The Artemis II astronauts are back after a 10-day journey around the moon

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The Orion capsule carrying the Artemis II astronauts has successfully splashed down off the coast of San Diego at 8:07PM Eastern time on April 10. It signals the conclusion of Artemis II’s 10-day journey around the moon, which is meant to be a test flight for a future mission that would bring humanity back to the lunar surface. The Orion crew module carrying the mission’s astronauts separated from the service module at 7:33 PM. While the service module was designed to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere, the crew capsule was built to bring the astronauts back home safely.

By 7:53 PM, Orion reached our planet’s upper atmosphere, where a six-minute communication blackout occurred due to the capsule heating up as it started its guided descent. The capsule has 11 parachutes, with its drogue parachutes being deployed at 23,400 feet to stabilize and slow it down. When Orion reached 5,400 feet above the ground, the drogue parachutes were cut off so that the three main parachutes could be deployed. That decreased the capsule’s velocity to 200 feet per second, enabling a safe splashdown.

NASA’s engineers conducted several tests while the capsule was in the water before the recovery team headed to the capsule on inflatable boats to extract the crew from Orion. By 9:34 PM, all four crew members were out of the capsule. They were then hoisted into helicopters and flown to the USS John P. Murtha dock ship, where doctors will assess their health.

Artemis II launched on April 1 with four astronauts on board: NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen. They traveled around the moon for almost 10 days, reaching distances no other crewed mission has before it. The astronauts took photos of the far side of the moon, the side we don’t see from our planet, including amazing closeups of the lunar surface using their smartphones. That makes them the first humans to directly and personally view the lunar far side.

During NASA’s post-splashdown news conference, the agency said it will announce the Artemis III crew soon. Artemis III will rendezvous with one or both commercial landers being developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin in low Earth orbit, which will take humans to the lunar surface. It will test the lander’s ability to dock with Orion before NASA lands humans on the moon again.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/the-artemis-ii-astronauts-are-back-after-a-10-day-journey-around-the-moon-033800654.html?src=rss

This Bike Cargo System Gives Your Bike a Face With 12 Color Zones

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Bike cargo gear has always been the part of cycling that nobody really gets excited about. Racks, panniers, and baskets exist to haul things, and most of them look exactly like what they are, brackets and platforms bolted on as an afterthought. Cyclists who care about aesthetics often treat this hardware as a necessary compromise, something you’d tolerate rather than actually want.

Chamelion begins with the idea that bikes deserve the same sense of character other vehicles already have. That inspiration drives a modular, color-customizable cargo platform from Seattle that includes front and rear racks, pannier rails, aluminum baskets, and a front assembly the designers call the “bike face,” treating cargo gear as part of your bike’s actual identity.

Designer: Yu-Chu Chen

Click Here to Buy Now: $986. Hurry, only a few left!

The bike face is the most interesting part of the system, and it does more than look distinctive. It consolidates everything that typically clutters the handlebars into one organized front unit. Your phone’s got a dedicated mount with a sunshade, rear mirrors attach at the sides with wide spacing for better sightlines, and your headlight sits front and center behind a transparent shell.

The racks do serious work. The front has been tested to hold up to 20 kg (44 lbs), and the rear handles up to 27 kg (60 lbs), which is enough for a full grocery haul or a heavily loaded bikepacking setup. The aluminum baskets drop in when you need proper containment, or you can skip them and just strap a bag directly to the platform.

One of the quieter design details is how the racks handle rough terrain. Rather than transmitting every bump directly into your load, the material has enough flex to absorb vibration, so things ride more smoothly on uneven surfaces. Add the pannier rails when you need side-hanging capacity, and the same bike that’s carrying your lunch on a weekday is hauling camping gear on a trail by Saturday.

Installing the system takes some effort upfront, but once that’s done, removing and remounting the racks requires no tools at all. The front rack’s handlebar connectors rotate to fit different bar types and the fork clamps have bearings inside that move with your suspension. The rear rack adjusts between 110mm and 180mm between the clamps, wide enough to accommodate most bikes, including full-suspension mountain bikes.

Of course, the color customization goes well beyond picking a finish. Every component has its own configurable color zone, from the rack platform and frame connectors down to the pannier cap and handlebar connector buckle. The bike face alone has more than 12 individually configurable areas. It sounds excessive until you realize that kind of specificity is exactly what makes the system feel genuinely personal.

What makes that level of customization possible is the manufacturing behind it. The plastic components are produced using powder bed fusion 3D printing in PA12 or PA11 nylon, with coloring handled by Dyemansion. That process gives the parts rich, durable color without relying on conventional painted finishes, and it allows for small-batch production without injection mold tooling, which is what makes individual configurations feasible.

Assembly is guided by interactive 3D step-by-step instructions that let you zoom in, rotate, and inspect every connection from multiple angles before putting it all together. It’s the kind of manual that actually makes you want to read it, which is more than can be said for most flat-pack furniture and certainly more than anyone expects from a bike cargo system.

The broader idea here isn’t a one-off accessory set, but a system that can keep expanding over time, with new modules and accessories already being developed. The 3D-printed version stays the lightest and most configurable option, and the design accommodates future additions as the lineup expands. For a category that’s spent decades being mostly forgettable, this one at least gives your bike the kind of personality it probably should have had all along.

Click Here to Buy Now: $986. Hurry, only a few left!

The post This Bike Cargo System Gives Your Bike a Face With 12 Color Zones first appeared on Yanko Design.

World’s Most Affordable Foldable Phone Costs $320. That’s Less Than an Apple Watch

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The moment Motorola resurrected the Razr as a foldable in 2020, every industrial designer I know had the same thought: the flip form factor was always the right one, the market just needed to catch up. Five years later, the category has matured enough that Samsung, Motorola, Oppo, Honor, and a dozen Chinese brands all compete for the same $800-to-$1,200 buyer, nudging specs up and prices sideways with each generation. Nobody was competing seriously for the buyer who wants the flip experience at a fraction of that figure, because the assumption was that buyer did not exist at scale. Ai+ has decided to test that assumption directly.

The Nova Flip, unveiled at Ai+’s April 2026 launch event in India alongside the Nova 2 series and a tablet, carries a sticker price of Rs 29,999, roughly $320. The inner display measures 6.9 inches across an AMOLED panel resolving at 2790 x 1188 pixels, complemented by a 3.1-inch AMOLED cover screen. A MediaTek Dimensity 7300 handles processing duties, paired with 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 256GB of internal storage. The camera array consists of a 50-megapixel primary sensor, a 2-megapixel depth lens, and a 32-megapixel front camera. Battery capacity clocks in at a surprisingly healthy 4325mAh, with 33W wired charging, 5G, NFC, and IP64 rounding out the headline features.

Designer: Ai+

Let’s talk about that battery for a moment, because 4325mAh in a flip phone is genuinely unusual. The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 packs a 4000mAh cell, and Motorola’s Razr Plus 2024 manages just 4000mAh as well, both at prices three times higher than the Nova Flip. Fitting a larger-than-average cell into a folding chassis requires either a very clever internal layout or an acceptance of added thickness, and Ai+ has not published the device’s folded dimensions yet. The 33W charging speed is adequate without being exciting, sitting well below the 65W and 80W speeds that Chinese flagship foldables now routinely offer. For a $320 device, though, adequate is a perfectly reasonable baseline.

The Dimensity 7300 helps keep the cost within its ultra-affordable bracket. MediaTek’s chip powers a range of competent mid-range phones in the $200-to-$400 segment, including several from Oppo and Vivo, where it handles everyday tasks, social media, and casual gaming without complaint. It does not belong in the same conversation as the Snapdragon 8 Elite powering the Galaxy Z Flip 6, and Ai+ is clearly not pretending otherwise. The 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM is similarly mid-range, a generation behind the LPDDR5X specification that flagship devices now ship with. None of this is disqualifying at this price point, but buyers upgrading from a previous-generation Galaxy or Razr will feel the performance delta in sustained workloads and camera processing speeds.

At that price, the fact that the phone comes IP64 rated is frankly surprising. Splash and dust resistance in a folding device requires careful engineering around the hinge mechanism, where gaps and moving parts create obvious ingress points. Many foldables at twice the price ship without any IP certification whatsoever (it also costs money to get the certification), so Ai+ clearing that bar at Rs 29,999 signals a level of build ambition that the spec sheet alone does not fully communicate. The side-mounted fingerprint sensor, dual SIM 5G support, NFC, and USB-C port complete a feature list that would have looked respectable on a $600 phone two years ago.

The real question the Nova Flip poses has nothing to do with its own specifications. It asks whether the Indian market, and potentially the broader emerging market landscape, is ready to embrace foldables as a mainstream form factor rather than a luxury signifier. Samsung has spent five years building the foldable as an aspirational object, priced and marketed accordingly. If Ai+ can deliver a hinge that survives 18 months of daily use, a display that resists visible creasing, and software that stays coherent across the cover screen and inner display, the Nova Flip could do to the foldable category what budget-tier 5G phones did to 5G adoption: accelerate it by years. The Glacier White colorway goes on sale in May 2026, and that month’s sales figures will tell us far more about the future of affordable foldables than any spec sheet ever could.

The post World’s Most Affordable Foldable Phone Costs $320. That’s Less Than an Apple Watch first appeared on Yanko Design.

Vancouver’s First Supertall Was Inspired by the Ocean Floor

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Vancouver has always had good bones. The mountains, the water, the way the city sits between them like it was planned by someone with an eye for drama. But for all its natural beauty, its skyline has played it relatively safe. That’s about to change, and the agent of disruption is, of all things, a sea sponge.

Henriquez Partners Architects, a local Vancouver studio, has unveiled designs for 595 West Georgia Street, a 1,033-foot tower that will become the city’s first-ever supertall skyscraper. To earn that designation, a building has to exceed 984 feet, which puts 595 West Georgia just barely in that club and makes it a landmark before a single floor has been built. It’s the centerpiece of a larger trio called Georgia & Abbott, developed by Holborn Group, but this one is clearly the main event.

Designer: Henriquez Partners Architects

The design draws from the glass sea sponge reefs, specifically hexactinellids, found off the coast of British Columbia. These aren’t the bath sponges you’re picturing. They’re ancient, rare, deep-sea organisms with a crystalline skeletal structure that is simultaneously porous and structurally formidable. Henriquez Partners didn’t just borrow the idea aesthetically; they borrowed it structurally. The building is wrapped in a steel exoskeleton clad in white Glass Fibre Reinforced Polymer panelling, with highly translucent spans of glass filling the rest. That external framework carries the structural loads, which means fewer internal columns, more open floor plates, and a surface that looks woven and textured rather than sealed and flat.

That last distinction matters more than it sounds. Glass-box towers have dominated skylines for decades, and while some are genuinely beautiful, most are just reflective. They bounce light around and blend into each other. 595 West Georgia is going for something different: depth. The lattice of the exoskeleton creates shadows and layers depending on where you’re standing and what time of day it is. It moves, visually, in a way that most modern towers simply don’t, which makes looking at it feel more like watching a living surface than a fixed object.

Henriquez Partners described the design as telling “a story that is unique to British Columbia.” That kind of regional specificity is increasingly rare in architecture, where global firms often produce work that could exist in Dubai just as easily as Dallas. The fact that this building could only make sense in Vancouver, because the glass sponge is native to BC’s coastal waters, gives it a conceptual integrity that goes beyond branding. It’s a building that knows where it lives.

The program is equally considered. 595 West Georgia will function as a hotel tower, with conference facilities, a rooftop restaurant, and a publicly accessible observation deck at the top that will be free for Vancouverites to visit. That detail alone shifts the building’s relationship to the city. A supertall designed to be shared with the public rather than sealed off for guests feels like a genuine gesture, and it suggests that the architects and developer thought about this tower as part of the city’s fabric, not just its skyline profile.

The whole project sits at a compelling intersection of ideas. It’s biomimicry applied at an urban scale, which is a growing conversation in both design and engineering. It’s also a statement about what cities are willing to reach for, literally and figuratively. Vancouver has been measured about its height limits for years, and for good reason. The city’s low-rise character has long been part of its identity. Greenlighting a supertall signals that the city is ready to stretch those boundaries, and having one that can argue its design philosophy this clearly makes that shift feel earned.

Whether 595 West Georgia turns out to be as striking in person as the renderings suggest is something only construction can answer. But the foundational idea, that the most interesting path forward might look like something pulled from the ocean floor, is exactly the kind of thinking that makes architecture worth paying attention to right now. Not every city gets to say its most ambitious tower was modeled after an organism that’s been living quietly underwater for centuries. Vancouver gets to say that.

The post Vancouver’s First Supertall Was Inspired by the Ocean Floor first appeared on Yanko Design.

The FAA is encouraging gamers to get jobs in air traffic control

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Sick! The Federal Aviation Administration is targeting gamers in its most recent job advertisement for air traffic controllers. The administration's annual hiring window opens at 12AM ET on April 17, and considering the ongoing shortage of air traffic controllers, it's calling this a period of "supercharged hiring." Rad! The FAA's YouTube video draws parallels between gaming and directing air traffic, and notes that the average salary for the role after three years is $155,000. Hella!

The FAA is clearly seeking players who are at least old enough to remember the Xbox One and Bjergsen in the LCS, which puts would-be candidates around their early 20s at least. It's either that, or the ad editors really just picked videos at random from the pile of stock footage marked gamerz. But I won't lie, it made me smile to see that Xbox One logo appear out of nowhere. Nostalgia is a hell of a thing.

"To reach the next generation of air traffic controllers, we need to adapt," US Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy said. "This campaign’s innovative communication style and focus on gaming taps into a growing demographic of young adults who have many of the hard skills it takes to be a successful controller."

The FAA has been losing more air traffic controllers than it can hire and retain since the 2010s, and this trend only worsened during the pandemic in the 2020s, according to a report released in December by the US Government Accountability Office. The administration increased hiring every year since 2021, but at the end of 2025 it employed 13,164 air traffic controllers, 6 percent fewer than in 2015, the report said. At the same time, the number of flights in the air traffic control system increased by about 10 percent, to 30.8 million.

Or, as the FAA put it on the ATC hiring page: "Join the BEST AND BRIGHTEST, the elite squad of 14,000 controllers protecting 2.9 million daily passengers." Applicants must be a US citizen, under 31 (maybe those video editors do know what they're doing), and be able to speak fluent English. An aptitude test, medical screening and academy training follows, among other steps.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/the-faa-is-encouraging-gamers-to-get-jobs-in-air-traffic-control-230308014.html?src=rss

Disney and NatGeo Built Billboards That Bees Can Actually Live In

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Most billboards are built to be noticed and then forgotten. You see them, you process whatever they’re selling, and then they fade into the visual noise of the street. So when a campaign comes along that flips that formula entirely, it genuinely stops you in your tracks.

That’s exactly what’s happening in Manchester right now, where Disney and National Geographic, working with creative agency Meanwhile, have installed a series of billboards designed to do more than advertise. The structures, which the team calls “bloomboards,” are fitted with built-in cavities, textured surfaces, and planting elements that turn them into functioning habitats for bees. Not a two-week stunt. Not a PR photo op. Permanent installations, built from sustainably sourced cedar that had already been felled, placed across parks and public spaces throughout the city.

Designer: Meanwhile for Disney and National Geographic

The campaign ties to the launch of National Geographic’s Secrets of the Bees, a documentary series presented by explorer Bertie Gregory and executive produced by James Cameron. The series was filmed over several years using specialized cameras to capture bee behavior at a level of detail most of us have never seen. Entomologist Dr. Samuel Ramsey provided scientific input throughout. It’s streaming now on Disney+ and Hulu, and from a content standpoint alone, it sounds like essential viewing.

But the billboard work is where this becomes interesting as a piece of design thinking, not just marketing. Rather than placing a nature image on a billboard and calling it Earth Month, Meanwhile built the message into the medium. The physical structure becomes an argument for the cause. The billboard doesn’t just tell you bees matter; it gives them somewhere to live. Mini bee hotels have also been placed at several locations across Manchester, including Chorlton Water Park, Wythenshawe Park, Fletcher Moss Botanical Garden, and the Northern Quarter. Like the bloomboards, these aren’t decorative gestures. They’re functional, permanent additions to the urban landscape, and that distinction matters when the campaign is rooted in conservation.

Rachel Miles, creative director at Meanwhile, put it simply: “Our ambition is to encourage people to plant their own mix of shrubs and perennials to support bee populations and create a positive impact.” Michael Tsim, also a creative director at the agency, was just as direct: “Not just a two week campaign, but something they actually benefit from, permanently.”

That word, permanently, is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Environmental advertising has a long history of looking good while changing nothing. Companies run campaigns during Earth Month and then quietly move on. What makes this campaign feel different is that the outcomes are baked into the design itself. The bees don’t need to watch the documentary to benefit. The habitat exists regardless of whether anyone scans a QR code or downloads an app.

It also speaks to a broader shift in how thoughtful brands are approaching cause-driven work. The bar for audiences has risen sharply. People can spot the difference between a brand that has added a green ribbon to its logo and one that has committed real resources to a problem. Embedding a working habitat into an advertising structure is a tangible commitment, and one you can’t undo when April ends.

For anyone who follows design, this campaign is a reminder that the best work often finds its power in constraints. A billboard is a flat surface with a job to do. Meanwhile used that constraint not as a limitation but as a starting point, and the result is something genuinely unusual. Form serves function, function serves form, and both serve something beyond the campaign itself. Whether or not you plan to watch Secrets of the Bees (though I’d argue you should), the billboard project stands on its own as a piece of design worth paying attention to. It’s an example of what happens when a brief asks for more than attention and a creative team decides to take that seriously.

The post Disney and NatGeo Built Billboards That Bees Can Actually Live In first appeared on Yanko Design.

Epic is reportedly building an extraction shooter for Disney

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Besides a wealth of Fortnite skins based on Disney IP, it hasn't really been clear what the entertainment company has gotten in return for its $1.5 billion investment in Epic from 2024. That could change this November, Bloomberg reports, when Epic releases a Disney-themed extraction shooter. The game is one of three Disney projects the publisher is currently working on, and is reportedly expected to be Epic's comeback after the company laid off 1,000 employees in March due to a "downturn in Fortnite engagement."

The game is reportedly similar to Arc Raiders, a multiplayer shooter where players fight for resources before escaping through an extraction point, but with Disney characters fighting enemies instead of post-apocalyptic survivors. Bloomberg writes that internal reviewers have worried that the game's mechanics are "not very original," but the project is the most promising of the three Epic is developing. The second title received middling internal reviews, according to Bloomberg, and Epic moved resources off the third project "after reports that Disney was disappointed by Epic’s release timeline."

“This is not reflective of the ambitions of the Disney collaboration,” Liz Markman, Senior Director of Communications at Epic Games, said in a statement. “We are building a new games and entertainment universe of Disney experiences.”

While details of Epic's work for Disney are coming into focus, it's still unclear whether this new extraction shooter will be a standalone game or incorporated as a mode in Fortnite. In its efforts to sell the title as a "multiverse" and a competitor to Roblox, Epic has introduced multiple games inside Fortnite over the last few years with distinct mechanics. The developer announced that it would shut down three of those titles — Rocket Racing, Ballistic and Fortnite Festival Battle Stage — as part of its recent round of layoffs. According to current and former Epic employees Bloomberg spoke to, several affected employees were also working on these unannounced Disney games.

When it invested in Epic in 2024, Disney wanted to build an entertainment universe, where players could "play, watch, shop and engage with content, characters and stories from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, Avatar, and more." Epic's current plans sound less all-encompassing than that, but if they manage to increase engagement with Fortnite and Disney's brand, that might not matter.

Update, April 10, 7:29PM ET: Added a statement from Epic Games.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/epic-is-reportedly-building-an-extraction-shooter-for-disney-220401382.html?src=rss

A man allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s house

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A 20-year-old man was arrested by the San Francisco Police Department after allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's house, The New York Times reports.

In a statement shared on X, SFPD wrote that it responded to a request for a fire investigation in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco around 7:12 AM ET / 4:12AM PT. "At the scene, officers learned that an unknown male subject threw an incendiary destructive device at a home, causing a fire at an exterior gate." After the man fled on foot, police found and arrested him around an hour later while responding to a business' complaint about an "unknown male subject threatening to burn down the building." That business turned out to be OpenAI's headquarters and the subject happened to be the same man who threw the Molotov at Altman's house.

"Early this morning, someone threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s home and also made threats at our San Francisco headquarters. Thankfully, no one was hurt," an OpenAI spokesperson confirmed in a statement to Wired. "We deeply appreciate how quickly SFPD responded and the support from the city in helping keep our employees safe. The individual is in custody, and we’re assisting law enforcement with their investigation."

As it's become more commonplace, artificial intelligence has also become more divisive. While more and more people continue to use AI tools, public reaction to the encroachment of the technology, whether in gaming or customer service, is increasingly negative. Altman's warnings of AI's impact on employment, and a recent New Yorker investigation digging into his allegedly manipulative leadership style at OpenAI, have also raised questions about the CEO's prominent role as a steward of the technology.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/a-man-allegedly-threw-a-molotov-cocktail-at-sam-altmans-house-210444731.html?src=rss

The Volvo Cosmic Surfer Has Gravity-Adaptive Wheels Designed For Smooth Driving On The Moon

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Volvo has spent the better part of a century building its reputation on one foundational promise: keep the people inside the car alive, no matter what the road throws at them. That philosophy produced crumple zones, three-point seatbelts, and side-impact protection systems that the rest of the industry eventually copied wholesale. The logical endpoint of that thinking, taken to its most extreme conclusion, produces a vehicle engineered for terrain that would destroy any conventional automobile outright. Designer Sampad Chaulia arrived at exactly that conclusion with the Volvo Cosmic Surfer, a concept submitted for the Volvo Design Competition 2026 that imagines the Swedish brand’s DNA transplanted onto a lunar-grade off-road platform co-badged with The North Face.

The Cosmic Surfer’s central design provocation is its wheel system, a gravity-adaptive, inflatable assembly that swells and compresses in response to surface conditions, conforming around boulders and craters the way a hand closes around a stone. The body sits low and wide over those massive multi-lobe wheels, draped in Volvo’s signature steel blue with The North Face branding stenciled across the flanks in expedition-ready block lettering. Chaulia frames the vehicle’s intended era as 2040, an interplanetary expedition machine for galactic explorers, built from Scandinavian minimalist principles and wrapped in the visual language of gorpcore punk. The result lands somewhere between a NASA lunar rover and a concept car that wandered off the Geneva Motor Show floor and kept going until it hit the Moon.

Designer: Sampad Chaulia

The wheel remains perhaps the most interesting element on the vehicle, evoking the same jaw-drop that I had when I first saw NASA’s chainmail wheel back in 2017. Chaulia modeled and rendered it entirely in Blender 3D, and the result looks less like a tire and more like a living organism that happens to roll. Each assembly pairs a geometric star-shaped alloy core, all sharp angles and polished facets, with a ring of inflatable outer lobes that bulge around the rim like an over-pressured deep-sea creature. The engineering logic is genuinely elegant: rather than relying solely on suspension travel to absorb terrain irregularities, the inflatable lobes compress and deform on contact with rocks and surface obstacles, conforming to the ground rather than demanding the ground conform to them. At low gravity, where surface textures are extreme and suspension dynamics behave very differently than on Earth, that compliance-first approach to traction makes far more sense than anything pneumatic rubber could offer.

The body language above those wheels is angular and deliberate, a form study in what Chaulia calls “Scandinavian soul” filtered through techwear aesthetics. The flanks are wide and planted, with faceted surfacing that catches studio light in sharp, graphic planes rather than soft automotive highlights. A dark greenhouse tapers rearward and sits flush with the bodywork, keeping the silhouette monolithic and uninterrupted from nose to tail. At the rear, a broad red light bar stretches the full width of the vehicle, reading less like a regulatory tail lamp and more like a distress beacon, which, given the concept’s intended operating environment, seems entirely appropriate. The Volvo wordmark sits cleanly on the upper body, and The North Face logo claims the flanks, a co-branding pairing that frames the vehicle as high-performance technical apparel on wheels.

The gorpcore punk framing Chaulia wraps around the Cosmic Surfer is more than an aesthetic mood board. It locates the vehicle within a specific cultural conversation about what extreme outdoor equipment looks like when the outdoors in question has no atmosphere, no roads, and gravity running at roughly one sixth of what your suspension was tuned for. The North Face partnership makes genuine design sense here because both brands share the same foundational brief: build something that keeps the person inside it functioning when the environment outside it is actively trying to kill them. That shared DNA produces a concept where the co-branding reads as a logical merger of two survival philosophies rather than a marketing exercise.

Volvo’s production lineup in 2026 is focused squarely on Scandinavian refinement and urban electric mobility, the EX30, EX40, and EX90 forming a coherent family of composed, safety-first EVs for city intersections and motorway cruising. The Cosmic Surfer asks what happens when that same foundational commitment to occupant protection gets aimed not at pedestrian detection systems and crumple zones but at the lunar highlands, where the obstacles are the size of houses and the nearest service center is 238,000 miles away. Chaulia produced this entire concept in a single day, which makes its conceptual coherence remarkable. The central idea, a vehicle whose wheel technology borrows the compliance logic of outdoor gear rather than automotive convention, arrived fully formed and persuasive on the first pass, which is more than most studio teams manage in a month.

The post The Volvo Cosmic Surfer Has Gravity-Adaptive Wheels Designed For Smooth Driving On The Moon first appeared on Yanko Design.

Estonia is the rare EU country opposing child social media bans

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As child social media bans spread across Europe and beyond, Estonia isn't having it. On Friday, the country's education minister said the bans won't "actually solve problems," while warning that the kids will find a way regardless.

Although companies like Meta would love for you to believe it’s a fairy tale, social media addiction is associated with tangible negative repercussions for children. Studies show that its harms range from depression and anxiety to sleep deprivation and obesity. (The latter is from all the targeted junk food advertising.) On the other hand, teens can find community and support from social media.

A growing list of countries looked at the negative data and concluded that the answer was to ban social media altogether for children. Although the age cutoff varies, legislation has been floated or enacted in Australia, Greece, France, Austria, Spain, Indonesia, Malaysia, the UK and Denmark — just to name a few.

Estonia's education minister believes these countries are coming at the very real problem from the wrong angle. "The way to approach this, to me, is not to make kids responsible for that harm and start self-regulating," Kristina Kallas said at a Politico forum in Barcelona. She added that "kids will find very quickly the ways to go around and to still use social media."

Instead, she said the responsibility lies with governments and corporations. "Europe pretends to be weak when it comes to big American and international corporations," she added. But she called that a "pretense," challenging the EU to "actually take this power and start regulating the big American corporations."

To be fair, the EU regulates the tech industry more effectively than anywhere else in the world. But the point on childhood social bans stands.

Another argument against the bans is that it’s a short path from the well-meaning to a more sinister erosion of basic freedoms. In February, France suggested that the next logical step after passing an under-15 social media ban would be to go after VPNs. After all, once you pass the ban, you need to enforce it — and that can mean snuffing out the tools children could use to work around it.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/estonia-is-the-rare-eu-country-opposing-child-social-media-bans-194620916.html?src=rss