Innholdsfortegnelse for #510 i Techlife News

A California company that makes surgical robots will invest $500 million in an Atlanta-area expansion, hiring 1,200 new workers by 2024. Intuitive Surgical, based in Sunnyvale, California, announced its plans this week. It’s one of the largest announcements in terms of jobs and investments in Georgia this year. Intuitive said it already has about 180 employees at an office in Peachtree Corners, northeast of Atlanta. The company said it would build out a larger campus in the Gwinnett County suburb in phases by 2024. The company says it will create 750,000 square feet (70,000 square meters) of space for manufacturing, engineering, medical worker training and administration. One of the robot systems can cost $2 million or more. Surgeons worldwide used the company’s robots to perform more than 1.2 million procedures…

General Motors posted a healthy $2.8 billion second-quarter profit this week, but its cautious outlook for the rest of the year spooked investors. The Detroit automaker made the strong profit despite a global shortage of computer chips that have forced it and other companies to temporarily close factories. While GM raised its outlook for the year, it also cautioned about high commodity prices and lower production due to the chip shortage, and it warned that the highly contagious delta variant of the coronavirus could hamper its supply chain. The cautious tone rattled investors, who pushed GM shares down almost 9% after the announcement. Chief Financial Officer Paul Jacobson predicted that GM would produce 100,000 fewer vehicles in the second half of the year compared with the first, even as other…

Michael Andretti has a 21-year-old son with zero interest in obtaining a driver’s license. Rideshare apps get him where he wants to go. In New Jersey, the 16-year-old daughter of a local short track racer took a five-minute driving lesson on a golf cart through their yard before turning over the keys. “That’s it, I’m done. Don’t like it,” Kat Wilson told their father. The teenage rite of passage of rushing to the DMV on your birthday to get that plastic card that represents freedom has changed dramatically over the last 30 years. Data collected from the Federal Highway Administration and analyzed by Green Car Congress showed that in 2018 approximately 61% of 18-year-olds in the U.S. had a driver’s license, down from 80% percent in 1983. The number of…

Buying a hybrid vehicle is typically a smart way to help save money on gas and reduce your carbon footprint compared to a conventional gasoline-only vehicle. Not long ago your shopping choices were largely limited to hybrid hatchbacks and sedans, but the hybrid SUV market has expanded considerably the past few years. The latest hybrid SUVs can get impressive fuel economy while providing plenty of cargo space, a higher ride height, available all-wheel drive and cutting-edge technology features. Media experts have picked five of the best new hybrid SUVs on sale today. They are presented in alphabetical order, and all prices include the destination charge. 2021 FORD ESCAPE HYBRID Base price: $29,920 Fuel economy: 40-41 mpg combined The recently redesigned Ford Escape is a fine crossover SUV, but it’s the…

William Edward Mann enlisted in the Navy after graduating from high school in rural Washington state. A guitar player, he picked up the ukulele while stationed in Hawaii. He’s been presumed dead since Dec. 7, 1941, when Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor and set off a massive explosion that sank his battleship, the USS Arizona, launching the U.S. into World War II. Now, his niece is among some families of crew members who are demanding the U.S. military take advantage of advances in DNA technology to identify 85 sailors and Marines from the Arizona who were buried as unknowns. They say the military has disinterred and identified remains from other Pearl Harbor battleships and should do the same for their loved ones. “These men matter and they served. They gave…

Early in the coronavirus pandemic, Jennifer Sherlock went out with a few men she met through dating apps. The dates were “weird,” she said, and not just because they were masked, socially distanced and outdoors. One one occasion, a date remained masked while they were out for a stroll, but soon after invited her back to his place, a move Sherlock saw as reckless. “It was so off putting, and awkward,” she said. “So we wouldn’t be safe outside without mask(s), but we would be safe back at his place maskless?” She decided she needed a way to filter people, so she began arranging video chats before agreeing to meet anybody in person. Sherlock, 42, a PR consultant who lives in New Jersey, said it’s a practice she’ll continue post-pandemic.…

It’s a perfect day for Reese Witherspoon as the actress and producer is selling the media company she founded to a newly formed company backed by private equity firm Blackstone Group. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed but The Wall Street Journal reported that the deal was worth about $900 million. Witherspoon, known for her roles in films such as “Legally Blonde” and “Walk the Line,” created Hello Sunshine in 2016. She will continue to oversee its day-to-day operations along with members of Hello Sunshine’s existing senior management team, including CEO Sarah Harden. Witherspoon and Harden will also serve as board members for the new media company run by entertainment executives Kevin Mayer and Tom Staggs. Hello Sunshine, which focuses on putting women at the center of its stories,…

With U.S. health officials recommending that children mask up in school this fall, parents and policy makers across the nation have been plunged anew into a debate over whether face coverings should be optional or a mandate. The delta variant of the coronavirus now threatens to upend normal instruction for a third consecutive school year. Some states have indicated they will probably heed the federal government’s guidance and require masks. Others will leave the decision up to parents. The controversy is unfolding at a time when many Americans are at their wits’ end with pandemic restrictions and others fear their children will be put at risk by those who don’t take the virus seriously enough. In a handful of Republican-led states, lawmakers made it illegal for schools to require masks.…

China’s biggest gaming company, Tencent Holdings, said it will limit gaming time for minors and ban children under age 12 from making in-game purchases after a state media article called games “spiritual opium.” Tencent’s pledge to curb gaming for minors came hours after the company’s stock plunged as much as 11% following a critique published by the Economic Information Daily, a newspaper affiliated with China’s official Xinhua News Agency. The newspaper article named Tencent’s wildly popular Honor of Kings game as one that minors were addicted to, and cited a student as saying that some played the game for eight hours a day. The online article was removed hours later. “‘Spiritual opium’ has grown into an industry worth hundreds of billions,” the newspaper said, adding that no industry should be…

Qatar Airways said Thursday it grounded 13 Airbus A350s over what it described as fuselages “degrading at an accelerated rate” in the long-range aircraft, further escalating a monthslong dispute with the European airplane maker over the issue. While Airbus declined to specifically discuss the announcement, Qatar Airways’ decision to ground the aircraft raised questions about the A350s’ carbon composite fuselage, designed to make the twin-aisle aircraft lighter and cheaper to operate by burning less jet fuel. Qatar Airways also is one of the world’s top operators of the aircraft. In its statement, Qatar Airways said it had been monitoring the degradation beneath the paint on the fuselage of the aircraft for some time. It described the issue as a “significant condition,” without elaborating. “Following the explicit written instruction of its…

Nintendo’s April-June profit declined 13% from the same period the previous year, when the hit game “Animal Crossing: New Horizons” dramatically boosted sales. Nintendo Co.’s profit for the fiscal first quarter totaled 92.7 billion yen ($843 million), down from 106 billion yen, the Japanese maker of “Super Mario” and “Pokemon” games said Thursday. Quarterly sales fell 10% to 322.6 billion yen ($2.9 billion). Sales of the Switch consoles dropped nearly 22% during the quarter to 4.45 million units, mainly because of the sales decline of the smaller Switch Lite, dedicated to handheld playing. The regular Switch works for both traditional at-home and portable play. “Animal Crossing,” released in March last year, didn’t sell as well this year as it did in the April-June quarter the previous year, when 10 million…

Despite the pandemic, the IRS received more than 7 million requests for new employer identification numbers between January 2020 and June 2021, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. As those businesses grow, many will reach an important milestone: hiring their first employees. Here are six things business owners should do first. 1. MAKE SURE YOU NEED HELP First, look for signs that your business can’t move forward without assistance. If you’re “personally at capacity” and receiving more orders than you can handle, it may be time to hire someone, says Phelan Spence , a services and financial analysis associate at JumpStart, a Cleveland-based nonprofit that works with entrepreneurs. Hiring may also be on the horizon for business owners who are missing deadlines, fielding customer complaints or thinking about…

Apple changed the game when it announced its M1 silicon processor, pushing the boundaries of what some thought was possible. Since then, big chipmakers are now bending the laws of physics to create nano transistors that can compete, and power the next generation of smartphones, desktops, televisions, and other devices. For consumers, it means huge innovations are just around the corner, alongside more powerful technologies. THE 2-NANOMETER RACE Though it would be unfair to give Apple all of the credit for innovations in the nano transistor industry, there’s no denying that the Cupertino company had companies running scared. For the first time, Apple could develop and manufacture its industry-leading phones, laptops, and accessories in-house, without relying on third parties like Intel and their schedule to push out new products. As…

Digital payments company Square Inc. says it has agreed to acquire Afterpay, which provides a “buy now, pay later” option for merchants, in an all-stock deal valued at about $29 billion. Square allows retailers to process credit card transactions using devices that plug into tablets or smartphones. The San Francisco-based company said it plans to integrate Afterpay into its services, enabling merchants to offer customers the option to pay for goods later without relying on a credit card. Afterpay users would be able to manage their installment payments directly in Square’s cash app. “Square and Afterpay have a shared purpose,” Square CEO Jack Dorsey said in a statement. Some 70 million people use Square’s cash app. As of June 30, Afterpay was serving more than 16 million users and nearly…

Zoom will pay $85 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that weak privacy controls opened too many peepholes into the personal information of users and that it was too easy for outsiders to disrupt video meetings during the early stages of the pandemic. The proposed agreement must still be approved by U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh. A hearing on the settlement is scheduled for Oct. 21 in San Jose, California. Millions of people in the U.S. who have used Zoom since March 31, 2020 could be eligible for a slice of the settlement that was reached over the weekend. The payment amounts are expected to average $34 or $35 for those who subscribed to Zoom’s paid version, and $11 or $12 for the overwhelming majority who used the free version,…

One little article separates James Gunn’s “The Suicide Squad” from David Ayer’s “Suicide Squad.” But, oh, what a difference a word makes. Just five years after the trainwreck that prompted Warner Bros. to retool its DC Comics universe, James Gunn’s nearly wholesale redo exists in an entirely different movie galaxy. “The Suicide Squad” may go down as one of the greatest, and quickest, do-overs in blockbusterdom. Like Gunn’s two “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies, “The Suicide Squad” is a chaotic, freewheeling inversion of much of what’s expected in a comic book movie. Here, heroes die (a lot of them). Most aren’t really heroes, either. Some aren’t even human. But they’ve been sprung from prison for a kamikaze mission on behalf of the U.S. government. In this motliest of crews, no…

Tyson Foods will require all of its U.S. employees to get vaccinated against COVID-19, becoming one of the first major employers of front-line workers to do so amid a resurgence of the virus. Microsoft also announced this week that it will require proof of vaccination for all employees, vendors and visitors to its U.S. offices starting in September, following similar actions recently taken by Google and Facebook. Microsoft also postponed its planned return to the workplace from September to no earlier than Oct. 4, although it will allow flexibility for some employees to continue working from home, including parents of children who are not eligible for vaccines. While vaccination mandates have gained traction among employers, many of the companies adopting them have workforces that can transition to remote locations easily.…

Wake up. Take a coronavirus test. Go to an empty arena. Practice or play a game. Return to the hotel. FaceTime family and friends who they’ve been separated from for weeks. Watch other games on television. Sleep. Such is the typical itinerary for basketball players at the Tokyo Olympics. For those who were in the NBA and WNBA bubbles in Florida last summer, it seems familiar. That has no doubt played a role in both U.S. basketball teams reaching the Olympic semifinals. There are clear similarities between what basketball players are having to endure at these Tokyo Olympics and what went on last summer for NBA players in Lake Buena Vista, Florida and WNBA players in Bradenton, Florida. The days have seemed a bit monotonous, there’s separation from loved ones…

Germany’s Siemens AG raised its outlook for the year Thursday, joining other major European industrial companies in signaling that the economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic is gathering pace despite parts shortages and concerns over the spread of the delta variant. Rebounding global demand for infrastructure and manufacturing software led to a sharp increase in orders in the April-June quarter at Munich-based Siemens AG, with an order from U.S. rail company Amtrak a large contributor. Siemens said orders saw “double-digit growth in all industrial businesses and reporting regions.” The engineering and manufacturing company raised its outlook for its fiscal year, joining Volkswagen and Airbus in raising their predictions for business performance amid a global recovery from the worst of the pandemic shutdowns in the April-June quarter a year ago. Siemens…

Uber’s ride-hailing service is regaining the momentum that it lost during the pandemic, but it’s coming at a cost that’s raising more doubts about the company’s ability to make money. At the same time, Uber’s unprofitable delivery service is still growing at a torrid pace, indicating that some homebound habits may be here to stay, even though people are going out again. Those two trends produced Uber’s best quarterly report since the pandemic clobbered the San Francisco company 17 months ago. The results announced for the April-June period included a rare profit that investors glossed over to focus on ongoing losses in Uber’s operations. The second-quarter profit stemmed from a one-time gain of $1.4 billion to recognize recent increases in the values of Uber’s stakes in China’s leading ride-hailing service,…

If you’re homeless and looking for temporary shelter in Hawaii’s capital, expect a visit from a robotic police dog that will scan your eye to make sure you don’t have a fever. That’s just one of the ways public safety agencies are starting to use Spot, the best-known of a new commercial category of robots that trot around with animal-like agility. The handful of police officials experimenting with the four-legged machines say they’re just another tool, like existing drones and simple wheeled robots, to keep emergency responders out of harm’s way as they scout for dangers. But privacy watchdogs — the human kind — warn that police are secretly rushing to buy the robots without setting safeguards against aggressive, invasive or dehumanizing uses. In Honolulu, the police department spent about…

The chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission said that investors need more protection in the cryptocurrency market, which he said is “rife with fraud, scams and abuse.” Gary Gensler, appointed by President Joe Biden to lead the body that regulates securities markets, listed several areas where crypto needed to be reigned in or regulated, particularly with regard to money laundering, sanctions, tax collection and extortion via ransomware. “Right now, we just don’t have enough investor protection in crypto,” Gensler said in remarks to the Aspen Institute’s forum on security, “Frankly, at this time, it’s more like the Wild West.” Digital currencies, like Bitcoin, have been left largely unregulated by major governments up to this point. In June, China ordered cryptocurrency mining operations shut down and banks started refusing to…

Sony’s April-June profit rose 9% to 211.8 billion yen ($1.9 billion) as the Japanese electronics and video game maker continued to benefit from a sales perk from the hit “Demon Slayer” animation film. Healthy results in its music streaming business and robust demand for digital cameras, image sensors and the PlayStation 5 video game console helped Tokyo-based Sony Corp.’s quarterly sales grow 15% to 2.26 trillion yen ($20.7 billion), the company said this week. Sony had posted a 193.6 billion yen quarterly profit the previous year. Sony raised its full year profit forecast to 700 billion yen ($6.4 billion) from an earlier 660 billion yen ($6 billion). The higher projection is still a drop from the 1 trillion yen profit Sony had racked up the previous fiscal year, when its…

A recommendation to nullify the election results of an Amazon union vote in Bessemer, Alabama is breathing new life into the labor movement. The recommendation was issued Monday by a hearing officer for the National Labor Relations Board, who said that Amazon potentially interfered with the April election in which warehouse workers overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to unionize. Labor experts say that it’s rare for a hearing officer to call for a new election but in the case of Amazon, there’s a good chance it will happen since the NLRB regional director usually sticks with the hearing officer’s guidance. Moreover, the labor board’s standards in determining a new election favors the union, not Amazon. The board needs to only figure out whether the company “reasonably tended to interfere with the…

Remember lighthearted throwback adventure movies? “The Mummy”? “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”? “Pirates of the Caribbean”? The first one, at least? How about the classic romantic banter of a handsome but wholly mismatched pair in “Romancing the Stone” or “The African Queen”? “ Jungle Cruise ” certainly does and isn’t about to let you forget it, either. This is a film whose sole purpose is to remind you of at least a dozen other movies that you remember fondly and coast from there. And it almost gets away with it thanks entirely to its charismatic and entirely game stars Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson, who mostly make you forget that you’re watching a movie based on a theme park ride that seems to have been made-to-order at the nostalgia…

A Russian space official blamed a software problem on a newly docked science lab for briefly knocking the International Space Station out of position. The space station lost control of its orientation for 47 minutes, when Russia’s Nauka science lab accidentally fired its thrusters a few hours after docking, pushing the orbiting complex from its normal configuration. The station’s position is key for getting power from solar panels and for communications with space support teams back on Earth. The space station’s communications with ground controllers also blipped out twice for a few minutes. Vladimir Solovyov, flight director of the space station’s Russian segment, blamed the incident on a “short-term software failure.” In a statement the Russian space agency Roscosmos, Solovyov said because of the failure, a direct command to turn…

States across the U.S. are looking to adopt new recycling regimes that require producers of packaging to pay for its inevitable disposal — but industry is digging in to try to halt the movement. Maine became the first state to adopt such a program in July when Democratic Gov. Janet Mills signed a bill that requires producers of products that involve packaging materials to pay into a new state fund. The fund will be used to reimburse municipalities for recycling and waste management costs. Oregon has approved a similar bill that is awaiting signature from Democratic Gov. Kate Brown, and at least six other state legislatures have similar bills pending, said Yinka Bode-George, environmental health manager for the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators. Lawmakers in at least four other states…