The population of the International Space Station (ISS) is about to go up by one, but it won’t be another human occupant. It’ll be an AI-powered flying robot called CIMON-2, a followup to the experimental CIMON robot that debuted last year. The ISS’ newest AI bot should reach the station in a few days, and its designers hope CIMON-2 can prove even more useful to the crew than its predecessor. The CIMON project is a collaboration between German Aerospace Center (DLR), Airbus, and IBM that aims to design a robotic assistant that can save astronauts time on the ISS.
Samsung revealed the Galaxy Fold in early 2019, but it didn’t launch until just a few weeks ago. It turns out foldable phones are hard to get right, and the Fold wasn’t exactly inexpensive even when it did launch. Samsung wanted almost $2,000 for this first-of-its-kind smartphone. A new report from South Korea suggests the Galaxy Fold 2 may be here soon, and it . The Galaxy Fold was the first consumer-ready foldable phone to market, even after the months-long delay. Samsung initially wanted to launch the phone in spring 2019, but the first handful of review units began failing after just a few days.
Sedans are out at Buick in the United States as it shifts to an all-SUV lineup in 2020. The final sedan in the US lineup, the Regal (main photo), will sell off what remains in stock. That also includes the well-regarded and soft-selling Buick Regal Tour X, a European-style sporty station wagon. Buick will end the year selling about 15,000 Regals, or one of every 14 Buicks sold and one of ever 70 GM vehicles sold. This continues the transition of Buick from upper-echelon sedan from and for North America, below only Cadillac, to a brand with as much as 80 percent of sales coming from China in recent years.
Apple has always tried to forge its own path and develop many of the technologies it incorporates into its products, but that sometimes means ignoring existing standards. The company adopted its custom Lightning connector on mobile devices in 2012, and the industry has come a long way since then. While Apple has moved to USB Type-C on some devices, noted Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claims Apple won’t do that with the iPhone. Instead, it will . Lightning was a major step forward for Apple back in 2012. It replaced the ancient 30-pin dock connector, which was huge, ugly, and charged slowly.
If you are building a gaming PC this holiday season, we’ve got plenty of deals to help you. Notable among these is one of Dell’s high-end Alienware displays that supports G-Sync and is marked over half off. Dell loaded this 34-inch display with plenty of gaming features, including Nvidia’s G-Sync technology to smooth out the monitor’s refresh rate and avoid image ghosting and tearing. Currently, Dell is offering this display with a heavy discount that drops its price from $1,349.99 to $599.99. This may look like your average business computer, but it’s really designed to be an affordable server for small businesses.
Mobile data coverage is better than it was in years past as we reach the end of the LTE era, but we’ve all suspected from time to time that carriers aren’t being entirely truthful. Now, there’s proof, at least according to the FCC. After testing LTE data across the rural US, the agency has concluded that Verizon, T-Mobile, and US Cellular were . If you were hoping carriers would face some consequences for this, prepare to be disappointed. The FCC receives numerous complaints about coverage, but the volume of complaints about rural coverage from the aforementioned carriers spurred the agency to investigate.
You cannot deny that higher frame rates look nicer when playing a game. That’s why gamers sometimes spend ludicrous amounts of cash on the latest GPUs and monitors to boost their FPS. However, recently conducted a study showing that higher frame rates . A higher frame rate can improve a player’s kill-to-death ratio by as much as 90 percent. Unless you specifically shopped for a high-speed gaming display, you’re probably looking at a 60Hz screen all day. That means the panel refreshes 60 times per second. Depending on the game and your GPU, your computer might be able to produce more frames per second than that.
Score a small victory for common sense. BMW is dropping the $80 annual fee it charges owners to plug in and use their Apple iPhones via Apple CarPlay, a charge BMW extorts – sorry, extracts – even though Apple charges BMW no ongoing licensing fee BMW has to recoup. (In case there isn’t enough margin in cars costing $35,000 to $150,000.) BMW said this week the fee will no longer be charged. BMW’s infotainment system is arguably the industry’s best and most flexible, if you take time to learn iDrive, if you paid the $80 CarPlay fee, and if you didn’t have an Android phone, since BMW doesn’t support Android Auto.
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe started making history the very minute it launched, taking the crown as the fastest moving launch in history. It went on to pass closer to the sun than any previous spacecraft, and now NASA has of scans made during the probe’s first two solar flybys. The research, published in several groundbreaking studies, offers tantalizing details on the origin of the solar wind. Parker has now made two passes through the corona in November 2018 and April 2019, sending data back to Earth after each one. NASA launched the Parker spacecraft in August 2018, hoping to gather more data on the sun’s corona than we can collect from Earth or with probes that sit safely outside the blazing-hot corona.