Some of the JPL team posing with the VITAL ventilator. | Image: NASA
From spacecraft to medical craft
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Apple expects to start reopening more of its stores in May, after shutting down locations outside of China due to the coronavirus pandemic. Stores in Australia and Austria could reopen in the next two weeks, Apple CEO Tim Cook told Bloomberg. “A few” stores could reopen in the US in the first half of May as well, Cook added, but “not a large number.”
The decisions will be made location by location, “depending on the circumstances in that particular place,” Cook said. Apple has 458 stores outside of China, according to Bloomberg.
Apple closed all stores outside of Greater China in March and has since said stores will stay closed “until further...
Consumers aren't rushing to buy as many iPhones, iPads, or other Apple products as before the pandemic, but the company's services seem to be doing just fine.
During Thursday's earnings call, Apple disclosed that its services category, which includes the App Store and Apple TV+, hit an all-time revenue record of $13.3 billion for the second quarter.
The company saw strong performance within the App Store (for both downloads and search ads), Apple Music, video, and cloud services. App Store revenue also grew by double digits, as people continue to make in-app purchases and opt into subscriptions. Read more...
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Reddit botched the rollout of a new feature that could have endangered some vulnerable users — and now it is eating crow.
On Wednesday, Reddit announced that it was initiating a limited rollout of a new group chat feature called "Start Chatting" that would allow subreddit members to speak directly with each other in chatrooms. It was originally positioned as a way for Redditors to connect with people during COVID-19 social distancing.
The problem? Not only was there no way for communities to opt out of the feature, but moderators also would not be able to, well, moderate them. In the over 1,500 comments to the original announcement, many mods quickly pointed out that this made the chat function ripe for abuse by trolls. Read more...
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Disney’s live-action remakes are on a roll, and news of yet another project broke today: a version of the 1997 Hercules movie, produced (but not directed) by Joe and Anthony Russo of Marvel’s Avengers fame, via The Hollywood Reporter.
Also attached to the project is Dave Callaham, who worked on The Expendables films, wrote the screenplay for the upcoming Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and worked as a co-writer on Wonder Woman 1984.
The original 1997 movie is extremely loosely based on the Greek myth of Heracles, and sees the young Hercules — the son of Zeus — exiled from Mount Olympus due to the nefarious machinations of the god of the underworld, Hades. While stuck on Earth as a mortal, the demigod Hercules still retains...
The Great Toilet Paper Famine of 2020 might just be changing the future of U.S. homes — or at least their bathrooms.
Bidets have never really caught on in America. When people hear bidet, they either think Europe or extra: Really nice foreign hotels, rich people's houses in movies, or Marie Antoinette's pre-toilet paper chambers.
But when coronavirus fears made trips to the grocery store complicated, people started preparing for the worst. Toilet paper sections in stores and online were barren for weeks. Though stock has somewhat replenished since then, realizing mid-pee that the roll beside you is empty still brings a whole new level of anxiety. Read more...
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Brondell Swash 1400Every trip to the toilet can be customized with this luxury bidet's slew of settings on a wireless remote.
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Toto Washlet C200The internet stans the Toto Washlet C200 for its sweet balance of price and features, including pre-mist.
BEST BIDET ATTACHMENT
Tushy ClassicBidets are much less intimidating thanks to Tushy's one-knob attachment and awesome social media presence.
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CleanSpa Handheld Bidet Sprayer by BrondellNo unscrewing or measuring is needed for Brondell's no-fuss handheld sprayer, which offers decent stream consistency.
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Brondell Swash 300People who hate cold toilet seats will be psyched to find an affordable bidet with four temperature settings.
BEST PORTABLE BIDET
Tushy TravelStay squeaky clean when you're away from home with Tushy's stealthy, collapsible travel bidet.
Entertainment reporter Proma Khosla breaks down why "Never Have I Ever" is one of Netflix's best teen offerings to date. Read more...
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Microsoft is opening up free registrations for its Build 2020 developer event. It’s typically one of Microsoft’s biggest events of the year, but the software maker is doing things differently this time around. The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has forced Microsoft to entirely rethink the event, but instead of canceling, it’s bringing it online free for anyone to register.
That means developers will no longer have to pay the $2,395 entry fee that’s typically associated with Build, and there will still be lots of content available streamed free of charge. Microsoft is keeping some of its traditional keynote-style openings, with opening remarks from CEO Satya Nadella. While Build typically delivers a range of Microsoft news, the company has...
Remember how Reddit announced just yesterday that it was introducing built-in subreddit chat rooms? Yeah, never mind on that.
Alex Le, Reddit’s vice president of product and community, said on Thursday in multiple comments that the feature has been “rolled back 100%.” Le said that the platform “made several errors” in the process of releasing the function (called “Start Chatting”) and apologized for the confusion the rollout caused. One bug, in particular, caused the button to appear on all subreddits, even in the event it didn’t do anything when clicked or tapped.
“If you dismiss the banner in 3 communities where the feature is active on desktop web or android, then the small button you’re seeing appears on all communities. But...
Take the shy nerd meets sweet jock dynamic of To All the Boys I've Loved Before, combine it with the sexual self-discovery of Alex Strangelove and the Cyrano-inspired plotting of Sierra Burgess Is a Loser, add just a dash of the economic anxiety of The Perfect Date, and you might end up with something kinda sorta exactly like The Half of It.
For the latest entry in Netflix's original teen rom com canon, that familiarity is a good thing and a bad thingThe Half of It delivers on the charms we've come to expect from these films — the mostly unknown but instantly lovable leads, the warm and fuzzy chemistry between them, the bizarre fixation on handwritten notes by modern-day teenagers. Read more...
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Americans are returning to the Moon in 2024, which means NASA's already planning for what it needs to get astronauts safely there.
On Thursday, the space agency announced that three U.S. partners will coordinate to deliver human landing system concepts for the lunar mission known as the Artemis program. That mission, which aims to land the first woman on the Moon, will help the agency to prepare for an eventual Mars trip.
SpaceX, Elon Musk's space transportation company, and Blue Origin, founded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, were selected along with Dynetics, an Alabama-based company known for its reusable air systems. Read more...
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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Amazon expects to spend $4 billion or more — the predicted operating profit for the company’s entire coming quarter — just on COVID-19-related expenses. In a quarterly earnings release today, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said the expenses will come from spending on personal protective equipment (PPE), cleaning for facilities, “higher wages for hourly teams,” and expanding its own COVID-19 testing capabilities.
Many of the changes have been put in place already and came in response to pressure over treatment of workers during the pandemic. Amazon is under fire for its handling of employees who have publicly criticized working conditions; it fired six tech employees who took a sick day in protest of Amazon’s treatment of workers, and there has...
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla — the new viking-based iteration of the popular franchise — will support Microsoft’s upcoming Smart Delivery program for cross-generation games between the Xbox Series X and Xbox One, in one of the most encouraging signs of cross-generation gaming yet for the upcoming console.
Smart Delivery is what Microsoft calls its free upgrade program for the Xbox Series X that automatically upgrades owners who own the Xbox One version of the game to the Xbox Series X version for free. (It also works the other way — buy the Xbox Series X version, and you’ll get the Xbox One version.) Effectively, it means that players will only ever need to buy a Smart Delivery game once, instead of buying separate copies to be able to...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) sent a letter today to Google, YouTube, and Twitter urging the platforms to explicitly notify users when they’ve engaged with misinformation about the coronavirus.
Schiff wrote to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, saying it’s not enough to remove or downgrade harmful or misleading content about the pandemic, but that it’s critical to ensure that users who saw the content have access to correct information as well.
“Though the best protection is removing or downgrading harmful content before users engage with it, that is not always possible,” Schiff wrote in his letter to Pichai and Wojcicki. “As you are likely aware, Facebook recently announced plans to display...
I got through two weeks in isolation thanks to a 700-page book of Jewish folklore my fiancée’s father gave me
Elon Musk is having a rough 24 hours, and if his Twitter followers don't like it, then they can just get bent.
The Tesla CEO made waves late last night for a bizarre rant about "freedom," only to completely melt down during a Wednesday Tesla earnings call when asked about Bay Area shelter-in-place orders.
Musk's appetite for self-righteousness apparently wasn't sated, however, and following the call he hopped on Twitter to tell his 33.4 million followers that if they didn't like his misrepresentation of facts then they should get lost.
Notably, Musk claimed incorrectly (among other things) that Bay Area officials are "forcibly imprisoning people in their homes." To be clear, they are not. Read more...
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It probably comes as a shock to no one that people are using Facebook and its additional social media platforms more than ever while under lockdown.
During Wednesday's earnings call, the company announced it's seen a huge spike in its monthly active users with a 10 percent year over year increase.
On the call, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that for the first time ever more than three billion people have been using Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Messenger each month.
This includes 2.6 billion people using Facebook alone and more than 2.3 billion people using at least one of its services each day. Read more...
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Quarantine + addictive dance videos = app domination.
TikTok has surpassed 2 billion downloads, mobile app analytics company Sensor Tower reported Wednesday. (April 29). The 315 million installs it gained in Q1 of 2020 alone also reportedly give it the title of "most downloads for any app ever in a quarter."
Mashable has reached out to TikTok to confirm Sensor Tower's data, and will update this story if and when we hear back.
Sensor Tower is attributing the burst in downloads at least in part to the global pandemic. While it notes that TikTok has been consistently on the rise, Sensor Tower views the spike in downloads over the last two months as a consequence of people being confined to their homes and, frankly, bored. Read more...
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Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge
Microsoft says more than 10 million people now subscribe to Xbox Game Pass, its subscription service offering access to a growing selection of PC and Xbox Games. The service launched in 2017 with more than 100 Xbox games for $9.99 per month. Recently, Microsoft began launching a PC version of the service, which is currently available at an introductory price of $4.99 per month. Microsoft also offers a bundled subscription that includes access to both Xbox games, PC games, and Xbox Live for $14.99 per month.
The statistics came as part of Microsoft’s Q3 2020 earnings report this afternoon, and it’s the first time we’ve seen Xbox Game Pass numbers. Microsoft says that gaming in particular “benefited from increased engagement” due to...
Reddit is introducing a new chat room tool, in a throwback to the old days of the internet when those were a thing. The feature, called “Start Chatting,” will randomly sort users of popular subreddits into small, private group chats. Reddit says the feature is rolling out to around 16,000 SFW subreddits this week.
To use the feature, you’ll want to visit a popular subreddit that has the feature enabled. You’ll see a button labeled “Start Chatting” beneath the community’s description.
Click that, and you’ll be randomly matched with a small group of up to seven other users who are also in the subreddit. The group will be entered into a chat room for private discussion and meme-ing.
Reddit isn’t the only...
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft said last month that Teams usage had grown to 44 million daily active users during the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s now jumped another 70 percent. During an investor call today, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed that Teams usage has increased to more than 75 million daily active users.
Nadella also provided a new statistic for Teams usage: Microsoft saw 200 million meeting participants in a single day this month. That’s a statistic that Zoom has been using to detail its own impressive growth, and Zoom noted 300 million meeting participants earlier this month.
Zoom has confused the comparisons, though. Zoom originally stated it had “more than 300 million daily users”...
With most people sheltering at home during this pandemic, ride-hailing apps aren't getting much use these days. This initially translated into quickly declining revenue for companies like Uber and Lyft, but now, more than a month into the coronavirus pandemic, both are announcing layoffs.
Uber and Lyft are very much feeling the effects of social distancing measures to combat the coronavirus outbreak. On Wednesday, San Francisco-based Lyft put out a filing through the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission about a 17-percent workforce cut. That amounts to about 982 workers, a figure which doesn't involve any independently contracted drivers. In another cost-savings effort, roughly 288 additional employees were furloughed and all remaining salaried employees will see a range of cuts applied to their base pay for 12 weeks starting next month. Read more...
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The ThinkPad mouse nub — i.e., the TrackPoint — is a controversial piece of technology. People tend to either despise the red dot-shaped substitute for a real mouse, or adore it as the single best mouse solution around. For those in the second camp is Lenovo’s new $99 ThinkPad TrackPoint Keyboard II, an updated version of its old wireless keyboard that lets you use that good TrackPoint nub UI with your desktop computer.
The TrackPoint II — which was announced at CES, but goes on sale today — is pretty similar to the old ThinkPad Compact Bluetooth Keyboard with TrackPoint model, albeit with a new design that’s based on the more modern ThinkPad X1’s keyboard design and layout.
Unlike the old model, though, the TrackPoint II only offers...
Have you struggled to unlock your iPhone while wearing a face mask?
Well, Apple will soon have a fix for that. Sort of.
On Wednesday, developers enrolled in the Apple Developer Program noticed an interesting change in the new iOS 13.5 beta 3 release that will be quite helpful during the coronavirus pandemic: users can now input their passcode on the first unlock screen if they are wearing a mask.
As pointed out by @Sonikku_a2, if you’re wearing a mask, iOS 13.5 goes straight to the passcode screen if you try to unlock with Face ID (keypad not shown because iOS hides it in screen recordings) pic.twitter.com/bQCzu5u20p
— Guilherme Rambo (@_inside) April 29, 2020 Read more...
