Month: October 2023

Enlarge (credit: Amazon)

Amazon has a plan to deploy 100,000 electric vans to its delivery fleet by 2030. At the rate it's going, that might happen a little sooner. On Thursday, it announced that it now has 10,000 Rivian electric delivery vans in service—up from 5,000 earlier this July.

Rivian's big order from Amazon was placed in 2019 as part of the online retailer and web service provider's plan to become carbon neutral by the year 2040. Earlier that year Amazon was an investor in a $700 million financing round for the EV startup, which makes electric SUVs and pickup trucks in addition to the Amazon electric delivery vans.

At the time, Jeff Bezos wanted all 100,000 Rivian vans on the road by 2024, but even before the coronavirus pandemic landed in March 2020, that had been revised to 2030. The first Rivian EDVs went into service in 2021.

Enlarge / Artist's depiction of Neanderthals after taking down a lion. (credit: Julio Lacerda/NLD)

Neanderthal hunters living 48,000 years ago in what is now Germany killed a large cave lion in what might be the earliest example of lion hunting yet known, according to a recent paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. Gabriele Russo of the University of Tubingen and co-authors based their conclusions on a close forensic analysis of a cave lion skeleton showing evidence of injury by a wooden spear. They also examined recently discovered cave lion claw bones showing evidence of having been skinned around 190,000 years ago.

Now extinct, cave lions were apex predators, larger than today's mountain lions. They were frequently depicted in Paleolithic art, and their body parts were used as ornaments, according to the authors—part of a long-standing relationship between carnivores and hominids that shaped cultural behaviors. Although it's known that hominins have been interacting with lions since the animals first arrived in Europe, less is known about the relationships between carnivores and hominims like Neanderthals from earlier periods.

Neanderthals were expert hunters known to kill bears and other carnivores, but evidence for them interacting with cave lions has remained scarce. A pair of lion fibula from the Middle Paleolithic found in eastern Iberia with cut marks indicates the lion was butchered, while other lion bones found in Southwestern France from the same period had cut marks indicative of skinning. This latest paper focused on a re-evaluation of a medium-sized male cave lion skeleton found at Siegsdorf, in Central Germany, in the 1980s.

Enlarge / A view of the Moon from Chandrayaan 3 before landing. (credit: ISRO)

In recent years the nation of India has embraced spaceflight as a means of establishing itself as a major geopolitical player. The Soviet Union and United States, of course, pioneered the use of space exploration to exercise soft power in the 1960s during the Cold War. More recently China has used its various space missions, both human and scientific, to bolster its international prestige.

And now India is seeking to do the same. Spaceflight not only helps out on the international stage, but domestically as well. After the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft made a soft landing on the Moon in August, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was able to bask in the reflected glory of the nation's space agency, ISRO. Modi also previously set into motion the Gaganyaan program to launch the country's first astronauts from its own soil.

With that milestone now possibly set to occur in 2025, Modi has set his sights higher and farther. After a high-level meeting this week to assess progress on the Gaganyaan mission, Modi's office released a statement outlining the country's ambitions in space over the next two decades.

Enlarge (credit: living_images | E+)

On Monday, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Google search data evidence retrieved by Denver police using a controversial keyword search warrant can be used to prosecute a teenager who has been charged with deadly arson.

Gavin Seymour, the teenager accused of arson, had moved to suppress the evidence, asking the court to consider whether keyword warrants violate constitutional rights protecting against unlawful, overly broad searches and seizures.

This was the first constitutional challenge to the legitimacy of keyword warrants—which operate in the complete opposite manner of traditional warrants and do not require police to first identify a suspect before conducting a search—but the judge writing the majority opinion, William W. Hood, declined to definitively decide whether keyword search warrants are unconstitutional.