Health Trotter

April 19, 2021 at 10:36PM American tailpipes have played an outsized role in global warming. In 2019, transportation accounted for 29% of the country’s human-generated emissions , the most of any sector tracked by the Environmental Protection Agency—and the U.S. is the world’s second-largest carbon emitter . The Biden Administration wants to clean up transportation’s dirty reputation, and make America the global leader in electric vehicle production in the process. At the moment, electric vehicles, or EVs, aren’t particularly common in the U.S. Only about 2% of vehicles sold in the U.S. last year were electric. “It looks like, somewhere around 5% of sales is where things really start to take off”—when EV’s transition from the novel to the ordinary—says Colin McKerracher, head of advanced transport at BloombergNEF. Experts say that smart government policy can nudge the consumer market towards that tipping point. Indeed, it’s already happened in other countries. In Norway, ...

April 19, 2021 at 06:25PM Mars is a lousy place to try to fly a helicopter. There’s the temperature, for one thing—a paralyzing -90º C (-130º F), frigid enough to cause nearly any machinery to freeze up and lock. There’s the remoteness too; Mars is currently 287 million km (178 million mi.) from Earth, meaning that radio signals, even moving at light speed, take nearly 16 minutes to travel just one way between the two worlds. And then there’s the tenuous Martian atmosphere—just 1% the density of Earth’s, making it awfully hard for rotating blades to get any bite at all. But flying a helicopter on Mars is precisely what NASA did today, when the little Ingenuity drone lifted off from the floor of Jezero Crater at 3:34 AM EDT (just after noon, Mars time), hovered at an altitude of 3 m (10 ft) for 40 seconds, and touched gently back down, kicking up a plume of rusty red dust. It was the first flight of a powered aircraft on another planet, coming 118 years after the Wright Broth...

April 19, 2021 at 04:30PM 1171 Shoreham looks much like it did when Anna Zimmerman lived there: modest but presentable. A good starter home for Zimmerman and her husband when they bought it in 2005, for a while it provided an idyllic existence in suburban Charleston, S.C., a community of friendly neighbors for their young child, a quaint backyard and even space for Zimmerman’s mother-in-law. Then, in 2015, the first flood hit, taking most of their property with it after a heavy rain. This came as a shock; no flood risk had been disclosed when Zimmerman bought the house. But, determined to turn lemons into lemonade, she used the insurance money to fix it up just as she liked. “I would have been happy living in this house into retirement,” she says now, looking up at it from across the street. Then came Hurricane Irma in 2017. Water inundated the house, destroying virtually everything up to the waist. The insurance adjuster declared the home a total loss, and Zimmerman was ...