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Ring’s new TV show is a brilliant but ominous viral marketing ploy

The costs of market domination  In 2021, Ring sold 1.7 million devices, roughly the same number as its next four competitors combined, according to business intelligence firm Strategy Analytics. In other words,... Read more »

Erik Prince wants to sell you a “secure” smartphone that’s too good to be true

Prince told investors the UP Phone is built by “engineers with deep experience in lawful interception, surveillance, and spoofing capabilities.”  Unplugged’s day-to-day technology operations are run by Eran Karpen, a former employee... Read more »

The fight for “Instagram face”

But behind every filter is a person dragging lines and shifting shapes on a computer screen to achieve the desired look. Beauty may be subjective, and yet society continues to promote stringent,... Read more »

A Chicago city sensor project goes global

Each node in the Array of Things was equipped with an Nvidia graphics processing unit (or GPU) to perform computations on images out in the field and sent only processed data along... Read more »

The Download: transphobic panic, and the US-China chip war

When Jay told his mom he was bisexual at 14, she was supportive. But when he came out as transgender a few years later, she pushed back. YouTube videos and online forums... Read more »

How the idea of a “transgender contagion” went viral—and caused untold harm

The ROGD paper was not funded by anti-trans zealots. But it arrived at exactly the time people with bad intentions were looking for science to buoy their opinions. The results were in... Read more »

Inside the software that will become the next battle front in US-China chip war

EDA software is a small but mighty part of the semiconductor supply chain, and it’s mostly controlled by three Western companies. That gives the US a powerful point of leverage, similar to... Read more »

Tiny caps can measure activity in lab-grown minibrains

Until now, scientists haven’t been able to study brain organoids beyond just a few cells. While the organoids are spherical, the conventional tools to study them—microelectrode array plates, which contain electrodes to... Read more »

The Download: electric planes, and trans men’s fertility

Scientists have known for years that light pollution is growing and can harm both humans and wildlife. In people, increased exposure to light at night disrupts sleep cycles and has been linked... Read more »

This is what’s keeping electric planes from taking off

The company plans to start in niche markets—like hopping across fjords in Scandinavia. These routes are difficult to replace with ground transport, and in some countries, like Norway, they could be subsidized... Read more »