“Climate change poses a significant and growing threat to national security, both at home and abroad,” declared a memorandum from the White House to the heads of executive departments and agencies. With the United States about to enter its 15th year of fighting against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and with the fight against ISIS in Iraq spilling over into Syria more and more, it may seem odd for the President to direct resources towards a less direct threat. Does it really make sense for the United States military to spend resources on fighting climate change instead of defeating ISIS?
Wondering where to watch the presidential debates as Trump and Clinton finally face off? We've got good news: it'll be hard to miss them. Pretty much every social media app, network website, and news channel in broadcast and cable will have live coverage of the debates, starting next week.
A delivery van is a tiny warehouse on wheels. Away from the conveyor belts and simple machines of a warehouse, humans, usually two of them, do all the rudimentary tasks of delivery: driving, finding the packages in the back, and placing packages on doorsteps. Mercedes-Benz, in collaboration with drone delivery company Matternet, created a concept Vision Van that replaces this routine with an automated system, and adds two drones on top for speedy delivery.
Semcon, a product development company specializing in how humans actually use things, conducted a study on people's attitudes toward self-driving cars. People in Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany responded, and nearly half said they had very little trust in autonomous vehicles.
Launching a ballistic missile is a solved problem. It was first solved in World War II, when German V-2 rockets flew over 220 miles to rain death on the United Kingdom. During the Cold War, the potential to deliver a nuclear attack with a missile fired from one side of the globe to another led to an arms race, a massive nuclear stockpile, and the category of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, or ICBMs. Building an ICBM is also a solved problem, requiring the expertise to make a nuclear warhead and to build a missile body that can effectively deliver it.
This year we saw a solar-powered plane circumnavigate the globe and a solar-powered boat gear up to do the same. As of last week, we can add to that list of clean energy marvels the first-ever piloted flight of a solar-powered helicopter.
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