Last Friday, Volkswagen announced that its Zwickau plant has produced its last combustion engined vehicle. The last car to roll off the Zwickau production line was a Golf R station wagon with a 2.0 liter petrol engine in case you were wondering. [Read: Will the Lordstown Endurance electric truck beat the Tesla Cybertruck and Rivian R1T to market?] Automakers have been producing combustion cars in Zwickau for over 100 years....

What’s worse though, is they STOLE it, from ME! According to Car and Driver, VW of America posted a press release announcing that it’s changing its name to Voltswagen, to make itself appear more EV friendly. The post has since been removed, and it looks nothing more than perhaps a premature April Fool’s day gaff. Even though it was allegedly confirmed to CNBC. But the biggest atrocity is they stole the joke from me....

The trick was shared this week by Metaphysic.ai, a London-based startup behind the viral Tom Cruise deepfakes. The company used DeepFaceLive, a popular app for video deepfakes, to transform a volunteer into various celebrities. Most of the recreations were impressive when they looked straight-ahead. But once the faces rotated a full 90-degrees, the images became distorted and the spell was broken. The team believes the defects emerge because the software uses fewer reference points to estimate lateral views of faces....

It’s not often you find a founder so smitten with their own product as Roebyem Anders is with solar panels. Not only did she dedicate her career to getting them on every single rooftop; she also owns a solar panel-covered dress. Anders says she “fell in love” with the technology during a business trip in Mexico. “I was there for one of my first solar energy projects. During my trip, there was a large-scale power outage....

But we’re all busy people, right? To prove such a hypothesis you’d need to look at figures and facts and — sickeningly — plot that into some sort of scatter graph like a fucking nerd. Who in their right mind has time for something like that? Well, today, me. Anyway, without further ado, here’s a graph plotting iPhone screen sizes against the year the model was released: If you’re reading that on your phone, switch to “Desktop Mode” in order to get the fully interactive one with more detail....

The big idea A newly discovered fast radio burst has some unique properties that are simultaneously giving astronomers important clues into what may cause these mysterious astronomical phenomena while also calling into question one of the few things scientists thought they knew about these powerful flares, as my colleagues and I describe in a new study in Nature on June 8, 2022. Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are extremely bright pulses of radio waves that come from faraway galaxies....

From the 1960s to the ’80s, Vera Rubin, Kent Ford and Ken Freeman gathered more evidence in support of this hypothesis. They ultimately showed that most galaxies must contain six times as much invisible mass as they do visible stars, gas and dust. Other observations in favor of dark matter followed, such as gravitational lensing and anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. Gravitational lensing is a phenomenon in which light beams get bent around massive objects; the cosmic microwave background is an outer layer of the universe that would be quite homogeneous without dark matter but is rather lumpy in reality....

Now, it plans to let you unlock the phone with Face ID while wearing your mask — but you would need an Apple Watch. As noted by Engadget, the new iOS 14.5 developer beta allows you to do that if you’re wearing an unlocked Apple Watch. [Read: India’s new customs duties will make your next phone pricier] This is how the feature would work: you’ll have to manually enable an option to unlock your iPhone with a less accurate Face ID along with your Apple Watch for authentication....

They’ve been hailed as a money saver, an essential feature for EVs, and in some cases: a game changer. What am I talking about? Heat pumps of course! The idea is that heat pumps prevent excess heat created by an EV’s battery and drivetrain from going to waste. They absorb the excess heat generated by EV‘s battery and drivetrain to improve the car‘s efficiency, range, and driving experience. The name sounds simple enough, but what exactly do they do?...

But what explains Barcelona’s popularity among entrepreneurs and what is it like to be a founder there? TNW traveled to Barcelona to interview a host of international and local founders to hear what they had to say about the ecosystem’s strengths and weaknesses. Who exactly did we talk to? Let’s run through them quickly along with a short tease of what they had to say — and do watch the whole video to find out more about Barcelona!...

To them, these technologies represent salvation from corporate power over the internet, government intrusions on liberty, poverty and virtually everything else that ails society. But so far, the reality has mostly involved financial speculation with popular cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and dogecoin, which soar and plunge with alarming regularity. So what are cryptocurrencies and blockchain good for? As an expert on emerging technologies, I believe that decentralized finance, known as DeFi, is the first solid answer to that question....

Earlier this month, in a regulatory filing, the company said it wants to “advance money or give credit on such terms as may seem expedient, and with or without security, to customers and others.” However, as the company is barred by law from doing any banking business, it’ll have to execute this product through partnerships with existing banks. [Read: WhatsApp increases group call limit from 4 to 8 people] In 2018, WhatsApp started testing its Unified Payments Interface (UPI) based product in India with a cap of 1 million users....

Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday that the feature is now being rolled out to iOS and Android users globally. The feature secures backups stored on Google Drive or Apple’s iCloud with end-to-end encryption. This encryption will provide more privacy and security, but it’s not enabled by default. Here’s how to turn the feature on: Zuckerberg said that neither WhatsApp nor your backup service provider will be able to read your backups....

With the English app only available since September, it’s too early to tell how the system is actually doing. But even based on other countries whose apps have been available much longer, there’s still very little evidence that they can make a real difference to fighting COVID-19 – or that they can’t. While this doesn’t mean we should write off contact-tracing apps altogether, the lack of evidence is a concern given the focus and money devoted to these apps and the policy decisions made around them....

Now, research groups around the world are exploring the possibility of artificial gestation. For instance, one group successfully grew a lamb in an artificial womb for four weeks. Australian researchers have also experimented with artificial gestation for lambs and sharks. And in recent weeks, researchers in The Netherlands have received €2.9m ($4.66m) to develop a prototype for gestating premature babies. So it’s important to consider some of the ethical issues this technology might bring....

There are a lot of reasons that a faster spaceship is a better one, and nuclear-powered rockets are a way to do this. They offer many benefits over traditional fuel-burning rockets or modern solar-powered electric rockets, but there have been only eight U.S. space launches carrying nuclear reactors in the last 40 years. However, last year the laws regulating nuclear space flights changed and work has already begun on this next generation of rockets....

In the UK, the link between obesity and poorer coronavirus outcomes and the country’s new obesity strategy led to doctors prescribing cycling to improve patients’ health. While manufacturers and retailers reported a rise in bicycle sales and cycling in general during the pandemic, there remain many people who may not feel fit enough to cycle very far (or at all), have a long commute, or live in hilly places. For these people, bicycles that provide electrical assistance for the rider when pedaling, known as electric bikes or e-bikes, have proved an attractive option because they make cycling easier....

But I have some bad news. That steering wheel probably won’t make it in to the production model. Sorry. Yeah, it’s super cool — and you’d be able to drive along pretending you’re in Knight Rider or something — but steering wheels have to be complete, round, and not have any bits missing. [Read: How Netflix shapes mainstream culture, explained by data] According to legal resource HG.org, cars “cannot have a ‘butterfly’ shaped steering wheel or a fighter jet like joystick....

Hacking always sounds intriguing…but it might not be something you instinctively assume could be a new career. It’s…you know, hacking. People get arrested for that sort of thing. But not if you do it right. The process of ethical hacking, using your skills to spot bugs and uncover exploitable windows in the systems of some of the world’s biggest companies, is exploding. According to Cybersecurity Ventures, there are currently about 3....

But I’m too excited to talk about any of that until we get into the new subscription service for EUIV. Paradox started testing an EU4 DLC subscription model at least a year ago. And, while we recently saw Crusader Kings II launch a similar service, we hadn’t seen hide nor hair of a launch date for the EUIV service until now: it launches on Steam on 18 March for $4....