5-Minute Charge. No Steering Wheel. Flying Cars by Next Year. Welcome to Auto China
It’s officially the “Beijing International Automotive Exhibition,” but its friends call it “Auto China,” and it’s now the largest car show in the world. Nearly 1000 companies flock to the exhibits taking up more than 380,000 square meters, or over 50 football fields! Or 1,246,719 feet and 50 soccer fields, if you’re from America! Or 9,329,989 beep-boop-zoinks and 50 astro-space-ball fields if you’re a Martian from outer space! Any way you spin it, this car show is a big deal, and there were two standout trends.
The first was electric vehicles. There’s always been an issue with charging, as makers have tried to maximize how far cars can travel on single charge while minimizing how long that charge takes. Now, a company called BYD claims to have an ultra-fast charging system that can provide 400 km of range with only 5 minutes of charging. What’s more, it’s designed to operate under extreme weather conditions. Since batteries are usually sensitive to high or low temperatures, addressing this is a major step in making electric vehicles as reliable as gas cars.
The other big topic was also fully autonomous, or self-driving cars. The company Geely developed a self-driving car built specifically for ride-hailing, so there’s no steering wheel or driver’s seat. That means you can pick your nose without fear of the driver judging you! Xpeng’s driverless car uses a combination of lasers, radar, and cameras to build a real time picture of the road, but we hope it works just as well in the clouds, because they may be extending this technology into flying cars as early as next year. It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s just my Uber! That’s one way to beat traffic.
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The UK wants to see more hedgehogs, and it’s not because hedgehogs are incredibly cute. Well, not just because of that. The UK’s hedgehog population is in dangerous decline, but part of the solution could be an AI tool called Tessera that uses satellite images to help build a map of hedgehog habitats.
Before Tessera can work its magic, it needs some input. Researchers need to find and learn hedgehogs’ preferred environments by identifying the habitat’s fingerprint. A fingerprint, in this case, is a pattern or collection of characteristics generally found in hedgehog habitats. Maybe your habitat fingerprint would include a freezer full of ice cream and trampoline floors! It has nothing to do with actual fingers, even though that would be a great excuse to spend all day looking at hedgehog paws.
Researchers do their field work in small areas, then input their findings into the software that can extrapolate, show where the other similar habitats are, and record changes over time. The project will hopefully help us learn about where hedgehogs live, how we can help them survive, and how we can set up our homes to comfortably accommodate a hedgehog houseguest.
Feeling the heat lately? It might be because of El Niño, a climate pattern characterized by unusually warm sea-surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. It can affect the trade winds. These are the permanent, normally easterly winds that flow around the Earth's equator.
When we track the water temperature using tools like satellites, buoys, and ocean floats to measure temperatures below the ocean's surface, they show a large body of unusually hot water. Way bigger than the pot of water you’re boiling for your mac and cheese. Yes, even if you’re making extra mac and cheese. This is serious business! It can cause the sea-surface temperatures in parts of the tropical Pacific to rise by more than 2°C (about 3.6°F) above average, suggesting this year's El Niño is unusually strong, and could make 2027 one of the hottest years on record.
Depending on where you are in the world, El Niño is associated with both droughts and floods. These affect the lives of people living in those places, as well as their agriculture and food production, so the whole world feels the El Niño effects.
The DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo) is a large central African country now facing an Ebola outbreak along with neighboring Uganda. Ebola is a serious virus spread through contact with infected blood or body fluids, causing fever, vomiting, and bleeding. This outbreak's strain has no approved vaccine or treatment.
This isn't the DRC's first health crisis — and it's not bad luck. Three main factors are at play: the DRC borders nine countries with heavy cross-border movement and conflict-driven displacement, making disease spread easy; its health system is stretched thin, so early symptoms (which mimic other illnesses) often go unnoticed; and close contact with wildlife in its vast forests — including hunting and eating bushmeat — raises the risk of animal-to-human disease jumps.
Together, these factors explain why outbreaks keep happening — and why this one deserves close attention.
Your parents or grandparents probably talk about growing up outside — riding bikes, climbing trees, scraping up knees. Turns out, they were onto something.
The Wildlife Trusts, a UK conservation group, just wrapped up "30 Days Wild," the UK's biggest nature challenge. Millions of people, including tens of thousands of schools, took part by doing one "wild" activity a day — noticing, appreciating, or exploring nature. The Lancashire Wildlife Trust runs a similar effort called The Greenhouse Project, where people learn to grow food and care for nature together.
The idea: the more connected people feel to nature, the more likely they are to protect it. But a recent poll found that while almost all adults have fond memories of playing outside as kids, nearly half now spend just three hours outside per week — less than 30 minutes a day.
The UK wants to see more hedgehogs, and it’s not because hedgehogs are incredibly cute. Well, not just because of that. The UK’s hedgehog population is in dangerous decline, but part of the solution could be an AI tool called Tessera that uses satellite images to help build a map of hedgehog habitats.
Before Tessera can work its magic, it needs some input. Researchers need to find and learn hedgehogs’ preferred environments by identifying the habitat’s fingerprint. A fingerprint, in this case, is a pattern or collection of characteristics generally found in hedgehog habitats. Maybe your habitat fingerprint would include a freezer full of ice cream and trampoline floors! It has nothing to do with actual fingers, even though that would be a great excuse to spend all day looking at hedgehog paws.
Researchers do their field work in small areas, then input their findings into the software that can extrapolate, show where the other similar habitats are, and record changes over time. The project will hopefully help us learn about where hedgehogs live, how we can help them survive, and how we can set up our homes to comfortably accommodate a hedgehog houseguest.