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.

The post What the US Coast Guard found on their last OceanGate Titan salvage mission appeared first on Popular Science.

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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.” 

The post This new Polaris off-roader is the ultimate vehicle for rugged adventures appeared first on Popular Science.

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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:

The post Driving a McLaren at 200 mph is a thrilling, dangerous experience appeared first on Popular Science.

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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:

The post Saab says it has solved a modern camouflage conundrum appeared first on Popular Science.

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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.

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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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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.”

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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.

The post An art-filled time capsule is headed for the moon appeared first on Popular Science.

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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.”

The post Plasma beams could one day cool overheating electronics in a flash appeared first on Popular Science.

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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.

The post Robots could now understand us better with some help from the web appeared first on Popular Science.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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?”

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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.

The post How ‘underground climate change’ affects life on the Earth’s surface appeared first on Popular Science.

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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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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here. 

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.

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The oldest known sundial was made in Egypt over 3,000 years ago, for telling the time as the sun passed through the day’s sky. Since then, we’ve upgraded our time-telling technology significantly—but the fascination with tracking the sun remains. 

Today, the sun’s power is often discussed as a means to create clean, renewable energy through solar photovoltaic and thermal cells. A recently announced permanent artwork in the city of Houston, Texas makes a way to celebrate sun-centered technology over the eons. Artist and architect Riccardo Mariano plans to build the world’s largest free-standing sundial which will simultaneously generate clean energy. The 100-foot-tall arch is expected to produce around 400,000 kilowatt-hours of solar electricity each year, equivalent to the demand of around 40 Texas homes. 

[Related: Scientists think we can get 90 percent clean energy by 2035.]

Artist and architect Riccardo Mariano originally entered the idea, called the Arco del Tiempo (Arch of Time), in a Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI) design competition for Abu Dhabi in 2019. The arch has found its new home, however, acting as an entrance to Houston’s Second Ward community. The sculpture acts as a giant clock, as different beams of light create geometric shapes corresponding with the seasons of the year and the hours of the day on the ground and surfaces of the arch. At night, the arch will be used as a stage for concerts and other community events. 

“The apparent movement of the sun in the sky activates the space with light and colors and engages viewers who participate in the creation of the work by their presence,” Mariano said in a release. “It is a practical example to illustrate the movement of the earth around the sun in a playful way.” 

The south-facing exterior of the giant arch will be linked with solar modules, which will allow the artwork itself to offset the power demand of the nearby community arts center Talento Bilingue de Houston. Over its lifetime, LAGI states that the artwork will be able to generate over 12 million kilowatt-hours of energy, enough to “pay back” the footprint required to create the artwork and it’s materials.

[Related: Solar panels are getting more efficient, thanks to perovskite.]

This isn’t the first, or likely the last, exploration of renewable energy as art. While some opponents to clean energy projects note the less-than-attractive appearance of solar panels or wind turbines lining the landscape, innovative projects can turn energy-generating projects into gorgeous murals to funky sculptures that double as charging stations. 

Robert Ferry, one of the Land Art Generator Initiative co-founders, hopes the Arco del Tiempo can hopefully act as “an antidote to climate despair” in one of the most climate change-impacted regions in the US. The installation is set to be completed in 2024.

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As climate heats up and historic wildfires devastate our planet, finding new, sustainable ways of protecting people and ecosystems from growing fire concerns is crucial. Over the last few years, mycelium, a root-like structure of fungi strands, has become one of technology’s darlings as an ingredient for growable computers, building materials, and leather. Most recently, researchers at Australia’s Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology have made promising strides in turning the unique substance into fire-resistant roofing. 

[Related: Inside the lab that’s growing mushroom computers.]

“The great thing about mycelium is that it forms a thermal protective char layer when exposed to fire or radiant heat,” RMIT professor Everson Kandare, an expert in the flammability and thermal properties of biomaterials, said in a statement. “The longer and the higher temperature at which mycelium char survives, the better its use as a fireproof material.”

Kandare and his colleagues published their research on mycelium as a fireproofing agent in the journal Polymer Degradation and Stability earlier this month. The team was able to create paper-thin sheets of mycelium from edible Basidiomycota fungi in containers of sugary sweet molasses. They then added sodium hydroxide to convert the chitin in the mycelium into chitosan. 

When exposed to flames of nearly 1500 degrees Fahrenheit, according to New Scientist, the chitosan quickly turned into a protective layer of char. “The material caught fire for about one second then self-extinguished,” coauthor Tien Huynh told New Scientist. 

[Related: Fungi spores and knitting combine to make a durable and sustainable building material.]

Many composite cladding panels these days contain plastics, which are a nightmare for human and ecological health when they burn. “Bromide, iodide, phosphorus and nitrogen-containing fire retardants are effective, but have adverse health and environmental effects,” Kandare said in the release. “They pose health and environmental concerns, as carcinogens and neurotoxins that can escape and persist in the environment cause harm to plant and animal life.” Instead, according to the researchers, their mushroom solution only emits water and carbon dioxide.

Of course, plastics are considerably cheaper and easier to produce than growing mushrooms, but Huynh added in the release that leftover organic waste from the growing mushroom industry could one day help bring products like this to scale. 

“Collaborating with the mushroom industry would remove the need for new farms while producing products that meet fire safety needs in a sustainable way,” Huynh said.

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The shipping industry is important in linking together the global supply chain, but it’s fairly carbon intensive. Recent data suggest that shipping makes up around 3 percent of global carbon emissions, and there’s been much effort directed at making different parts of the process more green. 

Shipping giant Maersk has been investing more than $1 billion on ships that run on green methanol, which is derived from the methane that is produced by food waste in landfills. This week, a new container ship from the company that is powered by that type of fuel plans to set sail from South Korea to Denmark, according to a report from Fast Company, and will be the first ever to use green methanol. 

Some metrics about the ship, which doesn’t yet have a name: The vessel is 172-meters-long (around 560 feet), with a container capacity of 2,100 TEU and is designed to reach speeds of 17.4 knots.

CNBC estimated that each of these ships costs around $175 million. Maersk has 25 of these ships ordered, and is working to retrofit old ships to run on the new fuel, which means that they get new engine parts, and need new fuel tanks, along with a fuel preparation room and fuel supply system. 

[Related: Birds sometimes hitch rides on ships—and it’s changing the way they migrate]

The company’s vision for the next decade is to transform a quarter of its fleet to run on this fuel. While the green methanol will still generate some emissions as it’s used up, compared to traditional diesel, it can cut emissions by more than 65 percent. Maersk has figured out a couple of ways to make green methanol. Other than collecting methane gas from waste and turning that into bio-methanol, Maersk can also make green e-methanol (which combines captured carbon dioxide and green hydrogen) with renewable energy. Although it was reported last year by Quartz that Maersk was worried about finding enough green fuel for its ships, it has been signing deals with countries and companies to streamline the supply of green methanol and put these ships to work. 

Morten Bo Christiansen, who leads decarbonization at Maersk, said at the TED Countdown Summit last week that bringing down the cost is the next problem to tackle, as reported by Fast Company. But currently, the extra cost associated with green methanol compared to diesel is equivalent to consumers paying five extra cents for a pair of sneakers crossing the ocean. 

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The smartphone Fairphone 4 is finally available in the United States. The phone, lauded for its sustainability, is user-repairable and made with responsibly-sourced materials like Fairtrade-certified gold and aluminum from suppliers certified by the Aluminium Stewardship Initiative (ASI).

Like many other smartphones, the Fairphone 4 has front and back cameras, an LCD touchscreen, Near Field Communication technology that allows contactless payments via mobile wallets, and even a fingerprint scanner. It also offers at least five years of software support, assuring users that they’ll be providing updates for years to come.

Given that smartphones are the most widely used electronic device around the world, efforts to reduce their environmental impact are important, says Gregory A. Keoleian, director of the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan.

[Related: Memory vs. storage: What to know when buying a new smartphone.]

Emerging trends and technologies often create consumer demand for newer models with better features, even though older phones still function. Smartphones are a significant electronic waste stream in the US with around 151 million products being thrown away annually, and only about 17 percent are properly treated and recycled.

The impact of smartphones on the environment

Smartphones may be small enough to fit in your pocket, but their carbon emissions likely surpass that of desktop computers, laptops, and LCDs. For instance, the iPhone 14 Pro contributes 65 kilograms of carbon emissions throughout its life cycle, which is equivalent to driving about 167 miles in an average gasoline-powered passenger vehicle, says Keoleian.

About 80 percent of a smartphone’s carbon footprint is generated during the manufacturing stage. Mining, refining, and transporting precious metals consume a lot of energy, while the act of mining itself harms the natural environment. That’s why, Keoleian says there may be no such thing as a sustainable smartphone. “Every smartphone has impacts related to their manufacture and use, and opportunities exist to further reduce these impacts,” he says.

Consumers can reduce environmental harm by replacing devices less frequently or opting for refurbished phones instead, says Keoleian. Refurbished phones, or pre-owned devices that were restored to “like new” condition and verified to function properly, are cheaper as well. Refurbished iPhone 12 products, which completed full functional testing and come with their standard one-year limited warranty, cost about $120 to $240 lower than new ones.

Joy Scrogum, assistant scientist of sustainability at the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center, says that manufacturers make more money if consumers believe they need the latest smartphone models. For example, Apple and Samsung, the two companies that currently dominate the smartphone industry, both release new phone models every year. These often come with specs that were improved from the previous model: better camera system, longer battery, performance upgrade of the graphics card, and more.

[Related: Letting your favorite things gather dust is unsustainable—use them.]

However, Scrogum says this belief is not always reflective of reality. “Most people probably don’t use all the processing power or features of their current phone, let alone what they might find on the latest smartphone models,” she adds.

Smartphone users have to reassess whether they really need an upgrade. According to Scrogum, she bought her current smartphone when her now 18-year-old daughter started middle school. Although a few retailer apps are no longer compatible with the device, it’s “not a big deal” and the phone still functions well, she says.

“Would I like a better camera on my phone?,” says Scrogum. “Sure, but that’s not really a need. My phone still does everything I need it to do, and plenty of things I don’t really need, like providing games to play.” She adds that she’ll get a new phone when apps she regularly relies on stop being compatible with the device, but in that case, it’s not that the phone isn’t useful anymore—it’s because app developers stopped making the latest versions of their software compatible with the oldest devices still in service.

How manufacturers can practice sustainability

The best thing manufacturers can do to make devices more sustainable is to design them for repairability and upgradability, says Scrogum. Having components that can be easily removed and replaced is important because it allows consumers to fix issues and upgrade features without having to replace the entire phone.

[Related: Big tech companies are finally making devices easier to repair.]

“In other words, plan for durability rather than obsolescence,” she adds. “Keep in mind that phones which are designed to be easier to take apart for repair are also easier to disassemble at their end-of-life so components and materials can be reused or recycled.” 

Smartphones will also remain in service longer with more equitable access to the tools and information needed for repairs and upgrades. Scrogum says manufacturers can restrict access to replacement parts or tools to control repair through their own authorized technicians, but the cost or proximity to such service providers may be a barrier for some folks.

“When manufacturers make it easier for people to perform DIY repairs and modifications, or to use an independent repair service, they’re making repair a viable option for more people and supporting a more circular economy,” says Scrogum.

Policy support is also crucial. New York passed a Right to Repair law last year that covers smartphones. It ensures that the diagnostic and repair information for digital electronic products available to authorized repair providers is also made available by manufacturers to consumers and independent repair services. Companies like Samsung, Google, and Apple have also established programs allowing consumers and independent repair providers to buy official parts.

Policies requiring standardization of common components may also help consumers keep their smartphones around longer. The European Union recently passed legislation that requires a USB-C charging port for phones and other small- and medium-sized devices like tablets and e-readers by 2024. A mandatory universal charger was established to help reduce the generation of electronic waste. The rule also unbundles chargers with electronic devices, allowing consumers to forgo them when buying a new product and save about $280 million annually on unnecessary charger purchases.

“When in doubt, the ‘greenest’ device is the one you already own, or one previously owned by someone else,” says Scrogum. “We need to keep products in useful service for as long as possible.”

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Harnessing the Earth’s geothermal energy at a commercial scale could be an integral part of society’s transition to greener infrastructure, and a Houston-based startup just claimed a major milestone in making that goal a reality. On Tuesday, Fervo Energy confirmed it has successfully completed a 30-day trial run of its Project Red commercial pilot site in northern Nevada. The results could help open the industry at a crucial moment for climate sustainability.

According to the energy company’s July 18 announcement, the Project Red site was able to produce 3.5 megawatts of sustained power—enough to fuel approximately 2,600 homes—over the industry standard, month-long energy test. Fervo also contends their proof-of-concept sets new records for flow and power outputs.

Geothermal power is an incredibly attractive green energy source, as it is completely carbon-free and can operate 24/7, unlike solar and wind farms. The US Department of Energy estimates the country sits atop enough geothermal energy to hypothetically power the entire world, but only about 0.4 percent of the nation’s energy came from such sources in 2022.

[Related: How heat pumps can help fight global warming.]

That said, geological limitations—such as the right amounts of heat, water, and underground permeability—have largely restricted harvesting to shallow hydrothermal sources in areas such as Nevada’s Great Basin region. Meanwhile, mining operations can destabilize an underground area enough to trigger earthquakes.

An enhanced geothermal system (EGS), however, leverages oil and gas tech to drill much deeper into the Earth to reach energy reservoirs. As Bloomberg notes, engineers and researchers have attempted to make commercial EGS a viable avenue for energy production since the 1970s, and Fervo’s recent demonstration is the first to be done at such a scale.

Fervo’s EGS works by vertically drilling deep into geothermal reserves, thus allowing for multiple wells at a single location. Project Red’s setup, for example, uses a pair of 7,700 feet deep wells connected by roughly 3,250 feet long horizontal pipes. As Canary Media explains, fluid is then pumped into the reservoir, where it is heated to as much as 376 degrees Fahrenheit and fed into turbines to generate electricity. Meanwhile, fiber optic cables installed within the wells provide real-time monitoring of temperature, flow, and performance to best optimize its performance.

A number of roadblocks remain before EGS sites like Fervo’s can expand their scope—most importantly, reducing costs and meeting regulatory approvals. In 2022, US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced the Enhanced Geothermal Shot, which aims to reduce EGS costs by 90 percent to roughly $45 per megawatt hour by 2035. Regardless of future costs, however, a previously announced partnership with Google will soon begin using Project Red’s energy generation to fuel a portion of its data centers near Las Vegas.

The post An American start-up claims it just set a geothermal energy record appeared first on Popular Science.

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Storage and memory are both important parts of computers, smartphones, and other devices. They are often confused for each other, and despite the fact that both terms seem similar and are often measured in gigabytes, they aren’t the same thing. Computer storage refers to the hard drive, solid-state drive, or flash memory where information is stored by your computer for the long-term, while memory or RAM (random access memory) is a short-term option that’s crucial to high-speed performance. 

So, if you’re shopping for a new iPhone this September—or a new computer at any time—here’s how to tell the difference between memory and storage.

RAM is a big part of what makes a computer or smartphone feel fast to use. If you’re browsing the web, editing a photo, or creating a Word doc, all the data you are working with will be stored in RAM so the CPU can quickly pull it as it needs it. If you have lots of fast RAM, your computer can keep many things on hand so you can switch between different tasks quickly. If you don’t have enough RAM, it will have to pull information from slower storage drives.

RAM is typically measured in gigabytes. All else being equal, more RAM is generally better, as it means more information can be kept quickly accessible. If you’ve ever had your computer slow down because you have too many tabs open in Google Chrome or are trying to edit a large video, it’s most likely because you’ve maxed out the available memory. 

[Related: How bits, bytes, ones, and zeros help a computer think]

With that said, the situation is a little different with smartphones. High-end Android smartphones can have up to 12GB of RAM, and while Apple doesn’t really talk about the amount of RAM that iPhones have, the latest models all have 6GB. This doesn’t mean that Android smartphones are better than iPhones—their operating systems are just optimized differently. A Google Pixel 7 Pro with 12GB of RAM is almost always faster than an entry level Android smartphone with 4GB, but it isn’t necessarily faster than an iPhone 14.

One major distinction between memory and storage is that RAM is volatile. It is only capable of storing information while your computer is powered on (or in sleep mode). If you fully turn off your computer or smartphone, all the information currently held in RAM is wiped.

Smartphones and most computers use solid state drives (SSDs), while some older computers may use hard disk drives (HDD). SSDs store information using transistors that can maintain a charge even when they’re powered off, and HDDs have a physical platter where information is recorded. In general, SSDs are faster than HDDs since they don’t have any moving parts. If you have a computer with a HDD, upgrading it to an SSD can give it an instant boost in performance.

Storage capacity is measured in gigabytes or even terabytes (TB)—a terabyte is equal to 1,000GB.

While the amount of storage your computer or smartphone has doesn’t affect its performance as much as RAM, it’s still important. If you want to have a large photo library, save lots of videos for offline viewing, or keep many computer games or apps downloaded, you need enough storage. Otherwise, you will have to start deleting things. 

So, if you’ve ever said your smartphone has 64GBs of memory, you were making a common and understandable mistake. It actually has 64GB of hard drive space, or storage, and a few GBs of RAM. If you’re shopping for a new smartphone this year, remember that you have to choose how much storage you want. 

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The fascinating, complex world of fungi is enabling breakthroughs in everything from mushroom-powered motherboards to kombucha-derived bioplastics, but the latest achievement could one day form the very buildings in which researchers continue such experiments. 

As detailed in a new paper published on Friday in Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology, a team of scientists, engineers, and designers from Newcastle University’s Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment have developed a method to literally grow building materials from mycelium—aka fungi roots.

[Related: Inside the lab that’s growing mushroom computers.]

“Our ambition is to transform the look, feel and wellbeing of architectural spaces using mycelium in combination with biobased materials such as wool, sawdust and cellulose,” explains corresponding paper author Jane Scott.

Conventional mycelium composites can be created by first combining spores with structures to grow on and grain food sources. Researchers then pack the mixture into a desired mold and leave it in a warm, dark, humid environment; i.e., a prime habitat for growing fungi. As the mycelium grows, it tightly binds the material around it, but the mycelium is dried out before actual mushrooms begin to sprout. Unfortunately, this method is severely limited by the amount of oxygen that mycelium needs to actually grow.

To solve this, researchers turned to textile knitting, producing molds that are far more permeable for oxygen. According to Scott, textile knitting results in “incredibly versatile” three-dimensional structures that are flexible and lightweight. Another advantage compared to existing mycelium composite methods is that the knitted 3D structures can be created with “no seams and no waste.”

After creating a new composite known as “mycocrete” from a paste of mycelium, paper powder and fiber clumps, glycerin, xanthan gum, and water, researchers injected the substance into a “knitted formwork” made from sterilized merino yarn stretched across a rigid frame. As the mycocrete dried, it strengthened and adhered to the shape to create promising building materials. During subsequent stress tests, the mycocrete proved stronger than existing mycelium composite materials.

[Related on PopSci+: How to use the power of mushrooms to improve your life.]

As a proof-of-concept, the team created a prototype structure called BioKnit, a nearly six-foot-tall, freestanding three-dimensional dome constructed as a single piece without any joins. Although new machine tech will be needed to integrate knitted textiles into construction industry, the “biofabricated architecture,” according to Scott, could soon be a promising alternative for building projects.

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On July 12, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) announced that it wants a new way to make photorealistic virtual models. The organization’s mission is researching and developing new tools for intelligence agencies, like the CIA and the FBI, as well as others through the US government and the Department of Defense. Intelligence is the profession of finding useful, actionable information, and the new project on virtual renderings is a way to ensure that when people on the ground are sent to a building they’ve never visited before, they can find all the right side doors in.

Spy thrillers make it seem like government agencies have access to perfect information about the world, from the panopticon of 1998’s Enemy of the State through the superhumanly perceptive agencies of the 2000’s Bourne trilogy to the all-knowing and all-powerful AI “Entity” of 2023’s Mission: Impossible. Intelligence agencies guard knowledge of what they can and cannot do so as to not dispel that notion. This request, for a tool to create useful, 3D virtual models, suggests that movie scenes where an agent enhances a camera view until it’s a perfect life-size picture remain the stuff of fiction.

What IARPA wants help with, in brief, is the ability to give people, like soldiers or first responders, an explorable 3D map of a place made from real imagery, rather than a 2D depiction of the place.

The organization calls the initiative WRIVA. “The Walk-through Rendering from Images of Varying Altitude (WRIVA) program seeks to produce innovations that will advance 3-D site modelling capabilities far beyond today’s state of the art, giving personnel virtual ‘ground truth’ with unrivaled insights into locations that would be difficult, if not impossible, to view,” reads the announcement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Modeling in this instance conjures to mind specific renderings of locations made by computer software, which is the intent, but it’s worth considering how recently the models procured by the CIA were literal, physical models, with parts that might accompany an electric train set or a hobbyist wargame. 

“In support of the raid that resulted in the death of Usama Bin Ladin, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) modelers built Abbottabad Compound 1 Model,” notes the CIA’s description of the 1:84 scale model. Before Navy SEAL Team 6 went on the May 2011 raid, they used this model, where 1 inch matches 7 feet of the compound, to understand the compound and its surroundings. The CIA continues, “This model was used to brief President Obama, who approved the raid on the compound.”

The compound was under surveillance for a long time, and had the virtue of housing an occupant who was unlikely to leave. That allowed surveillance images to be collected for building the model, to ensure the SEALs found the highest profile target in the War on Terror. Not content with merely a miniature model, the SEALs also rehearsed the raid in a life-size mock-up of the compound in North Carolina.

WRIVA wants to offer that kind of detail and clarity, without the painstaking work of physical modeling, thus expanding who gets access to such walkthroughs.

“Imagine if the Intelligence Community (IC), law enforcement, first responders, military, and aid workers could virtually drop into a location and familiarize themselves before their feet even hit the ground,” reads the announcement.

In cases like the Abbottabad raid, where the mission was specifically about sending armed special operations forces into danger, knowing the external layout of a building and its surroundings allowed the raiders to move through the exterior parts of the compound with some familiarity. In rescue work, being able to pull up the outside of a building could give first responders en route a way to search for entrances and features familiar to locals but unknown to new arrivals.

DARPA, which tackles blue sky technological development for the military and is a type of cousin to IARPA, has explored development in a similar lane with its subterranean challenge. In this competition, competitors built robots that could go inside and map out buildings, creating useful tools for any humans that follow. This has immediate implications for rescue work, and also can be easily adapted to military use, where a robot explores a dangerous cave possibly filled by armed enemies, before any soldier is put at risk.

With IARPA’s project, it’s the observable outsides of buildings that become fodder for virtual model making. The announcement says the goal is to make “photorealistic virtual models using satellite, ground-level, and other available imagery.” (While IAPRA did not mention artificial intelligence in its announcement, the companies named as leads include Blue Halo and Raytheon, which have experience working with AI, which could be one way to tackle this problem.) The trio of satellite, ground level, and other available imagery sounds a lot like the methods used by open-source analysts to try and identify the location of videos and events in publicly available photography. With access to the resources on hand across the US intelligence community, what can be done in open source should be seen as just the beginning, not the end state, of what IARPA is asking companies to do.  

The post Why US intelligence wants a new way to make virtual, 3D models appeared first on Popular Science.

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The jet engines on commercial airplanes can be absolutely huge. Technically known as turbofans, these machines have massive spinning fans in the front that create thrust by sending air out the back. One specific engine model has a fan that measures about 11 feet across. The engines burn jet fuel, create huge amounts of thrust, and are very loud. 

But what if you could point a ray gun at them and shrink them way down, make them electric, and better yet, very quiet? That’s the goal of a company called Whisper Aero, which was founded in 2021. However, their propulsors aren’t intended to power large airliners. Instead, the company aims to have their innovative electric machines power military drones, perhaps a small nine-passenger jet, or even take on other, non-aerial tasks—like move the air in leaf blowers or HVAC systems. 

“Whisper’s all about delivering the next generation of cleaner, quieter, more efficient thrust—for drones, for jets, and anything that moves a lot of air,” says Ian Villa, the company’s co-founder and COO. He compares the company to “an electric Pratt & Whitney, plus a Dyson, combined.” In other words, merge a maker of aircraft engines with a company famous for vacuums, and you’ve got Whisper. 

[Related: The metallic guts of GE’s massive jet engines, in photos]

The company’s CEO and co-founder is Mark Moore, a veteran of NASA (and its X-57 program) and Uber Elevate, where Villa also worked. (Joby Aviation acquired Uber Elevate, which focused on flying taxis and urban air mobility, in 2020.) Moore notes that the result of the design is a “very rigid, very lightweight, high-performing fan unit.” 

Technically, what the company is working on is called an electric ducted fan, which just means that a spinning fan is enclosed within a duct. (For another take on ducted fans and flight, check out Lilium.) But Whisper’s version of this device involves some tweaks. For one, the tips of the fan blades are all connected with a circular shroud. Villa compares the setup to the wheels on a bike, with the fan blades being a bit like spokes and the shroud being like the outer wheel itself. And that means that the fan blades can be held in tension between the hub they are attached to at their base, and the shroud, or rim, at their tips. “We’re using tension to our benefit in order to be able to get to these high blade counts,” he says. 

The other aspect to know about the device is that those fan blades spin relatively slowly, at least when measuring the speed of their tips, and there are a lot of them. “We have so many blades that our fan looks like a solid disc, if you look at it from the front,” Moore adds. 

Because of the shroud that connects all the fan blade tips, “you’re also eliminating the tip vortex noise from the blade, which is a high contributor of noise,” says Villa. (Counterintuitively, the motor spinning the fan blades operates at a high RPM, but because the blades are small, their tip speeds are relatively pokey.)

“The combination of a lot of blades, with a high RPM on the motor, gets the tonal frequencies up to the ultrasonic, so people don’t even hear any tonal noise whatsoever,” Moore says. “That’s one of the reasons we’re so quiet.” Below is a video that demonstrates a Whisper propulsor in action:

Whisper currently shows off two different sized propulsors on their website. One has a fan diameter of just over 6 inches, and the other, nearly 10 inches. Moore notes that the small size of their thrusters swims against the current in the world of airplane engines, which like to be large to get better fuel efficiency. “Aircraft have essentially gone to fewer and fewer engines, that are bigger and bigger, to get to the highest possible efficiency and the lightest weight,” Moore adds. “The technology that we’ve developed has essentially broken that truth.”

So what can you do with such a highly engineered ducted fan? For one, you could put it on a drone. Whisper Aero has created and flown their own 12-foot-wide drone, which is powered by one of their propulsors. They have “shown that it’s inaudible from 200 feet away, [during] overflight,” Villa says. A quiet drone like that would be useful for a military that wants to carry out tasks focused on ISR, which stands for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. 

“Our goal is to actually get a DOD application—a DOD-focused propulsor—out the door later this year, early next year, for first flight probably next year,” Villa adds. 

The company also envisions that their propulsors could power something they call the Whisper Jet (the jet doesn’t actually exist) that would have 11 of their ducted fans on each wing, for a total of 22. That nine-passenger aircraft would be designed to take off in a conventional way, by speeding down a runway, as opposed to vertically, like the flying machines from other companies, such as Joby. When it comes to hypothetically using their propulsors to power aircraft that could carry people, the appeal is that the flying machines would be relatively quiet. 

And back down on the ground, these shrouded, ducted fans could do less glamorous work, like power leaf blowers that are also less of a noise nuisance in your neighborhood. 

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In general, we see cars as artificial and inanimate machines made from welded steel and plastic. But what if vehicles could be designed with the evolution of microorganisms in mind, representing a collaboration with nature? Kia, Hyundai, and Genesis are investigating that worldview with a group of young artists and scientists at the renowned Rhode Island School of Design. 

Hyundai Motor Group (HMG), the parent company of all three brands, kicked off the RISD x Hyundai Motor Group Research Collaborative in 2019. Now in its fourth year, the unique partnership is focused on actively exploring the relationship between nature, art, and design for the good of humankind. Using phrases like “biologized skin” for robots and “chemotaxi processes” to describe movement, the team of students, professors, and HMG engineers and designers are challenging traditional ideas about how machines can work. 

Here’s what to know about projects that RISD students have created with the future of Hyundai Motor Group in mind. 

Using slime mold to mimic autonomous vehicles

While test-driving a brand-new 2024 Kia Seltos in and around Providence, Rhode Island with a group of journalists, we made a stop at RISD to hear from students in the program. In an initiative called Future Spaces and Autonomous Vehicles, students examined the future of autonomous vehicles using scientific methodologies combined with design-focused thinking. 

The first presenter, 2023 graduate Manini Banerjee, studied at Brown and Harvard before making her way to RISD, and she challenged us to think about how a car might work if it were driven by organisms instead of algorithms. 

In their research, Banerjee and her lab partner, Mehek Vohra, discovered that each autonomous vehicle processes 40 terabytes of data per hour; that’s the equivalent of typical use of an iPhone for 3,000 years, Banerjee says. The problem, she asserts, is that data processing and data storage relies heavily on carbon-emitting data centers, which only accelerates global warming. Vohra and Banerjee set out to find out if there is an opportunity for organic, sustainable data-free navigation. 

[Related: Inside the lab that’s growing mushroom computers]

Using a slime mold organism as a vehicle, the team observed how the mold grows, learns, and adapts. In a cardboard maze, the slim mold organism mimicked the movements of autonomous vehicles. During the study, they noticed the slime mold learned how to find the maze’s center through sensing chemicals and light in its environment. Is it possible to replace carbon-heavy data processes with a nature-based solution? Yes, Banerjee says. (According to Texas A&M, slime molds exist in nature as a “blob,” similar to an amoeba, engulfing their food, which is mostly bacteria. And in related work, research out of the University of Chicago involved using slime mold in a smartwatch in 2022.) 

“Civilization has been measured by this distance between the natural and the built environment,” she told the group. “I feel that we’ve begun to build that space with technological advancements.”

“Turn away from blindly pursuing innovation”

Today, designers and engineers look to the outside world to better understand physiology, patterns in nature, and beauty. The future of nature and cars as collaborators is front and center for the RISD and HMG partnership. 

There are about 100,000 taxidermied specimens in RISD’s Nature Lab collection; it’s on par with a world-class natural history museum and has been around since 1939. Students can check out a specimen from the lab like one might check out a library book for study. For instance, studying the wings of the kingfisher may spur an idea for not just colors but patterns, textures, and utility. Observing the bone structure of a pelican for strength points or the ways an insect’s wing repels water can advance the way vehicles are made, too. 

The RISD team is also exploring how to embrace entropy, or the degree of disorder or uncertainty in a system, versus strict mechanical processes. Sustainability is also an important element in this research, meaning that researchers should understand how materials break down instead of contributing to waste and climate change. Together, those two concepts inform the idea that engineering and technology can be programmed with built-in degradation (an expiration date, if you will) at the rate of human innovation.

“The intent is to turn away from blindly pursuing innovation and toward creating living machines that may restore our relationship with nature,” Banerjee said during a TedX presentation earlier this year. “If we understand the organisms we’re working with, we won’t have to hurt, edit, or decapitate them. We can move from ‘nature inspired’ to ‘nature collaborated.’”

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It’s no simple feat to send a rover to space, land it on a celestial body, and get the wheels rolling. NASA has used all kinds of techniques: The Pathfinder rover landed on Mars in 1997 inside a cluster of airbags, then rolled down its landing vehicle’s “petals,” which bloomed open like a flower, to the dusty surface. Cables attached to a rocket-powered “sky crane” spacecraft dropped the Perseverance Mars rover to the Red Planet’s surface in 2021. On the moon, Apollo 15, 16, and 17 astronauts pulled mylar cables to unfold and lower their buggies from the vehicles’ compact stowage compartments on lunar landers. 

But NASA’s first-ever rover mission to the lunar south pole will use a more familiar method of getting moving on Earth’s satellite: a pair of ramps. VIPER, which stands for Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, will roll down an offramp to touch the lunar soil, or regolith, when it lands on the moon in late 2024. 

This is familiar technology in an unforgiving location. “We all know how to work with ramps, and we just need to optimize it for the environment we’re going to be in,” says NASA’s VIPER program manager Daniel Andrews.

A VIPER test vehicle recently descended down a pair of metal ramps at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, as seen in the agency’s recently published photos, with one beam for each set of the rover’s wheels. Because the terrain where VIPER will land—the edge of the massive Nobile Crater—is expected to be rough, the engineering team has been testing VIPER’s ability to descend the ramps at extreme angles. They have altered the steepness, as measured from the lander VIPER will descend from, and differences in elevation between the ramp for each wheel. 

”We have two ramps, not just for the left and right wheels, but a ramp set that goes out the back too,” Andrews says. “So we actually get our pick of the litter, which one looks most safe and best to navigate as we’re at that moment where we have to roll off the lander.” 

[Related: The next generation of lunar rovers might move like flying saucers]

VIPER is a scientific successor to NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS mission, which in 2009 confirmed the presence of water ice on the lunar south pole. 

“It completely rewrote the books on the moon with respect to water,” says Andrews, who also worked on the LCROSS mission. “That really started the moon rush, commercially, and by state actors like NASA and other space agencies.”

The ice, if abundant, could be mined to create rocket propellant. It could also provide water for other purposes at long-term lunar habitats, which NASA plans to construct in the late 2020s as part of the Artemis moon program. 

But LCROSS only confirmed that ice was definitely present in a single crater at the moon’s south pole. VIPER, a mobile rover, will probe the distribution of water ice in greater detail. Drilling beneath the lunar surface is one task. Another is to move into steep, permanently shadowed regions—entering craters that, due to their sharp geometry, and the low angle of the sun at the lunar poles, have not seen sunlight in billions of years. 

The tests demonstrate the rover can navigate a 15-degree slope with ease—enough to explore these hidden dark spots, avoiding the need to make a machine designed for trickier descents. “We think there’s plenty of scientifically relevant opportunities, without having to make a superheroic rover that can do crazy things,” Andrews says.

Developed by NASA Ames and Pittsburgh-based company Astrobotic, VIPER is a square golf-cart-sized vehicle about 5 feet long and wide, and about 8 feet high. Unlike all of NASA’s Mars rovers, VIPER has four wheels, not six. 

”A problem with six wheels is it creates kind of the equivalent of a track, and so you’re forced to drive in a certain way,” Andrews says. VIPER’s four wheels are entirely independent from each other. Not only can they roll in any direction, they can be turned out, using the rover’s shoulder-like joints to crawl out of the soft regolith of the kind scientists believe exists in permanently shadowed moon craters. The wheels themselves are very similar to those on the Mars rovers, but with more paddle-like treads, known as grousers, to carry the robot through fluffy regolith.

“The metaphor I like to use is we have the ability to dip a toe into the [permanently shadowed region],” Andrews says. ”If we find we’re surprised or don’t like what we’re finding, we have the ability to lift that toe out, roll away on three wheels, and then put it back down.”

But VIPER won’t travel very far at all if it can’t get down the ramp from its lander, which is why Andrews and his team have been spending a lot of time testing that procedure. At first, the wheels would skid, just momentarily, as the VIPER test vehicle moved down the ramps. 

”We also found we could drive up and over the walls of the rampway,” Andrews says. “That’s probably not desirable.”

[Related on PopSci+: How Russia’s war in Ukraine almost derailed Europe’s Mars rover]

Together with Astrobotic, Andrews and his team have altered the ramps, and they now include specialized etchings down their lengths. The rover can detect this pattern along the rampway, using cameras in its wheel wells. “By just looking down there,” the robot knows where it is, he says. “That’s a new touch.”

Andrews is sure VIPER will be ready for deployment in 2024, however many tweaks are necessary. After all, this method is less complicated than a sky crane, he notes: “Ramps are pretty tried and true.”

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Stinger missiles are Cold War relics, and like many such relics, have seen action to lethal effect in Ukraine’s war against the Russian invasion. Nations like the United States and other NATO allies have given Ukraine their Stingers, putting the venerable human-portable surface-to-air missile to use against Soviet-designed aircraft, as it was originally designed to do. But the Stinger missile design is so old, and the stockpiles of the missiles being expended so quickly, that Stinger-maker Raytheon is asking for its retired missile makers to teach current workers how to restart production, Defense One reported in late June.

The US Army announced it was looking for a new Stinger missile replacement in March 2022, just a month after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The announcement came after the Biden administration had already announced the planned transfer of hundreds of Stinger missiles to the country. The Department of Defense’s June 27 factsheet on security assistance to Ukraine records over 1,700 Stinger anti-aircraft systems sent to the country. The missiles, which can be shoulder-fired or mounted on vehicles like Humvees, are being put to use, depleting what was already a finite supply of the weapons.

“Stinger’s been out of production for 20 years, and all of a sudden in the first 48 hours [of the war], it’s the star of the show and everybody wants more,” said Wes Kremer, the president of Raytheon parent company RTX, reports Defense One. Kremer’s remarks came at the Paris Air Show in June, an annual gathering and exhibition of aircraft and aircraft-related technologies. Kremer continued: “We were bringing back retired employees that are in their 70s … to teach our new employees how to actually build a Stinger. We’re pulling test equipment out of warehouses and blowing the spider webs off of them.”

The relevance of the Stinger to modern combat, combined with the manufacturing know-how being bound up in the minds of retirees, frames the machine as something of a useful relic. To understand the drive to restart Stinger production now, it is helpful to understand the circumstances under which the missile was first made.

Take the Redeye

The Army’s search for an anti-air missile can be traced back to 1951, after years of experimenting with anti-air guns found the weapons had insufficient range and accuracy to stop newer and faster planes. The HAWK missile, which has also seen action in Ukraine, is one of the early anti-air developments, but it is big, and needs vehicles to transport and launch it. Putting a missile in the hands of soldiers and marines on foot allows infantry to shoot down low-flying aircraft, including attack planes and increasingly helicopters. 

The first shoulder-fireable missile developed by the United States for this purpose was the Redeye, which used an infrared seeker to chase after the hottest object in the sky. It was first deployed for combat in 1967. The Soviet Union, working on a similar problem, developed the Strela shoulder-fired anti-air missile, which has seen use by both Ukraine and Russia.

The Redeye’s seeker meant it was easy to throw off targets with flares or even just the sun on a bright day, limiting the weapon’s usefulness, and it could not distinguish between friendly and enemy aircraft, meaning anyone firing a Redeye risked the missile turning and hitting a nearby friendly plane. The original Redeye was also slow, making it a weapon that could hit a low-flying plane after an attack run, but not stop it before an initial pass. 

The Stinger’s evolution

What became the Stinger started its development as the Redeye II. The program was renamed in 1972 and the missile became operational in 1981. The Stinger included a system that let the missile attempt to distinguish between friendly and hostile aircraft, by matching a coded friendly radio signal from the allied planes. The guidance system of the Stinger is still infrared, but once it gets close to a target the missile can navigate to hit other parts of the aircraft. 

The Stinger received significant upgrades over the course of its production, ensuring the weapons would remain useful for the duration of their service life, but the weapon is fundamentally based on technology and components from decades ago. While all military production is to some extent bespoke products, they exist in an ecosystem of parts that match commercial capabilities available at the time. 

Raytheon bringing back retirees to teach the basics of Stinger production will likely help with a lost transfer of knowledge, until the Army’s desired Stinger replacement is designed, tested, and improved. In the meantime, another option for the Army would be to reach out to allies like Japan and the United Kingdom, and see if their respective Stinger updates (Japan’s Type 91) or replacements (the UK’s Starstreak) are available for production. 

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While plug-in electric vehicles are the center of much hype, they aren’t the only type of newfangled, potentially sustainable vehicle that the world’s brightest minds have set their sights on. Fuel cell electric vehicles also use electricity, but instead of using a battery, they produce electricity internally using a hydrogen fuel cell. While these kinds of vehicles have been around for a while, the technology has faced plenty of challenges and hurdles—namely inefficiency and range anxiety.

However, a team of students at the Netherland’s Delft University of Technology recently took a big step for hydrogen cars—and, simultaneously, broke the Guinness World Record for the greatest distance driven on full tanks of hydrogen fuel. On Sunday, June 25, the student team drove their hydrogen-fueled Eco-Runner XIII for 2,488.4 kilometers (1,546.2 miles) over the course of three days on just one kilogram of hydrogen fuel—that’s about the distance between Boston and Miami. The student crew drove the 71.5 hours in rotating shifts of two hours, only stopping to switch out drivers.

[Related: A beginner’s guide to the ‘hydrogen rainbow’.]

The previous record of 2,056 kilometers (1,277 miles) was set only last May by ARM Engineering’s electric Renault Zoe, which operates using a methanol fuel cell. 

The impressive feat took place at Germany’s Immendigen track. The record-breaking vehicle is the thirteenth iteration of the Eco-Runner, the first of which was revealed in 2005. The scientists first exhibited the final design of the Eco-Runner XIII in May, touting the development as possibly the most efficient hydrogen car yet. The three-wheeled, cloud-shaped vehicle utilizes carbon fiber instead of steel for parts such as push rods in the steering system, the hull of the vehicle, and suspension beams. Additionally, the team took extra care to factor in energy efficiency in terms of energy losses—especially during the conversion of hydrogen to electricity, and then electricity to kinetic energy. To do so, the team used a “brand-new” fuel cell. 

All in all, the 72 kilogram (158 pound) car can drive around 45 kilometers per hour (27 miles per hour). While this one-person, funky-shaped, car might not be road-trip ready, the team hopes their developments can keep pushing the clean technology closer to the mainstream. Around 56,000 hydrogen cars were sold worldwide in 2022 according to one report, and the market for such vehicles is slated to hit $17.88 billion by 2029.  

[Related: This plane powered by hydrogen has made an electrifying first flight.]

For those who are intrigued by hydrogen vehicles and live in the Netherlands, you’re in luck—the first hydrogen energy refueling hub was just unveiled outside of Amsterdam.

“Electric cars are also part of the solution for sustainable mobility, but the electricity grid is already filling up,” Eline Schwietert, the Delft team’s press contact, said in a recent statement. “Electrifying the whole world is not an option. Hydrogen and electric cars go hand in hand. There is not one big winner.”

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Almost a year ago, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that it was partnering with Harvard University to test and develop a quantum network. In late June this year, AWS opened up its labs and let media outlets, including Popular Science, peep at its early models of a quantum repeater, which is similar to a classical amplifier that carry optical signals down long stretches of fiber. 

“We’re developing the technology for quantum networks. They are not fully baked,” says Antia Lamas-Linares, head of the AWS Center for Quantum Networking. “There’s a lot of these technologies that have been partially demonstrated in academic labs that still need quite a lot of development to get to what we call a fully fledged quantum network.”

So what’s the point of this kind of technology? A quantum network could be used to distribute cryptographic keys without having to go through an intermediate party, or create anonymous multi-user broadcasts. 

The challenges of making a quantum network

In a quantum network, instead of communicating with classical bits that are one or zero, off or on, there are quantum bits, or qubits, that can be in a superposition of one and zero at the same time. Computer scientists can entangle these qubits and take advantage of their quantum properties to carry out interesting computations that would be hard, resource-intensive, or impossible to do classically.

But similar to classical systems, in order to have a network, the team needs to be able to generate the qubits, move them around, and store them. And a really great way to move them around is with photons, or pieces of light, explains Nicholas Mondrik, quantum research scientist at AWS. They travel well, and “you can, with a little bit of cleverness, encode your qubit in a photon,” he says.

[Related: Chicago now has a 124-mile quantum network. This is what it’s for.]

Light is already used in classical fiber optics systems to carry information over long distances. The problem with this method is that after about 62 miles, things start to get choppy. That’s where optical amplifiers come into play. They can detect when light gets weaker, and boosts it up before sending it down the line. However, the optical amplifier and other devices used to pass down the light signal forces that light to make a choice between one or zero, says Mondrik, and it doing so would destroy the quantum information carried on the photon.  

One of the key innovations AWS has been workshopping is a quantum equivalent of a signal amplifier, called a quantum repeater. 

Diamonds are a quantum researcher’s best friend

To make a quantum repeater, they first needed to figure out how to make quantum memory—something that can store a qubit. That way, it can catch the incoming photon and allow it to be processed, before sending it on its way. The solution: synthetic, “quantum-grade” diamonds. 

“Within the structure of diamonds, sometimes you get defects. Sometimes you get diamonds that are not transparent, that have colors and hues. Those things are called color centers and they are impurities in the diamond,” says Lamas-Linares. “It turns out those impurities behave like an artificial atom, and you can use them to store the state of a photon. These interesting colors are what allows us to interface with light, and store the state of the flying qubit and manipulate that state.” 

The way to make the diamond suitable for storing photons is to first create “silicon vacancies.” To do that, researchers take a diamond that’s as pure carbon as possible and bombard the carbon-lattice with silicon atoms. These silicon atoms will knock out a couple of carbons, take their place, and behave as a fixed atom in the diamond lattice that can interact with photonic qubits through electrons. 

To guide the photon to the electron on the silicon atom, researchers built nanocavities around the silicon vacancy that essentially acts like a set of mirrors that direct the light to where it needs to go. 

For this process to work, the team needs to stop the diamond structure from vibrating; they do this by cooling it down to near absolute zero. The device they use to do this is the same chandelier-like dilution refrigerator-vacuum-thermal shield combination that’s used for superconducting quantum computers. But this infrastructure is notably smaller (about half the size), and tail attachment is completely different. 

“This is where the silicon vacancy, where this diamond memory lives,” Mondrik says. “In order to make silicon vacancies work as a quantum memory, as a qubit, you need to put them in a strong tunable magnetic field.” Therefore, there are additional structures on the bottom of the chandelier that allows for a superconducting magnet to be attached before the thermal shield gets put on outside. 

There’s also a piezoelectric stack that helps researchers steer things around, a microwave line that helps them manipulate the qubit, an optical fiber that transfers light into the diamond cavity, and a microscope imaging system that extends from the bottom of the chandelier to the top to let researchers see what they’re doing. 

But not all the science is done in the dilution refrigerator. There are also room temperature workspaces stationed around the lab where qubits get made, measured, and characterized. 

In its current form, the contraption where all the different components come together seems like a complicated assembly of wires, metals, and lenses. But eventually, the team wants to compress this technology into one singular, adaptable piece of hardware that they can drag and drop onto any type of quantum computing device. 

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Computers today are capable of wonderful marvels and complex calculations. But if you break down one of these problem-solving engines into its essentials, at the heart of it you’ll find the most basic unit of memory: a bit. Bits are tiny, binary switches that underlie many of the fundamental operations computers perform. It is the smallest unit of memory that exists in two states: on and off, otherwise known as one and zero. Bits can also represent information and values like true (one) and false (zero), and are considered the language of machines. 

Arranging these bits into clever and intricate matrices on semiconductor chips allow computer scientists to perform a wide variety of tasks, like encoding information and retrieving data from memory. As computer scientists stack more and more of these switches onto a processing unit, the switches can become unwieldy to manage, which is why bits are sometimes organized into sets of eight, also known as a byte. 

You can also represent more complex information with bytes than you can with bits. While bits can only be one or zero, bytes can store data such as characters, symbols, and large numbers. 

[Related: The best external hard drives of this year]

Bytes are also commonly the smallest unit of information that can be “addressed.” That means that bytes can literally have addresses of sorts that tell the computer which cross wires (or cross streets, if you want to imagine a chip as a tiny city) to retrieve the stored value from. All programs come with pre-made commands, or operation codes, that correlate addresses with values, and values with variables. Different types of written codes can correlate the 256 states in a byte to items like letters. For example, the ASCII code for computer text (which assigns numeric values to letters, punctuation marks, and other characters) says that if you have a byte that looks like 01000100, or the deci-numeral 68, that corresponds to an uppercase “D.” By ordering the bytes in interesting combinations, you can also use codes to make colors. 

Bytes as a unit let you gauge the amount of memory you can store for different types of information. For example, if you were to type a note with 1,000 individual letters, that would take up 1,000 bytes of memory. Historically, because the industry wanted to keep count in binary, it still used units like kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, and terabytes, but here’s where it gets even more complicated: A kilobyte is not always 1,000 bytes (as the prefix would have you assume).

[Related: Best cloud storage services of this year]

In fact, a kilobyte is actually 2^10, or 1,024 bytes. The same can be said for the other units of memory—they’re a rough representation for bytes. A gigabyte is slightly larger than a billion bytes (2^30), and a terabyte is roughly a trillion bytes (2^40). Special prefixes, like kibi, mebi, gibi, were later introduced to account for the differences, although many computer scientists still prefer to stick with the old naming system.

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Small planes have one propeller, bigger ones have two, and helicopters have a giant rotor on top and a smaller one on the tail. Then there’s an electric aircraft from Joby Aviation, which has a whopping six propellers. They can all tilt to allow the flying machine to take off and land vertically, or cruise in forward flight. 

The California-based company, which has been developing electric air taxis for years, officially took the wraps off its first production prototype aircraft today. It looks similar to pre-production aircraft that the company has flown before, but this one is destined to be delivered to Edwards Air Force Base in California after Joby finishes testing it. “We have the approval to fly that plane now legally, and we will fly it very soon,” says Jon Wagner, a veteran of Tesla who is the company’s lead for the powertrain and electronics team. That FAA certification to fly the plane, which has the word “experimental,” written on its side, is not the same type of certification that the company needs to fly paying customers. That comes later, if all goes according to plan.

The schedule holds for Joby to bring the aircraft to the Edwards Air Force Base in 2024, but the company will conduct tests that include flying it before sending it to the military base. “We expect very, very soon it will be in the air,” Wagner says. “We’ll be flying it in Marina [California] here, and then it will be moved to Edwards, and complete its official flight test plan with the US Air Force as a partner.” 

Joby Aviation and other electric aviation companies like Beta Technologies have a relationship with the Air Force through a program called Agility Prime. The purpose behind this program is for the military to help out the companies working in the field, while also learning from the tech and exploring how it could help the military. In a press release, Joby said after the aircraft arrives at Edwards, “it will be used to demonstrate a range of potential logistics use cases.”

“We’re super excited about taking this aircraft to Edwards Air Force Base in California to begin testing with the DOD,” the company’s CEO, JoeBen Bevirt, told Bloomberg News. “That is just a spectacular opportunity for us to begin building the operational muscle and begin moving goods and people around military airbases before we have FAA certification.” 

Joby’s production aircraft could be a way to transport cargo or people someday; it can hold four passengers, plus a pilot. The company’s goal is to carry people beginning in 2025. “I believe what we’re showing here is going to revolutionize aviation forever,” Wagner says. Joby also has a planned collaboration with Delta Air Lines, which could provide a way for passengers to make a short hop from somewhere in the New York City area, for example, to John F. Kennedy International Airport, before embarking on a regular plane to someplace further away.

Wagner says that the production aircraft that they’ve just unveiled appears, superficially, to resemble the pre-production aircraft the company has fabricated already. It “looks substantially similar to the very first aircraft we built, six years ago,” he says, “and especially [similar] to the last two aircraft we built.” 

But he says that even if it looks similar, the flying machine that came off the production line has been subjected to iterations to improve it. “The biggest difference is that we’ve now invested in the manufacturing systems, and we can make multiple of these aircraft, over and over now, and that’s because we’ve gained the confidence in that design,” he says. 

The industry as a whole has seen setbacks, as has Joby. A company called Kitty Hawk, which was working on a single-seat self-flying aircraft, closed its doors last year. And, an uncrewed, remotely piloted aircraft from Joby crashed in February of 2022, after it “experienced a component failure over an uninhabited area near Jolon, California,” the NTSB said in its preliminary report. “There were no injuries, and the aircraft was substantially damaged.” Plus, earlier this month, NASA said that it wouldn’t fly its electric X-57 plane, due to safety concerns and time constraints. 

In the US, Joby’s competitors include Beta Technologies, Archer, and Wisk, which is owned by Boeing.

Take a look at the sleek new aircraft, below:

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This week, a company called AST SpaceMobile announced that it had successfully transmitted a 4G LTE signal from its BlueWalker 3 satellite to “off-the-shelf smartphones” in Hawaii using AT&T’s cellular network. According to the press release, it “achieved repeated successful download speeds above 10 Mbps during testing.” That’s fast enough for normal browsing, messaging, and even watching videos.

What’s impressive here is that cell phones typically connect to ground-based cell towers, not satellites. That’s why it’s hard to get cell service on a boat a few miles out to sea or when you’re traveling through a rural area. But by using satellites, AST SpaceMobile may be able to expand coverage to theoretically nearly anywhere on the planet. No more worrying about passing through a signal deadzone.   

“AST SpaceMobile’s space-based cellular capabilities are designed to be a critical extension for cellular communications,” Abel Avellan, chairman and CEO of AST SpaceMobile, said in the press release. “In addition to supporting basic voice and text that we expect from phones, it would also enable users to browse the internet, download files, use messaging apps or stream video.”

One of the big problems with cell coverage is that cell towers have a surprisingly limited range. Take the 5G networking standard. It relies on three different spectrum bands to provide three different kinds of cellular service. Low-band 5G uses frequencies less than 1 GHz and has the greatest range—but the lowest speeds (it tops out at about 100 Mbps); mid-band uses the frequencies between 1 GHz and 6 GHz, and has a pretty good balance of speed and range; and high-band or millimeter wave (mmWave) uses frequencies between 24 GHz and 40 GHz and allows for Gbps speeds but only within a few hundred feet. In other words, as range increases, speed decreases.

In cities and suburban areas, you will typically be within a mile or two of the cell tower providing your phone with service. In rural areas, towers can theoretically have a range of up to 45 miles, but the connection is affected by what wavelength the tower transmits, the geography of the region, how powerful the signal is transmitted, and many other factors, so the range is often a lot shorter. 

All this is to say, providing high-speed cellular broadband to an area as vast as the US using ground-based towers is a major challenge not readily solvable with existing technology. Which is where the idea of space-based broadband comes into play. 

While there are satellite phones, like Iridium, and satellite broadband services that require a small dish, like Starlink, there isn’t yet a satellite broadband service that can reach regular smartphones. That’s the kind of thing that would allow cell companies to provide blanket coverage throughout the whole country. And this is the service that AST SpaceMobile is trying to build. 

In the press release, Chris Sambar, head of AT&T says, “Successfully reaching double-digit download speeds during satellite-to-smartphone testing takes us one step closer to ensuring people across the United States will be able to stay connected no matter their location.”

Deploying this kind of technology means that in most locations, your smartphone would still connect to ground-based cell towers, but when you’re driving through the Sierra Nevadas or Rocky Mountains, it would be able to connect to a satellite in low-Earth orbit. Apparently, AST SpaceMobile already has “agreements and understandings” with over 35 global cellular providers.

To achieve its latest success, AST SpaceMobile relied on its BlueWalker 3 satellite, which it says is “the largest-ever commercial communications array deployed in low-Earth orbit.” It’s now fully deployed and spans 693 square feet. It was able to beam its 4G LTE signal to cellphones in Hawaii over AT&T’s network. Next, the company wants to achieve 5G speeds.

Of course, satellite broadband has its own issues. There are concerns that we are already putting too many satellites into space. And while space-based communication can be effective for downloading files, and making and receiving calls, upload speeds and latency (how long it takes for data to go from your smartphone to a server and receive a reply) can be much lower than what you get from ground-based towers. Even with satellites in low-Earth orbit, the round trip time to space can take a while!

Still, whether you’re excited or horrified about one-day being able to drive across America without losing your phone signal, this latest news suggests we may be getting closer to it. 

The post This company put a huge cell-tower-like satellite in space appeared first on Popular Science.

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Earlier this week, Microsoft said that it had achieved a big milestone towards building their version of a quantum supercomputer—a massive machine that can tackle certain problems better than classical computers owing to the quirks of quantum mechanics. 

These quirks would allow the computer to represent information as zero, one, or a combination of both. The unit of computing, in this case, would no longer be a classical zero or one bit. It would be a qubit—the quantum equivalent of the classical bit.  

There are many ways to build a quantum computer. Google and IBM are using an approach with superconducting qubits, and some smaller companies are looking into neutral atom quantum computers. Microsoft’s strategy is different. It wants to work with a new kind of qubit called topological qubits, which involves some innovative and experimental physics. To make them, you need semiconductor and superconductor materials, electrostatic gates, special particles, nanowires, and a magnetic field. 

[Related: Quantum computers are starting to become more useful]

The milestone that Microsoft claimed to have passed has to do with the fact that they proved in a peer-reviewed paper in the journal Physical Review B that their topological qubits can act as small, fast, and reliable units for computing. (A full video explaining how the physics behind topological qubits work is available in a company blog post.)

Microsoft’s next steps will involve integrating these units with controllable hardware and a less error-prone system. The qubits currently being researched tend to be fragile and finicky, prompting scientists to come up with methods to correct or work with the errors that might arise due to interference from the environment that make the qubits fall out of their quantum states.  

Alongside ensuring that the system can come together cohesively, Microsoft researchers will also improve the qubits themselves so they can achieve properties like entanglement through a process called “braiding.” This characteristic will allow the device to take on more complex operations. 

Then, the company will work to scale up the number of qubits that are linked together. Microsoft told TechCrunch that it aims to have a full quantum supercomputer made of these topological qubits within 10 years.

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Monarch butterflies in Eastern North America complete one of the longest animal migrations. Often compared to marathon runners, these spotted pollinators traverse the continent, flying for more than two months and up to thousands of miles from their mating grounds as far north as Canada to their wintering roosts as far south as Mexico.

Scientists have long been interested in learning how exactly an insect that weighs less than a paper clip can travel for such long distances. Research up until now has suggested that changes in their metabolism, a voracious appetite for lipid-rich flower nectar, and the shape of their wings all play a part. 

But a new study in the journal PLOS One published today finds that the colors on the monarch’s wings might influence its capacity for endurance flight as well. In a nod to the increasingly popular practice of biomimicry, where researchers try to replicate the natural world in engineering projects, the authors hope that studying the colors of the monarch’s wings will help them make drones more efficient.

[Related: Are monarch butterflies endangered?]

The question of how color influences the monarch’s flight began when Mostafa Hassanalian, a professor of mechanical engineering at New Mexico Tech, published a paper about how the colors on the wings of the albatross, a kind of ocean-roaming bird, might help it fly for longer distances. The black on the top of the bird’s wings absorbs more solar energy, creating a pocket of warm air; the white on the bottom absorbs less. Together, the opposite colors create more lift and less drag, helping the albatross to soar more efficiently. The temperature difference between the two sides of the wings could be up to 10 to 25 degrees Celsius, depending on the amount of sun they receive, according to Hassanalian. 

Andy Davis, a research scientist at the University of Georgia who studies monarchs, saw Hassanalian’s paper and wondered if the same might apply to the North American butterfly. The pair soon came into contact, and along with three other experts, began to investigate if the orange, black, and white pattern on the monarch’s wings determined how far it could fly. First, they measured the proportions of colors on 400 pairs of wings from preserved milkweed butterflies, including Eastern monarchs at different stages of their life cycle. Then they performed image analysis on the right wing of each specimen to figure out the size of the spots. 

The team determined that the butterflies who survived the migration to Mexico tended to have 3 percent less black pigment on their wings and 3 percent more white pigment, a surprising contrast from the albatross. They also found that the Eastern monarchs had significantly larger white spots than other milkweed butterflies that didn’t complete long-distance journeys. Previous research also identified deeper shades of orange on the wings of Eastern monarchs, which migrate farther than the Western and Floridian populations.

The authors still don’t know why the migrating monarchs have larger white spots, but their guess is that the alternating color patterns give them an aerodynamic advantage. “The trailing edge [of the monarch’s wing] is all black, and then you have the white spots,” Hassanalian explains. “White is cool air; black is hot air. So cool and hot, it will change the flow patterns in the trailing edge. And that would allow them to save more energy, enhance their dynamic efficiency, and make it easier to fly.”

No one has directly studied how the white patches on the monarch’s wings influence their flight, says Micah Freedman, a postdoctoral fellow who studies monarch migration at the University of British Columbia. Still, the size of the patches is relatively small. “To the untrained eye, it probably wouldn’t look like a big difference,” he says. “But when you use image processing software, it picks up on a difference.”

Hassanalian, Davis, and their team are planning more projects to validate this hypothesis. Their future experiments could involve building artificial monarch wings with different colors and putting them in a wind tunnel. They might also expose their models to smoke and lasers and use a high-speed camera to visualize the flow patterns around them. “These ideas here are so brand new,” Davis says. “I’ve been studying monarchs for 25 years or so. No one knows what these spots are for. We’ve never known.”

Should the connection between white markings and flight performance prove true, they plan to apply it to drone technology. If small coloration effects “can improve like 10 percent of your efficiency, that’s a lot,” Hassanalian says. “Another aspect is your drone would be able to carry more, because this coloration helps them gain extra lift.” The enhancement could also benefit other aircraft, but he points out one caveat: Planes fly at a much faster speed than butterflies, so coloration may not be as relevant to them. Still, one of his graduate students is currently researching if coloring the tips of a plane’s wings black could reduce fuel use. 

[Related: This ‘airliner of the future’ has a radical new wing design]

“This is bio-inspiration at its best here,” David adds, “because we’re learning from the butterflies that have evolved for eons on how to be better fliers.”

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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.

In the late 1700s, King George III glimpsed the future of shipping. Sir Charles Middleton, comptroller of the British Royal Navy, approached the monarch with a vision. His pitch came with a demo—a specially modified model of a warship called the Bellona. The king’s eye soon fell on the shimmering copper plates that encased the miniature ship’s hull below the waterline.

“It was … shall we say, blinged up,” says Simon Stephens, curator of ship models at Royal Museums Greenwich in London, England. When the king heard how the plates could make ships faster, by repelling marine organisms that would otherwise encrust their hulls, he was sold. By the early 1780s, the entire British naval fleet got the bling treatment, too: hundreds of warships were adorned with copper plates mounted like overlapping roof tiles to ease the flow of water across them.

Middleton and his copper plates more or less solved an age-old maritime headache. Since the advent of long-distance sailing, ships that had lengthy stays at sea returned to port with hulls contaminated by barnacles, seaweed, and other marine gunk. This slowed the vessels down—imagine trying to push a slimy, bumpy pineapple through water. Laborers toiled for days or weeks to scrape vessels clean again. But because copper is toxic to many marine organisms, Middleton’s plated ships remained smooth.

Today, copper is still applied to many oceangoing vessels—often as a component in certain characteristically red antifouling paints. As in the 1700s, the copper prevents fouling, leaving a smoother hull that creates less drag. This reduces fuel consumption and lowers carbon emissions. Less fouling also means fewer potentially invasive marine species being ferried around the world.

Yet with new regulations tightening emissions requirements, ship owners are taking hull coatings more seriously than ever before. Behind the scenes, the search for even better, more environmentally friendly solutions is gathering pace.

The challenge is to find effective, sustainable coatings that don’t cost the Earth or leach heavy metals into the ocean. Ship owners must choose carefully. Even a small increase in the roughness of a ship’s hull can have a dramatic effect on emissions, explains Nick Aldred, a marine biologist at the University of Essex in England: “You lose out in a big way by having any barnacles.”

When a ship enters the water, it doesn’t take long for bacteria and phytoplankton to colonize the hull. The microbes create a biofilm that attracts other organisms, and eventually the hull can become caked in barnacles and seaweed, says Maria Salta, a marine biofilm expert at Endures, a company in the Netherlands that studies fouling and corrosion.

So if you own a ship and want to stop this from happening, you have, broadly speaking, two options, says Salta: either a biocide-based coating or a fouling-release coating.

Like Middleton’s copper plates, biocidal coatings kill organisms looking to adhere to the ship’s hull. But it’s possible to push this too far, and the biocidal coating tributyltin (TBT) is a disastrous example of what’s at stake. This potent antifouling coating was used on ships’ hulls for decades, but it poisoned seaways and caused oysters’ shells to thicken so much that the creatures could no longer open their shells to feed. TBT was banned internationally in 2008.

The other option, a fouling-release coating, is like cooking with a nonstick frying pan, says Salta. Organisms generally won’t stick to fouling-release coatings, and if they do, they tend to adhere weakly and drop off when the ship gets underway.

An example is the silicone-based coating Sigmaglide, which PPG Industries has been gradually updating and improving for around 20 years. At one time, the coating was transparent. “It was very difficult to apply; you could not see where you sprayed it,” says Joanna van Helmond, PPG’s global product manager of antifouling and fouling release.

The firm soon added a pigment and tweaked the coating to be less sensitive to temperature and humidity, making it easier to spritz onto hulls in shipyards around the world. In March, the company announced the latest version of this coating. Van Helmond declined to elaborate on how it works, but says the coating reacts with water, aligning at the nanoscale to become extra smooth.

However, Van Helmond did say that in laboratory trials the coating significantly reduced drag. When compared with traditional antifouling coatings, such as PPG’s own biocidal Sigma Ecofleet 290, the company claims its new super sleek coating can reduce a ship’s carbon emissions by up to 35 percent.

Yet fouling-release coatings can be expensive compared with other options. And as Aldred notes, these coatings only work properly when water constantly brushes against the ship’s hull. That makes fouling-release coatings less useful for ships that are static for long periods, such as naval vessels.

Innovations to tackle fouling continue to develop in the footsteps of Middleton’s copper plates, and some of the most cutting-edge efforts to reduce fouling and drag function quite differently from existing coatings.

Take, for instance, the textured covering inspired by sharks that was prototyped by AkzoNobel, a Dutch firm. Rather than trying to make a ship’s hull extremely smooth, it mimicked shark skin’s characteristic roughness, which is naturally drag reducing and antifouling. Such textures have been applied successfully to the bodies of commercial airplanes to reduce drag in the air, though AkzoNobel has yet to report the same success in the water. (The company did not respond to a request for comment.)

Other scientists are looking to use ultrasound or ultraviolet light to deter marine organisms from attaching to hulls. Killing microbes before they get a chance to stick to the vessel could prevent the formation of biofilm onto which barnacles and other stowaways attach. Aldred cautions that these approaches have not been fully evaluated and could come with some unfortunate side effects. “Are we going to be selecting and breeding algae that are resistant to UV, for example? You can imagine all kinds of consequences,” he says.

In their own work, Aldred and his colleagues hope to develop a substance that would actually encourage the formation of a biofilm. But a special kind of biofilm. The team has identified bacteria capable of degrading barnacle glue, he says, which could prevent large marine organisms from colonizing a hull.

“We have a joke in our project that if we ever launched a company to sell this slime, we’d call it boat yogurt,” he explains. “It’s a kind of probiotic for your boat.”

Their research is yet to be published, and Aldred declines to share further details, though he says that, so far, he is happy with the results.

At least royal approval is no longer a requirement. What would King George III have made of boat yogurt?

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

The post Why scientists want to banish barnacles from ship hulls appeared first on Popular Science.

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The cruise control function has been around since the late 1950s, allowing drivers to keep a constant speed. Today, this often-standard feature is not just for rolling along while resting your right foot; drivers have learned over time that maintaining speed saves gas, too, and it smooths out the start-and-stop motion of average highway driving. 

What’s most remarkable about cruise control is not the system itself, which represented a breakout innovation at the time. This brilliant tech was invented by an engineer who was blind named Ralph Teetor, and it was his tenacity that led to a patent that changed driving as we know it. Cadillac picked up the technology soon after its debut as Speedostat, and rebranded it as cruise control, installing it in its luxury cars as an option. 

Today, GM is exploring other inventions for and by people with disabilities. The automaker is building an entire division dedicated to improving mobility for all called the Accessibility Center of Excellence, with benefits for all drivers and passengers. 

Here’s what GM is doing in this important field.

Why accessibility matters

A few months back, my 79-year-old dad pulled into a parking space set aside for people with disabilities at a store in Florida. As he got out of the car, my father recalls that a stranger yelled at him using a derogatory term, saying that he probably didn’t even have a disability. 

My father held out his artificial arm.

“Shake my hand,” he said dryly.

The nonprofit organization Disability:IN reports that there are about a billion people with disabilities on the planet, and roughly 25 percent of the US population is comprised of people with disabilities. While people might not notice an artificial arm or leg at first, it’s a visual and important clue that someone has a disability. Those with physical challenges as well as hearing loss, limited vision, or other non-apparent disabilities are doing the best they can in a world designed for people not living with disabilities, but there’s always room for improvement, and GM has put that high on its to-do list.

For the past year and a half, as GM’s chief engineer of accessibility, Carrie Morton has been working to make life easier for people who are disabled. With Morton in this role, which the company says is the first of its kind in the automotive sector, GM wants to change the way we think about cars within its Accessibility Center of Excellence.

Before Morton joined GM in 2022, she spent nearly a decade at the University of Michigan as the managing director of Mcity, formerly called the Mobility Transformation Center. The University of Michigan’s Mcity is a public-private partnership focused on transportation issues at the intersection of academia, industry, and government for the benefit of all.

“When we talk about inclusive design, it’s not just for people who use wheelchairs,” she says. “When you design for inclusivity, it helps everyone.”

Color blindness and (way) beyond

Morton and her team are dedicated to researching customer needs and defining what it means to have accessible solutions in vehicles. Currently, the center has about a half dozen spokes, but they reach far and wide, Morton says. Across the company, she works with advanced engineering, user design, policy, marketing, and more. That broader group actively working is nearing 100 people, and there are also weekly accessibility working groups made up of hundreds of people.

For example, consider something most people don’t pay any attention to: the colors on a dashboard. If you know someone with color blindness, you could imagine how challenging it might be to discern one control from another. Morton’s team is working on projects like that one, and she says they’re looking at current technologies like electronic steering and brake-by-wire as new opportunities to help adapt the controls for customer needs. 

“We have features like SuperCruise and other active safety features that help our customers with low vision or cognitive decline,” Morton says. “We also have RTT [real-time text] tech for the hearing impaired, and our seats use haptic feedback so if you’re not able to use the audio warning you can still benefit from the feature.” Real-time text appears on a screen in the vehicle.

Focusing on an initiative GM calls “Zero Barriers,” the team at the center makes a priority to hear from all customer types—especially people who might not have been included in the past, like those with both visible and invisible disabilities. That includes “situational disabilities” like a broken bone, eye injury, or mobility issues that are prevalent with aging. Think about how challenging it might be to get in or out of a vehicle with arthritic hips or worn-out knees. GM and Disability:IN are working with people with disabilities to find solutions for these challenges. 

One future innovation that could help is full automation. 

“My mother had Parkinson’s [disease] and my dad was having trouble with his eyes, so they couldn’t drive anymore; they became very isolated,” says Leslie Wilson, executive vice president of Disability:IN. “Could you imagine if self-driving vehicles had been available?” (GM owns Cruise, a self-driving car company; another prominent autonomous vehicle company is Waymo.) 

Then there are the issues of cargo and storage space—analog, yet important, features for people with disabilities, Morton says. Wheelchairs, service animals, and other equipment need space, and her team is working on the integration of those features as well. 

“GM is a large company with a lot of diversity and we want to implement that into our vehicles,” she says. “We’re working with the community to serve their needs.” 

The post How GM is moving its autos into an accessible and inclusive future appeared first on Popular Science.

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