Month: March 2019

Enlarge / Tesla CEO Elon Musk. (credit: Yuriko Nakao/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The Model Y, Tesla's more affordable SUV based on the Model 3 platform, will be unveiled at a March 14 event in Los Angeles, Elon Musk announced on Twitter on Sunday.

After introducing the Model S in 2012, Tesla reworked the vehicle into an SUV form factor and sold it as the Model X starting in 2015. Tesla is taking the same basic approach with the Model Y: it will look a lot like a Model 3, but will have a larger body and roomier interior.

"Model Y, being an SUV, is about 10% bigger than Model 3, so will cost about 10% more & have slightly less range for same battery," Musk tweeted.

Enlarge / Micah (Anthony Mackie) and Sam (Margaret Qualley) are two of the last people on a toxic Earth in the Netflix original movie IO. (credit: Netflix)

Much of the human race has decamped to a distant colony, leaving behind an uninhabitable Earth, in IO, Netflix's modest follow-up to its post-apocalyptic thriller, Bird Box. Directed by Jonathan Halpert, it's an ambitious film that doesn't quite work, with glacial pacing, little dramatic tension, and a rather flat tone. But it still has some lovely moments and a thought-provoking premise. It made us wonder how much of the film is based in real science, and we turned to Kevin Hand, an astrobiologist and planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, for answers.

Hand is an ideal person to comment on the film's science. His research interests include studying the ocean worlds of the outer solar system, most notably Jupiter's moon Europa, considered to be one promising site for extraterrestrial life. He's attempted to recreate the conditions on Europa in the laboratory—what he dubs "Europa in a can"—to see if any telltale forms of life might form. (It hasn't so far, but who knows when a breakthrough might occur?) And Hand is part of NASA/JPL's Europa Clipper mission to send a robotic spacecraft to perform repeated close flybys of the distant moon. He even consulted on the 2013 sci-fi "found footage" film, Europa Report, which dramatized a fictional crewed mission to Jupiter's moon.

(Spoilers below for IO.)

Enlarge / Micah (Anthony Mackie) and Sam (Margaret Qualley) are two of the last people on a toxic Earth in the Netflix original movie IO. (credit: Netflix)

Much of the human race has decamped to a distant colony, leaving behind an uninhabitable Earth, in IO, Netflix's modest follow-up to its post-apocalyptic thriller, Bird Box. Directed by Jonathan Halpert, it's an ambitious film that doesn't quite work, with glacial pacing, little dramatic tension, and a rather flat tone. But it still has some lovely moments and a thought-provoking premise. It made us wonder how much of the film is based in real science, and we turned to Kevin Hand, an astrobiologist and planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, for answers.

Hand is an ideal person to comment on the film's science. His research interests include studying the ocean worlds of the outer solar system, most notably Jupiter's moon Europa, considered to be one promising site for extraterrestrial life. He's attempted to recreate the conditions on Europa in the laboratory—what he dubs "Europa in a can"—to see if any telltale forms of life might form. (It hasn't so far, but who knows when a breakthrough might occur?) And Hand is part of NASA/JPL's Europa Clipper mission to send a robotic spacecraft to perform repeated close flybys of the distant moon. He even consulted on the 2013 sci-fi "found footage" film, Europa Report, which dramatized a fictional crewed mission to Jupiter's moon.

(Spoilers below for IO.)