 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 Ribbon, 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. TikTok 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. TikTok 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 Metta 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 acknowledged 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, were 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 $12.5 billion 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 going to 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 9330 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 will 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 going to have to wait until at least 2023 to get to that point. 2022 Lightning's 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-ink. The Amazon Kindle popularized it back in November 2007. It's been almost 15 years since that first Amazon Kindle. But e-ink screens don't seem to have advanced all that much in those years. Color e-ink has always just been a little impractical. Right now, if you get a Color e-ink device, it's probably not Color e-ink. It's probably using e-ink's Kaleido system, which is black and white e-ink with a color filter. That doesn't offer the crispness of a straight black and white e-ink screen. That's because the actual Color e-ink screens up until now have taken 10 seconds to refresh. Page turn. Wait, wait, wait. That was good for things like signage in a store, but not much else. However, there is hope. The company e-ink just announced e-ink gallery three. 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 on par with most black and white screens, double the previous color screens of 150, supports 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-ink will show off gallery three at the California display week starting May 10th. And I'm hoping Amazon and Kobo are taking a look because I'd like to see that show up in their products. The Verge's 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-ink would be much more power efficient than those and be a huge boon for battery life. e-ink encouraged this line of thinking by releasing demo videos of e-ink screens rolling and folding like a tablet or phone screen from Samsung or somebody like that. But I don't know, I get kind of excited at e-ink 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. As somebody who got to the e-ink market quite a bit later than some, my first e-ink product was the Remarkable 2, which was my most recent Live With It segment. So, you know, just kind of the last quarter of 2021. There were a lot of things where I was like, well, where's the, oh yeah, we don't do color. How do 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 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 whole thing to me, I get a little caught up on the, I mean, 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 I guess if you were used to e-ink readers in the past, then to be able to add color but to slow down the entire process could be pretty frustrating. 10 seconds sounds like a really long time getting that down. That's too long. Yeah, that's dial up speed, right? You know, and then we're getting at 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 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 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 illustrations and even visualizations 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 something that does that versus, you know, a multi-purpose tablet. So we're not quite to that, you know, nirvana that maybe we'll get to. Maybe we won't 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 resubscribe 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% in 2021 to $8.3 billion. Back in 2020, subscriptions represented 11.7% of spending on apps for the year. That rose to 14% 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 TrueBill that promises to help manage your subscriptions. It's very promising indeed. What TrueBill does is it analyzes your bank account, so you're obviously going to have to trust TrueBill to see some information, identifies your subscriptions, at least what it can glean from your inbox. So you can see what you're exactly paying for and when. It identifies subscriptions, but also 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'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 deals with credit reports, net worth tracking. So it's pretty robust. TrueBill is a subscription service itself though. So you pay anywhere between $3 and $10 per month. It depends on what you want to do. But co-founder of the company Haroon Mokhturzata 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 TrueBill was launched from there. It was back in 2015 when it launched Rocket Companies, the parent company of Rocket Mortgage, which you probably heard of, acquired it back in December. I tried it out. First of all, you mentioned an inbox. So just to make sure that people are clear, this doesn't access your email. It just access the inbox of your bank. Yes. So your listing of charges. 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 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 actual bank account. It was a noodle shop that I bought noodles at on Saturday called Arcadia Kyo-Dog. Oh, and it confused it with like a power company. And it like, yeah, it miscategorized it. This is your weekly noodle subscription. Yeah, yeah. I would love to be subscribed to noodles, but sadly, no. 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 interested in what Rocket Companies is going to do with this, because it seems to me that financial services company like Mint or another company that helps people manage their banking information, where people are already allowing a company access to their bank account information, that that would be the obvious add-on to a service that's already available like that. But Rocket Companies appears to be, it's financial 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, 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 a lot of their competitors out there. So yeah, anyway. I'm going to say, don't unsubscribe me from my mortgage, please. Yes, don't do that. And do create a noodle subscription service. I would like to see more of these. I think true bill looks promising. It's not perfect, obviously, 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, why not get in touch with the DTNS folks on the socials at DTNS show is our Twitter account and at DTNS pics. P I X 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 PicoStim. It's from a company called BioInduction, and they describe it as a brain pacemaker. It's about the size of 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 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. BioInduction says that at typical settings for Parkinson's, a recharge is required about once a week and takes less than two hours. Not super convenient, but okay. 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. Tony Howls 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 just didn't have anywhere else to go, but Kiki, this is a pretty good advancement in the treatment, just in the size, if nothing else. Yeah, so like you said, the deep brain stimulation 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 pacemaker part in the chest cavity up through the neck into the brain. Yeah, like even if effective, very invasive. 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. So I just putting it right on top of the head, in the skull, it's still invasive, but it's not as invasive. And it works off of a principle called induction. So the battery that is implanted in the skull, basically like your induction cooktop, it's a magnetic induction that's been used over and over again for things like back pain simulators and also for charging pain makers in chest cavities. But that induction works to charge the battery, to keep it going so that the stimulation can continue to work and work. But yeah, so this new device, the PicoStim, the advancement is basically that it's different charging. It's on the head instead of in the head. It's 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 SciTech 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 is a copy of the Code of Science and Technology Dr. Song Hyeong-cheol at the 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 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? But the technique that they're using that is different is that they've taken ultrasound and they've paired it with the triboelectric 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 triboelectric 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 the Pico-STIM, 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, the advantage over the Pico-STIM is that the Pico-STIM 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. That's exactly right. It can't have much in the way. At 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 you just lie down on a pillow or on 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, it's basically static electricity, right? It's the thing that makes packing peanuts stick to us. Yeah, so 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. Yeah, so static electricity is a product of triboelectric. So when the cat runs through the peanuts, that's the triboelectric effect causing the static electricity. Your cat is triboelectric. Yeah, yes. It's triboelectric cats, man. What a nutty cat thing to do. Well, it may not rival triboelectric cats, but 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 right now it's kind of Miso, right? It's kind of Miso, yeah. So the company has added fast food chain jack-in-the-box in one location. And I'll get to that in a second. But it is now on the list of its pilot customers. Pilot customers include White Castle, Panera Bread, Chipotle. 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 raised. Now at a single jack-in-the-box location in San Diego, California, and if you're not familiar with jack-in-the-box, you know, you live elsewhere in the world, it's a burger place, fast food burger place. Exactly, fast food. Yeah. It is 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 going to do their thing. You know, they're going to 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 starts to feel like it's gathering momentum. Panera, Chipotle, White Castle, jack-in-the-box. The next big thing for Miso Robotics would be widespread deployment for a chain, right? Like 300 in-and-outs are going to use them. Exactly. Not that in-and-out would ever use Miso Robotics. Yeah, we're still in test mode here. Yeah. Yeah, 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 full autonomy for particular tests like this, send it to us, feedback at dailytechnews.com. Love to hear about it. Indeed. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Speaking of the mailbag, Tom, aka TracerBullet, had wrote in and said, in most cases, I don't get NFTs. And this is no exception. I received an email from ArdbegWiskey 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 use the NFT to trade, right? Right, yeah. Hypothetically, yeah. Yeah, Glenfittic is doing this with 46-year-old Glenfittic, right? So these are tens of $1,000 per bottle of whiskey. And that way you don't, 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 show the NFT to Glenfittic or Artegg and say, give them a bottle, I'm ready to have a night. I mean, as somebody who just, I just do not collect alcohol, especially alcohol that everybody does, is that right? Yeah. Yeah, of these price points. But like, I love the idea that, okay, this actually works for lots of things, sneakers, makeup. Like he's been doing the same thing, yeah. Exactly. Yeah, it's just, it's a foolproof, I don't know, someone will fool it at some point, but a foolproof contract. There's some sort of a proof joke in there. Yeah, there really is. It's a 100 proof contract in this case. No, nothing is foolproof, obviously. It's a fool's errand to say so, but pretty close, like you said, Kiki, closer than a lot of things, and makes it super easy to trade. So I don't know, I like this one, TracerBullet. Thanks for showing us an NFT that isn't just a picture of an ape. Indeed, and thank you to everybody who emails us. Please do keep those emails coming, questions, comments, feedback at dailytechnewshow.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. Absolutely, and yes, do subscribe to 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 dailytechnewshow.com slash live, and we're back tomorrow with Patrick Norton. Talk to you then.