Month: April 2024

Enlarge / Walter Huang's Model X in a tow yard days after his fatal crash. (credit: NTSB)

Tesla and its controversial Autopilot driver assistance system goes on trial again today in California. It's fighting a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of Walter Huang, an Apple engineer who was killed in 2018 when his Tesla Model X drove head-first into a highway gore. But despite the findings of a highly critical National Transportation Safety Board investigation, Tesla may well win in court—California juries let the automaker off the hook in two separate trials last year.

Regular complaints

Huang died on March 23, 2018, when his Model X crashed at 70 mph into a concrete divider on US Highway 101, apparently confused by an interchange with State Highway 85 to its left.

Huang trusted Tesla Autopilot, the carmaker's partially automated driving system that, at the time, combined forward-looking radar and optical sensors to control the car's speed on the road relative to other vehicles and keep it centered within the lane. (In the years since, Tesla has abandoned the use of forward-looking radar, relying on just optical cameras instead.)

Enlarge / SpaceX will continue to iterate on Starship. (credit: SpaceX)

Elon Musk has been talking publicly about his sweeping vision for Mars settlement for nearly eight years now, dating to a speech in Guadalajara, Mexico, in September 2016.

This weekend, at SpaceX's Starbase facility in South Texas, Musk once again took up the mantle of his "making life multiplanetary" cause. Addressing employees at the location of the company's Starship factory, Musk spoke about the "high urgency" needed to extend the "light of consciousness" beyond Earth. That is not because humanity's home planet is a lost cause or should not be preserved. Rather, Musk said, he does not want humanity to remain a one-planet civilization that will, inevitably, face some calamity that will end the species.

All of this is fairly familiar territory for spaceflight enthusiasts—and observers of Musk. But during the last eight years he has become an increasingly controversial and polarizing figure. Based upon his behavior, many people will dismiss Musk's Mars comments as those of a megalomaniac. At least in regard to spaceflight, however, that would be wrong. Musk's multiplanetary ambitions today are more credible because SpaceX has taken steps toward doing what he said the company would do.

Enlarge (credit: Weber)

What if human blood turned into a sort of rubbery slime that can bounce back into a wound and stop it from bleeding in record time?

Until now, it was a mystery how hemolymph, or insect blood, was able to clot so quickly outside the body. Researchers from Clemson University have finally figured out how this works through observing caterpillars and cockroaches. By changing its physical properties, the blood of these animals can seal wounds in about a minute because the watery hemolymph that initially bleeds out turns into a viscoelastic substance outside of the body and retracts back to the wound.

“In insects vulnerable to dehydration, the mechanistic reaction of blood after wounding is rapid,” the research team said in a study recently published in Frontiers in Soft Matter. “It allows insects to minimize blood loss by sealing the wound and forming primary clots that provide scaffolding for the formation of new tissue.”

Enlarge (credit: Anadolu Agency / Contributor | Anadolu)

Brazil’s attorney general has demanded “urgent regulation” of social media sites after Elon Musk threatened to disobey a court order banning certain profiles on his X platform and after he called for a Supreme Court justice to “resign or be impeached.”

“It is urgent to regulate social networks,” said Jorge Messias.

“We cannot live in a society in which billionaires domiciled abroad have control of social networks and put themselves in a position to violate the rule of law, failing to comply with court orders and threatening our authorities.”