Enlarge / In a stunning Photoshop move, a Nintendo GameCube pulls ahead of the pack. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

On Sunday, NASCAR driver Ross Chastain made history with an unprecedented wall-riding maneuver that qualified him for a championship race and set the record for the fastest lap on the track at 18.845 seconds. Remarkably, Chastain said he learned the move playing NASCAR 2005 on the Nintendo GameCube when he was a kid.

The maneuver happened at the Xfinity 500 race hosted at Martinsville Speedway in Ridgeway, Virginia. Martinsville is a half-mile short track built in 1947 that is well known for its tight, shallow-banked turns that usually require heavy braking to negotiate.

During the final lap of the race, Chastain found himself in 10th place but needed to pick up two positions to earn enough points to qualify for the Championship race on November 6. Instead of slowing down on the turn, Chastain shifted into fifth gear and gunned it, riding the outside wall and passing five cars to finish the race in fith place.

Enlarge / The Grand Canyon viewed from the South Rim adjacent to the El Tovar Hotel on November 11, 2019, in Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona. (credit: Getty | George Rose)

The Grand Canyon is an immense, vibrantly painted geological wonder, treasured for its awe-inspiring stratified architecture, which has been spectacularly sculpted over millions of years. Up close, it will blow your mind and take your breath away—and if you've visited recently, it may also violently flush your colon and have you projectile vomiting your granola bars.

That's right—the majestic natural wonder has been the site of a months-long outbreak of gastrointestinal illness, likely caused by norovirus. The virus was confirmed to be the cause of illnesses among at least eight rafting trips. Overall, more than 150 river rafters and backcountry campers have fallen ill since April, according to a recent update from the Grand Canyon National Park Service.

While many may have sought the outdoor grandeur in hopes of avoiding the pandemic coronavirus, it seems they were instead met with a different germ that has been savagely hollowing out innards at a pace many orders of magnitude faster than the Colorado River gutted the southwestern section of the Colorado Plateau. Amid the smoothly carved buttes and intricately chiseled chasms serenely shaped over eons, park-goers are blowing chunks from both ends in hot seconds. And instead of reaching both the North and South Rims during their visits, some are forced to remain perched on the edge of a far smaller basin.

Enlarge / In 2026 we might well see a Red Bull F1 car powered by a Porsche hybrid powertrain. (credit: Dan Mullan/Getty Images)

Rumors that Volkswagen Group is poised to enter Formula 1 have circulated for years. Every few months, often in a European car magazine, we'll read about an unnamed VW Group board member who says it's happening, then it all goes quiet for a few more months. But now it's really for real, says VW Group CEO Herbert Diess, as the 2026 rule change offers the perfect opportunity.

For a while, VW Group moving to F1 barely even made sense. The two high-technology, high-engineering brands in the group—Porsche and Audi—were both already spending F1-sized budgets to compete against each other in sportscar racing. That's a far more road-relevant form of motorsport, and one where both companies proved new technology that's now commonplace in their road cars.

But then Dieselgate happened, and Audi's diesel-powered hybrid Le Mans conquerer had to go. A year later, Porsche's even faster hybrid program was shuttered, having won everything there was to win. Across the group, brands scaled back their motorsports programs, focusing on electric ones like Formula E and VW's Pikes Peak champion.

(credit: .imelda / Flickr)

One of the more disturbing aspects of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is its ability to readily hop between a variety of species, ranging from domesticated animals like cats and mink to wild deer. This creates a potential risk. While spreading in other animals, the virus can pick up mutations that make it look unfamiliar to the human immune system or evolve to cause a different collection of symptoms.

These risks, however, depend on the virus being able to move back to humans after evolving in a different host. And, so far, the only cases where that's known to have happened all involve people who have worked on mink farms. But a recent manuscript that is currently awaiting peer review indicates that Canadian health authorities have identified an instance in which a SARS-CoV-2 variant circulating in deer ended up back in a human patient.

Deer season

In response to findings in the US, where SARS-CoV-2 appears to be widespread in both wild and farmed deer populations, Canadian health authorities decided to initiate screening of their own deer population. During the last two months of 2021, which overlapped with deer hunting season, samples were collected from nearly 300 deer killed by hunters; the unfortunate beasts were all screened for the presence of SARS-CoV-2.