Month: April 2020

Enlarge / Quest Diagnostics Air Operations, Reading Regional Airport, Reading, Pennsylvania. Photo by Steve Hockstein/HarvardStudio.com (credit: Quest Diagnostics)

It's pretty quiet out there these days, particularly after you've gone to bed. But somewhere above, a pilot bathed in the glow of avionics is looking up from his instrument panel into the night. Behind him are 76 soft-sided coolers holding the physical data on which modern medicine depends—samples of blood, urine, and tissue from individuals around the country.

They're aboard a Pilatus PC-12 turboprop business aircraft, collected from airports where they've been delivered from laboratories, doctors' offices, and hospitals. The airplane is part of the 25-strong specimen-transport fleet of Quest Diagnostics, one of the two leading companies in the medical lab services market.

Quest pilots' mission to collect and transport this valuable cargo has the same goal every night: to gather the material and get it safely back to one of Quest's labs by 2am. That way, the lab results for the person from whom the specimen comes are available by 8am a day or two later.

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  The existing Fast Pair system. Just pop open your headphone case and you'll get a pairing notification. [credit: Google ]

Google finally started shipping the second-generation Pixel Buds, and with them came a slew of new features for Android's Bluetooth stack.

The 2nd-gen Pixel Buds are Google's first truly wireless headphones, and they are finally on sale for $179 in the US. They were announced a whopping six months ago at Google's annual hardware event, alongside the Pixel 4, Pixelbook Go, and Nest Wi-Fi. They have an always-on Google Assistant, a charging case, and no active noise cancellation.

Fine, fine. What's far more interesting are the new Bluetooth features Google is enabling for all Android phones running Android 6.0 and up. These are all quality-of-life features that copy existing Apple Airpods features, but Google is partnering with other headphone manufacturers, too, bringing better Bluetooth to the wider ecosystem. The first company to take Google up on the offer is Harman Kardon (a division of Samsung Electronics) for the Harman Kardon Fly.