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US automakers at risk of becoming niche manufacturers
Auto experts say old-line companies risk becoming obsolete if they don’t learn how to make appealing, profitable electric vehicles, which most executives expect to eventually replace cars that run on gasoline despite the Trump’s administration efforts to promote fossil fuels. Improvements in electric vehicle technology mean that, within a few years, they will be cheaper to buy and will charge in 15 minutes or less.
One of the biggest problems established manufacturers have is that many of the electric models they sell have fared poorly against cars from Tesla and other newer companies.
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Light exposure affects heart disease chances
A study that came out last year: light exposure affects heart disease chances.
Question Is personal light exposure at night associated with cardiovascular disease incidence?
Findings In this cohort study of 88 905 adults aged older than 40 years, exposure to brighter light at night was associated with higher risks of coronary artery disease, myocardial infarction, heart failure, atrial fibrillation, and stroke, independent of established cardiovascular risk factors.
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The kids are discovering iPods
Over the next two decades, Apple released more than 20 versions of the iPod, with some capable of storing tens of thousands of songs and others costing as little as $49. The company eventually pulled back on the device as it focused on the iPhone. As of 2022, the iPod’s final year, Apple had sold an estimated 450 million.
Apple declined to comment.
The resurgence of the iPod is a sign that “people want digital that’s not connected, but not necessarily analog,” said Tony Fadell, a former Apple executive who helped create the iPod. If the choice is “1,000 songs in my pocket, or unlimited songs in my pocket and 1,000 notifications every hour,” people don’t want the latter, he added.
“Apple should just bring them back — not the same way,” Mr. Fadell said. “I would do it differently. I would make it modern for the modern age.”
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The practicalities of having a robot in your house
“We basically created an algorithm for emotional intelligence,” he said.
“How does it work?” a woman in the group asked.
Skuler explained that one of his first realizations was that, unlike most other A.I. models, the robot needed to be proactive. If it wanted to build deep, reciprocal, human relationships, it wasn’t enough to simply respond to commands. It had to anticipate a person’s needs and then act with agency.
“But that opened up a whole new can of worms,” Skuler said. “How do you decide the right moment to engage someone without being annoying? How do you start talking in a way that makes them likely to respond?”
Math. A lot more math.
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Acme Weather
The folks who designed the Dark Sky weather app, created a new weather application – Acme Weather. The focus this time centered around the uncertainty of a weather forecast, and how to communicate that.
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Farmers aren’t selling out to data centers
More than a dozen of her neighbors received the same knock. Searching public records for answers, they discovered that a new customer had applied for a 2.2 gigawatt project from the local power plant, nearly double its annual generation capacity.
The unknown company was building a datacenter.
“You don’t have enough to buy me out. I’m not for sale. Leave me alone, I’m satisfied,” Huddleston, 82, later told the men.
As tech companies race to build the massive datacenters needed to power artificial intelligence across the US and the world, bids like the one for Huddleston’s land are appearing on rural doorsteps nationwide. Globally, 40,000 acres of powered land – real estate prepped for datacenter development – are projected to be needed for new projects over the next five years, double the amount currently in use.
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Rodger Sherman gives a Para-Olympics primer
What makes Rodger Sherman a great sports writer is how he can convey not only his enthusiasm for a sport but what makes it interesting and exciting. The Para Olympics start this weekend, and he has an excellent overview, explaining how certain events – visually impaired skiing – work.
There’s going to be BLIND people skiing down a mountain?
Yes, there are visually impaired events in all four alpine skiing categories. The visually impaired athletes ski down the mountain with a guide ahead of them, giving audio instructions through a Bluetooth headset
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Chocolate isn’t what it used to be
Chocolate, at least in the United States, is becoming more of a flavor than an ingredient. That’s because the major companies are cutting costs and making chocolate products that taste like chocolate to some degree, however, are making a worse product.
From a consumer perspective, there are few things that portend a worse outcome than a company knowingly making its product worse in order to save a few bucks, and finding out that just as many customers will still buy it anyway. This scenario, in a nutshell (beanshell?) has been the dominant story in the world of chocolate for the last few years, with the enshittification of the entire segment the end result of crop failures and cocoa bean scarcity that sent the price of cocoa soaring to stratospheric heights in 2024 and 2025. More recently, those prices have steadily come back down to Earth, but guess what hasn’t changed back to how it was before? The chocolate. In fact, many of the world’s biggest sellers of chocolate-dependent treats are instead pushing forward on the embrace of cheaper replacements, increasingly convinced of the fact that consumers simply don’t know enough to notice or care. And they’re probably right.
