Month: April 2022

Enlarge / The 2023 Hummer EV has gone from idea to production in just two years. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

PLEASANT VALLEY, Ariz.—The headline figures verge on the ridiculous: a thousand horsepower. A curb weight so heavy that you’d need a special license to drive it in some countries. A lithium-ion battery that’s almost twice the capacity of anything else on the road. A zero to 60 mph time of just three seconds. And despite the worst efficiency of any electric vehicle we’ve driven to date, it still has more than 300 miles of range.

If all that sounds like overkill to you, or if you already think EVs are a good idea, you are not the target audience for GMC’s new Hummer EV.

Instead, GMC is positioning the Hummer EV as “an all-electric super truck with zero emissions and zero limits” (except perhaps a road’s weight rating). It’s meant to convert the electro-curious over from gasoline or diesel to electrons. So think “off-road recreation Rivian R1T rival” rather than “blue-collar Ford F-150 Lightning fighter.”

Enlarge / Pages on macOS. (credit: Samuel Axon)

On Thursday, Apple released its first feature updates for the iWork suite in several months: Pages, Keynote, and Numbers 12.0.

There are new versions of all three apps on both iOS and macOS. Judging from the version number, you’d expect these to be major new releases, but they only add a few features.

On macOS, the significant change is support for Shortcuts, Apple’s automation tool. For example, Pages now features “Open Document” and “Create Document” actions. Numbers offers the same but adds the “Add Row to Top or Bottom of Table” action. As for Keynote, you can also open and create with the presentation app, but you can also specify to open a presentation in either Rehearsal Mode or Show Mode.

Enlarge (credit: Salazar et al. 2022)

A recent study of geological deposits and archaeological remains has identified a massive earthquake and tsunami that wiped out communities along the coastline of Chile’s Atacama Desert around 3,800 years ago. Studying the ancient disaster—and people’s responses to it—could help with modern hazard planning along the seismically active coast.

A long-forgotten disaster

Broken walls and toppled stones reveal the calamity that struck Zapatero, an ancient community in what’s now northern Chile, about 4,000 years ago.

The people who lived along the coast of the Atacama Desert 5,700 to 4,000 years ago built villages of small stone houses atop massive piles of shells (Zapatero’s shell-filled midden is two meters deep and spans 6 square kilometers). Usually, these houses stood adjacent to each other, opening onto inner patios. People buried their dead beneath the houses’ floors. The cement floors were made from algae ash, seawater, and shells—the same material that held the stone walls together.