Amazon is running a sale on Kindle e-readers just in time for outdoor reading, and there are a few good deals in the mix. The company is selling the base Kindle with lock screen ads for $80, or $20 off. That's near an all-time low, and makes it an easy pick if you want a compact, no-frills device for reading on the park bench. The sale also drops the price of the 8GB Kindle Paperwhite to $100, or $40 off.
Last fall's refresh of the entry-level Kindle helped it catch up to the Paperwhite in a big way. The 300PPI display is much easier on the eyes, and the longer six-week battery life helps you leave the charger at home. Factor in USB-C charging and double the storage (16GB) and you may have all you need to clear your reading backlog.
There are reasons to consider buying more advanced models, of course. The Kindle Paperwhite offers a larger screen, beach-friendly water resistance and an adjustable warm light. You can even charge wirelessly if you buy the Paperwhite Signature Edition (on sale for $140). However, those are more perks than must-haves. The starter Kindle covers the essentials well, and may even be preferable if you're looking for a small e-reader that can tuck into a bag's side pocket.
Netflix released at least one movie a week over the past two years – I challenge you to name them all! – but for 2023, the company is changing course. According to Bloomberg, the streaming giant is restructuring its movie division and releasing fewer movies overall. Despite the sheer number of titles Netflix previously released, only a few had won accolades, attained significant hours of streaming, or had the kind of cultural impact some of the biggest blockbusters had achieved. (According to the company's Top 10 page, its most-watched movies for 2021 and 2022 include Red Notice, Don't Look Up and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.)
Netflix ramped up its film development after studios started building their own streaming services instead of licensing their movies to the company. This restructuring will combine the team working on small projects with a budget of $30 million or less and the unit that produces mid-budget films that cost $30 million to $80 million. There’s also a big-budget arm to its film development unit – likely involved with the aforementioned hits. No word yet on whether the restructuring will affect that part of the business.
– 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.
The generative AI race is on, and the current frontrunners appear to be Google's Bard and Microsoft's Bing AI, which is powered by ChatGPT. But what are the limits to the questions it can answer? We asked Google’s Bard chatbots a series of questions to see which is better at delivering facts, replacing us at our jobs or participating in existential debates. We also looked at their speed, transparency and how likely they were to break if we started to push its buttons And don’t worry, Bing AI got the same treatment.
Apple won an appeal against an investigation launched by the UK’s antitrust watchdog last fall. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) opened a full probe into Apple and Google in November. At the time, the regulator said that many UK businesses felt restricted by the “stranglehold” the two tech giants had on mobile browsing. The probe also sought to determine if Apple was restricting the cloud gaming market through its App Store rules. The company said the CMA should have opened the probe at the same time it first published its report on mobile ecosystems last June. The Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT), the court that oversees CMA cases, agreed with Apple, saying the regulator gave notice of its investigation too late.
Tesla has also been ordered to rehire a worker that it illegally fired.
According to a federal appeals court, Elon Musk broke US labor law in 2018 when he tweeted that Tesla factory workers would forgo stock options if they chose to unionize. In May 2018, a Twitter user asked Musk about his union stance. “Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so tmrw if they wanted,” he tweeted in response. “But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing? Our safety record is 2X better than when plant was UAW & everybody already gets healthcare.” Tesla has argued the tweet was Musk’s way of pointing out that workers at other automakers don’t receive stock options. The court ordered Musk to delete the tweet. As of the writing of this article, the tweet is still there.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-netflix-plans-to-make-fewer-better-movies-111522164.html?src=rss
Twitter's handling of verified users continues to shift after a number of developments over the weekend. Last week, Twitter said it would start winding down the legacy verified program on April 1st, but that was limited to specific cases including one called out by CEO Elon Musk. Meanwhile, a new report indicated that around 10,000 of the top-followed sites would retain their legacy checkmarks, even if they didn't subscribe to Twitter Blue. And now, Twitter is displaying the same status for both legacy verified and Twitter Blue subscribers, making it difficult to tell them apart.
Verified legacy Twitter users were expecting to lose their white-on-blue checkmarks over the weekend, after the Twitter Verified account tweeted it would start stripping them on April 1st. For the most part, however, that didn't happen, reportedly because un-verifying users is a painstaking manual process (Musk tweeted in a now-deleted message that legacy users would be given "a few weeks grace"). However, Twitter did strip a verified badge from The New York Times after the site said it wouldn't pay for Twitter Blue, in an apparent fit of pique by CEO Elon Musk. He later labeled the site as "propaganda."
Elon Musk quickly deleted a tweet saying legacy verified accounts would not lose their checkmarks on April 1 as he previously said, won’t happen for another “few weeks”
however, if they specifically say they won’t pay for Twitter Blue, then Twitter will remove their checkmark pic.twitter.com/HiiWwf30tb
Speaking of the NYT, it reported that 10,000 of the top-followed sites and 500 leading advertisers would retain their verified badges without the need to subscribe to Twitter Blue. That follows tweets from a number of top users like LeBron James and The White House that they would never pay for a subscription.
"It is our understanding that Twitter Blue does not provide person-level verification as a service. Thus, a blue check mark will now simply serve as a verification that the account is a paid user," White House digital strategy director Rob Flaherty told staffers in a memo. Numerous other accounts tweeted a similar sentiment, with some noting that celebrities, journalists and other influential users are the primary drivers of Twitter traffic.
Topping off the drama, Twitter just changed the tags that appears when you click on a verified badge. Before, it gave separate messages for Twitter Blue subscribers ("This account is verified because it’s subscribed to Twitter Blue") and legacy verified users ("This is a legacy verified account. It may or may not be notable."). Now, it displays the same message for both: "This account is verified because it’s subscribed to Twitter Blue or is a legacy verified account."
Engadget
Some users applauded the revised tags as more egalitarian, but others said the message would make it harder to tell if users were genuine accounts or impersonators. That was the exact problem that delayed the rollout of Twitter Blue back in November, if you'll recall. For those on desktop who still want to know, a Chrome extension released last year can still tell you who paid for Twitter Blue, as shown by the different symbols above.
Twitter recently said that Twitter Blue would cost $1,000 per month for organizations, plus an additional $50 per month for individual affiliates in the US. The program has reportedly met with limited success to date, and Elon Musk recently told employees that Twitter was worth less than half what he paid for it, according to several reports.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/twitter-stokes-confusion-as-verified-drama-continues-104321432.html?src=rss
Paris residents have dealt a blow to e-scooter rental companies Lime, Tier and Dott, voting in an 89 percent landslide to ban "trotinettes" from streets amid low voter turnout, France 24 has reported. The French capital will likely become the second European city after Barcelona to prohibit the devices, as mayor Anne Hidalgo has promised to respect the referendum. Any ban won't affect e-bikes or privately-owned scooters.
Following a messylaunch in 2018, Paris introduced strict rules and reduced the number of rental companies from around 20 to just three. A spate of accidents ensued including a 2021 fatality, prodding the city to introduce new rules like a 10 km/h (6 MPH) speed limit in designated zones and fines for for not using dedicated parking. However, residents continued to complain about dangerous operation and devices strewn on city sidewalks.
Only eight percent of city dwellers voted, and that group appeared to skew away from younger people more likely to use the devices. "In the double queue here, a majority of 50+ and parents with toddlers," tweeted journalist Agnes Poirier. "Incapable of regulating their use, the City of Paris is just leaving it to its inhabitants in an all or nothing alternative."
The move may be welcomed by some, but it goes against Hidalgo's initiatives to make Paris less polluted and dependent on cars. As part of a pledge to be carbon neutral by 2050, the city has vowed to phase out ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicles by 2030, plant up to 170,000 trees, install electric chargers for EVs and promote e-mobility, including e-bikes and, at one time, e-scooters.
The city has since changed its tune on the latter, though. It noted that the scooters were mostly replacing walking or public transport rather than cars or taxi trips, so weren't achieving the goal of reducing vehicle use. "They’re honestly not very ecological — they get damaged and they are left lying wherever," said Hidalgo back in January, adding that she was personally in favor of a ban. "We can’t contain them in public spaces and they’re causing road safety problems, especially for older and disabled people."
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/paris-votes-to-ban-e-scooter-rentals-082352303.html?src=rss
While its next-generation rocket has yet to fly, that’s not stopping SpaceX from booking Starship flights. On Friday, a startup named Astrolab revealed that it had recently signed an agreement with Elon Musk’s private space firm to reserve a spot on an uncrewed Starship cargo mission that could launch as early as mid-2026. “This is SpaceX’s first commercial cargo contract to the lunar surface,” Jaret Matthews, CEO of Astrolab, told The New York Times, adding his company was one of a few customers involved in the flight.
Astrolab is building a vehicle it hopes will one day carry equipment, supplies and people across the lunar surface. The Flexible Logistics and Exploration (FLEX) rover is about the size of a Jeep Wrangler, making it a bit bigger than NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars. It also features a robotic arm for assisting with cargo and can travel up to 15 miles per hour. Oh, and FLEX can carry up to two astronauts.
Once it lands on the Moon, Astrolab claims FLEX will become the largest rover to travel the lunar surface. Matthews told The Times Astrolab already has customers waiting to use the rover to carry cargo during the 2026 Starship mission. Looking further to the future, Matthews said FLEX could assist with building a permanent human presence on the Moon and beyond. “Ultimately our goal is to have a fleet of rovers both on the Moon and Mars,” he said. “And I really think I see these vehicles as the catalysts ultimately for the off-Earth economy.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/spacexs-starship-will-carry-an-suv-sized-rover-to-the-moon-in-2026-213926510.html?src=rss
Echo smart displays and speakers aren’t the only devices on sale on Amazon this weekend, the retailer has also discounted Ring doorbells, cameras and alarm systems. Nearly every product Ring offers is part of the promotion, including the Ring Video Doorbell Pro 2. Thanks to a 30 percent discount, you can get the smart doorbell for $175, instead of $250 at its usual price. Other notable discounts include a $40 price drop on both the plug-in and battery models of Ring Spotlight Cam Plus. You can also save $40 on Ring Floodlight Cam Wired Pro, in either black and white.
Although it’s a few years old now, the Ring Doorbell Pro 2 is still one of the best smart home doorbells you can buy. Ring refreshed the Pro 2 in 2021, equipping the device with a 1,536p video camera and a new fish eye lens. Thanks to those features, the Pro 2 offers a 150-degree field of view, allowing you to see when parcels arrive on your porch. The addition of a radar sensor means the Pro 2 offers more accurate motion detection. As with other Ring devices, you’ll get the most out of the Pro 2 if you already invested in the Alexa ecosystem. For those who prefer Google Assistant, Nest offerings like the Nest Doorbell can be a better choice.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ring-video-doorbells-and-alarm-systems-are-up-to-33-percent-off-right-now-192126054.html?src=rss
Tesla has shared its first production and delivery report of 2023. And in a repeat of its Q4 2022 results, the automaker set a new record for deliveries but fell short of Wall Street estimates. Tesla announced on Sunday it delivered 422,875 EVs during the first three months of the year. It produced 440,808 vehicles during that same period, another record for the company.
Going into the weekend, independent analyst Troy Teslike predicted the company was on track to deliver 427,000 vehicles in the first quarter of the year. The company’s final tally represents a 36 percent increase from the 310,048 deliveries it announced during this time last year. It’s also a four percent increase from the 405,278 deliveries it reported in the final quarter of 2022.
Hi everybody. Tesla has just reported 422,875 deliveries in Q1 2023 which is a new record compared to 405K in Q4 2022. Congrats to the Tesla team.
My error rate was +1.2% for production and +1.0% for deliveries. I'm happy with that. pic.twitter.com/uGEyxztQVc
Unsurprisingly, the Model 3 and Model Y made up the bulk of Tesla’s deliveries in the first quarter of 2023, with 412,180 of those vehicles making their way to customers before the end of March. Comparatively, Tesla's more expensive Model S and Model X cars accounted for a modest 10,695 deliveries over the same time frame. That's a drop from the 17,147 Model S and Model X vehicles it delivered last quarter.
It will be interesting to see how Tesla’s latest delivery numbers affect the company’s bottom line. The first three months of the year saw Tesla aggressively cut pricing across most of its lineup. In January, for instance, the five-seat Model Y went from costing $65,990 to $52,990, and then $54,990 less than a month later. More recently, the automaker slashed the price of Model S and X vehicles by up to $10,000. Tesla will publish its full Q1 results on April 19th
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/tesla-sets-new-company-record-after-delivering-more-than-422000-evs-in-q1-2023-171816368.html?src=rss
The Echo Show 8 is one of Engadget’s favorite smart displays, and it’s on sale right now. At $75 after a $55 discount, the smart display is only $5 more than it was during Black Friday last year. Amazon has also discounted the Echo Show 15 by $55. You can get the company’s largest smart display for just under $225 at the moment. Separately, Amazon is offering up to 35 percent off on Echo speakers. One of the highlights here is the chance to pick up a 5th-generation Echo Dot for just $35.
Engadget Senior Editor Nicole Lee awarded the Echo Show 8 a score of 87 in 2021. Despite being a few years old now, the Echo Show 8 is the best smart display for most people. Its 8-inch, 1,280 x 800 resolution display is large enough to make viewing photos and participating in video calls comfortable. At the same, the Echo Show 8’s display isn’t so large it will look out of place in a kitchen or bedroom. Moreover, the Show 8's built-in speakers are also powerful enough to fill a small room, and the device features enough processing power not to feel sluggish. If you’re concerned about your privacy, the Show 8 comes with a physical camera shutter and a mic mute button.
Like all of Amazon’s Echo devices, the Show 8 works best if you already own other Alexa-compatible devices. If you’re not in the Amazon ecosystem, the 2nd-gen Google Nest Hub could be a better purchase, particularly if you depend on services like Gmail and GCal. The Nest Hub also doesn’t come with a camera for video calls, which might not be a downside if you value your privacy.
"Birds fly South for the winter and North for the summer," has historically proven to be only slightly less reliable a maxim than the sun always rising in the East and setting in the West. Humanity has been fascinated by the comings and goings of our avian neighbors for millennia, but the why's and how's of their transitory travel habits have remained largely a mystery until recent years. In Flight Paths, science author Rebecca Heisman details the fascinating history of modern bird migration research and the pioneering ornithologists that helped the field take off. In the excerpt below, Heisman recalls the efforts of Dr. Bill Cochran, a trailblazer in radio-tagging techniques, to track his airborne, and actively-transmitting, quarry across the Canadian border.
Swainson’s thrush looks a bit like a small brown version of its familiar cousin the American robin. Its gray-brown back contrasts with a pale, spotted chest and pale “spectacle” markings around its eyes. These thrushes are shy birds that forage for insects in the leaf litter on the forest floor, where they blend in with the dappled light and deep shadows. Birders know them by their fluting, upward-spiraling song, which fills the woods of Canada and the northern United States with ethereal music in summer. But they don’t live there year-round; they spend the winters in Mexico and northern South America, then return north to breed.
On the morning of May 13, 1973, a Swainson’s thrush pausing on its journey from its winter home to its summer home blundered into a mist net in east-central Illinois. The researchers who gently pulled it from the net went through all the usual rituals—weighing and measuring it, clasping a numbered metal band around its leg—but they added one unusual element: a tiny radio transmitter weighing just five- thousandths of an ounce. They carefully trimmed the feathers from a small patch on the bird’s back, then used eyelash glue to cement the transmitter, mounted on a bit of cloth, in place against the bird’s skin (Generations of ornithologists have learned exactly where to find the eyelash glue at their local cosmetics store. Designed to not irritate the delicate skin of the eyelids when attaching false eyelashes, it doesn’t irritate birds’ skin, either, and wears off after weeks or months.)
When the thrush was released, it probably shuffled its feathers a few times as it got used to its new accessory, then returned to resting and foraging in preparation for continuing its trek. At only around 3 percent of the bird’s total body weight, the transmitter wouldn’t have impeded the bird noticeably as it went about its daily routine. Then, around 8:40 that evening, after the sun had dipped far enough below the horizon that the evening light was beginning to dim, the thrush launched itself into the air, heading northwest.
It would have had no way of knowing that it was being followed. Bill Cochran — the same engineer who, a decade and a half earlier, had rigged up a tape recorder with a bicycle axle and six thousand feet of tape so that Richard Graber could record a full night of nocturnal flight calls — had been waiting nearby in a converted Chevy station wagon with a large antenna poking out of a hole in the roof. When the thrush set out into the evening sky, Cochran and a student named Charles Welling were following on the roads below.
All they could see in the deepening night was the patch of highway illuminated by their headlights, but the sound of the wavering “beep . . . beep . . . beep” of the transmitter joined them to the thrush overhead as if by an invisible thread. They would keep at it for seven madcap nights, following the thrush for more than 930 miles before losing the signal for good in rural southern Manitoba on the morning of May 20.
Along the way, they would collect data on its altitude (which varied from 210 to 6,500 feet), air and ground speed (eighteen to twenty-seven and nine to fifty-two miles per hour, respectively, with the ground speed depending on the presence of headwinds or tailwinds), distance covered each night (65 to 233 miles), and, crucially, its heading. Because they were able to stick with the bird over such a long distance, Cochran and Welling were able to track how the precise direction the bird set out in each night changed as its position changed relative to magnetic north. The gradual changes they saw in its heading were consistent with the direction of magnetic north, providing some of the first real-world evidence that migrating songbirds use some sort of internal magnetic compass as one of their tools for navigation. Today Bill Cochran is a legend among ornithologists for his pioneering work tracking radio-tagged birds on their migratory odysseys. But it wasn’t birds that first drew him into the field of radio telemetry; it was the space race.
From Sputnik to Ducks
In October 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite into orbit. Essentially just a metal sphere that beeped, Sputnik 1 transmitted a radio signal for three weeks before its battery died. (It burned up in the atmosphere in January 1958.) That signal could be picked up by anyone with a good radio receiver and antenna, and scientists and amateur radio enthusiasts alike tracked its progress around and around Earth.
It caused a sensation around the world — including in Illinois, where the University of Illinois radio astronomer George Swenson started following the signals of Sputnik 1 and its successors to learn more about the properties of Earth’s atmosphere. Around 1960, Swenson got permission to design a radio beacon of his own to be incorporated into a Discoverer satellite, the U.S. answer to the Sputnik program. In need of locals with experience in electrical engineering to work on the project, he recruited Bill Cochran (who still had not officially finished his engineering degree — he wouldn’t complete the last class until 1964) to assist.
Cochran, as you may recall, had spent the late 1950s working at a television station in Illinois while studying engineering on the side and spending his nights helping Richard Graber perfect his system for recording nocturnal flight calls. By 1960, no longer satisfied with flight calls alone as a means of learning about migration, Graber had procured a small radar unit and gotten Cochran a part-time job with the Illinois Natural History Survey helping operate it. But along the way, Cochran had apparently demonstrated “exceptional facility with transistor circuits,” which is what got him the job with Swenson. It was the transistor, invented in 1947, that ultimately made both the space race and wildlife telemetry possible.
The beating heart of a radio transmitter is the oscillator, usually a tiny quartz crystal. When voltage is applied to a crystal, it changes shape ever so slightly at the molecular level and then snaps back, over and over again. This produces a tiny electric signal at a specific frequency, but it needs to be amplified before being sent out into the world. Sort of like how a lever lets you turn a small motion into a bigger one, an amplifier in an electrical circuit turns a weak signal into a stronger one.
Before and during World War II, amplifying a signal required controlling the flow of electrons through a circuit using a series of vacuum-containing glass tubes. Vacuum tubes got the job done, but they were fragile, bulky, required a lot of power, and tended to blow out regularly; owners of early television sets had to be adept at replacing vacuum tubes to keep them working. In a transistor, the old-fashioned vacuum tube is replaced by a “semiconductor” material (originally germanium, and later silicon), allowing the flow of electrons to be adjusted up or down by tweaking the material’s conductivity. Lightweight, efficient, and durable, transistors quickly made vacuum tubes obsolete. Today they’re used in almost every kind of electric circuit. Several billion of them are transisting away inside the laptop I’m using to write this.
As transistors caught on in the 1950s, the U.S. Navy began to take a special interest in radio telemetry, experimenting with systems to collect and transmit real-time data on a jet pilot’s vital signs and to study the effectiveness of cold-water suits for sailors. These efforts directly inspired some of the first uses of telemetry for wildlife research. In 1957, scientists in Antarctica used the system from the cold-water suit tests to monitor the temperature of a penguin egg during incubation, while a group of researchers in Maryland borrowed some ideas from the jet pilot project and surgically implanted transmitters in woodchucks. [ed: Although harnesses, collars, and the like are also commonly used for tracking wildlife today, surgically implanting transmitters has its advantages, such as eliminating the chance that an external transmitter will impede an animal’s movements.] Their device had a range of only about twenty-five yards, but it was the first attempt to use radio telemetry to track animals’ movements. The Office of Naval Research even directly funded some of the first wildlife telemetry experiments; navy officials hoped that radio tracking “may help discover the bird’s secret of migration, which disclosure might, in turn, lead to new concepts for the development of advanced miniaturized navigation and detection systems.”
Cochran didn’t know any of this at the time. Nor did he know that the Discoverer satellites he and Swenson were building radio beacons for were, in fact, the very first U.S. spy satellites; he and Swenson knew only that the satellites’ main purpose was classified. Working with a minimal budget, a ten-pound weight limit, and almost no information about the rocket that would carry their creation, they built a device they dubbed Nora-Alice (a reference to a popular comic strip of the time) that launched in 1961. Cochran was continuing his side job with the Illinois Natural History Survey all the while, and eventually someone there suggested trying to use a radio transmitter to track a duck in flight.
“A mallard duck was sent over from the research station on the Illinois River,” Swenson later wrote in a coda to his reminiscences about the satellite project. “At our Urbana satellite-monitoring station, a tiny transistor oscillator was strapped around the bird’s breast by a metal band. The duck was disoriented from a week’s captivity, and sat calmly on the workbench while its signal was tuned in on the receiver. As it breathed quietly, the metal band periodically distorted and pulled the frequency, causing a varying beat note from the receiver.”
Swenson and Cochran recorded those distortions and variations on a chart, and when the bird was released, they found they could track its respiration and wing beats by the changes in the signal; when the bird breathed faster or beat its wings more frequently, the distortions sped up. Without even meaning to, they’d gathered some of the very first data on the physiology of birds in flight.
An Achievement of Another Kind
Bill Cochran enjoys messing with telemarketers. So, when he received a call from a phone number he didn’t recognize, he answered with a particularly facetious greeting.
“Animal shelter! We’re closed!”
“Uh . . . this is Rebecca Heisman, calling for Bill Cochran?”
“Who?”
“Is this Bill Cochran?”
“Yes, who are you?”
Once we established that he was in fact the radio telemetry legend Bill Cochran, not the animal shelter janitor he was pretending to be, and I was the writer whom he’d invited via email to give him a call, not a telemarketer, he told me he was busy but that I could call him back at the same time the next day.
Cochran was nearly ninety when we first spoke in the spring of 2021. Almost five decades had passed since his 1973 thrush-chasing odyssey, but story after story from the trek came back to him as we talked. He and Welling slept in the truck during the day when the thrush landed to rest and refuel, unwilling to risk a motel in case the bird took off again unexpectedly. While Welling drove, Cochran controlled the antenna. The base of the column that supported it extended down into the backseat of their vehicle, and he could adjust the antenna by raising, lowering, and rotating it, resembling a submarine crewman operating a periscope.
At one point, Cochran recalled, he and Welling got sick with “some kind of flu” while in Minnesota and, unable to find a doctor willing to see two eccentric out-of-towners on zero notice, just “sweated it out” and continued on. At another point during their passage through Minnesota, Welling spent a night in jail. They were pulled over by a small-town cop (Cochran described it as a speed trap but was adamant that they weren’t speeding, claiming the cop was just suspicious of the weird appearance of their tracking vehicle) but couldn’t stop for long or they would lose the bird. Welling stayed with the cop to sort things out while Cochran went on, and after the bird set down for the day, Cochran doubled back to pick him up.
“The bird got a big tailwind when it left Minnesota,” Cochran said. “We could barely keep up, we were driving over the speed limit on those empty roads — there aren’t many people in North Dakota — but we got farther and farther behind it, and finally by the time we caught up with it, it had already flown into Canada.”
Far from an official crossing point where they could legally enter Manitoba, they were forced to listen at the border as the signal faded into the distance. The next day they found a border crossing (heaven knows what the border agents made of the giant antenna on top of the truck) and miraculously picked up the signal again, only to have their vehicle start to break down. “It overheated and it wouldn’t run, so the next thing you know Charles is out there on the hood of the truck, pouring gasoline into the carburetor to keep it running,” Cochran recalled. “And every time we could find any place where there was a ditch with rainwater, we improvised something to carry water out of the ditch and pour it into the radiator. We finally managed to limp into a town to get repairs made.”
Cochran recruited a local pilot to take him up in a plane in one last attempt to relocate the radio-tagged bird and keep going, but to no avail. The chase was over. The data they had collected would be immortalized in a terse three-page scientific paper that doesn’t hint at all the adventures behind the numbers.
That 1973 journey wasn’t the first time Cochran and his colleagues had followed a radio-tagged bird cross-country, nor was it the last. After his first foray into wildlife telemetry at George Swenson’s lab, Cochran quickly became sought after by wildlife biologists throughout the region. He first worked with the Illinois Natural History Survey biologist Rexford Lord, who was looking for a more accurate way to survey the local cottontail rabbit population. Although big engineering firms such as Honeywell had already tried to build radio tracking systems that could be used with wildlife, Cochran succeeded where others had failed by literally thinking outside the box: instead of putting the transmitter components into a metal box that had to be awkwardly strapped to an animal’s back, he favored designs that were as small, simple, and compact as possible, dipping the assembly of components in plastic resin to seal them together and waterproof them. Today, as in Cochran’s time, designing a radio transmitter to be worn by an animal requires making trade-offs among a long list of factors: a longer antenna will give you a stronger signal, and a bigger battery will give you a longer-lasting tag, but both add weight. Cochran was arguably the first engineer to master this balancing act.
The transmitters Cochran created for Lord cost eight dollars to build, weighed a third of an ounce, and had a range of up to two miles. Attaching them to animals via collars or harnesses, Cochran and Lord used them to track the movements of skunks and raccoons as well as rabbits. Cochran didn’t initially realize the significance of what he’d achieved, but when Lord gave a presentation about their project at a 1961 mammalogy conference, he suddenly found himself inundated with job offers from biologists. Sharing his designs with anyone who asked instead of patenting them, he even let biologists stay in his spare room when they visited to learn telemetry techniques from him. When I asked him why he decided to go into a career in wildlife telemetry rather than sticking with satellites, he told me he was simply more interested in birds than in a job “with some engineering company making a big salary and designing weapons that’ll kill people.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-flight-paths-rebecca-heisman-harper-publishing-143053788.html?src=rss
Japan is officially moving forward with restrictions aimed at limiting China’s access to advanced chipmaking machinery. As CNN reports, the country announced Friday it would tighten export controls on 23 types of semiconductor manufacturing equipment. Once the new rules take effect in July, companies like Nikon and Tokyo Electron will need to obtain approval from Japan’s trade ministry if they want to sell their tools in some 160 territories across the world. A Japanese government spokesperson told CNN the restrictions aren’t designed to target a specific nation. However, Japan’s east asian rival is among the nations on the restricted list.
“We will fulfill our responsibilities in the international community as a technology-owning country and contribute to maintaining international peace and security,” Yasutoshi Nishimura, Japan’s minister of economy, trade and industry, told reporters.
The restrictions follow the US and Netherlands enacting similar export controls. At the start of the year, the three countries reportedly reached an agreement to limit China’s access to western-made lithography machines. In March, the Netherlands made good on the deal, announcing it would restrict overseas sales of semiconductor technology in the interest of its national security. Those restrictions will affect ASML. As of last year, the Dutch firm was the only company in the world producing the extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines chipmakers need to make the 5nm and 3nm semiconductors that power the latest phones and computers.
China has homegrown firms capable of making up some of the shortfall the country’s tech industry will experience from the lack of access to western-made lithography equipment. However, it may take some time before those companies match the capacity of their American, Japanese and European rivals. According to research from Reuters, Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment (SMEE), China’s only producer of lithography equipment, makes machines capable of printing 90nm node semiconductors. More promising is the work of SMIC, the country’s leading semiconductor manufacturer. Last summer, it began volume production of 14nm chips and began making 7nm chips without access to foreign-made equipment.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/japan-joins-us-led-effort-to-restrict-chinas-access-to-chipmaking-equipment-214602553.html?src=rss
