Category: Technology

Apple will no longer require corporate employees to wear masks at “most locations,” according to an internal email from the company’s COVID-19 response team seen by TheVerge. “We are writing to share an update to our current protocols,” the email reads. “In light of current circumstances, wearing a face mask will no longer be required in most locations.”

The company goes on to say that employees can, of course, continue to wear them if they prefer. “We recognize that everyone’s personal circumstances are different. Don’t hesitate to continue wearing a face mask if you feel more comfortable doing so. Also, please respect every individual’s decision to wear a mask or not.”

Apple is removing the mask mandate despite the fact that the number of new daily cases in the US currently sits at over 114,000, according to the CDC. Near Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, San Francisco’s BART metro system recently brought back its mask mandate, following the spread of the BA.5 COVID-19 variant that can evade immunity from past COVID-19 infection and vaccination.

Earlier this year, Apple said it would require employees to work at least three days per week at the office by May. However, it later softened that stance, saying that staff can continue to stay at home if they’re not comfortable.

Competitive Pokemon trainers are both excited and terrified at the recent rule changes in the video game championships (VGC), where players compete against one another via pokemon sword and Shield in an array of leagues. Mythical Pokémon are now allowed for official tournament play for the first time. This means that nobody is safe from heavy-hitters like Megearna or Victini, and the community is scrambling to find counters. Some of the most truly diabolic players have already started to add broken Pokémon to their own teams.

The rules for the latest Series 13 ranked matches, starting September 1, were posted yesterday for pokemon sword and Shield, this series focused on the Galar region, The rules mainly remained the same from the last series, except for an extended eligible Pokémon list. The information was originally spotted by the Pokemon fansite Serebiiand Kotaku was able to confirm the full list of eligible Pokémon in the Pokémon Home mobile app.

Mythical Pokémon are better known as event legendaries, and are normally close to impossible to obtain through normal gameplay. This group includes Mew, Celebi, Jirachi, Arceus, and so on. Previously, you had to participate in special in-person events in order to obtain these rare Pokémon. Now, the only mythical Pokémon that are excluded from the eligibility list are the ones that can’t be obtained in Sword and Shield.

These days, mythical Pokémon are much easier to obtain than in the past. The dreaded Megearna can be obtained by completing the Alola Pokédex in pokemon sun and moonand Mew can be captured and transferred over from the Pokémon GO app. Victini can be captured in the Pokémon Sword and Shield DLC. So not being able to access limited time events is less of a competitive disadvantage now than it has been in the past.

The new series rules complicates the meta further: There are no restrictions on the number of legendary and mythical Pokémon that players can bring to a ranked match. Previously, up to two legendaries had been allowed in tournaments under the “GS rules” introduced in Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver.

Series 13 kicks off September 1, and runs until October 31. After that, things will shift over to the freshly released violet and Scarlet, with their mid-November release. For now there’s absolutely nothing stopping competitors from being curb stomped by a full squad of broken legendaries and mythicals. And VGC Pokemon players have absolutely no mercy.

Each edition we take a look at the latest releases from the cycling world. Here’s what’s crossed the BA desk this month.

New Colnago C68

Legendary Italian bike builders Colnago have announced (drum roll…) the C68. This stunning machine is the company’s highest-end model and comes packed with the latest technology.

In releasing the bike Colnago also announced a direct-to-consumer purchase option—’from traditional B2B to Omnichannel’ as they put it—potential owners will have the option to buy direct from the Colnago website or even their app.

The bottom line is a price range of A$17,500 to A$26,000 (depending upon build options, exchange rate and freight), for one of the bikes that is hand-made in Italy.

A limited edition ‘C68 Road’ will also be available, this version featuring custom titanium components that are individually 3D-printed at Colnago central in Italy.

More at www.colnago.com

Sennheiser Sport Wireless Earbuds

We know headphones and earbuds can be a dangerous distraction when cycling, but this new release from Sennheiser allows some outside noise to enter for improved awareness. The German company’s Sport True Wireless earbuds offer superior audio performance with what they term an ‘Adaptable Acoustic’ feature.

Users have a choice of open or closed ear adapters, allowing them to tailor listening experience to their activities. The open ear adapters—in combination with Aware EQ settings—help to reduce noise and allow some outside sounds to enter for better situational awareness.

There’s a 9-hour battery life plus a further 18 hours of power in the charging case.

Sennheiser Sport True Wireless are available now for an RRP of $199.95.

Giant Dash L200 GPS

A dual release from Giant and Stages, the 200 series is the latest in Stages line of GPS/computer units.

Available in two sizes, the L (larger) and M (a medium sized unit), both models have full color screens and an enviable array of internal functions and features.

Truly rich in data, the L model shows up to 14 values ​​while the smaller-screened unit shows up to 10. With a crystal clear screen and 11hr battery life, this is a very impressive unit. We are currently riding and reviewing it with more on the BA website soon.

More at www.giant-bicycles.com

New Book: ‘Pain & Privilege, Inside Le Tour’ by Sophie Smith

The Tour de France—the race that captures competitors and spectators from across the globe with tales of human endurance, headlines of crashes and triumphs and its stunning landscapes. Yet there is more to this event than what plays out over the news for four weeks in July.

For a decade, Sophie Smith has been on the ground, witnessing the true cost of the contest. With contributions from Caleb Ewan, Cadel Evans, Richie Porte, Robbie McEwen, Sam Bennett, Marcel Kittel, Michael Matthews, Matt White & more.

Pain & Privilege: Inside Le Tour is a riveting backstage exploration of the humanity behind the spectacle. From the politics and strategies of riders, to the physical sufferings and exhaustion.

It’s available in bookstores and via online retailers such as Booktopia as well as direct from Ultimo Press via www.ultimopress.com

Fizik 3D Vento Argo Adaptive Saddle

Fizik’s ‘Adaptive’ 3D-printed saddle padding has expanded to the Argo range. Unveiled at Sea Otter 2022, the new saddle features similar 3D-printed lattice cushioning to the high-end Antares Evo Adaptive.

A short-nosed, power-style saddle, the Argo is suitable for a wide range of riding styles from road to gravel to cross country MTB. Coupling 3D-printing with the Argo shape, the new release features ‘zonal cushioning’ for improved comfort and stability, and is available in 140 and 150mm widths.

The Vento Argo Adaptive is 265mm long, 75mm high and has lightweight 7 x 7mm kium (black alloy) rails. Overall weight is 224g and the RRP is $370 (140mm) and $428 (150mm).

See your local Fizik dealer for more.

Easton Dropper Post & Lever

A dropper post on a gravel bike? Absolutely! The EA90 AX dropper post and lever have been specifically designed for drop bar off-road bikes.

Tested and used in many major oversea races and events, the dropper gives 50mm of drop for lower center of gravity and to help get the saddle out of the way for trickier downhill sections of the trail.

The post is suitable for a 27.2mm clamp and features solidly assembled mechanical internals and quiet operation thanks to spring guides. To the actuator cable, and it can be attached from either direction for easy compatibility.

Easton also have a slick and stylish gravel dropper lever that pairs perfectly with the post. Both are top quality components and highly recommended!

RRP EA90AX post $585.00. RRP AZ Dropper lever $129.00

More at www.ridefoxaustralia.com.au

New Eco Conscious Kit From Trek

Trek have released a range of new eco-friendly apparel they say delivers maximum performance while having far less of an impact on the planet.

Technologies include recycling scrap textiles from the manufacturing and cutting process and using them in shorts. In addition, a selection of their new jerseys contain fabric made from discarded water bottles that’s been converted into plastic pellets then woven into yarn.

How do they ride? Over the past few weeks we’ve had the opportunity to ride and review the new Circuit range. Presented in paper (not plastic) packaging, the jersey has a soft and supple feeling and is super comfortable on the skin. While simple and minimalist, the jersey has a classy and high quality feel and attention to detail (for example the zip stitching) is outstanding.

Similarly soft and comfortable, the bibs are made of 77% recycled nylon and 23% recycled Elastane. The chamois is Trek branded and proved comfortable over a number of 40-50km test rides.

Overall it’s subtly stylish, on trend, and ‘very 2022’ kit. We’ve found it to be soft and supple while looking great and performing well.

More at trekbikes.com

Finish Line Fibrelink Tubeless Sealant

Ever tried to count the number of tubeless sealants currently available? There are absolutely plenty of them! So much so, one of the most popular questions over the past few years has been ‘what sealant are you running?’

The major point of difference in the latest release from Finish Line is the inclusion of small Kevlar fibers in the latex formula.

We’ve recently installed, ridden and tested it and, in all honesty, can’t really vouch for it’s sealing properties due to not puncturing for a while.

That said, it’s made in the USA, is quite a thin and low viscosity mix, and therefore very simple & easy to apply. Finish Line say Fibrelink offers stronger and faster seals for punctures up to 8mm across! They also claim it is a longer lasting sealant.

Suitable for road, gravel and MTB applications, the other bonus is it comes in a handy 240ml plastic bottle with a spout suitable for Presta valves.

Ask for it at your local bike shop or visit http://www.velovita.com.au

WHOOP

If you watched the Giro d’Italia on GCN / Eurosport you probably saw the data updates from several star participants. Riding with WHOOP monitoring bands, pro’s including Matthieu van der Poel shared live data updates with the audience.

A wrist or apparel-mounted device, WHOOP monitors sleep, recovery and daily effort around the clock to deliver insights and help athletes of all abilities improve performance.

Bicycling Australia are currently testing and reviewing the system and will have a detailed report next edition.

For more on this interesting training and recover aid visit www.whoop.com

Koo Supernova Eyewear

Ultra light at just 21g, the Supernova from Koo are one-piece, frameless, high-performance eyewear from the Italian sunglasses arm of Kask.

Hand-assembled in Italy, they ooze quality and offer a fantastic fit due to the flexibility of the single lens. After recent testing of a pair with white frames and a Category 3 Turquoise lens, it’s fair to say you can hardly feel these lightweight sunnies on your face.

With a crisp and clear Carl Zeiss lens, they not only look great on but offer bright and sharp clarity. The Supernova’s dock well with Kask helmets and have proven to be a sensational addition to the kit.

Ask for them at your local bike store or read more at www.kooworld.cc

Challenge Tire Fitting Tool

Tubeless tires offer so many advantages over running old-school tubes, but one negative can be getting them onto the rim in the
first place.

Italian bike tire company Challenge have come up with a smart and simple solution for the perpetual ‘this damn tire won’t fit!’ issue with their tire fitting and seating tool.

Constructed of a high density synthetic polymer (which translates to super strong!), the tool is designed to be safe to use with beaded carbon and alloy rim designs. It’s also suitable for tubed tyres, with the design preventing any potential contact or damage to an inner tube during installation.

Via single-handed application, the tool offers far more leverage and grip of the tight tubeless tire, and makes fitting a breeze.

We have been using the tool over the past couple of months here
in the BA workshop and can vouch for it’s ease, simplicity, strength and abilities.

Quite simply, if you change tires regularly this is a workshop, car boot or toolbox essential!

The RRP is around $30.

More at www.challengetires.com or ask for the tool at your LBS.

Logitech and Tencent Games are partnering to create a handheld device tailored for cloud gaming. There are no images of it yet, but the handheld will support multiple cloud gaming services including Xbox Cloud Gaming and Nvidia GeForce Now when it launches later this year.

Porsche restomod specialist Paul Stephens has revealed a modern take on the revered Porsche 911 993, with drastic weight reductions and power uplifts.

Called the Autoart 993R, it combines an altered body of the standard, air-cooled 993 Carrera 2 – which was produced between 1994-1998 – with original Porsche 993RS kit, as well as the latest Porsche GT-derived components, and bespoke, lightweight parts.

This, the firm says, gives it the “rawness and charm of an air-cooled Porsche” but fitted with modern technology, lightweight engineering, which delivers enhanced performance, styling and driving experience over the original model, but with modern-day comfort.

The car, born from a bespoke Autoart customer brief but now “production-ready”, weighs in at 1220kg wet, 150kg lighter than when the 911 993 was first released. This has come from a drastic cutting of fat, which includes the deletion of the original sunroof, the steel bonnet replaced with a Porsche Motorsport aluminum version, bespoke front and rear bumpers, and lightweight racing glass fitted for the side and rear windows.

Under the bonnet, a 360bhp flat-six powerplant – based on the engine from a 993RS – is found, but with capacity increased to 3.8 liters from 3.6 litres. A cheaper 330bhp engine option is also available.

Both engines have been upgraded with a crankshaft from a Porsche 911 GT3 997, along with RSR pistons, and other parts from Porsche Motorsport. As expected, this power is sent to the rear wheels, with brakes coming from the 993RS.

Inside, the original interior has been given bespoke tweeks, which includes carbonfibre Recaro seats, integrated roll-cage, and all non-essential electronics deleted to reduce weight and improve engagement.

Do any of you remember the Dragon Ball Z Abridged series on YouTube? How about the Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged series? Now imagine this: what if people did that for video games? Enter Wind Waker Rewritten.

The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker is easily my favorite Zelda game. Perhaps it comes from nostalgia, considering it was the first Zelda game I ever finished, but there’s very little I don’t love about that darn game. It’s hard to think about what could be added to improve the overall experience. My thoughts and feelings about Wind Waker align perfectly with Patrick Marlborough’s stellar piece about it.

And yet, a hero comes along. Not Link. An artist and modder known as approx.

Aproxm has created a romhack for Wind Waker that keeps the vast majority of the game intact. However, what it adds gives the game a whole new tone in the best way. Approxm’s Wind Waker Rewritten romhack adds over 10,000 new lines of dialogue, reimagined cutscenes and characterizations of many, many NPCs, new video files, and a handful of texture edits. Check out the trailer below.

Wind Waker already had its own special kind of humor, but this romhack adds a jam-packed level of personality to everybody you meet, from main NPCs to the odd extra. It’s hilarious and a whole lot of fun.

What if the King of Red Lions was a rootin’, tooting’ cowboy? What if your grandma berated you instead of being soft and kind? What if Beedle was desperate for human connection after spending his life on a shop boat?

As described by Approx, Wind Waker Rewritten is ‘the perfect way’ for veterans and newcomers to play Wind Waker, and I’d have to agree. As someone who has played and loved the original, this take was a breath of fresh and funny air.

On top of that, the thought of someone playing Wind Waker for the first time and coming face to face with NPCs that happily disrespect them and a talking boat that greats them with a ‘Howdy’ is a beautiful thought.

If you’d like to try Wind Waker Rewritten out for yourself, you can check it out here.

If I haven’t convinced you, maybe this set of screenshots will:

Electrons find each other repulsive. Nothing personal—it’s just that their negative charges repel each other. So getting them to pair up and travel together, like they do in superconducting materials, requires a little nudge.

In old-school superconductors, which were discovered in 1911 and conduct electric current with no resistance, but only at extremely cold temperatures, the nudge comes from vibrations in the material’s atomic lattice.

But in newer, “unconventional” superconductors—which are especially exciting because of their potential to operate at close to room temperature for things like zero-loss power transmission—no one knows for sure what the nudge is, although researchers think it might involve stripes of electric charge, waves of flip-flopping electron spins that create magnetic excitations, or some combination of things.

In the hope of learning more by looking at the problem from a slightly different angle, researchers at Stanford University and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory synthesized another unconventional superconductor family—the nickel oxides, or nickelates. Since then, they’ve spent three years investigating the nickelates’ properties and comparing them to one of the most famous unconventional superconductors, the copper oxides or cuprates.

And in a paper published in Nature Physics today, the team reported a significant difference: Unlike in the cuprates, the magnetic fields in nickelates are always on.

Magnetism: Friend or foe?

Nickelates, the scientists said, are intrinsically magnetic, as if each nickel atom were clutching a tiny magnet. This is true whether the nickelate is in its non-superconducting, or normal, state or in a superconducting state where electrons have paired up and formed a sort of quantum soup that can host intertwining phases of quantum matter. Cuprates, on the other hand, are not magnetic in their superconducting state.

“This study looked at fundamental properties of the nickelates compared to the cuprates, and what that can tell us about unconventional superconductors in general,” said Jennifer Fowlie, a postdoctoral researcher at SLAC’s Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES) who led the experiments.

Some researchers think magnetism and superconductivity compete with each other in this type of system, she said; others think you can’t have superconductivity unless magnetism is close by.

“While our results don’t settle that question, they do highlight where more work should probably be done,” Fowlie said. “And they mark the first time that magnetism has been examined in both the superconducting and the normal state of nickelates.”

Harold Hwang, a professor at SLAC and Stanford and director of SIMES, said, “This is another important piece of the puzzle that the research community is putting together as we work to frame the properties and phenomena at the heart of these exciting materials.”

Enter the muon

Few things come easy in this field of research, and studying the nickelates has been harder than most.

While theorists predicted more than 20 years ago that their chemical similarity to the cuprates made it likely that they could host superconductivity, nickelates are so difficult to make that it took years of trying before the SLAC and Stanford team succeeded.

Even then, they could only make thin films of the material—not the thicker chunks needed to explore its properties with common techniques. A number of research groups around the world have been working on easier ways to synthesize nickelates in any form, Hwang said.

So the research team turned to a more exotic method, called low-energy muon spin rotation/relaxation, that can measure the magnetic properties of thin films and is available only at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Switzerland.

Muons are fundamental charged particles that are similar to electrons, but 207 times more massive. They stick around for just 2.2 millionths of a second before decaying. Positively charged muons, which are often preferred for experiments like these, decay into a positron, a neutrino and an antineutrino. Like their electron cousins, they spin like tops and change the direction of their spin in response to magnetic fields. But they can “feel” those fields only in their immediate surroundings—up to about one nanometer, or a billionth of a meter, away.

At PSI, scientists use a beam of muons to embed the little particles in the material they want to study. When the muons decay, the positrons they produce fly off in the direction the muon is spinning. By tracing the positrons back to their origins, researchers can see which way the muons were pointing when they winked out of existence and thus determine the material’s overall magnetic properties.

Finding a workaround

The SLAC team applied to do experiments with the PSI system in 2020, but then the pandemic made it impossible to travel in or out of Switzerland. Fortunately, Fowlie was a postdoc at the University of Geneva at the time and already planning to come to SLAC to work in Hwang’s group. So she started the first round of experiments in Switzerland with a team led by Andreas Suter, a senior scientist at PSI and an expert in extracting information about superconductivity and magnetism from muon decay data.

After arriving at SLAC May 2021, Fowlie immediately started making various types of nickelate compounds the team wanted to test in their second round of experiments. When travel restrictions ended, the team was finally able to go back to Switzerland to finish the study.

The unique experimental setup at PSI allows scientists to embed muons at precise depths in the nickelate materials. From this, they were able to determine what was going on in each super-thin layer of various nickelate compounds with slightly different chemical compositions. They discovered that only the layers that contained nickel atoms were magnetic.

Interest in the nickelates is very high around the world, Hwang said. Half a dozen research groups have published their own ways of synthesizing nickelates and are working on improving the quality of the samples they study, and a huge number of theorists are trying to come up with insights to guide the research in productive directions.

“We are trying to do what we can with the resources we have as a research community,” he said, “but there’s still a lot more we can learn and do.”