 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners thanks to all of you including Dustin Campbell, Tim deputy and Brandon Brooks Coming up on DTNS. Dr. Kiki helps us understand a couple of ways to recharge our batteries like literally the ones implanted inside of us plus hope for color e-ink screens and help for cancelling unnecessary subscriptions This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday 26th of April 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from studio red I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer Roger Chang and Joining us dr. Kiki Sanford host of this week in science welcome back to the show Kiki Hello everyone. Thank you so much It's good to have you we are going to start with a few tech things. We all should know so here they are Big spoiler alert tick-tock is one of the world's fastest growing social media platforms You might say well, I knew that but included in sensor towers recently released q1 2022 store intelligence data digest report tick-tock was the top app by worldwide downloads in q1 2022 it also surpassed 3.5 billion all-time downloads in the first quarter of 2021 as Just the fifth app and notably the only service not owned by meta to reach these numbers Casey Newton reports that while most Twitter employees seem pretty negative or at least wary of Elon Musk's pending purchase of the company Some Twitter employees acknowledge that taking the company private could make it easier for them to improve the service because they don't Have all that shareholder pressure some former executives even agreed almost none of them though We're happy to find out. They will not continue to receive equity once the company goes private It's not like they lose the stock they have they'll get that bought out They just won't get any more Newton also points out that two-thirds of the financing for the deal is coming from musk's own Assets with remainder being bank loans secured against Twitter's assets Musk also took out a 12 and a half billion dollar Margin loan which is secured against Tesla stock So if Tesla stock dropped by more than 40% he would have to repay that entire loan Newton says the deal is expected to take around six months to close So just settle down. It's gonna probably be October before things actually change And meanwhile Bloomberg sources say Twitter has put internal protections in place to stop employees from altering source code as a precaution Fidelity investments announced that later this year It will become the first major retirement plan provider to let customers put a Bitcoin account into a 401k retirement plan Fidelity will allow plan sponsors to let savers allocate up to 20% of their funds to Bitcoin Other digital assets may be added in the future as well Now whether to allow it will be up to each 401k plans operator usually the employer So it might not be available to anybody who has a fidelity 401k But it also might the US Department of Labor has advised employers to exercise extreme care in regards to adding cryptocurrency To their retirement plans. So yeah, that's kind of a strongly worded hint, isn't it? Dell announced new laptop models Tuesday a few interesting features on these you might want to hear about the Just a little more than a half inch thick 13 inch latitude 93 30 has a row of LED buttons across the top of the touchpad That give you quick access to zoom. So you got one for the mic one for camera one for chat one for screen sharing That one's coming in June and then the precision 7670 and 7770 workstation laptops use something called compression attached memory module or cam For the DDR5 memory that allows them to put 128 gigabytes of RAM on a single flat module not stacked that helps keep the laptop thin You can still get the models with old-fashioned stacked so dim RAM, but they'll max out at 64 gigabytes These are coming by the end of July The Ford f-150 lightning began shipping to customers on Tuesday while full-size electric pickup trucks are coming from GM Ram and also Tesla Ford is the only one available at the moment And we'll probably have the market to itself for about a year You might say, okay, I want one. You might have a hard time getting one There are 200,000 pre-orders to ship and some of those customers are gonna have to wait until at least 2023 to get To that point 2022 lightnings no longer available. This is a popular model The hope is that Ford's battery plant that's operated in partnership with Korea's SK battery can get up to speed sooner than later Tuesday Ford CEO Jim Farley also said that the company is working on a second EV truck model Let's finish making the first one Farley. Come on. Let's get a little crazy there. All right Let's talk about E Inc. The Amazon Kindle popularized it back in November 2007 it's been 15 almost 15 years since that first Amazon Kindle But E Inc screens don't seem to advance have advanced all that much in those years Color E Inc has always just been a little impractical right now if you get a color E Inc device It's probably not color E Inc. It's probably using E Inc's Kaleido system Which is black and white E Inc with a color filter Uh, that doesn't offer the crispness of a straight black and white E Inc screen That's because the actual color E Inc screens up until now have taken 10 seconds to refresh Page turn wait wait wait That was good for things like signage in a in a store, but not much else However, there is hope the company E Inc just announced E Inc gallery 3 it can produce More than 50,000 colors at a stately but much improved 1.5 seconds And if you don't need the best color quality you can get that refresh rate down to 500 milliseconds about a half a second Black and white on the panel is the common 350 milliseconds So colors getting closer and the resolution is much improved 300 ppi at the on par with most black and white screens Double the previous color screens at of 150 Support stylus input at up to 30 milliseconds for black and white and some colors And it has front light led meant to cut down on blue light E Inc will show off gallery 3 at the california display week starting may 10th And uh, i'm hoping amazon and cobo are taking a look because i'd like to see that show up in their products The verges alex kranz even points out that this huge jump in the refresh rate might Be putting it on a trajectory to maybe someday Rival tablet displays like OLED and lcd If you could get it to that level of refresh rate E Inc Would be much more power efficient than those uh and and be a huge boon for battery life E Inc encouraged this line of thinking by releasing demo videos of E Inc screens Rolling and folding like a tablet or phone screen From samsung or somebody like that But i don't know i i get kind of excited at E Inc screens because of their power efficiency I get kind of excited at the idea of my battery lasting longer is really what I get excited about Yeah, somebody who who got to the E Inc market, uh, quite quite a bit later than some Uh, my my first uh, my first E Inc product was the remarkable two, which was my Most recent live with that segment. So, you know, just kind of the uh, the last quarter of of of 2021 There were a lot of things where I was like, well, where's the oh, yeah, we don't do color How did we yeah, no, it's not a tablet not a tablet, sarah So there were a lot of things that I had to kind of get used to And for for reading books almost never do you think like I wish there were a lot of I I guess If you had or if you were reading a book where there were a lot of illustrations or photos or something involved You know more of like a magazine type thing then that would make a lot of sense This this whole thing to me I get I get a little caught up on the I mean how how how much are people like mad that like a millisecond Of a page turning is slightly slower than if it were just like a black and white thing It doesn't that doesn't mean anything to me But but I guess if you were used to E Inc readers in the past then To be able to add color but to slow down the entire process could be pretty frustrating Ten seconds sounds like a really long time That's too long. Yeah, I mean that's that's dial-up speed, right? You know and then we're getting it the one and a half seconds We're starting to get like, oh, you know, you've got like your 64 bit kind of stuff But the fifth the 500 milliseconds that really is the game changer if they can make that work And everybody's looking for their battery life to be longer I mean if you're reading stuff you want to be able to take it on the go You have your have your e-reader that can be what you take your notes on that you're reading your books in That you're reading your magazines as a scientist maybe journal articles and yeah having color for For illustrations and even visualizations from from scientific journals or textbooks This could be a real game changer for making those things more applicable And I'm imagining, you know instead of printing photo albums Maybe you have these have a photo album that's printed up Yeah, yeah with 50 000 colors and 300 ppi, you know that starts to make it possible. These are still specialty devices though You know, so it's still going to be like, oh, I want an e-reader I want I want something that does that Versus, you know a multipurpose tablet. So we're not we're not quite to that You know nirvana that maybe we'll get to maybe we want someday someday Well someday might be today if you're a person who manages a lot of subscriptions And you might say to yourself Wouldn't it be nice if there was a company that could come along and help me automate all these subscriptions and make my life easier For example, what if there was some kind of algorithm that knew when I had stopped watching Anything on a particular streaming service And it was proactive and canceled it for me And if enough time went by then allowed me to re-subscribe When I was allowed to use it again This obviously would apply to streaming services, but subscriptions in general creative cloud for example Or a magazine subscription that I might not be making use of that was you know digital too many to keep on sometimes So too many different ways to cancel them as well. I know it's a pain point. Many of you are Saying yes. Yes. Yes. I have that pain point as well And you end up paying for things that you simply aren't using and that's actually the real problem here Sensor tower issued a report back in february estimating that consumer spending on the top 100 non game subscription based apps rose 41 percent in 2021 to 8.3 billion dollars back in 2020 subscriptions represented 11.7 of spending on apps for the year that rose to 14 percent for 2021. So people are Subscribing to more things, but are those subscriptions really of use to them? Protocol has a write-up on a company called true bill. The promise is to help manage your subscriptions It's very promising indeed. What true bill does is it analyzes your bank account So you're obviously going to have to you know, trust true bill to to see some information Identifies your subscriptions at least what it can glean from your you know, your inbox So you can see what you're exactly paying for and when It identifies subscriptions, but also, you know who the companies are What the cancellation method is add some dates in there And it also has a service that cancels the subscription for you Either by email or letter or maybe even a phone call can't help with in-person requirements. So if you If you're you know, you're trying to cancel your gold's gym subscription You're probably going to have to go in there, but it also does spending reports. It can categorize things It uh deals with credit reports net worth tracking. So it's pretty robust True bill is a subscription service itself though So you pay anywhere between three and ten dollars per month depends on what you want to do but uh co-founder of the company haroon Mokhtur Mokhtur Zata said that he was paying for a security system on a home He had sold the previous year He and two of his brothers had similar stories and they said, you know, there's got to be a better way and true bill was launched from there It was back in 2015 when it launched rocket companies the parent company of rocket mortgage Which you've probably heard of acquired it back in december I tried it out Uh, first of all, uh, you mentioned an inbox. So just just to make sure that that people are clear This doesn't access your email. It just access the inbox of your bank. Yes So your your listing of charges Uh, it did a really good job of reassuring me that it wasn't going to use sell my private data That it was using encryption. I mean you kind of have to trust that it's doing that Nobody's caught them violating that so I I felt fairly reassured connected my accounts And it did a great job of finding most of my subscriptions But of course i'm a human being so i'm going to look at the two things that didn't do well One is there was an adobe subscription that I was like, yeah cancel this and it was like we can't adobe won't let us do that So it's going to depend on the company whether they can actually cancel on your behalf kind of kind of depends The other one was I had a bill for arcadia power, which is not my power company It's a power company somewhere else and I was like, what's that about? So I logged into my my actual bank account. It was a noodle shop that I bought noodles at On uh saturday called arcadia, uh, uh, q-dog Oh, and it confused it with like a power company and it like yeah, it it miscalculated This is your weekly noodles subscription. Yeah, yeah, I would love to subscribe to noodles, but uh, sadly no So so those are the two exceptions that prove the rule though It did a great job of capturing everything else I have not yet tried to use it to cancel something that it could cancel though Yeah, I'm I'm interested in what rocket companies is going to do with this because it seems to me that You know financial services company like mint or another company that helps people manage their banking information Uh where people are already allowing a company access to their their bank account information That that would be the obvious add-on to a service. It's already available like that, but um rocket companies appears to It's financial in in a lot of senses, but very insurance investment and mortgage related So it'll be just really interesting to see what they do with this new holding And true bill is saying, you know, we want to expand in those kind of financial management spending management sort of features But the difference is they make their money off of you paying for the subscription not off ads Not trying to sell you services like like a lot of the other competitors out there. So yeah, uh, anyway I'm gonna say don't unsubscribe me from my mortgage, please. Yes, don't do that Uh, and do create a noodle subscription service Uh, I I would like to see more of these. I think true bill looks promising Uh, it's not perfect obviously, you know, as I've noticed right out of the gate But anything that can help you manage these stuff and to get to that world sarah was describing Where it just knows like, oh, you're done with paramount plus, you know, we'll put that on pause for you Let us help you. Yeah, that'd be great Yep. Hey folks, if you're feeling social, uh, why not get in touch with the dTNS folks on the socials at dTNS show Is our twitter account and at dTNS pics pix is our instagram account. Say hi In december 2019 surgeons at southmead hospital in bristol england successfully implanted a device into the brain of tony howells With with his knowledge As a trial of a treatment for parkinson's disease The device uses something called deep brain stimulation dbs It overrides the abnormal brain cell firing patterns that cause the tremors and stiff muscles and slow movement And other symptoms of parkinson's attempting to override the brain firing is not the new part here There is a traditional dbs treatment that involves implanting a battery in your chest Running wires under the skin and through the top of the head Which sounds unpleasant unless you have parkinson's which is more unpleasant. This new device though is called the pico stem It's from a company called bio induction and they describe it as a brain pacemaker It's about the size of you know, roughly two sd cards or so has a tiny battery on board So you don't have to put one in your chest and they implant it directly into the skull bone Which still doesn't sound great, but it's better than the other one Electric probes from there connect it the device to the subthalmic nuclei to deliver the impulses And the operation takes about three hours half the time of that older chest battery procedure It's also easier to recharge a compact external inductive coil is fitted into a baseball cap And then you place that on your head Over the implanted device bio induction says that a typical settings for parkinson's A recharge a recharge is required about once a week and takes less than two hours and not super convenient But okay, uh, that compares to the three to four hours of the other systems Howls is the first of 25 patients selected for the trial that concludes next year And it appears effective in him to tony howl said before the procedure He could make it from the car about 200 yards before he had to turn around just couldn't walk that much farther After the procedure he went on a two and a half mile walk and says I probably could have gone farther I was yeah, I was you know, just didn't have anywhere else to go But but kiki, uh, this is this is a pretty good advancement in in the treatment Just in the size if nothing else. Yeah, so like you said the deep brain stimulation is has been around for a long time It's very highly effective. It's able to reduce motor related symptoms of parkinson's disease Even though it doesn't cure the disease it can hold off the progression of the disease And they've shown that people with deep brain stimulation can Keep going for 10 to 15 years once further than was expected previously Once they have that implanted. However, like you said surgeries are long You have to have parts replaced the wires going from the uh, the pacemaker part in the chest cavity up through the neck into the even if effective very Yeah, and if you're moving around and doing stuff those wires can get ripped apart and it can get damaged It's also uncomfortable. So highly invasive easily damaged uncomfortable This is getting rid of a lot of those problems by just putting it right on top of the head in the skull It's still invasive, but it's not Not as invasive. Um And it works off of a off of a principle called induction So the battery that is implanted in the skull It's basically like your induction cook cook top. It's a magnetic induction that's been used over and over again for things like back pain stimulators and also for charging pacemakers in chest cavities That that induction Works to charge the battery to keep it going so that the stimulation can continue to work and work Um, but yeah, so this new device the pico stem the advancement is basically that it's It's it's different charging. It's on the head instead of in the head It's uh, hopefully a bit better for the patients overall It's a bit like wireless phone charging, you know You put that cap on your head instead of putting your phone on the charger pretty ingenious But what if it didn't charge by induction kiki found a write-up in sci-tech daily about using ultrasonic waves To charge implanted devices as well as charging underwater batteries. Tell us more about this one kiki Yeah, so this story came out of the korea institute of science and technology Dr Song hyun chul at the elect electronic materials research center That he and his team published in energy and environmental science this last week about Their new technique that doesn't use induction So there's no need to get surfaces close together to create that electrical magnetic current loop To charge batteries, but instead uses ultrasound So like the ultrasound that's is used to look inside of your body to look at a developing baby Or to look for Problems in your heart. This is now potentially going to Drive the power for all sorts of devices could potentially drive deep brain stimulation. Who knows down the road What the the technique that they're using that is Different is that they've taken ultrasound and they've paired it with the tribo electric effect And so they have a transducer that is able to take the sound waves that are moving from the ultrasound That then vibrate little tiny molecules in this tribo electric receiver and the transducer and They get that electric current going just based on this vibration of molecules within the system And they've been able to create up to or more than eight milliwatts of power at a distance of six centimeters. So still not super far away, but it's the kind of thing that you could be sitting in a chair or not necessarily have to be Directly lined up like this the the pico stem It's a baseball cap kind of design so that everything has to fit very closely for some of those back pain stimulators It's a belt design and that belt it beeps until you're lined up exactly so that the charging can take place This is different it gives a little bit more leeway And eventually maybe they'll be able to increase the distance increase the power even that can be added to a device that's internally implanted and Who knows it could have other uses even Sensing things below the deep ocean any place that you need batteries This could be powering it even at six centimeters, which is not very far There the advantage over the pico stem is that the pico stem with the parkinson's treatment We talked about has to be put at the very top of the skull It can be planted into the skull But it has to be on the top so that that baseball cap can essentially touch it through the skin Right, you can't you can't have much in the way it's six centimeters. You could actually Implant it not far, but you could implant it closer to where it is needed, right? Right So if you need something the deep brain stimulation the deep brain stimulator could be in your deep brain and potentially Um, you just lie down on a pillow or on you know You're like that the the flat cell phone chargers. Maybe you've got one of those under your pillow even. Yeah. Yeah It's just six centimeters away If you don't understand triboelectric, uh, it's basically static electricity, right? It's the thing that makes packing that stick to us Yeah, so it was static electricity comes about because of the triboelectric effect It's because you have the movement of different materials Past each other in such a way that it creates a current So, um, yeah, so static electricity is a product of triboelectricity. So when when the cat runs through the peanuts That's the triboelectric effect causing the static electricity. Your cat is triboelectric. Yeah. Yes What a Nutty cat thing to do Well, yeah, you know, it may not rival triboelectric cats But uh, we do we we have in the past talked about a company called miso robotics quite a bit on the show because The whole idea is sort of like fast food chains using robots in the back Yeah, show me another restaurant robot company. We'll cover them. But yeah, it's kind of miso, right? It's kind of miso. Yeah, so Uh, the company has added fast food chain jack in the box in one location And I'll get that get to that in a second But it is now on the list of its pilot customers pilot customers already include white castle, panera bread chipotle You know, these are chain fast food ish type places miso is a crowd funded company So it makes it kind of interesting with 18 000 individual investors as of the state and over 50 million dollars raised Now at a single jack in the box location in san dieu california And if you're not familiar with jack in the box, you know, you know, you live elsewhere in the world It's a burger place fast-food burger place. Exactly food Yeah, um, it is uh one one of my favorites actually miso robotics Flippy 2 that is the robot that will flip burgers and sippy, which is the robot that will help with drink prep Are gonna do their thing You know, they're gonna try it out in the hopes that it will free up staff To spend more time interacting with customers and spending less time doing mundane things in the kitchen I mean this this starts to feel like It's gathering momentum Panera chipotle white castle jack in the box Yeah, the the the next big thing for miso robotics would be widespread Uh deployment for a chain, right like 300 in and outs are going to use exactly not that in and out Whatever use miso robot. We're still in test mode here Yeah, but uh, but they're getting more and more of these tests which indicates they're getting closer and closer And i'm not kidding. If you're like, hey, I know this company that's doing a similar thing I don't just mean like anything automated, but like a robotics company like miso That's doing like full autonomy for for particular tasks like this Send it to us feedback and daily tech news show dot com love to hear about it Indeed. All right, let's check out the mail bag making of the mail bag Tom a k8 tracer bullet had wrote in and said in most cases I don't get nfts and this is no exception I received an email from ardberg ardbeg whiskey today. I thought it might be of interest It describes the sale of 456 bottles of nft whiskey This bottle is out of my price range But I guess the nft could prove that you have a real and not counterfeit bottle of this whiskey It appears they issue you an nft for your bottle and they store it until you decide to burn your nft Then you get your actual bottle of scotch. So this would help solve the counterfeit whiskey problem So I believe the idea here is that you buy the nft and then the whiskey is reserved for you You can then use the nft to trade, right? Right. Yeah Hypothetically. Yeah. Yeah, glen fiddic is doing this with 46 year old glen fiddic, right? So these are tens of thousand dollars per bottle Whiskies and that way you don't the the whiskey is safe You've got the contract because remember nfts are just basically virtual contracts that says This bottle of whiskey belongs to this person And then you can transfer that contract to someone else without ever having to handle the bottle And then whenever someone finally wants to crack that open They can take you they can show the nft to glen fiddic or ardbeg and and say give me a bottle I'm ready to have a night. I mean if somebody who just I just do not collect alcohol Especially alcohol Yeah of these price points, but like I love the idea that okay, this actually works for lots of things sneakers Makeup Nike's been doing the same thing. Exactly Yeah, it's just it's a it's a Full proof. I don't know someone will fool it at some point, but a full proof contract There's some sort of a proof joke in there. Yeah Oh, there really is it's a hundred proof contract in this case. Yeah No that it nothing is foolproof, obviously It's a fool's errand to say so But but pretty close like you said geeky Yeah, you know closer than a lot of things and makes it super easy to trade so I don't I don't know I like this one tracer bullet. Uh, thanks Thanks for showing us an nft that isn't just a picture of an ape In deeds and thank you to everybody who emails us. Please do keep those emails coming questions comments feedback at daily tech newshow.com Also, thanks to dr. Kiki sanford for being with us today. It's been too long Let folks know where they can keep up with everything that you do kiki Thank you so much for having me on today. I really did enjoy it You can find me at twist.org for this week in science my weekly science podcast I'm on twitter as dr. Kiki d r k i k i and This week in science is at twist science So I hope I do get to come back again soon. Please do absolutely And yes, do subscribe to uh this week in science if you haven't already. It's a wonderful show Also, thanks to a brand new boss that we have on this here show and that boss's name is robert robert just started backing us on patreon Thank you robert good to have you There's also a longer version of the show. It's called good day internet It's rolling right after we finish dtns available at patreon.com slash dtns And just a reminder that if you'd like to join us live We are live monday through friday 4 p.m. Eastern 200 utc find out more at daily tech newshow.com slash live and we're back tomorrow with patrick norton talk to you then This show is part of the frog pants network Get more at frogpants.com