What will astronauts wear in more than 50 years? A brand-new spacesuit is developing.

Progress on the suit has been overshadowed(使不快乐). “The EEMU represents the first new spacesuit that NASA has developed in over 40 years, George Nield, previously the associate administrator for commercial space transportation at the Federal Aviation Administration, said. “So far, it looks like things are pretty on schedule.”

Nield outlined the agency’s plan to build five EEMU suits in the initial (最初的)group. One for design tests is almost done and should be completed in December. A second will be built for qualification testing and a third will be tested in orbit on the International Space Station. The final two suits of the set will walk on the moon in 2024 on a mission called Artemis 3.

In addition to the main spacesuits, each astronaut will also require an internal cooling garment (衣服), and NASA has now completed the first prototype of that undergarment, according to Nield. And the agency also needs to upgrade the backpack—like Portable Life Support System that astronauts carry to stay alive.

Meanwhile, NASA got a sense of how the new suit will perform on the moon by testing the design underwater. Underwater, astronauts can get a feel for moving around in a spacesuit and using the tools they will operate during a spacewalk. Lately, NASA has been using the pool to study movements like collecting moon rock and dust, navigating a ladder and planting a flag in the lunar surface.

Driverless taxicabs have been swarming (蜂拥) in the streets in San Francisco, Phoenix and Austin for months, and they’re most likely driving themselves soon to your city. One freaked-out passenger has documented his experience on TikTok, “I was startled by the empty front seats during a ride to a coffee shop!”

The comment of the anxious TikToker reminds historian Victor McFarland of what it was like when cars first hit American streets around a hundred years ago. The pedestrians yelled “Get a horse” to motorists in the 1910s. But McFarland, who teaches at the University of Missouri, says the new beasts known as automobiles were more threatening and unfamiliar to people a century ago than driverless cars are to us now. “Automobiles were frightening to a lot of people at first,” he says. “The early automobiles were noisy, dangerous, had no seatbelts and ran over pedestrians.”

Some people also felt threatened by the freedom and independence newly available to entire classes of people, says Saje Mathieu, a history professor at the University of Minnesota. They included black people whose movements were restricted by Jim Crow Laws (种族歧视法). Cars let them more easily search for everything from better employment to improved healthcare.

Larger concerns today move to numerous laws that can be broken when no one is at the wheel. Who is to blame if a pregnant person takes a driverless car across state lines to obtain an abortion, for example? Or when driverless cars transport illegal drugs?

And back then, like now, Mathieu adds, there were concerns about the future of certain jobs. Once we were worried about Teamsters, who then drove teams of horses, being out of work. Truckers today fear that they might soon compete with driverless vehicles in their own dedicated lanes.

“You can’t have congestion-free driving just because you constantly build roads,” observes history professor Peter Norton of the University of Virginia. Now, he says, is an excellent time to learn from what did not work in the past. “It doesn’t automatically get safe just because you have cutting-edge tech.” Such advanced tech even terrified one TikToker taking a driverless cab in Phoenix last Friday. “We’re making a left-hand turn without using the left-hand turn lane!”

Are these devilish machines going to change the face of the world? Maybe they won’t add to the beauty of the world, but they have come, and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring.

And now that they drive themselves, historians say, we need to remember that the world and the streets belongs to us and not to the cars. We need to stay behind the wheel, even if that’s only a figure of speech.

Scientists at Purdue University created the world’s whitest paint — a discovery that not only adds yet another choice to the “which white should we paint this wall” dilemma, but also might help the climate crisis.

The paint was developed by Purdue mechanical engineering professor Xiulin Ruan and his team. It works through a passive cooling technology that offers great promises to reduce space cooling cost and global warming. “When we started this project seven years ago, we had saving energy and fighting climate change in mind,” Ruan said in a podcast (播客) episode of This Is Purdue. They wanted to create a paint that would reflect sunlight away from a building, dramatically decreasing the need for air conditioning.

Heating, cooling, and lighting account for 28 percent of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions. And overusing air conditioning can overwhelm a city’s power grid and cause blackouts (停电). In a Queens blackout in 2006, 175,000 people were left without power, which lead to 40 deaths. This paint could effectively be an alternative to air conditioners in some places.

The paint reflects 98.1%of solar radiation while also giving out infrared (红外线的) heat. Because the paint takes in less heat from the sun than it gives out, a surface coated with this paint is cooled below the surrounding temperature without using power. Covering a roof area of 1,000 square feet with the paint could create 10 kilowatts ofcooling power, the researchers found.“That’s more powerful than the air conditioners used by most houses,”Ruan told This Is Purdue.

You can’t buy the paint just yet, but researchers are partnering with a company to put the paint on the market. While individual action to fight elimate change can help save our planet, it’s important to note that the vast majority of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions can be traced back to 100companies. Maybe we can douse(浇) those companies with this white paint, too — it could be worth a shot.