Tesla’s mobile app is one of the key parts of the Tesla ownership experience, and yet its security is lacking an important feature — two-factor authentication.
According to CEO Elon Musk, this will change in the near future.
When asked on Twitter whether there are any updates regarding two-factor authentication for the app, Musk said it’s “coming soon” (via Teslarati).
O,.O woah!
This summer, NASA plans to launch its next Mars rover, Perseverance, which will carry with it the first aircraft to ever fly on another planet, the Mars Helicopter. As the first of its kind, the Mars Helicopter will carry no instruments and collect no data—NASA describes merely flying it all as “high-risk, high-reward” research.
With the risks of extraterrestrial flight in mind, Penn Engineers are suggesting a different approach to exploring the skies of other worlds: a fleet of tiny aircraft that each weigh about as much as a fruit fly and have no moving parts.
These flyers are plates of “nanocardboard,” which levitate when bright light is shone on them. As one side of the plate heats up, the temperature differential gets air circulating through its hollow structure and shooting out of the corrugated channels that give it its name, thrusting it off the ground.
Tesla Cybertruck is going to be “able to float for a while,” says CEO Elon Musk, who apparently can’t wait to bring the electric pickup truck to production.
For a while now, Elon Musk has cautiously boasted about the ability of Tesla vehicles to float, or even “act as a boat” for short periods of time.
A few years ago, we posted about a Tesla Model S driving (or swimming) through a flooded tunnel. Musk commented:
Algae biofuel certainly faces an uphill battle these days, what with the global oil price crash and competition from electric vehicles. Nevertheless, there may be a glimmer of hope for algae biofuel fans, in the form of an ultra-fast 3D printer housed in a California laboratory. In an interesting sustainability twofer, the same machine might also spit out an assist for the world’s ailing coral reefs.
Circa 2015
— — Boeing’s new patent may let the force be with you even in real life.
The aircraft and defense company has taken a cue from science fiction with its plan to develop a Star Wars-style force field that would use energy to deflect any potential damage.
A key component of NASA’s X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology (QueSST) aircraft is undergoing vibration tests at the space agency’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. The eXternal Vision System (XVS) is a special camera system that the pilot of the X-plane will use to see forward while the experimental supersonic craft is in flight.
When the X-59 takes to the skies in 2021, the pilot will be faced with a problem not often encountered since the Concorde fleet of supersonic passenger jetliners was retired. The X-59 is meant to test new technologies to build a new generation of supersonic commercial aircraft and, while it promises to overcome some of the drawbacks of Concorde, it will still share some of its difficulties.
One is that the ideal design of a long-range supersonic liner is essentially that of a needle-nosed dart. The annoying thing is that, though this shape may be fine from an aerodynamic point of view, it makes it extremely difficult for the pilot to see forward without a lot of complex mechanics, like Concorde’s droop nose and special sliding windscreen.
