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Drivers traveled farther completing infotainment tasks than in 2022.

Interface design mattered more than physical or digital controls alone.

The study raised useful questions, despite limitations in its methodology.

Modern vehicles are packed with larger screens, faster processors, and supposedly smarter interfaces. Yet according to a new Swedish test, completing everyday tasks behind the wheel is actually taking drivers longer than it did just four years ago. If the findings are representative, it’s a bit of a black mark on infotainment UX designers . That said, some of the methodology here is worth considering.

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More: US Drivers May Get Physical Buttons Back Without Congress Lifting A Finger

Swedish publication Vi Bilägare reran a driver-distraction test it first staged in 2022, measuring how long drivers took to work through a set of common tasks while holding 68 mph (110 km/h) on a closed airfield. On average, they covered 813 meters (2,667 feet) before wrapping up, up from 756 meters (2,480 feet) four years earlier. That works out to roughly two extra seconds with at least part of the driver’s focus pulled from the road.

How They Ran The Test

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2026 Tesla Model Y

The test involved four routine actions: turning on the seat heater while increasing the cabin temperature and activating the defroster, switching radio stations, resetting the trip computer, and dimming the instrument lighting while turning off the center display.

Also: Mazda Says A Finger On A Screen Beats Reaching For 15 Similar Buttons

Drivers were given time to familiarize themselves with each vehicle beforehand, and any run where they drifted out of their lane or failed to maintain speed was repeated. Each task was timed separately, beginning when the driver placed both hands on the steering wheel and ending when the action was complete.

Source: ViBilagare

Two drivers ran each car, and voice control was left out because the functions it handles differ too much from one model to the next. Testing happened at Lunda Airport near Uppsala under partly cloudy skies at 12 degrees Celsius (54 degrees Fahrenheit). The study also weighed phone functionality, touchscreen operation while wearing various types of gloves, viewing distance to the display, and first impressions from a panel of drivers spanning a range of ages.

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It’s The Layout, Not The Screen

2025 Volvo XC60

Perhaps the most standout result is that touchscreens themselves don’t seem to be the issue. Proving that point is the Volvo XC60 , which completed the test in just 485 meters (1,591 feet). Its results suggest that the in-car UX is intuitive, fast, and good at helping drivers maintain focus on the road. On the flip side, and almost equally surprising, is a 2016 Volvo V60, used to represent a button-only approach, which needed 863 meters (2,831 feet) to complete the test.

2026 Mazda CX-60

The Mazda CX-60 fared worse still. Its touchscreen locks out on the move, leaving the driver dependent on physical controls, and finishing the tasks took 37 seconds across 1,137 meters (3,730 feet). The cabin also carried 50 buttons, the highest count in the 2026 test.

2016 Volvo V60

Tesla’s interface, which is almost entirely screen-based, improved between the two tests, but Mercedes went the other way, requiring 15 more seconds to complete the same tasks. In other words, design matters more than whether or not the buttons and switches are physical or baked into a screen. Excluding conventional controls such as power-window switches, the Model Y has only four buttons, with functions including mirror adjustment and gear selection handled through the display.

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Source: ViBilagare

The screen-focused Mercedes CLA took 35 seconds overall, dragged down partly by a 19-second startup lag from unlocking to the display accepting input, versus a Tesla that wakes the moment the door opens. Skoda’s blend of knobs and touchscreen posted the second-shortest distance at 542 meters (1,778 feet), with its drivers wrapping up the tasks in 18 seconds.

2026 Toyota Corolla Cross

In the Toyota Corolla Cross, a well-placed screen was let down by an instrument-lighting adjustment buried so deep in the trip computer that the car rolled 580 meters (1,903 feet) before the change was made.

How Far the Driver’s Eyes Drop, Top to Bottom

Model Top edge

of screen,

(degrees) Bottom edge,

(degrees) Difference

(degrees)

BYD Seal U DM-i 13 31 18

Citroen C3 AC 11 20 9

Kia EV3 15 25 10

Mazda CX-60 11 18 7

Mercedes CLA 16 29 13

Nissan Qashqai 8 19 11

Skoda Kodiaq 7 23 16

Tesla Model Y 12 33 21

Toyota Corolla 9 21 12

Volvo XC60 12 35 23

Volvo V60 (-16) 14 20 6

Volvo V70 (-05) No screen – –

SWIPE

Screen placement has at least improved, with the XC60 requiring the driver to drop their gaze 35 degrees against the 56 degrees demanded by 2022’s worst offender, the MG Marvel R, and the Nissan Qashqai’s display growing from nine inches to 12.3 since its last appearance.

2025 Skoda Kodiaq

Still, the study only goes so far to prove its point. A sample size of ten vehicles is hardly a complete representation of the automotive industry’s control set. Vehicle familiarity, cabin layout, steering wheel controls, and even the specific features being tested can all influence results. Despite the potential issues, the results we see here seem all but shocking.

Thanks to Vibilagare for sharing their finds with us!

2026 Mercedes-Benz CLA

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Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that busted their butts, scaled great heights, got it right, and discovered a new world.

First, Hannibal marched an army of men, horses, and elephants over the Alps to threaten Rome. Scientists ask the question: Just how hard did they grind? Then, the mouse at the top of the world, the ancient origins of handedness, and a throwback to the alien megastructures.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens , or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files .

Try the Hannibal diet (no, not the Lecter one)

E. Berti & F. Vollrath. “Energy costs of Hannibal’s alpine crossing.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In 218 BC, the Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca marched an army of 46,000 men and 37 war elephants over the Alps to threaten Rome right at its doorstep. This brash advance in the Second Punic War has become one of the most legendary military moves of all time, even though Hannibal was ultimately unsuccessful in his mad dash to sack Rome.

Yet despite the prominent place of this march in history, the exact route that Hannibal took over the Alps remains unknown. Now, scientists have taken a fresh stab at the millennia-old mystery by calculating how much energy various route options would have cost the troops and elephants. Though experts have generally considered a route called the Col du Clapier to be most likely, the new results suggest an alternate route known as the Col de la Traversette would have exacted less energy from the advancing army, which might have boosted its odds as Hannibal’s choice of crossing.

“Hannibal crossing the Alps on elephants.” Image: Nicolas Poussin “Most of the discussions concerning Hannibal’s crossing were guided by philological and geological considerations, which tend to ignore the biology of the men and animals,” said authors Emilio Berti of Halle-Jena-Leipzig and Fritz Vollrath of the University of Oxford.

“Compared to choosing the Col de la Traversette, the routes via the Col de Montgenèvre, Col du Clapier, and Col du Mont Cenis would have required 11%, 16%, and 19% more energy, respectively, for the army as a whole,” the team continued. “Although Hannibal would not have had such accurate estimates, he may have had a qualitative understanding of the ranking of the possible routes. In which case, driven by the aim to minimize the energy costs of the crossing, he would have chosen the Traversette route.”

While this study does not resolve the tantalizing question of exactly where Hannibal hauled ass over the Alps, it sheds new light on the immense costs of this ancient act of bravado. Berti and Vollrath estimated that even if the army took the path of least resistance—the Col de la Traversette—the “elephants would have lost 4% of their body fat reserves, horses 11%, and men 19%.”

Invading Rome: The ultimate weight loss plan. Considering that half of Hannibal’s troops died during the crossing, this diet is not recommended.

In other news…

The mighty mountain mouse

Liphardt, Schuyler et al. “Adaptation across an extreme elevational gradient in Andean leaf-eared mice, the world’s highest-dwelling mammal.” Science.

Speaking of alpine survival, meet the Andean leaf-eared mouse ( Phyllotis vaccarum ). This little critter can live more than four miles above sea level, on the dizzying peaks of the Andes mountains, making it by far the highest-dwelling mammal on Earth.

The mouse has surpassed the “known elevational range limits of all other terrestrial vertebrates” which “were previously thought to be uninhabitable by mammals owing to severe hypoxia and frigid temperatures,” according to a new study about this mouse’s amazing adaptations.

Andean leaf-eared mouse, Phyllotis vaccarum. Image: Marcial Quiroga-Carmona To understand how this unassuming mouse survives up in the clouds, scientists analyzed the genomes of 167 leaf-eared mice collected across their range, which spans the lowlands all the way up to high Andean slopes, and compared them to their more grounded mouse relatives. The results revealed that the mountain mice have evolved a unique set of adaptations that are distinct from many other alpine animals, including the ability to metabolize toxic plants.

“The world’s highest-dwelling mammal has adapted to habitats at both the low- and high-elevation limits of its range, and much of the elevation-related selection relates to previously unappreciated aspects of feeding ecology,” the team concluded.

Mmm…toxic salads. Keep on living the high life, P. vaccarum .

A handy discovery at the dawn of complex life

Evans, Scott D. et al. “Earliest evidence of behavioural handedness in the Ediacaran motile bilaterian Spriggina floundersi.” Scientific Reports .

Paleontologists have discovered the oldest potential evidence of a right-handed animal, though the 550-million-year-old seacrawler in question doesn’t actually have hands. Spriggina floundersi , an inch-long weirdo that lived in the Ediacaran period, has long fascinated scientists because it appears to be one of the first animals in the fossil record capable of locomotion.

When scientists took a closer look at more than 100 exquisite Spriggina fossils from South Australia, they discovered that about twice as many of them seemed bent to the left compared to the right, suggesting that the animal had a preferred direction of motion, or “handedness.” In this case, it was right-handed because the fossils are preserved in negative hyporelief, meaning that they are mirror images of the animal.

A fossil of Spriggina floundersi collected in South Australia. Image: Scott Evans / ©AMNH “A significant number of fossil specimens are bent to the left (right in life),” said researchers led by Scott D. Evans of the American Museum of Natural History. “The nature of these bends does not match expectations of anatomical asymmetry and instead constitutes the oldest described evidence of behavioural handedness.”

Now, the search is on for the elusive Ediacaran leftie.

It’s never aliens

Madurga-Favieres, Cristina et al. “Evidence for a giant companion orbiting Tabby’s star.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society .

Before there were interstellar objects and Pentagon UFO videos to ignite our extraterrestrial imaginings, there was Tabby’s Star, also known as KIC 8462852. Discovered in 2015, the star’s strange light patterns, which fluctuate significantly, sparked speculation that it might be orbited by “alien megastructures,” such as a massive solar energy plant called a Dyson sphere.

Now, scientists have discovered evidence of a huge planet transiting Tabby’s Star—meaning that it passed in front of the star from our perspective on Earth—which might help provide a natural exploration for its unusually pronounced dimming events. While reviewing observations from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), the team serendipitously “found a single unreported transit event…on 2019 September 3” that lasted 21 hours, hinting at the presence of a giant planet about ten times as massive as Jupiter.

“No transiting companion has ever been detected around this well-known star, so the potential evidence of a candidate presented in this work is significant, as its existence could explain the complexity of the system,” said researchers led by Cristina Madurga-Favieres of the University of Warwick. “The strongest theory is that a group of exocomets or planetesimal fragments are responsible for the irregular and apparently non-periodic dips…of Tabby’s star. The presence of a companion would explain why these bodies are driven to the vicinities of the star, breaking up, as it would orbitally perturb them.”

In other words, the huge planet may be gravitationally hoisting a flock of smaller bodies into orbit around the star, producing the dimming events. While it’s not quite as sensational as a colossal alien power plant, it may help resolve the decade-long mystery of this strange star.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

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In most areas of archaeology, excavators painstakingly dig layer by layer to reveal not just buried artifacts but also charred seeds, broken bones and microscopic grains of ancient pollen. This delicate process is followed by months of intensive lab work to study the newfound remains. But there is one kind of archaeologist that takes a different approach to understanding the past. Experimental archaeologists replicate how people did things in the past, using techniques they recreate from archaeological information and modern knowledge.

In his new book, " Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations " (Little, Brown and Co., 2025), science writer Sam Kean explores the experimental side of archaeology. Through a series of ancient and modern vignettes, Kean discovers how Stone Age city dwellers kept their houses cool 9,000 years ago, how the Romans used needle and thread to style hair, and how bog bodies were formed in Iron Age Europe.

In this excerpt, Kean meets two men who used ancient techniques to diligently mummify a human body in an effort to understand how ancient Egyptians took care of their dead.

Related: Read our interview with Sam Kean on 'Dinner with King Tut'

Cultures throughout history have mummified their dead, and a handful still do today, but Egyptian mummies remain the most iconic. Unfortunately, the Egyptians wrote down virtually nothing about their embalming process. This leaves experimental archaeology as one of the few avenues available for understanding mummification, and several practitioners have indeed re-created mummies in modern times. In most cases, they work with animals, but a few intrepid souls have mummified human beings, most famously when Bob Brier and Ronn Wade did so in 1994.

The cover of "Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations." (Image credit: Little, Brown & Company / Hachette Book Group) Wade grew up wanting to be a mortician like his father. After a stint as a medic in the Vietnam War, he became an anatomist and eventually the head of Maryland's state anatomy board. Brier also has training in anatomy, but is an Egyptologist by training and passion. He's accumulated so many books on Egypt over his life that he rents a second apartment just to accommodate them. Brier and Wade selected their mummy from the pool of people in Baltimore who donated their bodies to science. Ultimately, they settled on a seventy-six-year-old Caucasian man who died of a heart attack. His identity remains secret, but a bit crassly, Wade nicknamed him E. M. Balm.

For authenticity's sake, Brier and Wade used replicas of pharaonic-era tools and materials, including linen wraps, an oddly wide wooden embalming table, and copper and obsidian blades — although they quickly abandoned the copper ones, which couldn't cut flesh well. Before starting on their mummy, they practiced one important step on other cadavers: extracting the brain. Instead of using full cadavers for this, they obtained some decapitated heads leftover from a medical school's plastic surgery class. ("They were looking a little weird," Brier recalls. "They'd had facelifts and such.")

From some scant references, Brier knew that Egyptian embalmers removed the brain by inserting a hooked rod through the nostrils, but the details were vague. Brier and Wade first tried scooping the brain out with such a rod, but the tissue proved too soft and wouldn't come out. They finally took to squirting water up the cadaver's nose, then used the rod to whisk the brain into a slurry. After that, it poured right out. "Like a milkshake," Brier says. "A strawberry milkshake to be exact."

Skills honed, the duo began making their mummy in May 1994. The first step involved removing his organs.

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Different organs met different fates in Egypt. Unclear about the purpose of the brain, embalmers typically threw it away. The heart, in contrast, was left in situ [in place]; it was considered the seat of all thinking, emotion, and intelligence. Abdominal organs were carefully extracted and preserved. Following this protocol, Brier and Wade made a 3½-inch [9 centimeters] incision in their cadaver's abdomen and removed the spleen, liver, gallbladder, lungs, and twenty-two feet [6.7 meters] of intestines. Given their size, extracting the liver and lungs required some creative geometry and determined squeezing. The most difficult part involved detaching the lungs from the heart while working blind inside such a tiny hole.

With the organs removed, the pair cleaned the abdomen with palm wine and myrrh, then stuffed frankincense into the skull. This was an important ritual step to prepare the body for the afterlife, and also helped kill microbes and mask bad smells. Ancient embalmers used other sacred substances as well, often imported from Europe and Asia at great cost — pistachio resin, beeswax, castor oil. Ramses the Great's mummy had peppercorns from India shoved up his nose.

Next, Brier and Wade dehydrated the body using natron, a mineral of equal parts salt and baking soda that forms naturally in Egyptian wadis, or dry gullies. Like a sponge, natron sucks the moisture out of flesh, leaving it too dry to support bacteria, maggots, beetles, and other putrefying agents; the leftover tissue is essentially jerky. (Fully committed to authenticity, Brier dug the natron himself in Egypt, and recalls that sneaking hundreds of pounds of unidentified white powder through customs at JFK Airport was one of the more ticklish aspects of the project. Luckily, he was traveling with a film crew, and could hide the powder in suitcases amid their equipment.)

In their lab, Brier and Wade placed the mummy's spleen, lungs, liver, and intestines into bowls and covered them with natron. They also packed 29 linen bags of the powder into the body's empty torso, laid the body on top of 211 more pounds [96 kilograms], and dumped 583 additional pounds [264 kg] over it. They kept the body in Wade's old office, with the heat cranked up to 104 degrees F [Fahrenheit, or 40 degrees Celsius] and dehumidifiers running night and day to simulate Egyptian air.

Over the next five weeks, the natron on top turned crusty and brown from absorbing bodily juices, forcing Brier and Wade to crack through it with an iron rod. (Today Brier remembers the odor as acrid but not unpleasant, although news reports at the time say he and Wade donned surgical masks against the smell.) Regardless, the sight of the body beneath thrilled Brier. As it dries, the skin of mummies tightens and shrivels, especially on the face and scalp. The lips retract to reveal the teeth, and skin with less melanin turns brown-yellow. Brier always wondered whether those changes resulted from the immediate mummification process, or from several thousand years of weathering in Egypt's arid climate. One glance at his mummy and Brier knew the answer: even after five weeks, "he looked just like Ramses the Great," he recalls, with leathery skin, a beaky nose, and wispy hair sticking up. The embalming process, not time, made the iconic mummies we know today.

Ramses II's long-preserved mummy. Experts have recreated the mummification process to learn more about how the ancient Egyptians preserved their dead. (Image credit: Patrick Landmann via Getty Images) Beyond changing the body's appearance, the dehydration process left the limbs as stiff as tree branches, and dropped its weight from 188 pounds [85 kg] to just 79 [36 kg]. (Thirty-one pounds [14 kg] of that represented the removal of organs.) The organs drying in the bowls withered as well, which helped explain another mystery of Egyptian mummification: as other archaeologists have noted, embalmers typically placed the organs in so‑called canopic jars, funerary vessels with slim necks — so slim that it seemed impossible to fit the larger organs inside. But the natron shrunk them down enough to slip right in.

After removing him from the natron, Brier and Wade gave Mr. Balm a full body massage with lotus, cedar, and palm oils, another step that, while important ritualistically, also had pragmatic benefits — restoring flexibility to the joints, making the mummy easier to handle. This accomplished, they wrapped the body in linen bandages. (Embalmers in ancient times started with the hands and feet, wrapping each digit separately, then proceeded to the arms, legs, and torso. The penis was individually wrapped as well — or, if embarrassingly shriveled, a cod‑piece of stiff linen was bound in place.) At this point, they let the mummy dry for three more months in the arid office, which dropped its weight to 51 pounds [23 kg]. Afterward, they added several more layers of wrappings. In between the layers, they slipped magic amulets and scraps of papyrus with spells on them, a common practice in ancient times.

For the past three decades, the mummy has been lying in a metal casket in Maryland, stored at room temperature. Brier and Wade have partially unwrapped it twice to check for rot, but found nothing amiss. "He's dead and well," says Brier.

LITTLE, BROWN

Dinner With King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-Creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations

Finalist for the 2026 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award | LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER | INDIE BESTSELLER | The New Yorker's Best Books of 2025

Whether it's the mighty pyramids of Egypt or the majestic temples of Mexico, we have a good idea of what the past looked like. But what about our other senses: The tang of Roman fish sauce and the springy crust of Egyptian sourdough? The boom of medieval cannons and the clash of Viking swords? The frenzied plays of an Aztec ballgame...and the chilling reality that the losers might also lose their lives?

See how much you know about mummies with our mummy quiz!

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Netflix seems to have the crime drama market cornered right now. It's only been a few weeks since the streamer dropped I Will Find You — the gripping miniseries that dominated conversation at Fourth of July events around the country — and now it has another highly-anticipated show coming up soon. The Undertow began filming in May of 2024, and after two years of anticipation, the series is expected sometime at the end of 2026, or perhaps early 2027. By all accounts, this will be another must-see series, with all the lies and conspiracies crime fiction fans have come to expect from Netflix.