Alongside the Pixel 8 and Android 14, Google today launched the new Pixel Watch 2 -- a $350 second-gen smartwatch featuring a faster processor, overhauled sensor array, and longer battery life. The Verge reports: At a glance, the main difference is that the screen sits flush with the digital crown, where the original had a slight cutout. Another change imperceptible to the naked eye: the body is now made of 100 percent recycled aluminum instead of stainless steel. The result is a slightly lighter watch, but not by much. The Pixel Watch weighed 36 grams, while the Pixel Watch 2 is 31g. That's a bit disappointing, considering the Watch 2's price remains the same as last year. We're looking at the same 41mm case size and OLED display on top. But flip the watch over, and you'll find a completely different sensor array. Instead of a single line of LEDs, there are now multiple LEDs and photodiodes to take measurements from several angles and positions. That then feeds into an algorithm that Fitbit CEO James Park says is 40 percent more accurate for vigorous activities.

This year, Google also added a skin temperature and continuous electrodermal activity (EDA) sensor. Both help enable proactive stress tracking, which Fitbit introduced with its Sense 2. The EDA sensor detects minuscule amounts of sweat, which can help determine bodily stress when combined with metrics like heart rate variability, heart rate, and skin temperature. As with the Sense 2, you're supposed to get a slightly delayed notification when a stressful event has been detected. You're then encouraged to log how that event made you feel. Battery life was a major pain point when the Pixel Watch first launched. Park acknowledges that you couldn't use the always-on display on the first-gen watch if you wanted that 24-hour battery life. This time around, he says that the team has worked hard to make sure the Pixel Watch 2's 306mAh battery can get 24 hours with the always-on display enabled. Users should also be able to get a 50 percent charge in 30 minutes and a full day's worth in 75 minutes. Helping that should be Wear OS 4 -- which Google says ought to extend battery life -- and the new, more power-efficient Qualcomm Snapdragon W5 processor. (Speaking of Wear OS 4, Google says that, at first, it'll be exclusive to Pixel Watch 2.) Other features include the ability to automatically record workouts and do heart rate zone training; a new Safety Check feature that will alert your loved ones of your location after a preset timer expires (e.g. taking an Uber across town or going on a late-night walk); and support for Google services like Gmail, Google Wallet, and Calendar.

You can learn more about the Pixel Watch 2 here.

Renewable power sources generated 40% of Britain's electricity in 2022, up from 35% in 2021, while the share of fossil fuel in the energy mix also rose, a report by academics from Imperial College London for Drax Electric Insights showed on Thursday. From a report: Overall generation from renewables has more than quadrupled over the last decade. Wind, solar, biomass and hydro are the main sources of renewable power. Fossil fuel still has a larger share, providing 42% of Britain's power in 2022, which was its biggest contribution to the country's fuel mix since 2016. Iain Staffell of Imperial College London, and lead author of the report, said 2022 had been "a year like no other for the energy industry." Although renewables provide "more cheap, green energy than ever before," he said, the public is feeling the pain of gas prices, which surged in response to supply disruption linked to Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February.

Business Insider reports: An official Amazon study run as part of the company's "Earth's Best Employer" initiative showed mounting employee frustration and other challenges around the time the crucial project was getting off the ground.... The 11-page document, created in October 2021 for Amazon's most senior leaders, gives a brutally honest assessment of employee sentiment.... "We learned we are not seen as distinctively innovative and that our innovation culture is not fun. Innovation at Amazon is associated with stress, burnout, churn, and a cut-throat atmosphere," the document said....

A competitive labor market was one of the main drivers for change, according to the report. Amazon anticipated a "tech talent shortage" of 6 million to 8 million workers in the US by 2030. The Amazon Web Services cloud business alone was projected to need 210,000 to 336,000 tech employees by 2031, or at least 123,000 additional workers. Yet, Amazon is not perceived as a particularly attractive workplace even by its own employees, the report found. Corporate employees said they were subject to long hours and exhausting workloads. Sometimes, even finding answers to trivial HR policies led to confusion. For frontline workers, Amazon wants to provide more behavioral health support and reduce injuries like musculoskeletal disorders, which are more common at its warehouses than other similar facilities

. "Neither corporate nor front-line employees feel Amazon is a place they can clearly grow their careers and achieve personal success," the report stated.
The report identified six areas where Amazon sees room for improvement, including work-life balance and compensation and benefits.

Garmin has reacted to Apple's new rugged Apple Watch Ultra, saying in a tweet following the iPhone 14 and Apple Watch event that it measures battery life in "months" and "not hours," promoting its latest Enduro 2 watch for athletes. MacRumors reports: While the Apple Watch Ultra has the longest battery life of any Apple Watch to date, with Apple promising up to 36 hours of normal use and up to 60 hours with watchOS 9's new Low Power Mode setting and other optimizations, the Enduro 2 can last significantly longer depending on usage scenarios. Despite Garmin's claim that it measures battery life in months, the company actually advertises the Enduro 2 as having "up to 150 hours of battery life in GPS mode with solar charging" and "up to 34 days of battery life in smartwatch mode." The Enduro 2 has a 1.4-inch solar-powered display, compared to the nearly 2-inch display on the Apple Watch Ultra that can reach a peak brightness of 2,000 nits, the brightest ever in an Apple Watch. Battery life seems to be the main point of contention, based on comments from Hacker News and Reddit. "As someone who is into trail running and backpacking, a 36 hour battery life is untenable, and charging it every night seems like a pain," writes user lukeinator42.

"The real irony of the charge-at-night model is that you miss the single biggest source of error in human life: lack of sleep," adds killjoywashere. "Accurate sleep measurement is, on a day-to-day basis, far more valuable than many of the features advertised on this system."

Europe's energy crisis is threatening to slow experiments into the fundamental forces of nature. From a report: The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, is drafting plans to shut down some of its particle accelerators at periods of peak demand, said Serge Claudet, chair of the center's energy management panel. CERN is also considering how it could idle the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest accelerator, if necessary, Mr. Claudet said. "Our concern is really grid stability, because we do all we can to prevent a blackout in our region," Mr. Claudet said.

The preparations show the far-reaching impact of Moscow's move to transform Europe's dependence on Russian energy supplies into a weapon of economic war. Emergency measures are now on the table after Russian energy giant Gazprom PJSC said Friday it would indefinitely stop natural gas deliveries through the Nord Stream gas pipeline, Russia's main artery for delivering the fuel to Europe, pushing the continent closer to gas rationing as winter approaches. Sweden and Finland on Friday said they would offer funding support to regional electricity producers, saying that Gazprom's move threatened the region's power market and its broader financial stability. The European Union is preparing plans to restructure the market to ease some of the pain.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: It's Dr. Francis Collins' last few weeks as director of the National Institutes of Health after 12 years, serving under three presidents. Collins made his name doing the kind of biomedical research NIH is famous for, especially running The Human Genome Project, which fully sequenced the human genetic code. The focus on biomedicine and cures has helped him grow the agency's budget to over $40 billion a year and win allies in both political parties.

Still, in a broad sense, Americans' health hasn't improved much in those 12 years, especially compared with people in peer countries, and some have argued the agency hasn't done enough to try to turn these trends around. One recently retired NIH division director has quipped that one way to increase funding for this line of research would be if "out of every $100, $1 would be put into the 'Hey, how come nobody's healthy?' fund."

In a wide-ranging conversation, Collins answers NPR's questions as to why -- for all the taxpayer dollars going to NIH research -- there haven't been more gains when it comes to Americans' overall health. He also talks about how tribalism in American culture has fueled vaccine hesitancy, and he advises his successor on how to persevere on research of politically charged topics -- like guns and obesity and maternal health -- even if powerful lobbies might want that research not to get done. In regard to Americans not getting healthier over the last 12 years, NPR asked Collins why there haven't been more gains and what role NIH should play in understanding these trends and trying to turn them around. Here's what he said: Well, sure, it does bother me. In many ways, the 28 years I have been at NIH have just been an amazing ride of discoveries upon discoveries. But you're right, we haven't seen that translate necessarily into advances. Let's be clear, there are some things that have happened that are pretty exciting. Cancer deaths are dropping every year by 1 or 2%. When you add that up over 20 years, cancer deaths are down by almost 25% from where they were at the turn of the century. And that's a consequence of all the hard work that's gone into developing therapeutics based on genomics, as well as immunotherapy that's made a big dent in an otherwise terrible disease.

But we've lost ground in other areas, and a lot of them are a function of the fact that we don't have a very healthy lifestyle in our nation. Particularly with obesity and diabetes, those risk factors have been getting worse instead of better. We haven't, apparently, come up with strategies to turn that around. On top of that, the other main reason for seeing a drop in life expectancy -- other than obesity and COVID -- is the opioid crisis. We at NIH are working as fast and as hard as we can to address that by trying to both identify better ways to prevent and treat drug addiction, but also to come up with treatments for chronic pain that are not addictive, because those 25 million people who suffer from chronic pain every day deserve something better than a drug that is going to be harmful.

In all of these instances, as a research enterprise -- because that's our mandate -- it feels like we're making great progress. But the implementation of those findings runs up against a whole lot of obstacles, in terms of the way in which our society operates, in terms of the fact that our health care system is clearly full of disparities, full of racial inequities. We're not -- at NIH -- able to reach out and fix that, but we can sure shine a bright light on it and we can try to come up with pilot interventions to see what would help.

Uber lost $2.9 billion in the first quarter as its overseas investments were hammered by the coronavirus pandemic, but the company is looking to its growing food delivery business and aggressive cost-cutting to ease the pain. Tech Xplore reports: The ride-hailing giant said Thursday it is offloading Jump, its bike and scooter business, to Lime, a company in which it is investing $85 million. Jump had been losing about $60 million a quarter. "While our Rides business has been hit hard by the ongoing pandemic, we have taken quick action to preserve the strength of our balance sheet, focus additional resources on Uber Eats, and prepare us for any recovery scenario," said CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in a statement. "Along with the surge in food delivery, we are encouraged by the early signs we are seeing in markets that are beginning to open back up."

On Wednesday, San Francisco-based Uber said it was cutting 3,700 full-time workers, or about 14% of its workforce, as people avoiding contagion either stay indoors or try to limit contact with others. Its main U.S. rival Lyft announced last month it would lay off 982 people, or 17% of its workforce because of plummeting demand. Careem, Uber's subsidiary in the Middle East, cut its workforce by 31%. Uber brought in $3.54 billion in revenue in the first quarter, up 14% from the same time last year. Revenue in its Eats meal delivery business grew 53% as customers shuttered at home opted to order in. Gross bookings grew 8% to $15.8 billion, with 54% growth in the food delivery business and a 3% decline in rides, on a constant currency basis. The report adds that rides were down 80% globally during the month of April. "But rides have been increasing for the past three weeks and bookings in large cities across Georgia and Texas, two states that started re-opening, are up 43% and 50% respectively from their lowest points," the report says.

Is the Fed's massive coronavirus stimulus package helping the ultra-rich at the expense of ordinary American workers? That's what Chamath Palihapitiya, chief executive of venture-capital firm Social Capital LP, argued Thursday. From a story: Appearing Thursday on CNBC, Palihapitiya said the U.S. shouldn't be bailing out billionaires and hedge funds when it's the people on Main Street who are the ones actually getting hurt. Jobless claims hit nearly 17 million on Thursday, and are likely even higher as businesses across the country close in an effort to slow the spread of COVID-19. Economists say the unemployment rate has likely surged above 10% and will only get worse. Palihapitiya's argument, basically, is: Let those businesses fail, but without layoffs, and let the rich stakeholders absorb the pain.

When a business typically fails, Palihapitiya said, "it does not fire their employees," instead going though a bankruptcy process that often preserves pensions, and employees end up owning more of the company in the end. "The people who get wiped out are the speculators" who own debt, and the equity holders. "These are the people that purport to be the most sophisticated investors in the world. They deserve to get wiped out," Palihapitiya said. "But he employees don't get wiped out. The pensions typically don't get wiped out." A baffled Scott Wapner, the show's host, asked why anyone "deserves" to get wiped out. "Just to be clear on who we are talking about. We're talking about a hedge fund that serves a bunch of billionaire family offices. They don't get the summer in the Hamptons?" Palihapitiya said. "Who cares? Let them get wiped out. What we've done is disproportionately prop up poor-performing CEOs and boards, and you have to wash these people out," he said.

For decades Eric S. Raymond has been one of the open source movement's staunchest supporters. He co-founded the Open Source Initiative, and was the author of the influential book The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary .

Tuesday the 61-year-old super-geek posted a dramatic story to his blog: Today I had to -- literally -- crawl from my wife's car to my house. Because I couldn't walk. Life is what happens while you were making other plans. About six months ago I sprained my right ankle in kung fu class. It gave me occasional pain, mostly in cold weather, but I thought it was healing and I could just let it heal. Until about two months ago when I was out with friends on a chilly evening and my ankle folded up under me, just lost the power to support me entirely...

A couple of visits to doctors and an MRI scan later we determined that I had developed one of the more unfortunate possible sequelae of a sprain, a thing called an osteochondral lesion. This is what happens when an area of bone in the load-bearing area of the joint erodes away, so the cartilage above it is no longer supported. If the unsupported cartilage is then damaged, the long-term result can be crippling arthritis of the joint. In my case, it seemed I had gotten lucky. The cartilage seemed undamaged in the MRI images. The indicated procedure is to go in with an arthroscopic probe and squirt synthetic bone into the lesion. Once it hardens it can support the cartilage so it doesn't take additional damage.
Then two weeks ago, while waiting for his scheduled surgery, Raymond collapsed again in his kitchen, leading to an emergency room visit, another MRI, and three head staples where he'd hit his head on a chair leg: Home again home again. It's nice that even at 61 I'm a physically tough person with a high pain threshold and a thick skull who is actually rather difficult to injure -- my school name over at the kung fu kwoon is "The Mighty Oak". And I like that I can be self-reliant and stoic under stress. But thank you, I'd prefer not to have this confirmed by repeated injuries...

I had that surgery about eighteen hours ago. And ended up crawling from my car because none of the medical people talked about or planned for my post-operative problems until after I was out of anesthesia. Pain management was as far as they got... So now it's oh-dark-thirty the next morning, I'm writing this because the anesthesia and the four hours or so of shut-eye after I got home have left me all slept out for the moment, and I've learned from experience that quietly coding or writing until I'm tired enough to sleep again is better for me than tossing and turning.
By Wednesday he'd posted a reassuring update -- that "The post-op pain has stabilized at a level where the occasional Tylenol will handle it nicely." But the Tuesday blog post reminded readers that he'd been scheduled to give the main keynote at South East Linux Fest on June 14th. "Part of the reason this is a public blog post is as my subjunctive apology to everyone who was expecting to see me at SELF, in the all-too-likely event that I can't be there."

Posting stoicly about the details of his recovery -- at one point he writes "Improvise, adapt, overcome!" -- Eric Raymond added one final thought: If you've ever thought that you might join my Patreon feed, now would be a really good time. This... adventure... has blown a $6000 hole in my budget and the expenses aren't over yet. There's that post-op check at minimum, and probably physical therapy afterwards, and that's if all heals well; otherwise it'll be much, much more expensive.

If you're using an Apple TV as your main streaming box, you will be happy to know several big improvements are coming to the platform. Macworld reports of what's new in tvOS 12: With tvOS 12, Dolby Atmos comes to the Apple TV 4K. All you need for full 3D immersive audio is an Atmos-supporting sound bar or receiver. This makes Apple TV 4K the only streaming media box to be certified for both Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos.

One of the best features of tvOS 11 is called Single Sign-on. You add your TV provider's login information to your Apple TV device. If an app supports Single Sign-on, you can log in with your TV provider with just a few taps. It's a big step forward, but still a little bit of a pain. With tvOS 12, Apple makes the whole process totally seamless with Zero Sign-on. Here's how it works: If your TV provider is your Internet provider (a very common occurrence here in the United States), and your Apple TV is connected to the Internet through that provider, you sign in automatically to any Apple TV app your provider gives you access to. Just launch the app, and you're signed in, no passwords or configuration needed at all.

Apple's breathtaking 4K video screensavers, called "Aerials," is one of those minor delights that Apple TV 4K users can't get enough of. In tvOS 12, they get better. You can tap the remote to see the location at which the Aerial was filmed. A new set of Aerials is the star of the show, however. Called "Earth," these are stunning videos from space, taken by astronauts at the International Space Station. Furthermore, the TV app will provide live content from select TV providers; Charter Spectrum will support the app with live channels and content later this year. Apple is also now allowing third-party home control systems' remotes to control your Apple TV (including Siri).

schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: It's crazy to think that we still don't quite understand the mechanism behind one of the most common medical interventions -- general anaesthetic. But researchers in Australia just got a step closer by discovering that one of the most commonly used anesthetic drugs doesn't just put us to sleep; it also disrupts communication between brain cells. The team investigated the drug propofol, a super-popular option for surgeries worldwide. A potent sedative, the drug is thought to put us to sleep through its effect on the GABA neurotransmitter system, the main regulator of our sleep-and-wake cycles in the brain. But anyone who's been "put under" will know that waking up from a general anesthetic feels rather different from your usual morning grogginess. On top of that, some people can experience serious side-effects, so scientists have been trying to figure out what else the drugs might be doing in the brain.

Using live neuron cell samples from rats and fruit flies, the researchers were able to track neurotransmitter activity thanks to a super-resolution microscope, and discovered that propofol messes with a key protein that nerve cells use to communicate with each other. This protein, called syntaxin1A, isn't just found in animal models - people have it, too. And it looks like the anesthetic drug puts the brakes on this protein, making otherwise normal brain cell connections sluggish, at least for a while. The researchers think this disruption could be key to how propofol allows for pain-free surgery to take place - first it knocks us out as a normal sleeping pill would, and then takes things up a notch by disrupting brain connectivity. The research has been published in Cell Reports.

A new lawsuit has emerged claiming a robot is responsible for killing a human colleague, reports Quartz. It all started in July 2015, when Wanda Holbrook, "a maintenance technician performing routine duties on an assembly line" at an auto-parts maker in Ionia, Michigan, called Ventra Ionia Main, "was 'trapped by robotic machinery' and crushed to death." From the report: On March 7, her husband, William Holbrook, filed a wrongful death complaint (pdf) in Michigan federal court, naming five North American robotics companies involved in engineering and integrating the machines and parts used at the plant: Prodomax, Flex-N-Gate, FANUC, Nachi, and Lincoln Electric. Holbrook's job involved keeping robots in working order. She routinely inspected and adjusted processes on the assembly line at Ventra, which makes bumpers and trailer hitches. One day, Holbrook was performing her regular duties when a machine acted very irregularly, according to the lawsuit reported in Courthouse News. Holbrook was in the plant's six-cell "100 section" when a robot unexpectedly activated, taking her by surprise. The cells are separated by safety doors and the robot should not have been able to move. But it somehow reached Holbrook, and was intent on loading a trailer-hitch assembly part right where she stood over a similar part in another cell. The machine loaded the hardware onto Holbrook's head. She was unable to escape, and her skull was crushed. Co-workers who eventually noticed that something seemed amiss found Holbrook dead. William Holbrook seeks an unspecified amount of damages, arguing that before her gruesome death, his wife "suffered tremendous fright, shock and conscious pain and suffering." He also names three of the defendants -- FANUC, Nachi, and Lincoln Electric -- in two additional claims of product liability and breach of implied warranty. He argues that the robots, tools, controllers, and associated parts were not properly designed, manufactured or tested, and not fit for use. "The robot from section 130 should have never entered section 140, and should have never attempted to load a hitch assembly within a fixture that was already loaded with a hitch assembly. A failure of one or more of defendants' safety systems or devices had taken place, causing Wanda's death," the lawsuit alleges.

An anonymous reader writes from a report via Fast Company: The average day for a doctor consists of hours of data entry. Since the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009 took effect in January of 2011, which incentivized providers to adopt electronic medical records, hospitals have spent millions, sometimes billions, on computer systems that weren't designed to help providers treat patients to begin with. The technology was supposed to reduce inefficiencies, make doctors' lives easier, and improve patient outcomes, but in fact it has done the opposite. "Frankly, the main incentive is to document exhaustively so you cover your ass and get paid," says Jay Parkinson, a New York-based pediatrician and the founder of health-tech startup Sherpa. The systems are flooding doctors with important and utterly meaningless alerts. One of the biggest problems is that the systems have made it very difficult for doctors to share information between one another, which is what the systems were intended to do all along. Why? "Because it doesn't help the bottom line of the biggest medical record vendors or the hospitals to make it easy for patients to change doctors," reports Fast Company. Since it often takes weeks, or months for data to be sent to and from facilities, that, according to Consumers Union staff attorney Dana Mendelsohn, increases the chances of doctors ordering duplicate tests. All of this reduces the time doctors have with their patients. A recent study shows that the average time doctors spend with their patients is about eight minutes and 12% of their time, down from 20% of their time in the late 1980s. "This group is 15 times more likely to burn out than professionals in any other line of work," reports Fast Company. "And much of the research on the topic concludes that 'documentation overload' is a key factor." To help alleviate this pain, medical groups are working to reduce the data-entry burden for doctors, so they can in turn spend more of their time with patients.

Kim Dotcom was the founder of Megaupload, its successor Mega, and New Zealand's Internet Party. A while ago you had a chance to ask him about those things as well as the U.S. government charging him with criminal copyright violation and racketeering. Below you'll find his answers to your questions.

Last Thursday you had a chance to ask Linus Torvalds about programming, hardware, and all things Linux. You can read his answers to those questions below. If you'd like to see what he had to say the last time we sat down with him, you can do so here.

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers studying the commonly used pain reliever acetaminophen found it has a previously unknown side effect: It blunts positive emotions (abstract). Acetaminophen, the main ingredient in the over-the-counter pain reliever Tylenol, has been in use for more than 70 years in the United States, but this is the first time that this side effect has been documented.

samzenpus (5) writes "Last week you had the chance to ask biologist Stewart Brand about his books, his life, and his Revive & Restore project, which aims to to bring back extinct species and provide genetic rescue for those that are endangered. Below you'll find his answers to your questions."

New submitter Hector's House writes "'Nothing is certain. Nothing is secure,' reflects one of the characters in Paolo Bacigalupi's novel The Windup Girl. In 23rd century Bangkok, life for many hangs by a thread. Oil has run out; rising seas threatens to engulf the city; genetically engineered diseases hover on Thailand's borders; and the threat of violence smolders as government ministries vie for power. Environmental destruction, climate change and novel plagues have wiped out many of the crop species that humanity depends on: the profits to be made from creating — or stealing — new species are potentially enormous. After a century of collapse and contraction, Western business sees hope for a new wave of globalization; Thailand's fiercely guarded seed banks may provide just the springboard needed." Keep reading for the rest of Aidan's review.

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton contributes the following piece on trying to get some measure of satisfaction in the struggle against pop-up ads, writing "The most annoying thing about some pop-up ads, is that you have no way of knowing which ad-serving network served them or who the responsible parties are. Could we reduce the incidence of illegal or deceptive pop-up ads, by giving users an easier way to trace their origin and figure out where to send complaints? Here's one way to do it with a simple right-click." Read on for the rest.

Mass Effect debuted a little over two years ago to almost universal praise, getting high marks for the rich story, endless exploration options, and entertaining gameplay. Despite the game's success, BioWare listened closely to player feedback, promising to revamp the parts of the game that needed improvement while developing the sequel. They didn't hesitate to refine the elements they wanted to keep and do away with the ones they didn't. The result is a familiar, but much more streamlined experience. Rather than being a shooter with a great story added in, Mass Effect 2 a great story that often has you shoot things. Read on for the rest of my thoughts.