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Nikolaus Wogen

Meet Ducati's Squadra Alpina, all previous champions in the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. From left to right: Greg Tracy, Micky Dymond, Carlin Dunne, Gary Trachy.

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COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—The Pikes Peak International Hill Climb was an all-car affair for most of its 100 years. But the past few decades have seen motorcycles return to the mountain, getting faster (and more dangerous) since the entire road was paved in 2011. As with their four-wheel-riding cousins, bike racers have started looking at electric motors, which, unlike internal combustion engines, aren't fazed by altitude.

This year, 36 bikes, quads, and sidecars were entered in Sunday's race. They would get first crack at the course; running the cars first creates the risk of dirt or rocks being dragged onto the road, and the 12.4-mile (19.99km) route is already unforgiving enough.

"Unfortunately, now that it's all pavement and the speeds are higher, the risk factor is much greater [and] the future of bikes could be in peril. They've had a death the past two years, unfortunately," explained Don Canet. Canet is road test editor for Cycle World and has competed at Pikes Peak in recent years. To try to manage the risk, all of this year's motorbikes have to have single-piece handlebars, and the fastest liter-class Superbikes are no longer allowed. "Not to say that the bikes we're running now are nearly as fast, but at least it's a move—probably to appease the insurance carrier," Canet said.

In a somewhat unexpected twist, Facebook has won a legal battle against Belgium's data protection authority, which had sought to prevent Facebook from tracking non-Facebook (or not-logged-into-Facebook) users, both on the Facebook website itself but also via the company's Like and Share buttons that can be found in even the darkest depths of the known universe.

The Brussels appeals court dismissed the case on Wednesday, saying that the Belgian CPP (Commission for the Protection of Privacy) had no jurisdiction over Facebook, which has its European headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.

"We are pleased with the court's decision and look forward to bringing all our services back online for people in Belgium," a Facebook spokesperson said.

It's the question that every movie fan asks in summer: why are there so many remakes and sequels and reboots? It turns out that science may have an answer. Unfortunately, if you're hoping for more original stories, the prognosis is not good.

Two network theorists in the Netherlands, Folgert Karsdorp and Antal van den Bosch, just published a study on story networks in Royal Society Open Science. Story networks, they write, are "streams of retellings in which retellers modify and adapt retellings in a gradual and accumulative way." There is also a basic structure that seems to underly how these networks function. To explore retellings, the researchers looked at more than 200 versions of the Little Red Riding Hood story, which had been retold over the past two centuries. They measured the stories' similarity to one another with the amusingly named "bag-of-words" technique, which reveals how many words two texts have in common. Then they created a network diagram showing relatedness between stories over time. Earlier stories became what the researchers called "pre-texts" that inspired later retellings.

A network diagram showing the relatedness of two sets of "retold" texts. At left, a set of chain letters, and at right, the Little Red Riding Hood retellings. Note that some pre-texts (earlier stories) spawn huge numbers of retellings. (credit: Royal Society Open Science)

Translated into movie terms, you can think of Bram Stoker's original Dracula novel from 1897 as a pre-text, and all of the subsequent movies and TV series as retellings.  A story network grows out of Dracula as people retell the story, then retell the retellings, modifying it as they go. What the researchers found was that retellers rarely went back to the earliest pre-texts but instead preferred to retell more recent versions. In the case of the Dracula story, that would explain why a terrifying, barely human monster in the late nineteenth century is commonly represented today as an ultra-hot guy with sexual magnetism who occasionally goes fangy. As the story got retold throughout the twentieth century, you can see Dracula getting more and more handsome with each retelling, until we expect that Dracula is a suave and charming man with a tragic past. As retellers gravitated toward the most recent retelling, certain aspects of the story were magnified (such as Dracula's hotness) while others were forgotten (for example, we have yet to see a single Dracula retelling that deals with a forgotten aspect of the novel, which is that Dracula's love interest, Mina, is a geek who uses all the latest Victorian recording technology to do research on vampires).

Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

Your smartphone isn't the only thing that companies are obsessed with making thinner. Focus has turned to laptops as well, with the belief that making thin-as-paper and light-as-air notebooks will draw in more of the forever-on-the-go working professionals. Thinness also lends itself to design challenges that both excite and loom over OEMs—on one hand, thin laptops should be inherently sexy, but on the other hand, it can be a challenge to make a truly powerful, performance-driven pancake notebook.

Enter HP's new Spectre 13 laptop. The company bills it as the thinnest notebook in the world, and its sleek, metallic-accented design complements that title. However, unlike Apple's newest MacBook, HP managed to fit full Core i5 and i7 processors into the Spectre, in addition to three USB Type-C ports and a 4-cell battery. While it doesn't come cheap with a starting price of $1,169, it does do its best to offer more power and a fresh design compared to the likes of the MacBook and Dell's XPS 13.