For big fans of James Cameron's Avatar, the 13-year wait between the original and this year's sequel probably felt near interminable. But die-hard fans might have counted with a bit more agony and say it's actually been vomrra zìsìt, or "15 years." Rather, the blue-skinned Na'vi people, who inhabit the planet Pandora in Cameron's universe, have four digits per hand. As a result, their language--painstakingly built from scratch for the movies--uses base-eight counting instead of the human base-10. Fifteen in Na'vi actually means eight plus five (as opposed to 10 plus five in English), making it the equivalent of our 13.

Car and motorbike maker Honda Motor Co. is positioning itself for a vertical takeoff. The Tokyo-based company is embarking on efforts to field a new electric-hybrid air taxi, a robot with human-like hands that may one day toil on the moon and a reusable rocket to carry small satellites into space more economically. Honda's vision of how people will work, travel and spend leisure time in the future will help expand its business beyond cars, lawn mowers and motorcycles. The efforts are a key component of Honda's "2030 Vision" to broaden the definition of mobility and to improve peoples' daily lives. The automaker, which also has a niche business in small planes, is a newcomer to the space industry, dominated today by established defense contractors such as Boeing Co. and well-funded upstarts such as Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin.