- Tesla is sending shockwaves through the auto industry as intrigue around its $25,000 ‘mystery model’ continues to build Yahoo News
- Elon Musk Biographer Walter Isaacson’s Interview Raises Speculations On Tesla Robotaxi Design – Tesla (NA Benzinga
- $25,000 Cybertruck-Like Tesla Is Almost Here — Just Ask PT Barnum Forbes
- Tesla will Manufacture its Latest EVs in Gigafactory Texas and not Mexico gizmochina
- Elon Musk Wanted Cybertruck To Be Stainless Steel, ‘Cool’ And Different Than Other Trucks: ‘We’re Not Doi Benzinga
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Tag Archives: intrigue
Fantasy Baseball Today: Brad Keller intrigue; buy, hold or sell high on Jarred Kelenic? – CBS Sports
- Fantasy Baseball Today: Brad Keller intrigue; buy, hold or sell high on Jarred Kelenic? CBS Sports
- Mariners’ Scott Servais: ‘That was the series of Jarred Kelenic. Wow.’ The Seattle Times
- Salk: With Kelenic raking, there’s one thing Mariners shouldn’t do Seattle Sports
- Who is Jarred Kelenic’s girlfriend, Gina Muzi? A closer look into Mariners sensation’s personal life Sportskeeda
- Fantasy Baseball: Jarred Kelenic’s upside makes him a must-add waiver pickup, but beware small sample size CBS Sports
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Tina Brown Catches Up With Royal Intrigue in ‘The Palace Papers’
Being Tina Brown, she is more often rubbing shoulder pads with the elite in the course of business: huddling under an umbrella with the historian Simon Schama en route to a 9/11 memorial, for example, or telling the sporty Mr. Parker-Bowles in 1981 that she neither hunted nor fished. (“‘Real intellectual, are you?’ he said with a slight patrician sneer.”)
Proudly, she claims to have been the first, in The Daily Beast, to reveal the extent of Jeffrey Epstein’s “depredations.” She congratulates herself, an energetic shower-upper, for turning down one invitation: to the now-infamous dinner party Epstein held in Manhattan for Andrew, attended by Woody Allen; she asked the publicist if it was a “predator’s ball.”
But as in her earlier royal biography, Brown seems perennially torn between excoriating tabloid reporters for their most egregious trespasses and reveling in their discoveries. With palpably upturned nose, she describes Matt Drudge, who outed Prince Harry’s deployment in Afghanistan even as English outlets conspired to conceal it, as a “U.S. gossip buccaneer,” while Rebekah Brooks, the former editor of the notoriously phone-hacking News of the World, is “one of the great divas” of Fleet Street, a “flamboyant social operator” with “vulpine networking skills” and a “tumbling mane of curly red hair” (signifying what, exactly?).
Brown is perfectly happy to pass on that Prince Philip once slipped a card with his private number to an anonymous socialite on the Caribbean island of Mustique, or that Princess Margaret gave mundane household items like irons and even a toilet brush as gifts to her faithful staff.
In her delicious memoir, “The Vanity Fair Diaries” (2017), Brown also seemed torn between America and England. Here, though, Old Blighty definitely wins (“wins” being a very Tina Brown term). Writing from a pandemic bunker in Santa Monica, she romanticizes rain: “the morose picnics in a squelching car park at Wimbledon; the wet carton of strawberries at Glyndebourne opera house; the sodden scuttle through the church door at Cotswold weddings; the attempt to retain something resembling a hat as the skies open at the Henley Royal Regatta.” (And here’s Schama again, texting memories of chilly Pimm’s parties on the college lawn, with “girls whose faces are turning bluer than their eye shadow.”)
Analyzing the younger generation, the one arguably saving the “whole crumbling theme-park enterprise” of the monarchy, Brown compares Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, to an Anthony Trollope heroine (her birth family was “too dogged and upstanding for Dickens,” she supposes, while “George Eliot’s women, by contrast, were too complicated and reflective”). As for Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex and former actress, her story seems to emerge from “the back of bound copies of Variety” — which, given the state of print publications such as Brown used to oversee, feels like short shrift.
“The Palace Papers” isn’t juicy, exactly, nor pulpy — there’s just not enough new extracted from the whole royal mess. It’s frothy and forthright, a kind of “Keeping Up With the Windsors” with sprinkles of Keats, and like its predecessor will probably float right up the charts.
‘Harbor Seal Rock’ on Mars and other new sights intrigue Perseverance rover scientists
NASA’s Perseverance rover has landed in a rich scientific hunting ground, if its first good look around is any guide.
The car-sized Perseverance landed on the floor of Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, kicking off an ambitious surface mission that will hunt for signs of ancient Mars life and collect samples for future return to Earth, among other tasks.
Perseverance is not yet ready to dive into that science work; the mission team is still conducting health and status checks on its various instruments and subsystems. But the six-wheeled robot recently used its Mastcam-Z camera suite to capture a high-definition, 360-degree panorama of its surroundings, and that first taste has the mission team intrigued.
Live updates: NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover mission
For example, the zoomable panorama revealed a dark stone that the team has dubbed “Harbor Seal Rock,” Mastcam-Z principal investigator Jim Bell, of Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, said during a webcast discussion of the photo on Thursday (Feb. 25).
The Martian wind probably carved Harbor Seal Rock into its curious shape over the eons, Bell said. He also pointed out patches that showed evidence of much faster-acting erosion — spots where the thrusters on Perseverance’s “sky crane” descent stage blew away Mars’ blanket of red dust on Feb. 18, exposing the surfaces of small rocks.
One such patch harbors a group of light-colored, heavily pitted stones that have caught mission scientists’ eyes.
“Are these volcanic rocks? Are these carbonate rocks? Are these something else? Do they have coatings on them?” Bell said. “We don’t know — we don’t have any chemical data or mineral data on them yet — but, boy, they’re certainly interesting, and part of the story about what’s going on here is going to be told when we get more detailed information on these rocks and some of the other materials in this area.”
This is one of the key jobs of Mastcam-Z and Perseverance’s other cameras, Bell said — to spot interesting features that Perseverance can study in more detail with its spectrometers and other science instruments.
The 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero Crater harbored a deep lake and a river delta billions of years ago. Deltas are good at preserving signs of life here on Earth, so the Perseverance team is eager for the rover to study and sample the remnants of that feature within Jezero. And the delta is visible in the Mastcam-Z panorama; the cliffs that mark its edge are about 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) from Perseverance’s landing site, Bell said.
The ridgeline that’s visible beyond the delta cliffs in the Mastcam-Z panorama is Jezero Crater’s rim, he added.
The recently unveiled photo is just the beginning, of course. For starters, it’s the lowest-resolution panorama the Mastcam-Z team will construct. Bell said that similar shots that are three times sharper will be assembled after Perseverance switches over to its surface-optimized software, a four-day process that’s already underway.
And we haven’t gotten the slightest taste of Perseverance’s science discoveries yet. That work will take a while to get going, because the mission team’s first big task after getting the rover up and running is to conduct test flights of the 4-lb. (1.8 kilograms) Mars Helicopter Ingenuity, which rode to the Red Planet on Perseverance’s belly.
Ingenuity’s pioneering sorties — the first rotorcraft flights on a world beyond Earth — will likely take place this spring, and science and sampling are expected to begin in earnest in the summer, mission team members have said.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.