Month: October 2018

After announcing some updates to the Google Assistant user experience yesterday, today Google is rolling out a new way of booking rides with your voice — or at least getting most of the way there. Starting this week, you’ll be able to say “Hey Google, book a ride to” or “Hey Google, get me a taxi to” your destination.

Assistant will then respond by listing off price estimates and current wait times for Uber, Lyft, Ola, Grab, GO-JEK, “and many more” ride-hailing apps, according to Google. You can avoid the longer list and specify your preferred service by using its name when requesting a ride. This works on Android, iPhone, Google Home, and all other smart speakers that have Assistant built in.

Previously, Assistant would kick you over…

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Volvo’s in-house performance arm begins constructing verification prototypes of the Polestar 1 hybrid super coupe.

Significant spoilers ahead for episodes of The Good Place that have already aired.

The Good Place is a rare television phenomenon: a show that suggests prison is evil and cops are bad.

Part of the way the show gets away with that thesis without getting the kind of pushback afforded to movements like Black Lives Matter is because it doesn’t seem to be about cops or prison at all. The show, which just launched its third season, is a high-concept fantasy sitcom about the afterlife. Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) is killed in a tragic shopping cart accident and wakes up in what she believes is heaven, aka “The Good Place.” She appears to be there because of a bureaucratic slipup: they think she’s a crusading human rights lawyer rather…

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Heart rate data from a Fitbit has been used to charge a man with the murder of his stepdaughter, reports The New York Times. Anthony Aiello had initially claimed that he had left his stepdaughter Karen Navarra’s home within 15 minutes of arriving. However, data from her Fitbit was later compared against security camera footage to prove that her murder occurred while Aiello was still at the property.

The data the Fitbit provided to detectives (in response to a search warrant) showed Navarra’s heart rate spiked at 3:20PM before rapidly declining and stopping completely at 3:28PM. Detectives later discovered bloodstained clothes at Aiello’s property, and he was arrested on September 25th.

Data from…

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A study analyzed environmental exposures, like pet and secondhand smoke, to determine if they have a role in asthma control among children whose asthma is managed per NAEPP (EPR-3) guidelines. Researchers found that once asthma guidelines are followed, environmental exposures to pets or secondhand smoke were not significant factors in overall asthma improvement over time.

Object in distant galaxy most likely is a gamma ray burst whose beams of gamma rays were pointed away from Earth and thus not detected. Radio afterglow’s behavior over time, however, is what’s expected from a gamma ray burst.

Extracting energy from the wind causes climatic impacts that are small compared to current projections of 21st century warming, but large compared to the effect of reducing US electricity emissions to zero with solar. Researchers report the most accurate modelling yet of how increasing wind power would affect climate, finding that large-scale wind power generation would warm the Continental United States 0.24 degrees Celsius because wind turbines redistribute heat in the atmosphere.

Human evolution used to be depicted as a straight line, gradually progressing from an ape-like ancestor to modern Homo sapiens. But thanks to next-generation sequencing, findings in recent years have shown that it wasn’t quite so orderly. Now, a new study is reporting new details about the role of viruses in shaping evolution, in particular viral interactions between modern humans and Neanderthals.

Big phones, big competition.