Month: September 2017

Enlarge (credit: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images)

Over in the UK, the Goodwood Revival is just getting underway. It's a race-weekend/fancy-dress garden party, where people dress up in period attire to match the vintage and historic cars that battle it out over the course of three days. The racing is the antithesis of what we saw a few weeks ago in Monterey, although the cars are no less rare or valuable. And best of all, the entire thing is streamed on YouTube:

The Goodwood circuit was one of the UK's fastest. It was built in Sussex on the Goodwood Estate in 1948 but closed in 1966 as it became too dangerous for the cars of the time. When Lord March (who owns the estate) realized the success of his Goodwood Festival of Speed, a decision was made to reopen the circuit, but the only racing that happens there is for classic cars. What makes the Revival truly amazing are both the cars and drivers that turn up to compete.

For one thing, you literally won't see an assortment of cars like these anywhere other than at Laguna Seca during Car Week. As I type this, nine (!) Ford GT40s are lapping a rather wet track in search of pole position for the Whitsun Trophy, which happens on Saturday afternoon. (Did I mention all the races have cool names?) Second, everyone takes the racing a lot more seriously than in California—a lot. Part of that is the driver lineup; in addition to the wealthy amateurs, pros are drafted in for the weekend.

Enlarge / LAS VEGAS - JUNE 11: Greg Scherick (L) at the CineVegas film festival in 2006. Scherick has sued Gizmodo Media Group, claiming that an article in Jezebel about his project "Superstar Machine" was libelous. (credit: Photo by Michael Buckner/Getty Images for CineVegas)

An Oregon life coach, represented by the lawyer who won a $140 million verdict against Gawker Media on behalf of Hulk Hogan, has filed a defamation lawsuit against Jezebel, one of the websites that was once part of Gawker's online media group.

Jezebel, a culture and news site geared towards women, ran a story about a group called "Superstar Machine," which quoted some ex-members referring to the group as a "cult." The founder of Superstar Machine, Greg Scherick, has sued Jezebel for defamation.

The article described Scherick as running a self-help group in which women gathered around him in a semi-circle and Scherick proceeded to "call people on our shit," in the words of one former follower. Scherick would tell women "what he perceived their spiritual and romantic failings to be," according to the article. This often led to tears, and crying in the group was "frequent" and "praised."

Enlarge / Hurricane Irma at dawn on Friday, shown in a GOES-16 photo. (credit: NOAA)

On Thursday afternoon Eric Blake, a hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center and one of the country's foremost experts on these storms, took to Twitter to offer a few capstone thoughts on the storm bearing down on Florida. "Irma has me sick to my stomach," he wrote. "Need to be very lucky for it to miss Florida now."

Blake lives in Miami, like the rest of the NHC forecasters, and said Irma sends "chills" down the spines of residents there. "This hurricane is as serious as any I have seen. No hype, just the hard facts. Take every life-saving precaution you can. I have little doubt Irma will go down as one of the most infamous in Atlantic hurricane history."

This is a sobering message coming from someone like Blake, who above all preaches calm and preparedness during hurricane season. Here, he is saying that a realistic worst-case scenario hurricane is coming to the state of Florida. As we will discuss below, some questions remain about intensity and track, but parts of the state are going to get hit exceptionally hard.

TVR

The new TVR we were teased with earlier this week has now seen the light of day. TVR has returned to the Griffith name for this 500hp (373kW) rear-wheel drive V8 with a manual gearbox, a downforce-generating underbody, and as few driver aids as is possible to fit into a car and still meet European regulation approval.

We've already seen the chassis, a mix of steel tubes with composite panels (carbon fiber sandwiching an aluminum honeycomb) bonded on for stiffness. Now we know what the rest of the car looks like. That bright red body is also made from carbon fiber, which keeps the Griffith's weight nice and low. At just 2,756lbs (1,250kg), TVR met its power-to-weight target, and the Griffith will be a very quick car to 60mph (under four seconds). It will also exceed 200mph.

Enlarge / This reed warbler hasn't cottoned on yet. (credit: Per Harald Olsen / Wikimedia Commons)

Cuckoos are nest parasites. That means they lay eggs in the nests of other birds, which then put the effort into raising the chicks. So you'd think they'd be quiet about it. Yet female cuckoos have a tendency to make a bubbly, chuckling call while they’re laying their eggs. That’s a strange thing for them to do, because host birds aren’t too fond of cuckoos.

That chuckle doesn’t sound at all like the male cuckoo call. But it does have similarities to the call of the sparrowhawk, which led researchers Jenny York and Nicholas Davies to wonder whether the call might be a purposeful deceit—a ruse to distract the hapless host birds while their nest is being violated. York and Davies’ paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution this week provides evidence that the cuckoo chuckle does indeed seem to distract host birds by making them fear a sparrowhawk attack.

Faking it

Plenty of species have evolved to mimic predators, often for their own protection. For instance, the wasp beetle mimics a stinging wasp, causing predators to steer away. Cuckoos seem to be a fan of that tactic: some cuckoo species look quite a bit like hawks, and this seems to protect them from mobbing by other birds.

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple's annual September product event is happening Tuesday, and all signs point to it being huge. First, it'll be the inaugural event for the Steve Jobs Theater on the new Apple campus. Second, the company is expected to release three new iPhones, which is a change from recent norms. Third and most importantly, the iPhone 8 will be the showstopper of the event. It's expected to look very different than any iPhones that came before it, it'll sport a bunch of new features never seen before on an Apple handset, and it'll probably be expensive, too.

New iPhones aren't the only announcements to come on Tuesday: we'll likely see a new Apple TV and an updated Apple Watch. After the announcements made at Apple's WorldWide Developers Conference in June, we will also hear about forthcoming software releases. But make no mistake: this is primarily an iPhone event, and it might be the biggest one since the device debuted in 2007.

An iPhone by any other name...

We're assuming the next big iPhone will be called the iPhone 8, following Apple's numerical naming system, but we don't know for certain. Rumors suggest we'll see three new handset models on Tuesday: two with smaller updates that look familiar, and one totally new device. In that case, the most obvious naming system would be the iPhone 7S, the iPhone 7S Plus, and the wild-card iPhone 8.