Concept sketches of the Hyperloop passenger capsules; note the air intake noses. Tesla Motors The proposed design for the “Hyperloop, ” an ultra-fast transit system that would run between San Francisco and Los Angeles, was revealed today on Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors website. Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, describes a system that moves pods under low pressure through a tube between the two cities following the I-5 freeway, all within a 56-page PDF document . The Hyperloop would consist of aluminum pods inside a set of two steel tubes, one for each direction of travel. These are connected at each terminus. The tubes would be positioned on top of pylons spaced 100 feet apart holding the tube 20 feet in the air, and the tube would be covered by solar arrays to generate its own power. Inside the tubes, the pods would carry people up to 760 miles per hour. The pods would each carry 28 passengers, departing every two minutes from either location (or every 30 seconds at peak times). So each pod would have about 23 miles between each other while traversing the tube. The transport capacity would therefore be about 840 passengers per hour. Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Hyperloop—a theoretical, 760 mph transit system made of sun, air, and magnets
On Tuesday, the American mobile phone market took one step closer to looking a bit more like the European or Asian markets: free incoming calls, inexpensive outgoing calls, and a focus on data. A Canadian startup, TextNow , just launched a new mobile service in the United States. For $18.99 per month, you get 500MB of data, 750 rollover minutes, and unlimited texting and incoming calls. In the US, it’s the norm for both the sending and receiving parties to be charged for a call. But nearly everywhere else in the world, only the person who originated the call actually pays. “Incoming calls don’t really cost us that much, ” Derek Ting, the company’s CEO, told Ars. “Carriers charge you anyway because they can get away with it.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments 
The University of California—an enormous institution that encompasses 10 campuses and over 8, 000 faculty members— introduced an Open Access Policy late last week. This policy grants the UC a license to its faculty’s work by default, and requires them to provide the UC with copy of their peer-reviewed papers on the paper’s publication date. The UC then posts the paper online to eScholarship , its open access publishing site, where the paper will be available to anyone, free of charge. Making the open access license automatic for its faculty leverages the power of the institution—which publishes over 40, 000 scholarly papers a year—against the power of publishers who would otherwise lock content behind a paywall. “It is much harder for individuals to negotiate these rights on an individual basis than to assert them collectively, ” writes the UC. “By making a blanket policy, individual faculty benefit from membership in the policy-making group, without suffering negative consequences. Faculty retain both the individual right to determine the fate of their work, and the benefit of making a collective commitment to open access.” Faculty members will be allowed to opt out of the scheme if necessary—if they have a prior contract with a journal, for example. Academic papers published in traditional journals before the enactment of this policy will not be made available on eScholarship at this time. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments 
