Technology

May Fourth is informally the Star Wars Day holiday, which random brands typically use to hawk their wares. Although it’s not as bad as the promotions that come out of the woodwork on April Fools’ Day, I think I’m drawing the line at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum adding an X-wing Starfighter from Star Wars to its collection. The museum announced today that the famous ship would be going on display in 2022, via a prop loan from the Disney-owned production company, Lucasfilm. The Smithsonian says the X-wing in question is from Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and will be displayed outside the museum’s Albert Einstein Planetarium after undergoing “conservation in the Restoration Hangar in the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center.” The X-wing starfighter in the Mary Baker Engen Restorati...

The British Royal Navy has apparently been testing using jet suits to board ships like a scene out of some scrapped Christopher Nolan film, according to a new video released by UK-based Gravity Industries. Business Insider writes that the tests were conducted over three days on the HMS Tamar, a Royal Navy Batch 2 River-class offshore patrol ship. Royal Marines used Gravity Industries’ Jet Suit to conduct a “visit, board, search, and seizure” operation or VBSS. Basically a marine launched from a fast boat tailing the HMS Tamar, flew through the air like a slightly askew Iron Man, and landed on the larger ship, dropping a rope below so their fast boat buddies could climb up and “visit” the simulated enemy vessel. [embedded content] The whole thing is very cool, to the point of almost seeming...

Uber announced that it was teaming up with delivery startup Gopuff to expand its delivery business. Gopuff, which acquired liquor store chain BevMo last year, will make its inventory of convenience and grocery store items available to Uber as part of this new deal. The companies plan to roll out their new offerings to customers in 95 cities starting this June and nationwide later in the year. Gopuff will handle the logistics and delivery of the items, with Uber taking a cut of the transaction through its app. Gopuff, which was founded in 2013, operates in 650 cities in the US, with over 250 “micro-fulfillment centers.” Uber is slowly transforming into a delivery company The news follows months of Uber slowly transforming into a delivery company after suffering steep financial losses as a r...

“Super” greenhouse gases will soon be phased down in air conditioners and refrigerators in the US. The Environmental Protection Agency yesterday proposed new rules to cut the use of the “super” pollutants used as refrigerants, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), by 85 percent over 15 years. Consumers likely won’t notice much of a difference with their appliances, but lawmakers are anticipating big benefits for the planet. The EPA plans to determine a baseline for HFC production and consumption, and then set limits on companies making and importing HFCs. Those caps would become stricter over time. This is the agency’s first major new regulation taking on climate change under the Biden administration, and it makes good on a bipartisan commitment to regulate HFCs that passed in Congress last December ...

Reddit had a bit of a blip on Tuesday afternoon, going down for almost an hour. According to Reddit’s status page, the issues started around 1:56PM ET. At 2:17PM ET, Downdetector reports spiked, with around 45,000 users reporting problems connecting to its homepage and subreddits. Staff here at The Verge were also unable to load the site, with some getting a blank homepage and others experiencing slow loading times and getting kicked off of pages. The status page now indicates that Reddit has implemented a fix and is monitoring the results. While the status page still shows that there’s a partial outage, we were all able to successfully load and browse the site. Downdetector reports are also dropping, indicating that more users are seeing the same results that we are. Reddit did not reply ...

The way that we segment history can be divided into two eras: before the advent of penicillin and after — or, in other words, pre-antibiotics and post-antibiotics. Penicillin, the first antibiotic, was discovered in 1928 by Scottish microbiologist Alexander Fleming, who found that the juices from the Penicillium fungi were able to destroy harmful bacteria. Medicine was transformed forever, and to this day, penicillin is prescribed for everything from lung infections to sexually transmitted illnesses. This extraordinary elixir was by no means produced by fungi by chance, for in some ways fungi operate more akin to humans and animals than plants. One of the reasons that we derive so many antibiotics from fungi is because we are more closely related to them than any other kingdom of organism,...

The Bad Batch has arrived today as the latest Star Wars spinoff series for Disney Plus. It’s a different, smaller show than preceding animated shows like The Clone Wars or Rebels, focusing on a single squad of clone troopers, Clone Force 99 — the titular “Bad Batch” — and its struggle to find a place in the galaxy following the rise of the Empire. Unlike the other clone troopers, the Bad Batch’s members were cloned with an emphasis on specific genetic abnormalities. Hunter, for example, has improved senses, while Wrecker is far larger and stronger than the average clone. The Bad Batch was first introduced in the resurrected seventh season of Dave Filoni’s animated The Clone Wars series (which was brought back after its original cancellation in 2013 following Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfi...

The Epic Games v. Apple trial started on Monday, and if you wanted to follow along and listen to Epic CEO Tim Sweeney talk about the “metaverse,” your options were limited. In theory, there’s public access to the trial, like most court proceedings, but since the courthouse is still closed for lockdown, the only access was through the court’s teleconference line that was briefly overrun by screaming teens. But for anyone looking for more user-friendly options, there’s good news. A surprising, small community of streamers has decided to rebroadcast the trial on streaming platforms — places built for the people who play Fortnite rather than the antitrust policy wonks in the courtroom. For yesterday’s proceeding, I found a handful of YouTube channels and streamers rebroadcasting the hearing on...

Instagram now has a captions sticker for Stories, which will automatically transcribe speech in videos. The sticker will be available only in “English and English-speaking countries” for now but will eventually roll out to other languages and countries. Instagram says it will also start testing automated captions in Reels soon. Captions have been available in IGTV and the Threads app, and Instagram says it’s adding them to Stories and Reels to make them more efficient and inclusive to watch. The feature should be a welcome addition for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, are not native English speakers, or just generally watch videos without sound. The edit option lists each word of the captions separately. You can tap on individual words to make adjustments. Like other text options in...

A new document released as part of Epic’s legal battle with Apple has revealed how much Epic paid developers to give away their games for free following the launch of the Epic Games Store in December 2018. The document, which was spotted by writer Simon Carless, covers the 38 games given away free between December and September the following year. We already know that Epic is spending millions on its giveaways, but the new document reveals how much that translates to on a per-game basis. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney previously revealed that the company pays a flat fee to each developer to give away their games, rather than paying per download. Over the period covered by the document, Epic paid over $11.6 million in total for the games. In response to the deals, almost five million new users signed...

US dronemaker Skydio has begun shipping its first enterprise drones today with prices starting at an enterprise-worthy $10,999. Skydio is best known as a pioneer of self-flying drone tech, but in recent years has shifted its attention away from a consumer market dominated by Chinese giant DJI to courting enterprise customers instead. This switch is partly due to geopolitics. The US government blacklisted various Chinese drones over spying fears last year, meaning law enforcement, military, and federal customers are looking more to US firms instead. The switch helped boost Skydio to a $1 billion valuation, no doubt assisted by the higher prices such business can command. Skydio’s enterprise drones are available with thermal and color cameras Skydio’s X2 drone, which was originally announced...

General Motors has finally revealed its plan to fix the issue at the center of last year’s Chevy Bolt recall, which the automaker issued in response to a handful of battery pack fires. Affected customers have to bring their Bolts to a dealer so the battery packs can be inspected, and GM says some of the modules that make up the pack may be replaced if any “anomalies” are found. But dealers will also install “advanced onboard diagnostic software” on all of the affected vehicles. That software, GM says, will be able to “detect potential issues related to changes in battery module performance before problems can develop.” The company says the software will be standard on all new Bolts moving forward. Following last year’s recall, GM released a software update to dealers that limited the affec...