Charging your EV from home is cheap and convenient, but knowing which type of charger will get the most out of your electric car can often be confusing.
You may not know it, but minivans are making a comeback in the US. Look around, and you'll start to notice an uptick in these breadboxes on wheels. Sales were up 21 percent in 2025, suggesting that the humble minivan is shaking off its "uncool" stigma and finding new fans among an SUV-weary public. I'm here for it.
One of the companies currently carrying the torch for minivans is Kia, which has sold its popular Carnival minivan here since 2021. Kia is also one of the few automakers making all-electric vans. This week, the Korean automaker rolled out its new PV7 at IAA Transportation in Germany. This is the second electric van from Kia's Pla …
A Moriarty-based company’s stratospheric platform has re-entered the United States. High Altitude Platform Systems (HAPS) for stratospheric infrastructure completed its record-breaking trans-Pacific flight from New Mexico to Japan and back.
Callled Service Test 1 (ST1) mission, the stratospheric platform was developed by Sceye. ST1 launched on August 9, 2026, and arrived in Japan 13 days later. While operating in Japan, Sceye demonstrated mobile broadband connectivity to unmodified devices through SoftBank Corp.’s core network and HAPS-based edge computing and communication with drones to support the development of a 3D communications network.
“Groundbreaking and historic only begin to describe our ST1 flight,” says Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen, Founder and CEO of Sceye.
“This mission proved not only that our technology, vehicle systems, payload, and operational infrastructure are ready for connectivity services, but also that the stratosphere is where the future non-terrestrial infrastructure lies. The stratosphere is what will enable the always-on future – including the promised land of 6G. Together ground, stratosphere, and space – each operating at their optimal strengths, will change the course of humanity.”
During its journey, Sceye’s ST1 traveled nearly 30,000 km and re-entered continental U.S. on September 4, 2026. ST1 reached airspace near Sceye’s headquarters in Moriarty, New Mexico on September 5, 2026, where Sceye completed additional vehicle testing and a planned termination and descent.
Conducted in partnership with SoftBank Corp, a leading operator of telecommunications and IT businesses in Japan and globally, ST1 marks Sceye’s first flight to Asia and a groundbreaking milestone toward the commercial deployment of HAPS as stratospheric infrastructure. ST1 carried SceyeCELL, a first-of-its-kind “cell tower in the sky” designed to deliver wide-area mobile broadband directly to standard devices from the stratosphere. When deployed at full scale, one Sceye HAPS is designed to cover the equivalent area of approximately 500 terrestrial towers, according to a press release.
Stratosphere offers the optimal vantage point
The stratosphere offers the optimal vantage point: It is close enough to Earth for high-capacity connectivity and observation, yet the altitude is high enough for wide-area reach. Importantly, the stratosphere offers space-like conditions without the cost of being in space and the disadvantages of being in orbit. Sceye’s HAPS maintain altitude and their area of operation in the stratosphere through consecutive day and night cycles, operating like geostationary satellites, only 1,800 times closer to Earth and at a fraction of the cost, as per the release.
The platform traveled nearly 30,000 km from New Mexico to Japan and back to New Mexico over a month-long journey. The platform also tested emergency calls, using an emergency alert messaging system designed for large-scale disasters, as well as communications with drones.
Through a server installed on the HAPS, Sceye and SoftBank conducted data processing directly on the platform, demonstrating an average round-trip processing response time of 68 milliseconds, reducing communications latency by over 40% compared with internet-based cloud processing. This marks the world’s first successful test in which a mobile core network and a web server for processing were installed on a HAPS, enabling response processing to be performed entirely onboard the HAPS and the results to be relayed back to smartphones.
A new federal program to test the feasibility of electric, hybrid-electric, and autonomous aircraft kicks off today in Texas - before the rules governing this new technology have even been finalized.
Airline operations across the UK have reportedly resumed following an air traffic control failure that cancelled over 2,000 flights and left hundreds of thousands of travelers stranded at airports throughout the country.
British airports restarted operations on Wednesday, September 9, after the hours-long shutdown a day earlier. London-based aviation data and analytics company, Cirium, reported that around 1,750 flights were cancelled Tuesday, September 8.
The National Air Traffic Services (NATS), UK’s air traffic control body, reported that the departure disruption was caused by a “technical issue” in its flight processing system. Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester, and Birmingham experienced the most severe delays.
Reports said more than 290 further flights were cancelled on Wednesday. The first day saw 30 percent of departures grounded. Cirium revealed that the figure fell to five percent the following day.
Martin Rolfe, NATS CEO, apologized to the travelers affected by the reported “IT failure”. However, Yvonne Moynihan, Wizz Air UK managing director, and Neal McMahon, Ryanair COO, have both called on Rolfe to resign over the recurring technical issues.
UK flights come to a halt
The issue began Tuesday following a technical problem at NATS, the company in charge of Britain’s air traffic control system. The failure led to the cancellation of more than 2,000 flights and stranded hundreds of thousands of passengers.
According to the media, Ryanair was among the hardest-hit carriers. The airline said approximately 150,000 of its passengers were affected and that it canceled more than 200 flights. British Airways, meanwhile, canceled or diverted around 100 flights, affecting tens of thousands of passengers.
A Ryanair passenger plane parked on the tarmac at an airport. Credit: Ryanair
Rolfe disclosed that the organization was investigating the incident and believed the problem was different from those behind previous failures. However, while he apologized for the disruption and said that a cyberattack had been ruled out, he was summoned to meet Transport Minister Heidi Alexander on Wednesday.
Alexander urged all passengers to “continue to check with airlines” to confirm if their flights were operating as scheduled. “I am seeking assurances that lessons will be learned and systems that support aviation are up to the job,” she said on the social media platform X.
Earlier issues spark concern
The disruption has nevertheless raised fresh questions over the resilience of the UK’s air traffic infrastructure. Tuesday’s outage was not the first major technical problem to hit Britain’s air traffic network in recent years.
A system failure in August 2023 caused widespread cancellations during one of the busiest travel periods of the year. It apparently cost airlines around USD 135 million (GBP 100 million). Another technical problem emerged in July 2025 when a radar-related fault disrupted flights at major airports, including Heathrow.
In an interview with Reuters, Michael O’Leary, Ryanair CEO, said the outage was a repeat of the 2023 shutdown caused by a rogue flight plan. “Fire him. He’s been there since 2015. He is useless,” O’Leary said.
The firm also issued a statement saying that over 65,000 of its passengers were affected by the outage. “How many more failures do passengers have to suffer before overpaid failure NATS CEO, Martin Rolfe, accepts responsibility for his repeated mismanagement and resigns,” McMahon noted. “Families traveling on holiday, people traveling for work and thousands of visitors to the UK have once again paid the price for NATS’ abhorrent failure,” he added.
Moynihan also joined Ryanair in calling on Rolfe to resign. “I think in any industry, when you’ve had three failures, you need to consider that three strikes and you’re out. So I think it’s certainly something that he needs to look at,” she said. “A third time and a third excuse is not enough anymore.”
Rolfe took full responsibility for the incident. He has been given one week to investigate what happened and report his findings to Alexander.
On-device AI takes center stage as the panel explores MacPaw’s work with Liquid AI, personal assistants, and workplace restrictions. The conversation also discusses the panel's experiences with AI note-taking recording consent and privacy in both business and health care.
Joby Aviation announced it was acquiring Dayton, Ohio-based defense firm Resonant Sciences in a $500 million deal, in a bid by the electric aircraft company to expand further into the military industrial complex.
Joby says it expects to finance the deal with $450 million in cash and $50 million in equity. After the deal closes, which is expected in early 2027, Resonant will continue its existing work as Joby's dedicated defense division, the company said. The commercial division will remain focused on air taxis, the first of which are expected to launch later this year.
The deal is the latest example of the fledgling electric aviation in …
An anonymous reader shares a report from The Conversation, written by Hatim Sharif, a civil and environmental engineer who has "spent more than two decades staring at maps" and spatial data. Sharif finds one connection especially fascinating: the link between spatial reasoning and why taxi drivers seem to have lower rates of Alzheimer's. From the report: Taxi and ambulance drivers are less likely than workers in almost any other job to die of Alzheimer's disease. That was the surprising result of a 2024 study examining the death certificates of nearly 9 million people in the U.S. [...] Of the 9 million death certificates from January 2020 to December 2022 that researchers examined, taxi and ambulance drivers had the lowest risk of dying from Alzheimer's disease out of 443 occupations. After adjusting for age, sex, race, ethnicity and education, roughly 1 in 100 taxi and ambulance drivers died of Alzheimer's, compared with 1 in 60 people overall. This pattern did not extend to other driving jobs.
The researchers concluded that the key to reducing the risk of Alzheimer's was not driving itself but continuous real-time navigation: the constant work of locating yourself in space, tracking a destination and updating a mental map as conditions change. Drivers whose jobs relied on fixed or predetermined routes, like bus drivers and aircraft pilots, didn't seem to experience a similar advantage. Researchers believe the association between navigation-heavy work and lower Alzheimer's risk centers on the hippocampus, a part of the brain that governs memory and spatial navigation. It's one of the first brain regions that Alzheimer's damages: Problems with spatial navigation and orientation are among the earliest signs of the disease, sometimes surfacing before obvious memory loss.
In one landmark 2000 study, neuroscientists compared the brains of licensed London taxi drivers with those of people who did not drive cabs. Their findings provided the first evidence via structural imaging that regions of the adult brain can measurably change under sustained navigational demand. To earn a license, London cabbies must memorize more than 25,000 streets within a 6-mile radius of Charing Cross, a challenge known as "The Knowledge" that takes three to four years.
The researchers found that London taxi drivers had measurably more gray matter in the posterior hippocampus, a brain area tied to storing large-scale spatial maps. That volume tracked with experience: The longer someone had driven, the larger that part of the brain. The change was built through practice, not inherited. While people who are good at navigation might gravitate to this kind of job, the job itself does have an impact on the brain. Together, these two studies make a coherent case: Work that intensively exercises the hippocampus may reshape it, and that reshaping may protect against one of the most feared diseases of aging.
Head Coach Kyle Shanahan of the San Francisco 49ers | Image: Michael Zagaris / San Francisco 49ers / Getty Images
Four weeks ago, San Francisco 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan was involved in an accident near downtown Palo Alto. At the time Shanahan said only that the accident was his fault. But during a recent press conference he shared more details about the incident, including the fact that he had his Tesla's Autopilot engaged at the time. Shanahan was not passing the buck, however, saying it was his fault regardless of whether or not Autopilot was engaged.
"I've had Autopilot for nine years, so I'm pretty comfortable with it and, you know, who knows what happened when I turned around? Whether it malfunctioned or whether I knocked it off? That's somethi …
Researchers from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) have successfully developed an optimized spark-ignited hydrogen engine suitable for medium-duty commercial vehicles. As a form of internal combustion engine (ICE), the new engine behaves much more like a diesel engine than earlier hydrogen engines.
In other words, it is not a new kind of fuel-cell engine, but rather burns hydrogen inside cylinders using spark ignition. Just like a petrol engine, the new ICE produces mechanical propulsion using pistons.
“In addition to decades of developing medium- and heavy-duty engines, SwRI has some of the most extensive experience in the world developing and testing H2-ICEs for internal research, clients and industry demonstrations,” said Dr. Qilong Lu, a program manager in SwRI’s Powertrain Systems Engineering Department and one of the leads on this project.
“The engine was designed, constructed and rigorously tested at SwRI to ensure efficiency and performance,” Dr. Lu added.
Diesel-like torque hydrogen engine
“We began at the single-cylinder level, focusing on optimizing combustion and injection strategies,” Lu said. “From there, our team ramped up efforts to develop the full multi-cylinder engine, addressing key challenges such as pre-ignition, combustion stability and overall systems integration,” Lu added.
The attraction is that hydrogen contains no carbon, so burning it produces water rather than carbon dioxide. It also allows manufacturers to retain much of the familiar internal-combustion ecosystem: engines, transmissions, manufacturing equipment, servicing knowledge and supply chains.
The team also managed to deliver the new hydrogen ICE’s diesel-like torque using a turbocharger that forces more air into the engine. This allows it to burn more hydrogen and produce the strong low-speed torque needed to move loaded trucks.
The new engine also has improved airflow thanks to an innovative intake-port geometry allowing hydrogen to burn much faster than petrol and requiring different air movement inside the cylinder.
The engine also features larger intake valves and hydrogen-specific injectors to enable optimum fuel-to-air mixing within the cylinders. It also uses special software and calibrations to precisely manage injection, ignition, boost pressure and the air–fuel mixture.
Another wrinkle they had to overcome is safety. Hot engine surfaces or residual gases can ignite hydrogen before the spark fires, producing knocking, power loss or potentially engine damage.
Low-emissions but not zero
In terms of emissions, the engine produces what the team describes as “near-zero tailpipe CO₂.” While this is true in terms of the engine itself, the way in which the fuel hydrogen is produced matters here.
If produced from natural gas, rather than renewable electricity, CO₂ could remain high, all things considered. Also, hydrogen combustion can still produce nitrogen oxides, or NOx, because combustion heats nitrogen and oxygen from the air to very high temperatures.
It therefore isn’t literally a zero-emission engine and may require careful combustion control and exhaust after-treatment.
“The project brought together many areas and experts at the Institute to complete,” said Chris Bitsis, assistant director of SwRI’s Powertrain Systems Engineering Department, who oversees combustion research programs. “SwRI’s hydrogen combustion engine program is working every day to advance this technology and showcase its potential as a near-zero carbon emissions industry solution,” he added.
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