Expanding the Tesla Cybertruck aesthetic to architecture, New York-based Lars Büro design created the Cybunker as a spontaneous exercise. Once uploaded to the web, the 1,800-square foot storage depot and accessory dwelling unit found enough fans to convince the designer to begin engineering studies, with cost and build details said to come in early 2020. Seems the same thing happened in Russia, only on a larger scale: St. Petersburg design firm Modern House sent Motor1 its plans for what it calls the Cyberhouse. At 3,230 square feet of living space, the freestanding unit nearly doubles the size of the Cybunker. Furthermore, the Russians went all-in on the Cybertruck’s “Blade Runner” themes, including features to protect occupants from “extreme situations [from a] zombie apocalypse to nuclear threat.”
Modern House says the Cyberhouse needs 16,727 square feet of land, a little more than one-third of an acre, even though the outer shell takes up just 7,500 square feet. That shell is formed of concrete slabs sheathed in heavy-duty steel. The doors act as airlocks, the armored windows are protected by fixed shutters and steel gates that raise and lower like a drawbridge. The living space within the inner concrete core occupies two levels, fit for up to seven occupants. The video doesn’t tour the interior areas, and we don’t know how much of the floorplan’s open areas can be protected from outside influence. There is, though, a space in the lower atrium made for a Cybertruck, complete with an elevator to lower the pickup into subterranean safety.
As with the Cybunker, there’s a chance Cyberhouse will make the journey from Internet fancy to real life. Modern House’s head architect said, “The project was conceived as an architectural game, but, surprisingly, we have already received the first proposals.” At the moment, pricing begins at $865,000 “in basic configuration.”
Amid the growing popularity of the Impossible Burger, Beyond Meat products, and other plant-based meat alternatives, the meat industry has declared war.
Now, there’s a new claim: that they’ll make men grow breasts.
As first noted by The Washington Post, an article labeled as “news” in the trade publication Tri-State Livestock News claims that eating Burger King’s Impossible Whopper—a new faux-beef menu item—could cause men to grow breasts.
The impossible whopper has 44mg of estrogen and the whopper has 2.5ng of estrogen. Now let me refresh your metric system. There are 1 million nanograms (ng) in one milligram (mg). That means an impossible whopper has 18 million times as much estrogen as a regular whopper. Just six glasses of soy milk per day has enough estrogen to grow boobs on a male. That’s the equivalent of eating four impossible whoppers per day. You would have to eat 880 pounds of beef from an implanted steer to equal the amount of estrogen in one birth control pill.
The Post also notes that conservative news outlets, such as National File and MichaelSavage.com, have parroted the claims. “In short, the Impossible Burger is a genetically modified organism filled with calorie-dense oils that can make a man grow breasts if eaten in sufficient quantity,” Tom Pappert, editor in chief of the National File, concluded.
Plant-based bull
The claim that soy-based foods, like the Impossible Whopper, will “feminize” men is a tired one that has been around for years—and still lacks evidence to back it up.
It’s based on the fact that soy contains a high concentration of isoflavones. These are plant-derived chemicals that can act like estrogen in some tissues in mammals but are much weaker than the real sex hormone.
Soy consumption and its isoflavones have been studied extensively. There have been thousands of studies on its hypothetical benefits and harms to human health—from possibly protecting against certain types of cancers, possibly preventing heart disease, and possibly easing the symptoms of menopause, as well as possibly contributing to poor cognition in older age, and possibly reducing thyroid hormone levels. For general reviews of the findings, click
Then there are the studies that have looked into whether isoflavones can feminize men and infants and interfere with fertility and development. The general concern goes back decades and has been bolstered by the occasional case report and animal study, which have questionable applicability to human health overall.
In particular, the fear of men growing breasts from soy consumption was highlighted in a 2008 case report in which a 60-year-old man developed benign swelling of male breast tissue and elevated estrogen levels. Doctors reported that the man consumed a whopping three quarts of soymilk a day. That would provide around eight times the intake of isoflavones that have been recorded in older men in Japan and Shanghai who eat soy-heavy diets.
One nutrition researcher noted of the case report that such excessive intake of pretty much any nutritious food could result in untoward effects. For instance, if the soymilk had been fortified with calcium, it would have resulted in an overdose that can cause hyperkalemia.
Overall, analyses of numerous studies have found no evidence that isoflavone consumption in normal ranges affects male hormone levels or sperm and semen quality. Likewise, there is no conclusive evidence that soy-based infant formula has adverse effects, either. The American Academy of Pediatrics has concluded that “soy protein-based formulas are a safe and nutritionally equivalent alternative to cow milk-based formula for term infants whose nutritional needs are not met from breast milk.”
While nutrition researchers say long-term human studies could help provide more concrete conclusions, for now, there’s no reason to think eating an Impossible Whopper will increase anyone’s cup size.
ISTANBUL — Turkey unveiled its first fully domestically-produced car on Friday, saying it aimed to eventually produce up to 175,000 a year of the electric vehicle in a project expected to cost 22 billion lira ($3.7 billion) over 13 years.
The project has been a long-time goal of President Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling AK Party as a demonstration of the country’s growing economic power.
Speaking at the unveiling ceremony, Erdogan said Turkey aimed not only to sell the car domestically but also wanted it to become a global brand, starting with Europe.
“We’re all together witnessing Turkey’s 60-year-old dream become reality,” he said, referring to failed plans in the past to build a fully home-produced car. “When we see this car on roads around the whole world, we will have reached our goal.”
Following his speech, a red SUV model of the car and another grey sedan one were raised onto the stage, sporting the TOGG label of the consortium that is building them.
Erdogan said the charging infrastructure for electric cars would be ready nationwide by 2022.
Turkey is already a big exporter to Europe of cars made domestically by firms such as Ford, Fiat Chrysler, Renault, Toyota and Hyundai.
The new project, launched in October, will receive state support such as tax breaks, and establish a production facility in the automotive hub of Bursa in northwest Turkey, according to a presidential decision in the country’s Official Gazette.
Five models of the car will be produced, the statement said, adding the government had guaranteed to buy 30,000 of the vehicles by 2035.
Erdogan first revealed plans in November 2017 to launch a car made entirely in Turkey by 2021.
The consortium, called Turkey’s Automobile Initiative Group (TOGG), was established in mid 2018 by five industrial groups: Anadolu Group, BMC, Kok Group, mobile phone operator Turkcell and Zorlu Holding, the parent of TV maker Vestel.
TOGG’s CEO is former Bosch executive Gurcan Karakas and its chief operating officer is Sergio Rocha, former General Motors Korea chief executive. It said it would begin production in 2022 with compact SUVs.
In October, Volkswagen said it had postponed a final decision on whether to build a car plant in Turkey amid international criticism of an October Turkish military operation in Syria.
Flush with cash from Amazon and Ford, among others, Rivian is moving full speed ahead. It confirmed the R1T and R1S due out in late 2020 will be available with a unique tank turn function.
The feature gives Rivian’s battery-powered off-roaders the ability to perform a 180-degree turn by spinning in place like a tracked vehicle. We first heard of it in July 2019 when a video showing it in action surfaced on YouTube, but the company quickly pointed out it wasn’t authorized and had it taken down. This time, it’s official; Rivian announced the tank turn on its verified Twitter account.
Performing a tank turn requires simultaneously spinning the left and right wheels in opposite directions, which is why there’s not one car sold new in 2019 that’s capable of it. Rivian’s models can pull it off because the drivetrain they’re both powered by assigns each wheel its own electric motor. They’re individually controlled, so getting the wheels on the driver’s side to spin forward and the ones on the passenger’s side to turn backwards requires little more than a few lines of code.
As we previously reported, Rivian trademarked the terms Tank Turn and Tank Steer in October 2018, which hints the feature could wear either name. And while two-wheel drive models don’t appear in its product plan, we don’t know whether the function will be standard or optional. However, there’s a good chance we’ll see it on other models, like its upcoming rally-inspired electric car.
Hardcore off-roaders will undoubtedly put the function to good use while exploring the great outdoors. It’s far simpler to push the Tank Steer button on the touchscreen (or wherever Rivian places it) than to make a 14-point turn in a relatively big vehicle. It’s not called Donut Mode, though, and the company allegedly warned performing a tank turn on dry pavement to burn rubber will “break shit.”
The R1T and the R1S are both scheduled to enter production in late 2020. They’ll be built in a former Mitsubishi factory located in Normal, Illinois. Rivian has less than a year to reliably start manufacturing cars, so we expect to learn more about both models in the coming months.
For many of us, winter, with its chilly days and long nights, brings with it a general sense of malaise. It’s harder to peel ourselves out of bed in the half-light of morning, and hunched over our desks at work, we can feel our productivity draining away with the remnants of the afternoon sun.
For the small subsection of the population who experience full-blown seasonal affective disorder (SAD), it’s even worse—winter blues mutate into something far more debilitating. Sufferers experience hypersomnia, low mood, and a pervasive sense of futility during the bleaker months. SAD notwithstanding, depression is more widely reported during winter, suicide rates increase, and productivity in the workplace drops during January and February.
While it’s easy to put all of this down to some nebulous idea of winter gloominess, there might be a scientific reason for all of this despondency. If our body clocks are out of sync with our waking—and working—hours, shouldn’t we be tweaking our office hours to help improve our mood?
“If our body clock is saying it wants us to wake up at 9:00, because it’s a dark winter’s day, but we’re getting ourselves up at 7:00—then we are missing out on a complete sleep phase,” says Greg Murray, professor of psychology at Swinburne University, Australia. Research into the area of chronobiology—the study of how our body regulates sleep and wakefulness—supports the idea that during winter, our sleep needs and preferences change, and the constraints of modern life might be particularly ill-fitting during these months.
What do we mean when we talk about biological time? The circadian clock is a concept that scientists use to measure our internal sense of time. It’s a 24-hour timer that determines when we want to place various events of the day—most importantly, when we want to get up and when we want to fall asleep. “The body likes to do those things in synchrony with the body clock, which is the master controller of where our body and behavior is relative to the sun,” explains Murray.
There are a huge number of hormones and other chemicals involved in regulating our body clocks, as well as an array of external factors. A particularly important one is the sun, and where it happens to be in the sky. Photoreceptors nested at the back of our eyes known as ipRGCs are especially sensitive to blue light, and therefore perfectly primed to help calibrate the circadian clock. There’s evidence these cells have a crucial role in helping to regulate sleep.
The evolutionary value of this biological mechanism was to promote changes in our physiology, biochemistry, and behavior according to different times of the day. “This is what the predictive function of a circadian clock is,” says Anna Wirz-Justice, professor at the Centre for Chronobiology at the University of Basel in Switzerland. “And it’s there in all living creatures.” Given daylight shifts over the course of the year, it prepares organisms for seasonal changes in behavior too, like reproduction or hibernation.
While there hasn’t been an abundance of research specifically examining the question of whether we would respond well to more sleep and different wake times during winter, there’s evidence that this could be the case. “From a theoretical viewpoint, decreased availability of natural light in the morning in winter should encourage what we call a phase delay,” says Murray. “And biologically, there’s good reason to think that that probably does happen to some extent.” A phase delay means that our circadian clocks are nudged later during winter, explaining why the urge to stab the snooze button becomes increasingly tough to fight.
The idea of a phase delay might at first appear to suggest that we would want to go to bed later in winter too, but Murray hypothesizes that this tendency would likely be counteracted by a growing desire to slumber in general. Studies suggest that humans require (or at least desire) more sleep during winter. A study looking at three preindustrial societies—that is, those without alarm clocks, smartphones, and 9-to-5 working hours—in South America and Africa found that these communities collectively snoozed for about an hour longer during winter. Given that these communities are located in equatorial regions, this effect could be even more pronounced in the northern hemisphere where winters are colder and darker.
If you’ve ever been using a website and wished it had a voice input, now you can add one yourself.
Voice In is a Chrome extension that adds speech-to-text to most any website. That means you can do things like respond to Slack messages or send emails using your voice rather than typing all the words out.
It’s not entirely hands-free. You will have to select a “Start Recording” function on a text box before you’ll be able to start having your voice transcribed, but once you do it will work almost anywhere.
Like pretty much every other transcription product out there, it’s not perfect. You’ll have better results when you try to use it in quiet places with not a ton of background noise. Speaking slowly is always better than speaking quickly, and the most you annunciate the fewer issues you’ll run into.
Still, if you’re something who speaks better than they write, it’s a quick-and-easy way to voice out a longer email or even a blog post that you can go back and tweak afterward to remove any odd typos or issues.
Even better, the extension works in over 40 languages, so you can use it to test your pronunciation skills when you’re learning something new.
A significant chunk of carbon dioxide emissions come from the transportation sector, and within Europe nearly 40 percent of transport emissions come from trucks. Now, researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Lausanne (EPFL) have come up with a new concept for capturing carbon dioxide from truck exhausts which could reduce emissions by up to 90 percent.
In a paper published in the journal Frontiers in Energy Research, the researchers propose capturing carbon dioxide from a truck’s exhaust pipe and turning it liquid, which is stored in a tank on the vehicle’s roof. This liquid carbon dioxide can then be delivered to a service station where it can be reused in various ways, including being turned into conventional fuel.
The carbon dioxide capture works by first cooling the gases which are emitted from the exhaust pipe. Special absorbent materials developed at EPFL could separate the carbon dioxide from other gases like nitrogen and oxygen. When it is full, the absorbent material is then heated to extract the carbon dioxide, and heat from the vehicle’s engine is used to compress the carbon dioxide and turn it into liquid. That liquid can then be stored in a box attached to the vehicle’s roof until it can be deposited at a service station when the truck refuels.
The system is more appropriate for large vehicles like trucks or buses than for cars as it is rather bulky, requiring a 2-meter-long capsule and weighing 7 percent of the total payload of a truck. However, the researchers calculate that 90 percent of carbon dioxide emissions could be recycled in this way.
The system is only a concept at the moment, and the researchers estimate that it will take several years to realize the system in the real world. The next step is to develop a prototype of the system to test out the experimental elements in practice.
