Month: September 2021

Enlarge / The 2021 Blix Vika+ foldable ebike, as posed in a neighbor's fancypants garden. Thanks, neighbor. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

As the ebike universe explodes with options and brands all vying for a piece of the burgeoning market, I keep coming back to a company that I have liked but rarely heard much about: Blix. My first brush with the California e-bike manufacturer came in 2018 when I was offered a test ride of its then-$1,599 Vika folding ebike model. I enjoyed my time with the Vika, but as a relatively new ebike tester, I opted not to write up a novice review.

Since then, however, Ars' bike-savviest staffers have been testing and reviewing a number of high-quality e-bikes. In my case, I've had a few e-bike tests come and go, sometimes with vehicles not quite meriting Ars coverage. Most recently I reviewed the handsome VanMoof X3 in 2020, and I both appreciated its best aspects and wondered why it didn't fit some potential ebike use cases.

When the time came for me to buy a new bike this year, I opted for an ebike, largely because I want the freedom to ride farther in a single day without feeling worn out or sweaty—especially in a hilly city like Seattle. I soon circled back to Blix—that was a good bike at a good price, I kept thinking, and I found a used Blix cruiser (the 2018 Aveny) for an even better price. It became my daily rider at the outset of this summer.

A mile below ground, a sign hangs over the door to the LUX dark matter experiment telling visitors how far to Wall Drug—in both dimensions. (credit: Matthew R. Francis)

Update, Sept. 6, 2021: It's Labor Day Weekend in the US, and even though most of us are continuing to call home "the office," Ars staff is taking a long weekend to rest and relax. And given we can't travel like we could during Labor Day Weekends past, we thought we'd revisit one of our favorite trips from the archives. This story on our adventure to the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) dark matter experiment in South Dakota originally ran in July 2014, and it appears unchanged below.

One of the quietest, darkest places in the cosmos isn’t out in the depths of space. It’s at the center of a tank of cold liquid xenon in a gold mine deep under the Black Hills of South Dakota. It needs to be that quiet: any stray particles could confuse the detectors lining the outside of the tank. Those detectors are looking for faint, rare signals, ones that could reveal the presence of dark matter.

The whole assembly—the container of liquid and gaseous xenon, the water tank enveloping that, and all the detectors—is called the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) dark matter experiment. So far, LUX hasn’t found anything, but the days of its operation are just beginning: the detector was installed and started operations just last year.

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  Life is Strange: True Colors wears its heart on its sleeve as Alex Chen strums a plaintive rendition of Radiohead's "Creep" on the guitar. [credit: Square Enix ]

This preview is based on limited impressions tested on PS5 and made available by Square Enix ahead of the game's September 10 launch.

With four games released over the past six years (including one mini-spinoff, The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit), the Life is Strange series has established a reputation as an unlikely type of narrative adventure. Its YA protagonists, hipster-slanted coming-of-age stories, and proximity to trauma make it part of a specific genre, and the series has proven unexpectedly adept at mostly reinventing itself from entry to entry.

In theory, these underpinnings might suggest a (hear us out) Silent Hill-style problem that the series has so far managed to avoid. But where Konami's survival horror series punished its protagonists through unique, hellish manifestations reflecting their specific inner demons, Life is Strange's supernatural abilities empower its characters. Our protagonists aren't defined by their tragedies. They could be anything, which allows series developers much more freedom to try new ideas.