Month: March 2023

Enlarge / The Pixel Watch. It's a perfect, round little pebble. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

What good is a watch that can't help you keep track of the time? That's a problem the Pixel Watch has been facing recently, with reports of the watch missing alarm times. Google says it has the problem nailed down, though, and that a fix will be out eventually.

Google doesn't explain what the problem is, but it's most likely related to Android's power-saving "Doze" functionality. The Pixel Watch complaints mostly have to do with alarms for the morning, so the watch was in an idle "bedtime mode" for the night, and the right part of the OS isn't awake to know that it's time to set off an alarm. Doze mode is a constant problem for non-Pixel Android phones, which get aggressive sleep settings from manufacturers and frequently miss push notifications. More aggressive power savings on a watch with a tiny 300 mAh battery makes sense, but Google apparently went too far. Most reports of faulty alarms only say that the alarm was delayed by 1–10 minutes, not missed entirely, but that's still annoying and makes it hard to trust the Pixel Watch for important tasks.

The rollout for the fix is a bit strange. First, this announcement is for Google's March 2023 update for the Pixel Watch, but there's not much of "March" left—usually, these come out in the first week of the month—and Google says the update will take a week or two to hit everyone. That still won't fix your alarms, though. You'll also need an update for the clock app, which Google says will arrive via the Play Store "in the coming weeks." Having to change the OS and the app suggests this wasn't a small bug and that Google needed to create a special carve-out specifically for alarms.

Enlarge / AI-generated photo faking Donald Trump's possible arrest, created by Eliot Higgins using Midjourney v5. (credit: @EliotHiggins on Twitter)

As the world waits to see if former President Donald Trump will actually be indicted today over hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels, AI-generated images began circulating on Twitter imagining what that arrest would look like. Showing Trump resisting arrest and being dragged off by police, the realistic but very fake photos have already been viewed by millions.

“Making pictures of Trump getting arrested while waiting for Trump's arrest,” tweeted Eliot Higgins, who is the founder and creative director of Bellingcat, an independent international collective of researchers, investigators, and citizen journalists.

In a tweet, Higgins confirmed that he used the impressively realistic AI engine Midjourney v5 to generate the fake images.

Enlarge / The Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170 makes its wheels-up debut run at the Dodge Last Call Powered by Roadkill Nights Vegas performance festival at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on March 20, 2023. (credit: Dodge)

Dodge has been on something of a farewell tour for its Hemi V8 muscle cars. It has built a series of "last call" versions of the Charger and Challenger, limited editions with callback paint colors and retro liveries that refer to muscle-packed Dodges of old. Now it really is getting ready to end the car design and is doing so with a bang, via the 2023 Challenger SRT Demon 170, a production car so fast it can even show a Tesla Model S Plaid a clean pair of shoes with a 1.66 second 0-60 mph time.

Dodge's engineers have performed quite a bit of work under that bulging "Air-Grabber" hood compared to lesser Demons. There's a new supercharger with a larger throttle body and a pulley that increases boost pressure by 40 percent compared to the Challenger Hellcat Redeye Widebody.

You'll get the best results by feeding it E85 (a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline); on this fuel, the Demon 170 generates an enormous 1,025 hp (764 kW) and 945 lb-ft (1,281 Nm). On the more common E10 fuel, the engine will generate a slightly milder 900 hp (671 kW) and 810 lb-ft (1,098 Nm).

Enlarge / The Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170 makes its wheels-up debut run at the Dodge Last Call Powered by Roadkill Nights Vegas performance festival at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on March 20, 2023. (credit: Dodge)

Dodge has been on something of a farewell tour for its Hemi V8 muscle cars. It has built a series of "last call" versions of the Charger and Challenger, limited editions with callback paint colors and retro liveries that refer to muscle-packed Dodges of old. Now it really is getting ready to end the car design and is doing so with a bang, via the 2023 Challenger SRT Demon 170, a production car so fast it can even show a Tesla Model S Plaid a clean pair of shoes with a 1.66 second 0-60 mph time.

Dodge's engineers have performed quite a bit of work under that bulging "Air-Grabber" hood compared to lesser Demons. There's a new supercharger with a larger throttle body and a pulley that increases boost pressure by 40 percent compared to the Challenger Hellcat Redeye Widebody.

You'll get the best results by feeding it E85 (a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline); on this fuel, the Demon 170 generates an enormous 1,025 hp (764 kW) and 945 lb-ft (1,281 Nm). On the more common E10 fuel, the engine will generate a slightly milder 900 hp (671 kW) and 810 lb-ft (1,098 Nm).

Enlarge / The much-larger-than-2D form of molybdenum disulfide. (credit: RHJ / Getty Images)

Atomically thin materials like graphene are single molecules in which all the chemical bonds are oriented so that the resulting molecule forms a sheet. These often have distinctive electronic properties that can potentially enable the production of electronics with incredibly small features only a couple of atoms thick. And there have been a number of examples of functional hardware being built from these two-dimensional materials.

But almost all the examples so far have used bespoke construction, sometimes involving researchers manipulating individual flakes of material by hand. So we're not at the point where we can mass-manufacture complicated electronics out of these materials. But a paper released today describes a method of doing wafer-scale production of transistors based on two-dimensional materials. And the resulting transistors perform more consistently than those made with more traditional manufacturing approaches.

Better manufacturing

Most of the efforts made toward easing the production of electronics based on atomically thin materials have involved integrating these materials into traditional semiconductor manufacturing techniques. That makes sense because these techniques allow us to perform incredibly fine-scale manipulations of materials at high volumes. Typically, this has meant that much of the metal wiring needed for the electronics is put in place by traditional manufacturing. The 2D material is then layered on top of the metal, and additional processing is done to form functional transistors.

Enlarge / The much-larger-than-2D form of molybdenum disulfide. (credit: RHJ / Getty Images)

Atomically thin materials like graphene are single molecules in which all the chemical bonds are oriented so that the resulting molecule forms a sheet. These often have distinctive electronic properties that can potentially enable the production of electronics with incredibly small features only a couple of atoms thick. And there have been a number of examples of functional hardware being built from these two-dimensional materials.

But almost all the examples so far have used bespoke construction, sometimes involving researchers manipulating individual flakes of material by hand. So we're not at the point where we can mass-manufacture complicated electronics out of these materials. But a paper released today describes a method of doing wafer-scale production of transistors based on two-dimensional materials. And the resulting transistors perform more consistently than those made with more traditional manufacturing approaches.

Better manufacturing

Most of the efforts made toward easing the production of electronics based on atomically thin materials have involved integrating these materials into traditional semiconductor manufacturing techniques. That makes sense because these techniques allow us to perform incredibly fine-scale manipulations of materials at high volumes. Typically, this has meant that much of the metal wiring needed for the electronics is put in place by traditional manufacturing. The 2D material is then layered on top of the metal, and additional processing is done to form functional transistors.