Month: June 2021

Actress Nichelle Nichols will forever be remembered for playing Uhura in Star Trek: The Original Series—one of the first Black women to play a prominent role on television—as well as engaging in the first interracial kiss on scripted television in the US. Less known is her equally seminal role as an ambassador for NASA  in the 1970s, working tirelessly to bring more diversity to the agency's recruitment efforts. That work is highlighted in Woman in Motion, a new documentary directed by Todd Thompson that is now streaming on Paramount+.

Thompson himself was not a hardcore Star Trek fan growing up, although he had seen most of the movies and was certainly familiar with Nichols' portrayal of Uhura. His producing partners were fans, however, and when they told him about Nichol's contributions to NASA, he decided it was a story that had to be told. Over the course of production, he interviewed dozens of people about how Nichols inspired them, and also spent a considerable amount of time with the actress herself, now 88.

"She's the definition of Hollywood royalty for me," Thompson told Ars. "How she carries herself, how she treats others, how she engages with you—she's so incredibly magnetic. What she did was so paramount to giving us a blueprint of where we need to go, how we need to be, if we're going to make any sort of progress here on Earth and beyond the stars. I was very humbled by the responsibility to tell her story and tell it the right way."

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  This is a 1905 Columbia XXXV Open Drive Brougham, which won best in class for the EVs. This Edwardian monster is a twin-motor design. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

AMELIA ISLAND, FLORIDA—It's rare to see an electric vehicle among the polished and restored vintage cars of a concours d'elegance. (That's French for a very fancy car show.) And that's despite the fact that electric power was a credible alternative to the internal combustion engine for the first few decades of the automobile. But this year's Amelia Island Concours d'Elegance went some way to rectifying that. Under the oppressive humidity, nestled between the usual concours fare of interwar phaetons and a wonderful assortment of Porsche 935s, there was an entire class of ancient EVs on display.

And what a varied class it was. A marvelously named Electrobat IV 1895 was the oldest EV to take to the well-manicured golf course. They were still in the earliest stages of figuring out this whole automobile thing 126 years ago and the Electrobat IV, running on skinny buggy tires, still looks like it's missing its horse. But the real innovation that Pedro Salem and Henry Morris came up with for the Electrobat was its electric powertrain, consisting of a 1.5 hp (1.1 kW) motor and a 350 lb (159 kg) battery. They went on to build a fleet of Electrobat taxis that operated in New York at the beginning of the last century.

The Waverley Electric from 1901 was nearly primitive, and again there's the impression that it's incomplete without an accompanying equine. But the 1901 Waverley rides on pneumatic treaded tires, it has headlights, and is powered by a 2.5 hp (1.8 kW) motor. A Waverley Four-Passenger Coupe from 1910 shows how far the Indianapolis-based company developed over a decade; while obviously an antique, the red two-door fits most definitions of a car.

Enlarge / In 2020, Intel partnered with the National Forest Foundation in Phase III of a project replacing invasive Arundo and Tamarix weed species with native flora and revegetating burned-off areas. This phase of the project aims to restore 79 million gallons of fresh water per year. (credit: Intel)

Two of the world's leading chip manufacturers—Intel and TSMC—are increasing their US-based manufacturing presence by building new plants in Arizona.

Chip foundries are critically dependent on water, and Arizona is one of the driest states in the nation. Arizona gets only 13.6 inches of annual rainfall (compared with 50-60 inches in most of the Deep South, or 30.3 inches average for the USA as a whole). But as Forrester research director Glenn O'Donnell told CNBC, chip-fabrication plants are similar to indoor swimming pools—"you need a lot to fill it, but you don't have to add much to keep it going."

Counterintuitively, the famously thirsty industry can even improve the local water supply due to a focus on reclamation and purification—Intel has funded 15 water restoration projects in the Grand Canyon State with a goal of restoring 937 million gallons per year, and it expects to reach net positive water use once the projects are completed.