Month: September 2019

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  When Bugatti wants to find out just how fast one if its cars will go, it calls racing driver Andy Wallace. [credit: Bugatti ]

FRANKFURT, GERMANY—As the twin forces of efficiency and safety change the vehicles around us to meet the needs of the 21st century, there's not much day-to-day relevancy in how fast a car can go on a straight and flat enough road. Just about any new car sold today will happily cruise 20-30mph (30-65km/h) faster than even the most permissive speed limits outside a few stretches of German Autobahn. Even on the derestricted stretches, you might struggle to find yourself traffic-free long enough to exercise a supercar up to 200mph, and anything beyond that has always been more of an academic exercise than anything else. Unless your name is Andy Wallace, that is.

The British racing driver's initial big result came at Le Mans in 1988, the first of many in a success-filled career racing sports prototypes. That first win was back when the Mulsanne Straight really was flat-out for 3.7 miles (6km), which meant going a little faster than 247mph (398km/h) for most of the 394 laps it took to win that year. So it shouldn't be surprising that Wallace has gotten the call when someone needed a production car tested at that kind of velocity. He was behind the wheel of the record-setting McLaren F1 at Ehra-Lessien in 1998 and then again with an even faster Bugatti in 2007. That association continues to this day, most recently experiencing the 305mph (495km/h) Vmax of the Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 300+.

Enlarge / Richard Stallman in 2015. (credit: Michael Debets/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Free software pioneer Richard Stallman has resigned from his posts at MIT and the Free Software Foundation after leaked emails showed him quibbling over the definition of rape in a conversation related to Jeffrey Epstein.

The conversation that triggered Stallman's fall started when someone—names other than Stallman's are redacted in the leaked emails—posted about a planned protest at MIT. The email stated that famed MIT computer scientist Marvin Minsky "is accused of assaulting one of Epstein's victims."

Stallman objected, saying that the blurb "does an injustice" to Minsky because even if it's true that the then-17-year-old had sex with Minsky, "the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing." (One witness to the alleged incident says that Minsky, who died in 2016, declined to have sex with her.)

Enlarge / An artist's approximation of what today's newly announced Saved by the Bell reboot might look like, since it will include at least some original series actors. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

The streaming fragmentation war continues apace, and today's new contender comes from Comcast—specifically, its NBCUniversal subsidiary, which finally took thewraps off its NBC Peacock service on Tuesday after months of rumors.

The official site is currently scarce on details, but NBCUniversal has begun distributing a massive list of expected new and legacy series coming to Peacock when it launches in "April 2020." In all, NBCUniversal estimates "15,000 hours" of content on that day-one launch. No pricing information is yet attached.

To review: Peacock is just the latest to join the likes of existing "mainstream" services Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Video, YouTube TV, and CBS All Access, as well as this November's Disney+ and Apple TV+ and next year's HBO Max. That doesn't even count the proliferation of "niche" streaming services ranging from the anime-focused Crunchyroll to the proudly pretentious Criterion.

Enlarge (credit: By Paul Hermans - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10766212)

Fish farms play an important role in supplying the modern world’s massive demand for seafood—about half the fish we eat today comes from fish farms rather than being caught in the wild. Aquaculture helps lighten the burden on wild fish populations, and farmed fish have a much smaller carbon footprint per pound than beef. (Of course, fish farms also produce waste and nutrients at concentrations that can wreak havoc on local marine ecosystems.) With all its modern relevance and all the hopes pinned on it for the future, it’s easy to forget that fish farming is an ancient practice.

People around the world have farmed fish since at least 1500 BCE; Egyptian tomb paintings show Nile tilapia being raised in captivity, and in ancient Assyria and Rome, wealthy homes often kept fish and crustaceans in pools called vivariums—a household version of a restaurant’s lobster tank. In China, ancient writers describe raising carp in flooded rice fields starting at around 1100 BCE. But some archaeologists, like Tsuneo Nakajima of the Lake Biwa Museum in Japan and his colleagues, suggest that aquaculture may have started much earlier.

Finding fish from a farm

“Given that rice paddy fields date back to the fifth millennium BCE in China, it might be expected that carp aquaculture has a similar antiquity,” wrote Nakajima and his colleagues. But it’s hard to find archaeological evidence of fish farming; a rice paddy that once housed carp looks about the same as a rice paddy that didn’t. Nakajima and his colleagues suggest that the size of the fish people ate may offer a clue—a clue that points to people capturing and raising wild carp in channels and enclosed areas of marshes starting around 6000 BCE.

Enlarge / The Battlestar Galactica cast as "The Last Supper" from 2007. (credit: SyFy)

Battlestar Galactica, which arguably launched the current era of plot arc-heavy, short-season dramas that now defines prestige TV, is coming back. Again.

The reboot of the series was announced today for Comcast's upcoming NBCUniversal streaming service, Peacock, The Hollywood Reporter reports today.

The original Battlestar Galactica was on the air for all of one season, running from fall 1978 to spring 1979. A 2003 miniseries revisiting the core concept⁠—robots called Cylons are coming to kill us all, and that's Very Bad⁠—served as the backdoor pilot to an eventual four-season run on the SyFy basic cable network (then called Sci Fi). The reboot series, which ran from 2004 to 2008, proved divisive among fans, inspiring passionate responses to both undeniably strong and extremely questionable writing choices throughout its run.

Enlarge (credit: Harley Mac)

Action on climate change has been focused on the electrical grid and our transportation systems, but there are other hurdles between here and a zero-greenhouse-gas-emissions world. Agriculture and deforestation are major hurdles, but so is cement.

Producing this humble, gray, ubiquitous building material actually accounts for about eight percent of global CO₂ emissions. Firing the kilns required for this process is very energy intensive, but the process itself also releases CO₂ from its starting materials. The primary ingredient in concrete is calcium oxide, which is taken from limestone (CaCO₃)—and that leaves CO₂ as a byproduct.

That means there are two problems to solve: the cement-making process needs to run on clean energy, and the CO₂ that is released must be captured somehow. A new study led by MIT’s Leah Ellis outlines an option that could make progress on both.