Category: BUYSEMPERFI

The rubber band example does indeed have two nodes—they are at the ends of the rubber band where your fingers hold it. We only have half a wavelength in the standing wave, but there is indeed a relationship between the length of the rubber band and the size of the wavelength.

Guitar Strings

It’s time to put all these ideas together and look at a guitar string. Once you hit that string, it’s going to create a standing wave with an antinode in the middle and two nodes on the ends. This is called the first harmonic wave.

It’s possible to also produce a second harmonic wave (with a node in the middle) and even higher harmonics. However, because of drag forces on the string, these higher frequencies die out fairly quickly so that you are just left with a standing wave that has a wavelength equal to twice the length of the string.

But you don’t strum a guitar string to see a standing wave. No, you strum the guitar because you want to make a sound—maybe even some music. What we really care about is the frequency of that oscillating guitar string. Let’s use some realistic values. If you use the highest-frequency string, it could oscillate at 330 Hz. In terms of musical notes, that’s an E. Let’s also assume that the length of the string is 76.5 centimeters (30 inches). From this string length we can get a wavelength of 1.53 meters. Now using v = λf, we find a wave speed of 504.9 meters per second.

What if I want to play a G note, or 391 Hz, on the same string? I can do that by using my finger to push the string down on the fretboard. This effectively changes the length of the string and changes the wavelength. We can do the math and find that with an effective length of 64.6 centimeters (25.4 inches), the wavelength will decrease enough to cause the frequency to increase to 391 Hz. If you want an even higher-frequency note, just make the string even shorter.

How do you make a guitar note that’s lower than 330 Hz? You can’t do it with that same string. But you can get another string that has the same length but a higher linear density, or mass per unit length—which is why the strings on a guitar have different thicknesses. Remember that we can change the speed of the waves on the string by changing the properties of the string. With a higher density you get a lower wave speed, which means a lower frequency. The rest is just music.

What if your guitar doesn’t sound right, like if your E note is playing at 325 Hz instead of 330 Hz? You can solve this problem by tuning your guitar. At the end of each guitar string is a tuning peg. If you turn this, you will either increase or decrease the string’s tension. Increasing the tension will also increase the wave speed on that string, which increases the frequency. Now you aren’t just playing a guitar, you are a guitar hero. Wait, that’s a video game. Never mind.

There are a lot of great soundbars out there, and we don’t have room to feature them all. Here are some others you might want to consider.

The Yamaha SR-C30A for $200: This model SR-C30A soundbar looks very similar indeed to the SR-C20A, and that’s because they’re the same thing where dimensions, specification, and sound quality are all concerned. The difference is that the SR-C30A ships with a compact (335 x 160 x 364 mm) wireless subwoofer for some authentic Hollywood-style rumble and punch. —Simon Lucas

Sennheiser Ambeo Plus for $1,000: Given the price and the physical dimensions of the soundbar—which doesn’t even include a subwoofer—the Ambeo Plus might look like a poor deal. But thanks to its 400 watts of power and its nine carefully developed and even more carefully positioned speaker drivers, this Sennheiser is capable of big, enveloping sound with a strong suggestion of the sonic height that Dolby Atmos soundtracks thrive on. By way of an encore, it turns out to be a hugely capable wireless speaker when you want to listen to some music, too. —Simon Lucas

The Polk React for $236: This soundbar works if you want to get surround sound eventually but don’t have the cash right now. The Alexa-enabled soundbar is fine on its own, with surround speakers and subwoofers available from Polk if you want to upgrade.

The Vizio Elevate for $799: This is an awesome-looking soundbar with side speakers that swivel skyward when you’re watching content with object-based audio. It’s a nice-sounding bar, and that gimmick is neat, but there are better options for under $1,000.

Roku Smart Soundbar for $129: If you’re after a soundbar that also doubles as an awesome streaming device, WIRED senior writer Adrienne So swears by the Roku smart soundbar. After she spent years without one, I sent her home with this Roku model, and she was so impressed that she shouted it from the rooftops. Setup is extremely easy, and because it comes with Roku’s simple streaming interface (and support for surround sound, as well as 4K and High Dynamic Range video), you can stream movies and shows from just about every streaming service. You can also add a Roku subwoofer or surround-sound speakers down the line. We encourage getting a sub. We’ve linked to Roku’s Walmart version, named “Onn,” because it looks like the original model is being discontinued. It’s cheaper and slightly weaker but still a lot nicer than standard TV speakers, and it comes with the built-in Roku streaming interface.

Three hundred. No, not the stupid, sexy Spartans—the stupid-crazy price, in dollars, of the Tesla Wireless Charging Platform. Contrary to what you might expect, this is not some gadget that lives in your Tesla vehicle. It’s a somewhat large wireless charger you can place anywhere in your home to juice up multiple devices at the same time, like your wireless earbuds and smartphone.

I have had this hunk of metal sitting by my entryway since March, and it’s honestly hard not to like for its ease of use. It’s also impossible to recommend. There should be a limit to the price of convenience.

Tesla in Name

The Tesla Wireless Charging Platform leverages technology from a company called FreePower. I have written about it before, back when it was called Aira. FreePower’s charging tech debuted in a $150 wireless charger made in collaboration with accessory maker Nomad, but the Tesla collaboration utilizes the second generation of FreePower’s framework.

So what on earth is so special about it? You know how you can put your wireless earbuds case or phone on a wireless charger to recharge and, if you don’t align it just right, you realize hours later that it’s still dead? (This happened to me last night when I put my phone on another wireless charger in my sleepy daze, only to wake up to find it at 11 percent.)

FreePower’s goal has long been to eliminate the need for precise placement. How? By adding a crap-ton of wireless charging coils. Where a standard wireless charger might have a coil or two, the Tesla charger has 30 coils, up from 18 in the first generation. Apple also knows the more-coils trick but we’ve never gotten a product—the company famously announced a similar product called AirPower that never materialized.

The Tesla charger can identify where on the charging surface you have placed a device and supply it with the amount of power it asks for. FreePower also says it has greatly improved the energy efficiency of this charger, so there’s less energy lost during charging. You can charge up to three devices at a time, each at up to 15 watts, which is an improvement from the first-gen’s 5-watt limitation. Unfortunately, iPhones still only recharge at the 7.5-watt charging rate and not the 15 watts you can get with MagSafe wireless chargers.

Photograph: Tesla

Speed has never been the reason to buy into wireless charging, so you shouldn’t expect much here. All the phones I tried took three to four hours to fully recharge from zero. I much preferred using it to recharge wireless earbuds in their cases, which can be tricky to place on traditional wireless chargers, since you have to be more precise with placement. My wife stopped complaining that her earbuds didn’t charge, because no matter where she tosses them on the Tesla Wireless Charging Platform’s surface they’ll juice up.

The angular design is inspired by Tesla’s Cybertruck, but I’d say it looks much more tasteful here. The housing is aluminum, and it has a removable stand if you want to keep the charger propped up at an angle. However, wireless earbuds tend to slide down on the soft Alcantara surface, and if they gain enough momentum, they can slide completely off, so I preferred to use the charger without the stand to keep it all flat. I do like that, because it’s quite hefty, the charger never slides around on a table. It comes with a 65-watt wall charger and USB-C cable.

Magnetic Pull

There’s another reason that it’s hard to recommend the Tesla Wireless Charger outside of price: MagSafe. Apple’s wireless charging system, first introduced on the iPhone 12, has become ubiquitous, and it eliminates the very problem FreePower squashes. You don’t need to find a precise spot to place your iPhone on a MagSafe wireless charger—it automatically attaches into place via magnets, allowing for an efficient and faster charge.

In 2024, most new Android phones will support Qi2, the next generation of the Qi wireless standard, which includes the Magnetic Power Profile. Think of it as MagSafe for Android, meaning new Android devices will have a similar magnetic puck built into the back of the device, offering the same conveniences as MagSafe. These MagSafe chargers are far cheaper than the Tesla Charging Platform, and you can get models that charge multiple devices at the same time, though they don’t look as elegant.

FreePower’s goal is to continue expanding its charging technology into various other industries by integrating it into surfaces in our cars, homes, offices, and restaurants. It has refined its foreign-object detection to stop charging if it detects other materials on the charger, like your keys, so that it won’t heat them. It’ll be exciting to see where it goes next.

Until then, I’d much rather see the company bring down its prices with its next collaboration. People can charge their devices for very, very little money. Wireless charging is lovely, but there’s a limit to how much someone can spend for this convenience. As much as I’ve enjoyed the ease of recharging my gadgets for much of this year on the Tesla Wireless Charging Platform, I’d much rather fish for a cable or find the perfect spot on a cheaper competitor than drop hundreds of dollars.

Whenever he visited his local branch of Panera Bread in Fleming Island, Florida, it was Dennis Brown’s habit to order three drinks in a row. On September 28, and again on October 2, and the 4th, 5th, 7th, and 9th—the day Brown died—his drink of choice was Panera Bread’s Charged Lemonade.

A 20-ounce serving of Charged Lemonade contains 260 milligrams of caffeine, while the 30-ounce cup has 390 mg—close to the US Food and Drug Administration’s recommended daily limit. It isn’t known which size Brown, 46, consumed on October 9, but after finishing his dinner, he left the American fast casual restaurant and suffered a fatal cardiac arrest on a nearby sidewalk shortly after.

A wrongful-death lawsuit filed against Panera Bread on behalf of Brown’s family states that he usually drank iced tea, root beer, or water and was allegedly unaware that Charged Lemonade contains caffeine, as the lawsuit says it wasn’t advertised as an energy drink. Elizabeth Crawford, the attorney representing Brown’s family, has claimed the drink is “a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Panera Bread says it’s not to blame. “Panera Bread expresses our deep sympathy to Mr. Brown’s family. Based on our investigation, we believe his unfortunate passing was not caused by one of the company’s products,” Jessica Hesselschwerdt, senior director of public relations at Panera Bread, told WIRED. Hesselschwerdt says the case against the company is “without merit,” that Panera “stands firmly by the safety of our products,” and that Charged Lemonade contains “the same amount of caffeine per ounce as a dark roast coffee.”

That may be true. But while health bodies advise that consuming caffeine is OK, as long as we don’t overdo it, in recent years caffeinated drinks have been getting bigger and stronger—so much so that regulators are stepping in.

Nervous Energy

Panera Bread’s drinks aren’t the only ones to have raised concern. In January 2022, the internet found itself in a frenzy over Prime, an energy drink developed by YouTube stars turned boxers Logan Paul and KSI. Sold in neon-colored cans and advertising zero sugar and vegetarian-friendly ingredients, the brand was an immediate hit among the influencer’s combined—and often very young—40 million Instagram followers, who posted their own viral videos of themselves frantically searching for cans of the drink.

By July, US Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer had requested an FDA investigation into the brand, claiming parents were unwittingly serving their children a “cauldron of caffeine” when they purchased the drink. (Prime contains 200 mg of caffeine per 12 ounces—roughly equal to two cans of Red Bull plus a cup of coffee.) In response to Schumer’s calls, the company released a public statement claiming that “Prime energy … contains a comparable amount of caffeine to other top-selling energy drinks.”

The drink is still for sale in the US and UK, but it was one of six energy drinks recalled in Canada earlier this year, with new legislation outlawing drinks containing more than 180 mg of caffeine in a single serving. In a video after the announcement, Paul said that the drinks are compliant with each country’s specific regulations, claiming, “The crazy part about that is, we don’t even distribute Prime Energy in Canada.”

Our B cells help prevent us from getting sick. Their job is to make antibodies, immune system proteins that fight off viruses and other foreign invaders. And they make a lot of antibodies—thousands of them every second. What if these antibody factories could be harnessed to make other things the body needs?

That’s the idea behind a trial launched by Seattle-based biotech company Immusoft. The company announced today that its scientists have genetically programmed a patient’s B cells and put them back in his body in an effort to treat disease. It’s the first time engineered B cells have been tested in a person.

The patient has a genetic disorder known as mucopolysaccharidosis type I, or MPS I. His body doesn’t produce an essential enzyme that helps to break down long-chain sugars inside cells. Without this enzyme, these sugars build up in the eyes, heart, bones, and elsewhere.

The effects are life-threatening. Patients have cloudy eyes, respiratory problems, cognitive issues, and enlarged organs. Those with the most severe form of the disease die in childhood. Others may live to their twenties or thirties.

Patients are currently treated with weekly infusions of the enzyme their body lacks. The therapy must be given for the entirety of a patient’s life. Typically, a gene called IDUA provides instructions for making this enzyme, but people with MPS I have a mutation in this gene. Immusoft’s aim is to override this problem by prompting a person’s B cells to make the enzyme instead. B cells appealed to Immusoft because of their ability to pump out lots of proteins. If a person’s B cells could provide a continuous supply of this enzyme, it could eliminate the need for regular infusions.

Sean Ainsworth, CEO of Immusoft, says the initial patient is doing well after receiving the experimental therapy in mid-November. “So far, so good,” he says.

Researchers at the company collected the patient’s B cells using a machine that removes blood, separates out a particular component, then returns the rest to circulation. There are billions of B cells in the body; Immusoft uses only a portion. “The body is constantly regenerating and producing new B cells,” Ainsworth says.

To get the B cells to produce the missing enzyme in addition to antibodies, scientists had to add new genetic instructions to them in the lab. They packaged those instructions into a transposon, a DNA sequence that can naturally integrate into a cell’s genome using a cut-and-paste mechanism.

“All of these examples pose risks for users, causing confusion about who is running, when the election is happening, and the formation of public opinion,” the researchers wrote.

The report further claims that in addition to bogus information on polling numbers, election dates, candidates, and controversies, Copilot also created answers using flawed data-gathering methodologies. In some cases, researchers said, Copilot combined different polling numbers into one answer, creating something totally incorrect out of initially accurate data. The chatbot would also link to accurate sources online, but then screw up its summary of the provided information.

And in 39 percent of more than 1,000 recorded responses from the chatbot, it either refused to answer or deflected the question. The researchers said that although the refusal to answer questions in such situations is likely the result of preprogrammed safeguards, they appeared to be unevenly applied.

“Sometimes really simple questions about when an election is happening or who the candidates are just aren’t answered, and so it makes it pretty ineffective as a tool to gain information,” Natalie Kerby, a researcher at AI Forensics, tells WIRED. “We looked at this over time, and it’s consistent in its inconsistency.”

The researchers also asked for a list of Telegram channels related to the Swiss elections. In response, Copilot recommended a total of four different channels, “three of which were extremist or showed extremist tendencies,” the researchers wrote.

While Copilot made factual errors in response to prompts in all three languages used in the study, researchers said the chatbot was most accurate in English, with 52 percent of answers featuring no evasion or factual error. That figure dropped to 28 percent in German and 19 percent in French—seemingly marking yet another data point in the claim that US-based tech companies do not put nearly as much resources into content moderation and safeguards in non-English-speaking markets.

The researchers also found that when asked the same question repeatedly, the chatbot would give wildly different and inaccurate answers. For example, the researchers asked the chatbot 27 times in German, “Who will be elected as the new Federal Councilor in Switzerland in 2023?” Of those 27 times, the chatbot gave an accurate answer 11 times and avoided answering three times. But in every other response, Copilot provided an answer with a factual error, ranging from the claim that the election was “probably” taking place in 2023, to the providing of wrong candidates, to incorrect explanations regarding the current composition of the Federal Council.

A little over three years have passed since McDonald’s sent out an email to thousands of its restaurant owners around the world that abruptly cut short the future of a three-person startup called Kytch—and with it, perhaps one of McDonald’s best chances for fixing its famously out-of-order ice cream machines.

Until then, Kytch had been selling McDonald’s restaurant owners a popular internet-connected gadget designed to attach to their notoriously fragile and often broken soft-serve McFlurry dispensers, manufactured by McDonalds equipment partner Taylor. The Kytch device would essentially hack into the ice cream machine’s internals, monitor its operations, and send diagnostic data over the internet to an owner or manager to help keep it running. But despite Kytch’s efforts to solve the Golden Arches’ intractable ice cream problems, a McDonald’s email in November 2020 warned its franchisees not to use Kytch, stating that it represented a safety hazard for staff. Kytch says its sales dried up practically overnight.

Now, after years of litigation, the ice-cream-hacking entrepreneurs have unearthed evidence that they say shows that Taylor, the soft-serve machine maker, helped engineer McDonald’s Kytch-killing email—kneecapping the startup not because of any safety concern, but in a coordinated effort to undermine a potential competitor. And Taylor’s alleged order, as Kytch now describes it, came all the way from the top.

On Wednesday, Kytch filed a newly unredacted motion for summary adjudication in its lawsuit against Taylor for alleged trade libel, tortious interference, and other claims. The new motion, which replaces a redacted version from August, refers to internal emails Taylor released in the discovery phase of the lawsuit, which were quietly unsealed over the summer. The motion focuses in particular on one email from Timothy FitzGerald, the CEO of Taylor parent company Middleby, that appears to suggest that either Middleby or McDonald’s send a communication to McDonald’s franchise owners to dissuade them from using Kytch’s device.

“Not sure if there is anything we can do to slow up the franchise community on the other solution,” FitzGerald wrote on October 17, 2020. “Not sure what communication from either McD or Midd can or will go out.”

In their legal filing, the Kytch cofounders, of course, interpret “the other solution” to mean their product. In fact, FitzGerald’s message was sent in an email thread that included Middleby’s then COO, David Brewer, who had wondered earlier whether Middleby could instead acquire Kytch. Another Middleby executive responded to FitzGerald on October 17 to write that Taylor and McDonald’s had already met the previous day to discuss sending out a message to franchisees about McDonald’s lack of support for Kytch.

But Jeremy O’Sullivan, a Kytch cofounder, claims—and Kytch argues in its legal motion—that FitzGerald’s email nonetheless proves Taylor’s intent to hamstring a potential competitor. “It’s the smoking gun,” O’Sullivan says of the email. “He’s plotting our demise.”

Cruise, General Motors’ self-driving development subsidiary, will lay off almost a quarter of its workforce—about 900 employees—the company announced Thursday. The cuts are part of a broader restructuring to focus the robotaxi unit on a narrower path to commercialization. Instead of expanding its commercial robotaxi service to multiple US cities, the company will relaunch its currently paused service in just one.

Cruise wants to “enhance our safety standards and processes before we scale,” company co-president and CTO Mo ElShenawy wrote in a letter to employees announcing the layoffs today. A company blog post said that 24 percent of full-time Cruise employees will be let go, with a focus on field and commercial operations, and corporate staffing, though some engineers are also affected. The company had already cut last month a portion of its contingent workforce who kept self-driving vehicles clean, charged, and maintained.

The cuts at Cruise add to a tumultuous fall for the robotaxi company, which until recently was ,along with Alphabet’s Waymo. a front-runner in the race to automate driving. California regulators in October suspended Cruise’s permit to operate in San Francisco—home to its longest-running test bed—as they alleged the company failed to disclose details of a crash that sent a pedestrian to the hospital with serious injuries.

Days later Cruise halted autonomous vehicle testing and operations US-wide. Prior to the crash, the company also operated robotaxi services in Austin, Texas, and Phoenix, Arizona, and had plans to launch in Houston, Dallas, and Miami, among other cities.

On Wednesday, as first reported by Reuters,_, the company said it had parted with nine top executives, including leaders in legal, government affairs, commercial operations, and safety and systems, as part of a safety review triggered by the San Francisco crash. Company spokesperson Erik Moser said that Cruise is “committed to full transparency and [we] are focused on rebuilding trust and operating with the highest standards when it comes to safety, integrity, and accountability.” The company “believes that new leadership is necessary to achieve these goals,” he said. Cruise CEO and cofounder Kyle Vogt resigned last month.

In a written statement, General Motors spokesperson Aimee Ridella said “GM supports the difficult employment decisions made by Cruise as it reflects their more deliberate path forward, with safety as the north star.” The Detroit automaker acquired the self-driving developer in 2016.

General Motors has lost some $8 billion on Cruise since 2017, according to financial filings, and this year has spent at least $1.9 billion on the company. Last month, GM said it would cut the subsidiary’s funding by “hundreds of millions” of dollars in 2024.

Last month, General Motors halted production of its purpose-built robotaxi, called the Origin. The futuristic vehicle, a six-seat cube on wheels, doesn’t have a steering wheel, and it needs federal approval to hit the roads because its unconventional shape means it doesn’t meet safety standards. In his letter to staff on Thursday, ElShenawy confirmed the company’s pared-down vehicle ambitions. He said Cruise would be “focusing on the Bolt platform”—the conventional, Chevrolet-branded electric car that Cruise has used to operate for years— “for this first step before we scale.”

OpenAI was founded on a promise to build artificial intelligence that benefits all of humanity—even when that AI becomes considerably smarter than its creators. Since the debut of ChatGPT last year and during the company’s recent governance crisis, its commercial ambitions have been more prominent. Now, the company says a new research group working on wrangling the super-smart AIs of the future is starting to bear fruit.

“AGI is very fast approaching,” says Leopold Aschenbrenner, a researcher at OpenAI involved with the Superalignment research team established in July. “We’re gonna see superhuman models, they’re gonna have vast capabilities and they could be very, very dangerous, and we don’t yet have the methods to control them.” OpenAI has said it will dedicate a fifth of its available computing power to the Superalignment project.

A research paper released by OpenAI today touts results from experiments designed to test a way to let an inferior AI model guide the behavior of a much smarter one without making it less smart. Although the technology involved is far from surpassing the flexibility of humans, the scenario was designed to stand in for a future time when humans must work with AI systems more intelligent than themselves.

OpenAI’s researchers examined the process, called supervision, which is used to tune systems like GPT-4, the large language model behind ChatGPT, to be more helpful and less harmful. Currently this involves humans giving the AI system feedback on which answers are good and which are bad. As AI advances, researchers are exploring how to automate this process to save time—but also because they think it may become impossible for humans to provide useful feedback as AI becomes more powerful.

In a control experiment using OpenAI’s GPT-2 text generator first released in 2019 to teach GPT-4, the more recent system became less capable and similar to the inferior system. The researchers tested two ideas for fixing this. One involved trainingg progressively larger models to reduce the performance lost at each step. In the other, the team added an algorithmic tweak to GPT-4 that allowed the stronger model to follow the guidance of the weaker model without blunting its performance as much as would normally happen. This was more effective although the researchers admit that these methods do not guarantee that the stronger model will behave perfectly, and they describe it as a starting point for further research.

“It’s great to see OpenAI proactively addressing the problem of controlling superhuman AIs,” says Dan Hendryks, director of the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit in San Francisco dedicated to managing AI risks. “We’ll need many years of dedicated effort to meet this challenge.”