A quick look at everything that tickled my fancy this past week:
Hyperloop Passenger Test – Elon Musk’s high-speed transportation idea is picking up momentum as Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Hyperloop just completed their first test with real passengers on their test track in Las Vegas.
CNN explains:
“A hyperloop is an unproven transportation system in which people travel in a vehicle in a vacuum tube at speeds as high as 600 mph. Virgin’s system includes magnetic levitation, much like used in advanced high speed rail projects in Japan and Germany.
Magnetic levitation lifts a train car above a track, as the magnets’ like poles push the train upward. The magnets also propel the train as like poles repel and push the train forward, and the opposite poles attract and pull the train forward. Magnetic levitation has been used on some train systems since the 1970s.
Virgin Hyperloop’s pod only reached 100 mph on the track, according to the company, rather than the 600 mph that hyperloop advocates have long promised. Virgin Hyperloop says its track is 500 meters long, limiting how fast the pods can go.
Still, Virgin Hyperloop executives view the test as a major milestone and a step toward commercializing hyperloop technology.”
Tesla Tequila – Speaking of Elon Musk, another one of this viral jokes has turned into a real product. This time as a new brand of tequila.
Electrek sums it up best:
“From a fart machine inside Tesla vehicles to flamethrowers, Elon Musk had plenty of strange ideas that sounded like jokes but became reality.
Now add Teslaquila to that list.
Back in 2018, Musk poked fun at Tesla haters with an April Fool’s joke about the company going bankrupt.
As part of the joke, Musk wrote that he was found ‘passed out against a Tesla Model 3, surrounded by ‘Teslaquila’ bottles, the tracks of dried tears still visible on his cheeks.
Later, the company actually filed a trademark for “Teslaquila” (though it has been contested), but nothing happened with it until now.
Today, Tesla went ahead and launched its own tequila, now just called Tesla Tequila, and started taking orders for $250 a bottle on its website.”
New Organ – Scientists have discovered a new organ in the human body. This time in our heads, behind our throats.
As Live Science puts it:
“Scientists have discovered a new organ: a set of salivary glands set deep in the upper part of the throat.
This nasopharynx region — behind the nose — was not thought to host anything but microscopic, diffuse, salivary glands; but the newly discovered set are about 1.5 inches (3.9 centimeters) in length on average. Because of their location over a piece of cartilage called the torus tubarius, the discoverers of these new glands have dubbed them the tubarial salivary glands. The glands probably lubricate and moisten the upper throat behind the nose and mouth, the researchers wrote online Sept. 23 in the journal Radiotherapy and Oncology.”
New Nazca Lines – A new organ wasn’t the only new discovery lately. A new set of Nazca Lines were also discovered. Ones shaped like a cat!
The Guardian explains:
“The dun sands of southern Peru, etched centuries ago with geoglyphs of a hummingbird, a monkey, an orca – and a figure some would dearly love to believe is an astronaut – have now revealed the form of an enormous cat lounging across a desert hillside.
The feline Nazca line, dated to between 200BC and 100BC, emerged during work to improve access to one of the hills that provides a natural vantage point from which many of the designs can be seen.
A Unesco world heritage site since 1994, the Nazca Lines, which are made up of hundreds of geometric and zoomorphic images, were created by removing rocks and earth to reveal the contrasting materials below. They lie 250 miles (400km) south of Lima and cover about 450 sq km (175 sq miles) of Peru’s arid coastal plain.”
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