Pop Science Report

Johanna R.
James Cameron disputes Victor Vescovo's record for
deepest ocean dive
Vescovo's goal was to visit
the deepest point of each
ocean, and he succeeded in
nine short months. On his
last dive he delved 5,550
meters into the Molloy
Trench in the Arctic—but it
was his second-to-last that's
now provoking controversy.
Techathlon podcast: iPhone 11, a lie detector, and a
streaming content quiz

New Lie Detector party game and

our contestants faced off against it
with a barrage of questions
intended to draw out our greatest
digital shames.
Last week in tech: Apple's iPhone 11, Land Rover's new
Defender, and Nintendo's weird controller
The Ring-Con is a flexible toy
that syncs up with the
Swtich's Joy-Cons and lets
you exercise and game at the
same time. You'll have to
sweat your way through a
role-playing adventure by
squeezing the hoop-shaped
controller and jogging with a
Joy-Con strapped to your
leg. I hope these controllers
keep getting weirder and we
eventually get a turtle-
shaped device we can jump
on for an immersive Super
Mario experience.
Algorithms aren't all created equal

All around us, algorithms are

invisibly at work. They're
recommending music and
surfacing news, finding cancerous
tumors, and making self-driving
cars a reality. But do people trust
them? Not really.
Nintendo's new Switch controller is a flexible hoop that
forces you to exercise
̉̉ Nintendo has been trying to pull
gamers up off the couch for
decades. Going all the way back to
the sweat-inducing Power Pad, the
company's lineage includes a
variety of weird accessories
designed to push game controls
well past your thumbs. The latest
development comes in the form of
a flexible ring and leg-strap
controller for the Switch console.
You control the game by moving
your body
The coolest planes at the Reno air races
At the National Championship Air
Races in Reno, Nevada, over 100
small aircraft droned, whined and
roared as they zoomed in races at
hundreds of miles per hour over the
high desert floor; they maneuvered
around giant courses, banking left
around pylons that mark their turns.
These aircraft range from tiny,
home-built planes in the “sport”
category, to full-on jets, to biplanes.
All told, there are six different types
of planes that compete.
Lamborghini built a supercapacitor into its Sián hybrid
for a faster, smoother ride
Lamborghini previewed the
future of its hyper-performance
cars with the announcement of
the Sián, a hybrid-electric V12
that is the marque’s fastest and
most powerful model yet. At 819
horsepower, the Sián (Bolognese
slang for a flash of lightning)
rockets to 62 mph in just 2.8
seconds. Its top speed exceeds
217 mph.
The Bugatti Chiron supercar broke the 300 mph barrier
and set a new speed record
Bugatti’s 1,500-horsepower Chiron
hypercar has reclaimed the world
speed record for production cars
with a run of 304.773 mph, making
the French luxury marque the first
to top 300 mph in a production
model
The next big space race is happening in Asia
On September 7, India's
Chandrayaan-2 lunar mission
deployed its Vikram lander for an
attempted landing at the moon's
south pole. Communications with
the lander were lost just minutes
prior to the scheduled landing.
Recent imaging suggests that
Vikram may have survived the
landing intact, but it might be
unable to communicate. No
matter the outcome, the mission
has already proved successful as
Chandrayaan-2 continues to orbit
the Moon.
A U.S. adventurer just became the first to reach all of the
world’s deepest spots
There aren't many firsts left,
and adventurer Victor
Vescovo knocked off
arguably the last major one
— at least here on Earth —
when he reached the Molloy
Deep, the bottommost point
in the Arctic Ocean, on
August 24. That dive,
embargoed until yesterday,
was the final of the so-called
Five Deeps mission,
Vescovo's quest to reach the
absolute lowest spot in each
ocean.