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Although US coal consumption has fallen dramatically since 2005, the country still consumes millions of tons a year, and exports tons more—much of it transported by train. Now, new research shows that these trains can affect the health of people living near where they pass.

The study found that residents living near railroad tracks likely have higher premature mortality rates due to air pollutants released during the passage of uncovered coal trains. The analysis of the San Francisco Bay Area cities of Oakland, Richmond, and Berkeley shows that increases in air pollutants such as small particulate matter (PM 2.5) are also associated with increases in asthma-related episodes and hospital admissions.

"This has never been studied in the world. There's been a couple studies trying to measure just the air pollution, usually in rural areas, but this was the first to both measure air pollution and trains in an urban setting," said Bart Ostro, author of the study and an epidemiologist at the University of California, Davis.

Enlarge / At just under $70,000, the Lucid Air Pure is closer to the company's original target for an entry-level model than the "under $80,000" it told us in 2020. (credit: Evan Willams)

It's the lowest-priced entry from an automotive startup, so I wasn't expecting the world.

Too many EV startups do a great job on the electric side but not so great on the car side of the equation—and sometimes they don't do either particularly well. But the Air Pure wasn't just good; it was excellent. It's the rare car I had trouble finding flaws with, even after it locked me out in a parking lot.

The Pure RWD is the filtered version of the Lucid Air. It doesn't have two motors, and it doesn't offer a glass roof. It doesn't have more horsepower than a Lamborghini, and it definitely doesn't offer the 512 mile (824 km) range of the Air Grand Touring.

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Is space-based solar power a costly, risky pipe dream? Or is it a viable way to combat climate change? Although beaming solar power from space to Earth could ultimately involve transmitting gigawatts, the process could be made surprisingly safe and cost-effective, according to experts from Space Solar, the European Space Agency, and the University of Glasgow.

But we’re going to need to move well beyond demonstration hardware and solve a number of engineering challenges if we want to develop that potential.

Designing space-based solar

Beaming solar energy from space is not new; telecommunications satellites have been sending microwave signals generated by solar power back to Earth since the 1960s. But sending useful amounts of power is a different matter entirely.

Enlarge (credit: UNIVERSITY OF LAUSANNE)

In the early 2000s, local fossil collector Mohamed ‘Ou Said’ Ben Moula discovered numerous fossils at Fezouata Shale, a site in Morocco known for its well-preserved fossils from the Early Ordovician period, roughly 480 million years ago. Recently, a team of researchers at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) studied 100 of these fossils and identified one of them as the earliest ancestor of modern-day chelicerates, a group that includes spiders, scorpions, and horseshoe crabs.

The fossil preserves the species Setapedites abundantis, a tiny animal that crawled and swam near the bottom of a 100–200-meter-deep ocean near the South Pole 478 million years ago. It was 5 to 10 millimeters long and fed on organic matter in the seafloor sediments. “Fossils of what is now known as S. abundantis have been found early on—one specimen mentioned in the 2010 paper that recognized the importance of this biota. However, this creature wasn’t studied in detail before simply because scientists focused on other taxa first,” Pierre Gueriau, one of the researchers and a junior lecturer at UNIL, told Ars Technica.

The study from Gueriau and his team is the first to describe S. abundantis and its connection to modern-day chelicerates (also called euchelicerates). It holds great significance, because “the origin of chelicerates has been one of the most tangled knots in the arthropod tree of life, as there has been a lack of fossils between 503 to 430 million years ago,” Gueriau added.

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Advances in artificial intelligence are making it increasingly difficult to distinguish between uniquely human behaviors and those that can be replicated by machines. Should artificial general intelligence (AGI) arrive in full force—artificial intelligence that surpasses human intelligence—the boundary between human and computer capabilities will diminish entirely.

In recent months, a significant swath of journalistic bandwidth has been devoted to this potentially dystopian topic. If AGI machines develop the ability to consciously experience life, the moral and legal considerations we’ll need to give them will rapidly become unwieldy. They will have feelings to consider, thoughts to share, intrinsic desires, and perhaps fundamental rights as newly minted beings. On the other hand, if AI does not develop consciousness—and instead simply the capacity to out-think us in every conceivable situation—we might find ourselves subservient to a vastly superior yet sociopathic entity.

Neither potential future feels all that cozy, and both require an answer to exceptionally mind-bending questions: What exactly is consciousness? And will it remain a biological trait, or could it ultimately be shared by the AGI devices we’ve created?

Enlarge / No, we haven't photoshopped the rear wheel of this electric motorcycle; it uses a hubless motor. (credit: Michael Teo Van Runkle)

Despite the fact that Americans buy more electric bicycles than electric cars, widespread adoption of electric motorcycles still lags well behind both. Part of the sluggish sales pace likely comes down to high prices, but as tech continues to evolve, e-moto sticker shock will eventually subside.

Lower prices will only enhance the obvious benefits of electrifying motorbikes: silent operation, quick and easy charging, fewer moving parts to service, and a smaller footprint while commuting. In the meantime, one of the most interesting concepts on the market today comes courtesy of a company called Verge, in Finland, with an utterly baffling hubless rear-wheel motor design.

As usual with bleeding-edge tech, Verge's first model, the TS, commands a serious premium: a base TS starts at $26,900, and the mid-level TS Pro adds $3,000 to that, while the TS Ultra ramps all the way up to $49,900. I recently test-rode an early TS Pro that Verge shipped to the United States, hoping to prove whether this hubless rear motor truly deserves a future in the industry or simply represents another over-priced gimmick.

Enlarge / Tires are a growing source of microplastic pollution. Michelin says it wants to change that. (credit: Getty Images)

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle—it's more than just a fun alliteration tagline. It's also a set of instructions for how to consume in a way that's less destructive to our environment. We reduce our consumption and reuse what we already have, then recycle it once it no longer has any use. Unfortunately, many are going straight to recycling and calling it a day.

At its sustainability summit in Northern California at the Sonoma Raceway, Michelin laid out a new roadmap for its plans to become a more sustainable company. Most importantly, the company shared what it's been doing for decades to reduce the harm done to the world by its tires.

The company reiterated its desire to have 100 percent renewable tires by 2050. Companies make a lot of pronouncements like this, and they only sometimes come to fruition. But looking at Michelin's present efforts and past record, the company has a decent chance of succeeding.