Why is China’s heavy-lift Long March 5B able to launch only 10 Guowang satellites at a time? Welcome to Edition 8.06 of the Rocket Report! Two of the world’s most storied rocket builders not named SpaceX achieved major successes this week. Arianespace’s Ariane 6 rocket launched from French Guiana…
Acura will step into the software-defined vehicle era with its US-made electric vehicle. Acura’s next RSX crossover has broken cover. The automaker has used this year’s Monterey Car Week as a stage to show off a bright yellow prototype—the color is called Propulsion Yellow Pearl—ahead of the production car…
An electric turbocharger means almost instant throttle response from the T-Hybrid. Porsche 911 enthusiasts tend to be obsessive about their engines. Some won’t touch anything that isn’t air-cooled, convinced that everything went wrong when emissions and efficiency finally forced radiators into the car. Others love the “Mezger” engines; designed…
The Inca Empire hung by a thread—literally. Inca bureaucrats recorded all the goings-on in their bustling empire using knotted cords called khipu, where the position and order of the knots represented numbers. They relied on the khipu system to track people, taxes, produce, livestock, and products like woven cloth…
VA Tech experiment was inspired by Death Valley’s mysterious “sailing stones” at Racetrack Playa. Scientists have figured out how to make frozen discs of ice self-propel across a patterned metal surface, according to a new paper published in the journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces. It’s the latest breakthrough…
Photophoresis can generate a tiny bit of lift without any moving parts. Most people would recognize the device in the image above, although they probably wouldn’t know it by its formal name: the Crookes radiometer. As its name implies, placing the radiometer in light produces a measurable change: the…
Feature had been removed from US Apple Watches after Apple lost a patent fight. In early 2024, Apple removed a blood oxygen monitoring feature from its then-current Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 watches, following a ruling that the feature violated light-based pulse oximetry patents from a California-based…
The head of the FAA’s commercial spaceflight division will become a political appointee. President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday directing government agencies to “eliminate or expedite” environmental reviews for commercial launch and reentry licenses. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), part of the Department of Transportation (DOT), grants…
Apple has purportedly been working on new smart home devices for years now. Rumors about a touchscreen-equipped smart home device from Apple have been circulating for years, periodically bolstered by leaked references in Apple’s software updates. But a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman indicates that Apple’s ambitions might extend…
Opinion: Theatrical testing scenarios explain why AI models produce alarming outputs—and why we fall for it. In June, headlines read like science fiction: AI models “blackmailing” engineers and “sabotaging” shutdown commands. Simulations of these events did occur in highly contrived testing scenarios designed to elicit these responses—OpenAI’s o3 model…
