LAS VEGAS – Nissan at CES 2020 took the wraps off a successor, or more likely big brother, to the best-selling, now recently slow-selling Nissan Leaf EV. It’s called the Nissan Ariya Concept. It gets up to 300 miles of range and is a crossover/hatchback where the Leaf is a sedan. Think of the Ariya (pronounced like the musical term) as being a more sculpted, more current Nissan Rogue, and electrified. Nissan will use the second generation of its ProPilot Assist self-driving technology, which provides Level 3 hands-off driving for conditional automation. It’s roughly equivalent to Cadillac Super Cruise.
Google is almost ready to release a new search provider selection screen in the EU, but it’s not doing so by choice. Last year, the EU ordered Google to offer placement to other search engines in Android, and Google is complying in the most Google way possible. It has conducted an auction for spots in the setup flow, and now the results are in. , and Bing is almost entirely absent. The in 2018 hammered Google for its practice of integrating Google Search with Android. If users wanted to use a different search engine, they had to manually install it and change the defaults.
A few years ago, SpaceX started landing Falcon 9 rocket boosters so frequently that it stopped being a major event. Now, the same is starting to happen with the company’s Starlink satellite launches. The launch of 60 new satellites this week has made SpaceX the single largest commercial satellite operator in the world, and it could soon have more satellites than all other operators combined. That . SpaceX CEO Elon Musk envisions a day when people all over the world will be able to get internet access via the company’s Starlink satellite network. Satellite internet already exists, but the bandwidth and latency are awful compared with any other modern connectivity method.
LAS VEGAS – Take a BMW i3 electric vehicle, reconfigure it so there’s room for just one passenger with NBA-length legs, and you’ve got the BMW i3 Urban Suite Concept. As in a suite in a hip, boutique city hotel. The car uses medium-blue fabrics, nicely grained woods without a hint of high-gloss varnish, a drop-down infotainment screen, and a sliding ottoman for the passenger’s legs. It works because there is no right front seat (gone) or left rear seat (replaced by a wood shelf with a mushroom lamp on top). The BMW Urban Suite is a placeholder for EVs coming in a year or so.
If you own a microwave and use Wi-Fi, you’re probably aware that these two things don’t mesh well (pun intended). The impact of running a microwave while using Wi-Fi tends to vary depending on how much EM your microwave leaks and which frequencies your Wi-Fi network is using. If you’re on a 5GHz network, you may not see much interference, but a 2.4GHz system may choke and die when you cook a burrito, depending on the position of your hardware and the layout of your house. Microwaves and Wi-Fi, in other words, are not two things you would ordinarily combine.
Christmas is over, but why not treat yourself to a new iPad? Apple’s 2019 iPad with 128GB of storage is available now from Amazon with a 16 percent discount. The new 2019 iPad features the company’s A10 processor that first debuted in the iPhone 7 at the end of 2016. Although that makes this tablet’s hardware a few years old, you get get the performance of this former flagship with a large high-def screen and with 128GB of storage space. Right now you can get one from Amazon marked down from $429.00 to $359.99.
Scientists have long suspected that the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are on a collision course with our Milky Way galaxy, and it may be running ahead of schedule. While analyzing objects at the edge of the galaxy, astronomers noted an unexpected cluster of young stars. Upon closer examination, these celestial objects between the Milky Way and the Magellanic dwarf galaxies. According to Adrian Price-Whelan, a research fellow at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics, there are fewer than a thousand stars in the newly discovered cluster. Nevertheless, this discovery could have significant implications for astronomy. Stars at the edge of the Milky Way are among the oldest in the galaxy, so a group of young stars is notable.
As fun as it is to get a ride in a self-driving car (even if it does have a safety driver) there are only so many times that is exciting enough to write about. So, for a change, Aptiv, a leading automotive component supplier and innovator in self-driving technology, offered me a behind-the-scenes tour of their Las Vegas Technical Center instead of another test ride. Their LVTC is responsible for both the overall operation of the extensive fleet of autonomous vehicles it operates with Lyft in Las Vegas and working on the portions of the underlying technology. To put this in context, for nearly two years Lyft customers have been able to opt-in to getting a self-driving car to ferry them around Las Vegas — in lieu of a more traditional vehicle.
As fun as it is to get a ride in a self-driving car (even if it does have a safety driver) there are only so many times that is exciting enough to write about. So, for a change, Aptiv, a leading automotive component supplier and innovator in self-driving technology, offered me a behind-the-scenes tour of their Las Vegas Technical Center instead of another test ride. Their LVTC is responsible for both the overall operation of the extensive fleet of autonomous vehicles it operates with Lyft in Las Vegas and working on the portions of the underlying technology. To put this in context, for nearly two years Lyft customers have been able to opt-in to getting a self-driving car to ferry them around Las Vegas — in lieu of a more traditional vehicle.
