Month: March 2022

Enlarge / Volkswagen’s ID. Buzz will have the electric minivan market to itself when it arrives in 2024. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Nostalgia is a powerful emotion, particularly when you’re selling things. That’s why automakers regularly dip into their back catalogs to dust off a beloved nameplate or silhouette and marry it to modern underpinnings.

And you can’t get much more modern than a battery-electric powertrain, as in the case of Volkswagen’s new ID. Buzz. (Yes, the name has a period in it.) The company that gave us the new Beetle based on the much-loved old Beetle has now drawn inspiration from its iconic T1 Microbus. Although we saw the initial ID. Buzz concept back in 2017, the vehicle is back as a production model. It goes on sale in Europe next year and in the US in 2024.

If you don’t want a two-tone paint job for the ID. Buzz, that’s possible. But we think the two-tone will be more popular. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Depending how you look at it, the ID. Buzz has been two decades in the making. Back in 2001, Volkswagen designed a new Microbus, which looked cool but never progressed past the concept stage. Ten years later, VW tried again with Bulli. Although Bulli looked less gainly than the Microbus, it was perhaps a more realistic representation of a production van, with a bulging nose to accommodate an engine bay and front impact protection.

(credit: Getty Images)

Amazon lied to Congress about its use of third-party seller data, the House Judiciary Committee said today. In a letter to the Department of Justice, the committee chairs asked prosecutors to investigate the company for criminal obstruction of Congress.

“Amazon lied through a senior executive’s sworn testimony that Amazon did not use any of the troves of data it had collected on its third-party sellers to compete with them,” the letter says (emphasis in the original).

The committee said that not only was Amazon’s sworn testimony knowingly false but that repeated attempts to get Amazon to correct the record or to provide evidence to substantiate its claims were either rebuffed or ignored.

Enlarge / Apple Thunderbolt 4 Pro Cable. (credit: Apple)

Thunderbolt 4 can hit speeds of up to 40Gbps and support up to two 4K displays or even an 8K panel. And with Apple’s newly listed cable, you can reap those benefits from a nearly 10-foot distance.

As spotted by The Verge today, Apple has listed a 9.8-foot-long Thunderbolt 4 Pro Cable on its online store, saying the product is “coming soon.” That length offers greater flexibility than the longest Thunderbolt 4 offerings from cable makers like Belkin (6.6 feet), Cable Matters (6.6 feet), and Plugable (6.4 feet). The extra length could be just what the doctor ordered for large offices and studios. Even the countless brands on Amazon don’t offer a Thunderbolt 4 cable at a comparable length.

As with any product from Apple, the 9.8-foot Thunderbolt 4 cable comes at a premium. Apple is selling the cable for $159, or about $16.22 per foot. For comparison, Belkin’s longest Thunderbolt 4 cable is $10.61 per foot, Cable Matters’ is $9.09 per foot, and Plugable’s is around $10.94 per foot.

Enlarge (credit: Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating three investors for alleged massive insider trading just ahead of Microsoft’s January announcement of merger plans with Activision Blizzard, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

Film and music executive David Geffen, broadcasting executive Barry Diller, and Diller’s stepson Alexander von Furstenberg collectively spent over $108 million to buy $40/share call options of Activision Blizzard stock on January 14, according to the report. On January 18, when the Microsoft merger plans were announced, those shares rose 26 percent to $82.31, representing an unrealized gain of about $60 million for the three investors. The value of those options could increase further if the merger goes through at Microsoft’s proposed per-share price of $95.

“It was simply a lucky bet,” Diller told the Journal. “We acted on no information of any kind from anyone. It is one of those coincidences.”

Enlarge / The transplant team with the replacement heart. (credit: The transplant team with the replacement heart.)

On Wednesday, the University of Maryland Medical Center announced that David Bennett, the first human to receive a pig heart transplant, died on Tuesday, March 8. His death comes roughly two months after the transplant; the cause of death wasn’t specified.

The university’s statement is short on details, and those will be critical for understanding the prospects for future transplants of this sort. Bennett was in very poor health at the time of the transplant, with his heart requiring mechanical assistance to keep him alive, so there are many potential explanations for his death that have nothing to do with the transplant. All the university is revealing is that the organ was not immediately rejected by Bennett’s immune system and that his health had started declining several days prior to his death.

Understanding the causes of his death is critical because Bennett will not be the last human to receive a pig organ. Shortly after his transplant, a different group published results from an early clinical trial using hearts from the same genetically engineered pigs. In this case, the hearts were transplanted into brain-dead individuals rather than being used to keep someone alive, but the trial clearly represented a step toward normal transplants.