Divers and endurance athletes take note: the Apple Watch Ultra is on sale at Amazon. Thanks to a six percent discount, you can get the wearable for $749 right now. That’s only $10 more than the device was priced at during Black Friday last year. Moreover, Amazon has stock of most of the different bands Apple offers alongside the wearable.
Engadget Deputy Editor Cherlynn Low gave the Apple Watch Ultra a score of 85 when she reviewed the wearable last fall. Chances are you already know if the Ultra makes sense for your workout needs. The inclusion of features like dual-frequency GPS and a longer-lasting battery compared to regular Apple Watch models make the Ultra ideal for those who frequently go hiking or want the most accurate tracking possible for runs. Other additions like a more durable design and bigger display are features any Apple Watch user can appreciate. Still, when you can buy a Series 8 model for half as much, most people are better off purchasing the Ultra’s more affordable sibling. A $50 discount makes the price of Apple’s high-end wearable more palatable, but it’s still a specialized device for a niche audience.
America's first astronauts from the 1960s were all pulled from the highest ranks of the nation's military. As such, NASA's first few classes tended to conform to a rather specific demographic theme — white, male, flattop haircut you could set a watch too. By the mid-70's however, the space agency had gotten with the times and opened up the spacewalking profession to more than former Air Force and Navy test pilots.
In The New Guys, author Meredith Bagby follows the exploits of NASA's Astronaut class of 1978 — "Class 8," America's first women, African Americans, Asian American, and gay person to fly to space — from the team's selection through their mastering of cutting-edge technologies aboard the Space Shuttle and their history-making orbital missions. In the excerpt below, Class 8 receives a brutal introduction to the dangers that await them.
“Hey! We’ve got a fire in the cockpit!” a man screamed, then his voice cut out. Within seconds, another desperate voice cut through the static.
“We’ve got a bad fire . . . !” the second man shouted in pain.
“We’re burning up . . . !!!” a third howled.
Then the transmission faded into nothing but static.
In one of the many tiered seats in Mission Control, Ron McNair and his new classmates listened to a recording of the Apollo 1 fire. During a preflight test on January 27, 1967, astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee had burned alive. Even though over a decade had passed since the accident, the pain and fear of the astronauts who perished was palpable to the room of new recruits.
The instructor surveyed the faces of the astronaut candidates. Are you sure you’re ready for this? The audio was a wake-up call, especially for those like Ron who had not served in the military and had never had a job with life-and-death consequences. If this reality was too much for any of them to accept, the instructor suggested, now was the time to go. No one budged.
A few weeks earlier, as Ron moved his family across the country from left-leaning Malibu, California, to the Lone Star State, the summer sizzled. Disco hits from the Bee Gees’, “Night Fever” and “Stayin’ Alive,” blared from the radio. Billboards advertised the new Hollywood blockbuster Grease, starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. In the nation’s capital, almost a hundred thousand demonstrators marched in support of the Equal Rights Amendment—at the time, the largest march for women’s rights in US history. Muhammad Ali was on the verge of making history at the Louisiana Superdome, becoming the first man to win the World Heavyweight title three times in a row.
When Ron and his wife, Cheryl, arrived in Houston, they found a little starter apartment before moving to Clear Lake along with the Onizukas and the Gregorys. Everyone that had kids—or planned to—wanted a lawn for football and a cul-de-sac for bike riding. The neighborhood’s proximity to the middle and high schools made it the obvious choice for families. Single astronauts like Sally Ride, Kathy Sullivan, and Steve Hawley settled into apartments right outside Johnson’s back gate with a short commute, volleyball court, and communal barbecue pit.
On the Monday after the July 4th holiday, Ron drove through the gates of Johnson Space Center for his first day of work. Looking up from his baffling acronym-filled schedule, Ron spotted a few of his classmates and followed them to Building 4, the home of Johnson’s Flight Crew Operations. Everyone was rushing to the Monday morning all-hands meeting, a staple of the Astronaut Office since the Mercury days.
Standing watch from their office doors, Sylvia Salinas, Mary Lopez, and Estella Hernandez Gillette, all in their twenties, took in the excitement as the new astronauts stormed the hallways. The Hispanic American administrative staff — working in and around the Astronaut Office — came to be known as the Mexican Mafia. As the liaisons for George Abbey and John Young, Sylvia and Mary, and later Estella, ran the show behind scenes, making sure things went smoothly in the Astronaut Office. Up until then, the astronauts they worked for were military men, older in age and more conventional in style; they did not fraternize with support staff. Now, “kids like them” were rolling in. The arrival of Astronaut Class 8 was like a breath of fresh air.
A large conference table surrounded by two rings of chairs dominated Room 3025, the locus of the Monday meeting. Assuming the first ring was reserved for administrators and senior astronauts, Ron took a seat in the back row, as did the rest of his class. Everyone, that is, except the blond, mustachioed Rick Hauck, a US Navy commander who by military standards was the most senior-ranking pilot of their class. Hauck took a seat at the table. Some in the room gasped. Others eyed him with suspicion. Wow, he must either be a fool or the most confident bastard among us. Maybe both. Either way he made an impression.
Like Hauck, the fifteen fighter pilots in Ron’s class had plenty of swagger and bravado, and mixed easily with the veteran astronauts. The old guys, twenty-eight in all, including moonwalkers John Young and Alan Bean, whom Ron met during interview week, filled the inner circle. Among them were astronauts still itching for their first trip to space, like Bob “Crip” Crippen, the baby of the group at forty years old, and Richard “Dick” Truly, both career military pilots who had flown for both the Navy and Air Force. These yet-to-fly guys were caught between programs, too late for Apollo and—so far—too early for the shuttle. Crippen and Truly were part of Astronaut Group 7, who had been transferred to NASA after the cancellation of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL), a classified Cold War military project developed to acquire surveillance images from space. After a decade at the agency, the former MOL astronauts had only ever flown a desk.
Everyone here wanted a ticket to space, but the ten interesting people would be setting historical precedent, breaking barriers that in the past restricted people like them from space travel. Of the six women in the room, one would be the first American woman in space. While the Soviets had flown the first female astronaut, Valentina Tereshkova—being the first American woman in space would earn a prominent place in the annals of history. In 1978, no Black person had flown to space. Ron, along with Guy Bluford, and Fred Gregory would compete to be the first, while Ellison Onizuka would almost certainly be the first Asian American to fly. Guy and Fred, both Vietnam vets, and El, an Air Force test pilot, all spoke the military language of the old guys. Ron was an outsider even among outsiders.
John Young, chief of the Astronaut Office, began the meeting, mumbling “a few forgettable words of welcome” while staring at his shoes. Though he had braved the depths of space four times, on both Apollo and Gemini, Young had not conquered public speaking. Compact, with a jockey’s build, Young was a handsome Navy devil with big ears and an aw-shucks demeanor that belied how truly meticulous he was. He preferred solving thorny engineering problems, to dealing with management issues, and yet here he was as head of the Astronaut Office. He explained to the new class that they were not yet astronauts; they were still astronaut candidates, or “AsCans” for short. Only after two years of training would they earn the title astronaut and a silver pin to mark the achievement.
Inspired by Navy and Air Force aviator badges, the pin depicted a trio of rays merged atop a shining star and encircled by a halo denoting orbital flight. The silver pin meant you were flight-ready, but the gold pin meant you had flown to space. That’s when you make it. Young then left the group with a bit of sage advice: “Don’t talk about nothing you know nothing about.” Got it. So basically, keep our mouths shut.
As the old guys left the room, they once-overed the new guys. Quite simply, the old guys were a different generation. They were veterans, test pilots, and guys who had never worked with women or civilian graduate students. Underneath their pique was also perhaps a tinge of fear. The line to ride the bird just got a whole lot longer; maybe they would miss their chance altogether.
Who are these guys anyway? Hell, half of them are civilians, wet behind the ears, fresh off their mother’s teat. They traded in high grades and accolades, not in life-or-death. The old guys shook their heads. Those Fucking New Guys. “The Fucking New Guy,” a military term for the newest grunt in the unit, seemed to suit Astronaut Class 8 perfectly. So was born the official class nickname: TFNG. In polite company, the TFNGs referred to themselves as “Thirty-Five New Guys,” but everyone knew what the term really meant.
After the meeting, secretary Sylvia Salinas handed the New Guys their official NASA portraits and asked them to create signatures for the auto-pen machine. The agency would print thousands of autographed photos. Do thousands of people want our autograph? Ron wondered. It’s astronaut insurance, a veteran astronaut quipped. If you die, your family will have something to sell. The joke did not get any laughs.
A new racing series could one day make it easier for young drivers to take part in Formula E competition. At this weekend’s Hyderabad E-Prix, former Mahindra Racing team lead Dilbagh Gill announced the launch of the Ace Championship. Gill is positioning the series as “a feeder platform for drivers and engineering talent to move into other racing series.”
When the series begins next year, the Ace Championship will consist of two levels of competition. Teams will use a single pair of cars for both Challenger and Championship tiers. At the higher level, the vehicles will output more power. As a result, participating teams won’t need to field four cars to compete.
According to The Race, the Ace Championship plans to use Formula E’s outgoing Gen2 chassis to build new designs, a move that would likely further reduce entry costs for potential participants. The series recently tested a modified Gen2 car in Barcelona. It showed off the same vehicle at the Hyderabad race track with former Mahindra driver Nick Heidfeld behind the wheel. Ace Championship organizers told The Racethere’s already been “significant interest” from existing racing teams to join the circuit – though no organization has announced its participation just yet.
Ford is reportedly days away from sharing a plan to increase its supply of US-made electric vehicle batteries. According to Reuters, the automaker could announce as early as Monday that it’s partnering with China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Co (CATL) to build a $3.5 billion iron phosphate battery plant outside of Marshall, Michigan, a small town about 100 miles west of Detroit. Once completed, the facility is expected to employ at least 2,500 workers.
As Bloomberg points out, Ford is moving forward with the project despite uncertainty around how the Treasury Department will interpret President Biden’s landmark climate change bill. Specifically, the Inflation Reduction Act includes language that seeks to prevent automakers from taking advantage of consumer EV tax credits if they make vehicles with batteries made by a “foreign entity of concern.” Congress designed the rules to incentivize automakers to build a domestic supply chain for EV parts instead of relying on China for critical components.
According to Bloomberg, Ford has considered an ownership structure that would see it own the entire plant and nearby infrastructure. Ford employees would also work at the facility. CATL would only own the technology used to create the batteries. It’s an arrangement that could allow batteries made at the facility to qualify for the Inflation Reduction Act-related tax credits. “We’ve said that we’re exploring batteries based on CATL’s technology for Ford vehicles and that we plan to localize,” a Ford spokesperson told Bloomberg.
In July, Ford said it would begin sourcing batteries for US-bound 2023 Mustang Mach-E models from CATL. That same month, the company announced it had plans to produce 40 gigawatt hours of battery capacity in North America starting in 2026.
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before, but a Russian spacecraft docked with the International Space Station has sprung a leak. On Saturday morning, Russia’s Roscosmos space agency disclosed on Telegram that a Progress cargo ship docked with the ISS had lost cabin pressure. NASA later said the depressurization was due to a coolant leak.
“The reason for the loss of coolant in the Progress 82 spacecraft is being investigated,” NASA announced. “The hatches between Progress 82 and the station are open, and temperatures and pressures aboard the station are all normal. The crew, which was informed of the cooling loop leak, is in no danger and continuing with normal space station operations.”
Per Space.com, Progress 82 arrived at the ISS on October 28th. Before Saturday's announcement, the spacecraft was scheduled to leave the station on February 17th. It’s unclear if Roscosmos will move forward with that timeline as originally planned. Russia’s Progress spacecraft are designed to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere after they complete their resupply missions, meaning there’s no way for Roscosmos to investigate the leak on the ground. The timing of the discovery comes on the same day that another Progress spacecraft successfully docked with the ISS, and less than two months after another Russian spacecraft sprung a leak at the space station.
In December, Russia’s Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft began leaking coolant just as cosmonauts Dmitri Petelin and Sergey Prokopyev were preparing for a nearly seven-hour spacewalk. Roscosmos later blamed the incident on an apparent meteoroid strike. Unless there’s an emergency at the ISS, Roscosmos has deemed the spacecraft unfit to transport humans. The agency will launch another Soyuz craft later this month to bring Petelin and Prokopyev, as well as NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, back to Earth.
Ars Technica’s Eric Berger points out, the Progress incident raises doubts about whether Soyuz MS-22 was actually hit by a micrometeorite. Russia never released images of the impact, and the country’s space program has a history of recent issues. In 2021, for instance, Roscosmos blamed a software bug on the Nauka misfiring that temporarily moved the ISS out of its usual orientation.
Facebook parent company Meta reportedly plans to further reduce its headcount in the coming weeks. According to theFinancial Times, work at the tech giant has slowed to a crawl while it plots a new round of job cuts. Meta is likely to announce the restructuring after it has completed staff performance reviews sometime in March. In November, the company laid off 11,000 employees or about 13 percent of its global workforce. Those cuts were the largest in Meta’s nearly 20-year history, affecting every organization within the company. Meta did not immediately to Engadget’s comment request. The Times did not report on the potential scale of the restructuring.
While Meta is far from the only company to cut staff in the past year, significantly fewer have expanded previously announced layoffs. If the reporting from The Times is accurate, Meta would find itself in the company of the likes of Amazon and Coinbase. The former first outlined plans to reduce its headcount by 10,000 employees only to later announce it was cutting closer to 18,000 jobs. Before November, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts the company could become “a slightly smaller organization” by the end of 2023.
Microsoft reportedly plans to introduce upgraded Office apps with AI features in the coming weeks. According to The Verge, the tech giant is preparing to show what its Prometheus AI technology and OpenAI's language AI can do for Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and other Microsoft 365 apps as soon as this March. Microsoft recently launched a reimagined Bing that can generate conversational responses to search queries, thanks to the Prometheus model, which was built with the help of OpenAI.
Additionally, the company introduced a new Edge with a built-in "AI copilot" that's also powered by Prometheus. A button on the top-right corner gives users quick access to Bing's new chat feature, and as we mentioned in our hands-on, it's like having ChatGPT right in your browser. The Verge says Microsoft wants its AI technology to be able to generate graphs and graphics for use in PowerPoint or Excel. According to a previous report published by The Information, the company also wants its AI model to be able to generate text using simple prompts within its Office apps.
That Microsoft seems to be in a hurry to launch new AI-powered features for its products comes as no surprise. The company likely intends to move fast to get as many people as possible to start using its products before Google can launch its ChatGPT rival. Apparently, Microsoft was originally supposed to introduce the new Bing in late February, but it moved up the launch and scheduled it before Google's Bard announcement. The company is also bound to keep expanding its AI-powered feature list, seeing as it recently signed a "multi-billion dollar" investment in OpenAI last month.
A viral video trend in Japan has got sushi conveyor-belt restaurants racing to prevent food tampering. One chain, Kura Sushi, said it will use artificial intelligence to look for "suspicious opening and closing of sushi plate covers," Nikkei Asia reported this week.
Kura Sushi plans to start upgrading existing cameras, which are used to track the dishes customers take from conveyor belts to determine their bill, by early March. If the system detects suspicious behavior, it will alert employees.
"We want to deploy our AI-operated cameras to monitor if customers put the sushi they picked up with their hands back on the plates,” a spokesman told CNN. “We are confident we will be able to upgrade the systems we already have in place to deal with these kind of behaviors.”
Many folks in Japan have been outraged by a trend dubbed "sushi terrorism." Videos have shown people carrying out unhygienic acts, such as licking the spoon for a container of green tea powder. Other videos have shown patrons dumping wasabi onto sushi as it passes by on the conveyor belt.
Another video, which apparently has more than 98 million views on Twitter, showed a person licking the top of a soy sauce bottle and the rim of a teacup before putting them back at a branch of the Sushiro chain. They also licked a finger and touched a piece of passing sushi. The clip and the response to it caused the stock of Sushiro's parent company to drop almost five percent.
Sushiro said it replaced all the soy sauce bottles and cleaned every cup at the affected restaurant. Like other conveyor-belt sushi chains, it's enacted other policies like only making food to order to deter tampering and assure hygiene-conscious customers that restaurants are clean.
Kura Sushi has used AI in other ways. In 2020, it emerged that the company was using an app that can grade tuna. At least at the time, Kura Sushi was buying most of its tuna from outside of Japan. The app was said to help it evaluate the quality of the cuts without having to travel in the midst of a pandemic.
Gamers are no strangers to delayed seasons, but The Division 2 players are in a particularly awkward situation. Ubisoft has revealed that a development "error" has broken the shared-world shooter's build generation system, and thus the studio's ability to update the game. The team not only can't introduce the new season it delayed last week, but can't extend the outgoing one until it repairs the build functionality.
Ubisoft says it has made "good progress" in fixing the issue in recent days, and there are hints a solution is in sight. The company is in the midst of a three-hour "unscheduled maintenance" session as we write this, and it's using the downtime to fix problems that include an inability to make seasonal in-game purchases. The servers should be back online around 1PM Eastern if there are no complications.
The timing is particularly bad for this issue. Ubisoft recently cancelled three games in response to sinking revenue, and workers at its Paris studio went on strike last month to protest what they say are unfair working conditions. Things aren't going smoothly at the publisher, and it may be a while before there's a degree of stability.
Hogwarts Legacy is the Harry Potter game I’ve been dreaming of since I was a teenager. I grew up alongside the Harry Potter novels and devoured them all, and I spent the time between book releases reading and writing fanfiction set in the Wizarding World. I would’ve traded my little emo soul for a sprawling role-playing game that allowed me to be a student at Hogwarts, and 16 years later, that exact wish has been fulfilled. (And now I know what happened to my soul.)
Hogwarts Legacy is alive with magic. It’s a massive and gorgeous open-world RPG that extends far beyond the walls of the wizarding school, with mysteries, danger and cute creatures packed into every corner. Casting spells quickly becomes second nature in this environment and when it comes to puzzles, my magical instincts are often correct and richly rewarded. Combat involves intricate spellwork and lightning-quick responses, and this combination consistently results in a seamless, satisfying flow. I feel powerful while playing Hogwarts Legacy. I feel like a witch — and that’s all I’ve ever really wanted.
Warner Bros. Games
I’m not done with Hogwarts Legacy, but we weren’t given much lead time for the review and I feel I’ve played enough to form lasting opinions about the game. I’m about 22 hours in on PlayStation 5 and I’m one skill away from completing my witch’s ability set. Her name is Chenault, she’s a Slytherin, and her wand is 13 inches with a dragon heartstring core. Her favorite spell is incendio.
Combat in Hogwarts Legacy plays out across a variety of environments and against multiple enemy types, and it’s consistently delicious. Players eventually step into battle with 16 spells ready to fire, a wheel full of potions and plants, a meter that generates extra-powerful magic moves, and some basic defenses — and all of these actions culminate in explosive, frictionless duels. Spells, healing potions and protego bubbles respond even at the last possible moment, and my witch’s moves chain together in a way that feels volatile and magical. There’s strategy and challenge in each new battleground, and I look forward to testing my abilities and various clothing upgrades every time.
Combat may be where the action lies, but customization and exploration are core aspects of the game. Hogwarts is packed with students to assist (or not) and the school is overflowing with secrets, each one unlockable with the proper combination of curiosity and spellwork. I’ve spent a significant amount of time simply running through the halls and across the grounds of the school, happy to explore while passively gathering XP and watching the mysteries unravel around me.
Flying only makes this process more enjoyable. Whether on a broomstick or the back of a thestral, flight in Hogwarts Legacy feels exactly how I wanted it to — smooth, swift and stylish, and always with gorgeous views.
As the map expands beyond Hogwarts, past the streets of Hogsmeade and the boundaries of the Forbidden Forest, players encounter sidequests, challenges, secrets, puzzles and obstacle courses at a persistent pace. The world is large, but purposeful and truly beautiful; it’s clearly the result of intentional design, rather than procedural generation. There’s always something to find, a fresh riddle to solve or skill to learn, and my Quests tab is constantly growing. What’s more, I’m actually stoked to complete the activities I encounter, whenever I want to grind or take a breather from the main storyline.
The list of things to do in Hogwarts Legacy feels never-ending. For instance, about 10 hours in, the game introduces interior design mechanics in the Room of Requirement, allowing players to decorate a cavernous space from the architectural touches, to the placement and color of individual tables, chairs, paintings, rugs and tchotchkes. It’s a useful room, too; this is where players keep their clothing-upgrade loom, potions tables, herbology boxes and captured beasts. I’ve spent far too much time tweaking the appearance of my own Room of Requirement — like, hours — but I’m in love with the results and I’ve enjoyed the process immensely.
Warner Bros. Games
I see potential for the glut of stuff in Hogwarts Legacy to become tedious, but this hasn’t happened in my playthrough yet. More than 20 hours in, and the magic is still alive for me.
Before actually playing the game, I was especially excited to brew potions because this was my favorite activity in Pottermore, the browser-based Hogwarts-student simulator that disintegrated into gibberish in the mid 2010s. In Pottermore, brewing potions involved reading recipes and physically manipulating ingredients at the proper moments, and I found the process to be incredibly peaceful. However, potion-making isn’t an overly complicated affair in Hogwarts Legacy. You simply get the ingredients and then leave them on the table for a while, just like growing plants. The mechanics fit the game — in a world this busy and vast, gathering ingredients is the challenge, not the minutiae of chopping, stirring, grinding, measuring and timing — but it’s a missed opportunity.
Even just writing that, I’m itching to spend some quality time at a potions bench doing all of these things. Maybe this would make for a solid piece of DLC down the line, Advanced Potion-Making? Just a thought, Avalanche.
Right, back to the actual game.
Warner Bros. Games
The main storylines in Hogwarts Legacy are generic fantasy platforms. Two main arcs collide: one pits players against goblin revolutionaries planning to destroy wizardkind, and the other is an extensive investigation of an ancient and powerful magic — the same magic that you, the main character, can uniquely wield. The latter arc will be painfully familiar to Harry Potter fans, as it involves a bunch of old farts repeatedly throwing a child into deadly situations while withholding crucial information and stroking their long white beards. I guess we know where Dumbledore got it from.
Personally, I don’t love the focus on the Goblin Rebellions. It’s functional as a basic fantasy premise, but it’s an obvious choice for a Harry Potter prequel and the game hasn’t yet demonstrated that it was a particularly thoughtful decision. The conceit so far is, “goblins are bad, wizardkind is good,” and there hasn’t been an intricate discussion about class, power and revolution within this framework, though these opportunities are prevalent. Regardless of how this storyline concludes, I would’ve appreciated a more nuanced approach or an original enemy.
There are valid questions about whether the depiction of goblins in Harry Potter is inherently antisemitic, or the result of centuries of European fiction that coded vampires, dwarves and other creatures with its authors’ antisemitism. What you need to know is that goblins in Hogwarts Legacy are not meaningfully different to those in the novels, so your stance on the issue is unlikely to shift with this presentation.
Warner Bros. Games
The conversation around goblins and antisemitism would likely be top of mind in reviews and tweets about the game, but the author of the Harry Potter novels has made it publicly known that she’s transphobic, and this has understandably dominated the discourse. It’s led some people to call for a boycott of Hogwarts Legacy, and a portion of these folks are rebuking anyone who reviews, streams or talks about playing it. This controversy has consumed any broader criticism about the game itself. I addressed my personal decision to review this game for Engadget in an editorial at the start of the week, which is available to read here.
For anyone concerned about encountering transphobic or bigoted content in Hogwarts Legacy: The author of the Harry Potter novels was not involved in the game’s writing or creation, and in fact, its world is more inclusive than the series has ever been. Crucially, the Hogwarts Legacy character builder allows for an array of gender, voice and appearance configurations, and lets players choose their own names. In fanfiction terms, it’s basically a Mary Sue machine. This is ideal for an interactive role-playing medium — the customization options allow players to project their own identities onto the main character, who is an extra-special, super-powered student sorcerer surrounded by basic magic users. It’s a familiar premise for fantasy RPG players.
What makesthis game stand out among open-world RPGs is its density of activities, mysteries and awe-inspiring moments, and its expertly tuned combat mechanics. Hogwarts Legacy is thrumming with magic, and it expands not only the landscape around Hogwarts, but also the boundaries of representation in an incredibly popular fantasy universe. It’s the coolest work of Harry Potter fanfiction I’ve come across in years, and I’m excited to keep playing. Especially if there’s an Advanced Potion-Making DLC down the line.
