James' World 2

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It would be mixing ad campaigns if not metaphors to say that Swedes think differently about design, but I think there’s something to it: Saab was famously left field, even down to where it located the ignition switch; Volvo carefully treads its own path with safety foremost in its mind but with crisp modern design. And then there’s Koenigsegg.

Located at a former Swedish fighter base, this company has been ploughing its own furrow through the automotive superlatives: supercars, hypercars, now megacars. But always in its own way—how else to explain a three-cylinder engine with pneumatic actuators instead of camshafts, a V8 with no flywheel, or a transmission with seven clutches that’s both nine-speed automatic but also six-speed manual, with clutch pedal no less?

At this year’s Monterey Car Week, few are as close to automotive royalty as the company’s eponymous founder, Christian von Koenigsegg. The company’s stand at one end of The Quail was among the most mobbed throughout the day, as young TikTokkers in their best suits competed for his attention, or maybe just another look at his latest creation, the CC850. Part 50th birthday present to himself, part celebration of the company entering its third decade, it’s a new take on Koenigsegg’s first offering, the CC8S.

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Making a success of the supercar game is not easy, but Christian von Koenigsegg’s company has survived two decades and continues to develop innovative new technology that’s years ahead of the competition. Ars talked to him to find out what he’s most proud of.

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Yulia Petrova | Getty

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Eight years ago, a meteor believed to have been 2 feet long entered Earth’s atmosphere at more than 100,000 miles an hour before exploding into tiny, hot fragments and falling into the South Pacific Ocean.

Some scientists believe it came from another star system, which would make it the first known interstellar object of its size to impact Earth.

Now, professor Avi Loeb, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is planning an expedition to retrieve fragments of the meteor from the ocean floor. By analyzing the debris, he is hoping to determine the object’s origins — even going so far as to make the extraordinary suggestion that it could be a technological object created by aliens.

Yet astronomers are wary of his claims, citing a lack of data on the object and insufficient evidence to support his bold conjectures about alien life.

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Whether it’s James Bond flicking a switch to turn his Aston Martin invisible in the middle of a car chase, Harry Potter ducking and diving out of harm’s way by donning a magical invisibility cloak, the Predator, Klingon Birds-of-Prey, or the endless reams of literature based on characters being able to go about their lives undetected, the dream of tech that grants us invisibility has long been an obsession.

But it has, for now, remained in the realm of science fiction. As recently as 2016, researchers had concluded that the fundamental laws of physics meant a true invisibility cloak wasn’t possible. Past methods of creating invisibility relied on blocking objects at specific electromagnetic wavelengths—something that fell apart when you needed to work on multiple wavelengths at once. 

That may no longer be the case. A 2019 patent, filed by a Canadian company called Hyperstealth Technology, suggested that it’s possible to bend light around an object using a “quantum stealth” cloak to make it disappear—albeit not perfectly. And militaries around the world continue to try to make the technology work. In 2020, the Israeli Ministry of Defense and tech company Polaris Solutions announced a 500-gram thermal visual concealment sheet that uses polymers to conceal anyone or anything underneath it.

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Photograph: Vollebak

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There are all kinds of pollutants in the air around us. Outdoors, these can be washed away through the falling rain, and the oxidation that happens after ultraviolet light from the Sun interacts with ozone and water vapor.

So, what happens indoors?

As a new study shows, there’s also some oxidation going on indoors too: the chemical cleaning that occurs via these hydroxyl (OH) radicals – short-lived reactive species whose job is to oxidize other molecules – happens through a combination of ozone leaking in from the outside, and from the oxidation fields that we create around ourselves.

In some scenarios, levels of OH radicals indoors are comparable to daytime outdoor levels, scientists have found. In other words, we’re walking, breathing, chemical reaction machines, which has implications for indoor air quality and human health.

“The discovery that we humans are not only a source of reactive chemicals, but we are also able to transform these chemicals ourselves was very surprising to us,” says atmospheric chemist Nora Zannoni from the Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate in Italy.

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Computer modeling of OH reactivity (L) and concentration (R). (Zannoni et al., Science, 2022)

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