Wired

With the 2017unveiling of the ID Buzz concept, Volkswagen announced that the iconic VW bus—forever a symbol of beachy road trips and 1960’s hippie freedom—was returning to the market as an EV. The hype machine went into overdrive.

Jump to 2024, and the vehicle that has been on roads in Europe for about two years is finally, finally, making its way onto US shores.

The cost (around $60K) is maybe higher than many had anticipated, and the vehicle’s range (around 230 miles) is likely lower than many had hoped. Throw in a very long wait from the unveiling to its arrival in the marketplace, and the hype has dwindled. After spending a day behind the wheel of one, however, I can say that the ID Buzz has rekindled some of that excitement I felt way back in 2017.

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Kwikset is no newbie in the lock game. The company has been around since the 1940s making your classic locks and doorknobs and has been making smart locks under its Halo line since 2019. The Halo line originally consisted of two locks, the Halo Keypad and the Halo Touch. As of today there’s a third: the Halo Select.

On a dead-end road that climbs out of the tiny city of Jenkins, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in Eastern Kentucky, there stands a large warehouse with a mint green roof. It shares the road with a few other businesses, but is otherwise surrounded by an expanse of open fields and tree-lined slopes. Inside, the warehouse is stacked high with racks on racks of computers—thousands of them. But none have ever been switched on.

If Donald Trump wins the US presidential election in November, the guardrails could come off of artificial intelligence development, even as the dangers of defective AI models grow increasingly serious.

Trump’s election to a second term would dramatically reshape—and possibly cripple—efforts to protect Americans from the many dangers of poorly designed artificial intelligence, including misinformation, discrimination, and the poisoning of algorithms used in technology like autonomous vehicles.

The federal government has begun overseeing and advising AI companies under an executive order that President Joe Biden issued in October 2023. But Trump has vowed to repeal that order, with the Republican Party platform saying it “hinders AI innovation” and “imposes Radical Leftwing ideas” on AI development.

Analysts at the US Department of Homeland Security shared an internal report to local agencies in August, warning them about the economic risks of using Chinese utility storage batteries. It warns that the dependence on Chinese batteries could hurt developing a secure supply chain in the US.

The document, first obtained by national security transparency nonprofit Property of the People and seen by WIRED, accuses Chinese companies of “using People’s Republic of China state support to quickly and cheaply enter the emerging US utility battery energy storage industry and create supply chain dependencies on China,” and asks that any suspicious activity be reported.

It tends to really be used only by developers, but the address bar and search box up at the top of the Google Chrome interface has an official name: the omnibox. It reflects the multipurpose capabilities of this little text field, as it’s able to do much more than look up web addresses and run searches on Google.

When you know about everything the omnibox can do, you can save time jumping between different apps and sites, and get things done more quickly. What’s more, Google is constantly adding new features to the omnibox. Most recently, as you might expect, the company added an integration with Gemini AI.

The original version ofthis storyappeared inQuanta Magazine.

The bottom of the ocean is cold, dark, and under extreme pressure. It is not a place suited to the physiology of us surface dwellers: At the deepest point, the pressure of 36,200 feet of seawater is greater than the weight of an elephant on every square inch of your body. Yet Earth’s deepest places are home to life uniquely suited to these challenging conditions. Scientists have studied how the bodies of some large animals, such as anglerfish and blobfish, have adapted to withstand the pressure. But far less is known about how cells and molecules stand up to the squeezing, crushing weight of thousands of feet of seawater.

Last summer, when Krystal White was visiting Houston for a National Federation of the Blind convention, she claims she had to hide her guide dog named Gage in order to get an Uber from the airport.

This is a frequent problem, she explains.“I’ve had them drive right past me, and I’ve had neighbors go, ‘I think that was your Uber driver,’” White says. “And I’m like, ‘oh great.’ So I’ve missed appointments, I’ve missed my daughter’s play at school.

I’m here to make friends, bask in the kind, accepting glow of internet comments, and speak the dark truth you’ve all long known to be true: The N64 controller, Nintendo’s infamous trident joypad for its third home console, is, and always was, awful.

You may think you like it. If you’re of a “certain age,” there’s a fair chance you have fond memories of being huddled around a TV screen, screeching with fury as you got hit by a blue shell in Mario Kart 64; losing yourself in the frenetic chaos of multiplayer Super Smash Bros.; or exploring Hyrule with wide-eyed wonder in Ocarina of Time.

THIS ARTICLE IS republished fromThe Conversationunder aCreative Commons license.

Bottlenose dolphins in Sarasota Bay in Florida and Barataria Bay in Louisiana are exhaling microplastic fibers, according to our new research published in the journal PLOS One.

Tiny plastic pieces have spread all over the planet—on land, in the air, and even in clouds. An estimated 170 trillion bits of microplastic are estimated to be in the oceans. Across the globe, research has found that people and wildlife are exposed to microplastics mainly through eating and drinking but also through breathing.