Month: February 2024

Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket is seen with a Nova C lander tucked in its payload fairing. (credit: SpaceX)

Are you ready for round two of the lunar lottery?

As early as Thursday morning, a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a privately developed lunar lander may launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The vehicle, built by a Houston-based company called Intuitive Machines, will be the second US-made lunar lander to launch from Florida in a little more than a month.

The renaissance in American lunar landers represents the vanguard of NASA's program to return humans to the Moon and establish a more permanent presence. (No US-built vehicle has made a soft landing on the Moon in more than half a century.) Part of that is finding lower-cost transportation services, which is what these privately built lunar landers are all about.

Enlarge (credit: Roman Rybalko via Getty)

Almost half of all people in the world today speak an Indo-European language, one whose origins go back thousands of years to a single mother tongue. Languages as different as English, Russian, Hindustani, Latin and Sanskrit can all be traced back to this ancestral language.

Over the last couple of hundred years, linguists have figured out a lot about that first Indo-European language, including many of the words it used and some of the grammatical rules that governed it. Along the way, they’ve come up with theories about who its original speakers were, where and how they lived, and how their language spread so widely.

Most linguists think that those speakers were nomadic herders who lived on the steppes of Ukraine and western Russia about 6,000 years ago. Yet a minority put the origin 2,000 to 3,000 years before that, with a community of farmers in Anatolia, in the area of modern-day Turkey. Now a new analysis, using techniques borrowed from evolutionary biology, has come down in favor of the latter, albeit with an important later role for the steppes.

Enlarge (credit: Roman Rybalko via Getty)

Almost half of all people in the world today speak an Indo-European language, one whose origins go back thousands of years to a single mother tongue. Languages as different as English, Russian, Hindustani, Latin and Sanskrit can all be traced back to this ancestral language.

Over the last couple of hundred years, linguists have figured out a lot about that first Indo-European language, including many of the words it used and some of the grammatical rules that governed it. Along the way, they’ve come up with theories about who its original speakers were, where and how they lived, and how their language spread so widely.

Most linguists think that those speakers were nomadic herders who lived on the steppes of Ukraine and western Russia about 6,000 years ago. Yet a minority put the origin 2,000 to 3,000 years before that, with a community of farmers in Anatolia, in the area of modern-day Turkey. Now a new analysis, using techniques borrowed from evolutionary biology, has come down in favor of the latter, albeit with an important later role for the steppes.

Enlarge / BYD does most of its manufacturing in China, but that is rapidly changing. (credit: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The Chinese automaker BYD—which stands for Build Your Dreams—is on something of a roll. Last year, it sold more than 3 million cars, including 1.4 million hybrids and another 1.6 million battery electric vehicles. It even sold more BEVs in China than Tesla in the final three months of 2023, helped by the fact that its larger portfolio of vehicles includes smaller and cheaper vehicles. Now, BYD is considering opening a plant in Mexico, according to Nikkei Asia.

Although most of BYD's sales are in China, the automaker has more global ambitions. Factories are in various stages of planning or construction in Thailand, Hungary, and Brazil, and now, BYD is studying the feasibility of a factory in Mexico, potentially in Nuevo Leon, or perhaps the Baijo region in the middle of the country.

Mexico isn't a bad place to put a new car factory. The sector employs more than a million people, so there's a skilled workforce in place already, and the country produces 3.7 million cars per year. Indeed, BMW, Kia, and Stellantis have all said they will make EVs in Mexico, and Tesla has indicated it could do the same.

Enlarge / BYD does most of its manufacturing in China, but that is rapidly changing. (credit: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The Chinese automaker BYD—which stands for Build Your Dreams—is on something of a roll. Last year, it sold more than 3 million cars, including 1.4 million hybrids and another 1.6 million battery electric vehicles. It even sold more BEVs in China than Tesla in the final three months of 2023, helped by the fact that its larger portfolio of vehicles includes smaller and cheaper vehicles. Now, BYD is considering opening a plant in Mexico, according to Nikkei Asia.

Although most of BYD's sales are in China, the automaker has more global ambitions. Factories are in various stages of planning or construction in Thailand, Hungary, and Brazil, and now, BYD is studying the feasibility of a factory in Mexico, potentially in Nuevo Leon, or perhaps the Baijo region in the middle of the country.

Mexico isn't a bad place to put a new car factory. The sector employs more than a million people, so there's a skilled workforce in place already, and the country produces 3.7 million cars per year. Indeed, BMW, Kia, and Stellantis have all said they will make EVs in Mexico, and Tesla has indicated it could do the same.