Month: March 2023

Enlarge / Moderna pharmaceutical and biotechnology company's CEO Stephane Bancel speaks during a session of the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos on January 18, 2023. (credit: Getty | Fabrice COFFRINI)

Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel on Monday pushed back on criticism of the company's plans to raise the price of its mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines by 400 percent, arguing that the billions of dollars in federal funding the company received played little role in the vaccine's development.

Speaking at the Wall Street Journal Health Forum, Bancel suggested that the vaccine's development is thanks to private investors and that the federal funding merely hastened development that would have occurred regardless. The comments came in response to a question of whether the company has a "moral obligation" to give back to the taxpayers who helped develop the life-saving immunization—presumably by not dramatically hiking the vaccine's price as it moves from federal distribution to the commercial market this year.

While the government most recently paid $26 per dose for Moderna's updated booster dose, the company is planning to raise the price of its shots to $110 to $130 per dose.

Enlarge / A robotic arm controlled by PaLM-E reaches for a bag of chips in a demonstration video. (credit: Google Research)

On Monday, a group of AI researchers from Google and the Technical University of Berlin unveiled PaLM-E, a multimodal embodied visual-language model (VLM) with 562 billion parameters that integrates vision and language for robotic control. They claim it is the largest VLM ever developed and that it can perform a variety of tasks without the need for retraining.

According to Google, when given a high-level command, such as "bring me the rice chips from the drawer," PaLM-E can generate a plan of action for a mobile robot platform with an arm (developed by Google Robotics) and execute the actions by itself.

PaLM-E does this by analyzing data from the robot's camera without needing a pre-processed scene representation. This eliminates the need for a human to pre-process or annotate the data and allows for more autonomous robotic control.

Juvenile snapping shrimp now hold the acceleration record for a repeatable body movement underwater. They can snap their claws at accelerations on par with a bullet shot from a gun. (credit: Harrison and Patek, 2023)

The snapping shrimp, aka the pistol shrimp, is one of the loudest creatures in the ocean, thanks to the snaps produced by its whip-fast claws. And juvenile snapping shrimp are even faster than their fully grown elders, according to a recent paper published in the Journal of Experimental Biology. Juvenile claws accelerate as fast as a bullet shot from a gun when they snap, essentially setting a new acceleration record for a repeated movement performed underwater.

As we've reported previously, the source of that loud snap is an impressive set of asymmetrically sized claws; the larger of the two produces the snap. Each snap also produces a powerful shockwave that can stun or even kill a small fish. That shockwave produces collapsing bubbles that emit a barely visible flash of light—a rare natural example of sonoluminescence.

Scientists believe that the snapping is used for communication, as well as for hunting. A shrimp on the prowl will hide in a burrow or similar obscured spot, extending antennae to detect any passing fish. When it does, the shrimp emerges from its hiding place, pulls back its claw, and lets loose with a powerful snap, producing the deadly shockwave. It can then pull the stunned prey back into the burrow to feed.

Enlarge / Is the Playdate the most adorable portable console out there? You gotta believe! (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Last April, we enthused that the tiny, yellow Playdate portable game console "earns its $179 price tag" with a unique design and a lineup of free, inventive crank-powered games. Unfortunately, those interested in joining the ranks of 25,000 current Playdate owners will soon have to shell out $20 more to get their hands on this adorable handheld.

The increase to a $199 price is coming "because our factory recently gave us the inevitable news that in 2023, the price of building a single Playdate is going up," Panic (Untitled Goose Game) CEO Cabel Sasser said in a Playdate update stream Tuesday. "Our margins are already surprisingly slim, so although we've absorbed a lot of weird price increases on this weird journey, this is the one we couldn't avoid, and we're truly sorry."

For those who want to avoid the roughly 11 percent price hike, Panic is giving interested customers until April 7 to purchase a Playdate at the current $179 price. Customers still waiting on their preorders (which should all be fulfilled in "early 2023," Panic now says) will not have to pay the higher price.