What's New

The arrival of iOS 12 means you can now use Apple's long-awaited suite of Screen Time tools. The new features, which appear under Settings > Screen Time, are designed to give you a better idea of how you're spending time on your phone and limit the time you spend on certain apps. It’s all part of a greater push by tech companies to mitigate the ways personal devices are engineered to be addictive, by creating all kinds of new “digital wellness” features.

When Ole Kirk Kristiansen imported a newfangled contraption called a plastic-injection-­molding machine to Denmark in 1946, people thought he’d lost his mind. Kirk Kristiansen was a master carpenter who made wooden toys sold under the brand name Lego (abbreviated from leg godt, Danish for “play well”). The machine cost nearly 7 percent of the company’s annual revenue, but Kirk Kristiansen reckoned there was no limit to what he could manufacture with the new technology.

Cycle commuting is hot. Warm, at least. Depending on where you’re living. Each year, the League of American Bicyclists, a nationwide cycling advocacy organization, takes a look at the annual commuting numbers out of the American Community Survey.

Peter F. Hamilton, one of Britain’s leading science fiction authors, has been hard at work on his massive seven-volume Commonwealth series since 2003. His new novel Salvation, about a world where teleportation is cheap and easy, is a major change of pace. “It’s something I wanted to do as a writer, just to keep fresh,” Hamilton says in Episode 327 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

Amazon is all-in on Alexa, and this week, it revealed a new set of voice-enabled products ranging from a a wall clock to a doodad that goes in your car. The star and symbol for this bold new wave of Alexa devices? The AmazonBasics Microwave. At a glance, it looks identical to every other 700W microwave, but it has some new tricks. By touching the Alexa button on it, you can ping a nearby Echo speaker, which will let you tell the microwave what you want to cook.

Smash! Bang! Success! The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the arm of the Department of Transportation charged with reducing the number of Americans killed on the road, yesterday released the results of the crash test for the Tesla Model 3: five stars in every category. The perfect score is a welcome ray of sunshine during a (tweet)stormy stretch for Tesla—just yesterday, Bloomberg reported the automaker’s supply chain manager has left the company.

Of the many acronyms engineers spend their lives internalizing, few are more valuable than KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Constrain the problem, reduce the variables, and make life as easy as possible when designing novel systems—like, say, a self-driving car. The world is a messy, complicated place. The less of it you need to solve, the closer you are to having a working product.

A handful of years ago, a small pharmaceutical company quietly acquired the rights to an old but commonly used antibiotic. Few noticed until last week, when the new owner did something that’s recently become common in the world of pharmaceuticals: It abruptly raised the price. A lot. The manufacturer is called Nostrum Laboratories, and the drug for which it hiked the price—by more than 400 percent—is called nitrofurantoin.

Amazon is hosting a hardware launch event this morning at its Seattle headquarters, and has invited the press into the Spheres, Amazon’s urban botanical gardens, to show off the new products. It’s widely expected that Amazon will announce several new Alexa-equipped hardware products or device partnerships, adding to an already expansive line of Echos and other smart devices.

Far-right YouTube is the internet age equivalent of conservative talk radio: It’s a place for ultra-conservative commentators to react vehemently, personally, emotionally to the news of the day and the creeping horrors of American progressivism.