Team

Amazon’s serious injury rate at warehouses was still nearly double the rest of the industry in 2020

Amazon’s serious injury rate at its warehouses was nearly twice as high as the rest of the industry in 2020, newly released Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) data shows in reports from both The Washington Post and the Strategic Organizing Center (a collection of unions that represent over 4 million workers around the country)…. Read more

Instacart’s reported plan to automate its workforce seems a lot like bluster

Instacart has big plans to automate parts of its grocery delivery business, reports Bloomberg, but the company’s schemes look as much like bluster as ambition. Bloomberg details a plan for the gig-work grocery-delivery network to build “automated fulfillment centers around the US, where hundreds of robots would fetch boxes of cereal and cans of soup… Read more

A new collective will share a podcast feed to make money off Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces

A new collective is trying to solve the live audio monetization problem. A group of primarily tech-focused hosts are launching a shared podcast feed that’ll round up the many social audio chats they’ve started, with plans to run ads across the collected feed. The group, which is being spearheaded by Techmeme Ride Home host Brian… Read more

Bacteria get a fresh gig as art restorers in Italy

Michelangelo’s marbles in the Medici Chapel were looking dingy, so a team of art restorers decided to smear some bacteria on the situation. The specialized microbes cleaned up centuries of grime, leaving the marble statues with a fresh new look, The New York Times reports. The team selected specialized strains of bacteria to target different… Read more

THX Onyx

Our Verdict THX’s debut product is nicely made and well-featured, but it lets itself down in the sound department For Neat, versatile design MQA support Adds power, clarity and cleanliness Against Sonically basic Outclassed by cheaper rivals Next time you’re in a cinema, take a moment to appreciate THX. After all, the US firm will… Read more

Vilnius, Lithuania built a ‘portal’ to another city to help keep people connected

Weary of pandemic travel restrictions and aching to get out and see new people? The city of Vilnius, Lithuania has interesting solution: A real-time “portal” to another city. They really went all-in on the idea and the design; it looks quite a bit like something out of the erstwhile sci-fi movie/show Stargate. The city installed… Read more

NASA’s Curiosity rover has captured amazing images of clouds on Mars

NASA’s Curiosity rover has captured images of clouds on Mars— as described in its blog post: “wispy puffs filled with ice crystals that scattered light from the setting sun, some of them shimmering with color.” According to NASA clouds are rare in the thin atmosphere of Mars, but usually form at its equator during its… Read more

Among Us is free on the Epic Games Store

Among Us, the multiplayer game that soared in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, is the latest free title on the Epic Games Store. If you have an account for that storefront, you can download it for free until June 3rd (it normally costs $5). You can then join friends in the game’s newer Airship map,… Read more

Sonic Colors is getting remastered as Sega announces a handful of new Sonic games

One of the most beloved Sonic the Hedgehog games is making a return. Sega announced today that a remaster of Sonic Colors — called Sonic Colors: Ultimate — will be coming to the PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch on September 7th. The platformer originally launched in 2010, garnering a cult following, and Sega says… Read more

Enhanced Raspberry Pi GPIO Support Added to Ubuntu 21.04

Home News (Image credit: Tom’s Hardware) The dev team for Ubuntu on the Raspberry Pi shared a blog post this week detailing key new features in the latest update for Ubuntu 21.04. The most recent version of Ubuntu is confirmed to officially include enhanced GPIO support on the Raspberry Pi via a new Python library…. Read more

Acer’s new SpatialLabs tech brings 3D content to laptop screens

Acer has announced SpatialLabs, a new 3D technology that will debut on the company’s ConceptD laptops. I got a chance to try it. It’s not something we’ll realistically see on a consumer device anytime soon — but it’s pretty dang cool nonetheless. SpatialLabs is, according to Acer, “a suite of experiences empowered by cutting-edge optical… Read more

Nintendo is bringing Smash and Splatoon esports to high schools

Nintendo is expanding its esports efforts by moving into high schools. The company has announced a new partnership with PlayVS, which will see games like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Splatoon 2 introduced into varsity athletics starting in the fall. “What’s magical about this opportunity is that it’s a way for kids to participate, to… Read more

Microsoft’s ‘biggest change’ to Outlook for Windows improves shared calendars

If you’ve ever had to share an Outlook calendar with colleagues, you’ll know how painful it can be when things go wrong. I spent a decade of my professional career in IT support, and shared calendar problems with Outlook for Windows were a daily problem. Microsoft is now promising that it is “dramatically” improving the… Read more

OnePlus’ Digital WellPaper visualizes your app usage as a funky live wallpaper

OnePlus’ new Digital WellPaper app turns your app usage into one of three live wallpapers on Android. Apps are simplified into six categories — social, lifestyle and communication, entertainment, gaming, information and business, and tools — which translate to six colors within each wallpaper that become more or less prominent as you use the apps…. Read more

Stadia’s loss is Clubhouse’s gain: the social audio company has poached a longtime Google engineer

Clubhouse has hired Justin Uberti, creator of the WebRTC standard and the Google Duo video chat app. He leaves Google after nearly 15 years at the company, where he was most recently the engineering lead for Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service and led the team that made the Stadia iOS web app. “Justin is a… Read more