techresize (2024)

11/01/2022

Despite facing numerous antitrust lawsuits and tighter regulations in certain markets, Apple today reported new figures indicating record App Store growth in 2021. The company in a press release said it has now paid out more than $260 billion to app developers since the App Store first launched in 2008, a number that’s up from the $200 billion Apple reported at the end of 2020 — meaning, in 2021 alone, Apple paid developers a total of at least $60 billion.

11/01/2022

An astonishing fossil of an extinct 'sea dragon' discovered by a wetland conservationist one day at work has been hailed as the largest and most complete fossil of its kind ever found in Britain.

The fossil, identified as an ichthyosaur, an ancient marine reptile that swam in Earth's prehistoric oceans when dinosaurs walked on land, was found poking out of the mud, and scientists say the ancient specimen is practically complete from tip to tail.

"Our specimen, the Rutland Ichthyosaur or the Rutland Sea Dragon, is the biggest complete ichthyosaur ever found in Britain in over 200 years of collecting these things scientifically," says paleontologist Dean Lomax who led the excavation.

Joe Davis, a conservationist with the Leicestershire and Rutland Wildlife Trust, first spied an exposed jawbone of the fossil in February 2021 during routine landscaping works at the Rutland Water Nature Reserve, a small wetland conservation area in the English Midlands.

The fossilized remains were excavated over three weeks in a delicate operation involving plenty of plaster and wooden splints used to protect the gigantic yet fragile specimen as it was removed from its muddy tomb.

Faced with mounting bird p**p and awful weather, the team of paleontologists, conservationists, and volunteers ultimately prevailed, safely uncovering and extracting the 10-meter-long fossil and its entire backbone consisting of more than 150 individual vertebrae.

"I know lots of people have spent their lives looking for something like this and I've been very lucky to come across it," Davis told New Scientist about the find, which was initially dismissed by his colleague, Paul Trevor, as "just a pipe".

Ichthyosaurs, which range in size from 1 meter (3.3 feet) to more than 25 meters (85 feet) and resemble modern-day dolphins, first appeared roughly 250 million years ago and died out about 160 million years later.

11/01/2022

Video game giant Take-Two is acquiring mobile gaming company Zynga in a cash-and-stock deal that the company says will turn the Grand Theft Auto maker into a mobile gaming powerhouse. The deal is valued at around $12.7 billion, or $9.86 per Zynga share.

Take-Two Chief Executive Strauss Zelnick said the deal will benefit both companies, giving Zynga access to the best-selling game franchises Take-Two is known for, while also giving Take-Two access to player analytics, advertising and mobile game making technology that so far it's lacked. "What we've found is that great entertainment wins," he said in an interview Monday. "It's really hard to build organically."

02/01/2022

When it comes to trade shows such as CES, LG is typically the king of curvy displays. The company always brings some cool concepts to these shows, and next year's CES 2022, which kicks off on Jan. 5, is no exception.

LG Display has announced it will bring two concepts to the show. One is called Virtual Ride, and it consists of three vertical, 55-inch OLED displays placed in front and above a stationary, indoor bicycle. The topmost display has a curvature radius that reaches 500R, which LG claims is the biggest among large displays.

In practice, working out on this bike should provide the most immersive experience you can get outside of virtual reality, though it likely won't be cheap (and it certainly won't be cheaper than actually cycling outside).

The other concept that LG is bringing to the show is called Media Chair, a recliner with a curved, 55-inch OLED TV vertically positioned in front of the user. The TV uses LG's Cinematic Sound OLED tech, which emits the sound from the display itself, without the need to use external speakers.

02/01/2022

Tesla is to recall more than 475,000 cars in the US, according to documents filed with the US safety regulator.

The electric vehicle firm announced it was recalling 356,309 vehicles because of potential rear-view camera issues affecting 2017-2020 Model 3 Teslas.

A further 119,009 Model S vehicles will also be recalled because of potential problems with the front trunk, or boot.

The total recall figure is almost equivalent to the 500,000 cars Tesla delivered last year, Reuters reports.

The BBC has approached Tesla for comment.

A safety report, submitted this month, estimates that around 1% of recalled Model 3s may have a defective rear-view camera.

Over time "repeated opening and closing of the trunk lid" may cause excessive wear to a cable that provides the rear-view camera feed, says a Safety Recall report submitted by Tesla to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in the US on the 21 December.

If the wear causes the core of the cable to separate "the rear-view camera feed is not visible on the centre display", the report notes.

The loss of the rear-view camera display may "increase the risk of collision", it adds.

The Model S recall involves vehicles manufactured between 2014-2021, some of which may have a problem with a "secondary latch" on the front trunk, or boot.

31/12/2021

Elon Musk has rejected claims that his Starlink satellite internet project is taking up too much room in space.

"Tens of billions" of satellites can be accommodated in orbits close to Earth, he told the Financial Times.

His comments come after a claim by the head of the European Space Agency (ESA) that Mr Musk was "making the rules" for the emerging commercial space industry.

This week, China complained that its space station was forced to avoid collisions with Starlink satellites.

"Space is just extremely enormous, and satellites are very tiny," Mr Musk said in the interview.

Mr Musk pushed back at suggestions that his Starlink Internet Services project was effectively obstructing the entry of competitors to the satellite industry, saying that there is ample room in the Earth's orbit for satellites.

31/12/2021

A former TikTok moderator is suing the company, claiming it failed to protect her mental health after "constant" exposure to traumatic video content.

Candie Frazier says she reviewed videos that featured "extreme and graphic violence" for up to 12 hours a day.

She says she suffers from "significant psychological trauma", including anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

TikTok says it strives to promote "a caring working environment".

In September TikTok announced 1 billion people were using the app each month. It now has more hits than Google, according to Cloudflare, an IT security company.

To protect its users, the video-sharing platform uses thousands of in-house and contract content moderators to filter out videos and accounts that break its rules.

Ms Frazier is suing both TikTok and its parent company, Chinese tech-giant Bytedance.

She claims that in her role as a moderator she watched graphic content, including videos of sexual assault, cannibalism, genocide, mass shootings, child sexual abuse, and the mutilation of animals.

25/12/2021

Interstellar space is a graveyard of lost souls. Adrift far from any star, these planets float in the darkness like ghost ships in the night.

Catching sight of one requires patience, and a good eye. But a new approach based on tens of thousands of images collected by the European Southern Observatory's facilities has resulted in the identification of as many as 170 potential 'rogue' worlds in our corner of the galaxy.

If a good fraction of them are confirmed to be planets, it would suggest the Milky Way is swarming with solar exiles.

"There could be several billions of these free-floating giant planets roaming freely in the Milky Way without a host star," says Hervé Bouy, an astronomer at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux in France.

23/12/2021

US auto safety regulators said Wednesday they have opened a formal safety investigation into 580,000 Tesla vehicles sold since 2017 over the automaker's decision to allow games to be played on the front center touchscreen.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said its preliminary evaluation covers various 2017-2022 Tesla Model 3, S, X, and Y vehicles. This functionality, referred to as “Passenger Play,” "may distract the driver and increase the risk of a crash," the agency said.

NHTSA said it has "confirmed that this capability has been available since December 2020 in Tesla 'Passenger Play'-equipped vehicles." Before then, the game feature "was enabled only when the vehicle was in Park."

NHTSA said in a statement on Wednesday it was "committed to ensuring the highest safety standards on the nation's roadways."

The agency said the decision to open the investigation was based on reports "Tesla's gameplay functionality is visible from the driver's seat and can be enabled while driving the vehicle."

The Governors Highway Safety Association said on Wednesday it was pleased with NHTSA's Tesla safety investigation "and want to remind all drivers to be alert and focused on the road when you're behind the wheel."

23/12/2021

NASA has delayed the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, which would be the successor to the Hubble. The space agency said the launch will happen a day later than the earlier stipulated time, on Christmas Day, December 25, from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana, where high winds are a major factor.

An Ariane 5 rocket will lift off on Saturday, carrying the next-generation space observatory. The $10-billion (roughly Rs. 75,330 crore) James Webb Space Telescope is the largest ever built and intended to help astronomers in breakthrough discoveries. It has been designed to look deeper into the universe than the Hubble and detect events from further back in time — over 13.5 billion years ago.

23/12/2021

In a new interview with conservative satire website The Babylon Bee, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk took a stab at the concept of the Metaverse, the quirky virtual world Facebook-now-known-as-Meta says will supplant our boring two-dimensional screens.

“Am I like one of those people who was dismissing the internet [in] ’95 as some fad or something that’s never going to amount to anything?” Musk asked the site.

“Sure you can put a TV on your nose,” he added derisively. “I’m not sure that makes you ‘in the metaverse.'”

Musk, for one, is certainly not compelled by the idea of “strapping a frigging screen to their face all day and not wanting to ever leave.”

“That seems… no way,” he said in the interview.

“It gets uncomfortable to have this thing strapped to your head the whole time,” he added. “I think we’re far from disappearing into the metaverse.”

Musk also offered what he sees as a far better alternative: a chip surgically implanted in your brain, courtesy of the brain-computer interface company Neuralink he co-founded.

“Long term, a sophisticated Neuralink could put you fully, fully in a virtual reality thing,” he said.

20/12/2021

TikTok is preparing to launch a new service that will turn its viral food videos into meals you can actually order and enjoy. The social app is partnering with Virtual Dining Concepts and Grubhub to launch “TikTok Kitchen”-branded delivery-only restaurants across the United States next year, as first reported by Bloomberg.

The menu at the restaurants will draw upon the most popular viral food posts on TikTok, which people can then have delivered to their door via Grubhub. TikTok plans to launch around 300 locations that will start delivering dishes in March, with plans to open more than 1,000 restaurants by the end of next year.

20/12/2021

Electric-car maker Tesla Inc's Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said on Sunday on Twitter that he will pay more than $11 billion in taxes this year.

Earlier this week, Democratic US Senator Elizabeth Warren took to Twitter to say that Musk should pay taxes and stop "freeloading off everyone else" after Time magazine named him its "person of the year".

Musk responded by saying that he "will pay more taxes than any American in history this year".

18/12/2021

Despite having no players, and not being available to play, a new video game has already pulled in over $55 million in sales.

Rather than excited customers putting down money to pre-order the upcoming game, that money is actually coming from sales of virtual land within the game's virtual world.

Homes start at just shy $3,300, and one plot of land went for $972,102. In total, sales of virtual land have thus far pulled in over $55 million.

17/12/2021

Developed at ETH Zürich in collaboration with FenX AG, FoamWork explores how foam 3D printing (F3DP) can produce distinctive shapes for stay-in-place, or temporary and recyclable concrete casting. The foam produced is based on recycled waste and can reduce how much concrete is used by up to 70 percent.

17/12/2021

Imagine if all you needed to own your own house was a worthless hairpin. Well that is exactly the feat Demi Skipper has achieved - by trading up items on TikTok.

She started the Trade Me Project in May 2020 and swapped various things along the way, including a pair of earrings, an iPhone and three tractors. And the 30-year-old, from San Francisco, California, is now the proud owner of a house in Nashville, Tennessee.
Inspired by Kyle MacDonald, who traded his way from a single red paperclip to a house, in a series of online trades in 2006, Ms Skipper swapped the hairpin for a pair of cheap earrings. From there, she upgraded to four margarita glasses and then a vacuum cleaner, trawling sites such as eBay, Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist to find the right types of items.

Her first few trades were done in person around San Francisco. Later trades were made through road trips across the US. And along the way, Ms Skipper uploaded videos asking for trades to TikTok and Instagram and explained how her ultimate aim was to get to a house.

The vacuum cleaner turned into a snowboard, to headphones, to a laptop, to a camera.
She then swapped various pairs of Nike trainers before acquiring an iPhone and then a 2008 Dodge Caravan. The vehicle's owners drove it all the way from Minnesota to San Francisco - and Ms Skipper's followers grew in number as the story of her Trade Me Project became more exciting.

From there, Ms Skipper got a Mini Cooper convertible - and a couple of weeks later, she traded the car for a necklace she thought was worth $20,000 (£15,000), which turned out to be worth less than $2,000. After a frustrating two weeks of searching, Ms Skipper traded the necklace for a Peloton exercise bike worth $1,800.

The Peloton bike was traded up to a Mustang - and by last December, Ms Skipper had traded up to a tiny woodland cabin. The cabin became a Honda CRV, then three tractors, then a Chipotle celebrity card entitling her to a year's worth of free food and a catered party. Ms Skipper managed to trade the card for a $40,000 trailer with a Tesla Powerwall and then, finally, she made her last trade by swapping the trailer for her very own house near Nashville.

17/12/2021

An experimental vaccine successfully eliminated aging cells from the bodies of mice, helping to prolong the rodents' lives and reverse some signs of age-related disease.

The researchers say the experiment is a step on the road to a similar vaccine for humans, but could it really work?

"I think the data was extremely strong… I think it's a really good proof-of-principle," Paul Robbins, a professor of biochemistry, molecular biology and biophysics and an associate director of the Institute on the Biology of Aging and Metabolism at the University of Minnesota, said of the mouse study. In theory, the same approach would work in humans.

But the big question is whether that vaccine would be safe in humans, Robbins, who was not involved in the research, told Live Science. To figure that out, the researchers would need to conduct additional studies in animals, including non-human primates, and thorough safety trials in human patients.

16/12/2021

Jeff Bezos needs to cut loose, according to Elon Musk.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO said his fellow billionaire "does take himself a bit too seriously," in an interview with the Financial Times published Wednesday naming him its Person of the Year. Musk and Bezos, the two richest people on the planet, have feuded for going on two decades.

16/12/2021

An NFT memorializing Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales's first edit on the online reference resource 20 years ago and the computer he used when programming the platform sold for a total of almost $1 million at auction Wednesday.

Christie's sold the NFT — Non-Fungible Tokens that are unique digital objects and confer ownership through blockchain technology -- for $750,000 (roughly Rs. 5.7 crore) and the Strawberry iMac for $187,500 (roughly Rs. 2.4 crore).

The NFT is of Wikipedia's debut onscreen image when Wales posted the first words, "Hello world."

The Strawberry iMac was the personal computer he "used for development and research at the time of the website's launch on January 15, 2001," Christie's said.

The NFT, presented in JPEG format, is interactive, with the buyer able to edit the page, "which can be reset with a timer to revert to its original state," according to Christie's.

16/12/2021

Social media platform Reddit has announced that it has started the process to sell its shares on the stock market.

In a confidential filing, it did not reveal how many shares it planned to sell or the price of the shares.

In August, the company said it had raised $700m (£528m) in new funding, valuing it at more than $10bn.

15/12/2021

In the midst of the omicron variant's spread, Apple announced today that it will return to implementing COVID-19 protocols within Apple Stores in the US. These actions include mask mandates as well as limiting the number of customers allowed inside at any given time. The company reportedly disclosed the move in a statement made to Bloomberg.

Apple had to close some store locations before due to COVID-19 outbreaks among employees. This was the case with an Apple Store in Southlake, Texas when it experienced a spike in cases following Black Friday. The company was also one of the first to shutter all its US stores at the beginning of the pandemic.

15/12/2021

In an incredible historic first, a human-made spacecraft has swooped in and made contact with the Sun.

On 28 April 2021, NASA's Parker Solar Probe actually flew into and through the solar corona, the upper atmosphere of the Sun. Not only did it live to tell the tale – proving the efficacy of Parker's high-tech heat shielding – it took in situ measurements, giving us a wealth of never-before-seen data on the heart of our Solar System.

"Parker Solar Probe 'touching the Sun' is a monumental moment for solar science and a truly remarkable feat," said astrophysicist Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters.

"Not only does this milestone provide us with deeper insights into our Sun's evolution and its impacts on our Solar System, but everything we learn about our own star also teaches us more about stars in the rest of the Universe."

Parker Solar Probe launched in 2018, with its primary objective to probe the solar corona. In its planned seven-year mission, it should be making a total of 26 close approaches, or perihelions, to the Sun, using a total of seven gravity assist maneuvers from Venus to bring it ever closer. The April perihelion was the eighth, and the first to actually enter the corona.

14/12/2021

Thousands of feet beneath the surface of Monterey Bay off California, scientists recently captured footage of a fish with a bulbous, translucent head and green orb-like eyes that peer out through its forehead.

14/12/2021

WhatsApp on Tuesday announced the rollout of an ability to let you preview your voice messages before sending them to your contacts. The update essentially helps you listen to your voice message and see if the audio is fine for sharing over the instant messaging app.

If it's not, you can discard your voice message and record it again for sharing. The voice message preview feature on WhatsApp works with both individual and group chats. Also, it has been released for all platforms, including Android and iOS as well as Web and desktops.

14/12/2021

Apple has released a new Android app allowing users to detect whether there's an unfamiliar AirTag following them. It's a useful safety tool for any non-iPhone users concerned they may be a victim of high-tech stalking.

"Tracker Detect looks for item trackers that are separated from their owner and that are compatible with Apple’s Find My network," the app's Google Play store description reads. "These item trackers include AirTag and compatible devices from other companies. If you think someone is using AirTag or another device to track your location, you can scan to try to find it."

13/12/2021

Elon Musk doesn't think his tweets have the power to move markets.

In an interview with Time's Molly Ball, Jeffrey Kluger, and Alejandro de la Garza published Monday, Musk discussed his Twitter habit, a pastime that makes him easily the most famous CEO on the planet and probably the most adored and most criticized in equal measure.

13/12/2021

Instagram has rolled out a new “Reels Visual Replies” feature that lets users reply to comments on posts with Reels. Now, when users choose to reply to a comment, they’ll see a new option that allows them to select the Reels button to create a video reply. The social media giant notes that the video reply will appear as a sticker.

13/12/2021

Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk has been named Time's 2021 Person of the Year. The magazine also honors vaccine scientists who tackled COVID-19 as their heroes of the year, and Olympic and world champion gymnast Simone Biles was named athlete of the year.

Time said it gave Musk the award for his "dreams of Mars as he bestrides Earth, square-jawed and indomitable."

12/12/2021

Football clubs have potentially made hundreds of millions of pounds selling controversial crypto "fan tokens".

Analysis commissioned by BBC News estimates more than £262m ($350m) has been spent on the virtual currencies.

Some of the tokens are marketed as offering real-world perks to the buyer.

But critics say these perks are insignificant - one offered the chance to vote for songs to be played in stadiums - and clubs have insufficient protection for supporters.

12/12/2021

Max Verstappen has won the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, giving him his first ever Formula One championship title after a season-long battle with reigning champ and seven-time winner Lewis Hamilton.

With both drivers heading into the last 2021 F1 race of the season on equal points after Hamilton won the maiden race in Saudi Arabia last weekend, the world championship was up for grabs Sunday at the Yas Marina Circuit in Abu Dhabi.

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