blindmanontheplains

After getting caught cheating on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency emissions tests, the company is facing plummeting share prices, up to $18 billion in fines, impending lawsuits and the resignation of the company’s CEO Martin Winterkorn. Now, an analysis by Associated Press says that between five and 20 people might have died each year in the U.S. alone as a result of Volkswagen’s deceit. The software used by the firm allowed the cars to spew between 10 and 40 times more nitrogen oxides allowed by government regulations.

In this photograph by Ingo Wagner of @ap.images and @dpapicturealliance, Volkswagen rolls out a new shipment of cars at a terminal near the company’s plant in Emden, Germany on Sept. 30, 2015.

M45 Pleiades - 12.5 min exposure - by Scott Ainslie Hubert

Nancy L. Stockdale

“Hova”  

4/1/15

NYC

Screens (Detail 2)

Ryan Salge. 2015

The Sears Tower during construction, c. 1972. Upon completion, it was the world’s tallest building, a title it held until 1997. It was renamed the Willis Tower in 2009. Hedrich-Blessing Collection.

Read more about the building’s history.

Purchase a copy E-mail [email protected] and give them this number: HB-36150-H2

Seven-year-old Allen has a problem many of us face: He would like to be half-man, half-cheetah, but he doesn’t know where to begin. Does the technology exist to give him the spots, speed, adorable nose and tail missing from boring, old human beings?

Sort of, says Nicola Barber, a geneticist at the University of Utah. (She also tells How To Do Everything that, “ethically, absolutely we should not be doing this,” but let’s just ignore that.) Hybrids are easier when the combined species are genetically closer, which is how we already have lion-tiger hybrids — tigons and ligers. We, too, thought they were just a thing in Napoleon Dynamite.

Barber says giving a human the speed of a cheetah isn’t going to happen, because that involves so many different genes that would need to be altered. There is hope for Allen, though. Spots are within the realm of possibility.

Listen to the latest episode of How To Do Everything to find out how.

Tigons And Ligers And Boys, Oh My!

Sol Lewitt

Graphite Gradient, hand drawn, detail @ Mass MoCa, 2012