Juul has agreed to pay $1.2 billion to settle thousands of lawsuits – including 8,500 personal injury cases. If you think that’s a huge amount for a relatively young company, it’s got substantial financial backing: Marlboro owner, Altria, invested $12.8 billion in Juul back in 2018.

In 2018, Juul was the leader in the US e-cigarette market, but after a string of controversies, it slipped to second place behind Vuse. The US Food and Drug Administration ordered e-cigarette brands to stop selling flavored pods if they can't prove they can keep them out of minors' hands, and it attempted to ban the sale of Juul items.

Still, California sued Juul in 2019, accusing the company of targeting minors in the state, failing to verify the age of its customers and failing to warn users of their exposure to chemicals linked to cancer and birth defects.

– Mat Smith

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

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NASA’s Artemis 1 Moon mission has returned to Earth

The Orion crew vehicle landed in the Pacific Ocean.

NASA's Artemis 1 mission has returned to Earth following a successful trip around the Moon. On Saturday, at approximately 12:40 PM ET, the uncrewed Orion vessel landed off the coast of Baja, California. Its almost 26-day journey included a new spaceflight record and some stunning photos of Earth's natural satellite.

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A new self-driving tractor prototype has an electric motor

Another tractor can run on manure gases.

CNH

CNH Industrial has unveiled what it says is the "first" electric light tractor prototype with self-driving features. The machine promises zero emissions, quieter operation than diesel models and, according to CNH, lower running costs. Sensors and cameras on the roof help the vehicle complete tasks, dodge obstacles and work in harmony with other equipment. You can even activate it from your phone.

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Engadget Podcast: AI chat and avatars dominated our socials this week

Plus: This year in drones and action cams.

This week, many of us saw our social media feeds taken over by colorful, surreal pictures of people we follow, except they don’t quite look like themselves. Lensa AI generated the imagesI, the latest in what feels like a now-annual trend to use a new app to create mockups of your face in various scenarios. This week’s Engadget Podcast discusses the fascination with them, and Engadget Editor-at-Large James Trew joins the team for a check-in on the state of action cameras.

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Chevy's first hybrid Corvette leaks ahead of summer 2023 arrival

The E-Ray could pair a V8 with an electric motor to offer all-wheel drive.

Chevy

Fans on CorvetteBlogger and Corvette Forum discovered GM briefly made the 2024 Corvette E-Ray hybrid available through Chevy's online visualizer tool. The design combines the wide body of the C8 Z06 with the regular model's exhaust pipes. There are some new colors (Cacti green, anyone?) and model-specific wheels. The biggest changes, as you might guess, are in the engine. Images of the engine bay suggest the E-Ray will use the regular C8 Corvette's LT2 V8 engine. The absence of a charging port suggests this is a conventional hybrid rather than a plug-in.

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Just three months after announcing a partnership with Mercedes to manufacture commercial electric vans in Europe, Rivian now says its pausing those plans to concentrate on its own business. "At this point in time, we believe focusing on our consumer business, as well as our existing commercial business, represent the most attractive near-term opportunities to maximize value for Rivian," it said in a press release. 

The company said it will "no longer pursue the memorandum of understanding with Mercedes-Benz," but the parting appears to be amicable and potentially not permanent. "Exploring strategic opportunities with the team at Rivian in the future remains an option, as we share the same strategic ambition: accelerating the EV adoption with benchmark products for our customers," Mercedes-Benz's head of vans Mathias Geisen said in a statement. It added that Rivian's decision wouldn't change its commercial electrification strategy.

Rivian has seen some setbacks in the past year. Despite being one of the best of funded EV startups, the company announced last summer that it would lay off six percent of its workforce in an effort to cut costs. Earlier, it revealed that it would hike prices on vehicles already on pre-order, before backing off and applying the increases only to future orders. On the plus side, its R1S SUV and R1T pickup EVs have generally received good reviews.

Other EV startups have also run into problems this year due to inflation, higher interest rates and other issues. Arrival, for one, was forced to put its electric bus and car projects on hold due to struggles with cash. And Faraday Future delayed the launch of its first EV, the FF91, also over cash flow issues. 

Xiaomi's 13 series flagship smartphones are here, and as usual, they're loaded with the latest technology and features. With the 13 and 13 Pro, Xiaomi is the second manufacturer to use Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 platform, following Vivo with the X90 Pro and IQOO 11 series. They also have new camera modules with improved image quality, ultra-fast charging and more. 

As with the previous models, the Xiaomi 13 and 13 Pro have separate designs. The 13 Pro uses a wrap-around 6.73-inch 2K+ AMOLED screen (3,200 x 1,400) with vegan leather or ceramic back versions. Meanwhile, the 13 has a flat 6.36-inch 2,400 x 1,080 AMOLED display, iPhone-like aluminum sides and either glass or leather back options. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 mobile platform offers hardware accelerated ray-tracing and improved gaming performance, so both phones have 120Hz displays to keep up.

Xiaomi

The Xiaomi 13 Pro has top-flight camera specs, too. It packs a 50-megapixel (MP) f/1.9 main camera with a Type 1-inch sensor (like other Type 1-inch sensors it's really only 8.8 x 13.2mm, but still significantly larger than on most smartphones). It also includes a 50MP 3.2 zoom camera (75mm equivalent) with optical image stabilization (OIS) and a floating lens, as pictured above. Finally, it has a 50MP f/2.2 ultra-wide camera (14mm equivalent), and 32MP punch-hole selfie cam. 

The Xiaomi 13 (below), meanwhile, has the same selfie camera, a 50MP f/1.8 OIS main camera with a smaller sensor, a 10MP 3.2x zoom OIS zoom camera and a 12-megapixel ultra-wide (15mm equivalent) camera.

Xiaomi

The 13 Pro offers impressive 120W charging (more than many laptops), bringing the 4,820mAh battery from zero to a 100 percent charge in just 19 minutes. That's fast, but still significantly slower than Redmi's Note 12 Discovery Edition. Wireless charging happens at "just" 50 watts, or 36 minutes to a full charge. The Xiaomi 13, has a slightly smaller 4,500 mAh battery and is limited to 67W wired charging (38 minutes to 100 percent) and 50W wireless charging (48 minutes to a full charge). 

Other features include LPDDR5X RAM and UFS 4.0 storage on both models (8GB and 128GB up to 12GB and 512GB on both models), Dolby Atmos on the Pro model and Leica camera tech. For the latter, Xiaomi and Leica built a color model based on 4,700 scenes, presumably allowing for improved accuracy. Prices start at 4,999 yuan ($720) for the Xiaomi 13 Pro and 3,999 yuan ($570) for the Xiaomi 13. Those are seriously good prices for such high spec phones, but as usual, you likely won't be able to buy them in North America. 

Before Trump-era sanctions made the company a non-player in the market, Huawei was briefly the world’s largest phone manufacturer, surpassing both Samsung and Apple in shipments. In a sign of how much it has fallen since then, Huawei announced this week it recently entered into a patent cross-licensing agreement with its biggest domestic rival. Oppo, the parent company of OnePlus and subsidiary of one of China’s largest electronics manufacturers, now has global rights to Huawei’s coveted 5G patents.

The companies did not disclose the financial terms of the deal, but we have some idea of the money involved thanks to information Huawei has shared in the past. When the firm announced it was planning to monetize its patent portfolio more aggressively last year, it said it would charge phone makers a “reasonable” $2.50 per device to license its technologies. Huawei also said it expected to generate an additional $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion in revenue between 2019 and 2021 due to the move. When you consider Oppo and Vivo (both owned by China’s BBK Electronics) shipped more than 51 million smartphones last quarter, that’s a lot of money on the line.

At the same time, Oppo is obtaining access to some critical technologies. As of 2021, approximately 18.3 percent of Huawei’s 5G patents fell under the Standard Essential Patent (SEP) category, meaning they were considered critical to the 5G standard. At the time, Huawei had the most in-use 5G-related SEPs of any company in the world.

It will be interesting to see if the agreement draws interest from lawmakers in the US and other parts of the world. For much of the past decade, BBK has managed to stay under the radar of regulators and mainstream media in the way that Huawei and ZTE have not. The company’s segmented brand portfolio makes its footprint seem smaller than it is. In reality, it’s consistently been one of the largest and most important phone makers in the world.

Twitter has begun rolling out Community Notes to all of its users globally, the company announced on Saturday. Previously known as Birdwatch, the feature first debuted in 2021 under former CEO Jack Dorsey as means for the social media website to combat misinformation.

Community Notes takes a crowd-sourced approach to debunking misleading tweets. Moderators who are part of the program can append notes to tweets to add “context.” Regular users can then vote on whether they find the context “helpful.” Before today, only individuals in the US could see the notes. Twitter says it will start adding contributors from other regions soon.

Current company owner Elon Musk has positioned Community Notes as a critical element of his “Twitter 2.0” vision, claiming the feature will be “a gamechanger for improving accuracy on Twitter.” However, as with any crowd-sourced feature, there’s the potential for Community Notes to backfire if groups use the tool to promote partisan views.

The global rollout of Community Notes comes a day before the relaunch of Twitter Blue. Following a disastrous first attempt at paid account verification, Twitter announced on Saturday it would start rolling out its revamped subscription service again on Monday. This time around, subscribers will need to provide a number for verification purposes before the company will add a blue checkmark to their account. Additionally, users who change their handle, display name and profile photo will temporarily lose their blue checkmark while Twitter reviews their account.

NASA's Artemis 1 mission has returned to Earth following a successful trip around the Moon. On Saturday, at approximately 12:40PM ET, the agency's Orion crew vessel landed off the coast of Baja, California. On its way to the Pacific Ocean, Orion performed what’s known as a skip entry. After entering the Earth’s upper atmosphere, the crew vessel briefly used its own lift to “skip” back out before re-entering for the final descent. In doing so, it became the spacecraft designed to carry humans to carry out such a maneuver. 

Getting here wasn’t easy. NASA’s next-generation Space Launch System gave the agency plenty of headaches before it successfully carried Artemis 1 to space on November 16th. NASA spent much of the summer troubleshooting fuel leaks and engine problems. Come fall, Hurricane Ian and later tropical storm Nicole further delayed the launch of Artemis 1, but after all of that was said and done, the SLS produced one of the most memorable rocket launches in recent history. A nighttime flight saw the rocket lit up the Kennedy Space Center.         

More broadly, the conclusion of Artemis 1 caps off one of NASA's most successful years in recent memory.

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If you recently bought an iPad and have been patiently waiting for the second-generation Apple Pencil to go on sale, now is your chance to buy one at a significant discount. Amazon has dropped the price of the stylus by 31 percent, making it $89 at the moment. That marks a return to an all-time low price for the Apple Pencil. Note that if you order today, it should arrive by Christmas.

At this point, there’s not much to say about Apple’s latest stylus. If you’re an artist or enjoy drawing, it’s a must-buy accessory. The second-generation model's pressure sensitivity allows you to add as much or as little detail to digital artwork as you want, and you can customize the double-tap feature to some extent. The Apple Pencil is also a great tool for photographers who rely on apps like Lightroom. Best of all, the stylus attaches magnetically to the iPad Pro and iPad Air for easy storage and charging. If you recently bought Apple’s new 2022 iPad, keep in mind the tablet is only compatible with the first-generation Apple Pencil.

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The Covid pandemic wasn't the first time that America has found itself split along ideological seams over infectious disease, nor was the Spanish Flu in 1919. Even when America was still a collection of colonies, we held bitter disagreements on public health policy. 

During the run-up to the Revolutionary War, the 13 colonies found themselves besieged by a widespread and deadly outbreak of smallpox, carried here aboard a recently arrived slave ship. With that disease also arrived our best defense against it — inoculation techniques practiced by the slaves themselves. However, getting the wider, whiter public on board with these lifesaving treatments — even with the vigorous backing by Benjamin Franklin, who lost a cherished son to the disease after refusing to inoculate the boy — was anything but easy. 

But it damn well proved to be necessary. As historian Andrew Wehrman explains in The Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution, our downright violent resistance to, and demand for freedom from, the disease was also precisely what helped galvanize our mobilization of independence from England. 

JHU Press

Excerpted from The Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution by Andrew M. Wehrman. Copyright 2022. Published with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.

Creating a Critical Mass

On December 15, 1774, Reverend Samuel Williams of Bradford, Massachusetts, was invited to Salem by Reverend Asa Dunbar to deliver a Thanksgiving sermon before the congregation of the First Church. Williams titled his sermon “A Discourse on the Love of Our Country,” and it was preached and then published in the tense months between the announcement of Britain’s Coercive Acts in the summer of 1774 and the first shots at Lexington and Concord in April 1775. Williams, from the pulpit, touted America’s achievements in civil government, religion, and the military, but surprisingly also highlighted America’s scientific prowess. As an infant state, Williams argued, America could not be expected “to have the numbers, wealth, or literary establishments of ancient states,” but even with these disadvantages, Williams boasted that Americans had already made “two capital discoveries.” The first of these was Benjamin Franklin’s discovery of electricity, and the second was the discovery of inoculation against smallpox. These two breakthroughs indicated that America had “strong tendencies towards a state of greater perfection and happiness than mankind has yet seen.”

Popular mobilization for the war of independence required Americans in thirteen distinct colonies, possessing “different forms of government, different laws, different interests, and some of them different religious persuasions and different manners,” to imagine a shared culture that needed defending. By midcentury ordinary colonists had developed a great fondness for royal political culture and fashionable imported British consumer goods like tea, which created a shared and increasingly British identity across the colonies. The Revolution, then, was not inevitable but instead was the result of a sudden break in the 1770s over British grievances rather than a slow tear over decades of developing American values. By looking at how colonists viewed inoculation, however, we can see that Americans developed a particular sense of national pride while still maintaining their overall Britishness, and how suddenly such feelings could burst into jealous fury when unacknowledged. The discovery and implementation of smallpox inoculation from a folk practice to the medical triumph of the eighteenth century was certainly a global and transatlantic process, but Americans in the 1760s and 1770s cobbled together a shared history about the discovery of mankind’s greatest medical procedure, turning it into an all-American cure. Although they did not always agree on the details, they had no doubt that they did it without the help of anyone in Great Britain. As Williams did in his sermon, Americans used their claim to have invented inoculation to celebrate American achievement and ultimately to rationalize a revolution.

Throughout his sermon in Salem, Williams toyed with his audience about which country he was professing to love, Britain or America. He was speaking the day before the anniversary of the Destruction of the Tea in Boston Harbor. In retaliation for that destruction, Parliament had closed Boston Harbor with the Boston Port Act and altered how Massachusetts communities could conduct their own affairs and town meetings in the Massachusetts Government Act. The people of Massachusetts, angry over what they saw as tyrannical overreach, ended royal authority in much of the countryside, as communities were forming revolutionary committees of safety, closing county courts, demanding allegiance, arming themselves, and training their “minutemen.” Still, many hoped for a speedy reconciliation and a de-escalation of violence. Few were calling for outright independence.

Williams understood that his words mattered in this moment, as the people of Salem, which had been regarded — often derisively — as a center of loyalism in Massachusetts, considered how they would react to the inevitable crisis in the months to come. The minister established that people should love all mankind as they love God, but that there was a particular love that people should have for their own country. Not until the middle of the sermon did he begin to reveal that he had rhetorically separated the mother country from the united colonies and was encouraging the congregation to love the latter.

Williams understood his audience and the local context as well. Over the course of the last year, Essex Hospital and the Salem jail had been destroyed by mobs angry over inoculations. While not as violent as the controversy in Marblehead, in Salem, a civic debate about how best to protect their community from the smallpox epidemic had exploded into an issue of national pride over the claims of a flamboyant British doctor named James Latham, which split the town into Whigs and Tories on the eve of the Revolution. Williams, who would go on to become “Hollis Professor of Mathematicks and Natural Philosophy” at Harvard University five years after this sermon, used science to make his case. He compared the love of one’s country to a gravitational pull, which “will ever draw to a common centre.”

While the mother country had much to admire, Americans had created their own critical mass through population growth, drawing themselves together with asylum seekers from other lands: “From the weak beginnings of private adventurers, so amazingly rapid has been our growth and progress, that in a century and an half, we are become more than three millions of inhabitants.” And, Williams maintained, the process was accelerating. The discoveries of electricity and inoculation were bound to be only the beginning of America’s “improvements in commerce, philosophy, and the medicinal art.” Based on these achievements and this potential, Williams made it clear at the end of his speech that “the cause of America seems indeed to be much the better cause. It is not the cause of a mob, of a party, or a faction that America means to plead . . . Nor is it the cause of independency which we have in view. It is the cause of Self-Defense, of Public Faith, and of the Liberties of Mankind that America is engaged."

After 25 days in space, Orion is about to conclude its uncrewed test run to the Moon. The Artemis 1 mission will draw to a close when the NASA spacecraft splashes down in the Pacific Ocean close to Guadalupe Island, which is 130 nautical miles off the coast of Baja California. Orion is scheduled to hit the water at around 12:40PM ET. NASA's livestream will start at 11AM and continue after splashdown as a recovery team picks up the capsule. You'll be able to watch the stream below.

NASA chose the landing trajectory and splashdown site so as not to pose a threat to people, land or shipping lanes. Just before re-entry, Orion and the European Service Module will separate, with the latter burning up in Earth's atmosphere.

The crew mobile will carry out a skip entry technique to ensure it accurately arrives at the designated landing site. Orion will edge into the upper part of the atmosphere, then use that and its own lift to "skip" back out before re-entering for the final descent. The atmosphere will reduce Orion's speed to 325MPH and the 11 parachutes will eventually slow it to a splashdown speed of 20MPH or less.

After multiple delays, Artemis 1 launched on November 15th as a precursor to the first crewed mission to the Moon in over 50 years. After carrying out a flyby in which it got as close as 80 miles to the lunar surface, Orion went into a distant retrograde orbit around the Moon. That allowed NASA to test various systems while minimizing fuel consumption — Orion's cameras took some gorgeous pictures while it was out there too. The spacecraft left the Moon's gravitational pull on December 6th as it made its way home.

Following an unsuccessful first attempt at paid account verification, Twitter will start rolling out its revamped Blue subscription on December 12th, the company announced on Saturday. Twitter originally launched Blue verification for iOS devices in early November for $8 per month, but the company paused the rollout after the platform was overrun by verified trolls. On Saturday, the company also confirmed the service will cost $11 per month when users subscribe directly through its iOS app. On the web, the subscription will cost $8 per month. 

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