Month: June 2024

Enlarge (credit: gmast3r | iStock / Getty Images Plus)

After the most downloaded local news app in the US, NewsBreak, shared an AI-generated story about a fake New Jersey shooting last Christmas Eve, New Jersey police had to post a statement online to reassure troubled citizens that the story was "entirely false," Reuters reported.

"Nothing even similar to this story occurred on or around Christmas, or even in recent memory for the area they described," the cops' Facebook post said. "It seems this 'news' outlet's AI writes fiction they have no problem publishing to readers."

It took NewsBreak—which attracts over 50 million monthly users—four days to remove the fake shooting story, and it apparently wasn't an isolated incident. According to Reuters, NewsBreak's AI tool, which scrapes the web and helps rewrite local news stories, has been used to publish at least 40 misleading or erroneous stories since 2021.

Enlarge / Oral-B released the Guide in 2020, making promises of Alexa-powered convenience, which it ended in 2022. (credit: P&G)

As we’re currently seeing with AI, when a new technology becomes buzzy, companies will do almost anything to cram that tech into their products. Trends fade, however, and corporate priorities shift—resulting in bricked gadgets and buyer's remorse.

That’s what's happening to some who bought into Oral-B toothbrushes with Amazon Alexa built in. Oral-B released the Guide for $230 in August 2020 but bricked the ability to set up or reconfigure Alexa on the product this February. As of this writing, the Guide is still available through a third-party Amazon seller.

Oral-B debuted the Guide by highlighting its Alexa features. (credit: P&G)

The Guide toothbrush's charging base was able to connect to the Internet and work like an Alexa speaker that you could speak to and from which Alexa could respond. Owners could “ask to play music, hear the news, check weather, control smart home devices, and even order more brush heads by saying, ‘Alexa, order Oral-B brush head replacements,'” per Procter & Gamble's 2020 announcement.

Enlarge / A slowly rotating neutron star is still our best guess as to the source of the mystery signals. (credit: Nazarii Neshcherenskyi)

Roughly a year ago, astronomers announced that they had observed an object that shouldn't exist. Like a pulsar, it emitted regularly timed bursts of radio emissions. But unlike a pulsar, those bursts were separated by over 20 minutes. If the 22 minute gap between bursts represents the rotation period of the object, then it is rotating too slowly to produce radio emissions by any known mechanism.

Now, some of the same team (along with new collaborators) are back with the discovery of something that, if anything, is acting even more oddly. The new source of radio bursts, ASKAP J193505.1+214841.0, takes nearly an hour between bursts. And it appears to have three different settings, sometimes producing weaker bursts and sometimes skipping them entirely. While the researchers suspect that, like pulsars, this is also powered by a neutron star, it's not even clear that it's the same class of object as their earlier discovery.

How pulsars pulse

Contrary to the section heading, pulsars don't actually pulse. Neutron stars can create the illusion by having magnetic poles that aren't lined up with their rotational pole. The magnetic poles are a source of constant radio emissions but, as the neutron star rotates, the emissions from the magnetic pole sweep across space in a manner similar to the light from a rotating lighthouse. If Earth happens to be caught up in that sweep, then the neutron star will appear to blink on and off as it rotates.

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  The Motorola Edge 2024. [credit: Motorola ]

Motorola's newest phone is the Motorola Edge 2024. This is a mid-range phone with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 2. It costs $550 and will be in stores June 20. Every Motorola phone nowadays looks exactly the same, but Motorola assures us this is new.

The Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 is the bottom of Qualcomm's "7 series" lineup and features four Cortex-A78 cores and four Cortex-A55 cores built on a 4 nm manufacturing process. The phone has a 144 Hz, 6.6-inch 2400×1080 OLED panel with curved sides. It has 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, a 5000 mAh battery, 68 W wired charging, and 15 W wireless charging. Cameras include a mid-range 50 MP Sony "LYTIA" 700C, 13 MP wide-angle, and a 32 MP front camera. The phone has NFC, Wi-Fi 6E, an in-screen fingerprint reader, and—a big addition compared to other Motorola devices—an IP68 rating for dust and water resistance.

Just like on the Moto G Stylus, this phone has a "vegan leather" back option that should be softer than the usual plastic, but it's still plastic. Unlike that phone, there's no headphone jack or MicroSD slot. A customizable hardware button on the left side of the phone lets you open the Google Assistant or whatever other app you choose.

Enlarge / "It got more attention than last year, and the development feels steadier, faster, and safer," said Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda when asked how the hydrogen-powered Corolla had improved from 2023. (credit: Toyota)

A couple of weekends ago, when most of the world's motorsport attention was focused on Monaco and Indianapolis, Toyota President Akio "Morizo" Toyoda was taking part in the Super Taikyu Fuji 24 Hours at Fuji Speedway in Japan. Automotive executives racing their own products is not exactly unheard of, but few instances have been quite as unexpected as competing in endurance races with a hydrogen-burning Corolla.

A hydrogen-powered Toyota has shown up for the past few years, in fact, as the company uses the race track to learn new things about thermal efficiency that it says have benefitted its latest generation of internal-combustion engines, which it debuted to the public at the end of May.

With backing from its government, the Japanese auto industry has continued to explore hydrogen as an alternative vehicle energy source instead of liquid hydrocarbons or batteries. Commercially, that's been in the form of hydrogen fuel cells, although with very little success among drivers, even in areas that have some hydrogen fueling infrastructure.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto /)

Canada has ordered large online streaming services to pay 5 percent of their Canadian revenue to the government in a program expected to raise $200 million per year to support local news and other home-grown content. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) announced its decision yesterday after a public comment period.

"Based on the public record, the CRTC is requiring online streaming services to contribute 5 percent of their Canadian revenues to support the Canadian broadcasting system. These obligations will start in the 2024–2025 broadcast year and will provide an estimated $200 million per year in new funding," the regulator said.

The fees apply to both video and music streaming services. The CRTC imposed the rules despite opposition from Amazon, Apple, Disney, Google, Netflix, Paramount, and Spotify.