Month: March 2022

Enlarge / Purists may be aghast, but the commercial reality is that Lotus needs a volume-seller, and that means an SUV. At least it is fully electric. (credit: Lotus)

This week we found out what an electric Lotus SUV will look like when the company showed off a new car called the Eletre. Not everyone will be a fan of the styling, and others will just object to the idea of Lotus making an SUV, electric or otherwise, in the first place.

But keep an open mind, at least until the first road tests. As long as it drives like a Lotus, it might be just the thing to bring a lot of new customers to the marque, not just in Europe and China but here in the US from 2024. And as Porsche so ably demonstrates, it’s a good way to pay for the stuff that makes car nerds get hot under the collar.

The English manufacturer of lightweight sports cars has been in an unusual position these last few years—sufficiently funded, thanks to the same deep pockets that rejuvenated Volvo. Instead of having to warm over an increasingly old platform for small two-seaters, Lotus got to work developing not one but four new architectures.

Enlarge / The string of red dots represents the area of maximum magnification, with the location of Earendel indicated by the white arrow. (credit: NASA, ESA, Brian Welch (JHU), Dan Coe (STScI))

We don’t fully understand what the Universe’s first stars looked like. We know they must have formed from hydrogen and helium since most heavier elements were only produced after the stars formed. And we know that the lack of those heavier elements changed the dynamics of star formation in a way that meant the first stars must have been very large. But just how large remains an unanswered question.

Now, researchers are announcing that they might be a step closer to directly observing one of those stars. Thanks to a fortuitous alignment between a distant star and an intervening galaxy cluster, gravitational lensing has magnified an object that was present less than a billion years after the Big Bang. The object is likely to either be a lone star or a compact system of two or three stars. And its discoverers say they have already booked time for follow-on observations with NASA’s latest space telescope.

Gravity’s lens

Lenses work by arranging materials so that light travels on a curved path through them. Gravity, which distorts space-time itself, can perform a similar function, altering space so that light travels a curved path. There have been plenty of examples of the gravitational influences of objects in the foreground creating a lens-like effect, amplifying and/or distorting the light from a more distant object behind them.

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor)

LG Electronics quit the Android world last July, and while the company never produced a flagship smartphone capable of hanging with the best in the market, LG was a prominent source of cheap smartphones, especially in the US. Thanks to a new report from Counterpoint Research, we’re now getting a look at what a US market without LG looks like, and the big winner is apparently Lenovo’s phone division, Motorola.

Counterpoint Research shows Motorola capturing the number three spot in the US smartphone market, with 10 percent market share. Apple takes the top spot with 58 percent, and Samsung grabs a 22 percent share. It looks like LG supply cratered around September 2021.

Counterpoint’s current market-share chart for the US. (credit: Counterpoint Research )

Counterpoint says Motorola’s rise is mostly due to its success at the lower end of the market and its good relationship with US carriers. Research Director Jeff Fieldhack notes in the report that “Motorola has been a key OEM filling the void left by LG’s exit. The OEM has all the key characteristics major carriers look for—a full portfolio, ability to ramp volumes, and low return rates. Motorola’s sub-$300 portfolio—Moto G Stylus, Moto G Power and Moto G Pure—has driven its success in the US. Thanks to its reliability, Motorola has been a key free ‘switch’ device, a device carriers use to move subscribers from networks that are being shut off or as a device MVNOs (mobile virtual network operators) use when changing network partners.”

Enlarge / If you can’t buy Loop Hero, the developers encourage you to pirate it.

With Russian gamers effectively cut off from purchases on most major gaming platforms due to corporate sanctions against the country, the Russian game developer behind indie darling Loop Hero is encouraging Russian customers to pirate the game.

In a Sunday post on Russian social network VK (Google translated version), Loop Hero developer Four Quarters said, “In such difficult times, we can only help everyone to raise the pirate flag (together with vpn)” to get the game. The developer then included a link to a copy of Loop Hero on a popular Russian torrent tracker to aid in that process directly.

In a follow-up post the next day (Google translated version), Four Quarters insisted that “we didn’t do anything special, there’s nothing wrong with torrents.” The company also notes that players wanting to offer the developer donations in lieu of buying the game should refrain. “The truth is that everything is fine with us, send this support to your family and friends at this difficult time,” they wrote.