Wednesday, October 14, 2026

What Makes eVTOL Motors Different Than EV Motors?

Electric vehicles, whether they’re cars on the road or electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, are built around similar electric motors. But there are vital differences including component costs, mass, and redundancy.Jon Wagner spent five years as the senior director of battery engineering for Tesla before joining California-based eVTOL developer Joby Aviation in 2017.…

Pollen Trapped in Pitch Tracks Repairs Made to Ancient Ship

STRASBOURG, FRANCE—According to a statement released by Frontiers, the protective coatings on a 2,200-year-old Roman shipwreck found off the coast of Croatia were made of pine tar, or pitch, and a mixture of pine tar and beeswax. Beeswax was added to heated tar to make a mixture known to Greek shipbuilders as zopissa, which is…

Parasites Detected in Roman-Era Chamber Pots from Bulgaria

WARSAW, POLAND—Researchers led by Elena Klenina and Andrzej B. Biernacki of Adam Mickiewicz University and their colleagues identified intestinal parasites in residues taken from four chamber pots recovered from two archaeological sites in the Roman province of Moesia Inferior, which is located in what is now Bulgaria, according to a La Brújula Verde report. Three…

Giant octopuses may have ruled the oceans 100 million years ago

Giant, fearsome octopuses may have once ruled the ancient seas, according to new research that flips the script on their evolutionary past. By uncovering exquisitely preserved fossil jaws hidden inside rock, scientists revealed that early octopuses from the age of dinosaurs weren’t shy, soft-bodied drifters—they were massive apex predators, possibly stretching up to 20 meters…

Yong Wang Turns Information Into Insights

When Yong Wang recently received one of the highest honors for early-career data visualization researchers, it marked a milestone in an extraordinary journey that began far from the world’s technology hubs.Wang was born in a small farming village in southwestern China to parents with little formal education and few electronic devices. Today the IEEE member…