What the Controlled Chaos of Burning Man Reveals About Cities Every year, for the past 26 years, something truly remarkable happens: an entire city appears out of the desert. I’m speaking, of course, of Black Rock City, in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, erected for the quasi-ritualistic celebration of art, radical inclusion, and free-to-be-you-and-me-ness known as Burning …
The Concours d’Lemons Is America’s Crappiest Car Show The Trabant trembles. Its puny engine is running at idle, enough to visibly shake the small, boxy, creamy white car, made mostly of cotton waste. Its owner, a tall American guy, stands proudly by his car, encouraging an even taller man to climb inside and see the unexpected …
Zipline Launches Medical Supply Drone Deliveries in Tanzania Last month in Rwanda, a young woman started bleeding after giving birth by C-section. Try as they might, her doctors couldn’t stop it. They’d already transfused the two units of matching blood that they had on-hand. They could have called the national blood bank in the capital of …
Airbus’ Vahana Flying Car Uses Laser Sensors to Pick out Landing Spots Before you can zip about in a flying car, engineers must solve more than a few problems. Oddly, figuring out how to make a flying car fly isn’t among them. The basics of flight were sorted out more than 100 years ago. No, the …
Driverless Cars Need Ears as Well as Eyes You need just two eyes and two ears to drive. Those remarkable sensors provide all the info you need to, say, know that a fire engine is coming up fast behind you, so get out of the way. Autonomous vehicles need a whole lot more than that. They …
Nikola’s $35,000 Zero Electric UTV Offers More Torque Than a Tank If you love kicking up mud and bombing around off-road but feel guilty spewing all that carbon dioxide, Nikola Powersports has you covered—assuming you’ve got $35,000 to spend on an electric off-roader with more torque than a tank. I’ll pause while you let that settle …
DeLorean Aerospace Is Making a Flying Car “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads,” Doc Brown says, before flipping down his reflective goggles and launching his nuclear-powered DeLorean into the air. If you think you’ve heard that line too many times, try being Paul DeLorean. He’s not just the nephew of John DeLorean, founder of …