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  When the new F-150 arrives this fall, it will be Ford's most technologically advanced truck yet. Burt did you also know there are 11 different styles of front grille? These are just three of them. [credit: Ford ]

On Thursday evening, Ford livestreamed the launch of its newest F-150 pickup truck. It's hard to overstate how important the truck is for Ford; the F-Series has earned the company tens of billions of dollars, and it regularly tops the chart of best-selling light vehicles in the US market. So redesigning the truck for its 14th generation is not a task the company has undertaken lightly—according to the automaker, more than a thousand hours of customer research has informed this latest evolution of an American staple. When it goes on sale this fall, it will be Ford's most advanced light truck ever, with over-the-air updates enabling new features and for the first time, a hybrid option, and a battery EV version due in a year or two.

What’s PowerBoost?

For model year 2021, Ford is providing a variety of options when it comes to powertrains. Most of these carry over from the 13th-generation F-150, including a naturally aspirated 3.3L V6, turbocharged 2.7L and 3.5L V6 EcoBoost engines, a naturally aspirated 5.0L V8, and a 3.0L turbodiesel. (Exact power and torque outputs are not being disclosed yet.) All these use the same 10-speed automatic transmission. As standard, the F-150 is rear-wheel drive, but it can also be configured with all-wheel drive, with an open or locking rear differential.

The new, exciting addition to these is called PowerBoost, which is Ford-speak for a parallel hybrid. It combines the 3.5L EcoBoost V6 with a 35kW (47hp) electric motor that's integrated into the transmission and fed by a 1.5kWh lithium-ion battery pack. The pack is liquid-cooled and located between the frame rails, so there's no negative effect on interior volume or the load bed. There's no overall power or torque figure yet, but we are told it should tow up to 12,000lbs (5,443kg).

Enlarge / CERN makes its own superconducting wiring for the successor to the LHC. (credit: CERN)

The Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle collider humanity has ever built, resides in an enormous, 27-kilometer-long tunnel that extends under the Swiss and French countrysides. What's often overlooked is that the tunnel was built for an earlier piece of hardware, the Large Electron-Positron collider, or LEP. LEP had been built specifically to provide a clean way to study the Z boson; only later was it converted to a higher-energy proton collider that enabled the discovery of the Higgs boson.

Now, Europe is officially committing to taking a similar approach: building a huge tunnel at the CERN facility that will collide particles to enable a clean study of the Higgs boson. But Europe is leaving the option of using the tunnel for a future collider that could reach energies nearly 10 times higher than the LHC.

Electrons vs. hadrons

Electrons and positrons are fundamental particles; as far as we know, they have no smaller particles that comprise them. That makes their collisions extremely clean. The protons collided by the LHC, in contrast, are composed of a collection of quarks and gluons, making their collisions a complicated collection of sub-collisions that can be challenging to interpret.

Enlarge / Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), wears a protective mask during a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, June 23, 2020. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday updated and expanded its list of who is at risk of developing severe illness from COVID-19—emphasizing that it’s not just the elderly who suffer from the disease.

Most noticeably, the CDC removed the specific age threshold of 65 and over for those considered at risk of severe COVID-19—that is, those requiring hospitalization, intensive care, ventilation, or those who die from the disease.

Now, the agency emphasizes that there is a gradient of risk based on age. In other words, there is some risk at any age, but that risk increases with age. A 50-year-old will have more risk than a 40-year-old, and a 60-year-old is at higher risk than someone in their 50s. The greatest risk is seen in those aged 85 and over.

NBC's Peacock streaming service launches next month, and the jewel in the crown of its initial offerings is undoubtedly Brave New World, an ambitious adaptation of Aldous Huxley's classic 1932 dystopian novel. The full trailer for this Peacock original series is finally here, starring Alden Ehrenreich as Huxley's antihero, John the Savage, who finds himself struggling to adapt when he is thrust into a utopian society.

(Some spoilers for the book below.)

As we reported in April, Brave New World is set in the year 2540, in the World State city of London, where people are born in artificial wombs and indoctrinated through "sleep-learning" to fit into their assigned predetermined caste. Citizens regularly consume a drug called soma (part anti-depressant, part hallucinogen) to keep them docile and help them conform to strict social laws. Promiscuity is encouraged, but pregnancy (for women) is a cause for shame. Needless to say, both art and science (albeit to a lesser extent) are viewed with suspicion.

Enlarge / The 2020 Retina MacBook Air.

Apple has acquired device-management startup Fleetsmith. The technology and personnel that will join Apple as part of the acquisition could help Apple expand upon device enrollment and introduce better ways to set up new devices like iPads and Macs within organizations.

Fleetsmith's proposition to customers (and Apple) seems perfectly tailored to our times: the company offers a way for organizations to equip remote workers' (or workers otherwise not located in the central office) devices and have those devices automatically registered and set up for enterprise use as soon as they're first turned on. After that, Fleetsmith automatically ensures devices get needed software updates. It also provides IT managers with a dashboard for managing the fleet.

If you've used Jamf, a more widespread competitor, you get the general idea. But Fleetsmith already had a special focus on Apple devices, it has an Apple-like design sensibility, and it was likely a much cheaper option for Apple than Jamf, to boot. Jamf appears to be on a different path, with a $3 billion IPO planned.