The Shocking Truth About Electric Cars and Insurance
You’ve probably heard your parents (and everybody else) complain about insurance. And that’s fair, it’s expensive! Especially when it comes to electric cars, whose owners often pay higher more for insurance than drivers of more conventional cars. But why is that? Why are people being punished for trying to use less gas? Why does the cruel world continue to forsake us?!
Well, researchers investigated exactly that… the insurance thing, not the greater, overarching “cruel world” question. The team at a testing lab staged a crash at just 10 kilometers (or about 5 miles) per hour. Not exactly the crash that’d have you gripping your seat in a nail-biter of an action movie, but important for research. From the outside, the damage looked minor, but underneath, the high-voltage charging port had moved and some of its components had broken.
The problem was that the damaged charging components formed part of a much larger unit. So, instead of replacing one small broken piece, technicians would need to replace the charger and some of its cabling. One component alone was priced in the thousands, and leaving it out would render the car pretty useless.
It’s great that modern electric vehicles already have to meet high safety standards, but the concern is how expensive and difficult they can be to repair after relatively minor accidents. Experts say manufacturers need to design future EVs with repair in mind, protecting expensive components and making individual parts easier to replace. Seems easy enough… right?
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Japan’s Aeon shopping mall was the setting of a tragic scene when a powerful earthquake caused widespread destruction.
After the disaster, rescuers worked through the night to try to find survivors. Customers and staff began evacuating after the earthquake struck, but an explosion, possibly caused by a gas leak, collapsed part of the building before everyone could escape. At a nearby paper factory, a chimney also collapsed onto a building, where more people were still missing.
Japan builds structures specifically to withstand earthquakes, but this one was powerful enough to still cause serious damage — in fact, it could be felt as far away as South Korea. Hundreds of thousands of people were instructed to evacuate their homes, roads were torn apart, part of a bridge fell into the water, a train was derailed, and nearly 50,000 homes lost electricity. Historic sites, including a shrine and the wall of one of Japan's oldest castles, were also damaged.
Although people are already hard at work trying to recover, authorities warned that the danger did not end when the initial shaking stopped: weakened buildings, landslides, aftershocks and the possibility of further strong earthquakes could create additional risks.
This summer has been brutal in parts of France and Spain due to raging fires.
Near Bordeaux, France is experiencing its worst wildfires in decades. Despite the efforts of hundreds of firefighters working day and night, changing winds have kept changing the direction of the fires, making them hard to contain. Fields and forests have burned, villages have been evacuated, businesses have closed, and traffic has been diverted to keep people away from the danger.
Bordeaux’s mayor says the city itself is not being evacuated. That’s a good sign, but that doesn’t mean everything is all better. Tens of thousands of displaced people are staying in temporary shelters, such as schools and sports centers, while tourists are being urged to stay away until the fires can be contained.
Spain is also fighting to contain its blazes. One fire near Madrid was described by Spain’s Interior Ministry as “the most aggressive that Spain has ever seen.” The fires drove people to flee, abandoning their homes and even their pets (some of whom have been found and fed by rescuers.) Spain's prime minister described the situation as a “climate emergency” — six times more land burned during the hot, dry summer than during the previous year.
Most of our sub-par pictures just take up space on our phones and show off the insides of our pockets, but one blurry photo launched an almost two decades-long scientific endeavor.
A search that began with a picture of a tail in the trees eventually took researchers deep into Lomami National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo on a quest to find out exactly what kind of monkey they were dealing with. Using microphones, cameras and genetic testing, they gathered enough evidence to confirm that the animal is a distinct species, now named Colobus congoensis — the first time a monkey is being named after the Congo!
It belongs to a group of plant-eating primates that live high in trees and do not have thumbs, but the Colobus congoensis has some unique characteristics. It uses a roaring call that announces its presence through dense tropical forest and has distinctive pinkish-orange lips that researchers think could act as a visual signal, perhaps helping it attract a mate. It also gives you someone to blame if your sibling asks, “Who ate the last orange creamsicle?!”
Scientists still have a lot to learn about this monkey, but it seems rare and limited to a particular habitat in the central-eastern part of the country. Researchers hope that officially recognizing it as a separate species will help protect both the monkey and the environment it depends on.
NASA is attempting something it has never done before: rescuing a space telescope that's slowly falling toward Earth.
The Swift Space Telescope has spent more than 20 years helping scientists study some of the universe's most powerful explosions. It originally orbited about 600 kilometers (over 300 miles) above Earth. At that height, the atmosphere is normally very thin — but increased solar activity has been pushing more of the atmosphere outward, creating extra drag. That drag slowed Swift down and caused its orbit to drop to about 360 kilometers (a little over 225 miles) above Earth.
To save it, NASA launched a rocket carrying a fridge-sized robot called Link. Link will first take pictures of Swift to figure out the safest place to grab hold of it. Then, using three robotic arms and its thrusters, it will slowly push Swift back up into a higher orbit. The whole process could take several months.
The mission is risky, since NASA has never attempted a rescue like this before. But if it works, Swift could keep operating for another decade. A success could also give NASA a blueprint for rescuing other aging spacecraft in the future — including the Hubble Space Telescope.
Japan’s Aeon shopping mall was the setting of a tragic scene when a powerful earthquake caused widespread destruction.
After the disaster, rescuers worked through the night to try to find survivors. Customers and staff began evacuating after the earthquake struck, but an explosion, possibly caused by a gas leak, collapsed part of the building before everyone could escape. At a nearby paper factory, a chimney also collapsed onto a building, where more people were still missing.
Japan builds structures specifically to withstand earthquakes, but this one was powerful enough to still cause serious damage — in fact, it could be felt as far away as South Korea. Hundreds of thousands of people were instructed to evacuate their homes, roads were torn apart, part of a bridge fell into the water, a train was derailed, and nearly 50,000 homes lost electricity. Historic sites, including a shrine and the wall of one of Japan's oldest castles, were also damaged.
Although people are already hard at work trying to recover, authorities warned that the danger did not end when the initial shaking stopped: weakened buildings, landslides, aftershocks and the possibility of further strong earthquakes could create additional risks.
This summer has been brutal in parts of France and Spain due to raging fires.
Near Bordeaux, France is experiencing its worst wildfires in decades. Despite the efforts of hundreds of firefighters working day and night, changing winds have kept changing the direction of the fires, making them hard to contain. Fields and forests have burned, villages have been evacuated, businesses have closed, and traffic has been diverted to keep people away from the danger.
Bordeaux’s mayor says the city itself is not being evacuated. That’s a good sign, but that doesn’t mean everything is all better. Tens of thousands of displaced people are staying in temporary shelters, such as schools and sports centers, while tourists are being urged to stay away until the fires can be contained.
Spain is also fighting to contain its blazes. One fire near Madrid was described by Spain’s Interior Ministry as “the most aggressive that Spain has ever seen.” The fires drove people to flee, abandoning their homes and even their pets (some of whom have been found and fed by rescuers.) Spain's prime minister described the situation as a “climate emergency” — six times more land burned during the hot, dry summer than during the previous year.
Most of our sub-par pictures just take up space on our phones and show off the insides of our pockets, but one blurry photo launched an almost two decades-long scientific endeavor.
A search that began with a picture of a tail in the trees eventually took researchers deep into Lomami National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo on a quest to find out exactly what kind of monkey they were dealing with. Using microphones, cameras and genetic testing, they gathered enough evidence to confirm that the animal is a distinct species, now named Colobus congoensis — the first time a monkey is being named after the Congo!
It belongs to a group of plant-eating primates that live high in trees and do not have thumbs, but the Colobus congoensis has some unique characteristics. It uses a roaring call that announces its presence through dense tropical forest and has distinctive pinkish-orange lips that researchers think could act as a visual signal, perhaps helping it attract a mate. It also gives you someone to blame if your sibling asks, “Who ate the last orange creamsicle?!”
Scientists still have a lot to learn about this monkey, but it seems rare and limited to a particular habitat in the central-eastern part of the country. Researchers hope that officially recognizing it as a separate species will help protect both the monkey and the environment it depends on.
NASA is attempting something it has never done before: rescuing a space telescope that's slowly falling toward Earth.
The Swift Space Telescope has spent more than 20 years helping scientists study some of the universe's most powerful explosions. It originally orbited about 600 kilometers (over 300 miles) above Earth. At that height, the atmosphere is normally very thin — but increased solar activity has been pushing more of the atmosphere outward, creating extra drag. That drag slowed Swift down and caused its orbit to drop to about 360 kilometers (a little over 225 miles) above Earth.
To save it, NASA launched a rocket carrying a fridge-sized robot called Link. Link will first take pictures of Swift to figure out the safest place to grab hold of it. Then, using three robotic arms and its thrusters, it will slowly push Swift back up into a higher orbit. The whole process could take several months.
The mission is risky, since NASA has never attempted a rescue like this before. But if it works, Swift could keep operating for another decade. A success could also give NASA a blueprint for rescuing other aging spacecraft in the future — including the Hubble Space Telescope.