No, the sky isn’t falling, but Q Day is coming, and it won’t be as expensive as thought. Building a utility-scale quantum computer that can crack one of the most vital cryptosystems—elliptic curves—doesn’t require nearly the resources anticipated just a year or two ago, two independently written whitepapers have…
All your data remains intact, and you can go back to your original address at any time. Someone is celebrating a birthday tomorrow—it’s Gmail. The iconic email service debuted 22 years ago on April 1, forever altering what people expected from free email. But 22 years is a long…
The key is to evenly distribute elderly passengers, who move more slowly, among the aircraft cabins. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) requires that, in the event of an emergency, all airplane passengers must be able to evacuate any aircraft within a 90-second window. But is that a realistic requirement,…
“Things are certainly starting to feel real here at the Cape.” KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—The two-day countdown for the launch of NASA’s Artemis II mission began Monday evening, with clocks timed for the first of six opportunities in early April to send a crew of four astronauts around the…
Building the big electric SUV at two sites doesn’t make sense anymore. The Volvo factory outside Charleston, South Carolina, will get even busier this year. Formerly the site that built the S60 sedan, in recent years it shifted to building big electric SUVs, the EX90 and closely related Polestar…
Factory Zero went idle on March 16, workers expected to return April 13. After getting a little overoptimistic about the speed and nature of electric vehicle adoption in the US, automakers are now scaling back their production plans. The imposition of tariffs and the abolishment of federal EV incentives…
F1 cars don’t have enough energy in a lap to attack fast corners, and that’s bad. Following this past weekend’s Japanese Grand Prix, Formula 1 goes into a five-week hiatus now that war in the Gulf has made it impossible to hold races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. The…
Rachel Hartigan on her new book, Lost: Amelia Earhart’s Three Mysterious Deaths and One Extraordinary Life. Famed aviator Amelia Earhart mysteriously disappeared in 1937 during an attempt to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe. Speculative theories abound about what really happened to Earhart, but while tantalizing…
Research proceeds on alternatives, but some doubt whether true lie detection is possible. When George W. Maschke applied to work for the FBI in 1994, he had already held a security clearance for over 11 years. The government had deemed him trustworthy through his career in the Army. But…
Breathing capacity could have compensated for lower atmospheric oxygen. Three-hundred million years ago, the skies of the late Palaeozoic era were buzzing with giant insects. Meganeuropsis permiana, a predatory insect resembling a modern-day dragonfly, had a wingspan of over 70 centimeters and weighed 100 grams. Biologists looked at these…
