Month: June 2019

Enlarge / Romain Dumas has set a new lap record at the Nürburgring Nordschleife for electric cars. (credit: Volkswagen Motorsport)

A few weeks ago, I visited the Nürburgring Nordschleife in Germany as Volkswagen began testing its ID R Pikes Peak electric car at the famous race track. The ID R Pikes Peak is part of VW's multibillion-dollar apology for all those diesel emissions; a tiny part compared to the fines, the chargers, and the new business strategy, but a part nonetheless. Its job is to imbue the coming onslaught of ID-branded electric vehicles with a halo—the exciting kind one gets from on-track derring-do.

And the derring rarely gets done as well as this. On Monday, racing driver Romain Dumas and the VW Motorsport team set a new electric record at the 12.9-mile (20.8km) track also known as the Green Hell. As corporate apologies go, I like this one.

Dumas lapped the circuit in 6:05.336 minutes, lopping a full 40 seconds off the time set by Peter Dumbreck and the Nio EP9 hypercar back in 2017. The lap time is also almost six seconds quicker than the time set by Stefan Bellof in a Porsche 956 in 1983. Though separated by more than three decades, the two cars are closely matched in some regards; at 670hp (500kW) the electric VW is a little more powerful than the 630hp (474kW) Group C Porsche, but at "under" 2,425lbs (1,100kg) the VW is also a little heavier than the 1,852lb (840kg) 956.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Google, Amazon, Facebook, and the like want to convince you that you need a smart display. But as we've explored in previous reviews, most smart displays are luxury versions of their screen-less counterparts. Everything that you can do with an Amazon Echo or a Google Home can be done with a comparable smart display, but the latter can show you visual information and (in some cases) videos. If you don't care much for visual information in such a device, why spring for a smart display? These devices are hard sells, particularly because most cost $150 or more.

That's not the case with Lenovo's new Smart Clock. It's the first Google-Assistant answer to Amazon's Echo Spot, serving as a tiny smart screen that shows the time by default and can be used to set alarms and do everything a regular Google Home device does. It could be an ideal device for someone who wants a virtual assistant at home and could use some visual information in their daily routine. But most importantly, it's great for those who don't want to spend a lot—Lenovo's Smart Clock costs $79, which is even more affordable than the $129 Echo Spot.

But a few big differences distinguish Lenovo's Smart Clock from Amazon's Echo Spot, and they will be make-or-break for some users. We used both devices for about a week simultaneously to see if a tiny smart display is the way to go and how the two compare to each other.

Enlarge / One of the game's deformed monsters. (credit: Remedy Entertainment)

SANTA MONICA, Calif.—For nearly 20 years, Remedy Entertainment has put out a streak of cinematic, weird, memorable video games. But its Alan Wake series seems to be DOA, while 2016's Quantum Break was a low point. Does that mean the studio's glory days are behind them?

After my latest hands-on session with the studio's summer 2019 adventure game, Contact, I think I spot a bright light ahead for Remedy. That light is smothered in bold red tones and beams from a creepy underground lair, maybe, but it's still bright and promising.

From what I've played thus far, everything I liked about Quantum Break—jaw-dropping visuals, dimension-shifting weirdness, and telekinetic superpowers—has been paid forward to a new universe where mystery and plot don't get in the way of compelling action.

Enlarge / NASA Associate Administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate William Gerstenmaier is looking for "efficiencies" in the agency's budget. (credit: NASA)

Over the last two months, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has repeatedly said the agency's ambitious new Artemis plan for sending humans to the Moon in 2024 will not require raiding other areas of its budget, such as its broad array of science programs, technology research, or aeronautics work.

The reason, he said, is simple. The surest way to torpedo support for a program inside the agency is to take funding from someone else to pay for the new plan, and the surest way to lose support in Congress is to take work away from various field centers around the country.

"We can't cannibalize one part of the agency to feed another part of the agency," Bridenstine told Ars in April, which reflects comments he has made many times. "We can't cut the Science Mission Directorate to feed human exploration. We can't cannibalize the International Space Station to feed the Moon mission. So if we go in those directions, which have all been tried in the past, it never works politically. We can't do the same thing again and be upset that it didn't work."