Month: April 2016

A few years ago, in a classic ham-fisted fumble involving a pint of beer and a cat video, I dropped my Nexus 5. The colourful 1080p screen that I had spent so much of my free time pawing at was left shattered and unusable. Money was tight at the time, and so rather than get the Nexus fixed or buy an entirely new phone, I called in a favour from a journalist friend. The next day, I was the proud borrower of a Huawei P7, the Chinese company's first real stab at a flagship Android phone.

I'd never used a Huawei phone before, and at first I was pleasantly surprised. The build quality was excellent even if the design was rather nondescript, and it had a bright 1080p IPS screen. My excitement dwindled, however, when I flicked the P7 on and was presented with one of the most outrageously aggressive Android skins I'd ever seen. The icons had been squished, and given an odd iOS-like sheen, while the app drawer I loved from the stock KitKat build on the Nexus had been entirely removed in favour of shoving all the apps onto the home screen.

Indeed, the deeper I dove, the more I found had been changed by Huawei's Emotion UI. Settings weren't where I expected to find them, while various menu designs had been given a visual tweak that didn't match other parts of the OS. In short, the P7 was mess—and it was slow and laggy too. This was a classic case of great hardware being marred by terrible software, and it wasn't long before I bit the bullet and bought a new phone just so I could get back to something that at least vaguely approached a stock Android experience.

Vector could begin orbital flights of its micro-rocket by 2018. (credit: Vector Space Systems)

Before he founded SpaceX to colonize Mars, Elon Musk turned to long-time aerospace veteran Jim Cantrell in 2001 for advice. The rocket-building bug hadn’t bit Musk yet, but the tech prodigy still wanted to make a grand gesture to get NASA and the rest of the world talking about Mars. Musk had settled upon the idea of sending mice to Mars and back, having them procreate along the way. With about $20 million to burn, Musk sought to buy three old Russian ICBMs and retrofit them as launch vehicles.

It was a crazy plan. But Cantrell, who had worked with the Soviet and then the Russian space program for more than two decades, agreed to help smooth negotiations with the Russians. The scheme fell apart, of course, but that failure led Musk to the epiphany that he should build his own rockets, and he founded SpaceX in June 2002. Cantrell said at the time that the only foreseeable money-making pathway was big payloads: multiton communications and national security satellites.“In those days, you’d look at the market, and the only rational decision you could make was to start small and grow the size of the vehicle,” Cantrell said.

Cantrell left SpaceX in 2002, seeing the venture as too risky and unlikely to turn a profit. (It succeeded, he said, because Musk could not conceive of failure). However, even as SpaceX has become a dominant player in the large satellite launch industry, the small satellite industry has grown rapidly. The miniaturization of communications and imaging satellites has led to a new generation of rocket companies, such as Firefly Space Systems and Rocket Lab, which have built smaller launchers. Their rockets will generally heft payloads larger than 100kg into Sun-synchronous orbits 500km or higher.

NEW YORK—This year at the Tribeca Film Festival, we tried the many alternate uses for Virtual Reality storytelling (aside from gaming), but we also found four documentaries that appealed to our nerd tendencies.

Do Not Resist

Do Not Resist (84 minutes), winner of best documentary feature at TFF, opens with more than 9 minutes of footage from the Ferguson, Missouri, protests in 2015. Shots of angry crowds and police in riot gear lead to foreboding lightning flashes in the clouds as police use tear gas and enforce a curfew.

Jim Resnick

With 707hp under the hood, there aren't many cars as powerful as the Dodge Hellcat.

8 more images in gallery

Henry Kissinger once famously said "power is the ultimate aphrodisiac." This may have been Kissinger's most lucid moment. The statement is certainly a glass full of lucidity in the face of combustion run amok under the $62,495 Dodge Challenger Hellcat's hood.

One could easily get hung up on statistics here. Peak horsepower of 707 (527kW). Peak torque of 650 lb-ft (881Nm). A supercharger that, by itself, displaces greater swept volume (2.4L) than most of the world's automotive engines. And 110bar—nearly 1,600psi—of combustion pressure in each cylinder all paint a picture not so much of internal combustion, but of internal warfare.

It all started with a rather innocuous conversation between then-head of Chrysler's Street and Racing Technology division, Ralph Gilles, and Hellcat Chief Engineer Chris Cowland.