Month: September 2020

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  The new Apple Watch in Blue and Red Aluminum. [credit: Apple ]

Three days after they were all announced in a livestream on Tuesday, three new Apple products are arriving at consumers' doorsteps and available at retail: the Apple Watch Series 6, the Apple Watch SE, and the 8th-generation iPad.

The Apple Watch Series 6 adds new color options (like blue aluminum, gold stainless steel, graphite stainless steel, and Product Red red), an altimeter, and blood oxygen level monitoring, among other features. It succeeds the Series 5 as Apple's flagship watch and offers the key features of its predecessor as well, like an always-on display. The Series 6 is available in two sizes and starts at $399, but that price can go way up, depending on the customization options like material or band.

The Apple Watch SE doesn't have an always-on display, but it's a lot cheaper. It offers a more basic set of features—but it includes most of the sensors in the Series 6—for $279 and up. That said, it's not the lowest-end Apple Watch; the Series 3 is still available for $199 and up, making that the cheapest option.

Enlarge / Frankfurt, Germany - July 12, 2016: Tesla Model S luxury electric sedan. (credit: typhoonski / Getty)

Police in Alberta, Canada arrested a driver in July who was going 140km/h (87mph) in a Tesla Model S. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police announced the arrest yesterday.

The officer reported seeing "both front seats completely reclined and both occupants appearing to be asleep." The car "appeared to be self-driving," the RCMP says. When the officer turned on his emergency lights, the vehicle sped up to 150km/h (93mph).

Eventually, the RCMP pulled over the 20-year-old driver and charged him with speeding. They later added a dangerous driving charge.

Enlarge (credit: Stewart et al. 2020)

About 120,000 years ago, two or three people walked along the shore of a shallow lake in what is now northern Saudi Arabia. They left behind at least seven footprints in the mud, and today those tracks are the oldest known evidence of our species’ presence in Arabia.

A Pleistocene walk by the lake

Imagine that you’re a hunter-gatherer about 120,000 years ago, and you’re walking out of eastern Africa into Eurasia. Paleoanthropologists are still debating exactly why you’ve decided to do such a thing, and you almost certainly don’t have a destination in mind, but for now we’ll take it for granted that you just want to take a really, really long walk. Almost inevitably, you’ll come to the Levant, on the eastern end of the Mediterranean. From that important geographical crossroads, you’ve got some options: you could head north through Syria and Turkey, then veer east into Asia or west into Europe. You could also strike out east, across the northern end of the Arabian Peninsula.

That was a better option then than it sounds now. Off and on during the Pleistocene, the Arabian Peninsula had a wetter climate than it does today. Evidence from ancient sediments, pollen, and animal fossils all suggest that today’s deserts were once grasslands and woods, crossed by rivers and dotted with lakes like the one at Alathar in the western Nefud Desert.

Enlarge / SHENZHEN, CHINA - AUGUST 19: A woman walks outside the headquarters of Tencent on August 19, 2020 in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province of China. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

The US government is reportedly scrutinizing Chinese tech giant Tencent and the US gaming companies in which it has an investment interest. Bloomberg reports that the Treasury Department's Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS) has asked companies including Epic Games and Riot Games to answer questions about their data-security standards, according to "people familiar with the matter."

CFIUS has the authority to examine foreign investment in US companies when those investments could have an impact on national security. Historically, that has often meant examining foreign access to US natural resources or military secrets, More recently, though, CFIUS has taken an expanded interest in potential foreign access to US customer data.

“When you’re talking about massive amounts of data, there’s probably something for the committee to look at,” former Treasury Department Deputy Assistant Secretary for Investment Security Aimen Mir told Bloomberg yesterday. “The question then becomes is the risk high enough that it actually warrants forcing deals apart?”