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Japanese study shows driving a manual stimulates the prefrontal cortex. Nintendo s Brain Age creator led the research into manual gearboxes. Manual cars account for just 1% to 2% of new vehicle sales in Japan. Petrolheads pour their energy into saving the manual transmission in cars like the Porsche 911 GT3, the kind of halo machine that gets magazine covers and forum crusades. The cheap commuter cars losing their third pedal get no such defense, and they re disappearing far faster. A study out of Japan adds a wrinkle to the argument anyway, because the case for rowing your own gears may reach past the fun of it and into the health of your brain. var adpushup = window.adpushup = window.adpushup || {que:[]}; adpushup.que.push(function() { if (adpushup.config.platform !== "DESKTOP"){ adpushup.triggerAd("0f7e3106-c4d6-4db4-8135-c508879a76f8"); } else { adpushup.triggerAd("82503191-e1d1-435a-874f-9c78a2a54a2f"); } }); More: Suzuki s Every PA Still Has Crank Windows, But It Also Has A Manual The research comes from Professor Ryuta Kawashima, who runs neuroimaging work at Tohoku University s Institute of Development, Aging, and Cancer. Kawashima is no obscure academic. He built the science behind Nintendo s Brain Age series, the puzzle games that sold millions on the promise that the mind responds to exercise like any other muscle. What The Clutch Does To Your Head var adpushup = window.adpushup = window.adpushup || {que:[]}; adpushup.que.push(function() { if (adpushup.config.platform === "DESKTOP"){ adpushup.triggerAd("ea4d4b5a-f8e5-4d5d-9d9a-53a3b956b6cd"); } else{ adpushup.triggerAd("44c0a4dc-e25b-4ba5-ac64-2c510461b92a"); } }); According to a report from local outlet Best Car Web, the study found that the physical sequence of driving a manual lights up the prefrontal cortex, the region that handles memory, attention, and decision-making. Reading traffic speed, dipping the clutch, picking a gear by hand, and metering the throttle all happen at once, and keeping them coordinated demands a level of engagement that holds the driver s attention from one moment to the next. BMW Z4 M40i with a manual gearbox. In a country aging as quickly as Japan, asking the brain to juggle those inputs every day functions as a kind of low-grade workout it would otherwise skip. Stimulating neural pathways helps preserve cognitive function in a way that riding passively in an automatic or semi-autonomous vehicle simply cannot match. A Dying Breed Despite the benefits, cars with a traditional stick shift are far less popular than automatics in Japan. Best Car reports that manuals make up just 1 to 2 percent of new vehicle sales across Japan, a sliver that puts the automatic s dominance beyond any argument. var adpushup = window.adpushup = window.adpushup || {que:[]}; adpushup.que.push(function() { if (adpushup.config.platform !== "DESKTOP"){ adpushup.triggerAd("bb7964e9-07de-4b06-a83e-ead35079d53c"); } else { adpushup.triggerAd("9b1169d9-7a89-4971-a77f-1397f7588751"); } }); More: Subaru s Cheapest New Car Is A $7,200 Kei Van With Three Pedals Subaru Sambar Van The holdouts live at the bottom of the price sheet. Entry-level kei vans and trucks like the Honda N-Van, the Daihatsu Hijet, and the Suzuki Carry and Every, along with their rebadged siblings, still pair a naturally aspirated 660cc three-cylinder with a manual gearbox and a stripped-down spec written to hit a low number on the window sticker. More: Mazda s Cheapest New Car Has RWD And A Manual For $8,500 Unfortunately, the mainstream has already moved on. The Toyota Corolla and Honda Civic come only with a CVT because of their hybrid powertrains, leaving the hot-hatch versions as the lone exceptions. Even the new Honda Prelude, a coupe with a sporting name to protect, arrives automatic-only and tries to paper over the loss with fake gear changes piped in to keep the driver feeling involved. var adpushup = window.adpushup = window.adpushup || {que:[]}; adpushup.que.push(function() { if (adpushup.config.platform !== "DESKTOP"){ adpushup.triggerAd("b25ecba7-3bbb-4ea7-a3a8-dbea91695c07"); } else { adpushup.triggerAd("e46c436a-adeb-4b5e-a2c7-56bc36561c10"); } }); The kei cars are the last line. If the automakers keep building them with three pedals, Japan will hold onto something the rest of the industry has spent years engineering away. 2027 Honda Prelude

SpaceX launched 24 more of its Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit on Sunday (June 28), continuing to expand its broadband internet relay network.A Falcon 9 rocket carrying the new batch (Group 17-40) launched from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Liftoff took place at 12:09 p.m. EDT (1609 GMT or 9:09 a.m. PDT local time).The Starlink satellites reached orbit about 9 minutes after leaving the ground and were on track to be deployed by the Falcon 9 upper stage about an hour later.The first stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is seen after landing on its four legs atop the autonomous droneship "Of Course I Still Love You" in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California on Sunday, June 28, 2026. (Image credit: SpaceX)Previous Booster B1088 missionsNROL-126 | Transporter-12 | SPHEREx | NROL-57 | 12 Starlink missionsThe rocket's first stage (Booster 1088) completed its 17th flight, touching down on the autonomous droneship "Of Course I Still Love You" positioned in the Pacific Ocean.The 24 satellites increased the total number of active relays in the Starlink network to more than 10,700, according to tracker Jonathan McDowell. The Starlink service provides access to the internet to people around the world, as well to in-flight wifi and cell-to-satellite service providers.Sunday's launch was SpaceX's 75th Falcon 9 mission in 2026.

During several recent conversations, people have told me that they've stopped checking their phones in the morning. Not because nothing was happening, but because everything was. They described the feeling as standing under a waterfall of perpetual bad news.This experience is far from an isolated one. According to Reuters Institute's 2025 Digital News Report, 69% of Canadians at least occasionally avoid the news now.Globally, 40% report they at least sometimes or often do the same, the highest figure ever recorded. People shared consistent reasons for this: the news put them in a bad mood, they felt overwhelmed and powerless to act.As a researcher in developmental psychology, focusing on social development and psychological well-being, I argue that news fatigue is not laziness, weakness or a generational decline in civic interest. It's the predictable response of a human brain meeting an environment it was never designed to navigate.Wired for bad newsLong before smartphones or even the printing press, our cognitive architecture was shaped by a single problem: stay alive long enough to reproduce. Our ancestors whose attention drifted past the rustle in the grass left fewer descendants than those who froze, looked and listened.The brain that paid attention to threats was the brain that survived.This is the foundation of what psychologists call the negativity bias, one of the most replicated findings in cognitive science. Across decades of research, the human mind has been shown to weigh negative information more heavily than positive, attend to it faster and remember it longer.A predator nearby mattered more than a beautiful sunset. The cost of missing a real threat was death, while the cost of overreacting was a few minutes of wasted vigilance. The asymmetry made this bias adaptive.Here is the problem: the human brain has not changed since then. We are the same species as we were thousands of years ago. What's changed is the size of the world it's asked to scan for threats.News fatigue is not laziness, weakness or a generational decline in civic interest. It is the predictable response of a human brain meeting an environment it was never designed to navigate. (Image credit: pzAxe via Getty Images)Scanning the whole worldFor most of human history, the threats our nervous system processed were local. A neighbouring tribe. A drought. The illness of a child we personally knew. Information about distant places would barely arrive, and if it did, it was mainly irrelevant.In 2026, the same neurological system is being asked to absorb a war in one region, a financial shock in another, a climate disaster in a third and a violent crime in a fourth, all before lunchtime.A study published in the scientific journal Nature Human Behaviour examined more than 105,000 real news headlines viewed nearly six million times. Each additional negative word increased click-through rates, while positive words had the opposite effect.It's crucial to recognize the tactics meant to exploit our negative biases and create cognitive distance (Image credit: cbies/Shutterstock.com)Recent studies suggest people around the world demonstrate measurably stronger physiological responses to negative news than to positive news. The body is reacting before the mind has decided whether the threat is relevant.Some researchers have introduced a clinical framework for what happens in this instance called Problematic News Consumption (PNC) — a pattern of news engagement that results in preoccupation, dysregulation and disruption to daily functioning. In their 2022 study, the researchers found that 17% of American adults qualified as having severe levels of PNC. Among that group, 61% reported feeling unwell quite a bit or very much, compared with 6% of those who didn't.For minority populations, news fatigue may be even more consequential.Repeatedly witnessing harm directed at our own groups, even when we're not the immediate target, can have a significant psychological impact on people from the same group affiliation. For racialized communities, such as immigrants, the cognitive load could be even heavier, and the option to simply stop watching is much harder to exercise when the news is about their country of origin.Looking away is not the fixWhat's the solution to news fatigue? Well, it's not avoidance. A democracy depends on informed citizens.Many adults already cite the spread of misleading information as a major source of stress. Withdrawing from accurate, trustworthy information only deepens the problem. We're wired to pay more attention to bad news, and that kind of content will find its way to us one way or another.The fix is to manage the consumption and the sources.Several approaches can help manage news fatigue and protect mental health. Containing news consumption to defined windows of time reduces the sense of being overwhelmed. Choosing depth over volume also matters: one carefully reported long-form article will inform you better than bursts of random, unreliable and emotionally loaded posts on Instagram.There is also value in distinguishing between information and action — research on perceived control and stress consistently shows that the gap between awareness and agency is one of the strongest predictors of psychological distress. Identifying what you can actually do about what you read in the news, however small, regulates that response.Finally, be wary of "rage bait" — intentionally provocative messages or content designed to boost engagement on social media platforms by eliciting negative reactions. Recognizing that certain content creators want to provoke rather than reflect reality creates useful cognitive distance.The news will not become less "heavy." But our relationship with it can become more deliberate. Our brains were not built for this scale of input. They were, however, built to learn to adapt.This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

We rendered the new Hyundai IONIQ V in full N attire. Ioniq 6 N already offers a 641 hp template to borrow. A patented fake manual could add a real clutch pedal. When Hyundai pulled the wraps off its China-exclusive (for now) IONIQ V at Auto China 2026, the reaction was immediate, and most of it came down to the way it looks. Low-slung proportions and sharp angular surfacing that reads more Sant Agata than Seoul. Then you get to the spec sheet and find a single motor making 225 hp, which is a lot less drama than the bodywork suggests. var adpushup = window.adpushup = window.adpushup || {que:[]}; adpushup.que.push(function() { if (adpushup.config.platform !== "DESKTOP"){ adpushup.triggerAd("0f7e3106-c4d6-4db4-8135-c508879a76f8"); } else { adpushup.triggerAd("82503191-e1d1-435a-874f-9c78a2a54a2f"); } }); That gap between how it looks and how it moves invites one obvious thought: what would happen if Hyundai s N division got hold of it? Sure, there s no evidence to suggest such a model is being considered, yet the company has demonstrated with the Ioniq 5 and 6 N that it knows how to inject driver appeal into electric vehicles. Read: Hyundai s 2027 Elantra Is Bigger, Sharper, And Barely Recognizable Stretch the logic a little and the IONIQ V N starts to look like the spiritual successor to the Elantra N, only with the full weight of Hyundai s current EV tech behind it. var adpushup = window.adpushup = window.adpushup || {que:[]}; adpushup.que.push(function() { if (adpushup.config.platform === "DESKTOP"){ adpushup.triggerAd("ea4d4b5a-f8e5-4d5d-9d9a-53a3b956b6cd"); } else{ adpushup.triggerAd("44c0a4dc-e25b-4ba5-ac64-2c510461b92a"); } }); A Wicked Wedge Illustrations Josh Byrnes / Carscoops Our exclusive rendering imagines the IONIQ V in full N attire while preserving the dramatic, wedge-shaped aesthetic of the standard model. At the front, the aggressive fascia gains a deep splitter, larger cooling intakes and red accents seen on other N products. Also: BMW s i3 Sedan Divided The Internet, So We Drew The i4 Coupe Instead At 4.9 meters (193 inches), the Prius-on-steroids profile remains one of its defining features, with its heavily raked windscreen and fastback look. Larger wheels, performance brakes, subtle side skirts and lowered ride height help sharpen its stance. Out back, a more functional diffuser, discreet spoiler, and N-specific taillight elements help complete the transformation. var adpushup = window.adpushup = window.adpushup || {que:[]}; adpushup.que.push(function() { if (adpushup.config.platform !== "DESKTOP"){ adpushup.triggerAd("bb7964e9-07de-4b06-a83e-ead35079d53c"); } else { adpushup.triggerAd("9b1169d9-7a89-4971-a77f-1397f7588751"); } }); High Tech Cockpit The standard Ioniq V s interior. As with the exterior, the standard car s cabin would carry the concept s aesthetic into production largely intact. A 27-inch 4K panoramic display commands center stage, backed by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8295 processor, customizable performance graphics, track-focused telemetry, and an AI-powered voice assistant. Future Cars: Hyundai s Venue-Sized Bayon Could Get A 140-HP Hybrid America Won t Other goodies would include an advanced head-up display with a lap-timer, Level 2 semi-autonomous highway driving, heavily bolstered sports seats with illuminated N logos, a sports steering wheel with N mode presets, and acres of Alcantara trim. var adpushup = window.adpushup = window.adpushup || {que:[]}; adpushup.que.push(function() { if (adpushup.config.platform !== "DESKTOP"){ adpushup.triggerAd("b25ecba7-3bbb-4ea7-a3a8-dbea91695c07"); } else { adpushup.triggerAd("e46c436a-adeb-4b5e-a2c7-56bc36561c10"); } }); Performance to Stun Based on Hyundai s 800-volt E-GMP architecture, the IONIQ V N could utilize the same dual-motor, all-wheel-drive powertrain from the Ioniq 6 N, which in that application generates north of 601 hp (448 kW) or 641 hp in N Grin boost mode. Also a possibility is the use of Hyundai s recently patented electronic manual transmission. This setup expands on the automaker s e-Shift technology by employing a gated shifter with six speeds (plus reverse), a clutch pedal, and software-controlled gear simulation to recreate a manual driving experience. Underneath, the chassis would get stiffer springs with adaptive damping, larger anti-roll bars, sharper torque vectoring, and upgraded brakes to keep the powertrain honest. Amped Alternatives The regular 2027 Ioniq V is expected to go on sale in China later this year. If Hyundai ever greenlights an IONIQ V N, such a model would face off against Tesla s Model 3 Performance, Polestar 4 Performance Pack, MG IM5 Performance, BYD Seal Performance, Xpeng P7 Ultra, and BMW i3. The standard car is widely expected to go global eventually, albeit not in the US, where Chinese cars are effectively blocked. If it does, the smart money says it ll land with more performance than the Chinese-market version makes today. Would you rather this over the Ioniq 6? Let us know in the comments below. Illustrations Josh Byrnes / Carscoops