Month: June 2021

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  The latest true wireless headphones from Beats: the Beats Studio Buds. [credit: Jeff Dunn ]

Beats on Monday announced its latest pair of wireless earbuds, the Beats Studio Buds.

The new headphones feature a fully wireless design and active noise cancelation (ANC), putting them in line with similar noise-canceling pairs like the AirPods Pro from Beats parent company Apple and Sony’s new WF-1000XM4.

At $150, though, the Studio Buds undercut those competitors on price by a fair margin. The earbuds are available to preorder today and will begin shipping on June 24.

Enlarge / Thanks for the suggestion, Alexa—it just might be time to revist Ferris and friends this weekend. Oh, yeah! (credit: Jim Salter)

Amazon's newly redesigned Echo Show 8 offers a form factor with a ton of potential. The relatively small smart speaker/display combo is roughly the size and shape of a small Kindle Fire in a stand and offers an extremely high-resolution camera as well as stereo speakers, an eight-core CPU, a mic array for better voice recognition and processing, and a relatively heavy, flat base which positions its screen well for viewing at either desk or chest height.

We were lucky enough to get two of the new devices for hands-on testing before launch and have had them for about a week.

Overview and controls

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  The black rectangle at the upper right is the Echo Show 8's camera—when shuttered, it's covered with a plastic tab of the same color as the rest of the device's chassis. [credit: Jim Salter ]

Enlarge / Morning sun against the foothills of Boulder, Colorado, business area and campus. (credit: Fred Langer Photography | Getty Images)

Every day, the Sun rises and sets on Boulder, Colorado. And, like clockwork, a layer of sodium and other elements trickle down through the sky and hit the ground, a team of researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder found. These elements hail originally from space and, in various forms, hit the atmosphere before making their trek to the Earth's surface.

The team published this discovery in Geophysical Research Letters. A decade ago, Xinzhao Chu, the lead author of the research, discovered these metal layers at the McMurdo research station in Antarctica. However, near the Earth's polar south, these elements appear sporadically, rather than daily. This is the first time researchers have discovered a case where the layers drop at regular intervals.

These layers are not visible to the human eye. So, at the Table Mountain Observatory near Boulder, the team made use of a lidar system—which operates similarly to radar but use lasers instead of radio waves—to detect the minuscule sodium particles. While the lidar data from the region was taken a few years back, the team analyzed them last December and discovered our atmosphere's metal cycle.

Enlarge / Lordstown Motors says it will begin limited production of the Endurance EV truck later in 2021. (credit: Lordstown Motors)

Life isn't getting any easier for Lordstown Motors. Last week, the startup issued a "going concern" warning, telling investors that it might not be able to start production of its electric work truck without a fresh infusion of cash. We saw the consequences on Monday morning, as the company announced that CEO Steve Burns and CFO Julio Rodriguez have resigned. Angela Strand has been appointed as executive chairwoman and will helm Lordstown until a new CEO is appointed, with Becky Roof serving as Interim CFO.

Lordstown Motors emerged from another beleaguered startup called Workhorse, which planned to produce a plug-in hybrid work truck made from carbon fiber. But in 2018, the stock market was much less willing to hand out gigantic blank checks to electric vehicle startups, and that hybrid truck was shelved. Workhorse's then-CEO Steve Burns departed the company.

On his way out, Burns licensed some of Workhorse's technology (involving hub-mounted motors for each wheel), forming the basis for Lordstown Motors. Lordstown would make a battery EV pickup instead of a plug-in hybrid truck, and it would do so in a former General Motors factory in Lordstown, Ohio (giving the new startup its name).