POP SCIENCE REPORT

High speeds and low altitudes rule at Reno's annual airplane races

On Saturday, I stood in the high, hot, dusty, dry desert of Nevada and watched small jets zoom past
a pylon on a hill at low altitude as they flew their way through a race course in the sky. If you’ve ever
watched stock cars compete around a track, you get the general idea of what goes on at the
National Championship Air Races near Reno except the cars in this case are different types of
airplanes, the race courses are in the air, and the planes must bank around points that pylons mark
on the ground.
Lasers and 3D printing give New Balance's new kicks their
bounce
Take a look at a new running shoe called
the FuelCell Echo Triple coming out from
New Balance on Friday, and you’ll see that
the forefoot—the section at the front—looks
different. The black, lattice-like component
at the toe-end of the shoe is the product of a
3D-printing process that allows its makers
to design the structure of the material much
more deliberately than it can with more
common materials.
Apple Watches may soon decide when to administer medications

One of the most common psychiatric

emergencies is acute agitation, which makes
up around 10 percent of all emergency cases.
It often occurs in patients with dementia, as
well as other conditions like schizophrenia
and substance use disorders, and causes them
to exhibit inappropriate and out of control
verbal or physical activity, irritability, and
restlessness. Recognizing the early signs can
be key, and some think the Apple Watch and
other activity trackers might be able to help.
Sonos Move speaker review: Great sound in a semi-portable
package On-paper, the Sonos Move speaker doesn’t
make a ton of sense. It’s a portable speaker
that weighs six pounds and promises just
10 hours of battery life—when some of its
competition claim more than double that
number. At 10 inches tall and six-inches
around, it’s too big to easily stuff into a
typical day bag or backpack. And it costs
$400, which is extremely high if you’re
only comparing it to other Bluetooth
speakers.
182,000 Indians clean sewers largely by hand. These robots
could help. The Indian government defines a "manual
scavenger" as a person who physically carries
human excreta. Often without safety gear—no
helmets, masks, or gloves—these workers plumb
the manholes of Mumbai, waist-deep in grey silt
and sludge, searching for sewer-clogging debris:
feces, sanitary pads, hospital refuse, plastic bags,
and tree roots. With buckets full and fumes
threatening to overtake them, they exit for a few
moments, and then descend again. For their
service, and if they are lucky, the city might pay
them a monthly salary of about 14,500 rupees, or
roughly $200.
James Cameron doesn't think his deep-sea diving record was
broken. So we investigated
When explorer Victor Vescovo completed his
Five Deeps expedition at the end of August,
few people questioned the lengths he'd gone to
break multiple diving records.Vescovo 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.
Explore the gauges, levers, and history of a 747's iconic cockpit

Among the vast array of system switches

and controls in the worn flight deck, some
parts are easier to understand than others.
Four Rolls Royce engines power the giant
747 aircraft, hanging off wings that span
about 211 feet—and in the center of the
cockpit are four ivory-colored thrust levers,
one for each engine.
Last week in tech: iOS 13, Facebook's new gadgets, and a weird
video game about a goose It’s Friday afternoon (or later) and you’ve
been standing in line at the Apple store for
hours waiting for your new iPhone. Or has
it been days? Weeks, even? Time has lost
all meaning and you can’t even entertain
yourself by playing games on the display
iPads because that annoying, sick-looking
kid went around touching all of them.
Techathlon podcast: Look ahead to iPhone 12, ruin TV shows with texts, and ace our
tech trivia game
The iPhone 11 is brand new. In fact, if you
bought a packet of deli meat and an iPhone
11 on release day, you'd still have a couple
more days to finish your cold cuts before
things got sketchy. But the tech world never
stops, so, of course in this week's episode of
Techathlon, we're diving into all the
features we didn't get in the iPhone 11 and
hope show up in iPhone 12.
Google Pixel 4, Microsoft's new laptop, and the rest of the
current tech rumors
It’s fun to speculate about tech rumors,
especially when they apply to the products
we use every day. But, every rumor is
different. Some are likely true, while others
are little more than desperate clickbait. On
this page, we plan to keep a running tab of
the most popular rumors in the tech world
and contextualize them so you don’t get
your hopes up—and then feel sad when they
don’t pan out.