Month: September 2023

Warner Bros. has released the official trailer for Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, the oft-delayed sequel to 2018's Aquaman, which introduced the world to Jason Momoa as the exiled heir to the underwater kingdom of Atlantis. This time around, we find Aquaman juggling domestic duties while battling an existential threat to Atlantis in the form of an old foe bent on exacting revenge.

(Spoilers for 2018's Aquaman below.)

When it was first announced, Aquaman initially struck me as an odd choice for a superhero movie. After all, that was the role—deemed ripe for satire—that Entourage's fictional actor Vincent Chase took on, with James Cameron supposedly directing for purposes of the plot. Then early images appeared with Jason Momoa in all his Aquaman glory, and many people changed their tune. The finished film wasn't a slam dunk with critics—I enjoyed it well enough but thought the plot was an unholy mess—but you sure couldn't argue with that box office return. Aquaman grossed a whopping $1.15 billion worldwide, the highest-grossing film in the DCEU.

Enlarge / This is muc22, and it set a new record for electric vehicle range on a single charge, driving for six days inside this hangar. (credit: TUfast Eco Team)

It must be the season for student-set world records. Earlier this week, we learned that a Swiss team of student engineers set a new world record for the fastest electric vehicle 0–62 mph (0–100 km/h) time. Today's story features another EV designed and built by students, this time from the Technical University of Munich, and they took a lot longer to set the record.

The car, called muc22, looks more conventional than the Swiss speedster, if only a little. The diminutive coupe in this case was built for efficiency, and in a six-day test at Munich airport, it set a new distance record on a single charge (for a non-solar EV): 1,599 miles (2,574 km), with less battery capacity than many plug-in hybrids—just 15.5 kWh.

The specs for muc22 are extreme, but they're on the far other side of the scale compared to something like a Pininfarina Battista hypercar. For one thing, the streamlined EV has a top speed of just 26 mph (42 km/h) and weighs just 374 lbs (170 kg) without a driver. The airflow-optimized shape has faired-in rear wheels and a drag coefficient of just 0.159; more importantly, though, it has a pretty tiny frontal area (it's only 39.4 inches/1,000 mm tall and 47.2 inches/1,200 mm wide).

Enlarge / The iPhone 15's USB-C port doesn't require special cables or chargers. (credit: Apple)

The iPhone 15 lineup's transition from Lightning to USB-C this week wasn’t a surprise to anyone who had been paying attention. Apple had been signaling for months that it intended to switch ports, at least in part to conform with new regulations from the EU and elsewhere that required them to do it.

With the USB-C transition essentially taken for granted, the rumor mill focused on Apple’s implementation of USB-C, namely that the company would limit data and charging speeds for any accessories not certified through its Made for iPhone (MFI) program. Without certified cables, the rumors said, other USB-C accessories would be limited to basic functionality, like 480Mbps USB 2.0 transfer speeds and slower charging speeds. (Reporting from MacStories indicates that the new iPhones support 20 W fast charging, though faster speeds may be possible with higher-wattage adapters; the iPhones can also provide up to 4.5 W of power to a connected accessory like the USB-C AirPods case.) Officially licensed Lightning cables use a small controller chip to verify authenticity, and cables without them can generate error messages and refuse to work.

But this USB-C rumor was always difficult to believe, partly because Apple has been shipping fully standards-compliant USB-C ports in its Macs and iPads for years now. If anything, I’ve found Apple’s USB-C ports to be less temperamental than those that come in some PCs—I’ve used HP and Lenovo PCs that either complain about slow charging or reduce performance if you use third-party chargers with them, but my MacBooks have always happily connected to whatever charger I wanted to use them with.