Buzzed Bees | Europa Trip | Zomb-eBike - The Convo Kit #7

This week’s topics are the bee’s knees! Did you know bees do, in fact, have knees? Six of them.

Join The Convo for weekly briefings to kick start your weekend!

Caffeine Buzzz

Caffeinated bees work more efficiently and target specific flowers. A recent study found that buzz-enhanced bees could be trained to seek out plants by pairing the target plant odor with caffeinated sugar.

• Caffeine: naturally occurring plant chemical

• Improves bee memory

• Business ideas: Starbuzz. Dunkin Hornuts.

Influencing flower choice can increase productivity of commercial bee sales. Farms import bees to pollinate their plants, but often lose many to nearby wildflowers. This caffeine training would enable farmers to corral their bees to specific areas.

Related: An article on caffeine trained humans, by Michael Pollan. (no, that’s pollen)

More beetails: Buzz. Buzzzzz.

Europa Trip

NASA's Europa Clipper probe will begin its journey to study Jupiter's moon in October 2024. Hitching a ride on SpaceX's Falcon Heavy will save ~$1.8 billion compared to the homegrown Space Launch System (from TCK #1).

• ETA to Jupiter's orbit: 5+ years

• 45 Europa flybys in 3 years

• Close-up snapshot: 16 miles from surface

Despite being 10% smaller than our moon, Europa’s subsurface oceans are thought to be 2x Earth’s water volume. The vast amounts of water, liquid and ice, make the Jovian satellite an exciting place to search for microbial life!

More details and an illustration of Europa’s scarred surface.

Zomb-eBike

The DC100 electric motorcycle by Da Vinci Dynamics can follow you and eventually drive to you when summoned. Charging the 17.7 kWh battery can take as little as 30 minutes so you can get back to turning heads with the floating rear wheel.

• 135 hp

• 112-250 mile range

• $27,500

Da Vinci Dynamics will open the API for developers to create and share new features. This could lead to cool self-parking or horrifying hacking. Let’s hope for the former and get a real life Bat Pod.

Check out the slick bike over on New Atlas.

Helicopters in Space

Ingenuity has now accrued one air mile after completing its tenth flight on Mars. The lil chopper was only intended to make four flights and has vastly exceeded expectations.

• Weight = 4 pounds

• Solar-powered

• Record altitude: 40 feet

This most recent flight was meant to double as scouting for the Perseverance rover and sight-seeing for the scientists making things work. Ingenuity’s over-achieving success is paving the way for future air-based Martian exploration.

A map of the flight path is available on Space.com.

Air Taxi

Volocopter's 2X eVTOL became the first to complete a crewed test flight. The rip-cord copter look-a-like hopes to provide electronic air taxi service to consumers within two years.

• eVTOL = Electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing

• 4 minute test flight

• Max speed: 18 mph

A matter of “when”, not “if”. Short distance air-taxis will be popular among those who wish to avoid rush hour traffic at any cost. Now if we can get just an eVTOL that also drives like a car...

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a….toy helicopter?

Thank you for reading!

If you found something cool to talk about, please share this with other awesome people!

If you are the awesome person this was shared with, we're excited for you to join The Convo!

What would improve this email for you?

I'd love to hear your thoughts and suggestions. Reach out on Twitter @_steveburgess or reply to this email.