There is an enormous and serpentine new concrete-lined tunnel beneath London. For most of its 15.5-mile journey, it mirrors the curves of the River Thames, lurking as a subterranean shadow of the famous waterway, but well beneath it. Its job, when it’s up and running, won’t be to serve as a transit system for subway trains, or vehicles, or people—although a BBC reporter has biked in it and a composer has played the cello in it. 

Its purpose will be to carry a huge amount of sewage and wastewater, and if its impressive specs are any indication, it will do an excellent job at that stinky but important task. And in the process, if all works according to plan, it will result in a much cleaner Thames. Here’s what to know about this engineering feat beneath London.

The problem: sewage in the Thames

Like other cities, London has a sewer system that combines both rainwater runoff and sewage from homes and businesses. The system dates to the 1860s; Londoners can thank Joseph Bazalgette for the sewer’s creation, which followed an unpleasant event in 1858 called the Great Stink. 

“He designed the system to cope with a population of four million people,” says Taylor Geall, the communications manager with Tideway, the company building the new sewer. “Now, the population is nine million.” 

Here’s the problem. A combined system can work well if it doesn’t rain very hard. But if it does, the pipes become maxed out, and the runoff water and the sewage still need to go somewhere. In this case, it intentionally goes into the Thames, at spots called combined sewer overflows, or CSOs. 

[Related: The tallest building in the world remains unchallenged—for now]

Untreated sewage spewing into a river is never a good thing, and the more it happens, the worse the situation is. “Back in Bazalgette’s day, that happened quite infrequently,” Geall says. “But now, because we’ve paved over so much, and the population is so much higher, that it only takes a small amount of rain for the system to fill up. And rather than the system backing up into homes, and streets, etcetera, there are outfalls in the river wall and so it gets poured directly into the Thames, and that’s like untreated sewage and rainwater.” Those outfalls are the CSOs.

Geall says that annually, an estimated 44 million tons of rainwater and sewage flow into the Thames. Deborah Leach, the CEO of the environmental group Thames21, provides a similar estimate for the total spillage: around 43 million tons. “Sewage is a huge component of it,” she says. “We’re not just talking the odd little bit of dirt here and there—it’s massive.” 

With that discharge comes problems. “We are still seeing these stinking foreshores that you last saw back in Victorian times,” Leach says. “It makes it a horrible place to be.” 

And of course, pollution takes a toll on wildlife. “It’s just heartbreaking to see the fish kills coming down the river sometimes,” she adds. That typically happens in June, because sewage-eating bacteria in the water cause “clouds” of the river to become deoxygenated, she says. “They come to the surface—you can see them gasping to breathe.”

Then there are wet wipes, which like the sewage and rainwater flow into the river through the overflow outlets. “We’ve got big mounds of them in the River Thames,” says Leach. “They’re horrible.” 

One place where the wipes congregate is near west London’s Hammersmith Bridge. “You can see layer upon layer upon layer of wet wipes, building up,” she adds. “It’s just disgusting.”

London is not alone with this type of problem. New York City features a sewer network that is approximately 60 percent the combined type, meaning that sewage spills into the waterways when the system is overwhelmed. And Paris is dealing with something similar, aiming to make the Seine cleaner before the Olympics in 2024. That infrastructure project involves a tank for rainwater that Time describes as “mammoth.”

The solution: a gigantic tunnel, and other infrastructure

The centerpiece of the London project is the massive main tunnel, which is about 15 miles long and slopes gently downwards from west to east, an incline that means its contents will also flow eastward. Incredibly, the tunnel has an internal diameter of nearly 24 feet across, and in the east, where it’s deepest, it’s about 217 feet below the surface. “It is ridiculously big,” says Geall, of Tideway. “It’s a strange environment to be in.”

But the sewage and rainwater and wet wipes will be right at home. In addition to the main tunnel, other infrastructure will intercept more than two dozen of the combined sewer overflow points and channel the liquid from them into the big winding tunnel deep below London. In other words, instead of going into the Thames, it’ll go into the new sewer system. Once it’s in there, the crap will all flow eastwards. Its final destination is a big facility called Beckton Sewage Treatment Works. The Super Sewer doesn’t replace Bazalgette’s original creation; it augments it. 

The tunnel is not up and running yet, but once it is, the company estimates that the 44 million tons of rainwater and sewage that spill into the Thames annually will be reduced by 95 percent. Geall says that the entire system altogether, which includes the main tunnel and shafts, has a capacity to hold about 56.5 million cubic feet of liquid, or 422.7 million gallons.

The total cost of the project, he says, is 4.5 billion pounds, which is around 5.6 billion US dollars. Meanwhile, the company faced criticism last year for the high salary its CEO is being paid.

The project is about 85 to 90 percent complete, according to Geall, and even if it doesn’t officially wrap up until 2025, he says that in 2024 they’ll begin testing diverting flow away from the river and into the tunnel. “In reality, the Thames will begin to be protected next year,” he says.

Leach, of Thames21, says that she thinks “it can’t come soon enough.” 

“A hard engineering solution doesn’t come naturally to an environmental charity, but it’s simply the practical solution that needs to be built,” she adds. “It requires these nature-based solutions and wetlands as well.” In that sense, she highlights the ongoing need for natural additions to the landscape, like additional wetlands and rain gardens.

“I think everyone’s looking forward to seeing the river cleaned up,” she says.

Watch a video about the project, below. 

The post Look inside London’s new Super Sewer, an engineering marvel for rubbish and poo appeared first on Popular Science.

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For more than a decade, the king of the skyscrapers—the tallest building in the world—has been the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. With a total height of 2,722 feet, it’s the undisputed champion of the vertical world, a megatall building constructed with a core of reinforced concrete that sits on a piled raft foundation. 

Since its completion, the 163-story building has become a shining part of the world’s architectural and cultural landscape, providing a soaring platform for content that will make your stomach clench. A woman donned flight attendant garb and stood at its dizzying pinnacle not once but twice to hawk for Emirates airlines, with the second stunt involving an enormous A380 aircraft flying behind her. And Tom Cruise famously scaled its glass exterior in a Mission Impossible film.

The Burj Khalifa has owned the superlative designation of tallest building in the world since 2010, towering over everything else. “That’s pretty good staying power considering that there was actually a pretty high rate of replacement—between the replacement of the Sears Tower by Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers, then Taipei 101, and then we moved onto the Burj, which is considerably higher than its predecessors by a good margin,” says Daniel Safarik, the director for research and thought leadership at Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) in Chicago.

“That begs the inevitable question then: What’s going to be the next new tallest building in the world? And I think the answer is, we don’t know,” he adds. “Initially it was projected to be the Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia, but that building has stopped construction with no specified resumption date.” 

The tallest building in the world rises into the unknown 

Adrian Smith is the architect behind the Burj Khalifa, as well as for the on-pause Jeddah Tower. In a video chat from Chicago, he reflects on the question of when and if another building will surpass the height of the Burj. “I think inevitably, that’s the case,” he says.

“One of the interesting things about the ‘tallest building in the world’ as a title, is that if one is serious about doing the tallest building in the world, there’s an enormous amount of publicity that goes along with that,” he adds. Smith is now at Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture and formerly was at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which is known as SOM. “We’ve had clients hire us to do world’s tallest buildings before—they get an enormous amount of publicity and then for whatever reason, it doesn’t happen. Usually, 90 percent of the time, that reason is money.” 

As for the on-pause Jeddah Tower, which used to be called Kingdom Tower, Smith says that “it’s pursuing the process of starting up again,” and adds, “I have nothing that I can really disclose at all.”

Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Times took a close look at the Jeddah Tower’s frozen progress, and other mega projects in Saudi Arabia, reporting that the tower, at 826 feet tall, “remains a construction site with no construction.” 

[Related: 6 architectural facts about history’s tallest buildings]

But regardless of the Jeddah Tower’s question mark, the Burj remains a decisive and enormous exclamation point. Each time a new tallest building in the world rises up, its designers, engineers, and contractors are pushing into unexplored territory. “First of all, the structure is the most important single thing in a supertall building,” Smith reflects. “And the reason it’s the most important thing is that very few of them are done, and the history of the design process for a supertall—especially a world’s tallest—if it’s truly a world’s tallest, it’s never been done, you don’t know what you’re going to run into.”

The world’s tallest tower came from ‘a tube’

The Burj Khalifa’s core, which is supported by buttresses, is made of reinforced concrete. That’s a change from some of the classic skyscrapers of the previous century that may come to mind. “The structure of Sears Tower is all steel,” Smith says. So too is the structure of the Empire State Building, now just the 51st tallest building in the world but standing proudly since 1931. 

“The structure of Burj Khalifa is all concrete,” he adds. “And the structure for Kingdom Tower will be all concrete as well—but when I say all concrete, they’re heavily reinforced concrete structures. A lot of steel goes into that concrete.” 

Indeed, concrete technology has evolved over the decades, allowing it to have higher and higher compressive strength—the strength it can withstand as gravity pulls on it downwards. 

Stefan Al, an architect, author of the book Supertall, and an assistant professor at Virginia Tech, charts just how much concrete has improved. In the 1950s, he says, concrete was rated at around 20 megapascals. The concrete in the Burj was 80 megapascals, and today’s can do about 250 megapascals. “So basically it’s gotten 10 times stronger—or 10 times more able to withstand compression, meaning you can have 10 times more weight coming from top,” he says. “That’s certainly super impressive.” 

There’s another benefit to concrete (don’t get it confused with cement), which is the way it gets up to where workers need it—by being pumped up and then flowing out of a tube. Reinforced concrete’s current popularity is “a function of concrete’s ability to pump, because that makes it much easier to work with,” Al says. 

That’s different from working with steel way up high, because for that, Al says, “you need super-large cranes” to hoist the beams upwards. And concrete is quick. Al notes that using concrete in a city like New York can result in a building story going up every two to three days. 

Of course, pumping concrete up against gravity produces its own challenges—and opportunities to celebrate. A company that makes concrete pumps, Putzmeister, boasted that its equipment was able to get the material up 1,988 feet—a record at the time. In 2019, they looked back on that 2008 accomplishment, punning that in helping build the Burj, “Putzmeister was a concrete part.”

Smith points out that the plans for the Jeddah Tower call for it to be made out of concrete as well, including even its top spire, which on the Burj is made from steel. “Every few years, technology advances and changes—the concrete gets stronger. There are new additives, new ways of making concrete that’s better for this kind of application,” he says. “If you think about Burj Khalifa and Kingdom [Jeddah] Tower, they’re ultimately built out of a tube that’s maybe 8 inches to a foot in diameter.” He chuckled. 

The second-tallest building in the world

Words like supertall and megatall may sound vague, but in fact they have specific definitions. A supertall building is at least 984 feet tall, while a megatall stands at least 1,968 feet high. At 1,776 feet tall, One World Trade in New York City is a supertall building, but not a megatall one, and is the sixth-tallest building globally. And a new second-tallest building in the world is set to be finished this year—it’s the angular Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and measures a megatall 2,233 feet tall at the tippy top. (The current second tallest building in the world is the 2,073-foot Shanghai Tower.)

But architecture is about more than height, and Stefan Al highlights an exciting diversity of design he sees in new modern buildings. “You can really speak of a new generation of skyscrapers, which are much taller, but also, you could say, more exuberant” compared to what came before, he observes. “Most of the 20th century, we only had a handful of supertall buildings, including the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, but now we have more than 100, and most of them have been built in the last 20 years.” 

As for buildings with wild and varied new styles, he cites the “super slender” trend in New York City, with the skinny and supertall 111 West 57th Street as a notable example. Another is the Central Park Tower, which Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill designed. 

But buildings get even more interesting. The Capital Gate Tower in Abu Dhabi may only be 540 feet tall, but it looks like it could tip over. “It deliberately leans 18 degrees,” Al points out. He says that buildings like this one “are not very logical from a structural perspective.” 

Or check out the M.C. Escher-like CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, or Mexico City’s cool Torre Reforma. 

So will a building ever exceed the height of the Burj Khalifa? Al thinks so, saying he anticipates it happening “within our lifetime.” 

Safarik, of the CTBUH in Chicago, is more cautious, noting that the future seems murky when it comes to a building rising higher than the Burj. But one thing is clear: When it comes to the tallest buildings in the word, things have changed since the CTBUH was founded the same year that the US landed on the moon. 

The post The tallest building in the world remains unchallenged—for now appeared first on Popular Science.

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Pilots can experience forces while flying that punish their bodies, and they can also find themselves in disorienting situations. A military pilot in a fighter jet will endure G-forces as they maneuver, resulting in a crushing sensation that causes the blood to drain downwards in their bodies, away from the brain. And someone at the controls of a plane or helicopter, even in more routine flights, can have their senses become discombobulated. One of the causes of the crash that killed Kobe Bryant in 2020 was “spatial disorientation” on the pilot’s part, according to the NTSB. 

Then there’s being launched in a rocket up into space. One astronaut recalled to PopSci that when flying in the space shuttle, the engines shut down, as planned, 8.5 minutes after launch. “It felt like the shuttle stopped, and I went straight through it,” he said. “I got a tremendous tumbling sensation.” Another astronaut noted in a recent NASA press release that he felt like he “was on a merry-go-round as my body hunted for what was up, down, left, and right,” in the shuttle as well.

And of course, anyone down on Earth who has ever experienced vertigo, a sensation of spinning, or nausea, knows that those are miserable, even frightening sensations. 

To better understand all the uncanny effects that being up in the air or in space has on humans, NASA is going to employ a Navy machine called the Kraken, which is also fittingly called the Disorientation Research Device—a supersized contraption that cost $19 million and weighs 245,000 pounds. Pity the poor person who climbs into the Kraken, who could experience three Gs of force and be spun around every which way. NASA notes that the machine, which is located in Ohio, “can spin occupants like laundry churning in a washing machine.” It can hold two people within its tumbling chamber. As tortuous as it sounds, the machine provides a way to study spatial disorientation—a phenomenon that can be deadly or challenging in the air or in space—safely down on dry land. 

[Related: I flew in an F-16 with the Air Force and oh boy did it go poorly]

The NASA plan calls for two dozen members of the military to spend an hour in the Kraken, which will be using “a spaceflight setting” for this study. After doing so, half of them, the space agency says, “will perform prescribed head turns and tilts while wearing video goggles that track their head and eye movements.” The other half will not. All of them will carry out certain exercises afterwards, like balancing on foam. Perhaps, NASA thinks, the head movements can help. “Tests with the Kraken will allow us to rigorously determine what head movements, if any, help astronauts to quickly recover their sense of balance,” Michael Schubert, an expert on vestibular disorders at Johns Hopkins University and the lead researcher on this new study, said in the NASA release on the topic.

The study will also involve civilians who have pre-existing balance challenges (due to having had tumors surgically removed), who thankfully won’t have to endure the Kraken. They will also perform the head movements and carry out the same balance exercises. The goal of all this research is to discover if these head movement techniques work, so that “astronauts could adopt specific protocols to help them quickly adapt to gravitational changes during spaceflight,” NASA says. 

Additionally, the same techniques could help regular people who aren’t going to be launched into space but do struggle with balance or dizziness down on Earth. Watch a video about the Kraken, below. 

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On a small patch of land in the northeast Bronx in New York City sits a tidy but potent battery storage system. Located across the street from a beige middle school building, and not too far from a Planet Fitness and a Dollar Tree, the battery system is designed to send power into the grid at peak moments of demand on hot summer afternoons and evenings. 

New York state has a goal of getting a whopping six gigawatts of battery storage systems online in the next seven years, and this system, at about three megawatts, is a very small but hopefully helpful part of that. It’s intended to be able to send out those three megawatts of power over a four-hour period, typically between 4 pm and 8 pm on the toastiest days of the year, with the goal of making a burdened power grid a bit less stressed and ideally a tad cleaner. 

The local power utility, Con Edison, recently connected the battery system to the grid. Here’s how it works, and why systems like this are important.

From power lines to batteries, and back again

The source of the electricity for these batteries is the existing power distribution lines that run along the top of nearby poles. Those wires carry power at 13,200 volts, but the battery system itself needs to work with a much lower voltage. That’s why before the power even gets to the batteries themselves, it needs to go through transformers. 

During a January tour of the site for Popular Science, Adam Cohen, the CTO of NineDot Energy, the company behind this project, opens a gray metal door. Behind it are transformers. “They look really neato,” he says. Indeed, they do look neat—three yellowish units that take that voltage and transform it into 480 volts. This battery complex is actually two systems that mirror each other, so other transformers are in additional equipment nearby. 

After those transformers do their job and convert the voltage to a lower number, the electricity flows to giant white Tesla Megapack battery units. Those batteries are large white boxes with padlocked cabinets, and above them is fire-suppression equipment. Not only do these battery units store the power, but they also have inverters to change the AC power to DC before the juice can be stored. When the power does flow out of the batteries, it’s converted back to AC power again. 

The battery storage system is designed to follow a specific rhythm. It will charge gradually between 10 pm and 8 am, Cohen says. That’s a time “when the grid has extra availability, the power is cheaper and cleaner, [and] the grid is not overstressed,” he says. When the day begins and the grid starts experiencing more demand, the batteries stop charging. 

In the summer heat, when there’s a “grid event,” that’s when the magic happens, Cohen says. Starting around 4 pm, the batteries will be able to send their power back out into the grid to help destress the system. They’ll be able to produce enough juice to power about 1,000 homes over that four-hour period, according to an estimate by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, or NYSERDA.

[Related: How the massive ‘flow battery’ coming to an Army facility in Colorado will work]

The power will flow back up into the same wires that charged them before, and then onto customers. The goal is to try to make the grid a little bit cleaner, or less dirty, than it would have been if the batteries didn’t exist. “It’s offsetting the dirty energy that would have been running otherwise,” Cohen says. 

Of course, the best case scenario would be for batteries to get their power from renewable sources, like solar or wind, and the site does have a small solar canopy that could send a teeny tiny bit of clean energy into the grid. But New York City and the other downstate zones near it currently rely very heavily on fossil fuels. For New York City in 2022 for example, utility-scale energy production was 100 percent from fossil fuels, according to a recent report from the New York Independent System Operator. (One of several solutions in the works to that problem involves a new transmission line.) What that means is that the batteries will be drawing power from a fossil-fuel dominant grid, but doing so at nighttime when that grid is hopefully less polluting. 

How systems like these can help

Electricity is very much an on-demand product. What we consume “has to be made right now,” Cohen notes from behind the wheel of his Nissan Leaf, as we drive towards the battery storage site in the Bronx on a Friday in January. Batteries, of course, can change that dynamic, storing the juice for when it’s needed. 

This project in the Bronx is something of an electronic drop in a bucket: At three megawatts, the batteries represent a tiny step towards New York State’s goal to have six gigawatts, or 6,000 megawatts, of battery storage on the grid by 2030. Even though this one facility in the Bronx represents less than one percent of that goal, it can still be useful, says Schuyler Matteson, a senior advisor focusing on energy storage and policy at NYSERDA. “Small devices play a really important role,” he says. 

One of the ways that small devices like these can help is they can be placed near the people who are using it in their homes or businesses, so that electricity isn’t lost as it is transmitted in from further away. “They’re very close to customers on the distribution network, and so when they’re providing power at peak times, they’re avoiding a lot of the transmission losses, which can be anywhere from five to eight percent of energy,” Matteson says. 

And being close to a community provides interesting opportunities. A campus of the Bronx Charter Schools for Better Learning sits on the third floor of the middle school across the street. There, two dozen students have been working in collaboration with a local artist, Tijay Mohammed, to create a mural that will eventually hang on the green fence in front of the batteries. “They are so proud to be associated with the project,” says Karlene Buckle, the manager of the enrichment program at the schools.

Grid events

The main benefit a facility like this can have is the way it helps the grid out on a hot summer day. That’s because when New York City experiences peak temperatures, energy demand peaks too, as everyone cranks up their air conditioners. 

To meet that electricity demand, the city relies on its more than one dozen peaker plants, which are dirtier and less efficient than an everyday baseline fossil fuel plant. Peaker plants disproportionately impact communities located near them. “The public health risks of living near peaker plants range from asthma to cancer to death, and this is on top of other public health crises and economic hardships already faced in environmental justice communities,” notes Jennifer Rushlow, the dean of the School for the Environment at Vermont Law and Graduate School via email. The South Bronx, for example, has peaker plants, and the borough as a whole has an estimated 22,855 cases of pediatric asthma, according to the American Lung Association. Retiring them or diminishing their use isn’t just for energy security—it’s an environmental justice issue.

So when power demand peaks, “what typically happens is we have to ramp up additional natural gas facilities, or even in some instances, oil facilities, in the downstate region to provide that peak power,” Matteson says. “And so every unit of storage we can put down there to provide power during peak times offsets some of those dirty, marginal units that we would have to ramp up otherwise.” 

By charging at night, instead of during the day, and then sending the juice out at peak moments, “you’re actually offsetting local carbon, you’re offsetting local particulate matter, and that’s having a really big benefit of the air quality and health impacts for New York City,” he says.  

[Related: At New York City’s biggest power plant, a switch to clean energy will help a neighborhood breathe easier]

Imagine, says Matteson, that a peaker plant is producing 45 megawatts of electricity. A 3-megawatt battery system coming online could mean that operators could dial down the dirty plant to 42 megawatts instead. But in an ideal world, it doesn’t come online at all. “We want 15 of [these 3 megawatt] projects to add up to 45 megawatts, and so if they can consistently show up at peak times, maybe that marginal dirty generator doesn’t even get called,” he says. “If that happens enough, maybe they retire.” 

Nationally, most of the United States experiences a peak need for electricity on hot summer days, just like New York City does, with a few geographic exceptions, says Paul Denholm, a senior research fellow focusing on energy storage at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. “Pretty much most of the country peaks during the summertime, in those late afternoons,” he says. “And so we traditionally build gas turbines—we’ve got hundreds of gigawatts of gas turbines that have been installed for the past several decades.” 

While the three-megawatt project in the Bronx is not going to replace a peaker plant by any means, Denholm says that in general, the trend is moving towards batteries taking over what peaker plants do. “As those power plants get old and retire, you need to build something new,” he says. “Within the last five years, we’ve reached this tipping point, where storage can now outcompete new traditional gas-fired turbines on a life-cycle cost basis.” 

Right now, New York state has 279 megawatts of battery storage already online, which is around 5 percent of the total goal of 6 gigawatts. Denholm estimates that nationally, nearly nine gigawatts of battery storage are online already. 

“There’s significant quantifiable benefits to using [battery] storage as peaker,” Denholm says. One of those benefits is a fewer local emissions, which is important because “a lot of these peaker plants are in places that have historically been [environmental-justice] impacted regions.” 

“Even when they’re charging off of fossil plants, they’re typically charging off of more efficient units,” he adds. 

If all goes according to plan, the batteries will start discharging their juice this summer, on the most sweltering days. 

The post How an innovative battery system in the Bronx will help charge up NYC’s grid appeared first on Popular Science.

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LIFE IS RARELY WORRY-FREE, but unprecedented angst has become a constant. Beyond the regular challenges of everyday existence—chaotic households, traffic jams, overbearing bosses—the looming presence of a deadly virus over the past three years has made even mundane decisions feel fraught.

Any number of things can spark stress, but they all share a common origin. “It’s when the demands on somebody outstrip the resources they have,” says Lynn Bufka, a senior director at the American Psychological Association (APA). The results of that are rarely good. Face a difficult situation, unrealistic expectation, or sudden conflict without the right skills or tools, and you risk melting down or freezing up. That danger increases when you are pressed for time or cannot influence a challenging variable. “The feeling of not having control is anxiety-provoking,” Bufka says. “It’s pretty overwhelming.”

Most people had no experience dealing with the kind of prolonged pressure that came along with the pandemic. But for those with some of the world’s most intense occupations, it’s all just part of the job. Losing their cool is simply not an option. The strategies they employ to keep calm while facing a classroom, saving a life, or defusing a bomb just might help the rest of us deal with whatever’s pushing us to the edge of reason.

The fishing boat captain

THE STRESSORS: In 2021, the people bringing in Dungeness crab, black cod, and other bounties of the earth—the workers in America’s fishing and hunting industries—had the second deadliest job in the United States, coming in just behind loggers, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. “It is extremely hazardous,” says Richard Ogg, captain of the troller Karen Jeanne, which is based in Bodega Bay, California. The gale-force dangers he and his crew face include rough seas, miserable weather, and sleep deprivation. Pulling in a catch big enough to earn the money they need weighs heavily on his mind too. Above all else, though, Ogg feels a sense of guardianship over his team, and finds the biggest challenge can be coping with conflicts that arise among a crew corralled on a 54.5-foot boat miles from shore. That’s no easy feat when dealing with workers who don’t necessarily respect the hazards, the gear, or each other.

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Effective communication is essential to keeping cool. Ogg tends to be egalitarian, even if he as the captain has the final say and will pull rank if he must. He often discusses problems or disagreements with everyone aboard, seeks their perspectives, and considers their viewpoints to zero in on the best solution. He finds that this approach, and accepting that things sometimes go sideways despite his best efforts, helps everyone stay on an even keel whenever things get choppy.

The air traffic controller

THE STRESSORS: Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport hosted nearly 2,000 flights on average every day in 2022, making it the busiest hub in the world last year. “Almost every bit of airspace that we have, there’s going to be planes there,” says air traffic controller Nichole Surunis. Shepherding those thousands of passengers in and out safely requires tremendous concentration and the ability to process information quickly. Variables like bad weather or an unexpected move by a pilot can make an already challenging task even more dynamic at a second’s notice. There’s no time to dwell on what’s at stake. “You have to focus on all these pilots you’re talking to, with all these people on these planes,” Surunis says. In total, there are about 2.9 million travelers who fly into or out of the United States on a given day—and costly delays add to the strain of those minding the traffic. It’s only after the craft are safe that a controller might notice their racing heart and realize just how tense they were.

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Training and experience are key to handling rapidly shifting situations, and Surunis, like all controllers, has lots of both. “You have your Plan A—but you also must have a Plan B and Plan C,” she says. The occupation requires practicing self-care too. Stepping away from her workstation is essential, and mandated: Controllers typically aren’t allowed to go more than two hours without a break. Surunis doesn’t hesitate to tap a union-run support service after an especially grueling day, and she makes a point of unwinding by making time for hobbies like baking. That helps ensure she’s rested and ready to focus on keeping the sky safe.

The trauma surgeon

THE STRESSORS: Doctors who specialize in emergency care rarely have two days that are alike. A routine case like a ruptured appendix can end up on their table as readily as massive trauma. “They can be injured all over their body,” says Daniel Hagler, a critical care surgeon at NewYork-Presbyterian Queens Hospital in New York. “What you do within seconds or minutes of them arriving can be the difference between life and death.” The tension ramps up if he must handle many patients simultaneously. Over time, the strain takes a toll: A study published in The Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery found that nearly one-quarter of doctors in Hagler’s shoes experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Keeping it together requires the ability to triage, focus on what’s important, and put lesser priorities aside. Hagler employs “deliberate and algorithmic thinking”: If you see this, do that. Trust your intuition, using past experience to guide you to the best decision—while accepting that you may be wrong. “Take a step to just ready yourself and settle your nerves, and do what needs to be done,” he says.

The bomb tech

THE STRESSORS: Pipe bombs are the most common homemade explosive devices on American soil, according to the Department of Homeland Security, but the people who specialize in preventing them from blowing up are rare. Techs like Carl Makins, formerly of the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office in South Carolina, often face incendiaries crudely fashioned in someone’s kitchen or basement, so the safest way of deactivating them isn’t always clear. It doesn’t help that the gear includes 85 pounds of hot, uncomfortable Kevlar, making it hard to move. But the biggest source of anxiety is not knowing if someone tampered with the suspicious package or tried to move it in an effort to be helpful before he arrived. “What did you do to it?” Makins often found himself wondering. “Did you make it mad?”

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Makins always tried to compartmentalize his feelings. “You can’t get angry,” he says. “That limits your ability to see everything that you need to see.” He also used humor to help defuse tense situations—pointing out that, say, handling a bomb next to that shiny new pickup might not end well for the truck. He also remained mindful of his limits. If he was too tired, too tense, or just not up to the task, he’d say so and let someone else on the team step in to do the job. “You just tap out,” he says.

The teacher

THE STRESSORS: Teachers—despite diminishing resources, growing technological distractions, and students who often want to be anywhere but the classroom—are nevertheless saddled with the responsibility of shaping the future. That’s a lot of pressure, which explains why Gallup polls put teaching in a dead heat with nursing for the most stressful profession in the country, and why a RAND Corporation survey shows stress is the number one reason educators quit. And that was before COVID-19 compounded their challenges. When Teresa BlackCloud’s high school students in West Fargo, North Dakota, began taking turns attending class in person and learning from home in the fall of 2020, for example, she had to divide her attention between the pupils in front of her and the “online kids” who might need tech support. “I felt like my brain was split in two,” she says. “If only there were two Miss BlackClouds.” Like many educators, she had to quickly pivot between helping the teens in the classroom and assisting those working remotely.

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Setting clear boundaries is key to handling trying circumstances. BlackCloud had to put the kibosh on responding to pings from kids at all hours because it limited her ability to recharge. “I had to get really good at setting boundaries,” she says. She strives to practice mindfulness and sets aside specific parts of her day for mentally wandering into stressy places. “While I’m brushing my teeth is my time to worry about things,” she says.

The Alaska rescue pilot

THE STRESSORS: Flying a rescue helicopter in Alaska is so intense the Coast Guard requires pilots to complete a tour elsewhere before they can get the gig. The assignment often demands they travel long distances—​Air Station Kodiak monitors 4 million square miles of land and sea, an area larger than the entire lower 48 states—in the dark and through extreme conditions. Due to the environs, the Last Frontier has an aviation accident rate more than twice that of the rest of the country. “It is very challenging,” says Lt. Cmdr. Jared Carbajal, who flies MH-60 Jayhawks and often dons night-vision goggles to navigate the inky sky. The haste of operations compounds the tension: Pilots must be airborne within 30 minutes of getting the call to pull someone out of danger. That leaves little time to prepare and sometimes gives Carbajal scant knowledge of what he’ll find when he arrives at the scene. (Carbajal now flies out of US Coast Guard Air Station Sitka, also in Alaska.)

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Managing complex and uncertain scenarios requires focusing only on what you can control. Everything else is a distraction. Carbajal concentrates on one task at a time—​calculating flight distance, estimating how much fuel he’ll need, requesting the necessary gear, and so on—​that he tackles systematically. He avoids looking too far ahead on his to-do list or fixating on situations he cannot influence, like unusually turbulent waves. “If there’s something that you can’t make a contingency plan for, don’t even waste your time on it,” he says.

An earlier version of this article appeared on popsci.com in January 2021, and this feature first appeared in the Spring 2021 issue. It has been updated since that time.

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To fly at supersonic speeds is to punch through an invisible threshold in the sky. Rocketing through the air at a rate faster than sound waves can travel through it means surpassing a specific airspeed, but that exact airspeed varies. On Mars, the speed of sound is different from the speed of sound on Earth. And on Earth, the speed of sound varies depending on the temperature of the air an aircraft is traveling through. 

Breaking the so-called sound barrier in 1947 made Chuck Yeager famous. But today, if a person in a military jet flies faster than the speed of sound, it’s not a significant or even noticeable moment, at least from the perspective of the occupants of the aircraft. “Man, in the airplane you feel nothing,” says Jessica Peterson, a flight test engineer for the US Air Force’s Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California. People on the ground may beg to differ, depending on how close they are to the plane. 

Here’s what to know about the speed of supersonic flight, a type of travel that’s been inaccessible to civilians who want to experience it in an aircraft ever since the Concorde stopped flying in 2003. 

Ripples in the water, shockwaves in the air 

Traveling at supersonic speed involves cruising “faster than the sound waves can move out of the way,” says Edward Haering, an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center who has been researching sonic booms since the 1990s.

One way to think about the topic is to picture a boat in the water. “If you’re in a rowboat, sitting on a lake, not moving, there might be some ripples that come out, but you’re not going any faster than the ripples are,” he says. “But if you’re in a motorboat or a sailboat, you’ll start to see a V-wake coming off the nose of your boat, because you’re going faster than those ripples can get out of the way.” That’s like a plane flying faster than the speed of sound.

But, he adds, a supersonic plane pushes through those ripples in three-dimensional space. “You have a cone of these disturbances that you’re pushing through,” he says. 

The temperature of the air determines how fast sound waves move through it. In a zone of the atmosphere on Earth between about 36,000 feet up to around 65,600 feet, the temperature is consistent enough that the speed of sound theoretically stays about the same. And in that zone, on a typical day, the speed of sound is about 660 mph. That’s also referred to as Mach 1. Mach 2, or twice the speed of sound, would be about 1,320 mph in that altitude range. However, since a real-world day will likely be different from what’s considered standard, your actual speed when attempting to fly supersonic may vary.

[Related: How high do planes fly? It depends on if they’re going east or west.]

If you wanted to fly a plane at supersonic speeds at lower altitudes, the speed of sound is faster in that warmer air. At 10,000 feet, supersonic flight begins at 735 mph, NASA says. The thicker air takes more work to fly through at those speeds, though.

For the record books: the first supersonic flight

Chuck Yeager became the first documented person to fly at supersonic speeds on October 14, 1947. He recalled in his autobiography, Yeager, that he was at 42,000 feet flying at 0.96 Mach on that autumn day. “I noted that the faster I got, the smoother the ride,” he wrote. 

“Suddenly the Mach needle began to fluctuate. It went up to .965 Mach—then tipped right off the scale,” he recalled. “I thought I was seeing things! We were flying supersonic!” He learned afterwards that he had been going 700 mph, or 1.07 Mach. 

Over the radio, from below, Yeagar wrote that people in a “tracking van interrupted to report that they heard what sounded like a distant rumble of thunder: my sonic boom!” 

Sonic booms happen thanks to shock waves forming off different features on the aircraft. For example, the canopy of a fighter jet, or the inlet for its engine, can produce them. The problem occurs because of the way those various shock waves join up, coalescing into two. “When they combine, they just get higher and higher pressure,” says Haering. The way they combine is for one shock wave to come from the front of the plane, and one from the rear. People on the ground will detect a “boom, boom,” Haering says. 

Interestingly, the length of the aircraft matters in this case, affecting how far apart those booms are in time. The space shuttle, for example, measured more than 100 feet long. In that case, people would notice a “boom… boom,” Haering says. “And a very short plane, it’s booboom. And if it’s really short, and really far away, sometimes the time between those two booms [is] so short, you can’t really tell that there’s two distinct booms, so you just hear boom.” 

[Related: How does a jet engine work? By running hot enough to melt its own innards.]

The issue with these booms is leading NASA to develop a new experimental aircraft, along with Lockheed Martin, called the X-59. Its goal is to fly faster than the speed of sound, but in a quieter way than a typical supersonic plane would. Remarkably, instead of a canopy for the pilot to see the scene in front of them, the aviator will rely on an external vision system—a monitor on the inside that shows what’s in front of the plane. NASA said that the testing wrapped up in 2021 for this design, which helps keep the aircraft sleek. The ultimate goal is to manage any shock waves coming off that aircraft through its design. “On the X-59, from the tip of the nose to the back of the tail, everything is tailored to try to keep those shock waves separated,” Haering says. 

NASA says they plan to fly it this year, with the goal of seeing how much noise it makes and how people react to its sound signature. The X-59 could make a noise that’s “a lot like if your neighbor across the street slams their car door,” Haering speculates. “If you’re engaged in conversation, you probably wouldn’t even notice it.” But actual flights will be the test of that hypothesis.

The X-59 has a goal of flying at Mach 1.4, at an altitude of around 55,000 feet. Translated into miles per hour, that rate is 924 mph. Then imagine that the aircraft has a tailwind, and its ground speed could surpass 1,000 mph. (Note that winds in the atmosphere will affect a plane’s ground speed—the speed the plane is moving compared to the ground below. A tailwind will make it faster and a headwind will make it slower.) 

Supersonic corridors 

At Edwards Air Force Base in California, supersonic corridors permit pilots to fly at Mach 1 or faster above certain altitudes. In one corridor, the aircraft must be at 30,000 feet or higher. In another, the Black Mountain Supersonic Corridor, the aircraft can be as low as 500 feet. Remember, the speed to fly supersonic will be higher at a low altitude than it will be at high altitudes, and it will take more effort to push through the denser air.

“From a flight-test perspective—so that’s what we do here at Edwards, and we’re focusing on testing the new aircraft, testing the new systems—we regularly go supersonic,” says Peterson, the flight test engineer at the US Air Force’s Test Pilot School. 

[Related: Let’s talk about how planes fly]

The fact that one of the supersonic corridors is over the base means that sonic booms are audible there, although the aircraft has to be above 30,000 feet. “We can boom the base, and we hear it all the time,” she adds. 

She notes that in a recent flight in a T-38, when she broke the sound barrier at 32,000 feet, her aircraft had a ground speed of 665 mph. But at 14,000 feet, she was supersonic at a ground speed of 734 mph.

But there’s a difference between flying at supersonic speeds in a test scenario and doing it for operational reasons. Corey Florendo, a pilot and instructor also at the US Air Force Test Pilot School, notes that he’d do it “only as often as I need to,” during a real-world mission.

“When I go supersonic, I’m using a lot of gas,” he adds. 

Supersonic flight thus remains available to the military in certain scenarios when they’re willing to burn the fuel, but not so for regular travelers. A Boeing 787, for example, is designed to cruise at 85 percent the speed of sound. However, one company, called Boom Supersonic, aims to bring that type of flight back for commercial travel; their aircraft, which they call Overture, could fly in tests in 2027. You may not want to hold your breath. 

Joe Jewell, an associate professor at Purdue University’s School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, reflects that supersonic flight still has a “mystique” to it. 

“It’s still kind of a rare and special thing because the challenges that we collectively referred to as the sound barrier still are there, physically,” Jewell says. Pressure waves still accrue in front of the aircraft as it pushes through the air. “It’s still there, just the same as it was in 1947, we just know how to deal with it now.”

In the video below, watch an F-16 overtake a T-38; both aircraft are flying at supersonic speeds, and a subtle rocking motion is the only indication that shock waves are interacting with the aircraft. Courtesy Jessica Peterson and the US Air Force Test Pilot School.

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Body armor has a clear purpose: to prevent a bullet, or perhaps a shard from an explosion, from puncturing the fragile human tissue behind it. But donning it doesn’t come lightly, and its weight is measured in pounds. For example, the traditional Kevlar fabric that would go into soft body armor weighs about 1 pound per square foot, and you need more than one square foot to do the job. 

But a new kind of Kevlar is coming out, and it aims to be just as resistant to projectiles as the original material, while also being thinner and lighter. It will not be tailored into a John Wick-style suit, which is the stuff of Hollywood, but DuPont, the company that makes it, says that it’s about 30 percent lighter. If the regular Kevlar has that approximate weight of 1 pound per square foot, the new stuff weighs in at about .65 or .7 pounds per square foot. 

“We’ve invented a new fiber technology,” says Steven LaGanke, a global segment leader at DuPont.

Here’s what to know about how bullet-resistant material works in general, and how the new stuff is different. 

A bullet-resistant layer needs to do two tasks: ensure that the bullet cannot penetrate it, and also absorb its energy—and translate that energy into the bullet itself, which ideally deforms when it hits. A layer of fabric that could catch a bullet but then acted like a loose net after it was hit by a baseball would be bad, explains Joseph Hovanec, a global technology manager at the company. “You don’t want that net to fully extend either, because now that bullet is extending into your body.”

The key is how strong the fibers are, plus the fact that “they do not elongate very far,” says Hovanec. “It’s the resistance of those fibers that will then cause the bullet—because it has such large momentum, [or] kinetic energy—to deform. So you’re actually catching it, and the energy is going into deforming the bullet versus breaking the fiber.” The bullet, he says, should “mushroom.” Here’s a simulation video.

Kevlar is a type of synthetic fiber called a para-aramid, and it’s not the only para-aramid in town: Another para-aramid that can be used in body armor is called Twaron, made by a company called Teijin Limited. Some body armor is also made out of polyethylene, a type of plastic. 

The new form of Kevlar, which the company calls Kevlar EXO, is also a type of aramid fiber, although slightly different from the original Kevlar. Regular Kevlar is made up of two monomers, which is a kind of molecule, and the new kind has one more monomer, for a total of three. “That third monomer allows us to gain additional alignment of those molecules in the final fiber, which gives us the additional strength, over your traditional aramid, or Kevlar, or polyethylene,” says Hovanec.

Body armor in general needs to meet a specific standard in the US from the National Institute of Justice. The goal of the new kind of Kevlar is that because it’s stronger, it could still meet the same standard while being used in thinner quantities in body armor. For example, regular Kevlar is roughly 0.26 or .27 inches thick, and the new material could be as thin as 0.19 inches, says Hovanec. “It’s a noticeable decrease in thickness of the material.”  

And the ballistic layer that’s made up of a material like Kevlar or Twaron is just one part of what goes into body armor. “There’s ballistics [protection], but then the ballistics is in a sealed carrier to protect it, and then there’s the fabric that goes over it,” says Hovanec. “When you finally see the end article, there’s a lot of additional material that goes on top of it.”

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In the future, the US Air Force may employ drones that can accompany advanced fighter jets like the F-35, cruising along as fellow travelers. The vision for these drones is that they would be robotic wingmates, with perhaps two assigned to one F-35, a jet that’s operated by a single pilot. They would act as force multipliers for the aircraft that has a human in it, and would be able to execute tasks like dogfighting. The official term for these uncrewed machines is Collaborative Combat Aircraft, and the Air Force is thinking about acquiring them in bulk: It has said it would like to have 1,000 of them. 

To develop uncrewed aircraft like these, though, the military needs to be able to rely on autonomy software that can operate a combat drone just as effectively as a human would pilot a fighter jet, if not more so. A stepping stone to get there is an initiative called VENOM, and it will involve converting around a half dozen F-16s to be able to operate autonomously, albeit with a human in the cockpit as a supervisor. 

VENOM, of course, is an acronym. It stands for Viper Experimentation and Next-gen Operations Model, with “Viper” being a common nickname for the F-16 Fighting Falcon, a highly maneuverable fighter jet.  

The VENOM program is about testing out autonomy on an F-16 that is “combat capable,” says Lt. Col. Robert Waller, the commander of the 40th Flight Test Squadron at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.

“We’re taking a combat F-16 and converting that into an autonomy flying testbed,” Waller adds. “We want to do what we call combat autonomy, and that is the air vehicle with associated weapons systems—radar, advanced electronic warfare capabilities, and the ability to integrate weapons—so you loop all of that together into one flying testbed.” 

The program builds on other efforts. A notable related initiative involved a special aircraft called VISTA, or the X-62A. Last year, AI algorithms from both DARPA and the Air Force Research Laboratory took the controls of that unique F-16D, which is a flying testbed with space for two aviators in it. 

[Related: Why DARPA put AI at the controls of a fighter jet]

The VENOM program will involve testing “additional capabilities that you cannot test on VISTA,” Waller says. “We now want to actually transition that [work from VISTA] to platforms with real combat capabilities, to see how those autonomy agents now operate with real systems instead of simulated systems.” 

At a recent panel discussion at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies that touched on this topic, Air Force Maj. Gen. Evan Dertien said that VENOM is “the next evolution into scaling up what autonomy can do,” building on VISTA. Popular Science sibling website The War Zone reported on this topic last month. 

The project will see them using “about six” aircraft to test out the autonomy features, Waller tells PopSci, although the exact number hasn’t been determined, and neither has the exact model F-16 to get the autonomy features. “If we want the most cutting-edge radar or [electronic warfare] capabilities, then those will need to be integrated to an F-16C,” Waller says, referring to an F-16 model that seats just one person. 

The role of the human aviator in the cockpit of an F-16 that is testing out these autonomous capabilities is two-fold, Waller explains. The first is to be a “safety observer to ensure that the airplanes always return home, and that the autonomy agent doesn’t do anything unintended,” he notes. The second piece is to be “evaluating system performance.” In other words, to check out if the autonomy agent is doing a good job. 

Waller stresses that the human will have veto power over what the plane does. “These platforms, as flying testbeds, can and will let an autonomy agent fly the aircraft, and execute combat-related skills,” he says. “That pilot is in total control of the air vehicle, with the ability to turn off everything, to include the autonomy agent from flying anything, or executing anything.” 

Defense News notes that the Air Force is proposing almost $50 million for this project for the fiscal year 2024. 

“These airplanes will generally fly without combat loads—so no missiles, no bullets—[and] most, if not all of this, will be simulated capabilities, with a human that can turn off that capability at any time,” Waller says. 

Ultimately, the plan is not to develop F-16s that can fly themselves in combat without a human on board, but instead to keep developing the autonomy technology so it could someday operate a drone that can act like a fighter jet and accompany other aircraft piloted by people. 

Hear more about VENOM below, beginning around the 42 minute mark:

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A jet engine is a highly complex piece of equipment with a straightforward job: to give an airplane the thrust it needs to fly. Anyone who has felt themselves pushed back slightly in their seat as an aircraft speeds down the runway and then takes to the sky can likely intuitively sense what’s happening. The turbofan engines beneath each wing are inhaling the air, and accelerating it out the back, producing thrust.

While the high-level description might sound simple, the process within the engine itself is both complex and fascinating. Here’s what to know about an engine’s inner workings, where air is compressed, fuel is ignited, and temperatures become extremely hot. 

“There’s a big fan on the front—that actually provides about 90 percent of the thrust,” says Christopher Lorence, the chief engineer at GE Aerospace. 

Consider a GE90 engine, which hangs below the wings of planes like the Boeing 777. The company says that one of those will suck in about 3,600 pounds of air every second when a plane is taking off. 

The fan slurps in the air, and as the air travels through the engine, a proportionally smaller amount travels down one path through the center of the machine—its core. But most of the air bypasses the core, skipping it and going straight out the back. It’s the air that does not go through the core that does most of the work when it comes to propelling the aircraft. 

The difference between the volume of air that bypasses the core versus the air that goes through the core is known as the engine’s bypass ratio. Engine makers want the ratio to be high for peak efficiency. “The most efficient way to do it is to take a lot of air and increase the pressure a little,” says Lorence. “The early engines had a very low bypass ratio—and so what they were doing is, most of the air was going through the core, a limited [amount of] air was going through the bypass, and it was going through it at pretty high velocity.” But today, turbofan engines have very high bypass ratios.

[Related: Let’s talk about how planes fly]

An exception here are the jet engines on military aircraft, like fighter jets, which lack the large bypass ratios that engines on commercial planes have. These aircraft have other priorities besides pure fuel efficiency—like the ability to be highly maneuverable, hit supersonic speeds, and keep a low profile—and their engines, which are closely integrated with the body of the aircraft, can also make use of afterburners. 

The first part of the core is the compressor stage, where the air is—you guessed it—compressed. The air becomes more dense, and it heats up. “There’s many stages of compressor blades, which are rotating, and compressor vanes, which are static, and the air is sort of progressively squeezed and squeezed and squeezed as those compressor blades get smaller and smaller and smaller,” says Booth. 

[Related: The illuminating tech inside night vision goggles, explained]

The air, of course, doesn’t want to be compressed; it takes work to make that happen. “It’s basically like you’re trying to brush water uphill,” Booth explains. 

Then, after the compressor stage, comes the combustor. Jet fuel ignites and heats up the air even more. GE’s Lorence says that if the temperature of the air is around 1,200 to 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit at the tail end of the compressor, it could get as hot as 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit or so after going through the combustor. For comparison, lava from a volcano in Hawaii tends to be in the neighborhood of 2,140 degrees. 

The scorching air that departs the combustor is, amazingly, “higher than the melting point of the turbine blades that follow it,” says Lorence. “We actually have to pump air through those blades to keep them from melting.” That relatively cooler air comes from the compressor stage. Rolls-Royce also does something similar to prevent the blades in its turbine from melting.  

[Related: How high do planes fly? It depends on if they’re going east or west.]

And just like engine makers want a large bypass ratio, they also want the engine to be very hot inside. “The hotter you make that temperature, the more efficient that core operates,” Lorence says. 

Turbines in the core harvest energy

After the air is superheated, it has an important job to do before it can clock out for the weekend and relax: spin some turbines. In a General Electric engine, there are two turbines—a high-pressure turbine and a low-pressure turbine. “You have a bunch of air that’s got a lot of energy in it,” says Lorence. “The reason you’ve done all that is so that the energy can be released through these turbine stages.” 

Each of those two turbines has a specific task. First, the high-pressure turbine “takes that energy and spins the compressor, which basically runs the core,” says Lorence. “And then in the low-pressure turbine, it takes that energy and spins that shaft, which spins the fan [in the front of the engine].”

In Roll-Royce’s Trent engines, like those on Airbus A350s, there’s also an intermediate-pressure turbine, in between the high- and low-pressure turbines. In that case, those first two turbines make the compressor work, and the final one powers the large fan blades in the front. 

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For years, a drone company called Zipline has made deliveries using a fairly traditional approach: An uncrewed aircraft with an 11-foot wingspan drops off a package with a parachute, and it descends to the ground thanks to the predictable presence of gravity. Today, the company announced that they’re working on a new system for drone delivery that’s a bit more tech-forward: They plan to use what they refer to as a “droid” to place a package directly on a target, like a table in a customer’s backyard. 

The goal of using this so-called droid—more on how it all works in a moment—is to be able deposit the delivery in a precise way, even if there’s wind. The company refers to this new approach as platform two. (Platform one refers to the parachute approach, which uses a plane that can fly forward but cannot hover in place.) Perhaps, speculates the company’s head of engineering, Jo Mardall, the arrival of a package with this new system will even be a surprise to a customer. 

“The core of platform two is really to enable ultra-precise, silent delivery to homes,” Mardall, a former Tesla engineering director, tells PopSci. “I like to think, for platform two, that I might be standing at my back door, turn around to chat to my kids for a second in the kitchen, and I turn back around and there’s a package that’s been delivered to my deck behind me, and I don’t know how it got there.”

During an event today, the company’s CEO, Keller Cliffton, said that the objective for this new home delivery system is for the item to arrive in a way that feels “like teleportation.” 

The way the new airborne system works is a bit like a flying mechanical turducken—that infamous culinary creation that involves a chicken within a duck within a turkey. In this case, the package being delivered (the metaphorical chicken) is within the droid unit (the duck), which is nestled into the aircraft itself (the turkey). 

The new aircraft has four small rotors and a propeller in the back that can tilt to help it hover. The aircraft makes the delivery from some 300 feet, hovering above the target area. Then, the droid lowers on a tether towards, say, a picnic table. “It lands very briefly—for a second or two,” Mardall says. During that brief landing, doors on the belly of the droid open to deposit the package. 

After the delivery, the droid winches back up to the main drone, which is waiting above, and then the aircraft continues on its journey. The aspect of this new approach that is designed to allow for better precision, even during windy days, are thrusters on the droid itself. These thrusters—one electric fan in the rear, and two additional ones in other locations—can blow air to help the mini-drone, which Mardall says is about the size of a gym bag, maneuver. 

[Related: Getting rescued by helicopter has risks. This gadget could make it safer.]

“When [it’s] coming down on the winch, if it’s a windy day, we need to have a system to control the location of that droid,” he says. That’s where the three thrusters come into play. “Those thrusters mean that the Zip [the drone mothership above] is just carrying the weight, it’s not having to set the position.”

He adds that because the main drone remains at 300 feet above the target, the whole system is quiet. “This thing is barely audible—just sounds like the rustling of leaves in the trees,” he says. 

Aviation engineering typically involves tradeoffs, and this new system is no exception. Their gen-one drones, which resemble small airplanes with a wing, a v-shaped tail, and propellers in the back, have a range of about 50 miles. The new aircraft have the ability to hover and lower a droid, but unlike their predecessors, they have a range of just about 10 miles out and 10 miles back for dropping off an item and then returning from the same place it launched. Or, if the new drone is going on a one-way trip, traveling to a location where it can land and then charge, the range is 24 miles. “You don’t get to cheat the physics here—when you have to hover, hovering is more expensive from an energy point of view,” he says. 

The packages this new system can carry can weigh anywhere between 6 and 8 pounds. Mardall says that this year they will be testing the new system in California, and 2024 will see “a pilot delivering to real customers.” They’re aiming for it to be able to deliver items like meals-to-order, meaning that a Sweetgreen salad could theoretically arrive by droid onto a picnic table in someone’s backyard at some point in the future. The company also unveiled a logistics system that can be incorporated into the side of a building, allowing the drones to dock on the outside, and the droid to enter and exit through a small door for loading. 

Zipline isn’t alone in the market of delivering items from the sky. One competitor, Wing—from Google’s parent company, Alphabet—just announced a new AutoLoader system and what they’re calling the Wing Delivery Network. Wing’s drones also employ a tether to load and deliver the package, but they do not have a droid. 

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Last week in Washington state, an airplane that appeared perfectly normal from the outside made a brief flight. On the left side of the plane was a standard engine, burning jet fuel. But on the right side was something radically different: an electric motor that got its power not from batteries, but from hydrogen stored inside the aircraft. 

While burning jet fuel creates carbon emissions and particulate matter pollution, in this case the hydrogen system produces water vapor and heat. It’s just one way that aircraft makers are trying to make flying less bad for the planet: companies are working on planes that run off batteries, they are creating synthetic aviation fuel, and in this case, they are leveraging hydrogen fuel cells. 

“This is certainly the biggest aircraft to have ever flown on hydrogen fuel cells,” boasts Mark Cousin, the chief technical officer of Universal Hydrogen, the company behind the experimental aircraft. 

Here’s how the system works: While the left side of the plane stored its jet fuel in the wing like a typical aircraft, the hydrogen for the electric motor on the right wing was stored in tanks, in a gaseous form, in the back of the plane. “You simply can’t fit hydrogen in the wing of an airplane,” Cousin says. “It was taking up probably about a third of the fuselage length.” 

[Related: Watch this sleek electric plane ace its high-speed ground test]

The hydrogen travels up to the right wing, which is where the magic happens. There, in the nacelle hanging off the wing where the motor is, the hydrogen combines with compressed air (the air enters the equation thanks to the two inlets you can see near the motor on the right wing) in stacks of fuel cells. The system uses six stacks of fuel cells, each of which is made up of hundreds of individual fuel cells. Those fuel cell stacks create the electricity that the motor needs to run. “A fuel cell is a passive device—it has no moving parts,” Cousin says. The juice it creates comes in DC form, so it needs to go through inverters to become the AC power the motor requires. 

When the plane flew last week, it was a type of hybrid: a regular engine burning jet fuel in the wing on the left side, and the electric motor on the right running off that hydrogen and air. “Once we hit cruise, we throttled back and we flew almost exclusively on the right-hand engine,” the pilot said, according to The Seattle Times. “It was silent.”

Usually holding around 50 people, the aircraft, a modified Dash 8-300, in this case had just three aboard for the test flight, which had a duration of some 15 minutes. It flew at an altitude of about 2,300 feet above the ground. “The aircraft did a couple loops around the airfield,” Cousin says. Then eventually it made a “very, very smooth landing.” 

While the aircraft stored its hydrogen in gaseous form in the tanks in the back, the company has plans to switch to a method that stores the hydrogen as a liquid, which occupies less space than the gaseous assembly and doesn’t weigh as much. Those tanks must be kept at very cold temperatures, and the liquid needs to be converted to a gas before it can be used in the fuel cells. While this type of liquid hydrogen setup still takes up more space than regular jet fuel does, it’s a better solution than storing hydrogen in gaseous form, he says. Their plan is to switch the same plane that just flew over to a liquid hydrogen system this year. 

In terms of trying to decarbonize the aviation industry—after all, it’s a sizable producer of carbon dioxide emissions—Cousin argues that hydrogen is the best approach. “We think that hydrogen fuel is really the only viable solution for short- and medium-range airplanes,” he says. It’s certainly not the only approach, though. In September of last year, a battery powered plane called Alice also made a first flight in Washington state, and other companies, like Joby Aviation and Beta Technologies, are working on small aircraft that are also battery electric. 

Universal Hydrogen isn’t alone in pursuing hydrogen as a means of propelling aircraft. In February of last year, Airbus said that it would use a special, giant A380 aircraft to test out hydrogen technology, and in November, unveiled plans for an electric engine that also runs off hydrogen fuel cells.

Watch a short video about the recent flight, below.

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Before the jet fuel that powers an aircraft’s engines can be burned, it begins its life in the ground as a fossil fuel. But the US military is exploring new ways of producing that fuel, synthetically, and on site, where it needs to be used. They’ve just announced a contract for as much as $65 million to Air Company, a Brooklyn-based company that has developed a synthetic fuel that doesn’t take its starting materials from the ground. 

In announcing the contract, the Department of Defense notes that it has an eye on both security concerns and the environment. Getting airplane fuel where it needs to go, the DoD notes, “often involves a combination of ships, tanker planes, and convoys.” And these same transport mechanisms, the military adds, can “become extremely vulnerable.” 

Here’s how the fuel works, why the military is interested, and what the benefits and drawbacks are of this type of approach. 

The chemistry of synthetic jet fuel 

This DOD initiative is called Project SynCE, which is pronounced “sense,” and clunkily stands for Synthetic Fuel for the Contested Environment. By contested environment, the military is referring to a space, like a battlefield, where a conflict can occur.

The building blocks of the fuel from Air Company involve hydrogen and carbon, and the process demands energy. “We start with renewable electricity,” says Stafford Sheehan, the CTO and co-founder of Air Company. That electricity, he adds, is used “to split water into hydrogen gas and oxygen gas, so we get green hydrogen.” 

But fuel requires carbon, too, so the company needs carbon dioxide to get that element. “For Project SynCE specifically, we’re looking at on-site direct-air capture, or direct ocean-capture technologies,” he says. But more generally, he adds, “We capture carbon dioxide from a variety of sources.” Currently, he notes, their source is CO2 “that was a byproduct of biofuel production.” 

So the recipe’s ingredients call for carbon dioxide, plus the hydrogen that came from water. Those elements are combined in a fixed bed flow reactor, which is “a fancy way of saying a bunch of tubes with catalysts,” or, even more simply, “tubes with rocks in them,” Sheehan says. 

[Related: Sustainable jet fuel is taking off with commercial airlines]

Jet fuel itself primarily consists of molecules—known as paraffins—made of carbon and hydrogen. For example, some of those paraffins are called normal paraffins, which is a straight line of carbons with hydrogens attached to them. There are also hydrocarbons present called aromatic compounds. 

“You need to have those aromatic compounds in order to make a jet fuel that’s identical to what you get from fossil fuels,” he says, “and it’s very important to be identical to what you get from fossil fuels, because all of the engines are designed to run on what you get from fossil fuels.”  

Okay, enough chemistry. The point is that this fuel is synthetically made, didn’t come out of the ground, and can be a direct substitute for the refined dinosaur juice typically used in aircraft. “You can actually make jet fuel with our process that burns cleaner as well, so it has fewer contrails,” he says. It will still emit carbon when burned, though.

Why the Department of Defense is interested 

This project involves a few government entities, including the Air Force and the Defense Innovation Unit, which acts as a kind of bridge between the military and the commercial sector. So where will they start cooking up this new fuel? “We plan to pair this technology with the other renewable energy projects at several joint bases, which include solar, geothermal, and nuclear,” says Jack Ryan, a project manager for the DIU, via email. “While we can’t share exact locations yet, this project will initially be based in the Continental US and then over time, we expect the decreasing size of the machinery will allow for the system to be modularized and used in operational settings.” 

Having a way to produce fuel in an operational setting, as Ryan describes it, could be helpful in a future conflict, because ground vehicles like tanker trucks can be targets. For example, on April 9, 2004, in Iraq, an attack known as the Good Friday Ambush resulted in multiple deaths; a large US convoy was carrying out an “emergency delivery of jet fuel to the airport” in Baghdad, Iraq, as The Los Angeles Times noted in a lengthy article on the incident in 2007. 

“By developing and deploying on-site fuel production technology, our Joint Force will be more resilient and sustainable,” Ryan says.

[Related: All your burning questions about sustainable aviation fuel, answered]

Nikita Pavlenko, a program lead at the International Council on Clean Transportation, a nonprofit organization, says that he is excited about the news. “It’s also likely something that’s still quite a ways away,” he adds. “Air Company is still in the very, very initial stages of commercialization.” 

These types of fuels, called e-fuels, for electrofuels, don’t come in large amounts, nor cheaply. “I expect that the economics and the availability are going to be big constraints,” he says. “Just based off the underlying costs of green hydrogen [and] CO2, you’re probably going to end up with something much more expensive than conventional fuel.” In terms of how much fuel they’ll be able to make synthetically, Ryan, of the DIU, says, “It will be smaller quantities to begin with, providing resiliency to existing fuel supply and base microgrids,” and then will grow from there. 

[Related: Airbus just flew its biggest plane yet using sustainable aviation fuel]

But these types of fuels do carry environmental benefits, Pavlenko says, although it’s important that the hydrogen they use is created through green means—from renewable energy, for example. The fuel still emits carbon when burned, but the benefits come because the fuel was created by taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in the first place, or preventing it from leaving a smokestack. Even that smokestack scenario is environmentally appealing to Pavlenko, because “you’re just kind of borrowing that CO2 from the atmosphere—just delaying before it goes out in the atmosphere, rather than taking something that’s been underground for millions of years and releasing it.” (One caveat is down the line, there ideally aren’t smokestacks belching carbon dioxide that could be captured in the first place.) 

For its part, the Defense Innovation Unit says that they’re interested in multiple different ways of obtaining the carbon dioxide, but are most enthused about getting it from the air or ocean. That’s because those two methods “serve the dual purpose of drawing down CO2 from the air/water while also providing a feedstock to the synthetic fuel process,” says Matt Palumbo, a project manager with the DIU, via email. Palumbo also notes that he expects this period of the contract to last about two to five years, and thinks the endeavor will continue from there.

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The Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, is bulking up its internal tech team. The agency, which focuses on consumer protection and antitrust issues in the US, announced last week that it would be forming an Office of Technology and hiring more tech experts. 

Leading the new office is Stephanie Nguyen, the agency’s existing chief technology officer, who recently spoke with PopSci about what the new department will do and what her priorities for it are. 

“In general, the FTC has always stayed on the cutting edge of emerging technology to enforce the law,” she says. “In the 1930s, we looked at deceptive radio ads.” Earlier this century, she notes, they focused on “high-tech spyware.” The goal of the agency in general involves tackling problems that plague the public, like the scourge of robocalls.

“The shift in the pace and volume of evolving tech changes means that we can’t rely on a case-by-case approach,” she adds. “We need to staff up.” And the staffing up comes at a time when the tech landscape is as complex and formidable as it’s ever been, with the rise of controversial tools like generative AI and chatbots, and companies such as Amazon—which just scooped up One Medical, a primary care company, and in 2017 purchased Whole Foods—becoming more and more powerful. 

A relatively recent example of a tech issue the FTC has tackled comes from Twitter, which was hit with a $150 million fine in 2022 for abusing the phone numbers and email addresses it had collected for security purposes because it had permitted “advertisers to use this data to target specific users,” as the FTC noted last year. The Commission has also taken on GoodRx for the way it handled and shared people’s medical data. They have an ongoing lawsuit against Facebook-owner Meta for “anticompetitive conduct.” Meanwhile, in a different case, the FTC was unsuccessful at attempting to block Meta’s acquisition of a VR company called Within Unlimited, which CNBC referred to as “a significant defeat” for the FTC. 

[Related: Why the new FTC chair is causing such a stir]

Nguyen says that as the lines become increasingly blurry between what is, and isn’t, a tech company, the creation of the office became necessary. “Tech cannot be viewed in a silo,” she says. “It cuts across sectors and industries and business models, and that is why the Office of Technology will be a key nexus point for our consumer protection and competition work to enable us to create and scale the best practices.” 

The move at the FTC comes at a time when the tech literacy of various government players is in the spotlight and is crucially important. The Supreme Court has been considering two cases that relate to a law known as Section 230, and Justice Elana Kagan even referred to herself and her fellow justices as “not the nine greatest experts on the internet.” 

At the FTC, what having the new Office of Technology will mean in practice is that the amount of what she refers to as in-house “technologists” will roughly double, as they hire about 12 new people. She says that as they create the team, “we need security and software engineers, data scientists and AI experts, human-computer interaction designers and researchers,” and well as “folks who are experts on ad tech or augmented and virtual reality.”

Tejas Narechania, the faculty director for the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, says that the FTC’s creation of this new office represents a positive step. “I think it’s a really good development,” he says. “It reflects a growing institutional capacity within the executive branch and within our agencies.” 

“The FTC has been operating in this space for a while,” he adds. “It has done quite a bit with data privacy, and it has sometimes been criticized for not really fully understanding the technology, or the development of the technology, that has undergirded some of the industries that it is charged with overseeing and regulating.” (The agency has faced other challenges too.)

One of the ways the people working for the new office will be able to help internally at the FTC, Nguyen says, is to function as in-house subject matter experts and conduct new research. She says they’ll tackle issues like “shifts in digital advertising, to help the FTC understand implications of privacy, competition, and consumer protection, or dissecting claims made about AI-powered products and assessing whether it’s snake oil.” 

Having in-house expertise will help them approach tech questions more independently, Narechania speculates. The FTC will “be able to bring its own knowledge to bear on these questions, rather than relying on the very entities it’s supposed to be scrutinizing for information,” he reflects. “To have that independent capacity for evaluation is really important.” 

For Nguyen, she says the big-picture goal of the new office is that they are “here to strengthen the agency’s ability to be knowledgeable and take action on tech changes that impact the public.”

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A striking photo released on February 22 by the Department of Defense reveals a unique aerial scene: The image shows the Chinese surveillance balloon as seen from the cockpit of a U-2 spy plane on February 3, along with the pilot’s helmet, the aircraft’s wing, and even the shadow of the plane itself on the balloon. 

While the subject of the photo is the balloon, which was later shot down by an F-22, the aircraft that made the image possible is referenced in the image’s simple title: “U-2 Pilot over Central Continental United States.” Here’s a brief primer on that aircraft, a high-flying spy plane with a reputation for being tough to operate and land.  

The U-2 aircraft is designed to operate at “over 70,000 feet,” according to an Air Force fact sheet. That very high altitude means that it flies way higher than commercial jet aircraft, which tend to cruise at a maximum altitude in the lower end of the 40,000-foot range. 

The U-2’s ability to climb above 70,000 feet in altitude “makes it, I believe, the highest flying aircraft that we know about in the Air Force inventory,” says Todd Harrison, a defense analyst with Metrea, a firm formerly known as Meta Aerospace. “That becomes important for a mission like this, where the balloon was operating around 60,000 feet.”

[Related: Why the US might be finding more unidentified flying objects]

The plane features wings that stretch to a width of 105 feet, which is about three times longer than the wingspan of an F-16. “It is designed for very high altitude flight, and it has a very efficient wing—[a] very high aspect ratio wing, so that makes it very long and slender,” Harrison says. Long, slender wings are indeed more efficient than shorter, stubbier ones, which is one of the reasons NASA and Boeing are planning to have truss-supported skinny wings on an experimental commercial aircraft called the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator that would be more fuel efficient than existing models. 

On the U-2, those long wings, which are an asset in the sky, make for a real challenge when trying to get it back down on the ground. “This jet does not want to be on the ground, and that’s a real problem when it comes to landing it,” Matt Nauman, a U-2 pilot, said at an Air Force event in 2019 that Popular Science attended. To land it, “we’ll actually slow down, and that nose will continue to come up until the plane essentially falls out of the sky,” at just about two feet off the ground.  

[Related: Biden says flying objects likely not ‘related to China’s spy balloon program’]

A few other aspects figure into the landing. One is that the aircraft has what’s known as bicycle-style landing gear, as opposed to the tricycle-style landing gear of a regular commercial plane. In other words: It has just two landing gear legs, not three, so is tippy, side-to-side, as it touches down. To help with those landings, a chase car literally follows the plane down the runway as it’s coming in to land, with its driver—a U-2 pilot as well—in radio contact with the pilot in the plane to help them get the bird on the tarmac. This video shows that process. 

Because the plane is designed to fly at such high altitudes, the pilot dons a heavy space suit like this daredevil wore in 2012, while the cockpit is pressured to an altitude of about 14,000 or 15,000 feet. Having that gear on makes landing the plane even more challenging, as another U-2 pilot said in 2019, reflecting: “You’re effectively wearing a fishbowl on your head.” But having the suit means the pilot is protected from the thin atmosphere if the plane were to have a problem or the pilot had to eject.  

[Related: Everything you could ever want to know about flying the U-2 spy plane]

The point of the aircraft is to gather information. “It is used to spy, and collect intelligence on others,” says Harrison. “It has been upgraded and modernized over the years, with airframe modernization, obviously the sensors have gotten better and better.” The U-2 famously used to shoot photographs using old-school wet film with what’s called the Optical Bar Camera, and stopped doing so only in the summer of 2022. 

As for the recent photo of the surveillance balloon from the U-2, a reporter for NPR speculates that it was taken specifically “just south of Bellflower” Missouri, as did a Twitter user with the handle @obretix. 

“It’s a pretty incredible photo,” Harrison reflects. “It does show that the US was actively surveilling this balloon up close throughout its transit of the United States. It’s interesting that the U-2 pilot was actually able to capture a selfie like that while flying at that altitude.”

On February 6, a Popular Science sibling website, the War Zone, reported that the US had employed U-2 aircraft to keep tabs on the balloon. And on February 8, CNN reported before this photo’s official release that a “pilot took a selfie in the cockpit that shows both the pilot and the surveillance balloon itself,” citing US officials.

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In December, a special fighter jet made multiple flights out of Edwards Air Force Base in California. The orange, white, and blue aircraft, which is based on an F-16, seats two people. A fighter jet taking to the skies with a human or two on board is not remarkable, but what is indeed remarkable about those December flights is that for periods of time, artificial intelligence flew the jet. 

As the exploits of generative AI like ChatGPT grip the public consciousness, artificial intelligence has also quietly slipped into the military cockpit—at least in these December tests.  

The excursions were part of a DARPA program called ACE, which stands for Air Combat Evolution. The AI algorithms came from different sources, including a company called Shield AI as well as the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Broadly speaking, the tests represent the Pentagon exploring just how effective AI can be at carrying out tasks in planes typically done by people, such as dogfighting. 

“In total, ACE algorithms were flown on several flights with each sortie lasting approximately an hour and a half,” Lt. Col. Ryan Hefron, the DARPA program manager for ACE, notes to PopSci via email. “In addition to each performer team controlling the aircraft during dogfighting scenarios, portions of each sortie were dedicated to system checkout.”

The flights didn’t come out of nowhere. In August of 2020, DARPA put artificial intelligence algorithms through their paces in an event called the AlphaDogfight Trials. That competition didn’t involve any actual aircraft flying through the skies, but it did conclude with an AI agent defeating a human flying a digital F-16. The late 2022 flights show that software agents that can make decisions and dogfight have been given a chance to actually fly a real fighter jet. “This is the first time that AI has controlled a fighter jet performing within visual range (WVR) maneuvering,” Hefron notes.

[Related: I flew in an F-16 with the Air Force and oh boy did it go poorly]

So how did it go? “We didn’t run into any major issues but did encounter some differences compared to simulation-based results, which is to be expected when transitioning from virtual to live,” Hefron said in a DARPA press release. 

Andrew Metrick, a fellow in the defense program at the Center for New American Security, says that he is “often quite skeptical of the applications of AI in the military domain,” with that skepticism focused on just how much practical use these systems will have. But in this case—an artificial intelligence algorithm in the cockpit—he says he’s more of a believer. “This is one of those areas where I think there’s actually a lot of promise for AI systems,” he says. 

The December flights represent “a pretty big step,” he adds. “Getting these things integrated into a piece of flying hardware is non-trivial. It’s one thing to do it in a synthetic environment—it’s another thing to do it on real hardware.” 

Not all of the flights were part of the DARPA program. All told, the Department of Defense says that a dozen sorties took place, with some of them run by DARPA and others run by a program out of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). The DOD notes that the DARPA tests were focused more on close aerial combat, while the other tests from AFRL involved situations in which the AI was competing against “a simulated adversary” in a “beyond-vision-range” scenario. In other words, the two programs were exploring how the AI did in different types of aerial contests or situations. 

Breaking Defense reported earlier this year that the flights kicked off December 9. The jet flown by the AI is based on an F-16D, and is called VISTA; it has space for two people. “The front seat pilot conducted the test points,” Hefron explains via email, “while the backseater acted as a safety pilot who maintained broader situational awareness to ensure the safety of the aircraft and crew.”

One of the algorithms that flew the jet came from a company called Shield AI. In the AlphaDogfight trials of 2020, the leading AI agent was made by Heron Systems, which Shield AI acquired in 2021. Shield’s CEO, Ryan Tseng, is bullish on the promise of AI to outshine humans in the cockpit. “I do not believe that there’s an air combat mission where AI pilots should not be decisively better than their human counterparts, for much of the mission profile,” he says. That said, he notes that “I believe the best teams will be a combination of AI and people.” 

One such future for teaming between a person and AI could involve AI-powered fighter-jet-like drones such as the Ghost Bat working with a crewed aircraft like an F-35, for example. 

It’s still early days for the technology. Metrick, of the Center for New American Security, wonders how the AI agent would be able to handle a situation in which the jet does not respond as expected, like if the aircraft stalls or experiences some other type of glitch. “Can the AI recover from that?” he wonders. A human may be able to handle “an edge case” like that more easily than software.

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How does an airplane stay in the air? Whether you’ve pondered the question while flying or not, it remains a fascinating, complex topic. Here’s a quick look at the physics involved with an airplane’s flight, as well as a glimpse at a misconception surrounding the subject, too. 

First, picture an aircraft—a commercial airliner, such as a Boeing or Airbus transport jet—cruising in steady flight through the sky. That flight involves a delicate balance of opposing forces. “Wings produce lift, and lift counters the weight of the aircraft,” says Holger Babinsky, a professor of aerodynamics at the University of Cambridge. 

“That lift [or upward] force has to be equal to, or greater than, the weight of the airplane—that’s what keeps it in the air,” says William Crossley, the head of the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Purdue University. 

Meanwhile, the aircraft’s engines are giving it the thrust it needs to counter the drag it experiences from the friction of the air around it. “As you’re flying forward, you have to have enough thrust to at least equal the drag—it can be higher than the drag if you’re accelerating; it can be lower than the drag if you’re slowing down—but in steady, level flight, the thrust equals drag,” Crossley notes.

[Related: How high do planes fly?]

“You can clearly feel the lift force,” Babinsky says. In this straightforward scenario, the air is hitting the bottom of your hand, being deflected downward, and in a Newtonian sense (see law three), your hand is being pushed upward. 

Follow the curve 

But a wing, of course, is not shaped like your hand, and there are additional factors to consider. Two key points to keep in mind with wings are that the front of a wing—the leading edge—is curved, and overall, they also take on a shape called an airfoil when you look at them in cross-section. 

[Related: How pilots land their planes in powerful crosswinds]

The curved leading edge of a wing is important because airflow tends to “follow a curved surface,” Babinsky says. He says he likes to demonstrate this concept by pointing a hair dryer at the rounded edge of a bucket. The airflow will attach to the bucket’s curved surface and make a turn, potentially even snuffing out a candle on the other side that’s blocked by the bucket. Here’s a charming old video that appears to demonstrate the same idea. “Once the flow attaches itself to the curved surface, it likes to stay attached—[although] it will not stay attached forever,” he notes.

With a wing—and picture it angled up somewhat, like your hand out the window of the car—what happens is that the air encounters the rounded leading edge. “On the upper surface, the air will attach itself, and bend round, and actually follow that incidence, that angle of attack, very nicely,” he says. 

Keep things low-pressure

Ultimately, what happens is that the air moving over the top of the wing attaches to the curved surface and turns, or flows downward somewhat: a low-pressure area forms, and the air also travels faster. Meanwhile, the air is hitting the underside of the wing, like the wind hits your hand as it sticks out the car window, creating a high-pressure area. Voila: the wing has a low-pressure area above it, and higher pressure below. “The difference between those two pressures gives us lift,” Babinsky says. 

This video depicts the general process well:

Babinsky notes that more work is being done by that lower pressure area above the wing than the higher pressure one below the wing. You can think of the wing as deflecting the air flow downwards on both the top and bottom. On the lower surface of the wing, the deflection of the flow “is actually smaller than the flow deflection on the upper surface,” he notes. “Most airfoils, a very, very crude rule of thumb would be that two-thirds of the lift is generated there [on the top surface], sometimes even more,” Babinksy says.

Can you bring it all together for me one last time?

Sure! Gloria Yamauchi, an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Ames Research Center, puts it this way. “So we have an airplane, flying through the air; the air approaches the wing; it is turned by the wing at the leading edge,” she says. (By “turned,” she means that it changes direction, like the way a car plowing down the road forces the air to change its direction to go around it.) “The velocity of the air changes as it goes over the wing’s surface, above and below.” 

“The velocity over the top of the wing is, in general, greater than the velocity below the wing,” she continues, “and that means the pressure above the wing is lower than the pressure below the wing, and that difference in pressure generates an upward lifting force.”

Is your head constantly spinning with outlandish, mind-burning questions? If you’ve ever wondered what the universe is made of, what would happen if you fell into a black hole, or even why not everyone can touch their toes, then you should be sure to listen and subscribe to Ask Us Anything, a podcast from the editors of Popular Science. Ask Us Anything hits Apple, Anchor, Spotify, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every Tuesday and Thursday. Each episode takes a deep dive into a single query we know you’ll want to stick around for.

This story has been updated. It was originally published in July, 2022.

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A plane drawing a white contrail line across a blue sky is clearly thousands of feet above the ground, but how high is it flying exactly? It turns out that the precise altitude an airliner has at any given point in the flight has to do with a variety of factors, such as the plane’s weight, the temperature and weather, what the pilot requests, a protocol involving what direction the plane is headed, and of course what air traffic control says to do. 

When it comes to aircraft altitudes, here’s what’s up. 

On another plane

“In most cases, airliners will fly in the middle 30,000s [in terms of feet],” says John Cox, a retired commercial airline pilot who now heads a consulting firm called Safety Operating Systems. “They may be as high as 40 to 41,000, but that’s relatively rare.” 

Tom Adcock, a retired air traffic controller and now the director of safety and technology for the labor union National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA), gives a similar estimate, pegging most traffic as occurring in the “upper 30s” and some of it reaching altitudes of 41,000 or 43,000. A Boeing 757 can fly as high as 42,000 and a 767 at 43,000; 747-400s can go higher. Various aircraft types have different maximum service ceilings.

[Related: The illuminating tech inside night vision goggles, explained]

Controllers take into account the compass direction an aircraft is flying in when giving a pilot an altitude. Although altitudes like 38,000 and 39,000 are both even numbers, “38” and “39” are even and odd. Westbound flights get even numbers like 38,000 feet, while eastbound flights receive odd numbers like 39,000. That way, aircraft traveling in opposite directions have a built-in amount of vertical spacing between them. Aircraft heading northeast or southeast would still travel at an odd altitude, while northwest or southwest would be even. “There are exceptions to the rule,” says Cox, noting that hypothetically, if he was heading east at night and wanted 32,000 feet, he’d still request it. “Worse they can do is say no.” 

In a way, that odd-even system mirrors a pattern on the ground far below, where interstate highways historically received numbers that reflect their directions: Interstates that run east-west got even numbers (Route 80, for example), with the lowest numbers toward the south of the country, and the north-south interstates got odd numbers, with the lowest numbers beginning in the west (Route 5). Here’s more on that road number system.

Getting a better altitude 

A number of variables go into determining the precise altitude an aircraft occupies at any given time, and Cox says generally higher altitudes are better. “You want to be pretty much as high as you can,” he says. “The jet engines are more efficient at higher altitudes, and there’s less air resistance.” A pilot is incentivized to burn less fuel because they would prefer to conclude their flight with more fuel in reserve, rather than less, to give them more options in case of delays while airborne, Cox says. 

He says that higher-is-better rule of thumb holds true on brief hops, too. “You’d be amazed—even on short flights, the most [fuel] efficient way to do it is climb the airplanes up to high altitude, pull the power back, and then start back down,” he says. “I may run up to 31,000 feet and I won’t be there five minutes.”

[Related: Let’s talk about how planes fly]

The flight management computer gives a pilot information about the plane’s optimal altitude as well as their maximum altitude, taking into account the aircraft’s weight and the temperature of the air. An aircraft can climb higher after it burns off fuel and becomes lighter. 

“Pilots will stay as close to either optimum altitude or max altitude as they can,” Cox says. The goal is smooth air, and low headwinds if flying west—and climbing high can accomplish that. Meanwhile, an air traffic controller may ask a plane to climb to a higher altitude than the aircraft can manage at that time, so the pilot will need to decline the request. 

Commercial jets aren’t the only planes in the skies. A pilot in a Cessna 172 out for a Sunday jaunt will be below 10,000 feet (the planes aren’t pressurized), perhaps puttering around at 5,000 feet or so. A commercial turboprop would be above those aircraft but below the jets—a Bombardier Q400 like Alaska Airlines flies isn’t made to fly above 25,000 feet, for example. Turboprops like those might be in the “low 20s,” says Adcock, of NATCA. 

At the tippy top are the jewelry-encrusted people in private jets, where Learjets and Gulfstreams occupy the rarefied air at around 45,000 or higher, even up to 51,000 feet.

Something special happens even higher. Cox recalls that the supersonic Concorde flew at 60,000 feet. “When you get that high, the sky gets real, real, real dark blue, and you can see the curvature of the Earth,” he says. (Space itself doesn’t technically start until you get much, much higher.) “Having been on Concorde, and been at 60,000 feet, you can see it pretty clearly there.”

The post How high do planes fly? It depends on if they’re going east or west. appeared first on Popular Science.

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Something remarkable has happened in Hoboken, New Jersey over the past six years: No one has died in a traffic crash since early January, 2017. 

But Hoboken, with a population of some 60,000 people, unfortunately is not representative of the United States as a whole, where traffic deaths have risen since the beginning of the pandemic. In 2020, more than 38,800 people died because of traffic crashes, a nearly 7 percent increase from the year before. And then they climbed again in 2021, up by more than 10 percent compared to 2020 and hitting nearly 43,000. 

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg draws a comparison between this problem and casualties from firearms. “Most Americans know that there’s a difference between the rate of gun death in the US and in most developed countries. I’m not sure most Americans know that something similar is going on with roadway deaths,” Buttigieg tells PopSci. “Not the same disparity—but a comparable pattern, where a lot of other places that also have cars and drivers and advanced economies don’t have the level of carnage that we do.” 

That carnage has continued into 2022, although initial data from the first nine months of that year suggest that traffic deaths may have declined a tiny amount compared to the same time frame in 2021. But pedestrian and cyclist deaths still continued to climb last year, as they have throughout the pandemic—vulnerable people on the roads are being killed by vehicles, and in climbing numbers. 

Here’s why experts think it’s been happening, how technology can help (even as it also causes problems), and what to know about the simple changes that Hoboken has made to try to make its streets safer. 

Why did traffic deaths spike as the pandemic began?

“One prevailing theory is that you saw less traffic, higher speeds, and the crashes that happened were more likely to be fatal,” Buttigieg says. 

That’s a big piece of the equation, says Leah Shahum, the director of the Vision Zero Network, a nonprofit that aims to help connect communities with one another to fight traffic deaths. Another underlying issue is that “we’ve supersized our roads,” she says, allowing people to speed when congestion is absent. “And then secondly, our vehicles are getting a lot bigger.” 

Buttigieg also notes that in general, the tech inside some vehicles right now acts as a double-edged sword. 

He mentions in-car systems where the vehicle might track your eyes to see if you’re paying attention while cruise control is engaged. “What that means is that we have some technologies that are being developed to protect you from over-reliance on some of the other technologies that are being developed,” he says. “And it just shows you what a complicated and sensitive time we’re in.” 

Complicating the landscape are terms like “Autopilot,” the Tesla feature whose name alone implies that the vehicle is on a type of autopilot, like an aircraft. “There is no commercially available technology that doesn’t require that you be paying attention and driving,” Buttigieg says. “Words like ‘autopilot’ I think are extremely problematic.” 

[Related: What can ‘smart intersections’ do for a city? Chattanooga aims to find out.]

Tesla is in the crosshairs of the Justice Department and reportedly the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a part of the DOT. (Meanwhile, an option from Mercedes-Benz called Drive Pilot achieves what’s known as Level 3 autonomy, but is only legal in Nevada and comes with a speed restriction.) 

“I think we also need to recognize the responsibility that exists outside of just the technical design of the vehicle, to how you market, how you talk about it, and what expectations you create for drivers,” Buttigieg says.

How do you protect against ‘murderous’ human drivers? 

Advanced driver assistance tech can be a benefit, too, he argues. “I think we need to be very thoughtful about emerging technologies because they hold huge promise,” Buttigieg adds. “The track record of human drivers is borderline murderous.” 

He says that there is potential for in-vehicle tech to help improve the situation, arguing that it could “represent a major safety” improvement. But there are also low-tech changes that cities can make to their streetscape that can protect people from driving machines made of metal, glass, and plastic. 

Hoboken holds clues. The current mayor, Ravinder Bhalla, says that when he was a council member, an 89-year-old woman, Agnes Acerra, was killed in 2015 while crossing Washington Street after being struck by a vehicle. Bhalla attended Acerra’s funeral and wake. “That’s when it really hit home for me,” he says. “In the years that have passed, we’ve made multiple improvements that could have avoided that crash.” 

One of those, he says, are curb extensions. A curb extension, as the name implies, extends the sidewalk space out into the street to about the width of a car. “It reduces the distance that someone like Agnes would have to cross the street, thereby reducing the possibility of being hit by a vehicle,” Bhalla says. “It increases the visibility for both pedestrians and drivers” because the curb extension makes it harder for a vehicle to park right next to the crosswalk. 

They’ve also reduced the speed limit to 20 mph in the city. Shahum, of the Vision Zero Network, says that changes like these are important. “Most importantly, at the local level at least, it really is about redesigning streets—it really is about slowing drivers down so that there’s more safe, comfortable, shared space,” she says. 

[Related: It’s an especially dangerous time to be a pedestrian in America]

Bhalla says that they have made a tweak to the way the signals work when pedestrians cross, too. “Pedestrians have 30 seconds to cross Washington Street,” he says. Baked into that time is a “pedestrian-only interval” that lasts seven seconds. “All traffic lights are red, and only pedestrians can cross the street” during that time, he says. 

Bhalla’s advice to other cities is to move both slowly and quickly, depending on the issue. The slow approach refers to routine street maintenance, and using that moment to make safety tweaks. “We do that on an incremental, block-by-block basis, and I think over time, in the aggregate, the data shows positive results,” he says. The fast approach refers to acting when something urgently needs a change, like examining areas with high accidents. 

It’s not copy-paste from place to place, though. “Find out what works well in your own community, and do those things as well as possible,” he says. 

Can you change culture? 

Pedestrian deaths in the first three-quarters of 2022 climbed by 2 percent, and cyclists deaths by 8 percent, even as the total traffic fatalities declined a tiny bit. In 2020, more than 6,500 pedestrians were killed because of traffic crashes, and some groups are much more vulnerable than others: the DOT reports in the Safety Strategy they released last year that people who are American Indian or Alaskan Native, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, and Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islanders are all more likely to be killed as pedestrians. 

“There are a lot of measures that we can take that make a difference” with the pedestrian and cyclist fatality problem, Buttigieg says. That involves “making sure that we have more separated bike lanes, making sure that we have better lighting—basically reducing the frequency and the severity of situations where a pedestrian or bike and a vehicle can cross each other’s paths to begin with.”

[Related: US pedestrian deaths are reaching a new high]

“Part of it also I think though, beyond the physics of it, is frankly the culture—making sure that drivers are aware,” he adds. 

So how does one go about changing culture, and trying to get drivers to pay attention? He points out that street engineering can play a role in how people act. “We know that if the road is designed a certain way, it can force you to pay attention at a complex intersection, or nudge you toward driving at a safe speed,” he says, “and so these are among the things that I’m eager to see developed through the hundreds of planning grants that we’re supporting in different communities around the country.” 

Those grants total hundreds of millions of dollars and were announced on Wednesday. For example, they include $9 million for a “Complete Streets Project” on La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles that will “include new pedestrian crosswalks and signals.” On the other coast, a project in Boston is also getting $9 million for changes like “raised crosswalks, pedestrian island refuges, street right-sizing, curb extensions,” and more. Here’s the list. 

The cultural issue is on Bhalla’s mind, too. “There is a certain culture and cultural adaptation that’s occurring in Hoboken,” he says. “We’ve come to realize that everyone is a pedestrian at some point, even if you’re a motorist.” After all, he says, drivers have to walk to their cars to get in them in the first place. 

The post Pete Buttigieg on how to improve the deadly track record of US drivers appeared first on Popular Science.

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Sometime later this year—perhaps this summer, perhaps this fall—an electric aircraft from NASA, the X-57, is set to take flight in California. It’s what NASA describes as its “first all-electric experiment aircraft,” and when it does lift off the ground, it won’t look the way that NASA has been depicting the plane on its website.

Instead of a whopping 14 electric motors and propellers, the aircraft will have just two. But those two motors, powered by more than 5,000 cylindrical battery cells in the aircraft’s fuselage, should be enough to get it up in the air before 2023 is over, which is when the X-57 program is set to power down, too. 

Here’s what to know about how the plane will work, the challenges the program has faced, and how lessons from spaceflight helped inform the details of its battery system. 

Modification 2 

If the plane does indeed take flight this year as planned, it will do so in a form called Modification 2, which involves one electric motor and propeller on each wing giving the aircraft the thrust it needs to take to the skies.

While the aeronautics and space agency had hoped to fly the plane—which is based on a Tecnam P2006T—in additional configurations, known as Modifications 3 and 4, that won’t happen. Why? Because making a plane that flies safely on just electricity is hard, and the program is only funded through 2023. (IEEE Spectrum has more on the program’s original plans.)

“We’ve been learning a lot over the years, and we thought we’d be learning through flight tests—it turns out we had a lot of lessons to learn during the design and integration and airworthiness qualification steps, and so we ended up spending more time and resources on that,” says Sean Clark, the principle investigator for the X-57 program at NASA. 

“And that’s been hugely valuable,” he adds. “But it means that we’re not going to end up having resources for those Mod 4 [or 3] flights.” 

It will still fly as an all-electric plane, but in Mod 2, with two motors. 

Exploding transistors 

One glitch that the team had to iron out before the aircraft can safely take flight involves components that electricity from the batteries have to travel through before they reach the motors. The problem was with transistor modules inside the inverters, which change electricity from DC to AC. 

“We were using these modules that are several transistors in a package—they were specced to be able to tolerate the types of environments we were expecting to put it in,” says Clark. “But every time we would test them, they would fail. We would have transistors just blowing up in our environmental test chamber.” 

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

A component failure—such as a piece of equipment blowing up—is the type of issue that aircraft makers prefer to resolve on the ground. Clark says they figured it out. “We did a lot of dissection of them—after they explode, it’s hard to know what went wrong,” he notes, lightheartedly, in a manner suggesting an engineer faced with a messy problem. The solution was newer hardware and “redesigning the inverter system basically from the ground up,” he notes. 

They are now “working really well,” he adds. “We’ve put a full set through qualification, and they’ve all passed.”

Lessons from space

Traditional aircraft burn fossil fuels, an obviously flammable and explosive substance, to power their engines. Those working on electric aircraft, powered by batteries, need to ensure that the battery cells don’t spark fires, either. Last year in Kansas, for example, an FAA-sponsored test featured a pack of aviation batteries being dropped by 50 feet to ensure they could handle the impact. They did. 

In the X-57, the batteries are a model known as 18650 cells, made by Samsung. The aircraft uses 5,120 of them, divided into 16 modules of 320 cells each. An individual module, which includes both battery cells and packaging, weighs around 51 pounds, Clark says. The trick is to make sure all of these components are packaged in the right way to avoid a fire, even if one battery experiences a failure. In other words, failure was an option, but they plan to manage any failure so that it does not start a blaze. “We found that there was not an industry standard for how to package these cells into a high-voltage, high-power pack, that would also protect them against cell failures,” Clark says. 

[Related: The Air Force wants to modernize air refueling, but it’s been a bumpy ride]

Help came from higher up. “We ended up redesigning the battery pack based on a lot of input from some of the design team that works on the space station here at NASA,” he adds. He notes that lithium batteries on the International Space Station, as well as in the EVA suits astronauts use and a device called the pistol grip tool, were relevant examples in the process. The key takeaways involved the spacing between the battery cells, as well how to handle the heat if a cell did malfunction, like by experiencing a thermal runaway. “What the Johnson [Space Center] team found was one of the most effective strategies is to actually let that heat from that cell go into the aluminum structure, but also have the other cells around it absorb a little bit of heat each,” he explains.

NASA isn’t alone in exploring the frontier of electric aviation, which represents one way that the aviation industry could be greener for short flights. Others working in the space include Beta Technologies, Joby Aviation, Archer Aviation, Wisk Aero, and Eviation with a plane called Alice. One prominent company, Kitty Hawk, shuttered last year.

Sometime this year, the X-57 should fly for the first time, likely making multiple sorties. “I’m still really excited about this technology,” says Clark. “I’m looking forward to my kids being able to take short flights in electric airplanes in 10, 15 years—it’s going to be a really great step for aviation.”

Watch a brief video about the aircraft, below:

The post NASA aims to fly its experimental electric plane this year appeared first on Popular Science.

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Step into a commercial airliner like a Boeing 737, take a seat, and look out the window: You’ll likely be able to see the wing protruding out from the lower part of the plane’s body, partly blocking your view of the ground below. 

But today, NASA announced that it will be working with Boeing to produce an experimental new aircraft demonstrator that looks radically different from the jets that passengers are used to seeing. The flying machine will feature long, skinny wings that extend from the top of the plane’s fuselage, above the windows, not below. And because these wings will be more slender and more lengthy than typical wings on commercial aircraft, they will be supported by trusses. 

The reason for creating this new plane, which will be called the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator, is simple: To find a way to make the aircraft much more fuel efficient and better for the environment. The figure that NASA is shooting for is as much as 30 percent better efficiency, although that radically better efficiency gain wouldn’t come from new wings alone. 

At a press conference in Washington, DC today, Pamela Melroy, NASA’s deputy administrator, said the initiative was a “major new NASA commitment to reducing carbon emissions in the air transportation system,” which she referred to as “one of the most difficult industries to decarbonize.” 

In addition to those long, skinny wings, the aircraft will have two engines—one under each wing—and a tail in the rear shaped like a T. It will be a single-aisle aircraft like a Boeing 737 or an Airbus A320, and not a wide-body with two aisles, like a 787 or an A350. The goal is that planes like this would serve the typical, workaday flights of commercial air travel, connecting destinations like New York City with Chicago. 

The star of the show is the wing.

“We’re going to reduce as much as 30 percent the fuel consumption—with better engines, and look at this wing,” Bill Nelson, NASA’s administrator, said at the event. The wing is “so long and thin, it has to have a brace.” 

In addition to supporting the wings—which are what give an airplane the lift it needs to fly—the trusses, or braces, can pull off another trick. “You can actually get lift on this brace, as well as [from] the wing, [like] the old concept of the old biplanes,” Nelson added. 

Aircraft engineering is all about tradeoffs: This experimental plane needs those trusses to support the skinny wings, but there’s a good reason for the wings to be long and skinny in the first place. “It’s our plan to demonstrate this extra-long thin wing—stabilized by the braces—that will make commercial airliners much more fuel efficient by creating less drag,” he said. 

The plane’s design is technically referred to as a TTBW, which stands for Transonic Truss-Braced Wing. In May of 2020, Popular Science took a close look at NASA’s efforts regarding such an aircraft. Aerospace engineers say that the reason why long slender wings produce less drag is because they can reduce vortices at the wing tips. A NASA senior aerospace engineer, Kevin James, explained it at the time like this: “Out at the tip of the wing, where there’s no more wing beyond what the air can see, the air is very clever, and it will simply just go around the tip,” he said. But by making the wings longer, there is “more lift that we can generate, more efficiently.”

[Related: The illuminating tech inside night vision goggles, explained]

Drawbacks to configurations like this include the fact that a long, narrow wing could flutter, like a bridge or a sign blowing in strong winds, which is why a plane with these wings needs to have trusses. And of course, if aircraft with this design end up taking the place of narrowbody planes like 737s, they’ll need to fit into the gate at the airport—and long wings could make that challenging. 

NASA said today that along with Boeing, they plan to get this futuristic, more-fuel efficient bird flying by 2028, and even said that planes like this could be in service in the 2030s.

Globally, aviation represented more than 2 percent of carbon dioxide emissions in 2021 from “energy-related” sources, according to the International Energy Agency. In addition to exploring new aircraft designs like the TTBW in the form of the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator, there are other ways of trying to make aircraft greener, including running smaller planes on purely electric power to using sustainable aviation fuel. “I’m still very concerned about the carbon footprint of global air travel,” Melroy said at the beginning of the event. “The aviation sector is a giant in the global economy, and we have to take that seriously.” 

The post This ‘airliner of the future’ has a radical new wing design appeared first on Popular Science.

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If you want to be able to see in the dark, a good first step is to turn on the lights. That’s why cars have headlights, nocturnal hikers wear headlamps, and dog-walkers carry flashlights after the sun sets. Adding artificial light to the scene makes it knowable. 

But there’s another approach to seeing in the dark that involves a piece of military gear: night vision goggles. If you’ve ever seen a green-tinted scene in the movies and wondered how this type of equipment works, here’s a look at the three-step process that takes place inside this type of device. 

Imagine a single photon entering the goggles. The initial trick that the night vision device pulls off involves that incoming photon. “We convert that photon to an electron through a photocathode,” Renzi says. “That’s a specialized material that’s there to make that transition from a single photon of light into that electron.”

In brief, this step involves converting particles from the domain of light to the domain of electricity. 

[Related: Let’s talk about how planes fly]

The next step involves boosting the signal from that electron, and for that, the device uses onboard battery power, like from an AA battery or two. “That electron multiplies significantly,” Renzi says, noting that it could be multiplied “tens of thousands” of times. While the part of the device that converted the photon to an electron is called a photocathode, this part that turns the volume up on the electron is known as the microchannel plate. 

Finally, the information needs to be transferred back into the visual realm, so that whoever is looking through the goggles can see the scene. That happens thanks to a phosphor screen, which the user can see when they look through the eyepiece. “The phosphor screen is what takes that energy from those electrons and converts it back into visible light,” Renzi says. 

White and black is the new green and black

That last stage is where the traditional green and black images are produced, but Renzi says that instead of green, the more modern devices today display the scene in black and white. “You might say that a green and a white are equivalent in terms of measurable performance, but the human eye perceives white and black better than it does green versus black,” he argues. The white-versus-green phosphor distinction also surfaces when it comes to night vision equipment that’s for sale. 

So in brief, to make a dark scene more seeable, these gadgets take in photons, convert them to electrons, amplify those electrons, and then convert that information back to the visible again. In some cases, night vision goggles will include “an illuminator,” which actually produces a small amount of new light to brighten up the scene, he says.  

Renzi notes that the parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that these types of night-vision goggles are perceiving comes from both the visible range and the near infrared; the near infrared is the part of the spectrum that’s found right next to the red part of the visible spectrum. This cheesy NASA video breaks that spectrum down:

Traditional night vision goggles focus on the light from both the visible and near-infrared parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, which are, along with shortwave infrared, “part of what we call the reflective bands—where you’re still looking at light that bounces off something,” he says. 

Meanwhile, a different piece of gear—a thermal camera—sees a different part of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is longwave infrared; that’s emissive, as opposed to reflected light. That part of the spectrum, Renzi says, is “outside of the visuals of your traditional night-vision goggles.” A gizmo from L3 Harris called the ENVG-B actually combines both traditional night vision goggles, with their focus on the visible spectrum and the near infrared (both of which are reflected light), together with thermal sensing from the longwave infrared area that can see emissive body heat, for example. 

The difference between these two types of information is imaginable in a scenario like this: “Let’s say somebody was off in the distance and behind some leaves,” he says. “You would likely pick up that heat with the long-wave infrared, [which] might have been more difficult with [just] the reflective band—but you might not know much about it at that point—you would just see that there’s some heat there.” 

Ultimately, he says that the technology that allows people to see in the dark has evolved over the decades. Older systems with a “passive imaging” approach needed “a full-moon scenario or some sort of ambient light,” he says. Today, night vision goggles can “use starlight.” 

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An intersection is a complex place, even when regulated by a traffic signal. They’re full of vehicles with potentially distracted drivers trying to inch across the asphalt, and pedestrians with different levels of mobility attempting to use crosswalks. Throw bikes and other two-wheelers into the mix, and it can get hectic and hazardous, especially for the people not protected in machines made of metal and glass. 

There are other aspects of a modern urban streetscape as well, like operators of electric vehicles who want to find a place to charge. 

Experts hope that integrating more data-collection tech, in addition to traffic signals, can potentially help with issues like these. Chattanooga, Tennessee, is planning to create 86 new so-called smart intersections that are monitored by sensors such as lidar and cameras. 

The goal of making an intersection smart is “to be able to make sense of that intersection” based on the information provided by the sensors, says Mina Sartipi, the director of the Center for Urban Informatics and Progress at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. It will help them answer questions like: “Where are the cars? Where are the people? How close do they get to each other? How safe is it for a wheelchair [user]? Do we allow a disabled person, or an elderly [person], or a mom or a dad pushing a stroller, enough time to cross the street or not?” 

Adding the sensors will “make that environment observable,” she adds. 

[Related: It’s an especially dangerous time to be a pedestrian in America]

The project is supported by a $4.57 million grant from the US Department of Transportation, and builds on an already existing testbed of 11 other smart intersections in the same city. All told, the city will have nearly 100 smart intersections once the new ones come online. 

The DOT grant, she says, “basically brings transportation, energy, and people together.” The energy element comes from trying to connect people driving electric vehicles to charging stations if they need it, taking into account variables like if a station is available. 

Gathering data from intersections involves sensors like cameras and lidar, which use lasers to detect objects. And intersections, like people, are not all the same. “We do pay attention to the needs of each intersection as well,” she says. “It’s not necessarily copy-paste.” 

With lidar—which is also a key sensor that autonomous vehicles use to perceive the world around them—the data from those will be interpreted by a computer vision company called Seoul Robotics. “We interpret the information by looking at the objects that it sees in that world,” says William Muller, the vice president of business development at the company. “Those main three objects that we look at are people, vehicles, and bikes.”

“Because it’s all three-dimensional, it’s highly accurate,” he adds. “We’re within centimeters of accuracy, of knowing where those objects are in the three-dimensional space.” In an ideal world, the system could know if someone is crossing an intersection slowly, and the signals could take that into account—or even warn vehicles to be aware of them. 

To the west and south of Chattanooga, on an old airport runway in Texas, is a smart intersection used for research purposes at Texas A&M University’s RELLIS campus. “There’s a lot of paved surface there,” says Srinivasa Sunkari, a senior research engineer at Texas A&M Transportation Institute. Part of what makes the intersection smart, he says, is the detection sensors that it has, such as radar and a fish-eye camera. The intersection does not have regular traffic passing through it, but is used for tests. 

Sunkari says that smart intersection initiatives like in Chattanooga, “when done smartly, and when implemented with the right infrastructure, it gives an opportunity to improve pedestrian safety.” 

The project in Chattanooga starts later this year and is expected to last for three years. While connecting EV drivers with charging stations is the main focus of the $4.57 million grant, having nearly 100 intersections with rich sensor data flowing from them should allow researchers to study various aspects of them and ideally optimize the streetscape.

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In Kansas earlier this month, a large pack of aviation batteries plunged 50 feet from an orange-colored tower and smacked down below with a thud. The result of this test involving battery cells and gravity? The unit was ok! There was “no significant damage at the cell or pack level,” according to Beta Technologies, which supplied the pack and has created an electric aircraft that The New York Times has referred to as “the battery that flies.” 

Like jet fuel, lithium-ion batteries can be flammable, thanks to the liquid electrolyte within them as well as the fact that they store oodles of energy and can experience a fire-starting reaction called thermal runaway. And fire on an aircraft can be disastrous. 

This test, examining how a battery system holds up following a hard impact, took place at a facility called the National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR) in Wichita, Kansas. The FAA sponsored it. 

“This is the first time ever that anyone has run one of these 50-foot drop tests with a battery pack,” Gerardo Olivares, a senior research scientist at NIAR, said in the video of the test. “It’s going to help us define some of the future regulations and requirements for this technology.”

[Related: How a ‘digital twin’ of an Apache helicopter could help keep these old birds flying]

The 50-foot drop can mimic “emergency landing conditions,” NIAR said in a LinkedIn post yesterday, and noted that these tests are also “regulated for fuel cells and fuel tanks.”

Safer batteries that are thoroughly validated could help companies working on electric aircraft—among them Beta, Joby Aviation, Archer, Wisk Aero, and Eviation—continue to develop small flying machines that use electric motors instead of fossil fuels to transport people through the air. But the day when a regular paying passenger can climb aboard one and travel from place to place has not yet arrived. 

There’s been turbulence: In July, Bloomberg explored the incidents that have taken place among the startups working on this new aviation frontier. It highlights two battery-related fires that took place on the ground in 2020 involving Eviation and Lilium. (Other accidents include an uninhabited Joby aircraft that crashed in a test earlier this year and then experienced, as the NTSB has said in a preliminary report, a fire on the ground. There was also a 2019 crash involving an aircraft from the now-defunct Kitty Hawk, which was working on a single-seat electric aircraft.)

Beta itself, which supplied the 800-volt battery pack for this drop test, has experienced two fires with batteries on the ground. The most recent was in August, which Beta says involved a pack of batteries that was going to be tested and was not flight-approved. A Beta spokesperson notes via email: “The fire was quickly extinguished and there were no injuries or damage to our current test equipment or aircraft. We are grateful to the first responders who arrived on scene, and that the response plans and safety precautions we have in place worked effectively.”

Of course, aircraft powered by batteries, though newer, are certainly not the only type of flying machine subject to the dangers of fire or explosion. One especially tragic example is the 1996 explosion of a Boeing 747 operated by TWA, in which 230 people lost their lives. The NTSB noted last year, when announcing that they were decommissioning the reconstruction of flight 800 they had created, that “the probable cause of the crash was an explosion in the center wing fuel tank. Evidence indicated the explosion was the result of an electrical failure that ignited the flammable fuel/air mixture in the tank.”

One crucial aspect of aircraft safety is that the industry can learn from past accidents and mishaps, make changes, and move forward. 

Watch the battery drop test, below.

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The US Army just announced that it has made a historic decision about how its soldiers will be transported around battlefields in the future. After considering two different options—a helicopter from Sikorsky and Boeing and an aircraft from Bell Textron—it said that it is moving forward with the latter. 

Bell’s creation is called the V-280 Valor. But although it can take off and land vertically like a helicopter, it’s technically not a helicopter. It’s a tiltrotor aircraft. With the V-280, Bell won the Army’s competition to create the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft, or FLRAA. “The FLRAA is intended to eventually replace the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, which has been in service for more than four decades,” the Army said in a press release on Dec. 5. 

“It’s the biggest Army helicopter decision in 40 years, since they selected the Black Hawk,” says J.J. Gertler, a senior associate in the aerospace security project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “This is the Army selecting what will be its main transport helicopter for an entire generation.”

With a tiltrotor aircraft, the rotors do what its name suggests—they can tilt. What that means in practice is that they can direct the thrust they produce towards the ground to allow it to take off and land vertically, and then adjust their positions to send that thrust backwards in forward flight, like the propellers on a traditional aircraft. The wing to which those tilting rotors are attached provides the aircraft with lift as it cruises forward. “There’s nothing out there that can compete with a tiltrotor when it comes to speed and range,” Bell’s program director for the FLRAA program, Ryan Ehinger, told PopSci last year. 

Bell says that the V-280 has traveled faster than 345 mph. The numbers that Sikorsky has revealed for how fast its candidate can go are less than 300 mph. 

The other tiltrotor aircraft in service today is the V-22 Osprey, which is made by Bell together with Boeing. But the V-280 Valor differs from the larger Osprey in some key ways, one of which is that when the rotors tilt on the Valor, the engines do not. Comparing the Valor to the Osprey, “the basic technology of tilting rotors is the same—all of the details are different,” Gertler says. “Bell learned extensively from the V-22 experience.”

[Related: Tilting rotors could help make Bell’s speedy new aircraft the next Black Hawk]

Bell’s competition from Sikorsky and Boeing in the FLRAA contest was a craft called the Defiant X, which sports a compound coaxial design: Two top rotors, one stacked on top of the other, spin in opposite directions from each other. This design was chosen to avoid a problem that occurs with traditional helicopters when they try to travel very quickly: When a helicopter’s blade retreats through the air in the opposite direction of the one the aircraft is traveling in, it can lose lift. 

“This was a fascinating competition because it wasn’t just between two helicopters—it was between two visions of what rotorcraft should be, or could be, in the future,” Gertler says. 

The Defiant X helicopter shares a design approach with a smaller Sikorsky helicopter called Raider X that’s a candidate for a separate competition called FARA. That program also involves Bell, with its 360 Invictus, which is a more traditional helicopter that has partially detachable wings. Meanwhile, the US Air Force’s next-gen bomber, revealed last week, shares a similar name as one of these candidates: the B-21 Raider. 

In a statement following the Army’s decision on the FLRAA program announcement, Sikorsky said that they “remain confident” in their candidate and that they “will evaluate our next steps after reviewing feedback from the Army.”

Now that the contract has been awarded, Gertler notes that it could be protested. If Sikorsky and Boeing ask for a review, for example, it might slow down the process. 

It will be some time before the FLRAA is fielded and soldiers are flying around in a Bell-made tiltrotor—likely not until the next decade. Defense News noted that this new aircraft will start doing Black-Hawk-like tasks “around 2030.”

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On Friday, the public finally got a glimpse at the Air Force’s next bomber, the B-21 Raider. Northrop Grumman, which is producing it, rolled out the futuristic flying machine at a ceremony in Palmdale, California, on Dec. 2. It’s a stealthy aircraft, meaning that it’s designed to have a minimal radar signature. It’s also intended to carry both conventional and nuclear weapons. 

The new aircraft will eventually join a bomber fleet that currently consists of three different aircraft types: the old, not-stealthy B-52s, the supersonic B-1Bs, and the B-2 flying wing, which is the B-21’s most direct ancestor. 

Here’s what to know about the B-21 Raider.

A throwback to 1988

At the B-21’s unveiling, the US Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, referred to the new plane as “the first bomber of the 21st century.” Indeed, the bomber models it will eventually replace include the 1980s-era aircraft, the B-2 Spirit. 

As Peter Westwick recounts in his history of low-observable aircraft in the United States, Stealth, two aircraft makers competed against each other to build the B-2. Northrop prevailed against Lockheed to build the stealth bomber, while Lockheed had previously beaten Northrop when it came to creating the first stealth fighter: the F-117. Northrop scored the contract to build the B-2 in late 1981, and rolled out the craft just over seven years later, in 1988. 

The 1988 roll-out event, Westwick writes, included “no fewer than 41 Air Force generals,” and an audience of 2,000 people. “A tractor towed the plane out of the hangar, the crowd went wild, the press snapped photos, and then the tractor pushed it back out of sight,” he writes. It flew for the first time in 1989.

[Related: The B-21 bomber won’t need a drone escort, thank you very much]

Today, the B-2 represents the smallest segment of the US bomber fleet, by the numbers. “We only bought 21 of them,” says Todd Harrison, a defense analyst at Metrea Strategic Insights. “One has crashed, one is used for testing, and at any given time, several others will be in maintenance—so the reality is we have far too few stealthy bombers in our inventory, and the only way to get more was to design and build a whole new bomber.” 

The new bomber

The B-21, when it does fly, will join the old group of bombers. Those planes, such as the B-1, “are really aging, and are hard to keep in the air—they’re very expensive to fly, and they just don’t have the capabilities that we need in the bomber fleet of today and in the future,” Harrison says. The B-52s date to the early 1960s; one B-52 pilot once told Popular Science that being at the controls of that aircraft feels like “flying a museum.” If the B-52 is officially called the Stratofortress, it’s also been called the Stratosaurus. (A likely future scenario is that the bomber fleet eventually becomes just two models: B-52s, which are getting new engines, and the B-21.)

[Related: Inside a training mission with a B-52 bomber, the aircraft that will not die]

With the B-21, the view offered by the unveiling video is just of the aircraft from the front, a brief vision of a futuristic plane. “They’re not likely to reveal the really interesting stuff about the B-21,” observes Harrison. “What’s most interesting is what they can’t show us.” That includes internal as well as external attributes. 

Publicly revealing an aircraft like this represents a calculated decision to show that a capability exists without revealing too much about it. “You want to reveal things that you think will help deter Russia or China from doing things that might provoke us into war,” he says. “But, on the other hand, you don’t want to show too much, because you don’t want to make it easy for your adversary to develop plans and technologies to counter your capabilities.”

Indeed, the way that Secretary of Defense Austin characterized the B-21 on Dec. 2 walked that line. “The B-21 looks imposing, but what’s under the frame, and the space-age coatings, is even more impressive,” he said. He then spoke about its range, stealth attributes, and other characteristics in generalities. (The War Zone, a sibling website to PopSci, has deep analysis on the aircraft here and has interviewed the pilots who will likely fly it for the first time here.)

Mark Gunzinger, the director for future concepts and capability assessments at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, says that the B-21 rollout, which he attended, “was very carefully staged.” 

[Related: The stealth helicopters used in the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden are still cloaked in mystery]

“There were multiple lights on each side of the aircraft that were shining out into the audience,” he recalls. “The camera angles were very carefully controlled, reporters were told what they could and could not do in terms of taking photos, and of course, the aircraft was not rolled out all the way—half of it was still pretty much inside the hanger, so people could not see the tail section.” 

“The one word you heard the most during the presentation from all the speakers was ‘deterrence,'” Gunzinger adds. Part of achieving that is signaling to others that the US has “a creditable capability,” but at the same time, “there should be enough uncertainty about the specifics—performance specifics and so forth—so they do not develop effective countermeasures.”

The B-21 rollout concluded with Northrup Grumman’s CEO, Kathy Warden, who mentioned the aircraft’s next big moment. “The next time you see this plane, it’ll be in the air,” she said. “Now, let’s put this plane to bed.” 

And with that, it was pushed back into the hanger, and the doors closed in front of it. 

Watch the reveal video, below.

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In space, no one can hear a probe smash into an asteroid—but that’s just what happened in September, when NASA’s successful DART experiment proved that it’s possible to reroute a space rock by crashing into it on purpose. And that wasn’t even the most important event to materialize in space this year—more on the James Webb Space Telescope in a moment. Back on Earth, innovation also reached new heights in the aviation industry, as a unique electric airplane took off, as did a Black Hawk helicopter that can fly itself. 

Looking for the complete list of 100 winners? Check it out here.

Innovation of the Year

The James Webb Space Telescope by NASA: A game-changing new instrument to see the cosmos 

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Once a generation, an astronomical tool arrives that surpasses everything that came before it. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is just such a creation. After more than two decades and $9.7 billion in the making, JWST launched on December 25, 2021. Since February of this year, when it first started imaging—employing a mirror and aperture nearly three times larger in radius than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope—JWST’s vibrant images have captured the attention of the world.

The JWST can see deep into fields of forming stars. It can peer 13 billion years back in time at ancient galaxies, still in their nursery. It can peek at exoplanets, seeing them directly where astronomers would have once had to reconstruct meager traces of their existence. It can teach us about how those stars and galaxies came together from primordial matter, something Hubble could only glimpse.

While Hubble circles in low Earth orbit, JWST instead sits hundreds of thousands of miles farther away, in Earth’s shadow. It will never see sunlight. There, protected even further by a multi-layer sunshield thinner than a human fingernail, the telescope chills at -370 degrees F, where JWST’s infrared sight works best. Its home is a fascinating location called L2, one of several points where the sun and Earth’s gravities balance each other out. 

All this might just be JWST’s prologue. Since the telescope used less fuel than initially anticipated when reaching its perch, the instrument might have enough to last well past its anticipated 10-year-long window. We can’t wait to see what else it dazzles us with.

Parallel Reality by Delta: A screen customized for you

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You’ve probably found yourself running through an airport at some point, squinting up at a screen filled with rows of flight information. A futuristic new offering from Delta and a startup called Misapplied Sciences aims to change that. At Detroit Metro Airport, an installation can show travelers customized information for their flight. A scan of your boarding pass in McNamara Terminal is one way to tell the system who you are. Then, when you look at the overhead screen, you see that it displays only personalized data about your journey, like which gate you need to find. The tech behind the system works because the pixels in the display itself can shine in one of 18,000 directions, meaning many different people can see distinct information while looking at the same screen at the same time. 

Electronic bag tags by Alaska Airlines: The last tag you’ll need (for one airline)

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Believe it or not, some travelers do still check bags, and a new offering from this Seattle-based airline aims to make that process easier. Flyers who can get an electronic bag tag from Alaska Airlines (at first, 2,500 members of their frequent flier plan will get them, and in 2023 they’ll be available to buy) can use their mobile phone to create the appropriate luggage tag on this device’s e-ink display while at home, up to 24 hours before a flight. The 5-inch-long tag itself gets the power it needs to generate the information on the screen from your phone, thanks to an NFC connection. After the traveler has done this step at home, they just need to drop the tagged bag off in the right place at the airport, avoiding the line to get a tag. 

Alice by Eviation: A totally electric commuter airplane 

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The aviation industry is a major producer of carbon emissions. One way to try to solve that problem is to run aircraft on electric power, utilizing them just for short hops. That’s what Eviation aims to do with a plane called Alice: 8,000 pounds of batteries in the belly of this commuter aircraft give its two motors the power it needs to fly. In fact, it made its first flight in September, a scant but successful eight minutes in the air. Someday, as battery tech improves, the company hopes that it can carry nine passengers for distances of 200 miles or so. 

OPV Black Hawk by Sikorsky: A military helicopter that flies itself 

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Two pilots sit up front at the controls of the Army’s Black Hawk helicopters, but what if that number could be zero for missions that are especially hazardous? That’s exactly what a modified UH-60 helicopter can do, a product of a DARPA program called ALIAS, which stands for Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System. The self-flying whirlybird made its first flights with zero occupants on board in February, and in October, it took flight again, even carrying a 2,600-pound load beneath it. The technology comes from helicopter-maker Sikorsky, and allows the modified UH-60 to be flown by two pilots, one pilot, or zero. The idea is that this type of autonomy can help in several ways: to assist the one or two humans at the controls, or as a way for an uninhabited helicopter to execute tasks like flying somewhere dangerous to deliver supplies without putting any people on board at risk. 

Detect and Avoid by Zipline: Drones that can listen for in-flight obstacles

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As drones and other small aircraft continue to fill the skies, all parties involved have an interest in avoiding collisions. But figuring out the best way for a drone to detect potential obstacles isn’t an easy problem to solve, especially since there are no pilots on board to keep their eyes out and weight is at a premium. Drone delivery company Zipline has turned to using sound, not sight, to solve this conundrum. Eight microphones on the drone’s wing listen for traffic like an approaching small plane, and can preemptively change the UAV’s route to get out of the way before it arrives. An onboard GPU and AI help with the task, too. While the company is still waiting for regulatory approval to totally switch the system on, the technique represents a solid approach to an important issue.

DART by NASA and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory: Smashing into an asteroid, for good 

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Earthlings who look at the sky in fear that a space rock might tumble down and devastate our world can now breathe a sigh of relief. On September 26, a 1,100-pound spacecraft streaked into a roughly 525-foot-diameter asteroid, Dimorphos, intentionally crashing into it at over 14,000 mph. NASA confirmed on October 11 that the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART)’s impact altered Dimorphos’s orbit around its companion asteroid, Didymos, even more than anticipated. Thanks to DART, humans have redirected an asteroid for the first time. The dramatic experiment gives astronomers hope that perhaps we could do it again to avert an apocalypse.

CAPSTONE by Advanced Space: A small vessel on a big journey

Advanced Space

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Some lunar craft fill up whole rooms. On the other hand, there’s CAPSTONE, a satellite that can fit on a desk. Despite control issues, CAPSTONE—which launched on June 28—triumphantly entered lunar orbit on November 13. This small traveler is a CubeSat, an affordable design of mini-satellite that’s helped make space accessible to universities, small companies, and countries without major space programs. Hundreds of CubeSats now populate the Earth’s orbit, and although some have hitched rides to Mars, none have made the trip to the moon under their own power—until CAPSTONE. More low-cost lunar flights, its creators hope, may follow.

The LSST Camera by SLAC/Vera C. Rubin Observatory: A 3,200-megapixel camera

SLAC/Vera C. Rubin Observatory

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Very soon, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in the high desert of Northern Chile will provide astronomers with what will be nearly a live-feed view of the southern hemisphere’s sky. To do that, it will rely on the world’s largest camera—with a lens 5 feet across and matching shutters, it will be capable of taking images that are an astounding 3,200 megapixels. The camera’s crafters are currently placing the finishing touches on it, but their impressive engineering feats aren’t done yet: In May 2023, the camera will fly down to Chile in a Boeing 747, before traveling by truck to its final destination.

The Event Horizon Telescope by the EHT Collaboration: Seeing the black hole in the Milky Way’s center

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Just a few decades ago, Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at our galaxy’s heart, was a hazy concept. Now, thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), we have a blurry image of it—or, since a black hole doesn’t let out light, of its surrounding accretion disc. The EHT is actually a global network of radio telescopes stretching from Germany to Hawaii, and from Chile to the South Pole. EHT released the image in May, following years of painstaking reconstruction by over 300 scientists, who learned much about the black hole’s inner workings in the process. This is EHT’s second black hole image, following its 2019 portrait of a behemoth in the galaxy M87.

Starliner by Boeing: A new way of getting to the ISS 

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After years of budget issues, technical delays, and testing failures, Boeing’s much-awaited Starliner crew capsule finally took to the skies and made it to its destination. An uncrewed test launch in May successfully departed Florida, docked at the International Space Station (ISS), and landed back on Earth. Now, Boeing and NASA are preparing for Starliner’s first crewed test, set to launch sometime in 2023. When that happens, Starliner will take its place alongside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, and NASA will have more than one option to get astronauts into orbit. There are a few differences between the two: Where Crew Dragon splashes down in the sea, Starliner touches down on land, making it easier to recover. And, where Crew Dragon was designed to launch on SpaceX’s own Falcon 9 rockets, Starliner is more flexible. 

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Last year, the average distance that American drivers cruised around in their cars each day was just under 33 miles. That metric, which comes from a AAA survey, may not sound like much, but an aviation startup called Archer is aiming to focus on journeys that are even shorter. Its goal is to use electric flying machines for airborne hops above traffic or waterways, and the company just revealed an aircraft it calls Midnight. It’s designed to make jaunts that measure just 20 miles, with time in between for recharging. 

Midnight, which has not yet left the ground, is intended to hold four passengers, have a pilot at the controls, and wing itself through the air at 150 mph. “It can carry 1,000 pounds of payload, and it can travel up to 100 miles,” Adam Goldstein, the company’s CEO, said at an event yesterday. “But this vehicle was optimized around rapid, back-to-back, 20-mile trips in and around cities.” Some quick math suggests that the weight limit for the five humans on board and their bags will be around 200 pounds each.

One specific way that Archer hopes to make this short-hop plan a reality is through a partnership with United Airlines, which plans to purchase aircraft from the startup and has already given it $10 million. Earlier this month, the two companies said they plan to offer brief flights between Manhattan and Newark Liberty International Airport in Archer aircraft beginning in 2025. 

That announcement mirrors one by Delta Air Lines and Joby Aviation in early October, which will focus on carrying people in an electric aircraft in either New York City or Los Angeles into an airport, where they can then catch a regular, fossil-fuel-powered flight in a traditional aircraft. 

[Related: Watch Alice, a new electric commuter plane, fly for the first time]

The range that Archer is promising is either on par with, or slightly below, its competitors in the eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft) space. Last month, Wisk revealed its gen-six aircraft, which is boxy, yellow, and has an advertised range of about 90 miles. (Wisk, which is engaged in a lawsuit with Archer, has a unique plan: to offer autonomous flights for four passengers with no pilot, and just ground-based human supervisors.) Another electric aircraft maker, Beta Technologies, is aiming for missions that are about 150 miles. Joby, on its website, boasts a “max range” of the same. The more people or cargo that one of these craft try to carry, the shorter the distance they’ll be able to eke out of the battery power. 

Like its competitors, Archer’s design for its flying machine relies on battery power and electric motors powering propellers. In the case of Midnight, there are a dozen props: Six in the front of the wing can tilt to help the craft take off vertically and then transition into forward flight, and six in the back don’t tilt, but nonetheless spin and produce lift for takeoff and landing. A smaller aircraft from Archer, called Maker, has functioned as their uncrewed testbed to pave the way for Midnight. It has flown numerous times but hasn’t yet made the transition to completely forward flight with its forward props tilted all the way down. 

Archer is also leaning heavily into the design details of its Midnight aircraft, aiming to evoke nostalgic yet futuristic feelings about flight. 

“The golden age of flying—the 1950s—was a great source of inspiration for us,” Julien Montousse, the company’s head of design and innovation, said at the unveiling. “We want to bring this magical feeling back.” The aircraft, he added, “had to be beautiful.”

Beauty may be an inspirational element when it comes to any aircraft, but the challenge for all these companies will be demonstrating that their flying machines are safe, reliable, and a convenient, comfortable, and affordable alternative to taking ground transportation to a destination like an airport (and of course, they’ll need to pass regulatory scrutiny, too). Otherwise, people are likely to stick to trains, Lyfts, and other automobiles. 

Watch a brief video about Midnight, below.

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Almost exactly 32 years ago, in October of 1990, scientists shoved off on an ambitious project to map the human genome—an ultimately successful initiative that involved sequencing the DNA that makes us who we are. It wrapped up in 2003, but as recently as last year, researchers announced updates to the map of our genome and its more than 3 billion base pairs, which are made of hydrogen-bonded molecules like adenine and thymine.

Unlike humans and other living creatures, batteries do not have DNA. There are no chromosomes in a lithium-ion battery cell. But their importance to society as the world looks for ways to decarbonize is hard to overstate—lithium-ion batteries power electric vehicles, can help with storage on the electric grid, and can even be used to propel new aircraft on very short flights. 

In a paper published earlier this month in the journal Joule, a group of 28 scientists are calling for a “battery data genome” project. Here’s why they’re proposing it, and what that means. 

“The world needs it,” argues Susan Babinec, one of the paper’s authors and the program lead for stationary energy storage (think: battery storage on the grid) at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. “The world needs to have renewable energy, and deep decarbonization depends on a host of technologies.” 

And one of the technologies, of course, is batteries, not just for EVs, but also for key tasks like storing power made from renewable energy when the sun is shining and saving it up for later. “Batteries are very difficult to design, and similarly difficult to make, and so we’ve come a long way, and we know, now for sure, that energy storage can help with deep decarbonization,” she adds. 

[Related: How the massive ‘flow battery’ coming to an Army facility in Colorado will work]

So what kind of information will the project set out to gather? “The battery data genome is really about harnessing the entirety of knowledge,” says Eric Dufek, another coauthor on the paper and a department manager at Idaho National Laboratory. That may sound like a lot of information, and the way that the paper describes the project is a tad more concrete, with the goal being “a global initiative to assemble a massive collection of battery databases,” the authors write.

The goal is to get data out of its silos and to standardize the formats; that way, machine learning can be employed to look for patterns. It’s about “making sure that people have the protocols and procedures in place, so that sharing is easier, even if you don’t want all your data to be completely open,” Dufek says. 

One key type of battery data that the project would pursue relates to the question of “how does it perform,” says Babinec. “We all know batteries will lose capacity over time, but the way they lose capacity depends on about four or five different variables, so we call that path-dependence degradation. It’s really hard to know exactly how it’s going to fail.” That type of information is crucial, as an expensive battery storage installation on the grid should ideally work for a long time in the place it’s designed for, doing the job it’s intended to do. 

Voltage and current information while a battery is being charged and discharged is “like the secret code, that’s like the DNA for cycle life,” she says.

This kind of information can help battery experts figure out how long grid storage could last if it’s used in different ways, such as storing four hours of energy made by solar panels and releasing it at night, versus storing more energy that would be used during an emergency. Or, consider grabbing an old battery pack out of an EV and then using that for energy storage in a stationary way, Babinec wonders. How would that fare? This project aims to help unlock those questions. 

Importantly, the initiative isn’t trying to get people to share proprietary information, which is why battery performance is a main area of focus. “People get more sensitive when you start talking about the fine details on everything,” Dufek says. The information would ideally reside in different hubs, as opposed to in one central location. 

Besides Argonne National Lab and Idaho National Lab, authors on the paper hail from institutions such as the University of Oxford, Carnegie Mellon University, Toyota Research Institute in California, and the University of Hawaii. 

Ultimately, the goal involves answering this question: “How do we design and find a way to make better batteries, faster, so that we can make an impact?” Dufek says. 

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For years, companies have been working on developing electric flying machines that are designed to make short hops that bring people or cargo from one spot to another. That vision is getting closer to taking off, as two companies, Joby and Delta, announced today that they will be working together to whisk people to and from airports in a Joby-made aircraft. 

The plan is to begin with two large hubs: New York City and Los Angeles. The companies promise a “premium” experience, although aren’t yet sharing how much it will cost or when exactly the service will begin. The general idea is something like this: Someone booking a ticket via Delta to fly from John F. Kennedy International Airport to another city would see an option to add on an air taxi leg to get them from a heliport-like facility somewhere near their home to JFK, and would book it through Delta’s app or website. 

Eventually, the air taxi, made by Joby, might even deliver its passengers to a spot at the airport that’s located post-security, Ed Bastian, Delta’s CEO, said during a press conference on Monday. Delta is also investing $60 million in Joby. 

The main player here is Joby’s air taxi, which sports six large tilting propellers. They provide the thrust it needs to get off the ground, and then tilt into a different position to wing it through the air. Four of these propellers, which are all powered by electric motors, are attached to the wing, while two are on the tail. It took some work to arrive at this version: “We built dozens of different configurations,” JoeBen Bevirt, Joby’s CEO, told PopSci last year when we took a closer look at the aircraft. 

The modern version of the aircraft holds four people, as well as a pilot, and the company lists its capabilities as having a range of 150 miles and a maximum velocity of 200 mph. (A robust amount of passenger luggage could affect the aircraft’s ability to hold four riders who want to go to the airport.) The fact that it has a pilot might sound like a no-brainer, but not every player in this industry is taking that approach. Wisk Aero, which is backed by Boeing, just revealed its sixth-generation flying machine, and Wisk’s strategy remains to pursue autonomy first, and have no pilot on board. They will have human operators overseeing the flights from the ground, though. 

Work remains to be done before all of Joby and Delta’s plans become a reality—from getting the proper regulatory approvals to developing the actual sites where the Joby vehicle would take off and land. In a press release, Joby said that their aircraft has completed “more than 1,000 test flights, demonstrating its range, speed, altitude and low noise profile.” 

However, on February 16, a test flight ended in an accident, with an aircraft becoming “substantially damaged,” according to a preliminary report from the NTSB, due to a “component failure.” No one was hurt in the incident that took place near a village called Jolon, California, which is roughly halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The plane was being “remotely piloted” and the testing that day reportedly involved speeds as high as 276 mph; the aircraft was involved in a fire once it was on the ground, according to the NTSB. (You can find a link to the report here.)

Joby and Delta are not the only players working to usher in a new aviation era involving short, battery-powered flights. Others include Eviation, which just flew its Alice demonstrator for the first time, and electric-air-taxi-maker Archer scored $10 million in August from United. Plus, Air Canada plans to buy hybrid-electric aircraft designed to seat 30 people and made by Heart Aerospace. And in addition to Wisk and its plans for self-flying air taxis, Beta Technologies has developed a piloted electric aircraft that’s been flown by US Air Force pilots.

Watch a video about the Joby aircraft, below.

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Last week, an experimental electric commuter airplane from Eviation made a very brief flight for the first time. At the controls of the aircraft was a tried and true form of aviation technology: a human pilot.

Meanwhile, a different firm—Wisk Aero, which is backed by Boeing—unveiled the latest version of its electric flying machine today, and it’s designed to fly with no pilot at all. It’s an air taxi, intended to transport four passengers (and no human aviator) over distances of 90 miles, perhaps less for a smaller hop. The goal is to be an all-electric, driverless Uber in the sky that cruises at 138 mph.

Here’s what to know about this latest aircraft, and how Wisk’s approach differs from other companies. 

The newly released plane has a slightly boxy appearance and is Wisk’s sixth-generation aircraft. While in the past the company has referred to its fifth-gen aircraft as “Cora,” this one is simply called Generation 6. It hasn’t flown yet. It is designed to employ 12 motors that spin 12 propellers to enable it to take off, fly, and land. 

The dozen motors have different jobs. The 6 motors in the back spin what are known as lift fans, which are oriented parallel to the ground and remain that way. Those produce vertical thrust for takeoff and landing. The six motors in the front control six propellers that can tilt, so at takeoff and landing they would work together with the lift fans, with all of them oriented the same way, to allow the aircraft to move up and down. During forward flight, the tilting propellers in front of the wing would be positioned like normal propellers, and the lift fans behind the wing stop and remain motionless. Previous generations from Wisk had a propeller in the back to push the aircraft forward, but this one does not. 

The reason the company killed the propeller in the back is “simplicity of design,” says their CEO, Gary Gysin. While the previous setup needed two different motor types because it had that pusher propeller, the new one can utilize just one type of motor. “Right now, we have the same motor for all 12, [but] the front ones tilt,” he adds. He also notes that the new version is quieter and more efficient. 

What’s less simple, at least from a regulatory standpoint, is the company’s plans to make these air taxis self-flying. “The aircraft will be fully autonomous and run its route,” says Gysin. “There’ll be a human in the loop that’s on the ground—more like a supervisor. They don’t have a stick, they don’t have a rudder. They’re not actively controlling the aircraft.” 

The humans on the ground will be like air traffic controllers. “They’re watching the telemetry of the aircraft,” he says. The goal is for one human operator on the ground to be able to monitor 10 different flying machines in the sky, says Gysin, although Chris Brown, a spokesperson for the company, adds that that goal is for the future, and that an initial ratio might be more like one human for three unpiloted aircraft. 

Gysin compares what the aircraft will be like someday to a car with level-four self-driving capabilities. In case you don’t have the levels of car automation memorized, they come from an organization called SAE International. According to SAE, level four has “automated driving features [that] will not require you to take over driving.” That’s in contrast to level three, which involves a system that could ask you to assume control. Meanwhile, level five is similar to level four, but could operate autonomously in “all conditions.” In other words, by aiming for an airborne version of level four, Wisk wants to make an aircraft that can fly itself with zero control input from someone inside of it, but in limited conditions. 

That represents a different approach from competitors in the electric air taxi space. Joby Aviation, for example, has an air taxi that seats four people and is designed to be flown by a pilot in the fifth seat. Beta Technologies flies an electric aircraft designed to carry five people, with a pilot as person six. Archer is doing something similar, with plans for an aircraft called Midnight that can hold four and be flown by a fifth, although their current-gen aircraft is called Maker, and is just a demonstrator that flies with no one on board. (Archer and Wisk are involved in a lawsuit.) 

Finally, another company, Kitty Hawk, was working on a one-person self-flying airplane, but they recently announced that they are shutting down, leading the Washington Post to ask, “If a Google billionaire can’t make flying cars happen, can anyone?” (Kitty Hawk has been, and still is, a “minority investor” in Wisk, says Gysin.)

In terms of its automation-first approach, Gysin argues that that will be an asset but concedes that it will slow their process towards getting regulatory approval to carry passengers. “What we’re doing is automating all the mundane tasks” of flight, he says. “It’s going to be fundamentally safer [than a piloted aircraft]—it will be harder, for sure, to get certified.” 

“All the regulations are built around having a pilot in the cockpit,” he adds. 

Ultimately, how the industry and its multiple players end up truly shaking out remains up in the air. 

Watch a video about Wisk’s gen-six aircraft, below.

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For eight minutes today, an electric airplane from Eviation flew in the skies above central Washington state. Propelled by two electric motors spinning two propellers near the tail, pulling energy from 8,000 pounds of batteries, the aircraft hit a speed of about 171 miles per hour during its brief flight.

The flight of the sleek electric plane, which its maker calls Alice, was a significant milestone for a sector of aviation that focuses on carrying small amounts of people—nine or fewer—short distances, and doing it with no tailpipe emissions. 

“We made aviation history flying Alice, the world’s first all-electric commuter aircraft, here at the Moses Lake Flight Test facility,” Gregory Davis, the company’s CEO, said during a press conference following the flight. 

This successful flight, brief as it was, followed a high-speed ground test that the company conducted on September 18. 

While the flight test today appeared to go off without a hitch—save for a brief taxi away from the runway before takeoff and then back again, to adjust a screen in the aircraft—the company has hard problems to solve ahead of this milestone. The most pressing long-term technical problem, Davis reports, is the batteries themselves, which are in the plane’s belly. While the company is targeting eventual flight times of one to two hours and distances of some 170 to 230 miles, or even 288 miles, the energy that lithium-ion batteries can hold right now isn’t currently sufficient.

[Related: Watch this sleek electric plane ace its high-speed ground test]

“The biggest tech challenge that Eviation has to overcome is the development of the batteries—that couldn’t be more clear,” Davis said. “It’s looking at the evolution of the chemistry and the physics around those batteries. Of course, we are able to control how we integrate them, and how we optimize them from a design perspective for the aircraft, but we really do need the industry to boost the energy density.” 

That may be the company’s biggest technical hurdle, but others remain, such as conducting more flight tests, building more aircraft, getting the commuter aircraft certified under the FAA’s Part 23, and eventually shipping it to customers such as DHL or Cape Air at prices that airlines can afford. Davis says they hope to make their first deliveries in 2027. 

This is not the first electric aircraft to ever fly. Small air taxis from companies like Joby Aviation, Beta Technologies, and others have already taken to the skies multiple times. For example, a flying machine from Beta, called Alia, flew from New York to Arkansas—with many stops along the way—in May. Eviation’s Alice aircraft is positioning itself in a slightly different category from the air taxis being flown by these companies, as it’s an aircraft with the ability to someday carry nine people. (The air taxis from those companies are designed to carry fewer than nine people—Joby’s holds four passengers and a pilot, for example.)  

Additionally, an electric seaplane from Harbour Air has taken to the skies, as has a speedy Rolls-Royce machine. 

As for today’s flight, which had the aircraft flying at an altitude of 3,500 with Washington’s Grant County International Airport as its point of departure and landing, more immediate post-flight work remains for the team. Davis said that the flight produced oodles of systems data that Eviation now needs to process. That data is measured in terabytes, Davis said. “We need to review it, and understand how the performance of the aircraft matched our models—so we’ll be doing that over the next couple of weeks.” 

Watch the first flight, below:

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On September 18, an all-electric aircraft sped down a runway in Washington state, its nose wheel lifting off the ground. It didn’t take off, though, by intention: The test was a predecessor to an actual first flight, which the company says is “imminent.” 

The 57-foot-long aircraft, which its makers call Alice, is just a prototype, although a pretty slick one at that. Someday, if a production version enters service with an airline like Cape Air, the goal will be for it to be able to carry nine passengers and their bags for flights lasting about an hour or two—think distances of about 170 to 230 miles. Up front in the commuter plane will be space for two pilots, although it will be certified to be flown by just one person. 

Other companies working on electric flight, which is one way that the industry hopes to become less carbon-intensive, are developing flying machines that don’t look like traditional aircraft. An air taxi by Joby Aviation, for example, is capable of taking off and landing vertically, and thus has a different design. But Alice, made by a company called Eviation, looks a lot more like a regular plane. Here’s how it works right now. 

Batteries in the belly

The plane’s motors need battery power to give them the juice they need. Not surprisingly, the batteries that do that are in the bottom of the plane, where the girth of the aircraft is also a little wider. 

Batteries are heavy, and they don’t have the same energy density as regular fuel does, which sets a major limit for electric flight. The batteries on this prototype weigh a total of 8,000 pounds, and these lithium-ion cells are cylindrical, which is the same shape that some automakers, like Tesla and Rivian, use. For luggage, the cargo compartment is behind the passenger cabin. 

Other attributes of the aircraft’s design are all about making it be able to accomplish its intended mission—commuter flights over relatively short distances—while harnessing battery power. “Building an electric aircraft is a war on weight, and it’s a war on drag,” notes Gregory Davis, the company’s CEO and president. “Our challenges are to get the best possible lift-over-drag ratio.”

The aircraft has long, narrow wings, which don’t sweep backwards; wings that are lengthy and skinny are referred to as possessing a high aspect ratio. “We need to have the most efficient wing that we can,” he says. (For a point of comparison, take a look at the wings on an aircraft like an F-16, which is designed for performance and supersonic speeds, as opposed to efficiency.) 

As for keeping the weight to a minimum where they can, the plane is made mostly out of carbon composite material, Davis says. The aircraft is also what is known as fly-by-wire, which Davis says also makes it lighter than it otherwise would have been. A non-fly-by-wire aircraft employs mechanical connections, like metal cables, to translate what the pilot does at the controls to the actual surfaces on the outside of the plane. A fly-by-wire aircraft uses computer signals to do the same, removing those cables or other physical connectors.

Props in the back 

At the rear of the aircraft are two electric motors that spin two propellers. Those motors are made by a company called magniX; an airline, Harbour Air, has also used a magniX motor to power a converted electric seaplane. 

In the case of the Alice aircraft, the power units in the back “can produce 650 kilowatts of power per side, so 1.3 megawatts of power for the aircraft during takeoff, which is great,” Davis says. 

Right now, there’s an understandable gap between where the company eventually expects to arrive with the range of its production-model aircraft and the prototype, which will soon be making its first flight. “The batteries aren’t there yet,” he says. “Battery technology is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the biggest challenge in electric aviation.” The hope is that as development of the Alice aircraft continues, the industry—electric aircraft, electric ground vehicles—keeps innovating. 

He refers to this battery situation as “a challenge for the entire industry.” The prototype aircraft, he says, is good “for demonstrating that the technology works together.”

To be sure, Eviation and its Alice aircraft are not the only ones working in this new frontier. Companies like Beta Technologies and Joby Aviation are flying electric air taxis that are designed to take off and land like helicopters, although in recent flights with Air Force pilots at the controls, or a multi-leg journey to Arkansas, Beta’s demonstrator took off and landed conventionally. Others include Archer and Wisk. Finally, Kittyhawk was working on a one-person plane known as Heaviside, but just announced on September 21 that they would be shutting down the company.

And in related news, a company called Heart Aerospace is working on a hybrid-electric aircraft, the ES-30. The Air Current aviation website has more on why Heart recently pivoted away from an all-electric smaller craft to a larger, 30-seat machine that also has turbo-generators on board. 

For Eviation’s Davis, he compares their current stage of development to NASA’s Mercury program, which saw the first American in a sub-orbital flight in 1961, eight years before the moon landing of Apollo 11. “What we’re doing here with Alice is like Alan Shepard going into space on a Redstone [rocket]—it’s showing that we can do it,” he says. “Where we’re headed in terms of making electric aviation part of our world—something that our children will fly on and we won’t think twice about—that’s the destination here. We need to show that we can do it.” 

Watch the high-speed taxi test, below. 

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Some 155 miles from the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine is another atomic facility: the South Ukraine Nuclear Power Plant. Not long after midnight on Monday, what the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) described as “shelling” resulted in a blast near that second plant. The New York Times referred to the strike as being carried out by a “powerful Russian missile.” 

That projectile and explosion occurred some 984 feet, or about 300 meters, from the South Ukraine Nuclear Power Plant “industrial site,” the IAEA said. The event temporarily disconnected three power lines and broke windows nearby. 

Meanwhile, the Zaporizhzhia plant continues to be in the news, mostly in regards to the status of its connection with the external power grid. Below is a brief update with what’s been happening with the two plants, and what the stakes are. 

The South Ukraine NPP

This power plant has three reactors, which continue “to operate normally,” the IAEA said Monday, following that nearby strike and explosion.

But of course, a military strike near a nuclear power plant is hazardous for a number of reasons. Nuclear reactors, where the actual fission process takes place and creates heat, are strongly reinforced to withstand impact. Nonetheless, “the concern would be that it would breach the concrete containment vessel,” observes Cheryl Rofer, a nuclear scientist who formerly worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, if a more direct strike were to occur. 

Regardless of the strength of these containment vessels, ordinance hitting a nuclear power plant could still have serious follow-on effects. “The basic reactor structure—the steel containment vessel, and everything that’s inside of it—is probably pretty robust and pretty safe,” she says. “But if you think about connections and electronic equipment that runs everything, you’re starting to get into a little more delicate set of things.” 

“Most of those things are not tested against missile strikes,” she adds, which makes it hard to know what the effects of a more direct hit would be. 

[Related: Why do nuclear power plants need electricity to stay safe?]

And another hazard lurks at plants: Spent fuel rods reside in cooling pools after they’re done with their work in the reactor, but before they go into more permanent storage. 

“If they really wanted to make a radioactive mess, they could just aim at the spent fuel pools,” she observes. But that doesn’t appear to be Russia’s goal. “The hits are on the electrical connections, so they’re playing this game of, ‘we want to scare you guys in the West.’” 

But it’s a dangerous game. For one, taking out the electric connections themselves “can lead to a catastrophe,” she says. All nuclear reactors require cooling systems, and an interruption to those could lead to a meltdown.

“Mistakes happen, and at some point they could do something that would be worse—offhand, that would be hitting the spent fuel pools,” she adds.

The Times reports that Petro Kotin, the chief of Ukraine’s nuclear power company, Energoatom, referred to the attack as “nuclear terrorism” on television.

The Zaporizhzhia NPP

The Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant’s six reactors are now completely shut off, meaning that it’s not making electricity. However, nuclear plants need a supply of electricity, even when those reactors are shut down, to power its systems—here’s more on how they work. 

While that plant had been getting power from a reserve line, that power line was recently “disconnected,” the IAEA said. Fortunately, Zaporizhzhia still has power from a newly-connected different line, meaning that it lost one connection not long after gaining another. 

“The situation at the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant remains fragile and precarious,” Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director general of the IAEA, said in a statement. “Last week, we saw some improvements regarding its power supplies, but today we were informed about a new setback in this regard. The plant is located in the middle of a war zone, and its power status is far from safe and secure.”

Rofer has a similar reflection, saying: “My bottom-line message is: Russia, stop shelling nuclear plants and get out of Ukraine.”

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Much of the news surrounding the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine lately has been related to the question of whether or not the facility has access to external power lines. An update from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on September 13 shared cautiously good news: the largest nuclear power plant in Europe has three different lines connecting it to external power, after all of them had been disconnected.  

The situation, the IAEA said, is that one of those lines is giving the plant the power it needs, while the other two are present as backups. Although that is a good development, as is the fact that all six of the plant’s nuclear reactors have been shut down, the IAEA still struck a note of caution. The organization’s director general, Rafael Mariano Grossi, “again stressed that the nuclear safety and security situation at the plant – held by Russian forces but operated by Ukrainian staff in the middle of a war zone – remained precarious.” Grossi said that shelling “was still occurring in the wider area.” 

The question of whether or not the plant has the electricity it needs to keep its systems running is a key one, and presents an opportunity to dig into the basics of how nuclear power plants work—and how they stay safe, hopefully, even in extreme situations. 

The basics 

A modern nuclear power plant is a complex, expensive facility, but the fundamentals of how it works are theoretically simple. “Any nuclear power plant works by uranium decaying into other elements, and in the process releasing energy in the form of heat,” explains Norman Kleiman, an assistant professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health who researches the effects of ionizing radiation on people and animals. “And that heat is used to boil water, to make steam, to drive a turbine, to make electricity.” 

More specifically, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, and the majority of the nuclear fleet in the United States, are pressurized water reactors. What that means is that water in a reactor becomes toasty because of the presence of the fuel rods, and that water heats up other water—but doesn’t mix with it—which, in the form of steam, turns turbines. (Another type is called a boiling water reactor.) 

“There is a lot of heat being produced,” Kleiman adds. “And if that heat is not removed [it] can lead to the physical meltdown of the materials in the nuclear power plant—the fuel rods themselves, the metal casings that the fuel is in, and other components. So you need a way to cool the plant.” 

And of course, that takes electricity, as do the plant’s other myriad systems. Today’s nuclear power plants “always need electricity to keep the coolant cycling through the plant,” says Jessica Lovering, the executive director of the Good Energy Collective, an organization that argues for nuclear power (which produces no carbon emissions) from a climate change perspective. “They need pumps or something to push water through the core to keep it cool, so it doesn’t get too hot and cause an accident. If they’re shut down, they need a lot less cooling.” 

[Related: A new power-generating system works like a jet engine]

Zaporizhzhia has a half-dozen nuclear reactors. The IAEA noted that they are “in a cold shutdown state.” However, “they still require power to maintain necessary safety functions.”

That power can come from several sources. In the case of Zaporizhzhia currently, according to the IAEA, it is coming from the backup power lines, but it could also come from on-site diesel generators. The plant also used the last reactor that had been running, reactor six, to provide the power it needed. The New York Times reported last week that this practice is called “island mode,” but points out that it is not supposed to be done for long—not more than 60 minutes, citing an interview with Petro Kotin, who runs Energoatom, Ukraine’s national energy company. 

[Related: Russia’s hostile takeover of an active nuclear power plant was a first in war]

Generally, the coolant issue is key, says Lovering. “Most of the nuclear accidents we’ve had around the world have been because they lost coolant, in some form or another.” Fukushima in Japan is a tragic example. 

“They’re probably in a pretty good place now,” Lovering says, “but the downside is that they are not producing electricity for Ukraine and also for Europe.” Still, she also expresses concern about the diesel generators, in terms of how much fuel the facility has on site if their external power connection were to be severed again. She also is worried about the well-being of the workers on site. 

“You don’t want to see shelling around a nuclear power plant, but it’s not as urgent of a concern now that they’ve been shut down,” she adds. 

Spent fuel 

Cheryl Rofer, a nuclear scientist who spent more than three decades working at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and recently wrote about the Ukraine situation for Newsweek, says that she thinks the current state of the plant is “stable.” 

“Having two IAEA inspectors there will help in getting a more accurate picture of what’s going on there,” she adds.

However, beyond the shut-down reactors, there is the spent fuel to think about. Spent fuel first spends time in cooling pools, and in some cases also goes into containment in something called dry cask storage. With the cooling pools, the water in those needs to circulate as well, says Rofer—another reason for a nuclear power plant to have reliable electricity even if its reactors are shut down. 

[Related: An exclusive look inside where nuclear subs are born]

“I think if they hit the fuel pools [with shelling], it would be a mess, and it would require some clean up, but I think it could be done,” she says. “It would be a bad thing—it would be a worse thing than is happening now.” 

But a damaged fuel pool is different from a nuclear power plant undergoing a complete meltdown. “It wouldn’t really be a meltdown,” she says. “The release in that case would be mostly local.” 

Meanwhile, the plan remains to keep the plant offline: NPR reported on September 15 that Ukraine plans not to fire it up again until Russian forces depart. 

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Someday over the next decade, if you live in Texas or California, a roughly car-sized robot could deliver your Uber Eats order to your curb. That’s thanks to a 10-year partnership between Uber and a company called Nuro that’s set to start this fall. This curbside grab-and-go scheme was announced today. 

Nuro is known for creating autonomous electric vehicles that can schlep stuff like groceries or pizza down the road; those vehicles have no room in them for humans. In January, the company unveiled the newest version of this self-driving delivery machine, which, like the company itself, is called Nuro. This latest iteration of bot can transport almost 500 pounds of goods, keeping them hot or cold as needed. It even sports an airbag on the outside of its front end, so that if ever accidentally bumps into anyone, hopefully the harm will be minimal. 

The newest Nuro vehicle follows two predecessors, both also designed to take deliveries where they need to go along public streets. In February of 2020 Nuro revealed the R2 machine, which is about 9 feet long and 3.6 feet wide. The R2 unit followed the company’s original version, the R1, which Dave Ferguson, the company’s cofounder, described in 2018 as being about the size of “a big guy on a motorbike.”

The company won’t say exactly the size of the latest Nuro vehicle, but does note that it is about 20 percent smaller, width-wise, than a regular car. 

Today, the company lists three different vehicles in its fleet: the Nuro, the R2, and the P2, which is different from the others—it’s a Toyota Prius, with room for humans in it, outfitted with specialized hardware. P2 rolls with “onboard safety operators,” the company says on its website. 

With the Uber Eats deal, which will take place in Houston, Texas and Mountain View, California (as well as eventually the larger San Francisco Bay area), the company says that all of their different vehicle types will be involved. “We will be utilizing three different vehicles from the Nuro autonomous fleet including Nuro,” a Nuro spokesperson said via email. “We have committed to using Nuro with Uber at a mutually agreed upon time during the term of the partnership.” 

However, it remains unclear to what extent, and when, deliveries will be arriving in truly uncrewed vehicles versus the self-driving Priuses. Nuro has previously carried out programs with the likes of Kroger and Domino’s, but won’t say to what extent those deliveries have occurred with the person-less bots versus the Priuses. “We have made tens of thousands of deliveries to date,” the company said in a statement. “We can’t share the specific number of deliveries for each partner, since these details, along with the types of vehicle deployments and specific deployment plans with partners, are confidential.”

The company added: “We are actively working to increase our deployment of R2 on public roads and intend to learn much more from expanded operations over the next year.” 

More specifically, TechCrunch reports that the company “will initially use” the R2 and that the Nuro vehicle will be coming out in “late 2023.”

Ultimately, the robotics company sits at the interesting intersection of EVs, autonomy, and fulfillment of goods and services—and is certainly not the only player in that general space. While some companies like Waymo, Zoox, or Cruise work on creating vehicles that can carry humans from place to place on the road, others are delivering goods from the air, via small drone, like Wing and Zipline. And finally, companies are working on transporting people and cargo through the skies, like Beta Technologies or Joby. It’s a bold new transportation and delivery future—or at least that’s what the companies envision.

With the Nuro-Uber partnership specifically, the Verge reports that it is “the culmination of over four years of start-and-stop negotiations between the two companies.” Food delivery via bot doesn’t always come easily. 

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Apple held its annual iPhone extravaganza today, and among the debut of gadgets like the iPhone 14 and the chunky, extreme-sports-focused Apple Watch Ultra are two new services focused on safety. One of them, car crash detection, involves both gadgets, and the other, enabling emergency satellite communication, is iPhone-specific. 

Here’s a look at what to expect from the two new services. 

Car crash detection

Apple has previously rolled out two features tied to its wearable device that detect if you’ve taken a spill: a form of everyday fall-detection (in 2018) and then, last year, a workout-focused version of the same. 

A new service, announced today, aims to notice that you’ve been in a car accident and then call for help. 

Ron Huang, the company’s vice president for sensing and connectivity, said that the feature employs new sensors in the Apple Watch as well as machine learning. While the company’s watches already have gyroscopes and accelerometers in them, Huang said that new versions of these sensors help detect the forces present in a car accident. That new accelerometer, he said, can notice as much as 256 Gs of acceleration, “allowing it to detect the extreme impacts of a crash.” 

For context, one G—that stands for gravity—is what you feel pulling you straight down towards the Earth at any given moment, and fighter pilots endure as much as nine or more Gs while conducting maneuvers in which they bank hard or accelerate quickly. In a car accident, the Gs the watch are detecting likely stem from forces involved in actions like the rapid stop. 

[Related: A new AT&T update could make 911 calls more effective]

Huang also said that the onboard barometer, microphone, and GPS chip help with the detection process as well, and that machine learning helped tie everything together. The barometer is involved to measure pressure-related changes due to an airbag’s deployment, a promotional video during the event explained. 

The company’s latest phones also offer an identical service, said Kaiann Drance, the company’s vice president for iPhone product marketing, meaning that you do not need to buy the newest watch to get car crash detection. 

The announcement comes at a grim time for road safety in the United States, as almost 43,000 people died in car accidents in 2021, an increase of more than 10 percent over the year before. (Pedestrians are an especially vulnerable group.) But of course, difficult problems like national road safety are unlikely to be solved with something like a gadget. 

Satellite communications

The second safety feature the company announced is baked into the new iPhones specifically, and involves giving someone like an injured mountaineer a way to ask for help via satellite when they are out of cell service range. 

Apple is calling the new feature “Emergency SOS via Satellite,” and it works by instructing the lost hiker to point their phone at a far away, quick-moving communications satellite. To make this feature work, engineers had to tackle the bandwidth challenges that come with this form of communication. 

“To connect to these satellites, you need to be outside, with a clear view of the sky,” said Ashley Williams, the company’s manager for satellite modeling and simulation. “And the bandwidth is so limited that even sending a text message is a technical challenge.” (So, no Netflix via sat.) 

[Related: What it’s like to rescue someone at sea from a Coast Guard helicopter]

Other factors that allow this whole system to work are a “custom short text compression algorithm,” Williams said, as well as a specific screen interface for reporting what the problem is, like by hitting the “Lost or Trapped” option. Helping to handle any cries for help will be a ground network that also includes “relay centers staffed with highly trained emergency specialists ready to get your text and call an emergency service provider on your behalf,” she said, which are involved if the emergency center cannot deal with a text message exchange on its own. 

The satellite communication service will not come with any extra cost—for the first two years after you purchase an iPhone 14. After that, the sky’s the limit. The SOS service debuts in November, only in Canada and the United States. 

Watch the entire event, below.

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The US Army operates hundreds of large helicopters called Chinooks. The flying machine’s job is straightforward and unflashy: To transport people or equipment. But the Chinook fleet is not going anywhere right now, because the Army has grounded them. The problem leading to the grounding is a series of engine fires—there have been four reported fires over the past 90 days, according to an Army spokesperson.  

The news of the vast grounding was reported earlier this week by The Wall Street Journal. 

Here’s what to know about this unique military helicopter and why it was grounded. 

The basics 

“The Chinook is right now one-of-a-kind for the Army,” says Stacie Pettyjohn, who directs the defense program at the Center for a New American Security. “It’s the only heavy lift helicopter that it has.” 

The CH-47 doesn’t look like a typical helicopter, either, thanks to its bus-like shape and two large, counter-spinning top rotors. The body of the aircraft is just over 50 feet long and, when the rotors are spinning, the flying machine’s total length is about 100 feet, according to a Boeing factsheet. It can hold more than 30 passengers. 

“For the Army, it provides it with mobility, and an ability to transport needed equipment or troops to different locations,” she adds. “This is really important in operations such as Afghanistan, where you’re in this really mountainous terrain that doesn’t have a particularly good road network.” 

While versions of the Chinook have flown for decades, currently, two different variants are in service, notes Mark Cancian, a retired colonel in the Marine Corps and a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The CH-47F is the base model, and the MH-47G is intended for special operations. 

That “G” variant features “fancy additional capabilities,” Cancian says. “The big one is that the avionics are more sophisticated—it allows much more complex navigation, [and] I think it allows it to fly closer to the ground.” 

Regardless, experts describe the aircraft as a workhorse. It’s “not flashy,” Cancian notes. Flying in one, he says, is very loud, and passengers sit along the sides. “You’re in mesh seats, facing each other,” he says. “It’s just so noisy, you can’t talk.” 

Other Army helicopters include the Apache and the Black Hawk. Meanwhile, as part of a larger program called Future Vertical Lift, two companies, Sikorsky and Bell, are competing to produce both a new armed reconnaissance helicopter (see the candidates here and here) and a new Black-Hawk-type assault aircraft (here’s option one and option two). 

The grounding

The issue behind the fires and subsequent grounding is believed to stem from an O-ring, which is like a gasket, in some engines. “All CH-47 helicopters are currently undergoing inspection to determine if the O-rings are defective,” says Army spokesperson Jason Waggoner, via email. (A separate Army statement from Army spokesperson Cynthia Smith notes that “no deaths or injuries occurred” as a result of the “small number of engine fires.”)

Those O-rings are in T55 engines made by Honeywell. In a statement, the company said: “Honeywell helped discover that O-rings not meeting Honeywell design specifications had been installed in some T55 engines during routine and scheduled maintenance at an Army Depot. It is believed these suspect O-Rings have been identified and isolated.”

Waggoner notes that the Army cannot say how long the grounding will last. “Based on the results of our investigation some aircraft may not require corrective measures and may soon return to normal flight operations,” he says. 

In total, he says, the Army has more than 400 of these helicopters, but the Journal quotes a figure of “more than 70 aircraft” that could be specifically affected out of the larger fleet. 

The takeaway 

Experts characterized a grounding like this one as a major event, even if it’s not unprecedented. “I wish I could say it’s rare,” says Todd Harrison, the head of research at Meta Aerospace. “It’s unusual, to be sure, but it usually means that there’s a serious safety issue that they’re concerned about.” 

But the grounding of a fleet that includes more than 400 of the same type of aircraft is a reminder of a vulnerability that accompanies a trend in military aviation, Harrison says. “If you look at our broad inventory of aircraft—rotary wing and fixed wing, across the military—not only has it been getting smaller, we’ve been narrowing down different types of aircraft fleets into a smaller and smaller number of types.” 

While having larger numbers of the same types of aircraft can come with economical benefits, the strategy comes with a weakness in the form of many eggs in one basket. 

“What that means is since you’re flying a lot of the same hardware—same engine, same airframe, things like that—that when you find some sort of a critical vulnerability, a safety issue, and you have to ground that fleet,” Harrison observes, “you’re now grounding a much greater percentage of your overall force.” 

Correction on Sept. 3: This article has been updated to refer to the special operations variant of the Chinook as the MH-47G, not the CH-47G.

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The next time you scan a document and feel annoyed at the tedium of the process, consider the people in Kansas who have to scan in an entire Apache helicopter. A group at the National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR), a part of Wichita State University, is creating a three-dimensional digital rendering of an Apache attack helicopter, a process that includes making a scan of each part. The project is set to take three years and is the result of an Army contract. 

Melinda Laubach-Hock, who is leading the massive scan job, estimates that the Apache could have around 5,000 to 6,000 parts. Her estimate is based on a similar project her team is wrapping up that involved scanning in around 5,000 parts of a Black Hawk helicopter.

“We are taking an airframe, disassembling it down to the detail parts, cleaning it up, scanning it in, [and] reverse engineering it,” she says, describing the process for the Apache aircraft. “We build detailed models at the manufacturing-quality level for every part, and then we basically digitally reassemble the airframe.” 

A three-year undertaking like this, which a NIAR describes as “tedious,” begs the questions: Why do this? And how?

So, why?

The purpose is two-fold, says Lauback-Hock. The first is to help with repairs, or “to improve the way we’re doing sustainment for the legacy Apache fleet,” she says. The variant of Apache that they’re working on is an AH-64D, or delta, model, and she estimates that the US Army has 800 of them in service. Having a high-fidelity digital representation of a part could help with the fabrication process when it comes to repairing or replacing a helicopter component. She also argues that a digitally designed repair solution for a part could be more enduring than just a one-off fix created by one person. It’s probably not going to be a digital version of a helicopter in a Dropbox folder, but you get the idea. 

The second involves exploring, more generally, the role that having a detailed digital version of an aircraft—a concept generally called a digital twin—might play in the future. Next-generation helicopters and tiltrotor aircraft are being born in the digital age (with both Sikorsky and Bell competing in two separate Army programs), setting them apart in some ways compared to older machines. 

[Related: Why Bell’s sleek new helicopter has detachable wings]

With the Apache program, beyond just scanning in the parts, the goal is to also put them together digitally so they represent a virtual version of the real aircraft, that can be used to model how loads or stresses might affect the real thing. She refers to the digital beast that they will create as a “high-fidelity engineering structural model.” 

“Basically, that’s an engineering model that says, ‘If I push here on the structure, this is how the load propagates through the structure,’” she adds. And then to make sure that that digital model is truthful, she says that they will procure a second Apache helicopter, which they will physically stress. “We’re going to push and pull, and measure the response, and we’re going to use those measurements to calibrate our engineering model,” she notes. 

[Related: Take a peek at Sikorsky’s scout helicopter prototype]

She also argues that in general, having a digital version of a helicopter could help with doing maintenance in a more predictive, proactive way. 

So why not just get the plans from the company that made the helicopter in the first place, which for the Apache is Boeing? “I don’t know whether they exist at Boeing or not,” Lauback-Hock says. (The Apache version Boeing produces today is the AH-64E, while the version being scanned in Kansas is an AH-64D. A Boeing spokesperson said via email: “Boeing keeps detailed records in a variety of formats of the D-model and E-model Apaches.” They also noted, regarding the NIAR project, that “Boeing has offered assistance.”)

But more generally, the ways that aircraft makers created the plans for flying machines in the past were different from the standards of today. “My experience is, we’ve received models on other legacy platforms that we’ve been building [digital] twins for,” Lauback-Hock says, “and there’s quite a substantial amount of work that has to go into upgrading them to today’s standards.” 

How does one scan in a helicopter?

The team is using an Apache helicopter they have on site in Kansas, although it’s not a complete aircraft. “There was an airframe involved in an incident, and it could not be repaired,” she says. “We started there, and then the Army is looking for ways to get us access to pieces we don’t currently have.” 

Any damaged parts are gone now, so what’s left is roughly 80 percent of the helicopter. But with a project as big as scanning an entire helicopter, it made sense to just start with what they have, she says. To scan in the parts, they use a device called a Hexagon Arm that can capture components in 3D. “You just kind of paint over the surface with the laser multiple times, and that creates a very dense, geometrically correct point cloud that can represent the outside shape of the article,” she says. 

The Apache is not the first aircraft to be subjected to this kind of digital intake. The Black Hawk project is about 95 percent complete, she says. They’re also scanning in a B-1 bomber and an F-16 fighter jet, the latter of which is about 15 to 20 percent done. Laubach-Hock notes that other programs exist in this arena that have not been publicly disclosed. 

Students are going to be helping out, too. Ultimately, Lauback-Hock says that about 65 people will be working on the Apache program, with 30 of those being students. One student told ksn.com that the project “looks incredibly great on my resume.”

This post has been updated to include comment from Boeing.

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In mid-June, a drone called the Zephyr took off from Arizona. The solar-powered aircraft remained in the sky, flying through the rest of June, all of July, and about half of August. It flew, according to the Army, more than 34,500 miles. It even ventured over South America. 

But one night last week, something went wrong. While above the Yuma Proving Ground (YPG), which sits right near the border between Arizona and California, it “encountered events that led to its unexpected termination,” according to an Army release. The Army says that it is investigating what happened. 

All told, the aircraft, which is designed to soar at altitudes north of 60,000 feet, remained airborne for 64 days. Previously, the drone had completed other very long duration flights, such as one in 2018 that lasted almost 26 days, and two flights last year of about 18 days. As for the ultra-long journey that just suddenly ended, the Army says that it’s the longest flight on the books for an uncrewed aircraft, noting that it “beat all known unmanned aircraft endurance records.” However, as Simple Flying notes, a bizarre flight involving two pilots in a Cessna that took place between 1958 and 1959 lasted for nearly 65 days, so the record the Army is boasting about is for uncrewed aircraft. 

[Related: A solar-powered Army drone has been flying for 40 days straight]

So what happened to cause this flight to suddenly end? “Our team is working hard to gather and analyze important data following the unexpected termination of this flight,” Michael Monteleone, a cross-functional team director with Army Futures Command, said in a statement. The Army also notes that no one was hurt in the event.

Meanwhile, Simple Flying used the flight data it was able to glean and notes that its last moments had it at an altitude of some 45,000 or 50,000 feet, and that it experienced “a vertical descent rate which rapidly increased, topping out at a speed of 4,544 feet per minute.” As both that outlet and Task & Purpose speculate, the resulting unplanned impact with the ground was probably not gentle. 

The Zephyr gets its power from the sun, via onboard solar panels, and can store that energy in a battery system so that it has the juice it needs to keep flying when the sun isn’t shining. Made by Airbus, the most recent version has a wingspan of 82 feet. 

An aircraft like the Zephyr is known as a HAPS, which stands for high-altitude platform station (or pseudo-satellite). Besides Airbus, another company working in the space is AeroVironment. With the Zephyr, Airbus markets the craft as a type of connected watchtower high in the sky, like a satellite in the stratosphere, allowing it to conduct intelligence, surveillance, or reconnaissance missions for a military or carry out other tasks.

“When you have a platform that can stay in the air at very high altitudes that long, there are really two main missions that it’s very well suited for,” says JJ Gertler, a senior associate in the aerospace security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “One is reconnaissance—whether it’s looking down, or conceivably even looking up—the ability to stay on station a long time, and stare at a particular target or a particular area, is very useful.” 

“The other main mission would be [as a] communications relay—to be sort of a cell tower in the sky, connecting all kinds of different units,” he adds. “The more altitude you can get, the more area you can cover for that mission.”

Gertler notes that the Zephyr staying in the sky for 64 days “is something that was made possible by a number of technical advances—most significantly, lightweight photovoltaics.” 

But with a very long flight also comes new potential issues. “We’re not used to flying aero-structures for months at a time,” he adds. “We don’t know what kind of fatigue issue there may be when you do it for that long, without landing, or without maintenance. That’s life on the edge of technology.” 

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A big change is coming down the pike in how the federal government encourages people to buy clean cars like electric vehicles. The Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) on August 7, and the House of Representatives could pass it today. Barring any last-minute shifts, automakers and car buyers will find themselves with new tax rules that are baked into that massive legislation after President Biden signs it into law. 

The changes, experts say, are restrictive in terms of what electric vehicles and potential buyers will qualify. However, it’s not all bad news, either. 

Here’s a look at what to expect in the EV space if the IRA becomes law. 

The current landscape 

First, it makes sense to consider the way tax credits have worked in the clean vehicle space, pre-IRA, in the United States. Currently, in some cases, as much as $7,500 is available as a tax credit to people who want to buy an electric vehicle or a plug-in hybrid. “The amount of money that you could credit from your taxes was based on the battery size, although the battery size limits were so low, that basically everything qualified for the $7,500,” says James Di Filippo, a senior policy analyst with Atlas Public Policy. 

The current system has some important rules. One of those is that the $7,500 is a tax credit towards the sum a person might owe the federal government in taxes. For example, imagine that a taxpayer owes exactly $7,500 in federal taxes for a certain year, and has been careful about their withholdings in their paycheck, paying the exact right amount throughout the year. Typically, come tax time in April, when that person and the IRS reconciled, neither party would owe anything. But, if that individual bought an EV that qualified for the $7,500 tax credit, the IRS would then cut them a check for that amount. “Typically, the way that it was working was people were just getting their money back when they filed their taxes,” Di Filippo observes. 

But Di Filippo points out that that system wasn’t fair, or equitable, across income levels. “The key equity implication of that is that the less you earn—at a certain threshold, basically—the less you get in that credit.” Imagine you only owned $1,000 in federal taxes, then the maximum you could gain in a credit was also $1,000. 

There’s another issue with the current system, too. The full $7,500 credit only applies to the first 200,000 qualifying vehicles a company makes, and then it diminishes and ends. “That particular cap was a point of contention,” Di Filippo adds. General Motors and Tesla, for example, have since surpassed that 200,000 figure already. 

Interested in reading up more on all this? Here’s where it is spelled out in US Code. 

The road ahead 

If the IRA becomes law in its current form, the system outlined above will change. For one, the 200,000 limit disappears. “That is going to be a humongous help—in theory—for automakers like Tesla, as well as General Motors,” reflects Robby DeGraff, an industry analyst with AutoPacific. 

Another change restricts people who make over a certain amount of money annually from getting the credit. For example, households that make more than $300,000 a year are out of luck, at least in the tax-credit department. Also, there are caps on the price of the vehicles: For example, a pickup truck that costs more than $80,000 would not be eligible; others are capped at $55,000. In short, expensive vehicles are left out. 

But other changes have to do with where a vehicle—and the parts in it—comes from. “The vehicle must be assembled in North America,” says Di Filippo. “And right away, that removes quite a few current vehicles on the market from eligibility.”

An ID.4 made by Volkswagen in Tennessee is in good shape at least with this requirement, but a Hyundai Ioniq 5, which is made overseas, not so much. 

[Related: Can the Chips and Science Act help the US avoid more shortages?]

Then there are other requirements pertaining to the provenance of the vehicle’s components. In particular, in the spotlight are the questions of where the battery components (like the cells) are assembled, and where the minerals in the battery—such as lithium and cobalt—are mined from and processed. Whether or not an automaker checks these boxes determines how much of the $7,500 might apply. “The battery mineral content and components really make up the two halves of that $7,500,” Di Filippo says. (In other words, some vehicles could qualify for smaller tax credits based on what boxes they do tick.) 

“Battery components have to be manufactured and assembled in North America, and if you meet the thresholds, which expand over time—starting in 2023, it’s 50 percent—then the vehicle is qualified for $3,750,” he explains. 

As for the minerals that go in a battery (here’s more on how a lithium-ion battery works), that part is tricky.

The new restrictions state that by 2023, 40 percent of the battery’s critical minerals need to come from—be extracted from, and processed in—a country that the US has a free-trade agreement with. That percentage requirement increases over time. And by 2025, none can come from China (which refines lithium) or Russia, for example. So even if the lithium was mined in Australia or Chile, an issue could remain if it was processed in another country.

“My understanding is no car manufacturer can hit that 40-percent target in 2023, as of right now,” Di Filippo says. “They may be able to scramble and change that.” 

The takeaway

Ultimately, the changes are restrictive, says Di Filippo. “From a consumer’s perspective, this is going to probably reduce, or almost certainly reduce, the number and value of EV credits going forward for the next few years at least.” 

There are some bright spots, though. One is that there will be up to a $4,000 tax credit that a person can get when buying a used EV from a dealer, provided their income is below a certain level ($75,000 for an individual person, for example). “The used EV tax credit, or clean vehicle credit, is a huge perk for consumers looking to get into electrification,” says DeGraff, of AutoPacific. 

Also, previously the tax credit was money that someone would generally get when they filed their taxes; now there will be a way for it to go into effect when people actually purchase the vehicle at a dealer. 

But still, there’s general concern about the effects of the legal changes on the electric vehicle market, as the CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation wondered in a blog post titled: “What If No EVs Qualify for the EV Tax Credit? It Could Happen.” 

Ultimately, Di Filippo sees some improvements with the new policies over the old, but with an important caveat. “It’s a win for equity in the EV tax-credit policy space—of course none of that matters if nobody can buy a vehicle that can actually qualify for the tax credit,” he reflects. 

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In February, for the first time, a Black Hawk helicopter flew itself around with no humans on board. The self-flying military helo project involved both DARPA and Sikorsky, which makes the UH-60 helicopters. 

Meanwhile, in some places, companies like Zipline and Wing are delivering goods by drone. Other companies are working on electric air taxis to transport people or cargo, and of course normal air traffic—commercial flights out of big airports, general aviation airplanes zipping out of others—is flying around, too. Factor in helicopters, hot air balloons, and more, and there can be a lot going on up there.  

With all this busyness in the skies, researchers at Carnegie Mellon are working on an artificial intelligence pilot system that can carry out tasks like predicting what another aircraft might do, or keep an eye out for nearby planes using cameras on an aircraft. The idea is that an AI like this could help fly drones, assist a human pilot, or even someday fly a plane on its own. 

Right now, in a flight simulator, the AI is able to figure out what another aircraft is doing, or might do, and then figure out how to safely land the plane accordingly. Think of the way a driver behind the wheel of a car notices another vehicle approaching an intersection, and begins preemptively planning what to do if the other car were to run a stop sign, for example. 

In this case, the AI is looking out for another plane, not a car, of course. “It basically looks at their behavior for 10 seconds,” says Jay Patrikar, a doctoral student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. “It tries to judge: ‘They are here. What are they potentially likely to do?’” 

In that sense, it’s like an AI that can play chess, says Patrikar, thinking about what its move would be in advance if its opponent were to take a certain action.

[Related: The Air Force plans to test an AI copilot on its cargo planes]

Artificial intelligence systems need data to learn from. In this case, the team is gathering data from two real-world airports, both of them in Pennsylvania. One has an air traffic control tower, and the other does not. Patrikar says that at those airports the data they hoover up includes visual information from cameras located on a hanger or near the taxiway, spoken communication from the radios, weather data, and more. “We record the entirety of it,” he says. The idea is for the AI to be able to learn cause and effect by paying attention to all this information. 

“It knows the causality of things,” he adds. That means that the AI could learn, for example, that “it was because of the weather that they [a pilot] decided to do this particular thing.” The training the AI received in these scenarios has helped it learn how to navigate a landing in simulation, Patrikar says. 

Plus, an AI bringing an aircraft in for a landing at a small, uncontrolled airport must both follow FAA rules as well as other norms when interacting with other planes, Patrikar points out. “One of the ways humans trust each other is with our shared understanding of rules—our social norms,” he says. People on a busy sidewalk might decide how to pass each other by moving to the right, for example, and rules like that apply in aviation that the AI pilot must follow. 

[Related: This company is retrofitting airplanes to fly on missions with no pilots]

Related work in the real world, not in simulation, has the team putting cameras on aircraft like a Cessna 172 or a hexacopter drone. Those cameras and the AI are able to spot other aircraft in the area, identify them, and figure out how far away they are with a greater than 90-percent accuracy rate at a distance of 700 meters (about 2,300 feet). This kind of tech could help a human pilot in a small plane visually spot other traffic in the area. “I would like to have that system on my plane,” says Patrikar, who has a private pilot license. After all, artificial intelligence doesn’t blink.

To be sure, the Carnegie Mellon researchers are not the only people exploring the new frontier of artificial intelligence that can fly, or help fly, aircraft. The Zipline drone company has been working on a way to use microphones on its drones to listen for other aircraft in the area and then take evasive action to avoid any potential collisions. And notably, a company called Merlin Labs has also developed a digital pilot that could take the place of a human copilot. As one example, it’s working with the Air Force on equipping C-130J cargo planes with their system, so instead of a human crew of two pilots, the aircraft could be flown by a single human paired with an artificial copilot. 

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Both the Senate and the House have now passed the Chips and Science Act, and today, the White House said that President Biden would be signing the bill into law on Tuesday, August 9. The legislation contains more than $50 billion worth of funding intended to spur semiconductor manufacturing, research, development, and more in the United States. 

Semiconductors—computer chips—are essential for modern tech. If you’re curious about semiconductors and this new legislation, here’s what to know about how this new influx of money could affect the global chip landscape. 

The rationale behind the funding

“The primary motivation is that the world has become dependent on one company located in one country, which has a number of risks associated with it,” says David Yoffie, a professor of international business administration at Harvard Business School. (He also is a member of the board of Ampere Computing, which designs processors, and was a member of Intel’s board for 29 years.) The company he is referring to is TSMC in Taiwan, which is in the news because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi just visited it. In fact, Pelosi met TSMC’s chairman, Mark Liu, according to The New York Times and other outlets. 

To be sure, TSMC is not the only semiconductor manufacturer. The other two big companies are Samsung and Intel. Right now, 12 percent of chips are made in the United States, according to a Congressional summary of the bill. 

“The underlying philosophy of the Chip Act is to ensure some balance—balancing risk, balancing national security, balancing economics, and hopefully try to produce a more reasonable system for the world electronics business,” Yoffie says. 

Will the funding help move chip production to the United States?

Experts say it will probably help—to some extent. “It will lead to more investment in the US than otherwise would have occurred,” Yoffie says. He cites developments from Intel, Samsung, and TSMC in Ohio, Texas, and Arizona, respectively. “At the margin, it’s going to make a difference—we’re not going to go from 12 to 50 percent [of global chip production share].” 

James Lewis, the director of the strategic technologies program at CSIS, sees events unfolding roughly the same way. “One of the big effects will be to see more plants, more chip production capability, built in the US,” he notes. “This will strengthen the chip industrial base in the US.”

Will it make a big difference, or a little one?

Daniel Ives, a managing director and senior equity analyst with Wedbush Securities, argues that it’s the latter. “It’s a small step in what’s going to be a marathon for the US, to even make a dent,” he says. “The cost dynamics, logistics, and technology ecosystem, has cemented the chip food chain in and around Asia.” 

But, he notes that even seeing a “5 to 7 percent of chip production move out Asia would be a Herculean success for the US.”

This involves billions of dollars. That’s a lot, right?

Of course, a figure measured in the billions of dollars is a vast sum of money, but in the chip landscape, that doesn’t go very far, says Yoffie. “The kind of money we’re talking about here is actually relatively small,” he adds. Making a “state of the art” facility (called a fab) to fabricate the wafers for semiconductors costs anywhere from about $10 billion to $20 billion.

Plus, the equipment involved in the fabrication process can come with a sticker price of around $150 million for just one machine. If it all sounds complex, that’s because it is. “It’s the most complicated manufacturing product that exists in the world today,” Yoffie says. “There’s nothing more complicated than semiconductors.” (Quantum computing could give it a run for its money.)

Lewis, of CSIS, says the investment was necessary. “We needed to do this,” he says. “And on chips, we needed to do it probably a decade ago.” 

There’s been a chip shortage. What caused that, and how’s it going now?

“The primary reason was the pandemic,” Yoffie says, “which produced a shift between people consuming fewer services and more goods—so we saw a boom in demand for physical products, and many of those physical products required semiconductors, whether we’re talking about computers or whether we’re talking about cars.” In that sense, the chip shortage was a question of a big spike in demand and a supply that couldn’t meet it. 

[Related: Understanding the global chip shortage, a big crisis involving tiny components]

Lewis says other factors have affected the industry, too, like a fire at a chip plant in Japan that occurred in March of last year. Plus, bad weather in Texas hurt Samsung. Another factor has to do with vehicles and the chips needed for those. “Some chip consumers, mainly car industries, miscalculated how the pandemic would work,” Lewis says. “People miscalculated the pace of recovery.” 

“I think the crisis itself is going away naturally,” Lewis reflects. He argues that the funding from the legislation will not necessarily bring an end to the chip crunch, because “that was ending anyway.” 

The takeaway

“This will do two things—it will build in some more resiliency into the supply chain,” Lewis says. “The second thing it does is, it helps shift some of the production back to the US, which turns out, I think, to be a crucial change.” 

Read more about the Chips and Science Act here. 

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Very early in the morning on June 15, a lightweight drone with a 82-foot wingspan took off from the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, assisted by a handful of people who had to hand-launch it from the runway. It’s been 40 days since then, and the drone is still flying, continuously breaking its own record with each minute that goes by until it lands at some point. 

On Friday, Breaking Defense noted that the light, solar-powered aircraft had been up there for 37 days, a mission that had it “demolishing its previous 26-day record.” An Army spokesperson confirmed to PopSci that the drone is still airborne as of today, meaning it’s been flying for 40 days and change. 

The Airbus-made drone is solar-powered, designed to fly in the stratosphere and operate off just a tiny bit of electricity. In fact, an October 2021 Army release noted that its power needs are the same as “a single commercial light bulb.” 

The Zephyr has flown for long periods of time previously. It flew for two weeks in 2010, and then it carried out its then-record-breaking 26-day flight (to be precise, that flight time is actually listed as 25 days, 23 hours, and 57 minutes) in 2018. That year, it was also noted as a Best of What’s New winner from PopSci.

Since that year, the Zephyr has been upgraded internally, the Army said in 2021. “It has some design upgrades to make it a more capable system,” Simon Taylor, the head of Zephyr program, said in a release. “The aircraft physically isn’t very different, it’s what sits inside the aircraft and the clever software inside it. We’re going for a much more ambitious flying campaign than we’ve ever attempted to date.” In 2021, it carried out two flights, according to an Army spokesperson. Each of those was about 18 days long. 

[Related: An electric aircraft just completed a journey of 1,403 miles]

The Zephyr’s first flight of 2022 is the one that’s airborne now, and it took off mid-June. It is a mission that has so far “demonstrated Zephyr’s energy storage capacity, battery longevity, solar panel efficiency and station-keeping abilities that will further the Army’s goal to implement ultra-long endurance stratospheric UAS capabilities,” the Army said on July 21. This flight is also the first time that this drone has flown into international airspace or over water. 

Drones like the Zephyr, which can soar for long periods of time in the stratosphere at altitudes higher than 60,000 feet, have applications in a field known as ISR, which stands for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. “Ultra-long endurance unmanned platforms have the potential to provide significant military capabilities and enhanced confidence as part of the Army’s diversified multi-layered architecture,” Michael Monteleone, who directs a group in the Army called the APNT/Space CFT, said.

This Zephyr may be flying right now, but the Army says a second one is set to take off “in the coming weeks.” Its destination? It is set to “travel over the Pacific Ocean.” 

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Earlier this month, a Navy ship called the USS Essex received an enormous printer. The printer and the large gray box it is housed in—together weighing some 15,000 pounds—were hoisted onto the ship, via crane, in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The printer doesn’t print in ink. It prints using hot liquid metal, making it a small aluminum fabrication facility in a box. 

The idea behind putting the device on the ship is for the Navy to have a way to fabricate metal parts it might need at sea. Here’s how it works.

It reaches a temp of 1,562 degrees

The printer, called the ElemX, is made by Xerox. It measures 9 feet wide and 7 feet tall, and will remain in its roughly 20-foot-long conex storage box while deployed on the Essex. It weighs about 4,630 pounds alone, and needs a power supply of 480 volts. 

The material it prints with is aluminum, and it consumes aluminum wire as the raw material. 

“The wire gets fed into the heated print head. The print head gets to 850 Celsius [1,564 Fahrenheit], which essentially melts the wire, so you get this liquid pool of metal,” says Tali Rosman, the head of Elem Additive at Xerox. “And then we activate pulses on the print head, and eject [metal], drop by drop, to build the part.” 

[Related: An exclusive look inside where nuclear subs are born]

The pulses that expel the liquid metal are magnetic. The print head doesn’t move, but a plate beneath it does, allowing a custom part to take shape. “You can get the part in your hands in less than a minute from when the print finishes,” she adds. After it finishes printing, the creation and the plate it is attached to must be dunked in some water, a process that separates the two items. 

The result, she says, is “a mini factory in a conex box.”

She notes that the printer is not simple enough for a sailor with no training to operate it. “We’re not there yet,” she says. The training program for operating the printer takes three days. In other words, it’s not as simple as loading a file for a wrench and hitting print. 

A tale of two printers 

The printer currently on the Essex has a sibling: The same model machine has been installed at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, California, since December, 2020. “The Navy and NPS are printing the same parts at sea and on land,” Rosman says. After the ship docks, they’ll compare and contrast the parts made in the different environments to see if they differ. They will “make sure being at sea didn’t cause any significant variations or changes.”

So what could go wrong with printing parts using hot liquid metal on a 844-foot long Wasp-class ship that’s floating in the ocean? 

One variable on Rosman’s radar is vibrations from the ship, which might affect the printing process. The next concern is “the climate” the printer will experience while onboard, in terms of salty air or even saltwater—although the printer will remain protected within its large box and is inside the ship itself. “But in the interest of being fully transparent, since nobody’s done this before, we don’t know,” Rosman says. “There might be things that we haven’t thought about, that as this printer is now at sea, and printing parts, there might be things none of us had put on our risk checklist.” 

[Related: This huge Xerox printer can create metal parts for the US Navy]

The type of objects that want to fabricate using this printer are pretty straightforward. The idea is to be able to create items that might come in handy at sea when a stop at a hardware store would be logistically inconvenient. “They want to make relatively simple parts that break on a ship often,” says Rosman. 

Printers that can create three-dimensional objects can lead to “greater self-sufficiency for Navy ships,” notes Commander Arlo Abrahamson, a Naval spokesperson, via email. He says that the metal items that have been printed thus far on the Essex are “Common Valve Hand Wheels, Antenna Seal Band Brackets, Fire Hose Spanner Wrenches,” and more. 

Abrahamson also notes that a previous polymer-based 3D printer on the Essex produced non-metal parts, and created some 735 items during a deployment between 2018 and 2019. 

Take a look at a video showing how a metal item is made, below:

The post A Navy ship got a giant liquid-metal 3D printer earlier this month appeared first on Popular Science.

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Modern commercial airliners transport their passengers from point to point with great speed, but they don’t break Mach 1—the rate at which sound travels. Following the fall of Concorde, which ceased its supersonic flights in 2003, a company called Boom Supersonic is trying to change that paradigm. They’ve been working on bringing a new supersonic passenger airplane to market, and making headlines, for years. Today, at the Farnborough International Airshow in England, they revealed a new design for their future plane. 

The airliner, which has not yet flown, is called Overture. The 201-foot craft aims to travel at Mach 1.7 and carry as many as 80 people. The new design brings some changes from what the company has previously revealed. The most notable shift is that the aircraft now has four engines under its wings; a previous iteration showed three, with an engine in the tail. Two torpedo-shaped, cylindrical engines now hang under each wing, angled slightly downwards. A reason for the new design is that “using four identical engine installations reduces costs and streamlines maintenance for our customers,” a Boom spokesperson says by email. (Commercial airlines in general have moved away from aircraft designs with four engines, preferring the fuel efficiency that comes with two large engines—but supersonic travel is in its own category.)

Airplanes of all sorts need wings to generate lift, and the latest version of Overture reveals that the company is going with a gull-wing shape for those critical components; the wings sweep back in a rough delta shape and have undulations to them, arcing upwards somewhat over the spot where the two engines are mounted. In a press release, the company says the new design will make the aircraft more stable and safe, and that the wings are “sculpted to enhance supersonic performance as well as improve subsonic and transonic handling.”

The new design also includes a fuselage that slims down towards the rear of the plane, and is larger in diameter at the front, vaguely evoking the bulbous forward section of a Boeing 747. (Indeed, the company’s CEO, Blake Scholl, said, “It’s kind of like if Concorde and 747 had a baby,” according to Flight Global.)

“Boom has applied this design technique to minimize drag and maximize fuel efficiency at supersonic speeds,” the company says in its news release. 

Computer simulation time and wind-tunnel testing helped them arrive at this latest design, the company said; they considered 51 different design versions as part of the process of landing on this one. Boom also says that it will make use of carbon composite materials in much of the aircraft’s design.

[Related: Boom plans to make its supersonic passenger planes in North Carolina]

Earlier this year, Boom announced that it would create a “superfactory” for manufacturing the Overture jets at a facility in Greensboro, North Carolina. Meanwhile, the company has developed, but not yet flown, a smaller aircraft called the XB-1, which is intended to help test for Overture. A Boom spokesperson said that they plan on flying XB-1 this year. The design of the XB-1, with its three engines, mimics an older version of the Overture aircraft’s design, but Boom says that the aircraft is still relevant as a stepping stone for the bigger plane. 

“XB-1 has already proven valuable for Overture,” the spokesperson said. “It has informed aircraft development including in giving us valuable, real-world data to strengthen our software-based approach to airplane design. XB-1 has also informed how we think about safety management and how to build a safe, successful flight test program.”

The company also announced a partnership with the US Air Force last year, along with an investment for as much as $60 million. In the same military and governmental vein, part of Boom’s announcement today at Farnborough included that it would be partnering with Northrop Grumman to continue the work of creating Overture-like aircraft that could fly at supersonic speeds for military use. The agreement with Northrop Grumman is “to develop special mission variants for the U.S. Government and its allies.” (The US military already has fighter jets and a bomber, the B-1B, that can break the sound barrier.) 

Finally, about those four engines. The company describes them as “medium-bypass 100% SAF-compatible turbofan[s],” referring to SAF, which is sustainable engine fuel. But the final design of the engines remains a wild card. “We have matured the Overture configuration significantly, and we’re working with Rolls-Royce and others behind the scenes to develop multiple design options for an engine that is optimized for 100% sustainable aviation fuel, enabling net-zero carbon supersonic flight for the first time,” a spokesperson said.

Dan Rutherford, the shipping and aviation director of The International Council on Clean Transportation, noted via direct message to PopSci that the engine issue was the key point on his radar: “The only thing you need to know about the new Overture design [is] that it still doesn’t have an engine.”

Boom expects Overture to fly for the first time in 2026. Check out a video showing off the new design, below:

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In April, a company called Wing launched a drone delivery service in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in Texas. Wing is owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and uses a small flying machine called the Hummingbird to deliver goods from places like Walgreens, and even ice cream from Blue Bell Creameries. 

The Hummingbird drone is just over 4 feet long, with a wingspan of about 5 feet, and many little propellers driven by electric motors. A dozen of those props exist to help the small aircraft hover or move through the air vertically, but four propellers on the wings also help it cruise horizontally to get where it needs to go. (Another version of the Hummingbird has just two propellers for cruise and a shorter wingspan: 3.3 feet.) The craft weighs just about 12 pounds, can carry a package that weighs 2.6 pounds, and travels at 65 miles per hour. 

The way it delivers that package to a customer is charming: It lowers it down on a tether, with the contents secured in a small box. 

The company now says that it’s working on what it calls an “Aircraft Library,” sketching out new drone designs with different sizes that could carry packages of various weights. Here’s what they’ve got cooking. 

The small one

One prototype is smaller than the Hummingbird. It weighs about 4 pounds, and would carry a package with a heft of just about two-thirds of a pound. So, this drone size is ideal for transporting stuff from a pharmacy, like a bottle of Advil. 

Adam Woodworth, who became CEO of Wing in February, holds up the small prototype (resembling the upper drone in the image above) to demonstrate it in a video interview with PopSci. A propeller at its front is what would pull it through the sky, like you would see on any small airplane. “We have two main lift rotors here,” he says, gesturing towards two gray rotors beneath the craft’s little wing. These do the majority of the lifting work. 

[Related: These drones can avoid midair collisions by listening for other aircraft]

At the end of each wing are two smaller rotors, each pair positioned on a little boom. They “work almost like the thrusters on a spacecraft,” Woodworth adds. If the two main lift rotors are helping the machine hover or move up and down vertically, the smaller ones at the wingtips can help with smaller adjustments. 

While the main drone in use today delivers packages by lowering them on a line, the small prototype would be carrying such light stuff that it doesn’t need a gentle lowering mechanism. “The package is so light, you’d probably hover over the backyard and drop it on the ground,” he says. That’s fine for a bottle of Advil, but you might not want to order a single raw egg if you could find a purveyor to sell you one.

The big one

The larger drone concept has a pleasantly bulbous body, and sports two dozen hover motors on four booms that run perpendicular to its wings. Like with the latest version of the Hummingbird, it has four propellers to give it the horizontal thrust it needs to cruise through the sky. This prototype weighs about 20 pounds and could carry a package weighing around 6.6 pounds. 

Woodworth says that like the Hummingbird, the larger prototype would employ the same tether delivery system, although they’re still tinkering with it. “A lot of the work on the big one was figuring out how to get that same system to work,” he says. 

In review: The small prototype is good for little pharmacy stuff, and the existing Hummingbird is a fit for transporting “prepared food, and relatively small consumer goods,” Woodworth says. But for the big one, “you’d be focusing more on the sort of things that you’d order online, and expect to get the next day, but you’d get them in a few minutes [via drone].” Examples: a pair of sneakers, or a Wi-Fi router. 

Wing is certainly not the only company working in this space: Zipline delivers goods in Arkansas, as well as in countries such as Rwanda and Ghana. It recently developed an innovative way for its aircraft to employ microphones to listen for other planes that could present a collision hazard. Moving way up in size, Elroy Air makes a drone called the Chaparral, which weighs 1,900 pounds. Elroy is teaming up with FedEx for package transport. And companies like Beta Technologies, which is working with UPS, are developing larger electric aircraft that can carry humans or cargo. Finally, Amazon also just announced it will start offering drone deliveries “later this year” in a Texas city called College Station, although that company has had a rough go with their previous drone endeavors. 

Watch more about Wing’s drone “library” approach, below:

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A traditional airplane gets the lift it needs to stay in the air from its wings. A helicopter, meanwhile, has large spinning rotor blades on top that provide lift, allowing it to do fantastic things, such as hover over the ocean and rescue someone at sea. 

But a sleek new prototype from Bell partially fuses these concepts together, giving its new military helicopter a detachable wing that can help it achieve fast speeds of around 180 to 200 knots (207 – 230 mph). 

Bell’s aircraft, called the 360 Invictus, is a candidate to be the US Army’s next armed reconnaissance helicopter. It’s competing directly against an aircraft from Sikorsky, called the Raider X. Both competitors’ prototypes are part of an Army program called FARA, which stands for Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft. 

Bells says that their prototype is more than 90 percent complete. The design features a tandem construction, so pilots could fly it from the front seat or the rear. “It’s very narrow,” says Chris Gehler, the director for the 360 Invictus program at Bell. That, plus retractable landing gear and retractable weapons pylons, help reduce the helicopter’s drag. 

Here’s what to know about how this aircraft works. 

Winging it

Protruding from each side of the helicopter’s narrow body is a wing. That wing measures about 7.5 to 8 feet out from each side, Gehler says.

A typical helicopter does not have a wing like this. But there’s a reason why Bell chose to incorporate it in their design, and that’s because the Army would like this bird to be able to travel fast, at speeds north of 160 knots (184 mph) or so. When a helicopter tries to go very quickly, a phenomenon called retreating blade stall becomes a concern. As the whirlybird cruises forward through the air, and the rotors up top are spinning around in circles, at any given time one of the rotor blades is moving against the flow of oncoming air, and one is moving with the air, as it retreats compared to the helicopter’s direction of flight. That can affect how much lift the rotor blades produce at any given position. (This same issue is why Sikorsky’s design has two top rotors that spin in opposite directions.) 

“You get into a dissimilar lift situation, where the advancing blade is producing more lift than the retreating blade, and you get out of balance, and it becomes an unstable situation,” Gehler says. He notes that it tends to become an issue when the rotor blades are spinning fast enough that the tips’ speeds approach the sound barrier. 

[Related: Take a peek at Sikorsky’s scout helicopter prototype]

That’s where the “lift-sharing wing” helps, says Gehler. It assists when the helicopter passes the 160-knot threshold, and at that point, it provides about 30 percent of the lift that the aircraft needs. Because the wing is giving that extra lift, the helicopter can automatically slow down the speed at which the rotor is spinning, avoiding that blade-stall issue. While the Invictus itself would still be traveling quickly, the rotor blades themselves would be slowed down enough to keep them at a safe speed. (Another factor is the angle at which the rotor blades bite into the air, and thanks to the help of the wing, the Invictus’ retreating blade can be positioned with a lower angle of attack.)

The design of the Invictus and its wings features another trick: They are partially removable. While the initial 3.5 feet or so of them are permanently attached to the aircraft, the remaining 4 feet or so can be taken off. If a helicopter crew doesn’t anticipate that their mission would involve high speeds, removing the wing tips in advance would save weight. Also, detaching those wing tips when needed could help the aircraft’s hover performance, because “there’s a little bit of penalty in hover” with having the wing there in the first place, Gehler notes. 

An aircraft with 1.25 engines

Whichever aircraft the Army eventually chooses to go with—and that’s a decision the Army said it will make in fiscal year 2025—the engine it uses has already been determined. That power plant is called the GE T901. 

But Bell has decided to accompany that engine with another onboard machine—a supplementary power unit, or SPU. This smaller engine is like an auxiliary power unit (more on how APUs work here), which play a key role in getting aircraft started. On the Bell design, Gehler notes that the SPU can also act as an additional engine during flight to help actually power those top rotors. First, they use this engine to get the helicopter started, like a normal APU. “But we clutch it into the drive system, and that allows us to provide power into the drive system at a hover, at high speed, at any time the pilot might need it,” he says. 

This power plant burns jet fuel, like the main engine does, and can produce in the ballpark of 600 to 900 horsepower. The main GE-made engine will be 3,000-shaft horsepower. Between the main engine and the SPU, this aircraft can be thought of as a 1.25-engine machine, Gehler says. 

[Related: What it’s like to rescue someone at sea from a Coast Guard helicopter]

The SPU can also help out if the main engine fails and the pilots need to make an emergency landing. “The supplemental power unit would kick in, and drive the rotor system to enable a softer landing approach,” he says. To be sure, it’s not powerful enough to keep the bird totally flying, but it would help “to give the pilot more time, and more options to land safely.” 

Like Sikorsky’s option, this prototype from Bell has not flown yet, because it needs that main engine to do so. Gehler expects the Invictus to first fly in the fall of 2023; it should be a couple years after that before the Army decides which option to select. Finally, don’t confuse the FARA program with another one called FLRAA, which also has Bell and Sikorsky competing with two different, larger aircraft. 

Take a look around the Invictus design in the video, below:

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Electric vehicles require batteries to help them zip down the road. Those batteries consist of a multitude of individual cells that together form a battery system. Today, in Salzgitter, Germany, the Volkswagen Group broke ground on a new factory that will crank out those cells, someday producing enough of the powerpack units for around 500,000 vehicles every year. Production is set to begin in 2025.

In fact, this factory is just the beginning of what the corporation calls, in a press release, its “global battery offensive.” While a VW battery cell factory already exists in Skellefteå, Sweden, four more planned factories will follow a similar setup as the new one in Salzgitter, which will act as a type of blueprint. After this facility in Salzgitter, the next one is planned for Valencia, Spain; there will be a total of a half-dozen factories in Europe alone by 2030. 

The cells that these factories will produce, which the VW Group describes as a “prismatic unified cell,” will one day be able to power as much as 80 percent of the different vehicle models that the company makes. This prismatic design is different from the shapes other EV battery cells typically take—cylinders and pouches. The battery producers at these factories will be able to tweak the chemistries of the cells to best suit the vehicles they are going into. With this general approach should come cost savings, too. “The new unified cell harnesses synergy effects and will reduce battery costs by up to 50 percent,” the company said in a statement. 

[Related: How the massive ‘flow battery’ coming to an Army facility in Colorado will work]

A new company, called PowerCo, will take the reins of the battery production machine. “PowerCo will become a global battery player,” Thomas Schmall, the supervisory board chairman of PowerCo, said in the statement. “The company’s major strength will be vertical integration from raw materials and the cell right through to recycling.” 

The Volkswagen Group includes brands such as Volkswagen, Audi, and Porsche. Volkswagen, for example, recently announced a new electric sedan concept car, the ID Aero. In addition to other EVs, like the ID Buzz, VW also makes the ID 4, which it will also start producing in the US, in Tennessee. While the VW Group plans a total of six battery factories in Europe, the company also says that there is the “​​prospect of further factories in North America in the future.” 

Meanwhile, here’s what Stellantis, General Motors, and others are up to when it comes to producing batteries for electric vehicles. 

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Someday, the Army could welcome a new scout helicopter into its fleet. Two companies are competing against one another in a program called FARA (Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft) to create the whirlybird that will fill that role. One of them is Bell, which is working on a candidate called the 360 Invictus. The other is Sikorsky, whose flying machine is called the Raider X. 

Sikorsky’s candidate features coaxial top rotors: The two large rotors on top of the helicopter, which give it lift, spin in opposite directions, negating the need for a traditional tail rotor. 

Two images of Raider X in a hangar in West Palm Beach, Florida, shared recently by Sikorsky, reveal how the company’s prototype is coming together. “The aircraft build is 90-percent complete,” says Pete Germanowski, the chief engineer on the FARA program at Sikorsky. “The basic airframe’s there, the cockpit doors are installed, the weapons bay doors are installed, the landing gear is installed and serviced, [and] many of the electrical and hydraulic subsystems are fully installed and going through their acceptance test procedures.”

In the photo above, a few details stand out. At the aircraft’s nose is a simulated weapon—a 3D-printed substitute for the actual 20mm cannon that would someday hang from under the aircraft in the same spot. That cannon is attached to a turret. “The turret that’s installed on the aircraft is the real deal flight-worthy turret,” Germanowski says, “with the actuation motors, and the motor controller unit, and all of the electronics that allow us to swivel the gun in azimuth, and pitch the gun in elevation.” 

[Related: Sikorsky’s fancy new helicopter completed its longest flight yet]

On top of the helicopter is another component that’s 3D-printed, as a stand-in for what will be the hubs for the top rotors and the gearbox. Germanowski refers to that 3D-printed component as a “shop aid,” which he says “allowed us to verify the installation procedure for the gearbox on the actual aircraft.” Ultimately, the hub that holds the two top rotors—which aren’t shown in these images—will be forged from titanium. 

At the helicopter’s tail will also someday be a propeller that can help the aircraft accelerate or decelerate. Whichever helicopter becomes the Army’s choice for the FARA role will be powered by a single engine, which is General Electric’s T901.

In another image, below, additional 3D-printed components protrude out of the weapon’s bay, which is open. What’s visible is a simulated version of a system called the modular effects launcher, which someday could carry missiles, rockets, or other kinetic objects, like drones or other sensors. The same section of the helicopter could also hold six people on troop seats, an auxiliary fuel tank, or other gear. 

If this scout helicopter sounds similar in design to another from Sikorsky, that’s because it is. While the Raider X is part of the FARA competition, Sikorsky’s Defiant X is part of another Army competition called FLRAA, which stands for Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft. Both helicopters, Raider and Defiant, have similar design elements: two counter-rotating top rotors, and a propeller in back.

[Related: Tilting rotors could help make Bell’s speedy new aircraft the next Black Hawk]

“It looks similar to Defiant,” says Germanowski, referring to the Raider X. “It’s significantly smaller than Defiant.”

Meanwhile, over at Bell, their FARA candidate—both companies refer to the aircraft they are working on as a competitive prototype—is the 360 Invictus, which in March was reported to be 87-percent finished. Some obvious design differences present themselves between the two aircraft prototypes: Bell’s aircraft employs a single main rotor up top, and a tandem cockpit, meaning the two pilots sit with one person in front of the other, as opposed to side-by-side. Also, the Invictus has a wing. 

Both Sikorsky and Bell might see their FARA competitive prototypes fly for the first time next year. And while the two companies are going head-to-head in the FARA program, with the Raider X pitted against the 360 Invictus, they are also competing in the aforementioned FLRAA program, with the Defiant X up against the V-280 Valor.  If FARA is about finding a next-gen armed scout helicopter, then FLRAA is all about choosing a larger, Black-Hawk-type helicopter. 

While it’s unclear when the Army will make a decision as to which aircraft it wants to go with for the FARA program, the FLRAA competition is further along. “The review board is being very thorough and the contract awardee will be announced when the board completes its review,” an Army spokesperson said via email, regarding FLRAA. The Drive reports that that FLRAA decision could happen in September. Update: In an email, an Army spokesperson says the service plans to make a decision for one FARA aircraft in fiscal year 2025, which for the US government begins Oct. 1, 2024.

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Today, Volkswagen unveiled a sleek new electric sedan—a concept vehicle it is calling the ID Aero. The announcement indicates that the automaker’s electric car clan is set to grow. 

VW labels its EVs with the prefix “ID.” The only electric vehicle model from VW currently on the US market is the ID.4, which is a compact SUV. The new Aero sedan will sport a range of as much as 385 miles, and will roll on wheels that are designed to evoke turbines, the company said in a press release. Other design details include two light strips that begin at the front, near the VW logo, and wrap backwards, on either side, as well as honeycomb patterns on the front and rear. 

“Following the ID.4, this model will be our next global car for Europe, China and the US,” Ralf Brandstätter, the CEO of Volkswagen Passenger Cars, said in a statement. 

The company is crowing about the aerodynamics of the vehicle, which is an appropriate quality for a car named the Aero. “The roof slopes elegantly to the rear in coupé style and contributes to achieving an excellent drag coefficient of 0.23,” VW said. With that 0.23 number, the Aero will have a similar coefficient of drag as a Tesla Model S or Toyota Prius, which are 0.21 and 0.24, respectively (lower is better). Instead of regular handles to open the doors, touch-sensitive surfaces will do the trick. Other attributes of this concept car include a blingy paint job, which will contain “pigments [that] create a golden shimmer effect in appropriate light conditions.”

The ID Aero will be nearly 5 meters (16.4 feet) long, which is a bit longer than a Tesla Model 3. 

[Related: Volkswagen’s retro bus is finally going electric]

Another recent VW electric vehicle that is generating buzz is the ID Buzz, which is an electric model of the company’s famous little bus. A version of that EV, with a long wheelbase, is set to come to the US in 2024. Like the ID Buzz and other electric VW vehicles, the ID Aero will utilize what the company calls its MEB, or Modular Electric Drive system. 

Volkswagen says that by 2030, in North America, “the proportion of unit sales accounted for by purely electric vehicles” will be more than 50 percent, and that it will cease development of vehicles that run on internal combustion engines by 2026. 

[Related: FedEx is charging up its electric vehicle fleet]

In a Chattanooga, Tennessee, manufacturing facility, VW is gearing up for production of its 2023 model year ID.4 vehicles; right now, the ID.4s available on the US market were made in Germany. For the ID Aero, VW says it should be on sale in China in the second part of next year, and the company plans to start making a European version of it as well, also in 2023. Car-buyers in the US will be able to grab one sometime after that, as VW says that a version is coming to North America at some point.

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Electric vehicles and package deliveries are poised to go together as naturally as stamps stick onto envelopes. One of the big players moving forward in that space, FedEx, said today that it now has 150 electric delivery trucks in its Southern California fleet.

Those delivery vehicles, named the Zevo 600 after their approximate cubic-foot cargo capacity, come from a General Motors subsidiary called BrightDrop. 

Each van boasts a range of some 250 miles on a charge. One of them set a world record in April for the longest journey of an electric delivery vehicle on just one charge, when it clocked nearly 259 miles. (The road trip was so riveting that a reporter tagging along from the Verge seems to have, understandably, fallen asleep twice.) Like other electric vehicles from GM, the battery system that undergirds these BrightDrop rigs is called Ultium. 

The first five of these BrightDrop vehicles arrived in December, to an Inglewood, California, FedEx facility, the parcel giant previously said. Those deliveries continued, and now the electric vans number 150 in total, all in the hands of FedEx Express. The other stats to know: The company wants all of its pick-up and delivery vehicles to be electric by 2040, and it says it will purchase 2,500 Zevo 600s specifically from BrightDrop “over the next few years.” Plus, it says that it has already built “more than 500 charging stations” in the Golden State. 

James Di Filippo, a senior policy analyst with Atlas Public Policy, says that he expects to see a rapid shift to electrification in the parcel delivery space. He’s pleased with milestones like the one FedEx just announced. “It’s good to see those numbers starting to move up, especially because supply chain issues have plagued this transition—the delivery fleet transition—for a while,” he says. “Being able to take delivery on 150 vehicles is great news.” 

FedEx isn’t the only delivery company working towards electrifying its last-mile vehicles. UPS’s worldwide fleet includes “more than 1,000 electric and plugin hybrid electric vehicles on the road,” it notes on its website. The shipping corporation has also said it plans to buy 10,000 electric vehicles from a UK company called Arrival. 

[Related: FedEx will start testing a 1,900-pound drone for hauling packages]

When it comes to Amazon, The New York Times has described its need for EVs as “insatiable.” Amazon plans to incorporate electric delivery vehicles from Rivian (which it partially owns) into its fleet, though there have been speed bumps and drama with that process, and the number of vehicles it has actually delivered is not public. “We continue to produce and deliver Amazon custom electric delivery vans,” a Rivian spokesperson says via email, “with a focus on ramping both production and deliveries.” 

Amazon says that by 2030, it expects to have 100,000 delivery vans from Rivian making the rounds. 

Still, there are some variables holding back the switch to EVs, such as supply chain disruptions. And rural areas could pose a challenge for electric deliveries, Di Filippo says, because of the longer distances. But “urban parcel delivery is a slam dunk for electric vehicles,” he says. 

Metropolitan areas have a number of factors that lend themselves nicely to electrification: The fleet vehicles may return to a central hub where they can be charged after their routes, for example, and the routes themselves are predictable and not too long. 

“It’s great from a climate change perspective,” Di Filippo says, “especially as we are relying more and more on parcel delivery for the final mile of retail goods.” Plus, “it’s fantastic for air quality” in the neighborhoods in which they are delivering, he notes. 

An outlier is the United States Postal Service, which, as of April, was facing lawsuits resulting from its plans for its next-generation vehicles. As of March, it planned for just 20 percent of its new vehicles to be electric, with the rest to be combustion-engine powered. By comparison, FedEx’s plans hold for 100 percent of its pickup and delivery vehicles to be electric within the next 18 years.

“The real red flag for USPS is that all of their direct competitors in the private parcel delivery space have electrification plans, [and] are putting them into motion,” Di Filippo says. 

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Fort Carson, an Army facility south of Colorado Springs, Colorado, is set to get a very large new battery. The groundbreaking for the new energy-storage system is set for this fall, and the contractor behind it, Lockheed Martin, says it could take some eight or nine months to build it. 

The battery will be able to produce a megawatt of electricity for as long as 10 hours, meaning that it is a 10-megawatt-hour device. But this battery is very different from the kind of battery that is in your cell phone, laptop, or electric vehicle. It’s not a lithium-ion battery. It’s a redox flow battery. 

In a press release, Lockheed Martin refers to the project as “the first megawatt-scale, long-duration energy storage system for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).” Here’s what to know about the Fort Carson project and the energy storage devices called flow batteries.

Why is the DOD interested in energy storage?

“[The] DOD is concerned with ensuring that critical missions, operated from fixed installations, are able to continue operating if the grid goes down for long periods,” Roger Jenkins, the business development director for GridStar Flow at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, said during a media briefing earlier this week. That could be due to “a weather event, like we saw in Texas, or some sort of hacking event from unfriendly actors.”

In this case, Fort Carson actually has some battery storage already, thanks to a lithium-ion battery system. It also has a solar panel array on an old landfill that can produce 2 megawatts of juice. “And they have a plan to construct a larger solar array that will come online pretty close to the time this battery comes online,” Jenkins said. The new flow battery system will be in addition to this existing tech. 

So what’s a flow battery? 

First, it makes sense to consider the lithium-ion batteries that live inside a device like a smartphone or an electric car. Those types of batteries tend to supply power to devices where space is at a premium, so the battery cells must be small. 

Lithium-ion batteries have a few basic components. They have an anode, cathode, and a liquid electrolyte inside. Lithium ions travel back and forth in that electrolyte. When the battery is charged, electrons gather at one end of the battery, the anode, and so do the lithium ions. When the battery is powering something, the electrons flow out through the circuit, while the lithium ions shuttle over to the other side, which is the cathode. (Here’s an animation, with the cathode pictured on the left.) A separator in the electrolyte, as its name implies, keeps the two sides separated, although the lithium ions can pass through it. Many lithium-ion batteries are made up of small cells that can be in the shape of cylinders or pouches.

[Related: Why Dyson is going all-in on solid-state batteries]

Meanwhile, a flow battery is really big. In fact, it consists of large tanks of liquid electrolytes. “Unlike many batteries, a redox flow battery is built with flowing electrolytes,” says Levi Thompson, the dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Delaware, as well as a professor of chemical engineering. “Most batteries have stationary, or fixed [electrolytes].” In a lithium-ion battery, the liquid electrolyte isn’t flowing anywhere—it’s just a medium for the lithium ions to flow back and forth. 

With a flow battery, “because it’s flowing, and these tanks are going to be huge, you can actually store a lot of energy,” he adds. “For many of these installations, there’s not really a land constraint, or limitation—it’s not like a car battery, where you have a limited amount of real estate.” 

That’s why a spacious Army facility in Colorado, for example, can be a good place for a flow battery. 

With a Lockheed Martin flow battery, the power is generated in large boxes, or power modules, that each contain four power stacks. The liquid electrolytes (which are stored in the tanks) flow through lots of electrochemical cells in those stacks, past membranes that keeps them separate but allow ions to pass through.

What are the benefits of a flow battery?

With its big tanks and flowing electrolytes and need for large open spaces, a flow battery isn’t going to be powering an electric vehicle or laptop anytime soon, but they have their advantages. “The most important thing, I think, is cost,” says Thompson. “There’s the potential to store energy at a much lower cost than you would with a lithium-ion battery.” 

Another perk is that it will theoretically last longer than the competition. “It will cycle more times than a lithium-ion battery,” says Thompson, who also notes that it can be rejuvenated when it needs to be if it starts to degrade. 

Ultimately, Thompson says that batteries like this could be a good fit for situations where someone wants to store energy from the grid—perhaps energy made by solar panels, which only produce juice when the sun is shining. “There’s a real opportunity there, if we’re looking for low-cost, cyclable energy storage,” he says. “I think they’re perhaps the most attractive solution, in the long run [for grid storage].”

When the flow battery at Fort Carson is complete, Lockheed Martin says they plan to spend about two years testing it. Watch a video about the system in general, below. 

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BEFORE SUBMARINES can carry out their stealthy jobs beneath the waves, they begin their lives in pieces on land. The newest group of American nuclear-powered attack submarines is the Virginia class, also known as SSN-774, a collection of underwater ships that stretch 377 feet long. Their mission? To conduct surveillance, fight other vessels, and rarely, if needed, launch conventional cruise missiles at terrestrial targets. Their maximum diving depth? That’s a secret. Their top speed? Ditto.

What we do know is that each of these submersibles will protect a complement of sailors from the ocean’s incredible pressure—and from the nuclear reactor contained within, which powers everything from the propulsion system to the lights by heating water into steam. For workers at Electric Boat, an arm of General Dynamics responsible for many of these vessels, craftsmanship is more than a matter of pride. A single mistake in their meticulous metalworking could prove catastrophic in the murky depths. Here’s how these subs—known in the biz as boats—come together at facilities in Quonset Point, Rhode Island, and Groton, Connecticut.

↑ A submarine’s outermost layer of metal skin is its main defense against the drink. It can dive deeper than 800 feet, where the pressure will be more than 300 pounds per square inch. The thick steel (its exact width is a secret) starts in flat sheets, which this massive machine exerts thousands of tons of force to curve. The press bends the material slightly farther than necessary, ensuring it springs back into the exact crescent required.

↑ Sparks fly as a robot cuts the bent plates. Not only do these need to be a particular length, but the manner in which they’re trimmed matters too: The ends must have a specific bevel shape so each piece can join precisely with its neighbor. Multiple sections will soon come together to form enormous ring-shaped segments of the future submarine.

↑ These giant blue fixtures receive the curved and cut bits of steel, one of which is seen here suspended by a crane. Inside, robots or humans weld the bent plates into 34-foot-wide rings that will eventually stack into the completed hull. They’ll also fuse I-beams onto the interior to form riblike supports. The more perfectly round the hull, the stronger it is: A circle is the best shape to withstand undersea pressure on all sides.

↑ A portion of a boat stands vertically, as if perched on its tail. Welders complete their tasks—like attaching brackets, pipe hangers, and other elements—atop scaffolding within the reinforced cylinder. If the section were prone (as it is in its final state), the workers would have to do their job on the floor, perhaps lying down to do so.

↑ A welder fuses a portion of a submarine’s many mechanical systems. Whether a seam is on the hull or on another component, it’s vital that this work be done perfectly. Electric Boat will use nondestructive techniques—such as X-rays, dye tests, and magnetic tools—to ensure each part can keep its composure under the literal pressure of the sea.

↑ This green metal structure has been painted and primed, and it could eventually house equipment such as computers. Shipbuilders construct sections like these on the shop floor and slide them into a larger piece of the sub—as if slipping a collapsed ship into a bottle. Electric Boat says this process is three times faster than building within one of the hull cylinders.

↑ Sailors call their triple-stacked bunk beds “racks.” Like much of the boat’s inner chambers, this module is built on the shop floor, complete with elements like lockers, and then slotted into a section of the sub. During particularly packed missions, seafarers sometimes have to share racks by sleeping in shifts.

↑ The team at Electric Boat must carefully inspect even mundane objects, such as this ventilation unit, for flaws. This piece of hardware is destined for the submarine’s interior, where a variety of metals abound: The bathrooms and food prep areas employ stainless steel to avoid rust; workers also ensure that there are no imperfections where mold or bacteria might grow. Where strength is not crucial, as with a locker door, aluminum and other materials can do the trick.

↑ Now that it’s oriented horizontally, as it would be at sea, the decks of this Virginia-class attack sub are visible. When these segments are ready, they will be shipped on a barge from Quonset Point to Groton. By then, each one will be more than 90 percent complete. In Groton, they’ll be mated with other segments. Equipment for the engine room and other large components also has to go in before this step—otherwise that machinery won’t fit.

↑ This standard access hatch is a portal by which sailors and supplies enter and exit. The gearing you see is part of a so-called dogging mechanism—to dog a hatch is to lock it tight by turning the wheel. The machinery helps give the entryway the same structural integrity as every other portion of the hull.

↑ With its gargantuan sections now firmly welded, the submarine takes shape, its bow pointed toward the door. The vessel’s signature peak—its “sail”—holds sensor-filled antennas called masts that take the place of old-school periscopes, among other equipment. In addition to some paint and onboard equipment, the vessel is still waiting on an official name: It’s known as a PCU, or pre-commissioning unit, until the Navy receives the ship.

This story originally ran in the Summer 2022 Metal issue of PopSci. Read more PopSci+ stories.

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When a drone from a company called Zipline is zipping through the air at some 70 mph, the ideal scenario is that no other low-flying, but faster, aircraft smashes into it. Zipline drones deliver health-focused supplies (like blood) via parachute in countries such as Rwanda and Ghana. They also make commercial deliveries from a Walmart in Arkansas. In Rwanda, they’ve even been delivering semen from bulls (and pigs), for the purposes of insemination with a focus on, in the case of the bull semen, genetic diversity and milk production. 

Like any other aircraft operator, Zipline doesn’t want any midair collisions. Keenan Wyrobek, the company’s CTO, says that in the US especially, navigating the airspace can be tricky. Low-flying planes from regular folks out cruising for fun in a Cessna, or someone operating a crop duster, or a helicopter, may not have a transponder announcing their location. “A lot of these planes, they’re just not required to carry transponders,” Wyrobek says. “There’s kind of a wild west spirit of aviation in this country.”

While a human flying a small plane has the responsibility to look ahead and avoid hitting another aircraft such as a hovering helicopter, in the case of the drone, the UAV needs to take action to avoid being hit itself. “It’s actually the job of the drone to see that Cessna coming up on them, and get out of the way,” Wyrobek says. The pokey cowboy, in this instance, has to make way for the cowhand galloping much faster. 

That raises some questions, which are concerns that don’t just apply to this one company: How can a drone, with no human on board to use their eyes to look out for traffic that might smash into it, get out of the way of a fast-flying plane? How can it identify the threatening traffic in the first place?

[Related: An electric aircraft just completed a journey of 1,403 miles]

The solution to this larger problem, in Zipline’s case at least, does not involve radar, cameras, lidar, or other sensors, which tend to be approaches commonly used in the autonomous car space. Instead, the drone company has decided to employ microphones that can listen for other aircraft, and then have the drone get out of their way. 

The setup goes like this: A total of eight microphones, each one placed on a probe protruding from the leading edge of the 11-foot wing, comprise the sensor array tasked with detecting other aircraft. The system needs to be able to ignore the ambient noise of the drone itself—the air around the drone, and its own propeller sounds—and just listen for other flying machines. “The array is important to both help with getting enough signal-to-noise to hear the planes far away, but also to figure out where the planes are,” Wyrobek says. That way it can “triangulate where those planes actually are coming from.” 

To do this trick, the drone relies on a small amount of onboard computing power. “It’s a combination of signal processing techniques—like beam forming—as well as machine learning, AI-based techniques in order to actually localize where that aircraft is,” he says. A small onboard GPU helps with this job, as those types of chips are good at handling AI-related tasks. Wyrobek says that fortunately, the microphones don’t produce that much data. “The actual information pipe is so small, [so] it’s not a big compute load,” he adds. 

To build the system, they collected training data that included some 15,000 planned interactions between a drone and a human-crewed aircraft like an airplane or helicopter. Of course, microphones aren’t going to be too helpful in the case of a hot air balloon or a glider, but Wyrobek says that one fortuitous benefit of this approach is that fast-moving aircraft also tend to be louder, meaning that the signal from a quicker-moving threat is stronger. 

For now, the company is waiting for regulatory approval to let the software onboard the drone make decisions to take evasive action to avoid an aircraft that might hit it, which would involve a maneuver such as proactively turning out of the way and entering a holding pattern until the coast is clear. Currently, the microphones are installed in some of the drones, even if the whole system isn’t switched on, yet. “The microphones think they’re in control, but they’re not,” he says; the team examines the data from them post-flight to “make sure what it wanted to do is what it should have done.” 

Wyrobek anticipates using the sound-based detection and avoidance software in many regions where they operate. “In most places, I think we’ll use it,” he says. “As we scale, we want to keep increasing our safety, and this is a way to do that.” From an airspace management perspective, that sounds good. 

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Apple kicked off its Worldwide Developers Conference today, and as the company typically does, it previewed a slew of new features coming down the pike to iPhones, Macs, and more. The keynote highlighted a ton of changes, from big to the more granular. 

Here’s a look at five of the new software-based offerings en route from the Apple mothership in Cupertino, California, to your devices sometime over the next few months. 

Undo an iMessage, or edit it

With iOS 16, which is the next version of the operating system that your phone runs on, Apple is releasing a nice new perk: The chance to undo a sent iMessage. That means that the note you send somebody and instantly regret can be—in theory—recalled before they see it. (A similar feature is also coming to emails sent via Mail.) 

Another key feature with iMessages: The chance to edit a message you’ve already sent, to correct a typo or, presumably, just entirely rewrite it. That way, if autocorrect changes the word you had wanted to write, you theoretically can go back and edit it. Were happy to see this one coming. (*We’re.)

You’ll have 15 minutes to un-send a message or edit it.

Change up your lock screen

The lock screen—the time, date, photo or wallpaper, and more that you see when you touch your phone’s screen but don’t navigate to the home screen—is also changing. Craig Federighi, the company’s senior vice president of software engineering, explained that they are “completely reimagining how it looks and works for you.”

[Related: Everything you need to know about the new Apple M2 laptops and WWDC 2022]

While there are a series of options, some of the highlights include the opportunity to change the font or color of the clock, add widgets (like the weather), and also create multiple lock screens to use in different scenarios. For example, one lock screen could focus on the weather, and another could be the lock screen you configure for work. 

In short, your lock screen options are more unlocked now. This feature had been rumored to be on its way. Here’s more on what it looks like:

A change to your photo library 

Right now, if you’re using the Photos app on an iPhone, a single photo library undergirds your experience. If you want to share a photo with someone, you can already do that from that library, through a Shared Album, or by texting it to someone, as well as other approaches, like throwing your phone at someone and saying “hey, check out this photo.”

The company is now creating a Shared Photo Library in iCloud, which is just what it sounds like: a distinct photo library that you can jointly contribute to with as many as five other people. The idea is that a group of friends might create one, and everyone feeds their photos into it. A dropdown option in the camera app will let someone choose, while taking photos, which library will receive the images they’re making. (We look forward to accidentally adding photos to the wrong library going forward.) This feature will also be coming to the new iPad OS as well. 

CarPlay expands

Apple also teased new features coming to CarPlay, which is the software in some cars that allows an iPhone to be interconnected with a digital display in a car. That feature, previously a way to access apps like Messages or Maps, is set to become greatly expanded. Notably, with some cars—Apple says they are working with the likes of Land Rover, Honda, Volvo, Ford, and more—CarPlay will now be able to display additional information.

For example, think about your vehicle’s instrument cluster: the place where you see basic info such as your speed or what mode, like drive or park, your car is in. CarPlay will be able to display that information as well, and will be customizable in terms of appearance. In short, picture CarPlay displaying information on your dash such as how fast you’re going, a compass, and navigational info—you get the idea. 

“This next generation of CarPlay powers your entire instrument cluster,” Emily Schubert, a senior manager at Apple for car experience engineering, said at the event. “To do this, your iPhone communicates with your vehicle’s real-time systems, in an on-device, privacy friendly way, showing all of your driving information, like speed, RPMs, fuel level, temperature, and more.” 

Stage Manager

In the forthcoming operating system for Macs, which will be called “Ventura,” Apple is releasing a new way of organizing open apps and windows. With the Mac’s dock at the bottom as the traditional spot for app icons to reside, the left-hand portion of the screen becomes a gathering place for open apps, and all their pages, to live. The same organizing principle is also coming to the next version of iPad’s OS, as well. 

These five updates are among the biggest, but Apple announced other news bits as well. Four new watch faces are coming to the Apple Watch, and the Watch will also track sleep stages, such as REM. Finally, in the health vein, the company is announcing a new way to keep track of medications you might take. 

In hardware news, the company is producing a next-gen Apple-made chip, the M2, which will be the new silicon in a new Macbook Air and the 13-inch Macbook Pro.

Watch the whole event, below:

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On the morning of Monday, May 23, an electric aircraft took off from Plattsburgh International Airport in eastern New York, near Lake Champlain and the border with Vermont. From there, it pushed west and south. It landed and took off again two more times in New York, and then flew into Akron, Ohio the next day. After seven stops in total, it finally landed on Monday, May 30, in Bentonville, Arkansas, completing a start-and-stop journey of 1,403 miles. 

The craft is called Alia, and it was created by Beta Technologies, an aviation startup based in Burlington, Vermont. A single propeller, powered by two electric motors, gives it its thrust through the air. Electric aviation is in its infancy, and the burgeoning industry—which includes other firms like Joby, Wisk, Kitty Hawk, Archer—has generally focused on the idea of using electric aircraft as air taxis, like Ubers in the sky, for travel around cities. With this longer series of flights, Beta CEO Kyle Clark says that they wanted to show that aircraft like these can be more than just a vehicle for local transport. 

“I think that with this type of flight, at a very high level, we change the image of what electric aviation is,” he says. “It’s not an aircraft that’s hopping within a city; it’s not flying test flights around a range, unmanned; it’s you put a couple pilots in it, you put some cargo in it, and you go halfway across the country.” 

He says that the “launching point” for their business is to start with a focus on flights for cargo and logistics that span about 150 miles in length. “And we just went and proved that you can do that, and you do it over and over and over again,” he says.

[Related: FedEx will start testing a 1,900-pound drone for hauling packages]

After the stop in Akron, Ohio, it flew to Springfield, Ohio, then Bloomington, Indiana, before pushing into Illinois, Missouri, and then Arkansas. The flight legs ranged from about 159 miles to as long as 211, and had an average flight time of around 88 minutes. All told, over the eight days that the mission lasted, the aircraft was in the air for nearly 12 hours. 

Two pilots from Beta took turns flying the aircraft: Lochie Ferrier and Camron Guthrie. The pilot not flying the electric plane for each leg took the controls of a Cessna Caravan that acted as a chase plane. 

Guthrie, one of the pilots for the mission, notes that the journey took them through “really sleepy areas” of the country, attracting onlookers. “People just came out to see the folks from Vermont and their spaceship,” he says. In Ohio, the landing garnered an article in the Springfield News-Sun about the aircraft, which arrived at the Springfield–Beckley Municipal Airport on May 24. The website Electric VTOL News previously reported on part of the aircraft’s journey.

To be clear, the flying machine is not a spaceship. It’s an electric aircraft with a 50-foot wingspan that The New York Times has referred to as “a flying battery” that has an “exotic, almost whimsical shape.” (The company notes on its website that the plane’s design “takes inspiration from the Arctic tern.”) While Beta and its competitors are designing aircraft that can take off and land vertically from small areas, this particular model did not do that—it took off and landed like a regular airplane, just as it did in March when two Air Force pilots tried flying it. 

The journey also included a delay due to bad weather in Ohio. After landing in Springfield on Tuesday, May 24, it didn’t take off again until Saturday, May 28, when it flew to Indiana. The multi-leg journey was a chance for real-world testing of a new kind of aircraft. “We ran into weather, we operated out of austere locations, we tested our recharging network,” Guthrie says. “There’s a lot of things we learned about our design that we’ll put back in the hopper.”

[Related: The Air Force just soared past an electric aircraft milestone]

About the charging network: An electric aircraft produces zero tailpipe emissions while flying, but the juice in its batteries has to come from somewhere. For this journey, Beta says that they were able to recharge the aircraft using their own charging stations at four locations, including their departure airport of Plattsburgh, New York. (Another charger is located in Bentonville, Arkansas.) At other locations, they relied on a mobile generator that can burn fossil fuel to make electricity. “We try to minimize that, but yes, we have those provisions, and we used it on this flight,” Clark notes. 

Ferrier, one of the two test pilots, says that one issue driving where and how they charged was the performance of the aircraft, which he says exceeded their expectations. “Our charging network was actually spaced for a little bit less range than we’re currently making,” he says. “The airplane is actually outperforming the charging network—so we could have actually used more of our own charges, but we ended up with a better airplane than we expected, and so we had to skip some of the charges.” In short: briefer flights would have allowed them to utilize more of their stationary chargers instead of their mobile solution.

“The charging network is an evolving thing, and every week we get more chargers online,” adds Clark. 

The permission for this multi-state journey—the aircraft soared through six states in total—came in the form of a market survey certificate from the FAA. It’s not the longest flight on the books for an electric aircraft: between 2015 and 2016, a solar-powered airplane circled the world. 

Beta doesn’t intend to operate its own cargo or passenger airline; instead it plans to make the aircraft itself so that companies such as UPS could use it to carry goods. 

For now, the Alia aircraft, after flying just over 1,400 miles, remains in Arkansas. It will be at an event called the UpSummit, and then will eventually fly back east.

Watch more about the flight, below.

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Planning on catching Top Gun: Maverick? If so, there’s no need to do any pre-flight homework to prepare, besides perhaps screening the 1986 original first. You can expect fighter jets, beach sports, an aircraft carrier, and plenty of references—through dialogue, music, and visuals—to the ‘80s classic. 

But anyone with a fascination for military aviation might be interested in learning more about the flying elements of the new film, which The New Yorker concluded “far outflies its predecessor.” Popular Science caught up with Vincent Aiello, host of the Fighter Pilot Podcast, a former F/A-18 pilot, TOPGUN instructor, and current commercial airline pilot, to ask him about his thoughts on the new movie and how it stacks up against real Naval aviation. 

Although Aiello describes it as “a good tribute to the hardworking men and women of the United States Navy,” he notes that also, “it’s a movie, not a documentary—so they take some liberties.” (Apparently the uniforms aren’t quite right.)  

One of those liberties is a maneuver you can see in a trailer, when one F/A-18 flies up between two others. “You just wouldn’t do something like that,” he says. “History is full of examples of people that have tried silly maneuvers, and bump into each other, and it’s usually not good for the airplane, or your career—sometimes your life.”

Stunts like that are “needlessly risky,” he reflects. “Military aviators are very used to taking risks, but they are calculated risks—so, when we fly, when we land on aircraft carriers, or take off from aircraft carriers, that’s already very inherently risky.” 

Flying on and off an aircraft carrier does indeed feature in the new film, of course, and you might also hear terms thrown around like “Gs” or “fifth-generation fighter.” Here are some phrases and concepts that come up in the movie in different ways—don’t worry, there won’t be any pushups if you forget. 

From ‘barricade’ to ‘G-LOC’ 

Barricade: The typical way that a jet lands on an aircraft carrier is by catching one of the heavy, thick cables stretched across the deck with an arresting hook. But in a highly unusual event, an aircraft, its engines at idle, can also just smash into a raised barricade to stop. “It’s like a badminton net, where when you come down, you land in it, and it grabs you and pulls you to a stop,” Aiello says. “It’s very rare,” he adds, saying that one alternative to using a barricade is to have the pilot fly next to the ship and eject.

F/A-18: These fighter jets are the film’s shining metallic stars, and they have come in multiple variants over the years. F/A-18A, B, C, and D models are known as Hornets, and the F/A-18E and F models are the larger Super Hornets the Navy flies today. Those E models have just one seat, and the Fs have two. “The missions can be flown in either a single- or two-seat model,” Aiello says. More on what those back-seaters are called, below. 

[Related: I saw ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ and it’s way better than the original]

Fifth-generation fighter: If you think about jet fighter aircraft as falling into different generations over the decades, the most advanced ones of today are stealth machines like the F-35 or F-22, which are low-observable to radar. Those are fifth-generation aircraft, which Aiello summarizes as having “better sensors” and a “lower signature” as well as other attributes. Meanwhile, a fourth-generation fighter would be a craft like an F-16 or F-15. An example of a non-US fifth-generation fighter is Russia’s Su-57 Felon. 

Gs: If you’re currently reading this while sitting motionless on Earth, you’re feeling one G—as in gravity—pulling you straight downwards. Now imagine that that force suddenly doubles, and boom, you’re feeling 2 Gs. In a fighter jet, aviators may pull as many as 9 or more Gs, but they don’t experience that during steady, normal flight, when they’d just feel 1 G pulling them down. The Gs come during maneuvers like a hard bank and turn in one direction or another, or a strong nose-up pull. (Pilots in training can practice for these by being spun in a centrifuge.) Here’s more on what it’s like to pull 6 Gs:

G-LOC: This abbreviation, pronounced “gee lock,” makes an appearance in the film when an aviator experiences it during a training exercise. It stands for G-induced loss of consciousness, and it can occur when a pilot experiences Gs but doesn’t successfully manage them—the blood drains away from their head, and they pass out, sometimes just momentarily. It can be deadly. A member of the Air Force demonstration team, the Thunderbirds, died due to G-LOC in 2018, and Aiello recalls it claiming a life at TOPGUN, too. Some aircraft, like F-16s, F-22s, and F-35s, have ground-collision avoidance software on them to automatically pull them up if they’re about to crash because the pilot is unconscious or disoriented. Aviators also try to mitigate the pull of the Gs by doing a muscle exercise and utilizing a piece of equipment called a G-suit that squeezes them. 

Hypersonic: Anything that’s traveling five times the speed of sound or more is hypersonic, like in this recent Air Force test. 

From ‘hard deck’ to ‘WSO’ 

Hard deck: You’ll hear lots of angry discussion about the “hard deck” in both the original film and this one, and it’s a real training term. In actual combat, Aiello says, “you’ll fight down to the ground.” But that’s dangerous. “You can’t train to that without really accepting a lot of risk,” he adds. The hard deck is 5,000 feet above the ground, or the average terrain altitude, Aiello says. If someone just above the hard deck has a problem, they have thousands of feet of buffer to recover or eject. Above the hard deck by another 5,000 feet is a “soft deck,” which is a type of “warning” level. 

RIO: This is an acronym for the Radar Intercept Officer in an F-14, which was Goose’s job in the original film. This was, unsurprisingly, a “dedicated operator for the radar,” Aiello says. The F/A-18s of today do not have a RIO, but some of them do have a backseat. 

Tomcat: This is the name for the F-14 aircraft of the original film. These larger aircraft had a vibe to them, as Aiello told PopSci in 2019: they were “biggish, brutish, in your face, loud, American muscle.” A former Tomcat pilot remembered that while taxiing it, it had a truck-like feel. The US Navy no longer flies them. 

TOPGUN: This is the general way that the actual Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor Course, located in Fallon, Nevada, is written. It’s technically housed within the N7 division of the Naval Aviation Warfighting Development Center. If you’re thinking about the California setting of the original film, that’s because the program was located in Miramar at the time. It moved to Nevada in 1996. 

WSO: While no RIO rides in the back of Super Hornets of today, a two-seater F/A-18F variant can host a weapons system officer, or WSO, in the rear. “Certain missions are better done with a back-seater,” Aiello says. One job the WSO could do is positioning a laser on a target to “designate” it as such, as part of an aircraft system called ATFLIR. 

Find a more complete glossary here, and here’s more on how the film came together:

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The United States surpassed one million deaths from COVID, but another deadly trend has transportation experts concerned: a rising number of fatalities on the road. Data released this week from the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) shows that in 2021, there was a 10.5 percent increase in traffic deaths over the year before, for a total of nearly 43,000 deaths last year. 

Meanwhile, deaths on the roads in 2020 were also up, compared to 2019. 

NHTSA states that the uptick in 2021 is historical. “The projection [of lives lost] is the highest number of fatalities since 2005 and the largest annual percentage increase in the Fatality Analysis Reporting System’s history,” the administration said in the recent release.

Digging deeper in the statistics for 2021 shows spikes in a couple key areas. Deaths from crashes involving more than one vehicle are up 16 percent; deaths on roads in urban areas are also up by 16 percent; deaths among drivers who are 65 or older are up 14 percent; and deaths among pedestrians are up 13 percent. 

Here’s what experts think are the causes behind the recent increase in deaths on US roads.

“There’s a lot of converging issues,” reflects Laura Sandt, a senior research associate at the Highway Safety Research Center at the University of North Carolina. But she cites larger vehicles over the last decade or so as one problem. “That increase in vehicle size and weight has just increased the kinetic energy in our system.” 

“We have more energy, more high speeds, higher-mass vehicles on the road, coming in more contact with extremely vulnerable people who just can’t absorb that kind of energy in these crashes,” she adds. “We know that with our demographic trends, our aging population is increasing, and they’re even more vulnerable to high-energy crash forces and less able to survive.” 

Chris Cherry, a professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Tennessee, cites vehicle speeds as a factor in pedestrian deaths. “[A] survivable speed for most pedestrians is below 25-30 mph when hit by a car,” he says. “Most pedestrians are getting hit on these state DOT, 45-mph arterial roadways.”

A place with few crosswalks or sidewalks, and a long distance between traffic lights, is an “impossible scenario to survive in” for people who rely on public transit like buses, he says. 

Speeds on roads like that tend to be high. “At those speeds, if you’re hit by a car, or an 18-wheeler, it’s a really bad scenario for a pedestrian,” he says. Pedestrian deaths were up 13 percent in 2021 over 2020, and in 2020, there was an increase of about 4 percent over 2019.

Sandt says some of the problem is also the information, or lack thereof, for authorities. “We still see a lot of states and cities that have no handle on their pedestrian infrastructure,” she says. “They don’t even have very good inventories of where they have and don’t have sidewalks—and so they’re often not very proactive in knowing where they have to fund and fill their sidewalk gaps.” 

[Related: How the DOT wants to prevent thousands of traffic deaths]

She adds that pedestrian deaths are underreported to the police, although the numbers do show up in hospital counts. “Some of our research in North Carolina has shown that for every one crash that’s recorded in the police data, we have sometimes eight to 10 crashes that you can find injuries [for] in the hospital data,” she says. Younger people and older people hit by cars are also more likely to be a hospital-only statistic, she says, and lack a police report. 

Both Sandt and Cherry say the issue is bigger than just larger vehicles or a dearth of sidewalks or data. “We can’t chalk up all of this death and carnage on the road to big vehicles,” Cherry says. 

He points to design considerations as well, noting that a road’s construction should reinforce the speed limit. “We need to build roadways that are designed to provide a level of feedback to drivers, that if they’re going too fast, they feel it,” he says. 

During the coronavirus pandemic, danger on the roads increased, he says. One possible explanation is that when there are fewer cars on the road, people are more likely to speed. In that respect, counterintuitively, he notes that congestion can make roads safer. 

Sandt sees a similar effect at play. “What we saw during COVID, was when traffic was reduced, and the congestion was reduced, the average travel speeds definitely increased in urban areas,” she says. “We’ve seen more extreme speeding incidents as well.” Think: someone going 100 mph in an area with the 50-mph speed limit. And behavior like that puts pedestrians at risk. 

In response to all this, in January, the Department of Transportation issued a report called the National Roadway Safety Strategy that focuses on five different ways to try to improve the grim situation; those are under an umbrella that the DOT calls “a safe systems approach.” For example, one aspect of that program is a focus on “Safer Speeds.” 

“Everytime we get these updates from NHTSA, it’s always disappointing,” Sandt reflects, referring to the release of the 2021 numbers. “But it’s also not very surprising.” 

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Before the age of mobile phones, when a 911 call came in, figuring out its origin point was straightforward. A cry for help coming via a landline had to be from a static location, by definition. After all, someone’s house wouldn’t be driving down the highway or hiking in a park. But the majority of adults—68 percent, according to 2021 data from the National Center for Health Statistics—reside in homes that lack landlines. And most 911 calls, unsurprisingly, come from cell phones. 

Detecting a cellphone’s location during a 911 call is more complex than when it comes from a landline, but last week, AT&T announced that they were set to boost the specificity of their location-detection tech for mobile phones considerably. Here’s how it works now, how it’s changing, and how it stacks up against the competition. 

From landlines to cell phones 

Determining a location that’s coming in via a landline is “easy,” says Chris Sambar, the executive vice president and head of AT&T’s Network division. “A landline’s registered at a specific address.” The call coming in “gives location information.” 

With a cell phone, the location information is traditionally detected based on the towers relaying the signal to AT&T. “We use the cell towers to get the location of the caller,” Sambar says. That can provide location information that’s as large as a 10-mile radius, he says. “Sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint where the caller is,” he adds. 

Behind the scenes, an imprecise location can cause delays, and that’s due to the fact that the correct public-safety answering point (the industry calls this a PSAP) needs to handle the call. Imagine you make a call from the edge of a state or county, and a cell site from the other region picks it up—your call could be routed to a dispatcher at a PSAP in a different region. Then, the authorities need to transfer the call to the right place. This new, more precise method should help mitigate that problem.

It works, Sambar says, thanks to considering more information than just cell towers for people on the AT&T network. “We now have more data from the device, using a combination of GPS, wifi, [atmospheric] pressure sensor in the device, [and] accelerometer in the device,” he says. The result is that the location accuracy is boosted: the system can now locate the caller within about 164 feet, AT&T says.

That helps get the call to the right PSAP, and it also gives the dispatcher better location info, according to AT&T and Intrado, a company that focuses on 911-related technology. 

In terms of privacy, AT&T says that the detailed location tracking only occurs during an emergency call. “This can only happen while a 911 call is initiated and in progress,” says Adan Pope, the chief technology officer with Intrado. “Not before and not after.” (As the Verge points out, concerns about location tracking, bounty hunters, and data from the carriers were raised by a 2019 Motherboard investigation.)

What are other carriers up to?

The news that AT&T and Intrado are boasting about is that they are the first group in the US to deploy such a service with this level of accuracy at a large scale. “The nationwide rollout is scheduled to be completed by the end of June,” AT&T said in a press release, noting that it was already working in 16 states and Guam. 

“This technology is irrespective of the local public safety answering point’s technology sophistication,” says Nate Brogan, a senior vice president with Intrado. “So we’re not dependent on any local infrastructure or any other advanced technologies that may have already been deployed in those regions to accommodate it.” 

Here’s where things get a little more nuanced. AT&T competitor T-Mobile said in late 2020 that it was rolling out location-based routing—using a person’s location to get their call sent to the best PSAP—“in parts of Texas and Washington State,” the company said in a press release. 

That list has grown since then. In an email, a T-Mobile spokesperson said: “We offer the [location-based routing] capability nationwide and are working with PSAPs across the country to implement it.” Currently, they have it in the following places: Washington, DC, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnisota, Missouri, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington. (Just because a state is on the list doesn’t mean the updated location service is engaged across the entire state.) 

The same spokesperson added in a phone call that they work with PSAPs as they begin to offer the new service, and that their location accuracy is also within the same 164-foot standard; he also said that like the AT&T system, no technological upgrades are required. 

Verizon did not respond to a request for comment from Popular Science. 

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Dealing with wind is a part of flying through the air. Crosswinds can pose a challenge for pilots to overcome as they bring their airliners in for landings, or on a smaller level, a gust can push a drone around its small section of airspace. 

To give drones better maneuverability when flying in the wind, a team of engineers from CalTech have developed a deep neural network—an artificial intelligence tool—to allow a drone to be agile in the presence of blowing air. In a video, the researchers show off a quadcopter drone that, thanks to this software, can pull off figure-eight maneuvers and fly through a small gate, all in the presence of 27-mph-wind in a wind tunnel. 

The scientists first had to gather data to be able to train a neural network in order to make the flying machine pull off the stunts. It didn’t take much: just 12 minutes of flight time. “That’s very little data,” reflects Michael O’Connell, graduate student in the aerospace department at CalTech and one of the authors of a new study describing the work published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics. This AI-driven work is called Neural-Fly, and it follows other similar work called Neural Lander and Neural-Swarm. 

During training for this latest Neural-Fly experiment, the drone flew in a wind tunnel in the presence of six different wind speeds, with 13.4 mph being the fastest. “We basically teach the drone, ‘This is what it looks like when you’re hit by 5-mph wind, 10-mph wind,’” O’Connell says. “The drone is able to learn what wind looks like, and then when we go fly our figure-eight test trajectory, it uses that experience, and it says, ‘I’ve seen this before.’” 

From that data, the team created the deep neural network that then allowed their flying machine to be skilled at carrying out maneuvers in the same wind tunnel, like zooming through a gate in a figure-eight pattern or cruising through two gates in ellipse shape. The speed the drone experienced in testing were faster than what it had encountered in training: about 27 miles per hour. That’s the maximum wind speed this wind tunnel could produce, notes Guanya Shi, another author on the paper and grad student at CalTech. In addition to needing just a small amount of data, the software runs on just a Raspberry Pi, an inexpensive piece of computing equipment. 

Soon-Jo Chung, a professor of aerospace and control and dynamics systems at CalTech, and coauthor on the same paper, says that the rate of errors that they see with the new system is between 2.5 – 4 times better when comparing it to the existing “state of the art” tech for precise drone flying. The deep neural network flying the drone also has “adaptive control,” Chung notes, calling it a “breakthrough method.” This means that the AI can respond adaptively to what happens in real time with the wind. 

Chung sees applications for this machine-learning system when it comes to a future in which our skies could be filled with more drones. Companies like FedEx are looking into using large drones to help move packages from one spot to another, and Alphabet-owned Wing is delivering consumer goods via small drones in Texas. Meanwhile, other firms are working on electric flying machines that can carry humans—these are air taxis that can take off and land vertically. The plans for those range from craft designed to fly themselves autonomously with a passenger on board, to those currently planned around human pilots. 

Drones that need to have an “ultimate safety guarantee” could benefit from software like this, Chung says. “The ultimate example is obviously, the flying cars, because they have to carry human passengers.” 

“We are hopefully making that future where we can have safe unmanned vehicles that can survive potentially any wind conditions—tornadoes, hurricanes, and heavy storms,” Chung adds. “I cannot say that we can achieve that immediately using our Neural-Fly, but we are making one great step forward toward that goal.” 

After all, whether the drone is carrying packages or people, it needs to land safely on its pad, even if the wind is blowing in an unpredictable way. Without the promise of a safe landing, the mission might have to be scrubbed before it gets off the ground, or the flying machine rerouted to a different location if it’s already buzzing through the air. 

Watch a short video on the tech, below:

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In the last three months of 2019, well before the pandemic’s worldwide effect on air travel, Qantas Airlines operated three very long “research flights,” as it described them, to gauge the effects of all that time in the air on the well-being of the passengers and crew. Part of an initiative called “Project Sunrise,” the flights were ultra-long-hauls that each lasted more than 19 hours. For example, the second of the flights saw a Boeing 787 Dreamliner cruising from London to Sydney in November, with a tidy flight time of 19 hours and 19 minutes. 

Today, Qantas announced that it was gearing up for takeoff for more flights like that, with an order for a dozen new Airbus A350-1000 aircraft, all of which will be “capable of flying direct from Australia to any other city including New York and London,” the company said in a statement. Those flights are set to begin at the start of 2025, Qantas said, and if the air time from those research flights is any indication, expect them to last around 19 hours in the sky. 

Ultra-long-haul flights are nothing new, of course, and in November of 2020, Singapore Airlines launched an exceptionally long route between New York City and Singapore. The metrics from just one of those specific flights, traveling from Southeast Asia to the East Coast of the US, are impressive: The plane was in the air for around 17 hours, departing with some 238,540 pounds of fuel on board for a journey that spanned almost 9,000 nautical miles. 

If it feels like international flights on large planes are getting longer, that’s because they have been—at least before the pandemic, and just slightly. Andy Buchanan, a transportation expert at Oliver Wyman, a consulting firm, reports that they were getting longer both by distance traveled and flight time. From 2010 to 2019, the average mileage covered per nonstop flight globally among wide-body aircraft (think: a big plane with two aisles) increased by around 8 percent, he says. Also from 2010 to 2019, the percentage of flights that were between 12 and 15 hours long increased by about two percent, and those between 15 and 18 hours long increased by about the same amount. 

[Related: The world’s longest commercial flights, by the numbers]

Aircraft like Boeing’s 787-9 and the Airbus A350 offer longer ranges, and better operating costs, than previous aircraft, he notes. “I think the combination of the range capability that airlines are getting with the better economics—the cheaper operating costs relative to what they used to have—is causing a lot of airlines around the world to look at these new routes that perhaps they had been looking at, or thinking about, for years, but they just didn’t have the ability to reach them effectively,” he adds. 

Indeed, Qantas’s CEO reflected that aircraft have defined what they can do over the years. “The 707 introduced the jet age, the 747 democratized travel, and the A380 brought a completely new level of comfort. The A350 and Project Sunrise will make any city just one flight away from Australia,” he said in a statement. “It’s the last frontier and the final fix for the tyranny of distance.”

Buchanan notes that while the trend was towards longer flights before the pandemic, the outlook for what the future holds now for lengthy international flights is less clear. “International demand is starting to come back—it is showing signs of recovery—but it’s just further behind the domestic and shorter-haul demand,” he observes.

For these very long flights into and out of Australia, imagine an aircraft that holds 238 people and that includes “a wellbeing zone” in the middle.  

So will people want to buy tickets for 19-hour-long non-stop journeys that soar from Europe or North America to Australia? “Naturally, there’s a limit to everything, but I do think that what we saw in the trends does suggest that people are certainly willing to take these flights,” Buchanan says. “I do think they have appeal at least to some segment of the traveling public—my suspicion is that they probably have the broadest appeal to corporate business travelers, or other time-sensitive travelers.”

One thing is clear, however: Whoever signs up for these long flights should be sure to get up and stretch (perhaps in a “wellbeing zone”) in between the many movies they consume. 

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Ford officially launched its F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck today, roughly 11 months after we got our first glimpses of what the battery powered workhorse would look like. “Trucks are rolling off the line today,” said Ford’s CEO, Jim Farley, at the conclusion of the event. “We will begin shipping Lightnings in the coming days, starting with our Pro series.” 

As those first EV trucks get delivered, Ford also said in a statement that it is commencing “full production” of the electric pickups. 

Here’s what to know about the truck and the company’s EV plans, by the numbers. 

150,000 

Ford says that it would like to produce 150,000 of these new electric pickups annually. Farley noted that they had to increase the size of the factory, called the Rouge Electric Vehicle Center, in Michigan, two times. “We’re busting our butts to make more of these,” he said. “Demand for Lightning has literally pushed out the walls of this building where we are twice.” 

Originally, the company had planned to make fewer of these new rides annually, but said in January that it would boost that number to 150,000, “roughly doubling” their production goal. 

600,000

All told, Farley said that by the close of 2023, Ford would be making 600,000 electric vehicles annually. Ford also makes the Mustang Mach-E electric vehicle and the E-Transit van. 

4 power outlets 

That’s the number of power outlets in the vehicle’s frunk, or front trunk, which is officially called the “mega power frunk.” (Here’s how a cardboard box figured into that part of the vehicle’s design.) There will also be five outlets in the bed of the truck, and two in the cab. As for the frunk, it can also carry 400 pounds of goods, whether that’s in the form of some very heavy groceries, a bunch of bricks, or whatever you want to tote. 

20,000 sheets of plywood

That is the number of pieces of plywood that Farley boasted you could cut with a circular saw that’s plugged into the vehicle. While your average person probably won’t be cutting that many pieces of plywood with a saw connected to their truck, the point is that the 10-kW-vehicle is also a “powerplant, but on wheels,” Farley said. 

About 4 seconds

That’s the pickup’s approximate 0-to-60 acceleration time. To put that in perspective, the “Performance Version” of Ford’s electric crossover, the Mach-E GT, will do the same in 3.5 seconds, GMC’s new electric Hummer will do it in 3 seconds, a Lamborghini Aventador LP 780-4 Ultimae will do so in 2.8 seconds, and a Tesla Model S Plaid in around 2 seconds. Safety tip: You shouldn’t accelerate that fast unless you’re on a track, and besides, there are more important aspects of a vehicle than its acceleration time. 

230 – 320 miles 

A more practical number for EV owners to consider is the range, and this is the Lightning’s range of ranges, depending on which version you purchase. The price for the least expensive version of the vehicle comes in under $40,000. There’s a catch, though: They’re hard to get. “Due to high demand, the current model year is no longer available for retail order,” Ford notes in a video. 

[Related: Little green Corvette: Chevy’s classic car is going electric]

Ford isn’t the only company making a noteworthy new electron-fueled pickup truck. Others in the category include the GMC Hummer EV, the 2024 Chevy Silverado EV, and the Rivian R1T.

Farley also hinted about an additional vehicle in the works, saying that the company is “already pushing dirt down in Blue Oval City in Tennessee, for another electric pickup truck that’s different from this one.” Besides F-150s, Ford also makes other pickups like the Maverick and Ranger. 

Watch the event, below:

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Automakers are in the midst of a historic shift as they ramp up their electric vehicle offerings. To name just a few examples: Ford has released its Mustang Mach-E, and is making an electric F-150 that’s set to be featured in an event tomorrow, and General Motors has created a monstrous GMC Hummer EV, with an electric Chevy Silverado also in the works. And that’s not to mention Rivian and, of course, Tesla. 

Today, fans of Chevrolet’s Corvette and EVs in general received good news in the form of an announcement from GM’s president, Mark Reuss. The company officially has electron-fueled Corvettes in the works: “We are here today to tell you about an electrified Corvette that’s coming first, and then a fully electric Corvette after that,” Reuss told CNBC.

“We will have an electrified Corvette next year, so this is coming very quick,” Reuss added, in terms of the timeframe. Meanwhile, he was cagier about when the totally electric supercar would come out. “More to come on that,” Reuss said. 

Reuss also publicized the news on LinkedIn today, noting that the pure EV model of the Corvette will be Ultium-based. Ultium is the branding that GM uses for its modular system of pouch-style lithium-ion batteries that power its electric vehicles; GM also recently said it would partner with Honda to make an EV that costs less than $30,000 and will also use the Ultium platform. 

[Related: Car owners: here’s when experts say you should switch to an EV]

An electric Corvette is something that President Biden—then a candidate—talked about in August of 2020. “I believe that we can own the 21st-century market again, by moving to electric vehicles,” he said in a video posted to Twitter. “And by the way, they tell me—and I’m looking forward, if it’s true, to driving one—that they’re making an electric Corvette that can go 200 miles an hour.” At the time, Popular Science got behind the wheel of an electric Corvette made not by Chevy, but by a company called Genovation Cars, whose modified electric vehicle cost $750,000. 

But the new vehicle from Chevrolet will not be a modification from a third-party, of course—it will be a new ride straight from the original manufacturer. While it’s unclear precisely what the “electrified” version due next year will entail, expect a hybrid of some kind, with the fully-electric vehicle coming out at some point in the future.

Watch a teaser video, below:

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In June of 2020, a pilot flying an F-22 in Alaska reportedly became disoriented, and the aircraft likely would have crashed were it not for the intervention of a software system on the fighter jet. The F-22 in question had departed Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson in Anchorage, and was operating in “Instrument Meteorological Conditions” or IMC, which is when weather and visibility require the pilot to fly using their instruments. The incident, according to a short summary of the event provided to Popular Science by the Air Force Safety Center, occurred due to the pilot’s “spatial disorientation.”

The pilot of the stealth fighter jet “was focused on their situation display and over-banked the aircraft to 135 degrees angle of bank and began to accelerate rapidly as the nose continued to fall,” the Air Force Safety Center reported. 

When the aircraft was at an altitude of 13,520 feet above sea level, with its nose pointed downwards, traveling at a speed of about 600 mph, a software system onboard the aircraft “initiated an automatic fly-up” and steered the fighter jet out of its descent. The aircraft was also reportedly inverted at the time that the software activated. The plane was about 2,600 feet above the ground by the time the system had finished recovering the jet from its plunge.

The previously unreported F-22 event highlights the role of the software, called the Automatic Ground Collision Avoidance System, or Auto GCAS, and also represents the only completely confirmed save of a stealth fighter jet with this software, meaning that the pilot likely owes their life to the system.

Here’s what to know about the Auto GCAS software, the ways in which spatial disorientation can be a threat for pilots, as well as two additional incidents in F-22s that also involved the Auto GCAS system. 

Auto GCAS and spatial disorientation 

Auto GCAS is not on every fighter jet. It is, however, on 100 percent of active F-22s, nearly 100 percent of the F-35A models that the Air Force flies, and roughly two-thirds of F-16s, according to the Air Force Safety Center. 

The F-22 is a stealth fighter jet known as the Raptor. It predates the Air Force’s more modern stealth fighter jet, the F-35. The Air Force would like to retire 33 of the Raptors, leaving 153 of them remaining in the F-22 fleet. 

Lockheed Martin officially credits the software with saving 11 pilots in F-16s, and now one pilot in an F-22 due to that June 2020 event.

Spatial disorientation can happen in fighter jets, helicopters, or other aircraft if the pilot flying the machine becomes tricked by their senses. For example, the semicircular canals in a pilot’s inner ears can be fooled into “thinking motion is occurring when it’s not, or the vice-versa,” says Brian Pinkston, who is a physician with an expertise in aerospace medicine and former flight surgeon in the Air Force. A pilot in an aircraft that’s banking in bad visibility could, after a bit, stop noticing that the plane is banking because their “inner ear becomes habituated to that movement,” Pinkston says. In brief: An airplane can be gradually banking, but the pilot might not feel or notice that it’s doing so.

The way to avoid being tricked by the inner ear when visibility is poor is to rely on the aircraft’s instruments for the ground truth “every single time,” Pinkston says. “And that’s the problem—the thing in fighters is, you’re a single person, and you may have multiple inputs coming in.” With a myriad of factors to juggle, it’s still possible for a pilot to still get disoriented. 

Over the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific 

Another incident in an F-22 also involved Auto GCAS and took place over the Gulf of Mexico in a Raptor that had flown out of Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida on December 6, 2016. Like with the Alaska incident, the Air Force Safety Center also attributes this event to spatial disorientation. 

In this case, an alert from the software informed the pilot of trouble. The aviator in question “did not recognize a nose-low attitude while rolling to 45 degrees angle of bank and descending below 2,000 feet MSL [mean sea level] over water,” the Safety Center said. At 1,540 feet above sea level, the alert sounded in the cockpit and the pilot was able to recover the aircraft on their own, even though it had been dropping at an indicated rate of 9,400 feet per minute. The Safety Center said: “It was determined to be a save because the pilot was spatially disoriented and unaware of the altitude and attitude of the aircraft at the time of the Auto-GCAS alert and likely would have flown below the 1,000 feet floor or impacted the water without the aural warning.” The plane reached a low altitude of 1,430 above sea level.

[Related: The Air Force wants to modernize air refueling, but it’s been a bumpy ride]

While that incident took place more than five years ago, another one in an F-22 occured over the Pacific on March 2 of last year. The pilot, who had departed out of Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in California, was practicing basic fighter maneuvers with another aircraft. While executing a specific dogfighting move, “the pilot lost sight of the other aircraft,” according to a summary of the incident provided by the Air Force Safety Center. 

From there, the pilot tried to find the other plane, but “inadvertently flew the aircraft into a nose-low acceleration toward the water,” the Safety Center said. When the aircraft was 4,520 feet over the water, with its nose angled down by 42 degrees, and traveling some 800 miles per hour, Auto GCAS took over control of the jet and righted it, according to the Safety Center. The F-22 got within 1,730 of the ocean below during the dive. 

In basic fighter maneuvers like what the F-22 pilot was practicing in the March incident, “probably the most dangerous thing that the pilot has to worry about is the other aircraft, because it’s moving relative to him or her,” Pinkston observes. In this case, it was reportedly the process of searching for that other aircraft that resulted in the pilot’s dive towards the ocean below. 

An incident like this one can “happen very easily,” says Cheryl Lowry, also a physician with a speciality in aerospace medicine and former flight surgeon with the Air Force. (Together, Pinkston and Lowry run a company called Kinetic Medical Consultants.) In incidents in which the “air speed is very fast, there’s a lot going on, you’re trying to watch that guy and potentially lock on him; you’re trying to navigate, you’re trying to use the radio communication equipment, and all of the distractions in the cockpit. And sometimes it’s easy to get target-fixated on that one thing, which is ok, ‘where is he? Where is he? Where is he?’” 

In this case, Lowry adds, it “sounds like the Auto GCAS worked as advertised—that’s exactly what it’s for.” 

A differing analysis 

Of the three incidents in 2021, 2020, and 2016, defense contractor Lockheed Martin—which developed the software along with NASA and the Air Force Research Laboratory—only considers the Alaska event in 2020 to be definitely a save that is attributable to the Auto GCAS software, while the Air Force Safety Center considers all three events to be software-based saves. 

The differing analysis of the events stems from a couple factors. One of them has to do with what are apparently different conclusions reached internally at the Department of Defense. In a statement, Lockheed Martin said: “Lockheed Martin’s ‘one confirmed save’ [in an F-22] number is based on guidance from DoD’s Safety department, i.e. Force Safety & Occupational Health division, which conducted an internal analysis for all three referenced incidents using available data from the resulting Class E Mishap Reports as well as pilot interviews and concluded that only the June 2020 event was an actual Auto GCAS save.”

Meanwhile, the Air Force Safety Center says that all three F-22 incidents do have the software to thank for saving the aircraft and pilot. The Safety Center said: “The Air Force Safety Center and the F-22 Program office thoroughly reviewed the three F-22 incidents and consider all three of them to be Auto-GCAS saves.”

A related reason why the analysis of the events differs is because of slightly varied ways that the software works on F-35s and F-16s as compared to F-22s. In the Raptor, the ground-collision-avoidance software “uses a minimum altitude set by the pilot as an artificial floor,” the Air Force Safety Center explained. Meanwhile, the other two jets employ a system that’s more dynamic in regards to the terrain below, allowing the “system to automatically set a recovery altitude that changes throughout a flight to ensure the aircraft does not enter a buffer zone above the terrain which prevents ground impact.” 

In short, the F-22’s software employs a static “line in the sky” below which the jet shouldn’t go, whereas the software in the other aircraft allows for more variation. Lockheed Martin said in a statement: “Due to the limited availability of related Line-in-the-Sky on-board algorithm data, Lockheed Martin was unable to conduct the typical Auto GCAS analysis (as is accomplished for F-16 activations) for the referenced three F-22 incidents.” 

The Air Force Safety Center also says that because of the different way the software on the F-22 functions, it “allows for more variation when interpreting whether a reported event is considered a valid save.”

The human, the machine, and trust 

In the past, Auto GCAS has been credited with saving the lives of fighter pilots who have passed out while flying—here’s footage of one such event. A phenomenon called GLOC (G-induced loss of consciousness) can occur when a pilot, experiencing the pull of Gs as they maneuver, passes out because blood drains away from their brains. While both a physical exercise called the Anti-G Straining Maneuver and a piece of equipment called the G-suit on the jet can help an aviator avoid this potentially deadly problem, it still does happen. 

[Related: I flew in an F-16 with the Air Force and oh boy did it go poorly]

Incidents like these highlight the complex relationship between high-performance aircraft and the relative physical fragility of the humans who pilots them; they also highlight the question of when or whether software should take over in aircraft if needed, and how much trust the pilots might have in that software, an issue that’s even been the topic of academic research. 

“Things like Auto GCAS are definitely a life-saver, and will continue to advance as we look forward to newer fleets of fighter aircraft, and perfect this technology so that it continues to act as advertised, despite the growing speed and capability of our new-generation fighters,” says Lowry. “It’s not a negative that humans have to rely on systems like this—in fact it’s a testament to our ingenuity.”

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Consider the idea of a package delivered by drone, and it’s easy to imagine a small flying machine depositing an item in a consumer’s driveway or backyard. And indeed, that’s what companies such as Wing, from Google’s parent Alphabet, are working on right now. But FedEx, which announced last week that it’s teaming up with a drone company called Elroy Air, has something else in store: an exploration of how to use drones for what they call “middle mile” logistics.

The drone in question is called the Chaparral, which Elroy took the wraps off of earlier this year. Here’s what to know about how it works, and how FedEx is thinking of using it.

The Chaparral isn’t small: It measures about 27 feet across, 19 feet long, and weighs some 1,900 pounds. The wing can be rotated so that the drone takes up less space in storage or transport. If you stood next to the tail, you’d find that it is taller than you, unless you stand about 7 feet in height. The aircraft can schlep about 300 to 500 pounds in a pod below its belly, and has a range of some 300 miles, meaning it could make it from New York to Boston. It’ll travel at speeds faster than 100 mph. The plane is autonomous—no pilots needed—and it can take off and land vertically. 

In short, think of it like other large flying machines that companies like Joby, Wisk, and Beta have in development; those craft are called eVTOLS, for electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft. But unlike some of Elroy’s peers in this next-chapter-of-aviation space, the Chaparral aircraft is hybrid electric, not purely electric. It features 8 rotors on its wings to help it take off and land vertically, and four propellers for forward flight, and all of them are driven by electric motors. However, the source of that electricity is what makes this craft unique: it has a gas turbine and generator inside it to make that juice.

Within the aircraft, the gas turbine (it burns jet fuel) and generator produces electricity to feed those electric motors, and batteries inside allow the aircraft to store the juice. “We can actually boost the power that the engine is able to provide for those very high-power-consumptive moments in flight, as well as provide a backup to the engine,” says Terik Weekes, the aircraft’s chief engineer at Elroy. 

Kofi Asante, Elroy’s vice president of business development and strategy, argues that the hybrid-electric design is “a pretty big distinguisher for us compared to some of the other groups in the space,” he says. “It gets us the longer range; it allows us to make sure we don’t need charging stations at each one of the locations.” Asante says that the company isn’t just interested in commercial deliveries, but is also pursuing government and humanitarian opportunities. Regions such as West Africa or locales with many islands, like the Carribean, could be places where this uncrewed aircraft could help deliver items. 

So what are FedEx’s plans for this flying machine? Joseph Stephens, the senior vice president for global planning, engineering and technology at FedEx Express, says their intentions right now are to start testing out the Chaparral next year. He stresses that they are interested in using it for “middle mile” transport, so that it’s not replacing what the delivery vehicles do on your street. “This is going to be complementary,” Stephens says. Think about a truck delivering packages to a hub for air travel, and then an airplane delivering those packages to another hub: this drone would be used for the middle leg of a scenario like that. FedEx Express operates a range of ground vehicles and aircraft, with their airborne fleet including large planes like Boeing 767 and 777s as well as smaller ones, like the Cessna Caravan 208.

To get a sense of how many packages an aircraft like the Chaparral can handle, picture this: A typical FedEx delivery truck can carry some 700 to 1,000 pounds, so the 300 to 500 pounds the Elroy Air drone can transport represents about half of what a truck like that could carry, by weight. 

Meanwhile, the volume of packages that FedEx is delivering increased faster than they thought it would, Stephens says: A previous estimate had forecasted them carrying 100 million packages daily by the year 2026, but he says that they are now predicting 101 million packages per day for this year. That increase is “as a result of the pandemic,” he notes. 

Stephens says that they’re still working to determine where they will be testing the aircraft, but cites “remote Alaska” as the kind of place, domestically, that an aircraft like this could be used, perhaps winging packages to a far-flung village. “This would be a perfect opportunity for this particular aircraft, when you want to think in US terms,” he says. And because this drone can take off and land vertically and doesn’t need to be recharged with electricity, it does not need a typical runway or a charging station. 

See more about the aircraft, below:

Correction on April 12, 2022: This article has been updated to correct an error regarding the spelling of the name Terik Weekes.

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Last week, a fascinating experimental helicopter from Sikorsky and Boeing made its longest flight yet: It flew from West Palm Beach, Florida to Nashville, Tennessee—a distance of some 805 miles. The two companies behind the futuristic chopper announced the March 21 flight in a press briefing today, saying it was the first time that this helicopter had traveled out of Florida, where all its previous testing had taken place. 

The whirlybird flew at an average speed of some 200 mph for the journey, and had to make a couple fuel stops along the way. “It really behaved flawlessly,” Paul Lemmo, Sikorsky’s president, said. “There were no issues. Fuel burn was less than what we expected.” 

The helicopter in question is called Defiant, and it’s a unique-looking bird. The most noticeable difference between it and a regular helicopter is the fact that it has two large rotors up top. One rotor spins in one direction, and the other spins the opposite way: they counterrotate. Then, in the back of the helicopter is a propeller that can help the aircraft speed up or slow down. It flew for the first time three years ago, in March of 2019. 

Sikorsky and Boeing hope that the Army chooses this flying machine to be its next Black-Hawk-type aircraft, as it’s a candidate in a program called FLRAA, which stands for Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft. Defiant’s competition comes from Bell, whose entry into the showdown is called the V-280 Valor. Unlike the Defiant, the V-280 is a tiltrotor aircraft, meaning that large rotors on the craft’s wings can pivot to allow the craft to fly like a plane or land like a helicopter. The Army will likely decide this year which option it wants to buy. 

Sikorsky and Boeing also emphasized a survivability feature that the Defiant has baked into its design. That feature pertains to the fact that the spinning contraption in the back of it is a propeller, not a traditional tail rotor like you’d see on most any other helicopter. On a regular helicopter, the tail rotor exists as an anti-torque system: It cancels out the torque created by the main rotor, so that the aircraft does not spin in circles. But on a coaxial helicopter like the Defiant, the two big counter-rotating rotors up top play that important role, and don’t need any assistance from what’s happening in the rear of the helicopter to keep flying straight. “That [rear propeller] is simply for speed, but if that were to be damaged and inoperable, the helicopter could still fly safely back home,” Lemmo said. 

[Related: Check out the double-rotor helicopter that could be the US Army’s next Black Hawk]

What that means is that if the back propulser was “shot off” or otherwise made inoperable, the helicopter would be okay, Lemmo added. 

Sikorsky has previously boasted about the Defiant’s capabilities, such as hitting a speed of 236 knots (272 mph) last year, and turning at 60-degree angles of bank, moments highlighted in a January video. The company notes that it has gone faster than that, hitting 247 knots (284 mph) last year. The craft’s competition, the V-280 Valor from Bell, has hit speeds faster than that due to the fact that it functions similarly to an airplane in forward flight. 

In February, Sikorsky and DARPA announced that they had flown a specially configured Black Hawk helicopter for the first time without a single person onboard. They say that autonomy could figure into the Defiant’s toolbox as well. “Our offering will be fully equipped to have autonomous capabilities,” Lemmo said.

Two pilots flew the Defiant prototype for the roughly 800 miles from Florida to Tennessee so that it could be on display at an upcoming annual summit in Nashville run by the Army Aviation Association of America. (While the broader Defiant program is called Defiant X, the specific demonstrator aircraft is called SB>1 Defiant.) The companies say that before they made the decision to fly the experimental SB>1 Defiant for the long journey, it had to be evaluated by safety review boards at both Sikorsky-Lockheed Martin and Boeing. “This particular flight obviously passed both of those boards,” said Mark Cherry, the vice president of general manager of the vertical lift division at Boeing, “in terms of coming to the conclusion that it was safe to fly.” 

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Airbus may have decided to stop producing its double-decker A380 aircraft more than three years ago, but the company is now using one of those giant planes as a testbed to experiment with technology that could play a role in the future of aviation. Last Friday, an A380 test aircraft flew for some three hours with one of its four engines powered by 100-percent sustainable aviation fuel. 

Airbus flew the same A380 again today, this time for about two hours, and again with one engine getting its power from 100-percent sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF. In these tests, the aircraft’s other three engines burned conventional jet fuel. 

Airbus has flown other aircraft using 100-percent sustainable aviation fuel before—both its A350 and A319neo last year—but these recent flights mark the first time it has experimented with the A380, the biggest passenger plane there is. Steven Le Moing, Airbus’s SAF program manager, describes the SAF-powered engine’s performance as completely “normal” and was the same as what they’d seen in previous tests on the other aircraft. 

The plane’s test pilot, Wolfgang Absmeier, reported the same. “We didn’t notice any difference, from a pilot point of view,” he said in a video. “The engineers in the back, they were looking at 1,000 parameters, but at first glance, there was no difference at all.”

Commercial aircraft are already allowed to fly on a mix of regular jet fuel and SAF—as much as 50 percent SAF—but what makes these tests interesting is that one engine was running on 100-percent sustainable aviation fuel. In this case, the fuel in question mostly came from “used cooking oil, as well as other waste fats,” Airbus says. It’s called a HEFA fuel, which stands for hydroprocessed esters and fatty acids. 

[Related: All your burning questions about sustainable aviation fuel, answered]

Joshua Heyne, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Dayton, says that “there’s interest from industry to move to the fuel that Airbus tested for this flight.” 

However, he says that questions remain about using this type of SAF in the 100-percent form, as opposed to a blend of it with the regular kerosene. The first concern he has is about how compatible it is with the materials in the aircraft, as it could potentially impact seals, or o-rings, in the system, and cause leaks. 

The second is the potential for the fuel to affect the way the aircraft measures the quantity of the fuel in the tanks, since it could have a different density compared to traditional jet fuel. Le Moing, of Airbus, says that this second issue has been on their radar. “One of the topics that we explore is the behavior of the gauging system,” he says. 

The reason that companies like Airbus are interested in sustainable aviation fuels is because they represent one way to make the industry greener, and ideally contribute less to climate change. Sustainable aviation fuels are a complex topic—here’s an explainer—but they should have less of a carbon footprint than the regular stuff when considering their whole lifecycle. Heyne says that the HEFA fuels also produce less soot and are less likely to create contrails, too. 

Besides this Airbus test in the A380 and its other tests last year, other companies have tested out using sustainable aviation fuel. For example, United operated a passenger flight on a 737 MAX last year, with one of its engines burning 100-percent sustainable aviation fuel. 

Airbus even has plans to use an A380 to test out hydrogen fuel, although that’s several years away. 

Heyne says that the aviation industry is interested in the HEFA-type sustainable aviation fuels that Airbus tested, but he notes that supply availability could be a challenge. “Unfortunately, there’s just not a lot of used cooking oil out there—there’s not enough of it to replace all the aviation fuel we need,” Heyne says, “so we’ve got to look at other pathways.” 

Watch a video about the flight, below:

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It’s the year 2019, and we have so many cool gadgets: machines like flying taxis are even in the works. But we also still have to cope with passwords, the bane of our online existence. Google recently released the results of a survey about security, and it reported that 52 percent of the adults they polled use the same password for more than one account. It’s a forgivable offense, considering what a pain it is to remember all those letters and numbers. But some—a full 13 percent—even use the same password for every account. That’s very bad.

About a quarter of respondents to the same survey said they had employed a password manager to help them with this issue. These results are a good reminder that a platform that helps you manage your password—popular options include 1Password and LastPass—is a strong, if imperfect, solution to the problem of personal online security.

Password managers basically do two things: they autofill your existing passwords for you, and even better, they can generate a long, complex, random code for you and store that too. Browsers like Chrome and Safari can do that already (Apple, for example, saves those passwords in your iCloud Keychain). Those services can be a good option if you use just one system heavily, like an iPhone, plus a Mac, plus Safari.

But a third-party password manager will work across multiple platforms—from apps to different browsers, whether it’s a Google product or an Apple one.

The real security bonus comes from those lengthy, complicated passwords that a password manager will generate and save for you, which are definitely going to be better than whatever system you’ve cooked up. “It’s really difficult for the vast majority of people to be able to maintain good hygiene when it comes to passwords, because there are just so many different accounts they have to manage,” says Shuman Ghosemajumder, the chief technical officer at cybersecurity company Shape Security.

A compelling reason to consider using a service like this is the fact that millions of emails and passwords are already available to criminals who may try to use them. For example, a list known as “Collection #1” reportedly contains over 700 million email addresses and some 21 million passwords. Data like this isn’t the result of one security breach, but many, and criminals can try to use this fodder to log into accounts they shouldn’t have access to, like a bank’s website. That’s a tactic called credential stuffing, and by one estimate [PDF] from Shape Security, an average of 80 to 90 percent of the traffic hitting a retailer’s website in 2017 came from those attacks.

But if every single password you ever used was different and complex, a password released in one breach would have be totally useless on other sites. Interested in going a step further? A physical device like a YubiKey or the Google Titan Security Key can help make the two-factor login process more secure.

Password managers are not perfect, and they do have their user-experience pitfalls—for example, using a system like 1Password requires you to first teach it your existing password. Then, you must change that password so it can create a new one for you.

Still, you get the point. Even a not-perfect solution trumps the password scheme you carry around in your head. “Everyone who is not a security expert is going to be better off using a password manager than using whatever manual system they have tried to come up with on their own,” Ghosemajumder says.

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On Thursday, the United States Postal Service said that it was proceeding with an initial order for 50,000 new delivery vehicles, a purchase costing nearly $3 billion. In a change from its past stance, the agency said that 20 percent of those new vehicles would be electric. Previously, the USPS had said that they planned for only 10 percent of these new rides to be battery-powered. 

Specifically, the USPS said on March 24 that 10,019 of its routes are good fits for running electric vehicles, meaning that “a minimum” of 20 percent of their 50,000 new vehicles would be EVs. However, energy and environmental experts argue that electrifying just 20 percent of the fleet is a missed opportunity, both financially and environmentally.

“Eighty percent of those vehicles that they’re purchasing are combustion-engine vehicles that  we know are going to be on the roads for another 20-plus years,” says Patricio Portillo, a senior advocate with the National Resources Defense Council. “[It] is just really unfortunate that they are still resistant to this new technology that report after report is showing can really save them a lot of money, while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions and local air pollution problems.”

The statement from the Postal Service cites financial concerns as a hurdle to adding electric vehicles to their fleet. “Today’s order demonstrates, as we have said all along, that the Postal Service is fully committed to the inclusion of electric vehicles as a significant part of our delivery fleet even though the investment will cost more than an internal combustion engine vehicle,” Louis DeJoy, the Postmaster General, said in the statement. 

[Related: Volvo plans to make Starbucks a recharging stop for your EV]

But a report issued by Atlas Public Policy in August of last year argues that 97 percent of the agency’s vehicles could be electrified, and could save the Postal Service billions of dollars when taking the lifetime cost of owning an EV versus an internal combustion engine vehicle into account. “Yes, it costs more to procure [EVs] up front, but over time with savings from fuel costs and maintenance, you come out ahead very significantly,” says James Di Filippo, a senior analyst with Atlas Public Policy and the first author on their report.  

The fact that the recent news from the USPS indicates that 20 percent, not 10 percent, of their initial purchase of new vehicles—called the Next Generation Delivery Vehicle—will be electric is “better than it was,” Di Filippo adds. “I think our analysis is pretty clear that there is a much bigger opportunity [for EVs in the fleet].”

The saga of the USPS’s plan to procure new vehicles intensified when it released a final environmental impact statement in December of last year, which stated that the Postal Service wanted to go with the 10-percent EV plan. That report was received “very poorly,” says Portillo. “So many groups, and government agencies, and the public, put in all of these really robust comments on the draft, and on the final, there was like no change.” 

Following that report, in February, a group of 19 US senators sent a letter to the Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, and the agency’s chairman, Roman Martinez IV. “After an unjustifiable, truncated, and deficient process, it is unacceptable that the USPS intends to cling to an overwhelmingly fossil fuel-powered fleet whose emissions are endangering our planet,” the missive states. A different letter from the EPA refers to the USPS’s final environmental impact statement as “seriously deficient.” And earlier in March, the Office of the Inspector General of the United States Postal Service stated in its own report: “The adoption of electric delivery vehicles could save the Postal Service money in the long term — at least for certain delivery routes.”

The new vehicles will include important changes from the old ones, like air conditioning and other important modern human comfort and safety updates. 

Ultimately, the USPS may buy 165,000 new vehicles, as it refreshes a fleet that includes 217,000 delivery vehicles in total. The transition to new vehicles represents “a big opportunity for the Postal Service; it’s a big opportunity for the country,” says Portillo. “For generations, they’re going to be in our neighborhoods, in every single neighborhood in the country—and getting it right is really important.” 

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Following the crash on Monday of a Boeing 737-800 operated by China Eastern Airlines, multiple news outlets reported that investigators had found one of the aircraft’s two black boxes. 

Reuters reports that the device that was found in the wreckage, in the aftermath of a disaster that has likely claimed 132 lives, is possibly the plane’s cockpit voice recorder. The devices commonly referred to as black boxes consist of two items: the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder. 

“The flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders have been instrumental in solving the vast majority of accidents,” says John Cox, the CEO of Safety Operating Systems and a former Boeing 737 pilot. “So they’re really important devices because they often-time can be the lynchpin to understanding what happens in a major accident.”

Here’s what to know about what these devices do.

The cockpit voice recorder

As its name implies, this recording system chronicles what the people on the flight deck say. It gathers audio from multiple channels: the pilot, the first officer, anyone sitting in the jump seat, as well as something called the cockpit area microphone, or CAM. 

“There are four microphones in the cockpit,” Cox says. “The cockpit voice recorder records anything said in any one of those four microphones.” That can also include the conversations between the aircraft and air traffic control. 

The conversations among the pilots, of course, can provide valuable clues. “It tells you the pilots know what’s going on, and what checklists they called for, and how they’re doing the problem solving of whatever issue has arisen,” Cox says.

Audio doesn’t just include conversation. “Investigators also listen for things such as noises,” Cox says. “It could be a stabilizer trim wheel running, it could be a windshield wiper turning on or off, it could be the sound of rain—it could be any number of things.” These sounds can provide investigators with “more of an insight into what was going on, on the flight deck, whenever the incident occured.”

Modern cockpit voice recorders can record up to two hours of audio, while older ones captured just 30 minutes, says Anthony Brickhouse, an associate professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. 

Brickhouse notes that the tone of any speech from the pilots is important, too. “Were they stressed? Were they panicked? Were they having trouble breathing? These are all things that the cockpit voice recorder would pick up on,” he says.

The flight data recorder 

While voice communications and other audio clues are important, the flight data recorder chronicles other information, and over a longer time period. “The flight data recorder is much more complex,” Cox says, as it records a multitude of variables. 

This data can include information like plane’s “altitude, the heading, the ground speed, rate of climb, the selected mode of the autopilot, whether the landing gear is up or down, the position of the flaps, [and] whether the pressurization system switches and functions are all normal,” Cox says. “It just records all the parameters in the airplane of things that move, or are relevant to the operation of the airplane.” 

And while the cockpit voice recorder is designed to keep two hours of audio, the flight data recorder goes back further. “The flight data recorders have enormous memory,” he says, estimating they can maintain seven to eight days of data. That means that if investigators have access to this data, they can consider information from multiple flights. “They can look back at previous flights on the flight data recorder to see how the accident flight would relate,” Cox says. 

Brickhouse notes that the raw data that this device stores “looks just like a bunch of code,” but it can be converted into “an animation, or recreation, of the flight,” that shows what happened. For example, this video from the NTSB of a 2020 crash of a cargo aircraft utilizes data from the flight data recorder and other sources. 

The data in a black box lives in a specific area called the crash survivable memory unit, or CSMU, Brickhouse says. “That’s where the data are going to be stored,” he says. Here’s more on how the data is then handled. 

Companies like L3Harris and Honeywell make these crucial devices. “Honeywell is aware that one of the flight recorders has been retrieved from China Eastern Airlines flight 5735,” a spokesperson for the company said in an email. “Investigations into the incident are led by the appropriate regulatory authorities, and we stand ready to support those investigations if asked.”

The black boxes are not the only source of data about what happened. Other sources include data streamed from the aircraft’s engines, says Hassan Shahidi, the president of the Flight Safety Foundation, as well as broadcast systems like ADS-B, which is how outfits like Flightradar24 get info. Investigators will also consider other factors, too.

Cox reflects that it’s certainly good news that one of these devices has been found. “I think that there’s a pretty high likelihood that they’ll find the second one,” he says. “Those recorders contain vital information for us to understand what happened in this tragedy, and so they’re really important for the investigators to locate.” 

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More than 130 people are believed to have died following the crash on Monday of a Boeing 737-800 passenger jet operated by China Eastern Airlines, Reuters and other news organizations have reported. The plane took off from the city of Kunming with a destination of Guangzhou.

According to CNN, the airline said: “The cause of the plane crash is still under investigation. The company expresses its sorrowful condolences to the passengers and crew members who died in this plane crash.”

The flight, number MU5737, was cruising at an altitude of 29,100 feet, according to a playback from Flightradar24, but suddenly descended at a rate that at moments hit around 31,000 feet per minute. A data visualization of the aircraft’s altitude depicts a rapid downwards trajectory, with a brief climb and leveling off below 10,000 feet, and then another final descent. 

Video shared on Twitter (caution: some readers may find the footage in the link upsetting) appears to show an aircraft plummeting straight downwards. Other video, via The New York Times, shows smoke, fire, and debris on the ground.

“That rapid descent really caught my attention,” says Anthony Brickhouse, an associate professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and an expert in aviation safety.

In the aftermath of aviation disasters like this one, investigators will consider a variety of sources to try to determine what went wrong. “I think the investigators will be looking at this holistically,” says Hassan Shahidi, the president of the nonprofit Flight Safety Foundation. “They will be looking at all aspects associated with this airplane.” Those aspects might include the specific aircraft’s maintenance history, its engines and their history, the pilots and their training level, and more.

“They’ll be looking at the air traffic communications between the pilots and air traffic controllers,” he adds. Those recordings can come from the air-traffic control side of the communications, which is a different source from what’s recorded within the aircraft from the black boxes. 

“All of these [sources] are going to be information that’s going to be critical to investigators to find out what happened to this flight,” he says. 

Like Shahidi, Brickhouse says that investigators will examine a “plethora of different areas,” from aircraft maintenance to weather in the area when working to figure out what happened. 

And of course, the black boxes will be important in figuring out the cause. “If the video that we’ve seen is accurate, this would be what investigators would consider to be a high velocity, high angle-type impact,” Brickhouse says. “And with that, you don’t get a lot of wreckage.”

“The black boxes are designed to withstand a tremendous amount of force,” he says. “I would suspect that they’ll recover the black boxes, and hopefully they’ll get good data.” In most aircraft, the black boxes are two separate devices—a cockpit voice recorder, and a flight data recorder—located in the tail, Brickhouse says. 

The aircraft involved in the crash of flight MU5737 in China was a Boeing 737-800, which is a different model from the 737 MAX jets, and their MCAS software, which were involved in two separate disasters, in Indonesia in 2018 and Ethiopia in 2019. 

Boeing addressed the recent accident in two tweets on Monday: 

“There are thousands of these [Boeing 737-800s] in the fleet that are flying on a daily basis, all over the world, including the US, and Asia, and Latin American, and Europe,” Shahidi says. “It is a very, very solid airplane, with a solid background over many years.” 

He notes that records indicate the specific aircraft involved in this crash was about six or seven years old. In a detailed blog item about the crash, Flightradar24 pegs the aircraft’s delivery date to the customer as June 2015 and notes that it was a new aircraft at that time. 

“There is really no connection to the MAX model, which is a completely different model,” Shahidi says. “This airplane has had an excellent safety track [record] worldwide.” 

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Drivers cruising in electric vehicles across five states in the western United States will have a new place to plug in their EVs by the end of this year: at Starbucks. 

The pilot project, announced today by Volvo, will supply EV chargers at select Starbucks stores on a route that spans Denver to Seattle. The DC fast charging stations themselves come from a company called ChargePoint. In a release, Volvo says that the project could incorporate a maximum of 60 chargers in total, at more than a dozen of the coffee shops. The route itself is some 1,350 miles long, and the stations will be spaced at every 100 miles or so. 

The news comes on the heels of a major EV charging infrastructure announcement: the federal government’s plan to give states billions of dollars to install charging stations on routes like interstate highways, with fast chargers every 50 miles. Those funds come from the infrastructure bill passed last year, and the recent plan outlined how they will be allocated. 

But even if this coffee-meets-battery news isn’t a major infrastructure development on the same scale of the federal plans, James Di Filippo, a senior analyst with Atlas Public Policy, says that smaller steps like this are still good. “They’re very important,” Di Filippo says. “This kind of corridor charging [along travel routes] is pretty accepted among most professionals in the field to being really critical to supporting mass adoption [of EVs].”

[Related: Biden’s EV plan aims to build charging stations along interstate highways]

“We need a network that is reasonably as ubiquitous as gas stations are in these kinds of corridors,” he adds. 

Volvo will be branding the chargers with their company name, and says in a news release that people driving Volvo EVs can use this network at “no charge or at preferential rates,” although it will be open to non-Volvo drivers by paying for it, too. The company is likely looking to see if the “network can help them sell more vehicles,” Di Filippo speculates. 

Compared to companies like EVgo, Electrify America, and Tesla’s own charging network, ChargePoint is less known for serving travel corridors, Di Filippo says, and are more closely associated with retail locations or people’s workplaces. 

The charging power of the stations to be installed is a key factor in how helpful they will be. A Volvo representative notes via email that “Volvo will be using a mix of ChargePoint DC equipment including their Express Plus and Express 250 units. The Express Plus is capable of delivering up to 350 kW to a single vehicle.” 

But the Express 250 is less powerful, at 62.5 kW.

“It is encouraging that they are including those chargers,” Di Filippo adds via email, referring to the faster Express Plus rigs. The Express 250s, though, are “pretty slow for a corridor charging application,” he says, as they take around 20 minutes to boost a car’s battery by some 70 miles. He says that he hopes any location with a slower charger also has a faster one on hand, too, in a mix-and-match strategy. 

An early map of the project from Volvo shows the network snaking across Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. 

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Last week, on the morning of Wednesday, March 9, an electric aircraft with a 50-foot wingspan called Alia took flight out of Plattsburgh, New York. The plane, powered by two motors driving a propeller in the rear, flew for about an hour. Later that day, it flew again. The Alia aircraft is an experimental flying machine that produces no emissions while in the air, and it’s made by a Vermont-based company called Beta Technologies. What made these flights notable is that for the first time for this company and others in an Air Force program called Agility Prime, at the controls and on board the aircraft were Air Force aviators who both have a long history as test pilots.

Beta isn’t the only company working on electric aircraft: A number of others are as well, such as Joby, Kitty Hawk, Wisk, and Archer. Those startups and others are in the process of creating planes that can take off and land vertically, like a helicopter, and then fly like typical airplanes, powered by batteries, motors, and propellers in different configurations. The industry term for these new experimental flying machines is eVTOLs, for electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft. 

Beta and a number of other firms in the space are also part of an Air Force program called Agility Prime, an initiative that focuses on trying to help accelerate the work these companies are doing; it also gives the Air Force an inside look at what possible uses these new kinds of airplanes could serve for the military. “It allows us to take a look at these early prototypes from all the companies, and say, ‘Is there a military use case?’” says George Griffiths, a former F-16 and F-35 test pilot with the Air Force who also goes by the callsign “Hog,” and one of the pilots who flew Alia last week.

The flights by Griffiths and another Air Force aviator were notable for being the first time that Air Force pilots have flown an electric aircraft in the Agility Prime program while on board it—previously, an Air Force Reserve pilot operated a different electric aircraft from Kitty Hawk, but did so remotely, while on the ground. 

[Related: The Air Force wants to modernize air refueling, but it’s been a bumpy ride]

For Beta last week, the day’s first flight saw Major Jonathan Appleby at the controls, who also had an instructor pilot sitting to his left in the cockpit. “Flying it was very unique,” he reflects. One of the main reasons for that is the way the controls are arranged: a control stick was positioned to his right, which allowed him to command the plane to move its nose up or down, or bank side to side. Interestingly, that stick also allows pilots to twist it to have the plane yaw left or right. Other planes do that with rudder pedals. To his left was a wheel that he could operate with his thumb to control how much thrust the propeller in the back provides. “Imagine a donut that rotates,” he says. Setting that donut allows the pilot to control the amount of torque the motors are providing. 

Another key sensory difference was that it wasn’t loud the same way an airplane like a 737 with traditional engines is. “You hear some of the aerodynamic aspects of the wind hitting the windshield, or even the pusher [propeller] making some noise, but it’s a very soft hum behind you,” Appleby says. “I’d say it’s kind of like sailing, versus using a big powered boat.”

Griffiths, the other Air Force test pilot, says that his experience in the electric plane was similar to Appleby’s. “If you’ve driven an electric car, or even a golf cart on a golf course, as soon as you press that pedal down, you’ve got instant torque,” he says. “Same exact thing when we hit that thumbwheel, we can go from zero to 100 percent instant power.”

While these air mobility companies, including Beta, are focused on making planes that don’t need to take off by speeding down a runway to get into the air, the specific experimental aircraft that both Appleby and Griffiths operated last week was actually configured more like a traditional plane than an eVTOL. That’s because this aircraft did not have the additional propellers mounted on top of it to pull it vertically into the air or help it land that way. Instead, it was driven just by a pusher propeller in the back, and took off and landed just like a regular plane, albeit an experimental electric one. 

Griffiths reflects on the possible uses for an aircraft like this for the Department of Defense. “Maybe it’s just as simple as moving cargo from one base to another base,” he wonders. “Or is there a military mission that we can do? Maybe it’s in orbit [in the sky] somewhere, with some type of a sensor pod that we can actually mount to the airplane.” The goal, when considering uses like this, is to have government eyes on the prototypes, he says, as opposed to just having the individual companies report their progress. 

Safety looms large when piloting a new kind of aircraft, as these novel eVTOL-type planes certainly are; the pilots had parachutes and other safety gear. In fact, an uncrewed electric flying machine from a different company, Joby, crashed in February, and the National Transportation Safety Board has so far issued a preliminary report. No one was hurt, as Joby reported to the SEC. 

“We’ve done as much as we can to mitigate a lot of those risks of the unknown,” Griffiths reflects. “But you gotta go and fly it.” 

Watch moments from the Air Force’s testing, below:

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The first F-22 approaches from behind our KC-10 tanker aircraft, subtly camouflaged and eerily quiet thanks to the tanker’s ambient noise. We’re cruising thousands of feet above the Atlantic, going hundreds of miles per hour, and the F-22—a stealth fighter jet known as the Raptor—slowly closes the gap, sliding up toward a refueling boom that hangs from the rear and bottom of our plane. 

The KC-10 tanker is a flying gas station, a cargo aircraft capable of offloading thousands of pounds of fuel into receptacles atop planes like the Raptor. Holed up in a cozy compartment in the tanker’s rear, a human—in this case Sebastian Dewsnap, a member of the Royal Australian Air Force on exchange in the US—watches through a rear-facing window to operate the telescoping delivery system.

This is how the Air Force has handled refueling for decades: with a person like Dewsnap looking out through glass at a thirsty plane. But KC-10s like the one we’re flying for this training mission in November of 2021—and the KC-135s the Pentagon deployed to the EU just this week—are at a point of transition: The KC-10 is set to be retired over the next two years, with the KC-135 flying off into the sunset sometime long thereafter. The intended replacement, called the KC-46, relies on a higher-tech tactic: A remote-vision solution will replace Dewsnap’s rear window. Someday, tankers like this could do away with boom operators entirely in favor of partially, or fully, robotic systems.

An aging fleet filled with aging tech 

After that first Raptor arrives, over the next seven minutes or so, and through multiple attempts, the pilot tries to maneuver his stealth aircraft in the right place below the tanker. Meanwhile, Dewsnap plays the role of attendant at the flying gas station. Using his right hand on a joystick-like controller, he can manipulate the boom’s position—side to side, up and down—and with his left, he can telescope a portion of it outward to insert into the fighter. Eventually, having connected enough to take on some 4,900 pounds of fuel, the fighter falls back and banks away. 

“Here comes the other one,” Dewsnap says, as another Raptor floats in and approaches the boom. 

You may not have considered the fact that air refueling exists, because it never happens on commercial flights: Airliners lack the necessary hardware to receive fuel in the air, and there would be no reason for them to take on the extra risk of fueling in the sky when they can just gas up on the ground for their routine, predictable journeys. But for the military, it’s a long-established way to give a fighter jet, bomber, or other aircraft the petroleum product it needs to keep going for very long distances without landing. “It’s a fundamental enabling capability for all militaries that operate an air force,” says Todd Harrison, the director of the aerospace security project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Indeed, four US Air Force KC-135s have just arrived in Germany following Russia’s Ukraine invasion, though the Pentagon’s statement doesn’t specify what aircraft the tankers may support.

[Related: I flew in an F-16 with the Air Force and oh boy did it go poorly]

It’s a transitional time for these fuel-schleppers. The KC-10 that Popular Science caught a ride on has been in the Air Force’s inventory for some 40 years. The KC-135, which makes up the majority of the Air Force’s fleet of more than 400 tankers, has an average age of about 60, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office. “You just can’t keep [the KC-135] planes flying that much longer—they have reliability problems, they have maintenance challenges, they’re expensive to operate,” Harrison says. 

Between the KC-10s and the KC-135s, “we have a small fleet that’s old, and we have a large fleet that’s extremely old,” Harrison says. In the KC-135s—which despite their advanced age will stay in service for many more years for logistical reasons (although some will be retired as new aircraft come online)—boom operators lay down at the rear of the aircraft and look out through windows at the scene below them. But while they’re slightly newer, the Air Force is retiring the KC-10s first: There are far fewer of them (just 47) than the KC-135s, so it’s easier for the military to phase them out, in part because smaller fleets are more expensive to maintain on a per-plane basis. The KC-10s will fly only through 2024.

“The KC-10 has been definitely a workhorse for the US Air Force,” Dewsnap said before takeoff that day, standing on the tarmac, arms crossed. “It’s sad to see it go to pasture.” 

The quirks of the decades-old KC-10 were on full display before it lifted off the ground from McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey to fly south to meet the Raptors. The first problem was a fuel leak in one of the engines; the ground crew fixed it. The second problem occurred after the aircraft had already started taxiing. Each of its three engines has a generator, and those generators are supposed to operate in sync with one another. But they weren’t parallel with each other. After troubleshooting it, and nearly not being able to take off, the cockpit crew finally fixed the glitch by resetting the generators. 

The new bird is the Pegasus 

That isn’t to say that the KC-10’s looming replacement is perfect. Anything but. The KC-46 has been entering the fleet like the glitchy robotic new kid on the block. The Pegasus has been very problematic for the Air Force, mainly because of a major design change: instead of sitting at the back of the aircraft and looking through a window, operators get their information from a remote-vision system by way of a screen. 

That remote vision system, or RVS, has been tough to refine. “The biggest problem that it had was, as it began to be developed and fielded, camera technology was not where we thought it might be,” says Brig. General Ryan Samuelson, who heads the Air Force’s acquisition and operations process for the KC-46. “When we fielded it, we realized under certain sun angles, under certain reflections off of water, clouds, the cameras would start to wash out.”

Boeing concedes that the tech is now dated; the company received the contract over a decade ago. “We had basically 2010 technology that we had to build and produce [the aircraft with],” says Mike Hafer, Boeing’s business development senior manager on the KC-46 program. In 2020, Boeing and the Air Force agreed that the airplane maker would put in a new vision system. Specifically, the RVS includes two regular-vision cameras, plus two infrared ones to employ during nighttime refueling. Boeing promises a better system is coming. “This will be 4K, ultra-high-def cameras and displays, as well as the video processors, with fiber optic cable in between,” Hafer adds. 

[Related: Inside a training mission with a B-52 bomber, the aircraft that will not die]

The KC-46 originally arrived with what’s now called RVS 1.0, and the final goal is to start fielding the new system with those 4K cameras, RVS 2.0, in 2023 and 2024. A bridge system that the Air Force calls “enhanced RVS” will use software changes to mitigate the problems before the new hardware arrives. The current setup is reportedly hard to use. As one reporter said after flying in a Pegasus last year: “It’s hard to really describe the challenges boom operators have with the current set up.”

“Big picture on the KC-46 program,” Harrison, of CSIS, reflects, “is Boeing thought that it would require less development work to produce an aircraft to the Air Force’s requirements than it ended up being—not only did it cost more, it also took longer—much longer than anticipated.” 

Even today, the KC-46 has a total of seven major problems and has been the subject of multiple reports from the Government Accountability Office. These “critical deficiencies,” as the GAO describes them in its most recent report on the tanker, “are shortfalls that could cause death, severe injury, or illness, or otherwise cause loss or damage to the aircraft.” Two of those critical problems pertain to issues with the remote vision system. 

“The majority of those will either be certified and/or closed this year, to next year,” Hafer, of Boeing, adds. “RVS is the long pole in that tent, and we’re on path with the Air Force to close that by 2024.”

Boeing has lost more than $5.4 billion on the jet, which they boast offers a much more modern tanker for the Air Force—from better mission planning, to more advanced data sharing, to protection against an electromagnetic pulse, to armor that shields the flight deck. “It’s ready to go to war,” says Hafer. The caveat to that statement is that right now, the Air Force isn’t comfortable using the tanker to refuel fighter jets like F-35s or F-22s during actual military scenarios (as opposed to training exercises) for fear that the wonky boom system could scratch those aircraft’s fancy stealth coatings. 

Could automation do the job?

All of this raises the question: Why shift away from the simplicity of a window in favor of a newfangled remote vision system? Harrison speculates that this is meant to pave the way for completely automated future systems. “First step towards an automated boom is using a camera—using a synthetic system—for control of it,” he says. “That’s what I think it’s really a first step towards, is getting towards automated boom operations, and completely remotely piloted aircraft.” 

Right now, the Navy is trying out an aircraft for just that: a Boeing-made refueling drone called the MQ-25. And a tanker from Airbus has a similar setup to the KC-46, with the boom operator sitting up front. They already have transferred fuel from the tanker to a receiver using their automated system. 

[Related: What it’s like to rescue someone at sea from a Coast Guard helicopter]

Samuelson, of the Air Force, says his service branch could see more automation in his lifetime. He reflects that “it is absolutely in the art of the possible” that “automation—whether it be automation in the flight control systems or automation in offload of data or fuel—will be something that the US will have in its inventory.” 

Boeing echoes that assessment more decisively. “As we revamp that entire system, we are installing the architecture that will allow a transition into autonomous air refueling,” Hafer says, “so that you can either have the boom operator assisted by the computer, and/or have the computer fly and do the air refueling in and of itself.”

Automating a tanker completely is something that Harrison, of CSIS, thinks makes sense. “Aerial refueling is very tedious and routine and boring, and so if we can make this uncrewed, we absolutely should.” 

‘I grew up with this airplane’

That day in November, aboard the KC-10, the air refueling operation proceeded through its intricate dance. Dewsnap spent more than an hour gassing up the F-22 Raptors—which had call signs like Bobcat 2 and Oxen 1—offloading a total of around 75,000 pounds. It took place at some 28,500 feet, cruising at around 500 mph. 

Speeding through the air while other aircraft maneuver close behind you is enough to make one wonder if the operation is dangerous. “Anytime you fly two aircraft close together is risky,” Dewsnap says, before takeoff. “There is potential for stuff to go wrong, and that’s why we train so much.” 

Later, in a break between refueling the Raptors—after Bobcat 2 drifts away, and before another arrives—Dewsnap reflects for a moment. “That was hard work,” he says. There were a lot of communications over the radio to juggle, and one of the receivers “wasn’t staying on the boom.”

We finish giving the fighter jets the fuel they need, then practice with another KC-10 tanker (the vessels are also capable of receiving fuel in flight). We fly up close behind the other large metal bird, visible right there through the cockpit windows. Its colorful boom hangs below. We go through the motions, though no liquid changes hands. 

In the early afternoon, after about four hours in the air, we come in for a landing. The KC-10’s shadow flies across the trees below, visible through a window on the left side of the cockpit. An automated voice calls out our altitude over the ground as we descend. We make contact with the runway. Everything shakes. We are back on the ground in an aircraft that isn’t too long for this world. 

Lt. Col. Paul Murphy, one of the pilots and the aircraft commander that day, reflects on the KC-10 after we land. “I grew up with this airplane,” he says. “I chose this airplane to fly out of pilot training. It’s kind of hard to see it go.”

Watch footage from the flight, below.

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Yesterday, the US announced that it is following in the wake of moves made by other countries and is banning Russian flights from American airspace. President Joe Biden made the announcement during his State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, adding that the barring of flights from Russia will have the effect of “further isolating Russia and adding an additional squeeze on their economy.” 

A statement posted yesterday by the US Department of Transportation notes that the ban is far-reaching, as it “includes passenger and cargo flights, and scheduled as well as charter flights, effectively closing US air space to all Russian commercial air carriers and other Russian civil aircraft.” 

The decision follows similar actions taken by other countries, and is in response to the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine. On February 27, for example, Canada said it had closed its airspace to Russian aircraft, as have a large number of European nations, from Ireland and the United Kingdom, to France, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, and Luxembourg. Air tracker website Flightradar24 has a full list of countries that rolled out a flight ban here, as well as further information on airspace closures over and around Ukraine, plus the moves Russia has made in reciprocity to other countries’ airlines. 

The move from the US is major but not unexpected, says Todd Harrison, who directs the aerospace security project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It’s not too surprising,” Harrison says. “Maybe the only thing that is surprising is that the US took a little bit longer than other countries to take this step.”

[Related: A closer look at Russia’s nuclear arsenal—and the rest of the world’s]

Between the US closure and the others, “this is going to dramatically curtail the Russian aviation industry,” Harrison adds. “It is cutting off so many routes that it will likely cripple Russian airlines.”

And the airspace closures will likely have other ripple effects on the aviation industry as well, Harrison speculates, noting that frequently airlines don’t actually own all of the aircraft they operate, but instead, lease them. “The companies that actually own those aircraft are now going to pull them out [of Russia],” he says. “You’re going to have a glut of aircraft available for lease in other areas now.”

Aircraft makers Boeing and Airbus have also cut off Russian carriers. “We have suspended major operations in Moscow and temporarily closed our office in Kyiv. We are also suspending parts, maintenance and technical support services for Russian airlines,” a Boeing spokesperson said via email. Airbus has done the same, The Wall Street Journal and other outlets reported. And the Farnborough International Airshow said on Wednesday that Russia would not be welcome there when it takes place in July.

How these actions will affect Russian President Vladimir Putin’s course of action is, of course, an open question. “I don’t think he is likely to change his behavior,” Harrison says. “If anything he may double down on his invasion into Ukraine—what will change, though, is he is weakening Russia, significantly, by his actions.”

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Two clear trends are developing in the automotive space: The first is the move away from internal-combustion engines and toward battery-electric vehicles, and the second is the pursuit of autonomy. Cars that can drive themselves come from the likes of Waymo and other companies, while automakers such as Tesla boast about their driver-assistance features. 

One company planning on tinkering at the intersection of these trends is called Lightmatter, which is going to build the brains of a self-driving prototype vehicle. The company’s microchips set them apart from others in the tech industry: The chips that will do the computing for this experimental self-driving car will be light-based, unlike the traditional chips that employ electrons and transistors. 

The company, in conjunction with Harvard University and Boston University, has received $4.8 million in funding from a government organization called IARPA. That stands for Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, and can be thought of as an analog of DARPA—which funds defense-related research—but from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 

Lightmatter, unlike outfits such Zoox or Rivian, is definitely not a car or transportation company, so don’t expect to see Lightmatter-branded vehicles passing you on the highway. It’s a chip company, and the photonic chips they make are specifically geared towards powering artificial intelligence computations in an efficient way. 

“We are building something that’s not a general-purpose processor—it’s a processor targeted at AI,” says Nicholas Harris, the CEO and co-founder of Lightmatter. Running the neural networks that can execute AI tasks, such as what goes on in computer-vision processing, takes math. “It’s a lot of multiplication and addition, and it’s a lot of moving data around the chip at very high speeds—so we do all of those operations using integrated photonics,” he says.

[Related: Why this Amazon-owned company is bringing its autonomous vehicles to Seattle]

A photonics chip uses light waves, whereas traditional computer chips are based on electric circuits and transistors. One very simple way to think about the difference is this: “The basic concept is really destructive and constructive interference of light in one case, and controlling the path of electrons using transistors as switches in the other case,” explains Ajay Joshi, an associate professor at Boston University who is also involved in the project. 

So why try to use light-based chips on a self-driving car, even just as an experiment? Since Lightmatter boasts that its chips are both faster and more efficient than a traditional chip, the idea here is that running the brains of a self-driving car with their chips could more efficiently use the limited electrical resources onboard an autonomous EV. “Our vision, as that [AV] market grows, is that we’re going to preserve battery range while providing the enormous amount of compute you need to rip out the steering wheel,” says Harris. 

He says that their light-based chips will “serve as the brain for a buggy.” The entire experimental vehicle won’t run on light-based chips (so technically, the system will be a combination of photonic chips and traditional ones), but the part of the computing hub handling the AI would. That brain would probably operate “multiple neural nets that are running back-to-back,” he adds, helping the buggy figure out what its perception system is seeing and what the car should do next. 

The company is not planning to actually create a car from scratch. “We’re just going to buy something off the shelf,” Harris says. “We’re not trying to innovate on anything to do with the car—it’s just the brain.” The light-based chips, in other words, could work as the central compute unit for a self-driving buggy or even a golf-cart-type contraption. The ultimate goal is that if that brain can do its AI-operations efficiently, then the self-driving buggy could do more with its batteries. 

The IARPA program that this research is part of is called MicroE4AI. The government entity describes some of the initiative’s goals this way: “Examples of desirable outcomes for this program include the development of artificially intelligent navigation systems for Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles (UAVs), hybrid analog/digital/photonic computation, and advanced diagnostics and tamper detection for microelectronic devices.” Lightmatter is just one team involved in the program. Other organizations, like General Electric and Purdue University, have also received funding from IARPA. 

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February has already been a big month for autonomous flight. For the first time, this past Saturday, and then again on Monday, a specially equipped Black Hawk helicopter flew without a single human on board. The computer-piloted aircraft was being tested as part of a DARPA program called Alias, and the tests took place out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

The retrofitted whirlybird was controlled by a Sikorsky-made autonomy system. As part of that system, the helicopter has a switch on board that allows the aviators to indicate whether two pilots, one pilot, or zero pilots will be operating the chopper. This was the first time that a Black Hawk was sent into the air with the no-pilots option, so that the computer system was handling all the controls. While these were just test flights, they hint at a future in which the Army could potentially send an autonomous helicopter on a dangerous rescue mission—and have no one on board it at all. 

The first test occurred on February 5. “The pilots shifted the knob to zero, and we did our first uninhabited flight,” said Stuart Young, the program manager for Alias at DARPA, during a press briefing on Tuesday. “We did some simple forward flight, and some pedal turns, and then landed.” 

That short flight was followed by another approximately 30-minute one the same day. On the longer flight, Igor Cherepinsky, the director of Sikorsky Innovations, noted that the helicopter was given simulated sensor data. (Sikorsky produces the Black Hawk helicopters, which are also known as UH-60s.) While the Black Hawk was physically in Kentucky, as part of the mission, it acted as if it was dodging structures in Manhattan, thanks to that simulated sensor data, Cherepinsky said. “And the aircraft was avoiding essentially [what it thought was] buildings in real time.” He added that having a helicopter with this capability could come in handy in urban environments, both in a military and civilian context. 

[Related: The stealth helicopters used in the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden are still cloaked in mystery]

Cherepinsky also noted that the uncrewed Black Hawk flew at around 4,000 feet of altitude and at speeds of about 115 to 125 miles per hour. Another brief autonomous flight occurred on Monday with the same aircraft.

In general, this kind of autonomy technology has three main goals, Young said. The first is safety, to ideally help prevent an aircraft from doing something disastrous like flying into terrain or a structure. The second is in-flight assistance so that the crew can focus on bigger-picture concerns, like the overall mission. “If you can remove some of the lower-level functions, we can allow the pilots to be unburdened,” Young said. And the third is cost reduction, either in personnel-training fees or even maintenance. 

[Related: Are Autonomous Helicopters The Next 18-Wheelers?]

The DARPA Alias program that this test was a part of has been ongoing for about six years; “Alias” is an acronym that stands for Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System. Sikorsky, meanwhile, has also been working on its autonomy technology for several years. The company has been operating a non-military test helicopter called SARA, or Sikorsky Autonomous Research Aircraft, which Popular Science caught a ride on—and even tried flying—in 2019. That helicopter was a testbed for this type of autonomous technology, and featured traditional controls, joystick-like controls called inceptors, and a tablet control system. 

“SARA is where we developed all of this,” Cherepinsky said. “The Black Hawk’s very similar to it.”

With these uncrewed flights now on the books, the DARPA program is in the process of winding down, Young said. “We’re actively working with the Army to transition the capabilities to the services.” He also said that the Air Force is interested in this type of software for its F-16 fighter jets. 

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Autonomous vehicles aren’t typically aggressive drivers, and can have issues with maneuvers such as left turns. Companies like Waymo and Zoox have built, or are working on, high-tech taxi-service vehicles that use perception systems to see the surrounding environment and can transport people around the streetscape. 

Then there’s Toyota. The Toyota Research Institute (TRI) just released a video that shows a modified Supra screeching its tires as it drifts around obstacles on a track. The vehicle’s occupant, Jonathan Goh, may have been in the left-hand seat, but the car was doing the fancy driving. 

Drifting a vehicle on purpose is not something most people would ever do, and the main reason someone might experience something like it is when their car is skidding sideways, if they hit ice or otherwise lose control of the car. 

“Drifting is usually defined as purposefully sliding the rear tires of the vehicle, to destabilize the car,” Goh, a research scientist with TRI, explains. “Where the vehicle is going is significantly different from where the vehicle body is pointing.” 

In other words, the nose of the car points in one direction, but the vehicle itself is sliding another way, like an airplane crabbing in crosswinds while landing. 

In this case, the Toyota car in the video below wasn’t outfitted like a traditional self-driving vehicle. It didn’t have a perception system, like lidar sensors, to see the world around it. It did have the ability to localize itself, though, so it could know where it was on the track, explains Avinash Balachandran, a senior manager at TRI. 

[Related: Before self-driving cars can get safer, they need to push their limits]

“It’s a car that has the lane boundaries and obstacles programmed into it, and then it plans the route and drives,” he says. “What it’s trying to do is actually stay within the lanes.” It’s figuring out how to do all this, and choosing the exact route through the track and around those obstacles, while recalculating the path it wants to take each twentieth of a second. 

They also gave the vehicle instruction to drift. They told it to try to “maximize side slip—or get to specified, targeted side slip,” says Goh. 

So what’s the point of doing all this, besides the chance to produce a slick video showcasing Toyota’s skills? Balachandran says it relates to the kind of edge events human drivers might experience when their car loses traction. “If you are hitting a patch of ice, or you have to do a very aggressive lane change—let’s say an obstacle jumps in front of you, and you need to do an aggressive lane change—you are really in a traction-limited situation,” he notes. “And regular drivers typically find that very hard to control.” 

[Related: How the DOT wants to prevent thousands of traffic deaths]

The goal is for them to take the data they’ve learned from this research and then perhaps bake new skills into forthcoming Toyota safety or autonomy systems. “We are learning a lot about fundamental vehicle dynamics, and how we can use those kinds of insights and technologies to improve safety for drivers now,” he says.

What the vehicle in the video is executing is pretty challenging, he adds. “The car is doing things that actually I and Jon can’t do as drivers,” Balachandran says.

Watch the video, below:

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Car fires are a hot topic, especially when the vehicles on fire are electric. Last year, General Motors had to recall all of its Bolt electric vehicles because more than a dozen of them caught on fire, an issue that cost LG, which makes the batteries in the vehicles, around $2 billion. When a vehicle like a Tesla catches on fire, it makes headlines. 

While it’s clear that electric vehicles pose unique challenges to the emergency teams fighting them—the blazes can be persistent and hard to snuff out for good—one issue that’s less clear is whether they’re more likely to catch on fire than a car with a traditional combustion engine in it. 

A recent report by an online car insurance marketplace, AutoinsuranceEZ, shed some light on the issue, although it’s likely not to be the last word on the topic. Researchers at the company analyzed data from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), and to account for the fact that the numbers of combustion-engine cars and EVs on the roads are vastly different, they factored in the car sales of different vehicle types. The resulting analysis found that per 100,000 cars sold in each category, electric vehicles had the lowest number of fires. Hybrid vehicles had the highest risk ratio for fire, and traditional cars were in the middle. 

[Related: Why Dyson is going all-in on solid-state batteries]

Paul Christensen, a professor in the School of Engineering at Newcastle University in England, studies the issue of electric vehicle fires and acts as an advisor on the topic to emergency responders. “At the moment, I believe that spontaneous fires are less likely to occur in electric vehicles than they do in conventional, diesel or petrol vehicles,” he says. “But the problem we have is that the data collection has been very patchy—and we don’t have sufficient data as of yet.” 

“There’s so much hype around electric vehicles, when they do go up,” he adds, a problem that makes the ground truth on the issue harder to discover. He says that when focusing on “the reported incidents” on the topic, EVs do seem to have lower rates of fires. 

“My view is that electric vehicles are not more dangerous,” he says. “They just cause completely different challenges.” 

[Related: How the DOT wants to prevent thousands of traffic deaths]

Some of those challenges were spelled out in a report that the NTSB publicized early last year. A video from the agency notes that emergency responders in the US tackle around 170,000 vehicle fires annually. It highlights three distinct safety issues that specifically pertain to EVs and fire: thermal runaway, battery reignition, and stranded energy, which refers to energy that’s left behind in the batteries after a fire. One 2017 case in Lake Forest, California exemplifies the fact that the fire in an EV can start up again after being extinguished. “The battery reignited while responders were winching the car onto the tow truck—new short-circuits were created when the battery shifted, causing the fire to restart,” summarised Thomas Barth, an engineer and highway investigator with the NTSB, in the video. 

Christensen, who advises rescue crews on how to respond to electric vehicles, has counterintuitive advice that he stresses is his personal opinion and not official policy: “Let the bloody thing burn,” he says. “As soon as one [battery] cell goes into thermal runaway, and it propagates, that vehicle is a write-off, so why risk your life?” 

“If the car is in isolation, [and] there’s no risk to life, let it burn,” he adds. 

As for the report from AutoinsuranceEZ, Christensen says he was surprised to hear that hybrids topped the charts in that study when it comes to fires, but not surprised to see EVs at the bottom. Laura Adams, a senior analyst with AutoinsuranceEZ, attributes the relatively high rate of fires they saw in hybrid vehicles to the “combination of technologies under the hood” that those types of cars have. As with all studies, this represents just one set of findings at one point in time—expect more research on the topic to surface in the future, especially as EVs continue to penetrate the market. 

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If you’re going to die in a transportation accident in the United States, it will most likely happen on a road or highway. Between 2011 and 2020, more than 370,000 people perished in transportation-related accidents. About 94 percent of those deaths took place on roadways. For comparison, railroads were responsible for 2 percent. 

Those statistics and more are presented in a new report from the US Department of Transportation. Secretary Pete Buttigieg notes in a letter prefacing the publication that the country faces “a crisis on our roadways.” The report itself, called the National Roadway Safety Strategy, states that 2020 was a bad year for road deaths. About 38,680 lives were lost from motor vehicle accidents that year, an increase of about 7 percent over the year before. Breaking it down further, those deaths were higher in subgroups—9 percent higher for motorcyclists when comparing 2020 deaths to 2019, for example, and 23 percent higher for people who are Black. 

The number of mortalities continued to rise in the first half of 2021—specifically, by about 18 percent from 2020. The goal, as Buttigieg wrote in the report, is no deaths. “Zero is the only acceptable number of deaths and serious injuries on our roadways,” he wrote. Because of all this, the new strategy document, released today, outlines five different lanes on which to focus. 

Those five different areas are as follows: The first is what the report describes as “Safer People,” which looks at the human behaviors that can affect safety, like driving drunk or not wearing a seatbelt. The second looks at the structure of streets themselves, calling attention to differences between rural and urban roads, for example. The third explores the safety systems in cars themselves, which include not just airbags and seatbelts but also newer tech, like automatic emergency braking. The final two areas are “Safer Speeds,” pertaining to the rate at which vehicles travel, and “Post-Crash Care,” which incorporates the medical attention people get after an accident—and how long it takes to arrive. “The timing of the arrival of ambulances and emergency responders is a major factor in whether an injured person survives a crash,” the report states. Rural victims are more likely to experience longer times getting to a hospital. 

[Related: Jeff Goldblum on riding motorcycles—and feeling fear]

The report also spotlights pedestrian and biker deaths. In 2020, 891 people died riding bikes, which is an increase of more than 40 percent from 2010. But walking isn’t that safe either, especially when people have to worry about getting hit by a speeding SUV. In 2020, 6,236 pedestrians perished from traffic accidents, which is up significantly from 2010. And these types of deaths don’t occur equally across all groups. For example, in 2018, people who were American Indian or Alaska Native were by far the most likely to die traveling by foot or on a bike, followed by those who were Black or African American and then Hispanic or Latino. 

Read the full report here. 

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At an event in Greensboro, North Carolina earlier today, the state’s governor, Roy Cooper, and the president of Boom Supersonic, Kathy Savitt, announced that they planned to open an “Overture Superfactory” at the Piedmont Triad International Airport.

Boom is a Colorado-based startup with a goal to create a new kind of Concorde—a supersonic aircraft that would bring back faster-than–the-speed-of-sound travel to commercial aviation, and do it in an affordable, sustainable way. 

In 2020, the company unveiled a 71-foot-long jet called the XB-1, which has yet to fly. That smaller aircraft is meant to be a test vehicle to help pave the way for the Overture jet that doesn’t yet exist, but could someday carry passengers. (A Boom spokesperson notes via email that the XB-1 will fly for the first time this year.)

“Boom Supersonic, the company that’s building the next generation of cleaner, faster passenger jets, will build them right here, at the Piedmont Triad Airport, creating 1,761 new, good-paying jobs,” Governor Cooper said at the event. 

[Related: The Air Force is investing millions in what could be the next Concorde]

The company is boasting that the construction of the factory, the creation of the first plane, and even its first flight will happen at a dizzying speed. Savitt, the president and chief business officer of Boom, said that they would break ground on the facility this year, begin producing aircraft in 2024, roll out the first plane in 2025, and conduct flight tests in 2026. All planes will be “powered by sustainable aviation fuels, meeting our 100-percent, net-zero-carbon goals.” (More on what sustainable fuel is here.)  She said the jet would allow passengers onboard in 2029. 

[Related: This experimental NASA plane will try to break the sound barrier—quietly]

A decade from now, in 2032, Savitt said the factory would employ more than 2,400 people.

Questions remain about the company’s schedule: Besides the fact that the Boom demonstration aircraft, the XB-1, hasn’t yet flown yet, the passenger jet, Overture, will require engines. The company says it’s working with Rolls-Royce on that key part of the aircraft. On Twitter, Jon Ostrower, the Editor-in-Chief of The Air Current website, took note of that issue, as he has in the past on an episode of 60 Minutes. He wrote that “without a launched engine by Rolls-Royce, Boom is making claims about its schedule that it simply can’t keep.” He added: “Rolls-Royce hasn’t made a commitment [sic] for an engine and one would need to be deep in development with a significant engineering team right now to make [a first flight by] 2026.”

Earlier this month, Boom announced a major Air Force investment that will help the company create the Overture plane. 

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Aviation company Wisk announced yesterday that it is receiving a $450 million investment from Boeing as it works on its sixth-generation electric air taxi. Like other startups in the space, Wisk aims to create an Uber-type service in the sky in which paying passengers will book rides on a small aircraft that can take off and land vertically while running off battery power, not fossil fuels. 

The company, which is a joint venture between Boeing and Kitty Hawk Corp., has already been flying a two-seater electric aircraft that they’ve dubbed Cora. Cora, which debuted in 2018, flies autonomously—it hasn’t yet carried people—and can hit speeds of about 100 miles per hour, according to Wisk spokesperson Chris Brown. The yellow-colored Cora aircraft sports 12 small rotor-like fans on its wings, which allow it to take off and land vertically. A rear propeller pushes it through the air. When it’s cruising in forward flight, it does so using the lift from its wings to keep it in the sky—those fans can stop spinning and then stay in a stationary position while the pusher prop does all the work.

While the company’s yellow Cora aircraft represents its fifth-generation flying machine, the sixth remains under wraps. “It will be larger,” says Brown. “And have [a] longer range.” Cora’s range is about 25 miles. 

Brown says the influx of money will help them expand the company as they work on their next air taxi. “That funding is really going to a new growth phase that’s emerging over the coming year, in correlation with the sixth-gen aircraft,” he says. They’ll also prepare to manufacture the new aircraft at scale. The goal is for the company to eventually both make the aircraft and operate the mobility service that allows people to catch rides on them.

[Related: Check out the helicopter vying to be the next Black Hawk]

Wisk isn’t alone in this new aviation frontier—other companies have been taxiing towards takeoff in the sector, working on what are known as eVTOLs: electric vertical take-off and landing craft. One of them is Joby, which has been flying an electric craft that holds five people and uses six big tilting propellers to take off, cruise, and land. Heaviside, from Kitty Hawk, is offering a more solitary ride—it will seat just one. A notable competitor is Archer, which is also working on an electric air taxi. (Archer and Wisk have a legal dispute.)

Boeing had been working on an air taxi of its own, called the PAV, which crashed in 2019; no one was on board nor hurt. Boeing has “discontinued the development of PAV,” says Brown, who notes that Wisk is now their “singular focus” in this field. 

Like the way the single-seat Kitty Hawk aircraft is designed to totally fly itself, Wisk is also embracing a completely autonomous future, which is different from how Joby has designed its piloted craft. “I think we recognize that since we’re taking the autonomous-first approach, that we’re not going to be the first to market—that would most likely be another player, with a piloted service,” Brown says, predicting, however, that Wisk would be the fully first autonomous player to arrive on the market. 

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A few moments into a new episode of “The World According to Jeff Goldblum” devoted to motorcycles, Goldblum recalls something his mother used to say about the two-wheelers: “Don’t ride a motorcycle—don’t do it—it’s a magic carpet to death, and, and, uh, misery.”

“I’ve always found them kind of unnerving, to be honest,” he adds. 

The episode in question debuts on Disney Plus today, part of a series that has the actor exploring topics like fireworks, magic, and dogs. The motorcycle episode sees Goldblum skimming lightheartedly across the surface of the subject. He touches on the diversity of the riding community, speaking to Gurinder Singh Basra, the president of Sikh Riders of America. He checks out an electric motorcycle from a startup called Tarform. He hops on a dirtbike, thanks to the tutelage of two women from Babes Ride Out. It’s more about Goldblum’s feelings on motorcycles—as well as how others feel about them—than about the vehicle itself: Don’t expect a deep dive into their history, or how they work, or to see the Jurassic Park actor gunning it down the road at breakneck speeds with a computer-generated T. rex in the side-view mirror. 

Instead, the most interesting theme is a brief investigation he conducts into the idea of the danger that this form of transportation holds. He wonders, “Are motorcycles worth the risk?” He hops on a trapeze—it’s a metaphor for facing fear—talks to a rider who lost part of his leg in a motorcycle accident, and concludes, “Well, I think, everybody’s gotta find their own way of managing being scared.” 

Popular Science caught up with Goldblum to talk about motorcycles, acting, and feeling afraid. 

Fear as an ‘ingredient for the recipe of aliveness’

When it comes to living, or acting, Goldblum reflects that fear “isn’t something that you necessarily have to resist.”

Sure, it’s wise not to be “testing death at every moment,” he says. But when stepping out of your comfort zone, or doing creative work, it makes sense not to push the fear away. “This isn’t like brushing your teeth—there might be some nerves about this thing, or some fear about this thing, and it’s part of it—it can be a good ingredient for the recipe of aliveness.”

For high-stakes, important tasks—like riding on the Space Shuttle, he muses—fear is a reminder of the need to focus and be “very prepared,” Goldblum says. “It gives you some energy.” 

[Related: I rode an electric motorcycle for the first time. Here’s what I learned.]

With motorcycles specifically, Goldblum notes that he looked into their safety statistics. “It’s a riskier way of getting around than some other forms,” he says. 

It is indeed. More than 5,000 people died on motorcycles in 2019, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), a figure that represents 14 percent of all traffic deaths. Roughly the same number of people died on motorcycles in 2018. A starker statistic is to compare the death rate on motorcycles per 100 million vehicle miles traveled compared to the same metric for passenger cars: it was almost 29 times as high in 2019. 

Goldblum spends very little time actually on a two-wheeler in the episode, briefly trying out a dirt bike and also catching a lift on the back of a motorcycle piloted by a rider named Porsche Taylor. And to be sure, he says he felt like he was in good hands with the production team. “They assured me I’d be personally, probably, ok,” he says. “I wasn’t too scared.” In short: don’t expect the actor to be pulling any scary stunts. That’s not the point.   

Man on a wire

Goldblum steers the conversation down a more interesting road when he reflects on life beyond motorcycles. “You’re gonna be afraid, especially if you do things that are probably worthwhile—falling in love, or finally facing your mortality, or all sorts of things that have risk in them; having kids, or whatever it is,” he says. “You’ve got to go, ‘Hey, fear is part of this, and let’s see how that can be useful, how I can make it my ally, and use it as part of my energy.’”

Fear exists for a reason, says Dianne L. Chambless, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Her focus has been on treating and understanding anxiety disorders, and she notes that when it comes to “classic phobias that people have, they all have a sound evolutionary basis.”

“It is really quite sensible to be afraid of heights, so that we don’t walk off a cliff,” she continues. “It’s sensible to be scared of snakes, because many of them are poisonous. It’s sensible to be scared of the rejection of your group, because humans are inherently social animals.” 

“A lot of fears are there to protect us,” she says. “They’re meant to be a warning sign, and the problem is if that warning alarm is going off a lot of the time when it needn’t be.” Scared of motorcycles? Maybe that’s because you know they’re dangerous, and perhaps a safety class would be wise. Are you so scared that you can’t leave your house? That’s different. 

In fact, there’s a type of sweet spot when it comes to feeling anxiety, she notes, saying that the concept takes the form of an inverted U-shape. “Optimum performance is really somewhere there in the middle, when anxiety is moderate,” she says. “The people who were too anxious have difficulty performing a task, and people who weren’t anxious at all aren’t motivated enough, and [are] sloppy.” 

In short, the fear shows that you’re taking something seriously: Too much fear, and a person is paralyzed. Too little, and a person does a bad job. She recalls a friend who was too relaxed about giving a lecture: “He was so casual about it that he was terrible, because he didn’t really prepare, he just rambled.” 

“We need that little spurt of anxiety of wanting to do our best,” she says. 

It’s an idea that squares with what Goldblum says he learned about his occupation. “My acting teacher, Sandy Meisner, said that he wished that acting—getting on the stage—was like tightroping walking, because then nobody who was not qualified to do it would dare to do it,” he adds. “It’s not immediately evident that it requires a kind of masterfulness, if you’re really going to do it at a high level; and you should know that like tightroping walking, you’ve got to really be prepared.” 

He says he loves the film Man on Wire, about Philippe Petit, who literally tightroped between the two World Trade Center towers in 1974. “Talk about scary—I’m scared just watching that thing,” he says. “He got into a zone, and of course prepared his whole life to do that.” 

As for motorcycles and doing that episode, he looks back and says he enjoyed the community he met. “It’s a way to commune with other people from all different stripes, [and] that is a wonderful and nourishing kind of thing,” he says. “I feel like I’m part of the motorcycle family myself now, so I would happily engage in some sort of safe, and prepared, and jolly riding around.” 

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Two very different designs for futuristic flying machines are dueling against one another to be the Army’s next Black Hawk-type helicopter. Both of them challenge the traditional idea of what a helicopter even looks like. In one corner of the ring is a helicopter with two top rotors that spin in opposite directions, and in the other corner is an aircraft called a tiltrotor. The companies that make them are Sikorsky and Boeing (who have teamed up), and Bell, respectively, and they submitted their proposals last year. The program they’re competing in is called FLRAA, which stands for Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft. 

Sikorsky released a new video today of their coaxial candidate, called the SB>1 Defiant, demonstrating some of what it can do, such as banking at 60 degrees, hitting a speed of about 272 miles per hour, and descending into a tight space surrounded by trees. 

Because the Defiant looks so different from a regular helicopter, it’s worth unpacking how it works. Its two rigid top rotors are stacked atop one another, and they counterrotate. That’s rare: Most helicopters use a tail rotor as an anti-torque system to counteract the forces created by the single top rotor as it spins—picture a helicopter with one top rotor and no tail rotor, and you could imagine that it would spin around in circles. In the case of the Defiant, those two counterrotating top rotors create lift, while also negating the need for a traditional tail rotor. It also lets the company avoid an issue that can happen if a helicopter flies too quickly called retreating blade stall, which can limit how fast the aircraft safely travels.

[Related: What it’s like to rescue someone at sea from a Coast Guard helicopter]

In the rear, the Defiant has a large propeller in lieu of that traditional tail rotor. The pilots can use that propeller to help them accelerate or decelerate, and Sikorsky says that that feature also allows them to keep the aircraft level while slowing down, which has benefits when it comes to pilot visibility. “We fully demonstrated Defiant’s ability to execute the FLRAA mission profile by flying 236 knots in level flight, then reducing thrust on the propulsor to rapidly decelerate as we approached the confined, and unimproved, landing zone,” Bill Fell, the Sikorsky chief test pilot for Defiant, said in a statement. “This type of level body deceleration allowed us to maintain situational awareness and view the landing zone throughout the approach and landing without the typical nose-up helicopter deceleration.”

Defiant’s competition is the V-280 Valor, Bell’s submission for the FLRAA program. It’s a speedy craft that employs tilting rotors at the end of its wings. Because the pilot can adjust the orientation of the rotors, the craft can lift off or land like a helicopter, and it can cruise like a plane when it’s flying forward. (Watch it maneuver and fly here.) Bell says that it’s flown as fast as 350 miles per hour, while Sikorsky says their craft has zoomed quicker than 282 mph.

The Army should make a decision about which aircraft it wants to move forward with in the FLRAA program at some point this year. “FLRAA is currently in the competitive phase of the acquisition process,” the Army’s Program Executive Office for Aviation said in a statement to PopSci. “The source selection process is ongoing and includes many steps before the Army makes a final decision.” 

In the meantime, watch the latest video about the Defiant, below:

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Autonomous vehicles from the likes of Zoox or Waymo have a simple purpose: to shepherd humans from one place to another. But a company called Nuro has been working on self-driving vehicles whose only job is to carry stuff like groceries or pizza—not passengers. Their robots on wheels are much bigger than cute little machines like Amazon’s Scout, and they travel not on sidewalks, but on roads. 

Yesterday, the company took the wraps off the latest version of its vehicle. The newest iteration of the adorable electric four-wheeler will be able to hold nearly 500 pounds of groceries, Nuro says, with heating and cooling systems to keep food toasty or chilly, depending on what it’s carrying in what compartment. Like other self-driving vehicles, it uses onboard sensors like lidar, cameras, and radar to perceive the world around it.

In 2018, PopSci took a look at their first-gen vehicle, which measured about 8 feet long and 3.6 feet wide. The company’s president, Dave Ferguson, said at the time that because the small car wouldn’t ever have anyone in it, “you can do things like self-sacrificing the vehicle.” So it could steer itself into an object like a tree instead of hitting a person, for example. In the years since, the company released a second version, called the R2, and now they’re onto the third-gen vehicle, which isn’t called the R3. It’s just called the Nuro, and it’s larger and has more space for cargo than the R2.

The current Nuro vehicle sports something you might never have pictured a car having: an airbag that can deploy on the outside. That cushioning would inflate if the vehicle ever hits anyone. In renderings, it looks like an air mattress. Like that first-gen vehicle, “the new vehicle continues to prioritize the safety of other road users and in particular pedestrians and cyclists,” over the contents inside, the company said in a press release. In other words, it’s still people over pizza. 

The company first launched a grocery delivery service in Arizona in 2018 with grocery chain Kroger, but stopped it in 2019. Before Nuro used their R1 vehicles there, they employed self-driving Toyota Priuses. Nuro moved on to Houston, Texas in 2019 and then Mountain View, California late last year, with the California tests focused on deliveries from 7-Eleven. 

[Related: Kitty Hawk’s electric airplane will fly you around—with no pilot]

A company spokesperson clarified via email the locations where Priuses and the other vehicles were being used: “Nuro is actively providing deliveries using its fleet of autonomous Priuses in Houston with Kroger and in Mountain View with 7-Eleven. Nuro also plans to conduct testing in Houston with FedEx as part of its long-term commitment. Last year, Nuro also kicked off R2 deliveries for the very first time in Houston with Domino’s.” In California, the company and 7-Eleven will together decide to start using R2 for deliveries “as soon as possible.” 

The autonomous vehicle company says that they’ll put the finishing touches on the Nuro vehicles in a $40-million facility in Nevada, after BYD North America builds the machines in California. Check out a short video about the new Nuro vehicle, below:

Correction on Jan. 14, 2022: This article has been updated to fix errors with the spelling of Dave Ferguson’s name and the spelling of Mountain View, California.

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Ever since the Concorde stopped soaring around at supersonic speeds in 2003, it’s been impossible for people to book a ticket on an airliner that travels faster than the speed of sound. A Colorado-based startup called Boom Supersonic—named for the sound a plane typically makes when it breaks the sound barrier—wants to change that with a yet-to-be-built passenger aircraft called Overture. Earlier today, Boom said they’d scored a new investment from the Air Force for as much as $60 million. The money will focus on “research and development on Overture,” the company said in a press release.

In September of 2020, Boom received Air Force funding—as did other companies—to explore what supersonic aircraft could look like for government executive travel. Not long after that, in October, the company revealed an aircraft called the XB-1. It’s a third smaller than Overture will be, and is not a passenger plane—it’s meant to be a test vessel to help the company eventually produce the larger Overture aircraft. The company had initially planned to fly the XB-1 in 2021, but that has since moved to this year. 

Boom also made headlines last summer when it announced that United is planning to buy 15 of their supersonic planes, and could purchase as many as 50 of them in total.

[Related: This experimental NASA plane will try to break the sound barrier—quietly]

This new Air Force funding, which comes via a “strategic partnership” between the two organizations, will help Boom “accelerate critical design and development initiatives on Overture, including wind tunnel testing and propulsion system definition,” the company said today. The announcement also notes that a version of Overture could help the government with “executive transport; Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance; Special Operations Forces; and the Pacific Air Forces (PACAF).”

CBS’s 60 Minutes took a close look at Boom and other supersonic efforts in November of last year. The segment’s host, Bill Whitaker, asked Boom’s CEO, Blake Scholl, how the company plans to actually make flights on Overture happen in the future at the low price point Scholl envisions. “The Concorde charged thousands—thousands—of dollars for a one-way flight from New York to London,” Whitaker wondered. “How is it going to be possible for you to have a similar flight experience for $100?”

“You keep iterating,” Scholl said, comparing the planes to electric cars. “We kept working on them, and the price came down; they got better and better, and so we’re going to do the same thing with supersonic jets—we’re going to keep working on them, we’re going to keep innovating.”

Boom’s XB-1 is supposed to fly this year for the first time, and so is another supersonic aircraft. That’s the X-59 QueSST from NASA and Lockheed Martin, which has a very specific goal: to try to smash through the sound barrier, but without the “boom” that gives Boom Supersonic its name. The X-59 is in Texas now for testing and may someday break the sound barrier with just a thump sound.

Check out a promo video for Boom’s Overture aircraft, below:

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This year could be a big one for a unique aircraft called the X-59. The plane is a collaboration between Lockheed Martin and NASA, intended to break the sound barrier as quietly as possible. The space agency recently shared a picture of the flying machine wrapped in a pretty blue covering—complete with a red bow on top—from when it was prepped to move from California to Texas. It’s currently in the Lone Star State for structural testing.  

The plane could make its first flight this year in the late summertime out of Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works facility back in Palmdale, California. In two years, NASA says that their test pilots will fly it around and measure the noise it makes and how communities below react to it. Ideally, when it breaks the sound barrier, it will create a sound that the space agency refers to as a “thump,” and not a boom. That reduced noise signature may lead to a change in regulation to allow for supersonic flight over the US, a type of travel that’s currently forbidden. 

The X-59 QueSST—a mashup of Quiet Supersonic Technology—made the trip from California to a Lockheed Martin facility in Fort Worth, Texas, to undergo what’s known as a proof test. “The airplane has been designed with some fairly sophisticated tools,” says Walt Silva, a senior research scientist with NASA and the program’s structures lead. “And so now that it’s built, the goal really is to prove that it can handle the loads that it’s going to encounter during flight.”

“You want to do that on the ground,” he adds, “to make sure that the structure is worthy and sound.” 

The proof test process also gives them a chance to gather data. “That data is used to make sure that it compares well with all the computational models that have been used to date to design and build it,” Silva says.

To carry out the proof test, the X-59 will be on a large, rigid structure, and hydraulic jacks will apply loads to the aircraft in a programmed way. 

The airplane sports several distinct features that you don’t see on military aircraft like traditional fighter jets or commercial planes, either. Like Pinoccio when he’s told a fib, the X-59 has a very long nose. Measuring about 38 feet in length, that nose “will be essential in shaping shock waves during supersonic flight,” NASA said in a statement from September of last year, when it revealed an image of the nose set in front of the rest of the flying machine. Managing those shock waves is important in preventing the typical sonic boom sound—the goal is to have the plane be as sleek as possible to minimize disruptions to the air around it. One General Electric F414 engine will power the bird.

But the most mind-bending feature is that instead of looking out a windshield, the pilot (and sole occupant of the one-seat plane) will look at a 4K monitor in front of them. That high-definition display will get its feed from two cameras in front of the plane. Because the nose of the plane is so long, and because its design doesn’t allow for a typical protruding canopy, there is no space for a traditional windshield; the cockpit area is flush within the body of the plane. The pilot still will have glass to look out of in other parts of the cockpit, though. “Our ​​goal is to create an electronic means of vision for the X-59 pilot that provides performance and safety levels equivalent to, or better, than forward-facing windows,” Randy Bailey, who leads the electronic vision project, said in a statement last year. 

Stay tuned for news about the X-59’s first flight much later this year. In the meantime, check out a video showcasing a NASA simulator for the aircraft, below.

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In the future, the vehicle you summon through a ride-hailing service could be electric, self-driving, or both. Last week, Waymo, the self-driving car company from Google’s parent, Alphabet, announced that the new vehicles it’s developing with a Chinese automaker, Geely, will check both those boxes. The ride might eventually have no steering wheel or pedals at all, a concept for self-driving cars dating back to at least 2018. 

The electric vehicle from Geely will be a “version” of a vehicle called Zeekr, Waymo said in a blog post, and will be created “specially for autonomous ride-hailing.” The floors will be flat, and as envisioned today, it will have bench seats facing forwards. 

Waymo touts the amenities the cabin will hold, such as easily-reachable phone chargers and screens, and also looks towards a future where the most notable feature may be that which the car lacks, like a steering wheel. “The vehicles are currently configured with controls designed for human use that are required in the U.S.,” a Waymo spokesperson said via email. “That said, we’ve designed the interior of the vehicle to operate with different configurations, including without required human driving controls once regulations allow for this in the U.S. and elsewhere.”

Waymo already operates two different types of vehicles. The first are self-driving Chrysler Pacificas, which ply the streets in the Phoenix, Arizona area with no human behind the wheel as part of a public ride-hailing service called Waymo One. The second are electric Jaguar I-PACEs, which the company is using in a more limited way in San Francisco and have a safety driver sitting at the helm. 

Waymo’s new vehicle concept in some ways mimics what other companies in the space have already announced. Zoox, a startup owned by Amazon, is working on a self-driving electric carriage-like vehicle in which passengers will sit facing each other. It will also be driverless and bi-directional. (Although their vehicles in places like Seattle right now are retrofitted Toyota Highlanders.) And Cruise, which is owned by General Motors, has revealed a design for the Origin, which is similar in concept to the planned Zoox vehicle. Compared with those visions, the new Geely vehicle currently appears to be more traditional, with its front-facing bench seats. 

The partnership between Waymo and Geely is just one of several in the transportation space at the moment. Amazon, besides owning Zoox, has a relationship with Rivian, the buzzy automaker that created the R1T electric pickup truck and forthcoming R1S. And a British company called Arrival is working on an electric vehicle designed for Uber’s ride-hailing service as well, although it would not be self-driving. The two companies “are exploring a strategic relationship in key markets including the UK and EU,” an Uber spokesperson says via email. 

Nick Nigro, the founder of Atlas Public Policy, a research firm that keeps tabs on the EV space, points out that the nature of electric vehicles lends themselves to quick build times. “The pace in which you can design new vehicles is much quicker—you’ve got platforms that you can build lots of vehicle types on, with the skateboard concept,” he says. Because of that speed, and because of partnerships in the industry, he notes that it’s a transformative time in the field. 

“These next few years are going to be the most exciting time for vehicle manufacturing in the last hundred,” Nigro adds. “What’s going to happen in this industry, as these new manufacturers try to achieve scale, is just going to drive so much money into transportation that it’s going to be an exciting ride for all these startups that are coming up.” 

Waymo said in the blog item that their new Geely-made cars will be plying the roads in the “years to come.”

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The biggest military news of the year revolved around the chaotic and dramatic US evacuation from Afghanistan as the Taliban took over the country in August. 

While that series of historic events rightfully captured the biggest headlines, developments large and small in the military technology space also made news throughout 2021. Some of the more groundbreaking and revolutionary innovations earned Best of What’s New awards from Popular Science in both the Aerospace and Security categories, including a drone that can refuel Naval fighter jets, an AI-powered system called Skyborg that can fly uncrewed aircraft, and an anti-drone system known as THOR.

But many more military aircraft, vehicles, robots, gadgets, and events made news over the past 12 months. These are some of the important, fascinating, noteworthy, or just plain neat developments worth taking a look back at.  

On the ground

Microsoft inked an enormous, multi-billion-dollar deal to deliver high-tech augmented reality goggles for the US Army. The gadget is based on Microsoft’s HoloLens, although the Army refers to it as the Integrated Visual Augmentation System, or IVAS. The devices are a head-up display with night-vision tech and more, and while they promise to be a futuristic way for soldiers to receive information and see the battlefield, they’ve been delayed due to an issue related to the scope of its field of view. We’ll know more about how these devices are doing next year. 

Down at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, mechanical dogs from Ghost Robotics joined the security team to patrol the base in March. The legged bots can hit a top speed of just 4.5 mph and function as a “mobile sensor platform,” as one base official described them, meaning they can feed information back to humans. 

In June, US Marines experimented with a vehicle called the EMAV, a robotic, tank-like contraption that can act as both a stretcher to carry off an injured person or even execute tasks like launch weapons. Each vehicle weighs 7,000 pounds, and that’s before anything is mounted on it. Marines can control it via a tablet and it can fit inside a V-22 Osprey aircraft for transport. 

In the air 

While robots help out on land, up in the sky their winged cousins conduct their own missions. In October, DARPA demonstrated an eye-catching stunt: It used a C-130 cargo aircraft to grab a drone out of the sky and pull it into the mothership. The idea behind the program, called Gremlins, is that snagging the drones and bringing them into a cargo plane mid-air is a way to recover and reuse these aerial assets. In other DARPA news, the agency tested out a hypersonic missile in September—the weapon concept it demonstrated went faster than Mach 5. 

Drones and other uncrewed vehicles, like hypersonic weapons, are certainly not the only military innovations to zoom through the skies. In April, the Air Force took the wraps off its latest fighter jet and announced its official name, the F-15EX Eagle II. It’s the most modern US version of an aircraft that dates back to the 1960s and 70s and was first created to be an air-to-air dominance machine. Read a deep dive on the new aircraft here. 

Russia, meanwhile, unveiled its own new fighter jet, called Checkmate. Unlike the F-15EX, this new jet is stealthy, and is most frequently compared to the F-35 but promises to be less expensive. The Drive, a sibling website to PopSci, has more on the plane’s progress. 

Helicopters are some of the most dynamic and maneuverable flying machines around, and May of this year marked the 10-year anniversary of the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. Popular Science took a look back at what we know about the stealth helicopters that were part of the covert mission from Afghanistan into neighboring Pakistan in 2011. 

And in other helicopter news, we tagged along in May on a training mission with the US Coast Guard in a MH-60T helicopter to see how they train for hoist rescues at sea. The dramatic, dynamic process involved a brave “duck” being lowered into the frothy waters below the chopper off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. 

In the water

In the watery parts of the world, militaries cruise the oceans—in their depths and on their surfaces. In September, we got a glimpse of an uncrewed ship called the USV Ranger launching a missile. The program the ship is part of is known as Ghost Fleet Overlord. 

And over the summer, the Navy invested in underwater gliders that will be able to sense the water conditions below the surface, noticing factors like temperature or electrical connectivity; these uncrewed robotic submersibles need to be able to stay down for as long as 90 days at a depths of some 3,300 feet. 

Back up on the surface, the Navy has been trying out other robotic boats as well—deploying uncrewed vessels called Saildrone and MANTIS. After all, who needs humans when robots can do all the exploring for you? 

The post The most compelling military tech stories from the land, air, and sea this year appeared first on Popular Science.

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Two companies are vying to produce the next Black Hawk for the Army. The next-gen aircraft could speed quickly into harm’s way, drop off troops, and then zoom out again. Sikorsky, which makes the current-generation Black Hawk helicopters, recently revealed their progress on a futuristic machine with two counter-rotating rotors that it calls the Defiant X. The other contender is Bell, whose fancy bird is the V-280 Valor.

While the competitive program of record hasn’t officially begun yet, Bell has been flying their prototype since 2017. It takes a very different approach from the Defiant X—it’s a type of aircraft called a tiltrotor.

Here’s what to know about this fascinating machine.

What is a tiltrotor aircraft?

A typical airplane with an engine on each wing works in a familiar way. Those engines provide thrust, the wing gives it lift, and the plane takes off and lands on a runway. Now imagine that the engines on those wings were powering big propellers that could tilt. If the prop blades were perpendicular to the ground, it would fly forward like an airplane, but if the pilot wanted to take off or land vertically, like a helicopter, all it would take is adjusting those spinning blades to be more or less parallel to the ground. It represents an aviation ideal: a best-of-both-worlds configuration that’s fast in forward flight and doesn’t need a regular runway.

“There’s nothing out there that can compete with a tiltrotor when it comes to speed and range,” says Ryan Ehinger, a vice president and the program director for the Future Long Range Assault Aircraft initiative at Bell.

In fact, it’s an old-fashioned idea that dates back to the first half of the 20th century—they were long-ago referred to as “convertiplanes,” according to Richard Whittle’s book The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey.

[Related: Check out the double-rotor helicopter that could be the US Army’s next Black Hawk]

This new craft is a successor to a famous tiltrotor from Bell called the V-22 Osprey, a bigger machine utilized by the Marines.

The V-280 has hit speeds north of 300 knots, or 345 mph. A classic Black Hawk helicopter is roughly half that fast. “We proved that we could fly very fast, and at very long ranges, because of the efficiency of wing-born flight,” Ehinger says.

But it can also pull off the neat trick of being able to take off and land like a helicopter. In a recent video, Bell demonstrated the aircraft demonstrating some sick dance moves pretty close to the deck. The V-280 is “extremely agile in every mode of flight,” says Don Grove, the chief test pilot for the V-280 Valor and a former V-22 Osprey pilot.

The differences between the Osprey and the Valor

The Valor has two engines, but unlike its larger ancestor, the Osprey, those engines don’t physically move when the rotors they power change position, giving it a simplicity bonus over the V-22. Only the rotors swivel.

With the aircraft hovering and its two rotors configured in helicopter position, it’s easy to imagine how catastrophic it would be if one of them lost power. Thankfully, the two engines on the aircraft can power either rotor, just like on the Osprey. That’s different from what happens when, for example, a commercial aircraft loses one of its jet engines—the other engine can’t magically send power over to its disabled partner.

[Related: What’s it’s like to fly an 11,500-pound experimental helicopter (with zero experience)]

With the Valor, two engines push power to a gear box system. “Those two engines theoretically could be located anywhere on the aircraft,” says Grove. “Even when they’re both operating normally, the flight control computers determine how much power is taken from each engine to feed the system of gear boxes and driveshafts.” Translation: Both engines power both rotors, and if one engine fails, both rotors still spin.

The Valor benefits from everything the industry has learned on the Osprey. It was the aircraft that acted as a vanguard for tiltrotor tech and also developed a controversial reputation when it came to safety. “You really need to look at it as a journey,” says Douglas Birkey, the executive director of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. The Osprey program, he says, had to define “a radically different way of going about vertical flight.”

“Early in the program, yes, they did have crashes; they did have safety challenges,” Birkey says. “There was an incredibly thorough scrub done on it.” The aircraft being used operationally today, he adds, “is a very safe aircraft—understanding that you fly in some of the most demanding conditions around.”

Plus, there are additional ways of thinking about safety; speed is a way to avoid danger when dealing with hostile fire. “I would actually say the Osprey in a combat environment is probably safer than other vertical lift options,” he says. In fact, both Bell and Sikorsky tout the speed of their aircraft candidates. “Low and slow is really dangerous,” Birkey adds.

Grove, of Bell, notes: “Certainly, the 500,000-plus flying hours of the V-22 attest to the fact that the community learned from the mistakes that were made.” He says those lessons have been incorporated into the Valor and the Osprey.

Bell also touts another safety feature of the V-280. If it were to crash or land hard, “the wing and the nacelles—which is the engines, and the gear boxes, and the rotors—all that’s designed to break and shed away from the cabin,” says Ehinger. He compares that to more traditional helicopters, which have all the heft of those dynamic components right above the crew and passengers.

Plus, compared to traditional helicopters or even the Defiant X, there’s no tail rotor or tail propeller in the back, which can be a deadly hazard for people on the ground. The tail of the Valor is a simple V shape.

Ultimately, Grove, the test pilot, says that there’s a sizable difference between the Osprey and the next-gen craft that could be the Army’s future Black Hawk vehicle. “The V-22 is more like a truck,” he says. “The V-280 is more like a sports car.”

This article has been updated to fix a spelling error regarding Ryan Ehinger’s name. This article was originally published on March 19, 2021.

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Outer layer

A spare layer will help you weather unexpected chills. The Uniqlo Fluffy Yarn Fleece Full-Zip Jacket also bunches up nicely into a comfy pillow if you have to spend the night on the floor or in a vehicle.

Dental care

Your companions will thank you for minding your hygiene. For clean storage after you brush, the head of the Radius Tour folds backward into its 4-inch handle, which is made from a plastic that began its life as wood.

Water supply

The Bindle Bottle’s insulated chamber holds 24 ounces of liquid, but the real payoff is its hidden compartment. Unscrew the bottom of the stainless-steel vessel to access a spot to stow small valuables, like cash.

Light source

Three AAA batteries provide all the fuel necessary for the quarter-pound Black Diamond Moji lantern. On its lowest setting, it’ll shine about 6 feet in all directions and last for 100 hours, so you can play cards until dawn.

First aid

Treating minor injuries can prevent them from becoming major problems. The 5-ounce Uncharted Supply Co. Triage Kit includes bandages, meds, and flat-packed duct tape for crafting makeshift splints.

Backup power

Gadgets can provide critical information—and needed distraction—when you’re in a bad spot. The Anker PowerCore’s 26,800 mAh battery can deliver more than five phone charges via its three USB ports.

Gear bag

The water-repellent Eagle Creek Migrate Duffel holds 1.4 cubic feet of kit—enough for about a week of clothes and some supplies. If you need to walk a long way, a pair of shoulder straps on top convert it into a backpack.

Multitool

A magnetic latching system lets you open and close the Leatherman Free P2 with one hand. This gives you quick access to 19 tools, including a knife, pliers, and bottle opener for popping open post-crisis brews.

This story appears in the Winter 2020, Transformation issue of Popular Science.

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You might not think much about lane lines, but they’re important. Not only do your eyes rely on them to keep your vehicle in the right corridor when you’re cruising down the highway, any advanced driving assistance feature your car might have could be utilizing them, too. It will come as no surprise that for a car’s automatic lane-keeping system to function properly—the kind of tech that moves the steering wheel for you to keep the vehicle in the right place—having well-maintained lane lines is important. 

A new pilot program from Honda is focusing on lane lines for that very reason, and it turns out that these lines and their upkeep are a “hot topic,” says Sue Bai, the chief engineer with Honda Research Institute in Detroit, Michigan. “Based on our understanding, the lane lines are painted regularly—they have a fixed schedule, but sometimes they might not need to be repainted, [or] sometimes they might need to be repainted more, because of heavy snow,” adds Bai. “They don’t have a very efficient way to monitor when it needs to be painted.”

But if a state’s department of transportation had “near real-time information,” Bai says, the DOT could avoid painting the lines too much or too little. With lane lines maintained properly, the sensing system that a car’s lane-keeping tech employs would be able to function at its best. “It is very important, and depending on the lighting conditions, the weather conditions, the lane line can look very different” to a machine-vision system, Bai says. 

[Related: Why this Amazon-owned company is bringing its autonomous vehicles to Seattle]

The pilot program that launches next year will involve two modified vehicles from the Honda Research Institute cruising down route 33 in Ohio between Dublin and Marysville (this is the state’s Smart Mobility Corridor) and perhaps to other corners of the region, as well. The vehicles, which will have additional sensor and communications tech onboard, will gather lane line information, and eventually Honda will share it with other entities, like Ohio’s Department of Transportation. The vehicles will hoover up data on lane line “clarity,” notes Bai, relating to “how the vision sensors see the lane marking,” she says. “Not necessarily what the human sees.”

It may not seem like the sexiest stuff—using research vehicles to analyze lane lines—but what’s neater is what could come next. Since both Honda and Acura vehicles already offer driver assistance features such as automatic lane keeping (through Honda Sensing and AcuraWatch), what if the sensors they already have on consumer vehicles could be used to monitor highway lane lines or hazards, and report any irregularities back to a state’s DOT? 

That could close a loop, because with better road maintenance, the car’s driver-assistance features that monitored those lines in the first place would ideally work better. “That is our goal, to start the research and pilot program, to mature the technology, and when it’s ready, we certainly would like that to be part of the Honda products in the future,” Bai says. “Now the drivers and the vehicles have a way to help the road operators to maintain the road structure.” 

Both lane centering and adaptive cruise control are examples of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS); here’s more about how the different levels of driver support and self-driving capabilities work on the road today. 

The Honda Research Institute system will use a color-coded ranking, employing green, yellow, red, and gray, to categorize the state of the lane lines. Watch a video about it, below. 

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The past year and a half have taught us all how important it is to get outside and stay active—whether that means an easy hike or an epic day of mountain biking. The year’s top new gear makes those adventures better, safer, more comfortable, and more inclusive. We’ve chosen killer new shades for your next run, hiking pants designed to fit more bodies, and a helmet that will let you know when it (or you) have had one too many bad bumps. Plus, there’s even a kit made just to help your bathroom breaks in the woods leave less of a mark.

Looking for the complete list of 100 winners? Check it out here.

Grand Award Winner: The best e-mountain on the planet

Yeti Cycles

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When Yeti Cycles set out to build its first electric mountain bike, the company needed to do better than just slapping a battery and motor to an existing ride. The race-driven brand wanted a cycle that would scream uphill and bomb downhill at record-setting speeds, but do it with the same feel of other analog Yetis. Having a motor on board increases the whip’s acceleration and tire torque, meaning the ride could lose traction and spin out when traversing gravel, rocks, and roots if the team didn’t correctly manage that extra power. To keep a grip, they designed an entirely new suspension platform, called the Sixfinity linkage, specifically tuned for mountain-climbing e-bikes. One essential piece lies in how the rear triangle of the frame moves with the back wheel; a unique joint under the seatpost dynamically adjusts the geometry of the frame as cyclists crank over obstacles. This, and a series of other suspension modifications, result in a carbon-fiber ride that, when pedaling and climbing, reacts to the trail without too much springiness or the tires losing their connection to the ground.

Frameless sunglasses from the future 

Oakley

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Put these new shades on your face, and you’ll instantly feel a bit like Doc Brown from Back to the Future. That’s because, instead of frames, the lenses on Oakley’s Kato sunglasses act as the frame themselves. The curved piece of polycarbonate has a lip at the top and a curvature for your nose, both of which lend it structure. Without a top or bottom frame, the wraparound specs give the wearer a sweeping, unencumbered field of view. Designed mainly for athletes like cyclists or runners, the sunglasses weigh just 34 grams, sitting in front of the face like a snug, sweeping visor. 

A collapsible backpack that’s anything but flimsy 

Matador

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These two mountaineering backpacks have a unique trick up their nylon sleeves: they can compress down into a small package, but still retain structure in their expanded forms. The Beast18, for example, becomes a roughly 10-inch disc, but unfolded it is about 20 inches long. A loop of hardened, yet springy stainless steel runs along the pack’s perimeter to create a semi-rigid frame shaped something like a peanut. The pack collapses similarly to a nylon windshield sun screen: Flip it in half at the middle (creating a figure-8 shape with the metal loop), then fold it over on itself. The metal’s strong memory helps it snap back into shape. 

A soft fabric that repels rain 

Voormi

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Waterproof, breathable jackets are typically a little crinkly, because their moisture-blocking prowess relies on a special membrane sandwiched and glued between other fabrics. The Core Construction material from Voormi does it differently: Instead of laminating fabrics together, the company knits yarn through the membrane itself. The new material nets hoodies and a range of other garments—such as cycling jerseys or running wear—that’ll provide rain protection, but feel as soft and breathable as a sweatshirt. 

Hiking pants for every body

Alpine Parrot

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Clothing companies typically approach plus-size offerings as simply scaled-up versions of smaller sizes, an approach that fails to recognize that a person’s proportions may not simply be a larger version of a size six. The Ponderosa Pants not only come in sizes 14 to 24, but offer two distinct fits for plus-size body types. One, called mountain, is best for bodies with broader hips than waists, while the river model works better for folks with hips and waists that measure about the same. Made from nylon and elastane, the garments dry quickly, offer two-way stretch, and have five roomy pockets. 

A better way to bury your business

PACT Outdoors

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Sometimes when you’re on a hike, ride, or other adventure, you just gotta go. If you’re carrying this kit, you’ll have everything you need to bury your business. Dig a hole with the aluminum trowel, do as nature intended, and drop in three of the included tablets of mycelium. The fungi will break down poop ten times faster than the ground would on its own. Combined with included biodegradable wipes, the system also zaps e-Coli and other pathogens by an average of 66 percent, reducing the likelihood that those baddies will get into water sources and make people sick. 

A helmet that tracks its own health

Atomic

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A helmet is essential when skiing, but a damaged one will do you no good. Atomic’s Redster CTD brain bucket lets you know when it’s spent. A built-in impact sensor measures blows in five different zones—whether that hit is from a tree (or just dropping it in the parking lot)—and an accelerometer records and evaluates the location and force to determine if the helmet still has the integrity to provide full protection. Atomic’s smartphone app provides a green, yellow, or red indicator on its health. In the event of a severe fall, the app can also notify an emergency contact to your coordinates.

Fast-drying, non-drooping tent toppers

Nemo

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Most backpacking tent flys—the tarp-like portion that goes over the shelter to protect it from rain—are made from lightweight nylon coated with polyurethane. But if you’ve ever woken up to a wet, saggy mess, you’ve experienced the material’s shortcomings. It’s stretchy, absorbs moisture, and takes what can feel like forever to dry. Nemo’s new Osmo fabric is made from a checkered weave of durable, weather-repelling nylon and moisture-wicking polyester. The result is that it dries much faster than other tent flys, and doesn’t sag. The material will debut in three Nemo tents in 2022. 

Syncing underwater with sound

Garmin

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Scuba divers typically use radio transmitters to monitor their tank pressure. But those waves don’t travel well in water. Sound waves, or sonar, can move significantly farther through the wet stuff. Garmin’s Descent T1 transmitter taps those audio frequencies, allowing groups of divers to keep closer tabs on one another. The beacon reliably delivers tank pressure data, air time, and gas consumption rates for up to five divers to Garmin’s Mk2i dive watches from up to 30 feet away. 

The smartest mountain bike suspension

SRAM

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For mountain bikers, pedaling on smooth terrain with a bouncy suspension wastes energy, but a soft springiness is welcome when cranking over rocks and roots. The battery-powered Flight Attendant suspension automatically adjusts itself on the fly. Accelerometers in the shock and fork and a sensor in the crank feed motion and force data to an algorithm that decides how to tweak the suspension to suit the terrain. In fact, the Flight Attendant makes 200 decisions per second, sending signals to a pair of motors in the suspension to make it softer or firmer (or keep it the same). For now, it’s only available on bikes from YT Industries, Canyon, Trek, and Specialized, but someday you may be able to retrofit it onto an existing ride. 

The post The top sports and outdoor gear of 2021 appeared first on Popular Science.

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Augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and autonomy are just some of the technologies that elevated our air and space game in 2021. AI algorithms are helping route aircraft in more efficient ways, virtual enemies are training pilots mid-flight, and autonomous wingmen are scouting the skies ahead. Meanwhile, up in space, a NASA probe is going to sail beyond Earth’s orbit on sunlight. It might all seem like flashy, futuristic stuff, but one winner represents a small but impactful perk for passengers: On some United flights, you can now use wireless headphones to connect to the seatback entertainment system via Bluetooth. Finally! 

Looking for the complete list of 100 winners? Check it out here.

Grand Award Winner: A smarter system for creating flight plans

Alaska Airlines

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Take a flight between any two airports, and a dispatcher at the airline also serves a key purpose: They decide in advance what route the aircraft will take along the way, filing a flight plan with the FAA before takeoff. These humans working on the ground must consider variables like weather, restricted military airspace, and more. Often, they just go with a pre-existing option. Now, at Alaska Airlines, the dispatchers have an AI helper. Created by startup Airspace Intelligence, the software can suggest bespoke routes between cities, which the dispatcher can then accept or not. The suggestions result in an efficiency boost: Alaska Airlines says that since they started using the system, more than 28,000 flights have had their routes optimized, saving an estimated 15.5 million pounds of fuel and thus 24,490 tons of carbon dioxide emissions. The flights tend to land a couple minutes sooner, and not only that, the airline also has a more precise sense of when a plane will actually touch down. Passengers, meanwhile, will hopefully spend less time just circling the airport, waiting to arrive. 

A giant reusable rocket system

SpaceX

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SpaceX is betting its future on one very large vehicle. The approximately 165-foot tall stainless steel Starship aims to reach Earth’s orbit, the moon, or even Mars, and then return in one piece by landing vertically. In the future, the fully reusable spaceship could even ferry people and cargo across the globe in less than an hour. Elon Musk’s science-fiction dreams have been slow to achieve lift off—the first handful of test flights ended in spectacular fireballs. But in May, a Starship prototype finally nailed its landing, showcasing a complex “bellyflop” maneuver that involved a horizontal free-fall from miles in the sky before the craft righted itself just above the launchpad. In the following months, the company began building colossal booster rockets to prepare for the first orbital test of what could become the world’s most powerful and affordable launch system.

A Bluetooth connection in the sky

United

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Plugging in headphones while trying to catch Frozen II on your seatback entertainment system is very last-century. No longer: Starting this past summer, passengers on any United 737 MAX 8 aircraft could simply connect to the Panasonic system in front of them via Bluetooth with their own headphones (AirPods or otherwise). A metal tube full of competing wireless signals represented a complex problem to solve, but in the end, those Disney songs never sounded so good. 

Augmented reality training for fighter pilots

Red 6

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Military pilots train in simulators on the ground or in real aircraft in the sky, but new technology from a company called Red 6 blends those two ideas. A fighter pilot can don a helmet with an Airborne Tactical Augmented Reality System (ATARS) while flying in real life, and see virtual adversaries or airborne friendlies alongside them on their visor. That creates a much more realistic scenario than simply simulating the presence of a fictional aircraft on a plane’s radar: Fighter pilots can have the benefit of training in simulated multi-plane exercises in the sky. The tech also avoids the cost and logistical complexity of getting multiple real aircraft airborne. Red 6 is in the process of retrofitting a T-38 training jet with ATARS for the Air Force, and could do the same with an F-16 next. 

Truly solar-powered space exploration

NASA

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To navigate space, probes fire their thrusters and spew a trail of hot gas behind them. But the shoebox-sized Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) Scout, which NASA engineers readied for launch in July, will traverse tens of millions of miles pushed along almost entirely by sunlight. The spacecraft’s school bus-sized solar sail is made from a tough, Saran-wrap-like plastic that catches sunbeams as the probe leaves our planet behind. This tech builds upon previous prototype demonstrations in low Earth orbit, such as LightSail 2. Over the course of two years, NEA Scout will adjust its speed by 5,000 mph or more, enough to match the pace of an asteroid, map most of its surface, figure out what it’s made of, and determine if it’d be a good target for human exploration. It costs around $30 million, roughly a tenth the price of a bigger, fuel-laden mission.

Bricks made from ‘moon dust’

Redwire

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If humans ever build dwellings on the moon, the secret to affordable lunar construction might lie in three gray, palm-sized bricks, whose humble appearance belies their extraordinary roots. The slabs emerged from a 3D printer aboard the International Space Station, which squeezed them out in near-zero gravity about 250 miles above Earth. They are made largely from simulated moon dust, or “regolith,” which includes compounds like silica and alumina. Astronauts installed custom attachments to the printer, which let the device fuse regolith rather than its usual plastic—a first for 3D printing in space. The simulated moon bricks splashed down on the pale blue dot in September and are being tested for strength. Researchers hope that supersized versions of the machine will someday turn real moon dust into essential infrastructure, such as lunar roads and landing pads.

The brains for a robotic wingman

General Atomics

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Losing a drone flown by an AI is much less costly than losing an F-35—and the person in it—which is why the Air Force’s vision for the future includes fighter-jet-like drones partnered up with traditional aircraft. These robot planes could fly ahead of the ones with pilots to send back intel or carry out a weapons strike in dangerous territory. The Air Force’s Skyborg program doesn’t want to wed the intelligence to any specific hardware, so it’s developing the Autonomy Core System, or ACS, to pilot different makes of drones. The system has already been used to fly a drone from a company called Kratos, as well as multiple General Atomics MQ-20 Avenger drones. 

A plan to safely usher satellites to the afterlife

Astroscale

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More than 3,000 dead satellites circle the globe today. Astroscale, a company founded to combat this growing challenge, is demonstrating one way to drag future satellites out of the sky when their time is up, pulling them down into the atmosphere to burn up in a controlled way. In March, it launched its ELSA-d spacecraft, which features a magnetic ring that can snap onto any other satellite equipped with a matching component; in August, it released a nearly 40-pound box and captured it during a test run. Next, mission controllers will task ELSA-d with a much more daunting job: using sensors to semi-autonomously chase down and snag the same box while it’s spinning out of control. If it succeeds, the vehicle will pave the way for a larger model capable of dealing with compatible satellites weighing up to 1,750 pounds.

A drone that refuels fighter jets 

Boeing

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When one of the Navy’s F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets needs more fuel while it’s in the air, another Super Hornet does that job. But those jets are designed to fight, not be gas pumps in the sky. Enter the MQ-25 Stingray. Already in tests this year, the 51-foot-long drone has refueled an F/A-18, F-35C, and an E-2D, making history as the first uncrewed aircraft to fuel up another aircraft. Eventually, these drones should be able to take off and land from aircraft carriers, freeing up the fighter jets that had helped with refueling in the past for their primary mission. The Navy may buy as many as 70 of them. 

A new space station with ion-drive thrusters 

CMSA

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A new state-of-the-art outpost now orbits the Earth. China launched the core module of what will become the Tiangong (“heavenly palace”) space station on April 29, and the floating habitat is currently hosting its second group of occupants. Tiangong will measure about one-sixth the size of the International Space Station’s when it’s completed in 2022, but it already features bells and whistles missing from the aging ISS: The three-person crews can now enjoy hot meals during their months-long stays, courtesy of a custom microwave designed for use in space. And, in a first for a crewed vehicle, the module is equipped with four ion drives—hyper efficient thrusters that use electricity to expel charged particles.

The post The most high-flying aerospace innovations of 2021 appeared first on Popular Science.

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In 2018, there are generally two types of robotic or assistive devices that are worth putting in your home. The first: a smart speaker that lets you speak with Alexa, the Google Assistant, or Siri. The second? A robot that cleans your floors. If you’re going to invest in an expensive machine that’s not a toy and can move around, it should make your abode cleaner. (Compare that to the cute Kuri robot, which could cruise around a home but didn’t clean. The company recently stopped making them.)

Massachusetts-based company iRobot has been producing its floor-cleaning robots since 2002, and today, it’s announced the latest version. It’s called the i7 and it’s a Roomba that can remember the layout of your home. You can instruct it to leave its base and go tidy up a specific room, and then it can empty itself back at its dock. Here’s how it can figure out where it is in your home.

The not-all-seeing eye

The key component of this Roomba is an imaging sensor on the top. The previous generation Roomba—the 900 series—had that too, but an update to both the hardware and the software has essentially given this latest dirt-sucker a better memory than its ancestors. That previous generation could create a map of your home as it cruised around, but the tech wasn’t yet developed enough yet for it keep that map (or even maps of multiple homes, as this one can) in its silicon brain.

“The 900 series would build and maintain a map of the home during an individual cleaning mission—once that job is done, it starts afresh the next time you press clean,” says Chris Jones, the vice president of technology at iRobot. It was a robot with no long-term memory.

The i7, though, “will now remember the environment that it’s been run in in the past, and be able to leverage that historical information on the current cleaning mission,” he says.

The imaging sensor, which points forward and up, is crucial for this process. It’s not a full-fledged camera. Instead, what it’s looking for is something simpler: “a handful of pixels in an image that form a unique lighting pattern,” Jones says. The things actually creating those patterns? “That could be the corner of your TV against a white wall,” he explains, and perhaps next to it is a picture frame “that has its own contour of light and dark.”

Jones compares those types of markers in your home, and their relationship to each other, to stars forming constellations that allow the robot to localize itself in your house. It’s also making use of the cloud to let this happen: data about these visual landmarks are kept there for the Roomba to reference. “Whenever the robot runs anew, it requests the latest from the cloud,” Jones says.

It’s an approach that makes sense at the household level, because GPS wouldn’t be accurate enough and doesn’t work well inside. (Another way that more advanced robotics systems, like self-driving cars, figure out where they are is by using a spinning laser system—LIDAR—cameras, and radar, but that type of equipment would be excessive on a vacuum.)

One of Roomba’s competitor’s, Neato, uses a laser-based mapping system, but it doesn’t have the same kind of room recognition that allows you to send it to specific zones at any given time.

All of this means that the Roomba will be ok if encounters what the robotics industry calls the “robot kidnapping problem,” Jones says: that’s what happens when someone picks the robot up and moves it to a new place.

“Using this vision approach, as soon as it sees one of these constellations, it will know where it is,” he says. (The technique iRobot is using is called visual simultaneous localization and mapping, or vSLAM.)

That imaging sensor on the Roomba isn’t the only way it can learn things about its environment. It also has one that tracks the floor as the robot moves over it, plus wheel odometry, meaning it can infer, based on the turn of the wheels, how far it has traveled, just like your car.

The big picture

What this adds up to is a Roomba that can remember its environment, so you can label the map on the corresponding app by room type, and then tell the vacuum to clean a specific room by name. iRobot says the device can remember up to 10 floorplans, meaning you can “kidnap” it, take it to a new place, and it will learn that one, too. (It will also work with Alexa and the Google Assistant, so you should be able to shout at an Echo Dot for the Roomba to clean a specific room you’ve just sullied.)

Finally, it’s also the first Roomba to come with a docking station (called the Clean Base) that empties out the bot’s dust bin, producing a loud noise and sucking the dirt into a bag that holds 30 robot debris-dumps before you need to throw it out—you’ll eventually need to buy more bags for that part. With the Clean Base, the i7+ costs $949, but you can purchase just the robot itself for $699.

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An electric vehicle’s fuel comes from its batteries. Those lithium-ion battery cells can be a source of problems if they have defects, like with the recent Chevy Bolt recall. But they’re also a root source for innovation. Automakers can introduce new technology to try to increase their energy density—and thus increase the vehicle’s range, too. 

Today at an event in New York City, Zero Motorcycles, which makes sleek-looking electric two-wheelers, unveiled a new battery architecture that they brag has around 20 percent additional capacity but weighs about 6 pounds less. They’re pairing this power pack with a new iteration of its SR motorcycle, which they also unveiled. 

The new battery system from Zero is housed in a fancy-looking module made from diecast aluminum and polycarbonate. It contains 56 lithium-ion battery cells, which are shaped like rectangular pouches and are roughly half an inch thick. 

Brian Wismann, the vice president of product development at Zero, says that a few changes allowed them to pack the increase in capacity into the battery system. One of those is changes to the cells themselves, which Zero purchases from a company called Farasis Energy. “Certainly, the cell chemistry has to improve to be able to achieve higher capacity,” Wismann says. “There’s improvements to just the chemistry itself, and then there’s also improvements to the chemical stability of the cell, to allow you to charge to higher voltages.” 

At their most basic level, lithium-ion batteries have a few key parts to their design. The anode is the negative electrode, while the cathode is the positive one. Positively-charged lithium ions travel between those two electrodes, shuttling through a liquid electrolyte. An aptly-named component called the separator keeps the two electrodes separate. Electrons discharge from the anode when the motorcycle—or cell phone, vacuum, or whatever—needs juice, traveling through an external circuit and eventually into the cathode. One drawback to that liquid electrolyte is that it is flammable, so some companies, like Dyson, are moving towards solid-state lithium-ion batteries.

[Related: Why Dyson is going all-in on solid-state batteries]

Managing the heat that the battery pack on an electric motorcycle produces when it’s discharging or charging is a key aspect of the design that Zero had to develop. “With that additional capacity in a small space, you’ve got some heat to deal with, both in charge and discharge,” Wismann says. “And if you’re trying to figure out how to charge faster, then you’ve got to consider that when a rider plugs in their motorcycle, the battery may already be hot.” 

Wissman says they’ve dealt with this hot issue in a couple ways. One is by “optimizing” its passive heat sinks—the diecast aluminum with the ridges on the sides of the battery pack. Those “extract heat from the cell,” he says. 

The more dynamic way they’re handling the heat issue is by adding two fans to the battery assembly to actively cool it down, a new move for the company. Those fans could be spinning “even when the bike’s sitting there and charging,” he says.

“That active management allows us to extract the most out of this new cell technology,” Wissman adds. “This is a fairly novel approach, and it’s been very effective for us in testing so far.” 

[Related: I rode an electric motorcycle for the first time. Here’s what I learned.]

These new batteries will go into three of the company’s fanciest bikes, which all have confusingly similar names: the SR, the SR/F, and the SR/S. The company literally took the wraps off both the new battery module and their new SR motorcycle today, and Sam Paschel, the company’s CEO, explained that the increase in battery density leads to better range for the bikes; he estimates that the 20 percent boost in capacity translates into a 16 percent increase in range for the motorcycles that have the new module, on average. “The reason you lose a bit there, is that no powertrain—even as efficient as ours is—is perfectly efficient,” he says. 

The base model of the SR will hit 104 mph and travel some 156 miles on a charge with city driving. It starts at about $18,000, but you can also spend more money on added features that will allow the electric motorcycle to go faster and further. 

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A cyclist or runner who heads out for a solo workout and then takes a bad spill could discover that their Apple Watch has automatically called for help, now that Apple has pushed out a software update to its wearable. The new software version, watchOS 8.1, dropped recently, and it includes their new fall detection during workouts feature that the company first announced in September. 

The option works with a range of physical activities beyond cycling and running—in fact, it’s designed to detect falls for any type of workout an athlete might select on the watch, from a walk to rock climbing to even water sports. 

To equip the watch to do this, Apple needed reams of real-world data to first learn how to recognize falls during a workout. After all, a mountain biker taking a jump and then landing back down hard on the trail will create a force that the watch can pick up, but obviously isn’t representative of a fall. 

Here’s what to know about how it all works. 

Finding ‘true falls’  

Apple first rolled out a general fall detection feature in 2018. At the time, it was automatically turned on for people 65 and older, and the company has subsequently lowered that age to 55. But a fall that someone might take while in a domestic environment is different from the type of spill an athlete might take while running, for example. Plus, if a basketball player tumbles during a game but then is back on their feet in a moment, they’ve had a fall that the watch can probably ignore. 

“Our goal here is to tease out the falls that actually do matter, where you’re getting injured,” says Ron Huang, Apple’s vice president of sensing and connectivity. “Versus just the routine sports falls that you take.” Another force-causing action the watch can ignore: smacking your hand against a volleyball during a game.

[Related: The Apple Watch learned to detect falls using data from real human mishaps]

To get data to train their software, Apple needed what Huang describes as “true falls”—not a tumble simulated by a stuntman, for example. For that, they turned to the Apple Heart & Movement Study. That ongoing research project, Huang says, gave the company access to information from more than 150,000 people, more than 1.3 million workout sessions, hundreds of thousands of hours of workout data, and thousands of actual falls. 

It was a “vast amount of data,” Huang says, that helped ensure they included a “wide variety” of different people—with different skill levels and the like—who were doing workouts. (The fact that this Apple Watch feature was made possible in part from people who had opted into participating in the study is a reminder that this research from Apple, which it is carrying out in partnership with American Heart Association and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, can help the company develop features for its gadgets; as an FAQ from the study states, “Study data may be used for health-related product development and improvement.”) 

[Related: Apple Watch Series 7 Review: Living Larger]

“Many thousands of these users actually told us via questionnaires that they took a fall,” Huang says. “And many of these [people] even took a phone call from us, so with their permission, we were able to reach out, and talk live, and get even more context around the fall.”

The key here is matching an actual fall with what the accelerometer and gyroscope on the watch detected during that tumble. “We’re able to tie this back to the raw sensor data that they also opted in to share with Apple,” Huang says.  

What the sensors see

The sensors inside the wearable that matter for this type of detection are the accelerometer and gyroscope—the first detects changes in motion, and the second records rate of rotation on the X, Y, and Z axis. For example, if the watch is on your wrist and you hold it parallel to the floor in front of you, then rotate it towards you so that you can better see the screen, it is rotating along its X axis.

These sensors will reveal data that is full of chaos during an actual fall, versus clearer information from an impact that is not a fall. 

For example, a “controlled jump” on a mountain bike will reveal “highly directional” sensor data “on a single axis,” Huang says. Imagine that your hand stayed on the handlebar grip, and that when the bike tires smacked the ground after the jump, your watch detected an impact. That’s not a fall. A true fall reveals itself in the sensor data in a much different way. “If you’re actually falling, it’s a very chaotic motion that we can see from the accelerometer and the gyroscope,” Huang says. “During a fall, you see very quick, and just large and messy [gyroscope-detected] rotations happening.” If you’ve ever taken a tumble like this, you can imagine what the watch is noticing. 

[Related: Deep dive: How exactly the Apple Watch tracks swimming]

“In our algorithm discussions, we [frequently] talk about entropy,” Huang adds, as a way to describe that messiness of data they see from a fall. 

GPS offers another clue, because a cyclist who is still moving after a jump has likely not wiped out, whereas a stationary watch after the messy sensor data of a true fall is a signal that someone could be hurt, because they are lying down and not moving. 

With cycling specifically, Huang says that they have tens of thousands of workouts from which to glean data.

This isn’t the first time a company has released a feature to detect a fall for a cyclist. For example, bike company Specialized developed ANGi, a small sensor that attaches to a helmet, pairs with your phone, and can notify your emergency contacts if it thinks you’ve fallen.

How to turn it on (or off) 

It’s easy to see how fall detection could come in handy for a sport like cycling, but not all workouts are likely to lead to a fall. Could you fall while swimming or paddling? Or if you’re bouldering—a form of rock climbing where you stay low to the ground and don’t use ropes—it’s normal to fall on a mat, but then get back up quickly again. 

Instead of only having the feature work for only some activities, Huang says that they decided to take a simple approach and “have it supported for all different workout types” regardless of whether or not a fall is likely. Plus, it’s possible to imagine a scenario where someone falls hard on a pool deck, for instance, after a swim, while they still have the workout mode switched on. So yes, if you’re paddling in a canoe and you have that workout mode engaged, your Apple Watch is looking to see if you fall. 

Apple says that new Apple Watch users will have this feature automatically turned on when they set it up. For existing users, you’ll need to turn it on manually. One way to do that is by going to the Settings app on the watch itself, then the SOS field, then Fall Detection. From there, you can choose to have the feature off entirely, on all the time, or on just for workouts. You don’t need the latest watch to use it—it works on Series 4 watches and newer—but you do need to be running watchOS 8.1.

Ultimately, whether a new software feature is irritating, helpful, or even life-saving depends on how well it is executed. An athlete whose wearable constantly thinks they’ve taken a fall during routine play when they haven’t actually seriously tumbled may just switch off the feature; false positives will be irksome. Evidence of the feature’s utility will be felt in the years to come. 

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Lithium-ion batteries power an abundance of modern devices, from electric cars like a Chevy Bolt, to iPhones, to handheld vacuum cleaners from the likes of Dyson. 

In fact, in James Dyson’s new memoir, Invention: A Life, he notes that at one point, around 2012 to 2014, his company—famous for its battery-powered vacuum cleaners, as well as other gadgets—was “consuming something like 6 percent of the global supply of lithium-ion batteries.” 

That’s just one fascinating detail in a volume that recounts Dyson’s trailblazing career: In his early days, he sold a boat called the Sea Truck, then he invented a new kind of wheelbarrow called the Ballbarrow, and eventually created a vacuum cleaner design that employs cyclones—rapidly spinning air—to separate out the dirt, instead of relying on a bag to do that job. 

Dyson also devotes a chapter to the company’s electric car, which it developed but did not sell; he also writes about the company’s work on developing better batteries. “One of the reasons—not the only reason, but a subsidiary reason—we stopped the car,” Dyson says, “is that we’ve got to invest very heavily in our new solid-state battery technology, which is undoubtedly what will go on to transform transportation as it gets more efficient.”

“That’s the area we’re working in,” he says, referring to solid-state battery tech. “We’re going into production now.” 

A solid-state battery has a key difference from the traditional type of lithium-ion batteries that are common today—more on exactly what they are in a moment. “The potential of that technology is undoubtedly the future, for batteries at least,” he says.

“We’ve got a lot of battery-operated products coming online, not just in our current field,” he adds, “but in other fields, for which these batteries will be an essential and really important part.” 

Products with its next-gen batteries will be debuting “pretty soon,” he says.

Here’s what to know about what a solid-state lithium-ion battery is—why it promises to be a step forward from the way regular lithium-ion batteries work, and why the new tech could be an asset in a device as quotidian as a hand-held vacuum cleaner.

How does a regular lithium-ion battery work?

At its most simple, a basic lithium-ion battery cell contains two electrodes. One is the positive electrode, or the cathode. The other is the negative side, or anode. And tiny lithium ions, which have a positive charge to them, play a key role in how the cell functions. 

When the battery is charged, lithium ions are on the negative side; the most basic kind of lithium-ion battery stores those ions in graphite in the anode. That graphite is “a bunch of sheets of hexagons that are connected,” says Greg Less, the technical director of the University of Michigan Battery Lab. “The lithium ions slide in between those sheets, and find a place where they are comfortable.”

When you charge a battery, electrons flow from the wall socket and make their way to the negative side of the battery and the graphite sheets. Meanwhile, the positively-charged lithium ions are on the same side, balancing out the negative charge of the electrons. 

[Related: GM is recalling all its Bolts, but there’s no need to panic about EV safety]

When you use the battery to do something, like power a motor in an electric car, the electrons flow out of the cell through a circuit, and the lithium-ions inside the battery move to the other side of the battery cell. Now those lithium ions are over on the cathode. The process continues when you charge the battery again and the ions move back over to the anode. 

“We’re pushing electrons back and forth through the external circuit, and pushing positive ions back and forth inside of the cell,” he says. This animation from the US Department of Energy shows the process well; the positive electrode (the cathode) is on the left. 

As the lithium ions shuttle back and forth within the cell, they travel through a liquid electrolyte, like swimmers in a pool of water. Finally, a separator inside the cell keeps the two sides separate. It allows lithium ions to pass through it, but not electrons. 

[Related: The enormous cost of the Bolt EV recall is falling on LG]

A solid-state battery replaces the liquid electrolyte—the pool of water that allows the lithium-ion swimmers to travel back and forth—with a solid one. 

So why replace the liquid electrolyte? “The reason we want to remove the liquid electrolyte is that it’s heavy,” Less says. “It’s expensive and it’s flammable—and flammability is one of the big issues.” That’s because, he says, “the electrolyte is literally a liquid fuel.” 

So why would this tech be helpful in a device like a vacuum cleaner?

The upshot of all this is that a solid-state battery could be a better way of powering something like a Dyson vacuum cleaner or possibly an electric vehicle one day. “The advantages are clearly the energy density, and perhaps the safety,” Less reflects. 

Because a solid-state battery would be more energy-dense, it could hold more of a charge, meaning that the electric vacuum you’re holding in your hand and pushing around your home lasts longer. “If you can put more power into a cordless vacuum cleaner, that’s huge,” Less says. “Trying these high-energy-density cells into a vacuum cleaner, or power tools, makes a lot of sense.” 

Ultimately, Less doesn’t see solid-state batteries as necessarily replacing every kind of battery there is. For example, people still use regular alkaline batteries in their remote controls, and combustion-engine cars still have a lead-acid battery in them to get the vehicle started. Solid-state lithium-ion batteries may be best used to power something like a vacuum cleaner for now, before moving them into a bigger item like an electric car. 

“You’re not going to realistically start with electric vehicles with solid-state,” he says, “you’re going to take the baby step and do a household item like a vacuum cleaner.”

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Seattle residents can start keeping their eyes out for matte black Toyota Highlanders, clad with a wealth of sensors on their roofs, plying the streets of their drizzly city. These retrofitted SUVs belong to Zoox, a self-driving car company owned by Amazon that wants to one day operate autonomous taxi services—like Uber, but with no driver behind the wheel. 

Self-driving cars are nothing new, of course, although the vision that Zoox has is especially slick. The company is working on an autonomous vehicle that, in general, belongs to a category of vehicles that tend to jokingly be compared to rolling toasters. In Zoox’s case, their future taxi will seat four, and can drive bi-directionally, since it has no front or back the way a regular car does. It also boasts four-wheel steering, and lacks any spot for a driver. It has no official name just yet. The company likes to compare it to a carriage, because the four passengers will sit facing each other. 

In Seattle, the company is planning to open an office next year and is also bringing a double-digit fleet of Toyota Highlanders (not the futuristic carriage-type vehicles) to the streets. In fact, the company has discreetly already made some exploratory moves on the streets of the city that’s home to their parent company, Amazon. 

“We actually first sent a Highlander to Seattle in late 2019,” says Jesse Levinson, the company’s co-founder and CTO. With these SUVs, the company can use the sensors on them—devices like lidar units and cameras—to create highly-detailed maps of the urban environment, a key prerequisite for a self-driving car. “We were able to build a map of downtown Seattle very quickly, and then on our next trip we were able to drive fully autonomously in downtown Seattle,” Levinson says. “Daytime, night time, and in the rain, and it worked really, really well.”

“We did that very quietly,” he adds. 

Searching for soggy skies  

Now, the company isn’t being quiet about it, announcing today that they’re officially expanding to Seattle. They’ve already been testing their Highlander vehicles in other locations: two spots in California, and in Las Vegas. 

Levinson notes that Seattle will bring some challenges for these Toyota Highlanders, which boast level-three autonomy and have safety drivers behind the wheel. One of those challenges will be the city’s famous drizzle. “We’re looking for some rain, to test our sensors out,” Levinson says. “We’ve really designed our vehicle to handle inclement weather, but we don’t get a ton of it in San Francisco, and we get even less of it in Las Vegas, so having frequent rain will be really useful for that purpose.” 

He also notes that just being in a new location will help train the company’s software. “Getting more diversity of data is good for machine learning algorithms,” he says. 

[Related: What will it take for humans to trust self-driving cars?]

At a point yet to be announced, Zoox hopes to open a robo-taxi service for customers who would hail one of their new carriage-like vehicles, something like one of their rivals, Waymo, is operating right now in the Phoenix area with driverless Chrysler Pacificas. The next-gen Zoox taxis sport lidar sensors on their corners, as well as other sensors, like cameras, radar units, and an IMU, or inertial measurement unit. Plus, the vehicle’s roof will feature a sunroof and hundreds of LED lights to set a vibe for future passengers. (Another company, Cruise, is working on a similar vehicle, also in the toaster-on-wheels category, called Origin.)

Meanwhile, the Toyota Highlanders are the company’s more pragmatic stepping-stone vehicles, which they’ll use to conduct mapping and autonomous driving in Seattle. The company doesn’t intend to use the Toyotas as part of the future ride-hailing service, but Levinson says the sensor set-up on the Highlanders is similar enough to the next-gen vehicle that the data they gather with the SUVs is still useful. “They have the same sensors, and they’re in almost identical geometric configurations,” he says. 

Modern-day cartography 

For a self-driving car to know where it is in the urban streetscape, it needs a detailed three-dimensional map to reference as well as onboard sensors to perceive what’s around it. The map, of course, is much different from what a human driver navigates with when they fire up a navigation app. 

“The maps that we use in self-driving cars are entirely different, and they’re much higher detailed, much higher fidelity,” says Taylor Arnicar, a staff technical program manager at Zoox. “And also things that humans might think of as being important have no real bearing to the self-driving car itself—the self-driving car doesn’t care what the name of the street is, actually.” (Instead, the car is using numbers to understand what street it’s on.)

But before the vehicles can use those maps, the company has to build them, which they do using one of those Highlanders. “We drive those vehicles around in a new area that we want to be exploring in the future,” Taylor says. That allows them to connect the information they need to make the maps. 

[Related: Kitty Hawk’s electric airplane will fly you around—with no pilot]

Interestingly, the process works better if the terrain is varied, as opposed to including spans of bridges or tunnels that contain very repetitive features and thus could be confusing. “These mapping systems are strongest when they are operating in areas with lots of unique 3D structures in the world,” he says. Human eyes could have trouble determining their location on a desolate stretch of road in a featureless desert, or a long span of bridge that looks just like the part before it, and the same is true of a robot car.

The ‘reality phase’ 

Certainly, Zoox is not the only player in the autonomous vehicles space. Other notable competitors include Aurora, Argo AI, Cruise, Motional, and of course Waymo, which has already made a driverless taxi service a reality in the Phoenix, Arizona area. Waymo is also conducting some rides in the San Francisco area, on a smaller scale and using electric Jaguars. 

Cars driven by computers are certainly still imperfect, and tend to hit snags that might not throw off a human driver. (Then again, they never get tired or distracted.) In San Francisco, some Waymo vehicles have been showing up mysteriously on a dead-end street. In Phoenix, Waymo has reportedly struggled with issues like left-hand turns (which are hard for self-driving cars and regular cars, too) and even puddles.

[Related: How Waymo is teaching self-driving cars to deal with the chaos of parking lots]

The industry goal isn’t solely to build robo-taxis: other sectors involve autonomous trucking, self-driving shuttles, and the also the kind of driver assistance features that are designed for regular cars, like GM’s Super Cruise. 

Currently, the self-driving car industry has reached a type of “reality phase,” says Raj Rajkumar, who directs the Metro21: Smart Cities Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He noticed a “massive hype cycle” that peaked around 2018, and then industry “doldrums” in 2019. 

“I think it’s beginning to bounce back,” he says. “Right now, the hype is a lot more muted.” 

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In late August, General Motors announced that it was recalling all of its Bolt electric vehicles due to a risk of fire stemming from defective batteries. Today, the automaker said that it will be reimbursed for the costs of that recall from LG, the company that makes the battery cells in the vehicles’ power systems. GM estimates that the recall will cost them $2 billion, although they don’t yet know the precise number. 

The issue—which has sparked 13 fires in vehicles, CNBC reported—lurks in the small cells that comprise a vehicle’s battery pack, and two problems that need to coexist in one cell to be a potential hazard. Those two problems are a “torn anode and a folded separator,” GM says. 

Late last month, GM said that LG had already started producing cells again at two facilities in Michigan. That timeline suggests good news, according to Greg Less, the technical director of the University of Michigan Battery Lab. “Given how quickly this was corrected after the root cause of the fires was identified, I am fairly confident that something on one of the production machines went out of spec after extended use and needed to either be readjusted or a part replaced,” he notes via email. “I don’t think we will be seeing this exact problem again, now that both the cause and a fix have been identified.”

[Related: GM is recalling all its Bolts, but there’s no need to panic about EV safety]

General Motors also said on Sept. 20 that it hopes to have “advanced diagnostic software,” which will need to be installed by dealers on the Bolts, ready to deploy within about two months. That new code will, according to the company, ideally be able to spot “specific abnormalities that might indicate a damaged battery” and could also help the automaker in “prioritizing damaged battery modules for replacement.” In the meantime, the company has guidance for Bolt owners as to how to mitigate the fire risk and charge safely. 

Shilpan Amin, a vice president with GM, said in a statement that they were glad to have come to the deal with LG. Amin added: “Our engineering and manufacturing teams continue to collaborate to accelerate production of new battery modules and we expect to begin repairing customer vehicles this month.”

Fires in electric vehicles are known for their intensity, and it remains unclear whether a blaze is more likely to occur in an electric vehicle or a traditional, internal combustion engine car. One expert told Popular Science in August: “The final answer to whether EV’s are more likely or less likely than ICE [internal combustion engine] vehicles to experience a fire is still years away.” Other information, from Tesla and from a Department of Transportation report, suggests that fires in EVs are less likely to happen than conflagrations in regular vehicles. 

Meanwhile, the EV market continues to heat up with the release of Ford’s electric F-150 pickup truck this year, the recent debut of the Rivian R1T, and the upcoming reveal of the Chevy Silverado pickup truck at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2022. 

The post The enormous cost of the Bolt EV recall is falling on LG appeared first on Popular Science.

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