Skip to main content

Last week in tech: Autonomous Teslas, laundry-folding robots, and a fast Nike shoe

[ad_1]


It’s been hard not to be preoccupied by Avengers: Endgame, which came out this week. Maybe you’ve been scrambling to get tickets, or worrying about whether you can sit through the 3-hour film without a pee break. (On that last point, we have some advice to share.) Regardless, if you feel like you’ve missed out on tech news lately because you’ve been daydreaming about hanging out with Bruce Banner, don’t worry. We’ve got the info you need.



Listen to the latest episode of our tech podcast, the Techathlon!


Speaking of superhero cinema, have you ever noticed that film villains always get the best lines? And that silver-tongued tech CEOs love to bend our ears, too? On this week’s episode of the podcast, we play a fun game of who-said-it: a bad guy in a movie, or a tech company executive? For example: “If you’re good at something, never do it for free.” Give the podcast a listen for the answer. Plus, as always, we begin with the Techathlon Decathlon, where we quiz ourselves on the week’s biggest tech news.


Check it out in the player above, subscribe on iTunes, add us on Stitcher, follow on Anchor, or find us wherever quality podcasts reside. Also be sure to join us on Twitter.


Will we be getting fully autonomous Teslas next year?



We love following what’s going on in the fascinating world of self-driving cars, and this week, Tesla explained how it will produce fully-self driving vehicles and maybe even a robo-taxi fleet by 2020. “Only criticism, and it’s a fair one—sometimes I’m not on time,” Musk said, during the event. “But, I get it done.”



The event largely focused on the onboard computer and chips that Tesla will use to make self-driving happen, which will also rely on cameras and other sensors on the cars to see the world around it. Whether or not Teslas can be fully autonomous in the near future, self-driving cars from other companies are already on the roads. Those vehicles use lidar to help them perceive the streetscape, a key instrument Teslas notedly do not have.




RIP Laundroid



Some people—devotees of Marie Kondo, perhaps—love the meditative act of folding laundry. Others would happily hand off the task to a robot. Sadly for the majority of us, a company hoping to make a bot that would fold our t-shirts and jeans for us is going out of business.



We’ve been keeping our eye on these types of machines since 2018, and while we’re skeptical, we can’t quite give up on a world where something, somewhere knows how to fold a fitted sheet.


Nike released a faster shoe



Nike just unleashed its latest highly engineered running shoe, the Vaporfly Next%. PopSci’s resident running expert reported what they’re made out of and how they feel on a run.



You can preorder Samsung’s 5G phone now



Samsung has been in the news a lot lately, both for its Galaxy Fold screen fiasco and, more recently, the 5G-enabled Galaxy S10 phone, which finally went up for presale this week. The $1,300 device can connect to 5G networks and take advantage of their fast speeds—but right now, it only works on Verizon and in parts of Chicago and Minneapolis. For those reasons and more, we recommend waiting until 5G technology matures before investing in a pricey new gadget like this one. If you do pre-order one, expect it to arrive in the middle of next month.


How to buy a good phone case



If you do buy a new Samsung Galaxy S10 phone or any other, there’s a good case to be made for, well, putting it in a case. Check out our guide to purchasing the right one here.



Artificial intelligence made a livestream of death metal music



Artificial intelligence can do lots of things, including generate music. Give it a listen, here. In my opinion, it is horrible.



[ad_2]

Written By Rob Verger

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ice technicians are the secret stars of the Winter Olympics

[ad_1] The emphasis of this year's two-week-long Winter Olympic Games has been placed squarely on the Olympians themselves. After all, the stated purpose of the international competition is to bring together the world’s greatest athletes in a nail-biting competition across fifteen different winter sports. But before the curlers, skiers, and skaters even arrived in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the Olympians of the ice technician world were already a few weeks deep in a competition of their own. Mark Callan of the World Curling Federation and Markus Aschauer of the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation both say they’re hoping to make the best ice the Winter Olympics have ever seen. To transform the barren concrete jungle of existing tracks and arenas into an ice- and snow-covered wonderland is an enormous undertaking. And it takes a keen understanding of the physics and chemistry that keeps frozen precipitation pristine. Curling Callan has been making and maintaining ic...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to avoid the mid-movie bathroom break

[ad_1] Long movies and the urge to pee have been linked since the early days of cinema. Sixty-three years before Avengers: Endgame and its three-hour runtime, moviegoers settled in for nearly four hours of The Ten Commandments . “There will be an intermission,” director Cecil B. DeMille announced during the movie’s introduction. And audiences’ bladders were relieved. On average, movies aren’t getting longer, but they also don’t come with a predetermined bathroom break. That means when nature calls, you’ve got to either sit in growing discomfort or gamble on the best time to run to the restroom. But it doesn’t have to be this way, and for most people, setting your body to “do not disturb” is fairly simple. Go before the show The first piece of advice is also the easiest: pee before the movie starts. Generally, healthy adults urinate every 3-4 hours, so the longer a movie runs, the more urgent it becomes to reset your internal p...
Post a Comment
Read more

Charted: Here's how much your food waste hurts the environment

[ad_1] Our species is pretty good at wasting food. Some we discard at the farm for being undersized or oddly shaped. Others we allow to decay in their shipping containers, thrown away before they even reach shelves. We leave even more foodstuffs wasting away in grocery stores, often by letting it sit there until it reaches its sell-by date. As consumers, we don’t have much control over most of the process that brings our food to the grocery store, but we do have control over how much food we personally waste. Let's face it: We’ve all found liquified lettuce in our veggie drawers. Don't fret. It's arguably impossible to consume 100 percent of the food we buy. But a healthy reminder of the effect food waste has on the environment might help us all to be more conscious of the amount of food we eat—and don't eat. Consumer food waste varies extensively depending on the area. In South and Southeast Asia, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that only around ...
Post a Comment
Read more