Technology

Turns out that the bean-like Fall Guys characters would be the perfect height to pat the bean-like Among Us crewmates on the head, should they ever exist in the same universe. The Among Us and Fall Guys Twitter accounts made the discovery on Monday. How? Well, it all started with this question from Chris on Twitter: It’s a good question. I can’t believe I’ve never asked it myself before. The Among Us Twitter account then revealed that the crewmates in the game are three feet, six inches tall. Seems about right, though I honestly thought they were a little shorter. dunno how tall our Fall Guys beanfriends are, but Crewmates are 3’6″ — Among Us (@AmongUsGame) May 31, 2021 The Fall Guys Twitter account quickly followed up with what people believe to be the canonical size of a Fall...

Google Photos has long offered one of the best deals in all of photo storage: it’ll back up your entire library for free, so long as it can compress the images a bit. But as of tomorrow, June 1st, that deal goes away, and you’re now eating through Google storage (which you may have to pay for) whether your images are compressed or not. With the change looming, I’ve been wondering how bad Google’s compression actually is. Does the compression leave my photos in “High Quality,” as Google has claimed for years? Or does the compression degrade my photos enough to make it worth using more storage by switching over to “Original Quality” backups? I ran some quick tests this morning to find out. I took some photos and videos from my Pixel 5 (one of a few phones that will continue to get free compr...

EA just released its chaotic and fun new multiplayer dodgeball game, Knockout City, on May 21st, and for the launch, had put together a special promotion: the full game would be free to play until May 30th, after which you could pay $19.99 on the platform of your choice if you wanted to keep playing. (It’s also included with an EA Play or Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription.) But on Sunday, EA and developer Velan Studios announced that even if you missed that window to try Knockout City without paying for it, you can still check it out without dropping a dime: the game is now free to try up until you level up your “Street Rank” (Knockout City’s take on a Fortnite-like battle pass) to 25. Block Party is over, but new players to Knockout City can still start brawlin’ for free! If your...

Michelangelo’s marbles in the Medici Chapel were looking dingy, so a team of art restorers decided to smear some bacteria on the situation. The specialized microbes cleaned up centuries of grime, leaving the marble statues with a fresh new look, The New York Times reports. The team selected specialized strains of bacteria to target different stains on the marble. Some types of bacteria can thrive in harsh environments and are adapted to eating things that can cause humans problems. These bacteria can break down things like pollutants into relatively harmless components. In this case, the team looked for bacterial strains that would eat away at the stains and other gunk, without harming the marble itself, and tested their top choices on an unobtrusive patch of marble behind an altar in the ...

Heat is a killer — and climate change is driving up its body count. On average, about 37 percent of heat deaths can be tied back to human-caused climate change, according to a new study in Nature Climate Change. The study looked at data from 732 places in 43 countries over a period of about three decades, from 1991-2018. They used information including heat deaths and temperature readings from those places to build computer models that calculated how many deaths could be attributed to climate change. The numbers varied depending on location, with a larger percentage of climate-change related deaths occuring in warmer countries than cooler ones. Overall, about 166,000 people died of heat-related deaths between 1998 and 2017, according to the World Health Organization. Thanks to climate chan...

Intel made a splash earlier in May with the launch of its first 11th Gen Tiger Lake H-series processors for more powerful laptops, but at Computex 2021, the company is also announcing a pair of new U-series chips — one of which marks the first 5.0GHz clock speed for the company’s U-series lineup of lower voltage chips. Specifically, Intel is announcing the Core i7-1195G7 — its new top of the line chip in the U-series range — and the Core i5-1155G7, which takes the crown of Intel’s most powerful Core i5-level chip, too. Like the original 11th Gen U-series chips, the new chips operate in the 12W to 28W range. Both new chips are four core / eight thread configurations, and feature Intel’s Iris Xe integrated graphics (the Core i7-1195G7 comes with 96 EUs, while the Core i5-1155G7 has 80 EUs.) ...

Xiaomi has shown off its latest fast charging tech demo, and consequently is claiming the new world records for both wired and wireless charging speeds. Using a modified Mi 11 Pro with a 4,000mAh battery, Xiaomi says it’s able to fully charge the phone in 8 minutes over a 200W wired “HyperCharge” system, or in 15 minutes with 120W wireless charging. Charging speeds are a frequent battleground for Chinese smartphone companies, who often release demonstrations of breakthroughs that may or may not show up in final products. Two years ago, for example, Xiaomi announced a 100W system that could charge a 4,000mAh battery in 17 minutes, while last year’s Mi 10 Ultra filled up in 23 minutes at 120W — though it did have a bigger 4,500mAh battery. Oppo is another leader in this field, with its VOOC ...

So tonight is the finale for Mare of Easttown and there are so many threads that need to be tied up that I legitimately don’t know how they’ll answer all the open questions. I have a theory of who the killer is, and I don’t think it’s the same person who fathered Erin’s baby. Will Mare ever find happiness? It seems unlikely, I’m afraid. But maybe she’ll find answers or closure. I realized that in this week’s trailer roundup that— in addition to a time-traveling theme— we have two movies that feature Sam Richardson, who played Richard Splett, arguably the best supporting character on the late great HBO show Veep. Please cast him in all the things, Hollywood, he’s hilarious. [embedded content] The Tomorrow War Chris Pratt is drafted into a war where he has to go into the future and fight ali...

Weary of pandemic travel restrictions and aching to get out and see new people? The city of Vilnius, Lithuania has interesting solution: A real-time “portal” to another city. They really went all-in on the idea and the design; it looks quite a bit like something out of the erstwhile sci-fi movie/show Stargate. The city installed a circular “door” for the portal near its train station that connects to a portal in Lublin, Poland, about 600 kilometers (or roughly 375 miles) away. The portals both have large screens and cameras that broadcast live images between the two cities— a kind of digital bridge, according to its creators— meant to encourage people to “rethink the meaning of unity,” Go Vilnius said in a press release. Aw. Vilnius, Lithuania says hi to Lublin, PolandGo Vilnius “Humanity ...

Facebook-owned Instagram has made changes to its algorithm after a group of its employees reportedly complained that pro-Palestinian content was not viewable for users during the conflict in Gaza. Instagram typically surfaces original content in its stories before reposted content, but will now begin to give equal weighting to both, the company confirmed to The Verge on Sunday. As reported by BuzzFeed News and the Financial Times, the Instagram employee group had made numerous appeals about content that had been censored by Instagram’s automated moderation, such as posts about the al-Asqa mosque being mistakenly removed. The employees didn’t believe the censorship was deliberate, according to FT, but one said that “moderating at scale is biased against any marginalized groups.” The change ...

Tesla is building a factory in Texas to make some of its cars, but when it’s up and running, the cars made there may have to go on a roundabout journey to get to Texan buyers (via The Drive). Because of state laws banning car companies from selling directly to consumers, Tesla could end up shipping the cars from its Austin factory to other states, before they’re sent back to their Texan buyers. The state’s lawmakers were debating legislation that would have prevented the situation, but they’ve now missed their chance to pass it before they have to go on break until 2023 — the factory is expected to be completed by the end of 2021. Laws preventing automakers from selling their vehicles directly to consumers aren’t unique to Texas, nor are they targeted at Tesla: they were originally put in ...