Month: September 2023

Enlarge / Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella formally announces the ready-for-the-public version of Copilot. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

NEW YORK—Microsoft will be releasing its next major Windows update with "over 150 new features" later this month, the company announced in a presentation today. The update furthers Microsoft's crusade to tuck generative AI into all of its products, though, as usual, it makes a ton of smaller iterative changes to the OS and its apps.

Microsoft says these new features "start becoming available September 26," which could mean that some are available on that day and others are available later. It could also be a reference to Microsoft's standard practice of rolling major Windows updates out to smaller groups of users first, checking for problems, and expanding the rollout to larger groups afterward.

Curiously, Microsoft says this version of Windows will still be called "22H2," where we'd normally expect it to be released as the 23H2 update. Microsoft hasn't formally announced any changes to its "annual feature update cadence," though these days, it seems to run counter to the company's "release new features whenever they're ready and we feel like doing it" policy.

Enlarge / Jaguar is the latest automaker to negotiate a switch from the Combined Charging Standard to the North American Charging Standard. (credit: Jaguar)

The North American Charging Standard has another new convert. On Thursday, Jaguar announced that it's the latest automaker to decide to change its charger plugs on its battery electric vehicles to the Tesla-style NACS port, securing all-important access to the Tesla Supercharger network in the process. As with all the other NACS announcements we've seen since May, when Ford went first and opened the floodgates, native NACS ports will appear on Jaguars in 2025.

Coincidentally, that's when the next new electric Jaguar will appear, too. The British brand was an early entrant to the long-range electric vehicle segment with the I-Pace, a bespoke BEV that wowed road testers in 2018. But despite a big order from Waymo to use I-Paces as robotaxis, the I-Pace's relatively small interior and high purchase price put off potential private customers, making it a relatively rare sight on North American roads outside of the Bay Area.

The I-Pace got a mild midlife refresh at the beginning of this year, but it remains the sole EV in Jaguar's lineup for now. We were supposed to see an electric replacement for the venerable Jaguar XJ sedan, and development of the car was at an advanced stage when it was suddenly canceled in 2021, mere months from its debut.

Enlarge / Ian Madrigal, dressed as the Monopoly Man, outside federal court on the first day of the Justice Department's antitrust trial against Google. (credit: Win McNamee / Staff | Getty Images North America)

The third week of the Department of Justice's antitrust trial probing Google's search business kicked off this week with a small win for public access to the trial's secretive proceedings. Yesterday, judge Amit Mehta ruled that at the end of each day, trial documents can be posted online, Bloomberg reported, promising public access "as soon" as possible to trial documents—including likely one email that Google considered "embarrassing."

Mehta's ruling ended a week of confusion and public outcry after the judge last week hastily ordered the DOJ to remove public exhibits from a website sharing updates from the trial.

Much of the trial is already blocked from public view—with documents heavily redacted and hours of testimony sealed. Nearly two-thirds of Google's responses and motions in the case have been sealed, The New York Times estimated.

Enlarge (credit: Cathy Scola via Getty Images)

From breakfast cereals and protein bars to flavored yogurt and frozen pizzas, ultraprocessed foods are everywhere, filling aisle upon aisle at the supermarket. Fully 58 percent of the calories consumed by adults and 67 percent of those consumed by children in the United States are made up of these highly palatable foodstuffs with their highly manipulated ingredients.

And ultraprocessed foods are not just filling our plates; they’re also taking up more and more space in global conversations about public health and nutrition. In the last decade or so, researchers have ramped up efforts to define ultraprocessed foods and to probe how their consumption correlates to health: A wave of recent studies have linked the foods to heightened risk for conditions ranging from cardiovascular disease and cancer to obesity and depression.

Still, some researchers—and perhaps unsurprisingly, industry representatives—question the strength of the evidence against ultraprocessed foods. The category is too poorly defined and the studies too circumstantial, they say. Plus, labeling such a large portion of our grocery carts as unhealthy ignores the benefits of industrial food processing in making food affordable, safe from foodborne pathogens, easy to prepare and in some cases more sustainable—such as through the development of plant-derived products designed to replace meat and milk.