Month: March 2020

Enlarge (credit: Elle Cayabyab Gitlin)

For the last couple of years I've wanted to spend some time with an Acura NSX. After all, it's a hybrid, which I like, and a supercar, which I also like. Despite a strong suspicion that I'd like a car that combined both of those things, for one reason or another the stars never aligned save for a brief 20 minutes back in 2017, which was not long enough to really form an impression. But in January, Acura asked me and and three other journalists to ferry four NSXs from Ohio, where these mid-engined hybrid supercars are built, down to Florida. The only catch: we had just two days to get there—a distance of about 1,200 miles (1,931km), according to the route we were to take.

It's not like the first one

Honda, which owns the Acura brand and uses it for high-end US vehicles, introduced the NSX in 1990, and it really did shake up the established order. Until then, the mid-engined sports car had mainly been the preserve of small European outfits, most notably Ferrari. The cars looked great and sometimes handled well, but they were expensive to buy and expensive to maintain. The NSX proved you could have your cake and eat it, too. It looked the part, with relatively simple but elegant lines that left no doubt as to where the engine was in relation to the driver, along with a black roof meant to evoke the canopy of an F-16 jet fighter.

The car was a technological tour de force, with a lightweight aluminum construction and a high-revving, naturally aspirated 3.0L V6 engine mounted sideways behind the cabin. It made more expensive cars like the Ferrari 348 look positively antiquarian by comparison. In addition to the car's F1-inspired tech, Honda even recruited F1 drivers Ayrton Senna and Satoru Nakajima to help hone the car's handling on track. The first-generation NSX lived on until 2005, and while it never sold in massive numbers, it became a cult favorite thanks to video games like Gran Turismo.

Enlarge (credit: Thomas Trutschel / Getty Images News)

The cryptocurrency world has experienced its biggest one-day plunge in months. Bitcoin, the most popular cryptocurrency, is down 21 percent over the last 24 hours. Earlier today, Bitcoin fell below $6,000 for the first time since May 2019.

Ether, the currency of the Ethereum network, is down a whopping 27 percent. Lesser-known cryptocurrencies have seen similarly large losses.

There's no obvious cryptocurrency-specific reason for the crash. Instead, it seems to be part of the broader coronavirus-related selloff that has rocked stock markets around the world.

Enlarge / South Korean soldiers wearing protective masks sit at a temperature screening point at Incheon International Airport in Incheon, South Korea, on Monday, March 9, 2020. The coronavirus outbreak in South Korea is showing signs of slowing as the rate of new daily infections falls and health authorities almost finished testing members of a religious sect at the center of the epidemic, the country's health minister said. (credit: Getty Images)

This pandemic—the new disease COVID-19, the virus SARS-CoV-2—is not Singapore’s first epidemiological nightmare. In 2002 and 2003, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, the original SARS, tore out of China and through Asia, killing 33 people in Singapore and sparking wholesale revisions to the city-state’s public health system. “They realized they wanted to invest for the future to reduce that economic cost if the same thing were to happen again,” says Martin Hibberd, an infectious disease researcher now at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who worked in Singapore on SARS.

So Singapore instituted new travel controls and health infrastructure. Then, in 2009, it got hit again—with H1N1 influenza, the so-called swine flu. “Pandemic flu came from Mexico, an Americas event, and Singapore tried to put in place in 2009 what they learned with SARS,” Hibberd says. “But flu was much more difficult to contain than SARS was, and they realized what they thought they’d learned didn’t work. It was another lesson.”