Month: May 2022

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Update (5/30/22 10:55 am ET): We’ve updated our roundup of recommended Memorial Day deals for the holiday proper, crossing out expired offers and adding new discounts on Nintendo’s Switch Pro Controller, Roomba robot vacuums, Roku streamers, and Xbox Series S bundles, among others.

Original post (5/28/22 2:30 pm ET): It’s Memorial Day weekend, which means the time has come for another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of good tech deals from around the web includes all the best offers we could dig up from this weekend’s crop of holiday sales. While Memorial Day promotions generally focus on home goods, appliances, and mattresses more than electronics, we’ve still found a few gadget deals of note for those who can’t wait for more tech-centric sales events like Black Friday or Amazon Prime Day.

The highlights include a number of deals on Apple devices. The Apple Watch Series 7, for instance, is back down to $329, which is about $25 off its street price online, $70 off Apple’s MSRP, and generally a good price for the top pick in our guide to the best smartwatches. The 256GB version of the latest iPad Air is available for $679, which matches the lowest price we’ve tracked, while the MacBook Air is discounted to $900, which matches the lowest price we’ve seen this year. (Just note that the latter is expected to receive a refresh with a faster chip at some point in 2022, if you can afford to wait.) Best Buy is running a promotion that gives a bonus $10 in store credit if you buy a $100 Apple Gift Card, and other gadgets like the third-gen AirPods and MagSafe Charger are cheaper than we typically see as well.

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Thirty years ago, on May 29, 1992, Apple announced its most groundbreaking and revolutionary product yet, the Newton MessagePad. It was released to great fanfare a year later, but as a product, it could only be described as a flop. Widely mocked in popular culture at the time, the Newton became a poster child for expensive but useless high-tech gadgets. Even though the device improved dramatically over time, it failed to gain market share, and it was discontinued in 1997. Yet while the Newton was a failure, it galvanized Apple engineers to create something better—and in some ways led to the creation of the iPad and the iPhone.

The vision thing

Steve Jobs, who co-founded Apple in 1976, had wooed marketing guru John Sculley away from PepsiCo to become the new Apple CEO in 1983. However, their relationship broke down, and Jobs resigned from Apple two years later after a bitter power struggle. Although Sculley made Apple profitable by cutting costs and introducing new Macintosh models, he felt lost without Apple’s visionary founder. So when Apple Fellow Alan Kay burst into Sculley’s office and warned him that “next time, we won’t have Xerox” (to borrow ideas from), he took it seriously.

Apple Knowledge Navigator concept video.

In 1986, Sculley commissioned a team to create two “high concept” videos for a new type of computing device that Apple could conceivably build in the future. These “Knowledge Navigator” promos showed a foldable, tablet-like device with a humanoid “virtual assistant” that interacted via spoken instructions. While some derided the impracticality of these sci-fi vignettes, they fired up Apple employees and got them thinking about the future of computing.

Enlarge / A brown bear with two cubs looks out of its den in the woods under a large rock in winter. (credit: Byrdyak | Getty)

Every spring, as days in the north stretch longer and melting snow trickles into streams, drowsy animals ranging from grizzlies to ground squirrels start to rally from hibernation. It’s tempting to say that that they are “waking up,” but hibernation is more complicated and mysterious than a simple long sleep: Any animal that can spend months underground without eating or drinking and still emerge ready to face the world has clearly mastered an amazing trick of biology.

The roster of animals that hibernate includes all manner of rodents, some amphibians and even a few primates (several species of dwarf lemurs), but bears are literally the biggest hibernators of them all. Adult grizzly and black bears weigh as much as American football players, or more, with the energy and curiosity of preschoolers, but they have no trouble hunkering down for months at time. The choreography that goes into shutting down a creature this big defies easy explanation, says Elena Gracheva, a neurophysiologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. “Hibernation is so complex it requires adaptations at multiple levels,” she says.

Bear hibernation offers important insights into the workings of large mammals, especially us, explains Gracheva, who coauthored an exploration of the physiology of hibernation in the 2020 Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology. A better understanding of the process could potentially change our approach to a wide range of human conditions, including stroke, osteoporosis, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s (see sidebar).

Enlarge / Having this guy stomp through might mean that things would struggle to grow there afterwards. (credit: Roger Harris)

Words I did not expect to read in a scientific paper this week: “The similarity in mass and contact area between modern farm vehicles and sauropods raises the question: What was the mechanical impact of these prehistoric animals on land productivity?” The paper, from Thomas Keller and Dani Or, raises what may be a significant worry: Farm vehicles have grown over the past few decades, to the point where they may be compacting the subsurface soil where roots of crops extend. This poses a risk to agricultural productivity.

The paper then compares that compaction risk to the one posed by the largest animals to ever roam our land: sauropods.

The big crunch

We think of the ground as being solid, but gaps and channels within soil are critical to plant life, since they allow air and water to reach roots. Soil compaction, in its extreme form, gets rid of all these spaces, making the ground much less hospitable for plants. And compaction is hard to reverse; it can take decades of plant and animal activity to break up the compacted soil again and re-establish a healthy ecosystem.