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Nissan just explained how to decode its brake setups by the caliper colors.

Base cars get plain silver calipers, and only a rare few get to use yellow ones.

Porsche follows a similar color-coding approach across its sports car models.

Most drivers probably see brake caliper colors as little more than a styling flourish, maybe something chosen by the driver to match or contrast with their car’s paint. But in Nissan ’s case there’s a little more to it than that, and the automaker has now explained how to decode those colors.

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The colors used on its brake hardware form a visual shorthand that communicates exactly what kind of braking performance sits behind the wheels, the US division of the Japanese brand says.

Related: Nissan Buried Five Easter Eggs In The 2027 Z, Starting With The Front End

The system traces its roots to the 1999 R34 Skyline GT-R, where name-dropping Brembo brake hardware became part of the car’s identity. Over the years, different finishes have been used to distinguish everything from everyday braking systems to track-focused setups capable of surviving repeated punishment on a racing circuit.

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Silver Calipers

At the bottom of the hierarchy sits silver. That’s the finish found on the vast majority of Nissan models and indicates a braking package designed primarily for normal road use. Nissan stresses that these systems still provide strong stopping performance, but a few hard laps of your local track without a few leisurely ones in between to give them a breather will likely leave your Sentra stoppers fit for the trash.

Red Calipers

Even the base Z sports car comes with silver, two-piston calipers in stock form. But the Z Performance trim upgrades to more serious Akebono four-piston floating calipers and bigger rotors, and the calipers are dressed in red paint to let everyone know.

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Bright Red Calipers

But Nissan also has another, brighter shade of red brake caliper paint that it currently reserves for the Z Nismo . And it’s not just marketing spin, because the Nismo gains GT-R-derived front brake hardware, including even more track-capable calipers and larger rotors.

Old Is Gold

If the Z Nismo had existed 15 years ago its calipers might have been painted gold, which for years was one of Nissan’s most recognizable performance signatures. It first appeared on the R34 GT-R in 1999, then later became familiar to American enthusiasts through vehicles like the 350Z Track Edition and the R35 GT-R .

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Yellow Calipers

Yellow calipers sit at the very top of Nissan’s braking ladder. They’re reserved for carbon ceramic brake systems designed to handle extreme temperatures and repeated track use, and make you cry every time the dealer says you need a new set of discs. You can’t currently buy a new Nissan with yellow brake calipers but models that have featured them in recent years include the 2020 GT-R Nismo and GT-R Track Edition.

If you’re a hardcore Nissan geek, you might have known all this already, plus that there are a few executions, like the red calipers on the Italdesign GT-R50 . Much like Porsche fans are aware that the German brand has a similar code for its brakes. Porsche sports cars with steel brakes get red calipers and those with carbon ceramics get yellow, with hybrids often getting lurid green ones, unless the buyer upgrades to ceramics.

What other color-coded messages do automakers leave that some car fans might not know about? Drop a comment below and let us know.

Nissan

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Genesis is studying a small EV to sit below the compact GV60.

Europe’s boss says the idea is real but nothing is confirmed yet.

All this sits alongside a V8 mid-engined Magma halo in the works.

Cracking into the premium car market is no easy feat, in part because of the fierce loyalty many buyers in this segment have to iconic brands like Mercedes-Benz, Audi, and BMW. Despite the challenges, Genesis remains committed and is eyeing new segments of the market to expand into.

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In just a matter of weeks, the Hyundai-owned premium brand is expected to unveil its new flagship luxury model, taking the form of the three-row, all-electric GV90 . Positioned as a higher-end alternative to the Hyundai Ioniq 9 and Kia EV9, it signals the company’s intention to grow and challenge legacy brands.

Read: Genesis’ Magma GT Supercar Concept Edges Closer To Production

It’s not just the upper echelons of the market that Genesis is looking to expand into. According to Genesis Europe Managing Director Peter Kronschnabl, this could include smaller models to slot below the GV60 , which is currently the company’s most compact model.

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Quizzed by Autocar about whether Genesis could launch its own version of the Ioniq 3, Kronschnabl said “We’re evaluating this still but [have] nothing to confirm.” He added that, “for a brand that is evolving, we need to look at fast-growing segments where we might need to be present in order to nurture customers.”

Treading Carefully

Genesis Mint Concept

Crucially, Kronschnabl said the company needs to ensure it only expands into new segments with solid long-term prospects, rather than chasing short-term success.

“There are some niches,” he noted. “For instance, there’s not a real premium pick-up truck. But is that a segment you should enter? So there are segments where maybe there is white space, but they don’t make sense [for us]. You need to be very careful when you look into this white space and not just go there because you believe there is a short-term opportunity.”

Genesis isn’t only thinking about moving into smaller, slightly more affordable models. Late last year it unveiled its wild Magma GT Concept , previewing a V8-powered mid-engined sports car that’s expected to hit the market in the coming few years.

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Genesis G90 Wingback Concept

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During a pivotal moment in The Odyssey , Circe sends Odysseus to the Kingdom of the Dead to find the soothsayer who can instruct him on how to return home after more than a dozen years away. But to travel to the Kingdom of the Dead, our “complicated” (the most fitting Homeric epithet, introduced only a few years ago in Emily Wilson’s translation) protagonist must traverse the world’s boundary in the form of the Stream of Oceanos and the city Cimmerian, where mortals live in total darkness. Here, the dead speak the truth, but only if you first feed them blood from the living. How’s that for a metaphor?

At its heart, The Odyssey is a quest narrative. An adventure story. The hero must leave home—though was it really necessary to go slaughter so many people in a faraway city?—and, after trials and tribulations, return changed.

Back home, his wife Penelope wonders: Is Odysseus alive? Will he ever return? We readers know the answers because we are allowed to rove across the text and through the ancient Greek world, but she is stuck in Ithaca with no cell phone and no Internet.

At some point in my recent re-reading of the tale, I began to wonder: Does Penelope even want him to return?

Penelope resists believing at first that the man who has returned is actually her husband, and maybe that resistance points to the real tragedy: not how long it took him to return but the fact that he does so at all.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

*

In addition to the throughline of the quest, The Odyssey juggles multiple characters in multiple places and creates nested stories that move back-and-forth in time. It starts, famously, in medias res (as Horace advises we all should). The narrative spools and unspools. The son, Telemachus, leaves in search of his father while at the same time Odysseus attempts to return. Penelope tells the suitors, who party day and night and eat all her food, that she will marry when she finishes weaving her father-in-law’s shroud, but she unravels it again each night. There are gods and battles and danger and magic and romance—it is, in a word, epic . It’s also just a story about a guy trying to get home.

But The Odyssey gives more attention to the female than The Iliad, certainly, and more than most ancient texts, such that some early scholars theorized it had actually been written by a woman: the narrative opens with Penelope, not Odysseus; the suitors are said to admire her for her intelligence and wit; the central deity of the text is the goddess Athena, rather than Zeus.

I didn’t set out to incorporate a retelling of The Odyssey into my second novel Mudlark . I dipped back into The Odyssey when Emily Wilson’s translation came out in 2017—in the 60-plus translations into English, hers is the first by a woman—and then I couldn’t unsee it everywhere I looked, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Mad Max: Fury Road. We also live in a literary world rich with retellings of Homer (just look to Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad , Madeline Miller’s Circe , Claire North’s The Songs of Penelope ).

Emily Wilson makes the claim that Penelope’s dominant characteristic in the poem is her “opacity,” how little we really know about her mind or desires. What if Penelope’s waiting is her own form of aggression, a way of holding a space, for as long as possible, that excludes the men and their own attempts at power? Penelope resists believing at first that the man who has returned is actually her husband, and maybe that resistance points to the real tragedy: not how long it took him to return but the fact that he does so at all.

In this way, The Odyssey is ripe for us to project our own ideas onto it. With Mudlark , I envisioned my own quest narrative. Like Odysseus, my character Neko is also looking for answers that may only come from beyond The Veil, and like him, she is in search of a lost home. Her mother, Jenny Sweet, a middle-aged indie rock musician, works on a solo album inspired by The Odyssey, a sort of apocryphal retelling from the female perspective, as she thinks of it.

The Odyssey hasn’t survived because of what it tells us about the ancient world or about the long shadow of Western patriarchy, but because of what it continues to tell us about ourselves, today, here.

Does anyone remember that Scylla and Charybdis are not monsters but goddesses? In her album, Jenny Sweet portrays them as mothers angry at how humans have warmed their waters, turning them into lobsters in a pot being boiled alive by climate change. The sirens are “nags” telling any boat that passes how they want childcare and healthcare. They want equal pay for equal work. Each age sees metaphors of their own struggles in these ancient texts.

I am absolutely not the first person to reframe this story from the perspective of a woman, and I trust that I am far from the last. We are like Penelope, unraveling Homer’s tale for our own purposes.

*

Jenny Sweet’s album is called The Wreckage , and developing her character also made me think about the ways in which rock musicians might be the epic poets of our age. While we know The Odyssey was written down between the late eighth and late seventh century BCE, we also know that it was part of an oral tradition for hundreds of years before that. The repetitions and formulaic expressions (rosy fingered dawn, the wine-dark sea) are like the choruses of our pop songs, and the dactylic hexameter is like the melody. A band comes together to write collectively, and then other bands cover and reframe those same songs. This is also how The Odyssey has traveled through time. It was not composed by one person but woven together by many voices.

Like all the best stories, The Odyssey hasn’t survived because of what it tells us about the ancient world or about the long shadow of Western patriarchy, but because of what it continues to tell us about ourselves, today, here. Like Penelope’s shroud, it is woven and unwoven, always becoming, never complete. Maybe it is another way to put off the end of our own story. Another way to feed the dead from the blood of the living. Maybe that’s all it is or maybe that’s everything.

____________________________

Mudlark by Mary Helen Specht is available from Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

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For the first time, astronomers have reconstructed the magnetic field of an entire cluster of galaxies, from its central nucleus to its outer limits.

The record-breaking achievement is the product of the deepest-ever observations of the galaxy cluster Abell 2255, located around a billion light-years away — and those observations are thanks to the European radio telescope LOFAR (Low Frequency Array).

Abell 2255 has long been known for its complexity in radio waves. Its vast, diffuse radio emissions are created by particles called electrons racing at near-light, or relativistic, speeds and interacting with magnetic fields of galaxies in the cluster. Thus, using Abell 2255 as a cosmic laboratory to study the universe in radio waves could lead scientists to a better understanding of how magnetic fields come about and evolve. These observations could also help paint a picture of the dynamics of hot gas in galaxy clusters . This could reveal how the largest structures in the universe are constructed.

As part of the LOFAR Galaxy Cluster Ultra-Deep Field project, this team used 224 hours of radio image collection to discover that the distribution of large-scale magnetic fields throughout Abell 2255 (which itself stretches out for several million light-years) are not randomly distributed. Instead, these magnetic fields seem to be organized by the motion of gas that occurred during the formation of this galactic cluster.

"Obtaining very sensitive images of galaxy clusters at radio wavelengths is crucial to understanding how electrons are accelerated to relativistic speeds and magnetic fields are amplified on large cosmic scales," team leader Andrea Botteon, of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), said in a statement. "The complexity of these studies is due to the elusiveness of the radio signal from electrons moving in very weak magnetic fields. We believe that the mechanism that 'turns on' these gigantic radio emissions is linked to the formation process of galaxy clusters."

Botteon added that for this research he and his colleagues combined the deepest radio observations ever made with an innovative data analysis technique that allowed them to reconstruct the shape of a galaxy cluster's magnetic field for the first time.

"The coherence of the magnetic field lines observed in some regions of the cluster suggests that the morphology of the field is intimately linked to the dynamics of the gas in which it resides, where it can be 'stretched' or 'compressed' by the motions associated with the formation of the cluster itself," Botteon said.

The invisible texture of the magnetic field in the central region of the galaxy cluster Abell 2255. (Image credit: A. Botteon et al. (INAF), A&A 2026) This analysis revealed that, in some regions, the magnetic fields follow very specific directions, stretching radially along extended radio emissions. In contrast to this, in regions dominated by shock waves, magnetic fields are orientated at tangents. This suggests magnetic fields in Abell 2255 are carved out by the same dynamics that allow clusters to accrete gas and grow.

This serves as the first observational evidence that the same mechanisms that allow galaxies to grow and cluster, creating the largest structures in the universe , also shape their magnetic fields.

The team's research has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and is available as a pre-peer-reviewed paper on the repository site arXiv.

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A game publisher has spoken out about Sony's plan to kill off physical games, saying it's still valuable to reach certain audiences.

You know the story by now: Rockstar Games opened the floodgates by announcing that GTA 6 will only release digitally – well, technically there will be a physical version, but it's a code in a box, so I'm not counting it – and then shortly after, Sony announced it will stop making disks in 2028 . This caused massive outrage from players, with the latest Marvel's Wolverine trailer – and most trailers on the PlayStation YouTube channel – being bombarded with comments demanding Sony change course.

Speaking to Game File , founder and CEO of publisher Serenity Forge, Zhenghua Yang explains, "For us, physical publishing has actually never just been another sales channel" and that the disk releases are "actually an important part of our mission to bring meaningful games to as many people as possible globally."

Serenity Forge has published a number of iconic indie titles like Lisa, Doki Doki Literature Club, and Slay the Princess over the years. Yang adds, "Physical games help us reach audiences that digital often can’t," explaining, "They can be discovered in retail stores like Walmart/GameStop/etc, given as gifts, distributed to places with limited internet access, and preserved as lasting works of art."

However, Yang stresses the importance of digital games too, saying, "Digital distribution has made games more accessible, and it's been one of the biggest drivers of growth for our industry."

However, he doesn't see it as a 'one or the other' situation, adding, "We see physical and digital as complementary rather than competing" and that a combo of the two helps games reach the "widest possible audience."

Yang adds, "Every platform holder has to make long-term decisions based on manufacturing costs, logistics, consumer behavior" and says he has "no doubt Sony evaluated all of those factors carefully."

Industry analyst Mat Piscatella also revealed that in 2026, only seven games on PlayStation have sold more than 100,000 physical copies in the US this year, suggesting that, unfortunately – despite the massive online outrage – people aren't putting their money where their mouth is.

Despite Sony's decision likely having massive effects on the industry, Yang says the company's mission statement hasn't changed: "Our responsibility can really only be to adapt, continue serving our players, and keep finding new ways to make meaningful interactive art accessible to the widest possible audience."

PlayStation killing discs is bad for everyone, whether you care about physical games or not