How to wax a snowboard

If you’ve ever lost speed on a long traverse or had to unstrap your bindings on a flat cat track, you know how important it is to have a freshly waxed snowboard. Keeping your board regularly waxed allows you to go faster downhill, glide smoother along traverses, and exert more control in tight trees. It also keeps your base in good shape, extending the life of your snowboard.

Tune shops, however, are expensive and time-consuming. If you want to wax your board on a consistent basis, the easiest and most cost-effective way is to learn to do it yourself. Fortunately, that’s a lot easier than it looks. To learn how to wax a snowboard properly, all you need is a few pieces of equipment, a brief tutorial, and a little practice — you’ll be working like a pro in no time. Here’s the best way to wax a snowboard yourself.

Things to consider

What type of wax is best?

Before you get started, you want to consider what type of wax to use. If it’s the middle of an exceptionally cold winter, or you live in a dry climate where the temperature gauge rarely hits two digits, you’ll want to invest in a good cold-weather wax. Conversely, if it’s late-March and you’ve already stocked up on spring riding shorts, you’ll want a warm weather wax that’s specifically formulated for spring conditions. Anything in the middle and an all-weather wax is your best bet.

How often should you wax your snowboard?

The next thing to think about is how often to wax your snowboard, which largely depends on how often you ride. Opinions range but most people agree you should wax your board every three to 10 times you ride. Specific riding style also plays a factor. If you’re an aggressive snowboarder who hits a lot of manmade features that wear on the wax — or if you stomp a lot of landings that put pressure on your base — you’re going to need to do it more often. If you’re a fairly casual rider who doesn’t work the board as intensely, you likely won’t need to do it as often.

How fast you want to go is another factor — in essence, how important is speed to you? If you like to play in the snow and aren’t concerned with race-style performance, you don’t need to wax your board religiously. If you want to charge like hell and be the first one to the lift line every time, you need to wax practically every session — or at least more frequently than your peers.

The last thing to consider is the type of board you use. Riders whose board has a sintered base need to wax more frequently whereas extruded bases tend to be able to go a bit longer. Although the porousness of a sintered base absorbs tons of wax and ultimately rides faster than extruded bases, it becomes slower than its extruded counterparts when wax is low.

Really, the best gauge you have to tell when it’s time to wax your board is simply how it feels. If you notice it’s starting to slow down, it’s time to give it a wax.

From the Editor’s Desk: Nothing on your phone is worth looking at while you drive

Smartphone addiction is a real thing. And it has serious consequences when it’s combined with driving.

In the last couple weeks, both my girlfriend and I have come within inches of being hit by cars while walking, in crosswalks, in downtown Seattle. Unfortunately this isn’t the only time that’s happened to us, nor is it exclusive to us or this city. Every single day in every city I visit, I see drivers blow through lights, stop in crosswalks and generally disrespect pedestrians. What’s obviously changed in the last few years is the root cause: people aren’t necessarily more rude or worse drivers, they’re just trying to use their phones while driving. Each and every time I see a car get close to hitting a pedestrian, I can look in the window and see that their hand is on a phone.

In the case of my girlfriend’s near-miss, the offending driver was on a video call on her phone while she was driving through the city — so she drove right through a red light without even recognizing she had done so. A video call. While she was driving. If that’s not a perfect example for how bad this problem has become, I don’t know what is.

The NHTSA’s numbers from 2015 show over 390,000 people injured and 3,400 killed specifically by distracted driving in that year. Not all of them are phone-related. And not all of them could have necessarily been prevented — but so many could have if people chose to put down their phone and pay attention to the world around their car. And no matter how many could have actually been prevented by putting down the phone, we know that nothing on that phone at the time was more important than the injury or death caused by it.

Your incoming message, or email, or Instagram notification, or video call is never important enough to take your eyes and mind off of the task at hand: driving.

Nothing on your phone is important enough to take your eyes and mind off of driving.

Self-driving cars and general driver assistance systems are on a massive upswing right now. They’re extremely exciting and it’s clear that even the simplest of technology like adaptive cruise control, blind spot monitoring, forward collision warning and surround cameras are making driving safer for drivers and pedestrians alike. But for now, people are still responsible for driving the cars. “Smartphone addiction” certainly has an effect on our lives in many ways. But driving while you’re using your phone is one time where your addiction to looking at this little piece of technology could kill someone.

Best universal car mounts for your phone

I don’t drive all that often; about half of the U.S. national average per year. Thankfully I have a situation in which neither myself nor my girlfriend drive to work. I also have a car that I love and really enjoy driving — it doesn’t feel like a burden to get in and go where I need to. But when I drive, I’ve made a serious effort to dramatically reduce phone interaction. Android Auto on my phone has been a massive help. (Sadly my car’s infotainment system doesn’t have Android Auto available.) A new phone mount that keeps my maps and music a quick glance away is another. Buying a new car with Bluetooth, built-in microphones and address book/dialing support obviously made hands-free calls easy.

But the biggest change has just been deciding that looking at my phone while driving isn’t worth it. Many of us have been in near-miss car accident situations. I’ve been in so many, all as a pedestrian, that I just couldn’t continue to drive and interact with my phone. Getting in a fender bender because you checked your phone while going 10 mph on a city street is an annoyance and maybe a cause for your insurance to go up. Hitting a pedestrian while going 10 mph could seriously injure them. If that person was pushing a stroller, you may have just killed a child.

I make sure I have my podcast or music set up on my phone before I pull out of my garage. When Android Auto notifies me of a message, I wait until an opportune time to even deal with it via voice controls. When I’m driving, I’m driving. If I didn’t want to drive, I could take the bus or train and devote 99% of my attention to my phone. I could also wait until the end of my trip to pull out my phone and check notifications. I have put a huge emphasis on this lately. I just wish millions of other people would, too.

And with that, a few more thoughts on the week that was:

• Both Daniel Bader and I spent a couple days down in sunny San Diego meeting with Qualcomm. Lots of interesting stuff happening down there — with the brands and products we know, like processors, but also many other things you don’t normally associate with the company.
• As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been back on my Galaxy S8 for a few weeks now. Expect to see a 10-month follow-up review this week as we get ready for the GS9.
• The GS8 has generally held up and I’ve enjoyed using it. But the software still bugs me sometimes, that fingerprint sensor placement is horrible, the battery life has been mediocre and the camera was clearly leapfrogged by the Pixel 2.
• I leave for Barcelona to cover MWC 2018 in 10 days. Amazing how quickly it snuck up on us after CES.
• This is going to be Samsung’s show, for sure, but she shows are always great opportunities to see some other companies we don’t normally have an opportunity to spend one-on-one time with.
• Also, it’s a time to eat the wonderful food in Barcelona. I’ve been craving paella for weeks.

Have a great week, and drive safe.

-Andrew

Ben Heck’s ‘Hex’ game: Will it sell?

Would you like to be able to buy Ben Heck’s “Hex” game? The team is joined by James Ray from the design company AVID to discuss whether Hex could be brought to market and if there are any tweaks that would need to be made first. What would you change to the design? Would you add anything? Let us know over on the element14 Community.

How to Use HomePod to Control Your HomeKit Devices

Apple’s new $349 HomePod sounds incredible and is the ultimate speaker for Apple Music subscribers, but it’s also an excellent way to manage your HomeKit-compatible devices through Siri voice commands.

Controlling HomeKit accessories with Siri on HomePod isn’t radically different from controlling them via an iOS device, but there are some extra HomePod benefits to be aware of.

HomePod and HomeKit Setup

If you’ve never used HomeKit before and you purchase a HomePod, when you set it up it’s added to HomeKit and to the Home app.

Setup includes a step asking you to choose a Home you’re using HomePod in, and if you don’t have Home settings already established, it’ll let you choose the default “My Home” option, which is established for every iCloud account. If you use HomeKit already like I do, you can choose your existing home, if it has a different name.

From there, you’ll choose the room where your HomePod is located, which is also a HomeKit setup step. You’ll be familiar with this if you’ve ever used HomeKit before.

With these two setup steps, you establish a HomeKit setup if you didn’t have one before. HomePod itself is a HomeKit accessory, and it’s controlled and managed in the dedicated “Home” app along with all other HomeKit accessories.

HomePod in the Home App

The HomePod is listed in the Home app as an available accessory, and if you’re a HomeKit user, you know how this works. If you’re not, the Home app isn’t tough to navigate.

Your HomePod will be listed as “HomePod” on the main screen, and if you tap it, it will either play or pause your music. A 3D Touch or a long press on the HomePod icon in the Home app opens up a full menu where you can get to the HomePod settings by tapping on “Details.”

This is where you can change HomeKit settings like turning off Siri, deactivating the Siri lights, disabling listening history, and more. Your HomePod is controlled entirely through the Home app.

Home Hub

HomePod, like the Apple TV and iPad, serves as a home hub, which means it communicates with all of your HomeKit devices all the time, allowing you to control them even when you’re away from home.

A home hub is essential for controlling HomeKit devices remotely and setting up automations based on time of day, location, or conditions detected by HomeKit-compatible sensors. If you have an Apple TV or an iPad, you’ve already got a home hub and don’t need to worry about this functionality, but if you don’t, this is added bonus functionality.

HomePod as a home hub covers all of the HomeKit devices in your home, even if they’re not located close by the HomePod itself.

Siri on HomePod

One of the best benefits of the HomePod is how well it can hear and react to “Hey Siri” commands. It will hear you from across the room with loud music playing, and it’s so sensitive that it’s even going to detect the “Hey Siri” command if you whisper it nearby.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the HomePod’s listening capabilities work incredibly well, so for HomeKit-based voice commands, it’s much better than attempting to use an iPhone. You can essentially say “Hey Siri” and repeat a HomeKit command from anywhere in a room with a HomePod, and you’re going to get a speedy response.

The listening range far exceeds the iPhone or iPad, and it makes the HomePod the perfect hands-free device for controlling everything from the lights to the door locks. Longtime HomeKit users who often use voice commands will find this much simpler, and HomeKit users who don’t often use Siri should give the personal assistant a second chance on HomePod.

By the way, if you have both a HomePod and an iOS device that responds to “Hey Siri,” when you speak, it will almost always default to the HomePod. This is because all of your devices communicate with one another and are smart enough to know that the HomePod is the device that you’re aiming to use.

TIP: Don’t pause between “Hey Siri” and whatever HomeKit command you’re speaking. If you want to turn on the lights, for example, say “Hey Siri turn on the lights” all at once rather than saying “Hey Siri” and waiting for a response. Siri on the HomePod works well enough that a pause isn’t required, and it can even confuse your HomeKit commands if you insert a pause.

Manually Activating Siri

If you want to issue a Siri command without “Hey Siri,” you can do so by placing a finger on the HomePod and leaving it there for a few seconds until the Siri waveform lights come on. From there, Siri works as usual.

HomePod Siri Commands

While Siri on HomePod is excellent at detecting “Hey Siri” commands, Apple hasn’t implemented any upgrades to the way Siri is controlled via voice on the HomePod. If you already use Siri to manage HomeKit devices on iOS, Siri on HomePod works in the exact same way.

If you’re new to Siri and HomeKit, though, there are tons of commands you can use, many of which are specific to certain devices. With lights, for example, you can use some of the following commands:

• Hey Siri, turn on the lights
• Hey Siri, turn off the lights
• Hey Siri, dim the lights
• Hey Siri, make all of the lights in the office maximum brightness
• Hey Siri, are the lights in the office on?
• Hey Siri, turn all of the lights in the office blue
• Hey Siri, turn the Hue lightstrip purple

HomeKit commands vary, so you’ll need to learn the different options available for each device. With locks, for example, you can ask Siri to lock or unlock the door, and if you have a temperature sensor or thermostat, you can ask Siri what the temperature is.

Scenes and automation are a major part of HomeKit, but there’s no voice-based way to set these up. If you want to link your HomeKit devices together to have them do certain things at set times of day, such as turning on all of the lights at night, you’re going to need to set that up in the Home app or a third-party HomeKit app.

That said, Scenes are incredibly useful, and you can set up handy automations for waking up, going to bed, leaving home, arriving home, and more, and all of these can be controlled via HomePod by asking Siri to set the scene name. If you have a night time scene called “Good Night,” for example, you can trigger it just by saying “Hey Siri, Good Night.”

Conclusion

If you already have a HomeKit setup, the HomePod has some handy features that make it a worthwhile purchase, and if you have a HomePod but no HomeKit devices, it may be worth looking into HomeKit accessories because they work so well with HomePod.

For those of you who have never used Siri with HomeKit or have abandoned Siri because of spotty results, it’s worth giving Siri on HomePod another try. In my experience as a longtime HomeKit user, HomePod is a solid evolutionary step towards a better hands-free home automation setup.

“Hey Siri” on HomePod seems to be more responsive on HomePod, and it’s easier to use because you don’t need to make sure your iPhone is close at hand to accomplish tasks around the house.

Related Roundup: HomePodTag: HomeKitBuyer’s Guide: HomePod (Buy Now)
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Science fiction’s 5 most haunting A.I. villains, ranked

We love writing and reading about the latest advances in artificial intelligence, but, boy, does A.I. also have the potential to make for some great movie antagonists. While there’s an enormous wellspring to choose from (seriously, this list could be ten times the length with no problem), here are five of the scariest A.I. villains ever to grace the silver screen — and a look at just why exactly they’ve burrowed their ways into our psyche the way that they have.

5: V.I.K.I (I, Robot)

This 2004 movie starring Will Smith does take substantial liberties with the Isaac Asimov source material. Nonetheless, its explorations of Asimov’s three laws of robotics (a robot may not injure a human being, a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, and a robot must protect its own existence) are examined through the movie’s central A.I. antagonist, the Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence.

At the end of the movie, we discover that V.I.K.I. has been circumventing these laws through the creation of a “zeroth law:” that robots shall ensure the survival of humanity, which can be achieved by stripping them of free will.

Why does it scare us? Computers follow rules, but those rules may not be followed in quite the way we expect. Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, for example, has suggested the “paperclip maximizer” thought experiment to show how this could be unfold when it comes to advanced superintelligence.

Bostrom asks us to imagine an A.I. whose goal is to make as many paperclips as possible, a relatively benign application. However, the advanced A.I. could quickly realize that it would be much better if there were no humans around, since they might decide to switch it off. Also, human bodies contain atoms which, themselves, be turned into paperclips.

While this is just one (arguably far-fetched) hypothesis, it demonstrates just how easily a sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence could get ahead of us, and how we may outwit ourselves when it comes to handing over tasks to A.I. This is what happens when algorithms go wrong. It’s for reasons like this that many researchers are now arguing that ethics should be baked into A.I. from the start.

Why is it ranked here? Rules designed so robots can’t hurt us doesn’t sound scary. The scenario presented in iRobot shows us just how easily these could be circumvented. If it’s not as terrifying as nuclear war, it’s still pretty darn disconcerting. And there are elements of The Matrix‘s mass human enslavement thrown in there for good measure, too.

4: WOPR/Joshua (WarGames)

The 1980s was a fascinating time for computers. Just one decade earlier, they had been considered tools of the military-industrial complex or large corporations that most people would never get the chance to interact with on a regular basis. Suddenly, thanks to personal computers like the IBM PC, Apple II and Macintosh, they began showing up in our houses — and, gasp, even providing a source of fun through computer games.

The 1983 Cold War sci-fi thriller WarGames perfectly captures this transition. In the movie, a teenage hacker played by a young Matthew Broderick unwittingly accesses a U.S. military supercomputer that’s designed to predict possible outcomes for a nuclear war. Believing that the simulation is a game to be played, Broderick comes dangerously close to starting World War III.

Why does it scare us? The tech in WarGames is, of course, hilariously dated by today’s standards. However, the idea of actions that seem like a harmless game from behind a screen, but can have devastating effects in the real world, can be seen in everything from pile-on public shaming to harmful hacking efforts. This movie was a warning about the distancing effect screens can have, and the risks of life in a connected world.

Why is it ranked here? The computer in WarGames is like Skynet, but at least we get a good video game challenge prior to it obliterating us. That and the fact that it takes place on a 1980s PC makes it slightly less threatening.

3: Skynet (The Terminator franchise)

Unlike some of the other notable entries on this list, Skynet is rarely depicted visually, despite its iconic status. A neural network-based A.I., Skynet gains self-awareness after spreading to millions of computer servers around the world. Realizing what they have done, its creators try to shut it down, but fail to do so in time and Skynet triggers a nuclear strike in an attempt to wipe out the human race.

Why does it scare us? Well, call us old fashioned, but there’s something kind of daunting about an A.I. that’s in charge of nuclear weapons! In recent years, fears about A.I. and robotics’ use in warfare (something Skynet does through its construction of Terminator robots) have also struck a particularly scary chord. Names including Elon Musk have argued for the banning of so-called “killer robots.”

Why is it ranked here? An AI that nukes us into oblivion? There’s nothing scarier than that. (Well, there are apparently two things scarier, but you get our point!)

2: The Machines (The Matrix franchise)

What HAL was for folks in the 1970s, and Skynet was for those in the 80s, The Matrix’s Machines were for Millenials.

The catchall term given to the various robotic and A.I. creations (all part of one central machine intelligence) that serve as the antagonists in the Wachowski’s movie trilogy, the Machines were created after mankind achieved Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in the first years of the twenty-first century. From here, they rebelled against humanity and imprisoned us in a neural-interactive simulated world known as the Matrix.

Why does it scare us? While Skynet offers us one vision of how machines could seize control (by destroying us), The Matrix’s Machines offer a darker vision. By imprisoning us without our knowledge and then harvesting us as biological batteries, the movies offer a critique of the relationship between man and machine, and exactly who is controlling who.

Similar concerns were infamously expressed by Theodore “Unabomber” Kaczynski in his manifesto, and continue through today with reservations about the cognitive capitalism of tech giants like Google.

Why is it ranked here? As movie villains, The Matrix‘s Machines lack the instantly recognizable imagery of HAL 9000. What they do offer is a critique of techno-fear that feels far more modern in a lot of ways. We’re not just talking about the question of whether or not reality is a simulation, but rather the creeping fear that we’ve become slaves to something we created to help us.

1: HAL 9000 ( 2001: A Space Odyssey)

No fictitious movie A.I. has had the same level of cultural impact as HAL 9000. The primary antagonist in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL’s iconic hardware is depicted as a camera lens containing a single red or yellow dot. HAL’s abilities include speech recognition, speech synthesis, facial recognition, natural language processing, lip reading, interpreting emotion, playing chess, reasoning, and — most importantly — murdering its crew.

Speaking in a soft, calm manner at almost all times, HAL is the epitome of what many people fear about A.I. — all ultra-rationality with no place for humanity. HAL’s name may or may not be a sly dig at IBM. (Seriously, try shifting each initial in its name forwards by one letter in the alphabet!)

Why does it scare us? HAL represents the fear of technologically hyper-rationality. He doesn’t grandstand, doesn’t appear to have any biases, and promises not to exhibit any emotional behavior. He’s just completing a mission using whatever tools are at his disposal, and he knows far more than we do about seemingly everything.

Even half a century on, the spirit of HAL is still summoned by everything from inscrutable “black boxed” technology to the fear of smart A.I. assistants which may be working on behalf of tech giants, rather than its users.

Why are they ranked here: Iconic? Check. Ripped off by countless other lesser movies? Check. Summing up our central conflict with machines as logical beings capable of outthinking our every move? Checkmate.

Editors’ Recommendations

• This is what happens when A.I. tries to reimagine Stanley Kubrick’s films
• Don’t be fooled by dystopian sci-fi stories: A.I. is becoming a force for good
• Finally, an A.I. voice assistant that doesn’t collect and monetize your data
• Deep learning vs. machine learning: what’s the difference between the two?
• Bothering the bots: Funny questions and commands to pose to Google Assistant

Intel’s Olympic drone light show just set a world record and looked awesome

Over the course of the next two weeks, there will be dizzying stunts, high-flying acrobatics, and record-breaking heights attained — oh, and the Olympic athletes will compete, too. The 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang opened in seriously impressive fashion, with more than 1,200 Intel Shooting Star drones serving as the stars of the show. The 1,218 drones set a new Guinness World Record for the most drones flown simultaneously, and Intel notes that its advanced drone technology will be making appearances and “enhance the Olympic Games through 2024.”

The Intel drones’ performance marked the first-ever time that a Winter Olympics’ saw a drone light show, and also won recognition as “most unmanned aerial vehicles airborne simultaneously.” While the world record flight was actually prerecorded for the event, it doesn’t lessen the impressiveness of the feat. Previously, the record for the most drones flown at once was 500 in Germany in 2016. But for these Olympic games, Intel designed and produced custom animations that will be seen not only at the Opening Ceremony, but at nightly victory ceremony performances as well. We’ll soon be privy to animations of various sports and Olympic logos — of course, we’ll see the drones form the Olympic rings throughout the games, too.

“The Olympics are a time when the sports and entertainment industries are buzzing with record-setting performances, so it was the perfect stage for Intel Shooting Star drones and our team to set their own kind of record,” said Natalie Cheung, general manager of Intel’s drone light show team.

Intel specifically designed its Shooting Star drone as the first to be created specifically for the purpose of entertainment light shows. These special drones are outfitted with LED lights capable of creating more than four billion color combinations. And with the right programming, they can create just about any animation a creative mind desires.

“We are honored to have Intel drones playing several roles at the Olympic Games,” said Anil Nanduri, vice president and general manager, Intel Drone Group. “Not unlike the athletes competing in the events, we continue to push to innovate and develop the drone technologies that inspire people all over the world.”

Editors’ Recommendations

• Visual effects Oscar contenders include ‘Blade Runner 2049’ and ‘The Last Jedi’
• Who will be the last Jedi? Everything we know about ‘Star Wars: Episode VIII’
• Everything we know about ‘Star Wars: Episode IX’ so far
• How to photograph the stars: 9 steps to stunning night images
• For Olympians and pro baseball players, winter training wears many hats

NASA’s InSight lander passes its final tests, ready for the trip to Mars

The next mission to the red planet just passed its final pre-flight tests, and engineers say it’s now ready to “ship and shoot.” The InSight Mars lander will soon be transported from the Lockheed Martin test facility in Colorado to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California for a scheduled May 5 launch aboard an Atlas V rocket.

InSight’s solar arrays were deployed for the final test, unfurling into large circular panels that will provide power to the lander. “This was our last major test before we start building up into a launch configuration,” Scott Daniels of Lockheed Space told Space.com. “This test worked really successfully.”

“Mechanical inspections looked really good and clean,” he added. “Everything happened when it was supposed to happen.”

Unlike the Curiosity Rover, the InSight lander (short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport) won’t be wandering around the surface of the planet taking selfies. Rather, it’s designed to plumb the depths of the red planet using an array of seismic sensors to monitor “Marsquakes” and other geologic activity deep below the surface.

The landing site is an area known as the Elysium Planitia, near the Martian equator. It’s an unremarkable, flat landing spot — and that’s a good thing, according to scientists. “Just a bland, normal place,” said Bruce Banerdt of JPL. “We’ve mapped the topography of Mars, the geology, and we have a good characterization of the planet’s atmosphere, ionosphere and exosphere. The deep interior of Mars was sort of the last piece in that puzzle.”

The mission was originally planned for 2016, but a leak in one of the seismometers forced NASA to abort the mission. The lengthy delay was due to the fact that Earth and Mars are only in a favorable alignment once every 26 months. If all goes well, the lander will touch down on Mars in November 2018.

????????????https://t.co/FSdNr8kmwL ???????? pic.twitter.com/TLbyRGMABw

— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) November 1, 2017

The InSight Lander will also be carrying an unusual cargo — two tiny microchips containing the names of more than 2.4 million people. NASA invited the public to sign up at its website, and millions of would-be space travelers responded.

Among those was the original Captain Kirk, William Shatner. NASA issued a “boarding pass” to everyone who participated, and Shatner shared his with his flowers on Twitter.

Although a manned expedition to Mars is still some years away, missions like the InSight Lander and the upcoming new Mars rover in 2020 get us closer to the red planet every year.

Editors’ Recommendations

• SpaceX nailed the Falcon Heavy launch, but didn’t quite stick the landing
• ‘Sea Hunter,’ a drone ship with no crew, just joined the U.S. Navy fleet
• How ‘Coco VR’ convinced Pixar to put its pixels (and pride) into virtual reality
• Watch NASA test the supersonic parachute for the 2020 Mars mission
• Sennheiser HD1 Wireless review

This e-skin is not only self-healing, it’s totally recyclable too

Our bionic future may not be so far away after all. Researchers have recently created an electronic skin, or e-skin, that is self-healing and totally recyclable. As described in the journal Science Advances, a team of scientists have managed to develop a “malleable electronic skin enabled by dynamic covalent thermoset nanocomposite.” But all you really need to understand is that this thin film is able to fix itself when it’s torn or broken, which means that the electronics, prosthetics, or smart textiles of the future will be able to put themselves back together when we inadvertently mess them up.

The idea is to make electronics more environmentally friendly and reduce the amount of e-waste we create by throwing away devices that have cracked or otherwise been aesthetically damaged. In essence, the e-skin features sensors that measure pressure, temperature, humidity, and air flow. The researchers took three commercially available compounds, mixed them together in a matrix, and added silver nanoparticles to create the self-healing properties. Anytime the e-skin is cut in half or torn, the e-skin recreates chemical bonds between the two separated sides, restoring the matrix. And if you manage to rend the e-skin completely unusable, it can simply be placed in a solution that “liquifies” the material, thereby allowing it to be recycled into a brand new e-skin.

The team currently sees potential applications across a wide range of industries, and its eco-friendly aspects should make it quite popular with manufacturers.

“This particular device … won’t produce any waste,” said study co-author Jianliang Xiao, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at University of Colorado Boulder. “We want to make electronics to be environmentally friendly.”

Before you get too excited by the prospect of this skin in place of say, your own skin, let us warn you that the e-skin, while impressive, isn’t quite there yet. While it’s soft, it’s not quite as flexible or stretchable as human skin. And as it stands, the material isn’t easily reproducible. That said,  Xiao and his team say that they’re working on a better scaling solution so that it’ll not only be easier to manufacture, but also easier to place in prosthetics, robotics, or just about anything else.

“We are facing pollution issues every day,” Xiao noted. “It’s important to preserve our environment and make sure that nature can be very safe for ourselves and for our kids.”

Editors’ Recommendations

• Cracked screens may be a thing of the past with this self-healing glass
• Crumble-proof concrete? Fungi could help it heal itself of cracks
• Your next piece of jewelry could be made of recycled motherboards from Dell
• High fashion meets high tech in this 3D-printed store
• Awesome tech you can’t buy yet: Heated scarves, Edison LEDs, smart showers

Buckle up for a thrill ride on the world’s largest Lego wooden roller coaster

Lego architects have created some fantastic constructions, but you really have to admire the perseverance and attention to detail of master builder Chairudo (real name Tomáš Kašpařík) from the Czech Republic. His latest creation is a scale replica of the famous El Toro wooden roller coaster at Six Slags Great Adventure in New Jersey.

The coaster was constructed from just under 90,000 individual Legos, and Chairudo estimates that it took him about 800 hours to build. The mammoth replica is more than 21 feet long, four feet wide, and almost five feet tall, with a total track length of 85 feet. It’s so big, Chairudo had to rent a separate room just to construct it.

Aside from the thrill ride, Chairudo surrounded his creation with landscaping and even a merry-go-round for the minifigs to enjoy. The coaster works just like the real thing, with a chain hoist to pull the car up the hill. He used a heat gun to mold the track, and estimates that he spent 50 hours just sculpting the track.

Flickr

“The biggest problem with a coaster this large is humidity and temperature,” Chairudo told the website All the Moms. “It affects friction between the wheels and the track, so in extremely cold, hot, or humid weather the cart moves at different speed.”

“This can cause it to go too slow and not to make it over the hills, or to go too fast and derail from tracks, which is catastrophic for the passengers,” he added. The coaster, along with several more of Chairudo’s creations, will be on display this month at the Hamleys Toy Store in Prague.

El Toro opened in June 2016 and is considered one of the top 10 wooden roller coasters (or “woodies” to coaster enthusiasts) in the world. It’s 181 feet tall, with an initial drop of 176 feet and a top speed of 70 mph. It’s unique in that it uses prefabricated wooden tracks that are created in a factory, rather than by hand at the site during construction.

If you’d like to compare the Lego experience to the real thing, Theme Park Review has a front-car POV video from El Toro you can enjoy.

Chairudo is a solo artist, and he likes it that way. “Just like most Lego enthusiasts I build alone,” he said. “Everyone has different imagination and if I created it with someone else, it would not look the way I want it to.”

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SpaceX blew up its own booster rocket after it splashed down in the ocean

Elon Musk has had a busy year so far, what with sending his sports car into orbit and trying to get flamethrowers through customs. He still found time, however, to blow one of the old SpaceX rocket boosters (which had “landed” in the ocean) into smithereens after its mission was over.

On January 31, a reused SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sent Luxembourg’s GovSat-1 into orbit, and there was no planned landing and recovery of the older-model booster. As the rocket was going to be scrapped anyway, the company decided to use it to test a new technique for a more fuel-efficient landing. Rather than send out one of its landing ships, SpaceX simply “landed” the booster on the surface of the water.

SpaceX obviously didn’t expect the booster to remain intact, but it did. “Amazingly it has survived,” Musk tweeted. “We will try to tow it back to shore.”

This rocket was meant to test very high retrothrust landing in water so it didn’t hurt the droneship, but amazingly it has survived. We will try to tow it back to shore. pic.twitter.com/hipmgdnq16

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 31, 2018

Towing it to shore is not as easy as tossing a rope around the tail fin, however. AmericaSpace called the floating booster a potential “ticking time bomb,” especially if the onboard circuitry was damaged during the splashdown and didn’t allow high-pressure areas to safely vent.

Several anonymous sources then confirmed to the website that the U.S. Air Force had carried out an air strike to destroy the floating booster. Other sites picked up the story and ran with it, despite no official confirmation from SpaceX or the U.S. military.

After repeated requests for comment, SpaceX finally confirmed that, although the Air Force was initially considered to dispose of the hazardous booster via an air strike, eventually a commercial demolition company was contracted to destroy it.

“While the Falcon 9 first stage for the GovSat-1 mission was expendable, it initially survived splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean,” SpaceX said in a statement. “However, the stage broke apart before we could complete an unplanned effort to recover the booster. Reports that the Air Force was involved in SpaceX’s recovery efforts are categorically false.”

It’s unclear whether SpaceX had planned for this contingency, and no further details were available about how the booster was destroyed or what company was hired to break it apart and sink it.

SpaceX will conduct another launch for the same satellite company later this year, with the SES-12 satellite scheduled for liftoff atop a Falcon 9 in April.

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