Autoblog notes that the acceleration numbers have been adjusted, shaving one-tenth of a second on the quarter mile to 10.7, and two-tenths in 0 – 124 MPH to 9.6 seconds. Nothing has changed about the specs, it’s just that Porsche’s data collection shows the car is consistently faster than where it had been rated.
Finally, Porsche is adding more “Function on Demand” subscription features. The company describes this as more convenient, as customers can add extra assists at their leisure without visiting the dealer, but it sounds a lot like paying for tech that’s already installed in the car. According to Porsche, “four functions will be available for purchase and three will be available as monthly subscriptions,” via its Porsche Connect Store. These include Active Lane Keeping assist, an InnoDrive feature that control’s the car’s speed through changing conditions and its Range Manager that operates when you’re using the navigation optimize the balance between comfort and shortest travel time.
There’s no word on pricing for those software updates or the cars themselves, but orders will open in Q4, with US arrivals of the first models scheduled for early 2021.
After trying to make a statement about modern warfare, the Call of Duty franchise is returning to a more distant conflict. On Wednesday, series publisher Activision shared the first teaser for Call of Duty: Black Ops: Cold War (proper title punctuation to be determined).
Activision promises to share more about the new entry, including gameplay footage, on August 26th. Until then, the teaser provides a couple of hints about the game’s story. Consisting mostly of archival footage of a TV interview with KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov, the teaser says the story is “inspired by actual events.” Text interspersed between the footage mentions Perseus, a Soviet spy who allegedly infiltrated the Manhattan Project during the height of World War II to steal secrets related to the atomic bomb. Perseus, it turns out, was never caught and may have worked their way into the highest echelons of the US government.
In an interview with MSNBC, Khosrowshahi said the company would shut down until November. That’s when the state votes on Proposition 22. If passed, the measure would allow Uber to continue employing drivers as contractors but would require the company to offer them benefits such as health insurance. “It’ll take time but we’re going to figure out a way to be in California,” Khosrowshahi told the Pivot School podcast.
As he’s down in past interviews, Khosrowshahi went on to warn that Uber’s forced compliance with AB5 will hurt consumers. He said the cost of Uber rides in cities like San Francisco could increase by approximately 20 percent, with the price of service growing even more in more sparsely populated communities. He also warned that close to 80 percent of drivers who work about five to 10 hours a week would likely no longer be able to earn money through the app.
“No other structural battery reported is comparable, in terms of energy density, to today’s state-of-the-art advanced lithium batteries. We improved our prior version of structural zinc batteries on 10 different measures, some of which are 100 times better, to make it happen,” he continued.
In a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics Kotov points out that not only is the zinc-air battery chemistry his team employed around three times as energy dense as your standard Li-Ion brick but by incorporating the battery into the body of the robot itself, they were able to open up about 20 percent more space in the robot’s interior than if they’d used a conventional power system.
“This is not the limit, however. We estimate that robots could have 72 times more power capacity if their exteriors were replaced with zinc batteries, compared to having a single lithium ion battery,” first author Mingqiang Wang, noted.
What’s more, this battery design gets around an other difficult tradeoff seen in other efforts to incorporate batteries into a machines structure: that between the amount of energy the battery can produce and its ability to endure stress. Normally metal-air electrochemical batteries use an aqueous solution to separate the cathode and anode. The U of Michigan battery consists of a zinc electrode and an ambient air cathode separated by a layer of Kevlar fibers suspended in a water-based polymer gel that helps transfer hydroxide ions between the electrodes. Since the separator layers is effectively a solid, it won’t rupture or burst under stress like a liquid separator would. And even if it does rupture, the solution is nontoxic.
What’s more the separator layer so tough that it actually helps inhibit the formation of zinc dendrites, small outgrowths of metal between the electrodes created during the charge-discharge cycle that degrade battery performance and lifespan. Lithium-Ion batteries can go for around 500 cycles without noticeably degrading, however zinc batteries begin to decline after just 100.
Kotov likens the battery system to human body fat. Our fat doesn’t just store energy for us, it also provides cushions for our joints and helps conserve body heat. As such he expects the current single-battery design to eventually evolve into a distributed power storage system. “We don’t have a single sac of fat, which would be bulky and require a lot of costly energy transfer,” Kotov noted. “Distributed energy storage, which is the biological way, is the way to go for highly efficient biomorphic devices.”
Kotov hopes to have a commercial battery system ready within the next 3 to 5 years and expects the first buyers to be drone and robot manufacturers. “And it’s not just about the big Amazon robots but also very small ones,” Kotov told IEEE Spectrum. “Energy storage is a very significant issue for small and flexible soft robots.”
Boston Dynamics’ Spot robots have been used in many creative ways, from surveying a Ford plant in Michigan to herding sheep in New Zealand. Earlier this year, the tech company announced Spot was chipping in to help coronavirus patients — now, we’re seeing the fruits of that work. Boston Dynamics and MIT researchers say they’ve collaborated to create “Dr. Spot,” a robot that can measure a patient’s vital signs without doctor-to-patient contact.
Spot robots are four-legged and designed to nimbly navigate areas wheeled robots cannot, either autonomously or via remote control. To make Dr. Spot, MIT researchers wrote in a study that they outfitted Spot with “contactless monitoring systems,” which included radio signals and radar-based sensors to measure vital signs like respiratory rate and heart rate. Infrared cameras were used to measure fever. Dr. Spot also has a computer tablet that allows doctors to remotely speak with patients. Researchers tested Dr. Spot with volunteers at the Harvard Medical School’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
If you own a Google Home, you have noticed it doing something it hadn’t done before. Toward the start of August, Google erroneously rolled out an update to its smart speakers that gave some people free access to a perk that comes with its Nest Aware subscription. The specific feature notifies you when your Home or Nest device hears glass breaking or a smoke alarm going off.
Since the feature came online without explanation from Google, it led some to believe that their smart speaker was listening for everyday sounds and invading their privacy. The error should now be resolved, however.
We’ll first caution that the iPad Air has been frequently in and out of stock at Amazon. You’ll have to wait until late August/early September to actually get this model, but you can grab the deal price now and just wait for it to ship. Currently, the sale price only applies to the silver, WiFi, 256GB model. Since the base iPad Air has only 64GB of storage and costs $500, you’re getting four times that amount of space for only $50 more in this deal.
We gave the latest iPad Air a score of 90 for a number of reasons, but they all add up to a tablet that will likely meet most people’s needs. It has the classic design that most think of when they think of an iPad, featuring the Home button with TouchID sensor below its 10.5-inch Retina display. The screen has True Tone technology, which adjusts the color temperature based on the lighting in your surroundings, but it doesn’t have ProMotion technology, which is reserved for Apple’s higher-end devices.
The iPad Air runs on Apple’s A12 Bionic chip, which is a step up from the A10 chip found in the entry-level $329 iPad. You may not require the level of performance found in the iPad Pros, but the Air will age better over time and provide better overall performance than the base iPad. We also appreciate the Air’s 11-hour battery life and its support for the first-generation Apple Pencil and Apple’s Smart Keyboard. Overall, the iPad Air not only gets the basics right but also adds just enough extra to be worth spending a few more dollars on it.
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QAnon’s reach has exploded since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, and Facebook’s own algorithms, which recommended QAnon content on Facebook and Instagram, have been blamed for helping fuel its rise. And the company has faced heavy criticism for not doing more to prevent QAnon content from going viral on its platform. Facebook’s actions comes weeks after Twitter banned the group and nearly two years after Reddit booted QAnon off its platform.
Facebook’s approach is slightly different: Instead of trying to root out the conspiracy entirely, the company is taking steps to prevent it from continuing to go viral on its services. Facebook says it will prevent pages, groups and Instagram accounts from appearing in its algorithmic recommendations, reduce their distribution in News Feed and rank accounts lower in search results. The company notes that on Instagram it has “temporarily removed” the “related hashtags” feature, which has been a major source QAnon recommendations.
In addition to QAnon, the new rules will also apply to “offline anarchist groups that support violent acts amidst protests” — an apparent reference to “antifa” — and “US-based militia organizations,” the company said. These groups “have demonstrated significant risks to public safety,” Facebook said, even if they “do not meet the rigorous criteria to be designated as a dangerous organization and banned from having any presence on our platform.”
What’s less clear is just how effective these steps will be. NBC Newsrecently reported that the largest QAnon groups have millions of members (it’s so far unclear how many members were in the groups Facebook took down), and QAnon memes have seeped into other conspiracy theory groups on the platform. Facebook also has a mixed track record when it comes to dealing with conspiracy theories. For example, the company said last year it would limit the visibility of anti-vaccine misinformation, but these groups have continued to find new ways to evade these efforts.
Luckily, Lucid is teaming up with Volkswagen subsidiary, Electrify America to offer, “three years of complimentary charging,” per the release, at any of Electrify America’s 2,000-plus stations. Electrify America has been busy expanding its selection of 150kW to 350kW stations throughout the US. Air owners will be able to navigate between these stations along preplanned routes to ensure that they never find themselves stranded on the side of the road with nary an outlet in sight.
Lucid also announced that it is developing a novel home charging station unsurprisingly named the Lucid Connected Home Charging Station. While virtually all of today’s home charging boxes only have current flowing from the grid to the car, the LCHCS is bi-directional, meaning that you’ll be able to use the Air as a mobile battery in the event of an electrical outage and run household appliances off energy stored within the vehicle’s power cells.
Instacart will cover the cost of COVID-19 screenings and virtual medical appointments for shoppers until the end of the year. The company ran a pilot project on that front earlier in the summer in Pennsylvania and Washington, DC, and now it’s rolling out the program nationwide.
When a shopper shows symptoms of COVID-19, they can take an online assessment. Depending on the results, they can set up a telemedicine consultation with a Doctor On Demand clinician to determine whether they should undertake a COVID-19 screening. If they are diagnosed with the disease, shoppers will be “eligible to receive up to 14 days of extended pay to provide financial support during their recovery,” the company said.
