Enlarge / The GTS Sport Turismo is the wagon version the Porsche Taycan always deserved. (credit: Porsche)

When Porsche announced the Taycan Cross Turismo, plenty of automotive enthusiasts raised half an eyebrow. The car checked so many boxes—wagon body style, blazing fast, all-electric. Yet at the same time, it was lifted by 0.8 inches and festooned with the kind of black plastic body cladding that mainstream marques use to “ruggedize” their crossovers. With the right tires, the Cross Turismo is apparently a capable off-roader, but the low-slung sedan screamed for a sporty wagon counterpart, like Porsche has done with the Panamera, not a pseudo-SUV.

Wagons may not be for everyone, but we think the Taycan GTS Sport Turismo has a fetching profile. (credit: Porsche)

Well, dream hard enough and Porsche shall answer, apparently. The automaker took the wraps off the Taycan GTS Sport Turismo at the Los Angeles Auto Show last week. The handsome wagon strips the Cross Turismo of its black wheel arches and drops its suspension back down to a suitably sporty height. It also adds a healthy dollop of power over the next-best 4S model at a price that’s significantly cheaper than the top-shelf Turbo, though with a starting price of $133,300, few people will consider it cheap.

Porsche is famous for tweaking its products ad infinitum, and the Taycan is no exception. The model was first introduced as a sedan with regular, 4S, and Turbo flavors, all of which carried over to the lifted-wagon Cross Turismo. Now, with the introduction of the Sport Turismo, Porsche is adding a GTS trim for the sedan and the wagon (but not the lifted wagon).

Enlarge / A painted lady butterfly lands on a flower. The bright iridescent colors in its wings don’t come from pigment molecules but from how the wings are structured. Chitin scales essentially form a diffraction grating tuned to specific wavelengths of light. (credit: Mark Rightmire / Getty Images)

One of the best-known poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins opens with a tribute to the phenomenon of iridescence. It’s represented by the colorful wings of kingfishers and dragonflies in Hopkins’ poem, but iridescence can also be found in the wings of cicadas and butterflies, in certain species of beetle, and in the brightly colored feathers of male peacocks. Now, a team of researchers at MIT have captured on video the unique structural growth of butterfly wings—continuously, as a butterfly develops inside its chrysalis—for the very first time. The researchers described their findings in a new paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As I’ve written previously, the bright iridescent colors in butterfly wings don’t come from any pigment molecules but from how the wings are structured. It’s a naturally occurring example of what physicists call photonic crystals. The scales of chitin (a polysaccharide common to insects) are arranged like roof tiles. Essentially, they form a diffraction grating, except photonic crystals only produce certain colors, or wavelengths, of light, while a diffraction grating will produce the entire spectrum, much like a prism.

Also known as photonic bandgap materials, photonic crystals are “tunable,” which means they are precisely ordered in such a way as to block certain wavelengths of light while letting others through. Alter the structure by changing the size of the tiles, and the crystals become sensitive to a different wavelength. (In fact, the rainbow weevil can control both the size of its scales and how much chitin is used to fine-tune those colors as needed.)

Enlarge / HP Chromebook x2 11-inch two-in-one.

The HP Chromebook x2 two-in-one makes a play for this space with an 11-inch display that offers more screen area than rivals like the 10.1-inch Lenovo Chromebook Duet, the 10.5-inch Microsoft Surface Go 3, or even similarly priced iPads. HP’s portable, bendable (and did we mention blue?) Chromebook is ripe for travel and less intensive tasks.

Despite an MSRP of $600-$680, depending on the configuration, I’ve seen the HP Chromebook x2 at more appropriate sale prices of $370, $400, or $480. Considering its level of power, its touchpad that demands a hard surface, and a keyboard cover that feels like a temporary solution, you’ll want to wait for that discount.