Voting really feels good to this werewolf. (credit: State of Michigan)

You can't just ask the Internet to vote on something and assume you'll get a "normal" result.

The town of Fort Wayne, Indiana, learned this the hard way in 2011, when an online vote to name a new government center in town went with "Harry Baals." Though Mr. Baals was in fact a respected former mayor of the town back in the 1930s, contemporary officials weren't convinced that his name was chosen out of merely historical interest.

Or there was the time in 2015 when the British Columbia Ferry Service asked Internet users to name its newest ships and perhaps win a $500 prize. Contest entries included :

Enlarge / Other automakers have half-heartedly tuned their EVs, but Hyundai's N brand has gone all-out with the Ioniq 5, and the results are spectacular. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Hyundai's transformation over the past decade and a half has been one to watch. The automaker went on a hiring spree, luring design and engineering talent away from the likes of BMW and Audi to grow its own competency in these areas. It worked—few can rival the efficiency or charging speed of the current crop of Korean electric vehicles , for instance. And Hyundai's N division has shown it can turn prosaic underpinnings into performance cars that push all the right buttons. Both of those things are on vivid display with the Ioniq 5 N.

The regular Ioniq 5 has been on sale for a while now, long enough to have just received a facelift . It's one of our favorite EVs, with styling that calls back to the angular hatchbacks of the 1980s and an 800 V powertrain that's easily best-in-class. Now, the company's in-house tuners have had their way with it, applying lessons learned from rallying and touring car racing to up the fun factor.

It's not exactly a novel approach, even for EVs. Kia beat Hyundai to the punch with the EV6 GT ; the car is fearsomely fast, but I found it less compelling than the normal version, which is cheaper, less powerful, and more efficient. In fact, I'm on record as saying that when looking at EVs, the cheapest, least-powerful version is almost always the one to get.

Enlarge / "Hmm, no signal here. I'm trying to figure it out, but nothing comes to mind …" (credit: Getty Images)

One issue in getting office buildings networked that you don't typically face at home is concrete—and lots of it. Concrete walls are an average of 8 inches thick inside most commercial real estate.

Keeping a network running through them is not merely a matter of running cord. Not everybody has the knowledge or tools to punch through that kind of wall. Even if they do, you can't just put a hole in something that might be load-bearing or part of a fire control system without imaging, permits, and contractors. The bandwidths that can work through these walls, like 3G, are being phased out, and the bandwidths that provide enough throughput for modern systems, like 5G, can't make it through.

That's what WaveCore, from Airvine Scientific , aims to fix, and I can't help but find it fascinating after originally seeing it on The Register . The company had previously taken on lesser solid obstructions, like plaster and thick glass, with its WaveTunnel . Two WaveCore units on either side of a wall (or on different floors) can push through a stated 12 inches of concrete. In their in-house testing, Airvine reports pushing just under 4Gbps through 12 inches of garage concrete, and it can bend around corners, even 90 degrees. Your particular cement and aggregate combinations may vary, of course.

Enlarge / The CycWagon. (credit: John Timmer)

More so than most other forms of bicycle, cargo bikes are specifically designed to make ditching a car easier. Whether hauling groceries or kids, they can handle a lot more of the day-to-day errand running than most other forms of two-wheeled transport. The problem with some of the higher-end cargo bikes is that the upfront costs can be competitive with a decent used car (although operating costs will be dramatically lower) without offering quite the flexibility that a car might.

Fortunately, as Beth Mole discovered, you don't necessarily have to spend that much to get a decent riding experience , putting cars at a further disadvantage. That left me curious as to what the price floor for a decent cargo bike might be—how little can you pay and still get a satisfactory experience? I was also keen for a second try on my experiment of going a month without using a car, meant to happen during my earlier review but interrupted by wildfire smoke.

All of which explains why I took delivery of a $1,500.00 cargo bike called the CycWagon , from a company called Cycrown. It's currently well on its way toward getting me through a car-free month, but it has... well, a lot of issues.

Enlarge / The second stage of the New Glenn rocket rolls to the launch pad on Tuesday. (credit: Blue Origin)

Welcome to Edition 7.10 of the Rocket Report! It has been a big week for seeing new hardware from Blue Origin. We've observed the second stage of New Glenn rolling out to its launch pad in Florida, and the rocket's first stage recovery ship, Jacklyn, arriving at a nearby port. It looks like the pieces are finally coming into place for the debut launch of the massive new rocket.

As always, we welcome reader submissions , and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Vega rocket makes its final flight . The final flight of Europe's Vega rocket lifted off Wednesday night from French Guiana, carrying an important environmental monitoring satellite for the European Union's flagship Copernicus program, Ars reports . About an hour after liftoff, the Vega rocket's upper stage released Sentinel-2C into an on-target orbit. Then, Sentinel-2C radioed its status to ground controllers, confirming the satellite was healthy in space. The Vega rocket will be replaced by the larger Vega-C rocket, with a more powerful booster stage and a wider payload fairing. One of the primary purposes of the Vega-C will be to launch future Copernicus satellites for Europe.

Enlarge / AMD's Ryzen 7700X makes enough sense to feature in our higher-end gaming build. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

It's been a while since our last system guide , and a few new products—most notably AMD's Ryzen 9000 series CPUs —have been released since then. But there haven't been many notable graphics card launches, and new ones are still rumored to be a few months off as both Nvidia and AMD prioritize their money-printing AI accelerators.

But that doesn't make it a bad time to buy a PC, especially if you're looking for some cost-efficient builds. Prices of CPUs and GPUs have both fallen a fair bit since we did our last build guide a year or so ago, which means all of our builds are either cheaper than they were before or we can squeeze out a little more performance than before at similar prices.

We have six builds across four broad tiers—a budget office desktop, a budget 1080p gaming PC, a mainstream 1440p-to-4K gaming PC, and a price-conscious workstation build with a powerful CPU and lots of room for future expandability.

Enlarge / Boeing's Starliner spacecraft sits atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket before liftoff in June to begin the Crew Flight Test. (credit: Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo/AFP via Getty Images )

NASA is ready for Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, stricken with thruster problems and helium leaks, to leave the International Space Station as soon as Friday, wrapping up a disappointing test flight that has clouded the long-term future of the Starliner program.

Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who launched aboard Starliner on June 5, closed the spacecraft's hatch Thursday in preparation for departure Friday. But it wasn't what they envisioned when they left Earth on Starliner three months ago. Instead of closing the hatch from a position in Starliner's cockpit, they latched the front door to the spacecraft from the space station's side of the docking port.

The Starliner spacecraft is set to undock from the International Space Station at 6:04 pm EDT (22:04 UTC) Friday. If all goes according to plan, Starliner will ignite its braking rockets at 11:17 pm EDT (03:17 UTC) for a minute-long burn to target a parachute-assisted, airbag-cushioned landing at White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico, at 12:03 am EDT (04:03 UTC) Saturday.

Enlarge / Researchers say that Dungeons & Dragons can give autistic players a way to engage in low-risk social interactions. (credit: Nicole Hill/CC BY-SA 4.0 )

Since its introduction in the 1970s, Dungeons & Dragons has become one of the most influential tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs) in popular culture, featuring heavily in Stranger Things , for example, and spawning a blockbuster movie released last year. Over the last decade or so, researchers have turned their focus more heavily to the ways in which D&D and other TRPGs can help people with autism form healthy social connections, in part because the gaming environment offers clear rules around social interactions. According to the authors of a new paper published in the journal Autism, D&D helped boost players' confidence with autism, giving them a strong sense of kinship or belonging, among other benefits.

“There are many myths and misconceptions about autism, with some of the biggest suggesting that those with it aren’t socially motivated, or don’t have any imagination," said co-author Gray Atherton , a psychologist at the University of Plymouth. " Dungeons & Dragons goes against all that, centering around working together in a team, all of which takes place in a completely imaginary environment. Those taking part in our study saw the game as a breath of fresh air, a chance to take on a different persona and share experiences outside of an often challenging reality. That sense of escapism made them feel incredibly comfortable, and many of them said they were now trying to apply aspects of it in their daily lives.”

Prior research has shown that autistic people are more likely to feel lonely, have smaller social networks, and often experience anxiety in social settings. Their desire for social connection leads many to "mask" their neurodivergent traits in public for fear of being rejected as a result of social gaffes. "I think every autistic person has had multiple instances of social rejection and loss of relationships," one of the study participants said when Atherton et al. interviewed them about their experiences. "You've done something wrong. You don't know what it is. They don't tell you, and you find out when you've been just, you know, left shunned in relationships, left out.... It's traumatic."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Federal prosecutors on Thursday unsealed an indictment charging six Russian nationals with conspiracy to hack into the computer networks of the Ukrainian government and its allies and steal or destroy sensitive data on behalf of the Kremlin.

The indictment , filed in US District Court for the District of Maryland, said that five of the men were officers in Unit 29155 of the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), a military intelligence agency of the General Staff of the Armed Forces. Along with a sixth defendant, prosecutors alleged, they engaged in a conspiracy to hack, exfiltrate data, leak information, and destroy computer systems associated with the Ukrainian government in advance of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Targeting critical infrastructure with WhisperGate

The indictment, which supersedes one filed earlier, comes 32 months after Microsoft documented its discovery of a destructive piece of malware, dubbed WhisperGate , had infected dozens of Ukrainian government, nonprofit, and IT organizations. WhisperGate masqueraded as ransomware, but in actuality was malware that permanently destroyed computers and the data stored on them by wiping the master boot record—a part of the hard drive needed to start the operating system during bootup.