Another good example is technology derived from the One Laptop Per Child project. John Ryan, vice president of Pixel Qi, a company that’s commercializing the non-profit OLPC’s tech, said that he’s working with chip manufacturers to help reduce the power that a computer’s processor consumes. OLPC’s XO laptop cleverly shuts off the processor when it’s not being used, saving tons of power. Soon chip makers may build this capability right into processors, extending the battery life of ordinary laptops everywhere....

“The story really starts with Apollo,” says Thomas Watters, lead author of the research paper and a senior scientist at the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. NASA astronauts installed five seismic data collection stations on the moon during Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, and 16. From 1969 to 1977, the stations recorded four different types of seismic activity on the moon ranging from magnitude 2 to 5: quakes that occurred from thermal expansion, quakes from meteorite impacts, deep moonquakes due to tidal stresses created from the orbit around the Earth, and shallow moonquakes that didn’t have a discernible cause....

The magic of the Z starts under the hood. The all-new coupe packs a stout 400-horsepower twin-turbocharged V6, plucked from the luxury-branded Infiniti Q50 Red Sport. This alone offers a 68 hp bump from the outgoing model’s naturally aspirated 3.7-liter. Central to the platform is the standard-issued six-speed manual transmission—a feature which caused the crowd to erupt with cheers when Nissan COO Ashwani Gupta revealed the car live on stage on August 17....

New EV chargers are being installed at precincts around the city, and the cars will enter rotation this summer. The city has also approved the acquisition of an additional 250 Tesla Model 3 police cars, though that order has not yet been executed. Electric vehicles are a boon from an environmental point of view, and can be a good fit for a police department: Many hours of a patrol car’s day are spent in idle with the engine running, doing nothing more than emitting tailpipe greenhouse gasses....

The story of how DuPont came to outfit not only [fitness entrepeneur] Gilda Marx and her students but active women the world over is one of American social progress itself. It begins in the 1920s, when the Delaware-based chemical giant—which had spent its first century producing gunpowder—underwent a dramatic rebranding. In an effort to distance itself from the carnage of World War I, the company began to market itself as one that existed primarily to serve women....

If you had more than one car in your garage and life suddenly got financially tight, you’d probably start driving the most fuel-efficient one the most. And if those trips involved fewer people, well, that’s even more of a reason to hop in a vehicle that’s small and new. Airlines are doing something similar with their aircraft during the coronavirus pandemic, and it likely means that beloved big—or just older—planes are going to find themselves in the airplane graveyard sooner than usual....

Anyway, in the trailer we get a glimpse of the juvenile origins of the future Captain Kirk’s daredevil thrill-seeking persona, not to mention his incredible physical prowess. In the scene in question we see young James T. leap out of his classic convertible sports coupe moments before it projects itself off of a several-thousand-foot precipice. James saves himself by gripping the sandy ground and pulling himself to a stop just as he reaches the edge of the cliff....

“We have found evidence that there’s a giant planet in the outer solar system,” Brown says. “By ‘giant’ we mean the size of Neptune, and when we say ‘outer solar system’ we mean 10 to 20 times farther away than Pluto.” Granted, Brown is not the first to make such a claim. Theories of a Planet X have been around for a century, including two published in the arXiv last month....

Here’s the case, from University of Washington assistant law professor Ryan Calo’s new study “Robots In American Law“: While the 1950s may have imagined driverless cars, they didn’t need that imagination for robots to work as metaphor. A teenager giving his date step-by-step instructions was enough for a jury to place the teenager as the operating person, and not the person physically behind the wheel (it probably didn’t help she was a woman at a time when gender inequality was more profound than it is today)....

Katherine Gibbons’ life turned upside down on the day in October 2018 when she skipped school, stole a liter of vodka, and drank much of it on the walk back from the grocery store. Her mother, who had been worried about Katherine’s erratic behavior for months, saw the 17-year-old was off campus through a phone-tracking app. She arrived at the school as her daughter stumbled in and was losing consciousness on the floor of the assistant principal’s office....

In a study published last month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists presented a way to do just that. By closely surveying the movements of a new strain of swine influenza in pig farms, they hoped to gain insight into the ways we can catch a virus before it wreaks havoc on the human population. Along the way, the scientists uncovered a new swine influenza virus called G4....

Researchers used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile’s Atacama Desert to capture the section of sky pictured above, which has a simply flabbergasting amount of detail. Imaging stars with such precision is the equivalent of spotting a soccer ball in Zurich while standing 150 miles away in Munich, according to an ESO press release. To get such detail, astronomers used the VLT’s HAWK-I instrument, which detects near-infrared light at varying wavelengths in order to see what lies beyond dense clouds of gas and dust....

Right now, traditional aircraft take off from runways and, after some time traveling to their destination, have a set amount of time they can fly over an area before they have to return and land. But if any part of the target can move, be it people, tanks, or anything that can fit on a truck, it’s better to have aircraft that can adapt and pursue it from the sky....

“These vehicles fit a new category of robotic systems,” Alberto Lacaze, president of Pegasus-maker Robotic Research, said in a release from the Army about the event. “They aren’t quite ground vehicles, they’re not quite aerial vehicles—they’re somewhere in between.” The Pegasus family of drones comes in three sizes, ranging from 4 to 38 pounds. The electric drones are all designed to fly between 20-30 minutes—or to drive for several hours on the ground....

In the presentation, Musk explains how this robot is the natural evolution for the tech at Tesla. “Tesla is arguably the biggest robotics company because our cars are semi-sentient robots on wheels,” he boasts. It “makes sense,” he says, to put the cars’ self-driving capabilities and built in neural networks that understand and navigate the world around the car into a humanoid robot form. The robot will supposedly stand 5’8” tall and weigh 125 pounds....

A similar process, Lovelock speculated, might have maintained Earth’s temperature over geological time. He believed the planet’s systems could self-regulate, and in the 1970s, he proposed what came to be known as the Gaia hypothesis. In 1987, shortly after Congressional hearings on climate change—during which a Republican senator from Rhode Island concluded that “the scientific evidence … is telling us we have a problem”—Lovelock was no longer satisfied with metaphors....

Single-shock rear suspensions are near-universal today. Traditional twin-shock setups are still seen, but exist mainly for reasons of retro style. When the era of longer rear-suspension travel arrived in 1974, it made the best sense to implement it with a single-suspension unit. Why have suspension at all? For decades, American motorcycles had rigid frames—no rear suspension. But as highways improved and speeds rose, rear suspension became necessary to provide chassis stability....

So why does the Jimi Hendrix lyric “kiss the sky” often become “kiss this guy”? When noise hits our eardrums, tiny hairs convert it into an electric signal, which ­travels through the auditory nerve to the temporal lobe. There, it turns those firings into words with meaning. If the sounds are clear and the terms familiar, we then “hear” a mostly accurate rendition of what someone is saying. But when the babble is muddy and unclear—a common occurrence in songs ­because music can drown out lyrics, and singers can pronounce words with extra flair—our brains scramble to find what makes sense....

To help solve this unique problem, Russia has developed specialized dual-use underwater and above-water rifles. The latest of these is the “dual-medium ADS assault rifle” created by High-Precision Weapons Company, part of Russian defense giant Rostec. With a magazine located behind the trigger and handle (the “bullpup”) configuration, the rifle is compact. Its barrel is fitted for 5.45x39mm bullets, the same kind commonly found in the AK-74 rifle and in use across the world today....