Month: April 2017

Enlarge / Google Home + Google Wi-Fi = Whatever this new product is. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Google's home strategy is a little conflicted right now. Aside from the TV-focused Chromecast, Google's strategy revolves around Google Home, a Google Assistant voice appliance and speaker, and Google Wifi, a mesh Wi-Fi router. Google's sales pitch for these two devices is pretty similar: multiple Google Home boxes will work together to give you music and voice commands in every room, while multiple Google Wifi boxes will work together to give you a strong Wi-Fi signal throughout the whole house. Put the two together and Google wants you to have two boxes in (almost) every room. Who wants that?

A new report from The Information (subscription required) claims that Google is working on fixing this. The company is reportedly mulling over "a version of its Google Home intelligent speaker with built-in mesh Wi-Fi networking"—a combo box containing Google Home and Google Wifi. That's a speaker, a voice-command system, and a Wi-Fi router all in one box. Such a combo box would represent a singular device from Google to put in every room. This makes a lot more sense than the current sales pitch.

The report doesn't say much more than that and doesn't have offer anything on price. Both Google Home and Google Wifi cost $130 each, with Google Wifi available in a three-pack bundle for $300. A combo product would certainly help differentiate Google Home from its mortal enemy, the Amazon Echo, and would help Google Wifi stand out from the growing range of mesh Wi-Fi routers.

Enlarge / A body camera from Taser is seen during a press conference at City Hall September 24, 2014 in Washington, DC. (credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / Getty Images News)

Taser, the company whose electronic stun guns have become a household name, is now offering a groundbreaking deal to all American law enforcement: free body cameras and a year’s worth of access to the company’s cloud storage service, Evidence.com.

In addition, on Wednesday, the company also announced that it would be changing its name to “Axon” to reflect the company’s flagship body camera product.

Right now, Axon is the single largest vendor of body cameras in America. It vastly outsells smaller competitors, including VieVu and Digital Ally—the company has profited $90 million from 2012 through 2016.

Flattr co-founder Peter Sunde at a conference in 2011. (credit: SHARE Conference)

Eyeo, the parent company of Adblock Plus, has acquired the micropayment company Flattr, following a year-long collaboration period.

"We share almost identical values of making the Internet safe and fair for everyone," said Flattr cofounder Peter Sunde in a press release about the acquisition. "We’re excited to continue our work on the Flattr project to give back control to the users of the internet. They should decide how they want to use the internet and how they want to support the content they enjoy."

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Flattr was founded in 2010 by Sunde and Linus Olsson. Sunde is best known for being one of the three cofounders of the torrent-indexing website The Pirate Bay. Since its founding, Flattr says it has paid more than 30,000 different online content creators.

(credit: Photograph by CCAC North Library)

Though science is supposed to be about objective interpretations, science often finds itself at the heart of political debates. The intermingling of political and scientific beliefs leads to a pretty obvious question: does political affiliation inform consumption of science, or does consumption of science inform political leanings? A recent paper published in Nature suggests that political and scientific beliefs go hand in hand, which may contribute to the “echo chamber” phenomenon.

This study looks at consumers’ online book purchases at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Using this data, the authors tried to tease out whether people co-purchase books on political and scientific topics. They started by identifying political books, classifying them as either "conservative" or "liberal" based on their content. Additionally, the authors looked at books that contained scientific information, dividing them into scientific domains. Then, they looked for relationships between purchases of liberal/conservative books and books that covered specific scientific fields.

The good news is that everyone loves science. The data shows that people who buy books with overt political content (both liberal and conservative) are more likely to purchase books about science compared to books on other subjects. This initial piece of information reinforces the researchers’ hypothesis that science has political relevance.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | VOISIN)

Banishing bacteria from the body with antibiotics around birth may cause haywire signals in the brain and lasting behavioral changes, a series of studies suggests.

In the latest study, involving only mice, researchers found that low doses of penicillin given to pups before and after birth spurred changes in their blood-brain barrier and brain chemistry. The mice grew up to be more aggressive and have impaired social behavior, researchers reported Monday in Nature Communications.

That study backs up earlier work in mice, as well as in humans, showing that the microbes residing in our guts can, indeed, spark changes in our brains. In one small, notable study from 2014, researchers found that eating two servings of bacteria-loaded yogurt a day for four weeks altered brain chemistry in a dozen healthy women. This January, New Zealand researchers published a study involving 871 kids that found a correlation between getting antibiotics in the first year of life and having more behavioral problems and symptoms of depression when the kids reached the ages of seven and 11.