The Apple Car never felt real

Apple has reportedly pulled down the shutters on Project Titan, its initiative to build the future of transportation. If the reports are accurate, the project chewed through billions of dollars and several high-profile leaders as its mission shifted and shifted again. What may have started as a control-free autonomous vehicle was eventually scaled down to a generic EV but, ya know, made by Apple. But, I’ll be honest, I never believed we’d see an Apple Car in the real world, because it seemed so impossibly far-fetched as to be fictional.

I'm not saying Titan itself didn't exist, because every company has speculative projects, and I'm sure the reporting around what it achieved is accurate — Tim Cook definitely wrote "Car?" on a whiteboard at some point. If any company could walk in, learn the skills needed to build and launch a car and do it well (and profitably), it would be Apple. Other tech companies, like Sony, are making a real noise about entering the field, albeit in partnership with Honda. But, from a lot of logical angles, the idea that Apple would start making cars was impossible to fathom.

There’s a line in The Unbearable Lightness of Being where kitsch – a German word for bad or tacky art – is defined as a denial of the realities of life. Apple fits that description because while it’s wildly successful, it’s often despite decisions made that fly in the face of common sense. A watch that lasts for less than a day on a charge. A slippery, easily-dropped phone with a glass front and back that’s nightmarishly difficult to repair. A mouse that is still being sold with the charging port on its underside so you can only charge it when it’s not in use.

Even the most environmentally-friendly car still needs to lubricate its workings, wheels that leave rubber on the road, brake pads that wear down. Seats that have to deal with spilled coffee and toddler vomit when you’re on a long road trip, the grime you only seem to find when you’re loading IKEA boxes into your trunk. Can you imagine Apple’s design team, who were behind the FineWoven case, who had to be dragged kicking and screaming toward bigger batteries, USB-C and waterproofing, thinking about such considerations?

Not to mention that while Apple can exert a lot of control over its devices now, cars aren’t so neatly closed off. Imagine how hard it would be for a company obsessed with control to cede so much to the auto shops of the world. Yes, you need to take your Tesla back for major repairs but can you imagine not being able to replace your tires when you get a flat? Unless, of course, Apple is planning to build garages in every major population center to overcharge you when it comes time to get a routine service. 

And that’s before you get to the idea that Apple, who is quite obsessive about its brand, would have its logo plastered on the internet every time one of its cars so much as kissed a lamppost. Car accidents are currently an unfortunate fact of life that we, as a society, are not prepared to tackle the way we should. But all it would take is one fatality in an Apple car and the company would be demonized — and opened up to a raft of lawsuits all looking to get a piece of Apple’s cash pile.

A car also would muddy the company’s stance on environmental matters, and I can already picture the internal contortions. The executives driving their convertible Mercedes into Apple Park’s rarified subterranean parking garage would, I’m sure, quite like an Apple car. But I imagine the company’s teams who have to look at figures around energy consumption, emissions and climate change don’t. If Apple’s fine words about looking after the environment mean anything, it would throw its weight and expertise behind something better like scooters or e-bikes.

I’ve also struggled to fathom out how Apple would justify charging $100,000 for a limited-run EV when its real wins have come in the mass market. EVs take enormous amounts of capital and labor to assemble and it’s nowhere near as profitable as what Apple does today. In Q3 of 2023, VW — the world’s biggest car maker — made a net profit of about $4.7 billion, or about a quarter of what Apple made in the same period. How many luxury EVs would Apple be able to get out of the door and how many would it need to sell in order to justify that initial investment?

In fact, I suspect a lot of people piled a lot of unreasonable hopes on Project Titan's shoulders despite Apple's repeated scaling back. 'We'll make a car without a wheel, it'll be great,' you can imagine them saying, 'okay, maybe it'll have a wheel...' they added, years later, 'oh okay so, how about it's just a car that's not as autonomous as a Mercedes.' It hardly screams the sort of class-leading ambitions you normally see with an Apple product, does it?

And yes, there may have been lots of pretty renders of what an Apple car would look like made by talented graphic designers looking to bulk out their portfolio. And lots of wishful chat on social media about Apple buying another EV maker like Tesla or Rivian to slap its brand on top of — despite the fact that Apple buying a name-brand company outright has only happened once or twice in a decade. But, until the NDAs lapse and we get a tell-all book with internal imagery, I’m going to say that, despite the reported billions of dollars poured into it, the Apple Car never got close to being a real thing.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-apple-car-never-felt-real-163058168.html?src=rss

Apple Sports puts real-time scores on your iPhone lock screen

Apple today announced Sports, a new iPhone app offering real-time stats for a number of major leagues. Once installed, users can set their favorite team and get a trove of data on their lock screen in the live activities box when the team is playing. Available free starting today in the US, Canada and the UK, the app currently supports basketball, hockey and soccer football. The company added that other sports, including baseball and American football will debut for their upcoming seasons.

There are plenty of reasons you might not be able to watch your team of choice play live. You may have a prior engagement, the game may not be televised, or Todd Boehly has done so much damage to the club you can’t bear to look at it any more. In those situations, push alerts from major sports apps has been a lifeline, but it’s not always entirely reliable.

Now, it has been possible to get this working since iOS 16, if you fancied messing around in the depths of the Apple TV app. And some third-party platforms, like MLB’s homegrown app, would put this data in your lock screen or Dynamic Island. But Apple says that its own setup offers a “simple and fast way to stay up to speed on the teams and leagues they love.” The setup will also sync up with any sports preferences already stored in the Apple TV or Apple News apps.

Of more concern is that Sports will also offer up live betting odds for the games as they’re in play. It’s worth noting it will be possible to deactivate the live odds feature in settings, but it seems like it would have been smarter and less potentially harmful to make that opt-in, rather than opt-out.

Apple Sports is available to download now in English. French and Spanish are supported where available.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apple-sports-puts-real-time-scores-on-your-iphone-lock-screen-140050382.html?src=rss

Dr. Garmin will see you now

There’s a reason smartwatches haven’t replaced clinically validated gear when you visit the hospital — accuracy and reliability are paramount when the data informs medical procedures. Even so, researchers are looking for ways in which these devices can be meaningfully used in a clinical setting. One project in the UK has explored if a Garmin Venu 2 and dedicated companion app could be used to free up doctors and nurses, six minutes at a time.

The Six Minute Walk Test (6MWT) is used to diagnose and monitor a number of cardiovascular maladies. This includes conditions like Pulmonary Hypertension that, if left untreated, are eventually fatal. “[The test has been] a cornerstone of hospital practice and clinical trials for decades all around the world as [...] a marker of how well the heart and lungs are working,” project leader Dr. Joseph Newman told Engadget. While a change in a blood test marker might be clinically relevant, he said “it’s probably more important to someone that they can walk to the shop and back.” 

The test requires a patient walk on a flat, hard surface for six minutes straight, which stresses the heart enough to measure its capacity. A professional tests the patient’s heart rate and blood oxygen levels at the start and end. While it’s simple and reliable, "it’s not perfect,” according to Dr. Newman. “This is why we’ve looked to change it in two important ways," he said, "can we make it shorter [...] and digitize it for remote use?"

After all, six minutes is a lifetime in a clinical setting, and patients dislike having to schlep all the way to their hospital just to walk up and down a corridor. It’s why Newman and Lucy Robertson — both researchers at the Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge — began looking for ways to revolutionize the test. They wanted to see if the test could be shortened to a single minute, and also if it could be carried out by a patient at home using a Venu 2. 

The watch was connected to a secure and dedicated clinical trial platform built by Aparito – a Wrexham-based developer – for testing. This was then sent out to patients who were instructed to wear the watch and walk outdoors to complete their own tests. “They’re asked to walk on flat, even, dry, relatively straight roads rather than in laps or circuits,” Dr. Newman said, with patients walking at their own natural pace.

“We carried out a product appraisal early on in the research process and were open-minded as to the brand or model,” said Dr. Newman. “Garmin came out on top for a few reasons; we can access raw data as well as Garmin’s algorithmically-derived variables,” he said. Because the research was being funded by a charity, the British Heart Foundation, the watch had to offer good value for money. It helped that Garmin, with its established health research division, gave the team “confidence in the accuracy of the sensors,” not to mention the fact that Aparito feels that “the Garmin SDK is relatively easy to work with,” he added. 

But while Garmin is in use right now, there’s no reason this setup couldn’t eventually work with a number of other brands. “As long as the technology works, it’s accurate, reliable and patients accept it, then we’re not tied to any brand,” he said.

There are several benefits in giving patients the ability to run the tests at home: it’s more representative of the demands of their actual life, and patients can retake the test at regular intervals, making it easier to track that person’s health over time. “We can see real value in providing patients with pulmonary hypertension with an app and smartwatch to monitor their progress,” Dr. Newman said. “It’s unlikely to ever fully replace the need for in-person hospital reviews, but it will likely reduce their frequency.”

The results of the study right now suggest cutting the test to one minute has no detrimental effect on its outcome or accuracy, and that patients are far more likely to run the test regularly if they’re able to do so at home. “It’s likely that the upfront costs of wearables [to a hospital] may be offset by the longer term reduction in hospital visits,” Dr. Newman said. If that turns out to be right, it means clinicians can better focus their time and efforts where their expertise is more valuable.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/dr-garmin-will-see-you-now-160013340.html?src=rss

The ice caps are melting. Is geoengineering the solution?

Since 1979, Arctic ice has shrunk by 1.35 million square miles, a new JPL study found ice loss in Greenland is far worse than previously thought and Antarctic ice is now at the lowest level since records began. The more they melt, the faster the rate of decline for the ice that remains until we’re faced with a series of catastrophes. The most immediate of which is sea level rise which threatens to eradicate whole nations that are situated on low-lying islands. How do we stop such a problem? While we remedy the longer-term issues around fossil fuel consumption, we might have to buy ourselves more time with geoengineering.

The severity of this situation can’t be stressed enough. Professor John Moore of the Arctic Center, University of Lapland, says that we’re long past the point where emissions reductions alone will be effective. “We are faced with this situation where there’s no pathway to 1.5 [degrees] available through mitigation,” he said. “Things like the ice sheets [melting] and other tipping points will happen regardless,” adding that the Earth’s present situation is akin to a patient bleeding out on the operating table, “we are in this situation where we cannot mitigate ourselves out of the shit.”

Moore is one of the figures behind Frozen Arctic, a report produced by the universities of the Arctic and Lapland alongside UN-backed thinktank GRID-Arendal. It’s a rundown of sixty geoengineering projects that could slow down or reverse polar melting. A team of researchers opted to examine every idea, from those already in place to the ones at the fringes of science. “We wanted to be thorough,” said Moore, “because even the craziest idea might have a nugget of gold in there.” Each approach has been given a brief analysis, examining if it’s feasible on a scientific or practical basis, if it would be potentially helpful and how much it would cost. The report even went so far as to look at pykrete, a wacky World War Two initiative to create artificial glaciers for strategic use by mixing sawdust or paper products into ice.

If you’re curious and don’t have a day or two to read the report yourself, you can boil down the approaches to a handful of categories. The first is Solar Radiation Management, i.e. making the polar regions more reflective to bounce away more of the sun’s heat. Second, there’s artificial ice generation to compensate for what has already been lost. Third, enormous engineering work to buttress, isolate and protect the remaining ice — like massive undersea walls that act as a barrier against the seas as they get warmer. Finally, there are measures that nibble at the edges of the problem in terms of effect, but have more viable long-term success, like preventing flora and fauna (and the warmth they radiate) from encroaching on regions meant to remain frozen.

If you’re a climate scientist, the likely most obvious approach is the first, because we’ve seen the positive effects of it before. Albedo is the climate science term to describe how white ice acts as an enormous reflector, bouncing away a lot of the sun’s heat. Ice ages dramatically increase albedo, but there are more recent examples in living memory: In 1991 Mount Pinatubo, a volcano in the Philippines, erupted, spewing an enormous amount of volcanic ash into the atmosphere. (The event also caused a large amount of damage, displaced 200,000 people and claimed the lives of at least 722.) According to NOAA, the ash dumped into the atmosphere helped reflect a lot of solar heat away from the Earth, causing a temporary global cooling effect of roughly 1.5 degrees celsius. The devastation of Pinatubo isn’t desirable, nor was the ozone depletion that it caused, but that cooling effect could be vital to slowing global warming and polar melting.

It’s possible to do this artificially by seeding the clouds with chemicals deposited by an airplane or with ground-based smoke generators, which can also be used to promote rain clouds. This is a tactic already used in China to help make rain for agriculture and to alleviate drought-like conditions. In this context, the clouds would act as a barrier between the sun and the ice caps, bouncing more of that solar radiation away from the Earth’s surface. Unfortunately, there’s a problem with this approach, which is that it’s incredibly expensive and incredibly fussy. The report says it’s only viable when the right clouds are overhead, and the work would require enormous infrastructure to be built nearby. Not to mention that while we have some small shreds of evidence to suggest it might be useful, there’s nothing proven as yet.

And then there are the second order effects when these approaches then spill over into the rest of the global ecosystem. “If you do sunlight reflection methods and you put anything up in the atmosphere, it doesn’t stay where you put it.” That’s the big issue identified by Dr. Phil Williamson, honorary associate professor at the University of East Anglia and a former contributor to the UN’s keystone Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. His concern is that regional, targeted climate solutions “don’t solve the problem for the whole world,” and that if you’re not tackling climate change on a global scale, then you’re “just accentuating the difference.” With a cold arctic, but rising temperatures elsewhere, you’re climbing aboard a “climate rollercoaster.”

Second in the ranking of hail-mary climate approaches is to build a freezer to both cool down the existing ice and make more. Sadly, many ideas in this area forget that ice sheets are not just big blocks of immovable ice and are, in fact, liable to move. Take the idea of drilling down two miles or so into the ice sheet and pumping out the warm water to cool it down: Thanks to the constantly shifting ice and water, a new site would need to be drilled fairly regularly.

There’s another problem: The report says one project to bore a hole down 2.5km (1.5 miles) burned 450,000 liters of fuel. Not to mention how much energy it would consume to run the heat exchangers or freezers to create fresh ice on such a scale. That's a considerable amount of greenhouse gas pollution for a project meant to undo that exact type of damage. Dumping a layer of artificially-made snow on a mountain may work fine for a ski resort when the powder’s a little thin, but not the whole planet.

As hard as the scientific and engineering battles will be, there’s also the political one that will need addressing. “A lot of people get quasi-religiously upset about putting stuff into the stratosphere,” said Professor John Moore, “you’d think they’d get similarly upset about greenhouse gasses.” One strategy under consideration is to inject sulfur into the atmosphere to replicate the cooling effects observed after major volcanic eruptions. The sulfur would form SO2, creating thick layers of dense cloud to block more heat from reaching the ice. But if you, like me, have a high school-level knowledge of science, that’s a scary prospect given that sulfur dioxide would resolve to sulfuric acid. Given the microscopic quantities involved, there would be little-to-no impact on the natural world. But the image of acid rain pouring down from the clouds means it’d be a hard sell to an uninformed population.

But if there is a reason for concern, it’s that any unintended consequences could pose a problem in the global political space. “It’s almost like declaring war on the rest of the world if [a nation] goes it alone,” says Phil Williamson, “because any damage or alteration to the global climate system, the country that did it is responsible for all future climatic disasters because the weather isn’t the same.”

Of course, Moore knows that the Frozen Arctic report’s conclusions aren’t too optimistic about a quick fix. He feels its conclusions should serve as a wake-up call for the planet. “Nobody is going to scale up something for the entire arctic ocean overnight,” he said, but that this is the time to “find ideas that might be valuable [...] and then put resources into finding out if [those ideas] really are useful.” He added that the short turnaround time before a total climate disaster isn’t much of an issue, saying “engineers can pretty much do anything you ask them to if you put enough resources into it.” Because the alternative is to do nothing, and “every day that we choose to do nothing, we accept more of the damages that are coming.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-ice-caps-are-melting-is-geoengineering-the-solution-150004916.html?src=rss

Apple’s rivals aren’t happy about its EU App Store changes

Last year, the European Union implemented new laws to make big tech open up its platforms to competitors. The deadline for compliance is March, and all eyes were on how Apple, which is famous for not playing nicely with others, would react. Now the company has set out how it will comply with the law, and the result is the sort of malicious compliance everyone was expecting. Similarly, the reaction from the coalition of well-heeled critics who were all hoping to get a slice of Apple’s pie for free has been similarly predictable.

The Digital Markets Act

In 2023, the EU laid down a new regime to prevent big tech throwing all of its weight around in the bloc. The Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act govern what it calls “gatekeepers,” the big platforms who get between users and businesses. That includes Meta, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon and (TikTok owner) ByteDance, who all have big user bases, deep pockets and a lot of power. One key provision of the law was to get platform holders like Apple and Google to open their systems and allow competing services, such as alternative app stores, a topic we covered in depth back in 2020.

On January 25, Apple published a statement explaining how the DMA would impact iOS, Safari and the App Store. The document is laced with references to how the law makes iOS less secure and that Apple needs to take steps to mitigate those risks. And while Apple does not say how much each part of its business makes specifically, the App Store is a key part of its services division which earned a combined $22 billion in its most recent quarter. Consequently, Apple will happily let you set up a competing iOS app store, but in order to do so, you will have to vault Mount Everest, dig a tunnel to the center of the Earth and front a million dollars in cash.

Okay, not quite that.

You can compete, but you won’t want to

The creators of a would-be rival app store can’t simply turn up and sell their wares without any oversight. It was obvious from the get-go that even if Apple did open up its platforms, no third party app store would be allowed to do an end-run around the company’s basic rules. If you were hoping to run Honest Doug’s App Store (Not A Scam) and take the world for a ride, then you’re out of luck.

Would-be rivals will still need to meet Apple’s Notarization requirements and have tight rules and moderation tools governing quality, piracy, fraud and payment disputes. (Notarization will mean these apps will be checked by Apple to look for “known malware”, with the ability to shut the app down if any is detected.) They will need key rules around data collection and to offer users the same level of control they enjoy in the App Store proper. Not to mention complying with the Digital Services Act, GDPR and a number of other acronym-heavy EU regulations around digital services and online privacy. Essentially, if you want to run your own App Store, you’ll need to do it to the same level that Apple does.

Apple has also said app stores need to ensure they can meet their obligation to pay app developers. In this case, it means sharing a letter from a top financial institution with proof they have access to a minimum of €1,000,000 (around $1.1 million) in credit. And to avoid third party app stores taking advantage of Apple’s platform without Apple benefiting, developers will need to pay a Core Technology Fee once an app has been downloaded more than a million times. This is a per-install fee of €0.50 (around 54 cents) which renews every 12 months the app is installed for. You can decide for yourself if this reminds you of Unity’s aborted Runtime Fee payment scheme.

At the present time, Apple charges developers either $99 or $299, depending on if they are for an individual or a company. Apple then takes a flat commission on any transaction, either to buy the app itself or with an in-app purchase. For small developers making less than $1 million per year, Apple takes a 15 percent cut, while bigger names pay 30 percent. There are exceptions, including “reader” apps which are downloaded for free and tie to subscriptions elsewhere. So far it's not clear under what circumstances the sideloading fees might be preferable (if ever) to the vanilla "Apple tax" through its proprietary storefront.

The expected response

Naturally, Apple’s statement and all of the explanatory detail in its developer notes was controversial. Its critics, many of whom feel that Apple has too much power over its platform, were incensed.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, who has previously sued the company about this matter, was quick to denounce the changes. He said the new rules were “a devious new instance of malicious compliance.” Adding that it is forcing app developers to pick between App Store exclusivity or an “anticompetitive scheme rife with new junk fees on downloads and new Apple taxes on payments they don’t process.”

The Coalition for App Fairness, a lobby group backed by Epic, Spotify and Match Group, was quick to support one of its biggest backers. Executive director and former Republican spokesperson Rick Vanmeter said Apple had “no intention” to comply with the DMA. And added the move was a “shameless insult to the European Commission and the millions of European consumers they represent,” and urged officials to reject the move.

Despite Sweeney’s personal objection and that of his lobbyists, Epic Games has already said Fortnite – which was pulled from the Apple Store when Epic deliberately violated Apple’s Terms of Service – will return to iOS. The company said it would launch its own Epic Games Store for iOS in 2024, through which it would distribute its own titles. It added in the announcement tweet it would continue to “argue to the courts and regulators that Apple is breaking the law.”

But it’s not just Apple’s well-heeled rivals who feel the company is thumbing its nose at the EU with these changes. Andy Yen, the founder of privacy service Proton, told Engadget that Apple’s compliance with the DMA is “done in bad faith,” and that the iPhone maker is “fighting tooth and nail to maintain its profits and monopoly." Yen added that the “strings attached to Apple’s new policies mean that in practice it will be impossible for developers to benefit from them.” And that the moves erode “the fundamental rights of users by giving Apple the ability to review apps downloaded outside the App Store.” He added that the “European Commission can’t let this blatant bending of the rules fly.”

But despite the chorus of calls demanding the European Commission to Do Something, the body hasn’t budged just yet. “We take note of Apple’s announcements ahead of the compliance deadline,” a commission spokesperson told Engadget “We do not comment on these announcements.” The spokesperson added they “strongly encourage designated gatekeepers to test their proposals with third parties.” And that these comments were “without prejudice to the Commission’s own assessment of these proposals.”

At the time of writing, there has not yet been a comment from any high-profile EU figures about the matter. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Margrethe Vestager, who handles technology and competition matters, have been active on social media but not about this topic. Similarly, we are waiting to hear back from Deezer, who have both previously urged the European Union to act. Not to mention that, before Apple’s announcement, Spotify published its own announcement saying it will offer app downloads directly from its site.

Update, January 26 16:19 ET: Spotify has now shared its statement saying that Apple's proposals are a "total farce." It adds that the plan for alternative app stores is an "undesirable alternative to the status quo" which will punish successful developers for "their success." 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apples-rivals-arent-happy-about-its-eu-app-store-changes-160032585.html?src=rss

AI is coming for big pharma

If there’s one thing we can all agree upon, it’s that the 21st century’s captains of industry are trying to shoehorn AI into every corner of our world. But for all of the ways in which AI will be shoved into our faces and not prove very successful, it might actually have at least one useful purpose. For instance, by dramatically speeding up the often decades-long process of designing, finding and testing new drugs.

Risk mitigation isn’t a sexy notion but it’s worth understanding how common it is for a new drug project to fail. To set the scene, consider that each drug project takes between three and five years to form a hypothesis strong enough to start tests in a laboratory. A 2022 study from Professor Duxin Sun found that 90 percent of clinical drug development fails, with each project costing more than $2 billion. And that number doesn’t even include compounds found to be unworkable at the preclinical stage. Put simply, every successful drug has to prop up at least $18 billion waste generated by its unsuccessful siblings, which all but guarantees that less lucrative cures for rarer conditions aren’t given as much focus as they may need.

Dr. Nicola Richmond is VP of AI at Benevolent, a biotech company using AI in its drug discovery process. She explained the classical system tasks researchers to find, for example, a misbehaving protein – the cause of disease – and then find a molecule that could make it behave. Once they've found one, they need to get that molecule into a form a patient can take, and then test if it’s both safe and effective. The journey to clinical trials on a living human patient takes years, and it’s often only then researchers find out that what worked in theory does not work in practice.

The current process takes “more than a decade and multiple billions of dollars of research investment for every drug approved,” said Dr. Chris Gibson, co-founder of Recursion, another company in the AI drug discovery space. He says AI’s great skill may be to dodge the misses and help avoid researchers spending too long running down blind alleys. A software platform that can churn through hundreds of options at a time can, in Gibson’s words, “fail faster and earlier so you can move on to other targets.”

Image of Human HT29 Cells which are highlighted in Cell Profiler, the Carpenter-Singh software platform used to examine cellular images.
CellProfiler / Carpenter-Singh laboratory at the Broad Institute

Dr. Anne E. Carpenter is the founder of the Carpenter-Singh laboratory at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. She has spent more than a decade developing techniques in Cell Painting, a way to highlight elements in cells, with dyes, to make them readable by a computer. She is also the co-developer of Cell Profiler, a platform enabling researchers to use AI to scrub through vast troves of images of those dyed cells. Combined, this work makes it easy for a machine to see how cells change when they are impacted by the presence of disease or a treatment. And by looking at every part of the cell holistically – a discipline known as “omics” – there are greater opportunities for making the sort of connections that AI systems excel at.

Using pictures as a way of identifying potential cures seems a little left-field, since how things look don’t always represent how things actually are, right? Carpenter said humans have always made subconscious assumptions about medical status from sight alone. She explained most people may conclude someone may have a chromosomal issue just by looking at their face. And professional clinicians can identify a number of disorders by sight alone purely as a consequence of their experience. She added that if you took a picture of everyone’s face in a given population, a computer would be able to identify patterns and sort them based on common features.

This logic applies to the pictures of cells, where it’s possible for a digital pathologist to compare images from healthy and diseased samples. If a human can do it, then it should be faster and easier to employ a computer to spot these differences in scale so long as it’s accurate. “You allow this data to self-assemble into groups and now [you’re] starting to see patterns,” she explained, “when we treat [cells] with 100,000 different compounds, one by one, we can say ‘here’s two chemicals that look really similar to each other.’” And this looking really similar to each other isn’t just coincidence, but seems to be indicative of how they behave.

In one example, Carpenter cited that two different compounds could produce similar effects in a cell, and by extension could be used to treat the same condition. If so, then it may be that one of the two – which may not have been intended for this purpose – has fewer harmful side effects. Then there’s the potential benefit of being able to identify something that we didn’t know was affected by disease. “It allows us to say, ‘hey, there’s this cluster of six genes, five of which are really well known to be part of this pathway, but the sixth one, we didn’t know what it did, but now we have a strong clue it’s involved in the same biological process.” “Maybe those other five genes, for whatever reason, aren’t great direct targets themselves, maybe the chemicals don’t bind,” she said, “but the sixth one [could be] really great for that.”

A male in his 30s of Indian ethnicity, working in a scientific laboratory searching for a vaccine for COVID-19.
FatCamera via Getty Images

In this context, the startups using AI in their drug discovery processes are hoping that they can find the diamonds hiding in plain sight. Dr. Richmond said that Benevolent’s approach is for the team to pick a disease of interest and then formulate a biological question around it. So, at the start of one project, the team might wonder if there are ways to treat ALS by enhancing, or fixing, the way a cell’s own housekeeping system works. (To be clear, this is a purely hypothetical example supplied by Dr. Richmond.)

That question is then run through Benevolent’s AI models, which pull together data from a wide variety of sources. They then produce a ranked list of potential answers to the question, which can include novel compounds, or existing drugs that could be adapted to suit. The data then goes to a researcher, who can examine what, if any, weight to give to its findings. Dr. Richmond added that the model has to provide evidence from existing literature or sources to support its findings even if its picks are out of left-field. And that, at all times, a human has the final say on what of its results should be pursued and how vigorously.

It’s a similar situation at Recursion, with Dr. Gibson claiming that its model is now capable of predicting “how any drug will interact with any disease without having to physically test it.” The model has now formed around three trillion predictions connecting potential problems to their potential solutions based on the data it has already absorbed and simulated. Gibson said that the process at the company now resembles a web search: Researchers sit down at a terminal, “type in a gene associated with breast cancer and [the system] populates all the other genes and compounds that [it believes are] related.”

“What gets exciting,” said Dr. Gibson, “is when [we] see a gene nobody has ever heard of in the list, which feels like novel biology because the world has no idea it exists.” Once a target has been identified and the findings checked by a human, the data will be passed to Recursion’s in-house scientific laboratory. Here, researchers will run initial experiments to see if what was found in the simulation can be replicated in the real world. Dr. Gibson said that Recursion’s wet lab, which uses large-scale automation, is capable of running more than two million experiments in a working week.

“About six weeks later, with very little human intervention, we’ll get the results,” said Dr. Gibson and, if successful, it’s then the team will “really start investing.” Because, until this point, the short period of validation work has cost the company “very little money and time to get.” The promise is that, rather than a three-year preclinical phase, that whole process can be crunched down to a few database searches, some oversight and then a few weeks of ex vivo testing to confirm if the system’s hunches are worth making a real effort to interrogate. Dr. Gibson said that it believes it has taken a “year’s worth of animal model work and [compressed] it, in many cases, to two months.”

Of course, there is not yet a concrete success story, no wonder cure that any company in this space can point to as a validation of the approach. But Recursion can cite one real-world example of how close its platform came to matching the success of a critical study. In April 2020, Recursion ran the COVID-19 sequence through its system to look at potential treatments. It examined both FDA-approved drugs and candidates in late-stage clinical trials. The system produced a list of nine potential candidates which would need further analysis, eight of which it would later be proved to be correct. It also said that Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, both much-ballyhooed in the earliest days of the pandemic, would flop.

And there are AI-informed drugs that are currently undergoing real-world clinical trials right now. Recursion is pointing to five projects currently finishing their stage one (tests in healthy patients), or entering stage two (trials in people with the rare diseases in question) clinical testing right now. Benevolent has started a stage one trial of BEN-8744, a treatment for ulcerative colitis that may help with other inflammatory bowel disorders. And BEN-8744 is targeting an inhibitor that has no prior associations in the existing research which, if successful, will add weight to the idea that AIs can spot the connections humans have missed. Of course, we can’t make any conclusions until at least early next year when the results of those initial tests will be released.

DNA molecular structure with sequencing data of human genome analysis on black background.
Yuichiro Chino via Getty Images

There are plenty of unanswered questions, including how much we should rely upon AI as the sole arbiter of the drug discovery pipeline. There are also questions around the quality of the training data and the biases in the wider sources more generally. Dr. Richmond highlighted the issues around biases in genetic data sources both in terms of the homogeneity of cell cultures and how those tests are carried out. Similarly, Dr. Carpenter said the results of her most recent project, the publicly available JUMP-Cell Painting project, were based on cells from a single participant. “We picked it with good reason, but it’s still one human and one cell type from that one human.” In an ideal world, she’d have a far broader range of participants and cell types, but the issues right now center on funding and time, or more appropriately, their absence.

But, for now, all we can do is await the results of these early trials and hope that they bear fruit. Like every other potential application of AI, its value will rest largely in its ability to improve the quality of the work – or, more likely, improve the bottom line for the business in question. If AI can make the savings attractive enough, however, then maybe those diseases which are not likely to make back the investment demands under the current system may stand a chance. It could all collapse in a puff of hype, or it may offer real hope to families struggling for help while dealing with a rare disorder.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai-is-coming-for-big-pharma-150045224.html?src=rss

Five CES products that make you ask… ‘but why?’

The technology industry loves to breathlessly sell you its latest and greatest and best-est new idea. Pitches have to be fast and aggressive because if you took more than a second to think about what they were selling, you might not reach for your wallet. As flashy as the products at CES 2024 in Las Vegas can be, they often have one fatal weakness. Which is to not have any sort of answer to the most important question of them all: “y tho?”

One: LG’s wireless transparent OLED TV

LG OLED T
Photo by Billy Steele/Engadget

LG came to CES showing off a 77-inch wireless 4K OLED TV that is transparent for some reason. You can play footage of a singer, or an aquarium, or other screensaver-y type things as a talking piece in your home. But it turns out, being transparent isn’t great for actually watching TV, so it ships with a roll-out black background to make your transparent TV no longer transparent. I can imagine this used as an advertising screen or as an installation in a museum or corporate office. But why would you spend so much money on a TV where its key feature is an impediment to its proper function?

Two: Kohler PureWash E930 Bidet Seat

A white toilet (with a smart bidet seat) sitting in an upscale bathroom (green walls with floral patterns outside the throne room).
Kohler

It’s important that devices are designed with accessibility as a primary concern, rather than tacked on at the end. Nobody would hate on a voice-activated toilet that could help folks with access needs get through their day. But Kohler’s bidet seat is deeply integrated with Alexa or Google Home. Why on earth would you spend more than two grand to give Amazon or Google detailed insights into your bathroom habits?

Three: Lockly Visage facial-scanning smart lock

A person's face is scanned by a lock.
Lockly

Lockly’s Visage smart lock uses facial recognition to allow access to your home, opening the door if it spots you approaching. Setting aside the hideous privacy and security implications of smart locks, a thing you should never connect to the internet, this is a mad idea. Why would you leave something as important as access to your home at the whims of a sensor or some unproven gadget?

Four: Urtopia’s ChatGPT-enabled e-bike

A grey, white and black Urtopia Fusion e-bike rests on its kickstand on the blue-carpeted CES 2024 showfloor.
Urtopia

The Urtopia Fusion is an e-bike equipped with a 540Wh battery promising 75 miles of range, a beefy mid-drive motor and air suspension forks. It is also, for some godforsaken reason, equipped with ChatGPT which, the company says will enable you to “talk” to your bike. Its custom assistant will, when asked, help you “explore new routes,” “get real-time information” and even “engage in entertaining conversations.” Why on earth would you want to have a conversation with your bicycle when you should be focusing on literally anything else.

Five: Hyundai S-A2 air taxi concept

A gray and blue aircraft.
Hyundai

Hyundai showed off a new VTOL air taxi concept that, it’s hoped, would take people on short hops of up to 40 miles. It can reach a top speed of 120 miles per hour and will probably never ever come to the real world. After all, why would you go to the trouble of reengineering the whole world to accommodate this disaster waiting to happen?

We're reporting live from CES 2024 in Las Vegas from January 6-12. Keep up with all the latest news from the show here.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/five-ces-products-that-make-you-ask-but-why-150010098.html?src=rss

Jackery shows off a rooftop solar tent at CES that makes overlanding more environmentally friendly

Friends, I’m not what you would call an experienced overlandist, which is a word I have now learned exists to mean when you go camping in a truck. Part of the process of overlandering is that you actually sleep in a collapsible tent on the roof of the truck you’re driving. Now, I’ll be honest and say sleeping on the roof of a truck, even if there are elastic straps stopping you from falling off, is not what I’d call a fun weekend adventure. But it’s the market that Jackery is catering toward with its new concept solar roof tent, which it showed off here at CES 2024 in Las Vegas and will launch as a real product by the end of 2024.

The Jackery Solar Generator for Rooftop Tent is equipped with 1,000W solar panels (with a 25 percent efficiency rate). Unlike the flimsy panels you can currently buy, these are rigid slide-out units that should offer a sturdier canopy under which to sleep. Once you’ve parked up and opened the tent, the panels are wired up to an Explorer 1,000 Plus generator. That’ll hold 1,264Wh of power and can output at rates up to 2,000W, enough to power a 900W cooker for an hour. Plus, you can daisy-chain other batteries alongside to increase the storage further for longer trips away from an outlet and/or civilization.

Image of the solar panel end of Jackery's rooftop solar tent.
Photo by Daniel Cooper / Engadget

There’s no concrete details — yet — about how much this will cost when it reaches retail, or how much will change from this initial demonstration. But if you’re a big fan of perching atop a tiny truck roof and trying to sleep, untroubled by the terrifying prospect of rolling over and plummeting several feet to the ground, then this might be the product for you.

We're reporting live from CES 2024 in Las Vegas from January 6-12. Keep up with all the latest news from the show here.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/jackerys-rooftop-solar-tent-makes-overlanding-more-environmentally-friendly-230029346.html?src=rss

It’s a great time to buy a solar generator

I’ve been interested in solar generators for a long while, but very few of them ever felt worthy of specific comment. Many of them historically boasted of running laptops, TVs or coolers, but their constrained outputs made them incapable of powering kettles, washing machines or air conditioners. CES 2024 has shown that the industry has moved beyond those limitations, with newer units capable of fulfilling the promise inherent in their names.

Take the new EcoFlow Delta Pro Ultra, the company’s flagship whole-home backup, which can pump out 7,200W. The company claims the unit is strong enough to power a three ton central air unit, one of the most demanding appliances in the home. Plus, because it’s a modular design, you can add up to three of these units to the same home for a cumulative output of 21.6kW — and, with enough batteries, a total storage capacity of 90kWh.

Solix, Anker’s big battery division, was here at CES showing off its new F3800 portable power station. The company moved into the home battery market in the summer of 2023 but even something designed to be wheeled around is shorn of the older limitations. The F3800 can pump out a peak of 6,000W – a figure you can double if you buy two – enough to add juice to an EV in a pinch. And, best of all, it’s currently available to buy for $3,499 which, depending on how much solar you pair it with, should mean payback considerations are less than five years.

Jackery, which has been a name in this market for a long while, will sell you its 2000 Plus, complete with two 200W solar panels, for just $3,300. That small unit, if you use the right accessory, can be wired into your home’s breaker box and similarly has a surge peak of 6,000W. It’s not quite as muscular as some of its competitors, but the low cost means that it’s hard to argue against if you’re looking to dip a toe into this world.

Cost for solar panels and batteries have fallen dramatically in the last few years, with Our World in Data reporting that the cost of a panel has dropped from $2.32 per watt in 2010 to just $0.26 per watt in 2022. BloombergNEF reported that lithium ion battery prices have fallen from $780 per kWh in 2013 down to $139 per kWh in 2023. And it’s this that has enabled this surge in home battery uptake.

Emma Ross, who heads up communications for Jackery, says that customers are drawn to these falling prices. She added that, second to cost, the plug-and-play element of the gear is key, offering “the perfect combination of convenience and environmental friendliness.” The low cost and ease of installation means these systems “require less investment than other, larger solar options,” making it a “less intimidating” way for wary neophytes to get involved.

Nick Bowers, head of business development at EcoFlow in the US, says that consumers are frustrated with the domestic energy market. He claims rate increases, natural disasters, power outages and climate change have all driven people toward buying solar gear. “The pain points pushing people toward renewables,” he said, “will only grow more acute,” with users looking to “be less reliant on the grid.”

And the solar industry writ large is gearing up to address a surge in demand expected to come as these prices fall. Eric Villines, head of global communications at Anker, says that the only roadblock right now is the fact most homeowners aren’t investing in storage alongside their solar gear. “In 2022, only ten percent of installed home solar systems in the US included energy storage,” he told Engadget, “preventing homeowners from securing protection against blackouts.” To address this, the company surveyed users and found most were either put off by the high price, or didn’t even know that it was a viable option for them.

Which is why the knock-down prices on hardware the likes of which we’ve seen at CES 2024 is hopefully going to address some of those issues. After all, whereas some of this gear would have cost tens of thousands of dollars a few years ago, they’re now less than half that price. Perhaps these units will serve as a gateway drug to investments into more expansive whole home batteries further down the line. And that’s a good first step towards our bigger, and hopefully brighter solar future.

We're reporting live from CES 2024 in Las Vegas from January 6-12. Keep up with all the latest news from the show here.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/its-a-great-time-to-buy-a-solar-generator-175705763.html?src=rss

Swarovski’s smart binoculars identify the birds you’re looking at

Swarovski has turned up at CES 2024 in Las Vegas with its first ever pair of smart binoculars that will identify the bird you’re looking at. All you have to do is point the gear at a bird and make sure the view is in focus, and then press down an action button. Within a few seconds, the system will overlay a bird’s name over your view, using data pulled from the Merlin Bird ID database. That has over 9,000 species tagged, and will even let you know the degree of certainty it has if the bird in question is in an unexpected location. And if this was the only feature these binoculars had, it’d be enough to justify the purchase, but that’s only the beginning of what these things can do.

Between the eyepieces, there’s a function wheel similar to one you would find on a camera that lets you cycle between various features. That includes a Wildlife ID version which hooks into its built-in Mammal, Dragonfly and Butterfly ID databases. Plus, there’s a camera which lets you send pictures and video to a paired smartphone, which would similarly be plenty to justify the expense. But the system is also designed to be expandable, with the focus wheel including space for any future custom databases you might need. For instance, one idea could be to build a database for stars, or airplane types for aviation fans to spot the make and model of what’s flying overhead.

Then there’s the discovery sharing feature, which enables you to share something you’ve found with whoever you’re outdoors with. All you need to do is tag whatever you’ve found, and then hand the AX Visio over to them, where a series of flashing arrows will guide them to where you were looking. Even in the busy halls of CES, one of the company’s representatives was able to pinpoint a far-off fire exit sign before handing me the binoculars and asking me to find it. All you need to do is follow the arrows straight to what you’re meant to be looking at with a system that’s as elegant as it is useful. There's even a built-in compass that'll let you identify which direction you're gazing toward to help you navigate.

You might notice from the pictures that there are three lenses, with the central one holding the 13-megapixel sensor shooting HD-quality (1,920 x 1,080) pictures and video. There’s 8GB storage, which should hold up to an hour of video or 1,700 photos before needing to be cleared off. Beyond the smarts, the binoculars magnify up to 10x with 88 percent light transmission, thanks to the company’s high-end lenses. Swarovski says its glassware offers almost flat, distortion-free images with plenty of contrast and color fidelity.

Now, here’s the thing, my father-in-law is a serious ornithologist who is respected, at least among his peer group. His ability to spot the genus and species of a bird in flight is extraordinary and I’m often left bewildered at the depth of his knowledge. I don’t think I’d have the ability, patience or time to even get within a hundred miles of his capability. But, with a device like this, it might mean that I can at least vaguely keep up with him when we’re out on the trails.

The AX Visio is, however, not messing around with price, and Swarovski is charging €4,600 (around $5,000) for you to get this into your hands. While bird fans often have to be patient, this should start arriving at people’s homes at some point in February.

We're reporting live from CES 2024 in Las Vegas from January 6-12. Keep up with all the latest news from the show here.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/swarovskis-smart-binoculars-identify-the-birds-youre-looking-at-173151637.html?src=rss