Month: November 2022

Enlarge / In a stunning Photoshop move, a Nintendo GameCube pulls ahead of the pack. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

On Sunday, NASCAR driver Ross Chastain made history with an unprecedented wall-riding maneuver that qualified him for a championship race and set the record for the fastest lap on the track at 18.845 seconds. Remarkably, Chastain said he learned the move playing NASCAR 2005 on the Nintendo GameCube when he was a kid.

The maneuver happened at the Xfinity 500 race hosted at Martinsville Speedway in Ridgeway, Virginia. Martinsville is a half-mile short track built in 1947 that is well known for its tight, shallow-banked turns that usually require heavy braking to negotiate.

During the final lap of the race, Chastain found himself in 10th place but needed to pick up two positions to earn enough points to qualify for the Championship race on November 6. Instead of slowing down on the turn, Chastain stayed in fifth gear and gunned it, riding the outside wall and passing five cars to finish the race in fith place.

Enlarge (credit: Robert Llewellyn / Getty Images)

Black widows must despise Clint Sergi. While working on his Ph.D. in biology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Sergi spent his time designing little challenges for spiders—which often involved rewarding them with tasty dead crickets or confounding them by stealing the crickets away. “The big question that motivated the work was just wanting to know what is going on inside the minds of animals,” he says.

Biologists already know spider brains aren’t like human brains. Their sensory world is geared for life in webs and dark corners. “Humans are very visual animals,” says Sergi. “These web-building spiders have almost no vision. They have eyes, but they're mostly good for sensing light and motion.” Instead, he says, a black widow’s perception comes mainly from vibrations, kind of like hearing. “Their legs are sort of like ears that pick up the vibrations through the web.”

Enlarge / The Falcon Heavy rocket as seen at an altitude of about 160 meters on Tuesday, climbing above the fog but disappearing into haze. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

A dense fog shrouded much of Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday morning, largely obscuring the liftoff of the most powerful operational rocket in the world.

But takeoff the Falcon Heavy did, promptly at 9:41 am ET, climbing steadily above the Florida coast on its way to orbit. A few minutes into the launch, two side-mounted boosters—slightly modified versions of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket—peeled away from the center core of the rocket.

As that center core continued to climb toward orbit, the boosters fell back to Earth, burning a subset of their nine engines twice and making a picture-perfect side-by-side landing just a few kilometers away from where they launched from. SpaceX will now refurbish these side boosters for reuse on the military's next Falcon Heavy mission, USSF-67, in January. The center core was not recovered.