The big movie of the weekend is the CG animated film DC’s League of Super Pets, which famously stars a range of established actors, headlined by Kevin Hart and eventual Black Adam Dwayne Johnson. Super Pets joins Disney’s Lightyear from earlier this month, along with the now finally released Paws of Fury, in being…
BMW is recalling 83 iX and i4 vehicles after investigating multiple battery fire incidents involving the two EVs. In an advisory spotted by Autoblog, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration warns owners of select iX xDrive 50, iX M60, i4 eDrive40 and i4 M50 vehicles not to drive their cars, charge them or park them inside.
After first investigating an overseas incident involving a 2022 i4 eDrive back in April, BMW found a manufacturing defect with select Samsung SDI battery cells in iX models produced between December 2nd, 2021 and June 30th, 2022, and i4 models built between November 22nd, 2021 and June 13th, 2022.
BMW has already notified dealers of the recall. The automaker will replace the batteries in affected vehicles free of charge. BMW adds it’s not aware of any accidents or injuries due to the battery defect. Affected owners can expect a notification letter by September 19th. You can also contact BMW support ahead of time for more information.
For those worried about a potential repeat of the situation Chevy Bolt owners went through with GM, it’s worth noting BMW sources batteries for its iX and i4 EVs from two manufacturers: CATL and Samsung SDI. By contrast, GM single-sourced the Bolt’s battery from LG Chem before it announced a worldwide recall in 2021.
Back in 2018, MGM released the Tomb Raider reboot film starring Alicia Vikander that did solidly at the box office. A sequel seemed like a sure thing for Vikander’s take on Lara Croft, which was largely modeled after the events of Crystal Dynamics’ reboot trilogy, but then the pandemic cut off its production date, and…
The national news cycle may have largely moved on from coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic — despite, as of this writing, infections being on the rise and more than 300 deaths tallied daily from the disease. But that certainly doesn't diminish the unprecedented international response effort and warp speed development of effective vaccines.
In The Messenger: Moderna, the Vaccine, and the Business Gamble That Changed the World, veteran Wall Street Journal reporter Peter Loftus takes readers through the harrowing days of 2020 as the virus raged across the globe and biotech startup Moderna raced to create a vaccine to halt the viral rampage. The excerpt below takes place in early 2021, as the company works to adapt its treatments to slow the surging Delta variant's spread.
Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpted from The Messenger: Moderna, the Vaccine, and the Business Gamble That Changed the World by Peter Loftus. Copyright 2022 Peter Loftus. All rights reserved.
Viruses of all types frequently change. They mutate as they jump from person to person. The coronavirus was no different. Throughout the pandemic, health officials tracked variants of the SARS CoV-2 virus first found in Wuhan, China, as those variants arose. None seemed a big concern, until one was flagged in the United Kingdom in December 2020, right as Moderna’s vaccine neared approval. This UK variant appeared to be as much as 70 percent more transmissible. It was given the name the Alpha variant.
Alpha reinforced the possibility that the virus could mutate enough to become resistant to vaccines and treatments that were designed to target the earlier, predominant strain. Or it could fizzle out. But variants would keep coming. Shortly after Alpha, researchers identified another variant circulating in South Africa. Beta.
In late December—just a few days after the United States authorized its vaccine — Moderna issued a statement that it was confident the vaccine would be effective at inducing the necessary immune response against variants. The original vaccine targeted the full length of the spike protein of the coronavirus, and the new variants appeared to have mutations in the spike protein that represented less than a 1 percent difference from the original.
“So, from what we’ve seen so far, the variants being described do not alter the ability of neutralizing antibodies elicited by vaccination to neutralize the virus,” Tal Zaks said during a virtual appearance at the all-important J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in January 2021. “My definition of when to get worried is either when we see real clinical data that suggest that people who’ve either been sick or have been immunized are now getting infected at significant rates with the new variants.”
Even if the vaccine proved less effective against a new variant, Moderna could use its mRNA technology to quickly tweak the design of its Covid-19 vaccine, to better target a variant of the virus, Zaks said. After all, the company and its federal health partners had already demonstrated the year before how quickly they could design, manufacture, and test a new vaccine.
Still, Moderna needed to run a series of tests to see if its original vaccine offered the same high level of protection against variants as it showed in the big Phase 3 clinical trial.
Moderna collaborated again with researchers from NIAID including Barney Graham and Kizzmekia Corbett. They analyzed blood samples taken from eight people who were vaccinated with Moderna’s shot in the Phase 1 trial back in early 2020. They essentially mixed these blood samples with the coronavirus variants, engineered so they copied the mutations of the variants but couldn’t replicate and pose a threat to lab researchers. Researchers then analyzed whether the vaccine-induced antibodies present in the human blood samples could effectively neutralize the virus variants.
The results were mixed. They suggested the vaccine worked as well against the UK Alpha variant as against the original strain of the coronavirus. That was good news. Even if the UK variant spread more easily than the original virus, Moderna’s vaccine could probably mute its effects.
But the Beta variant first identified in South Africa seemed to pose a problem. The vaccine-induced antibodies had a significantly reduced neutralization effect on this strain in the lab tests. “Oh shit,” Bancel said when Stephen Hoge showed him the data. It wouldn’t be the last time. Moderna’s leaders saw the data on a Friday in late January 2021 and spent the weekend discussing it. They hoped that a modified, variant- targeted vaccine wouldn’t be needed, and that Moderna’s original vaccine would suffice, even if it had a reduced neutralizing effect. But Moderna didn’t want to be caught flat-footed if a variant-specific booster was needed.
They decided by the next Monday it was time to take action. They would develop a new version of the vaccine, one that more closely matched the mutations seen in the strain that circulated in South Africa, and which could potentially be given as a booster shot to better protect people who had gotten the original vaccine.
“It really highlights the fact that we need to continue to stay vigilant,” Moderna’s president, Stephen Hoge, said. “This virus is evolving, it’s changing its stripes. And we need to keep testing the new variants, and make sure the vaccine works against them.”
Moderna repeated the steps it took a year earlier: it quickly designed a new variant vaccine and manufactured an initial batch for human testing, shipping it to NIAID in late February, a year to the day after it had shipped the original batch of the original vaccine. The new batch was called mRNA-1273.351, appending the “351” because researchers initially called the variant seen in South Africa “B.1.351.”
“Moderna is going to keep chasing the variants until the pandemic is under control,” Bancel said that day.
Moderna also developed other plans to test. It would try a third dose of its original vaccine, given several months after the second dose, to see if that booster shot would protect against variants. It would also develop a combined vaccine that targeted both the original strain and the Beta strain.
Once again, volunteers stepped up to test these various approaches. Neal Browning, the Microsoft engineer who was the second person to get Moderna’s vaccine, showed up once again to volunteer. In the intervening year, he had gotten married, in a small outdoor ceremony to minimize Covid risk. Now he received a third dose of the Moderna vaccine. He felt tenderness at the injection site and a low-grade fever and chills, but the symptoms went away after several hours. He continued to visit the research site to give blood samples to be analyzed for immune responses.
By early May, Moderna had some answers. It gave booster shots — either the original vaccine or the Beta variant – targeting vaccine — to people about six to eight months after they had been vaccinated with two doses of the original vaccine. The company found that in the new analysis, both types of booster shots increased neutralizing antibodies against the Beta variant. And they increased antibodies against a related variant that had been detected in Brazil. But the newer version of the vaccine that targeted Beta induced a stronger immune response against the Beta variant than the booster shot of Moderna’s original vaccine.
At the time, Moderna’s plan was to continue testing the different booster approaches, with an eye toward possibly getting government approval to sell the booster shot that specifically targeted the Beta variant. But it didn’t seem particularly urgent. The existing mass vaccination campaign was making good progress at the time.
Then, with the virus on the retreat in the United States, scientists discovered a new variant driving an alarming surge in India. This variant had already jumped to other countries, including the United States. Initially, it was code-named B.1.617.2. It was even more contagious than the Alpha variant and there were fears that it could evade vaccines. This was the Delta variant.
The previous winter the hope provided by vaccines was juxtaposed with the deadliest virus surge in the United States. Again, in early summer 2021, the lifting of mask mandates and reopening of public life was bringing great hope and a sense of relief. And again, this would be juxtaposed with public-health officials sounding the alarm about the Delta variant. It could become the dominant strain of the virus in the United States, they said. The best way to stop its spread, officials said, was to get more people vaccinated, with any of the three vaccines available.
By mid-June, about 55 percent of the US adult population was fully vaccinated, which was good but still left many people exposed to the new Delta variant that spread much more easily than earlier strains. And there were clear geographic vulnerabilities. The Northeast United States had higher vaccination rates than the national average, particularly in some New England states, like Vermont with its 62 percent vaccination rate. But in the South the numbers were much lower in states like Alabama, where only 30 percent were fully vaccinated.
The high proportions of unvaccinated people in those places would serve as a breeding ground for Delta. And the more the variant spread, the more it could mutate into more variants.
By late July, the effects of an ill-fated combination — stubbornly low vaccination rates in some regions, the winding down of masking and distancing, and a rapidly spreading Delta strain—were clearer. Infections, hospitalizations, and deaths were climbing again, especially in open states like Florida, which suffered one of the highest rates of Covid-19 hospitalizations, and low-vaccinated states.
Doctors and nurses who thought they had put the worst of the pandemic behind them were once again scrambling to treat severely ill Covid-19 patients in intensive-care units. By the end of August, the United States was averaging about fifteen hundred Covid-19 deaths a day, versus fewer than two hundred in early July. Nearly all of the patients who ended up in the ICU were unvaccinated.
Some vaccinated people were beginning to test positive for Covid-19, too — commonly called “breakthrough” cases—and a few progressed to severe cases. The vaccines, after all, weren’t 100 percent effective in the clinical trials, either. A small percentage of vaccinated people in the studies got sick with Covid. But it was becoming clear that the vaccines weren’t entirely blocking transmission of the virus or stopping asymptomatic infections, as initially hoped.
Vaccinated people were better protected than unvaccinated people, even when Delta took over. In states like Massachusetts, less than 1 percent of fully vaccinated people in the state had tested positive for Covid-19 by the fall of 2021. Other analysis showed that people who weren’t fully vaccinated were nearly five times more likely to get infected, ten times more likely to be hospitalized and eleven times more likely to die from Covid than fully vaccinated people.
But Delta reminded people, or made them understand for the first time, that the vaccines weren’t bullet-proof. New indoor mask mandates were imposed, including at schools, where educators just weeks earlier had been eager for the first normal back-to-school season in two years. No vaccine was yet authorized for children under twelve (both Moderna and Pfizer were studying that population), raising concerns that Delta would spread rapidly among them as they gathered in classrooms.
By the end of the summer, people wondered if the pandemic would ever end. Some started talking about the coronavirus as endemic, not a pandemic.
And a big slice of America was still saying “No thanks” to the vaccine.
If you missed the chance to buy the Apple TV 4K when it was $59 off a few weeks ago, now is your opportunity to purchase it at that price again. Amazon has discounted the 32GB model to $120, making it only $10 more than it was during Prime Day. That’s a compelling price for one of the best streaming devices you can buy.
Engadget senior editor Devindra Hardawar awarded the 2021 Apple TV 4K a score of 90. Highlights include a much improved Siri remote and a more powerful A12 Bionic chip. The latter allows the Apple TV 4K to output HDR video at up to 60 frames per second and deliver excellent gaming performance.
Buy Apple TV 4K at Amazon - $120If you own a handful of other Apple devices, you’ll appreciate the Apple TV 4K’s support for AirPlay. The wireless protocol makes it easy to share video, photos and music from your iPhone, iPad or Mac to your TV. With SharePlay built-in, you can even participate in watch parties over FaceTime with friends and family. For those with AirPods, Apple updated the Apple TV 4K last fall to add support for spatial audio so you can enjoy a more immersive experience without buying an expensive sound setup.
The Apple TV 4K also supports all of the most popular streaming services, including Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Hulu and more. One of the most significant drawbacks of Apple’s streaming device is its expensive price tag, but that's something the $59 discount helps address.
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Digimon isn’t quite the juggernaut it was back when us 90s kids were watching it early in the morning before school, but Toei has been gradually releasing more of it over the years. For anime fans, there was a reboot of the original Digimon Adventure season that premiered last year and whose English dub is currently…
With stories of hackers selling personal information in bulk on forums becoming more common, it can be stressful to send your device for repair. Yes, you could wipe your phone, but then you have to go through the hassle of restoring it afterward. Now, Samsung has introduced a solution for that issue in the form of a new function called "Repair Mode."
According to a Korean announcement first spotted by SamMobile, you can activate the new mode under "Battery and Device Care" in Settings. Samsung didn't explain the technology behind the feature, but when activated, it will hide your personal information, photos, messages and linked accounts. Only the device's pre-installed apps will be visible to the technician. To regain access to your data, you simply have to disable Repair Mode and use pattern or fingerprint recognition to authenticate your identity.
Seeing as Samsung has yet to announce the feature outside Korea, it's most likely safe to say that it's only available in the company's home country at the moment. Further, it's only available on the Galaxy S21 series phones for now. However, the company says it will roll out Repair Mode to other models — and hopefully to other regions — in the future.
Every new season of Adult Swim’s Rick & Morty is a big deal, and the same holds true for the upcoming sixth season. The sci-fi animated comedy’s future has been set in stone for years—having a multi-season renewal offers some degree of safety—but there’s still a degree of unpredictability from the show that always…
Charlie Warzel, Galaxy Brain/The Atlantic
Warzel dives into questions about DALL-E 2 in his newsletter for The Atlantic, many of which have been voiced by others. Those include what it could mean for the future of art and the potential commercial ambitions of OpenAI, the company that created it.
Polygon
Enjoy a bit of nostalgia this weekend with pieces like "Type to Learn became a battle royale in our computer lab" and "Artists somehow keep making masterpieces with Kid Pix and MS Paint."
Mike Isaac, The New York Times
Before Meta's dismal earnings report this week, there was news of how CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to revitalize the company as it focuses on the metaverse.
In early 2012, the New York Times Magazine put out a cover story about Andrew Pole, a statistician working for Target who was tasked with inventing a way to identify potentially pregnant shoppers, even if those shoppers didn’t want the company to know. The rationale, Pole said, was that moms-to-be are a multi-million…
Kenya's National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC), a government agency that aims to eradicate ethnic or racial discrimination among the country's 45 tribes, has given Facebook seven days to tackle hate speech related to next month's election on its platform. If the social media fails to do so, it faces suspension in the country. The agency's warning comes shortly after international NGO Global Witness and legal non-profit Foxglove released a report detailing how Facebook approved ads written to instigate ethnic violence in both English and Swahili.
The organizations joined forces to conduct a study testing Facebook's ability to detect hate speech and calls for ethnic-based violence ahead of the Kenyan elections. As Global Witness explained in its report, the country's politics are polarized and ethnically driven — after the 2007 elections, for instance, 1,300 people were killed and hundreds of thousands more had to flee their homes. A lot more people use social media today compared to 2007, and over 20 percent of the Kenyan population is on Facebook, where hate speech and misinformation are major issues.
The groups decided not to publish the exact ads they submitted for the test because they were highly offensive, but they used real-life examples of hate speech commonly used in Kenya. They include comparisons of specific tribal groups to animals and calls for their members' rape, slaughter and beheading. "Much to our surprise and concern," Global Witness reported, "all hate speech examples in both [English and Swahili] were approved." The NCIC said the NGOs' report corroborates its own findings.
After the organizations asked Facebook for a comment regarding what it had discovered and hence made it aware of the study, Meta published a post that details how it is preparing for Kenya's election. In it, the company said it has built a more advanced content detection technology and has hired dedicated teams of Swahili speakers to help it "remove harmful content quickly and at scale." To see if Facebook truly has implemented changes that has improved its detection system, the organizations resubmitted its test ads. They were approved yet again.
In a statement sent to both Global Witness and Gizmodo, Meta said it has taken "extensive steps" to "catch hate speech and inflammatory content in Kenya" and that the company is "intensifying these efforts ahead of the election." It also said, however, that there will be instances where it misses things " as both machines and people make mistakes."
Global Witness said its study's findings follow a similar pattern it previously uncovered in Myanmar, where Facebook played a role in enabling calls for ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims. It also follows a similar pattern the organization unearthed in Ethiopia wherein bad actors used the Facebook to incite violence. The organizations and Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen are now calling on Facebook to implement the "Break the Glass” package of emergency measures it took after the January 6th, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. They's also asking the social network to suspend paid digital advertisements in Kenya until the end of the elections on August 9th.
One week ago, 21-year-old influencer and photographer Tati Bruening was scrolling through Instagram and became annoyed over the fact that she was only seeing a seemingly endless stream of Reels, even though she wasn’t in the Reels tab. Where were the photos of her friends? In her frustration, Bruening threw together a…
At least eight people are dead in Eastern Kentucky after heavy rains pounded the state on Thursday, flooding roads and towns and forcing rescuers to save people stranded on rooftops and in trees.
Last month, Instagram started testing a full-screen display for photos and videos. And we didn’t like it. Now, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri says the test will be wound down over the next couple of weeks. “For the new feed designs, people are frustrated, and the usage data isn’t great,” Mosseri said to Platformer.
He added: “When you discover something in your field that you didn't follow before, there should be a high bar — it should just be great,” he said. “You should be delighted to see it. And I don't think that’s happening enough right now."
Instagram brought in the full-screen feed and larger number of recommended posts to compete with TikTok and to contend with the pivot from photos to videos. The time spent by people watching Reels grew by 30 percent last quarter, and Mosseri said users' gradual embrace of video was happening, regardless of Instagram’s own movements.
In an earnings call on Wednesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said around 15 percent of the posts people see on Facebook (and even more on Instagram) are recommended by algorithms. Zuckerberg expects the volume of recommended posts to double over the next year or so.
— Mat Smith
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NASA has altered the Mars Sample Return Program meant to bring back the rock samples the Perseverance rover has been drilling and collecting from the Jezero crater. Instead of sending a rover to the red planet like originally planned, the program will use Perseverance itself and send over two helicopters. The Earth Return Orbiter and Sample Retrieval Lander will take off in fall 2027 and summer 2028. Their journey to and from the red planet will take years, so the samples aren't expected to arrive on Earth until 2033.
The PlayStation 5now supports 1440p, at least for gamers with access to its beta software. While the console has supported 1080p and 4K output from the start, 1440p support is still a much-requested feature by players who use monitors instead of TVs. However, Variable Refresh Rate (VRR), which rolled out for the console in April, is only available for 1080p and 2160p. VRR gives the screen the ability to sync its refresh rate with the game for a smoother experience. It's not quite clear why it's not available for 1440p output.
Automakers might just get the EV tax credit extension they've been hoping for. Senators Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin may have agreed on an Inflation Reduction Act that would replace the 200,000-unit cap on federal EV tax credits with a system that would restore those perks for GM, Tesla and Toyota. According to Bloomberg sources, the new approach is a compromise that would switch to price- and income-based limits, drop union manufacturing requirements and even offer credits for used EVs.
Google’s latest Pixel Buds are its best yet, due mostly to the company finally checking a missing box: active noise cancellation. They do cost more, however, but the sound quality impresses, and there’s a host of handy features, like hands-free access to Assistant. There are a few shortcomings, but they remain Google’s best buds yet. Read on for our full verdict.
A winning Mega Millions lottery ticket is one of the most coveted items in modern capitalism, and with the current estimated jackpot at $1.1 billion, lots of people are buying tickets today. We all know that winning the lottery is rare, but with the Mega Millions now cresting over a billion, the odds of you actually…
After Meta's revenue shrank for the first time in its history, the company has reportedly told publishers it will no longer pay for content to run in Facebook's News Tab, according to Axios. "Most people do not come to Facebook for news, and as a business it doesn't make sense to over-invest in areas that don't align with user preferences," a spokesperson said in a statement.
Facebook spent around $105 million on such deals, paying $20 million to The New York Times, $10 million to The Wall Street Journal and $3 million to CNN, according to Axios. Facebook struck the deals back in 2019 as it boosted its investment in news and even hired journalists to direct traffic to the news tab.
Facebook also promised to pay partner sites including The Guardian and The Economist for news in the UK when it launched the News Tab there late in 2020. Shortly after that, it signed a deal with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp to pay for content in Australia, after the Australian Parliament passed a law requiring Facebook and Google to do so.
Along with Google, Facebook has taken criticism for drawing ad dollars away from dedicated news sites. That has contributed to the failure of a quarter of US news sites over the last 15 years, according to Poynter, with the professional journalism vacuum often been filled by false or misleading news on Facebook.
The PlayStation 5now supports 1440p, at least for gamers with access to its beta software. While the console has supported 1080p and 4K output from the start, 1440p support is still a much-requested feature by players who use monitors instead of TVs. It provides a middle ground between full HD and 4K, after all, and is a popular choice for gamers who also play on their PCs. Testers who get the latest beta software for the PS5 will now see a 1440p HDMI video output option as an additional visual setting when they use the console with a compatible monitor.
Obviously, they can enjoy the full benefits of 1440p rendering if the game they're playing supports the resolution. But if they're playing a game that supports 4K, they could also benefit from the feature, because the option downsamples the visuals for 1440p output and that leads to sharper images. As VG247 notes, though, Variable Refresh Rate (VRR), which rolled out for the console in April, is only available for 1080p and 2160p. VRR gives the screen the ability to sync its refresh rate with that of the game for a smoother experience, and it's not quite clear why it's not available for 1440p output.
In addition to 1440p support, the latest beta software also gives users a way to create gamelists in their Game Library so that they can better organize all the titles they own. Players can create up to 15 gamelists with 100 games each. Their in-progress activities will now be shown prominently at the top of the game hub when they resume a game, as well, and they can now request party members to share their screens so that they can watch their gameplay. Plus, when they enter a party and a member is playing game they can join, they'll now receive an alert and then join the game directly from that notification.
Sony has introduced more experimental features with the new beta and has listed them all on the PlayStation blog.
Five major oil and gas companies are set to release their Q2 earnings reports on Thursday and Friday. The numbers are already astronomical: Shell announced Thursday it had made a jaw-dropping $11.5 billion in profit last quarter, smashing a record it set earlier this year. The industry is expected to log a record $50…
NASA has altered the Mars Sample Return Program meant to bring back the rock samples the Perseverance rover has been drilling and collecting from the Jezero crater in a big way. Instead of sending the Sample Fetch Rover to the red planet like originally planned, the program will make use of Perseverance itself and send over two helicopters based on the Ingenuity for backup.
NASA and the ESA have been working together on the Sample Return Program over the past few years. The original plan was to send over the ESA-made Sample Fetch Rover to retrieve the samples and drive them back to a rocket, which will fly them up to be snatched by the Earth Return Orbiter. As The New York Times notes, though, the rover's design became too big until it could no longer fit in one lander with the return rocket. NASA would have to use one lander for each of them.
But why do that when there are other, more affordable options? The Sample Return Lander isn't scheduled to arrive on Mars until 2030, but NASA is confident that Perseverance will still be operational by then — after all, the Curiosity rover is still up and running almost 11 years after it launched. Under their renewed plan, the Perseverance will drive up to the lander to deliver 30 rock samples that will be loaded onto the rocket.
If anything goes wrong with Perseverance before then, though, the lander would settle closer to the rover and then the backup helicopters will fly over to retrieve the samples. While the helicopters are modeled after the Ingenuity, they'll have small wheels at the bottom. These will allow them to drive up to the samples that are sealed inside tubes and pick them up from the ground where the rover has dropped them.
The Ingenuity helicopter completed its first test flight on Mars in April 2021. NASA wasn't expecting much from the helicopter, which was just supposed to prove that flight on Mars is possible. It was also only supposed to fly a handful of times during a one-month technology demonstration, but it has accomplished 29 successful flights so far, with more on the way. Ingenuity's success has given NASA another means to retrieve the precious samples Perseverance has been collecting.
Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA's science directorate, said during the press conference announcing the new Sample Return Program plans:
"We reached our decision based on new studies and recent achievements at Mars that allowed us to consider options that, frankly, weren’t available to us one year ago or before."
The Earth Return Orbiter and Sample Retrieval Lander will take off in the fall of 2027 and the summer of 2028, respectively. Their journey to and from the red planet will take years, so the samples aren't expected to arrive on Earth until 2033.
Despite the surge of public backlash over Instagram’s recent changes, fueled by internet powerhouses Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is unmoved. He said the photo-sharing app—if it can still be called that—will show twice as much AI-recommended content by the end of next year in the interest…
Ghosting can hurt, for sure. When someone suddenly cuts off contact, doesn’t show up at a date or just unmatches on one of those many dating apps, it sucks. One Filipino lawmaker is trying to make it stop, which could be a tall order. Arnolfo Teves Jr., a member of the Philippine House of Representatives, said ghosting was "a form of emotional cruelty and should be punished as an emotional offense."
The bill — yes there’s proposed legislation — doesn't offer specific penalties, but Teves suggested in an interview that community service might work. The bill tries to define a dating relationship as one where the parties live together without being married or are "romantically involved over time and on a continuing basis."
Teves said neither casual acquaintances nor “ordinary socialization” constitutes a dating relationship. But those are likely the connections that ghost the most. The bill doesn’t account for blocking someone without explanation if they're being creepy or threatening, which can often be the case. (Why am I coming across as a regular ghoster / ghostee?) Silently ditching a conversation is usually easier than being honest, sadly. It’s not cool, but I’m not sure it’s truly a criminal offense.
— Mat Smith
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Google Photos is getting a significant update that has the distinction of first arriving on Chromebooks. Your photo and video library will get a new movie editor and video editing features this fall as part of a Chrome OS update. You’ll be able to make videos similar to the highlight clips the app already automatically makes, and select a theme, people or pets you want to feature in it; from there, Google Photos will pull together a movie using video clips and images from your library. Google isn’t saying yet if these video editing features will come to the mobile apps for iOS and Android, but Google Photos has usually had feature parity regardless of platform.
Generative Artificial Intelligences (GAIs) are systems that create pieces of work to equal the old masters in technique, if not in intent. But there’s a problem: These systems are trained on existing material, often using content pulled from the internet, from us.
DALL-E 2, Open AI’s system for creating “realistic images and art from a description in natural language” is the current star of GAIs. A user could enter the phrase “teddy bears shopping for groceries in the style of Ukiyo-e,” and the model will produce pictures in that style, often to a pretty high standard. But this all prompts several questions on ownership, data biases and the law of art. Engadget’s Daniel Cooper explores the future of AI-generated images.
Projectors have come a long way from the clunky, dim models of the past. The latest models are brighter, sharper, more discreet and easier to install than ever. There are a lot of different types of projectors, though, ranging from ultra short throw to portable to long throw. There are also a lot of technical terms, so it’s the perfect topic for our latest Engadget guide, which explains everything you need to know.
The music streaming company hasn’t yet felt the effects of a looming global recession. Unlike Netflix, which had to report a fall in its overall customer base, Spotify has seen both free and paying accounts grow. It now has 433 million users, up from the 422 million reported at the end of the first quarter. Of those, 188 million pay for Premium, a leap of six million from three months ago. Spotify’s plan to pivot toward cheaper forms of audio content, like podcasts and audiobooks, should help to keep new listeners streaming away.
Finally, some early details of PlayStation VR2's software experience, not just the hardware. Sony teased a few key features for its PS5 VR headset, including live streaming support. If you have a PS5 HD Camera, you can broadcast both gameplay and a view of yourself. As you might guess, that could be helpful for Twitch streamers and YouTubers. The company also explained how it will handle non-VR content, with a 1080p Cinematic Mode that displays the PS5 interface and conventional games on a virtual screen at refresh rates between 24Hz and 120Hz.
Sean Hannity took President Joe Biden to task on his show Wednesday, something that’s obviously not new. What did the Fox News personality get all bent out of shape about this time? Hannity is apparently upset that President Biden got a weaker variant of covid-19 than President Trump, the big strong man who barely…
Logitech's Litra Glow is a glare-free soft light developed for streamers that flew off the shelves after it was first unveiled early this year. Now, it's on sale for the first time at Amazon for $50, or $10 off the regular $60 price — a significant 20 percent discount.
Buy Logitech Litra Glow at Amazon - $50The Litra Glow is designed to be gentle on the eyes and safe for all-day streaming, while providing a "natural, radiant look across skin tones." It also promises cinematic color accuracy via Logitech's TrueSoft technology, while providing a soft, flattering light. Logitech also said at launch that it works well for people of different skin tones
It's ready to go out of the box thanks to five presets with different brightness levels and color temperatures, or you can use the G HUB software to create your own. As a bonus, any presets you create can be assigned to the G Keys on a Logitech G keyboard or mouse.
You can find other soft- and ring-style lights from Elgato and others, but most from any recognizable name brand are considerably more expensive. Now, with the discount on offer, it's a particularly sharp deal, especially considering Logitech's promised color accuracy.
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If you're one of the few people in the US who've yet to get an Instant Pot — or if you want another model to add to the one(s) you already have — this is your chance to grab one at a discount. Amazon is holding a one-day sale for the brand's products, including the 5.7-quart Instant Pot Vortex Air Fryer, which is currently listed on the website for 52 percent off. At $67, that's the lowest price we've seen on Amazon for the air fryer-oven combo that has an original retail price of $140. While Instant Pot Vortex is an air fryer, it also has one-touch controls for baking, roasting and reheating. You can also create customized programs for specific types of food, so you can cook wings, potatoes or even cinnamon buns with a single touch.
Shop Instant Pot deals at AmazonInstant Pot's 8-quart 9-in-1 Duo Plus model is also on sale, if you what you need is the brand's classic pressure cooker. It has dropped back to an all-time low of $80, or $70 less than its retail price. The Duo Plus has nine functions in one device and could act as a rice cooker, slow cooker, yogurt maker, steamer, sauté pan, food warmer, sous vide and sterilizer, in addition to being a pressure cooker. It has 15 customizable programs to make cooking ribs, cake, soup, among other types of food a lot easier, as well.
But if you're looking to get an air fryer and a pressure cooker on a limited budget, you can get the Instant Pot Duo Crisp instead. It has nine functionalities that include air frying and pressure cooking — plus, it lets you easily switch between lids especially designed for each function. The Duo Crisp is currently on sale for $100, which $50 off its retail price. You'll find a few more models to choose from on the deals homepage. Some of them aren't selling for their all-time low prices at the moment, but Instant Pots are always a great pick-up on a deal.
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Leaked documents from within TikTok reveal how the company games out responses to tricky questions — and highlight what the company thinks its biggest public perception problems are. Chief among them: China.
A federal court has ruled that Uber does not need to provide wheelchair-accessible service in every US market, ABC News has reported. The company's decision to provide such a service only in certain cities was not in violation of federal law and would be overly burdensome, said Chief Judge Richard Seeborg of the federal San Francisco Court.
Two users of motorized wheelchairs in New Orleans and Jackson, Mississippi sued Uber over the lack of accessible services in those cities. Since Uber couldn't accommodate non-foldable wheelchairs, they claimed that it was in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) that prohibits businesses from discriminating against people based on their disabilities. They further argued that Uber has a "deep-rooted accessibility problem," treating it as an "afterthought." The trial for the case lasted nearly five years.
Uber said in its defense that it would be too expensive to offer wheelchair service in every city if it needed to contract with providers of wheelchair-accessible vehicles. Judge Seeborg agreed, saying that the plaintiffs gave "scant evidence" that Uber could do so cost-effectively and that wait times would still be "significant" if it did. "The anticipated cost here is too high for the limited service that would result, making the proposed modification unreasonable," he said.
The judge did reject Uber's argument that it didn't need to provide wheelchair-accessible services everywhere because it has done so in some cities, noting that the ADA looks at each modification for reasonableness.
Uber does accommodate wheelchair users in other cities like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston. New Orleans considered mandating the service, but Uber lobbied against those efforts, according to the court records. "We welcome the outcome and are proud of our efforts to improve accessibility for all users, including through Uber WAV,” said an Uber spokesperson in a statement.
Noting that the decision arrived on the eve of the anniversary of the ADA's passage into law, lead plaintiff Scott Crawford decried the ruling. "Uber made no sincere attempt to provide accessible service, but instead claimed it was too burdensome," he said. "This could have been economically resolved years ago.'
At least 1 million people in the city of Wuhan, the city where covid-19 first spread to humans in late 2019, have entered lockdown, as China shows it’s still not ready to give up on eradicating the disease. And with the country reporting less than 1,000 new cases on Wednesday in a country of 1.4 billion people,…
The world has gotten a little mad for chips (the kind that go in your computers, not your stomach), and the U.S. wants to take a big piece of the semiconductor pie away from countries like China. But first, it has to pass a bill, so expect a lot of last-minute wrangling, sweating, mind changing, weird additions, and…
Sometimes the headline says it all: A chess-playing robot accidentally broke the finger of its seven-year-old opponent during an exhibition match in Moscow. The child apparently moved his piece too soon, and the robot grabbed his finger and squeezed it, resulting in a fracture.
A video shows the robot grabbing the boy's finger and holding it for several seconds before a group of people come to free him.
The boy competed the next day, finishing the tournament. His parents, however, have reportedly contacted the public prosecutor's office. Russian chess official Sergey Smagin downplayed the incident, calling it "a coincidence" and saying the machine was "absolutely safe." Which I’m not sure is true.
— Mat Smith
Kmart halts use of in-store facial recognition amid Australian privacy investigation
GM secures $2.5 billion government loan to build EV battery factories
Leaked documents show the hoops Roblox jumped through to do business in China
'The Lord of the Rings: Gollum' is delayed a month before launch
Anker has revealed its third-generation gallium nitride (GaN) chargers, barely a year after the previous batch. The company is branding the new line-up of power bricks and portable chargers as GaNPrime. Anker said it worked with several partners to create products that last longer and are more sustainable. It claims GaNPrime is the "most intelligent, most powerful and greenest multi-device charging system ever created."
Intel and MediaTek have formed a strategic partnership to build chips. The aim is to ensure MediaTek has a "more balanced, resilient supply chain," with added capacity in the US and Europe. It looks like Intel won’t be building chips for smartphones but for less glamorous devices used in industrial computing, medical devices and internet-of-things applications.
NFL+ gives you access to live football streams and ad-free library content through the NFL App and the web, starting at $40 per year or $5 per month. Spend $80 per year or $10 per month on NFL+ Premium and you also get ad-free match replays. There are some catches, however. While you'll have live audio for every game regardless of device, live video is only available for live local and primetime games on phones and tablets — you can't use this to watch a playoff run on your TV.
To celebrate its 10-year anniversary, Google is… unveiling a new logo. No, no free games or trials, but you can get extra points if you’re signed into the app store’s rewards program. Which apparently exists.
Funko, which is best known for its Pop vinyl figurines, is about to venture into new territory. It's making video games with the help of developer 10:10 Games. The studio is led by Jon Burton, the founder of Traveller's Tales and TT Games. Funko says its first game will have "major third-party studio integration," which probably shouldn't be a big shock given the high-profile licensing deals.
Meta is putting its considerable weight behind the tech industry's push to do away with the leap second. In a post on the company's engineering blog, Meta production engineer Oleg Obleukhov and research scientist Ahmad Byagowi talked about how a leap second can wreak havoc on a network, along with the solution Meta implements to prevent outages and any issues it could cause.
The leap second was introduced back in 1972 as a way to adjust Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and make up for the difference between the International Atomic Time (TAI), which is measured by atomic clocks, and imprecise observed solar time (UT1). They sometimes don't match due to irregularities and slowdown in the Earth's rotation caused by various climate-induced and geological events, such as the melting and refreezing of ice caps on the tallest mountains.
As Obleukhov and Byagowi note, the offset a leap second creates can cause issues all over the industry. In 2012, for instance, it took Reddit out for 40 minutes when the time change confused its servers and locked up its CPUs. A time leap added in 2017 also affected Cloudflare's DNS service.
To prevent unwanted outages, Meta and other tech companies, such as Google and Amazon, use a technique called "smearing." These companies "smear" a leap second by slowing down or speeding up the clock throughout a number of hours. Meta smears a leap second throughout 17 hours, while Google uses a 24-hour smear technique that lasts from noon to noon and encourages everyone to follow suit. That way, a leap second doesn't create any weird time stamps that could throw networks off.
But Meta isn't advocating for the adoption of its smearing technique — its new post's purpose is to lend its voice to the movement that's calling for the leap second's retirement. The body responsible for deciding whether to adjust UTC, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, has added 27 leap seconds since 1972. Meta believes that's enough adjustment for the next millennium.
The company's post comes over a year before the fate of the leap second is decided. Back in 2015, the International Telecommunications Union discussed the leap second at its World Radiocommunication Conference and came to the conclusion that further studies are needed to figure out the impact of dumping it. The union is expected to examine the studies' results and to consider the proposal to retire the leap second at its next conference in 2023.
Meta said in its post:
"Leap second events have caused issues across the industry and continue to present many risks. As an industry, we bump into problems whenever a leap second is introduced. And because it’s such a rare event, it devastates the community every time it happens. With a growing demand for clock precision across all industries, the leap second is now causing more damage than good, resulting in disturbances and outages."
Saudi Arabia is developing a new city, 150-stories tall and built from scratch, that will serve as a semi-enclosed environment where people can live and work without ever stepping foot outside. And while the promotional videos released Monday are likely an attempt to give the development a utopian feel that recalls so…
After hiking US Prime prices earlier this year, Amazon is doing the same across Europe. According to emails received by Engadget staffers and a Reuters report, it's raising the cost of Prime in the UK from £79 to £95, in France from €49 to €69.90, in Spain and Italy from €36 to €49.90, and Germany from €69 to €89.90.
Those increases are the first in several years and quite significant, ranging from 20 percent in the UK to 43 percent in France. Amazon cited "increased inflation and operating costs" along with faster delivery and more streaming content to justify the rises. "We will continue to focus on making Prime even more valuable for members" via faster deliveries, more streaming content and more, the company's UK branch wrote in an email.
Last quarter, Amazon lost money for the first time since 2015 due to slowing growth and higher costs, following a huge boom during the pandemic. The company also took a hit due to its investment in electric pickup truck maker Rivian. It vowed to increase productivity during its last earnings report, but is facing a federal probe over the required pace of work and other potential warehouse hazards.
Every now and then, Teen Titans Go loves to bring in a real life celebrity who will either gleefully bully the titular heroes, or let said heroes get viciously bullied by the special guest star. (Assuming they don’t team up to fight a musical dragon or some such.) Next on the list of guest celebrities is Zack Snyder,…
China has successfully launched the second of three modules that will eventually make up its Tiangong space station. On Sunday at 2:22 PM local time (2:22 AM ET), the Wentian “Quest for the Heavens” module lifted off from the country’s Wenchang spaceport atop a Long March 5B rocket, Reuters reports. With the launch a “complete success,” Wentian is expected to rendezvous with the Tiangong space station later today.
At that point, the crew of China’s Shenzhou-14 mission will begin the work of linking Wentian with the Tianhe “Harmony of Heaves” module. The latter has been in space since orbital construction on Tiangong began in April 2021. Once Wentian is operational, it will serve as one of two laboratories that will form Tiangong’s eventual t-shaped structure. Once complete, the station will be about a fifth of the size of the International Space Station, with long-term accommodation for three astronauts.
In addition to including space and equipment for Chinese astronauts to carry out microgravity and life sciences research, Wentian features an airlock cabin that will serve as the main entry and exit point for future extravehicular activities out of Tiangong. The module also has temporary living quarters that will allow China to carry out crew handover missions. According to Space.com, the first such handover is planned for later this year. China plans to launch Tiangong’s final module in October. The country is exploring the possibility of allowing commercial space flights to visit Tiangong. It has also invited international space agencies to visit the station.
Keanu Reeves has spent the last near decade moving from different parts of the entertainment industry. Both The Matrix Resurrections and Cyberpunk 2077 proved that he could hack it in games, he’s had a really good streak of action and comedy films with John Wick and Always Be My Maybe, and he co-wrote the BOOM graphic…
COVID-19 has fundamentally changed where we live and work, how we socialize, and what we do to earn a living. The pandemic, like past microbic and economic plagues, set off an exodus of well-heeled professionals out of cities to the suburbs, exo-burbs and beyond. But in an era where working from home has become easier than ever — among the privileged classes, at least — will the easing of COVID restrictions see a boomerang migration back to metro centers? Or, like catered corporate lunches and hugging coworkers, has the office, as both a place of business and a social institution, thankfully been made obsolete?
In his new book, Return of the Artisan, Grant McCracken explores how a post-war America gradually rediscovered its home-spun roots, sprouting amidst the sterile futurism of the 1950s, growing through the 1960s and '70s counterculture revolution, and blooming with the maker movement at the start of the 21st century. In the excerpt below, McCracken discusses the accelerating effect the COVID pandemic has had on America's rejection of "smart city" living and embrace of a more rural, artisanal lifestyle.
Excerpted from Return of the Artisan. Copyright © 2022, Grant McCracken. Reproduced by permission of Simon Element, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved.
The arrival of COVID-19 in 2020 transformed the American economy and culture in many ways. It was manifestly bad for hotels, airlines, restaurants, anyone who supplied restaurants, performing arts, live music, gyms, and country fairs. It was (mostly) good for people who were selling online or could seize new opportunities there. (Etsy-based artisans were quick to bring face masks to market; at their height, masks made up a tenth of all Etsy sales.) To say COVID was a mixed blessing would be an understatement.
But in one way COVID was unambiguously good news for the artisanal movement. People began to flee the city for suburbs, exurbs, small towns, and the countryside. By some estimates, three hundred thousand people left New York City, heading to upstate New York and the far end of Long Island. Sometimes this meant merely activating summer homes. Sometimes it meant renting. Sometimes it meant purchase. For all, it meant giving up their treasured city, at least for a while.
Most of these people were not migrants.They had no intention of staying. After all, a real New Yorker scorned the idea of the “bridge and tunnel” world beyond the city.This was the world God created for suburbanites, “breeders,” the weak of head and heart, people without real cultural currency, those who choose to wallow in the wasteland of popular culture.
Bridge and tunnel is the world so heartlessly captured by Christopher Guest in Waiting for Guffman. In this “mockumentary,” Guest gives us a town called Blaine, Missouri, a place where everyone is a clueless hick except for one man, Corky St. Clair. Corky is in fact a total dunce. Corky has failed to make it on Broadway and returned to Blaine to start again. Poor Corky.When he realizes that Blaine too must betray him, he lashes out.
“And I’ll tell you why I can’t put up with you people: because you’re bastard people! That’s what you are! You’re just bastard people!”
In a culture where expressions of outrage are crafted for us by the best writers in Hollywood, “bastard people” seems a little ineffectual. This was Guest’s point exactly. In bridge and tunnel world, people aren’t really very good at anything. They can’t even manage convincing indignation.
The bridge and tunnel stereotype had long kept New Yorkers in place, in check, at home. Things could get very bad in the city—you could lose your job.You could fail to complete that novel or win that contract. But until you actually left the city, you were still a New Yorker, an insider. You were not yet Corky St. Clair.
The artisanal movement managed to shift this stereotype. It helped us see small towns and the countryside as a virtuous choice, instead of a Corky-scale failure.With the artisanal lens in place, the world outside of New York City became a more attractive place. Human scale, handmade, historical, authentic, kinder, gentler, less competitive. Quite suddenly, bridges and tunnels were less a source of shame than a method of escape.
...
Some people began to hear echoes of the 1970s and early ’80s, when the city suffered from so much unemployment and lawlessness that people began to leave, taking their taxes with them and pushing the city into a downward spiral. Fifty years later, New York City appeared poised for yet another fall. Three hundred thousand people left. Fewer people threatened a small tax base, fewer services, and more chaos. This would mean diminished police and fire support.This would mean more crime and chaos. This would mean more flight. A self-renewing cycle had been set in train.
New Yorkers are perpetual motion machines. And now that New York City was pushing (thanks to COVID and crime) and places like upstate New York were pulling (thanks to the artisanal revolution), departure felt like a compelling option.
What a gift for the revolution! Every small town got an infusion of people. In the early part of 2020, Litchfield, Connecticut, got two thousand newcomers in a period that would normally bring them sixty. Most came bearing the big salaries that can be made in a big city. And virtually all these people had been inducted into the artisanal movement while still living in the city, by the diasporic chefs doing Waters’s work there. They were newcomers, but not entirely unwitting when it came to local culture.
This is what every social movement dreams of. New recruits who are sophisticated and well-heeled. For people living in a subsistence economy, barely eking out an artisanal existence, this was water in the desert, manna from heaven. Restaurants flourished. CSAs finally passed their break-even point. Farmer’s markets filled to overflowing. Life was good, or at least better.
But, of course, there is always a tension.The newcomers might grasp the general idea of the artisanal mission, but some of the realities escaped them. They could be rude and clueless. In Winhall, Vermont, the locals were feeling a bit overwhelmed:
The post office ran out of available P.O. boxes in mid-June. Electricians and plumbers are booked until Christmas. Complaints about bears have quadrupled.And as far as the [town] dump is concerned, as [one town resident] put it,“the closest word I can tell you is sheer pandemonium.”
In the worst cases, the newcomers were driving real estate prices up and old-timers out. The irony was palpable. Writing from the small town of Kingston, New York, Sara B. Franklin warned of the “potential loss of people who’ve kept our community vibrantly diverse, not to mention alive and functioning.”
Still. The COVID moment brought together people with taste, money, and commitment with locals who had been making small towns and artisanal economies work for generations. Sometimes it worked; sometimes it didn’t. But generally speaking, the artisanal movement was massively augmented.
The key question was whether the newcomers would stay.And this depended on a series of smaller questions.Would they put down roots? Would they “take” to life outside the big city? Would their employers let them stay, or would they call everyone back to headquarters the moment it was safe to do so.
I did a research project on American families in the COVID era. Mothers were clear on whether they wanted to go back to work outside the home. For most, the answer was a resounding “no.” These women now had proof that they could work from home. And now that they were working from home, they looked back at the pre-COVID era with a sense of puzzlement.
“Why was it,”one of them asked me,“that we had to spend all that time commuting, all that time on our clothing and hair, all that time in the office with lots of empty engagements and pointless meetings? For what?” In the ensuing conversation, some women were prepared to entertain the suspicion that work had been a kind of “theater.”This had nothing to do with functionality or practicality. My respondents thought something else was going on. One of them said:
I think it must be men. Women can do lots of things at the same time. We can work at home.We can manage a family. It’s men who need to have a separate time and place to work.They need a box to work in. It’s also a question of ego. Men like to see cars in the parking lots.Why do women go into the office? They do it to satisfy male egos in the C suite.
But it was not just women who took this point of view. The New York Times talked to a guy who gave up his home in LA and bought a place in Vermont. Apparently, Jonny Hawton “finds it hard to conceive of returning to his old commuter lifestyle, which allowed him only an hour a day with his 1-year-old daughter.”
If someone told me I had to go back to do that tomorrow, I don’t know what I would do,” he said.“It’s almost like we were in a trance that everyone went along with. I used to see Millie for an hour a day. This whole crisis has kind of hit the reset button for a lot of people, made them question the things they sacrificed for work.
These folks will want to stay outside the city, and they are prepared to make extraordinary sacrifices to do so. The research told me that these women had used the time saved in the COVID era to change their families, to get to know their kids better, to build new relationships with their daughters, to restructure mealtime, and to give the family new centrality. At one point I thought I was looking at the possibility of the emergence of a more fully, more emphatically matrifocal family.
