EBayer tries to sell prototype Pixel 7, provides lots of pictures

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  You really can buy anything on eBay. [credit: archive.org ]

Google shocked us all when it decided to reveal the Pixel 7 live at Google I/O a few weeks ago. The phone, which isn't due out until at least the fall, was officially confirmed as the "Pixel 7" and "Pixel 7 Pro" with promises of next-gen Google Tensor chips, a polished aluminum camera bar, and a few official pictures of the back. We can learn a bit more about the device now, though, thanks to ...an eBay listing?

Over the long weekend, some eBay seller had the bright idea to try to sell a prototype Pixel 7. The $530 listing of what is surely a stolen item has been pulled from eBay, but you can still see an archive of the listing here. The seller listed the item saying it "comes with android 13 and pixel apps in development stage. Selling as is. No guarantees of any sort." Hmmm. The seller at least scored what counts as the first in-person pictures of the Pixel 7, showing the device from all angles.

The Pixel 7, complete with that new camera bar and identifying prototype line symbols in the bottom third. (credit: meetveeru)

The Pixel 7 is very close to the Pixel 6, so there's not a ton to look at, but this gives us a good look at that new camera bar. The Pixel 6 camera bar has one big sheet of glass across the entire back, while the Pixel 7's camera bar is a big block of aluminum, with a smaller glass cover for the lenses. The Pixel 7's smaller camera glass should make it less susceptible to glare—it was easy for light to bounce around inside of the Pixel 6's huge glass camera cover. The new look is aesthetically a downgrade, though. The Pixel 6 camera bar was a simple, continuous black strip that contrasted against the body color, while this aluminum is trying to match the glass body color, failing, and then has a black blob inside it for the camera lenses.

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Updated Surface Laptop Go leaks in retailer ad, promises big GPU performance boost

Enlarge / The original Surface Laptop Go. (credit: Jeff Dunn)

Microsoft's Surface Laptop Go was originally introduced in October 2020 as a smaller, lighter, and more budget-friendly member of the Surface family, but it hasn't been updated since then. That may change soon, according to a leaked retail ad spotted by The Verge—it said that a spruced-up version of the Surface Laptop Go could be available for preorder as soon as June 2.

Intel's 12th-gen processors have been available for a while now, and in that context, the new Laptop Go's hardware isn't very exciting. The laptop was listed with a Core i5-1135G7, a quad-core CPU originally launched in late 2020 that we've seen in tons of other laptops in the last two years. The new Laptop Go appears to use the same 12.4-inch touchscreen, the same un-backlit keyboard and fingerprint sensor, and the same complement of ports (one USB-C, one USB-A, a headphone jack, and a Surface Connect port). The laptop will also ship with Windows 11—the current model fully supports Windows 11 but still ships with Windows 10 in S Mode out of the box.

Though it's almost as old as the original Surface Laptop Go, the i5-1135G7 would be an interesting upgrade to the current laptop's i5-1035G1. It has the same number of CPU cores, but there are big increases to the base and boost clock speeds. The Iris Xe integrated GPU would also be considerably faster, thanks to a newer GPU architecture, a higher GPU clock speed, and more than twice as many execution units (80, up from 32). A gaming laptop it ain't, but, especially at the screen's native 1536×1024 resolution, it should be fast enough to play older and less-demanding games.

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AstroForge aims to succeed where other asteroid mining companies have failed

Enlarge / Can AstroForge succeed where other space mining companies have failed? (credit: AstroForge)

Asteroid mining was all the rage nearly a decade ago. In 2012 several billionaire entrepreneurs founded a company called Planetary Resources with the goal of harvesting water from asteroids and selling it as propellant at in-space fuel depots. A year later, another group of investors founded Deep Space Industries to harvest rare metals from asteroids.

While it seemed like the era of space mining had dawned, these commercial efforts were soon eclipsed by a harsh reality—by 2019 both companies effectively no longer existed. Neither could overcome the significant obstacles of building spacecraft capable of traveling into deep space, let alone examining asteroids and mining them for materials. Beyond the technical challenges, each of these projects also required a huge outlay of funding ahead of any profit that lay years, if not decades, into the future.

Now, a new challenger, AstroForge, has entered the arena with the goal of mining platinum on asteroids and selling it on Earth. The founders of the company, Jose Acain and Matt Gialich, said in an interview they were well aware of the challenges of deep space mining when starting AstroForge earlier this year.

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New Roomba operating system has no new features, but vast dreams

Enlarge / iRobot Roomba j7+ robot vacuum. (credit: iRobot)

Roomba launched the iRobot OS on Tuesday to signal its robotic household cleaners' advanced software capabilities. As of writing, it only rebrands the two-year-old Genius Home Intelligence AI platform, but the company aims for it to be a leading computer vision platform that differentiates its robot vacuums and mops and eventually moves to other products, like air purifiers.

iRobot OS doesn't include any new features yet but represents iRobot's focus on "superior software intelligence," Colin Angle, chairman and CEO of iRobot, said in a statement shared in Roomba's announcement.

As it stands, Roomba's iRobot OS-powered devices use computer vision to avoid, depending on the product, up to 80 "common objects," like cords, socks, and, oh so importantly, animal waste. The OS is pet-friendly by including features like "Keep Out Zones" so your dog doesn't start a fight with your robo vac when it's around the food bowl. It can also recommend cleaning schedules, including based on when your furry friend tends to shed. If you want to see all that iRobot OS offers, the strongest iteration is the Roomba J7-series. The device came out in September and uses a front-facing camera with computer vision to better understand its environment's layout than any other iRobot robot.

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Two European countries won’t get Diablo Immortal because of loot box laws

Enlarge / What's in the box? (credit: Getty / Aurich Lawson)

Blizzard's upcoming open beta launch of Diablo Immortal later this week will be skipping the Netherlands and Belgium, thanks to regulations in those countries that consider games with randomized loot boxes to be illegal gambling.

"Diablo Immortal will not be available in Belgium or the Netherlands, and will not appear on Battle.net or the Belgian and Netherlands App or Google Play Stores," an Activision Blizzard spokesperson told Eurogamer over the weekend. "This is related to the current operating environment for games in those countries. Accordingly, pre-registrations for the game are not accessible in those markets."

Activision Blizzard had reportedly let Belgian and Dutch players preregister for the game's public beta test and listed the game briefly on mobile app stores in both countries. But the company quietly changed course in recent months, as Dutch gaming news site Tweakers noticed over the weekend.

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Qualcomm wants to buy a stake in Arm alongside its rivals

Enlarge (credit: Arm)

The US chipmaker Qualcomm wants to buy a stake in Arm alongside its rivals and create a consortium that would maintain the UK chip designer’s neutrality in the highly competitive semiconductor market.

Japanese conglomerate SoftBank plans to list Arm on the New York Stock Exchange after Nvidia’s $66 billion purchase collapsed earlier this year. However, the IPO has sparked concern over the future ownership of the company, given its crucial role in the global technology sector.

“We’re an interested party in investing,” Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm’s chief executive, told the Financial Times. “It’s a very important asset and it’s an asset which is going to be essential to the development of our industry.”

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The Internet needs to stop getting excited by vaporware EVs

Enlarge / The DeLorean Alpha 5 is inspired by the mediocre mid-engined coupe from Northern Ireland. (credit: DeLorean)

Back in the earlier days of the Internet, when web fora still mattered and there was no such thing as Twitter, Sniff Petrol's Richard Porter published a now-infamous "Press Release Help For New Supercar Makers." No stranger to cutting satire, Porter's checklist was a reaction to a seemingly never-ending string of new British supercars announced to middling fanfare and then often never heard of again.

Sixteen years later, I can't help but feel that we need a new version, this time not the UK's cottage industry of vaporware supercars, but the ever-expanding field of electric vehicle startups. Specifically, I'm writing this in reaction to the "new" DeLorean, renders of which went public yesterday, causing some particularly excitable corners of the Internet to begin smoldering dangerously.

Now, this isn't John DeLorean's company—that went bankrupt in 1982 after producing about 8,500 examples of a single model that wasn't really ever as good as it should have been, called the DMC-12. However, the DMC-12 acquired cult status after starring in Back to the Future, and the DeLorean name now belongs to a company in Texas that supplies spares for the stainless steel-bodied classics.

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Remembering Apple’s Newton, 30 years on

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Thirty years ago, on May 29, 1992, Apple announced its most groundbreaking and revolutionary product yet, the Newton MessagePad. It was released to great fanfare a year later, but as a product, it could only be described as a flop. Widely mocked in popular culture at the time, the Newton became a poster child for expensive but useless high-tech gadgets. Even though the device improved dramatically over time, it failed to gain market share, and it was discontinued in 1997. Yet while the Newton was a failure, it galvanized Apple engineers to create something better—and in some ways led to the creation of the iPad and the iPhone.

The vision thing

Steve Jobs, who co-founded Apple in 1976, had wooed marketing guru John Sculley away from PepsiCo to become the new Apple CEO in 1983. However, their relationship broke down, and Jobs resigned from Apple two years later after a bitter power struggle. Although Sculley made Apple profitable by cutting costs and introducing new Macintosh models, he felt lost without Apple’s visionary founder. So when Apple Fellow Alan Kay burst into Sculley’s office and warned him that “next time, we won’t have Xerox” (to borrow ideas from), he took it seriously.

Apple Knowledge Navigator concept video.

In 1986, Sculley commissioned a team to create two “high concept” videos for a new type of computing device that Apple could conceivably build in the future. These “Knowledge Navigator” promos showed a foldable, tablet-like device with a humanoid “virtual assistant” that interacted via spoken instructions. While some derided the impracticality of these sci-fi vignettes, they fired up Apple employees and got them thinking about the future of computing.

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Bear hibernation: More than a winter’s nap

Enlarge / A brown bear with two cubs looks out of its den in the woods under a large rock in winter. (credit: Byrdyak | Getty)

Every spring, as days in the north stretch longer and melting snow trickles into streams, drowsy animals ranging from grizzlies to ground squirrels start to rally from hibernation. It’s tempting to say that that they are “waking up,” but hibernation is more complicated and mysterious than a simple long sleep: Any animal that can spend months underground without eating or drinking and still emerge ready to face the world has clearly mastered an amazing trick of biology.

The roster of animals that hibernate includes all manner of rodents, some amphibians and even a few primates (several species of dwarf lemurs), but bears are literally the biggest hibernators of them all. Adult grizzly and black bears weigh as much as American football players, or more, with the energy and curiosity of preschoolers, but they have no trouble hunkering down for months at time. The choreography that goes into shutting down a creature this big defies easy explanation, says Elena Gracheva, a neurophysiologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. “Hibernation is so complex it requires adaptations at multiple levels,” she says.

Bear hibernation offers important insights into the workings of large mammals, especially us, explains Gracheva, who coauthored an exploration of the physiology of hibernation in the 2020 Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology. A better understanding of the process could potentially change our approach to a wide range of human conditions, including stroke, osteoporosis, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s (see sidebar).

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Which is worse for the soil—combines or dinosaurs?

Enlarge / Having this guy stomp through might mean that things would struggle to grow there afterwards. (credit: Roger Harris)

Words I did not expect to read in a scientific paper this week: "The similarity in mass and contact area between modern farm vehicles and sauropods raises the question: What was the mechanical impact of these prehistoric animals on land productivity?" The paper, from Thomas Keller and Dani Or, raises what may be a significant worry: Farm vehicles have grown over the past few decades, to the point where they may be compacting the subsurface soil where roots of crops extend. This poses a risk to agricultural productivity.

The paper then compares that compaction risk to the one posed by the largest animals to ever roam our land: sauropods.

The big crunch

We think of the ground as being solid, but gaps and channels within soil are critical to plant life, since they allow air and water to reach roots. Soil compaction, in its extreme form, gets rid of all these spaces, making the ground much less hospitable for plants. And compaction is hard to reverse; it can take decades of plant and animal activity to break up the compacted soil again and re-establish a healthy ecosystem.

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