Month: January 2022

Enlarge / Verizon store front near Grand Central Terminal in New York City. (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images /)

The Federal Aviation Administration tentatively agreed not to seek any more 5G delays from AT&T and Verizon, potentially ending a battle over the aviation industry's unproven claim that 5G transmissions on C-Band frequencies will interfere with airplane altimeters.

The commitment came Monday night, when AT&T and Verizon agreed to one more delay of two weeks, pushing their deployment off until January 19. They had previously agreed to a delay from December 5 until January 5. Terms of Monday's deal were described in an attachment to a letter that Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg sent to the carriers.

"In light of the foregoing, and subject to any unforeseen aviation safety issues, DOT and FAA will not seek or demand any further delays of C-Band deployment," the deal terms say.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

It's a new year, so it's time for a new Dealmaster. Today's roundup of the best tech deals we can find is headlined by a nifty bundle for Nintendo Switch owners at Best Buy. Right now, if you buy a 12-month Family Membership to Nintendo's Switch Online service at its usual cost of $35, you can get a 128GB SanDisk microSD card thrown in for no extra cost. The latter should appear automatically in your cart.

We highlighted a similar deal last June, but if you need to top off your Switch Online membership and your Switch could use the extra storage space, this is still a nice opportunity. In general, Switch Online isn't quite as essential to enjoying the Switch as competing services from Sony and Microsoft are for their consoles, but it's still required to play online multiplayer in a variety of popular games (Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate among them), and it allows you to back up your game save data to cloud servers. A subscription also provides access to a number of emulated classic NES and SNES games. You don't get access to the more recently supported N64 or Sega Genesis titles with this subscription tier, but that might be for the best anyway.

Just note that this deal applies to the Family Membership, which is designed to cover benefits for up to eight different Switch users in a designated "family group." If you're just looking for a Switch Online membership for yourself, you can still get a 12-month Individual Membership for $20, but this deal is a bit less appealing.

Enlarge / Yes, it has a light bar, just like pretty much every other EV concept. Still, the lit Chrysler badge is tastefully integrated. (credit: Stellantis)

Not much appeared to be happening at Chrysler in the past few years, though that’s about to change. Its parent company, Stellantis, announced yesterday that Chrysler will become its vanguard electric brand. By 2028, the 96-year-old automaker’s entire lineup will be all-electric.

That’s not too much of a stretch. Chrysler only sells two vehicles right now, the decade-old 300C sedan and the Pacifica minivan, which is available as a plug-in hybrid. Today, at the Consumer Electronics Show, the company shared more details on the Airflow, a concept crossover that appears to be close to ready for production—so close, in fact, that the announcement was probably a thinly veiled preview of the company’s first EV due in 2025. 

The Airflow is powered by two 150 kW (201 hp) electric motors, one for each axle, and while Chrysler hasn’t disclosed the size of the battery, it said it is targeting 350–400 miles of range. If the company can achieve that, it would be quite the coup, rivaling the best from Tesla. Good thing it has a few years before it has to deliver.

Enlarge (credit: Sahoglu et al. 2021)

Archaeologists working in what is now western Turkey recently unearthed the rubble left behind by a series of powerful tsunamis that slammed into a Bronze Age city. The giant waves were triggered by the eruption of the volcano Thera on the island of Santorini, hundreds of kilometers away—a cataclysm that toppled the Minoan civilization and shook the rest of the ancient Mediterranean world.

Among the ruins left by the event in Çeşme-Bağlararası, Ankara University archaeologist Vasıf Sahoglu and his colleagues found the skeleton of a young man and a dog; they’re the only victims of the disaster ever found by archaeologists.

Going out with a bang

From around 2000 BCE to around 1450 BCE, the Minoan civilization was the dominant force in the Mediterranean. Its power and wealth came from seafaring and trade, and its cultural and economic influence stretched from its home island of Crete all the way to Egypt. But sometime between 1600 and 1500 BCE, a volcano called Thera, on what is now the island of Santorini (about 200 km north of Crete in the Aegean Sea), erupted violently.