Month: February 2020

Enlarge (credit: Alexander Koerner / Stringer / Getty Images)

Volkswagen’s chief executive has pledged to employ a young climate campaigner to “aggressively” challenge the company’s environmental policies, as he acknowledged the world’s largest carmaker was moving too slowly in the race to roll out electric vehicles.

“I’m looking to hire an activist,” Herbert Diess told the Financial Times. “We have so many ideas, but they take too long to implement in our big organization, so I need someone really aggressive internally.”

In a rare move for a multinational, the appointee will be granted direct access to Mr Diess, and other top VW executives.

Enlarge / A self portrait of InSight's hardware on the Red Planet. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

While the rovers seem to get most of the attention, they're just one part of a suite of instruments we're using to understand the history and geology of Mars. We have an orbiting telescope pointed down toward its surface and an orbiting atmospheric observatory trying to help us understand why Mars is so sparse. And, for nearly a year, we have had a seismograph, weather observatory, and magnetic sensor parked at Mars' equator.

The InSight mission (from the bacronym "Interior exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport") is a stationary lander and contains a suite of instruments designed to give us a clear picture of Mars' workings. It landed toward the end of 2018 and has had instruments in operation since early last year. Now, in a large series of papers, the teams behind the lander's hardware have analyzed the first data to come back from InSight, which includes the first recordings of marsquakes, along with some details on the local magnetic field.

At the equator

InSight landed at a region of Mars called Elysium Planiti, a region sandwiched between the southern highlands and the second largest volcano on the planet, Elysium. Billions of years ago, that volcano left large rock deposits that spread across parts of Elysium Planitia. But to the east, there's additional volcanic terrain that appears to have formed as little as 10 million years ago and terrain that's associated with the flow of liquid water.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Last week, an email popped into my mailbox with a simple subject: "Jif vs. GIF." Its sender asked if I was interested in hearing about a peanut butter producer's interest in "setting the record straight on how to pronounce GIF."

That's not quite what I got. The powers that be at Smucker's advertising department thought we at Ars Technica might bite on their proposal that a new jar of Jif would put the years-long pronunciation debate to rest. Instead, I ended up spending too much time talking about, contemplating, and researching the pronunciation of the letter G—and of other invented brands and acronyms in general.

Does Wilhite have it right?

If you're wondering, the J.M. Smucker Company—known on the street as Smucker's—comes down on the "hard-G" side of this debate. The company does this in order to support its latest advertising campaign that says—wouldn't you know it—the soft-G version has already existed for decades in the form of a massive peanut butter brand. Thus, the people at Smucker's say, don't mix up the two. Soft G "jiff" for food; hard G "giff" for an animated image format that came into vogue during GeoCities' heyday.

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  Chevrolet has designed plenty of mid-engined Corvettes over the past six decades, but this is the first time it's put one into production. [credit: Chevrolet ]

Predicting the arrival of a mid-engined Corvette has been a perennial bench-racing sport in the auto news game for decades. The first of the Chevrolet research cars that placed an engine behind the driver goes back to 1960, conceived by the first chief engineer of the Corvette, Zora Arkus-Duntov. Now, after thinking about it very, very long and very, very hard, Chevrolet starts building production mid-engined Corvettes this year, some 60 years after that first research vehicle.

With all that pent-up anticipation, could the new $59,995 Corvette actually be both brilliant and actually shy of the mark? We tested several with different suspensions on the road and the track around Spring Mountain Raceway in Nevada to glean the truth.

Design

The inescapable reality of designing a mid-engine layout in the sports car segment is that, well, the Italians basically own it. But they didn't pioneer it. Post-WWII, Porsche built sports-racing 550 Spyders, RSKs and 904s, but Ferrari and Lamborghini built street cars placing engines behind drivers' heads in earnest by the 1960s.

Enlarge / "Cowardly Dones," a piece by Jospeh Delappe, is a bit more direct about its message than some of his more interactive work.

In 1983, President Reagan gave a speech about the role of computers in military preparation and recruiting that seems more relevant than ever nearly 40 years later.

In it, he noted the “incredible hand, eye, and brain coordination” many young people were developing by playing video games, and said the “Air Force believes these [game-playing] kids will be outstanding pilots should they fly our jets.” Reagan also pointed out that the “computerized radar screen in the cockpit is not unlike the computerized video screen,” and that if you “watch a 12-year-old take evasive action and score multiple hits while playing Space Invaders… you will appreciate the skills of tomorrow's pilot.”

What Reagan didn’t know was that some of those kids-turned-pilots would grow up never needing to take evasive action. That is because they’d be flying deadly drone warplanes remotely over villages half a world away. “Right now you're being prepared for tomorrow in many ways, and in ways that many of us who are older cannot fully comprehend,” Reagan said at the conclusion of his speech.