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During the Cold War, the United States produced a truly mind-boggling amount of radioactive waste. We failed to properly dispose of much of that sludge, and it’s been leaking from underground storage tanks since the 1950s. Over the years it has contaminated more than 2 billion cubic feet worth of soil and nearly 800 billion gallons of groundwater at low levels.

Cleaning this mess up will be a daunting task, but scientists have just enlisted a new ally. It turns out our best bet for containing radioactive waste might be to stick yeast on it. Many of these tiny fungi can survive extremely radioactive and acidic conditions, scientists reported January 8 in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology. What’s more, they form gunk called biofilms that could potentially trap the waste.

“The potential for yeast is enormous,” says coauthor Michael Daly, a pathology professor at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USU) in Bethesda, Maryland. “You have a huge group of organisms that are already there, naturally in the environment, that could be harvested for this sort of work.”

The scale of the problem these yeasts would tackle is almost indescribably vast, Daly says. Radioactive waste from the 46,000 nuclear weapons built between 1945 and 1986 is stored in 120 sites around the country. The largest is the sprawling Hanford Site in southeastern Washington, where the first atomic bombs were assembled during the Manhattan Project. It houses more than 50 million gallons of waste.

Leakage at Hanford has contaminated enough soil and sediments to bury 10,000 football fields a yard deep, and polluted enough groundwater to keep Niagara Falls flowing for a month. It’s mostly contained within the soils and aquifers at Hanford, Daly says, although small amounts are slowly seeping into the nearby Columbia River.

The Cold War waste is an assortment of radioactive versions of elements such as strontium, uranium, and plutonium: acids once used to extract metal out of uranium ores, heavy metals like mercury and lead, and toxic chemicals. Scientists have long hoped to find microbes tough enough defang or capture it, a technique known as bioremediation. Bacteria and other microorganisms are relatively cheap to grow and could use a few tricks to neutralize these lethal materials. Certain microbes can catch radioactive waste so rain doesn’t wash it away, feed on toxic chemicals, or transform heavy metals or these chemicals into less dangerous states.

For decades, Daly and his colleagues have tried to harness a microbe so tough its nickname is Conan the Bacterium. This microbe, more properly called Deinococcus radiodurans, is one of the most radiation-resistant life forms we know of (it can also withstand drought, lack of food, extreme temperatures, and the vacuum of space). Over time, scientists managed to genetically engineer this bacterium to have the ability to transform toxic chemicals and heavy metals into less deadly forms. But they just couldn’t get it to thrive in acidic conditions. “At the end of the day the damn thing wouldn’t grow at lemon juice pH ranges,” Daly says.

The mighty Deinococcus radiodurans can survive high levels of radiation but is sensitive to acid. TEM of D. radiodurans acquired in the laboratory of Michael Daly, Uniformed Services University, Bethesda, MD, USA

He and his colleagues decided to search for better candidates in nature, and sampled microbes from deserts, mines, rivers, and hot springs around the world. The most promising was a red-hued fungus from an abandoned acid mine drainage facility in Maryland. The yeast, a species called Rhodotorula taiwanensis, surprised the researchers with its endurance in the face of acid and chronic radiation. On top of this, it tolerates heavy metals and even forms biofilms under these trying circumstances, a trick Conan never mastered.

The researchers tested a total of 27 yeasts to see if they could handle exposure to noxious substances like mercury chloride. “These are really, really toxic heavy metals,” Daly says. “If we got a little bit in us they would kill us, and these microbes are flourishing in these mixtures of heavy metals, radiation, and [acid].”

Most bacteria can’t tolerate acidity or radiation, but both skills turn out to be very common among yeasts. “They are masters of the low-pH world,” Daly says. On the other hand, fungi tend to be more sensitive to heat than bacteria. R. taiwanensis prefers to grow around room temperature, but the decaying nuclear wastes can heat the soil around the steel storage tanks to around 120 degrees Fahrenheit. This wouldn’t necessarily thwart the microbes, though. Placed a small distance away from the storage tanks, the yeasts could capture leaking waste without succumbing to the warmth.

Ideally, different strains of yeasts and bacteria could team up, says Rok Tkavc, an adjunct pathology professor and staff scientist at the Henry Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine at USU. He recently reported that when Deinococcus radiodurans mixes with other bacteria it seems to endow its neighbors with radiation resistance. These cocktails could potentially be used to combat radioactive waste released by nuclear meltdowns as well as that left over from the Cold War.

For the Hanford Site, a successful cleanup would mean keeping radioactive elements out of the Columbia River for the thousands of years it takes them to decay to less dangerous forms. “We cannot get rid of the radiation; no one can do that,” Daly says. “The only thing we can conceivably do to protect ourselves is to contain it, to keep it from coming out.”

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Nuketown ’84 Map In Cold War: Everything You Need To Know

For many FPS gamers growing up in the ranks of Call of Duty games, Nuketown is one map – one place that holds special importance. To say that it’s been a long-standing fan-favorite will still be an understatement. It means a lot to CoD veterans and fans alike and thus when Treyarch teased the return of Nuketown to Black Ops Cold War, it’s no surprise that it broke the internet.

If you’ve seen the trailer, you’d know how much the community was looking forward to such a release. Something that’ll take off their minds from the bugs and glitches they’d been facing while Treyarch hopefully keeps working on them. That said, let’s dive into it and find out all the new deets!

Related: How to Get Plasma Cutter in Cold War Zombies

What’s new in the Nuketown ’84 Map

So you’d notice the first change right off the bat – Nuketown ’84. This isn’t just some Dev’s moment of insanity. It’s Treyarch letting us know that they’re going with an ’80s – inspired theme with Nuketown this time for Black Ops Cold War.

This map comes with the all-new ‘Free to Claim’ bundle introduced by Activision. Along with the map, you get around 10 new items that can allow you to customize your character’s appearance and loadout for Nuketown.

You get the “Last Stop” epic shotgun blueprint.

Six assorted Weapon Charms for you to hang on your guns.

A “Test Subjects” sticker which you can apply on almost any gun from the gunsmith in Cold War.

Adding to all that, you also get the “Omnibus” calling card plus a “Nuketown Legend” emblem to switch up how your profile looks like while playing Nuketown ’84.

All of this adds up to give us a solid retro-feeling combat and gameplay while running around on the map you’ve basically grown up on playing.

Related: Cold War Zombies Camo Challenges Guide: Everything You Need To Know

Easter Eggs on Nuketown ’84 in Cold War

Easter eggs in Call of Duty doesn’t surprise us anymore, given how liberal the Devs over at Treyarch are with them. However, the Easter Eggs we saw in the new Nuketown ’84 map really blew out our minds. Okay so here’s what we know of them, as of yet.

Screengrab via: KARNAGE Clan

If you go around shooting the arms and hands of the mannequins on the new Nuketown ’84 map, you’ll trigger the first Easter Egg that is essentially an in-game filter. Check out what it looks like in the image below!

Honestly, the second easter egg looks even better than the first one, but that’s just our opinion.

Related: How to get Easter Egg in Cold War Zombies Nuketown

So that’s pretty much all we know about Easter Eggs on the new Nuketown ’84 Map that hit Cold War servers on the 24th of November at 10 am PT.

Oh yeah, one more thing – you can get the Nuketown weapon bundle for free if you purchase Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and log in before December 4 arrives. Read more about this on Call of Duty’s official page right here.

Screengrab via: KARNAGE Clan

Moondust Could Chill Out Our Overheated Earth, Some Scientists Predict

In one possible future, great maglev lines cross the lunar surface. But these rails don’t carry trains. Instead, like space catapults, these machines accelerate cargo to supersonic speeds and fling it into the sky. The massive catapults have one task: throwing mounds of moondust off-world. Their mission is to halt climate change on Earth, 250,000 miles away.

All that dust will stream into deep space, where it will pass between Earth and the sun—and blot out some of the sun’s rays, cooling off the planet. As far-fetched as the idea is, it’s an idea that received real scientific attention. In a paper published in the journal PLOS Climate on February 8, researchers simulated just how it might go if we tried to pull it off. According to their computer modeling, a cascade of well-placed moondust could shave off a few percent of the sun’s light.

It’s a spectacular idea, but it isn’t new. Filtering the sunlight that reaches Earth in the hope of cooling off the planet, blunting the blades making the thousand cuts of global warming, is an entire field called solar geoengineering. Designers have proposed similar spaceborne concepts: swarms of mirrors or giant shades, up to thousands of miles across, strategically placed to act as a parasol for our planet. Other researchers have suggested dust, which is appealing because, as a raw material, there’s no effort or expense to engineer it.

“We had read some accounts of previous attempts,” inspiring them to revisit the technique, says Scott Kenyon, an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and one of the study’s authors.

Kenyon and his colleagues don’t usually dream up ways to chill planets. They study a vastly different type of dust: the kind that coalesces around distant, newly forming stars. In the process, the astrophysicists realized that the dust had a shading effect, cooling whatever lay in its shadow.

[Related: The past 8 years have been the hottest on human record, according to new report]

“So we began to experiment with collections of dust that would shield Earth from sunlight,” says Kenyon. They turned methods that let them simulate distant dust disks to another problem, much closer to home.

Most solar engineering efforts focus on altering Earth’s atmosphere. We could, for instance, spray aerosols into the stratosphere to copy the cooling effects from volcanic eruptions. Altering the air is, predictably, a risky business; putting volcanic matter in the sky could have unwanted side effects such as eroding the ozone layer or seeding acid rain.

“If you could just reduce the amount of incoming sunlight reaching the Earth, that would be a cleaner intervention than adding material to the stratosphere,” says Peter Irvine, a solar geoengineer at University College London, who was not an author of the paper.

Even if you found a way that would leave the skies ship-shape, however, the field is contentious. By its very nature, a solar geoengineering project will impact the entire planet, no matter who controls it. Many observers also believe that promises of a future panacea remove the pressure to curb carbon emissions in the present.

It’s for such reasons that some climate scientists oppose solar geoengineering at all. In 2023, researchers scrubbed the trial of a solar geoengineering balloon over Sweden after activists and representatives of the Sámi people protested the flight, even though the equipment test wouldn’t have conducted any atmospheric experiments.

But perhaps there’s a future where those obstacles have been cast aside. Perhaps the world hasn’t pushed down emissions quickly enough to avoid a worsening catastrophe; perhaps the world has then come together and decided that such a gigaproject is necessary. In that future, we’d need a lot of dust—about 10 billion kilograms, every year, close to 700 times the amount of mass that humans have ever launched into space, as of this writing.

That makes the moon attractive: With lower gravity, would-be space launchers require less energy to throw mass off the moon than off Earth. Hypothetical machines like mass drivers—those electromagnetic catapults—could do the job without rocket launches. According to the authors, a few square miles of solar panels would provide all the energy they need.

That moondust isn’t coming back to Earth, nor is it settling into lunar orbit. Instead, it’s streaming toward a Lagrange point, a place in space where two objects’ respective gravitational forces cancel each other out. In particular, this moondust is headed for the sun and Earth’s L1, located in the direction of the sun, about 900,000 miles away from us.

There, all that dust would be in a prime position to absorb sunlight on a path to Earth. The 10 billion kilograms would drop light levels by around 1.8 percent annually, the study estimates—not as dramatic as an eclipse, but equivalent to losing about 6 days’ worth of sunlight per year.

[Related on PopSci+: Not convinced that humans are causing climate change? Here are the facts.]

Although L1’s gravitational balance would capture the dust, enough for it to remain for a few days, it would then drift away. We’d need to keep refilling the dust, as if it were a celestial water supply—part of why we’d need so much of it.

That dust wouldn’t come back to haunt Earth. But L1 hosts satellites like NASA’s SOHO and Wind, which observe the sun or the solar wind of particles streaming away from it. “The engineers placing dust at L1 would have to avoid any satellites to prevent damage,” says Kenyon.

Of course, this is one hypothetical, very distant future. Nobody can launch anything from the moon, let alone millions of tons of moondust, without building the infrastructure first. While market analysts are already tabulating the value of the lunar economy in two decades’ time, building enough mass drivers to perform impressive feats of lunar engineering probably isn’t in the cards.

“If we had a moonbase and were doing all sorts of cool things in space, then we could do this as well—but that’s something for the 22nd century,” says Irvine. Meanwhile, a far more immediate way to blunt climate change is to decarbonize the energy grid and cull fossil fuels, with haste. “Climate change,” Irvine says, “is a 21st century problem.”

Genetically Engineered Fungus Knocks Out Deadly Mosquitoes Using Scorpion Toxins

Malaria is often transmitted through mosquitoes that are infected with the parasite, Plasmodium falciparum. Flckr CC by Yasser

Mosquitoes aren’t just annoying summer-time pests: they also put about half of the world’s population at risk for malaria, infecting around 300 million victims annually. With increased insecticide use, populations of little blood suckers who’ve evolved resistance to our poisons pose a new risk.

A new study from the University of Maryland demonstrates how a mosquito-slaying fungus genetically altered to produce spider and scorpion toxins could help solve this insecticide resistance dilemma.

“The World Health Organization has called on new approaches, new types of insecticide, new approaches to knock back the mosquitos,” says coauthor Raymond John St. Leger, a professor of entomology. “Our products, our transgenic products, are one of the outcomes that were requested.”

The fungus used in this study, Metarhizium pingshaensei, is a known mosquito killer. However, it takes quite a while for the fungus to do the deed naturally.

“The fungus normally takes a very long time, because it want to drain the insect of its resources,” says St. Leger.

St. Leger and his colleagues wanted to speed the process up, so they created transgenic strains of fungi using two toxins from the North African desert scorpion Androctonus australis and the Australian Blue Mountains funnel-web spider Hadronyche versuta. The scorpion toxin blocks sodium channels and the spider toxin blocks both potassium and calcium channels, going beyond the impact of an ordinary insecticide. With those toxins in the mix, a single fungal spore is enough to infect and kill a mosquito. According to St. Leger, it doesn’t get much better than that.

Even before death, the study reports, nearly 100 percent of the insects infected by the hybrid fungi were rendered unable to transmit malaria in as little as five days, which surpasses the World Health Organization’s threshold for a successful vector control agent.

An unfortunate mosquito meeting her end—by resting on a fungus-coated sheet. Brian Lovett

The best part? These toxins have already been approved by the EPA, and they only affect the targeted insects because of very specific promoters which only drive the expression of the toxin in the insect’s blood (the engineered fungal strains did no harm during a test run on honeybees). This means the toxin shouldn’t be able to run wild.

The University of Maryland research teamed up with scientists at the Institut de Recherche en Sciences de la Santé/Centre Muraz, Bobo-Dioulasso in Burkina Faso. Coauthor and graduate student Brian Lovett says this institute was instrumental in the development of insecticide treated bed nets.

“This area in particular has seen sort of the rise of this new technology, insecticide treated bed nets, which has done a whole lot to malaria in the area, but they’ve also seen sort of the decline of this, as resistance has come on the rise,” says Lovett. “New technologies, like the ones we are trying to develop, are hopefully going to be able to integrate well with these other technologies in development.”

St. Leger says that the fungus is suspended into locally available sesame oil, which is then spread out on locally available black sheets and hung in houses. Mosquitos are attracted to black, and if they rest on the sheets they will pick up the fungal infection, bringing them to their doom.

The researchers will soon test the spores on mosquitoes in an enclosure made of netting, as well as testing the fungus on similar species such as midges and gnats. St. Leger says it’s also important to keep an open dialogue with the people that could benefit from the product.

“We’re always getting more safety tests, always talking to people,” he says. “Local people, experts in the field, government. But in the terminology of trade it’s called the stakeholders, the people who will be impacted by our technology.”

How We Can Burn Our Way To A Better Future

The West is experiencing continually record-breaking flames, but the solution is more fire.

That’s why experts say that we need prescribed burns now more than ever. It’s a complex topic that many people are only just starting to hear about, but ecologists and Indigenous peoples are well aware of exactly how helpful the practice can be.

The case for fire

Prior to Euro-American settlement of western lands, fire was a fact of life. In California alone, more than four million acres burned annually on average. Hazy summer skies were not unusual, and in fact might have been beneficial at times. In the Klamath River Basin, the Native Americans used fires in part to produce smoke that shaded the region and cooled river temperatures, enhancing salmon habitat. Lightning also ignited regular fires.

Many, though not all, ecosystems in the American West are adapted to fire. Lower elevation conifer forests in the past may have burned every 3 to 30 years, and oak woodlands and savannah had even more frequent fires. Some higher elevation forests probably also had blazes, though the interval between flames was somewhere around 40 to 80 years, explains Kip Van de Water, a fire management specialist with the Forest Service in Klamath National Forest.

Fire has a profound influence on these systems. Some seeds literally can’t sprout without it. A serotinous cone, for instance, produced by certain pines, won’t free its seeds until it’s heated up. You can see that process occurring in a toaster oven in the video below.

Fires also open up clearings, letting sunlight reach teeny trees so they can grow. The flames also release nutrients into the soil. There are many more benefits, but one that’s less often paid attention to—and more unusual—is the impact on plants’ immune systems. Sharon Hood, a Forest Service research ecologist in Montana, explains that flora have immune systems analogous to those of fauna, and in fire-adapted ecosystems, fire stimulates that immunity. Low-severity embers can ramp up a tree’s response such that it’s better equipped to fight back bark beetles, native parasites than can devastate entire stands of conifers when the trees are already weakened by forces like drought. Without those fires, they’re more vulnerable.

How controlled burns work

There are a few ways that we can return fires to lands starved of it. At the Forest Service, Van de Water explains that fire crews use two main methods: broadcast burns and pile burns.

In a broadcast burn, numerous workers are on the ground, digging out fire lines—areas where the ground has been scraped to act as a barrier to further fire travel—and lighting a blaze with drip torches, hand-held canisters that drizzle flaming fuel onto the ground. There are firefighters on standby in case the burn jumps its boundary. Having the right conditions is crucial. An ideal window is when winds are calm and temperatures are cool, and fires are usually planned ahead of rainfall to put a natural end to the treatment. Prescribed burns burn at a lower intensity, eating up debris and twiggy materials but leaving bigger trees intact.

Pile burns involve heaping up dry fuels from a given area, then burning them. It doesn’t provide all the ecosystem benefits that burning the whole area would, but it can still help reduce catastrophic fire risk. Van de Water says that most of the acres he treats in Klamath National Forest are done via pile burns. That’s because it can be cheaper, requires fewer people on the ground, and can be done across a wider weather window. “It’s easy to write a contract for piling and burning, and then hire a private company with people with chainsaws to do them,” he says.

Native American tribes also have traditional ecological knowledge of how to conduct burns, methods which they developed over thousands of years of managing their lands. After more than a century of being barred from performing their burning, there have been some moves in recent years to return the practice. The Karuk Tribe has developed a climate adaptation plan for their territory that focuses heavily on restoring cultural burning practices. The Yurok Tribe in northern California has been able to buy back their traditional lands through carbon credits they earned by maintaining forests with prescribed fire. And North Fork Mono tribal leaders are partnering with officials to bring the benefits of fire back to the oak woodlands of the Sierra Foothills.

Why we don’t do it enough

All of these current efforts are just a sliver of the millions of acres that need fire. And areas that do get a prescribed burn often don’t get a follow-up fire treatment. In the Northern Region of the Forest Service’s jurisdiction—covering 23 million acres of land in Washington, Idaho, Montana and the Dakotas—only about 30,000 acres are treated every year, says Robert Keane, an emeritus research ecologist with the Forest Service and editor of the research journal Fire Ecology. “We’re not gaining on the [fire] deficit.”

Keane says that a major roadblock is pushback from communities adjacent to areas planned to burn. Some are afraid their homes are at risk if a fire escapes its bounds, or that the smoke will harm their health. However, the evidence suggests that planned burns rarely escape, and that their smoke is not as hazardous as that from the high-intensity fires that ignite when forests don’t receive treatment. “When society doesn’t want this to happen, we’re ensuring we’re going down this spiral,” says Keane. “And then a big fire will happen and it will burn an ecosystem.”

Survey work has found that the public is mostly accepting of the prescribed burns, however, points out Kate Wilkin, fire ecologist at San José State University. The main impediments are personnel time and money, researchers have found.

Indeed, the budget for maintenance has not been helped by the megafires of the past decade. Fire suppression once used only eight percent of the Forest Service’s budget, but Keane says it now sucks up over half the money available. That means there’s less funding left for proactive treatments.

Ironically, environmental protection laws sometimes get in the way, too. While relatively small burns intended to regenerate habitat—say, 100 acres to improve mule deer range—are exempt from rigorous analysis, larger projects can take years to be approved, says Van de Water. When agencies do prepare their environmental impact reports, timber companies and environmental groups alike find reasons to sue.

Individuals in charge of planning fires might also be reluctant to do so, because the risk of being held liable if anything does go wrong. It’s a thankless job. People don’t see the absence of fires and thank their local officials for periodically burning the land. Burn leaders generally aren’t celebrated for helping avoid a fire in the same way firefighters receive gratitude for their work, points out Keane. And when something does go wrong, burners can be held legally liable.

How to restore fire

For some solutions, we might look across the country to Florida. Prescribed burns are the norm there. Fires are heavily used because fuels build up so fast due to the ample moisture available for plant growth, says Hood. Part of what makes it possible to do these treatments is that Florida has ‘right to burn’ laws that reduce liability for people planning a burn. “Liabilities are reduced if you go through all the right steps,” says Hood. “You’re not as likely to be held liable in the Southeast compared to the West … So it really promotes the use of prescribed burning.”

Due to a century of fire suppression, many forests in the West are incredibly dense with trees, which can make it especially hard to do a controlled burn because small trees can act as “ladder fuels” and help transport fire into the canopy. Wilkin says that these regions may need thinning treatments to cut out some of the trees to reduce that risk before bringing in fire.

Increased funding dedicated for forest treatment can help, too. Recently, burners have been able to apply for funds derived from California’s cap-and-trade climate program. Van de Water is part of a team at Klamath National Forest that just received such a grant for a proposed burn in the Klamath region.

Because of their traditional knowledge honed over millennia, “tribes are uniquely positioned to lead the way,” wrote University of Oregon researchers in an article at the Conversation. However, they still face barriers in being able to conduct burns. “We’ve been trying to work within existing processes to make it all come together,” says Bill Tripp, the director of natural resources and environmental policy for the Karuk Tribe. “We’ve been pretty successful in starting to make some changes and getting more thinning and pre-burn treatments done. But we’re struggling to get through the agency bureaucracy far enough to even burn piles.”

Due to hurdles such as environmental impact reporting requirements, the tribe is only able to burn on the two percent of their territory that is not overlapping with national forest land. “I believe it’s time for the federal and state governments to recognize Indigenous sovereignty and start to take a hard look at how that relationship … can build the coalition needed to make all this [prescribed fire] work,” says Tripp. “If we can get back there within three years and start to rebuild our Indigenous fire management cycles and get those into place, we’ve got a shot at making this happen.”

This story has been updated to provide further detail on how and why pile burns are used.

How A New Macbook Could Reinvent The Laptop

How a new MacBook could reinvent the laptop

Today we’re taking a real Apple invention and hypothetically applying it to a real Apple product. What we’re doing is having a look at a patent made by Apple – a new sort of hinge design for the MacBook. This new hinge could change the way you and I use a notebook and, potentially, blow the rest of the industry away completely.

There’s a lot of engineering bits and pieces going on in the patent that revealed this tech to us – but that’s not what I’m going to relay to you. Instead I’m going to present this tech in a way that’s situated more like an OG Apple product presentation – slides and everything. This presentation is for the return of the iBook.

Today we’ve got a very rare sort of situation on our hands – and it has to do with the letter “i”. You’ll remember a while ago here at Apple we used the letter “i” a lot, in the front of words like iPhone, iPad, iCloud – and so on. After a while it seemed to get too predictable – everyone knew what our products were going to be named, even before we did.We’ve come a long way since the first iMac back in 1998. Before you get too excited – no, we’re not releasing a new wave of brightly colored all-in-one computers. Those designs have moved on to a more conveniently sized place – and the personal computer is a different experience entirely.Today we’re reintroducing a product which did for the laptop what the iPhone did for the mobile phone. Today we’re reintroducing the iBook.

You might be thinking – uh oh. They’re going to show some sort of monster of a clam-shell notebook with wings. Don’t worry, we’re just as much in a different universe with laptop design here in 2023 as we are with desktop design. This notebook is sleek, powerful, beautiful, and extremely chúng tôi might also be thinking – wait a second. Isn’t Apple already selling a MacBook Air? Doesn’t that already cover the consumer-aimed portable market? Yes, it does, and the MacBook Air has served us all quite well over its lifetime. But also no – no because we’re not satisfied with that.

We wanted to go a step further by making the already-great experience of the MacBook Air into an experience that is as simple to use as possible. To do this, we went back to engineering. We took the whole machine apart and started from chúng tôi asked our customers what was most important to them. Overwhelmingly we heard that users wanted something new. Something that’d make their experience feel like never before – but without the added cost of battery life. We heard this – and went right to the center of this machine.

The iBook features a new type of hinge we call Magic. This Magic Hinge allows the user to open, adjust, and close the iBook with ease. Instead of relying on traditional friction-based design to hold the display in place, the iBook senses when it’s being touched by your hand, and glides through space to the place where you wish it to go.

Using an extremely low-power processing unit inside the base of the machine, this iBook uses an sinpercievably small amount of battery life. At the same time, the iBook makes every notebook before it feel like an antique.

The iBook is more powerful than last year’s MacBook Air, and it has longer battery life. The iBook out-performs all similarly-sized Windows PCs and Chromebooks on the market today. The iBook is coming to the Apple Store for a price that’s no higher than the machine it chúng tôi iBook will be available starting today online, and will be available at Apple Stores around the world later this week. The iBook will be available in any color you like, just so long as it’s black or white. Thank you, and we look forward to you trying everything out!

Once again, everything above is a hypothetical presentation as done by Apple at a special event which has not happened. This presentation is meant to give users an idea of what it might be like to see Apple introduce the product shown in Apple’s own patent for a “Variable resistance electronic device brake clutch” – which allows a notebook the ability to move freely instead of relying on frictional resistance to stay in place.