” says Olson. 

However, even with good planning, there are certain limitations. One of those is the funding that goes into this effort. “Back in the 1970s, the federal government was contributing 63 percent to all of the water infrastructure that we had,” Olson notes. “Now that’s down to less than 10 percent. It comes down to either the states or the municipalities, or the counties to help to invest in their own systems and fund that investment.” 

The good news is that the 2022 Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill has recognized the need to improve the country’s water infrastructure. “That bill did target money to that [issue] and it’s a good down payment for what we need,” says Olson. “But the need is so vast that that’s just hopefully the start of future federal investment in our water infrastructure.”

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This article is republished from The Conversation.

Not only people need to stay cool, especially in a summer of record-breaking heat waves. Many machines, including cellphones, data centers, cars and airplanes, become less efficient and degrade more quickly in extreme heat. Machines generate their own heat, too, which can make hot temperatures around them even hotter.

We are engineering researchers who study how machines manage heat and ways to effectively recover and reuse heat that is otherwise wasted. There are several ways extreme heat affects machines.

No machine is perfectly efficient – all machines face some internal friction during operation. This friction causes machines to dissipate some heat, so the hotter it is outside, the hotter the machine will be.

Cellphones and similar devices with lithium ion batteries stop working as well when operating in climates above 95 degrees Farenheit (35 degrees Celsius) – this is to avoid overheating and increased stress on the electronics.

Cooling designs that use innovative phase-changing fluids can help keep machines cool, but in most cases heat is still ultimately dissipated into the air. So, the hotter the air, the harder it is to keep a machine cool enough to function efficiently.

Plus, the closer together machines are, the more dissipated heat there will be in the surrounding area.

Deforming materials

Higher temperatures, either from the weather or the excess heat radiated from machinery, can cause materials in machinery to deform. To understand this, consider what temperature means at the molecular level.

At the molecular scale, temperature is a measure of how much molecules are vibrating. So the hotter it is, the more the molecules that make up everything from the air to the ground to materials in machinery vibrate.

As the temperature increases and the molecules vibrate more, the average space between them grows, causing most materials to expand as they heat up. Roads are one place to see this – hot concrete expands, gets constricted and eventually cracks. This phenomenon can happen to machinery, too, and thermal stresses are just the beginning of the problem.

Travel delays and safety risks

High temperatures can also change the way oils in your car’s engine behave, leading to potential engine failures. For example, if a heat wave makes it 30 degrees F (16.7 degrees C) hotter than normal, the viscosity – or thickness – of typical car engine oils can change by a factor of three.

Fluids like engine oils become thinner as they heat up, so if it gets too hot, the oil may not be thick enough to properly lubricate and protect engine parts from increased wear and tear.

Additionally, a hot day will cause the air inside your tires to expand and increases the tire pressure, which could increase wear and the risk of skidding.

Airplanes are also not designed to take off at extreme temperatures. As it gets hotter outside, air starts to expand and takes up more space than before, making it thinner or less dense. This reduction in air density decreases the amount of weight the plane can support during flight, which can cause significant travel delays or flight cancellations.

Battery degradation

In general, the electronics contained in devices like cellphones, personal computers and data centers consist of many kinds of materials that all respond differently to temperature changes. These materials are all located next to each other in tight spaces. So as the temperature increases, different kinds of materials deform differently, potentially leading to premature wear and failure.

Lithium ion batteries in cars and general electronics degrade faster at higher operating temperatures. This is because higher temperatures increase the rate of reactions within the battery, including corrosion reactions that deplete the lithium in the battery. This process wears down its storage capacity. Recent research shows that electric vehicles can lose about 20 percent of their range when exposed to sustained 90-degree Farenheit weather.

Data centers, which are buildings full of servers that store data, dissipate significant amounts of heat to keep their components cool. On very hot days, fans must work harder to ensure chips do not overheat. In some cases, powerful fans are not enough to cool the electronics.

To keep the centers cool, incoming dry air from the outside is often first sent through a moist pad. The water from the pad evaporates into the air and absorbs heat, which cools the air. This technique, called evaporative cooling, is usually an economical and effective way to keep chips at a reasonable operating temperature.

However, evaporative cooling can require a significant amount of water. This issue is problematic in regions where water is scarce. Water for cooling can add to the already intense resource footprint associated with data centers.

Struggling air conditioners

Air conditioners struggle to perform effectively as it gets hotter outside – just when they’re needed the most. On hot days, air conditioner compressors have to work harder to send the heat from homes outside, which in turn disproportionally increases electricity consumption and overall electricity demand.

For example, in Texas, every increase of 1.8 degrees F (1 degree C) creates a rise of about 4 percent in electricity demand.

Heat leads to a staggering 50 percent increase in electricity demand during the summer in hotter countries, posing serious threats of electricity shortages or blackouts, coupled with higher greenhouse gas emissions.

How to prevent heat damage

Heat waves and warming temperatures around the globe pose significant short- and long-term problems for people and machines alike. Fortunately, there are things you can do to minimize the damage.

First, ensure that your machines are kept in an air-conditioned, well-insulated space or out of direct sunlight.

Second, consider using high-energy devices like air conditioners or charging your electric vehicle during off-peak hours when fewer people are using electricity. This can help avoid local electricity shortages.

Reusing heat

Scientists and engineers are developing ways to use and recycle the vast amounts of heat dissipated from machines. One simple example is using the waste heat from data centers to heat water.

Waste heat could also drive other kinds of air-conditioning systems, such as absorption chillers, which can actually use heat as energy to support coolers through a series of chemical- and heat-transferring processes.

In either case, the energy needed to heat or cool something comes from heat that is otherwise wasted. In fact, waste heat from power plants could hypothetically support 27 percent of residential air-conditioning needs, which would reduce overall energy consumption and carbon emissions.

Extreme heat can affect every aspect of modern life, and heat waves aren’t going away in the coming years. However, there are opportunities to harness extreme heat and make it work for us.

Srinivas Garimella is a professor of mechanical engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and Matthew T. Hughes is a postdoctoral associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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California authorities will begin accepting electric train manufacturers’ Request for Qualifications  proposals (RFQs) by the end of the year, the latest stage of the state’s long-gestating, high-speed rail line. Although voters approved initial funding back in 2008, the decades’ long project has since encountered repeated setbacks and financial issues. Construction sites finally began making headway in 2015, and nearly 422 miles between the Los Angeles Basin and the Bay Area have since been “environmentally cleared for the project,” the Los Angeles Times recently reported.

Once selected and constructed, the high-speed trains would be tested at maximum speed of 242 mph while traversing a 171-mile starter segment connecting Central Valley’s Bakersfield and Merced. Rail authorities will select the final manufacturer during the first quarter of 2024, with an eye to debut a pair of functioning prototypes by 2028 for trials. According to the High-Speed Rail Authority’s announcement, whoever is chosen to provide the train cars will also agree to oversee train set maintenance for 30 years.

[Related: Texas could get a 205-mph bullet train zipping between Houston and Dallas.]

In a statement, Board Chair Tom Richards described the latest phase “allows us to deliver on our commitment to meet our federal grant timelines to start testing,” adding that, “This is an important milestone for us to deliver high-speed rail service in the Central Valley and eventually into Northern and Southern California.”

California’s high speed rail project is one of several in development across the US, each facing their own logistical and funding issues. Earlier this month, Amtrak announced a partnership with Texas Central to begin seeking grants for a bullet train line that could travel between Houston and Dallas in under 90 minutes. Similar high-speed train routes are underway to connect Las Vegas and Los Angeles, as well as San Francisco and LA. Both of those projects have also encountered significant delays. Such projects could greatly help transition the US towards greener public transport methods—Amtrak’s proposed Texas project, for example, could save as much as 65 million gallons of fuel per year, cut greenhouse gas emissions by over 100,000 tons annually, and remove an estimated 12,500 cars per day from the region’s I-45 corridor.

Over 30 construction sites along Central Valley’s high-speed railway are currently active. Although backers hope the project will begin public service by the end of the decade, a recent progress report notes delays could push completion as far as 2033.

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Piloting a new Bugatti Chiron Super Sport down the Pacific Coast Highway on a random Saturday afternoon is a bucket-list item for anyone who loves cars as much as I do. Bystanders crane their necks as the Bugatti roars by; it’s not often these beasts are seen in the wild. 

This French-made Bugatti is very, very expensive and very, very powerful. These $4 million(ish) cars can accelerate from zero to 62 miles per hour in 2.4 seconds, and the top speed for the Chiron Super Sport is 273 miles per hour. That’s speedier than Japan’s Shinkansen bullet train, by the way. 

However, what makes this machine interesting is not just its beating heart, which is the car’s 1,600-horsepower engine. The car sports a sleek, prowling silhouette with wide aerodynamic scoops carved from the flanks, and cathedral-like buttresses anchoring the rear. It’s also unique in its engineering; built on a hand-constructed carbon fiber monocoque (the car’s structural frame), the Chiron Super Sport is powered by 16 cylinders and four turbos, which breathe more air into the combustion chamber to fan the flames. 

This vehicle, even at its base configuration, sets itself apart with features like diamond membranes in the Accuton audio system and titanium in the exhaust system. 

Let’s take a closer look at the unique touches that will take your breath away, even when the Chiron Super Sport is sitting perfectly still. 

A car celebrating a ‘Golden Era’

Bugatti customers can request a customized vehicle through the brand’s Sur Mesure program (“custom made” in French). Anything goes in the design studio, and one customer chose a Chiron Super Sport to be the canvas for a celebratory mural honoring the company’s history. Bugatti designer Jascha Straub rose to the challenge and led a team that invested 400 painstaking hours drawing 45 sketches by hand on the sides of the car. 

For this specific vehicle (dubbed “Golden Era”), Straub tells PopSci that it was important to the design team to use pencil sketches directly on the car. The pencils they chose incorporate a bit of wax, giving the drawings an oil pastel effect. “There are easier ways to do it, like using a pen or marker, but a pen drawing doesn’t look like a pencil sketch,” he says. “We wanted to keep the grain and shading and highlights intact, which was why it was clear we had to use pencil.” 

During the first set of tests, the designers used body prototype panels and sketched directly on the paint, then covered it with a transparent protective layer called clear coat. The problem, they discovered, was that the clear coat cracked atop the pencil markings. As a result, the designers defined a process to achieve the desired effect: First, a light layer of clear coat was laid on top of the gold paint, and then the images were sketched on top with professional-quality Prismacolor and Polychromos pencils. Then they added another thin layer of clear coat, and the artists sketched right on top of that. Every image was drawn at least three to four times, Straub says. 

And there’s more: just above the gear shifter, the dashboard on all of these vehicles is fitted with embedded tweeters each using a one-karat diamond membrane for extremely low-distortion, high-quality sound. The membrane looks like a contact lens, but made from the hardest naturally-occurring substance on Earth. Because diamonds are so strong, the sound waves pass through them quickly and without warping. Paired with titanium parts, the Accuton audio system is about as good as it gets. 

So what’s a W16 engine?

The Chiron Super Sport’s W16 engine—which is currently the only 16-cylinder powertrain in a car—does the work of moving this automotive cathedral on wheels from place to place. First seen in the brand’s 2005 Veyron, the W16 is made up of 3,500 individual parts, each piece assembled by hand. 

Some quick engine background: A V8 engine has the “V” in it because of its shape; two banks of four cylinders each are arranged in a V configuration. In this case, the W16 has the “W” in the name because the cylinders are arranged in a ‘W’ configuration for efficiency of space. Essentially, the engineers at Bugatti created a 16-cylinder engine that is the size of a 12-cylinder engine. 

But this W16 is more than just the sum total of two V8s. Bugatti’s W16 is enhanced by four turbos (two on each cylinder bank). Typically, turbos are added to boost power to a smaller engine, but that’s not the case here, clearly: The engine is massive and the turbos are the icing on top. An intricate water-cooling setup keeps it running smoothly without overheating. For that matter, the brand turned to titanium for the exhaust system, as the W16 kicks off a lot of heat. This iconic engine setup is as distinctive for its artistry as its sheer power. 

What comes next for Bugatti?

Right now, the French company’s future is uncertain. 

A century after he founded the company, Ettore Bugatti himself might be surprised to see his company still building cars in his name. (Bugatti died in 1947.) Even more so, he might be shocked to learn that Croatian EV-maker Rimac owns a majority stake in Bugatti, with plans to electrify the brand. He’d surely find kinship with Rimac’s founder and CEO, the young Mate Rimac himself, who kick-started his career converting the powertrain of his 1984 BMW 3 Series from internal combustion to electricity.

While former Bugatti CEO Stephan Winkelmann has already said that the W16 engine is “the last of its kind,” that doesn’t necessarily mean the supercar builder is finished with massive powertrains. If the automaker takes a tip from Lamborghini, it may opt for a high-powered hybrid going forward. The partnership with Rimac is surely going to charge things up. 

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The B-2 Spirit bomber is an elegant machine for a war that never came. The flying wing stealth bomber, unveiled for the first time in 1988, represented the near-peak of the American Cold War defense industry. The first Spirit entered operational service in 1997, six years after the end of the Cold War, and only 21 of the bombers were ever built. Nineteen of those bombers remain in service (one was destroyed in a fire in 2008), and on August 9, Northrop Grumman announced the successful demonstration of transferring mission data from a ground station to an airborne bomber’s computer, thanks to new upgrades.

It is easy, given how futuristic the B-2’s appearance remains, to forget that the bomber was designed and built before the ubiquitous wireless data transfers of modern technology. Mission data, or information like where to fly and what targets to bomb, had to be inputted manually. B-2s are crewed by two pilots, and they fly long missions. An Air Force fact sheet lists the range as simply “intercontinental”; the Federation of American Scientists notes the range without refueling is 6,000 nautical miles (6,900 statute miles), and with air refueling the range of the B-2 can cover the entire globe. 

On such a long flight, or even a normal one, there’s always a chance a human pilot manually entering data will make an error.

The new technology is an “integrated airborne mission transfer,” which “delivers an advanced capability that enables the B-2 to complete a digital, machine-to-machine transfer of new missions received in flight directly into the aircraft,” Northrop Grumman stated in a release.

Machine-to-machine transfer is a big deal, especially ensuring that it is done securely. Every B-2 bomber is capable of carrying both conventional and nuclear weapons. Together with roughly half of the venerable B-52 bombers, these planes largely constitute the bomber third of the “nuclear triad,” a distribution of nuclear launch capabilities between ground-based Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched missiles, and bombs dropped or missiles launched by planes. (US fighter jets are also capable of carrying some nuclear bombs, though these aren’t usually included in the discussion of the nuclear triad.)

Carrying nuclear weapons is a terrible responsibility, and films like Dr. Strangelove and Failsafe show what tragedy might happen when a nuclear bomber cannot receive new information in flight. The B-2’s manual system to input data mid-mission makes changes possible. But a human manually entering data can still make errors, even in the least stressful of contexts. A direct machine-to-machine update of mission data removes the possibility of human error from data entry, letting pilots devote their full attention to piloting and other tasks.

In addition, as Northrop Grumman told Air & Space Forces Magazine, this allows mission data to be uploaded to the bomber without interfering with any other computer processes, keeping flight and other critical systems secure. Introducing any connectivity can risk a possible exploit of that entry point by a malicious actor, though it appears the security concerns and risks are being taken seriously.

“We are providing the B-2 with the capabilities to communicate and operate in advanced battle management systems and the joint all-domain command and control environment, keeping B-2 ahead of evolving threats,” said Nikki Kodama, vice president and B-2 program manager, Northrop Grumman in a release.

Advanced Battle Management and Joint All Domain are military concepts, heavily pursued by the Pentagon in recent years, that make it so many different tools, from fighter squadrons to bombers to ships to tanks and infantry, can be used together in a fight together. Battle management is giving tools to the commanders in charge of parts, or all these forces, to be able to send new orders as the situation changes. If soldiers fighting on one island spy the deployment of anti-air missiles, and communicate that, a commander could then use that information to redirect bombers on a course out of range of those missiles, for example. In short, the Pentagon wants to make it easier for the military to share information with itself, in a timely fashion.

“The integration of this digital software with our weapon system will further enhance the connectivity and survivability in highly contested environments as part of our ongoing modernization effort,” said Kodama. 

Taking in new mission data, directly from machine to machine, reduces the steps in which error can enter the process. It’s the difference between handing someone a written note or playing a verbal game of telephone, where whispered messages can lose or change meaning at every step of the process.

While the B-2 fleet is small, upgrades like this could help ensure the stealth bombers can remain part of the US arsenal for years to come, while the new, more numerous B-21 Raider stealth bomber fleet is built and integrated into the Air Force. There is no retirement date set for the B-2 beyond the readiness of its planned replacement. New tools ensure that, for however long that transition takes, the US will still have a handful of stealth flying wings, ready to drop conventional or nuclear weapons across continents.

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Treated radioactive water reserves near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant are now slowly dispersing into the Pacific Ocean. The initial release is the first part of a decades’ long plan to handle the hundreds of millions of gallons accumulated since the 2011 meltdown disaster. Although numerous scientific organizations and experts deem the project extremely safe—the treated waters actually contain tritium isotope levels far below global contamination standards—residents near the nuclear plant have continuously voiced concerns about potential reputational damage to the local fishing industries.

These worries are not unfounded. On Thursday, China announced a wholesale ban on the import of all “aquatic products” from Japan, effective immediately. According to the Associated Press on Friday, Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) president Tomoaki Kobayakwa stated the utility provider is preparing to compensate business owners affected by the ban.

[Related: Japan’s plan to release treated water from the Fukushima nuclear plant is actually pretty safe.]

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida reiterated his plea for China to reconsider its import ban, urging them to consider the treatment plan’s numerous safety assessments. “We will keep strongly requesting that the Chinese government firmly carry out a scientific discussion,” Kishida added earlier this week, per the AP.

Final preparations for the controlled release project started on August 22, when one ton of treated water was transferred to a dilution tank containing 1,200 tons of seawater. Experts repeatedly tested the combined waters over the next two days to ensure safety. Then, experts ran 460 tons of the mixture into a mixing pool for discharge. From there, the decontaminated waters traveled an estimated 30 minutes through a 1-kilometer-long undersea tunnel, exiting into the Pacific Ocean.

In a news conference on Thursday, a Tepco spokesperson confirmed that the released water’s Becquerels per liter measurement was just 1,500 bq/L. The Becquerel is a standard unit for measuring radioactivity, and references one atomic nucleus decaying per second. Japan’s national safety standard is 60,000 bq/L.

As the AP reports, Tepco intends to release 31,200 tons of treated water into the Pacific Ocean by March 2024, barely 10 of the roughly 1,000 tanks awaiting treatment. Despite the seemingly large amount, that number is a literal and figurative drop in the bucket compared to how much irradiated water is stored near the Fukushima plant—currently filled to 98-percent of their 1.37-million-ton total capacity. The entirety of those storage containers must be cleaned and emptied in order to make way for the facilities necessary to decommission the larger power plant. The treated wastewater is expected to finish dispersing around 2035.

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A drone’s size affects what it can—or can’t—do. If a drone is too small, it may be limited in the types of tasks it can complete, or the amount of heavy lifting it can do. But if a drone is too big, it may be difficult to get it up in the air or have it navigate around tricky structures, but it may make up for that in other ways 

A solution that a group of engineers from the University of Tokyo came up with is to create a set of drone units that can assemble and disassemble in the air. That way, they can break up to fit into tight spaces, but can also combine to become stronger if needed. 

Last month, the detailed design behind this type of system, called Tilted-Rotor-Equipped Aerial Robot With Autonomous In-Flight Assembly and Disassembly Ability (TRADY), was described in the journal Advanced Intelligent Systems. 

The drones used in the demonstration look like normal quadcopters but with an extra component (a plug or jack). The drone with the plug and the drone with the jack are designed to lock into one another, like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. 

[Related: To build a better crawly robot, add legs—lots of legs]

“The team developed a docking system for TRADY that takes its inspiration from the aerial refueling mechanism found in jet fighters in the form of a funnel-shaped unit on one side of the mechanism means any errors lining up the two units are compensated for,” according to Advanced Science News. To stabilize the units once they intertwine, “the team also developed a unique coupling system in the form of magnets that can be switched on and off.”

Although in their test runs, they only used two units, the authors wrote in the paper that this methodology “can be easily applied to more units by installing both the plug type and the jack type of docking mechanisms in a single unit.” 

To control these drones, the researchers developed two systems: a distributed control system for operating each unit independently that can be switched to a unified control system. An onboard PC conveys the position of each drone to allow them to angle themselves appropriate for coming together and apart. 

Other than testing the smoothness of the assembly and disassembly process, the team put these units to work by giving them tasks to do, such as inserting a peg into a pipe, and opening a valve. The TRADY units were able to complete both challenges. 

“As a future prospect, we intend to design a new docking mechanism equipped with joints that will enable the robot to alter rotor directions after assembly. This will expand the robot’s controllability in a more significant manner,” the researchers wrote. “Furthermore, expanding the system by utilizing three or more units remains a future challenge.” 

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The ancient Japanese art of paper folding and cutting known as kirigami has increasingly inspired a new generation of engineering materials, resulting in strikingly beautiful and resilient designs. The latest iteration, courtesy of researchers at MIT, adds attributes found in both honeycomb and human bones to further strengthen advanced architectural materials, as well as potentially boost the resilience of certain airplanes, spacecraft, and robots.

As detailed in a new paper to be presented at American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ upcoming Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, the team at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) developed a novel method to manufacture plate lattices—high-performance materials useful in automotive and aerospace designs. “This material is like steel cork. It is lighter than cork, but with high strength and high stiffness,” explains Neil Gershefeld, the paper’s senior author and lead researcher at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA).

To achieve their breakthrough, engineers altered a traditional origami Miura-ori crease already used in creating plate lattices for “sandwich structures,” which place a corrugated core between two flat plates. Although standard plate lattice sandwich structures are often made with slow, costly, and difficult adhesive and welding, the team modified a Miura-ori design’s sharp angles into facets, allowing for plate attachments via rivets and bolts. This altered design can be further customized via different creasing patterns and shapes to hone specific stiffness, flexibility, and strength—much like cellular shapes found within bones and honeycombs.

[Related: Origami-inspired robot can gently turn pages and carry objects 16,000 times its weight.]

According to the team’s findings, the kirigami-augmented plate lattices withstood three times as much force as standard aluminum corrugation designs. Such variations show immense promise for lightweight, shock-absorbing sections needed within cars, planes, and spacecraft.

“Plate lattices’ construction has been so difficult that there has been little research on the macro scale,” explained Alfonso Parra Rubio, a co-lead author of the paper and a research assistant in the CBA. “We think folding is a path to easier utilization of this type of plate structure made from metals.”

To demonstrate both the kirigami-inspired structural and artistic capabilities, some of the team’s graduate students even designed a trio of large, three-dimensional sculptures currently on display in the MIT Media Lab. “At the end of the day, the artistic piece is only possible because of the math and engineering contributions we are showing in our papers,” said Parra Rubio. “But we don’t want to ignore the aesthetic power of our work.”

For the time being, the new plate lattice manufacturing method remains difficult to model ahead of construction. Going forward, however, the team intends to build user-friendly CAD tools to streamline and simplify the kirigami lattice design process. According to MIT’s announcement on Tuesday, they also hope to investigate ways to reduce the computational costs that go into simulating designs ahead of production.

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Humans are predicted to go through nearly 175 million bags of coffee over the next year, totalling over 23 billion pounds of spent coffee grounds. For decades, most of that waste has been generally destined for landfills, the transport of which results in large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. It stands to reason that these spent coffee grounds (after a cup of joe or two) offer a massive, untapped recyclable resource opportunity—and researchers at Australia’s RMIT University have potentially figured out just what to do with them.

According to findings recently published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, engineers have developed concrete that is almost 30 percent stronger than existing standards after mixing in coffee-derived biochar. To create the new, charcoal-like additive, the team employed a low-energy process known as pyrolysis, in which organic waste is heated to 350 degrees Celsius without oxygen to avoid generating carbon dioxide. Roughly 15 percent of sand used in traditional concrete was then swapped for the coffee biochar, offering not only a more resilient building material, but one that could take care of a massive food waste obstacle.

[Related: Dirty diapers could be recycled into cheap, sturdy concrete.]

“Our research is in the early stages, but these exciting findings offer an innovative way to greatly reduce the amount of organic waste that goes to landfill,” Shannon Kilmartin-Lynch, a postdoctoral fellow and joint lead author, said in a statement.

Speaking with The Guardian on August 22, Kilmartin-Lynch explained although coffee biochar is structurally finer than sand, its porous qualities allows the cement to actually better bind to the organic material. While in its early testing stages, the coffee-concrete is showing immense engineering promise.

Replacing at least some of traditional concrete’s sand also offers a major additional bonus to the team’s innovation. According to the university, 50 billion metric tons of natural sand is annually used in construction projects across the globe—resulting in a huge stress on ecosystems such as riverbeds and banks. Minimizing sand mining in favor of recycled coffee grounds therefore offers an additional, positive environmental effect.

If further research and finetuning goes according to plan, essentially all spent coffee ground waste could be put towards new concrete projects.The research team now intends to explore practical implementation standards, as well as field trials in collaboration with outside industry leaders. Perhaps joining forces with both the diaper concrete engineers is in order.

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While the planet continues to endure scorching, unprecedented temperatures, a 60-square-foot shipping container is serving as a testing ground for passive, sustainable cooling solutions. As detailed in a new study published in the research journal Energies, an engineering team at Washington State University is utilizing the space to find and improve upon ancient cooling methods that don’t generate any forms of greenhouse gas—including water evaporation atop repurposed wind towers.

Buildings require roughly 60 percent of the entire world’s electricity, almost 20 percent of which is annually earmarked to keep those structures cool and comfortable. As society contends with climate change’s most ravaging effects, air conditioning systems’ requirements are only expected to rise in the coming years—potentially generating a feedback loop that could exacerbate carbon emission levels. Finding green ways to lower businesses’ and homes’ internal temperatures will therefore need solutions other than simply boosting wasteful AC units.

[Related: Moondust could chill out our overheated Earth, some scientists predict.]

This is especially vital as rising global populations require new construction, particularly within the developing world. According to Omar Al-Hassawi, lead author and assistant professor in WSU’s School of Design and Construction, this push will be a major issue if designers continue to rely on mechanical systems—such as traditional, electric AC units. “There’s going to be a lot more air conditioning that’s needed, especially with the population rise in the hotter regions of the world,” Al-Hassawi said in a statement.

“There might be [some] inclusion of mechanical systems, but how can we cool buildings to begin with—before relying on the mechanical systems?” he adds.

By retrofitting their shipping container test chamber with off-the-grid, solar powered battery storage, AL-Hassawi’s team can heat their chamber to upwards of 130 degrees Fahrenheit to test out their solutions while measuring factors such as air velocity, temperature, and humidity. The team is particularly focused on optimizing a passive cooling method involving large towers and evaporative cooling that dates as far back as 2,500 BCE in ancient Egypt. In these designs, moisture evaporates at the tower’s top, which turns into cool, heavier air that then sinks down to the habitable space below. In the team’s version, moisture could be generated via misting nozzles, shower heads, or simply water-soaked pads.

“It’s an older technology, but there’s been an attempt to innovate and use a mix of new and existing technologies to improve performance and the cooling capacity of these systems,” explained Al-Hassawi, who also envisions retrofitting smokestacks in older buildings to work as new cooling towers.

“That’s why research like this would really help,” he adds. “How can we address building design, revive some of these more ancient strategies, and include them in contemporary building construction? The test chamber becomes a platform to do this.”

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A massive cargo ship retrofitted with a pair of nearly 125-foot-tall “wing sails” has set out on its maiden voyage, potentially providing a new template for wind-powered ocean liners. Chartered by shipping firm Cargill, the Pyxis Ocean’s journey will take it from China to Brazil in a test of its two, rigid “WindWings” constructed from the same material as wind turbines. According to the BBC on Monday, the design harkening back to traditional boat propulsion methods could reduce the vessel’s lifetime emissions by as much as 30 percent.

Per an official announcement on August 21, Pyxis Ocean’s WindWings can save 1.5 tonnes of fuel per wing, per day. Combined with alternative fuel sources, that number could rise. During its estimated six week travels, the cargo ship’s sails will be closely monitored in the hopes of scaling the technology across both Cargill’s fleet, as well as the larger shipping industry. Speaking with BBC, one project collaborator estimated a ship using four such wings could save as much as 20 tonnes of CO2 every day.

[Related: These massive, wing-like ‘sails’ could add wind power to cargo ships.]

“Wind is a near marginal cost-free fuel and the opportunity for reducing emissions, alongside significant efficiency gains in vessel operating costs, is substantial,” explained John Cooper, CEO of project collaborator, BAR Technologies.

In addition to being a zero emission propulsion source, wind power is both a non-depleting resource as well as predictable. Such factors could prove extremely promising in an industry responsible for around 2-3 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions—around 837 million tonnes of CO2 per year. Less than 100 cargo ships currently utilize some form of wind-assisted technology, a fraction of the over 110,000 operational vessels throughout the world. Depending on Pyxis Ocean’s performance, the massive WindWings could help spur increased green tech retrofitting, as well as new builds already coming equipped with the proper systems.

Elsewhere, similar wind-based vessel projects are already underway. Earlier this year, the Swedish company Oceanbird began construction on a set of 40-meter high, 200 metric ton sails to be retrofitted on the 14-year-old car carrier, Wallenius Tirranna. According to the trade publication Offshore Energy, one of Oceanbird’s sails could cut down emissions by 10 percent, saving around 675,000 liters of diesel per year.

“The maritime industry is on a journey to decarbonize—it’s not an easy one, but it is an exciting one,” said Jan Bieleman, president of Cargill’s ocean transportation business.

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Jaguar has an ambitious vision to go all-electric by 2025 with a new set of EVs. By 2030, the brand plans to launch e-models of its whole lineup. It joins a suite of other carmakers racing to develop zero-emissions vehicles to fight against climate change. And, on the race track, the luxury brand is already showing off its electric prowess. 

Although Jaguar had a Formula 1 team for a few years in the early 2000s, it took a break and didn’t participate in any motorsport activity after 2004. It returned in 2016 through a new all-electric championship called Formula E.

“It was a very immature series, but it had this ability, this scope to be massive,” Jack Lambert, research innovation manager for Jaguar Motorsport, tells PopSci. When the championship launched, the market was only starting to embrace EVs. “And as the technology developed from Gen 1 to Gen 2, and now Gen 3, the road relevance has developed with it.”    

As summer starts winding down, Jaguar is coming to the end of its ninth season of racing in Formula E. Lambert notes that since the first race, EV technology has rapidly progressed, reshaping how the races look. Next year, the company expects to deploy fast-charging systems in its races next year, which will put that technology to the test. “I would imagine in the next two or three seasons, we would see the pure acceleration capabilities of Formula E cars being able to match that of Formula 1,” he says. “We’re catching up.”

[Related: Electric cars are better for the environment, no matter the power source]

During the early phases of the Gen 1 races, when battery technology was less advanced, teams had to use two cars to complete the approximately 30-mile race. “We would see these really dramatic pit stops where the driver would come in and jump out of the car, basically while it was still moving, and try and jump into another one that’s fully charged,” Lambert says. Just six seasons later, he says, Jaguar’s 500-horsepower electric cars have batteries that last the full 50-minute race. Plus, the cars can pull in 600 kilowatts through regenerative braking, an electric vehicle quirk that can convert the kinetic energy from braking into power that charges the battery. 

Formula 1 vs Formula E

They may look similar on the surface, but at the core, Formula 1 and Formula E races are quite different. Formula 1 is known as a constructors’ series. Each team must design and manufacture every element of the vehicle, and consider how a chassis would work with aerodynamics, power units, braking technology, and all of a car’s other systems. 

Formula E, on the other hand, is a manufacturers’ series, which means that a high percentage of each vehicle is the same. “We place our unique development in only certain areas of the car that are technically regulated by the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA). For Formula E, it’s all focused on the powertrain and e-mobility-related technology,” says Lambert. Jaguar’s engineers must figure out how to take power from the battery and get that to the wheel in the most efficient way possible. The crux of their focus is on the inverters, the motors, and the batteries. 

[Related: An inside look at the data powering McLaren’s F1 team] 

Formula E cars operate the way that all EVs do. The batteries store a big block of chemical energy that needs to be turned into kinetic energy at the tires. “The way you do that is you take the energy that comes out of the wheel in the form of voltage and direct current through an inverter,” Lambert explains. The inverter uses several switching methods to convert direct current into an alternating current, in the form of an oscillating sine wave. The motor, which contains a magnet, has a magnetic field. When the oscillating electric current interacts with the rotor’s magnetic field, it creates torque that translates to a gearbox and ultimately drives shafts and tires. 

Race to road

When Jaguar’s team thinks about race to road technology transfer, they aren’t focused on any specific component. Race cars have dramatically different hardware than any road-bound consumer cars. It’s more about the systems engineering approach to solving big-picture problems, such as how to get electric power from the battery to the tires in the most efficient way. 

“Efficient powertrains in racing allow us to be faster and complete the race distance quicker, but actually, the same technology translated into road allow consumer EVs to go further on one charge,” Lambert explains. “There’s a lot of different approaches and a lot of different technologies that enable that.” 

One good example is their work with semiconductor company Wolfspeed on silicon carbide technology, a material that has been used in Jaguar’s race car inverters since 2017. These types of inverters can expand an EV’s overall range, “but at the time it wasn’t appropriate for the market, given that it was very early in its maturation and it was expensive,” says Lambert. “Now what you’re seeing is the automotive industry is catching up. So all the cars that you’ll see on the road going forward, particularly in the luxury space, will have silicon carbide within their inverters.”

Through racing, Jaguar can also observe how its technology behaves and collect relevant data around performance metrics like acceleration and battery use. And data, like in Formula 1, is a powerful tool for the team. 

The design for Formula E cars are checked over and locked in for two seasons. That means once racing regulators approve a car design, the team can’t really change it. What Jaguar’s engineers and developers can tweak in the off-season is their software. In collaboration with IT company Tata Consultancy Services, Jaguar is building analytics platforms to process and handle all the data—3 terabytes every weekend—generated through the races. This software’s capabilities, as tested through racing, could one day help smart or autonomous vehicles on the road. 

Quite often, when the Jaguar team looks at a new EV innovation, they’ll note that it’s not fully developed for consumer vehicles, but it could be put into a race car. “That becomes an early innovation testbed,” says Lambert. “Rather than having something that lives in the virtual space and in the research for two years, we can quickly turn that into proof-of-concept and put it on a race car.”

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Some of the most expensive and difficult-to-source materials found in smartphone screens and solar cells may soon be phased out for a cheaper, exponentially more common substitute. This substitute isn’t a new find—it is actually most often associated with kitchen appliances and motorcycles.

Whenever a company’s fridge, tool, or other item is advertised as “stainless steel,” they have chromium to thank. Manufacturers have long valued the hard, shiny metal’s anticorrosive properties, and adding it into steel allows it to resist degradation and tarnishing. Meanwhile, electroplating a thin layer of chromium atop another metal produces what is commonly known as chrome plating—think Harley-Davidson motorcycles, or hot-rod cars. Chrome can reflect as much as 70 percent of visible spectrum light, as well as 90 percent of infrared radiation.

According to findings recently published in Nature Chemistry from a team at Switzerland’s University of Basel, carefully substituting chromium into catalysts and luminescent materials also works nearly as well as their traditional noble metal components, osmium and ruthenium, but for a fraction of the cost. What’s more, chromium is 20,000 times more common within the Earth’s crust than either noble meta—both of which are nearly as rare as gold or platinum.

[Related: Solar panels are getting more efficient, thanks to perovskite.]

As The Independent explained on August 14, the team first inserted chromium atoms next to hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen within a stiff molecular framework. In this array, chromium was much more reactive than its noble metal counterpoints, while simultaneously keeping energy loss at a minimum during molecular vibrations.

When irradiated by a red lamp, the chromium compound also stored energy within its molecules for potential later use, much like a plant’s photosynthesis. “Because of this, there’s also the potential to use our new materials in artificial photosynthesis to produce solar fuels,” Oliver Wenger, research lead and a professor within the University of Basel’s department of chemistry, said in a recent statement.

Although previous research into noble metal alternatives investigated the potential of using iron and copper to some success, chromium initially appears to perform much better than either option. That said, Wenger concedes that “it seems unclear which metal will ultimately win the race when it comes to future applications in luminescent materials and artificial photosynthesis.”

Going forward, Wenger’s team hopes to scale their research to be tested in other applications, which could allow molecules to glow across the color spectrum to include red, green, and blue hues. Additionally, optimizing its catalytic attributes could further push it towards a viable alternative material to use in solar power arrays.

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Airlines can’t control the weather. They can only do the next best thing, which is to predict upcoming hazards as accurately as possible, as soon as possible, and plan ahead for route disruptions. To do that, they need a team of meteorologists tracking conditions in the sky and on the ground. Delta Air Lines gave PopSci a peek into the inner workings of their weather team. Here’s what we found out. 

“There’s always weather. Every summer, we’re always ready for thunderstorms, we’re always ready for hot temperatures across the desert southwest,” says Warren Weston, lead meteorologist at Delta. Summer brings its unique set of challenges. For this summer in particular, Weston says they observed a fairly persistent high pressure set up across the desert southwest. 

“When we saw the hot temperatures, we started producing a daily forecast for Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Salt Lake City, that was available not only to our decision-makers here within our operation center, but it was also visible to the station managers in the field,” he adds. “And they could look at each day to see what the temperature was each hour, so they would know what hours of the day to expect the highest impact, and we were able to give them this higher resolution data for them to make decisions.” 

[Related: You can blame Southwest Airlines’ holiday catastrophe on outdated software]

Climate change is adding another set of challenges for meteorologists. But weather is an incredibly data-driven field, and Weston hopes that with the learnings they gather each summer, they’ll be able to predict hazardous events in a better and more timely manner. 

Here’s a detailed look at the breakdown of the meteorology team’s job. Delta boasts that it has 23 meteorologists on staff, which is more than any other airline. 

Every day, this team provides weather briefings to the operations operators at airports, and monitors ongoing conditions. They source a great deal of publicly available data from the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The team also uses in-house data for their predictions. For instance, if a plane is flying from point A to point B, and they start receiving turbulence, they can make a pilot report. That report is visible inside of Delta’s operation center, and the team can use that information to refine their turbulence forecast. 

Airline meterologists are the sole weather providers for Delta Air Lines. But every day they collaborate with government meteorologists and other airline meteorologists on highlighted areas of concern, like if a line of thunderstorms is traveling across a specific area in the US. They also collaborate with the air traffic control system command center in Washington DC to give them an idea of what Delta is thinking in terms of tailoring their routes based on the forecasts.

The meteorologists are split into two groups: The “surface desk” and the “upper air desk.”

The surface desk meteorologists look at Delta’s hub airports like Atlanta and New York City closely and puts out detailed hourly forecasts, primarily for the next 30 hours. “On those desks we’re looking for things like thunderstorms, is there going to be low clouds causing fog, or anything that could prevent us from getting into that airport when we attempt to land,” says Weston.

The “upper air desk” looks at high-level turbulence and other conditions such as space weather like solar flares, concentrations of ozone, and even volcanic ash, which can damage an airplane’s engines.

“On the upper air side, most of our forecasts are happening well before the flight is planned. If you think about a 10-hour flight from the US to Europe, you need a forecast that’s valid for the next 10 or 15 hours, not just right now,” Weston says. “We’re looking at turbulence, thunderstorms, and working with our flight planners to find the most efficient route with the least amount of turbulence.”

For example, if there was a snowstorm forecast for New York City, they’ll start issuing updates a few days before the storm gets there to other parts of the operation like the station manager looking at staffing levels. Extra hands may be needed if planes need de-icing. If it isn’t planned for, that can all cause delays. 

[Related: How a quantum computer tackles a surprisingly difficult airport problem]

If a hurricane or severe storm is brewing, the meteorology team has to issue a specific forecast showing when the main impacts will be. “Most of the times in a hurricane you’ll get winds high enough that it’s over the threshold that an airplane is able to land or take off in. So it’s our job to narrow down that time frame to say between this period and this period, conditions are going to be inoperable,” Weston explains. “But, as we get outside of this time period, the winds will come down and we should be able to gradually start operating, and restore operation to a certain region.” 

The team monitors air quality conditions too, not just for seeing whether planes can fly, but for ensuring that the ground crew is staying safe as well. In that respect, wildfire smoke has become an item of note to look out for. “Smoke is very unique because of course we don’t predict the formation of smoke, because that’s predicting a forest fire which we are not in the business of doing,” Weston says. “But our concern with the fire is that it results in mostly air quality issues. If the air quality because of the smoke reaches a certain threshold, then there’s processes in place, like having [the ground crew members] mask, or having them work outside only for a certain amount of time.”

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Shaking around some crumpled balls of tinfoil may not seem like a very productive action. But surprisingly, it can generate enough electricity to power a small LED light. At least that’s what an experiment recently described in the journal Advanced Science shows. 

The crinkled foil balls rattling around are part of a tubular contraption called a triboelectric nanogenerator that the researchers constructed to harness the energy of movement. Here, by playing with the charges generated through contact electrification and electrostatic induction (think static electricity), mechanical energy can be converted into electricity.

The first such device to use this type of physics for power comes from a 2012 study by Zhong Ling Wang from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and his colleagues. Similar ideas, like taking the mechanical energy generated by soundwaves and turning them into power, have also been around for a decade or so. 

[Related: How to turn AAA batteries into AAs]

Since then, that idea has been iterated upon many times, with different research groups switching out the materials and trialing various designs. Such technology could have applications for smart homes, multi-purpose clothing, and other remote sensors. 

This recent version in Advanced Science proposes foil balls as a way to both generate electricity but also recycle used aluminum foil that would otherwise go into the bin.  

[Related: Hyperspectral imaging can detect chemical signatures of earthbound objects from space]

According to the paper, this device “primarily comprises an acrylic substrate, a charge-inducing polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) layer, aluminum top and bottom electrodes, and crumpled aluminum foil.” The foil balls, which are positively charged, shuttle electrons from one electrode to another as they’re shaken. 

This mechanism, interacting with the air around it, can produce an electric field that plays an important role in the charging and discharging cycle, seen commonly in batteries. This process can produce just a little bit of juice.

While this tiny amount of energy may never be able to power serious electronics like a flatscreen TV, it could be integrated into a light, portable charger. The researchers tested it on smaller devices like 500 light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and 30-W commercial lamps, and it performed well.

Watch the device at work below:

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A new high-speed railway system inspired by Japanese bullet trains could someday carry commuters between Houston and Dallas in under 90 minutes. Announced on Wednesday, the partnership between Amtrak and a company called Texas Central aims to connect the two cities by train, spanning roughly 240 miles at speeds upwards of 205 mph.

According to Quartz, the applications have already been submitted to “several federal grant programs” to help finance research and design costs. Amtrak representatives estimate the project could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by over 100,000 tons annually and remove an estimated 12,500 cars per day from the region’s I-45 corridor. The reduction in individual vehicles on the roads could also save as much as 65 million gallons of fuel each year.

[Related: High-speed rail trains are stalled in the US—and that might not change for a while.]

The trains traveling Amtrak’s Dallas-Houston route would be based on Japan’s updated N700S Series Shinkansen “bullet train,” a design that first debuted in 2020. Bullet trains have operated in Japan for over half a century, and are now completely electric, as well as lighter and quieter than traditional railcars. Additionally, the transportation method generates just one-sixth the amount of carbon-per-passenger mile than a standard commercial jet, according to Texas Central’s descriptions.

“This high-speed train, using advanced, proven Shinkansen technology, has the opportunity to revolutionize rail travel in the southern US,” Texas Central CEO Michael Bui said via the August 9 announcement.

[Related: A brief, buttery ride on Shanghai’s maglev train.]

American city planners have been drawn to the idea of high-speed railways for decades, but have repeatedly fallen short of getting them truly on track due to a host of issues, including funding, political pushback, and cultural hurdles. That said, 85 percent of recently surveyed travelers between Dallas and the greater North Texas area indicated they would ride such a form of transportation “in the right circumstances.” If so, as many as 6 million travelers could be expected to ride the train by the end of the decade, with the number rising to 13 million by 2050. Similar high-speed projects are also in the works to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles (though no track has actually been installed yet), as well as another that hopes to connect LA and Las Vegas, although repeated setbacks have delayed such endeavors.

“The US is really a very auto-centric country,” Ian Rainey, a senior vice president at Northeast Maglev, told PopSci in 2022. “… If you can get that sweet spot of big populations that are 100 to 300 miles apart from each other, I think you’ve got a winner for high-speed rail.” 

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In Overmatched, we take a close look at the science and technology at the heart of the defense industry—the world of soldiers and spies.

YOU’RE STANDING at the top of a mountain, elated to have reached the summit. But when you reach into your pack for some water, your foot gets wedged between two rocks, and you fall and crack your ankle. While you’re not dead, you definitely can’t hike down. You need help. Luckily, you have an SOS device: a little piece of technology that can communicate with satellites to send a cry for help, along with your location and maybe a text or two, to authorities. Teams mobilize to come get you. 

In this hypothetical scenario, you were in the backcountry for recreation—to have fun. But satellite communication and tracking aren’t useful just for hikers, hunters, and mountaineers who have no cell signal. It’s also important for those doing their jobs in the kinds of wild, harsh environments that could otherwise leave them incommunicado: people like those on search-and-rescue teams who would help an injured hiker, as well as miners, forestry technicians, wildland firefighters, and soldiers. 

To make communication easier for all those folks, a company called Everywhere Communications has brought together services from two powerhouses of the industry—Iridium, maker of satellites, and Garmin, maker of GPS devices—to create a secure system that organizations can use to track and communicate with extremely remote employees and assets. If you did, in fact, crack your ankle on a peak, the search-and-rescue team that would mobilize might use Everywhere to help themselves help you. Today, the company has 300 customers, including the US government and the US national parks. 

Global SOS

Patrick Shay, who founded Everywhere Communications in 2016 along with a core team, has a long history in the finding-things and communications spaces. Earlier in his career, while working at Motorola and Sirius, Shay was instrumental in putting SOS buttons in cars, the first being a fancy one: a $100,000 S-Class Mercedes. After that, he joined Iridium. Iridium, initially funded by Motorola, created and launched a constellation of communications satellites and the bulky satellite phones you may have seen in ’90s movies. 

Finally, Shay joined a company called DeLorme, which created inReach, an SOS device that allows its users to track themselves, call for help, and send messages to civilization. In 2016, Garmin bought DeLorme and thus acquired inReach. But the device, and most commercial satellite communications tech today, tends to end up in the hands of outdoorsy recreators rather than people with dirty and dangerous jobs such as those in defense. Shay wanted to reach out to that latter segment. “At Everywhere, we focus on exclusively government and business,” he says. That includes the business of search and rescue.

But he didn’t want to start from scratch. Why reinvent the wheel when it’s already rolling around? So Everywhere formed a partnership with Garmin, which by then owned the inReach technology whose development Shay had been a part of. The inReach device looks like a diminutive walkie-talkie, and in its smallest form, the burnt-orange-and-black device weighs just 3.5 ounces and measures 4 inches tall by 2 inches wide. 

“We were incredibly fortunate because we do business with our old friends,” says Shay of his colleagues from DeLorme. Those friends allowed Everywhere to take off-the-shelf versions of inReach and add firmware that makes it secure and encrypted enough for professional and government use and also lets operators erase all the data remotely if a device gets lost. “The reason that happened,” says Shay, of the partnership and device modifications, “was because of personal relationships and history.”

Those security features were necessary if Everywhere was to appeal to the feds, because traditional satellite communications—including those of the Iridium constellation, on which Everywhere relies—have historically been simple to hack, allowing clever eavesdroppers to intercept communications. 

The software, too, needed amping up to appeal to this new crowd, so Everywhere has created code that operates differently from what you’d interact with as a civilian carrying a device like a Garmin inReach on a peak-bagging quest. Most important is the Everywhere Hub, a web-based portal that functions like an incident command center or a security operations center—the place with all the information that directs the people in the field. “That’s that room with all the TVs on the wall,” says Shay. “And one of those TVs is a picture of the world with a bunch of blinking dots and lights.” Those little lights are the team members. “If somebody in Yemen pushes an SOS button, it’s going to light up on that screen,” Shay continues.

These aren’t totally new capabilities, but Everywhere combined them into one package rather than requiring a hodgepodge of services and gadgets. The company’s innovation is taking existing hardware, modifying it for security, and linking it with Everywhere’s own professional software backbone. 

The software also has capabilities your average casual elk hunter wouldn’t need. For instance, a person using the Everywhere Hub can create a “geofence,” essentially a boundary in space and time. When, say, a soldier or miner enters or leaves that specific area during that specific time, the command center gets an alert. Those soldiers and miners could also send large amounts of information back to base, or to each other, like data regarding which streets are flooded or where a sensitive material like uranium is. And anyone driving a secured vehicle—be that a car full of cash or the lead vehicle in a security convoy—could be tracked along their route. Home base can also schedule check-ins for workers—meaning they don’t have to be tracked all the time.

A satellite constellation

All that connection is possible because of the Iridium satellite constellation—66 spacecraft in orbit—and cellular network. Together, they provide coverage for the whole planet, all the time, so no matter where you are, you can communicate if you have a device like the inReach. Iridium also allows a device to transmit information about its location—information the device gathers from GPS satellites. The GPS satellites do the pinpointing, but communications satellites relay those pinpoints. Like SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites, the Iridium spacecraft live in low Earth orbit, around 500 miles from Earth, so signals like those to and from an inReach can whiz back and forth quickly, without the lag time caused by more distant orbits. 

While Iridium does make its own communications and tracking devices, it also sells chips and antennas to other outfits, like Garmin, so they can implant those in their devices, or stick them to their assets, allowing their own technology to enable a connection from the satellites.

“Other networks were going after who can provide the fastest internet pipe to your home or remote cabin,” says Matt Desch, Iridium’s CEO. “We weren’t going after that. That’s not what we do.” 

Instead, Iridium aims to provide extremely mobile connections, like those that firefighters, miners, soldiers, and searchers would need as they roam in the field and use Everywhere’s services. More than 60,000 aircraft—including medevac helicopters whose position and ability to communicate are lifesaving, not just vacation-enabling—also have Iridium chips inside. Iridium’s network also guides autonomous vehicles on land, by sea, or in the air. For example, Swoop Aero’s drones use it above the ground, and SailDrone’s uncrewed boats use it on the surface of the ocean. 

Military or aid organizations can also stick sensors on, say, pallets of food and water to make sure they get delivered to their intended destination, or use the antennas to send, for example, weather and seismic information from ground sensors to an intelligence outfit halfway across the world. The ability to do such data transfer is especially important, militarily, in the Arctic: Near the top of the Earth—where missile warning and air surveillance are prime activities—satellite comms are really the only option. And when teams are completing missions, or helping deliver aid, an organization can use a software-hardware combo system like Everywhere to watch the boots on the ground from the comfort of the incident command room and to send a text if, say, someone looks stuck.

People have typically gone to areas like distant summits to be a little alone, to disappear for a while, to feel self-sufficient, and, maybe, to not be tracked. But when people need rescuing, the ability to call for help and say where to send it can trump that desire for solitude. And when you’re out there—or in a combat zone without cell service, or on a cross-conflict trek with no infrastructure, or deep in a mine or forest—for work, a bit of job security, in the more literal sense of the word, can be lifesaving.

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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The current AI boom demands a lot of computing power. Right now, most of that comes from Nvidia’s GPUs, or graphics processing units—the company supplies somewhere around 90 percent of the AI chip market. In an announcement this week, it aims to extend its dominance with its newly announced next-generation GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip platform.

While most consumers are more likely to think of GPUs as a component of a gaming PC or video games console, they have uses far outside the realms of entertainment. They are designed to perform billions of simple calculations in parallel, a feature that allows them to not only render high definition computer graphics at high frame rates, but that also enables them to mine crypto currencies, crack passwords, and train and run large language models (LLMs) and other forms of generative AI. Really, the name GPU is pretty out of date—they are now incredibly powerful multi-purpose parallel processors.

Nvidia announced its next-generation GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip platform this week at SIGGRAPH, a computer graphics conference. The chips, the company explained in a press release, were “created to handle the world’s most complex generative AI workloads, spanning large language models, recommender systems and vector databases.” In other words, they’re designed to do the billions of tiny calculations that these AI systems require as quickly and efficiently as possible.

The GH200 is a successor to the H100, Nvidia’s most powerful (and incredibly in demand) current-generation AI-specific chip. The GH200 will use the same GPU but have 141 GB of memory compared to the 80 GB available on the H100. The GH200 will also be available in a few other configurations, including a dual configuration that combines two GH200s that will provide “3.5x more memory capacity and 3x more bandwidth than the current generation offering.”

[Related: A simple guide to the expansive world of artificial intelligence]

The GH200 is designed for use in data centers, like those operated by Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. “To meet surging demand for generative AI, data centers require accelerated computing platforms with specialized needs,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA in the press release. “The new GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip platform delivers this with exceptional memory technology and bandwidth to improve throughput, the ability to connect GPUs to aggregate performance without compromise, and a server design that can be easily deployed across the entire data center.”

Chips like the GH200 are important for both training and running (or “inferencing”) AI models. When AI developers are creating a new LLM or other AI model, dozens or hundreds of GPUs are used to crunch through the massive amount of training data. Then, once the model is ready, more GPUs are required to run it. The additional memory capacity will allow each GH200 to run larger AI models without needing to split the computing workload up over several different GPUs. Still, for “giant models,” multiple GH200s can be combined with Nvidia NVLink.

Although Nvidia is the most dominant player, it isn’t the only manufacturer making AI chips. AMD recently announced the MI300X chip with 192 GB of memory which will go head to head with the GH200, but it remains to be seen if it will be able to take a significant share of the market. There are also a number of start ups that are making AI chips, like SambaNova, Graphcore, and Tenstorrent. Tech giants such as Google and Amazon have developed their own, but they all likewise trail Nvidia in the market. 

Nvidia expects systems built using its GH200 chip to be available in Q2 of next year. It hasn’t yet said how much they will cost, but given that H100s can sell for more than $40,000, it’s unlikely that they will be used in many gaming PCs.

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Sealed safely inside the International Space Station, astronauts dress for comfort and convenience. Their typical getups—short-sleeve collared shirts and long cargo pants—are regular Earth clothes, sourced from retailers that include Cabela’s and Lands’ End. But astronauts require exceptional attire when outside the ISS’s climate-controlled confines. NASA’s chunky spacesuits are, essentially, spacecraft condensed to human size. They protect wearers from an environment that swings from 250 degrees Fahrenheit in the sun to minus 250 degrees in the shade. 

Inside the suits, spacewalkers often work up a sweat, despite cooling tubes that wick away body heat. Extravehicular activities, or EVAs, may involve hours of strenuous labor. To stay warm and pressurized, astronauts also have to wear layers—including an inner form-fitting garment akin to long underwear—that they re-wear and even share. Complicating matters still: There are no laundry machines on the ISS. Because water is so valuable, washing a suit in orbit is not an option. Which is why NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and other organizations have asked textiles experts to investigate the problem of biocontamination in suits and develop fabrics that might solve it.

[Related: Future astronauts and space tourists could rock 3D printed ‘second skin’]

Heavy work in heavy gear leads to filth. After mock EVAs on Earth, technicians who help peel stand-in astronauts out of their suits have learned to turn their heads away on the first unzip to avoid a stinky blast, says Gernot Grömer, director of the Austrian Space Forum, a research group that conducts simulated astronautical missions. “Everybody sees those beautiful, shiny white spacesuits. But nobody knows what it smells like at the ISS.” (It’s not particularly pleasant.)

As these suits are used again and again, worries go beyond foul odors to hygiene and health hazards. The possibility for biocontamination, which includes human debris, bacteria, and other foreign substances, may get worse as spacefarers travel past low-Earth orbit for longer trips to the moon. 

“Washing spacesuit interiors on a consistent basis may well not be practical” in lunar habitats, ESA materials and processes engineer Malgorzata Holynska says in a statement. That space agency is investing in unusual ways to keep suits clean, such as antibiotic chemicals churned out by microbes.

Some of the fabrics were infused with copper, which has impressive antimicrobial properties. When bacteria touch the element, it destabilizes their cell walls and membranes, making the microbes vulnerable to damage from the metal’s ions. The NASA scientists also examined textiles treated with silver—likewise toxic to germs on contact—and silicone.

After observing the gunk that grew on the fabrics for up to 14 days, they found that only one compound kept bacteria and fungi below targets set by NASA’s Constellation program—a now-defunct plan for lunar missions in which a spacesuit would have been reused up to 90 times in six months. The winner was a solution of silver molecules used for disinfecting hospital dressings and other fabrics. But the metal ion was too good at its job. “It kills everything,” Orndoff says. Total sterility can cause even more problems than grime, given than humans need a balanced ecosystem of millions of microorganisms to keep the skin and other organs healthy.

The experiments showed that concentrations of other antimicrobial compounds were generally too low to be effective. Some microbes would initially dip in numbers, but the resistant ones would repopulate the samples. The scientists worried that, at high-enough amounts, antimicrobial particles would irritate anyone wearing the fabric or pollute the space station. “After that we never really revisited antimicrobial treatments,” Orndoff explains, for the “simple reason” that it would present complications for the ISS life-support system that provides clean air and water. 

[Related: Onboard the ISS, nothing goes to waste—including sweat and pee]

While Orndoff’s team did not pursue their idea further, NASA’s commercial contractors have. In 2022, the agency hired US companies Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace to develop the next generation of suits for spacewalks. Earlier this year, Axiom unveiled a prototype suit that Artemis III astronauts might use to explore the lunar south pole. In a statement to Popular Science, the company says: “The Axiom Space AxEMU spacesuits will use textiles that have antimicrobial properties to reduce biocontamination.” The suits’ cooling system will also use biocide in its water loops “to prevent microbial buildup.” The company did not share the exact type of the agents, citing their proprietary nature.

One metabolite in particular, named violacein, survived every hostile attack with its antimicrobial properties intact. The purple-black substance can be found in the bacteria that live on the skin of red-backed salamanders. It’s so good at killing microbes that some biologists suspect it protects the amphibians from deadly chytrid fungus infections. The Austrian Space Forum plans to field-test violacein in a simulated Mars mission, in which six astronaut roleplayers will spend four weeks in Armenia’s rugged mountains in 2024. 

Grömer envisions a future where this pigment’s potent defenses leave the planet, not only on treated spacesuits but also towels and other gear. While dirty linens might just sound like a chore, they can be a breeding ground for microbes, which thrive in low gravity and may mutate faster in space. “When you go to Mars, you’re at the edge of what’s technologically possible, so little nuisances can transform into real disaster-prone situations,” Grömer says. “And so if there’s a risk we can control, hell, let’s do it.”

The post How do you keep a spacesuit clean? One answer is antimicrobial fabric. appeared first on Popular Science.

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An archive of international art is headed to the moon this year. The project, called the Lunar Codex, brands itself as “a message-in-a-bottle to the future, so that travelers who find these time capsules might discover some of the richness of our world today.” It will contain contemporary art, poetry, magazines, music, film, podcasts and books by 30,000 artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers from 157 countries.

The project is run by Incandence, a private company that owns the physical time capsules, the archival technology used in the capsules, and related trademarks, and was thought up by Canadian scientist and author Samuel Peralta, who is the executive chairman of Incandence. 

From 2023 to 2026, in a parallel mission with the Artemis launches, NASA will not only send scientific instruments to the moon, but also carry commercial payloads from partners. Peralta, in July 2020, purchased payload space from Astrobotic Technology, reserving it for the time capsules that would make up the Lunar Codex. Then the submissions rolled in. Artists do not have to pay to be considered, but the works that make it in have all been hand-selected. 

If all goes according to plan, the project will be a permanent installation on the moon, sitting within a MoonPod onboard the lunar lander for the Astrobotic Peregrine Mission 1 scheduled to launch later this year. The team plans to send multiple collections via multiple launches on rockets from SpaceX and the United Launch Alliance. 

Such a message requires an equally enduring medium. The one chosen by Lunar Codex is NanoFiche—a nickel-based material that etches shrunken down versions of texts and photos onto a disc-like surface. According to Lunar Codex, a single disc, which is around 3 centimeters across, can hold hundreds of small square images, each 2,000 pixels by 2,000 pixels in size. They come in sets of three in order to portray color, one channel each for red, green, and blue. 

According to Lunar Codex, each disc “can store 150,000 pages of text or photos on a single 8.5”x11” sheet. It is currently the highest density storage media in the world.” The benefit of these discs is that you can read the data easily with a microscope, or a really powerful magnifying glass, no software needed. It bypasses the difficulties many forms of digital storage have today, which is that digital data, usually kept in the form of bits, can degrade over time. 

Since nickel does not oxidize, degrade, or melt (unless under extreme high temperatures), and can withstand various types of environmental factors that they might have to withstand in outer space like radiation and electromagnetic radiation, it’s the most stable, and probably cheapest form of long-term storage option. The Arch Lunar Library, an effort by the non-profit Arch Mission Foundation to preserve human culture and knowledge, also uses NanoFiche as its preferred form of storage. 

[Related: Inside the search for the best way to save humanity’s data]

This kind of storage does have some limitations. For example, capturing film and music would be tedious and expensive. For film, each frame would have to be etched—a daunting task. As an alternative, screenplays or scripts are captured instead. And for music, it’s represented as sheet music or hex-encoded MIDI files. 

The Lunar Codex is also experimenting with another way to archive music, by etching their waveform and frequency spectrograms onto NanoFiche. “The original music may be  reconstructed via sound wave analysis algorithms,” Peralta explains on the website. 

Of course, The Lunar Codex isn’t the first project to set foot on the moon. Other than the Arch Mission Foundation’s Lunar library, and an assortment of miscellaneous human trash left behind, there’s also “The Moon Museum” which arrived with Apollo 12 in 1969. It was an etched ceramic wafer smuggled onto a lander leg.

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On July 16, 1945, at 5:30 am, the first atomic bomb in history was detonated at what is now White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The Trinity test was named as such by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the first director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the central figure in Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster biopic Oppenheimer. Getting the science of atomic fission correct was hard work—up to the moment of the test scientists were taking bets on whether or not the explosion would ignite all the oxygen in the atmosphere (it didn’t). Important, also, was the difficult work of capturing the test on film, a feat that had never been done before.

Filming Trinity allowed the scientists to have a record of the test for analysis after the act. So much in an atomic reaction happens quickly, and any instruments that could normally measure blast details in proximity would be destroyed by a successful explosion. That meant relying on distance photography, and developing special high-speed cameras in order to capture in precise detail moments of the blast fractions of a second apart.

Photographing Trinity

Specialized cameras were used to study atomic processes in the laboratory setting, and then more advanced cameras were adapted to capture the test site. These cameras provided important and durable information, but the only color still photograph of the test happened to be captured by the personal camera of a civilian employee of the labs, Jack Aeby.

“[I] aimed the camera at the detonation point, which was roughly 6,000 yards away,” Aeby told the Atomic Heritage Foundation. He had four shots left on a roll of color film when he went down to the test site, and one of those shots ended up being the only color capture of the explosion. “I released the shutter, it closed, I cranked the exposure down to where it was reasonable, at about 1,000th of a second, and fired the other three shots in rapid succession. The middle one, by luck, turned out to be just about the right exposure—the other two were usable but not as clear or in focus.”

That photograph ended up being one of the first images of the Trinity test the Army released, and it was used by the researchers to confirm what they had calculated about the explosion.

“They actually did one of the first yield measurements by measuring the width of the fireball and estimated time of when that was made and they could back calculate something resembling a good estimate of the yield. It turned out to be in agreement with the other estimates they had,” said Aeby.

Beyond Aeby’s camera and his lucky shot, the Manhattan Project records that 52 different cameras were used to capture the detonation. Most of them were cameras used to record motion pictures, so many of the photographs that endure today from the blast are stills taken from film.

“I was just sitting there with the camera running. Everything was operated from the central control station. Turned on. So I didn’t have to do anything at the time but just sit there. The camera started running,” Manhattan project photographer Berlin Brixner told the Los Alamos Historical Society. Brixner had gone with scientist Kenneth Bainbridge to set up the Trinity site and the photography stations needed, and was managing the cameras for the test.

“Of course it was nighttime, I couldn’t see anything. But when the explosion went off, that welding glass seemed to just glow white, intense white like the sun. So it just blinded me, so I looked aside to the left, the Oscuras Mountains were at the left, and they were just lit up like daylight then. So I looked at that for a few seconds, and then I looked back through my welding glass and I saw that the terrific explosion had taken place. Just unbelievably large explosion. My camera was just sitting there, but soon the ball of fire was starting to rise and I thought, gee, I better get busy. So abruptly I raised it and photographed the ball of fire as it went up to the stratosphere. I kept photographing it for the next couple of minutes or so,” Brizner continued.

[Related: Survivors of America’s first atomic bomb test want their place in history]

Many cameras were set up at fixed locations, some as close as 800 yards from the explosion. To ensure that these cameras could work through the blast, they were set up in shelters, angled facing mirrors that were pointed at the blast. It was raining the night of July 15, and the rain did not let up until the early hours of July 16, so Brizner and a technician had to go and clean the lenses from water and dust to ensure the film worked. Most of the cameras worked, creating footage visible today.

Where can I see Trinity photographs?

Several collections of Trinity photographs exist online, with varying degrees of curation. Los Alamos National Laboratory, the great inheritor of the Manhattan Project’s theoretical division, has shared an album on Flickr of test photographs titled “Trinity to Trinity.” This album includes Aeby’s color photograph, pictures of the mushroom cloud at time intervals from 0.006 seconds to 16 seconds, as well as pictures of Gadget (as the explosive device was called) before the test, and the Trinity site afterwards.

[Related: Watch a 1953 nuclear blast test disintegrate a house in high resolution]

Los Alamos National Laboratory is part of the Department of Energy, and the Department of Energy’s Manhattan Project interactive history includes an animated gif made from film of the first 0.11 seconds of the Trinity explosion. The Atomic Archive offers a guided slideshow of Trinity site and test photographs. 

The Atomic Heritage Foundation has galleries of Trinity test footage, including shots of the specially modified military tanks used to test the soil after the detonation. One of the more haunting and unusual images of the blast is that captured by the only pinhole camera at the test, used by photographer Julian Mack.

The Atomic Heritage Foundation’s YouTube page also offers videos of the test. The test can be seen in black and white (embedded below, as well), color, and close-up.

Twice a year, the White Sands Missile Range opens up to the first 5,000 visitors at the site, who can go and walk around the Trinity crater. As part of the display, photographs of the Trinity test are mounted on the chain link fence surrounding the crater. For 2023, the Army expects a higher than usual number of visitors to the site. 

After images

Nolan’s film leaves out direct imagery of the people killed by atomic bombs the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though it does feature the audio from a filmed Manhattan Project report of the devastation wrought by the weapons. 

The Atomic Archive has galleries of damage at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and of Nuclear Effects on Humans, the latter of which carries a warning:  “These images can be quite graphic, and should be viewed with caution.”

One way to view photographs and understand the attacks on Japan, which are inseparable from the test at Trinity, is through the stories of hibakusha, or atomic bomb survivors. A digital archive project, developed in 2010-2011, allows readers to click over digital maps of the cities, and view stories and images from the people who lived in them at the time of the bombing. Paired with photography from the devastation, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki digital archives offer a deeper perspective on the cities, beyond just targets on the map.

The post How the real Trinity test was filmed and photographed, and where to watch it appeared first on Popular Science.

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Earth’s air is often a decent, convenient coolant for military planes’ electronics systems, while ocean waters function similarly for naval ships. But neither source is exactly available the farther you get from the planet’s surface—say, the upper atmosphere and outer space, for example. There, it’s much more difficult to keep electronics at safe temperatures, given that coolant is heavy and takes up valuable onboard real estate. According to new findings recently published in ACS Nano, one potential aid could be found via harnessing plasma—ironically, the same matter that composes stars and lightning bolts.

Researchers at the University of Virginia’s Experiments and Simulations in Thermal Engineering (ExSITE) Lab have discovered an extremely promising, previously unrealized way to quickly cool down surfaces: plasma “freeze” rays.

[Related: Will future planes fly on wings of plasma?]

Using plasma to lower temperatures may seem counterintuitive—after all, plasma can easily heat to 45,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and higher—but according to mechanical and aerospace engineer Patrick Hopkins, shooting a focused jet of matter’s fourth state can offer some incredibly interesting thermodynamic results.

“What I specialize in is doing really, really fast and really, really small measurements of temperature,” Hopkins recently explained. “So when we turned on the plasma, we could measure temperature immediately where the plasma hit, then we could see how the surface changed.”

In their experiments, Hopkin’s team fired a purple jet of helium-generated plasma through a thin needle coated in ceramic onto a gold-plated target. They then measured the effects on the target’s surface using specialized, custom microscopic instruments, only to record some incredible results.

“We saw the surface cool first, then it would heat up,” said Hopkins.

After repeated tests and observations of the phenomenon, the team determined the plasma beam must be first striking a micro-thin layer of carbon and water molecules, which quickly evaporates the coating much like what happens when you air dry after getting out of a pool in the summer. Or, more simply, Hopkins is making the materials sweat.

“Evaporation of water molecules on the body requires energy; it takes energy from [the] body, and that’s why you feel cold,” said Hopkins. “In this case, the plasma rips off the absorbed [molecules], energy is released, and that’s what cools.”

Researchers measured a decrease in temperature as much as a few degrees for a few microseconds—perhaps unimpressive on a human scale, but such a difference could be extremely helpful in delicate, highly advanced electronics and instruments. Going forward, Hopkins’ team is experimenting with both various plasma gasses, as well as their impact on different materials like copper and semiconductors. Eventually, the researchers envision a time when robotic arm attachments can pinpoint hotspots in devices to cool via tiny plasma shots from an electrode.

“This plasma jet is like a laser beam; it’s like a lightning bolt,” said Hopkins. “It can be extremely localized.”

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Every time a delicious kernel of corn passes your lips or you crunch into a slice of crusty, freshly-baked bread, you can thank a farmer. According to the US Department of Agriculture, farming and food-related industries contributed about $1.3 trillion to America’s gross domestic product in 2021. 

It’s not a stretch to say that agriculture is critical to our lives, as is the machinery that prepares the land, plants and fertilizes the seed, precisely pulls the weeds, and harvests it all. From its inception in 1837, John Deere started by manufacturing a steel plow and has evolved into a modern company producing highly technical equipment. But beyond making farming vehicles like combines and tractors, the Illinois-based company also manufactures heavy construction and forestry machines such as motor graders, dump trucks, and skidders.

[Related: The metallic guts of GE’s massive jet engines, in photos]

Here’s an inside look at this colossal machinery and the people who put it all together in the John Deere Davenport Works factory in Davenport, Iowa.

[Related: An exclusive look inside where nuclear subs are born]

Correction: This article has been updated to clarify that the equipment made at the Davenport, Iowa facility is for construction, not farming. Additionally, a dump truck originally identified at a 410 P-Tier has been updated to be correctly described as a 310 P-Tier.

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Storing clean energy is as vital as harvesting it. Unfortunately, the vast majority of rechargeable batteries currently rely on rare earth metals like lithium, the mining of which is fraught with environmental and ethical issues. According to researchers, however, a promising alternative can be found simply by combining two of civilization’s oldest and most commonplace materials: cement, and the charcoal-like mixture known as carbon black.

As detailed in a new study published on July 31 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, engineers working together from MIT and the Wyss Institute recently discovered that properly mixing the two ingredients in electrolyte-infused water creates a powerful, low-cost supercapacitor capable of storing electricity for later usage. With some further fine-tuning and experimentation, the team believes their enriched cement material could one day compose portions of buildings’ foundations, or even create wireless charging.

[Related: This rechargeable battery is meant to be eaten.]

Much like batteries, supercapacitors store and direct large reserves of electrical power. To do this, designers soak two conductive plates in an electrolyte solution before inserting a membrane between them. Once charged, the barrier then prevents ions from traveling between the positive and negative plates, thus storing the potential power for later usage.

In the case of researchers’ new cement-based material, however, its relatively high internal surface area is key to its supercapacitor potential. After combining highly conductive carbon black, cement powder, and water, researchers wait for their resultant mixture to cure. During this time, the water naturally creates tiny openings which are subsequently filed by the carbon to ostensibly create an internal, fractal-like network of wiring. Position two plates of this material atop one another and separate them by an insulating layer, and you have a novel supercapacitor at your disposal.

According to researchers such as paper co-author Admir Masic, the new material is as promising as it is poignant—cement usage dates as far back as 6,500 BCE, while carbon black was the ink authors employed to pen the Dead Sea Scrolls.

“You have these at least two-millennia-old materials that, when you combine them in a specific manner, you come up with a conductive nanocomposite, and that’s when things get really interesting,” Masic said in a statement.

The team envisions projects such as stretches of roadways imbued with the concrete supercapacitator material wired to nearby solar panel arrays. Similar to experimental projects already underwayin Europe, the streets themselves could then be harnessed to wireless charge vehicles as they ride atop the surface. But before they get to such a potentially revolutionary civic engineering project, researchers have to start small.

[Related: Get ready for the world’s first permanent EV-charging road.]

To initially test their new material, Masic and their colleagues first created a trio of tiny, 1 volt supercapacitator prototypes, each roughly 1cm in diameter and 1mm-thick. When wired together, the three conductors easily powered a 3-volt LED. Going forward, the team hopes to scale up their prototypes to a 12-volt example comparable to an EV battery, then a 45-cubic-meter supercapacitator capable of hypothetically powering an entire home.

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Tech giant Google and its subsidiary AI research lab, DeepMind, have created a basic human-to-robot translator of sorts. They describe it as a “first-of-its-kind vision-language-action model.” The pair said in two separate announcements Friday that the model, called RT-2, is trained with language and visual inputs and is designed to translate knowledge from the web into instructions that robots can understand and respond to.

In a series of trials, the robot demonstrated that it can recognize and distinguish between the flags of different countries, a soccer ball from a basketball, pop icons like Taylor Swift, and items like a can of Red Bull. 

“The pursuit of helpful robots has always been a herculean effort, because a robot capable of doing general tasks in the world needs to be able to handle complex, abstract tasks in highly variable environments — especially ones it’s never seen before,” Vincent Vanhoucke, head of robotics at Google DeepMind, said in a blog post. “Unlike chatbots, robots need ‘grounding’ in the real world and their abilities… A robot needs to be able to recognize an apple in context, distinguish it from a red ball, understand what it looks like, and most importantly, know how to pick it up.”

That means that training robots traditionally required generating billions of data points from scratch, along with specific instructions and commands. A task like telling a bot to throw away a piece of trash involved programmers explicitly training the robot to identify the object that is the trash, the trash can, and what actions to take to pick the object up and throw it away. 

For the last few years, Google has been exploring various avenues of teaching robots to do tasks the way you would teach a human (or a dog). Last year, Google demonstrated a robot that can write its own code based on natural language instructions from humans. Another Google subsidiary called Everyday Robots tried to pair user inputs with a predicted response using a model called SayCan that pulled information from Wikipedia and social media. 

[Related: Google is testing a new robot that can program itself]

RT-2 builds off a similar precursor model called RT-1 that allows machines to interpret new user commands through a chain of basic reasoning. Additionally, RT-2 possesses skills related to symbol understanding and human recognition—skills that Google thinks will make it adept as a general purpose robot working in a human-centric environment. 
More details on what robots can and can’t do with RT-2 is available in a paper DeepMind and Google put online.

[Related: A simple guide to the expansive world of artificial intelligence]

RT-2 also draws from work done through vision-language models (VLMs) that have been used to caption images, recognize objects in a frame, or answer questions about a certain picture. So, unlike SayCan, this model can actually see the world around it. But to make it so that VLMs can control robots, a component for output actions needs to be added on to it. And this is done by representing different actions the robot can perform as tokens in the model. With this, the model can not only predict what the answer to someone’s query might be, but it can also generate the action most likely associated with it. 

DeepMind notes that, for example, if a person says they’re tired and wants a drink, the robot could decide to get them an energy drink.

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In 1957, the Soviet Union changed the night sky. Sputnik, the first satellite, was in orbit for just 22 days, but its arrival brought a tremendous set of new implications for nations down on Earth, especially the United States. The USSR was ahead in orbit, and the rocket that launched Sputnik meant that the USSR would likely be able to launch atomic or thermonuclear warheads through space and back down to nations below. 

In the defense policy of the United States, Sputnik became an example of “technological surprise,” or when a rival country demonstrates a new and startling tool. To ensure that the United States is always the nation making the surprises, rather than being surprised, in 1958 president Dwight D. Eisenhower created what we now know as DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Originally called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, ARPA/DARPA has had a tremendous impact on technological development, both for the US military and well beyond it. (Its name became DARPA in 1972, then ARPA again from 1993 to 1996, and it’s been DARPA ever since.) The most monumental achievement of DARPA is the precursor to the service that makes reading this article possible. That would be ARPANET, the immediate predecessor to the internet as we know it, which started as a way to guarantee continuous lines of communication over a distributed network. 

Other projects include the more explicitly military ones, like work on what became the MQ-1 Predator drone, and endeavors that exist in the space between the civilian and military world, like research into self-driving cars.

What is the main purpose of DARPA?

The specific military services have offices that can conduct their own research, designed to bring service-specific technological improvements. Some of these are the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Research Laboratory, and the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM). DARPA’s mission, from its founding, is to tackle research and development of technologies that do not fall cleanly into any of the services, that are considered worth pursuing on their own merits, and that may end up in the hands of the services later.

How did DARPA start?

Sputnik is foundational to the story of DARPA and ARPA. It’s the event that motivated President Eisenhower to create the agency by executive order. Missiles and rockets at the time were not new, but they were largely secret. During World War II, Nazi Germany had launched rockets carrying explosives against the United Kingdom. These V-2 rockets, complete with some of the engineers who designed and built them, were captured by the United States and the USSR, and each country set to work developing weapons programs from this knowledge.

Rockets on their own are a devastatingly effective way to attack another country, because they can travel beyond the front lines and hit military targets, like ammunition depots, or civilian targets, like neighborhoods and churches, causing disruption and terror and devastation beyond the front lines. What so frightened the United States about Sputnik was that, instead of a rocket that could travel hundred of miles within Earth’s atmosphere, this was a rocket that could go into space, demonstrating that the USSR had a rocket that could serve as the basis for an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, or ICBM. 

ICBMs carried with them a special fear, because they could deliver thermonuclear warheads, threatening massive destruction across continents. The US’s creation and use of atomic weapons, and then the development of hydrogen bombs (H-bombs), can also be understood as a kind of technological surprise, though both projects preceded DARPA.

[Related: Why DARPA put AI at the controls of a fighter jet]

Popular Science first covered DAPRA in July 1959, with “U.S. ‘Space Fence’ on Alert for Russian Spy-Satellites.” It outlined the new threat posed to the United States from space surveillance and thermonuclear bombs, but did not take a particularly favorable light to ARPA’s work.

“A task force or convoy could no longer cloak itself in radio silence and ocean vastness. Once spotted, it could be wiped out by a single H-bomb,” the story read. “This disquieting new problem was passed to ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), which appointed a committee, naturally.”

That space fence formed an early basis for US surveillance of objects in orbit, a task that now falls to the Space Force and its existing tried-and-true network of sensors.

Did DARPA invent the internet?

Before the internet, electronic communications were routed through telecommunications circuits and switchboards. If a relay between two callers stopped working, the call would end, as there was no other way to sustain the communication link. ARPANET was built as a way to allow computers to share information, but pass it through distributed networks, so that if one node was lost, the chain of communication could continue through another.

“By moving packets of data that dynamically worked their way through a network to the destination where they would reassemble themselves, it became possible to avoid losing data even if one or more nodes went down,” describes DARPA. 

The earliest ARPANET, established in 1969 (it started running in October of that year), was a mostly West Coast affair. It connected nodes at University of California, Santa Barbara; University of California, Los Angeles; University of Utah; and Stanford Research Institute. By September 1971 it had reached the East Coast, and was a continent-spanning network connecting military bases, labs, and universities by the late 1970s, all sending communication over telephone lines.

[Related: How a US intelligence program created a team of ‘Superforecasters’]

Two other key innovations made ARPANET a durable template for the internet. The first was commissioning the first production of traffic routers to serve as relay points for these packets. (Modern wireless routers are a distant descendant of this earlier wired technology.) Another was setting up universal protocols for transmission and function, allowing products and computers made by different companies to share a communication language and form. 

The formal ARPANET was decommissioned in 1988, thanks in part to redundancy with the then-new internet. It had demonstrated that computer communications could work across great distances, through distributed networks. This became a template for other communications technologies pursued by the United States, like mesh networks and satellite constellations, all designed to ensure that sending signals is hard to disrupt.

“At a time when computers were still stuffed with vacuum tubes, the Arpanauts understood that these machines were much more than computational devices. They were destined to become the most powerful communications tools in history,” wrote Phil Patton for Popular Science in 1995.

What are key DARPA projects?

For 65 years, DARPA has spurred the development of technologies by funding projects and managing them at the research and development stage, before handing those projects off to other entities, like the service’s labs or private industry, to see them carried to full fruition. 

DARPA has had a hand in shaping technology across computers, sensors, robotics, autonomy, uncrewed vehicles, stealth, and even the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. The list is extensive, and DARPA has ongoing research programs that make a comprehensive picture daunting. Not every one of DARPA’s projects yields success, but the ones that do have had an outsized impact, like the following list of game-changers:

Stealth: Improvements in missile and sensor technology made it risky to fly fighters into combat. During the Vietnam War, the Navy and Air Force adapted with “wild weasel” missions, where daring pilots would draw fire from anti-air missiles and then attempt to out-maneuver them, allowing others to destroy the radar and missile launch sites. That’s not an ideal approach. Stealth, in which the shape and materials of an aircraft are used to minimize its appearance on enemy sensors, especially radar, was one such adaptation pursued by DARPA to protect aircraft. DARPA’s development of stealth demonstrator HAVE BLUE (tested at Area 51) paved the way for early stealth aircraft like the F-117 fighter and B-2 bomber, which in turn cleared a path for modern stealth planes like the F-22 and F-35 fights, and the B-21 stealth bomber.

Vaccines: In 2011, DARPA started its Autonomous Diagnostics to Enable Prevention and Therapeutics (ADEPT) program. Through this, in 2013 Moderna received $25 million from DARPA, funding that helped support its work. It was a bet that paid off tremendously in the COVID-19 pandemic, and was one of many such efforts to fund and support everything from diagnostic to treatment to production technologies.

The post What is DARPA? The rich history of the Pentagon’s secretive tech agency appeared first on Popular Science.

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Every year, around 42,000 women and 500 men in the US die of breast cancer, a disease that when caught early before it spreads to the rest of the body has a 99-percent five-year survival rate. It’s when the cancer gets detected in later stages when things become more dire, with survival rates dropping below 30 percent if the cancer spreads to lungs, liver, bones, or elsewhere in the body.

The most common way to test for potential breast cancer is through a mammogram—an X-ray image of the breast. And while mammograms can typically find lumps in breast tissue much before a doctor or individual can feel them themselves, screening mammograms miss about one in eight breast cancers, according to the American Cancer Society. 

Mammograms are recommended for women above the age of 40 about every year or so, but for high-risk patients that might not be enough. “Interval cancers,” or cancers that develop in between routine scans, make up 20 to 30 percent of all breast cancer cases and can be more aggressive. 

However, scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have come up with another possible solution—a flexible patch that can take ultrasound images comparable to those done by medical centers, but can fit into a bra. They published their recent development on July 28 in Scientific Advances. 

“We changed the form factor of the ultrasound technology so that it can be used in your home. It’s portable and easy to use, and provides real-time, user-friendly monitoring of breast tissue,” Canan Dagdeviren, an associate professor in MIT’s Media Lab and the senior author of the study, said in a release.

Inspired by her aunt who died at age 49 of breast cancer, Dagdeviren designed a tiny ultrasound scanner using piezoelectric material that could take images whenever a user wanted; the team also designed a flexible 3D-printed patch with “honeycomb-like” openings. Fitted up with a matching bra, the scanner can be moved around to six different spots to image the entire breast—no special training needed.

The researchers tested their device on a 71-year-old subject with a history of breast cysts, and were able to detect cysts as small as 0.3 centimeters in diameter up to 8 centimeters deep in the tissue, all while maintaining a resolution similar to traditional ultrasounds.

Right now, users need to plug in the device to an imaging center-style ultrasound device to see the images, but next steps for the team include building a mini, phone-sized imaging system. In the future, high-risk individuals could use the device at home over and over, and it could also come in handy for patients that don’t have access to regular screening.

“Access to quality and affordable health care is essential for early detection and diagnosis.” study author Catherine Ricciardi, nurse director at MIT’s Center for Clinical and Translational Research, said in the release. “As a nurse I have witnessed the negative outcomes of a delayed diagnosis. This technology holds the promise of breaking down the many barriers for early breast cancer detection by providing a more reliable, comfortable, and less intimidating diagnostic.” 

The post MIT develops an at-home mammogram alternative that fits in a bra appeared first on Popular Science.

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HDMI 2.1 is the latest widely available version of HDMI, the high definition audio/video interface that’s been the gold standard for connecting media sources to your TV since the mid-2000s. Since then, there’s rarely been a need to upgrade your HDMI cables, but if you want to display the highest quality footage on your television as this technology advances, you might need to.

Although the HDMI port itself hasn’t physically changed over time, newer versions of the standard have been introduced, enhancing the connection’s ability to support higher resolutions and frame rates. So while the port is identical, a TV with HDMI 2.0 might not support the same features as one with HDMI 2.1. It can be confusing, because while you can find HDMI 2.1 ports on the latest and greatest televisions, A/V receivers, projectors, and video game consoles, companies don’t always distinguish which version of HDMI their device supports.

We’re here to clear up what HDMI 2.1 brings to the TV stand, to explain how to tell if you have it, and give you a basic understanding of the interface standard in general. 

HDMI basics

High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is an audio/visual standard capable of transmitting audio and video through a single cable. Look behind your television, and chances are it has an HDMI port (or four). Since its introduction in 2002, HDMI has been a mainstay in households across the globe, with an estimated 10 billion HDMI devices sold (although it took some time to truly take off). 

Over the past 20-plus years, the amount of data that HDMI cables can transmit has steadily increased: The original version could only send up to 4.95 gigabits per second (Gbps), which allowed for 1080p video at 60Hz. Today, HDMI 2.1 can carry almost 10 times that amount.

What is HDMI 2.1?

In 2017, the HDMI Forum unveiled HDMI 2.1, which has a maximum data throughput of 48 Gbps. This allows it to support 4K, 5K, 8K, and 10K content at up to 120 frames per second. It’s the current high bar you’ll find in new TVs.

Colorwise, HDMI 2.1 supports 16-bit color and HDR, just like its predecessors HDMI 2.0a and HDMI 2.0b. But HDMI 2.1 offers significantly more support for dynamic HDR, where the color settings can be automatically adjusted on a scene-by-scene or even frame-by-frame basis to get the best possible color range. 

HDMI 2.1 also supports a number of other features that can improve your media viewing experience, including:

• Quick media switching (QMS): This feature reduces the time it takes to swap between sources, eliminating a 1-to-3-second blackout that would otherwise occur when switching from one video source to another with a different frame rate.
• Enhanced Audio Return Channel (eARC): The latest implementation of this feature allows for your TV to send higher quality audio directly to a sound bar or A/V receiver. All your connected devices can now communicate directly, making it easier to keep video signals and audio signals in sync. This is compatible with formats like Dolby Atmos and DTS:X.

Beyond that, HDMI 2.1 also offers a number of upgrades to your gaming experience:

• Variable refresh rate (VRR): This feature allows for smoother transitions between different frame rates, so you are less likely to see any juddering or frame tearing if your frame rate changes as you play a video game.
• Quick frame transport (QFT): Simply put, this reduces the time it takes for video footage to pass from a source to your display, which will also reduce lag when you’re gaming.
• Auto low-latency mode (ALLM): If you’re using a gaming console or PC, ALLM can automatically turn off any picture processing to reduce lag even more.

Confusingly, just because a TV includes HDMI 2.1 doesn’t mean it supports every feature mentioned above. For example, a TV with an HDMI 2.1 port may support eARC, but not VRR. This inconsistency is not only frustrating for consumers, but could also make HDMI 2.1 adoption really messy.

When looking for an HDMI 2.1-equipped TV, pay close attention to the features it supports. Some manufacturers aren’t very transparent about this, so you may want to keep looking until you’re absolutely certain you know what’s included. Hopefully, as newer TVs are released, we’ll get more transparency, and more TVs with HDMI 2.1 will support many or all of the features introduced by the latest standard. 

What devices use HDMI 2.1 now?

HDMI 2.1 ports are available on most high-end TVs and A/V devices. 

The latest generation of video game consoles—the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S—support HDMI 2.1. They are one of the few widely available sources of the 4K, 120fps video that requires the bandwidth HDMI 2.1 offers.

So, while there’s no need to rush out and get a new TV, chances are that if you upgrade at some point in the next few years, it will have HDMI 2.1 as standard. And over time, as more high resolution, high-frame rate, HDR content becomes available, having a device with HDMI 2.1 will become more important.

Does HDMI 2.0 even matter anymore?

We’ve mentioned HDMI 2.0 a few times now, so let’s get this out of the way: This older version of the standard doesn’t have the bandwidth to support modern high-resolution, high-frame, HDR content.

HDMI 2.0 was released in 2013 and had a maximum data throughput of 18 Gbps, about 63 percent less capacity than HDMI 2.1. That was fast enough to support 4K resolution video at 60 frames per second or 8K resolution at 30 frames per second. HDMI 2.0a and HDMI 2.0b later added support for high dynamic range (HDR) video. Today, that’s not enough.

How to tell if your device supports HDMI 2.1

Checking to see what version of HDMI you have is, sadly, more complicated than it should be. As we explained above, manufacturers aren’t always clear about what version of HDMI is supported, and because the connector doesn’t physically look different, you can’t easily figure out what you have. As a general rule, though, unless you bought your TV within the last two or three years, chances are it supports HDMI 2.0—not HDMI 2.1.

First, check your device’s manual to see if it mentions support for HDMI 2.1. Some product listings on Amazon and other retailers will highlight HDMI 2.1, but it might only be supported in one or two ports out of the three or four your TV has. To check which specific ports are HDMI 2.1, look for some mention of “4K@120fps.” Even TVs with only HDMI 2.1 ports should note the distinction.

Do I need new HDMI cables?

If you have HDMI 2.0 cables, they won’t be sufficient for HDMI 2.1. To enjoy the enhanced picture and frame rate that HDMI 2.1 enables, you will need both an HDMI 2.1 TV and an HDMI 2.1 source device, as well as an HDMI 2.1 or ultra high-speed HDMI cable. 

These new cables come with the ultra high-speed HDMI logo printed on them as well as a holographic image and QR code that proves they are genuine and lists the exact HDMI 2.1 features it supports. If you need help choosing one, our gear and reviews team has curated a selection of the best HDMI cables currently available.

Thankfully, many devices that support high frame rate modes, including the PS5 and Xbox Series X, come with the proper cable, so you may not need to buy one after all.

Do I need a new TV?

HDMI 2.1 is a technology with its eye on the future. If you’re in the market for a new TV and want the best of the best, we recommend you get one with at least one HDMI 2.1 port, especially if you’re into gaming. This may cost a little more money, but we believe it will be a crucial feature for many of the ways we will use TVs going forward, particularly if you plan to connect any device other than a cable box to your TV.

That said, while we think it’s smart to prioritize the feature if you’re buying a new TV, there’s no need to rush out and replace the 4K TV you just bought to play some games in 4K at 120 Hz.

What about HDMI 2.1a?

HDMI 2.1 is still taking off, but HDMI 2.1a has already been announced. It adds support for source-based tone mapping (SBTM) which allows for HDR and standard dynamic range (SDR) footage to be displayed at the same time without issue. This comes in handy, for example, if you are watching a live stream with HDR video game footage and SDR picture-in-picture commentary. 

As of right now, though, HDMI 2.1a products are not widely available.

This story has been updated. It was originally published on March 19, 2022.

The post What is HDMI 2.1? appeared first on Popular Science.

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If you want to see a retired NASA space shuttle, you have a few options. You could travel to Virginia and see Discovery, or journey to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida to check out the angled Atlantis. And don’t forget about Enterprise in New York City, a shuttle that never flew into space but did glide through the atmosphere. 

Then there’s Endeavour. Right now, that space shuttle, which made 25 trips to space and back, is on display horizontally at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. But the museum has towering plans for the shuttle: It’s going to move it into a vertical position, and display it with solid rocket boosters and an external fuel tank, all attached together as if the ship was about to blast off into space. When that happens, it’ll be the only shuttle displayed vertically. And instead of having to cope with the forces of a launch, the orbiter assembly will need to withstand any California earthquakes.

As Endeavour is now, “it’s a great display, you can walk under it, look up at the tiles—it’s wonderful,” says Jeffrey Rudolph, the president and CEO of the museum. “But it will be amazing, and we think [a] far better display, when it’s vertical, with the whole stack. This’ll be 200 feet tall—20 stories tall—and you’ll be able to look at it [from] multiple perspectives, multiple views, at multiple levels.” 

To get it into the launch position requires an operation worthy of an actual NASA mission. It kicked off in earnest on July 20, when two components called aft skirts came in via crane and were lowered into position on a concrete pad. Each of those aft skirts are as wide as 18 feet and weigh 13,000 pounds and have both lifted off on actual shuttle flights. 

The aft skirts comprise the base of the solid rocket boosters (SRBs). Other segments, called the solid rocket motors, which are about 116 feet tall, will join them to make up each SRB, as will parts called forward assemblies. Those two SRBs will weigh in at a total of a quarter million pounds together. Before Endeavour can join those SRBs, the 76,000-pound external tank (technically known as ET-94) must be moved into place, too.

The plan holds that early next year, the 176,000-pound Endeavour itself will be lifted into launch position using two cranes, one of which will simply make sure the orbiter’s tail doesn’t hit the ground.  

For this whole assembly operation, “we’re basically following the same process that Kennedy Space Center used,” Rudolph notes, adding that no one has put together a shuttle at a non-NASA facility before. As an example, this incredible time-lapse video shows the space shuttle Atlantis being lifted and then mated with its solid rocket boosters and external fuel tank for the very last shuttle flight in July of 2011. 

Like a real NASA launch, Rudolph adds that weather will play a key role in when they actually carry out that maneuver of lifting the actual orbiter into place. Windy conditions, which could interact with the orbiter, would cause a delay. “It is a glider,” he points out. “It’s got wings.” 

[Related: Astronauts explain what it’s like to be ‘shot off the planet’]

The whole flight assembly—Endeavour, the solid rocket boosters, and the tank—will together weigh just over half a million pounds, according to the California Science Center. “We’ve got the last hardware—the last external tank—so it’s the only place in the world you’ll be able to see a full space shuttle stack in launch position,” Rudolph says.

To mitigate against the possibility of an earthquake, the whole shuttle configuration will be perched on a thick concrete pad that weighs more than 3 million pounds. “It’s a 8-foot-thick concrete pad that is surrounded on all four sides by a 3-foot moat, basically,” Rudolph explains. And under that pad are a half-dozen seismic isolators, which Rudolph compares to “big ball bearings.” The Los Angeles Times has helpful graphics.

“That whole pad can move independently of the building, and will withstand any foreseeable earthquake,” he adds. 

Rudolph says that it will be a couple years before the facility is actually open, and that the entire planned Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center that will house Endeavour and other exhibits costs $400 million. According to a previous NASA estimate, it cost around $450 million to actually launch a shuttle. A more recent estimate via the Center for Strategic and International Studies put the number at well over $1 billion for each launch, in fiscal year 2021 dollars. 

Rudolph says that they had hoped to display a space shuttle in this way starting as early as three decades ago. “I actually have a rendering from 1992 showing a space shuttle in launch position,” he says. With any luck, the shuttle will be moved into place in January of 2024. 

Watch a short video about the new facility, below.

The post What it takes to display a 176,000-pound space shuttle in a launch configuration appeared first on Popular Science.

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Imagine that you could detect the chemical makeup of a car, pipeline, or field of crops from space. In theory, that would allow scientists to identify leaks, runoff, pollution and more from a wide-scanning observatory hundreds of miles away from the target object. 

A technology called hyperspectral imaging makes that possible, and it does so by working with the different wavelengths of light. According to GIS Geography, this approach divides a spectrum of light into hundreds of “narrow spectral bands.” Based on how certain objects transmit, reflect and absorb light, they can be assigned a unique chemical signature. 

The approach is a bit different from other remote sensing approaches that may measure microwaves or radio waves, and is more detailed than other spectral imaging technology that works with fewer bands of light. 

Everything from trees, soils, metals, paints, and fabrics have a unique spectral fingerprint. Northrop Grumman’s hyperspectral imaging system, for example, can distinguish a maple from an oak tree, and within the tree, healthy growth versus unhealthy growth. 

This fingerprint can allow satellites to pick up on nutrient variations, moisture levels, and more. While fundamentals of the tech has been around since the 1970s, it still needs to be further developed for commercial use and has been heavily investigated by various agencies and research groups for the better part of the last decade. 

[Related: Google expands AI warning system for fire and flood alerts]

Key hurdles to this technique becoming more common have been bringing down the cost, miniaturizing the materials needed in such a system, developing software and machine learning models that can rapidly process and sort through the data, and getting better image resolution. 

This year, a growing number of investments by private companies and government agencies around the world are bringing this technique to the forefront—which could be useful in the fields of agriculture, defense, environmental science, industrial settings, forensics, art, medicine, energy, and mining. A research report from Spherical Insights & Consulting predicts that the market for hyperspectral imagery will grow to be worth 47.3 billion by 2032. It is currently valued at around $16 billion.

In March, TechCrunch reported that the US National Reconnaissance Office awarded five-year study contracts worth $300,000 each to BlackSky, Orbital Sidekick, Pixxel, Planet, Xplore and HyperSat to add hyperspectral satellite imagery to its available suite of remote sensing tech. One of the companies, Pixxel, also saw a massive investment in its latest funding round from tech giant Google. 

The post Hyperspectral imaging can detect chemical signatures of earthbound objects from space appeared first on Popular Science.

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If you’re in the market for a new wireless router, smartphone, or other device that relies on WiFi to connect to the internet, you’re probably looking at something that uses WiFi 5 or WiFi 6. These are the two most common WiFi standards available right now, and you should know which one is better for you—before you spend any money.

Next year, however, WiFi 7 is due to be released, and this new generation will be more than twice as fast as WiFi 6. But before that happens, let’s dig into the key differences between WiFi 5 and WiFi 6.

Released in 2013, WiFi 5 was a significant improvement over IEEE standard 802.11n, or WiFi 4. Since then, WiFi 5 support has become incredibly common in wireless devices and routers. WiFi 5 allows devices to transmit data over the 5 GHz wireless frequency band at theoretical speeds of up to 3.5 Gbps, though it is more realistic to get speeds of more than 1 Gbps under ideal conditions.

[Related: How bits, bytes, ones, and zeros help a computer think]

WiFi 5 relied on a number of new and improved technologies to achieve its faster, more reliable speeds. It supports channels up to 160 MHz wide; it is multi-user, multiple input, multiple output (MU-MIMO); and can do beamforming, in which a WiFi signal is directed toward specific receiving devices rather than radiated out in every direction. 

Still, at almost a decade old, WiFi 5 is far from being the state-of-the-art wireless standard. 

While WiFi 6 is generally designed to make WiFi more efficient, it does allow for faster connections. While WiFi 5 had a maximum theoretical data rate of 3.5 Gbps, WiFi 6 has a theoretical maximum of 9.6 Gbps. 

Using both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz wireless frequency bands, WiFi 6 is backwards compatible with both WiFi 5 and WiFi 4 devices. It also supports other improvements like orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OMFDMA), where different devices get assigned their own channel for more efficient data transfer; Target Wake Time (TWT), which allows devices to save battery life by automatically switching off WiFi connections when they’re not being used; and it supports WPA3 encryption, which enables more secure WiFi connections. 

All told, WiFi 6 allows for more devices to get faster, more stable internet connections on the same local network than WiFi 5.

Due to be released in 2024, WiFi 7, or IEEE standard 802.11be, is designed to allow for significantly faster wireless connections and will have a theoretical maximum data throughput of 46 Gbps. 

Which is best: WiFi 5 or WiFi 6?

Right now, WiFi 5 is looking increasingly dated. While you can still get routers that only support WiFi 5, you are locking yourself out of almost a decade of technological improvements. 

Although WiFi 6E and WiFi 7 both offer improvements over WiFi 6, neither is widely supported. You can get a WiFi 6E router now and the first WiFi 7 routers have been announced, but they’re all pretty expensive and most devices don’t yet support the new standards.

[Related: How to check which apps are hogging your WiFi]

That leaves WiFi 6 as the best option for most people. WiFi 6 devices are affordable, widely available, and will likely be supported for years to come. So, if you’re shopping for a router, it’d be best to look out for the WiFi 6 logo.

The post WiFi 5 vs. WiFi 6: Which should you choose? appeared first on Popular Science.

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One of the world’s strongest structures could be one of its smallest: Collaborators from University of Connecticut, Columbia University, and Brookhaven National Lab have developed a new nanomaterial composed of DNA strands coated in flawless glass. At proportionally four times stronger and five times lighter than steel, the minuscule latticework structures could provide a template for a new wave of extremely durable and lightweight vehicles, body armor, and countless other products.

As detailed recently in Cell Reports Physical Science, the team first connected multiple portions of self-assembling DNA to form a nanostructure framework akin to a building’s support beams. They then coated the enjoined DNA strands with a glass-like material only a few hundred atoms thick, leaving relatively large empty spaces akin to rooms in a house. These spaces allowed the resulting nanomaterial to remain extremely lightweight, while the glass reinforced its durability.

[Related: Microscopic mesh could be the key to lighter, stronger body armor.]

“The ability to create designed 3D framework nanomaterials using DNA and mineralize them opens enormous opportunities for engineering mechanical properties,” explains nanomaterials scientist Oleg Gang and paper co-author via UConn’s announcement.

Glass may not be the first material that comes to mind when imagining something strong and resilient, but that’s because glass structures, at most tangible scales, are structurally compromised in little ways that add up over time. Chips, cracks, and scratches can all cause glass to eventually shatter—but completely flawless glass is another story entirely. As UConn’s announcement notes, a flawless cubic centimeter of glass is capable of withstanding a whopping 10 tons of pressure.

Finding a flawless cubic centimeter of glass is easier said than done, but when a piece of glass is less than a micrometer thick, it is almost always flawless. The DNA nanostructures therefore lend themselves to these glass coatings that retain their nearly unequaled durability. Scale these DNA superstrands up, and you could eventually see material with extremely promising applications—it’s much more feasible, for example, to build a lighter and stronger electric vehicle by focusing on its exterior frame instead of trying to make its rechargeable battery smaller or more powerful.

Moving forward, the team plans to experiment with carbide ceramic coatings in lieu of glass to make potentially even stronger nanostructures. Meanwhile, they also hope to try out different DNA shapes to see which works best for such a material. Eventually, these optimized structures could underlay some of the lightest, strongest products in the world. But what else would you expect from something so “flawless?”

The post These super strong nanostructures are made of glass-coated DNA appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine.

When a Manhattan parking garage collapsed in April this year, rescuers were reluctant to stay in the damaged building, fearing further danger. So they used a combination of flying drones and a doglike walking robot to inspect the damage, look for survivors and make sure the site was safe for human rescuers to return.

Despite the robot dog falling over onto its side while walking over a pile of rubble — a moment that became internet-famous — New York Mayor Eric Adams called the robots a success, saying they had ensured there were no overlooked survivors while helping keep human rescuers safe.

Soon, rescuers may be able to call on a much more sophisticated robotic search-and-rescue response. Researchers are developing teams of flying, walking and rolling robots that can cooperate to explore areas that no one robot could navigate on its own. And they are giving robots the ability to communicate with one another and make many of their own decisions independent of their human controller.

Such teams of robots could be useful in other challenging environments like caves or mines where it can be difficult for rescuers to find and reach survivors. In cities, collapsed buildings and underground sites such as subways or utility tunnels often have hazardous areas where human rescuers can’t be sure of the dangers.

Operating in such places has proved difficult for robots. “You have mud, rock, rubble, constrained passages, large open areas … Just the range and complexity of these environments present a lot of mobility challenges for robots,” says Viktor Orekhov, a roboticist and a a technical advisor to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which has been funding research into the field.

Underground spaces are also dark and can be full of dust or smoke if they are the site of a recent disaster. Even worse, the rock and rubble can block radio signals, so robots tend to lose contact with their human controller the farther they go.

Despite these difficulties, roboticists have made progress, says Orekhov, who coauthored an overview of their efforts in the 2023 Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems.

One promising strategy is to use a mix of robots, with some combination of treads, wheels, rotors and legs, to navigate the different spaces. Each type of robot has its own unique set of strengths and weaknesses. Wheeled or treaded robots can carry heavy payloads, and they have big batteries that allow them to operate for a long time. Walking robots can climb stairs or tiptoe over loose rubble. And flying robots are good at mapping out big spaces quickly.

There are also robots that carry other robots. Flying robots tend to have relatively short battery lives, so rescuers can call on “marsupials” — wheeled, treaded or legged robots that carry the flying robots deep into the area to be explored, releasing them when there is a big space that needs to be mapped.

A team of robots also allows for different instruments to be used. Some robots might carry lights, others radar, sonar or thermal imaging tools. This diversity allows different robots to see under varied conditions of light or dust. All of the robots, working together, provide the humans that deploy them with a constantly growing map of the space they are working in.

Although teams of robots are good for overall mobility, they present a new problem. A human controller can have difficulty coordinating such a team, especially in underground environments, where thick walls block out radio signals.

One solution is to make sure the robots can communicate with one another. That allows a robot that’s gone deeper and lost radio contact with the surface to potentially relay messages through other robots that are still in touch. Robots could also extend the communications range by dropping portable radio relays, sometimes called “bread crumbs,” while on the move, making it easier to stay in contact with the controller and other robots.

Even when communication is maintained, though, the demands of operating several robots at once can overwhelm a single person. To solve that problem, researchers are working on giving the robots autonomy to cooperate with one another.

In 2017, DARPA funded a multiyear challenge to develop technologies for robots deployed underground. Participants, including engineers working at universities and technology companies, had to map and search a complex subterranean space as quickly and efficiently as possible.

The teams that performed best at this task were those who gave the robots some autonomy, says Orekhov. When robots lost touch with one another and their human operator, they could explore on their own for a certain amount of time, then return to radio range and communicate what they had found.

One team, from Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), took this further by designing its robots to make decisions cooperatively, says Navinda Kottege, a CSIRO roboticist who led the effort. The robots themselves decided which tasks to undertake — whether to map this room, explore that corridor or drop a communications node in a particular spot.

The robots also decided how to split up the work most effectively. If a rolling robot spotted a corridor that was too narrow to enter, a smaller walking robot could come and take over the job. If one robot needed to upload information to the base station, it might transmit it to a robot that was nearer to the entrance, and ask that robot to walk back to within communications range.

“There were some very interesting emergent behaviors. You could see robots swapping tasks amongst themselves based on some of those factors,” Kottege says.

In fact, the human operator can become the weak link. In one effort, a CSIRO robot wouldn’t enter a corridor, even though an unexplored area lay beyond it. The human operator took over and steered the robot through — but it turned out that the corridor had an incline that was too steep for the robot to manage. The robot knew that, but the human didn’t.

“So it did a backflip, and it ended up crushing the drone on its back in the process,” Kottege says.

To correct the problem, the team built a control system that lets the human operator decide on overall strategy, such as which parts of the course to prioritize, and then trusts the robots to make the on-the-ground decisions about how to get it done. “The human support could kind of mark out an area in the map, and say, ‘This is a high priority area, you need to go and look in that area,’” Kottege says. “This was very different than them picking up a joystick and trying to control the robots.”

This autonomous team concept broke new ground in robotics, says Kostas Alexis, a roboticist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology whose team ultimately won the challenge. “The idea that you can do this completely autonomously, with a single human controlling the team of robots, just providing some high-level commands here and there … it had not been done before.”

There are still problems to overcome, Orekhov notes. During the competition, for example, many robots broke down or got stuck and needed to be hauled off the course when the competition was over. After just an hour, most teams had only one or two functioning robots left.

But as robots become better, teams of them may one day be able to go into a hazardous disaster site, locate survivors and report back to their human operators with a minimum of supervision.

“There’s definitely lots more work that can and needs to be done,” Orekhov says. “But at the same time, we’ve seen the ability of the teams advanced so rapidly that even now, with their current capabilities, they’re able to make a significant difference in real-life environments.”

10.1146/knowable-072023-2

Kurt Kleiner is a freelance writer living in Toronto.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.

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Metals aren’t known to “heal” themselves on their own; once they break, it’s assumed the materials remain broken unless outside forces reform them. But new research into metallic properties indicates this isn’t always the case. In fact, some metals appear to naturally mend of their own accord—a discovery that could one day change engineering designs here on Earth and beyond.

According to a study published last week in Nature, materials scientists from Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Texas A&M University discovered at least some metals—in this case copper and platinum—can “undergo intrinsic self-healing.” As Live Science recently noted, the team’s observations came completely by accident while observing the two materials at a nanoscale level.

[Related: Watch this metallic material move like the T-1000 from ‘Terminator 2’]

The discovery occurred while testing the stress resiliency properties of extremely tiny samples of platinum and copper. To do this, the team subjected the metals to rapid, miniscule prodding via a transmission electron microscope at a rate of 200 taps per second. Although the device only applied pressure akin to that of a mosquito’s legs walking, the metals still developed small cracks over time.

Such issues occur everyday in the real world. “From solder joints in our electronic devices to our vehicle’s engines to the bridges that we drive over, these structures often fail unpredictably due to cyclic loading that leads to crack initiation and eventual fracture,” Brad Boyce, a materials scientist at Sandia National Labs, said in a recent press release.  “When they do fail, we have to contend with replacement costs, lost time and, in some cases, even injuries or loss of life.”

Within 40 minutes of the team’s testing, however, both the platinum and copper samples healed as if the fissures were never even there.

“Cracks in metals were only ever expected to get bigger, not smaller. Even some of the basic equations we use to describe crack growth preclude the possibility of such healing processes,” Boyce in the press release.

[Related: This giant solar power station could beam energy to lunar bases.]

While a surprise for many of the researchers, the healing abilities actually confirmed a decade-old theory first put forth by Michael Demkowicz, a materials sciences and engineering professor then at MIT. In 2013, Demkowicz attempted to correct conventional materials theory via computer simulations showing that, under certain conditions, metal hypothetically could mend stress-induced cracks. The key to such a startling ability comes via what’s known as “cold welding,” in which the flanks of two cracks are pressed into one another under very certain conditions.

Much still remains to be explored and tested, but such implications could be far-reaching, altering how engineers design and build everything from buildings on Earth to space faring vehicles. The recent experiments were conducted in a vacuum, but the team hopes to learn if metal cold welding could occur in normal atmospheric conditions. If nothing else, Demkowicz thinks the discovery is an excellent reminder that, “under the right circumstances, materials can do things we never expected.”

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During the summer, cities can get really hot compared to surrounding rural areas—just look at New Orleans and New York City compared to nearby areas with fewer impermeable surfaces. This urban heat island effect happens because buildings and other infrastructure absorb and re-emit the sun’s heat more than natural landscapes. Daytime temperatures in urban areas may end up being 1 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than that in outlying areas.

But it’s not just the surface and air temperatures that can rise—the ground also warms up. Rising air temperature, combined with the effects of human activities and infrastructure, can cause subsurface heat islands under urban areas. This “underground climate change” is also affected by indoor heating and operating appliances in buildings that inject heat into the ground.

[Related: A new climate report finally highlights the importance of our decisions.]

Since soils, rocks, and construction materials can deform when subjected to temperature variations, a recent study published in Communications Engineering sought to assess whether subsurface heat islands can cause ground deformations that would affect the performance of civil infrastructure.

“The results of this study support that the ground deformations caused by underground climate change can be of sufficient magnitude to affect the day-to-day function and long-term durability of civil structures and infrastructures,” says Alessandro Rotta Loria, study author and assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University.

Potentially excessive angular distortion, tilting, and/or cracking of structural members may affect the aesthetic and operational requirements of infrastructure. Luckily, these changes don’t necessarily represent an impact on their performance and don’t threaten people’s safety, says Rotta Loria.

How underground climate change affects the soil

Extreme changes in underground temperature under or near infrastructure impose temperature gradients that can promote pore water movement. The drying and wetting of soil is responsible for strains and deformations that can cause damage to structures, says Claudia Zapata, geo-engineer and associate professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University.

“While this is not a new issue that geotechnical engineers have to deal with, longer periods of high temperature can promote more significant changes in moisture content,” says Zapata. “The unsaturated condition will extend to deeper areas, causing larger deformations than those allowable by building codes.” 

The impact is generally related to the soil type and the extent of drying or wetting, among other factors. For instance, sandy materials are not as prone to large deformations under climatic change conditions, unlike clay-heavy soils, says Zapata.

When analyzing the potential impact of structures, Rotta Loria says the distinct features of different cities and their infrastructure should be considered. Older and denser cities may generally experience a more intense underground climate change, which can translate to more significant effects on civil infrastructures.

[Related: Why some climate change adaptations just make things worse.]

“Major cities like New York City, which are densely built and rich in underground structures and heat sources, exhibit a particularly intense underground climate change,” says Rotta Loria. “For this reason, these cities may be particularly prone to structural and infrastructural operational issues in the long-term.”

Ground deformations caused by underground climate change develop slowly, but continuously, therefore it should be mitigated in the coming years to avoid unwanted effects on civil structures and infrastructures, he adds. 

Mitigating underground climate change in a warming world

Underground climate change presents an opportunity for urban planners and policymakers to “enhance the sustainability of urban areas worldwide,” says Rotta Loria.

For example, applying thermal insulation to underground building envelopes and enclosures can minimize the amount of waste heat that would be injected into the ground. Installing shallow geothermal technologies to absorb at least part of the heat from basements, parking garages, and tunnels to reutilize it in buildings and infrastructures for space heating and hot water production is also a major possibility.

[Related: Urban sprawl defines unsustainable cities, but it can be undone.]

A 2022 study published in Nature Communications said that recycling subsurface heat, which accumulates due to climate change and urbanization, is a sustainable alternative to conventional space heating methods for various sites. Subsurface heat recycling makes it possible to capitalize on warming climates while helping society move to a low-carbon economy at the same time.

Rotta Loria says that retrofit interventions aimed at enhancing energy efficiency and geothermal installations to reutilize subsurface waste heat are “two concrete and relatively straightforward mitigation strategies” that would hamper underground climate change and its effects on civil infrastructure in a warming world. With all the impacts that climate change is having, and will soon have, on cities, it’s best to act sooner versus later.

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What does the Department of Defense do with scrap wood, cardboard, and paper? Usually, just send them to the landfill. But these seemingly small portions of waste materials do add up—to about 13 pounds per soldier each day. According to the US Army Corps of Engineers, these comprise around 80 percent of all solid waste made at DoD forward operating bases. 

Now, DARPA, a Pentagon agency that focuses on innovation and research, wants to take that waste and divert it from the landfills or burial by turning it into something useful. Through a new program called Waste Upcycling for Defense (WUD), they want to find ways to integrate scrap wood, cardboard, paper, and other cellulose-derived matter into building materials. Scientifically speaking, this is not a new idea. Various teams of researchers have been testing out this process for years. 

The basics of the formula is as follows: You need to chemically treat the scraps to degrade a wood component called lignin, then mechanically press them together to make them more dense, strong, and durable against bad weather, water, and fire. In some instances, these made-again wood products are stronger than the original wood itself. And as attention around climate change focuses on the sustainability of the construction industry, there are increasing efforts to reduce emissions and experiment with greener materials, like green cement and maybe even fungi. 

[Related: The ability for cities to survive depends on smart, sustainable architecture]

Although small batches of products have been made with this technique at a laboratory scale with harvested wood, these methods have not been tested on scraps, so may need to be adjusted or refined. Ideally, researchers would come up with a solution that can be scaled up for mass production. 

“Finished products could greatly reduce the need for re-supply of traditional wood products, such as harvested lumber used in DoD construction and logistics,” WUD program manager, Catherine Campbell said in a press release. 

[Related: DARPA wants aircraft that can maneuver with a radically different method]

DARPA aims to develop and test products and methods through a feasibility stage in the next 24 months. At the eight-month-mark, they hope to be able to start conducting mechanical property testing for the samples to figure out ways to reduce chemical and energy consumption in the process. Near the 21-month-mark is when full demos are expected to be ready to be presented to DARPA. The end goal of the Phase I period is to have a preliminary design for a device that can produce densified wood from wood waste at the rate of 100 kg/hr. 

There is an accompanying callout for participation from the scientific community in this effort. Proposals are due by mid-September this year.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

During Japan’s sweltering summers, nothing hits the spot quite like a frozen orange. The popular treat, known as reito mikan, tastes great when made at home. But it tastes even better when made 850 meters below the ocean’s surface. “A bit salty, but super delicious,” says Shinsuke Kawagucci, a deep-sea geochemist at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology.

The frozen fruit was the product of a particularly tasty scientific experiment. In 2020, Kawagucci and his colleagues designed a highly unusual freezer—one built to operate in the intense pressure of the deep sea. The frozen orange, chilled in the depths of Japan’s Sagami Bay, was their proof that such a thing is even possible.

Kawagucci and his colleagues’ prototype deep-sea freezer is essentially a pressure-resistant tube with a thermoelectric cooling device inside. By running an electric current through a pair of semiconductors, the device creates a temperature difference thanks to a phenomenon known as the Peltier effect. The device can chill its contents down to -13 °C—well below the freezing point of seawater. Because it does not require liquid nitrogen or refrigerants to cool its housing, the freezer can be built both compactly and with minimal engineering skill.

With a few adjustments, Kawagucci and his colleagues write in a recent paper, their prototype freezer can be more than a fancy snack machine. By offering a way to freeze samples at depth, such a device could improve scientists’ ability to study deep-sea life.

Bringing animals up from the deep is often a destructive affair that can leave them damaged and disfigured. The best example is the smooth-head blobfish, a sad, misshapen lump of a fish that got its name from the blob-like shape it takes when wrenched from its home more than 1,000 meters below. (In its deep-sea habitat, the fish looks like many other fish and hardly lives up to its name.)

Although scientists have previously designed tools to keep deep-sea specimens cold on their way to the surface, the new prototype freezer is the first device capable of freezing specimens in the deep sea. Similarly, other tools do exist that allow scientists to collect creatures from the deep unharmed, such as pressurized collection chambers. Yet these often don’t work well for small and soft-bodied deep-sea animals that are prone to dying and decomposing when kept in such containers for too long—an oft-unavoidable reality, says Luiz Rocha, the curator of ichthyology at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. “It can take hours to bring samples up,” Rocha says.

A device that freezes samples first would stave off degradation, enabling better scientific analysis of everything from anatomy to gene expression. While the freezing process will undoubtedly damage the tissues of some of the deep’s more delicate life forms, specimens damaged by freezing tend to be more useful to scientists than specimens damaged by decomposition—at least when it comes to DNA analysis.

The prototype freezer takes over an hour to freeze a sample, which is probably “too slow to be broadly useful,” says Steve Haddock, a marine biologist with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California who studies bioluminescence in jellyfish and ctenophores. Every minute of deep-sea exploration is precious, he says. “We typically spend our time searching for animals, and we bring them to the surface in great shape using insulated chambers.” However, if the freezing time could be improved, Haddock believes such a device could be “empowering” for those who study deep-sea creatures that are extremely sensitive to changes in pressure and temperature, such as microbes living on hydrothermal vents.

Kawagucci says he and his team plan to improve their freezer before testing it out on any living specimens. But he hopes that with such improvements, their tool will give scientists a way to collect even the most delicate deep-sea organisms.

In the meantime, Kawagucci is just happy his device proved that deep-sea freezing by a thermoelectric cooler is possible. “Throughout the Earth’s history, ice has never existed in the deep sea,” he says. “I wanted to be the first person to generate and see the ice in the deep sea with my freezer.” And when he finally sank his teeth into that tangy, salty, sweet reito mikan, “one of my dreams came true.”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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Incorporating plastic waste into asphalt pavement and other types of infrastructure projects shows some limited promise, according to a new report published Tuesday by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

But those efforts are hampered by an American recycling system that lacks clear economic and environmental goals and suffers from a dearth of scientific and engineering information, the chairman of the research committee said Monday.

“As we got into this, one question that came up to the committee is, ‘What problem are we trying to solve?,’” said David Dzombak, who chaired a panel of 12 experts tasked by Congress to look into ways to recycle plastic waste into roads, railroad ties, drainage pipes, utility poles and other common types of infrastructure applications. “Are we trying to keep (plastic waste) out of landfills? Or reduce litter or leakage into the environment that ends up in the ocean or along roads and rivers? Are we trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions?

“Determining exactly which pathways to pursue, however, depends on goals, policy, and economics,” he said. “A coordinated direction for policy and research is key for advancement of plastics recycling in the U.S.”

The committee members included consultants, academic researchers and various state transportation officials. They looked into plastic recycling in infrastructure applications such as asphalt pavement mixes, drainage pipes, railroad ties, bike paths, composite utility poles and highway sound barriers. A range of factors inhibit their adoption, however, such as uncertainties over how to make the infrastructure components with recycled plastic and “unknowns regarding environmental impacts―including the potential release of microplastics―and effects on long-term performance.”

The report comes amid a growing awareness in the United States and throughout the world of a global plastics crisis, and as 175 nations have agreed to find a way by the end of next year to stop future plastic production from choking ocean and land ecosystems and clean up legacy plastic pollution.

The United Nations Environment Program in May reported that the world produces 430 million metric tons of plastics each year, of which over two-thirds are short-lived products that soon become waste. Plastic production is set to triple by 2060 under a “business-as-usual” scenario.

Two years ago, a different committee of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine found that in 2016, the United States led the world in the generation of plastic waste at 287 pounds per person and needed a comprehensive strategy to curb the waste’s devastating impact on ocean health, marine wildlife and communities.

EPA has said the U.S. recycling rate of plastic is 8 percent; others have estimated it to be even lower.

The lack of national direction, Dzombak said, stems in part from the fact that the United States has no national recycling law. Recycling, according to the committee’s 407-page report, lacks coordination between public and private sectors, with recycling policies varying from state to state. Research and development into the capture, processing and reuse of plastic products and materials is also not very advanced in the United States, the report concluded.

But the report also found that it is in society’s interests to expand and standardize plastics waste collection, increase recycling and explore new applications for plastics waste in infrastructure, even as it outlined potential risks to public health and the environment by doing so.

“There is isolated activity that is very promising that is reusing recycled plastics, so there is reason for optimism here, if we can share more data and information,” said Dzombak, the Hamerschlag University Professor Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department.

One economic segment the committee examined and found to successfully reuse waste plastic was the manufacturing of drainage pipes. But beyond that, the committee found little success, despite decades of attempts, according to the report.

As a result, he said, “it is unclear how much of a solution” integrating plastic waste into infrastructure  applications will be to help solve the plastic waste problem.

The report found the most promise with the recycling of plastic waste from manufacturing processes, and said those plastics are in high demand. Unlike the mixed plastic waste people dump in recycling bins, post-manufacturing waste is more uniform in its chemical make-up and clean, making it easier to recycle. 

Mixed plastic waste that people toss in their recycling bins consist of many different kinds of plastic, made with many different chemicals, and as a result are harder to recycle. This post-consumer waste can also be contaminated with other kinds of waste products or chemicals.

The report focused mostly on what’s called mechanical methods of recycling of plastic, involving cleaning, sorting and shredding of plastics before they are molded or added into new products. It also noted new industry investment in processes that seek to break down waste plastic into chemical feedstocks, often called “chemical” or “advanced” recycling, including a process called pyrolysis, but said its environmental benefits were “considerably lower than for mechanical recycling and may even be worse than the status quo.”

Turning products like old bottles, bags or yogurt tubs into a material that goes into asphalt has not been tested extensively, for performance or environmental risks, the report found. It may not hold up as well under the wear and tear of cars and trucks, and some research has found it could increase the spread of dangerous microplastics as the road surface breaks down, the report observed.

Judith Enck, founder and president of the environmental group Beyond Plastics and a former EPA regional administrator, said she has her doubts about whether plastics can be effectively recycled into roads or other infrastructure applications.

“While I appreciate work to try to make the best of a bad situation there are a number of serious problems with these attempted solutions to the growing problem of plastic pollution,” Enck said. “Perhaps the most significant is abrasion causing the release of microplastics into the air and water. I don’t see this as a viable solution to the plastics problem.” 

The health and environmental implications of microplastics have become a focus of intense research as scientists have found them throughout the world and inside human bodies. In May, research out of the United Kingdom found that even the process of mechanical recycling can produce a lot of microplastics.

The new national academies report recommended the Department of Transportation conduct field-testing to assess the environmental and health impacts, overall service life and effects of plastics additives on the use and recyclability of asphalt pavements. It further recommended that EPA support research and data collection required to understand and evaluate the potential environmental, human health, economic and performance implications of each new use of recycled plastics.

“Given the limited supplies of recycled plastics having the requisite properties and quality for infrastructure applications, it will be important, from a societal standpoint, to understand the full economic and environmental benefits and costs of candidate applications to make best use of these sup- plies,” the report concluded. “Ideally, this understanding will be informed by assessments made on a life-cycle basis that take into account the stream of benefits and costs associated with the complete product life, including manufacturing, installation, maintenance, service life, and end-of-life management.”

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In the series I Made a Big Mistake, PopSci explores mishaps and misunderstandings, in all their shame and glory.

On my first attempt to find the Museum of Failure, I made a wrong turn while navigating through the massive, often unlabeled buildings nestled in Brooklyn’s Industry City, and accidentally stumbled across The Innovation Lab instead. Consider it a tiny mistake.

The Museum of Failure is not a permanent addition to the eccentric collection of galleries in New York, but is rather a traveling pop-up that aims to engage people all over the world with the idea of making mistakes. It was created in 2016 by Samuel West, an Icelandic-American psychologist who worked with companies on increasing their innovation and productivity. 

Previously, he had found during his research that the most innovative companies were those that have a high degree of exploration and experimentation, which of course, means that they’re also going to have a high rate of failure. By making room for failure, companies could paradoxically tap into an opportunity for learning and for growth. 

West started collecting projects that were deemed failures, but he kept looking for a new way to communicate the research. Inspiration struck when he visited the Museum of Broken Relationships in Los Angeles. “Then, I realized that the concept of a museum is very flexible,” he tells PopSci. 

As of this year, the pop-up has made stops in Sweden, France, Italy, mainland China, and Taiwan. In the US, it was in Los Angeles for a spell, and after New York, they will pack up shop and reopen in Georgetown in Washington, DC on September 8. The reception has surpassed all of West’s expectations. It was so popular in New York that its opening was extended for a month. “I thought it was a nerdy thing,” he says. “And to see how it resonates with people around the world has been fantastic.”  

The main objective of the museum is to help both organizations and individuals appreciate the important role of failure—a deviation from desired outcomes, if you want to think about it in a more clinical way—in progress and innovation. “If we don’t accept failure as a way forward and as a driving force of progress and innovation, we can’t have the good stuff either,” West says. “We can’t have the tech breakthroughs or the new science, and products. Even ideologies need to fail before we figure out what works.” 

Despite being marked as failures, most of the items in the museum are actually innovations, meaning that they tried something novel, and attempted to challenge the norm by proposing something that was interesting and different. 

The museum itself felt like a small expo center, and is composed of a hodgepodge of stalls that group products loosely together by categories and similarity. There’s not a set way to move through the space. “A lot of people, I’ve found, are sort of lost without a path, and they kind of don’t know where to begin,” says Johanna Guttmann, a director of the exhibit. “The people that really get it automatically are in product design, or marketing.” 

The team has also designed an accompanying app that guides museum-goers through the various items on display. The app has a QR code scanner, which takes users inside a back catalog of more than 150 “failures” across themes like “the future is (not) now,” “so close, and yet,” “bad taste,” “digital disasters,” “medical mishaps,” and more. Each product on show not only comes with a detailed description of its history and impact, but is also ranked on a scale of one to eight for innovation, design, execution, and fail-o-meter. 

Familiar names of people, companies, and products pepper the exhibit, like Elon Musk, Theranos, MoviePass, Fyre Festival, Titanic, and Google Glass. It features both the notorious and newsworthy, from Boeing 737 Max, CNN+, Facebook Libra, Hooters Air, to Blockbuster. Donald Trump has his own section. “I like the ones with the good story,” West says.

Some of these stories are intended to challenge the perception of failure. “The reason for failure many times is outside of you doing something wrong,” says Guttmann. For many products, it was a case of bad timing, money issues, and in the case of the Amopé Foot File, it was so successful at doing what it was supposed to do that it was a failure for the company profit-wise. 

“Kodak invented the digital camera in the 70s only to be bankrupt by digital photography,” says West. “So it was a failure not of tech, but a thing of adapting and updating their business model.” 

Some failures showcase the importance of persistence and reiterating on certain ideas. “Nintendo, for example, tried early on in the 90s to make their games more interactive and immersive by making them 3D,” West noted. They made a 3D console that was terrible and gave kids headaches, and they made the poorly received Power Glove that hooked up to a TV through wonky antennas. Even though the execution was bad, the idea of motion control stuck, and Power Glove became a precursor for the popular Nintendo Wii console. 

Placed at the end of the exhibit is a wall titled “Share your failure,” and it’s plastered with sticky notes. This is Guttman’s favorite part of the experience. “It has taken on a life of its own,” she says. People leave both funny and serious anecdotes behind, including microwave failures, relationship disasters, and personal tragedies. “The anonymity is part of the appeal,” she notes. 

Guttman likes to say that the 150 or so items in the museum are really just props for conversation. She sees its potential for opening dialogues around the culture, especially since in countries like the US, there’s encouragement to move fast and break things, or “fake it until you make it,” whereas in other countries, there is a greater emphasis on constant perfectionism. For certain people, the experience has been cathartic—West recalls visitors who have cried at the wall of failure. 

Guttman heard recently in a podcast from an expert who said that too much of US education is designed for success. “His point was that every semester should involve a task that’s designed for failure because otherwise, the students build no resilience, and they don’t know what to do with frustration,” she says. “We say that failure is a part of life, and in an educational setting in particular, students should experience some type of failure to learn that they should try different things, deal with it in different ways.”

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In the series I Made a Big Mistake, PopSci explores mishaps and misunderstandings, in all their shame and glory.

Super Glue is a fascinating substance. A strong, quick-drying adhesive, it is useful enough to keep around the house as a handy tool, and so easy to use (and misuse) that it’s a regular source of trips to the emergency room. One such study highlights “patient carelessness” as responsible for nearly 80 percent of the cases involved, with “childhood curiosity and lack of parental supervision” clocking in at another 11 percent. The history of Super Glue’s creation is as wild as that of the stories that ER doctors could tell each other over drinks, and it starts in 1942, with an attempt to improve the accuracy of weapons.

Super Glue was twice invented by Harry Coover. The first time, he was working at Eastman Kodak on military research. Eastman Kodak is best known today as a film manufacturer, one whose present survival came thanks to a bailout from Hollywood film studios. As a side note, director Christopher Nolan, whose 2023 film Oppenheimer covers the most famous military research project of all time, was one of the leading forces behind Kodak’s rescue, emphasizing the specific qualities of the film.

In the 1940s, Eastman Kodak could point to decades of work in military technology. Its researchers, engineers, and technicians had designed gunsight lenses for fighter planes in World War I. Before World War I, the best-quality optical glass came from Germany, and other nations regarded its creation as a trade secret, leading the US to engineer its industry on its own. In 1942, Coover was continuing in that line of research, looking to design a new gunsight made of clear plastic. Plastic had the promise of making for a lighter sight, and one that could be made at scale if the right compound was found. 

Coover did not, in 1942, discover a better gunsight material. Instead, he had found a problem.

Sticky situation

What would become known as Super Glue was a cyanoacrylate, and the first impression was that it was worthless for the problem Coover was looking to solve.  

“I was working with some acrylate monomers that showed promise,” Coover recalled for Popular Science in the February 1989 issue. “But everything they touched stuck to everything else. It was a severe pain.”

Coover and colleagues were looking for a straightforwardly useful material. Cyanoacrylate presented only problems, and throughout World War II, Eastman Kodak would make its gunsight lenses in the tens of thousands out of glass.

[Related: Raytheon asks retirees for help making new Stinger anti-air missiles]

It would take the post-war world, and a move to Tennessee, for Coover to stumble on Super Glue a second time, and realize its unique value. In 1951, Coover’s job was moved to Kingsport, Tennessee, where he was assigned a team of chemists.

“He had been overseeing the work of a group of Kodak chemists who were researching heat-resistant polymers for jet airplane canopies. They tested cyanoacrylate monomers, and this time, Coover realized these sticky adhesives had unique properties in that they required no heat or pressure to bond. He and his team tried the substance on various items in the lab, and each time, the items became permanently bonded together,” notes an MIT profile of Coover.

In 1954, after this second discovery of Super Glue, Coover filed a patent for “Alcohol-catalyzed alpha-cyanoacrylate adhesive compositions.” This facilitated the commercialization of the discovery, as Eastman 910 industrial adhesive, in 1958.

Because glue forms a polymer where it contacts water, it can be used to seep into and seal small cracks and pores on the surfaces it is connecting, creating a powerful, tight bond. Under normal conditions, continued Coover in 1989 in Popular Science, “all surfaces have at least a monomolecular layer of water on them. It’s actually the water, or any weak base, that is the catalyst causing the polymerization.”

Coover once demonstrated this to comedic effect on a gameshow, where he demonstrated Super Glue’s strength by binding two pieces of metal together, and then holding on to one as it was lifted into the air. Show host Garry Moore jumped on as well, and still the glue held the metal together, enough for the men to both be lifted up. 

All patched up

Coover’s invention seems like it should follow a straightforward trajectory as a happy accident of military research, finding postwar use instead. What makes Super Glue remarkable is that it ended up on the battlefield anyway.

[Related: Super Glue could make it easier to recycle plastic]

In 1964, Eastman Kodak submitted an application to the FDA that Super Glue be considered for wound sealing. It would take years for a variation of the glue to be formally certified, but during the Vietnam War, the glue was reportedly used as a way to seal wounds and cuts, at least until better medical attention could be found. Today, specific medical variants exist. 

Skin adhesives specifically formulated for the task are a regular tool in hospitals, and while the Mayo Clinic doesn’t encourage the use of Super Glue as a way to treat small cuts and wounds, it acknowledges that it has been successfully used as such. So let that fact stick in your brain, and proceed at your own risk when using the substance.

The post How a shot at making better gunsights became Super Glue instead appeared first on Popular Science.

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