Month: November 2017

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

On Thursday night, Elon Musk upstaged his own semi truck launch with the news that Tesla is going to build a new performance car, the Roadster. The specs certainly have the Internet ablaze this morning: a 200kWh battery and 620-mile (1,000km) range, 0-60mph in 1.9 seconds, the standing quarter-mile in 8.9 seconds, and a top speed of 250mph. That's truly impressive—particularly if it costs just $200,000. But Musk's claims that it will be the "fastest production car ever made, period" seem more than a little hyperbolic from where I'm sitting.

You see, we're entering another one of those automotive arms races, where engineers and designers attempt to outdo each other in the performance stakes with ever-more extreme hypercars. Tesla will not be the only game in town. In fact, it's only just getting ready to take to the pitch.

Supercars are passé; it's all about the hypercar now

Supercars like the McLaren F1 and Ferrari Enzo used to be the last word in four-wheeled performance until a reborn Bugatti came along and rewrote the rules. The Veyron, which arrived in 2011, boasted an 8.0L W16 engine, 987hp (736kW), and a 253mph (407km/h) top speed. The supercar was dethroned, and the hypercar became king. But achieving massive power and bonkers performance from an internal combustion engine is old hat—even if Bugatti is sticking to the formula with the Chiron.

Enlarge / Look at this happy couple enjoying voice commands and high quality audio in their home! (credit: Apple)

In a statement to CNBC this morning, Apple said its HomePod smart speaker will be released in 2018, not by the end of this year as originally announced.

Here is the company's statement:

We can't wait for people to experience HomePod, Apple's breakthrough wireless speaker for the home, but we need a little more time before it's ready for our customers... We'll start shipping in the US, UK and Australia in early 2018.

The 7''-tall HomePod was expected to launch in December. It will cost $349 and bring Siri into any room in your house that it wasn't already present, allowing for voice features like answering questions and managing your smart home. That said, Apple said the main focus of the HomePod is music. The device will feature an A8 processor—the same found in the iPhone 6—and will sense the layout of the room and adjust its audio output for optimal acoustics. It will also work in tandem with other HomePods wirelessly to provide home-wide coverage or deliver stereo sound.

Enlarge (credit: Bullion Vault)

In early September, one Bitcoin was worth almost $5,000. Then the Chinese government cracked down on cryptocurrency investments, and Bitcoin's value plunged 40 percent in a matter of days, reaching a low below $3,000.

But Bitcoin bounced back. By early November, one Bitcoin was worth almost $8,000. Then last week, a controversial effort to expand the Bitcoin network's capacity failed. Within days, Bitcoin's price had plunged 25 percent, while the value of a rival network called Bitcoin Cash doubled.

Today, Bitcoin has recovered all of last week's losses—one Bitcoin is now worth more than $7,800.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | vladru)

Phone companies are now authorized to be more aggressive in blocking robocalls before they reach customers' landlines or mobile phones, but you might have to pay for the new blocking capabilities.

The Federal Communications Commission yesterday issued an order to "expressly authorize voice service providers to block robocalls that appear to be from telephone numbers that do not or cannot make outgoing calls, without running afoul of the FCC's call completion rules."

Carriers will thus have greater ability to block calls in which the Caller ID has been spoofed or in which the number is invalid. Caller ID spoofing hides the caller's true identity and is one of the biggest sources of illegal robocalls.

Enlarge / T cells latch on to a cancer cell before killing it. (credit: NIH)

We've made some impressive advances toward inducing the immune system to attack cancers. One of these techniques, using CAR-T cells, is amazing. CAR-T cells are made by inserting receptors that recognize cancerous cells into a leukemia patient’s own T cells. This induces those T cells to recognize the patient’s tumor as the threat that it is and destroy it.

But, that T cells mount such an effective immune response is their therapeutic weakness as well as their strength. Engineered immune cells like these can completely disrupt normal immune function, causing unpleasant conditions with names like macrophage activating syndrome, cytokine storms, and even neurotoxicity, all of which can be life-threatening. So a group of Swiss researchers has decided to engineer a killing system into non-immune cells to avoid all these side effects.

T cells target their tumor-killing immune response through cell-to-cell contact. This is a distinctive feature of how the T cell receptor works. It hangs out on the T cell's surface membrane, with some parts on the outside and some parts on the inside. When its external part contacts a particular feature on the surface of a cell, its intracellular part sends a signal through a cascade of molecules that eventually results in collection genes getting expressed. These genes include the ones needed to kill the target cell.