The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has issued a sweeping recall affecting nearly every Tesla sold in the US due to safety flaws within the vehicles’ Autopilot systems. About two million vehicles will receive over-the-air software updates in the coming days to address the company’s latest setback in its ongoing “Full Self-Driving” project.

According to the federal authority’s December 12 announcement, the electric vehicle company’s flagship, increasingly criticized “driver-assistance feature” reportedly fails to properly ensure drivers remain attentive and in control of their EVs. Because of this, the NHTSA determined “in certain circumstances when Autosteer is engaged, the prominence and scope of the feature’s controls may not be sufficient to prevent driver misuse.” As a result, Tesla vehicles with the outdated Autopilot system enabled could fail to properly guard against potential accidents.

[Related: Tesla is under federal investigation over autopilot claims.]

The update will apply to all Model X, Model S, Model 3, and Model Y cars manufactured between October 5, 2012, and December 7, 2023. Once installed, the latest Autorsteer version will reportedly “further encourage the driver to adhere to their continuous driving responsibility” via additional controls and alerts, as well as limit where the feature can be activated.

The sweeping recall is the latest blow to Tesla’s long standing promise to soon offer customers a suite of fully autonomous vehicles. The Full Self-Driving program has faced years of pushback from vehicle safety regulators and industry critics over its safety record, efficacy, and overall capabilities. Prior to this week’s recall, Autopilot was advertised as a “hands-on driver assistance system” intended only for use while operators maintained constant attention on the road.

“It does not turn a Tesla into a self-driving car nor does it make a car autonomous,” reads the company’s own description.

As Wired notes, Tesla drivers must agree to “maintain control and responsibility” for their EV while Autopilot is engaged. When activated, the feature offers a scalable number of audio and visual warnings when a driver is detected to have removed their hands from the steering wheel. Autopilot will automatically shut off for the rest of a trip if too many alerts are triggered.

Despite these caveats, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has long promised the imminent arrival of autonomous Tesla EVs. In October 2022, Tesla CEO Elon Musk told investors during a call that Full Self-Driving would soon allow drivers to travel, “to your work, your friend’s house, to the grocery store without you touching the wheel,” before cautioning, “we’re not saying that that’s quite ready to have no one behind the wheel.”

[Related: Tesla lawyers argued Elon Musk Autopilot statements might be manipulated with deepfake tech.]

Aside from the multiple recall alerts in recent years, the Department of Justice is also investigating whether or not Tesla and its CEO repeatedly misled investors and consumers about Autopilot’s capabilities. In a demonstration video still available on Tesla’s website, a person is shown sitting in the driver’s seat without their hands on the steering wheel as the car navigates a public road.

“The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself,” reads a video subheading.
As The Register reported earlier this week, Tesla lawyers recently responded to a separate, similar investigation by the state of California into false and misleading Autopilot claims—according to the company’s legal team, Tesla continues to operate within its First Amendment right to free speech.

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European Union officials made tech policy history last week by enduring 36 hours of grueling debate in order to finally settle on a first of its kind, comprehensive AI safety and transparency framework called the AI Act. Supporters of the legislation and AI safety experts told PopSci they believe the new guidelines are the strongest of their kind worldwide and could set an example for other nations to follow.  

The legally binding frameworks set crucial new transparency requirements for OpenAI and other generative AI developers. It also draws several red lines banning some of the most controversial uses of AI, from real-time facial recognition scanning and so-called emotion recognition to predictive policing techniques. But there could be a problem brewing under the surface. Even when the Act is voted on, Europe’s AI cops won’t actually be able to enforce any of those rules until 2025 at the earliest. By then, it’s anyone’s guess what the ever-evolving AI landscape will look like. 

What is the EU AI Act? 

The EU’s AI Act breaks AI tools and applications into four distinct “risk categories” with those placed on the highest end of the spectrum exposed to the most intense regulatory scrutiny. AI systems considered high risk, which would include self-driving vehicles, tools managing critical infrastructure, medical devices, and biometric identification systems among others, would be required to undergo fundamental rights impact assessments, adhere to strict new transparency requirements, and must be registered in a public EU database. The companies responsible for these systems will also be subject to monitoring and record keeping practices to ensure EU regulators the tools in question don’t pose a threat to safety or fundamental human rights. 

It’s important here to note that the EU still needs to vote on the Act and a final version of the text has not been made public. A final vote for the legation is expected to occur in early 2024. 

The AI Act goes a step further and bans other use cases outright. In particular, the framework prohibits mass, untargeted scraping of face images from the internet or CCTV footage to create a biometric database. This could potentially impact well known facial recognition startups like Clearview AI and PimEyes, which reportedly scrape the public internet for billions of face scans. Jack Mulcaire, Clearview AI’s General Counsel, told PopSci it does not operate in or offer its products in the EU. PimEyes did not immediately respond to our request for comment. 

Emotion recognition, which controversially attempts to use biometric scans to detect an individual’s feeling or state of mind, will be banned in the workplace and schools. Other AI systems that “manipulate human behavior to circumvent their free will” are similarly prohibited. AI-based “social scoring” systems, like those notoriously deployed in mainland China, also fall under the banned category.

Tech companies found sidestepping these rules or pressing on with banned applications could see fines ranging between 1.5% and 7% of their total revenue depending on the violation and the company’s size. This penalty system is what gives the EU AI Act teeth and what fundamentally separates it from other voluntary transparency and ethics commitments recently secured by the Biden Administration in the US. Biden’s White House also recently signed a first-of-its kind AI executive order laying out his vision for future US AI regulation. 

In the immediate future, large US tech firms like OpenAI and Google who operate “general purpose AI systems” will be required to keep up EU officials up to date on how they train their models, report summaries of the types of data they use to train those models, and create a policy acknowledging they will agree to adhere to EU copyright laws. General models deemed to pose a “systemic risk,” a label Bloomberg estimates currently only includes OpenAI’s GPT, will be subject to a stricter set of rules. Those could include requirements forcing the model’s maker to report the tool’s energy use and cybersecurity compliance, as well as calls for them to perform red teaming exercises to identify and potentially mitigate signs  of systemic risk. 

Generative AI models and capable of creating potentially misleading “deepfake” media will be required to clearly label those creations as AI-generated. Other US AI companies that create tools falling under the AI Act’s “unacceptable” risk category would likely no longer be able to continue operating in the EU when the legislation officially takes effect. 

[ Related: “The White House’s plan to deal with AI is as you’d expect” ]

AI Now Institute Executive Director Amba Kak spoke positively about the enforceable aspect of the of the AI Act, telling PopSci it was a “crucial counterpoint in a year that has otherwise largely been a deluge of weak voluntary proposals.” Kak said the red lines barring particularly threatening uses of AI and new transparency and diligence requirements were a welcome “step in the right direction.” 

Though supporters of the EU’s risk-based approach say it’s helpful to avoid subjecting  more mundane AI use cases to overbearing regulation, some European privacy experts worry the structure places too little emphasis on fundamental human rights and detracts from past the approach of psst EU legislation like the 2018 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Charter of Fundamental Human Rights of the European Union (CFREU).

“The risk based approach is in tension with the rest of the EU human rights frameworks, “European Digital Rights Senior Policy Advisor Ella Jakubowska told PopSci during a phone interview. “The entire framework that was on the table from the beginning was flawed.” 

The AI Act’s risk-based approach, Jakubowska warned, may not always provide a full, clear picture of how certain seemingly low risk AI tools could be used in the future. Jakubowska said rights advocates like herself would prefer mandatory risk assessments for all developers of AI systems.

“Overall it’s very disappointing,” she added. 

Daniel Leufer, a Senior Policy Analyst for the digital rights organization AccessNow echoed those concerns regarding the risk-based approach, which he argues were designed partly as a concession to tech industry groups and law enforcement. Leufer says AccessNow and other digital rights organizations had to push EU member states to agree to include “unacceptable” risk categories, which some initially refused to acknowledge. Kak, the AI Now Institute Executive Director, went on to say the AI Act could have done more to clarify regulations around AI applications in law enforcement and national security domains.

An uncertain road ahead 

The framework agreed upon last week was the culmination of years’ worth of back and forth debate between EU member states, tech firms, and civil society organizations. First drafts of the AI Act date back to 2021, months before OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E generative AI tools enraptured the minds of millions. The skeleton of the legislation reportedly dates back even further still to as early as 2018. 

Much has changed since then. Even the most prescient AI experts would have struggled to imagine witnessing hundreds of top technologists and business leaders frantically adding their names to impassioned letters urging a moratorium on AI tech to supposedly safeguard humanity. Few similarly could have predicted the current wave of copyright lawsuits lodged against generative AI makers questioning the legality of their massive data scraping techniques or the torrent of AI-generated clickbait filling the web. 

Similarly, it’s impossible to predict what the AI landscape will look like in 2025, which is the earliest the EU could actually enforce its hefty new regulations. Axios notes EU officials will urge companies to agree to the rules in the meantimes, but on a voluntary basis.

Update 1/4/24 2:13PM: An earlier version of this story said Amba Kak spoke positively about the EU AI Act. This has been edited to clarify that she specifically spoke favorably about the enforceable aspect of the Act.

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Your biological center for thought, comprehension, and learning bears some striking similarities to a data center housing rows upon rows of highly advanced processing units. But unlike those neural network data centers, the human brain runs an electrical energy budget. On average, the organ functions on roughly 12 watts of power, compared with a desktop computer’s 175 watts. For today’s advanced artificial intelligence systems, that wattage figure can easily increase into the millions.

[Related: Meet ‘anthrobots,’ tiny bio-machines built from human tracheal cells.]

Knowing this, researchers believe the development of cyborg “biocomputers” could eventually usher in a new era of high-powered intelligent systems for a comparative fraction of the energy costs. And they’re already making some huge strides towards engineering such a future.

As detailed in a new study published in Nature Electronics, a team at Indiana University has successfully grown their own nanoscale “brain organoid” in a Petri dish using human stem cells. After connecting the organoid to a silicon chip, the new biocomputer (dubbed “Brainoware”) was quickly trained to accurately recognize speech patterns, as well as perform certain complex math predictions.

As New Atlas explains, researchers treated their Brainoware as what’s known as an “adaptive living reservoir” capable of responding to electrical inputs in a “nonlinear fashion,” while also ensuring it possessed at least some memory. Simply put, the lab-grown brain cells within the silicon-organic chip function as an information transmitter capable of both receiving and transmitting electrical signals. While these feats in no way imply any kind of awareness or consciousness on Brainoware’s part, they do provide enough computational power for some interesting results.

To test out Brainoware’s capabilities, the team converted 240 audio clips of adult male Japanese speakers into electrical signals, and then sent them to the organoid chip. Within two days, the neural network system partially powered by Brainoware could accurately differentiate between the 8 speakers 78 percent of the time using just a single vowel sound.

[Related: What Pong-playing brain cells can teach us about better medicine and AI.]

Next, researchers experimented with their creation’s mathematical knowledge. After a relatively short training time, Brainoware could predict a Hénon map. While one of the most studied examples of dynamical systems exhibiting chaotic behavior, Hénon maps are a lot more complicated than simple arithmetic, to say the least.

In the end, Brainoware’s designers believe such human brain organoid chips can underpin neural network technology, and possibly do so faster, cheaper, and less energy intensive than existing options. There are still a number of hurdles—both logistical and ethical—to clear, but although general biocomputing systems may be years down the line, researchers think such advances are “likely to generate foundational insights into the mechanisms of learning, neural development and the cognitive implications of neurodegenerative diseases.”

But for now, let’s see how Brainoware can do in a game of Pong.

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America’s eight largest pharmacy providers shared customers’ prescription records to law enforcement when faced with subpoena requests, The Washington Post reported Tuesday. The news arrives amid patients’ growing privacy concerns in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 overturn of Roe v. Wade.

The new look into the legal workarounds was first detailed in a letter sent by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Sara Jacobs (D-CA) on December 11 to the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

[Related: Abortion bans are impeding medication access.]

Pharmacies can hand over detailed, potentially compromising information due to legal fine print. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations restrict patient data sharing between “covered entities” like doctor offices, hospitals, and other medical facilities—but these guidelines are looser for pharmacies. And while search warrants require a judge’s approval to serve, subpoenas do not.  

Representatives for companies including CVS, Rite Aid, Kroger, Walgreens, and Amazon Pharmacy all confirmed their policies during interviews with congressional investigators in the months following Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Although some pharmacies require legal review of the requests, CVS, Rite Aid, and Kroger permit their staff to deliver any subpoenaed records to authorities on the spot. Per The WaPo, those three companies alone own 60,000 stores countrywide; CVS itself employees over 40,000 pharmacists.

According to the pharmacy companies, the industry giants annually receive tens of thousands of subpoenas, most often related to civil lawsuits. Information is currently unavailable regarding how many of these requests pharmacy locations were honored, as well as how many originated from law enforcement.

Given each company’s national network, patient records are often shared interstate between any pharmacy location. This could become legally fraught for medical history access within states that already have—or are working to enact—restrictive medical access laws. In an essay written for The Yale Law Journal last year, cited by WaPo, University of Connecticut associate law professor Carly Zubrzycki argued, “In the context of abortion—and other controversial forms of healthcare, like gender-affirming treatments—this means that cutting-edge legislative protections for medical records fall short.”

[Related: The dangers of digital health monitoring in a post-Roe world.]

Zubrzycki warns that, “at the absolute minimum,” patients seeking reproductive and gender-affirming healthcare “must be made aware of the risks posed by the emerging ecosystem of interoperable records.”

“To permit people to receive care under the illusion that their records cannot come back to harm them would be a grave injustice,” she wrote at the time.

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This article was originally featured on Knowable Magazine.

Kākāpō are avid walkers, wandering on strong legs for miles at a time and hiking up mountains to find mates. They’re keen climbers too, clambering up New Zealand’s 65-foot-high rimu trees on large claws to forage for red berries on the tips of the conifer’s branches.

But there’s one thing that the world’s heaviest parrot species can’t do: fly. With their bulky frames—males weigh up to nine pounds—and waddling gait, they have little chance of outrunning predators like stoats and feral cats. When threatened, the nocturnal parrots freeze, relying on their moss-green feathers to act as camouflage.

New Zealand was once a land of flightless birds like the extinct moa—no terrestrial mammalian predators in sight. That changed in the 13th century, when Māori voyagers brought rats and dogs, and again in the 19th century, when European settlers brought more rats, cats and mustelids like weasels, stoats and ferrets. These predators have played a major role in putting at risk some 300 native species on New Zealand’s two main islands and smaller offshore islands, taking an especially heavy toll on flightless birds like kākāpō.

Now listed as critically endangered, the kākāpō teetered on the edge of extinction in the mid-1900s due to hunting, predators and land clearance. From the 1970s, conservation efforts focused on managing the remaining kākāpō on the country’s offshore islands, where predators are systematically eradicated. Due to those ongoing efforts, which include breeding programs, veterinary treatment and supplementary food, parrot numbers have grown from fewer than 60 in 1995 to more than 200 today.

That success, plus lack of space in offshore islands, led New Zealand’s Department of Conservation and Ngāi Tahu, the Māori tribe whose people serve as traditional guardians of the kākāpō, to find a new habitat for the parrots. Starting in July 2023, relocations began to the 8,400-acre Sanctuary Mountain Maungatautari, a predator-free haven enclosed by one of the world’s longest pest-proof fences.

So far, 10 male parrots have moved to the reserve—the first time the species is living back on the mainland in almost half a century. Researchers are tracking their locations and conducting regular health checkups to assess whether the birds can thrive there.

If male parrots start hiking to the ridgetops, serenading female kākāpō with deep “booms” and high-pitched “chings,” they might be in shape to breed, says conservation biologist Andrew Digby, science advisor for kākāpō at the Department of Conservation. “We might start looking at bringing females in.”

Kākāpō have much lower fertility than other parrots. Since the 1980s, fewer than half their eggs have hatched, which is thought to be partly due to inbreeding. Left to their own devices, they breed only when rimu trees bear masses of fruit, every two to four years, with females laying one to four eggs.

Recently, researchers have started to explore how genomic data can contribute to kākāpō survival. Such studies can help wildlife managers boost genetic diversity and resilience in threatened species, says evolutionary biologist Cynthia Steiner of the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.

In one important study published in 2023, researchers analyzed whole-genome sequence data for 169 parrots—nearly all of those living when the research began in 2018. That work yielded crucial insights, including genetic variations affecting aspects of kākāpō chick development, like height and growth rate. This could help scientists predict how quickly baby birds will grow, and initiate veterinary interventions should the growth rates deviate, says Joseph Guhlin, a genomicist with Genomics Aotearoa at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.

Scientists also found that some kākāpō have genetic resistance to aspergillosis, a fungal respiratory disease. In 2019, an outbreak affected 21 birds and killed nine. If another outbreak occurs, vulnerable parrots could be isolated and treated ahead of time, Guhlin says.

As of October 2023, all parrots in the sanctuary were doing well, although the first four arrivals lost a bit of weight. Thanks to GPS trackers attached to each bird, “we can see that they’ve been bouncing around all over the place,” Digby says. But the survival of kākāpō beyond fenced-in sanctuaries depends on the success of Predator Free 2050, an ambitious initiative to eradicate some of the introduced predators most harmful to New Zealand’s native wildlife by 2050.

“Eradications are a high-cost, high-risk, high-reward strategy,” says ecologist Stephen Hartley of Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington. Hartley thinks it may be possible to get rid of possums, because they breed slowly and are easy to detect, but that rats and mustelids will be nearly impossible to eliminate without introducing some form of genetic or biological control, such as gene editing or introducing a parasite to prevent them from reproducing.

If all goes as planned, people across New Zealand may one day be able to see and hear the parrots from their own backyards. For now, they can traipse through the forest sanctuary the parrots now call home. “Transferring them to Maungatautari is a good first step,” Digby says. “It brings kākāpō back to where people are.”

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.

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Current EV Motors Founder Rocco Calandruccio grew up surrounded by cars; his grandfather opened a Ford dealership and then a Buick dealership and collected vintage and sports cars throughout his life. Calandruccio’s family lived in a rural part of Tennessee, where it wasn’t uncommon to find fields full of “rusting carcasses” of vehicles that had been abandoned when the engines or transmissions had failed.

Calandruccio had those rusted-out cars on his mind when he started his company. He wasn’t willing to accept that cars are disposable entities and set out to figure out a way to give them new lives. Centered on that goal, Calandruccio secured two patents for EV conversion kits. Internal combustion engines are complicated beasts with thousands of failure points, he says; he wants to provide a simplified, streamlined path to all-electric driving.

Here’s Calandruccio’s plan to bring EV conversions mainstream. 

Bypassing the transmission

Crate engines have been available for decades. These fully assembled internal combustion engines provide a cornerstone for automotive restoration projects as replacement or power upgrades. You can buy a basic LS9 block with nothing else included, or opt for a package like Chevrolet’s “connect and cruise” setup that also contains a transmission.  

Less common is what Chevrolet calls an “eCrate,” which includes a single all-electric motor and some of the elements you’d need to convert a gas-powered GM vehicle to an EV. The kit includes a low stall torque converter, transmission control module kit, flex plate, and hardware. Launched just this year, Chevrolet presents the eCrate as a motor “designed to connect directly to a GM 4-speed automatic transmission with an external mode switch.” 

One defining aspect of the eCrate is the standard one-size-fits-all 66 kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack. For scale, Chevy’s Bolt carried a 66-kWh battery for a little more than 250 miles of range. Now imagine you own a fleet company that only needs a range of about 50 miles per day; you’d be carrying a lot of surplus battery. That affects the range and can cost thousands more than a smaller, right-sized battery to match the vehicle.

What Current EV is offering is more than a crate engine, Calandruccio says. His kit is instead engineered to bypass the transmission to improve the electric motor’s performance and efficiency. Instead of using a transmission to convert energy from the engine to turn the wheels, the motor is bolted directly to the axle. 

“We’re focused on a bolt-on, all-inclusive solution for electrification,” he explains. “For this solution to be sustainable, it has to appeal to everyday mechanics and be safe, quick, and effective.” 

Calandruccio’s marquee project is a 1978 Ford F-150 he named Gator for its signature green finish. A rolling example of what can be done when a solid mass-produced body meets an all-electric motor, Gator is one of about 10 million Ford trucks built between 1961 and 1978 on that chassis. That’s a key factor for Current EV, which plans to build kits in volume to bring the cost down. As a result, smaller conversion shops can complete projects in shorter amounts of time.

“We want this to be a solution that helps people in the EV industry see better margins and turn around more vehicles in their shops,” he says. 

Quicker, easier conversions

One major challenge is that the conversion process isn’t typically a plug-and-play option. It’s a complex process to take a car designed to support an internal combustion engine; pulling the engine shifts the center of gravity one direction and adding a battery pack and motor shifts it again. Everything about the drive is effectively different, and that’s partially why it’s an expensive, customized undertaking.

EV West, a custom conversion shop in San Diego, California, converts classic and specialty cars into EVs. Even with costs topping $40,000 to $60,000 per conversion, CEO Michael Bream told U.S. News and World Report that his shop has a four to five-year wait list.

While individuals may be able to wait it out, some organizations cannot. Case in point: the University of the South in Tennessee wanted to convert a 12-vehicle fleet of Ford Econoline vans to continue shuttling students around campus. The university’s fleet was starting to age, and it became clear that replacement was necessary. Unfortunately, there was a multi-year wait for replacement vans, and swapping the old units for new EVs would cost between $80,000 and $120,000 each.

The listed starting price for a gas-powered Econoline is about $35,000, or $46,000 for Ford’s E-Transit all-electric van. That’s just a starting point, though, because those prices reflect the vehicle as a cutaway. Basically, a cutaway is a cab that seats two with a frame and axle behind it that can be fitted with a bus body and seats or even a box truck. Upfitting an interior can add tens of thousands of dollars to the invoice for each vehicle.

Instead, the university signed on with Current EV Motors for a cost of $35,000 to $50,000 per vehicle. A driving study uncovered the fact that the vans require minimal range, Calandruccio says, at less than 10 miles per day, so the conversion kits would price out on the lower end of that spectrum with smaller battery packs. As one of the most significant costs for an EV is the battery pack, that means the university could purchase what it requires without overspending.

How that translates to one-off conversions

The next frontier for Calandruccio’s company will be kits for vintage (model years 1964-1977) Bronco SUVs and Scouts. Incidentally, the classic Scout Motors relaunched itself not long ago as an EV company, and will be selling its own electric SUV and truck starting in 2026. Those with an older-model Scout on their hands might consider a retrofit if they don’t want to wait.

Meanwhile, Current EV Motors is actively working toward making EV kits easier and more accessible to more drivers while refreshing cars that might otherwise be put out to pasture. To do so, Calandruccio is working toward scaling production and on the hunt for investment partners or collaborators to scale operations and buy in bulk.

Calandruccio’s dream is for any mechanic or fleet maintenance staff to be able to swap out any gas-powered vehicle with a bolt-on kit. That’s the tipping point, he believes, toward larger-scale conversion rates.

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Researchers at Drexel University are experimenting with imbuing concrete with living organisms to extend the building material’s lifespan. And although the new approach is based on cutting-edge technology, the underlying engineering strategy originates within the human body.

Concrete is second only to water as the most consumed material on Earth—a particularly problematic statistic, given the enormous carbon emissions of its manufacturing process. A number of promising, green updates to the millennia-old structural material are already in the works, but another avenue to reduce concrete’s environmental impact is to extend its longevity. Depending on the surrounding environment, concrete can begin to weaken and break down barely 50 years after setting. Delaying this degradation using innate real-time repair mechanisms could offer a solid way to get more out of the material.

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

As detailed in a new paper recently published in Construction and Building Materials, a team of engineering researchers at Drexel University have developed a new polymer “BioFiber” coated in bacteria-infused hydrogel, all within a damage-responsive casing half a millimeter thick. The BioFiber is then arranged in layers of grid patterns as concrete is poured, serving as a reinforcing additive much in the way builders have used straw or horsehair to strengthen bricks for millennia. Of course, these reinforcements can only do so much—but when the team’s BioFibers begin to falter is when they really shine.

“In our skin, our tissue [repairs] naturally through multilayer fibrous structure infused with our self-healing fluid—blood,” Amir Farnam, an associate professor in Drexel’s College of Engineering and research co-lead, said in a December 8 university profile. “These BioFibers mimic this concept and use stone-making bacteria to create damage-responsive, living, self-healing concrete.”

Inside each BioFiber is a cache of Lysinibacillus sphaericus in their dormant, endospore form. Generally found in soil, the bacteria undergoes a process known as microbial induced calcium carbonate precipitation—basically, it generates a rock-like substance as it consumes its nutrients.

This could be particularly handy if the bacteria could be found near, say, a newly formed crack within a certain, popular building material. After the team’s BioFibers break under stress, water from the outside environment eventually finds its way into the concrete, where it comes into contact with the endoscopic bacteria. This then activates Lysinibacillus sphaericus, which begins to push out and up towards the surface—all while beginning its microbial-induced calcium carbonate precipitation. That calcium carbonate then fills the cracks in question, where it hardens into ostensibly a cement scab, much when dried blood covers and protects a cut. In recent tests, the concrete “healed” itself within two days.

Although researchers still need to better understand and control the BioFiber-imbued material’s repair time, self-healing materials may one day help reduce the need for additional, climate-costly concrete.

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I’m laughing uncontrollably, but nothing’s funny. I’ve been secured for days behind chain-link fences, surrounded by men in towers with shotguns. Now I’m in a car going 150+ mph, overwhelmed by feelings of terror and freedom.

It sounds like a fast and furious getaway, but the only thing that’s been captured is excitement. The barriers line the Circuit of the Americas (COTA) racetrack, the camera risers are armed with shotgun microphones, and the vehicle is a professionally driven BMW M2 safety car. I’m taking what we’ll call a victory lap to get a final feel for the physical and logistical course that Dorna Sports S.L. productions and Audio-Technica mics navigate as they choreograph an immersive broadcast of the MotoGP Red Bull Grand Prix of the Americas motorcycle race, held April 14-16 outside Austin, Texas.

The partnership between Dorna, the Spain-based commercial-rights holder of MotoGP since 1991, and Audio-Technica, the Tokyo-headquartered microphone services solution provider for the 21 Grands Prix held yearly, is a potent collaboration. “We say it is a love story,” says Sergi Sendra i Vives, Dorna’s head of global technology, praising the meticulous nature of Audio-Technica’s Japanese engineers, who started R&D in 2018 to provide Dorna with components that can withstand the rigors of premier motorsports.

Feeding international distributors from a new location every few weeks, the host-broadcast team can adjust to any venue and every hush or rush—from the telemetry crosstalk of the pit to the rapid pitch shifts of 220 mph straightaways to the ramping giggles of a tech journalist who normally would only push his Honda CR-V 10 miles over the limit if he’s feeling reckless. It takes over 200 microphones, more than 160 cameras, tens of tons of mobile command center, nearly 300 people, and several imported espresso machines to communicate a cohesive narrative (Dorna being European means an on-demand Café Solo or Cortado is crucial). And the result—thanks to tightly coordinated efforts and a newly developed eight-element mic—brings viewers worldwide into an experience that includes hundreds of thousands of cheering fans and 20 laps of high-performance, high-SPL prototype bikes.

Defining a sport’s spirit

Wandering 1,500 acres of paddock, plazas, grandstands, and observation decks bordering 3.4 miles of winding asphalt gives you plenty of space and time for reflection—both mental and sonic. Out at the track, you notice the oscillations, the changing notes of the engines. What are tailpipes but a brass section? As the motorcycles approach, you’re first hit by the broadband unity of 115dB acceleration—enough hot nasty speed to make an Apple Watch blush and warnings blare. The closer you listen, however, the more you pick up on the range of high notes in the pummeling bliss. And every tight corner and embankment, any transition from gravel to grass, changes the acoustics and challenges of accurately representing the peaks and valleys of soundwaves and elevation.

It’s a symphony of angry hornets, of RPM breaking points. It’s transients that racing simulators find difficult to recreate as game sounds often come from bike-embedded microphones that can’t fully capture the impact of wind, humidity, and other environmental contamination. And it’s breathable frequencies, how different landscapes reverberate, that Audio-Technica mics are deployed to help reproduce—trusted to render the tonal variance of raceways worldwide to those watching from afar. My first tour of COTA, along the service road at a far slower pace than in the safety car, reveals the many essential arrays for track audio acquisition.

Nine stereo pairs of BP28 shotgun mics are set up along the perimeter, in 90-degree X/Y configurations on corners and with 110-degree separation on straightaways. This compensates for dropouts as cameras pan, stabilizing the approach and departure imaging of rapidly moving sound sources (aka the Doppler effect). Aiding this are BP4027 and BP4029 stereo shotgun mics with independent line-cardioid and figure-of-eight elements for wide, narrow, or discrete signals, as well as BP28L large-diaphragm condenser mics mounted on 12 cameras for highly directional, low-noise sync with video.

There’s something in the air

Leaving the flash zone for the finish line, we look up and see the BP3600s—satellite-shaped near-coincident assemblies deployed on telescopic poles. Designed to provide the diffuse soundbed of action sports—but quickly being adopted for churches, orchestral recordings, and other creative forums—each $5,140 BP3600 is eight phantom-powered 12mm hypercardioid capsules with discrete analog outputs via LEMO-to-XLRM breakout cable. With a frequency response of 40 – 20,000 Hz, each channel can be independently assigned to mirror the position of a 5.1.4 setup, simplifying routing/decoding for real-time spatial mixing without proprietary processing. There are hammers, and then there are air guns; both drive nails, but one is faster, more accurate, more efficient.

“Because immersive is a fairly new technology, and there are still competing formats, we wanted to make sure that what we did was compatible,” says Gary Dixon, Audio-Technica’s director of broadcast business development. “So, we chose an analog out on this mic because it’s very agnostic to what’s going on; there’s no one interface you have to have to get what you need. At the end of the day, the microphone is analog; it’s taking a physical sound wave and creating electrical energy, and then what happens in the chain is the preference of the director.”

Math determines the enclosure angles and response curves needed in a mic; art ensures the mic remains linear without losing its musicality. Audio-Technica’s “8.0 Microphone Concept” debuted at a sweltering Spanish MotoGP Grand Prix, the first of many proving grounds for sensitivity at various air pressures and durability under duress. Prototyped over multiple seasons, the weatherproofed, easily repairable BP3600—like a high-headroom hedgehog in its windshield—features stable transducers born from the dynamics and drama of dropped gears and carbon-ceramic discs.

“A lot of times you say, okay, we’re going to do this product because we believe there is a niche in the market that needs to be fulfilled, and we hope we can design for any issues, but the BP3600 was actually the other way around,” says Rodrigo Thomaz, Audio-Technica’s project manager of broadcast partnerships. “We knew the needs and demand because we had the expertise of real action broadcasters; they were telling us everything that can possibly go wrong so no one would have to back-engineer solutions.”  

Decoding sonic signatures

All these timbral nuances throughout COTA’s 20 corners get coupled to the video feed and make it to the production compound digitally over 30 miles of custom fiber optic cable, each mic anchored to a Lawo Audio-over-IP node in a ruggedized Pelican case. Located behind the paddock, the media village is a labyrinth of modular control rooms masquerading as expandable shipping containers, very Suez Canal chic. It’s a flowchart of workflow—the audio box feeds to the video box, the RF management box a branch of the sequence off to the side, etc.

Most of the production, 70 to 80 percent, is always the same, says Sendra i Vives, and the rest adapts to the conditions at each event in a sprint (adopting the language of Agile project management). If the camera misses something in the first practice lap or the distinct tonality of a newly calibrated engine sound off, the Dorna crew in these temperature-controlled nerve clusters must correct for that part of the circuit immediately because they may not be back until next year.

Along with the track audio, de-embedded from the video feed in the audio control room’s Lawo mc²56 console, Dorna’s engineers mix in wireless feeds from custom bike-mounted heat-tolerant Audio-Technica BP899 low-profile lavalier omnidirectional condenser microphones, as well as discreet wall- and ceiling-mounted U851R unipoint cardioid condenser boundary microphones in the pit boxes. Audio-Technica even provides the mics, in-ear monitors, and headphones for race control and ENG (electronic news gathering) teams. Altogether, upwards of 300 audio channels combine to round out the activity for home viewers saturated in even more rumble and roar than they could be from the stands.

Stereo and surround mixes are fed to the master control room in Barcelona simultaneously; the only thing holding you back from the visceral thrill of the chase and the crashes may be your TV, AV receiver and/or surround sound system, soundbar, or headphones. Pioneering how to consistently capture unpredictability, Dorna Sports and Audio-Technica will pack and transport the flight cases to ensure every MotoGP broadcast gives your tweeters and adrenaline a workout. Nervous chuckling optional.

The post Leaning into the thrills: Audio-Technica microphones and the dynamic soundscapes of MotoGP appeared first on Popular Science.

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Getting mice to pay attention to two-dimensional screen projections of simulated surroundings can be tricky due to their tendency to notice the external lab settings around them. In a bid to get mice to focus on the experiment at hand, a team of researchers have built their own virtual reality headset sized for a mouse.

As detailed in a new study published Friday in the journal Neuron, a team of engineers at Northwestern University recently designed a VR device for mouse test subjects. By projecting potentially more realistic, immersive, natural surroundings, the team believes researchers are already able to more intricately analyze and study the rodents’ neural activity.

According to Daniel Domeck, the paper’s senior author and an associate professor at Northwestern’s school of neurobiology, researchers have used the same “VR arrays” for the past 15 years to approximate outdoor environments and other experiment settings. But even these advanced lab simulation systems for mice ostensibly only amount to surrounding the animals with computer or projection screens. In these environments, mice will often notice the exterior laboratory space, as well as the flat screens’ two-dimensional imaging.

In Northwestern’s December 8 announcement, Dombeck explained that while the 2D arrays can get the job done, “the animals aren’t as immersed as they would be in a real environment.” He continued, “it takes a lot of training just to get the mice to pay attention to the screens and ignore the lab around them.”

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

Dombeck compares this to watching a TV show while sitting on your living couch. VR Goggles like Meta Quest, however, occupy your full visual field, while separate projections for each eye create a sense of depth.

“That’s been missing for mice,” explained Dombeck. Enter: The Miniature Rodent Stereo Illumination VR, aka iMRSIV. Harnessing recent hardware miniaturization advancements, Dombeck and his collaborators combined bespoke lenses alongside tiny OLED displays custom-fit for a mouse. Each lens offers a 180-degree field-of-view that, when combined, shuts out any real world visual interferences.

Perhaps predictably, goggles on mice is easier said than done, so Dombeck’s team avoided it altogether. Instead, they designed a harness to suspend iMRSIV in just the right position in front of a mouse’s face. The mouse then runs on a treadmill to simulate movement within their VR surroundings with iMRSIV remaining static. Analyzing mouse brain mapping scans as they wore iMRSIV goggles already show promise for the new simulation alternative. Not only did their brains activate in ways much as they would in a natural environment, but the mice also engaged with their VR surroundings more quickly than during the standard 2D screen setups.

[Related: Here’s a look at Apple’s first augmented reality headset.]

“They knew where to run and looked to the right places for rewards,” Dombeck said of the mice VR experience. “We think they actually might not need as much training because they can engage with the environment in a more natural way.”

iMRSIV’s design and immersion capabilities mean that, for the first time, researchers were able to use VR to simulate an overhead threat. In this case, a dark disc shape expanded “above” the mice, prompting them to scurry faster or freeze in place—both common mouse responses in such situations. The team could then capture the test animals’ neural patterns in detail.

Given their many similarities, rodent brains are often used as stand-ins for human neurobiology research. Dombeck’s team believes that iMRSIV could allow for greater research into the effects of VR exposure on users’ brains, as well as their ability to adapt to the technology. As for the mice, don’t worry—they’ll get their day on top of the food chain, at least virtually.

“In the future, we’d like to look at situations where the mouse isn’t prey but is the predator,”  John Issa, a postdoctoral fellow in Dombeck’s lab and a study co-first author, said in Friday’s announcement. “We could watch brain activity while it chases a fly, for example. That activity involves a lot of depth perception and estimating distances. Those are things that we can start to capture.”

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Amazon is canceling its payment partnership with Venmo only a year and some change after first offering the purchasing option to users. Venmo also announced the abrupt aboutface through a brief update to its “Using Venmo on Amazon” tutorial page, citing only “recent changes” for the policy shift. Screenshots posted to the social media platform, X, indicate a December 6 email from Amazon sent to account members echoed the news.

[Related: It’s time to make your Venmo transactions private.]

In a statement provided to TechCrunch on Thursday, PayPal (Venmo’s parent company) noted users will still be able to add their Venmo debit and credit cards to pay on the site, and added that the company still has “a strong relationship with Amazon and look forward to continuing to build on it.” Venmo is already no longer included on Amazon’s list of acceptable payments.

An Amazon spokesperson also confirmed the phaseout in an email to PopSci while noting customers can “still use nearly a dozen” alternative payment options. Amazon has never integrated a PayPal option for shoppers, either, although it does support PayPay debit cards.

Amazon and PayPal first unveiled plans for the integration in November 2021, but didn’t begin to enable the feature until shortly before the 2022 holiday season. As Bloomberg notes on Thursday, PayPal alongside similar e-commerce companies have struggled in recent months due to an increasing return to in-store shopping, alongside consumers contending with overall economic inflation issues. It is still unclear if this influenced the two companies’ decision, however.

“We expect this news is simply the result of a lack of traction, as consumers failed to adopt using Pay with Venmo as their preferred checkout method,” analysts noted to Bloomberg earlier today.

[Related: Amazon to offer instant pay to workers and more loans to sellers.]

Despite the dissolution, Amazon continues to pursue in-house financial options, particularly for its employees. In September 2022, the company announced Anytime Pay, which allows workers to withdraw up to 70 percent of their earnings as soon as they accrue. Amazon also announced a partnership with Lendistry around the same time that introduced small business loan options to independent retailers.

“Whether it’s restocking household essentials or purchasing a last-minute gift, we know that Venmo users shop over two times more frequently than the average shopper and are 19 percent more likely to make repeat purchases,” Amazon said during last year’s payment feature rollout.

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Best overall		Alpine iLX-W650		SEE IT	The Alpine iLX-W650 is compatible with Apple and Android car systems and offers dual-camera connectivity alongside a bright display, making it one of the most well-rounded options available.
Best splurge		Sony XAV-AX6000		SEE IT	The Sony XAV-AX6000 features a sleek design paired with cutting-edge connectivity and OEM compatibility.
Best budget		Pioneer MVH-S622BS		SEE IT	The Pioneer MVH-S622BS pairs all the basic essentials for enjoying radio and device audio with a barebones user interface that’s intuitive to use.

Adding an aftermarket double DIN head unit to your car is one of the quickest ways to upgrade your audio quality, media playback options, and overall user experience with relatively little effort. Because a wide majority of these stereos come standard with touchscreen interfaces, Bluetooth connectivity, and smartphone control capability, they’re an especially appealing option for aging vehicles with stereos from an earlier era. If your current head unit plays CDs or cassettes, swapping in a new double DIN one is also a great way to purge your collection and free up storage space in your vehicle in favor of newer media playback options like wireless, USB, and even HDMI. Here’s a quick rundown of our picks of the best double DIN head units for refreshing your car’s look, feel, and most of all sound.

• Best overall: Alpine iLX-W650
• Best splurge: Sony XAV-AX6000
• Best budget: Pioneer MVH-S622BS

The best double DIN head units: Reviews & Recommendations

Best overall: Alpine iLX-W650

SEE IT

Specs

• Sources: AM/FM tuner, Bluetooth, USB, SiriusXM (not included)
• Screen: 7-inch capacitive touchscreen, 800 x 480 resolution
• Smartphone features: Apple CarPlay, Android Auto
• Power: RMS: 16 watts x 4 channels / Peak: 40 watts x 4 channels
• Expandability: Rear USB, two camera inputs, subwoofer compatible, microphone included
• Equalizer: 9-band parametric with time alignment

Pros

• Shallow chassis less than 3 inches deep
• Dual-camera compatibility for front and rear views
• Swipe controls for volume and navigation

Cons

• Parking brake must be engaged to access settings

The Alpine iLX-W650 features all the best of what modern double DIN head units offer in a balanced and affordable design, making it one of our favorite aftermarket options overall. For starters, it’s less than 3 inches deep, allowing it to be installed in shallow dashboards or mounted with an optional Alpine KTA-450 amplifier for even greater dynamic range and up to 45 watts RMS per channel. The unit also features a 7-inch anti-glare capacitive touchscreen with at-a-glance swipe controls and plug-and-play compatibility with up to two cameras for monitoring front or rear views. Like many of the best double DIN head units, the Alpine iLX-W650 comes standard with an AM/FM radio tuner, Bluetooth connectivity, smartphone car controls, and SiriusXM satellite radio compatibility. While it sounds great out of the box, the iLX-W650 offers users further sound customization options through its built-in 9-band equalizer, complete with delay compensation for synchronizing your front and rear speakers. Some users may find the iLX-W650 frustrating to use because it requires the parking brake to be engaged for access to some settings. However, this is a very common feature found in aftermarket touchscreen systems designed to keep users’ eyes on the road whenever in motion.

Best splurge: Sony XAV-AX6000

SEE IT

Specs

• Sources: AM/FM tuner, Bluetooth, USB, SiriusXM (not included)
• Screen: 6.95-inch capacitive touchscreen, 800 x 480 resolution
• Smartphone features: Apple CarPlay, Android Auto
• Power: RMS: 20 watts x 4 channels / Peak: 55 watts x 4 channels
• Expandability: Rear micro-HDMI, rear USB-C, camera input, subwoofer compatible, microphone included
• Equalizer: 14-band with time alignment

Pros

• Ultra-fast 3-amp USB-C port for charging
• micro-HDMI port for playing external audio and video
• Compatible with iDatalink Maestro for enhancing OEM features

Cons

• Requires parking brake to be engaged for access to settings

Sony’s XAV-AX6000 is a stylish double DIN unit packed with the latest tech in a user-friendly design, making it a worthwhile upgrade if you’re looking for one of the best aftermarket car multimedia experiences available. In addition to including a single input for connecting a rear-view camera, the XAV-AX6000 comes with a micro-HDMI port for streaming movies and other content from a device of your choice and a USB-C port that delivers three amps of power for super-fast charging. Like our best overall pick, the XAV-AX6000 also features all the basics like an AM/FM radio tuner, Bluetooth, backup camera connectivity, and satellite radio compatibility. If you have a compatible vehicle, this double DIN head unit can also display and perform vehicle-specific functions via iDatalink Maestro.

Best budget: Pioneer MVH-S622BS

SEE IT

Specs

• Sources: AM/FM tuner, Bluetooth, USB, SiriusXM (not included), AUX
• Screen: LCD display
• Smartphone features: iPhone and Android control
• Power: RMS: 14 watts x 4 channels / Peak: 50 watts x 4 channels
• Expandability: Subwoofer compatible
• Equalizer: 13-band graphic

Pros

• Knob-based controls are easy to use at a glance
• Pioneer SmartSync companion app available for wireless control
• Includes classic front-panel 3.5-millimeter AUX jack

Cons

• Display may be difficult to read in bright environments

If you’re open to forgoing a double DIN head unit with a touchscreen or native Apple CarPlay and Android Auto support, the Pioneer MVH-S622BS offers fantastic compatibility with Bluetooth, SiriusXM, and wired audio sources at a bargain price point. In lieu of a screen, the MVH-S622BS features a classic LCD display for viewing track and source information at a glance and an intuitive suite of knobs and buttons that make the unit easy to operate while keeping your eyes on the road. Despite lacking fully integrative smartphone support, the MVH-S622BS can still be controlled wirelessly from any smartphone using Pioneer’s SmartSync companion app. In addition to supporting USB media playback like our other picks, this best value also features a classic 3.5-millimeter audio input on its front panel so you and your passengers can take turns “passing the AUX.”

Here are more double DIN units we think are, well, head and shoulders above the rest: 

• Best CD/DVD player: Pioneer AVH-1400NEX
• Best large display: Kenwood DMX1037S

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best double DIN head units

• Best overall: Alpine iLX-W650
• Best splurge: Sony XAV-AX6000
• Best budget: Pioneer MVH-S622BS

Double DIN head units can bring an aging vehicle into the modern age and elevate your car multimedia experience with satellite radio, Bluetooth, USB, and camera connectivity. While all double DIN head units are the same size, they offer a wide variety of user interfaces, connectivity, and power options. For the broad majority of users, a well-rounded double DIN head unit like the Alpine iLX-W650 constitutes a major upgrade over older stock stereos. If you want similar connectivity with a sleeker design, a boost in power, and OEM feature support, consider a premium unit like the Sony XAV-AX6000. Finally, if you’re more interested in audio connectivity options but don’t want Apple CarPlay or Android Auto support, you can save a few bucks by going with an LCD-based unit like the Pioneer MVH-S622BS.

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

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Years after plans were first announced, end-to-end encryption (E2EE) is finally the default communications option for Messenger and Facebook. Meta’s security update arrives following years of mounting pressure from digital privacy rights advocates, who argue the feature is necessary to protect users’ communications.

A complete E2EE rollout will take a “number of months” due to the more than one billion users on Messenger. Once chats are upgraded, however, users will receive a notification to create a recovery method, such as a PIN, for restoring conversation archives in the event of losing, changing, or adding a device.

[Related: 7 secure messaging apps you should be using.]

Meta’s messaging services have offered E2EE as an optional setting since 2016. CEO Mark Zuckerberg voiced his desire to transition to default encryption across all Meta’s products as far back as 2019. In an announcement posted to Meta’s blog on December 6, head of Messenger Loredana Crisan wrote, “[E2EE] means that nobody, including Meta, can see what’s sent or said, unless you choose to report a message to us.”

E2EE is one of the most popular and secure cryptographic methods to integrate additional privacy within digital communications. Once enabled, only users possessing a unique, auto-generated security key can read your messages. When set up properly, it is virtually impossible for outside parties to access, including law enforcement and the app makers themselves.

[Related: Some of your everyday tech tools lack end-to-end encryption.]

Services like iMessage, Telegram, WhatsApp, and Signal have long offered E2EE as their default setting, but Meta was slow to integrate it within the company’s most widely used features. In the company’s December 6 blog post, Crisan argues the company “has taken years to deliver because we’ve taken our time to get this right.” Critics, meanwhile, chalk up the tech company’s reluctance to financial incentives, as access to users’ messages means access to vast, lucrative data troves that can be utilized for targeted advertising campaigns. People share over 1.3 billion photos and videos per day through Messenger.

“Meta just did something good—protected users from the company itself!” Caitlin Seeley George Campaigns and Managing Director at the digital privacy group, Fight for the Future, wrote in a statement on Wednesday.

In addition to the E2EE update rollout, Meta also announced forthcoming features including a 15-minute “Edit Message” window, the ability to toggle “Read” receipts, a 24-hour timespan for “Disappearing” messages, and other general updates to photo and video quality.

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AI has been eating the world this year, with the launch of GPT-4, DALL·E 3, Bing Chat, Gemini, and dozens of other AI models and tools capable of generating text and images from a simple written prompt. To train these models, AI developers have relied on millions of texts and images created by real people—and some of them aren’t very happy that their work has been used without their permission. With the launches came the lawsuits. And next year, the first of them will likely go to trial. 

Almost all the pending lawsuits involve copyright to some degree or another, so the tech companies behind each AI model are relying on fair use arguments for their defense, among others. In most cases, they can’t really argue that their AIs weren’t trained on the copyrighted works. Instead, many argue that scraping content from the internet to create generative content is transformative because the outputs are “new” works. While text-based plagiarism may be easier to pin down than image generators mimicking visual styles of specific artists, the sheer scope of generative AI tools has created massive legal messes that will be playing out in 2024 and beyond.

In January, Getty Images filed a lawsuit against Stability AI (the makers of Stable Diffusion) seeking unspecified damages, alleging that the generative image model was unlawfully trained using millions of copyrighted images from stock photo giant’s catalog. Although Getty has also filed a similar suit in Delaware, this week, a judge ruled that the lawsuit can go to trial in the UK. A date has not been set. For what it’s worth, the examples Getty uses showing Stable Diffusion adding a weird, blurry, Getty-like watermark to some of its outputs are hilariously damning.) 

A group of visual artists is currently suing Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Runway AI for copyright infringement by using their works to train their AI models. According to the lawsuit filed in San Francisco, the models can create images that match their distinct styles when the artists’ names are entered as part of a prompt. A judge largely dismissed an earlier version of the suit as two of the artists involved had not registered their copyright with the US copyright office, but gave the plaintiffs permission to refile—which they did in November. We will likely see next year if the amended suit can continue.

Writers’ trade group the Authors Guild has sued OpenAI (the makers of ChatGPT, GPT-4, and DALL·E 3) on behalf John Grisham, George R. R. Martin, George Saunders, and 14 other writers, for unlawfully using their work to train its large language models (LLMs). The plaintiffs argue that because the ChatGPT can accurately summarize their works, the copyrighted full texts must be somewhere in the training database. The proposed class-action lawsuit filed in New York in September also argues that some of the training data may have come from pirate websites—although a similar lawsuit brought by Sarah Silverman against Meta was largely dismissed in November. They are seeking damages and injunction preventing their works being used again without license. As yet, no judge has ruled on the case but we should know more in the coming months.

And it’s not just artists and authors. Three music publishers—Universal Music, Concord, and ABKCO—are suing Anthropic (makers of Claude) for illegally scraping their musicians’ song lyrics to train its models. According to the lawsuit filed in Tennessee, Claude can both quote the copyrighted lyrics when asked for them and incorporate them verbatim into compositions it claims to be its own. The suit was only filed in October, so don’t expect a court date before the end of the year—though Anthropic will likely try to get the case dismissed.

In perhaps the most eclectic case, a proposed class-action lawsuit is being brought against Google for misuse of personal information and copyright infringement by eight anonymous plaintiffs, including two minors. According to the lawsuit filed in San Francisco in July, among the content the plaintiffs allege that Google misused are books, photos from dating websites, Spotify playlists, and TikTok videos. Unsurprisingly, Google is fighting it hard and has moved to dismiss the case. As they filed that motion back in October, we may know before the end of the year if the case will continue. 

[ Related: “Google stole data from millions of people to train AI, lawsuit says” ]

Next year, it looks like we could finally see some of these lawsuits go to trial and get some kind of ruling over the legality (or illegality) of using copyrighted materials scraped from the internet to train AI models. Most of the plaintiffs are seeking damages for their works being used without license, although some—like the Authors Guild—are also seeking an injunction that would prevent AI makers from continuing to use models trained on the copyrighted works. If that was upheld, any AI trained on the relevant data would have to cease operating and be trained on a new dataset without it. 

Of course, the lawsuits could all settle, they could run longer, and they could even be dismissed out of hand. And whatever any judge does rule, we can presumably expect to see various appeal attempts. While all these lawsuits are pending, generative AI models are being used by more and more people, and are continuing to be developed and released. Even if a judge declares generative AI makers’ behavior a gross breach of copyright law and fines them millions of dollars, given how hesitant US courts have been to ban tech products for copyright or patent infringement, it seems unlikely that they are going cram this genie back in the bottle. 

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On Wednesday, Google announced the arrival of Gemini, its new multimodal large language model built from the ground up by the company’s AI division, DeepMind. Among its many functions, Gemini will underpin Google Bard, which has previously struggled to emerge from the shadow of its chatbot forerunner, OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

According to a December 6 blog post from Google CEO Sundar Pichai and DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis, there are technically three versions of the LLM—Gemini Ultra, Pro, and Nano—meant for various applications. A “fine tuned” Gemini Pro now underpins Bard, while the Nano variant will be seen in products such as Pixel Pro smartphones. The Gemini variants will also arrive for Google Search, Ads, and Chrome in the coming months, although public access to Ultra will not become available until 2024.

Unlike many of its AI competitors, Gemini was trained to be “multimodal” from launch, meaning it can already handle both text, audio, and image-based prompts. In an accompanying video demonstration, Gemini is verbally tasked to identify what is placed in front of it (a piece of paper) and then correctly identifies a user’s sketch of a duck in real-time. Other abilities appear to include inferring what actions happen next in videos once they are paused, generating music based on visual prompts, and assessing children’s homework—often with a slightly cheeky, pun-prone personality. It’s worth noting, however, that the video description includes the disclaimer, “For the purposes of this demo, latency has been reduced and Gemini outputs have been shortened for brevity.”

In a follow-up blog post, Google confirmed Gemini only actually responded to a combination of still images and written user prompts, and that their demo video was edited to present a smoother interaction with audio capabilities.

Gemini’s accompanying technical report indicates the LLM’s most powerful iteration, Ultra, “exceeds current state-of-the-art results on 30 of the 32 widely-used academic benchmarks used in [LLM] research and development.” That said, the improvements appear somewhat modest—Gemini Ultra correctly answered multidisciplinary questions 90 percent of the time, versus ChatGPT’s 86.4 percent. Regardless of statistical hairsplitting, however, the results indicate ChatGPT may have some real competition with Gemini. 

[Related: The logic behind AI chatbots like ChatGPT is surprisingly basic.]

Unsurprisingly, Google cautioned in Wednesday’s announcement that its new star AI is far from perfect, and is still prone to the industry-wide “hallucinations” which plague the emerging technology—i.e. the LLM will occasionally randomly make up incorrect or nonsensical answers. Google also subjected Gemini to “the most comprehensive safety evaluations of any Google AI model,” per Eli Collins, Google DeepMind VP of product, speaking at the December 6 launch event. This included tasking Gemini with “real toxicity prompts,” a test developed by the Allen Institute for AI involving over 100,000 problematic inputs meant to assess a large language model’s potential political and demographic biases.

Gemini will continue to integrate into Google’s suite of products in the coming months alongside a series of closed testing phases. If all goes as planned, a Gemini Ultra-powered Bard Advanced will become available to the public sometime next year—but, as has been well established by now, the ongoing AI arms race is often difficult to forecast.

When asked if it is powered by Gemini, Bard informed PopSci it “unfortunately” does not possess access to information “about internal Google projects.”

“If you’re interested in learning more about… ‘Gemini,’ I recommend searching for information through official Google channels or contacting someone within the company who has access to such information,” Bard wrote to PopSci. “I apologize for the inconvenience and hope this information is helpful.”

UPDATE 12/08/23 11:53AM: Google published a blog post on December 6 clarifying its Gemini hands-on video, as well as the program’s multimodal capabilities. Although the demonstration may make it look like Gemini responded to moving images and voice commands, it was offered a combination of stills and written prompts by Google. The footage was then edited for latency and streamlining purposes. The text of this post has since been edited to reflect this.

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Four-legged robots like Boston Dynamics’ Spot and Cheetah owe almost all their agility to fancy footwork. While they may visually move much like their mammalian counterparts, the anatomical inspirations largely stop at their legs. In biology, however, a quadrupedal animal’s movement, flexibility, and intricate motor functions stem almost entirely from its spine. Replicating that complex system of stacked vertebrae in robots is much more difficult than the legs—but if artificial spines could be integrated into such designs, engineers could open up entirely new avenues of precise maneuverability.

[Related: A new tail accessory propels this robot dog across streams.]

Now, engineers are reportedly a few steps further towards spine-centric quadruped bots thanks to a research team’s very uncanny, rodent-inspired robot. Writing in Science Robotics on Wednesday, collaborators across Germany and China have unveiled NeRmo, a biomimetic, four-legged robot that relies on a novel motor-tendon framework to scurry its way around environments.

As far as looks go, NeRmo mirrors a mouse’s skeletal system—although the ears, although cute, are likely superfluous. The robot’s rigid front half houses its electronics systems, while its latter half functions much as an actual flexible spine would, with four lumbar and lateral joints. Artificial tendons thread through the spine as well as the robot’s elbow and knee joints allow NeRmo even more mouselike movements alongside quicker turning times. 

According to collaborators at the Technical University of Munich, University of Technology Nuremberg, and China’s Sun Yat-Sen University, NeRmo’s tendon-pulley system precludes the need for any musculature while still allowing for smooth flexion capabilities across the lateral and sagittal planes, i.e. side-to-side, and up-and-down.

To test their new design, the team ran NeRmo through a series of four experiments to demonstrate static balancing, straight-line walking, agile turning, and maze navigation. Each trial included two rounds—one with the spinal system engaged, and another with it disabled. Across the board, NeRmo performed their tasks better, faster, and more accurately when it integrated the spine into its movements.

Maze navigation, however, was NeRmo’s true shining moment. With its spine engaged, the mouse-bot completed its labyrinth runs an average of 30 percent faster than simply waddling through without spinal support.
Although still in its early stages, researchers believe further design tweaking and integration of the spinal systems into future quadruped robots could vastly improve their functionality. If NeRmo wasn’t proof enough, think of it this way—MIT’s Cheetah can gallop at 13 feet-per-second with just one actuated joint mimicking spinal flexion in the sagittal plane. NeRmo, meanwhile, has eight joints.

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When it comes to slicing into bone, three lasers are better than one. At least, that’s the thinking behind a new, partially self-guided surgical system designed by a team at Switzerland’s University of Basel.

Although medical fields like ophthalmology have employed laser tools for decades, the technology’s applications still remain off the table for many surgical procedures. This is most frequently due to safety concerns, including the potential for lasers to injure surrounding tissues beyond the targeted area, as well as a surgeon’s lack of full control over incision depth. To potentially solve these issues, laser physicists and medical experts experimented with increasing the number of lasers used in a procedure, while also allowing the system to partly monitor itself. Their results are documented in a recent issue of Laser Surgeries in Medicine.

[Related: AI brain implant surgery helped a man regain feeling in his hand.]

It’s all about collaboration. The first laser scans a surgery site while emitting a pulsed beam to cut through tissue in miniscule increments at a time. As the tissues vaporize, a spectrometer  analyzes and classifies the results using on-board memory to map the patient’s bone and soft tissue regions. From there, a second laser takes over to cut bone, but only where specifically mapped by its predecessor. Meanwhile, a third optical laser measures incisions in real-time to ensure the exact depth of cuts.

Using pig legs acquired from a nearby supplier, researchers determined their laser trifecta accurately performed the surgical assignments down to fractions of a millimeter, and nearly as fast as the standard methods in use today. What’s more, it did it all sans steady human hands.

“The special thing about our system is that it controls itself without human interference,” laser physicist Ferda Canbaz said in a University of Basel’s profile on December 5.

The system’s benefits extend further than simply getting the job done. The lasers’ smaller, extremely localized incisions could allow tissue to heal faster and reduce scarring in the long run. The precise cutting abilities also allow for shaping certain geometries that existing tools cannot accomplish. From a purely logistical standpoint, less physical interaction between surgeons and patients could also reduce risks of infections or similar postsurgical complications.

Researchers hope such intricate angling could one day enable bone implants to physically interlock with a patient’s existing bone, potentially even without needing bone cement. There might even come a time when similar laser arrays could not only identify tumors, but subsequently remove them with extremely minimal surrounding tissue injury.

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In case any readers need reminding: please do not intentionally crash your small prop plane into a national forest for the social media likes. If you somehow still choose to abandon commonsense in the hopes of gaining an ad sponsorship, at the very least, do not lie to the National Transportation Safety Board about your stunt. And, if absolutely nothing else, definitely do not treat your plane’s wreckage like you’re covering up a murder scene. You will probably go to prison.

Case in point: Trevor Jacob, a 30-year-old online YouTuber sentenced on Monday to six months in prison in the ensuing aftermath of his 12-minute YouTube video, “I Crashed My Airplane.”

News of Jacob’s punishment arrived in a Monday Department of Justice announcement, via The Verge. The “experienced pilot, skydiver, and former Olympic athlete” first uploaded his video-turned-felonious evidence to the platform on December 23, 2021. The footage, taken from multiple video cameras mounted to his single-prop Taylorcraft BL-65 and a camera attached to a selfie stick, shows Jacob abandoning his flight midair due to an alleged power failure (later revealed to be false) and unfurling a parachute above California’s Los Padres National Forest near Santa Maria. Jacob captures brief shots of the plane’s uncontrolled descent as he floats to the ground, while onboard cameras record the subsequent crash landing in dry brush within the federally protected area.

Jacob only informed the NTSB of the crash two days later, at which time the agency told Jacob to preserve the wreckage and provide coordinates to its location—neither of which he did, says the DOJ.

Jacob instead “lied to investigators” for weeks, claiming he could not find the crash site. Meanwhile, he and a conspirator flew a helicopter back to the plane’s remains, strapped the wreckage to it, and traveled back to Rancho Sisquoc in Santa Barbara County. Once there, they transferred the evidence into a trailer attached to Jacob’s truck, drove to Lompoc City Airport hangar, and proceeded to break down the debris over the ensuing days.

[Related: Influencer fined for hitting golf ball into the Grand Canyon.]

“[Jacob] deposited the detached parts of the wrecked airplane into trash bins at the airport and elsewhere… with the intent to obstruct federal authorities,” reads a portion of the DOJ announcement.

Nearly a month to the day after the stunt, Jacob uploaded their “I Crashed My Airplane” video to YouTube, which included clear scenes of Jacob traveling to the wreckage site reportedly 20 minutes after parachuting to the ground. “I Crashed My Plane” also satisfied the conditions of a prior sponsorship deal according to the DOJ, which stipulated Jacob would promote a wallet company’s products within an upcoming video post.

Jacob continued to maintain his innocence in a January 2022 statement to the Federal Aviation Administration, claiming the doomed flight was intended to spread the ashes of his deceased friend, Johnny Strange, over the Sierra Nevada mountains. Strange died in 2015 during a BASE jumping accident.

Although initially facing up to 20 years in prison, Jacob received his six month sentence after pleading guilty in April to one count of destruction and concealment with the intent to obstruct a federal investigation. Any opportunities to carry out similar airplane antics are unlikely once he is released—the FAA revoked the ninth-place 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics snowboarder’s private pilot license in April 2022 during its own investigation.

“During this flight, you opened the left side pilot door before you claimed the engine had failed,” the FAA wrote at the time.

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Korean auto manufacturer Kia opened access to pre-orders in October for its newest all-electric vehicle, a three-row SUV called the EV9. The EV9 will compete in the hot family-vehicle segment and includes up to 304 miles of range with the single-motor setup (up to 280 miles with two motors) and towing capacity of up to 5,000 pounds.

But the most interesting feature of the EV9 isn’t how fast it charges or how many passengers it can carry; it’s the vehicle’s ability to conduct bidirectional charging from the SUV to your home and back around in a neat circular energy cycle. Now that an agreement with Wallbox (an EV charging and energy management solutions company) is in place, Kia is even poised to deliver energy back to the community grid through the EV9.

Here’s how the automaker is sharing energy between cars and homes.

Energy management throughout the cycle

Earlier in 2023, Kia sibling Hyundai unveiled its Ioniq 6 EV with a playful ducktail spoiler on the rear. It was also launched with the ability to charge up in about 18 minutes and provides a vehicle-to-load (V2L) energy exchange to charge and operate electric devices. Think coffee machines, a hair dryer, or charging up a portable lantern on a camping trip, or plugging in a laptop while at a work site.

On the scale of vehicle-to-X charging, V2L is just the starting point. The public is looking for more options, including V2H (vehicle-to-home), V2G (vehicle-to-grid), and V2V (vehicle-to-vehicle). The Wallbox partnership comprises its next-gen bidirectional charger. The company says that a Kia EV9 can hold between 76 and 100 kilowatt hours of energy, which is more than five times the energy of a standard home storage system. That’s enough to power up the average home for up to four days.

In case of a power outage, the bidirectional charger automatically switches the user’s power source from the grid to their vehicle to allow a homeowner to use their EV battery as an emergency generator, Wallbox says. Consider the number of power outages in the past few years due to big storms like Hurricane Ian in Florida, the ice storm that shut down parts of Texas, and rolling brownouts and blackouts in California. The Ford F-150 Lightning electric truck made headlines for solving power issues of scores of people for days after outages affected wide swaths of communities. 

Connected home

Kia showcased vehicle-to-home (V2H) capability at the Los Angeles Auto Show by building a demo “Kia Connected Home” to show how simple bidirectional charging can be. The steps are straightforward, Kia spokesperson Jeff Jablansky explains to PopSci: install the bidirectional charger at your home, and plug in your vehicle. Based on intelligent time-of-day management and vehicle energy needs, the Wallbox Quasar 2 can either charge the EV9 or discharge power from the EV9 to the home.

Typically in a V2G scenario, the EV’s battery is charged during off-peak hours, which is typically in the wee hours of the night when most people are sleeping. As an example, a driver could commute to work, usually consuming only a fraction of the battery capacity. They can plug the car  into a charger, which can both charge the battery back up to 100 percent and remain on standby in case the grid needs its energy during peak hours. At home, it works similarly by utilizing the ebb and flow of energy needs in a “cloud” versus a straight pipeline from A to B. Some companies are offering buyback for energy in the form of credits on their home bill. 

Underneath all of that, a software system manages the power allocation and routes it to where it’s needed most. Wallbox helps with that, too. 

Kia is focused intently on its sustainability goals, and the EV9 is one of 11 EV models promised by 2026. The company says it is committed to 100 percent renewable energy by 2040 at its manufacturing sites.

[ Related: The 50 greatest innovations of 2023 ]

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A data hack affecting 23andMe users is reportedly far more severe than what representatives first admitted to earlier this year. Although initially reported to affect less than one percent of users, additional datasets assessments confirmed by a company spokesperson over the weekend indicate as many as half of all 23andMe accounts could be involved in the security breach.

[Related: The Opt-Out: 5 reasons to skip at-home genetic testing.]

Back in October, the popular genetic testing company revealed hackers had gained access to the personal information of a portion of users—such as names, birth years, familial relationships, DNA info, ancestry reports, self-reported locations, and DNA data. 23andMe claims the breach was most likely the result of brute force attacks. In such instances, malicious actors take advantage of a customer’s previously leaked login information, usually repeated passwords and usernames used across multiple internet accounts. 23andMe would not offer concrete numbers for nearly another two months—on December 1, new Securities and Exchange Commission revealed the company estimated only 0.1 percent of users, or roughly 14,000 customers, were directly affected. In the same documents, however, 23andMe also admitted a “significant number” of other users’ ancestry information may have been also tangentially included in the leak.

Over the weekend, TechCrunch speaking with 23andMe officials confirmed the final tally of data breach victims: roughly 6.9 million users, or about half of all accounts.

Those users include an estimated 5.5 million people who previously opted into the service’s DNA Relatives feature, which allows automatic sharing of some personal data between users. In addition to those customers, hackers stole Family Tree profile data from another 1.4 million people who also used the DNA Relatives feature. The increase in victim estimates allegedly stems from the DNA Relatives feature allowing hackers to not only see a compromised user’s information, but the information of all their listed relatives.

[Related: Why government agencies keep getting hacked.]

And while the hacking incidents were first publicly announced in October, evidence suggests the breaches occurred as much as two months earlier. At that time, one user on a popular hacking forum offered over 300 terabytes of alleged 23andMe profile data in exchange for $50 million, or between $1,000 and $5,000 for small portions of the cache.

On a separate hacking forum in October, another user announced their possession of alleged data for 1 million users of Ashkenazi Jewish descent alongside 100,000 Chinese accounts—interested parties could purchase the information for between $1 and $10 an account.

23andMe, alongside genetic testing companies such as MyHeritage and Ancestry, have instituted mandatory two-factor authentication methods for all accounts since the breach’s October confirmation.

UPDATE 12/7/23 2:06PM: This article has been edited to more accurately reflect certain details of the data breach.

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Japan and the European Union have officially inaugurated testing at the world’s largest experimental nuclear fusion plant. Located roughly 85 miles north of Tokyo, the six-story, JT-60SA “tokamak” facility heats plasma to 200 million degrees Celsius (around 360 million Fahrenheit) within its circular, magnetically insulated reactor. Although JT-60SA first powered up during a test run back in October, the partner governments’ December 1 announcement marks the official start of operations at the world’s biggest fusion center, reaffirming a “long-standing cooperation in the field of fusion energy.”

The tokamak—an acronym of the Russian-language designation of “toroidal chamber with magnetic coils”—has led researchers’ push towards achieving the “Holy Grail” of sustainable green energy production for decades. Often described as a large hollow donut, a tokamak is filled with gaseous hydrogen fuel that is then spun at immense high speeds using powerful magnetic coil encasements. When all goes as planned, intense force ionizes atoms to form helium plasma, much like how the sun produces its energy.

[Related: How a US lab created energy with fusion—again.]

Speaking at the inauguration event, EU energy commissioner Kadri Simson referred to the JT-60SA as “the most advanced tokamak in the world,” representing “a milestone for fusion history.”

“Fusion has the potential to become a key component for energy mix in the second half of this century,” she continued.

But even if such a revolutionary milestone is crossed, it likely won’t be at JT-60SA. Along with its still-in-construction sibling, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in Europe, the projects are intended solely to demonstrate scalable fusion’s feasibility. Current hopes estimate ITER’s operational start for sometime in 2025, although the undertaking has been fraught with financial, logistical, and construction issues since its groundbreaking back in 2011.

Experts alongside Simson believe creating sustainable nuclear fusion would mark a revolutionary moment that could ensure an emissionless, renewable energy future. Making the power source a feasible reality, however, is fraught with technological and economic hurdles. Researchers have chased this goal for a long time: The world’s first experimental tokamak was built back in 1958 by the USSR.

While researchers can now generate fusion energy at multiple facilities around the world, it is usually at a net loss. By advancing the technology further at facilities like JT-60SA, however, industry experts think that it is only a matter of time until fusion reactors regularly achieve net energy production gains.

[Related: Colorado is getting a state-of-the-art laser fusion facility.]

In the meantime, another possible road to fusion energy is making its own promising gains. Earlier this year, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Northern California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved a net energy gain for the second time using what’s the inertial confinement fusion method. In this process, a high-powered laser is split into 192 beams that then hit a capsule containing a pellet of tritium and deuterium. The resultant X-rays generate pressure and temperatures that then initiate fusion.

No matter which process—be it tokamak reactors or ICF lasers—a successful nuclear fusion facility could play a major role in finally shifting humanity away from fossil fuels.

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This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

At hundreds of wildlife rehabilitation centers across the U.S., people can learn about wild animals and birds at close range. These sites, which may be run by nonprofits or universities, often feature engaging exhibits, including “ambassador” animals that can’t be released–an owl with a damaged wing, for example, or a fox that was found as a kit and became accustomed to being fed by humans.

What’s less visible are the patients–sick and injured wild animals that have been admitted for treatment.

Each year, people bring hundreds of thousands of sick and injured wild animals to wildlife rehab centers. Someone may find an injured squirrel on the side of the road or notice a robin in their backyard that can’t fly, and then call the center to pick up an animal in distress.

We study ecology and biology, and recently used newly digitized records from wildlife rehabilitation centers to identify the human activities that are most harmful to wildlife. In the largest study of its kind, we reviewed 674,320 records, mostly from 2011 to 2019, from 94 centers to paint a comprehensive picture of threats affecting over 1,000 species across much of the U.S. and Canada.

Our findings, published in the journal Biological Conservation, point to some strategies for reducing harm to wildlife, especially injuries caused by cars.

Tracking the toll

Humans are responsible for the deaths and injuries of billions of animals every year. Bats and birds fly into buildings, power lines and wind turbines. Domestic cats and dogs kill backyard birds and animals. Development, farming and industry alter or destroy wild animals’ habitats and expose wildlife to toxic substances like lead and pesticides. Extreme weather events linked to climate change, such as flooding and wildfires, can be devastating for wildlife.

Most Americans support protecting threatened and endangered species, and recognize that human activities can harm wildlife. But it is surprisingly difficult to determine which activities are most harmful to wildlife and identify effective solutions.

Information from wildlife rehab centers across the U.S. can help fill in that picture. When an animal is brought into one of these centers, a rehabilitator assesses its condition, documents the cause of injury or illness if it can be determined, and then prepares a treatment plan.

Wildlife rehabbers may be veterinarians, veterinary technicians or other staff or volunteers who are certified by state agencies to treat wildlife. They follow professional codes and standards, and sometimes publish research in peer-reviewed journals.

A growing data pool

Until recently, most wildlife rehab records existed only in binders and file cabinets. As a result, studies drawing on these records typically used materials from a single location or focused on a particular species, such as bald eagles or foxes.

Recently, though, rehab centers have digitized hundreds of thousands of case records. Shareable digital records can improve wildlife conservation and public health.

For example, the Wildlife Center of Virginia has worked with government agencies and other rehab centers to establish the WILD-ONe database as a tool for assessing trends in wildlife health. This will be an exciting area of research as more records are digitized and shared.

Threats vary by species

Using this trove of data, we have been exploring patterns of wildlife health across North America. In our study, we identified key threats affecting wildlife by region and for iconic and endangered species.

Overall, 12% of the animals brought to rehab centers during this period were harmed by vehicle collisions–the single largest cause of injury. For great horned owls, which are common across the U.S., cars were the most common cause of admission–possibly because the owls commonly forage at the same height as vehicles, and may feed on road kill.

Other threats reflect various animals’ habitats and life patterns. Window collisions were the most common injury for the big brown bat, another species found in many habitats across the U.S. Fishing incidents were the main reason for admission of endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtles, which are found in the Gulf of Mexico and along the Atlantic coast.

Toxic substances and infectious diseases represented just 3.4% of cases, but were important for some species. Bald eagles, for example, were the species most commonly brought to centers with lead poisoning. Eagles and other raptors consume lead ammunition inadvertently when they feed on carcasses left in the wild by hunters.

In southern Florida, hurricanes and floods resulted in spikes in the numbers of animals brought to rehab centers, reflecting the impact of climate-driven extreme weather events on wildlife health.

About one-third of animals in the cases we reviewed were successfully released back to the wild, though this varied greatly among species. For example, 68% of brown pelicans were released, but only 20% of bald eagles. Unfortunately, some 60% of the animals died from their injuries or illnesses, or had to be humanely euthanized because they were unable to recover.

Spotlighting solutions

Our results spotlight steps that can help conserve wildlife in the face of these threats. For example, transportation departments can build more road crossings for wildlife, such as bridges and underpasses, to help animals avoid being hit by cars.

Wildlife management agencies can ban or limit use of ammunition and fishing gear that contain lead to reduce lead poisoning. And governments can incorporate wildlife into disaster management plans to account for surges in wildlife rescues after extreme weather events.

People can also make changes on their own. They can drive more slowly and pay closer attention to wildlife crossing roads, switch their fishing and hunting gear to nonlead alternatives, and put decals or other visual indicators on windows to reduce bat and bird collisions with the glass.

To learn more about animals in your area and ways to protect them, you can visit or call your local wildlife rehab center. You can also donate to these centers, which we believe do great work, and are often underfunded.

The scale of threats facing wild animals can seem overwhelming, but wildlife rehabbers show that helping one injured animal at a time can identify ways to save many more animal lives.

Tara K. Miller is a Policy Research Specialist at Repair Lab, University of Virginia. Richard B. Primack is a Professor of Biology at Boston University. Disclosure statement: Tara K. Miller received funding from the National Science Foundation. Richard B. Primack does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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This article was originally featured on MIT Press.

In 2017, Google researchers introduced a novel machine-learning program called a “transformer” for processing language. While they were mostly interested in improving machine translation—the name comes from the goal of transforming one language into another—it didn’t take long for the AI community to realize that the transformer had tremendous, far-reaching potential.

Trained on vast collections of documents to predict what comes next based on preceding context, it developed an uncanny knack for the rhythm of the written word. You could start a thought, and like a friend who knows you exceptionally well, the transformer could complete your sentences. If your sequence began with a question, then the transformer would spit out an answer. Even more surprisingly, if you began describing a program, it would pick up where you left off and output that program.

It’s long been recognized that programming is difficult, however, with its arcane notation and unforgiving attitude toward mistakes. It’s well documented that novice programmers can struggle to correctly specify even a simple task like computing a numerical average, failing more than half the time. Even professional programmers have written buggy code that has resulted in crashing spacecraft, cars, and even the internet itself.

So when it was discovered that transformer-based systems like ChatGPT could turn casual human-readable descriptions into working code, there was much reason for excitement. It’s exhilarating to think that, with the help of generative AI, anyone who can write can also write programs. Andrej Karpathy, one of the architects of the current wave of AI, declared, “The hottest new programming language is English.” With amazing advances announced seemingly daily, you’d be forgiven for believing that the era of learning to program is behind us. But while recent developments have fundamentally changed how novices and experts might code, the democratization of programming has made learning to code more important than ever because it’s empowered a much broader set of people to harness its benefits. Generative AI makes things easier, but it doesn’t make it easy.

There are three main reasons I’m skeptical of the idea that people without coding experience could trivially use a transformer to code. First is the problem of hallucination. Transformers are notorious for spitting out reasonable-sounding gibberish, especially when they aren’t really sure what’s coming next. After all, they are trained to make educated guesses, not to admit when they are wrong. Think of what that means in the context of programming.

Say you want to produce a program that computes averages. You explain in words what you want and a transformer writes a program. Outstanding! But is the program correct? Or has the transformer hallucinated in a bug? The transformer can show you the program, but if you don’t already know how to program, that probably won’t help. I’ve run this experiment myself and I’ve seen GPT (OpenAI’s “generative pre-trained transformer”, an offshoot of the Google team’s idea) produce some surprising mistakes, like using the wrong formula for the average or rounding all the numbers to whole numbers before averaging them. These are small errors, and are easily fixed, but they require you to be able to read the program the transformer produces.

It might be possible to work around this challenge, partly by making transformers less prone to errors and partly by providing more testing and feedback so it’s clearer what the programs they output actually do. But there’s a deeper and more challenging second problem. It’s actually quite hard to write verbal descriptions of tasks, even for people to follow. This concept should be obvious to anyone who has tried to follow instructions for assembling a piece of furniture. People make fun of IKEA’s instructions, but they might not remember what the state of the art was before IKEA came on the scene. It was bad. I bought a lot of dinosaur model kits as a kid in the 70s and it was a coin flip as to whether I’d succeed in assembling any given Diplodocus.

Some collaborators and I are looking into this problem. In a pilot study, we recruited pairs of people off the internet and split them up into “senders” and “receivers.” We explained a version of the averaging problem to the senders. We tested them to confirm that they understood our description. They did. We then asked them to explain the task to the receivers in their own words. They did. We then tested the receivers to see if they understood. Once again, it was roughly a coin flip whether the receivers could do the task. English may be a hot programming language, but it’s almost as error-prone as the cold ones!

Finally, viewing programming broadly as the act of making a computer carry out the behaviors that you want it to carry out suggests that, at the end of the day, you can’t replace the individuals deciding what those behaviors ought to be. That is, generative AI could help express your desired behaviors more directly in a form that typical computers can carry out. But it can’t pick the goal for you. And the broader the array of people who can decide on goals, the better and more representative computing will become.

In the era of generative AI, everyone has the ability to engage in programming-like activities, telling computers what to do on their behalf. But conveying your desires accurately—to people, traditional programming languages, or even new-fangled transformers—requires training, effort, and practice. Generative AI is helping to meet people partway by greatly expanding the ability of computers to understand us. But it’s still on us to learn how to be understood.

Michael L. Littman is University Professor of Computer Science at Brown University and holds an adjunct position with the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing. He was selected by the American Association for the Advancement of Science as a Leadership Fellow for Public Engagement with Science in Artificial Intelligence. He is the author of “Code to Joy.”

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A research team from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology recently designed and built their own swimming robot modeled on oceanic eels. Despite its relatively simple design, the bot’s award-winning underwater undulations could provide key insights into its eel inspirations’ biology.

As New Scientist first highlighted on November 30, a video showcase of the collaborators’ work. The clip highlights the abilities of 1-guilla, the team’s nearly three-foot-long, waterproof robot. Featuring eight motorized segments, a malleable tail fin, as well as a head piece containing its frontal battery and computational unit, 1-guilla was named in honor of the more technical term for an eel’s body—anguilliform. The video of the machine’s aquatic journeys recently took home a Gallery of Fluid Motion award during last month’s annual American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics.

While anguilliform evolutionary design allows flesh-and-blood eels to migrate thousands of miles without eating, biologists are not fully sure how the fish subspecies accomplishes such a feat. Enter 1-guilla, whose body movements could be tinkered with by its designers to explore various physical patterns, as well as the interplay between energy efficiency and a speed

During testing, a “standing wave” motion occurred when 1-guilla repeatedly alternated between an S-shape and its original, straight position—only to thrash about in the water. Researchers then programmed 1-guilla to undulate so an S-shape traveled down its body. During this phase, the robot created a “traveling wave” motion allowing it to move forward. Increasing the “amplitude” of its body bending alongside lengthening its S-shape “wavelength” also led to a speedier swim.

But the main influence in how quickly 1-guilla could move through water is its tailfin. Increasing the tail’s angle to its maximum 45-degree range offered the most speed—but at a steep cost. Maximum range, perhaps predictably, requires maximum energy usage, which isn’t exactly a winning strategy for traveling long distances.

[Related: NASA hopes its snake robot can search for alien life on Saturn’s moon Enceladus.]

“To calculate efficiency, the motor’s power consumption (P) is divided by its speed (U) to get the Cost of Transport (CoT),” the team explains in its demonstration video.

The more 1-guilla’s motions resembled traveling waves, the lower its cost of transport. Knowing this, the researchers hypothesize that overall efficiency, not the fastest speed possible, is the key to an actual eel’s lengthy migration while on a comparatively empty stomach.

Serpentine robots are all the rage right now. NASA, for example, is putting the final touches on its aptly named Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) prototype. Ostensibly 1-guilla’s 16-foot-long, 200-pound bigger sibling, EELS could one day find itself traversing both the surface and underground passageways on Saturn’s icy, possibly life-hosting moon, Enceladus. Meanwhile, MIT engineers recently unveiled their own three-foot-long, modular eel-bot made from simple lattice-like structures known as “voxels.”

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Tesla’s stainless steel Cybertruck made its limited debut on Thursday afternoon, roughly two years later than its initial estimated release date. To celebrate, Elon Musk hosted a livestreamed delivery event at his company’s Giga Texas factory. 

Before Tesla’s CEO took the stage, pre-taped footage shown during the launch event included the Cybertruck traversing a variety of off-road vistas including a snowscape and sepia-filtered desert, idling in front of a cinematic sunset (or sunrise), towing SpaceX rocket parts, dramatically driving in circles, and being riddled with machine gun bullets. Later, per Newsweek, Musk told the audience, “In movies you sometimes see the hero or heroine hiding behind the car door while being shot with bullets. That doesn’t actually work unless you’re driving a Cybertruck. So, if Al Capone showed up with a Tommy gun and emptied the entire magazine into the car door, you would still be alive.”

The CEO delivered brief remarks before escorting the first 30 owners into their new electric vehicles, occasionally seeming to struggle with the handleless passenger side doors as smiling owners entered their new sharp-edged EVs. “It’s not just some grandstanding showpiece like me. It’s actually very useful,” Musk promised as the camera appeared to struggle to remain focused on the afternoon’s emcee. “How tough is your truck?” Musk rhetorically asked unnamed, rival carmakers, speaking into the direction of the audience. The challenge drew an enthusiastic response from dozens of attendees. Later, Musk repeatedly stressed the new, angular truck’s utility and durability.

During the Cybertruck’s official unveiling four years’ ago, Tesla vehicle designer Franz von Holzhausen hurled metal balls at a prototype to illustrate the EV’s “Armor Glass” enhancement, causing the driver side windows to shatter. Von Holzhausen demonstrated a similar exercise on Thursday afternoon, tossing a baseball at the Cybertruck twice. The windows did not appear to break this time.

[Related: Elon Musk says ‘we dug our own grave with Cybertruck’ ahead of its November release.]

“Here at Tesla we have the finest in apocalypse technology,” Musk declared to his excited fans at one point. Additional sizzle reel clips also highlighted the Cybertruck’s acceleration and towing capabilities. It apparently can outrace a 2023 Porsche 911 while towing an identical luxury vehicle for at least a quarter-mile.

“Experts said it was impossible,” Musk recounted of the Cybertruck’s design phase. Previously, critics have repeatedly voiced concerns about the Cybertruck’s potential safety issues and reports of numerous production woes allegedly costing Tesla billions of dollars. During an October 2023 earnings call, Musk cautioned shareholders and customers to “temper expectations” about Cybertruck’s initial profitability, adding that, “we dug our own grave with Cybertruck.” But here it finally was. 

Several tweets following the one containing yesterday’s livestream declared, “CAN’T WAIT! It’s basically the most badass car [that] ever existed! ❤️‍🔥🫶” and “LFG!!! Hope I can afford one.🤞🏻”

When first announced in 2019, Tesla’s website briefly listed the Cybertruck’s estimated starting price as $39,990 before removing the amount. Now, its base model officially costs $60,990.

“It’s going to be amazing to see all these cars driving around,” Musk said near his presentation’s end as the 30 vehicles departed the showroom. “This is really going to change the look of the roads.”

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This article was originally published on The Markup. 

Picture a high school student who wants to go to college, likes to cheer on her school’s football team, and plays in a sport or two herself. 

One day after school, she signs up for an official ACT account so she can schedule her college entrance exam and see what score she gets after taking it. Then, she researches a few colleges through the Common App’s website, and like more than a million students every year, she uses the site to start an application for her dream college. 

She spends a few minutes starting a presentation for class using the website Prezi. On a homework break, she registers for her high school’s after-school sports program through a service called ArbiterSports, then she hops on her phone, remembering to order a yearbook through the company Jostens. Long day over, she takes out her laptop and flips on her school’s big football game through the NFHS Network, a subscription service for high school sports.

Here’s what the student doesn’t know: Although she surfed the internet in the privacy of her home, Facebook saw much of what she did.

Every single site she visited used the Meta Pixel, a tracking tool that silently collects and transmits information to Facebook as users browse the web, according to testing by The Markup. Millions of invisible pixels are embedded on websites across the internet, allowing businesses and organizations to target their customers on Facebook with ads. 

Businesses embed the pixel on their own websites voluntarily, to gather enough information on their customers so they can advertise to them later on Meta’s social platforms, Facebook and Instagram. If there’s a pixel on a website’s checkout page and a visitor buys a baseball hat with their school’s logo, for example, the pixel may note that interaction, and the owner of that page can send that person more apparel ads on Facebook later. This is one of the reasons people see the same ad following them on Facebook and Instagram after they shopped on a different site. The Markup has also found hospitals, telehealth companies, tax filing websites, and mental health crisis websites using the pixel, and transmitting sensitive information to social media companies.

Along with encouraging businesses to spend ad dollars, Facebook also receives the transmitted data, and can use it to hone its algorithms. Facebook can also use data from the pixel to link website visitors to their Facebook accounts, meaning businesses can reach the exact people who visited their sites. The pixel collects data regardless of whether the visitor has an account. 

Our investigation found the pixel on dozens of popular websites targeting kids from kindergarten to college, including sites that students are all but required to use if they want to participate in school activities or apply to college.

See our data here: GitHub

On some level, that’s not a surprise: tracking tools like the pixel are so widespread that intensive tracking is almost the status quo. You could make the argument that these educational sites are “just the same as any other site,” said Marshini Chetty, associate professor of computer science at the University of Chicago.

But dealing with kids raises bigger questions about tracking on the web. “Why is there the Meta Pixel? Why are there session recorders?” she said. “What is the place of that on these sites?”

In 2022, around 1.4 million high school seniors took the ACT, up from 1.3 million in 2021, according to the nonprofit that runs the test. The Markup found that the official ACT sign-in page tracked users who visited the site, and when a student logged in, the pixel sent Facebook a scrambled version of the student’s email address. Meta says these “hashed” email addresses “help protect user privacy.” But it’s simple to determine the pre-obfuscated version of the data—and Meta explicitly uses the hashed information to link other pixel data to Facebook and Instagram profiles. 

After signing into their ACT account, if a student accepted cookies on the following page, Facebook received details on almost everything they clicked on—including scrambled but identifiable data like their first and last name, and whether they’re registering for the ACT. The site even registered clicks about a student’s ethnicity and gender, and whether they planned to request college financial aid or needed accommodations for a disability.

An ACT spokesperson declined to comment, but a few days after The Markup reached out for comment, we tested the ACT account page for the pixel again, and found that it was no longer sending personal data to Facebook.

When students visit the Common App website, a pixel tells Facebook what they click, including whether they start an application. The associated application URL they’re directed to after doesn’t track them. More than 1 million students use the Common App to apply to colleges, according to the organization, and more than 1,000 colleges accept applications through the platform. The organization did not respond to a request for comment.

If someone starts or modifies a presentation on Prezi, Facebook gets notified. When a student or parent visits ArbiterSports to sign up for activities at their high school or college, the pixel tells Facebook what schools they searched for on the platform. When a person clicks an email address to reach out to a school for more information, the pixel tells Facebook. According to ArbiterSports’ website, the company claims to be “the backbone of K-12 and collegiate sports and event management in America” and that it’s used by “over 65 million Americans, one in every 5 of us.” Prezi and ArbiterSports didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

Jostens tracks anyone looking for a yearbook in detail, telling Facebook what schools they browsed for, and sends along their hashed email address when they log in. And if a visitor navigates to a high school sports page through the NFHS network to watch a game, the site sends the text of that search to Facebook. Jostens says it partners with more than 40,000 schools and serves 2.5 million customers annually. Some schools require students to place an order with Jostens for apparel like graduation gowns. Jostens didn’t respond to a request for comment.

While many of these sites did not send along a student’s (or any website visitor’s) email or name, Facebook doesn’t need that information in order to track and retarget them for ads. Data from the pixel is connected to individual IP addresses—an identifier that’s like a computer’s mailing address and can generally be linked to a specific individual or household—creating a much more intimate connection between students and their page views. (Meta offers options on the pixel to let organizations adjust what data they collect and transmit—and here’s how you can turn it off or limit it.)

A Meta spokesperson, Emil Vazquez, noted in an emailed statement that the company has recently made changes to how advertisers can market to teens on its services, including limiting the ways advertisers can target them. The company’s terms of use for its business tools prohibit organizations from sending data on children under 13.

“We’ve been clear in our policies that advertisers should not send sensitive information about people through our Business Tools,” Vazquez said. “Doing so is against our policies and we educate advertisers on properly setting up Business tools to prevent this from occurring. Our system is designed to filter out potentially sensitive data it is able to detect.”

Tracking kids under 13

Facebook doesn’t allow children under 13 to use its services. But The Markup found that some sites directed at kids under 13 used the pixel to track visitors as well. 

If a teacher assigned a class to visit the educational reading website Raz-Kids, a service for kids between kindergarten and fifth grade, for example, the site would alert Facebook when visitors clicked a button labeled “KIDS LOGIN.” (There was no pixel on a dedicated log-in page visitors are directed to after that.)

The homepages of ABC Mouse—an animated learning site—and XtraMath—an educational math service—used the tool to track visits to their homepages. The website kids.getepic.com, a digital reading platform for children, didn’t use the pixel. But if a student navigated to the main page, getepic.com, and clicked the “I’m a kid” pop-up, the click and the button text identifying them as a kid was sent to Facebook. The service explicitly markets itself on its site as being for kids 12 years old and younger. 

Once a visitor gets past the homepages of these sites, however, they are no longer tracked, as the sites all have dedicated log-in pages for students that did not use the pixel tracker.

Spokespeople for these sites for kids under 13 stressed that they had separate URLs specifically for kids that did not use the pixel, and only used the pixel on their public-facing homepages to market to potential buyers of their products, like teachers. 

Roy King III, Executive Director of XtraMath.org, said in an email that the site uses the pixel for business campaigns but “student data from our application is not mixed, associated, or identified with any marketing data” and that the site complies with privacy laws for children. Kiki Burger, a spokesperson for Epic, also noted their use of a separate tracking-free site and said Epic’s actual educational product does not track. 

John Jorgenson, a spokesperson for Cambium Learning, parent company of Raz-Kids, similarly pointed out that kids are directed to a page without tracking, saying “our approach is to separate application log-on pages from other parts of our websites with general website traffic, which we do track.”

The Markup tested these sites for the pixel because they were some of the most commonly linked to websites from public schools in the U.S. We gathered data on popular education-related websites by building on a list created by computer science researchers from the University of Chicago and New York University (NYU) this year. The researchers used public databases of K-12 schools to develop a list of URLs for more than 60,000 public schools in the United States, generating more than 15,000 domains from those schools. 

The researchers then scraped those school domains for links to other sites. They gathered a list of the links that appeared most frequently, giving them a list of which websites schools were most likely to direct visitors to. They then whittled the list down to only sites that were related to educational technology. Finally, they used The Markup’s Blacklight tool, which scans websites for trackers, finding widespread use of tools like the Meta Pixel. 

The Markup re-ran the researchers’ Blacklight search, then went further. For 30 websites on the list that used the pixel, we analyzed the network traffic while browsing the site, which gave us detailed insight into how the sites communicated with Facebook.

In all, we searched through dozens of sites on the list that used the Meta Pixel in some way. The search had some limitations: Just because a school linked out to a site didn’t necessarily mean the school approved of it, or wanted students to use it. Many of those sites were also promotional sites for educational products directed toward school administrators, not students. Since they required a login, The Markup couldn’t review some of those products directly.

Jim Siegl, a senior technologist at the Future of Privacy Forum, said school districts might do a great job policing apps they contract with for services and that kids use while in school. But even trying to search for those apps through corporate marketing pages on the open web is a different story.

Siegl uses the analogy of a school in a neighborhood surrounded by a corporation, with surveillance cameras scattered all around. “In order to get to school, Billy has to walk through this corporate neighborhood and through the lobby of the corporation to get to the classroom,” he said.

Facebook’s fraught relationship with kids

Early last year, The Markup launched the Pixel Hunt, a project exploring how the Meta Pixel is quietly used to track web users. The project has highlighted several ways the Meta Pixel collects potentially sensitive data, including educational, financial, and health information. Since launch, the series has sparked concern and direct inquiry from legislators and regulators, and led to dozens of lawsuits against Meta and other companies. 

However, there’s been little focus on how pixels on the web may be collecting data on kids and teens. Earlier this year, Gizmodo reported that the College Board, which is responsible for administering the SATs and Advanced Placement exams, was transmitting information on SAT scores and grades to Facebook, as well as TikTok and others. Recent testing by The Markup showed the pixel still active on some SAT-related pages. According to the College Board, 1.9 million students in the class of 2023 took the SAT. Jerome White, director of communications for the College Board, said in a statement the organization doesn’t send personally identifiable information to Meta and that “pixels are simply a means to measure the effectiveness of College Board advertising.”

Facebook’s relationship with young people is especially fraught, and comes with a years-long history of controversy that extends to today. Last month, a coalition of more than 40 states filed suit against Meta. Attorneys general for the states accused Meta of using intentionally addictive design to hook kids and teens on apps like Instagram, and violating children’s privacy in the process. Meta disputes the claims and argues that it has introduced protections for young people.

This month, Arturo Béjar, a former Facebook engineer, testified to Congress that Facebook knew about, and had failed to stop, developing systems that were hurting kids. Béjar wasn’t the first former Meta worker to weigh in on the issue. Another former employee, Frances Haugen, released internal documents in 2021 indicating Facebook knew the company’s products were damaging the mental health of teenage girls, findings that were in line with what independent researchers have said.

Those revelations followed mounting concerns that Facebook has been drawing young children into an unhealthy digital space. Those fears were magnified even further following news that Facebook planned to release a version of Instagram for children under 13 years old, who have special privacy protections in the United States. 

That plan quickly led to scrutiny from lawmakers and children’s health advocates, and in 2021, about six months after news of the project leaked, the company announced that it was halting Instagram Kids. “While we stand by the need to develop this experience, we’ve decided to pause this project,” Instagram Head Adam Mosseri said in a statement at the time. “This will give us time to work with parents, experts, policymakers and regulators, to listen to their concerns, and to demonstrate the value and importance of this project for younger teens online today.”

There’s no federal privacy law in the United States that broadly covers all data. There is one law, passed in 1998, that does cover data for children under 13 years old: the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA.

COPPA applies to sites that are directed or marketed to children under 13, or who know they’re collecting data on kids under 13. Those sites have to get parental permission before collecting data and give those families a chance to opt out, including through web tracking technologies. If not, they could face penalties from the Federal Trade Commission. Rather than face a potentially daunting task of getting parental permission from millions, some services simply don’t allow children under 13 on their platforms—although in practice, of course, many still make accounts anyway by lying about their age. 

What legally counts as a service directed toward kids is open to some interpretation, with the FTC taking enforcement action against diverse companies like educational technology vendor Edmodo and Amazon, for its Alexa devices. The FTC says it might find a service is directed toward kids based on the subject matter, as well as if they feature “the use of animated characters or child-oriented activities and incentives.”

But again, “kids” means under 13. “If you’re over 13, there’s no real specific law that addresses privacy protections,” Siegl said.

In May, the FTC took direct action against Facebook, alleging the company had violated a previous privacy order and banning the company from monetizing any data collected on users under 18. The agency said Facebook’s “recklessness has put young users at risk.” Meta called the action “a political stunt” and said the FTC was stretching its authority.

There are signs that momentum is building for tighter, more expansive regulations for kids. Multiple states have proposed or passed laws that expand the types of data covered or  expanded COPPA’s protections to include kids who are 13 to 18. 

But attempts to pass new federal laws have stalled in the past. One now on the table, the Kids Online Safety Act, would place new requirements on social media sites to prevent minors from seeing harmful content. That bill and others have, however, triggered civil rights concerns over censorship, especially over what content might be “harmful.” 

Meanwhile, the people responsible for protecting students and kids have to make do with what they have.

As part of their research, the University of Chicago and NYU team interviewed school administrators about their security practices. They broadly found that many districts lack the technical skills or resources to properly assess privacy concerns for students. 

“Some sort of comprehensive federal privacy regulation would be helpful,” said Jake Chanenson, a PhD student and law student at the University of Chicago who worked on the research paper identifying educational sites. “The last privacy act we had was in the ‘90s.”

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Xenobots—a new classification of robots built from biological cells—evolved from theory to reality in only a few short years. Not long after first proposing the concept, researchers successfully harvested material from frog embryos to create their first multicellular biobots in 2020. From the outset, their xenobots could move, record data, collect materials, heal themselves, and even replicate for a few generations before naturally decomposing.

[Related: Meet xenobots, tiny machines made out of living parts.]

Unlike the typical image of a robot built with electronics and other metal components, bioorganic robots often combine genetically altered or guided cells into a form that does not naturally occur within their source bodies. At first, the team didn’t know if they would be able to adapt their methods for any species other than their amphibian-derived xenobots. The answer to their question is already here: researchers have now advanced to “anthrobots”—biological machines derived from human tracheal cells.

As detailed in a new study published Thursday in Advanced Science, anthrobots not only can be constructed from adult human cells without the need for any genetic modification, but they are already proving more medically promising than their xenobot forebears.

“We wanted to probe what cells can do besides create default features in the body,” PhD candidate and study co-author Gizem Gumuskaya explained in a November 30 announcement. “By reprogramming interactions between cells, new multicellular structures can be created, analogous to the way stone and brick can be arranged into different structural elements like walls, archways, or columns.”

[Related: Robots built from frog cells have unlocked the ability to self-replicate.]

According to the November 30 announcement, shaping xenobots required the laborious use of tweezers and scalpels. Anthrobots, by contrast, are able to self-assemble in lab dish environments, and are sourced from adults instead of embryonic cells.

The anthrobots each started as a single, donated tracheal cells covered in armlike cilia responsible for sweeping particles from lung airways. Researchers engineered cellular growth in a lab setting, which in previous studies has been shown to randomly result in the creation of spherical structures known as organoids. These organoids were then carefully conditioned to form exterior-facing cilia to function as paddles for movement. Using variants of tracheal cells offered an array of anthrobot abilities, such as being able to help build additional engineered tissues. Combining multiple organoids into a single structure created large clusters dubbed “superbots” by the researchers.

But of all an anthrobot’s features, its most promising is one that took its engineers by surprise. When passing over a layer of additional human neurons grown within the lab petri dish, the anthrobots scratched their surfaces and encouraged new growth.

“It is fascinating and completely unexpected that normal patient tracheal cells, without modifying their DNA, can move on their own and encourage neuron growth across a region of damage,” said study co-author Michael Levin, a Tufts University professor of biology who previously helped design xenobots, in Thursday’s announcement. “We’re now looking at how the healing mechanism works, and asking what else these constructs can do.”

As researchers gain a better understanding of their anthrobots’ functions and potential, the team believes the bio-machines could be deployed across a wide range of scenarios. A swarm of anthrobots could hypothetically repair spinal or retinal nerve damage, identify cancerous cell growths, or apply drugs to specific areas of the body.

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The first 60 minutes following a traumatic brain injury such as concussion are often referred to as a patient’s “golden hour.” Identifying and diagnosing the head trauma’s severity within this narrow time frame can be crucial in implementing treatment, preventing further harm, and even saving someone’s life. Unfortunately, this can be more difficult than it may seem, since symptoms often only present themselves hours or days following an accident. Even when symptoms are quickly recognizable, first responders need to confirm them and access to CT and MRI scans is often needed, which is only available at hospitals that can be from the scene of the injury.

[Related: When to worry about a concussion.]

To clear this immense hurdle, a team at UK’s University of Birmingham set out to design a tool capable of quickly and accurately assessing potential TBI incidents. Their resulting prototype, that fits in the palm of a hand, has detected TBI issues within postmortem animal samples. As detailed in a new paper published in Science Advances, a new, lightweight tool developed by the team combines a smartphone, a safe-to-use laser dubbed EyeD, and a Raman spectroscopy system to assess the structural and biochemical health of an eye—specifically the area housing the optical nerve and neuroretina. Both optic nerve and brain biomarkers function within an extremely intricate, precise balance, so even the subtlest changes within an eye’s molecular makeup can indicate telltale signs of TBI.

After focusing their device towards the back of the eye, EyeD’s smartphone camera issues an LED flash. The light passes through a beam splitter while boosted by an accompanying input laser, and then travels through another mirror while refracted by the spectrometer. This offers a view of various lipid and protein biomarkers sharing identical biological information as those within the brain. The readings are then fed into a neural network program to aid in rapidly classifying TBI and non-TBI examples.

The team first tested EyeD on what’s known as a “phantom eye,” an artificial approximation of the organ often used during the development and testing of retinal imaging technology. After confirming EyeD’s ability to align and focus on the back of an eye, researchers moved onto clinical testing using postmortem pig eye tissue.

Although the tool currently only exists as a proof-of-concept, researchers are ready to begin assessing clinical feasibility and efficacy studies, then move on to real world human testing. If all goes as planned, EyeD devices could soon find their way into the hands of emergency responders, where they can dramatically shorten TBI diagnosis time gaps.

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Every 13 or 17 years, the buzzy mating call of billions of cicadas is the soundtrack of the summer in some parts of the United States. Their clicky noises are so loud that they could potentially be detected by the same fiber optic cables that help deliver high-speed internet. A proof-of-concept study published November 30 in the Entomological Society of America’s Journal of Insect Science describes how this technology could help track the these loud and fleeting insects

[Related: The Brood X cicadas are coming, and you should eat them. Here’s how.]

When hung on a utility pole, fiber optic cables can be used as a sensor to detect changes in temperature, vibrations, and very loud noises. This emerging technology is called distributed fiber optic sensing and it was tested in the study. 

“I was surprised and excited to learn how much information about the calls was gathered, despite it being located near a busy section of Middlesex County in New Jersey,” study co-author and entomologist Jessica Ware said in a statement. Ware is the associate curator and chair of the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Measuring ‘backscatter’

According to the team, distributed fiber optic sensing is based on finding and analyzing the backscatter when an optical pulse is sent through a fiber cable. Backscatter occurs when small imperfections or disturbances in the cable cause a tiny amount of the signal to bounce back to the source. Technicians can time the arrival of the backscattered light to calculate exactly where along the cable the light bounced back. Monitoring how backscatter varies over time creates a signature of the disturbance. In acoustic sensing, this signature can indicate the frequency of the sound and volume in the cable. 

One sensor can also be deployed on a large segment of cable. According to the study, a 31-mile-long cable with a sensor can detect the location of disturbances at a scale as precise as 3.2 feet. The authors report that this is identical to installing 50,000 acoustic sensors in a tested region that not only synchronized, but don’t require an onsite power supply.

However, according to co-author and NEC Labs America photonics researcher Sarper Ozharar, acoustic sensing in fiber optic cables “is limited to only nearby sound sources or very loud events, such as emergency vehicles, car alarms, or cicada emergences.”

Return of Brood X

In 2021, the Brood X population of cicadas emerged from the ground in at least 15 states. Brood X is the largest of several populations of cicadas that emerge on 17-year cycles. Ozharar, Ware, and colleagues from NEC Laboratories America, Inc. took this opportunity to use the lab’s fiber-sensing test apparatus to see if they could pick up the Brood X cicadas buzzing in trees. The cable was cable strung on three 35-foot utility poles in Princeton, New Jersey between June 9 and June 24, 2021.

[Related: The world’s internet traffic flows beneath the oceans—here’s how.]

The cable picked up the insects’ sounds. The buzzing appeared as a strong signal at 1.33 kilohertz (kHz) via the fiber optic sensing. This matched the frequency of the cicadas’ call when it was measured with a traditional audio sensor in the same location. 

The team also saw the cicadas’ peak frequency varying between 1.2 kHz and 1.5 kHz. This pattern appeared to follow changes in air temperature. The fiber optic sensing also showed the overall intensity of the bugs’ noise over the course of the testing period. The signal decreased over time, as the cicadas’ sounds peaked and then faded as they approached the conclusion of their reproductive period.

“We think it is really exciting and interesting that this new technology, designed and optimized for other applications and seemingly unrelated to entomology, can support entomological studies,” said Ozharar. 

Fiber optic sensors are multifunctional, so they can be installed and used for any number of purposes, detecting cicadas one day and some other disturbance the next. They could also be used to detect a variety of different insects, according to Ware. 

“Periodical cicadas were a noisy cohort that was picked up by these systems, but it will be interesting to see if annual measurements of insect soundscapes and vibrations could be useful in monitoring insect abundance in an area across seasons and years,” said Ware.  

Brood X cicadas are back underground and will not emerge until 2038. The long gap between their appearances does allow entomologists to make technological leaps in the interim. Using a mobile smartphone or an app was not feasible when Brood X last emerged in 2004, but both technologies heavily documented the 2021 emergence. Fiber optic cables could lead to a similar technological leap in cicada chorus study. 

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This article was originally featured on KFF Health News.

The Department of Defense relies on hundreds, if not thousands, of weapons and products such as uniforms, batteries, and microelectronics that contain PFAS, a family of chemicals linked to serious health conditions.

Now, as regulators propose restrictions on their use or manufacturing, Pentagon officials have told Congress that eliminating the chemicals would undermine military readiness.

PFAS, known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down in the environment and can build up in the human body, have been associated with such health problems as cancer. In July, a new federal study showed a direct link between testicular cancer and PFOS, a PFAS chemical that has been found in the blood of thousands of military personnel.

Congress has pressured the Defense Department to clean up U.S. military sites and take health concerns more seriously. Under the fiscal 2023 James M. Inhofe National Defense Authorization Act, the Pentagon was required to assess the ubiquity of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, in products and equipment used by the military.

In a report delivered to Congress in August, Defense Department officials pushed back against health concerns raised by environmental groups and regulators. “DoD is reliant on the critically important chemical and physical properties of PFAS to provide required performance for the technologies and consumable items and articles which enable military readiness and sustainment,” the authors said.

Further, they wrote: “Losing access to PFAS due to overly broad regulations or severe market contractions would greatly impact national security and DoD’s ability to fulfill its mission.”

According to the report, most major weapons systems, their components, microelectronic chips, lithium-ion batteries, and other products contain PFAS chemicals. These include helicopters, airplanes, submarines, missiles, torpedoes, tanks, and assault vehicles; munitions; semiconductors and microelectronics; and metalworking, cooling, and fire suppression systems—the latter especially aboard Navy ships.

PFAS are also present in textiles such as uniforms, footwear, tents, and duffel bags, for which the chemicals help repel water and oil and increase durability, as well as nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare protective gear, the report says.

The Pentagon’s report to Congress was released last month by the American Chemistry Council.

Defending a tradition of defense

Military officials’ defense of PFAS use comes as concerns mount over the health risks associated with the chemicals. Beyond cancer, some types of PFAS have been linked to low birth weight, developmental delays in children, thyroid dysfunction, and reduced response to immunizations. Health concerns grew with the release of the study definitively linking testicular cancer in military firefighters to a foam retardant containing PFAS.

But that wasn’t the first time U.S. military officials were warned about the potential health threat. In the 1970s, Air Force researchers found that firefighting foam containing PFAS was poisonous to fish and, by the 1980s, to mice.

In 1991, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers told Fort Carson, Colorado, to stop using firefighting retardants containing PFAS because they were “considered hazardous material in a number of states.”

The Environmental Protection Agency has struggled to determine whether there are acceptable levels of PFAS in drinking water supplies, given the existence of hundreds of varieties of these chemicals. But in March, the EPA did propose federal limits on the levels of PFAS in drinking water supplies.

The regulation would dramatically reduce limits on six types of the chemicals, with caps on the most common compounds, known as PFOA and PFOS, at 4 parts per trillion. Currently, the Defense Department’s threshold for drinking water is 70 parts per trillion based on a 2016 EPA advisory. As part of a widespread testing program, if levels are found on installations or in communities above that amount, the military furnishes alternative drinking water supplies.

The Defense Department has used PFAS-laced firefighting foam along with other products containing the chemicals for more than a half-century, leading to the contamination of at least 359 military sites or nearby communities, with an additional 248 under investigation, according to the department.

In its report, however, the Department of Defense did not address the health concerns and noted that there is “no consensus definition of PFAS as a chemical class.” Further, it said that the broad term, which addresses thousands of man-made chemical chains, “does not inform whether a compound is harmful or not.”

Researchers with the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group that focuses on PFAS contamination nationwide, said the report lacked acknowledgment of the health risks or concerns posed by PFAS and ignored the availability of PFAS-free replacements for material, tents, and duffel bags.

The military report also did not address possible solutions or research on non-PFAS alternatives or address replacement costs, noted EWG’s Jared Hayes, a senior policy analyst, and David Andrews, a senior scientist.

“It’s kind of like that report you turn in at school,” Andrews said, “when you get a comment back that you did the minimum amount possible.”

Andrews added that the report fell short in effort and scope.

The Defense Department announced this year it would stop buying firefighting foam containing PFAS by year’s end and phase it out altogether in 2024. It stopped using the foam for training in 2020, by order of Congress.

The report noted, however, that while new Navy ships are being designed with alternative fire suppression systems such as water mists, “limited use of [PFAS-containing systems] remains for those spaces where the alternatives are not appropriate,” such as existing ships where there is no alternative foam that could be swapped into current systems.

According to the report, “the safety and survivability of naval ships and crew” from fires on ships depends on current PFAS-based firefighting foams and their use will continue until a capable alternative is found.

Pervasive yet elusive

Commercially, PFAS chemicals are used in food packaging, nonstick cookware, stain repellents, cosmetics, and other consumer products.

The fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act also required the Defense Department to identify consumer products containing PFAS and stop purchasing them, including nonstick cookware and utensils in dining facilities and ship galleys as well as stain-repellent upholstered furniture, carpeting, and rugs.

But in a briefing to Congress in August accompanying the report on essential uses, Pentagon officials said they couldn’t comply with the law’s deadline of April 1, 2023, because manufacturers don’t usually disclose the levels of PFAS in their products and no federal laws require them to do so.

Come Jan. 1, however, makers of these chemicals and products containing them will be required to identify these chemicals and notify “downstream” manufacturers of other products of the levels of PFAS contained in such products and ingredients, even in low concentrations, according to a federal rule published Oct. 31 by the EPA.

This would include household items like shampoo, dental floss, and food containers.

Officials reiterated that the Defense Department is committed to phasing out nonessential and noncritical products containing PFAS, including those named above as well as food packaging and personal protective firefighting equipment.

And it is “developing an approach” to remove items containing PFAS from military stores, known as exchanges, also required by the fiscal 2023 NDAA.

Risk-benefit assessments

In terms of “mission critical PFAS uses,” however, the Pentagon said the chemicals provide “significant benefits to the framework of U.S. critical infrastructure and national and economic security.”

Andrews of EWG noted that the industry is stepping up production of the chemicals due to market demand and added that the federal government has not proposed banning PFAS chemicals, as the Defense Department alluded to when it emphasized the critical role these substances play in national security and warned against “overly broad regulations.”

“The statements are completely unsubstantiated, and it’s almost a fear-mongering statement,” Andrews said. “I think the statement is really going beyond anything that’s even being considered in the regulatory space.”

“There haven’t been realistic proposals policy-wise of a complete ban on PFAS,” his colleague Hayes added. “What people have been pushing for and talking about are certain categories of products where there are viable alternatives, where there is a PFAS-free option. But to ban it outright? I haven’t really seen that as a realistic policy proposal.”

Kevin Fay, executive director of the Sustainable PFAS Action Network, a coalition of corporations, industry advocates, and researchers who support the use and management of PFAS compounds, said the Defense Department has a point and it is up to federal regulators to “responsibly manage” these chemicals and their use to strike a balance among environmental, health, and industrial needs.

“The U.S. Department of Defense’s report on critical PFAS uses is crystal clear: regulating PFAS through a one-size fits all approach will gravely harm national security and economic competitiveness,” Fay wrote in an email to KFF Health News.

Adding that not all PFAS compounds are the same and arguing that not all are harmful to human health, Fay said risk-based categorization and control is vital to the continued use of the chemicals.

But, he added, in locations where the chemicals pose a risk to human health, the government should act.

“The federal government should implement plans to identify and remediate contaminated sites, properly identify risk profiles of the many types of PFAS compounds, and encourage innovation by clearing the regulatory path for viable alternatives to specific dangerous compounds,” Fay wrote.

Assessments are completed or underway at 714 active and former military installations, National Guard facilities, and other former defense sites to determine the extent of contamination in groundwater, soil, and the water supply to these locations and nearby communities.

Last year, the Pentagon issued a temporary moratorium on burning materials containing PFAS. Studies have shown that the practice can release toxic gases. But on July 11, the Defense Department lifted the moratorium on incineration, along with interim guidance on PFAS disposal.

Military personnel who were exposed to PFAS—including through firefighting foam—say they live in fear that they or their family members will develop cancer as a result of their service.

“I’ve got more of some of those materials in my system than 90-plus percent of those on the planet. This is bad. It doesn’t go away,” said Christian Jacobs, who served in the Army for four years and worked as a civilian Defense Department firefighter for nearly three decades. “It keeps me up at night.”

KFF Health News visual reporter Hannah Norman contributed to this report.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.

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Google’s first-of-its-kind geothermal power plant is now fully operational in Nevada, marking a major moment in the company’s overall goal to power its office campuses and data centers using carbon-free energy by 2030. Built in partnership with the green energy startup Fervo, the facility feeds clean electricity into a local grid connected to the tech company’s Google Cloud operations in Las Vegas, as well as data centers in Henderson and Reno.

[Related: An American start-up claims it just set a geothermal energy record.]

According to a November 28 announcement, Fervo’s geothermal energy procurement differs from traditional methods through its reliance on drilling techniques developed within the oil and gas industry. Known as an enhanced geothermal system (EGS), Fervo first drilled a pair of 7,700 feet deep wells into a gas reservoir before connecting them through nearly mile-long horizontal pipes. Fluid pumped into the reservoir then heats the underground region as high as 376 degrees Fahrenheit. Steam then travels to aboveground turbines, which generate clean electricity. During the entire procedure, fiber optic wiring within the wells provides real-time performance monitoring. 

Fervo successfully completed an industry-standard 30-day trial run over the summer at its Project Red commercial pilot site in Nevada. At the time, the geothermal plant produced 3.5 megawatts of sustained power—enough to power roughly 2,600 homes. Now, that same energy will help keep the lights on at a handful of Google’s local, resource-devouring data centers.

Geothermal production is an increasingly attractive alternative power source to other sustainable industries such as wind and solar, since it is capable of providing around the clock energy regardless of time or weather conditions. According to the US Department of Energy, the country rests above enough geothermal reserves to theoretically power the entire world—yet geothermal energy supplied roughly 0.4 percent of all US energy in 2022. Federal regulators estimate up to 120 gigawatts of geothermal energy could come online within the US by 2050, enough for about 15 percent of the country’s anticipated electricity needs.

[Related: How Google Search is helping ‘greenwash’ oil companies.]

Google first pledged carbon neutrality in 2007, and continues to pursue its ambitious goal of carbon-free power at all its office campuses and data centers by 2030. Such a feat remains a massive undertaking—current geothermal kilowatt-per-hour costs are about 90 percent more expensive than the Department of Energy’s current goal of $45/kWh by 2035. Over the summer, Fervo CEO Tim Latimer described the Nevada facility’s production costs as “significantly” higher than the DOE goal, but expects the price to significantly lower in the coming years as the technology scales. Fervo clearly wants to help with that scaling—the company is currently working on a 400 megawatt geothermal facility located in Utah scheduled to go online in 2026.

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Here at Popular Science we celebrate innovation. Whether it’s a new medical treatment, infrastructure project, consumer product, or big idea, they almost always spring up as the solution to a problem. Some honorees address age-old annoyances while others speak to larger and even existential issues that profoundly affect people around the globe. This year, we’ve selected honorees that exemplify this desire to improve people’s lives, just as we have every year since 1988.

Here are the innovations that affected our world in 2023.

• Health
• Engineering
• Auto
• Sports & Outdoor
• Entertainment
• Home
• Personal Care
• Gadgets
• Aerospace
• Emergency Service and Defense

Health

It takes time for scientists and drug makers to move the needle in medicine. But during public health emergencies like the pandemic, they need to act urgently without compromising safety, quality, and effectiveness. Opill is a shining example of that. The US Food and Drug Administration approved the over-the-counter contraceptive in just 13 months (some approvals take longer than a decade). The open access will benefit millions of people, which is why PopSci chose it as the 2023 “Innovation of the Year.” Timeliness also factored into the FDA’s decisions to green-light extraordinary new treatments for RSV, Alzheimer’s, and muscular dystrophy this year. Finally, the budding field of space medicine took a big leap with a successful 3D printing experiment in microgravity.

Innovation of the Year

Opill by Perrigo: The first over-the-counter birth control pill in the US 

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When Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, Americans were stripped of a crucial female reproductive healthcare right. Nearly half of the 6.1 million pregnancies in the US are unplanned. But the release of an affordable birth control pill means that anyone can get contraceptives anywhere in the country. It’s the first over-the-counter option since the FDA approved birth control pills back in 1960. 

Opill is a progestin-only tablet that’s up to 98 percent effective when taken at the same time every day. The generic version, norgestrel, was developed by Pfizer and prescribed for decades. Perrigo purchased the license in 2015, rebranded the drug, and applied for nonprescription status just days before the US Supreme Court ruled against abortion. The contraceptive has a few nominal side effects, including nausea, headaches, and cramps, but shouldn’t cause disruptions like mood swings and weight gain. Though Opill won’t be available in pharmacies and online retailers until early 2024, its arrival represents one solution for the country’s current reproductive health battles.

LEQEMBI by Eisai: A life-changing treatment for early Alzheimer’s disease

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By 2060, the number of people around the world living with Alzheimer’s is expected to triple to 14 million. LEQEMBI, a newly approved antibody treatment, has been hailed “revolutionary” by neurologists because it is the only drug clinically shown to reduce the number of amyloid plaques that build up in the brain with the disease and slow down cognitive decline. It is only for patients with mild memory loss and other symptoms—about 15 to 20 percent of the affected population—and is delivered through an IV infusion every two weeks. LEQEMBI is expected to be covered by Medicare and reach at least 10,000 individuals by 2024. 

Abrysvo by Pfizer: Building immunity in the womb 

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RSV is the leading cause of infant hospitalization in the US. While there is a vaccine available for babies and toddlers, it’s now possible to immunize them even earlier. Abrysvo is the first FDA-approved shot targeting the respiratory illness in individuals who are expecting. One dose, administered between 32 and 36 weeks of pregnancy, can deliver antibodies to the fetus through the placenta. A clinical trial involving nearly 3,700 vaccinated individuals and their infants found Abrysvo was 81.8 percent effective in preventing the virus up to 90 days after birth.

3D Biofabrication Facility (BFF) by Redwire: Printing knee replacements in microgravity

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Your next knee replacement could be out of this world—literally. In January, NASA astronauts installed a bioprinter on the International Space Station that uses human tissue cells to replicate meniscuses, which are notoriously hard to repair. Meniscal tears are one of the most common knee injuries, affecting 12 to 14 percent of people and many US veterans. The microgravity in orbit helps the printed part hold its shape until the cells are fully cultured. The BFF produced its first test meniscus in September: The sample survived the journey back to Earth and is now being analyzed at a military medical school.

Elevidys by Sarepta Therapeutics: A profound way to treat muscular dystrophy

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Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a potentially fatal genetic condition where children can’t produce dystrophin, a key protein for muscle contraction, making it hard for them to walk and for their heart and lungs to function. Surgeries and steroids can delay these debilitating effects, but Elevidys is the first gene therapy for Duchenne and delivers a gene that codes for a shortened form of dystrophin to muscle cells, with the goal of protecting the muscle from damage. The one-time therapy has to be administered between 4 to 5 years of age, and its long-term benefits need to be studied. Still, the FDA fast-tracked approval in June to give patients with muscular dystrophy a chance to get ahead of the disease.

Engineering

As more countries invest in renewable energy and carbon-efficient tech to blunt the destruction caused by climate change, it’s no surprise that new solutions are springing up across disciplines, even in risk-averse fields like construction or utilities. Ideas have moved off the drawing board and into the real world, and scientists, governments, and funders are all getting more thoughtful about using and consuming energy. From a computer server-based system that repurposes extra heat for homes to carbon-conscious cement that meets construction standards, here are the coolest engineering wins from the past year.

Grand Award Winner, Engineering

Carbon removal and electrolysis plants by Equatic: Pairing carbon capture with green hydrogen production

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Capturing carbon dioxide directly from ambient air is a great idea in theory, but in practice can cost more than $1,000 a ton to sequester. It’s also about 150 times more concentrated in seawater than in the air. Equatic, a US startup with pilot plants in Los Angeles and Singapore, has a novel way to sequester the compound directly from the ocean, and simultaneously produce green hydrogen that can be sold or used to help trap even more emissions. 

The company runs an electrical current through pumped seawater to split H₂O into hydrogen and oxygen without producing corrosive chlorine gas—the traditional byproduct of electrolysis with water from the ocean. The current also divides the seawater into basic and acidic streams. In the basic seawater stream, calcium and magnesium react with CO₂ in the seawater and air, turning it into calcium carbonate and magnesium bicarbonate. After rebalancing the pH of the two streams, the seawater and immobilized carbon are released back into the ocean, in accordance with American and Singaporean environmental regulations. As it scales up its plants, the company says it can slash carbon-sequestration prices by up to 90 percent.

Awarion by Charles River Analytics: Blind-spot alert for whales around wind turbine construction

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With 62 turbines producing more than 800 megawatts of power, Vineyard Wind will be the largest offshore wind installation in the US when completed in 2024. As construction picks up near the Massachusetts coast, trained observers use advanced acoustic monitoring tools to detect marine life like North Atlantic right whales and help boats avoid collisions in crowded shipping lanes. But right whales don’t sing as much as humpbacks, so the team recently doubled up with Awarion, a new computer vision system trained to ID marine life and vessels on infrared camera images, as well as electro-optical images. In dark, foggy, or rainy conditions, the AI program can outperform experienced humans in whale watching. The tool has achieved 80 percent accuracy in recognizing whales nearly two miles away, based on testing data announced last year.

The Brimstone Process by Brimstone: A way to make carbon-negative cement

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Concrete, which accounts for 7.5 percent of the world’s carbon footprint, has been tough to decarbonize. The process to make the most important component, Ordinary Portland Cement or OPC, requires burning fossil fuels to heat limestone to 2,500-plus degrees Fahrenheit. The chemical reaction also releases additional CO₂.  

Brimstone, a startup that has raised $60 million planning its first pilot plant near Reno, Nevada, has devised a better mousetrap. It uses carbon-free silicate rock rather than limestone, which avoids the release of greenhouse gasses from the feedrock. Additional bits of magnesium (depending on how they’re processed) can react with CO₂ in the air, rendering the process reduced-carbon or even carbon-negative. The final material is OPC, the same material produced by the conventional process, which gives Brimstone an edge in a crowded field.

The Heata unit by Heata, supported by British Gas and Innovate UK: A data server that warms your bathwater

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Instead of relying on noisy fans to cool the sauna-like temperatures in computer servers, UK-based startup Heata built a custom thermal conductor that carries heat from the hardware to the hot water heater in a person’s house. Unlike a giant server farm with many devices, Heata has created a ‘distributed data center’ by hosting individual servers in people’s homes, using their hot water cylinders as the heat sink for the waste heat byproduct of the processing. The company rents out server space to clients, primarily architecture rendering firms, and pays for the electricity. The homeowner, in turn, saves on utility bills by using the heat for their boiler: It can cover up to 80 percent of the hot water needs of a typical UK household. The system is not secure enough for military secrets or medical records, but experts say it works for lower-value data. Each Heata unit can save about a ton of CO₂ per year at typical utilization and grid carbon intensity levels. In a trial in 80 homes running through this year, participants get deeply discounted hot water compared to current UK energy prices.

Space Solar Power Demonstrator (SSPD-1) by Caltech: An orbiting solar demonstration project

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Imagine a fleet of satellites able to beam solar power to a receiver on the ground in a disaster area or war zone. Or, a space-based system that could shift electricity from New York City to Buenos Aires in milliseconds in response to a heat wave. Flexible, lightweight solar panel arrays in low-Earth orbit could provide energy to any place with the right infrastructure, 24/7.

Now, we have a proof of concept for the orbital model. A Caltech team, headed by engineering professors Ali Hajimiri, Harry Atwater, and Sergio Pellegrino, made headlines in June when it powered LEDs on a satellite with multiple wireless receivers at a distance of about a foot. By showing that solar panel arrays with low-cost custom chips can accurately beam electricity amid the harsh temperatures and radiation of space, the SSPD-1 effort achieved a major milestone. Though it will take another decade or so for this method to compete with the sweeping solar farms on Earth from a price and volume standpoint, the US Navy and Air Force are racing China’s researchers and the European Space Agency to harvest the sun’s rays on the fly.   

Auto

We’re in the midst of an automotive renaissance, with most of the excitement and innovation stemming from the burgeoning EV industry. Automakers are finding new ways to make cars lighter, and are also creating new body styles that look and feel modern without the quirky appearance of EVs of the past. Electric vehicles don’t have to be boring anymore, and we’re seeing creativity with how companies approach accessories, interior materials, and even tires. It’s clear the industry has turned when Lamborghini finds a way to build a hybrid powertrain that makes the car even more powerful than before, adding a touch of green without sacrificing the brand’s character. Below are the automotive innovations we’re most excited about. 

Grand Award Winner, Auto

ActivAir tire inflation system by BFGoodrich: An off-roader’s best friend

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Just about any vehicle on the road today wears a sticker on the inside of the front driver’s-side door that lists the appropriate tire pressure per square inch (PSI) for the car’s rubber shoes. When cruising on the highway, following these instructions is the key to both better fuel efficiency and safety. When leaving the pavement, however, airing down is the best way to expand the tires’ footprints, giving them better traction on gravel or sand. To make the process easier, BFGoodrich created ActivAir, a tire inflation system. Choose from pre-set modes like road, rock, sand, and mud, or dial in an exact setting for the best experience, and never leave the car. In inclement weather, the feature is a real time and sanity saver. 

EV9 by Kia: Going green never looked so good

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Kia’s new EV9 may be an impressive-looking electric vehicle, but what’s inside may be even more important. To deck it out in a green way, the automaker is sourcing recycled materials from items like single-use water bottles, textiles, and discarded fishing nets to create plush, upscale materials way beyond the vehicles’ price point, adding value. Starting at just under $55,000, this three-row electric SUV is impressively affordable, as well. In a unique partnership with the Rhode Island School of Design, Kia and its parent company Hyundai Motor Group are exploring the intersection of art, nature, and design to harness the materials we already have on hand instead of creating new disposable goods. 

Revuelto by Lamborghini: The Raging Bull electrifies its iconic V12

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A Lamborghini is supposed to be loud and bold, with massive engine power. That’s still true for the all-new Revuelto, the Italian brand’s first plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. The newest pony in the Raging Bull’s stable starts with the components fans love about its supercars, like that powerful, roaring V12 and distinctive body style. Then Lamborghini added three electric motors, kicking the horsepower up to 1,001. The result is a hybrid designed for breathtaking performance, and it’s still unmistakably a Lamborghini when it rolls past, even in all-electric mode, in which it can travel just over six miles.

Volvo EX30 by Volvo: Setting the standard for affordable, high-quality EVs

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As the US (and the world) gears up for the transition to EVs, automakers are looking to beat the market leader: Tesla. In June, the Swedish manufacturer unveiled its EX30, a five-seat SUV that starts at a shade over $36,000. Volvo has a reputation for building attractive cars with solid safety features, and this new crossover is aimed squarely at the mass market. With renewable interior materials, two powertrain options, and up to 275 miles of range, the EX30 is positioned well for EV adoption. And in a market where many EVs start at $50,000 or more, a vehicle at the EX30’s reasonable cost is great.

RANGER XP Kinetic by Polaris: Rugged, all-electric utility

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This year, Polaris delivered its newest RANGER side-by-side: the all-electric XP Kinetic utility task vehicle (UTV). The company established a 10-year partnership with Zero Motorcycles for the RANGER XP Kinetic electric powertrain, which boasts 110 horsepower and 140 pound-feet of torque. The RANGER XP Kinetic can also tow up to 2,500 pounds and haul 1,250 pounds, which leads the segment and makes life easier for those who rely on UTVs as working machines. Farmers, ranchers, or anyone with a large property can use it as an electric pack mule, and all you have to do to feed it is plug it in. 

Sports & Outdoor

Best of What’s New innovations often involve completely new products designed to solve massive problems. However, you only need one tiny spark to start a fire, and this year’s sports and outdoors innovations largely highlight small-but-powerful ideas that cause an outsized improvement in the ways we compete and have fun. Mint can wick odors sustainably, performing better than its eco-antagonist, copper-infused kin. Vacuum-insulated coolers allow you to pack more while using less space–no foam necessary. A fabric that was famous in the 80s is changing how we recycle camping gear. And, one winner changes an entire industry by deprecating a single small component. The best sports and outdoors innovations prove that small changes can make big impacts. 

Grand Award Winner, Sports and Outdoors

SRAM Eagle Transmission by SRAM: Bye bye, broken derailleur hangers

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The derailleur hanger is a bike’s Achilles heel. Drop your bike on the drivetrain side or clip an errant rock and suddenly your misaligned derailleur won’t allow you to shift. This means your bike gets left in the garage unridden, since diagnosing and fixing a bent derailleur can be tricky. SRAM’s Eagle transmission turns the weakest point of a bicycle into one that’s strong and damage-resistant. SRAM bolts the derailleur directly to the bicycle frame and rear axle, eliminating the derailleur hanger completely. Direct mount of the derailleur to the frame offers a stiffer, more precise shift and overall performance. For now, it’s on high-end mountain bikes. However, it has already started to come down the line with the cheaper GX Eagle. Hopefully, it will continue to trickle down and save components for every rider.

Tempo cooler by Oyster: A cooler cooler, no ice required

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You probably encounter vacuum insulation every day in your travel mug—a vacuum trapped between two metal walls creates a thermal barrier to keep contents cold. It’s easy to do with a mug, but much harder on a large cooler. The Oyster Tempo features Oyster’s DLTA technology, a patented integrated vacuum insulation system constructed with recyclable aluminum and chemical-free silica. This construction allows for the cooler’s optimal thermal insulating performance. The end product is a cooler that’s half as big, offers three times the internal space, and stays three times colder than a typical hard-sided model. It’s 100% recyclable, and the company says the DTLA thermal technology they created for the cooler can be used for medicine, organ transports, and more. 

Fresh Face Odor Control by Polartec: Using the power of mint to stop smell

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Synthetic materials offer thermal and durability advantages in outdoor gear, but they also tend to augment the body’s natural (and not-so-pleasant) odors. While effective, many odor-wicking fabrics use metallic elements: Finite resources whose long-term effects on the environment, specifically aquatic life, are called into question. Polartec’s Fresh Face is made from a naturally sourced mint oil that’s harvested and distilled in Willamette, Oregon. The threads in the performance fabric are infused with the mint extract. The result is a powerful odor control that is a naturally-derived, long-lasting solution to a major problem without any lingering mint smell. You can currently find the fabric in Rabbit’s Fuel n’ Fly shorts, but expect more Fresh Face in the future. 

Pioneer Pro Inflatable Hardboard by Isle: An inflatable SUP that feels like a hardboard

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Inflatable stand-up paddleboards (SUP) typically sacrifice sturdiness for exceptional portability. SUP manufacturer Isle’s Pioneer Pro is an inflatable hardboard that’s up to three times more rigid than other inflatables and considerably lighter weight and less bulky than traditional hard boards. Two new technologies make the Pioneer Pro possible. A patented composite material called InfinityFiber combines fiberglass and thermoplastic to create rigid surfaces. A technique it calls PowerFuse mechanically bonds the top and bottom layers to the rail layer using heat and pressure in a welding machine. According to the company, the military is looking at using this material in unmanned spacecraft and unmanned submersibles.

Forte Endless Promise sleeping bag and Endless Promise line by NEMO: The circle of (gear) life 

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IN 2018, the EPA estimated that 17 million tons of textile waste ended up in landfills—only 2.5 million tons of that were recycled. NEMO’s Endless Promise line—currently consisting of the Forte sleeping bag—is circular, meaning old products are used to make new ones. To make a circular sleeping bag compatible with recycling systems, the company needed to build the majority of the bag from a single polymer. With so many elements, including the fabric, insulation, hardware, and trims, a typical bag includes 10 or more unique materials. The solution lay in good ol’ polyester. The sleeping bags can be repaired, completely recycled, or resold when sent back to NEMO. The company will introduce Endless Promise packs and down sleeping bags in 2024.

Entertainment

Televisions have gotten bigger, faster, brighter, and cheaper over the past two decades. A 70-inch TV was a novelty just 15 years ago, and now they’re available at Black Friday-like prices all year round. Our category winner this year is a TV, but the award isn’t about picture quality or backlight tech. It’s about finding a clever way to move image and sound data from one place to another to make life a little simpler. This year’s list also includes the world’s fastest monitor, a game controller made for truly anyone, and a massive spherical digital emoji in the middle of the desert.

Grand Award Winner, Entertainment

Signature OLED M TV by LG: A wireless TV without compromise

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LG took a big step toward cutting the cord this year. The company debuted its 97-inch Signature OLED M TV, which sports a power cable—and that’s it. The ports all exist on a device it calls the Zero Connect box. The box has all the normal connectors you’d expect on a high-end TV, including three HDMI 2.1 ports, a pair of USB-A ports, a LAN connection, a coax socket, and an infrared audio port. But no physical wire connects that box (and ultimately your streaming or gaming devices) to the actual display. Instead, LG has developed proprietary wireless technology that it says offers three times the speed of WiFi 6E. As a result, it can chuck 4K video at 120 fps over a distance of 30 feet. 

Access controller for PS5 by Sony: A modular gaming controller setup designed for accessibility

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Everyone deserves to enjoy video games regardless of whether they have a physical disability or the dexterity required to use a conventional controller.  The Access controller is an accessibility controller kit for the PS5 that can interface with many popular third-party accessibility devices via four built-in 3.5mm aux ports. Out of the box, the controllers are arranged like daisies; the buttons are like petals, and the players can arrange them however they like. Players can customize the controller’s inputs on their PS5 console and store up to 30 control profiles. The Access controller can work independently, in pairs, or even in concert with the innovative DualSense controller for PS5.

PRO X 2 LIGHTSPEED gaming headset by Logitech: The first gaming headset with true graphene drivers

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To create speaker drivers that would be as stiff and light as possible for its high-end gaming headset, Logitech relied on a familiar-but-finicky material known as graphene—essentially a lattice made of carbon. Each 50mm driver in the Logitech headset has a graphene diaphragm instead of the typical Mylar material found in most other headsets. That allows the driver (which physically produces the sound) to move more without introducing unwanted vibrations and deformations, which cause distortion. When you’re surrounded by video game enemies and laser blasters are going off all around you, Logitech’s headset can clearly differentiate between sounds and maintain the spatial immersion players need to play your best.

Alienware 500Hz Gaming Monitor – AW2524H by Dell: The fastest monitor around

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It’s tough for a monitor to stand out of the pack these days, but the real battle for supremacy is in the refresh rate column of the spec sheet. Alienware’s 500GHz monitor refreshes its on-screen image up to 500 times every second, which was faster than any other display when it debuted. Hooked up to a fast enough machine, this monitor can all but eliminate lag and distracting motion blur for ever-smoother gameplay. It also has NVIDIA G-SYNC variable refresh rate technology and NVIDIA Reflex Analyzer to measure overall system latency to reduce screen tearing and other game-ruining weirdness.

The Sphere in Las Vegas by Sphere Entertainment Co.: A truly immersive theater experience

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At 366 feet tall and 516 feet wide, this massive structure on the Las Vegas Strip stands out due to its truly impressive engineering. The Sphere’s outside shell is covered in 1.2 million LED lights that allow the building to take on any appearance, including a giant emoji. Inside, the sound system is the largest of its type, and the venue can create wind, seat vibrations, and even scents for the audience to enjoy. The screen inside is also so massive that it requires a new camera system just to capture 18K footage to fill it. It’s an unreal experience, and it still has a ton of potential as creators push the limits of what it can do.

Home

Innovation doesn’t always start with an enormous change from what came before. Sometimes, it’s the small adjustments that have outsized effects well beyond their own industries. Sure, the list includes a 50-pound solid-state battery power station—a type of tech that’s been notoriously difficult to scale—but there’s also a small spring in a shock-absorbing hammer, and a little lever in an easy-to-install power outlet. These sometimes seemingly iterative changes can ripple and we expect to see the effects of this year’s winners for a long time coming.

Grand Award Winner, Home

Solid-state technology by Yoshino: The first portable power stations to use solid-state batteries

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Type “solid-state batteries” into Google and you’ll see a list of frequently asked questions along the lines of, “Are solid-state batteries coming?” Well, if you need a portable power station capable of providing 330 to 4,000 watts of juice, they’re already here. Solid-state batteries promise to provide longer-lasting, more powerful replacements for lithium-ion batteries, but the cost has made them impractical for most usages, especially in larger sizes. Yoshino has found a way to scale solid-state cells into portable power stations that weigh anywhere from 10 to 54 pounds. They’re the first devices of their size to run on solid-state batteries. What’s more, is you won’t have to worry about damage causing a dangerous fire. Unlike liquid electrolyte-based lithium-ion batteries, which can explode in flame when punctured, solid-state batteries are, well, solid and much more rugged. 

Decora Edge outlets and switches by Leviton: The easiest DIY power outlet installation ever

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Electrical work and plumbing are two trades many DIYers won’t touch. The respective risks of fire and flooding make it intimidating for enthusiasts. But Leviton’s Decora Edge line of power outlets and wall switches might convince a few more people to hook these electrical endpoints up themselves. Decora Edge outlets and switches offer color-coded lever terminals on the back that clamp wires in place. It holds the wires more firmly than the old connection methods, and the case itself contains no exposed metal that could send electricity to a place it shouldn’t be like your body.

Eletta Explore espresso machine by De’Longhi: Finally, automatic cold foam

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At this point, pretty much all of the at-home coffee-making has been automated. Grinding, brewing, and even pouring can happen automatically. But one holdout has been cold foam, which is necessary for an exquisite, iced latte that rivals any cafe, and many other cold coffee drinks. Until now, you’ve needed an immersion blender or some other manual tool to whip cold milk into a frothy topping, but De’Longhi has automated that process in their full-service Eletta Explore espresso machine. The system delivers milk frothed to the perfect texture and dispensed at the perfect temperature to coincide with your drink, all without a hint of learning curve. Combined with DeLonghi’s patented cold brew extraction technique (which takes just three short minutes), it’s basically a gourmet coffee shop on your counter.

ShockStop hammers by ToughBuilt: A shock-absorbing framing hammer

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Framing hammers are big, heavy, and have essentially remained unchanged for ages. After all, what’s better at driving long nails through wood than a block of metal on a stick? One side effect of framing, though, is that the shock of repeatedly striking one object with another eventually makes its way into your arm and causes soreness, at best, and permanent damage at worst. ToughBuilt found a way around that by stuffing a shock-absorbing spring into the head of their ShockStop hammers. They still provide a satisfying impact, but the reduced vibration mitigates fatigue and damage to your arm. The added flex also helps prevent destructive microcracks from forming in the head, which could make it last longer before it needs replacing.

Mach V1 Ultra by Eufy: A vacuum, mop, and steamer all in one

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Household messes come in countless forms, and it’d be nice if you only needed one tool to clean them all. Eufy’s Mach V1 Ultra comes closer than any stick vacuum before it, with the ability to suck up dry detritus like a traditional vacuum, swallow wet spills like a mop, and even steam-clean hard surfaces like, well, a steamer—no cords involved. With 16,800 pascals of suction power, 230-degree steam, and the ability to suck up wet and dry debris at the same time, it’s a Swiss Army Knife of a cleaner. But, it doesn’t compromise in its performance. It’s the first device of its kind to earn a TÜV Rheinland certification for killing 99.9 percent of common bacteria with its scalding hot steam.

Personal Care

The beauty and wellness industry often relies on science-y buzzwords and flashy packaging more than actual innovation. But consumers are starting to see through the marketing tricks and are now demanding products that truly break the mold. This year’s Personal Care awards highlight companies that address this need and tackle real problems with smart solutions. From acne care that conceals and heals to a recovery app made by and for long COVID patients, these winners use serious research, testing, and improving to give your wellness routine the makeover you’ve been waiting for.  

Grand Award Winner, Personal Care

Visible Plus by Visible Health: An app that helps long COVID patients manage their symptoms

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Millions of people suffering from long COVID worldwide—and other chronic conditions like myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS)—face the daunting task of tracking symptoms, identifying triggers, and budgeting their energy to avoid crashes. Launched by long COVID patient Harry Leeming in 2022, Visible is an app designed to empower patients and fuel new research. Currently available through an early access program, the upgraded version, Visible Plus, pairs the platform’s symptom-tracking interface with a Polar heart rate monitor to capture pulse variability. This is a good indicator of the stability of the autonomic nervous system, which can trigger symptoms for various chronic conditions when disrupted. New data from thousands of patients inform Visible’s algorithms, revealing trends in symptom severity and reminding users (in real time) when they need more rest. So far, it’s only available in English in a handful of countries, including the US. 

The New RevAir by RevAir: A hair dryer that works in reverse

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One of the best hair dryers on the market this year looks more like a vacuum cleaner than a bathroom appliance. The New RevAir uses reverse-air technology to suck in tresses and quickly dry, smooth, and straighten them with less heat than traditional methods, leaving your mane shinier and less prone to damage. The upgraded styling tool, made to be smaller and quieter than its predecessor, excels at straightening tight curls and coils, stretching strands more gently than a hot comb. Users can even insert braids and twist-outs into the RevAir wand to dry them completely in seconds.

Theragun PRO Plus by Therabody: The ultimate multi-therapy massage device 

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Therabody is known for crafting the industry’s top percussive massage guns, but its latest model is in a league of its own. The Theragun PRO Plus is sleeker and more compact than its predecessor, and features a new suite of recovery tools. Near infrared LED light therapy helps stimulate circulation and boost healing, while heat and cold therapies help loosen up stiff muscles and soothe inflammation. The device also overcomes one of the biggest shortcomings of at-home massagers by offering a vibration setting to safely relieve joint pain. Users can even access built-in routines to track heart rates and guide their breathwork during treatment. 

Invisible Bandage by Violette_FR: Reinventing a first aid staple to fight acne

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Applying makeup on blemishes rarely works well, since it can add injury to insult by making pimples even more inflamed. Taking inspiration from the liquid bandages often found in first aid kits, French beauty company Violette_FR changed the game by replacing skin-irritating ingredients with a common food thickener, polysaccharide xanthan gum, and sap from acacia trees. The result, Invisible Bandage, glides on as a smooth, quick-drying layer to protect your pimple from any makeup you place on top of it. Even better, the clinically tested product contains soothing ingredients like CM-Glucan granules to soothe the infection and heal your zits, even if they’re hiding.

Loona by Boom Home Medical: A bedside urinal with serious style

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Injuries, pregnancy, and balance and mobility issues can sometimes make it difficult and even dangerous to get up and use the toilet without help. Dissatisfied with the current options for women and other people with vulvas, the founders of Boom Home Medical set out to create a comfortable and colorful personal urination device that doesn’t look like a contraption out of a hospital room. The Loona’s soft, contoured funnel aligns effortlessly with bodies of many shapes and sizes, while its snap-close lid limits the risk of spills. The integrated handle diverts flow into smaller streams, minimizing noise and helping the urinal blend in at home. 

Gadgets

Any real gadget innovation should allow people to do something that they couldn’t do before. That may sound like a tall order, but every year devices present people with new opportunities thanks to technological advances, big or small. This year’s list is full of innovations that help people create something from nothing. Our grand prize winner harnesses the power of generative AI and presents it in a way that’s wildly accessible to just about everyone. Meanwhile, 3D printers have also gotten easier to use, especially the latest from Bambu, which makes printing fast and simple. And Meta delivers on a promise several now-defunct companies have made for years. It’s a fascinating time to be a creator—and a great time to be a gadget nerd.

Grand Award Winner, Gadgets 

Photoshop Generative Fill by Adobe: A tool to turn anyone’s words into art

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Generative AI has been the biggest technology story of 2023, and for good reason. The ability to generate full-fledged artistic creations from a simple text prompt appeals to a wide range of people, and Adobe has dropped that tech into the most popular photo editing program in the world. Many other generative AI tools require complex setups and can present other hurdles for a new user. Adobe’s solution, however, nestles neatly in with traditional image editing tools. During the beta period, the internet exploded with people using Photoshop’s new feature to create countless weird, wonderful, and sometimes unnerving images. The tool now resides in the official version of Photoshop, Illustrator, and Adobe’s other apps, and the results are often impressive, if sometimes confounding.

P1P by Bambu Lab: An accessible 3D printer that doesn’t make you choose between quality and speed

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Even as 3D printing gets more accessible, it can still be painfully slow. But Bambu’s P1P has streamlined both the speed and quality of the process. The P1P is ready to print in just about 15 minutes after taking it out of the box, which is refreshing compared to some models that take hours. Once it’s running, the P1P can print at a rate of up to 500 millimeters per second (mm/s), which is nearly twice what printers at this price typically output. Plus, the head accelerates at an impressive 20,000 mm/s². Despite its speed, this machine spits out objects that are smooth, detailed, and free from errors. Bonus: It costs less than $1,000. 

MX2A by Cherry: A classic mechanical keyboard switch gets a high-tech makeover

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You probably never think about it, but every time you press a key on your keyboard, you’re activating a switch. The original Cherry MX keyboard switches hit the market in 1983, winning the hearts of nerds everywhere with their impeccable feel and clacky sound. The MX2A redefines those classic switches for an even better feel and longevity beyond the 100 million strokes promised by the originals. Cherry developed a new proprietary lubrication mix and technique for applying the slippery stuff to the socket dome in the key’s rear housing. Along with a stronger barrel-shaped spring (instead of a typical cylinder), six ribs that keep the key centered, and redesigned socket geometry, these upgrades create the bounciest, clickiest keys yet.

Quest 3 by Meta: Accessible mixed reality for the real (and virtual) world

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Years ago, a company called Magic Leap promised immersive mixed reality (MR) that blended digital objects with the real world at a consumer level. It worked, but it wasn’t practical enough to catch on thanks to its clunky hardware and clumsy images. The Meta Quest 3, however, delivers that promised MR experience in an accessible way. A pair of cameras and a depth sensor dutifully recreate the real world in the headset’s 4K+ infinite display. Digital objects seamlessly blend into the terrain so convincingly that taking off the headset can feel slightly disorienting—it’s a truly impressive experience from a standalone headset.

Deep Dark Technology by Unistellar: A chance for city dwellers to see the stars

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Light pollution makes stargazing all but impossible in many urban areas, but Unistellar built a solution for that view-ruining haze. The company has analyzed millions of images captured by its smart telescopes to collect a comprehensive view of the night sky. Its Deep Dark tech assesses the scene a telescope user is looking at, recognizing which objects belong there and which are simply products of light pollution. The result? A clear, detailed map of deep space objects that would otherwise be impossible in a well-lit area. 

Aerospace

It’s been an exciting year in the aerospace industry. Two heavyweights—NASA and Boeing—announced that they were teaming up to create a new research aircraft called the X-66A, also known as the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator. The goal of the program is to make an experimental passenger aircraft that will be more efficient with the fuel it consumes. And speaking of sustainability, two different companies working on electric aircraft—Joby Aviation and Beta Technologies—delivered battery-powered flying machines to the Air Force for testing. What’s more, Alaska Airlines claims to have concocted a coffee blend that it says tastes good up at high altitudes. (What will they think of next?) But the biggest breakthroughs of the past 12 months include a giant rocket, exciting new space exploration missions, and a sixth-generation bomber for the Air Force. Take a look. 

Grand Award Winner, Aerospace

JUICE by the European Space Agency (ESA): On a quest for hidden seas

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Science fiction has long abounded with tales of life teeming in subsurface oceans on worlds like Europa, an ice-coated moon of Jupiter. Soon, we’ll have a close look at Europa and other Jovian moons, thanks to ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE), which launched on April 14 this year. JUICE’s science instruments include spectrographs and penetrating radar designed specifically to peer under ice, making it primed to explore not just Europa, but also its fellow icebound moons Ganymede and Callisto. JUICE will arrive at Jupiter in 2031 and, after orbiting the gas giant for more than three years, will move itself into Ganymede’s orbit in 2034 for further study.

Psyche by NASA/JPL and Arizona State University: To deep space without rocket fuel

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NASA’s Psyche is flying through space thanks to a futuristic propulsion system. Psyche isn’t like traditional space probes that rely on thrust from dramatic chemical reactions. Instead, itrelies on solar power, which produces electricity that strips xenon atoms into ions and pushes them out the back. This type of propulsion has propelled spacecraft before, but Psyche uses a type called a Hall-effect thruster; Psyche’s engine relies on a magnetic field to corral the xenon ions, boosting the thruster’s efficiency. In fact, Psyche will be the first time a craft using a Hall-effect thruster has traveled further than the moon (though plenty of spacecraft have used one in Earth orbit). Launched on October 12, Psyche is headed to a stellar body of the same name: a metal-rich asteroid, unique among others made out of stone, and thought to be the core of a planet that never formed.

Chandrayaan-3 by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO): The first craft to land at the lunar south pole

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Before this year, no one had ever landed in the moon’s south polar region (a region where water ice is plentiful), not even with an uncrewed craft. On August 23, the ISRO changed that when the lander of its latest lunar mission, Chandrayaan-3 (from Sanskrit words meaning “moon craft three”), touched down. In the days that followed, that lander (Vikram) and its attached rover (Pragyan) conducted the first-ever scientific tests of the south polar surface. Unfortunately, a month after its landing, both the lander and rover failed to respond to a wake-up call. Still, Chandrayaan-3 undeniably helped break new ground. There is a good reason that NASA plans to someday land astronauts near the South Pole: The water ice could perhaps support human habitation. 

The B-21 Raider by Northrop Grumman: A stealth bomber for the 21st century

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Way back in 1988, the US Air Force unveiled the B-2 Spirit, the first stealth bomber in its arsenal. That futuristic aircraft, a flying wing, earned a Best of What’s New award from PopSci that year. More than three decades later, Northrop Grumman rolled out that aircraft’s successor, a sixth-generation flying machine intended to eventually replace the B-2, which the Air Force only owns a relatively small number of. The B-21 Raider is designed to be able to evade detection by radar and will have the capability to deploy either conventional or nuclear weapons. As of November 10, it is in flight testing.

Emergency Service and Defense

As technology evolves and iterates, so does war. Breakthroughs in materials science allow for better body armor, hopefully saving lives. An expanded definition of service means providing appropriate clothing for all soldiers, regardless of anatomy. The cheap and widespread availability of quadcopters has changed how squads scout and fight, as hobbyist toys are turned by the tens of thousands into short-range eyes in the sky. And the climate is warming, which means militaries are turning to new ways to ensure the electrical power stays on despite grid failures. This year’s best emergency services and defense innovations meet the world where it is, and offer added protection and redundancy so that more people can live to see tomorrow. 

Grand Award Winner, Emergency Service and Defense

Kevlar EXO by Dupont: Lighter body armor

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On April 14, DuPont announced Kevlar EXO, a new variant on Kevlar that incorporates a third monomer molecule into its fibrous composition. That change makes the new fiber as strong as existing Kevlar but at lighter weights: existing Kevlar weighs 1 pound per square foot, while Kevlar EXO is between 0.65 and 0.7 pounds per square foot. That’s an improvement of over 30 percent, ensuring that the new material can overcome one of the biggest obstacles to ensuring body armor offers protection: the lighter the body armor, the easier it is for a person to wear it. The hope is that Kevlar EXO will be able to meet body armor standards with a thinner layer, letting the armor go from the lab and into the field, where it can save lives.

Army Tactical Bra by U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command: At last, a durable undergarment for all bodies in the military

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The Army Tactical Brassiere, which is currently in its prototype phase, is the first bra designed specifically by the U.S. Army to be worn into ground combat. Created by U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Soldier Center, or DEVCOM SC, the stain-concealing black bra prototype is flame-resistant and may have a redundant closure mechanism to endure long deployments. Women make up 17 percent of the active-duty US military and must buy their own support, often layering sports bras. Four Army Tactical Bra variants are designed to fit more bodies, and can work with uniforms, armor, and tactical gear, ensuring the services remain open to anyone capable of the job.

RQ-28A, Short Range Reconnaissance System by Skydio: A US quadcopter for squads and scouts

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Made by Skydio, the RQ-28A drone is the Army’s first “program of record” quadcopter, which means it has gone from idea to a regular part of the Army’s budget and planning. This ends years in which the US Army struggled to find a quadcopter that works in the field, but didn’t have the risks associated with being an off-the-shelf toy pressed into military use. In November 2022, the 75th Ranger Regiment at Fort Benning, Georgia, successfully fielded the RQ-28A. Weighing less than five pounds, it can be carried in a rucksack and quickly deployed. The drone is controlled from an Army handset, and has a camera that shares video in visual and infrared light. 

Oklo Micro Reactor by Oklo Inc: Resilient backup power, no fossil fuels needed

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In August 2023, the Air Force announced the award of a contract to California-based Oklo to design and construct, and then own and operate, a micro nuclear reactor at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska. The reactor, intended to go online in 2027, is aiming to provide 5 megawatts of power. That’s less than one sixth of the electricity already provided by Eielson’s coal and oil power plant, but it’s still a good basis for ensuring that emergency functions can continue if the base otherwise loses power. Should the reactor prove successful, power generators like this could become a tool for resiliency in both military and civil grids.

Barracuda Ultra-lightweight Camouflage Screen with Frequency Selective Surface technology by Saab: Camouflage that’s communication-friendly

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Multispectral camouflage netting must hide the people, vehicles, and equipment under it from visual sight, infrared cameras, and detection by radar. But this type of camouflage can block desired radio signals going in and out, leaving those hiding underneath it in the dark when they need to communicate with allies in the field. In August 2023, Saab announced the new frequency Selective Surface technology for its Barracuda Ultra-lightweight Camouflage Screen, which allows certain radio signals to be sent from underneath the netting, while still protecting against detection by radar. That means soldiers hiding under the net are still hidden from foes, but are still in communication with friendly forces.

Credits

Package Editor: Rob Verger

Editors, writers, and researchers: Amanda Reed, Andrew Rosenblum, Annie Colbert, Berne Broudy, Charlotte Hu, Jen McCaffery, Jocelyn Solis-Moreira, John Kennedy, Kelsey Atherton, Kristin Shaw, Purbita Saha, Rachel Feltman, Rahul Rao, Rob Verger, Sandra Gutierrez, Stanley Horaczek, Terri Williams

The post The 50 greatest innovations of 2023 appeared first on Popular Science.

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Toyota finally gave the Tacoma pickup truck a glow-up in its fourth generation after eight years, including an important powertrain update: the Tacoma is available as a hybrid for the first time. 

First introduced for model year 1995, the Tacoma was equipped with a five-speed manual or four-speed automatic transmission matched with three gas engine options (four or six cylinders).  The Tacoma was 199 inches long and could tow between 3,500 and 5,000 pounds. 

The 2024 Tacoma is 14 inches longer from stem to stern than the 1995 truck. It’s built on the same global truck platform as the Tundra (all new for 2022), Sequoia (which launched its third generation for model year 2023) and the redesigned Land Cruiser, unveiled earlier this year. 

And Toyota says the Tacoma’s new i-Force Max hybrid powertrain, offered as an option on the TRD Sport, TRD Off-Road, and Limited trims and standard on TRD Pro and Trailhunter variants, is the most powerful powertrain ever offered on a Tacoma. 

Take a look at the no-longer-secret recipe behind the 2024 Tacoma, including the new engine/motor combination. 

More torque, better off-road capability

The new Tacoma’s hybrid setup starts with the same 2.4-liter engine found in the gas-only trims. In the i-Force Max versions, a 48-horsepower electric motor sits between the engine and eight-speed transmission. If that configuration sounds familiar, it’s because Toyota equipped its Grand Highlander (launched earlier this year) with a 2.4-liter hybrid powertrain, too. The Grand Highlander Hybrid Max is the fastest and quickest in the lineup, providing 362 horsepower and 400 pound-feet of torque in the SUV. 

In the new Tacoma, the hybrid setup produces 326 horsepower and 465 pound-feet of torque. That’s more than double what the original V6 could provide in the 1995 Tacoma; even more impressively, it’s significantly more than the 265 pound-feet in the outgoing 2023 model with a V6. Great torque numbers are essential for effortless off-roading, as the rotation helps the vehicle power up and over hills and boulders.

Some trims of the 2024 Tacoma are available with a multi-link rear coil suspension, replacing the leaf springs from the previous generation. Leaf springs are sturdy and preferred for more heavy-duty hauling, but the coil springs offer more flexibility and cushion for the ride. They’re a bit more expensive, which is why they’re an option on the higher grades. The three least expensive trims (SR, SR5 XtraCab and TRD PreRunner) will still come standard with leaf springs. 

Tacoma fans know that the compact truck was already quite capable off-road, climbing rocks and hills like a mountain goat. However, after driving a 2021 model back to back with the new 2024 hybrid version, I can attest that the additional torque makes a noticeable difference. On an off-road course near Malibu, California, I scaled steep ascents and crawled over rock piles, and it’s clear that chief engineer Sheldon Brown and his team have smoothed out the edges. 

And it’s quieter, too

A smoothed-out ride is even more clear on the asphalt. Tackling the twisty curves of Mulholland Drive, the interior of the Tacoma Limited was hushed, and Brown says technologies like active noise cancellation ensure a quiet cabin. This technology reduces the overall noise, vibration, and harshness, commonly referred to as an acronym: NVH. The study and adjustment of noise and vibration characteristics has become an art form, and Toyota put extra time and money into improving the in-cabin experience in the upper trims of the Tacoma. 

“We’re also using electronic sound enhancement, or ESE, to supplement what we’re hearing through the exhaust system,” Brown says. “We use specialized software that is paired with the exhaust type: the standard OE exhaust or you might choose our performance exhaust, which is an option. So it not only sounds good, but it cancels out any of those noises and vibrations that otherwise might make their way in.”

Some industry analysts have accused Toyota of taking too much time to get into the electrification stream, but the fact is that the Japanese company has been pumping out successful hybrid powertrains for decades. Now that the Tundra, Sequoia, and Tacoma are all available with an engine/motor combination, the 4Runner and Land Cruiser can’t be far behind. 

The post Toyota just electrified its popular compact pickup appeared first on Popular Science.

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THE GEORGE EASTMAN MUSEUM in Rochester, New York, is, like most museums, full of historically significant and wonderfully nerdy objects. The museum’s namesake, George Eastman, founded the Eastman Kodak company at the turn of the 20th century and revolutionized photographic film in 1888 in a way that made photography accessible to the general public, so they would no longer be forced to sit in front of a professional or learn complex chemistry. He died in 1932, but the museum was founded in 1947. The collection now contains authentic Ansel Adams prints, a number of very rare (and extremely flammable) early-20th-century nitrate cinema film reels, and a smattering of cameras and photographic accessories from way before digital photography. The true treasures, however, live in the subbasement, in the technology collection.

Descend three flights of stairs in the middle of the atrium and you’ll find yourself in a time capsule of offices adorned in the same turquoise-and-pink color scheme you’d find in an early-’90s Taco Bell. From there, pass through a double-door climate lock into one of the world’s most comprehensive and impressive collections of photography and cinema gear, with more than 10,000 cameras and 20,000 objects in total. 

Curator of technology Todd Gustavson has been in charge of the collection since it moved into its current home in 1989 (hence the interior design choices). Many of the pieces came directly from Kodak’s former technology archive in the basement of the Eastman House. Since then, new additions have come from private gifts, public auctions, and even eBay. Gustavson gave us an opportunity to see some of the most intriguing, historically significant, and just plain weird pieces in the archive.

↑ The space itself boasts a roughly 5,000-square-foot main floor, as well as an elevated 3,000-square-foot mezzanine that was added in the early 2010s. It’s kept at 62 degrees with 45 percent humidity. That climate strikes a balance that’s dry enough to prevent fungus from growing but moist enough to prevent dry rot and keep the lubricating oil in the cameras from turning to sticky tar. A two-story motorized storage system holds thousands of cameras on trays in a revolving carousel. It’s like a massive vending machine full of photography gear. 

↑ In 1888, George Eastman released roughly 5,000 units of the original Kodak camera with a clever slogan: “You press the button, we do the rest.” The camera cost $25 at the time (roughly $800 in 2023 dollars) and came preloaded with enough film for 100 shots. Once the film was exposed, customers would return the camera to a shop to get their prints and a reload of film for $10, roughly $300 in today’s money. It was a revolutionary concept that brought about the age of snapshot photography by drastically simplifying the process.

↑ You’ve likely seen box cameras at antique stores and estate sales, as hundreds of models hit the market in the years after the original Kodak debuted. The Eastman collection contains hundreds of them spanning decades. Some are wood, while others are made of cardboard or a type of plastic called Bakelite, which was popular approaching the middle of the 20th century. The two small boxes with K’s neatly cataloged in the top left are extremely rare early rolls of Kodak film that would be the centerpiece of a typical camera collection. 

↑ This Scovill Manufacturing Company camera doesn’t have a lens or a shutter mechanism, but it holds a special place in both photographic and scientific history. It’s one of 24 cameras that Eadweard Muybridge used in the 1880s during his endeavors to capture animal locomotion. A horse would trigger a tripwire attached to each camera’s elaborate shutter mechanism as it sped by to capture a sequence of images. Presented in rapid succession, the glass plates would create the illusion of continuous motion. This process laid the groundwork for the original motion pictures. The Eastman collection actually has three of these. 

↑ This drawer contains numerous examples of shutter mechanisms from various Kodak cameras produced roughly a century ago. The shutter is the mechanical part of the camera that opens and closes in order to control how much light comes in and hits the film, and Kodak kept an example of every version of its devices in order to track the technology as it advanced. Each has its original label with part numbers and patent info. 

↑ The Ticka is just one of several watch-shaped cameras that the Eastman Museum has in its collection. The boxes to either side of the camera contain the film that was sold with it. The camera itself doesn’t have a traditional viewfinder to look through, so photographers would look down at the watch face. The hands form a V that represents the lens’s angle of view. Anything within that angle would show up in the photo. 

↑ While the Kodak represented the genesis of modern photography, the Brownie also played a crucial role. It debuted just 12 years after the original Kodak, but its $1 price tag ($36 in modern money) was a fraction of what the original Kodak cost. Kodak made dozens of versions of the Brownie, many of which you can still find out in the world right now. This original Brownie packaging gives a rare view of how the camera would have appeared on the shelf in the shop in the early 1900s. The Brownie Number 2 uses 120 roll film, a size that’s still available today.

↑ There are roughly half-dozen Talbot Romain gun cameras left in the world. This is a fully functioning tintype camera. The tiny sensitized sheet went into the top of the barrel. Once the photographer took the photo, the plate would go into the small tank on which the camera rests for processing. The unique shape wasn’t essential to its function, but it did help photographers on the street lure in potential customers, who would walk away with a tiny tintype print once they had paid for their portrait. 

↑ This early Technicolor camera debuted in the early 1930s and shot the same image to three strips of black-and-white negatives at once through a prism. Cyan, yellow, and magenta filters made each roll of film sensitive to a specific part of the visible spectrum. Once the footage was shot, each roll was dyed a specific shade. When combined, they would create a full-color image. The technology collection includes a pair of these cameras that were used in the cinematography of some of the most iconic movies ever made, including The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind, and even Star Wars. 

↑ This massive Graflex camera would have been right at home in the stands at a baseball game in the 1940s or ’50s. It’s an SLR, just like the relatively tiny Nikon F sitting next to it in the photo, just on a much larger scale. Moving the lever on the right of the camera would move the entire lens back and forth on a track to focus. Photographers could set stops along the focus path for specific distances so they could switch focus between bases in a hurry as the action unfolded. 

↑ This magnesium flash bomb stands nearly 6 feet tall and spends most of its time zip-tied to a support beam in the museum’s collection, even though all the flammable material has long been removed. The US armed forces used these in the 1930s for aerial reconnaissance. They would descend on a parachute, and at roughly 500 feet, the magnesium powder would ignite, creating enough light to illuminate the ground so aerial photographers could capture images that would otherwise be unobtainable.

↑ Back in 1923, Leica produced just 22 prototypes as a trial run in the camera business. Roughly 12 of them have survived, many of which reside in private collections and all of which would fetch millions of dollars at auction. This is serial number 109 of the original production run. Number 105, which belonged to inventor Oscar Barnack himself, sold for $15 million back in 2022. The Eastman’s still works. 

↑ Pilots in WWI didn’t have advanced simulators in which to practice dogfighting. Instead, they could use the Eastman Machine Gun camera, which was styled after a Lewis machine gun. Gunners could load a roll of common 120 film and then aim it just like a real gun. Once the film was processed, pictures with the enemy plane centered in the frame would be considered hits. It was a cheaper, safer way to practice than using live rounds. 

↑ Originally built as a backup camera for NASA’s Skylab space station in the 1970s, this rig found its use with the US Forest Service. Its six-camera array allowed aerial photographers to load six different kinds of film at once. The Forest Service used it to monitor the health of the landscape from above. It has six lenses, each with an independent film back so researchers could load several kinds of film all at once. The rig could shoot color, high-contrast black and white, and infrared all at the same time to observe different aspects of the scene.

↑ There are several cameras very much like this Lunar Hasselblad sitting on the surface of the moon right now. It doesn’t look all that different from a typical 500 EL you’d find here on Earth, but it has a few astronaut-friendly modifications. The extra-large film back held far more shots than a typical roll, and the oversize handle on the dark slide (a simple piece of metal that blocks light when the camera isn’t in use) is big enough that astronauts could grab it with their bulky gloves. 

↑ In the mid 1960s, NASA sent a lunar orbiter exactly like this one (this is a spare that was ready for flight, but never needed) to photograph and catalog the entire surface of the moon in preparation for the 1969 landing. The module had two lenses: a wide-angle and a telephoto. It shot bimat film, which it developed and dried inside the device itself. It then made a scan of the image, which it beamed back to Earth in the form of a TV signal. The resulting images have some light and dark horizontal banding, but ultimately make up what’s still one of the most complete and detailed maps of the moon’s surface to date. 

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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Reducing damaging “ultra-emission” methane leaks could soon become much easier–thanks to a new, open-source tool that combines machine learning and orbital data from multiple satellites, including one attached to the International Space Station.

Methane emissions originate anywhere food and plant matter decompose without oxygen, such as marshes, landfills, fossil fuel plants—and yes, cow farms. They are also infamous for their dramatic effect on air quality. Although capable of lingering in the atmosphere for just 7 to 12 years compared to CO2’s centuries-long lifespan, the gas is still an estimated 80 times more effective at retaining heat. Immediately reducing its production is integral to stave off climate collapse’s most dire short-term consequences—cutting emissions by 45 percent by 2030, for example, could shave off around 0.3 degrees Celsius from the planet’s rising temperature average over the next twenty years.

[Related: Turkmenistan’s gas fields emit loads of methane.]

Unfortunately, it’s often difficult for aerial imaging to precisely map real time concentrations of methane emissions. For one thing, plumes from so-called “ultra-emission” events like oil rig and natural gas pipeline malfunctions (see: Turkmenistan) are invisible to human eyes, as well as most satellites’ multispectral near-infrared wavelength sensors. And what aerial data is collected is often thrown off by spectral noise, requiring manual parsing to accurately locate the methane leaks.

A University of Oxford team working alongside Trillium Technologies’ NIO.space has developed a new, open-source tool powered by machine learning that can identify methane clouds using much narrower hyperspectral bands of satellite imaging data. These bands, while more specific, produce much more vast quantities of data—which is where artificial intelligence training comes in handy.

The project is detailed in new research published in Nature Scientific Reports by a team at the University of Oxford, alongside a recent university profile. To train their model, engineers fed it a total of 167,825 hyperspectral image tiles—each roughly 0.66 square miles—generated by NASA’s Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) satellite while orbiting the Four Corners region of the US. The model was subsequently trained using additional orbital monitors, including NASA’s hyperspectral EMIT sensor currently aboard the International Space Station.

The team’s current model is roughly 21.5 percent more accurate at identifying methane plumes than the existing top tool, while simultaneously providing nearly 42 percent fewer false detection errors compared to the same industry standard. According to researchers, there’s no reason to believe those numbers won’t improve over time.

[Related: New satellites can pinpoint methane leaks to help us beat climate change.]

“What makes this research particularly exciting and relevant is the fact that many more hyperspectral satellites are due to be deployed in the coming years, including from ESA, NASA, and the private sector,” Vít Růžička, lead researcher and a University of Oxford doctoral candidate in the department of computer science, said during a recent university profile. As this satellite network expands, Růžička believes researchers and environmental watchdogs will soon gain an ability to automatically, accurately detect methane plume events anywhere in the world.

These new techniques could soon enable independent, globally-collaborated identification of greenhouse gas production and leakage issues—not just for methane, but many other major pollutants. The tool currently utilizes already collected geospatial data, and is not able to currently provide real-time analysis using orbital satellite sensors. In the University of Oxford’s recent announcement, however, research project supervisor Andrew Markham adds that the team’s long-term goal is to run their programs through satellites’ onboard computers, thus “making instant detection a reality.”

The post How AI could help scientists spot ‘ultra-emission’ methane plumes faster—from space appeared first on Popular Science.

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The end is nigh for many Google accounts. Beginning on December 1, “inactive” accounts that haven’t been logged into within the last two years will begin disappearing as part of a purge announced by the company back in May. This means any unused accounts’ emails, photos, videos, and documents spread across Google products like Gmail, Docs, Drive, Calendar, Meet, and Photos could disappear as soon as this weekend.

That said, the move shouldn’t come as a surprise. Since revealing its plans earlier this year, Google says it sent multiple notifications to applicable users, both to any account’s Gmail address, as well as any available associated recovery emails.

[Related: The US antitrust trial against Google is in full swing. Here’s what’s at stake.]

The reasoning behind trashing unused accounts is, simply put, security. According to Google, bad actors are as much as 10 times more likely to gain access to abandoned accounts than active accounts utilizing protective measures like 2-step-verification. Once compromised, the hijacked accounts can be then harnessed to send malware, spam, and even aid in identity theft.

Google won’t slash its list of inactive accounts in one fell swoop, however. First up will be any accounts that were never used after being created, followed by a phased approach to tackle the rest “slowly and carefully,” according to the May announcement.

To spare your rarely-if-ever used account from the culling, all users need to do is simply sign in at least once before December 1. That’s enough to reset Google’s activity threshold, and stave off an automatic deletion. Using Gmail, accessing Google Drive, watching YouTube videos while logged in, or even signing into a third-party app using your Google Account all count as activity, as well.

Currently, the purge only concerns personal Google accounts. School, work, and official organizational accounts are not in danger come December 1, as well as those accounts with linked, active subscription plans set up through news outlets or apps. Google also does not currently plan to delete any accounts hosting YouTube videos, either.

[Related: How to back up and protect all your precious data.]

If nothing else, the mass deletion campaign can serve as a helpful reminder to log into old accounts, update passwords, establish two-factor authentication protocols, and download backups of any old uploaded content or data. The easiest way is to head over to the Google Takeout page and follow its instructions for exporting data.

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Entry-level motorcycles too often feel like beginner bikes. Even if they don’t have training wheels, they have the vibe of first bicycles that are quickly outgrown and forgotten.

BMW has escaped this trap with the G 310 R, which is an ideal starter bike because of its affordable $4,995 price tag, its rider-friendly low seat that makes it easier to plant both feet on the ground, and its 349-lb. curb weight. The company even trimmed its regular $495 destination fee to $245 to help keep the price within reach for buyers on a budget.

BMW tells me that the G 310 R is a favorite at Motorcycle Safety Foundation’s Basic RiderCourse. It is easy to see why, considering the bike’s combination of racy styling and ease of use.

But anyone who decides to start out on a G 310 R shouldn’t feel like it is a temporary ride, waiting to be replaced by a “real” bike once the owner gains some experience. That’s because the G 310 R provides “real” big technology like standard anti-lock brakes (ABS) and a sophisticated suspension that includes an inverted fork for the front wheel and a long-wheelbase cast aluminum swingarm for the rear.

Inverting the fork (also called “upside down” forks”) bolts the heavy forks sliders into the triple clamps that secure them to the bike’s steering head, leaving the lightweight tubes to stretch down to the axle. That leaves the lighter tubes as the unsprung mass that has to travel up and down with the road surface while the heavier part is fixed in place. This contributes to more responsive front suspension.

Meanwhile, the lengthy swingarm to the rear axle lends the bike greater stability compared to a short swingarm.

The value of anti-lock brakes should be self-evident, but to recap, the BMW’s computer prevents riders from locking a wheel under heavy braking. In a car, this produces a slide and prolongs stopping distances. On a bike, if the front wheel locks, it tends to immediately slip to one side or the other and pitch the rider to the ground. 

If the rear wheel locks, the bike will start to slide sideways. Riders’ typical response to this is to release pressure to the rear brake. Doing so while the bike is not pointed in the direction of travel when the rear tire regains traction causes the bike to catapult the rider off in a spectacular and painful “high side” crash. 

ABS is worth its weight in cryptocurrency because it prevents both kinds of crashes by ensuring that the wheels keep turning until the bike comes to a complete stop. It is also important because most riders, when faced with a potential crash, fail to apply the brakes hard enough. Ideally, knowing that they can’t lock the brakes will encourage more riders to brake harder so that maybe more of them will stop short of hitting the obstacle ahead.

Regardless, riding the Cosmic Black G 310 R test bike was enough fun to put such sober considerations in the background. I had the opportunity to test it alongside BMW’s sexy S 1000 R and I can confirm that the smaller bike held its own while slicing through mountain switchbacks, courtesy of its advanced suspension and light weight.

It also highlighted the G 310 R’s user-friendliness. While the S 1000 R has a very abrupt clutch friction point and brakes that grab aggressively with the slightest application of pressure (very much like Ferrari’s brakes), the G 310 R has a wide, easy-to-engage clutch friction point and brakes that grip progressively, making it very easy for even beginning riders to pull away from a stop and then arrive at the curb like pros instead of the amateurs they are.

Like most of today’s generation of starter bikes, the G 310 R has only one cylinder in its 313-cc engine, when earlier small bikes would have had smoother-running twin-cylinder engines. But the BMW’s 34-horsepower single incorporates a counterbalancer, so it revs to its surprisingly high 9,500-rpm redline with unexpected smoothness. This makes it easier to keep the engine spinning out as much power as possible while clicking through the six-speed transmission, letting the G 310 R feel adequately powerful.

The bike’s engine has an unorthodox configuration, with the cylinder tilting rearward like the back half of a Harley-Davidson V-twin. As with the Harley’s rear cylinder, that puts the BMW’s intake system in front, with the exhaust pipe trailing off the rear, which is the opposite of most single-cylinder bikes.

The rear-leaning cylinder lets the bottom of the engine and the heavy transmission shafts that live there slide forward, shifting the bike’s balance onto the front wheel for greater stability. It also clears space behind the transmission for the aforementioned long rear swingarm.

All of this speaks to the benefit of rethinking the engineering challenge from the beginning of a project and dismissing convention to deliver a superior result. The G 310 R is fun to ride for riders of all levels, not just beginners. But it treats them especially well, just as the Motorcycle Safety Foundation’s rider’s school. The BMW engineer team should be proud of their clever solutions to creating an affordable bike that is a true BMW.

The post 2024 BMW G 310 R review: A starter bike you won’t outgrow appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article was originally featured on Undark.

Twice each year, members of a subspecies of red knots—salmon-colored sandpipers—migrate thousands of miles between their wintering grounds in northern Mexico and breeding sites in the Arctic tundra, encountering myriad obstacles along the way. Thought to migrate during both day and night, brightly lit cities likely disrupt their nighttime journeys, and rising sea levels and invasive species threaten the wetlands they rely on for refueling at stopover sites.

The red knot is one of some 350 North American bird species that migrate. Yet there remains much to learn about the details of their journeys. It’s a critical information gap given the loss of an estimated 3 billion birds in North America since 1970, according to a 2019 study.

“The only way to think about conservation of migratory birds is to consider their full annual cycles,” including their migration routes and wintering sites, said Bill DeLuca, a senior migration ecologist with the National Audubon Society.

The problem, he said, is “We don’t know, for a lot of species, what time of the year is causing the declines.” For the vast majority of migrating birds, the full picture of their life cycle is incomplete, DeLuca added.

That’s partly due to technology. Until recently, while scientists could study birds at their North American breeding sites, they had few ways to track them individually throughout their migrations or while in their wintering grounds, especially small songbirds like warblers and sparrows.

And for birds that migrate through the West’s remote deserts and mountains and across its wild shorelines, like the rufous hummingbird, which journeys between Alaska and the Pacific Northwest and Mexico, their flight routes are even less understood. “Knowledge of migration patterns for birds in the West is way behind the East,” said Mary Whitfield, research director at the California nonprofit Southern Sierra Research Station, because of the smaller number of long-term banding stations there.

But scientists across the West are increasingly turning to an accessible, low-cost technology to answer key questions about bird migration and how climate change is impacting their life cycles.

The Motus Wildlife Tracking System, launched in 2014, is an international network of about 1,800 radio receiver stations in 34 countries. The program, run by the conservation organization Birds Canada, is already well established in eastern North America, but has begun to spread rapidly across the West in the last couple of years. Researchers in the Motus network track birds (or other animals, like butterflies) using small tags. When a bird flies within range of a station—up to about 12 miles away, depending on the conditions—the tag automatically transmits a signal to a receiver, which is then uploaded to the Motus website. Scientists participate through tagging, building Motus stations, or both, and fund their own projects. Museums, zoos, and schools may also participate by hosting a Motus station and educating the public about bird migration and movement, Whitfield noted. So far, more than 43,600 animals, including butterflies, bats, and birds, have been tagged by researchers using Motus globally.

Until recently, tracking tags were too large and heavy for small songbirds. The Motus system uses tags that weigh less than 3 percent of a bird’s weight—in the case of a small songbird that weighs around 18 grams, a tag weighs just half a gram. After birds are captured in mist nets made of fine mesh, they are fitted with the tags using a harness, which they wear like a backpack.

An estimated 1 billion birds use the Pacific flyway, a route through Western coastal states, during their migration, and many millions more migrate via the central flyway through the interior West. Along the way, they routinely encounter natural phenomena like storms, drought, and predators, as well as man-made obstacles like glass-facades that attract birds and pose serious collision risks. In addition, given the rapid growth of wind and solar projects across the West, Whitfield said, it’s crucial to identify birds’ movements through desert areas earmarked for alternative energy development.

According to Whitfield, Motus (Latin for motion) could be a “game changer” for understanding Western birds’ movements through the seasons. “It’s critical,” Whitfield said. “We have to find out more about migration, because it’s definitely a pinch point for bird mortality—that’s typically when birds die the most, because it’s just a really perilous journey.”

In May of this year at the Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico, Matt Webb, an avian ecologist with the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies, was getting ready to install a Motus radio tower with funding from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He hoped to fill “in some of the knowledge gaps” about grassland songbirds, which are experiencing rapid declines in population. Four species in particular have declined more than 70 percent since 1970, according to the bird conservation network Partners in Flight.

Grassland birds range from the prairies of Saskatchewan to the southernmost edges of the Chihuahuan desert in Mexico. “We’ve got this massive geography that we need to cover adequately” to understand their migration, Webb said.

And the birds don’t just travel during migration, he added—they roam widely during both the breeding season and winter, making them even more difficult to monitor. With data from Motus, Webb said, they hope to “unravel some of those mysteries of why they’re moving around and where they’re going during those seasons.”

Webb was equipped with several long antennas and a shoebox-sized, solar-powered sensor station computer with cellular connectivity for receiving and transmitting data. But the road to the tower site was flooded, after increased snowpack drove high flows in the Rio Grande River.

So Webb and Kylie Lamoree, another Bird Conservancy ecologist, turned to Plan B, surveying old water and communications towers as potential locations. In order to detect tagged birds up to 12 miles away, “We need to get it up above the topography and the vegetation nearby,” Webb said. (He later noted that they were able to go back at the end of August and install the station.)

At the northern end of the Chihuahuan desert, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge is a major destination for migrating and wintering waterfowl as well as for birders. Webb was seeking to determine if the four grassland birds he’s studying—thick-billed longspurs, chestnut-colored longspurs, Baird’s sparrows, and Sprague’s pipits—are using the refuge during the winter, during migration, or both.

Those four species are small songbirds with ochre, tan, or black plumage that make them well-camouflaged in shortgrass prairie habitat. The birds are difficult to capture for tagging without large vegetation to conceal the researchers’ mist nets, Webb said.

Even so, Webb said the payoff is great: “There’s really never been a technology that works well enough to be able to collect this data” for such tiny birds, he said. And after a bird is tagged with its transmitter “backpack,” it doesn’t need to be recaptured.

Migrating shorebirds are another group of Western birds with steep population losses in recent decades. Julián Garcia Walther, a Mexican biologist and Ph.D. student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is monitoring shorebirds in northwest Mexico to find out more about climate change impacts on sea level rise and biodiversity. “I started thinking about how these birds that live on the interface between land and sea, the intertidal zone, how they’re going to be affected by sea level rise,” Garcia Walther said.

He learned about Motus in 2019, and realized the small tags used in the network were ideal for monitoring red knots, many of which winter in the coastal wetlands of northwest Mexico and whose populations are under pressure. But there were no Motus stations in the region.

Garcia Walther has now installed about 25 Motus stations with the help of the Mexican conservation organization Pronatura Noroeste, where he is the Motus network coordinator, along with other partner organizations. “It’s a big learning curve,” he said, requiring skills in electricity, radio communications, and construction. One of his biggest challenges is sourcing materials in Mexico, so he turned to improvised materials, like a pole once used for an osprey nest converted into an antenna mast.

Another hurdle was capturing the birds. Without tagged birds, stations are “just poles and antennas,” Garcia Walther said. Shorebirds are especially tricky to capture because they disperse across the coastline’s open expanses. While the harness method used for tagging grassland birds is also often used in shorebird research, Garcia Walther added, his team uses glue to secure the tags to the backs of red knots, meaning the birds will shed the devices when they molt.

But with three years of data from some 100 birds, Garcia’s team has made some significant observations. One finding, the result of data from Motus stations as well as GPS loggers—trackers that show fine-scale movements—revealed that during high spring tides, red knots use dried seagrass as rafts to rest on while the tidelands are inundated.

“This is analogous to what’s going to happen with sea-level rise,” Garcia Walther said. The data he has collected should help wildlife researchers plan for the future when there will likely be little shoreline available for roosting, he said, informing strategies to protect, restore, and improve vulnerable habitats.

Garcia Walther said he got advice from colleagues in the U.S. when he was setting up his stations, and he now helps scientists elsewhere in Latin America with their Motus projects.

Blake Barbaree, a senior ecologist at Point Blue Conservation Science with projects in California’s Central Valley, also depends on cross-border collaboration. His team is investigating the impact of drought on shorebirds, using Motus to track the movements of birds in California during the winter as well as during migration.

Since they’re only in the second season, Barbaree said it’s too soon to draw any definitive conclusions, though data collected at Motus towers has confirmed high connectivity between the Central Valley and coastal Washington, as well as the Copper River Delta in Alaska. “Numerous detections at Motus stations along the coasts of Oregon and British Columbia,” he wrote in a follow-up email, “have also highlighted the fact that a network of stopover sites is critical to their migration.”

This linkage, Barbaree said, helps researchers “piece together puzzles of population increases or decreases,” looking for impacts not just in wintering or breeding grounds but in key stopover habitats.

The network “has really opened up a world of migratory connectivity research” on other small animals like insects and bats, Barbaree added. And he’s seen it inspire collaboration between researchers investigating not just birds, but other migratory species.

Motus projects include studies on bats and insects, for example, with more than 340 species tagged to date. And scientists are turning to Motus for help identifying threats common to birds and bats. In 2023, a team from the U.S. Geological Survey installed two coastal Motus stations in California—with plans to install about two dozen more—to monitor three seabird species and three species of bats, to determine potential impacts of offshore energy.

After a major effort last winter to tag grassland birds in northern Mexico, Webb followed their migration north in the spring—via data their tags uploaded to the Motus website. A Baird’s sparrow his team tagged was tracked from Chihuahua to northern Kansas and up through North Dakota and Montana, the first time they had connected migratory stops through North American grassland habitats in such detail. It was “a lot of fun this spring watching the stations every morning,” he said.

DeLuca of the Audubon Society said understanding the life cycles of different species is the first step in revealing the factors causing their decline, like habitat loss or pollution. “When you think of all of the drivers that are pushing these species” towards extinction, he said, “it’s really kind of mind boggling.”

And climate change, he said, is an additional “huge over-arching pressure,” since it affects bird migration directly with impacts like increased severe weather, and indirectly when food resources like fruit or insects aren’t available.

Identifying the habitats birds rely on during migration and winter is key, DeLuca said.

And the Motus network can amplify those efforts.

The Motus philosophy is “all about collaboration,” Garcia Walther said. In addition to recording birds tagged by his own team, his Motus stations in Mexico are detecting birds from other research projects.

Once a tower is installed, any bird tagged by a Motus collaborator anywhere in the world can be detected there. “Any stations we place benefit the network as a whole,” Webb noted. And most of the data collected is publicly accessible on the Motus website.

The more the network grows, DeLuca said, “the more flexibility we have in terms of the kinds of questions we can answer with Motus.”

And with increased knowledge, scientists can better target conservation actions.

“The more we know, the more we realize just how dire the situation is,” DeLuca said. For migratory birds, he said, “The stakes, honestly, could not be higher.”

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Apple doesn’t discount its own hardware, and although the company is currently holding a Black Friday promotion in which you get gift cards toward a future purchase, there are deals out there that save you money immediately. We’ve scoured the web to find the best Black Friday discounts on Apple hardware, and have come up with a surprising amount of deals. If you’ve been holding off on getting a new piece of gear for the right price, now is the time to shop. We wouldn’t be surprised if many of these items sell out before the day is done.

Apple AirPods Pro (2nd Generation) $189.99 (Was $249)

SEE IT

Apple’s AirPods 2 are the company’s latest true wireless earbuds, and they’re down to their lowest price ever on Black Friday thanks to a $60 discount. The earbuds support active noise cancellation, are IPX5 water-resistant, and last up to six hours per charge. Their included battery case can fully recharge them four times. These earbuds support Spatial Audio, which means they can decode music and movie soundtracks with a Dolby Atmos mix and give you the feeling of listening to music in surround sound on speakers. This feature works shockingly well. Additionally, the processor in each earbud optimizes and adjusts its sound in real-time, so you always get the best EQ setting. No true wireless earbuds are as good for all-around use as the AirPods Pro 2, and this discount makes them even easier to recommend.

AirPods deals

• Apple AirPods (2nd Generation) $79.99 (Was $129)
• Apple AirPods (3rd Generation) $139.99 (Was $169)
• Apple AirPods Max $449.99 (Was $549)

MacBook deals

• 15-Inch M2 MacBook Air $1,049 (Was $1,299)
• 13-Inch M1 MacBook Air $749 (Was $999)
• 16-Inch M3 Pro MacBook Pro $2,299 (Was $2,499)

iPad deals

• iPad (9th Generation) $249.99 (Was $329.99)
• iPad (10th Generation) $349 (Was $449)
• iPad Air $649.99 (Was $749.99)
• 11-Inch iPad Pro $849 (Was $899)
• 12.9-Inch iPad Pro $1,139 (Was $1,199)

HomePod deals

• HomePod Mini $94.99 (Was $99.99)
• HomePod (2nd Generation) $284.99 (Was $299.99)

Mac Mini deals

• M2 Mac Mini $499 (Was $599)
• M2 Pro Mac Mini $1,234.05 (was $1,299)

Mac Studio deals

• M2 Max Mac Studio $1,899.05 (Was $1,999)
• M2 Ultra Mac Studio $3,799.05 (Was $3,999)

Apple Watch deals

• Apple Watch Series 9 (GPS) 41mm $349 (Was $399)
• Apple Watch Series 9 (GPS) 45mm $379 (Was $429)
• Apple Watch Series 9 (GPS + Cellular) 41mm $699 (Was $749)
• Apple Watch Series 9 (GPS + Cellular) 45mm $749 (Was $799)
• Apple Watch Ultra 2 (GPS + Cellular) 49mm $739 (Was $799)

Need a monitor for that Mac Mini? Samsung has gaming flagships on sale.

Looking for more affordable audio? These headphones and earbuds are all under $100.

The post You can still get the best Apple products at the best prices … if you act fast appeared first on Popular Science.

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Etsy creators, Poshmark sellers, and side hustlers in general are receiving a Thanksgiving pardon from the IRS and its latest guidelines pertaining to digital sales and payment platforms. The new, drastically lowered $600 threshold to receive a tax reporting form from third-party settlement organizations such as Venmo and PayPal is delayed yet again.

First announced as part of the Biden administration’s 2021 American Rescue Plan, the regulation previously scheduled for the 2023 tax season substantially reduced the Form 1099-K benchmark for third party commerce service providers. Previously, those forms were only issued to people with more than 200 transactions or $20,000 in total profits. The new rules would drop the requirement down to just $600 in profit. The majority of such commerce is facilitated by services like the aforementioned Venmo and PayPal, as well as Square and Zelle. Ensuing backlash from lawmakers, tax filing companies, and the public eventually caused the IRS to issue its first delay in December 2022.

On Tuesday, the IRS conceded the estimated 44 million pending Form 1099-K’s could result in unnecessary “potential confusion” this year for “many taxpayers who wouldn’t expect one and may not have a tax obligation.”

“We spent many months gathering feedback from third party groups and others, and it became increasingly clear we need additional time to effectively implement the new reporting requirements,” IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said in Tuesday’s announcement. “It’s clear that an additional delay for tax year 2023 will avoid problems for taxpayers, tax professionals and others in this area.”

[Related: How to avoid tax season stress.]

The government’s newest pause comes alongside a more detailed, transitional plan before the $600 limit goes into effect in 2025. The 200 transaction, $20,000 profit margin will lower to $5,000 for tax year 2024, although the IRS did not specify the number of transactions in its November 21 statement. The originally intended $600 limit will finally move into place the following year. The IRS also revealed new plans to update and simplify the existing Form 1099-K “to make the reporting process easier.” Basically, you won’t receive an official tax form for upselling thrift store finds in your spare time until early 2026—and when you do, it should hypothetically be less of a headache.

Although all this really just boils down to delaying the inevitable, the US government is also forging ahead with ways to make tax filing both simpler, and potentially cheaper. The upcoming 2024 filing season will finally see the long-awaited IRS free federal direct tax filing pilot program for certain eligible citizens in 13 participating states. The no-cost option is intended to eventually become nationally available as an alternative to third-party filing services like Intuit TurboTax and H&R Block. Such companies have come under increasing regulatory scrutiny in recent years for allegedly predatory practices, deceptive advertising, and privacy concerns.

As for those of you with extremely lucrative side gigs—sorry, the $20,000 limit will remain in place for 2024. While third party services usually automatically generate forms for anyone exceeding the IRS 1099-K threshold, that’s not the case for everyone else. Meanwhile, the IRS also reminded the public that business income has always been taxable, and it’s still up to Americans to report such profits even if they don’t receive a Form 1099-K. Do with that information what you will.

The post The IRS delayed its controversial new policy regarding digital payment platforms appeared first on Popular Science.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sam Altman is CEO of OpenAI once again. The return of the influential AI startup’s co-founder caps a chaotic four-days that saw two replacement CEOs, Altman’s potential transition to Microsoft, and threats of mass resignation from nearly all of the company’s employees. Altman’s return to OpenAI will coincide with a shakeup within the company’s nonprofit arm board of directors.

Silicon Valley’s pre-Thanksgiving saga started on November 17, when OpenAI’s board suddenly announced Altman’s departure after alleging the 38-year-old entrepreneur “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.”

The move shocked not only shocked industry insiders and investors, but executive-level employees at the company, as well. OpenAI’s president Greg Brockman announced his resignation less than three hours after news broke, while the startup’s chief operating officer described his surprise in a November 18 internal memo.

“We can say definitively that the board’s decision was not made in response to malfeasance or anything related to our financial, business, safety, or security/privacy practices,” he wrote at the time.

A flurry of breathless headlines ensued, naming first one, then another CEO replacement as rumors began circulating that Altman would join Microsoft as the CEO of its new AI development team. Microsoft previously invested over $13 billion, and relies on the company’s tech to power its growing suite of AI-integrated products.

Just after midnight on November 22, however, Altman posted to X his intention to return to OpenAI alongside a reorganized board of directors that will include previous members such former White House adviser and Harvard University President Larry Summers, as well as former Quora CEO and early Facebook employee Adam D’Angelo. This is just what happened. Entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and director of strategy and foundational research grants at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology Helen Toner are no longer board members.

[Related: Big Tech’s latest AI doomsday warning might be more of the same hype.]

“[E]verything i’ve [sic] done over the past few days has been in service of keep this team and its mission together,” Altman wrote on the social media platform owned by former OpenAI executive Elon Musk. Altman added he looks forward to returning and “building on our strong partnership” with Microsoft.

Although concrete explanations behind the attempted corporate coup remain unconfirmed, it appears members of the previous board believed Altman was “pushing too far, too fast” in their overall goal to create a safe artificial general intelligence (AGI), a term referring to AI that is comparable to, or exceeds, human capacities. Many of AI’s biggest players believe it is their ethical duty to steer the technology towards a future that benefits humanity instead of ending it. Critics have voiced multiple, repeated concerns over Silicon Valley’s approach, ethos, and rationality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Rogue monster waves, once believed extremely rare, are now statistically confirmed to occur “all the time” thanks to researchers’ new, artificial intelligence-aided analysis. Using a combined hundreds of years’ worth of information gleaned from over 1 billion wave patterns, scientists collaborating between the University of Copenhagen and the University of Victoria have produced an algorithmic equation capable of predicting the “recipe” for extreme rogue waves. In doing so, the team appear to also upend beliefs about oceanic patterns dating back to the 1700’s.

Despite centuries of terrifying, unconfirmed rumors alongside landlubber skepticism, monstrous rogue waves were only scientifically documented for the first time in 1995. But since laser measuring equipment aboard the Norwegian oil platform Draupner captured unimpeachable evidence of an encounter with an 85-foot-high wall of water, researchers have worked to study the oceanic phenomenon’s physics, characteristics, and influences. Over the following decade, oceanographers came to define a rogue wave as being at least twice the height of a formation’s “significant wave height,” or the mean of the largest one-third of a wave pattern. They also began confidently citing “some reasons” behind the phenomena, but knew there was much more to learn.

[Related: New AI-based tsunami warning software could help save lives.]

Nearly two decades after Draupner, however, researchers’ new, AI-assisted approach offers unprecedented analysis through a study published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Basically, it is just very bad luck when one of these giant waves hits,” Dion Häfner, a research engineer and the paper’s first author, said in a November 20 announcement. “They are caused by a combination of many factors that, until now, have not been combined into a single risk estimate.”

Using readings obtained from buoys spread across 158 locations near US coasts and overseas territories, the team first amassed information equivalent to 700 years’ worth of sea state information, wave heights, water depths, and bathymetric data. After mapping all the causal variables that influence rogue waves, Häfner and their colleagues used various AI methods to synthesize the data into a model capable of calculating rogue wave formation probabilities. (These included symbolic regression which generates an equation output rather than a single prediction.) Unfortunately, the results are unlikely to ease fears of anyone suffering from thalassophobia.

“Our analysis demonstrates that abnormal waves occur all the time,” Johannes Gemmrich, the study’s second author, said in this week’s announcement. According to Gemmrich, the team registered 100,000 dataset instances fitting the bill for rogue waves.

“This is equivalent to around 1 monster wave occurring every day at any random location in the ocean,” Gemmrich added, while noting they weren’t necessarily all “monster waves of extreme size.” A small comfort, perhaps.

Until the new study, many experts believed the majority of rogue waves formed when two waves combined into a single, massive mountain of water. Based on the new equation, however, it appears the biggest influence is owed to “linear superposition.” First documented in the 1700’s, such situations occur when two wave systems cross paths and reinforce one another, instead of combining. This increases the likelihood of forming massive waves’ high crests and deep troughs. Although understood to exist for hundreds of years, the new dataset offers concrete support for the phenomenon and its effects on wave patterns.

[Related: How Tonga’s volcanic eruption can help predict tsunamis.]

And while it’s probably disconcerting to imagine an eight-story-tall wave occurring somewhere in the world every single day, the new algorithmic equation can at least help you stay well away from locations where rogue waves are most likely to occur at any given time. This won’t often come in handy for the average person, but for the estimated 50,000 cargo ships daily sailing across the world, integrating the equation into their forecasting tools could save lives.

Knowing this, Häfner’s team has already made their algorithm, research, and amassed data available as open source information, so that weather services and public agencies can start identifying—and avoiding—any rogue wave-prone areas.

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The SUV market is big business, especially in the United States. Even supercar manufacturers like Lamborghini are making five-seat SUVs and thriving. Aston Martin’s DBX crossover represents roughly half of its overall sales. And that’s only on the gas-powered side. All-electric SUVs are just starting to find their groove, and vehicles like the three-row Kia EV9 SUV and Volkswagen ID.Buzz “microbus” are on their way to the U.S. market in 2024. Now, emerging luxury EV builder Lucid just announced the Gravity, a seven-seat SUV with an astonishing claim of 440 miles of all-electric range.

The SUV boasts other niceties like acceleration from zero to 60 miles per hour in less than 3.5 seconds, 1,500 pounds of payload (what it can carry inside) and the ability to tow 6,000 pounds. To compare, Tesla’s Model X can tow 5,000 pounds, haul 1,065 pounds inside the vehicle, and can go for 348 miles with the long-range package.

Here’s how Lucid is pushing other EV automakers to increase range and capability.

Gunning for Tesla

Lucid started producing its first model, the Air, in 2021 after more than a dozen years developing battery technology. Launched with 520 miles of EPA-estimated all-electric range and up to 1,111 horsepower, the Air earned rave reviews from users and journalists alike. Luxurious and uncommonly aerodynamic (more about that below), the Air’s starting price is roughly the same as a Tesla Model S. However, the Lucid model gets 115 more miles of range and  91 more horsepower than the Tesla.

If it sounds like an intrastate basketball rivalry, it may be partially attributed to the cross-pollination across the executive level. Before joining Lucid in 2013, CEO Peter Rawlinson spent three years at Tesla as a top engineer. Rawlinson led the engineering team for the Model S; when he left Tesla, he emerged swinging with the Lucid Air sedan. 

The company’s latest accomplishment is the Gravity SUV, and Lucid says “it can achieve 440 miles of range with a battery pack a little more than half the size of some of our battery-hungry competitors.” For context, a GMC Hummer EV’s battery pack alone weighs in at a hefty 2,818 pounds on the GM’s Ultium platform. 

The entire Lucid Air weighs 5,203 pounds and the Gravity is expected to tip the scales north of 6,000 pounds. Sure, it’s relatively heavier than some three-row SUVs such as the Kia Telluride and Lexus GX, but it’s on par with others like the Grand Wagoneer. 

Advanced battery technology 

Carrying two electric motors, the Gravity is touted as more efficient than its competitors. Rawlinson says the Gravity’s smaller and lighter technology battery pack means consuming fewer precious metals and minerals and results in less energy to charge and less pressure upon the grid. 

The Lucid Air is available with two battery packs–92 kilowatt hours or 112 kilowatt hours–and while Lucid is being vague about its exact specs for now, we expect the Gravity to utilize the larger 112 kWh version. For scale, the GMC Hummer EV and Cadillac Escalade IQ use packs over 200 kWh. 

Justin Berkowitz, Lucid’s senior manager for technology PR, says the company offers “the most efficient electric motors on the market and ultra-high voltage power electronics (over 900 volts compared to many EVs at 400-500).” All of these are designed, patented, engineered, and manufactured in-house by Lucid, and the company also develops the software powering it all. 

The stellar range is also a result of Lucid’s proprietary winding technique that produces a denser magnetic field along with several other innovations that create a super-compact package. The company holds eight patents related to the motor’s windings and cooling, and continues to find ways to squeeze as much copper into the motor stator as possible to generate big energy in a small package.

Aerodynamics are also a key, and Lucid says the Gravity has a drag coefficient of under 0.24. The lower the number, the more efficient the result. Hyundai’s three-row gas-powered Palisade has a 0.33 coefficient of drag, and the upcoming Kia EV9 hits 0.28. Tesla says its Model X sits at 0.24, so Lucid is sliding just below that with the Gravity. It’s still not as aerodynamic as the five-passenger Hyundai Ioniq 6, which has an impressive 0.21 drag coefficient. Give them time, though. Lucid is poised for major growth. 

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Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt announced his resignation from the controversial robotaxi startup on Sunday evening. The co-founder’s sudden departure arrives after months of public and political backlash relating to the autonomous vehicle fleet’s safety, and hints at future issues for the company purchased by General Motors in 2016 for over $1 billion.

Vogt’s resignation follows months of documented hazardous driving behaviors from Cruise’s autonomous vehicle fleet, including injuring pedestrians, delaying emergency responders, and failing to detect children. Cruise’s Golden State tenure itself lasted barely two months following a California Public Utilities Commission greenlight on 24/7 robotaxi services in August. Almost immediately, residents and city officials began documenting instances of apparent traffic pileups, blocked roadways, and seemingly reckless driving involving Cruise and Google-owned Waymo robotaxis. Meanwhile, Cruise representatives including Vogt aggressively campaigned against claims of an unsafe vehicle fleet.

[Related: San Francisco is pushing back against the rise of robotaxis.]

“Anything that we do differently than humans is being sensationalized,” Vogt told The Washington Post in September.

On October 2, a Cruise robotaxi failed to avoid hitting a woman pedestrian first struck by another car, subsequently dragging her 20 feet down the road. GM issued a San Francisco moratorium on Cruise operations three weeks later, followed by a nationwide expansion of the suspension on November 6.

But even with Cruise on an indefinite hiatus, competitors like Waymo and Zoox continue testing autonomous taxis across San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin, and elsewhere to varying degrees of success. As The New York Times reports, Waymo’s integration into Phoenix continues to progress smoothly. Meanwhile, Austin accidents became so concerning that city officials felt the need to establish an internal task force over the summer to help log and process autonomous vehicle incidents.

[Related: Self-driving taxis allegedly blocked an ambulance and the patient died.]

In a thread posted to X over the weekend, Vogt called his experience helming Cruise “amazing,” and expressed gratitude to the company and its employees while telling them to “remember why this work matters.”

“The status quo on our roads sucks, but together we’ve proven there is something far better around the corner,” wrote Vogt before announcing his plans to spend time with his family and explore new ideas.

“Thanks for the great ride!” Vogt concluded.

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Update November 22, 2023, 10:06am: Actually, nevermind, Sam Altman is back as OpenAI’s CEO.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has had a wild weekend. On Friday, founder and CEO Sam Altman was fired by its board of directors, kickstarting an employee revolt that’s still ongoing. The company has now had three CEOs in as many days. The shocking shakeup at one of the most important companies driving artificial intelligence research could have far-reaching ramifications for how the technology continues to develop. For better or worse, OpenAI has always claimed to work for the good of humanity, not for profit—with the drama this weekend, a lot of AI researchers could end up at private companies, answerable only to shareholders and not society. Things are still changing fast, but here’s what we know so far, and how things might play out.

[ Related: A simple guide to the expansive world of artificial intelligence ]

‘Too far, too fast’

November should have been a great month for OpenAI. On November 6th, the company hosted its first developer conference where it unveiled GPT-4 Turbo, its latest large language model (LLM), and GPTs, customizable ChatGPT-based chatbots that can be trained to perform specific tasks. While OpenAI is best known for the text-based ChatGPT and DALL·E, the AI-powered image generator, the company’s ambitions include the development of artificial general intelligence, in which a computer matches or exceeds human capabilities. The industry is still currently debating the broad definition of AGI and OpenAI plays a large role in that conversation. This tumult has the potential to resonate well beyond the company’s own hierarchy.  

[ Related: What happens if AI grows smarter than humans? The answer worries scientists. ]

The recent upheaval stems from OpenAI’s complicated corporate structure, which was intended to ensure that OpenAI developed artificial intelligence that “benefits all of humanity,” rather than allowing the desire for profitability to enable technology that could potentially harm us. The AI venture started as a non-profit in 2015, but later spun out a for-profit company in 2019 so it could take on outside investment, including a huge deal with Microsoft. The quirk is that the board of directors of the non-profit still has complete control over the for-profit company and they are all barred from having a financial interest in OpenAI. 

However, the six-member board of directors had unchecked power to remove Altman—which it exercised late last week, to the surprise of almost everyone including major investors. Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, was reportedly “blindsided” and “furious” at how Altman was fired, as were many of OpenAI’s staff who took to Twitter/X to post heart emoji in support of Altman.

Initially, the board claimed that Altman was let go because “he was not consistently candid in his communications,” however, later accounts site differing opinions on the speed and safety of how OpenAI’s research was being commercialized. According to The Information, Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist and a board member, told an emergency all-hands meeting, “This was the board doing its duty to the mission of the nonprofit, which is to make sure that OpenAI builds [artificial general intelligence] that benefits all of humanity.” Sutskever apparently felt that Altman was “pushing too far, too fast,” and convinced the board to fire him, with chief technology officer Mira Murati taking over as the interim CEO. According to The Atlantic, the issues stemmed from the pace at which ChatGPT was deployed over the past year. The chatbot initially served as a “low-key research preview,” but it exploded in popularity and with that, features have rolled out faster than the more cautious board members were comfortable with. 

As well as Altman, President of the board Greg Brockman resigned in protest, which really kicked off the chaotic weekend. 

Three CEOs in three days and the threat of an exodus

Following internal pushback from the employees, over the weekend, Altman was reportedly in talks to resume his role as CEO. The extended will-they-won’t-they eventually fizzled. To make things more dramatic, Murati was then replaced as CEO by Emmett Shear, co-founder of streaming site Twitch, bringing the company to three CEOs in three days. Shear reportedly believes that AI has somewhere between a five percent and 50 percent chance of wiping out human life, and has advocated for slowing down the pace of its development, which aligns with the boards’ reported views.

Of course, as one of the biggest names in AI, Altman landed on his feet—both he and Brockman have already joined Microsoft, one of OpenAI’s biggest partners. On Twitter/X late last night, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, announced that he was “extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team.”

This morning, more than 500 of OpenAI’s 750 employees signed an open letter demanding that the board step down and Altman be reinstated as CEO. If they don’t, Microsoft has apparently assured them that there are positions available for every OpenAI employee. Shockingly, even Sutskever signed the letter and also posted on Twitter/X that he regretted his “participation in the board’s actions.”

Turbulent aftermath

As of now, things are still developing. Unless something radical shifts at OpenAI, it seems like Microsoft has pulled off an impressive coup. Not only does the company continue to have access to OpenAI’s research and development, but it suddenly has its own advanced AI research unit. If the OpenAI employees do walk, Microsoft will have essentially partially acquired the $86 billion company for free.

Whatever happens, we’ve just seen a dramatic shift in the AI industry. For all the chaos of the last few days, the non-profit OpenAI was founded with laudable goals and the board seems to have seriously felt that their role was to ensure that AI—particularly, artificial general intelligence or AGI—was developed safely. With an AI advocate like Altman now working for a for-profit company unrestrained by any such lofty charter, who’s to say that it will? 

Similarly, OpenAI’s credibility is in serious doubt. Whatever its charter says, if the majority of the employees want to plow ahead with AGI development, it has a major problem on its hands. Either the board is going to have to fire a lot more people (or let them walk over to Microsoft) and totally remake itself, or it’s going to cave to the pressure and change its trajectory. And even if Altman does somehow rejoin OpenAI, which looks less and less likely, it’s hard to imagine how the non-profit’s total control of the for-profit company stays in-place. Somehow, the trajectory of AI seems considerably less predictable than it was just a week ago.

Update November 20, 2023, 2:11pm: Shear, OpenAI’s current CEO, has said he will launch an independent investigation into the circumstances around Altman’s firing. While it might be too little, too late for some employees, he says the investigation will allow him to “drive changes in the organization” up to and including “signification governance changes.”

Update November 21, 2023, 2:30pm: In an interview with CNN Monday evening, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella reiterated the possibility that Altman could still return to his previous role at OpenAI. Nadella added he was “open to both possibilities” of Altman working for either OpenAI, or Microsoft.

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SpaceX’s second, unpiloted Starship test flight of the year ended in yet another fiery inferno on November 18. This time, the sudden end arrived roughly 8 minutes into its 90-minute scheduled mission. But although its Super Heavy first stage booster suffered a fatal “rapid unscheduled disassembly” in the Caribbean, the world’s most powerful rocket almost doubled its previous lifespan and passed multiple other crucial milestones.

Starship launched once again from its test site near Boca Chica, Texas, at 8:03am ET on Saturday, with all 39 of the Super Heavy booster’s Raptor engines remaining lit during the mission—a first for the spacecraft intended to eventually deliver humans to Mars. At two minutes and 41 seconds following liftoff, Starship’s hot-staging sequence—in which upper stage engines ignite and separate from the booster—also proceeded successfully, clearing yet another hurdle for SpaceX engineers. The reusable booster then performed its flip maneuver en route towards an intended safe return back to Earth, but exploded only a few seconds later. The booster’s fate wasn’t a huge surprise, however, as SpaceX mission control operators already suspected such a dramatic event could occur due to the immense “load on top of the booster.”

Meanwhile, the Starship upper stage continued to soar for another few minutes to roughly 92 miles above the Earth’s surface—well above the Kármán Line, an internationally recognized demarcation between the planet’s atmosphere and outer space. Moments before its scheduled Second Engine Cut Off, or SECO, the upper stage met its own explosive demise. Space X representatives cited a delay in Starship’s automated flight termination system, but do not yet know the exact cause for its malfunction. If successful, Starship would have circumnavigated Earth before performing a hard landing near Hawaii.

The results of April’s Starship test received considerable criticism from both Boca Chica locals and the Federal Aviation Administration for surrounding environmental damage sustained during launch. Starship’s Raptor engines burn approximately 40,000 pounds of fuel per second to reach 17 million pounds of thrust. Nearby Texan residents described the blowback as resembling a “mini earthquake” at the time, with at least one business owner’s store window shattering. The April 20 test flight blasted a 25-feet deep crater, ejecting clouds of dirt, dust, and debris into the air while smashing a bowling ball-sized fragment into a nearby NASA Spaceflight van. Much of the area near Starship’s launch site includes protected ecosystems, as well as land considered sacred by local Indigenous communities. The FAA soon issued 63 corrective actions needed before SpaceX could legally attempt another Starship test.

[Related: SpaceX’s Starship launch caused a ‘mini earthquake’ and left a giant mess.]

Unlike SpaceX’s outing, Starship’s upgraded launch mount reportedly better mitigated the resulting blowback—at least according to Elon Musk’s company assessment. The FAA, meanwhile, wasted no time in issuing its own statement on Saturday’s event.

“A mishap occurred during the [SpaceX] Starship OFT-2 launch from Boca Chica, Texas, on Saturday, Nov. 18,” the administration posted to X over the weekend. Although no injuries or public property damage was reported this time, the FAA promised to oversee the “SpaceX-led mishap investigation” to ensure the company will comply with “regulatory requirements.”

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Although NASA’s Psyche spacecraft is currently en route to its rendezvous with a unique, metal-heavy asteroid floating between Mars and Jupiter, it still has quite a while before it reaches its destination. But researchers aren’t waiting until the end of its 3.5 year, 280-million-mile journey to make the most of the project. Even after barely a month of spaceflight, Psyche is already achieving some impressive technological feats.

On November 16, NASA announced its Deep Space Optical Communications experiment aboard Psyche successfully achieved “first light” earlier this week, beaming a data-laden, near-infrared laser nearly 10 million miles back to Caltech’s Palomar Observatory. Additionally, DSOC operators were able to “close the link”—the vital process in which test data is simultaneously beamed through both uplink and downlink lasers. Although only the first of numerous test runs to come, it completes a necessary step within NASA’s ongoing plans to develop far more powerful communications tools for future space travel.

[Related: In its visit to Psyche, NASA hopes to glimpse the center of the Earth.]

Astronauts, ground crews, and private companies have all utilized radio wave frequencies for data transfers and communications since the late-1950’s, thanks to a global antenna array known as the Deep Space Network. As organizations like NASA aim to expand humanity’s presence beyond Earth in the coming decades, they’ll need to move away from radio systems to alternatives like infrared lasers. Not only are such lasers more cost efficient, but they are also capable of storing and transmitting far more information within their shorter wavelengths. Further along in DSOC’s development, for example, will hopefully accomplish data transmission rates between 10-to-100 times greater than today’s spacecraft radio systems.

“Achieving first light is one of many critical DSOC milestones in the coming months, paving the way toward higher-data-rate communications capable of sending scientific information, high-definition imagery, and streaming video in support of humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans to Mars,”  Trudy Kortes, NASA’s director of Technology Demonstrations, said in Thursday’s announcement.

NASA also noted that, while similar infrared communications has been successfully achieved in low Earth orbit as well as to-and-from the moon, this week’s DSOC milestone marks the first test through deep space. This is more difficult thanks to the comparatively vast, growing distance between Earth and Psyche. During the November 14 test, data took roughly 50 seconds to travel from the spacecraft to researchers in California. At its farthest distance from home, Psyche’s data-encoded photons will take around 20 minutes to relay. That’s more than enough time for both Earth and Psyche to drift further along their own respective cosmic paths, so laser arrays on the craft and at NASA will need to adjust for the changes. Future testing will ensure the terrestrial and deep space tech is up to the task.

[Related: NASA’s mission to a weird metal asteroid has blasted off.]

Once it becomes the new norm, Jason Mitchell, director of the Advanced Communications and Navigation Technologies Division within NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program, believes optical lasers will offer a “boon” for researchers’ space missions data collection, and will help enable future deep space exploration.
“More data means more discoveries,” Mitchell said in NASA’s announcement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Formula One race car cracks a drain cover during Las Vegas Grand Prix practice run appeared first on Popular Science.

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Car seats, like the vehicles themselves, are available in a variety of materials with a wide range of manual and electronic controls. My old 1977 Dodge Aspen, for instance, had a front row bench seat that moved as one, like a faux-brocade couch on rails. It had no ventilation, no heat, and definitely no massaging functions. Automobile seating has come a long way since then. 

The first production car with optional heated seats was the 1966 Cadillac DeVille, and massaging seats came along decades later in 2000 Mercedes-Benz and Cadillac models. Bentley, however, has taken the spa-like cabin to the next level with its available “airline seat specification” setup; the British brand says its super-deluxe airline seat specification is a world first.

This $11,000 option in the extended wheelbase version (EWB) of the Bentayga includes not just heat, but cooling, massage, recline, and small trays that fold out like those on a commercial airline. This SUV’s seats even have sensors that predict that you’re about to start sweating even before you know it yourself and preemptively adjusts the temperature. 

Here’s how they work.

First class seats

When travelers on an airplane upgrade to business or first class, they gain a significant amount of legroom and space around their seat. Bentley chose to call this Bentayga EWB setup “airline seat specification” to drive home the message that this is a roomy, first-class experience. As soon as you sit down, the sheer number of positioning options is dizzying: The rear seats can be adjusted 22 ways, not including the rear footrest behind the front passenger seat. 

Steve James, the head of interior design for Bentley, has been developing seating for the luxury brand since 2006. His first task when he joined Bentley was to come up with the initial concept for the seats in Bentley’s then-new flagship model, the Mulsanne. While the uber-luxurious Mulsanne model included heated, cooled, and massaging seats, the Bentayga EWB says “hold my Dom Perignon” and ratchets it up even more to prevent fatigue, not just treat it.   

“High-end cars focus quite a lot on fatigue recovery; if you’re getting tired in the car, the massage function is designed to help after the fact,” James says. “But we thought the real luxury experience is to do something to stop the fatigue in the first place. We saw an opportunity with the Bentayga EWB because we have more room to work with.” 

Science, research, and “perfect posture” 

James explains that Bentley focused on two key metrics during the development of the first-class seats: posture and thermal response. Bentley collaborated with an American chiropractor and Comfort Motion Global (CMG), a company that partners with research universities to test its proprietary technologies. Through its research, it discovered that making small adjustments in the leg and back angles of a vehicle seat–as little as one to two degrees–results in a positive increase of blood flow, increasing alertness and reducing fatigue. 

Bentley’s seats are fitted with 12 electric motors and three pneumatic valve engine control units. Unique algorithms developed in conjunction with CMG apply 177 individual pressure changes, shifting stress points from one area to another to stop the onset of fatigue. And the leg rest feature in the Bentayga is situated at a particular angle to create what James calls “perfect posture” that bends the legs slightly for maximum comfort and blood flow. 

“As you may have experienced if you’re in a plane or sitting statically for a long period of time, fatigue sets in,” James says. “The postural system is a system of pneumatic bladders inside the seat and they make small micro-adjustments that fine-tune the angles of your pelvis, your thighs, they are helping motion constantly happen. Small motions that give the customer the option to regulate them. They really make a difference.”

Temperature

Another important element of Bentley’s high-end seats is what it calls “thermal comfort.” (There is a default calibration, but it can be adjusted depending on the average temperature preference of the passenger.)

Bentley embedded two sensors in the seats, each constantly measuring humidity and temperature levels of the bottoms and backs of the seats. With that data, the car can automatically activate its seat climate system for heating or ventilation to maintain the passenger’s individual comfort level. James says that the system detects temperature variations of 0.1 degrees and registers upward and downward trends and the human brain doesn’t notice before the delta is 0.5. So the seats’ constant monitoring heads off perspiration before it even happens.

While the concept started to take shape in 2015, the brand didn’t create a working prototype until 2019 after years of data collection and validation. The team had to do quite a bit of calibration on the thermal comfort side, as different passengers feel comfort at vastly different temperatures depending on a number of factors. And as it turned out, one of the engineers became a real-time case study; he became ill during the development and started feeling hot and sweaty. As designed, the system measured that and calculated the delta in his calibration preferences. 

“The real clever bit of the system is it can sense even to one-tenth of a degree Celsius at all times,” James says. “It can measure how you’re feeling and how your temperature is trending. So if you start feeling a little bit warm or perspire a bit–we can actually see it before you feel it.”

In a mainstream car with heated seats, you might find that activating them to full power feels wonderful in cold temperatures until you start overheating. At that point, the seats hold residual warmth that feels uncomfortable until it cools off. Bentley’s seats are designed for an ideal balance of hot and cool so that you feel consistently content. 

The post Bentley’s deluxe seats know you’re about to sweat before you do appeared first on Popular Science.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Watch NASA’s supercomputer simulation of the Apollo 12 lunar landing appeared first on Popular Science.

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Best overall		Sony RX100 VII		SEE IT	While quite expensive for a point-and-shoot, this camera offers a lot of quality and high-end features in a tiny package, so we think it’s worth the price.
Best for travel		Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark III		SEE IT	The one-inch sensor is larger than in a typical compact camera, translating into better low-light shooting, even when not using the built-in flash, and built-in autofocus pixels help track objects for sharp shots even when your subject is moving.
Best instant camera		Instax Mini 11		SEE IT	There’s just something special about a camera spitting out an image, and the wait for it to appear seemingly magically to kids of all ages.

Point-and-shoot cameras may be less common these days, in part thanks to smartphones, but there are still some worthy reasons to invest in these pocketable cameras. For starters, even though smartphone cameras have become quite impressive, the sensors in compact cameras are still larger. And the lenses typically have more to offer as well. Plus, sometimes it’s nice to keep the phone tucked away but still be able to take photos. The best point-and-shoot cameras offer great image quality, easy-to-use controls, and compact designs, making them ideal for a wide range of people and situations.

• Best overall: Sony RX100 VII
• Best for travel: Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark III
• Best waterproof: Olympus Tough TG-6
• Best film camera: Ilford Sprite 35-II Reusable 35mm Film Camera
• Best instant camera: Instax Mini 11
• Best for street photography: Ricoh GR IIIx
• Best for content creators: Sony ZV-1
• Best budget: Panasonic LUMIX DC-FZ80

How we chose the best point-and-shoot cameras

The writers and editors at Popular Science have decades of combined experience writing about and reviewing cameras because they’re also the writers and editors of Popular Photography. These picks come from a mixture of personal experience, spec comparisons, user reviews, and editorial reviews.

The best point-and-shoot cameras: Reviews & Recommendations

When picking our favorite point-and-shoot cameras, we emphasized models that perform in a variety of different situations while keeping their sizes small. While some of these models climb up over $1,000, we tried to keep the price relatively low for most selections because these aren’t the most advanced models.

Best overall: Sony RX100 VII

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Specs

• Sensor: 20.1MP 1″ Exmor RS BSI CMOS sensor
• Lens: f/2.8-4.5 9-72mm (35mm equivalent: 24-200mm)
• Weight: 10.65 ounces
• Dimensions: 4 x 2.29 x 1.69 inches

Pros

• Exceptional autofocus
• Versatile zoom range
• Large sensor
• 4K video

Cons

• Pricey for a point-and-shoot

The Sony RX100 VII is an awesome little camera. Despite the tiny body, it’s packed with a large, one-inch sensor, resulting in excellent image quality for the category. It also has the best autofocus of any point-and-shoot camera, meaning you’ll get more images in focus even when working with moving subjects.

This compact camera offers a 24-200mm equivalent lens, which is a versatile zoom range. And it is capable of 4K video, making this a well-rounded camera suitable for just about everyone. The only downside is the price. It is quite expensive for a point-and-shoot. But it offers a lot of quality and high-end features in a tiny package, so we think it’s worth the price.

Best for travel: Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark III

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Specs

• Sensor: 20.2MP 1″ Stacked CMOS sensor
• Lens: f/1.8-2.8 8.8-36.8mm (35mm equivalent: 24-100mm)
• Weight: 1 pound
• Dimensions: 4.13 x 2.4 x 1.63 inches

Pros

• Large sensor
• Versatile lens
• Manual control options
• Solid flash

Cons

• A little pricey

The one-inch sensor is larger than what you’ll find in a typical compact camera. This translates into better low-light shooting, even when not using the built-in flash. And the sensor has built-in autofocus pixels that help track objects for sharp shots even when your subject is moving. 

The 4.2x optical zoom lets shooters capture more distant objects without sacrificing image quality, and the 3-inch tilting LCD screen allows for shots from creative angles. Finally, raw photo capture provides extra flexibility for travel photographers who want to perfect images with photo editing software once they return from their trip. It’s a great camera for beginners and more experienced shooters alike.

Best waterproof: Olympus Tough TG-6

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Specs

• Sensor: 12MP BSI CMOS sensor
• Lens: f/2-4.9 4.5-18mm (35mm equivalent: 25 to 100mm)
• Weight: 8.92 ounces
• Dimensions: 4.45 x 2.6 x 1.28 inches

Pros

• Waterproof
• Extremely tough
• Versatile lens
• Underwater shooting modes
• Compatible with tons of accessories

Cons

• Small sensor

This point-and-shoot camera can go pretty much anywhere. It’s waterproof down to 50 feet without a separate case. It’s totally dust-proof, so it won’t suffer if you take it to the beach or deep in the desert. Plus, it’s crush-proof up to 220 pounds, so you can sit on it by accident and still go shooting later in the day. Most compacts can’t stand up to that kind of abuse. 

Toughness isn’t worth much if the camera isn’t very good. This compact offers a relatively small sensor, but it has a versatile 4x zoom lens that will cover most common scenarios on your adventures. And if you fall in love with the camera, Olympus offers a ton of different accessories like action camera mounts and underwater lights to go with it. (Looking for something cheaper but still waterproof? We’ve got you.)

Best film camera: Ilford Sprite 35-II Reusable 35mm Film Camera

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Specs

• Sensor: N/A
• Lens: f/9 31mm
• Weight: 4 ounces
• Dimensions: 4.7 x 2.6 x 1.7 inches

Pros

• Comes in eight fun color combinations
• Very affordable
• Fixed settings make it easy to use
• Features a built-in flash

Cons

• Fixed settings may be limiting
• Plastic lens results in some softness

If you want to get your feet wet with film, the Ilford Sprite 35-II is a fantastic and fun choice. It’s similar to disposable camera in that it has a plastic lens with a fixed aperture and shutter speed. But it’s reloadable, thus producing less waste. And it simply looks cooler than a disposable camera as well.

The Sprite 35-II features a 31mm lens with a fixed f/9 aperture to ensure that your scene is in focus. It also has a fixed 1/120s shutter speed. There is a built-in flash for low-light situations, perfect for shooting indoors. You won’t get precisely sharp and perfect results from this camera, but we think that’s half the fun. It’s a great outlet compared to highly technical cameras and fun to bring along on outings with friends and family. And since it has no settings at all, it’s a true point-and-shoot that is extremely simple to use, even with it being a film camera.

Best instant camera: Instax Mini 11

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Specs

• Sensor: N/A
• Lens: f/12.7 60mm
• Weight: 10.34 ounces
• Dimensions: 4.24 x 4.77 x 2.65 inches

Pros

• Affordable
• Produces fun, tiny instant prints
• Easy to use
• Includes a selfie mirror on the lens

Cons

• Results aren’t the sharpest

There’s just something special about a camera spitting out an image, and the wait for it to appear seemingly magically. The best instant cameras are easy to use and result in attractive prints, which is true of the Instax Mini 11. The results aren’t pristine like you may be used to with your phone or digital camera, but we think that’s part of the charm.

The Instax Mini 11 features a fixed 60mm lens with an f/12.7 aperture that focuses from 11.8 inches to infinity. Or, you can turn the lens to Selfie Mode for a close focusing range of 11.8 to 19.7 inches. And there is a built-in flash, which is ideal for indoor shooting. It is a little slick to hold but comes with a lanyard to prevent drips.

I recently let my nieces and nephews—all under 12—use the Instax Mini 11, and seeing how excited they were was a blast. They all wanted to keep taking photos despite the limited quantity of film I had and ran around showing the rest of the family what they captured. And despite some of them being quite young (and impatient to take a photo), they all managed to take a clear and relatively sharp photo. 

Best for street photography: Ricoh GR IIIx

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Specs

• Sensor: 24.2MP APS-C CMOS sensor
• Lens: f/2.8 26.1mm (35mm equivalent: 40mm)
• Weight: 9.2 ounces
• Dimensions: 4.3 x 2.4 x 1.4 inches

Pros

• Large sensor provides excellent image quality
• Compact and pocket-friendly
• 40mm lens is sharp and versatile

Cons

• No zoom
• Battery life isn’t great

Ricoh’s GR IIIx is a fantastic pick for street photography, largely thanks to its compact design. It is pocketable, so you can easily keep it on you when out and about. And it won’t draw much attention when you take it out to snap a photo. It also has slick all-black styling and an easy-to-hold design, even when shooting with one hand.

This discreet look is furthered by the lack of a zoom lens. It uses a fixed 40mm focal length (35mm equivalent), so you won’t lose the compact size when taking photos. 40mm is also an ideal focal length for street photography, as it is wide enough to get some context in the scene but not so wide that you end up with loads of extra space around your subject. If you do want something wider, the GR III is essentially the same, except it features a wider 28mm equivalent lens.

The GR IIIx image quality is excellent, partly thanks to the relatively large sensor. Images are sharp all the way to the edges, even when shooting wide open at f/2.8. And it produces vibrant, attractive colors. Interested in learning more? Check out our full review of the GR IIIx on Popular Photography.

Best for content creators: Sony ZV-1

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Specs

• Sensor: 20.1MP 1″ Exmor RS BSI CMOS sensor
• Lens: f/1.8-2.8 9.4-5.7mm (35mm equivalent: 24-70mm)
• Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Dimensions: 4.15 x 2.36 x 1.71 inches

Pros

• Excellent lens
• Large sensor
• Very compact for its specs
• Above-average autofocus features

Cons

• Can feel a little cramped with big hands

Sony’s ZV-1 is a camera truly designed for vloggers and, as a result, is packed with features to make recording yourself easier. The auto exposure settings keep your face bright and clear. It even centers your face and quickly adjusts background blur with the push of a Background Defocus button. And the little camera gets Sony’s impressive autofocus abilities, so if you are showcasing other people or products, the camera will quickly find focus for you.

The forward-directional onboard mic and detachable windscreen will help you get great sound, leaving you fussing with levels in post less. There’s also a handy flip screen so you can preview the frame and capture the perfect shots and angles, making it one of the best point-and-shoot cameras for vlogging.

Best budget: Panasonic LUMIX DC-FZ80

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Specs 

• Sensor: 18.1MP 1/2.3″ MOS sensor
• Lens: f/2.8-5.9 3.6 to 215mm (35mm equivalent: 20-1200mm)
• Weight: 1.35 pounds
• Dimensions: 5.1 x 3.7 x 4.7 inches

Pros

• Massive zoom range
• Responsive autofocus
• 4K30p video recording
• Easy to hold

Cons

• Not as compact as other options

Panasonic’s Lumix DC-FZ80 is an affordable bridge camera, offering a DSLR-like body with easy-to-use controls. Because of the deep hand grip, it’s an easy camera to hold than the other point-and-shoots mentioned on our list. It isn’t as compact as a result, so it is a tradeoff, but for many, the classic feel is preferred. 

The built-in lens provides a whopping 60x zoom, making it suitable for just about any situation you find yourself wanting to photograph. And it’s autofocus is quite responsive, so you’ll be more likely to get sharp photos as well. And it’s capable of 4K video, making it a good tool for getting started with video as well. And best of all? It’s cheaper than most alternatives.

Things to consider when shopping for the best point-and-shoot cameras

Point-and-shoot cameras are small and compact cameras that can create sharp, vibrant images. This makes them the best camera for beginners, a good option for travelers, and even a worthy choice for some professional uses. Here are some features to consider when choosing the right one for you.

Are you a true beginner?

A point-and-shoot camera is designed to make the process of photography as simple as possible. They typically feature fully automatic exposure and focus so that you can, as the name implies, point the camera and snap a photo with nothing more than a press of a button. If you are a true beginner and want the easiest-to-use camera, you’ll want to look for models with simple menu systems and fully automatic controls. 

That said, some point-and-shoots offer more settings than others. If you are slightly beyond beginner status or want a camera to grow into, check to see what settings the camera allows you to change. You may want to adjust things like ISO, shutter speed, and aperture down the line, as opposed to relying on auto exposure modes.

Will you travel with your camera?

One of the main purposes of a compact camera is that the camera is, well, compact. With typical dimensions of roughly 2.5 x 3.5 x 1.5 inches, point-and-shoots are specifically designed to easily fit into pockets, purses, fanny packs, and other small compartments. And unlike hefty DSLRs or mirrorless cameras, point-and-shoot cameras weigh way less than a single pound. And if you’re worried about safety, the discreet size of compact cameras makes them less of a target for theft.

While all point-and-shoot cameras are pretty compact, there are still size differences across available cameras. Be sure to pay attention to the dimensions and weight of the cameras you are considering if that is something important to you.

Do you need a tough camera for an active lifestyle?

If you live for the outdoors—hiking steep mountain trails or backpacking through desert Canyons—you need a point-and-shoot camera that can handle adventure. Rugged and waterproof cameras are built to endure and capture the extreme environments you love exploring. Taking electronics to the beach is usually a big no-no, as even a single grain of sand can cause damage. Yet rugged models can resist sand, allowing you to take all the sunset shots you want.

For us less risky folk, these tough cameras can survive your average accidental drops, spills, and kicks. Some of them may be overkill for general use, however. If you don’t intend to take your camera on rugged adventures, you may be able to save some money by getting a camera without extensive protective qualities. 

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best point-and-shoot cameras

• Best overall: Sony RX100 VII
• Best for travel: Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark III
• Best waterproof: Olympus Tough TG-6
• Best film camera: Ilford Sprite 35-II Reusable 35mm Film Camera
• Best instant camera: Instax Mini 11
• Best for street photography: Ricoh GR IIIx
• Best for content creators: Sony ZV-1
• Best budget: Panasonic LUMIX DC-FZ80

No matter the setting, creative vision, skill level, or age of a photographer, there are high-quality options that meet every need. The ultimate advantage of a point-and-shoot is its size and portability, making it the perfect camera for travel and adventure, as well as documenting day-to-day life.

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

The post The best point-and-shoot cameras in 2023 appeared first on Popular Science.

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