Day: May 9, 2025

https://www.popsci.com/technology/flying-car-aircar/

A Slovakian startup working to make the age-old dream of flying cars a reality says it has a new prototype that could ship as early as 2026. Klein Vision, which has spent the past three decades developing its “AirCar,” has already completed over 170 flight hours and more than 500 takeoffs and landings. It also became one of the first vehicles of its kind to receive a certificate of airworthiness back in 2022. 

Now, the company says it’s ready to shift out of the testing phase and into production. Whether it can actually get there, however, remains far from certain. Many companies have tried—and failed—to bring flying cars to life.

How the AirCar works 

Klein Vision claims its Jetsons-like vehicle can transform from a four-wheel car into a fixed-wing aircraft in under two minutes. Video demonstrations of its transition from flight mode to driving show the two wings retracting and folding in on themselves, somewhat resembling a hardtop convertible. Once in car mode, the company says it generates downforce using a spoiler and elevator pitch. The newest iteration of the vehicle can reportedly reach top speeds of 124 mph on the road and 155 mph in the air, with a maximum flight range of around 1,000 kilometers. (620 miles). 

“The AirCar is a fusion of certified aviation engineering and advanced automotive design—a true dual-mode vehicle that meets rigorous standards in both air and ground performance,” AirCar co-founder Anton Zajac said in a statement.

The company did not immediately respond to Popular Science‘s request for comment, but  told The Next Web that it hopes to start shipping to customers as early as 2026, with an estimated price between $800,000 and $1 million. According to The Next Web, the newly announced model includes several noteworthy improvements. It features a 280-horsepower motor—double the power of the previous version. It can also fly longer, drive farther, and switch between modes slightly faster. The first iteration of the AirCar received a Certificate of Airworthiness from the Slovak Transport Authority after completing 70 hours of “rigorous flight testing,” according to the company. This newest version will also need to receive certification before it can legally take to the skies.

But even if the new and improved AirCar finds buyers, potential owners shouldn’t expect their expensive new toy to soar over rush hour traffic. In car mode, the AirCar can, in theory, operate much like any other road vehicle. Those looking to fly it, however, will first need to drive to an airport and take off from a runway. For now, the AirCar’s flight path is limited to travel between airports. The video below shows the original AirCar making its maiden flight back in 2021.

Making flying cars is much easier said than done 

Dreams of functional flying cars date back to the days of Henry Ford in the early 1900s. For now, they remain primarily in the realm of fiction, but that might be changing ever so slightly. Startups like Terrafugia and Moller Skycar have previously demonstrated the ability to transform between car and plane modes, but neither were able to successfully bring their vehicles to a commercial market. Terrafugia actually received a certificate from the Federal Aviation Administration, but it has since reportedly shuttered its US operations after being acquired by the Chinese firm Geely back in 2017. Moller Skycar famously listed its flagship vehicle on eBay that same year—with the caveat that the buyer would not be legally allowed to fly it.

Where there’s significantly more commercial activity currently ongoing is in the closely related area of Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) vehicles. These vehicles have wheels but are intended to be able to lift off into the air without the need for a runway. In practical terms, they are somewhere in between a flying car and a helicopter. The two leading companies in that space, Joby Aviation and Archer Aviation, have already struck deals with airlines in the US and the U.K to transport passengers between airports and helicopter pads. In theory, that would allow time-crunched travellers to bypass traffic on busy streets. 

Related: [These new flying taxis offer a glimpse at our future commutes]

But those use cases are still a far cry from the vision many futurists have of personal flying cars swarming city skies. Many of the obstacles keeping that vision grounded go beyond the technology itself. Current certification processes mean owners of these vehicles would need to acquire a pilot’s license to operate them. Federal and local regulators would also need to radically reimagine traffic logistics and safety rules to accommodate what would essentially be a new dimension of navigation. There’s also the very real concern about what happens if one of these flying cars falls out of the sky. The far more likely scenario is that a handful of airworthy car-plane hybrids may reach the market—but remain confined to use as expensive toys for wealthy enthusiasts.

The post This $1M flying car can reach speeds of 155 mph appeared first on Popular Science.

via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now https://www.popsci.com

May 8, 2025 at 01:38PM

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2771474/i-built-a-desktop-pc-specialized-for-ai-now-i-seriously-regret-it.html

via PCWorld https://www.pcworld.com

May 8, 2025 at 01:29PM

https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/youtube/the-enshitification-of-youtubes-full-album-playlists-172934629.html?src=rss

So a professional dominatrix specializing in foot worship signs into her YouTube account for the first time in seventeen years and compiles over 900 playlists, including the debut LP of progressive math-rock band 90 Day Men, an album from hyperpop/chiptune darling Saoirse Dream and portions of the original soundtrack from early 2000s anime Chobits. There’s no punchline to that one. Let me explain.

Despite an entirely separate paid product — YouTube Music — vanilla YouTube’s sometimes spotty enforcement of copyright has made it a goldmine for music, especially the kind that’s niche, and possibly unavailable on legal streamers. Dedicated channels for screamo, doom metal or acid jazz, for instance, are regularly uploading rare releases, and searching for nearly any artist and "full album" will typically return the desired result no matter how obscure. In some cases, albums are uploaded as a single, lengthy video with timestamps indicating where one track ends and the next begins; in others, individual tracks are uploaded and compiled as playlists.

In recent months, however, countless tainted playlists have cropped up in YouTube search results. Engadget compiled a sample of 100 channels (there are undoubtedly many, many more) engaged in what we’ll refer to as playlist stuffing. These had between 30 and 1,987 playlists each — 58,191 in total. The overwhelming majority of these stuffed playlists contain an irrelevant, nearly hour-long video simply titled "More."

Engadget

The robotic narration of "More" begins: "Cryptocurrency investing, when approached with a long-term perspective, can be a powerful way to build wealth." You’d be forgiven for assuming its aim is to direct unwitting listeners to a shitcoin pump-and-dump. But over the next 57 minutes and 55 seconds, it meanders incoherently between a variety of topics like affiliate marketing, making a website and search engine optimization. (Here’s the entire transcript if you find yourself pathologically curious.) What’s odd is there’s no link to any scam page, no specific business the video directs a listener to patronize. Its description simply reads "Other stuff I’ve recorded and edited that I hadn’t released until now, a special for my biggest fans with footage never seen before!"

For all its supposed advice on making easy money online, its best example isn’t anything said in the video, it’s that "More" has amassed nearly 7.5 million views at the time of this writing — and it’s monetized.

It’s far from the only video of its kind. Many longer albums, like Mal Blum’s You Look A Lot Like Me, Titus Andronicus’s The Most Lamentable Tragedy and Slugdge’s The Cosmic Cornucopia are appear as stuffed playlists with "More," "Unreleased" and "Full Album." Both are similar marketing slop; they have 3.7 and 3.5 million views, respectively.

Unscrupulous artists also seem to engage, on a smaller scale, in a less obtuse sort of playlist stuffing. The channel Ultra Sounds has garnered 4.1 million views on its song "The Pause," after inserting it into — among other places — the Nine Inch Nails album Add Violence. Anastasia Coope’s Darning Woman and 1991, an album by shoegaze pioneers Drop Nineteens, are not made better for the inclusion of Murat Ba?kaya, an apparent Turkish rapper. Electronic dance group The Daring Ones have added a few hundred thousand views to several of their tracks by stuffing them into a variety of playlists, including one of last month’s new Viagra Boys record. Engadget attempted to contact these musicians on their content strategy but has not heard back.

"More" takes advantage of a very simple UI quirk. Besides there being no easy way to tell how many playlists a YouTube account has made (it loads them 30 at a time on scroll), search results show only the first two tracks of a given playlist. "More" is almost invariably inserted as track three. Unwitting listeners who click and tab away are greeted with irrelevant marketing jargon around seven minutes later — a scenario reflected in the often bewildered comments beneath the video.

Playlist stuffing would seem to contravene YouTube’s policies on playlists and deceptive practices, which proscribe "playlists with titles or descriptions that mislead viewers into thinking they’re about to view videos different than what the playlist contains." A glance at the channel to which "More" was uploaded provides a hint that something more insidious is at play than just playlist stuffing for ad revenue.

"More" is not the only video on the channel Hangmeas. The channel description states "I produce my own custom music videos with footage I record around East Asia where me and the locals sing and dance to traditional music from their cultures," and sure enough its other two uploads are songs from Cambodian musicians — uploaded 18 years ago. The army of channels posting stuffed playlists containing "More" are all similarly ancient. One, kcnmttcnn, was created on December 26, 2005, only a few months after YouTube itself first launched. It now hosts over 900 playlists. The vast majority of channels engaged in this activity were created in 2006, and the youngest was claimed in February of 2009. In all likelihood, these accounts were abandoned long ago and have since been compromised, either by whoever is behind "More" or by a third party which sold access to these accounts to them.

Just like Hangmeas, several of these possibly compromised accounts have their channel descriptions, links — like the Myspace account for the aforementioned dominatrix — and old uploads intact. Viewing them in aggregate triggers a strange kind of melancholy, like finding the photo album of someone else’s family in a thrift store. Here’s two friends go-karting down a stretch of farmland; here’s a girl sledding down a very short hill; here’s 11 minutes off an online game of Uno; here’s two girls trying on hats in a department store; here’s Muse playing "Time Is Running Out" in Paris, 2006, rendered in such poor quality it could be literally any show at all. This one’s just called "David." Its description reads "I’m cool."

Unfortunately none of these channels had extant contact information. It’s impossible to know how the subjects of these videos feel about their old digital selves being leveraged for playlist stuffing. We can’t even know how many of these people are still alive.

Somehow, a raft of accounts old enough to vote logged back in, probably from very different parts of the world than where they originated, and churned out playlists at a rate no human being could possibly hope to achieve. YouTube, it seems, did not find this suspicious. We reached out to YouTube for comment and did not receive comment by time of publication.

Yes, amateurish, nearly two decade-old footage harkens to a simpler time, when being able to upload a video that the whole world could see — though much more likely it would be viewed by a couple of your friends, and then one reporter 18 years later — was still exciting. But the history of the internet seems to be contained here: The simple joy of connection, neglected on a megacorp’s servers, slowly co-opted by anyone trying to make a quick and dishonest buck.

Author’s note: I’ve included a list of the potentially compromised accounts here; if you happen to be the owner of one of them, I’d love to hear from you.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://ift.tt/vZj8OgX

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

May 8, 2025 at 12:42PM

https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/some-medications-used-to-treat-hiv-may-prevent-or-delay-alzheimers-onset

via Discover Main Feed https://ift.tt/OnHjdUX

May 8, 2025 at 05:36PM