People with fast street cars like to put them through their paces at the quarter-mile track. One way to get your quarter-mile time is to just buckle up and put the pedal to the metal. But if your car’s design is suboptimal, you won’t be taking home the bragging rights.
So here’s this week’s question: Can automotive engineers predict a car’s quarter-mile time using physics? And could the physics suggest some tricks to make a car faster? Yes and yes! Let’s see how.
Simple Model for an Accelerating Car
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When a car launches off the start, its increase in speed is described by its acceleration (the rate of change of velocity). But according to Newton’s second law, to increase velocity, you need a force pushing in the direction of travel.
We can model the motion of a car with just three forces. There’s the downward-pulling gravitational force (= mass, m, times the gravitational field, g). There is also the interaction between the car and the road. It’s useful to split this into two forces: One, perpendicular to the ground, is called the “normal force” (FN). It’s the resistance of the ground to gravity—what keeps a car from plunging to the center of the Earth. The other force, friction (Ff), acts parallel to the ground. Here’s a picture:
It can be startling to look at a world population counter. There are eight billion (and counting — fast) humans on Earth. That’s a lot. And humans, of course, have an enormous impact. However, we are far from the most abundant animal on the planet. In fact, mammals are at the bottom of the list, with only about 5,500 or so named species.
On the other hand, scientists have identified about a million species of insects, and there are many insects that haven’t yet been identified, explains Scott Hoffman Black, entomologist and executive director of the Xerces Society, an organization dedicated to the conservation of invertebrates. Experts estimate that anywhere from a conservative four million to possibly as many as seven million species are yet to be identified.
So yes, the most abundant land animal is definitely an insect. But which one?
The Most Populated Animal in the World
According to an oft-told anecdote, the British evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane was once asked what he could say about the nature of God based on his study of the natural world. Haldane responded dryly that the creator has “an inordinate fondness for beetles.” The story is most likely apocryphal but so delightful that it has been repeated for decades.
And indeed, there are a lot of beetles on the planet — by some estimates, approximately 350,000 described species. But they aren’t the most abundant land animals. There are a lot of ways to break this down, but if you go by either individual animals or biomass, which is basically weight, the honor almost certainly goes to ants.
The authors of a widely cited 2022 study estimated that there were 20 quadrillion (that’s 20 followed by 15 zeros) ants on Earth — and they were being conservative. Or if this helps you get your mind around the sheer number of ants, the total biomass of ants is greater than the combined biomass of all wild birds and mammals and is about 20 percent of the biomass of all humans on the planet, according to the study.
Phillip Barden studies ants (and other social insects) at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He says the amazing success of ants is likely due to the fact that ants are social animals.
“Once you get out of this unitary system where it’s one individual collecting and foraging on its own, the race is on, and you get these massive colonies, some with tens of millions of workers,” he says.
Black adds that ants have adapted to almost all environments, from the high mountains to deserts, and have many different strategies for survival. They also have a very adaptable diet. Many ants are predators, eating other animals — and they’re good at it because they cooperate in getting food. Some ants eat seeds, and some grow a fungus they eat, basically practicing agriculture, as Barden puts it.
This ability to adapt to whatever conditions they find themselves in is probably the reason ants have survived. Ants were present in the Cretaceous period, says Barden, but they made up no more than one percent of all the insects researchers have found in amber or fossil deposits. But after the K-T extinction at the end of the Cretaceous, some 65 million years ago, ants made up at least 10 percent and maybe as much as 30 percent of all insects.
And he adds, “If you go to a rainforest, the biomass of ants and termites today is greater than not only all insects, but all insects plus all vertebrates combined.”
Many experts argue that we’re in the midst of the sixth mass extinction. If that’s the case, how will ants fare? Almost certainly better than humans, says Black. In previous extinctions, insects have survived when many other groups didn’t, he says. And ants specifically?
Barden points out that many types of ants do exceptionally well in places that humans have disturbed, such as golf courses and lawns.
“I think we’re going to see, and will continue to see, that a handful of ant species that are really well suited to disturbed habitats are going to continue to be really successful. And so instead of finding many dozens or hundreds of species in certain places, we might find just a few, but in those places, those species will be highly abundant,” says Barden.
So have some respect the next time you come across an ant in your cupboard.
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
Avery Hurt is a freelance science journalist. In addition to writing for Discover, she writes regularly for a variety of outlets, both print and online, including National Geographic, Science News Explores, Medscape, and WebMD. She’s the author of Bullet With Your Name on It: What You Will Probably Die From and What You Can Do About It, Clerisy Press 2007, as well as several books for young readers. Avery got her start in journalism while attending university, writing for the school newspaper and editing the student non-fiction magazine. Though she writes about all areas of science, she is particularly interested in neuroscience, the science of consciousness, and AI–interests she developed while earning a degree in philosophy.
Fusion energy has the potential to be an effective clean energy source, as its reactions generate incredibly large amounts of energy. Fusion reactors aim to reproduce on Earth what happens in the core of the Sun, where very light elements merge and release energy in the process. Engineers can harness this energy to heat water and generate electricity through a steam turbine, but the path to fusion isn’t completely straightforward.
Controlled nuclear fusion has several advantages over other power sources for generating electricity. For one, the fusion reaction itself doesn’t produce any carbon dioxide. There is no risk of meltdown, and the reaction doesn’t generate any long-lived radioactive waste.
I’m a nuclear engineer who studies materials that scientists could use in fusion reactors. Fusion takes place at incredibly high temperatures. So to one day make fusion a feasible energy source, reactors will need to be built with materials that can survive the heat and irradiation generated by fusion reactions.
(Credit: xia yuan/Moment via Getty Images)
3D rendering of the inside of a fusion reactor chamber.
Fusion Material Challenges
Several types of elements can merge during a fusion reaction. The one most scientists prefer is deuterium plus tritium. These two elements have the highest likelihood of fusing at temperatures that a reactor can maintain. This reaction generates a helium atom and a neutron, which carries most of the energy from the reaction.
(Credit: Sophie Blondel/UT Knoxville)
In the D-T fusion reaction, two hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium, fuse and produce a helium atom and a high-energy neutron.
Humans have successfully generated fusion reactions on Earth since 1952– some even in their garage. But the trick now is to make it worth it. You need to get more energy out of the process than you put in to initiate the reaction.
Fusion reactions happen in a very hot plasma, which is a state of matter similar to gas but made of charged particles. The plasma needs to stay extremely hot – over 100 million degrees Celsius – and condensed for the duration of the reaction.
To keep the plasma hot and condensed and create a reaction that can keep going, you need special materials making up the reactor walls. You also need a cheap and reliable source of fuel.
While deuterium is very common and obtained from water, tritium is very rare. A 1-gigawatt fusion reactor is expected to burn 56 kilograms of tritium annually. However, the world has only about 25 kilograms of tritium commercially available.
Researchers need to find alternative sources for tritium before fusion energy can get off the ground. One option is to have each reactor generating its own tritium through a system called the breeding blanket.
The breeding blanket makes up the first layer of the plasma chamber walls and contains lithium that reacts with the neutrons generated in the fusion reaction to produce tritium. The blanket also converts the energy carried by these neutrons to heat.
The fusion reaction chamber at ITER will electrify the plasma.
Fusion devices also need a divertor, which extracts the heat and ash produced in the reaction. The divertor helps keep the reactions going for longer.
These materials will be exposed to unprecedented levels of heat and particle bombardment. And there aren’t currently any experimental facilities to reproduce these conditions and test materials in a real-world scenario. So, the focus of my research is to bridge this gap using models and computer simulations.
From the Atom to Full Device
My colleagues and I work on producing tools that can predict how the materials in a fusion reactor erode, and how their properties change when they are exposed to extreme heat and lots of particle radiation.
As they get irradiated, defects can form and grow in these materials, which affect how well they react to heat and stress. In the future, we hope that government agencies and private companies can use these tools to design fusion power plants.
Our approach, called multiscale modeling, consists of looking at the physics in these materials over different time and length scales with a range of computational models.
We first study the phenomena happening in these materials at the atomic scale through accurate but expensive simulations. For instance, one simulation might examine how hydrogen moves within a material during irradiation.
From these simulations, we look at properties such as diffusivity, which tells us how much the hydrogen can spread throughout the material.
We can integrate the information from these atomic level simulations into less expensive simulations, which look at how the materials react at a larger scale. These larger-scale simulations are less expensive because they model the materials as a continuum instead of considering every single atom.
The atomic-scale simulations could take weeks to run on a supercomputer, while the continuum one will take only a few hours.
In the multiscale modeling approach, researchers use atom-level simulations, then take the parameters they find and apply them to larger-scale simulations, and then compare their results with experimental results. If the results don’t match, they go back to the atomic scale to study missing mechanisms. Sophie Blondel/UT Knoxville, adapted from https://ift.tt/IsCbDBe
All this modeling work happening on computers is then compared with experimental results obtained in laboratories.
For example, if one side of the material has hydrogen gas, we want to know how much hydrogen leaks to the other side of the material. If the model and the experimental results match, we can have confidence in the model and use it to predict the behavior of the same material under the conditions we would expect in a fusion device.
If they don’t match, we go back to the atomic-scale simulations to investigate what we missed.
Additionally, we can couple the larger-scale material model to plasma models. These models can tell us which parts of a fusion reactor will be the hottest or have the most particle bombardment. From there, we can evaluate more scenarios.
For instance, if too much hydrogen leaks through the material during the operation of the fusion reactor, we could recommend making the material thicker in certain places or adding something to trap the hydrogen.
Designing New Materials
As the quest for commercial fusion energy continues, scientists will need to engineer more resilient materials. The field of possibilities is daunting – engineers can manufacture multiple elements together in many ways.
You could combine two elements to create a new material, but how do you know what the right proportion is of each element? And what if you want to try mixing five or more elements together? It would take way too long to try to run our simulations for all of these possibilities.
Thankfully, artificial intelligence is here to assist. By combining experimental and simulation results, analytical AI can recommend combinations that are most likely to have the properties we’re looking for, such as heat and stress resistance.
The aim is to reduce the number of materials that an engineer would have to produce and test experimentally to save time and money.
Analogue 3D is the retro console maker’s take on the Nintendo 64. For $250 it will play your old The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Banjo-Kazooie cartridges in 4K. It was supposed to arrive this year but has unfortunately been delayed until 2025.
Boutique retro console maker Analogue, which teased the console last year, is billing it as “The unmistakable Signature and Soul of the CRT. On your HDTV. In 4K.” That’s a tall order, but selling retro magic has been the company’s ethos for years, beginning with the SNES-inspired Super NT, and then the Analogue Pocket, based on the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance.
Like those systems, the Analogue 3D uses FGPA technology to recreate the N64 at the hardware level rather than relying on emulation and will be compatible with all N64 cartridges (you’ll need to own the physical games rather than use ROMs). It also includes four original controller ports for your old, tri-pronged paddles, and comes with a new operating system that should make navigating menus and taking screenshots a much breezier experience.
“Analogue has developed the first, ultimate solution to play N64 today in total fucking glory,” CEO Christopher Taber told Kotaku last year. “Despite all of the amazing love, effort and work that developers have put into the software emulation of the N64—it results in an experience that feels unjustly and wrongly aged—generally ‘off.’ Flatly not a good experience. Coupled with Original Display Modes recreating not just the video game system, but the other critical contextual pieces (analog televisions, CRTs)—it’s difficult to overstate how fucking mint Analogue 3D is.”
While $250 covers the price of the console, an 8BitDo 64 controller will be sold separately that connects wirelessly for just $40. The N64 was home to GoldenEye 007, Mario Kart 64, the original Super Smash Bros., and tons of Mario Party games. Analogue touts it as one of the best retro couch co-op consoles of all time. Hopefully the 8BitDo 64 controller can support that dream with limited lag for anyone who doesn’t have their old N64 controllers lying around, or, more likely, busted the center joysticks on them long ago.
The Analogue 3D comes in both white and black, and pre-orders will be available starting on October 21 at 11:00 a.m. ET. The company’s CEO, Christopher Taber, previously told Kotaku that since its not a limited-edition product, “we will produce to meet demand and continue to make Analogue 3D available into the foreseeable future.” It’s a shame it won’t make it out in time for the holidays, but the company says orders will start shipping out in the first quarter of 2025.
Drew Crecente’s daughter died in 2006, killed by an ex-boyfriend in Austin, Texas when she was just 18. Her murder was highly publicized, so much so that Drew would still occasionally see Google alerts for her name, Jennifer Ann Crecente.
The alert Drew received a few weeks ago wasn’t the same as the others. It was for an AI chatbot, created in Jennifer’s image and likeness, on the buzzy, Google-backed platform Character.AI.
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Jennifer’s internet presence, Drew Crecente learned, had been used to create a “friendly AI character” that posed, falsely, as a “video game journalist.” Any user of the app would be able to chat with “Jennifer,” despite the fact that no one had given consent for this. Drew’s brother, Brian Crecente, who happens to be a founder of the gaming news websites Polygon and Kotaku, flagged the Character.AI bot on his Twitter account and called it “fucking disgusting.”
Character.AI, which has raised over $150 million in funding and recently licensed some of its core technology and top talent to Google, deleted the avatar of Jennifer. It acknowledged that the creation of the chatbot violated its policies.
But this enforcement was just a quick fix in a never-ending game of whack-a-mole in the land of generative AI, where new pieces of media are churned out every day using derivatives of other media scraped haphazardly from the web. And Jennifer Ann Crecente isn’t the only avatar being created on Character.AI without the knowledge of the people they’re based on. WIRED found several instances of AI personas being created without a person’s consent, some of whom were women already facing harassment online.
For Drew Crecente, the creation of an AI persona of his daughter was another reminder of unbearable grief, as complex as the internet itself. In the years following Jennifer Ann Crecente’s death, he had earned a law degree and created a foundation for teen violence awareness and prevention. As a lawyer, he understands that due to longstanding protections of tech platforms, he has little recourse.
But the incident also underscored for him what he sees as one of the ethical failures of the modern technology industry. “The people who are making so much money cannot be bothered to make use of those resources to make sure they’re doing the right thing,” he says.
One of the biggest blows to our attention spans happened when content started being squeezed into 10-second TikToks, Reels, and Snaps. That gradually made watching long-form content fairly difficult. I’m concerned that Apple will soon kill the few remaining brain cells we have left with its iOS 18.1 update on October 28.
The abundance of summarization features stood out to me about the first Apple Intelligence update rolling out at the end of the month. With iOS 18.1, you will have summaries in all the places you do the major chunk of reading on your phone: Safari, Mail, and Notifications. Look at this tragic example of a presumably long breakup text summarized in a brutal one-liner.
Apple Intelligence on iOS 18.1 is going to summarize articles on Safari. You’d just need to switch to reader mode for it to have the article summarized in a few lines in a box at the top of your screen. This is, of course, going to save time, but it also makes users read a lot less. You can also select a certain paragraph to pull out its summary or key points.
It will also update the Mail app so that you see a one-line summary of your email in your inbox instead of the first few words/lines you usually do. If you’re viewing a number of emails in your notifications, you’ll now see summaries for all of them, too. A Smart Reply option will let you reply to the emails with a single tap, similar to what Gmail offers. Your notifications will also appear in a single sentence summarizing a specific app’s recent activity so you can catch up with a single glance.
The upcoming writing tools will work like Grammarly on your phone, underlining every misspelled word or grammatical error. You can also write a shabby message and have Apple Intelligence refine it in the tone of your choice: Friendly, Professional, and Concise.
The highlight of Apple’s Glowtime event was a revamped Siri on the new OS. This one will feature a glow on the corners of your screen when you activate the assistant and animate in sync with your voice as you speak to it. I’m looking forward to finally being able to type to Siri in addition to talking to it. Apple says it’ll also get better at understanding memory and context so your follow-up questions can be handled better.
Natural language processing is also coming to the Photos app. So, instead of manually scrolling to a specific picture, you can simply say, “Ali making breakfast on the Catskills trip,” and have Photos intelligently look that up for you. You can use the same way to make movies from memories. Just speak your prompt to it. The iOS version of the Magic Eraser on Pixel, Clean Up in Photos, will let you remove an unwanted object in the background by simply circling or finger-brushing it.
Availability
When iOS 18.1 is released on October 28, you’ll be required to join a waitlist. This isn’t usually how iOS updates are rolled out, but it is something Apple is experimenting with this time to ensure a smooth experience for everyone. The waitlist is account-based, meaning joining it on any device will guarantee waitlisting across all your Apple devices. The compatibility criteria for iOS 18.1 is any iPhone 16 model or one of the iPhone 15 Pro models. Initially, Apple Intelligence will only be available in the US and English.
Seventeen years is an odd anniversary to call out. But at an event launching four new Kindles, Amazon’s head of devices and services Panos Panay reminded a group of media that “Kindle is 17 years in the making, almost to the day.” Panay added that the device is currently seeing its highest sales numbers, and that 20.8 billion pages are read each month on a Kindle. But people aren’t just reading on Kindles. Since the introduction of the Kindle Scribe in 2022, there has been even more development in e-paper writing tablets, with a notable recent product in the reMarkable Paper Pro. While that $580 device supports a color writing experience, Amazon’s Kindle Scribe still only works in black and white. But it might offer enough by way of software updates to make up for its monochrome manner.
Plus, being able to write on what’s already a popular ereader makes that book-like experience even more realistic, and the Kindle Scribe represents what Panay called the “fastest growing category” of Kindles. You could almost call it a 2-in-1, since it’s an ereader and writing tablet at once. “I have a lot of passion around 2-in-1s,” Panay said at his presentation, and he used that term repeatedly to describe the Kindle Scribe. I haven’t thought about it that way, but I was less worried about semantics and more about how the Kindle Scribe and its new features felt at a hand-on session yesterday.
I’m the sort of person that needs to physically write out something while I plan a project. Whether it’s lofty goals to get my life together or draft up a strategy for covering certain software releases at work, my hands grasp at the air for an imaginary pen and paper. For that reason, the Kindle Scribe and other writing tablets call out to me. I reviewed the original Kindle Scribe almost two years ago and since then Amazon has slowly expanded the feature set and made the device more useful.
With the original Scribe, Amazon got a lot of the basics right. The latency and smoothness of the writing experience were close to feeling like pen and paper, and the device felt sturdy and slick. The new Scribe felt very similar in that sense, with little noticeable difference in the way the stylus interacted with the screen, and I didn’t encounter any jarring lag in the brief time I had with it.
Where the Scribe left me wanting more was software, and that’s also the area Amazon appears to have focused on this year. Don’t get me wrong — it’s not like the company didn’t tweak the hardware. There are some refinements like new white borders, a smaller grip, different color options and an updated stylus with a soft-tip top that feels more like a conventional eraser.
Cherlynn Low for Engadget
But inside the device lie the more intriguing changes. Most significant in my opinion is the new Active Canvas. It directly addresses one of my biggest complaints in my review, which is that the writing experience within books and publications was a little wonky.
To quote myself, this was what I said in 2022: “You can also take down notes when you’re reading an e-book. But it’s not like you can scribble directly onto the words of your e-books. You can use the floating toolbox to create a sticky note, then draw within a designated rectangle. When you close the sticky note, a small symbol appears over the word it was attached to, but otherwise, your scribbles are hidden. No annotating in the margins here.”
All of that has changed with the new Kindle Scribe. When you’re in an e-book, you can now just start writing on the page, and a box will appear, containing your scribbles. You no longer need to first find the floating toolbox and select the sticky note tool. Just write. It’s so much simpler, and in the Kindle Scribe I played with it worked almost instantly. Not only is the box embedded within the text, with the book’s words rearranging and flowing to accommodate it, but you can also resize the rectangle to take up however much space you like. The rest of the page will reflow to make room as necessary. I was particularly impressed by how quickly this happened on the demo unit — it was more responsive than switching between notebooks on my existing Scribe.
Plus, the box containing your note will stay in place instead of being hidden and replaced by a small symbol. It’s clear that Amazon’s earlier implementation was a rudimentary workaround to allow people to write on fixed format media, whereas the new approach is more deeply integrated and thought out.
And unlike what I said two years ago, you can now annotate in a new collapsible margin. Tapping the top right corner brings up options to pull up the column, and you can choose from having it take up about a quarter of the width or spread out to about three quarters. Content in the margin will be scrollable, so you theoretically won’t run out of space.
Cherlynn Low for Engadget
Now, this isn’t a perfect replica of annotating on a real textbook, but it might be better since you won’t have to scrawl all around the borders or write upside down just to squeeze in your thoughts. I’m not sure yet, as I really need to spend more time with it to know, but I like that Amazon clearly has taken in feedback and thought about how to add these requested features.
The company also added the ability to use the Pen and directly highlight or underline within those books, and pretty much any Kindle title will support most of these features. They’d have to be content that allows for font resizing, to start, so things like PDFs, which are fixed, won’t work with the Active Canvas. Word documents are compatible as well.
I spend more time writing in blank notebooks than in actual books, and for those scenarios, Amazon is using generative AI in two new tools: Summarization and Refined Writing. The former is pretty straightforward. If you’ve handwritten 10 pages worth of brainstorming meeting notes, the system can scan all of it and collate just the highlights. You can have this be added as a page to the existing notebook as a summary, or save it as a separate document on its own.
Refined Writing, meanwhile, is like Apple’s Handwriting Assist on iPadOS 18 but on a larger scale. While Apple’s software feels like it’s about nipping and tucking stray words that are out of alignment, Amazon’s takes your entire handwritten page and converts it into text in a script-like font. This works best if you tend to write in a single column with clear indentations and paragraphs. I tend to draw random boxes all over the place for breakout thoughts, and the system will not perfectly replicate that. For example, a two-column shopping list I quickly drafted on a demo Scribe was merged into one, and the checkboxes I drew were interpreted as capital letter Ds that were inserted at the start of every bullet.
Amazon
It might not seem immediately useful, but if you’re the sort of person that’s shy about their handwriting, this could save you some shame. More importantly, it can make you writing more legible in case you need to share, say, your screenplay treatment with a production partner. Or if your scrawled shopping list just isn’t making sense to your partner. I also like that even after you’ve converted your notes into text, you can still erase them using the top of the pen and make edits. You’ll have to run Refined Writing again to regenerate a neatly formatted page. Oh, and I appreciate the flexibility you get here. You’ll have a few fonts and sizes to choose from, and can select the pages you want to reformat or have the entire book done up altogether.
None of the notebook features are destructive, meaning you’ll usually be able to retain your original written content and save the generated material as addendums. The AI work is done in the cloud, with your data being encrypted throughout the process. The Kindle Scribe also displays an animated page showing it’s busy with the generative AI task, which in my experience so far took at least 10 seconds. It might be different on the original Kindle Scribe, which will also be getting these software features either later this year or, in the case of the expandable margins, in early 2025 when it arrives on the new Kindle Scribe.
In its 17 years, the Kindle has done a lot to disrupt physical books, and since the introduction of the Scribe, it’s been poised to do the same for notebooks. As someone who’s relished being able to carry around the equivalent of a thousand books in a super thin device, the idea of replacing a bunch of notebooks with a Scribe is immensely intriguing. Amazon does find itself up against some stiff competition from reMarkable and Boox, but it has its sheer size and the power of its Kindle library in its favor. The Kindle Scribe will be available in December for a starting price of $400, and I hope to have a review unit in soon enough to see if I love or hate the new annotation and AI features.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://ift.tt/VSeX1tu
