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Trek CarBack bike radar lets you know when cars are approaching
Trek takes on the Garmin Varia with its new CarBack bike radar.
“Car back!”
If you’ve ever been on a group bike ride, you’ve no doubt heard these two words shouted by a nearby rider. It’s also the name of Trek’s new bike radar.
For safety-conscious cyclists, bike radars have been a game-changer. Usually mounted on the seat post, the radar units alert cyclists to cars approaching from behind. While they will work on any bike on any road, bike radar is most useful in suburban and rural settings. After all, if you’re doing some urban bike commuting, you’ll just assume cars are behind you because that’s how it is. But on more open roads with higher speed limits or free-flowing traffic, bike radars are fantastic.
Remains of Andrew “Sandy” Irvine found on Everest
A longstanding mystery is finally solved 100 years after mountaineer’s disappearance.
In June 1924, a British mountaineer named George Leigh Mallory and a young engineering student named Andrew “Sandy” Irvine set off for the summit of Mount Everest and disappeared—two more casualties of a peak that has claimed over 300 lives to date. Mallory’s body was found in 1999, but Irvine’s was never found—until now. An expedition led by National Geographic Explorer and professional climber Jimmy Chin—who won an Oscar for the 2019 documentary Free Solo, which he co-directed—has located a boot and a sock marked with Irvine’s initials at a lower altitude than where Mallory’s body had been found.
The team took a DNA sample from the remains, and members of the Irvine family have volunteered to compare DNA test results to confirm the identification. “It’s an object that belonged to him and has a bit of him in it,” Irvine’s great-niece Julie Summers told National Geographic. “It tells the whole story about what probably happened. I’m regarding it as something close to closure.”
As previously reported, Mallory is the man credited with uttering the famous line “because it’s there” in response to a question about why he would risk his life repeatedly to summit Everest. Mallory had already been to the mountain twice before the 1924 expedition: once in 1921 as part of a reconnaissance expedition to produce the first accurate maps of the region and again in 1922. He was forced to turn back on all three attempts.
Are Tesla’s robot prototypes AI marvels or remote-controlled toys?
Partying robots spark debate about accuracy of Musk’s “biggest product ever of any kind” vision.
Two years ago, Tesla’s Optimus prototype was an underwhelming mess of exposed wires that could only operate in a carefully controlled stage presentation. Last night, Tesla’s “We, Robot” event featured much more advanced Optimus prototypes that could walk around without tethers and interact directly with partygoers.
It was an impressive demonstration of the advancement of a technology Tesla’s Elon Musk said he thinks “will be the biggest product ever of any kind” (way to set reasonable expectations, there). But the live demos have also set off a firestorm of discussion over just how autonomous these Optimus robots currently are.
A robot in every garage
Before the human/robot party could get started, Musk introduced the humanoid Optimus robots as a logical extension of some of the technology that Tesla uses in its cars, from batteries and motors to software. “It’s just a robot with arms and legs instead of a robot with wheels,” Musk said breezily, easily underselling the huge differences between human-like movements and a car’s much more limited input options.
Rare bear meat at gathering gives 10 people a scare—and parasitic worms
These roundworms have the potential to invade your brain.
If you’re going to eat a bear, make sure it’s not rare.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that once the beast has been subdued, all danger has passed. But you might still be in for a scare. The animal’s flesh can be riddled with encased worm larvae, which, upon being eaten, will gladly reproduce in your innards and let their offspring roam the rest of your person, including invading your brain and heart. To defeat these savage squirmers, all one must do is cook the meat to at least 165° Fahrenheit.
But that simple solution continues to be ignored, according to a report today in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. In this week’s issue, health officials in North Carolina report that rare bear meat was served at a November 23 gathering, where at least 22 people ate the meat and at least 10 developed symptoms of a worm infection. Of the 10, six were kids and teens between the ages of 10 and 18.
AMD unveils powerful new AI chip to challenge Nvidia
AMD CEO Lisa Su on the MI325X: “This is the beginning, not the end of the AI race.”
On Thursday, AMD announced its new MI325X AI accelerator chip, which is set to roll out to data center customers in the fourth quarter of this year. At an event hosted in San Francisco, the company claimed the new chip offers “industry-leading” performance compared to Nvidia’s current H200 GPUs, which are widely used in data centers to power AI applications such as ChatGPT.
With its new chip, AMD hopes to narrow the performance gap with Nvidia in the AI processor market. The Santa Clara-based company also revealed plans for its next-generation MI350 chip, which is positioned as a head-to-head competitor of Nvidia’s new Blackwell system, with an expected shipping date in the second half of 2025.
In an interview with the Financial Times, AMD CEO Lisa Su expressed her ambition for AMD to become the “end-to-end” AI leader over the next decade. “This is the beginning, not the end of the AI race,” she told the publication.
Xbox plans to set up shop on Android devices if court order holds
Google has already said it plans to appeal the ruling that would let Xbox in.
After a US court ruled earlier this week that Google must open its Play Store to provide more download and payment options, Microsoft is moving quickly to slide into this slightly ajar door.
Sarah Bond, president of Xbox, posted on X (formerly Twitter) Thursday evening that the ruling “will allow more choice and flexibility.” “Our mission is to allow more players to play on more devices so we are thrilled to share that starting in November, players will be able to play and purchase Xbox games directly from the Xbox App on Android,” Bond wrote.
Because the court order requires Google to stop forcing apps to use its own billing system and allow for third-party app stores inside Google Play itself, Microsoft now intends to offer Xbox games directly through its app. Most games will likely not run directly on Android, but a revamped Xbox Android app could also directly stream purchased or subscribed games to Android devices.
Eleven things to know about in the Windows 11 2024 Update
A look at some of the changes and odds and ends in this year’s Windows release.
The Windows 11 2024 Update, also known as Windows 11 24H2, started rolling out last week. Your PC may have even installed it already!
The continuous feature development of Windows 11 (and Microsoft’s phased update rollouts) can make it a bit hard to track exactly what features you can expect to be available on any given Windows PC, even if it seems like it’s fully up to date.
This isn’t a comprehensive record of all the changes in the 2024 Update, and it doesn’t reiterate some basic but important things like Wi-Fi 7 or 80Gbps USB4 support. But we’ve put together a small list of new and interesting changes that you’re guaranteed to see when your version number rolls over from 22H2 or 23H2 to 24H2. And while Microsoft’s announcement post spent most of its time on Copilot and features unique to Copilot+ PCs, here, we’ll only cover things that will be available on any PC you install Windows 11 on (whether it’s officially supported or not).
Rocket Report: ULA investigating SRB anomaly; Europa Clipper is ready to fly
US Space Force payloads will ride on the first flight of Impulse Space’s cryogenic space tug.
Welcome to Edition 7.15 of the Rocket Report! It’s a big week for big rockets, with SpaceX potentially launching its next Starship test flight and a Falcon Heavy rocket with NASA’s Europa Clipper mission this weekend. And a week ago, United Launch Alliance flew its second Vulcan rocket, which lost one of its booster nozzles in midair and amazingly kept going to achieve a successful mission. Are you not entertained?
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
PLD Space is aiming high. Spanish launch provider PLD Space has revealed a family of new rockets that it plans to introduce beyond its Miura 5 rocket, which is expected to make its inaugural flight in 2025, European Spaceflight reports. The company also revealed that it was working on a crew capsule called Lince (Spanish for Lynx). PLD Space introduced its Miura Next, Miura Next Heavy, and Miura Next Super Heavy launch vehicles, designed in single stick, triple core, and quintuple core configurations with reusable boosters. At the high end of of the rocket family’s performance, the Miura Next Super Heavy could deliver up to 53 metric tons (nearly 117,000 pounds) of payload to low-Earth orbit. The Lince capsule could become Europe’s first human-rated crew transportation spacecraft.
Intel’s Core Ultra 200S CPUs are its biggest desktop refresh in three years
CPUs bring Core Ultra features to desktops, with similar performance caveats.
Intel’s 14th-generation desktop processors were a mild update on top of a mild update: a barely faster revision of the 13th-gen Core CPUs, which were themselves a modest tweak to 2021’s 12th-gen Core processors. The new Core Ultra CPUs (and their underlying architectural changes) were exclusive to laptops.
Today, that changes: The Core Ultra 200S processors (codenamed Arrow Lake) will bring to desktops many of the changes Intel has made to its Core Ultra 100- and 200-series laptop CPUs (Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake, respectively). Changes include a new chiplet-based design, new manufacturing technologies, updated CPU and GPU architectures, and a neural processing unit (NPU) for accelerating some AI and machine learning workloads.
All of the new processors launch on October 24th.
Breakdancers at risk for “headspin hole,” doctors warn
Headspin power move is showy but can lead to hair loss, inflammation, and bulging scalp.
Breakdancing has become a global phenomenon since it first emerged in the 1970s, even making its debut as an official event at this year’s Summer Olympics. But hardcore breakers are prone to injury (sprains, strains, tendonitis), including a bizarre condition known as “headspin hole” or “breakdance bulge”—a protruding lump on the scalp caused by repeatedly performing the power move known as a headspin. A new paper published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) describes one such case that required surgery to redress.
According to the authors, there are very few published papers about the phenomenon; they cite two in particular. A 2009 German study of 106 breakdancers found that 60.4 percent of them experienced overuse injuries to the scalp because of headspins, with 31.1 percent of those cases reporting hair loss, 23.6 percent developing head bumps, and 36.8 percent experiencing scalp inflammation. A 2023 study of 142 breakdancers reported those who practiced headspins more than three times a week were much more likely to suffer hair loss.
So when a male breakdancer in his early 30s sought treatment for a pronounced bump on top of his head, Mikkal Bundgaard Skotting and Christian Baastrup Søndergaard of Copenhagen University Hospital in Denmark seized the opportunity to describe the clinical case study in detail, taking an MRI, surgically removing the growth, and analyzing the removed mass.