Macbook Batteries Are Exploding: Apple Has Issued a Recall; Go Here to See if Yours Is Affected – This Week in Tech – 06/30/2019
Macbook Batteries Are Exploding: Apple Has Issued a Recall; Go Here to See if Yours Is Affected
Apple has determined that, in a limited number of older generation 15-inch MacBook Pro units, the battery may overheat and pose a fire safety risk. Affected units were sold primarily between September 2015 and February 2017 and product eligibility is determined by the product serial number…
Boeing’s 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers
It remains the mystery at the heart of Boeing Co.’s 737 Max crisis: how a company renowned for meticulous design made seemingly basic software mistakes leading to a pair of deadly crashes. Longtime Boeing engineers say the effort was complicated by a push to outsource work to lower-paid contractors…
Researchers Teleport Information Within a Diamond
Researchers from the Yokohama National University have teleported quantum information securely within the confines of a diamond. The study has big implications for quantum information technology – the future of how sensitive information is shared and stored…
An Amazon Employee Made an AI-Powered Cat Flap to Stop His Cat From Bringing Home Dead Animals
Machine learning can be an incredible addition to any tinkerer’s toolbox, helping to fix that little problem in life that no commercial gadget can handle. For Amazon product manager Ben Hamm, that problem was stopping his “sweet, murderous cat” Metric from bringing home dead and half-dead prey in the middle of the night and waking him up…
Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan Warns AI-Powered Gerrymandering Could Undermine US Democracy
The possibility of ending partisan gerrymandering— the practice of redrawing voting districts in favor one party over another — was all but obliterated on Thursday, when the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that challenges to the controversial practice cannot be heard in federal court…
Startup Packs All 16GB of Wikipedia Onto DNA Strands to Demonstrate New Storage Tech
Computer storage technology has moved from wires with magnets to hard disks to 3D stacks of memory chips. But the next storage technology might use an approach as old as life on earth: DNA. Startup Catalog announced Friday it’s crammed all of the text of Wikipedia’s English-language version onto the same genetic molecules our own bodies use…
Firefox Is Reinventing Its Android App to Undo Chrome’s Monopoly
Google is under siege. Chrome is the world’s dominant browser but its rivals are fighting against the firm’s heavy data collecting habits. Now Firefox is taking the battle to Google’s front lawn: Android…