Month: July 2017

We live in strange times. Bookending the automotive universe right now are pure electric cars rapidly approaching mainstream usability for anyone within a conventional gas tank's distance of a latte. Development of autonomous cars is plainly visible. Pickup trucks outsell everything in America and yet, there's still an appetite for 650 horsepower (485kW) track-day weapons. Chevy's new Camaro ZL1 1LE goes back to the well-understood niche of—comparatively speaking in sales numbers—a tiny portion of thrill-seeking track junkies who want to arrive and drive at the nearest circuit. To counter Steely Dan's debut album title, you can buy a thrill.

Rocketing around the new Area 27 race track in Kelowna, British Columbia (name hinting at the car number carried around by Jacques Villeneuve, 1997 Canadian F1 Driver's Champion, who helped design the course, as well as his father Gilles), it took a bit of effort not to simply bust out laughing at the stupid level of grip, acceleration, and never-quit braking performance of the 1LE over the 3.0-mile (4.8-km) circuit.

Enlarge (credit: Bilal Farooqui)

The automation revolution, where most of our jobs are replaced by robots and we spend the rest of our days floating around on rubber rings sipping piña coladas, has hit a snag: a Knightscope K5 security bot appears to have fallen down some stairs and drowned itself in a water feature.

The scene, which took place at the mixed-use Washington Harbour development in Washington DC, was captured by Bilal Farooqui on Twitter. One local office worker reported that the K5 robot had only been patrolling the complex for a few days. Knightscope said in a statement that the "isolated incident" was under investigation, and that a new robot would be delivered to Washington Harbour this week for free.

Here's what a Knightscope K5 looks like when it isn't on its side in a pond. It's about 5 feet (1.5m) tall and weighs 300lbs.

We first wrote about the Dalek-like K5 back in 2014. The first bots were deployed on campuses and shopping complexes near the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California. The company has never disclosed how many robots are on active duty, but this is the first time I've heard of a K5 deployment outside of Silicon Valley.

Enlarge (credit: Mark Walton)

In recent years, the humble earbud has fallen out of fashion in favour of the headphone—and with good reason. Headphones offer a sizeable upgrade over their compact counterparts, which often come bundled with smartphones and music players and offer miserable, if at least listenable, sound quality. Good headphones have more bass (a typical inadequacy of cheap earbuds), are more comfortable, block out more exterior noise thanks to heavily padded ear cups, and in some cases they're even more of a fashion statement than Apple's ubiquitous EarPods. Some might even be wireless.

The tradeoff, though, is that headphones are big. For those that value discretion, headphones, even compact ones, are too bulky to be manageable on the go. That's not to mention their impracticality for fitness enthusiasts, for whom earbuds tend to be the preferred option. Traditionally, the upgrade path for earbuds has been towards sets like Sennheiser's CX300 II. These offer decent sound quality and the addition of silicone sleeves, which sit inside the ear rather than outside of it, helping to isolate outside noise, provide better bass, and ensure a more stable fit.

Foam tips like these fitted to UE900 earphones are the best way to get a good seal on a budget.

But even the silicone sleeve has its limits. Until recently, the best fit for consumers has been via foam tips, which are squished before being inserted into the ear where they expand to form a surprisingly solid seal. As someone that's been using Comply-branded foam tips for years with a set of Ultimate Ears' excellent UE900 earphones—which boast four balanced armature drivers, two for bass, and one each for middle and treble—I can confirm they make a huge difference to comfort and noise isolation, provided they're used with a good set of headphones to begin with.

Enlarge (credit: Catherine Losing for Mosaic)

Bringing genetics into medicine will lead to more accuracy, better diagnosis, and personalised treatment—but not for all. For Mosaic, Carrie Arnold meets families for whom gene testing has led only to unanswered questions. This article was first published by Wellcome on Mosaic, and it's republished here under a Creative Commons licence.

AnneMarie Ciccarella, a fast-talking 57-year-old brunette with a more than a hint of a New York accent, thought she knew a lot about breast cancer. Her mother was diagnosed with the disease in 1987, and several other female relatives also developed it. When doctors found a suspicious lump in one of her breasts that turned out to be cancer, she immediately sought out testing to look for mutations in the two BRCA genes, which between them account for around 20 per cent of families with a strong history of breast cancer.

Ciccarella assumed her results would be positive. They weren’t. Instead, they identified only what’s known as a variant of unknown or uncertain significance (VUS)—or two of them, one in both BRCA1 and BRCA2. Unlike pathogenic mutations that are known to cause disease or benign ones that don’t, these genetic variations just aren’t understood enough to know if they cause problems or not.