 Coming up on DTNS, hope for 3D printing OLED panels, Apple's maybe saying no to the metaverse, and Blair Bazderich is here to tell us how your dog might be just as critical of video game physics as you are. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, January 10th, 2022 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us co-host of TWIS this week in Science, Blair Baz, Blair Bazderich, welcome back to the show. Thanks so much, happy to be here. Good to have you. Thank you for bringing a dog story, Sarah and I very much appreciate that. We do, always a pleasure. We were just talking reminiscing a little about the past couple of years on Good Day Internet, the longer version of the show that's available at Patreon.com slash DTNS. Speaking of which, big thanks to our top patrons. Today they include Michael Bolick, Tony Glass, and Phillip Lass. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. PayPal confirmed it is developing a stable coin. This comes after the developer Steve Moser found reference to a PayPal coin in PayPal's app code, indicating that it would be backed by the US dollar. The company said it will, quote, work closely with relevant regulators if it decides to move forward with the coin. Indian government officials say Foxconn's plant in southern India near the Tamil Nadu State Capitol of Chennai will open on January 12th. The plant closed on December 18th, following employee protests over living conditions. Apple said the plant will remain on probation as far as it's concerned and that it will continue to work with independent auditors to monitor workers' conditions. Reuters sources say the plant will reopen gradually and not resume full production for up to two months. The game publisher Take Two Interactive intends to acquire Zynga in a deal worth $12.7 billion. The deal is expected to close by the end of Q2 of this year. Post-acquisition Take Two plans to leverage Zynga's mobile game expertise with its AAA game IP. The never-ending saga of the FAA and 5G operators continues. The Federal Aviation Administration in the United States has designated 50 airports that will have 5G buffer zones around them to help prevent interference during flights. Airports were chosen based on location, traffic volume, and the likelihood of low visibility, which low visibility rate alt is one of the things that is of concern. AT&T and Verizon agreed to turn off 5G transmitters within these zones for six months. The two carriers agreed last week to delay switching on 5G expansions using the C-band spectrum over flight instrument interference concerns until January 19th. Founder of Secure Messaging Company, Signal, Moxie Merlin-Spike announced that he's stepping down as CEO. In a blog post, Merlin-Spike wrote, every day I'm struck by how boundless signals potential looks and I wanna bring in somebody with fresh energy and commitment to make the most of that. He's also said, I now feel very comfortable replacing myself as CEO based on the team that we have. Merlin-Spike has interviewed a few candidates but made his intentions public in order to encourage more people to express interest. Merlin-Spike will remain a member of Signal's board going forward. It seems healthy and it seems like he just wants to get the right person in the job. Merlin-It doesn't seem very dramatic, yeah. That's good. All right, let's talk a little more about 3D printing. One of the promises of it would be to make manufacturing easier in more places. If you can just 3D print stuff, that's easier to set up than an entire factory, like four OLEDs for instance. Right now you need a specialized micro fabrication facility, maybe somewhere like in China and then you make the panels and you have to ship them around the world. What if you could just print them where they're needed in this day of logistics nightmares? That probably sounds too good to be true to a lot of folks. We're not quite there entirely yet, but scientists at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities have developed the first fully 3D printed flexible OLED display. It's tiny, it's 1.5 inches by 1.5 inches and eight by eight pixels. So 64 pixels big, but it's a start and it works and it's fully, fully printed. The OLED panels have been partially printed in the past. This time they're able to do the whole thing from a printer and it had stable emission over 2000 bending cycles too. So it's flexible. An OLED display needs six different layers. So the team combined two different kinds of 3D printing methods, extrusion, that's the one where you're kind of used to seeing like a Play-Doh come out, was used to make the inactive parts, electrodes, the encapsulation of the modules, insulation, interconnects, that kind of stuff. And then the active part, the emitters and everything, used a spray paint method. The custom printer cost the price of a Tesla Model S according to the scientists. So well above $100,000, probably not a thing you can do at home quite yet, but that would be affordable for a manufacturing facility. And obviously they need the size and resolution to improve as well. You're not gonna replace your iPhone display with a 64 pixel display, but the scientists plan to go right for that next. They're gonna make brighter versions of this. They want higher resolutions. If you wanna read the current state of the research, it was published in Science Advances on Friday. Who doesn't wanna print an OLED panel at home, right? I very much want to do this. When I looked at the specs, I was like, okay, I'm not replacing my television right now, but this is the first step of something where it could be in the hands of consumers to not consume something that maybe isn't even the perfect situation for them, but to make the OLED screen that they're actually after. Yeah, I love stories about the developing of new 3D printing models because as somebody focused very much on the biotic side of 3D printing, all the research gone into 3D printing for tech often gets turned into new research on 3D printing organs and things like that. And that's often what I'm super focused on for 3D printing. And this could definitely help with that, kind of finding ways to combine different methodologies to make something really complex that functions would be great. Yeah, I hadn't even thought about that aspect of it. It's just the principle of being able to print a more complex thing means that other more complex things would be able to draft off that, right? Like if you have a different thing besides OLEDs, you might say, oh, I could take and adapt their model. And man, talk about complex biology. That's some complex stuff there. I mean, I'm not saying you could print an eyeball, but this gets to thinking about more complex things like that, right? Totally, absolutely, yeah. Yeah, I will hopefully they get this already so that by the time I'm 90, I can print myself a new liver and a new television all in the same machine. One stop shop? One day, yeah, it's good stuff for you, Tom. The UK-based food delivery company Deliveroo plans to open its first restaurant, a pizza place in London called Pizza Paradiso. The company says that staff will learn how to manage a restaurant that offers dine-in and also delivery service and how to manage providing both services at peak times. Deliveroo hopes the restaurant will help it understand restaurants' pain points and get a sense of restaurant owners' mindsets. Deliveroo says it has no plans to build a restaurant business beyond one site. That's what it says now. We'll see how it goes. Deliveroo isn't a total stranger to operating food service, though. It opened its first Deliveroo additions, Ghost Kitchen. Ghost Kitchen basically a place you never actually go and dine in, but provides food that is then delivered to folks. That was back in 2016. And it now operates almost 300 global locations. Yeah, it was a little like you, Sarah, when I first read this, I'm like, well, but if it goes really well, then they could start opening up their own restaurants. But that's not what they did with the Ghost Kitchens. With the Ghost Kitchens, they really are providing a facility for people to operate their own restaurants within. Deliveroo doesn't operate the restaurants in the Ghost Kitchens. So if we take them at their word, and they're like, we just wanna try this out, our producer Rich pointed out that they might want to figure out, like, oh, this is the best way to lay out your restaurant in order to be able to do dine-in and delivery properly. And then like Amazon did with AWS, now you have a platform that you can license out to people or advise restaurants. And with restaurants complaining about delivery fees so much, any ability to provide them an extra benefit for participating in your ecosystem is probably a good idea. I mean, it's also Deliveroo saying, we're gonna compete with restaurants. I mean, that's for sure what's going on. The pizza paradiso may be a success, maybe it won't be. I don't know, in the age of, well, I mean, COVID is part of it, but in the age of going to a restaurant to pick up, like, I don't know, a pizza, for example, there are many times where, depending on the place I go in, they're either really used to delivery people, kind of being off to the side, kind of waiting for the deliveries and doing their own thing. And oftentimes it's just sort of a mess. You know where you're like, I'm in line, but I think I have a pizza, but I'm not a delivery person. I do think that Deliveroo has a really good point in saying, we don't really understand what is the best way to set up a restaurant so that we all, you know, come out happy in the end. Yeah. Yeah, and that's why- And the question is if they're being sincere. Is this really a test of a model or is this them trying to cut out the middleman? And honestly, in today's climate, the common reaction, the gut reaction is going to be like, here we go again, but I don't think it makes sense for Deliveroo to get into creating restaurants. That is a low margin, filled with possibility of failure in business, providing the platform way safer way to make money. So I tend to believe that they're like, yeah, we don't wanna make more of these. We just want to see the concept in action ourselves and learn from it because it's the one aspect of the business we haven't done. And I think they are sincere. Now, that doesn't mean they won't change their mind down the road, but I really don't believe they would just because of how difficult it is. Mark Gurman's power-on newsletter at Bloomberg often contains some Apple morsels. Gurman's sources say Apple's gonna hold its first event of 2022, as usual in the spring, probably March or April. And as you might expect, focused on a new iPhone SE, for sure, among other things, that will be virtual, I think you probably could have guessed that too. And Gurman's sources say that the WWDC set to follow in June will likely also be virtual, which would be the third in a row that Apple has made virtual. Now comes the maybe more surprising part. Gurman and others have found out a lot of details recently about Apple's unannounced mixed reality headset, providing an adorable render drawing, a supposed processing power, and even the types of displays and lenses. Interestingly though, above and beyond all that, Gurman's sources now say that Apple has made the idea of the metaverse in development of their mixed reality headset, quote unquote, off limits internally. In other words, don't think about the metaverse when you're designing this, design it for bursts of gaming, communication, and content consumption, and not for all day use. Not surprisingly, Apple's headset is also reportedly going to be pretty pricey, but the information reports that last year, Apple discussed a $3,000 price point internally. That is so insane. I mean, so, okay, I'm really excited for this, and I'm excited for anytime Apple brings a product to market in a category that it hasn't brought to market yet, because Apple does a lot of things well, and I'm an Apple person in general, $3,000 for a mixed reality headset, that is great, like you can get a Quest 2 for $300, and I know that it might be Apples and Oranges that we're talking about here, but that is just, that is crazy. I don't know anybody who would- Apples and Oculus's, but yeah, yeah. Yes, Apples and Oculus's, they're very different, but especially because the VR, AR market is pretty new, a lot of us are into it, but it has so much room to grow, and so many use cases that just haven't been discovered yet, to have something at that price point is like, I don't know who would pay for that, besides a company where possibly the company could work better, Deliveroo perhaps, I don't know, but yeah, I just, I'm just balking at that number. This is an information source telling us last year, Apple thought the price point might be $3,000, so keep that in mind. It's not like this is for sure gonna be the price, but it does indicate that this price is gonna be above a thousand bucks for sure, and honestly, think about it though, the first gen iPhone cost $750 in 2007. I was gonna say, I feel like as consumers, it sounds really cheap. We have basically told Apple time and time again, yeah, we'll pay five times what the competitor charges for a similar product, yeah, we're okay with that, and so I can see them kind of doing something similar here, and just kind of continuing with, well, they let us last time, we're going for it. I can see them doing a multiple thousand dollar price point, maybe $1,995 to start, and the higher storage fund is above 2,000, and be able to convince a lot of people to jump on board because it's the first gen. They know they're not gonna sell a ton of them, but they know that there are enough people in the Apple ecosystem that will snap it up almost no matter what they charge, to be honest. This is MacBook Pro pricing, so if they can position it that way, again, what we're hearing is that this would be an all-encompassing thing, this wouldn't be connect, need your phone, it would be able to stand on its own, which means it's probably worth having a little higher price than say something like a Google Glass or a Facebook Wayfarer that needs your phone in order to be functional. I don't know, aside from the price point, which we, who knows, we might end up this being totally off base and it's not even close to that price, I think it is fascinating that Apple is saying, we're not making a metaverse, we are going to make a device that allows you to access things and we think the things people are gonna access aren't the metaverse yet, because there is no metaverse. Let's focus on the things you can do and allow the metaverse to be the web. They didn't make the web to launch the Mac, they made the Mac be able to access the web when the web came along. So I feel like that's their attitude here is we're gonna make a device that can access a metaverse or any number of metaverses when they come along, but that's a thing that needs to be decentralized and will we have an Apple store in the metaverse? Sure, absolutely. But they don't want to be the operator of one. All right, if anybody listened to our prediction show for 2022 during our holiday week, I had predicted that this would be tied, the Apple mixed reality headset would be tied in closely to Fitness Plus, which is currently something you need Apple Watch for and I don't have an Apple Watch, so I haven't really played around with it too much, but I'm like, oh, it's perfect because that's what I love VR for. And I still believe that that will happen, but I mean, boy, it better be great for anything above $1,000 when you can do lots of great things on competitors' models for less than half of that. We think that you're gonna love it, is probably what they'll say. Yeah. Hey, folks, what do you like to hear us talk about on the show? Is it these kind of sourced things from reputable places like Mark Gurman? Is it the OLED stuff? One way to let us know is our subreddit, submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Well, science has demonstrated many things, not least of which is that human babies and also adult chimpanzees can notice when something that they're looking at seems to violate the rules of physics. Like, hold on, I was like, and a person can't jump up a building, that sort of thing. Like a video of something falling up instead of down. All that stuff. They kind of go, that doesn't seem right. Well, dogs, our friends, are joining these critics of bad video game physics. And Blair, we would love for you to tell us more about how this came to be. How do we know this? Yeah, so this was some research from Medical University of Vienna and University of Vienna. And a couple of researchers there found that dogs notice when objects do not conform to the laws of physics in a computer simulation. They taught 14 adult dogs to watch a video while resting their chins on a cushioned fixture, which I just love picturing. And they tracked their eye movements and pupil dilation as they showed them a video. The first time the video showed a ball rolling towards another one, the ball collided with a second, and that forced that one to stop moving and the other one to move in reaction. And then they watched a similar video, but this time the moving ball stopped just short of hitting the second ball. And then the second ball moved like it got hit. And they saw that the dogs stared much longer in the second video and that their pupils became dilated. This is typical for the reactions that you'd see in a dog when they alert, they're alert to something unexpected and dilated pupils in people and other animals happen when they encounter something that requires visual attention. It's maybe unusual or needs extra time to look at. And so the suggestion here is that the dogs did become more alert and watched for longer because they were waiting for something to happen to explain why that second ball started rolling. So this is definitely very preliminary, just looking at eye movements and stuff like that. I think the next step would definitely be to stick a dog in a cat scan, as we often do in science, dog in a cat scan. The joke writes itself, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think this is interesting for a few reasons for me personally. One is that there's a lot of kind of conflicting science about how dogs see. There's this whole theory that dogs see in black and white, but we actually have no scientific proof to that. There's theories that dogs can't understand what's happening on a screen. We know that's not true. If you have a dog at home that likes to watch TV, you definitely know that's not the case. Yeah, I've got one of those. Yeah, but so this is definitely, I think it's an interesting look at how good dogs are at seeing what's happening on a screen and relating it to real life when it doesn't look exactly like real life, but also at how their brain works. I think there's a lot of future science there. But one of the things that actually I thought about with this story was, I absolutely love watching this show that's on YouTube called Monster Factory, which is where a couple of comedians play with character generation and video games and make the characters look insane. And it is really funny, but my dog freaks out every time I put it on. And I wonder if it's because what the faces are doing violates what is expected. Oh, yeah. The dog's like, this shouldn't happen. Why is this? Yeah, that is not allowed by physics. Well, and it's hard to explain like fantasy show to a dog. Things might happen that don't work out naturally. Y'all are very literal, yeah. I mean, my dog Otis is very ball oriented, very ball focused. In fact, ball is life for Otis. That's, he kind of doesn't care about anything else except having a ball. And what you just described Blair, it would freak him out. Cause he'd be like, well, I think that it looks fun. But the, and the balls didn't touch, but something weird happened. I could see him kind of running in circles being like, I'm confused. Yeah. Cause the, cause the, the second ball did what you would expect, but it didn't do it the way you expect. I think that's what's so clever about this test is like, they're like, oh yeah, one ball goes this way. And then the other ball bounces off of it, except when they don't touch, that takes a little more attention to be able to tell like, okay, the beginning and end were the right, but somewhere in the middle, something was, was not okay there. And obviously, you know, different dogs will react differently. My border collie Sawyer loves to play fetch does not have any sense of where drop near me is. Like, you know, run halfway back and drop it. And I'll be like, no, closer. You got to bring it all the way here. I don't know. I'd be curious to test him on this and see it. Like, you know, would do all dogs do this? Or is it like vary by personality? But yeah, I wonder if you could create video games, combine this with the other stories we've heard of, like teaching the dogs to interact and so quote unquote talk, teaching them which buttons to push. Could you teach a dog to play a video game? Oh, for sure. I think so. And I think that's really what this, the crux of the story is that dogs understand that the laws of physics translate to a virtual space. Yeah. Right. Cause that's a flat thing up there. Yeah. Yeah, but they understand that it's supposed to follow the same rules as real life. And my old dog, Jango used to love watching equestrian. Didn't matter if the sound was off. So it wasn't the, it wasn't the sound. She'd see a horse on TV and she'd just like stop and watch the main. Oh, any, anytime a show has like a wolf or howling, you know, Otis is just like, what's happening? I need to get in there and help everyone. Yeah. Yeah. My dog last night barked at Star-Lord while I was watching Guardians of the Galaxy. I do not know why. Yeah. Star-Lord. You know, he didn't like the physics. The laws of physics. Yeah. Speaking of things that aren't as expected, we don't have enough chips. They had that ongoing semiconductor shortage has had a lot of unforeseen side effects, most of them negative. You can't get a new car as easily, tough to buy next-gen consoles, ship times for a lot of consumer electronics are sort of an open question. The one silver lining though is this at least temporarily seems to be killing off printer ink and toner DRM, digital rights management. The thing that prevents you from buying third-party ink and toner sometimes. HP Canon and Lexmark as well as other printer makers have required chip-enabled cartridges, which they say can, quote, enhance the quality and performance for the best customer experience and also coincidentally maintain a recurring revenue stream for their first-party provisions. However, because of the chip shortage, Canon's German support site now says the company will supply toner cartridges without chips. That means they won't be able to report when the toner level is low, but they also won't be able to verify whether that toner is official or not. To get around error messages when inserting the chipless toner, users can just click through the message and print normally with, according to Canon, no negative impact on print quality. It seems limited for now to the image-runner large office printers, but the longer the chip shortage gets, the more chance maybe they'll just give up on this. I don't know. I mean, it would be hard to come back from it, right? For a company like, what do I even have? I have an Epson printer. The last time I bought printer cartridges, it was like over $100, it was crazy. I was like, okay, what choice do I have? And I had to have a certain model. And for the companies to say, listen, we still want you to enjoy our products. That's why you bought them. And here's what we're gonna do, to then go back to a DRM world, seems pretty far-fetched to me. Yeah, because the business model, if people don't realize, is sell the printer for super cheap and then make the money selling you ink for it. I think this accelerates the switch to laser printers. That's what I have now. I have a brother laser printer and I don't even think about ink anymore. So I feel like maybe this just pushes us. Laser printers have been around for a while, but ink serves a purpose, particularly if you're printing out photos or anything that's a little bit more complicated. I mean, ink is great. Well, it has its disadvantages too. Price is only one of those. But yeah, I'd be interested to see if we ever get back to the old days of hell, ink works with the big manufacturers. Yeah, maybe it's over. Well, two space-hardened Raspberry Pi four units called AstroPi, launched back in September and are now being put into action aboard the International Space Station. These are part of the Earth-focused Mission Zero and Mission Space Lab project run by the European Space Agency, which gives young Python programmers the ability to run scientific experiments using the onboard sensors. The units can be powered with a Griffin power adapter connected to an ISS AC power inverter or through USB port on an ISS crew laptop. So you have some options there. They're also connected to the Joint Station Land Network with an Ethernet cable. These replaced the outgoing Ed and Izzy AstroPi units that were sent to the ISS back in 2015. It was time. Students participating in the program will vote on which European scientists the new AstroPis will be named after. So we haven't named him yet. That'll be fun. Yeah. I think there's an AstroPi for now. The thing that fascinated me the most just about this was the mundanity of the connectors. USB port on the laptop on the International Space Station. Oh, just plug the Griffin power adapter into the International Space Station. It's like, oh man, my laptop's out of battery. Sorry. Okay, what else we got? This Griffin power adapter that I'll plug in. Yeah, that's great. It's good stuff. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one came from Douglas. Douglas says, just listen to your segment on Tesla and Mobile Eye and the autonomy levels. This was a conversation we had last week with Shannon Morris on the show. Douglas says, I've bought you a few times in the past on getting the SAE levels correct, even sending you the link to the SAE formal definitions. Last week, you were one of the few media hosts I've ever heard get the idea of L2+, L3, and L4 correct, as well as avoiding the marketing trap of pretending these systems are L5. As somebody in the field, I really appreciate it because there's so much misinformation and confusion around this topic, often driven by marketing teams that wanna give an impression of capability that the engineering teams know isn't ready yet. Great job, makes me happy to be a supporter. Douglas also pointed out that driver engagement in an L4 vehicle, because I needed some advice on this as well. L4 vehicle is misunderstood. Douglas says, we always have a path projected to complete the mission, getting you somewhere, and a path computed to do a minimum safety maneuver, stopping up the side of the road, for example. For that reason, there is no driver takeover required in L4. Yeah, and I think that causes the confusion with level five because level five is you don't need a human in it, it can just drive. Level four is you won't need a human while we do our thing, but you might need a human to do another thing, so we're not gonna take out the driver quite yet. Well, we would like to thank a few new bosses that we got over the weekend, and this is my favorite part of the show. Thank you to our brand new bosses, Dan Sweehart, Verstraut François Valhoye, Gerald Mabrito, and Robert Kitchen. All just started backing us on Patreon, so thank you, Dan. Thank you, Verstraut. Thank you, Gerald, and thank you, Robert. Hey, good crew, good to have you. Yeah, yeah, it's always a Monday fuzzy. Also a Monday fuzzy, having Blair Bazrich with us, Blair, so good to have you on the show, bringing the dog physics knowledge, as well as all sorts of other things. Let folks know where they can keep up with the rest of your work. Sure, so every Wednesday at 8 p.m. Pacific Time, this week in Science goes live on YouTube. You can find out more about us at twist.org. You can also support our Patreon at patreon.com slash this week in Science, and I am on Twitter at Blair's Menagerie, because I post pretty much exclusively pictures of animals. And then also, I will mention, since it's January 10th, you still have time to get your this week in Science Blair's Animal Corner calendar. Yay. Yay. You're right, there's some oil paintings with one line drawings on top of them, and they have Science and Animal Holidays all throughout the calendar, also just some stuff that I think is funny. And those are also available at twist.org. I was so embarrassed that I didn't get to my post office box before Blair got on the show, because I have a calendar sitting there waiting for me, I just need to go get it and put it up. You'll get it up there before February, that's what's important. Yeah, I will, I will, I definitely. You gotta make sure you can enjoy the emu in January. Exactly. Those are so cute. Thank you Blair for being with us today. Always a pleasure. Reminder for folks, we are live Monday through Friday, 4 30 p.m. Eastern, 2130 UTC. If you haven't joined us live, we'd love to have you and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We will be back doing it all again tomorrow. We're gonna talk about what your non-Tesla EV options are this year with Tim Stevens, because he knows. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Well, I hope you have enjoyed this program.