Amazon's new Kindle includes almost all of the best features from the latest Paperwhite for $40 less. It features 300 PPI pixel density, 16GB storage, and a USB-C charging port. A kids edition with an extended two-year warranty, colorful covers, and a one-year subscription to Amazon's Kids+ service is available. The new Kindle is available for preorder now and will be released on October 12.
Chinese researchers are testing modified cars that can magnetically levitate over a stretch of specially modified highway. The researchers modified a roughly five mile stretch of highway and added an array of permanent magnets to the floor of eight vehicles for the test. The cars could reach a velocity of 143 miles per hour on the track. A link to a short video from the test is available in the article.
Harvard's Office of Technology Development has granted an exclusive technology license to Adden Energy to scale a solid-state lithium-metal battery for commercial deployment. The battery prototype can charge in three minutes and last over 10,000 charge cycles. Adden aims to create a full-scale vehicle battery within the next five years. Enabling electric vehicles to charge within minutes with batteries that last for many years will make EV technology accessible to many more people.
s3sqlite is an APSW SQLite VFS that enables reading databases from S3 using s3fs. It only supports reading operations. The VFS only works when the database file is in any journal mode that is not WAL.
BrainFlow is a library for obtaining, parsing, and analyzing data from biosensors. It features a uniform API for all devices, eight language bindings, and a signal processing and machine learning API. All features are available for free.
Rocket Ranch is an isolated area of land in Boca Chica near the Starbase launch site. SpaceX enthusiasts have been gathering at the site to watch the company's tests from afar. Some fans live at the site full-time. This article explores what it is like to live at the Rocket Ranch. It also looks at how the launch site has affected local residents and the impact the site has on the environment around it.
This post looks at past predictions of the future to evaluate which prediction techniques worked and which didn't. Most predictors and futurists have a fairly poor track record of predictions. People with big ideas and a shallow understanding of their subject generally fared poorly. Those who had a deep understanding of the problem and had a record of learning lessons from past predictive errors had relatively accurate predictions.
China's new missile will be able to cruise at 2.5 times the speed of sound for 200 kilometers before diving and skimming across the waves for up to 20 more kilometers.