Month: August 2018

Enlarge / NASA's Curiosity rover is rolling around where a lake once sat. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

Mars is mostly a red pile of mysteries. In its youth, it was clearly a very different place, even hosting oceans and lakes of liquid water. But apart from wondering whether anything living ever made Mars its home, figuring out how the Red Planet got warm enough to thaw all that water has turned out to be no small thing.

The evidence shows there probably wasn’t enough CO₂ to warm up the early Martian greenhouse above the freezing point of water on its own. So might other gases have contributed? One option is simple hydrogen gas (H₂). Although two-atom molecules like this typically aren’t greenhouse gases, hydrogen can absorb some infrared radiation in the moment it bounces off other molecules. And it can also react with CO₂ to make some methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas.

But was there a source of hydrogen gas on Mars? A team led by Nicholas Tosca of the University of Oxford decided to follow a lead from the rocks beneath the wheels of the Curiosity rover—the mineral magnetite in a rock typical of lake-bottom sediments. The magnetite (which, not shockingly, is magnetic) would have formed within the mud, and that process can produce hydrogen.

Enlarge / Mazda racing driver Harry Tincknell in the Multimatic driver-in-the-loop simulator in Markham, Ontario. (credit: Al Arena/Ignite Media/Mazda)

Devotees of racing games love to throw shade at each other. Xbox versus Playstation, console versus PC, controller versus wheel; you name it, people will argue about it on the Internet. And one of the more common ways to denigrate an opponent in such an argument is to play the purity card. This inevitably involves some variation of "my game's better than yours, because mine is a simulator, and yours is just an arcade game." The implication is that you aren't hardcore enough because you play something fun and accessible.

It's not an argument I buy into, but it is one I've thought about through the years. If being a faithful simulation is the be-all and end-all of it, then how do consumer games compare to the real thing? Not racing an actual car on an actual track—I answered that one years ago. No, I'm talking about the driver-in-the-loop (DIL) simulators used by professional racing teams—these proprietary setups that move and shake and carry price tags in the hundreds of thousands or even millions. It's been a tricky question to answer. DIL sims are few and far between, and they tend to be in heavy use doing actual work.

As luck would have it, the nice people at Mazda North America didn't laugh when I recently asked them if I could visit their sim. In fact, they invited me to see it in action as the team prepared for an upcoming race in the IMSA Weathertech Sportscar Championship. Two of their four drivers were new to the series this year, and they'd be spending a couple of days getting up to speed with a track they'd never been to before. Suddenly I had a chance to see what pro drivers and engineers actually got from spending time in a sim, and to gauge how the whole endeavor differs from even really, really hard racing games. Plus, if I was really lucky, I might even get to have a go myself…

Enlarge / Elon Musk. (credit: Chris Saucedo/Getty Images for SXSW)

When I asked University of Arizona legal scholar William Sjostrom about the way Elon Musk announced his plan to take Tesla private, he was scathing.

"A securities attorney would say 'what the hell are you doing?'" Sjostrom told me on Wednesday.

When making a big, market-moving announcement, companies normally halt trading and provide the entire proposal in one well-vetted document—they don't dribble it out in a series of tweets.