Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

This February Google finally brought the Google Assistant from the Pixel and Google Home to other Android devices, but they were newer products like the Samsung Galaxy S7 and HTC 10. Older phone owners were stuck with upgrading or going Assistant-less. That changes now, the company announced on Wednesday that Google Assistant is now coming to some older devices. In a blog post, Google announced that it’ll come to tablets running Android 7.0 Nougat and 6.0 Marshmallow.

Surely you’re aware of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. The violent storm is the planet’s most noticeable feature, defining Jupiter in the same way that Saturn is defined by its rings, and Earth is defined by its yapping apes. There’s so much still to learn about this gas giant, and the yapping apes of Earth have the tools to do it. New results from the Juno probe have revealed data about the depth, temperature, and evolution of the spot. And it’s thick.

An Italian woman, her two daughters, and her three grandchildren have always had trouble feeling pain. They can’t sense temperature. They break bones without noticing. Now, a team of scientists in the United Kingdom think they’ve figured out why. Pain—whether it’s the sharp agony of a stubbed toe or the warning heat that comes before a burn—is an everyday occurrence for most people, but not for this unusual Italian family.

People have been using drones to smuggle goods for years. Porn, weapons, drugs—god, so many drugs. The tiny whirring machines have proven discreet little contraband-transport contraptions, but one smuggling operation’s astoundingly successful run just got grounded. From July 2015 through May of this year, a drone gang made at least 49 flights into prisons in England and Scotland, smuggling in weed and mobile phones.

Last week recurring donation platform Patreon announced a change to its payments structure from an intuitive, once-a-month setup to a convoluted one that may as well have relied on used car salesman math. Creators and patrons alike made their displeasure known, loudly. Today the company’s CEO Jack Conte announced unequivocally that the changes won’t take place. [Wild cheering erupts on Twitter.

Even in the absence of giant earthquakes, this planet is still emitting a quiet hum. Researchers have measured it at the ocean’s depths. Scientists have been aware of this quiet hum for decades, and many seismic stations have measured it on the planet’s surface. No one has measured it underwater during periods without earthquakes, though—there’s been far too much background noise. Now, a team of European scientists has made that measurement using ocean-bottom seismometers.

Thanks in large part to the low-cost Echo Dot, Amazon grabbed an early lead in the smart speaker space. But this fall Google hit back hard with the Home Mini, which has become the best cheap smart speaker to buy for most people. Unfortunately, shortly after its launch,a bug affecting the top touch controls in some Home Minis caused Google to disable the feature in order to prevent its device from recording audio at all times.

When it comes to satisfying the needs of the PC master race, there’s no such thing as too much. That’s why Nvidia went and created the $3,000 Titan V, which the company is calling the most powerful graphics card ever created. Then, Nvidia went and painted it gold, so you wouldn’t confuse it with any of those other pedestrian GPUs. All kidding aside, playing games on the Titan V isn’t really what this thing is meant for. (Please, no Crysis jokes.

You are going to find yourself idling on a fine website like Gizmodo or wandering through some store like Target or Best Buy, and you are going to remember you need to buy a gift for a loved one. You are going to remember, one time while you were at Outback housing a Blooming Onion that they said they were feeling unhealthy and wanted a Fitbit. You are going to try to buy them one because the fitness tracker starts at just $60 and that is affordable. Do not buy them a fucking Fitbit.

Physics has a bit of a problem. Stuff that you don’t really think about, like single items moving on frictionless surfaces or two bodies traveling in the void of space, are really easy to explain. Stuff you experience every day, like water dropping or M&Ms spilling on the floor, are incredibly complex. A team of Spanish and Mexican scientists were therefore interested in a problem I bet you’ve thought of: How to perfectly compact a container full of jumbled dice.