 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Ken Hayes, Philip Shane and Paul Boyer. Coming up on DTNS, Europe makes USBC the law, Uber Eats takes on Gold Belly for shipping food across the continent, and Dr. Nikki Ackermans tells us about the tech needed to slice up muskox brains for science. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, June 7th, 2022 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Joining us are science correspondent Dr. Nikki Ackermans. Welcome back, Nikki. Hello, thanks for having me back. Thank you for bringing your headbutting knowledge of both technology and literal heads to our show. My pleasure. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Believing computer reports that the city of Palermo, which is in Italy's Sicily, has been shut down for three days due to what may be a ransomware attack. Palermo's counselor for innovation said all systems were shut down and isolated from the network, which is behavior consistent with combating ransomware. In the meantime, all of Palermo's services that includes its police can only be reached by phone or fax. Tourists can't access online bookings for museums or theaters or other public venues, and no one can acquire traffic zone cars for restricted areas like the city center. Kind of a cluster. Yeah. So they all sat down and had an ombre de vino or something. I'm sure it'll be fine. TikTok launched a new avatars feature, letting users create a customized digital representation, including custom voice styles. These can be used as an overlay for a user while recording video or as a miniature avatar that can be added with reactions to a video. German drone taxi company Volocopter announced that its four seat electric VTOL aircraft, the Voloconnect, completed its first flight in May. The initial trip was only two minutes and 14 seconds, but aerodynamics and performance held up in real world conditions, says the company at a 60 mile range and 155 mile per hour flight speed. The Voloconnect serves as a companion to the Volocity, you might remember that is a shorter ranged E VTOL flyer meant for urban areas. The Voloconnect expects to serve customers starting in 2026, two years after the Volocities projected 2024 roll out. eBay launched something called eBay Vault, which is a service that'll store your valuable trading cards to enable faster and secure selling. Cards valued at more than $750 can be stored in eBay's 31,000 square foot Delaware facility. Cards are going to be graded and verified by the PSA service upon arrival. So you get high quality grading, high quality storage and the cards can be left in the vault even after you buy them for safekeeping. eBay plans to add a processing fee for the service, but not until early next year. We covered WWDC with Nika Monford and Terence Gaines of the SnubOS podcast, but here's a roundup of some Apple announcements that didn't make it into the keynote but are notable. Rapid security responses will allow some security patches on iPhone, iPad and Mac to be applied without a reboot. iOS 16 will support Face ID in landscape mode on iPhone at 13s. iOS 16 will also let users view their Wi-Fi passwords and settings and will also support Nintendo Switch Pro and Joy-Con controllers. TVOS will support those controllers as well, so if you're looking for something besides that remote, you got some other options. Mac OS Ventura will also ask for user permission before sending data to connected USB and Thunderbolt accessories. All right. Big waves being made by the EU. What do we got here, Sarah? All right. So EU lawmakers have reached an agreement on an amendment to the Radio Equipment Directive. If you need a little refresher or you haven't heard of it, the directive will apply to 15 categories of electronics, including smartphones, laptops, digital cameras, headphones, handheld video game consoles, e-readers and tablets. Kind of all the hardware. So what are the details, Tom? Yeah. So devices in 14 of those categories, we're going to leave out laptops for the moment, but for the rest of the categories, if they are rechargeable via a wired cable, that's in the law or will be, they will have to have a USB-C charging port if they want to be brought to market in the EU two years after the amendment goes into effect. So the amendment goes into effect two years from that moment, everything has to have a USB-C port in it for charging. That likely would happen sometime in 2024. Laptops get a longer deadline. They have three years and four months before all the laptops marketed in Europe have to have USB-C. The extra time for laptops is there to agree on the definitions for laptop chargers above 100 watts. Between 100 and 240 watts is covered by USB-C 2.1. But cables supporting the higher charging levels are just now hitting the market. So they're giving a little extra time for that. The directive will not apply to products brought to market before the deadline. So you're not going to see them like sweeping the shelves clean of lightning ported iPhones, for example. Device makers also must market their devices both with and without chargers in the box. You can't have just one or the other. You have to give folks the option. And we can already hear your wheels turning on. Ways companies might try to get around these rules, right? Yeah. So it's possible the companies might just do away with a wired charging port altogether saying we don't want to do this. So that's how we get around this. And the directive accounts for that possibility as well. The commission will ask standards bodies to create a standard for wireless charging interoperability that will then become a requirement. One criticism of this directive is that it might deter the development of new and better charging standards. I mean, that's what we're all looking for, right? Commissioner for the EU's internal market, Terry Breton said, quote, we have a dedicated team that will help, that will keep a close eye on all of this and adapt as time goes by, end quote. So one might say, when is this going to become law? Yeah. So as usual with these big announcements in the EU, it's a provisional agreement that they're making a big deal about today. Members of the European Parliament and representatives from the European Council, which has a seat for every country, have gotten together and agreed. I think we can pass this. All of our people are on board. That makes it more than likely it will pass votes in both bodies and then get approved by all the member countries. If all goes to plan, this one should move pretty quickly. It doesn't have a lot of controversy around it. So it's likely to get published later this summer, which then that's why they're saying, okay, two years from later this summer would be 2024. That's why when we'll see the supply to most of the devices. Nikki, do you care if your devices have to have a USB-C port or not? I like the idea from an environmental standpoint, less cables potentially. If everyone can have just one cable for all of your things. I also tend to forget my charger all the time. So if someone had the same cable, it'd be easier. And this comes with the caveat that's like as long as they can keep up with the modernity, say they have something in there that like refreshes the standard every year. Maybe that could keep it on track. I personally like the idea, but I could see how from a tech point of view, you'd be kind of reticent to it. Yeah, I mean, we've talked about this. I don't know if it was Justin Robert Young who was on the show where the idea was brought up of like, yeah, there's nothing wrong with this. But as technology advances and laws sometimes lag behind the technology advancement, does this actually hurt consumers in the long run? And Tom, I know you have some thoughts on that. Yeah, I like this in principle. I like the idea that everybody has a USB-C charging port and we can interoperate. And I think that's a great goal. What I worry about is the unintended consequences down the road. I'm glad the Commissioner Bretton is saying don't worry, we're going to keep an eye on it and we'll adapt the law as it goes. As we all know, laws never have a tough time keeping up with the times. They're always passed quickly and without controversy every time they're needed. Of course, I'm being sarcastic. That's my concern is that it's great that they're saying the right thing. It would have been nicer to put a mechanism in the law that maybe tied it to the standards organization. USB-IF is a standards organization. If you said whatever USB-IF determines, then that becomes the new thing, would have made it a little more seamless. But even then, I have a little bit of a concern that this is going to dissuade companies from exploring new technologies that aren't part of the USB Implementers Forum that they would have otherwise because why bother? You can't even sell it in Europe. I think it provides a small break on innovation because of that. It is a small disincentivization of innovation. All right, let's talk food. Uber Eats has given Gold Belly some competition. Gold Belly, if you haven't heard of it, ships food from top restaurants in hundreds of locations in the United States. That includes the Pipeline Bake Shop in Honolulu. That's right, you can get it from Hawaii. You can get barnacle foods from Alaska. It ships to those states too. It doesn't just pull the food off of Alaska and Hawaii. It brings it to the mainland as well. Pretty much anywhere in the domestic U.S., sorry, Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands, but shipping is almost always free. So Uber said, that's a great business. We'd like a piece of that too, please. Starting June 7th, Uber Eats customers in the U.S. are doing what, Sarah? Well, yeah, so they are going after Gold Belly in a more limited scale. So Uber Eats customers starting June 7th can find options for things like bagels from the other side of the country that you might just really have a hankering for Cuban dishes or macaroons, chimichurri sauces from popular merchants in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Miami. So it is limited. Like, well, what about that wonderful barbecue place in St. Louis that I would like to order from? Not happening yet on Uber Eats, but again, small rollout. It also won't ship outside the mainland U.S. It only has 15 restaurants where the food is coming from in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles. Average delivery time according to Uber Eats' shipping program on the app is five to seven days. So you might say, is it even going to be fresh? Spokesperson for the company says, oh, that number is closer to four to five days. But still, you know, you got to put it on ice, probably. It's also partnering with FedEx for delivery. Uber's delivery spinout, Uber Freight, which we've talked about on the show, is not part of this. That connects shippers with carriers, separate service. Shipment tracking, again, handled by FedEx. Packing and shipping is done by the restaurants themselves. Uber Eats just provides the shipping label and a postcard with instructions. And Uber Eats not the only one that wants a piece of gold bellies pie. DoorDash also started this business model in November last year when it launched nationwide shipping for merchants, including Carlos Bakery and Katz's Deli, which I'll be honest, the Uber Eats launch partners don't have me incredibly impressed. I know it's early and they'll get more, but their one bagel shop is in Los Angeles and the barbecue place is in Los Angeles as well. Whereas like, I've done gold belly. I've got Nessa bagels from New York. I've gotten Kansas City barbecue sent to me. So I hope Uber Eats expands and does better. It's good to have competition for gold belly, but right now I don't know if this is competition for gold belly. I know we were talking before the show and Nikki, you and I were both like, had not heard of gold belly before. It's funny, a friend of mine was like, yes, you have, Sarah. How great it was. Like a couple of weeks ago, like this is a very, very common thing that people order for gifts, not just for themselves, but you know, you want to send somebody that you love their favorite item from a restaurant that they're not going to be near anytime soon. Love the idea of this kind of a novelty thing, right? But love the idea of it. And yeah, I just, I've never used gold belly before. When I look at their website, I'm like, well, we have quite a few options. So Uber Eats is sure creeping into the market as a competitor, but on a smaller scale. Yeah, I like the idea. I just don't know how I feel about like having food. That's four days old. But again, maybe they're really good at it. Also environmentally, this seems not sustainable, but that's just the biologist in me who's like, do we have to do it though? Yeah, the way gold belly does it, I'm sure Uber Eats is going to do something similar, but I don't know the details. You're using dry ice. You're packing stuff frozen. It's got dry ice in the package, you know, enough that if it went a week getting there, it'd still be good. Everything I've ever gotten from gold belly was hard frozen. It was not even partially melted by the time I get it. So that part is doable. And we have to wait and see if Uber Eats does it as well as gold belly does, but it's certainly doable. The environmental impact of it, as far as like, you know, the transportation cost and the packaging materials, most of everything was recyclable, but even recyclable is still a loss. So I don't know that that's any worse than shipping anything else to be honest, except maybe because you have to do a little dry ice, but it's certainly a consideration, you're right. I haven't used it a lot because even though the shipping is free, the price of the food is still kind of expensive. Yeah. So it's not something I'm doing every day. You've got to cover your transportation costs. But we did it for Thanksgiving. We got Joe's barbecue from Kansas City sent to us for Thanksgiving. We did the ESSA bagel during the lockdown. And back then a lot of companies, a lot of restaurants were able to survive because of gold belly because they were able to ship, you know, around to people who needed it. A little bit of a different situation we're in now. And I think that, you know, sometimes freezing food gets a bad rap because you go, oh no, freezer burn. It's going to be, you know, stale and gross by the time you reheat it. Not always the case. I mean, it has to be, it has to be prepared the right way. But, but freezing food can actually be the best thing for it. Yeah. Certain food depends on the food, right? Yeah. Levains. I don't know if you know, Levain's cookies. Yeah. I can tell Nikki knows. Yeah. Not through gold belly, just direct from Levain's. You can have them mail you frozen cookies and then you heat those up and then it's indistinguishable. Yeah. I eat at least one a day. I don't know if I can eat one a day. I've heard of it. Definitely heard of it. Yeah. Well, folks, if you've used the DoorDash or the gold belly system or you're going to try the super eats one, let us know feedback at Daily Tech News Show.com. If you're thinking about solar panels these days, because you're like, you know what, I don't want to be adding to the problem. I want to be helping the problem. We have a listen for you, a solar panel round table. Myself, Sarah, and three guests explain the process, the things to consider what you can expect to spend and save coming to this feed this Saturday. So look for it. Share with your friends. And if you want it sooner, you can listen to it right now. Just become a patron, patreon.com, slash DTNS. Recently, Dr. Nikki published a paper in the journal Acta Neuropathologica called Evidence of Traumatic Brain Injury in Headbutting Bovids. It turns out that headbutting muscoxon and big horn sheep aren't as resistant to trauma maybe as you thought. But to get the data she needed for the research, Nikki relied on two bits of technology, MRI and fluorescence microscopy. But let's start with why you wanted to research this, Nikki. And what did you find? Sure. And I'm so excited to talk about it. The reason we wanted to research it is because traumatic brain injury and CTE are huge issues for humans. And we don't really have a good way of addressing them. We know the person gets injury, then it's a black box and then they pass away and we can look at their brains. And sort of the middle part is really blurry. So we need models to try and understand how this develops. So the idea was to go to animals who did the most extreme form of headbutting in the world. So big horn sheep and muscoxon and try and figure out if they're protecting their brains, if they're not, how are they not dead? So that's what we did. So the idea being like we can learn a lot by looking at animals. These are some animals that seem to be okay. You know, they're walking around after doing this. Yeah. Maybe it'll teach us something. And what you found was like, well, they're not as okay as we thought, huh? Yeah, the opposite actually. And I'll go into how the tech worked out with that. So as you would do in a human, if you suspect someone has some brain injury, you send them through an MRI machine. MRI is basically magnetic resonance imaging. So it looks at the soft tissue in your body and in the case of a brain and the image that we have up there is a muscox brain, not a human brain. Probably the only muscox MRI you're going to see for a while. Basically you can see if you have trauma. And the way that this works is that this machine has giant magnets in the tube that you're laying in. And it creates a really strong magnetic field. And this forces the protons in your cells to align. And then it sends a radio frequency current through your body. And it causes these protons to misalign and spin around. And they release energy. So basically the sensors in the machine pick this up and then can make an image out of this because different organs in your body have different densities. They have different sort of proton energy emissions. And then you get this image on there. And to link this to our muscox and when we sent the brain through, we didn't see anything. And that's actually what we would expect because in a human, if you send them through an MRI, if you see something, so you would see like brain bleeding, tissue tearing, or brain shrinkage, they're already really far advanced in TBI, CTE, or Alzheimer's. So it showed at least that these guys didn't have super advanced disease. Go ahead. So you send them through the MRI. These are skulls, I assume, right? Just the brains. We took the brains out because the skulls are massive. So we thought the bone might interfere with the MRI. All right. So you pop a brain out of a muscox. You send it through the MRI. It looks normal. So then what do you move on to then? So because of that, we wanted to move on to the cellular level. So in humans, you'll usually see a sort of pattern of some dying neurons in specific patterns. It's different for Alzheimer's than it is for CTE. CTE is basically chronic traumatic brain injury. So sort of small, milder concussions over time leads to this disease that can later lead to Alzheimer's. And so to look at them on the cellular scale, we basically slice them up in a mini deli slicer. That's not so technology. It's just vibrating and it's a deli slicer. So it's an actual deli slicer? I mean, some people use a real deli slicer. It's called a vibratone, but it's just a razor blade that vibrates. So it's no different then. Okay. But I have seen people use a real deli slicer. Nice. Interesting. For whale brains. Anyway, when we get them really thin like this on the slicer, we can start to see through them on the microscope, but to stain the specific cells and proteins and things that we want to look at that can indicate that there might be trauma. We have to sort of stain them. And one of the ways to look at them is by staining them with fluorescent molecules and fluorescent. Yeah, there you go. That's one of the pictures. So, oh yeah, that's not very descriptive for audio listeners, but basically you can stain different cells, different colors using these fluorescent molecules. So what happens is you have a fluorescence microscope and these days you can buy specific lasers that are very expensive and you attach them to your microscope and they'll emit specific wavelengths and they'll excite these molecules at different wavelengths. And the way that you, when you sort of incubate them and you're doing your experiment, you can choose the wavelength. So let's say we want something to fluoresce in red and we choose the wavelength 495. And then when you shine the laser on it, that specific thing that you say will come out in red. And the cool thing about being able to do multiple wavelengths is that you can add different colors. So you can do red, green and blue. If I wanted to look at how a certain protein is interacting with a certain cell type, you can look at them both at the same time with two different colors. And you can't do this with traditional microscopy. And this is really cool for something like TBI because actually when there's a brain trauma, you'll have neurons start to die off and show certain types of protein that you could stain that. And you have other cells called glial cells. They kind of clean up and they'll start to activate and clump around these neurons. And so if you can see them both together, this is like a really good sign for us and a bad sign for the person or the muskox that there's been sort of a chronic brain trauma. I mean, for the, what comes to mind, Niki, to me is, I mean, certainly in professional football, certainly professional boxing, even if you're a professional, you're playing a lot of these combat sports and you're getting repeated trauma to the head, are any of these organizations interested in this kind of research? Is that something that they're gonna get something out of? So of course they're interested in the prevention research. Like when this big news came out around 2015, the NFL dumped a ton of money into concussion research because they kind of got caught red-handed. So right now we don't know very well how to look at it while the people are still alive. So I'm sort of trying to establish a model of animals who develop naturally. That's basically what we found, is that they do give themselves brain trauma, just enough that they don't die. And so if we can try and study animals like domestic sheep, so like smaller headbutting animals, not only muskox, and try to learn how these diseases develop in their brains, we can hopefully try and understand better how it works in human brains. There's a lot of steps in between, but that's the idea. Yeah, yeah. This is fascinating technology. Hopefully on the expanded show, we can talk about the pendulum that you were telling me about when we met in Las Vegas, which is not related to this particular study, right? It's for a different... It's a cousin. Yeah, yeah. It's a related thing. But thanks for sharing this with us and we'll have links to the article itself as well as some other write-ups on it in the show notes at dailytechnewshow.com. Indeed, we will. And keep it on the science train. This is a cool one. A patient born with Microsia in the right ear has been surgically fitted with a 3D-printed implant made of the patient's own cells. The company behind the technique, 3D Bio, which is in an ongoing clinical trial, says of the procedure, quote, we believe this is the first time that a company has printed a whole living engineered construct and implanted it into a patient to replace a body part that the patient was either born without or lost due to trauma or disease. End quote. This new method of ear reconstruction could help Microsia treatment. That's quite a bit easier than what are current procedures which include surgery, invasive techniques like harvesting rib cartilage to build back that organ. So pretty cool. Yeah. It's printing cartilage, which is a living material. A little bit of a sheet, I guess, because cartilage is less living than like a liver. But it's still technically living material that can divide and everything. And the pictures on the CNET article are impressive where you see the person missing the cartilage and their ear isn't formed properly. And then once the implant is in there, it looks like the kind of ear you would expect to see in a good working order. Yeah, drastically different. I would say improved because it depends on what kind of ear you want. But yeah, it's probably improved the hearing, right? Yeah. Which is usually the number one thing that you care about. I wonder about things like blood vessels and the different hearing tubes and how that all connects up. Of course, this is already a pretty big innovation, but cool. Yeah. But also, how can we go further? Right. It's one of those where I know a lot of outlets that published this overstated it, like first living material printed. And people are like, wait, I thought they printed livers. Like, why don't they print part of livers? This is like, you know, full on condor sites doing cartilage. It's good for aesthetics too. And the organ. Like to be able to have an ear. And then we're like, how come we're not good at 3D printing meat because like we can make an ear? So. Well, and one of the things with meat is having the scaffolding properly to get the texture. And if you can print some cartilage for it to grow around, then yeah, maybe there's a combination to be had here. That's good stuff. All right, let's check out the mail bag. We got a real nice email from Jeremy who wrote in saying, I've debated on buying some of Lynn's art. He's talking about Lynn Peralta from the show before. Never pulled the trigger. But on Friday, that was June 3rd, DTNS Jeremy says, I had to both digital and physical. My grandma was a Rosie. Now, if you're like, what, what is this? Lynn, you got to, you got to see what he drew on Friday. It was at Rosie the Riveter kind of derivative. Jeremy says, my grandmother worked in a GM body plant after leaving there. She became a teaching assistant where her students named her Ms. Rosie after the character on the posters. Thank you for bringing back some great memories. Oh, thank you, Jeremy. That's great. Yeah. Go check out Lynn Peralta store.com. You can, you can find the, the art there. I'm sure you'll notice the, the Rosie, the Riveter looking one with the red bandana on. Can't miss it. Yeah. I mean, Lynn always does good stuff, but I feel like Friday resonated with some folks. So thank you for letting us know. Yeah. We did get a little bit more positivity around it than, than normal. There's always some, like you said. And then Scott was listening to our conversation yesterday about the sleep tracking announcements related to iOS 16 and watch OS nine and said, I just wanted to mention that the URA ring and app do exactly what you were talking about. When you were talking about nap tracking, Terrence and I were joking about we, we need something that just tracks you while you're taking a nap because we want to take off our watch while we sleep. And not only Scott, but Josh also wrote in and said that the URA ring do that. Scott said, it identifies when you appear to be resting or napping. You can then confirm the activity if accurate and it updates your daily stats appropriately. So thank you both, Josh and Scott for pointing that out. Maybe another reason to maybe get an URA ring now, huh? Yeah. I know some URA ring faithful out there who say this is just the best way. It's better than, you know, if you don't like something on your wrist, you know, wear a, wear a ring on your finger, but you know, that's a whole other thing. Thank you to Dr. Nikki Ackerman's for being with us today. Nikki, I don't know if you do any sleep tracking, but I know you're busy. So let folks know where they can keep up with what you do. Yeah. I'm pretty active on Twitter. So people can follow my science there at Ackerman's Nicole, if not my website is that Nicole Ackerman's.com. So knock yourself out. Well, thank you so much for being on the show. But don't literally knock yourself out, or then you'll have to use the results of Nikki's research to Nikki will slice your brain up with the meat. I will slice her. Just know that ahead of time. Also, we have a brand new boss to thank that new boss's name, Steven. Steven just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Steven. Thank you, Steven. You are our, there it is. You know, you won Eurovision, the bar show. Really? Really, you did. And who will it be tomorrow? Yeah, you did. Yeah. There's also a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet where we expand lots of topics we talk about on DTNS and veer into others available at patreon.com slash DTNS. We roll into it right after we wrap up here. Just a reminder, we are live on the show Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 2100 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live and we're back doing it again tomorrow with Scott Johnson joining us. Talk to you that. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.