Technology

Electric boat startup Arc revealed new images and a video of the pre-production version of the Arc One, a 24-foot-long vessel with a massive battery pack and an elegant design. The company has raised $30 million from a group of prominent investors that include Will Smith, Kevin Durant, and Sean “Diddy” Combs. The company has already tested an early prototype, and the reveal of its pre-production version is meant to send the signal that the company is getting closer to customer deliveries, which are on schedule for this summer. Grid View The specs of the Arc One have changed slightly since the company first came out of stealth last year. The boat will still have a top speed of around 40 miles per hour and can last about four hours under power before needing to be recharged — which the start...

Spotify has closed its office in Russia and removed content from Kremlin-backed outlets RT and Sputnik, Variety reports. In addition, it’s also restricting the discoverability of content from other outlets affiliated with the Russian government. Reuters reports that RT and Sputnik’s content has been removed in several markets including the United States and European Union, but not in Russia itself. In total, Spotify says it’s reviewed thousands of pieces of content since the start of the war. Closing Spotify’s Russian office means that the company is no longer in compliance with a Russian law from July 2021 which obliges foreign social media companies with over 500,000 daily users to have a local office in the country. Failing to comply means these services can face restrictions up to and ...

One promised benefit of the Apple Watch is early detection of a heart condition called atrial fibrillation, a type of irregular heart rhythm. But most people who wear the watch are in a demographic that wouldn’t actually be able to do much with that information, according to a new study — most doctors wouldn’t prescribe them the medication usually given for that condition, which is usually detected in older people. Getting an alert about a heart rhythm, then, doesn’t help the typical Apple Watch user’s overall health, says study author Josh Pevnick, co-director in the division of informatics at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. “It can cause anxiety for people who it identifies, and if there’s no treatment, then you’re maybe not bringing much benefit,” he says. Most research on t...

Amazon is closing most of its physical stores, the company announced today, with all 68 of its Amazon Books, Amazon 4-Star, and Amazon Pop Up locations across the US and the UK set to close while the company refocuses on its grocery and fashion stores, Reuters reports. Amazon Books was one of the primarily online storefront’s first physical retail experiences when the first location opened in Seattle in 2015. Amazon has since expanded to 24 bookstores across the US, all of which are now slated to be closed down. Amazon is ending most of its retail experiments to focus on grocery stores The company would go on to expand its retail efforts with Amazon 4-Star in 2018, with a more generally focused store that sold products with a four-star or higher rating curated from Amazon’s digital storefr...

HBO Max is adding more sports coverage to its programming slate. Turner Sports, an arm of WarnerMedia, has reached a deal with the US Soccer Federation to air matches exclusively on TNT, TBS, and HBO Max. As part of the eight-year agreement that will begin in 2023, HBO Max will stream more than 20 matches for the men’s and women’s national teams each year, WarnerMedia announced Tuesday. WarnerMedia-owned linear channels TNT and TBS will simultaneously air roughly half of those, while the other half will stream exclusively on HBO Max. Turner Sports and its division Bleacher Report will have exclusive rights to live coverage of the matches as part of the agreement. Additionally, the deal positions Turner Sports as the exclusive English-language home of various events for the women’s and men’...

Rivian increased the estimated prices of its R1T electric pickup and R1S electric SUV this week by up to 20 percent, as reported by TechCrunch. The company is applying the new estimates to new orders and changing them for reservation holders who don’t yet have a vehicle entering production. This is the first significant change in pricing Rivian has revealed since orders opened, and while customer preorders all stated “prices are subject to change as they get closer to production,” it seems like no one was ready for a change this big. Prospective EV buyers are used to fluctuations in the pricing of cars from Tesla, but in that case, prices are usually locked in from the time they put in their orders. Many customers shared they have cancelled or plan to cancel their orders The news of the pr...

Sennheiser’s new earbuds are 3D printed with the same material used in the drill bits for the Mars rover. The IE 600 earbuds have a shell that’s composed of ZR01 amorphous zirconium, lending it a unique aesthetic and remarkable durability. What the hell is zirconium anyway? Without going into too much detail, zirconium is a shapeable metal that’s highly resistant to corrosion. This is why zirconium is frequently used for a variety of industrial and medical applications and is commonly used in steel alloys. So why is Sennheiser using zirconium in its headphones? One might assume that using this uncommon material would somehow provide you with otherworldly sound quality, but that’s not what Sennheiser seems to be pitching here. Rather, it’s the material’s malleable nature and toughness...

Amazon employees at the Staten Island LDJ5 warehouse have reportedly gotten the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) permission to continue with unionization efforts, according to the Amazon Labor Union, after the workers filed a petition to unionize in February. According to a screenshot posted by Vice reporter Lauren Kaori Gurley, Amazon has acknowledged the decision in a message sent to employees through its A to Z app. The Amazon Labor Union, or ALU, has been working to unionize the facility for a while — in October it filed a petition to unionize Amazon’s facilities on Staten Island, but later refiled that petition to focus on a single warehouse, JFK8. Workers at JFK8 have since gotten approval to hold an election starting on March 25th. After the ALU filed a petition for LDJ5, the...

It looks like Twitter’s building a tab dedicated to podcasts, as shown in a screenshot posted by reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong. The image shows a microphone icon in the Twitter app’s bottom menu bar, which appears to lead to a page titled “Podcasts.” The screenshot doesn’t show any indication of how podcasts could be displayed on the platform or if it’ll somehow incorporate Spaces, the platform’s audio-only chatrooms. Right now, live Spaces are stuffed at the top of Twitter feeds, and it would make sense to organize them into a separate tab. Twitter began branching out to audio when it first launched Spaces in 2020 and dove even deeper into the medium with its acquisition of social podcast platform Breaker. Spaces has been an ongoing project for the platform, which recently started le...

The Wordle clones are back on the App Store, just a few weeks after Apple wiped out nearly all the copycat games in January. A quick glance at the top free apps on the App Store reveals at least two prominently placed Wordle-alikes, while diving into Apple’s more specific word games category (or simply searching “Wordle”) surfaces plenty of other copycats, many of which appear to have been part of Apple’s first wave of takedowns a few months ago. None of the new games are actively passing themselves off as Wordle — at least, not in name. Instead, the clones have creatively rebranded to “Wordus,” “Word Guess,” “Wordl,” and other thinly veiled references to the original game. But all of them offer some variant on Wordle’s gameplay, down to the same gameplay, UI, design, and color scheme. App...

Beats is releasing a limited-edition model of its discontinued Beats Pill Plus in collaboration with fashion brand Stüssy. The release comes not long after Apple discontinued the Beats Pill Plus in January. Apple released the original Beats Pill Plus speaker, which measured a bit larger than the first Beats Pill, in 2015. It was the first speaker Apple released following its 2014 acquisition of Beats for $3 billion. This new version of the Pill Plus will only be available for a limited time. Image: Stüssy Image: Stüssy The new Pill Plus will keep the original design and come in a sleek black with a white skull and crossbones design on the front of the speaker. One side of the speaker reads “the only good system is a sound system.” The description on Stüssy’s website says the new Pill Plus ...

A coalition of state attorneys general from California, Florida, Kentucky, and more is investigating TikTok for its potential effect on young people’s mental and physical health (via CNBC). The group of AGs is looking to see if the way TikTok designs, operates, and markets its platform has a negative effect on children, teens, and young adults’ health, according to a press release from Attorney General Maura Healey of Massachusetts. TikTok’s algorithm determines what content users see, and has proven remarkably effective at keeping users engaged on the app. While the company has offered some insight into how it works, it’s hard to get a grasp on exact details outside of leaks and educated guesswork. The attorneys general may be looking to change that, though — the investigation will focus ...