Radia just handed its giant cargo plane a second job. WindRunner started as a flying warehouse for 105-meter wind turbine blades that no highway, rail line, or existing freighter can take in one piece. On September 9 the Boulder company said that same 356-foot airframe can carry fully assembled rockets, boosters, and oversized satellites, and it will argue the case next week at the Air and Space Forces Association conference in National Harbor, Maryland.
Researchers at MIT built ShiftLens so a printed chemical bottle can turn red and show an exclamation mark while its cap sits loose, then switch to green with a checkmark the moment you screw it down tight. The same printed surface can flip a door plaque between “Please Come In” and “Meeting in Progress,” run a flame animation across a lampshade, or let each square on a tic-tac-toe board display an X, an O, or nothing at all.
Mustafa Muhibullah did not set out to name a new class of object. He was a University of Alabama graduate student working through public Chandra X-ray Observatory files that other groups had already used. In the softest sliver of those files, sources lit up and then disappeared as soon as the energy cut moved a little higher. Artifacts were the first suspicion. Stacked exposures and careful cleaning left something real.
Oracle Red Bull Racing put Sebastian Vettel’s 2012 championship RB8 onto Madrid Metro rails this week and drove it through closed tunnels as if a subway line had suddenly become a racetrack. Heritage Team staff and Spanish engineering collective Andtonic did the work at Metro de Madrid’s Canillejas workshops, racing a two-week deadline to finish custom metal wheels before the Spanish Grand Prix weekend at the new Madring circuit.
Apple kept the familiar 49-millimeter Grade 5 titanium case for Watch Ultra 4, offered in natural or black, and built that shell with 100 percent recycled titanium. Dimensions stay 49 by 44 by 12 millimeters. Weight ticks up a gram or so to about 63 grams. Sapphire covers the same Always-On LTPO3 wide-angle OLED, 422 by 514 pixels, peaking at 3,000 nits and dimming to 1 nit. Action button, Digital Crown, and side button remain where they were. Dual speakers still push an 86-decibel siren. A three-microphone array handles wind and conversation. Water resistance holds at 100 meters with recreational scuba to 40 meters, IP6X dust rating, and MIL-STD-810H testing. Oceanic+ and similar apps still turn the watch into a dive computer with depth, water temperature, and entry-exit GPS marks.