The RSPCA received a call about the horse and his plight, and rescuers quickly rushed out to the river to assess the situation. The horse appeared to be too injured and stuck for rescuers to get him out on their own, so they called on the South Wales Fire & Rescue Service for a little extra help. They were able to use their equipment to carefully pull the horse up to safety.
“We’re so grateful to South Wales Fire & Rescue Service, who were able to assist us and get this horse out of the [river],” Selina Griffiths, an inspector with the RSPCA, said in a press release.
“I went outside to feed my dogs and they were nowhere to be found,” Fraustro told The Dodo. “I called all my friends and family to help me look for them. We put up flyers around the neighborhood. I drove to different shelters around my area, but I had no luck.”
Fraustro didn’t want to believe that her dogs were really gone, but after two months of visiting shelters, she finally gave up.
“I thought I’d never see my dogs again,” Fraustro said. “When they left, they took a piece of my heart with them. I never replaced my dogs because losing them was too painful.”
But nearly three years later, Dodger returned to Fraustro’s life just as suddenly as he had left it.
“If you can imagine being abandoned, going to a shelter, having her babies taken away, going to a kennel, having pneumonia so bad she could barely breathe, going through all the trauma that she did and she was really such a nice dog,” Smith said. “The woman wouldn’t just separate them and let them eat. Normally I will work with the person in keeping the dog so they aren’t bounced around — even send in a trainer — but this time all I said was, ‘Here’s my address, just return her.’”
The rhino, who came to be called Spartacus, was limping and obviously in pain.
“He was shot in the upper right front limb, in an attempt to poach his horns,” Saving the Survivors, an organization that fights to save wild animals who have been victims of poaching attempts, wrote on Facebook. “In the process [he] sustained a fracture of the humerus.”
Inside a home, a baby chimp wearing a onesie jumps up and down as he wraps his little arms around a man’s neck for a hug.
He nestles his furry head onto the man’s shoulder as they embrace, calling out with loud screams of excitement.
It’s a “cute” scene that has been shared millions of times online — but the backstory is anything but heartwarming. Limbani the chimp is reuniting with his supposed “rescuer,” as the caption states, but it’s highly likely that he was actually bought from a breeder and torn away from his mother, animal welfare experts say.
The next morning, Easdale realized that the young dog had a very big secret. “I noticed her nipples and I thought, ‘Uh oh, she has babies down there,’” she said.
The skinny dog had started producing milk, and Easdale knew she had to try and find the hidden babies.
Easdale and a friend returned right to the deserted riverbed and strapped Mama to a long leash. With miles of terrain to canvass and time running out, the dog wouldn’t budge. Easdale realized she would have to get creative if Mama was going to give them any direction.
“At first, she was not going to show us where her babies were, so we sat down and played sounds of puppies crying on YouTube,” Easdale said. “Finally, she looked up at us, got up and led us to her water source. She laid down and drank for a long time, cooled down, and then she looked at me and I said, ‘OK, let’s go girl.’ And she led us all the way to her babies.”
They should have been in the wild, exploring the world and learning to hunt by their mothers’ sides.
But instead, they were locked inside a man’s upstate New York house, just a few months old and destined to be sold off as pets.
Last week, officials with New York Department of Environmental Conservation and rescuers from World Animal Protection (WAP) seized four servals and two caracals, both wild species native to Africa, from a home in Buffalo. The cats are illegal to keep and sell in New York, but are commonly bred and sold into the pet trade within the United States.
So the man, who lives in Liberia, bought the baby chimp and, because the little animal’s family had been killed by wildlife traffickers, named him Survivor. The man said that Survivor’s forehead had even been grazed by a bullet when poachers attacked his family. He truly was a little survivor.
But keeping Survivor as a pet turned out to be much more complicated than the man expected. As Survivor grew, he became stronger. Because he had no trees to climb, he tried to climb all over the house, leaving destroyed furniture in his wake.
Sometimes, having a sweet tooth can get you into trouble.
That was the problem for one little possum in Loganholme, Australia, last week when he stumbled upon an open jar of Nutella that someone had thrown away.
Hoping to get a taste of what was left in the jar, he stuck his head inside — and then couldn’t get it back out.
Microsoft is making a big bet on a tiny-computer future: Earlier this week, the company announced the Surface Go, a 10-inch, 1.15-pound little detachable that runs full Windows 10. It’s not the first time Microsoft has made a 10-inch tablet, but its previous efforts resulted in underpowered machines; whereas now, Microsoft exec Panos Panay says, “it’s time.”
Lucky for you, WIRED had the exclusive sit-down with Panay ahead of the product’s launch, and we’re playing part of the conversation here, on this week’s Gadget Lab podcast. Hear what he has to say when Lauren asks him if Microsoft will ever make a Surface Phone.
Some notes: Read the backstory on the making of the Surface Go, reported from Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington. The Surface Go wasn’t the only laptop(ish) news to drop this week: Apple also refreshed its MacBook Pro line, and we’ve got the full story here.
Recommendations this week: Mike recommends Google’s new Podcasts app, which launched last month and is a worthy alternative to Pocket Casts and Overcast. Lauren recommends checking out the work of Janet Iwasa, a molecular biologist and professor at the University of Utah who later learned motion graphics just so she could create visualizations of cellular activity.
Send the Gadget Lab hosts feedback on their personal Twitter feeds. Arielle Pardes couldn’t join this week’s episode, but she’s at @pardesoteric and will be back next week. Lauren Goode is @laurengoode, and Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. Our theme song is by Solar Keys.
How to Listen
You can always listen to this week’s podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here’s how:
If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts, and search for Gadget Lab. And in case you really need it, here’s the RSS feed.
If you use Android, you can find us in the Google Play Music app just by tapping here. You can also download an app like Pocket Casts or Radio Public, and search for Gadget Lab. And in case you really need it, here’s the RSS feed.
We’re also on Soundcloud, and every episode gets posted to wired.com as soon as it’s released. If you still can’t figure it out, or there’s another platform you use that we’re not on, let us know.
Gaming laptops, once immune to price pressures, are the latest segment in the mobile space to see true competition at the cash register. The latest gaming laptop to attack the market is the Dell G7 15, which starts at just $850. (My review unit, considerably upgraded from the base specs, runs closer to $1,200.)
The G7 15 is a 15.6-inch machine that can only be described as a bit of a beast. The 30mm of thickness isn’t out of the ordinary, but its 6.3 pounds of weight put it at the top of the class, half a pound heavier than HP’s Omen 15 and a pound and a half bulkier than the Gigabyte Aero 15. If you don’t plan to tote the monster around campus, that may not matter, so let’s consider what does: Performance.
While it’s outfitted with an 8th generation Intel Core i7, 16GB of RAM, and two storage devices—a 128GB SSD and a 1TB hard drive—the centerpiece is the video card, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060. It’s not quite the state of the art, but it’s close enough, and it powered the G7 to some impressive benchmark scores in my testing, including some of the best I’ve seen on 3DMark, VRMark, and high-end video game framerate tests. General app performance—which can suffer on some gaming rigs—is also top-notch, as is battery life, which I clocked at 5 hours. Connectivity includes three traditional USB ports, a USB-C port, full-size HDMI, Ethernet, and an SD card slot.
A single screw on the bottom of the chassis allows the entire bottom panel to pop off, giving you access to RAM, the SSD, the hard drive, and the battery.
Now, if that performance doesn’t meet expectations, you can always upgrade the G7. It’s got arguably the easiest upgrade pathway of any laptop built to date: A single screw on the bottom of the chassis allows the entire bottom panel to pop off, giving you access to RAM, the SSD, the hard drive, and the battery. Even an amateur could upgrade most of these components in a matter of minutes without a hiccup. The only problem I encountered: One of the many plastic tabs holding the panel in place (I counted 23) broke off when I removed it the first time.
Of course, the G7 is far from perfect, as low prices invariably lead to compromises. While the touchpad is so-so, the keyboard is completely unacceptable, with mushy response and minimal key travel. The fan is loud and runs often, and the screen, while it offers a wide viewing angle, is very dim compared to the competition. I found stability to be fine on the whole, except for a nagging crash issue I encountered during video playback.
Lastly, opinions about the design are bound to vary, but I find its angled chassis and plasticky grilles to be hopelessly dated, needlessly adding weight and size to an already over-large machine. In an era of brushed aluminum and carbon fiber, there’s just a ton of plastic here, from the lid to the thick frame around the LCD. For what it’s worth, the laptop is available in two colors; pick white or black.
Given the affordability of the machine, many of these flaws feel surmountable, the keyboard issue being the only real deal-breaker here. While it doesn’t really merit a hands-down recommendation, gamers without deep pockets may find this an appealing proposition.
MacBook Pros are becoming worthy of their “Pro” moniker again. Apple just refreshed its line of professional laptops, a move that had been recently rumored. The new MacBook Pros, which go on sale today, get a bump in processor speeds, RAM, and internal storage. They also allow you summon Siri at all times by using just your voice.
The announcement shows how Apple is leaning heavily into its marketing around creative professionals, just as its education announcement a few months ago leaned heavily into the creative aspects of education devices. And that makes a lot of sense for Apple. At the same time, though, these updates aren’t addressing all of the issues that users have had with recent generations of MacBook Pro, nor do the updates apply to the entirety of the Mac laptop line.
For example, the new MacBook Pros also have new keyboards. But the keyboards haven’t been completely redesigned, which is notable considering the reams of grief caused by the previous design. This also means there could potentially still be issues with Apple’s ultra-thin, butterfly-switch keyboards, even on the new machines.
Enhance!
The updates are coming to two laptop models: the $2,399 15-inch MacBook Pro and the $1,799 13-inch MacBook Pro. The 15-inch model now has a six-core processor. It’s been upgraded to an 8th generation, Intel Coffee Lake CPU (core i7 and, for the first time in this laptop, a Core i9), with 2.9 gigahertz and with Turbo Boost up to 4.8 gigahertz. It ships with Radeon Pro discrete graphics, and can be configured with up to 32 gigabytes of DDR4 memory and up to 4 terabytes of solid-state storage, double the amount in the previous model.
The new MacBook Pros have noticeably quieter keyboards.
Thanks to a T2 chip, which showed up previously in the iMac Pro, you can now summon Siri by simply shouting at your machine. Previous MacBook Pros required you to click a button, but now Siri is hands-free. The display isn’t getting any kind of resolution bump (or a touchscreen), but it does now have Apple’s alternating display temperature function, called True Tone, which means additional sensors have been built into the laptop. It has the same Touch Bar and Touch ID capabilities as previous models.
The Touch Bar models of Apple’s MacBook Pro laptops are getting performance bumps this week.
Brooks Kraft/Apple
The 13-inch MacBook Pro is getting similar updates, just with less power and graphics capabilities. It will ship with a quad-core Intel Core i5 or i7 Coffee Lake up to 2.7 gigahertz and with Turbo Boost up to 4.5 gigahertz. It has Intel Iris Plus integrated graphics, up to 2 terabytes of SSD storage, and the same T2 chip, Siri support, and Touch Bar and Touch ID features as its larger counterpart. Battery life is expected to be around the same on both models as it was on previous models.
Last year’s 13-inch MacBook Pro without a Touch Bar won’t get an update, though it’s still on the retail shelf. And neither the 12-inch MacBooks, nor the Mac Mini, are getting refreshed (although a new analyst’s report points to an upcoming Mac Mini). Apple will retire the third-generation 15-inch MacBook Pro, which was first released in 2012 (and didn’t have a Touch Bar). It will be sold as long as there’s inventory, but will eventually drop off of Apple’s website.
Just Your Type
The keyboards on the new MacBook Pros are likely to draw interest, considering that Apple just announced a repair and replacement program for the keyboards on its newer MacBook and MacBook Pros. The Outline’s Casey Johnston was among the first to report the issue of sticky keys, which Apple attributed to dust under the keyboards, and a few class-action lawsuits were filed over the allegedly defective equipment. The movement gained steam—a Change.org petition calling for a recall of every MacBook Pro since late 2016 currently has more than 30,000 signatures—and it was even called one of the “biggest design screwups in Apple history” by influential Apple blogger John Gruber.
The 15-inch MacBook Pro is estimated to be a whopping 70 percent faster than the previous model, all features and specs combined.
The new MacBook Pros have noticeably quieter keyboards. I was able to type a few sentences on one, and it was remarkable how quiet it was compared to the keyboard on the 2017 13-inch MacBook Pro, which I’m typing on now. Apple has also described the new keyboard as having a slightly different key feel. The keys still have the same butterfly mechanism underneath as the previous generation of MacBook Pros, which means they’re still potentially prone to having sticky keys. Apple has determined that it’s a small percentage of users who are impacted, but when you sell a high volume of products, even a small percentage can be a lot of people.
Going Pro
At a small press briefing in New York City yesterday, a dozen different professionals and students, all hand-picked by Apple, were on hand to vouch for the new products. They’d all received the new 15-inch MacBook Pro a couple weeks ago. The roster included music producer Oak Felder, molecular biology researcher Janet Iwasa, app founder and developer Leah Culver, photographer Lucas Gilman, video director Carlos Perez (who directed “Despacito”), and mixed media artist and sculptor Aaron Axelrod, among others. Two students, whom Apple plucked from its annual software conference last month, showed off apps focused on accessibility and mental health awareness.
Los Angeles-based mixed media artist Aaron Axelrod talks about his experiences with the new MacBook Pro at a media event in New York on Wednesday.
Brooks Kraft/Apple
While most of their testimonials weren’t heavy on tech specs, there were some common threads. Many of the creative types said that they found the 4TB drive to be immensely convenient because they didn’t have to carry around external hard drives. Some said media transfer speeds were faster, too, although it wasn’t clear in all cases whether that’s because of Thunderbolt 3 or because of the 4-terabyte solid-state drives. And some of the app makers said they thought that coding, or running app simulators, was faster on the new machine.
Few, if any, shared any drawbacks they’d experienced with the new MacBook Pros (they also haven’t had the machines for very long, and representatives from Apple were hovering). But there have been plenty of complaints from the Apple community about MacBook Pros in recent years, not just around its keyboard but its lack of support for features that many would consider to be “pro” grade. Apple’s Retina displays, while extremely nice-looking, are still sub-4K. They still don’t display the full colors of Adobe’s color space, which visual pros care about when they’re using apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, or Premiere.
But, from a power perspective at least, if a 4-terabyte, six-core MacBook Pro does in fact mean people can step away from their desktop workstations and produce heavy multimedia projects in the field, that is a marked improvement. The 15-inch MacBook Pro is estimated to be a whopping 70 percent faster than the previous model, all features and specs combined.
Buy High
While the broader PC market continues its multi-year decline, with research firm Gartner predicting it will dip another 1.2 percent in 2018, Mac shipments have either remained relatively steady or seen some promising jumps year-over-year. In fact, two of the bright spots in the PC market have been shipments of either Chromebooks or Macs (with Chromebooks even overtaking Macs in shipments during one quarter in 2016).
Apple likely wishes that students the world over would buy $2,000 laptops and do their homework on high-end machines—it’s offering a Back to School promotion as part of today’s laptop announcements—but the reality is that Chromebooks offer personal computing and simple device management at a price that makes a lot of sense for schools. Apple’s sweet spot with the MacBook Pro is creative professionals with disposable income, and it needs to keep those customers happy in order to maintain the success of the MacBook Pro line. It also needs to fix those keyboards.
Last year, we eviscerated the BlackBerry Keyone. Physical “keyboards are bad,” we argued, and they were never better than on-screen keyboards. You could make all the same arguments against the new BlackBerry Key2, but after using this unique, productivity-focused device for a few weeks, I don’t get the hate.
It’s true that the BlackBerry of old did not keep up with trends, became uncool, and died a slow and painful death. In 2013, I even felt compelled to advise everyone to avoid its phones completely because I wasn’t sure the company would survive.
Today, the situation is different. BlackBerry’s old operating system no longer exists, and it doesn’t make smartphones itself anymore. The Key2 was made by TCL under the BlackBerry brand, and it’s powered by the latest version of Google’s Android. BlackBerry adds in a few productivity apps, and some work-friendly DTEK security software, which quietly runs in the background. Unless you’re still scared of being seen as uncool there’s no reason to avoid a BlackBerry. I’m happy to report that no one has mocked me in public for rocking a phone with a physical keyboard—at least not yet.
Click Those Keys
It’s odd seeing a BlackBerry phone in 2018, with that same QWERTY keyboard you might remember from 2008. Physical keyboards are so rare these days, it’s hard to find one that isn’t in a bargain bin with a pile of flip phones.
It’s been a while since my thumbs tapped on real keys, so it took some getting used to, but typing on a real keyboard has its benefits. The buttons are backlit and about 20 percent bigger than last year’s model so there was plenty of space for my thumbs. Once I was in the groove, I found that the physical keys to be more precise. I still feel like I need to watch my fingers—when I messed up, I messed up big time—but like a software keyboard, Blackberry’s autocorrect is there to save your bacon. The only regular trouble I had was remembering where the Alt key was, so I could select letters and punctuation.
Though it’s mostly straightforward, the keyboard holds a few secrets. For instance, the spacebar hides the phone’s fingerprint sensor—I can’t think of a more appropriate spot for it, right there on the Key2’s chin. You can also slide your finger up, down, left, or right on the surface of the keyboard to scroll through pages, which can be very handy. Lastly, if you choose, you can map any app to every one of the QWERTY keys on the keyboard. I chose to let the A key opens Amazon now and I can call up the calculator by simply pressing C.
The biggest drawback of this BlackBerry’s design? The keyboard eats into real estate usually reserved for screen space. Its 4.5-inch 1,620 x 1,080 pixel LCD screen is just big enough that it doesn’t cause headaches. You have enough screen space to watch videos, play games, and use apps without feeling too boxed in, but you notice it.
Bumps, Bruises, and Battery Life
The Key2 is surprisingly comfortable to hold, and seems very durable. Unlike many devices, it’s designed to take a fall. The frame is made of aluminum, which extends out from the screen’s edges, likely protecting it from cracks and scrapes better in the event of a light drop.
The back is also covered in a comfortable rubber coating, which improves grip and traction. I’ve had terrible luck with phones this year. As careful as I am, multiple Android phones have slid right off my table or counter thanks to their all-glass designs, but the Key2? It doesn’t budge. It probably doesn’t need a case. I wouldn’t want to drop it, but I feel like it has a fighting chance when dropped—which is more than I can say for many competing handsets.
The only thing missing is waterproofing—so don’t take it for a swim.
It’s been a while since I’ve gotten excited about a phone’s battery life, but the Key2 is a phone that can legitimately get two full days of juice on light to medium use. With my use, it rarely had less than a 40 percent charge by 11 p.m. and I’ve left it unplugged some nights because I was confident it would still be alive to play my alarm come the morning. This phone is the cure for your smartphone range anxiety.
The mid-range Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 processor doesn’t impress on paper, but I haven’t noticed any slowdown, likely thanks to the generous 6GB of RAM. Still, this isn’t the phone to buy if you play graphically-intense games. The 64GB of file storage in the regular model should be enough for many, especially since you can buy a MicroSD card to give your media and apps more elbow room.
Tolerable Photography
The Key2 is not the phone that will put BlackBerry cameras on the map. The dual 12-megapixel rear cameras are adequate enough outdoors. I took a lot of lovely photos on a trip to Cape Cod around the Fourth of July. Close ups can come out particularly well, though it’s tough to tell just how focused the camera is. The second rear camera allows you to zoom 2x and there is a basic portrait mode, but these extra features don’t usually lead to better photos.
Low light is tough for the Key2’s camera. I managed to snap a couple decent fireworks shots, but many night shots came out grainy, and soft. The 8-megapixel selfie cam had more trouble in the dark, making skin tones look horribly discolored. Don’t buy the Key2 for its camera, but if photos aren’t your top concern, don’t rule it out, either.
Should You Key2?
The Key2 is not for everyone, and that’s OK. You have to be willing to spend time re-learning how to type, and be okay with the quirks and shortcomings. But as someone who came in expecting to get annoyed, I found myself appreciating it more and more.
On a road trip where I was without my laptop, I found myself tapping some paragraphs out on the little guy. I also like the spacebar fingerprint sensor and the ability to launch apps with the click of a key. Its durable exterior might not win awards for its industrial design, but I love that I don’t have to baby it constantly. Most of all I adore its real-world multi-day battery life.
Am I crazy for liking this phone so much? Possibly. After all, the keyboard does shrink the screen considerably, and the phone isn’t waterproof. $650 is also a high price to pay for a phone with a mid-range processor in it, and the Key2 isn’t currently compatible with Sprint or Verizon. But what can I say? I like it. If you long for the days of tiny, clicky physical phone keyboards long past, you might like it, too.
A typical single-family home in the US takes an average of six and a half months to build, according to the Census Bureau’s latest survey. Now an Austin-based startup called Icon can erect a house nearly 200 times faster—in a day.
WHAT:
The Vulcan, a house-building 3-D printer
SIZE:
12.5 x 22.5 x 35 feet
WEIGHT:
1 ton
TOP SPEED:
5 inches per second
To be fair, the company is building houses that max out at 800 square feet, but that’s not the limit. The hyperspeed fabrication is the work of a megasize 3-D printer—picture a MakerBot on steroids—named the Vulcan. Engineers run digital blueprints for the home through so-called slicer software, which translates the design into the programming language G-code. That code determines where the printer moves along its track, extruding 3⁄4-inch-thick layers of concrete like icing on a cake. The base material—a finely calibrated mix of cement, sand, plasticizers, and other aggregates—gets poured into a hopper at the top of the printer and flows onto the rising walls below.
Casey Dunn
The resulting abodes, which will cost $4,000 to build, are the latest addition in the ubiquitous tiny-house movement. (Icon’s ultimate goal is to alleviate the housing crisis; the company is exploring partnerships with FEMA and Fannie Mae.) In 2019, Icon intends to ship the Vulcan to El Salvador, where it’s slated to print 100 homes for disadvantaged families. But the startup’s next excursion may be even farther afield: Icon is participating in a NASA competition to develop printable space habitats using “indigenous materials,” the planetary soil available onsite. Once again, the Vulcan may boldly go where no human has gone before.
Brown Bird Design
1. Mortar Mix
The base material is finely tuned to prevent sagging. In the future, Icon also plans to print materials such as insulating foams and plastic.
2. Energy Efficiency
The Vulcan runs on six electric motors that require only 240 volts of power—roughly the same as a clothes dryer—so it won’t overwhelm fragile power grids in developing countries or disaster zones.
3. Flexible Design
Slicer software is used to interpret digital blueprints that plot points in three-dimensional space. Code can be written for any type and size of building.
4. Frame
The lightweight aluminum frame disassembles quickly for easy transport. It’s stabilized by triangular trusses, allowing the printer to emit concrete with 1/4 inch of the points laid out in the plans.
5. Moveable Tracks
The printer rolls back and forth along 10-inch-wide tracks, which are repositioned as the home rises. There’s no limit to how long the wall can be.
Casey Dunn
This article appears in the July issue. Subscribe now.
Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 5/25/18) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated 5/25/18). Your California Privacy Rights. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices.
It’s hard to know, at first, what problem the Brava smart oven is supposed to solve. Its value proposition—to use the Silicon Valley parlance—is a bit diluted. Is it supposed to heat up more quickly than your current oven? Is it designed to distribute heat in an innovative way? Is it supposed to be more energy efficient? Is it compatible with an app—and does that make it better? Will it be smarter than your current oven?
The short answer, according to the entrepreneurs at Brava, is all of the above. You will want to spend $995 on Brava’s Wi-Fi-connected countertop oven, the pitch goes, because it will make your insanely busy life better.
While Brava is launching with a piece of hardware, the company is selling more than just an oven.
The long answer is more complex than that. Brava may indeed be a beautifully made oven packed with time-saving tech. But it’s not just the oven you’ll pay for; you’ll need some accessories to get the most out of it. And, as part of Brava’s launch this fall, the company plans to offer a food delivery service that drops ready-to-cook items onto your doorstep. Sure, you can buy your own groceries and make stuff with the Brava, but the company will try to convince you its produce options are superior. So while Brava is launching with a piece of hardware, the company is selling more than just an oven.
The company’s business models mirrors that of other startups offering hardware with a service attached. Most famously, Peloton sells pricey exercise equipment—$2,000 for its stationary bike, $4,000 for its new treadmill—that you use while livestreaming workout classes through its $39-a-month subscription service.
Brava is, in a bizarre way, the Peloton of ovens.
Beth Holzer for Wired
That makes a lot of sense when you consider that Brava CEO John Pleasants is the brother-in-law of John Foley, the CEO of Peloton, which has taken the fitness world by storm. Pleasants joined Brava as CEO in August 2016, having previously worked as an executive at Disney and Samsung. But the idea for Brava started percolating back in 2013, during the holidays.
As Pleasants and chief technology officer Thomas Cheng tell it, their co-founder Dan Yue was enjoying a holiday meal with his family when he noticed that his mother, who was prepping the food, wasn’t really an active participant in the dinner. She was too stressed out to talk, running back and forth between the kitchen and dining room. “What if the oven knew what was inside of it, and knew when to start and stop? That was the very basic thought. What if she could have more time at the dining room table?” Pleasants said. (Yue wasn’t there the day I visited Brava’s office, so I didn’t hear this story from him firsthand.)
Two years later, in 2015, Yue and Cheng connected and decided to make something together. They had actually gone to high school together in Palo Alto in the late 1990s, so it was a reunion of sorts. By June of that year, they had come up with the first Brava oven prototype, made from the parts of off-the-shelf countertop ovens. The following year was when Pleasants joined as CEO.
The team ended up making 15 prototypes in Cheng’s garage, some of which are now on display in Brava’s Redwood City offices. These include small countertop ovens, large countertop ovens, units with only one heating element, some with three heating elements, a copper-coated prototype, an oven with a removable magnetic knob, and another oven with a slot for a smartphone on top, which is where a display would eventually be built in.
“We wanted to make sure we could do a 12-inch pizza and a 6-pound chicken,” Pleasants said. “Those were the two thresholds we felt were really important. After we figured out the sizing, we got fancy.”
Three years and $25 million in venture-capital funding later, Brava is finally launching its debut product. Its run up to launch wasn’t completely stealthy; funding rounds were made public, and thanks to a trademark filing, some details about the oven had had leaked in advance. A report last year from The Spoon noted that the upcoming smart oven would have “a number of interesting features.”
Warming Trend
A Brava oven weighs 34 pounds. Inside the anodized aluminum case is a stainless steel interior cooking chamber. It’s 11.3 inches tall, 14.1 inches wide and 16.7 inches deep, which means it’s large enough that you should measure your countertop space before you buy one. Its top is covered in a food-safe, high temperature silicone, with a thick glass strip at the edge. It has a single physical button for starting and stopping the cooking process, and a 5-inch, multi-touch LCD display.
That display is where you’ll swipe and tap and essentially tell the Brava what you’re cooking, so it can do all the cognitive work for you beyond that. You can also send recipes from the Brava mobile app directly to the oven over Wi-Fi.
The oven’s heating elements include six, 270-millimeter bulbs. They resemble incandescent bulbs or tungsten halogen lamps, but they have been tweaked for culinary use. Brava likes to say the bulbs can ramp up to full power in under a second. That’s one of the things that’s supposed to make a Brava oven different—how quickly it heats up. But the more interesting part is how the heat is controlled, a technology that Brava has labeled “Pure Light.” There are three zones inside the oven, and they can each be heated independently of one another. The heat of these zones can be dialed up or down depending on what you’re cooking.
Beth Holzer for Wired
It’s basically cooking by numbers. Let’s say you’re making a protein, a starch, and a vegetable. You’re supposed to tell the Brava oven what you’re about to cook, and it would then assign a number to each of your ingredients. Each number corresponds to one of the labeled sections on the custom-made trays Brava sells. Place your ingredients in the designated sections of your tray, shove a Swiss-made temperature sensor in the protein, slide the tray in the oven, and each portion of the meal will cook at the appropriate temperature for the appropriate amount of time. The company tells me the oven is capable enough to sear meats.
Cheng, the CTO, says the oven’s lamps aren’t the magical part of this equation. It’s the whole package: the control system, the software, the sensors. “I wouldn’t call this a revolution, but more of an extreme evolution of sorts,” he says. “One, it’s just far more powerful, and two, it’s far more precise in controlling the elements.”
The Brava oven also has a 5-megapixel, fisheye camera inside of it, which is less about allowing mere mortals to watch their food cook and more about training Brava’s machine-learning engine. The camera itself doesn’t even recognize the food item you’ve put inside the oven. Instead, it’s designed to capture the surface texture of the food, the company says, and it’s using that gathered information to gauge how well something is cooked. Once it sees dinner’s done, the oven shuts itself off.
The demo I saw involved using Brava’s AI to make toast. To develop the machine-intelligence component, Brava’s software engineers loaded up gobs of food photos; in this case, pictures of toasted bread. Then, Brava’s staff of seven chefs looked at those toast pics—uncooked bread, cooked toast, burned toast—and helped put together a kind of matrix for what an ideal piece of toast looks like. This database, which now contains thousands of food items, lives in the cloud, but Brava has condensed it down to a model that lives on the oven.
During the demo, I watched through the Brava camera as a slice of bread went from white and doughy to a crisp, medium brown; while a laptop sitting on top of the oven (just for the purposes of the demo) showed the computational process behind it.
Deep Cuts
Those same chefs are a critical part of Brava’s other big sell: its food delivery service. It’s an a la carte food service, not a subscription business, and all of the foods are sourced by Travis Rea, Brava’s head chef. The beef is from Double R Ranch, the salmon is Ora King salmon, and the veggies are organic. One of the eggs suppliers is Good Eggs. Los Angeles-based Chef’d is assembling and fulfilling the food orders.
Of course, you can buy your own food and cook it in the Brava oven. But Brava says your experience will be optimized if you buy direct. The cuts of meat will be just the right thickness, Brava’s recipes are designed around these ingredients, and so on. Pleasants emphasized that he believes Brava isn’t just about the hardware; it’s about the relationships you’ll have with chefs, with other people in the community sharing recipes. Like Peloton.
This kind of magical cooking doesn’t come cheap. $995 gets you the oven, two oven trays, and sensor, plus a dinner for two that you order through Brava. Spend $1,295, and you get three additional accessories—a chef’s pan, a cast iron grill pan, and an egg tray—as well as a $150 food credit. The meals cost, on average, $13 to $15 per serving. So, dinner for two costs between $26 and $30. Brava says the oven will ship in November.
“There have been a lot of entrepreneurial efforts around making the act of getting food more convenient,” says Aileen Lee, the founder of Cowboy Ventures, which invested in Brava. “But this is about making it easier to cook, and I think people actually like to cook. And an hour to an hour-and-a-half prep for a meal is just not a reality for a lot of people.” Another reason why Lee invested, she tells me, is that what Brava’s doing is technically challenging.
Dinner Time
Brava is part of a broader trend around connected kitchen appliances, and specifically, around oven technology, which goes beyond just using an app or shouting “Alexa!” at something. Size-wise, Brava falls into the same category as the June countertop oven, a $1,495 convection oven that uses carbon fiber heating elements that are designed to heat up quickly. The Miele Dialog oven is a full oven, not a countertop oven, that also holds the promise of precisely controlling the cooking process, through electromagnetic waves that are emitted at specific frequencies. It started selling in select countries in Europe last month.
But Brava’s claim that its main product is the “fastest oven in the world” applies only to certain foods. During my visit to Brava, I saw multiple food items being cooked (and even participated in some of the cooking), and times varied. That piece of toast, for example, still took around three and a half minutes to brown properly, so, not very fast. An egg and cheese frittata, cooked in an egg tray, took around six minutes. The founders say that not all foods will cook at supersonic speeds; but since the Brava is taking up significant counter space, they wanted to ensure that it could do some of the basics, like toasting, in case you ditched your toaster.
Even with foods that do cook quickly, that claim is difficult to fact-check. Cheng is candid about the fact that Brava’s marketing copy—”zero to 500 degrees in under a second”—wasn’t something that thrilled him. “I wanted to clarify one thing. What it actually does is it goes from zero to as if you’re at 500 degrees,” he says. “If you try to do that with a completely cold oven, you’d have a safety override, and you’d have to hack something to do this. This is effectively a 500-degree oven.”
And considering that the oven will likely only cook enough food for four people at a time—or two very hungry adults—you’ll have to factor in that you might end up cooking in batches.
On the upside, the total cook time for salmon and asparagus was around 12 minutes that day in Brava’s kitchen, and a filet mignon has a typical cook time of 15 to 18 minutes. Considering how ridiculously long it takes for my own electric oven to heat up, that was a marked improvement. The skin on the salmon was also crispy, which would normally only happen if I had pan-seared it.
You can also set the Brava’s zone temperatures yourself, or, if you’d like, just crank up the oven to a specific temperature and cook something in an un-smart way. I ask Pleasants and Cheng whether a customer needed to have the Brava connected to the internet. Basically, is the kitchen of the future one in which you can’t cook some vegetables without being Wi-Fi-connected?
No, you don’t have to connect it to the internet, Pleasants says. But you’ll want to. “Just like a Tesla, we can update the features and the operating system over time,” he says. “Another thing is the recipes—we give you new ones every week, and you’ll want to be able to see them.”
Earlier, I ask Pleasants about another Silicon Valley hardware startup, one that sold an expensive, internet-connected juice machine that didn’t work out. Did stories like that concern him as he readies to launch a food-related hardware product?
“Every industry sector has its stories like that,” he says. “You have to stand behind the quality of your product and the problem you are solving. I think we’re solving a real problem.”
More Great WIRED Stories
The entire history of World of Warcraftin one video
So who is this tiny Surface Go actually made for? It depends on who you ask at Microsoft, but the short answer seems to be: anybody and everybody.
Urbanowicz, the product marketing manager, says Go is about “reaching more audiences, and embracing the word ‘and’: I can be a mother, and an entrepreneurial badass; I can be a student, and a social justice warrior.” Kyriacou, when describing the Go’s cameras, says to “think about the front line worker in the field—a construction worker, architect, they can capture what they need to or even scan a document.” You can also dock the Go, Kyriacou points out, using the Surface Connect port, which makes it ideal for business travelers. Groene talks about reading, about drawing, about running software applications like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Almost everyone talks about watching Hulu and Netflix on it.
Panos Panay initially has a philosophical answer to this. It’s his “dream,” he says, to just get Surface products to more people. “I mean, that’s not my ultimate dream. But there are these blurred lines of life and work that are happening, and if you collect all that, Go was an obvious step for us.”
The evening before Panay and I chatted, he went to the Bellevue Square shopping center with his son, and at one point, had to pull out his LTE-equipped Surface Go to address what he said was an urgent work issue. His son asked if it was a new product, and Panay, realizing the blunder of having the thing out in public, tucked the Go in his jacket. To him, that’s the perfect anecdote: The lines between work and family time were blurred, he had to do something quickly, and when he was done, he could make his computer disappear.
Panos Panay, Microsoft’s chief product officer.
Ian C. Bates
Panay’s team also has a lot more insight into how people are using Surface products than it did eight years ago, he says, when Surface was still just a concept being developed in a dark lab. To be sure, Microsoft has been making hardware for decades—keyboards, mice, web cameras, Xbox consoles. But when Microsoft made the decision to start making its own PCs (and ultimately, take more control over how its software ran on laptops), it was a new hardware category for the company. It was a chance to get consumers excited about Microsoft again, not just enterprise customers.
The first few years of Surface were rocky. The first one, known as Surface RT, seems to be something that Microsoft executives would rather forget about; I don’t see it anywhere in the product lineups that Microsoft’s PR team has laid out ahead of my visit. Its 2012 launch coincided with the rollout of Windows 8, which had an entirely new UI from the previous version of Windows. It ran on a 32-bit ARM architecture, which meant it ran a version of the operating system called Windows RT. Depending on who you ask, the Surface RT was either a terrible idea or ahead of its time. (Panay says it was visionary.) Microsoft ending up taking a massive write-down on it the following year.
Since then, Microsoft has rolled out a series of Surface products that, due to the company’s design ethos, a newer operating system, and plain old Moore’s Law, have only gotten better. In 2013 it introduced the Surface Pro line, which are still detachables, but are built to perform like a premium laptop and can cost anywhere from $799 to $2,600. There’s the Surface Book line; the Surface Book 2 starts at $1,199 and clocks in around 3.5 pounds, making it a serious commitment of a laptop. The Surface Studio is a gorgeous, $2,999, all-in-one desktop PC, aimed at creative types. The Surface Laptop is Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s MacBook Air. It starts at $799, and got largely positive reviews when it launched last year.
Even still, Microsoft’s Surface line has struggled to make a significant dent in the market for personal computing. HP and Lenovo dominate the broader PC market, while Apple leads in the tablet category (including both detachables and slate tablets).“From a shipment perspective, the entire Surface portfolio has been fairly soft,” says Linn Huang, an IDC research director who tracks devices and displays. “It was growing tremendously, and then the iPad Pro launched and Surface shipments have either been negative, year-over-year, for the past several quarters, or flat.”
Microsoft has new competition to worry about, too: Google’s inexpensive Chromebooks, which in a short amount of time have taken over a large share of the education market.
“Do I think about Chromebooks? Absolutely,” Panay says, when I ask him about them. “Do I think about iPads? Absolutely. I use multiple devices. It’s exhausting. But this product is meant to bring you a full app suite.” Panay is highlighting one of the drawbacks of lightweight Chromebooks: Their lack of local storage. Meanwhile, he says, Surfaces are designed to let people be productive both locally on the device, and in the cloud when they need to work in the cloud.
And, while Panay says he’s keeping an eye on Chromebooks, he insists that Microsoft didn’t build Go to compete with Chromebooks. That said, Surface Go will have a school-specific software option: IT administrators for schools can choose whether they want a batch of Go’s imaged with Windows 10 Pro Education, or Windows 10 S mode-enabled.
Panay wouldn’t comment on Microsoft’s plans for the future beyond Surface Go, although there have long been rumors of a possible Microsoft handheld device, codenamed Andromeda. If the Surface Go is something of a return to a smaller, 10-inch detachable, then a pocketable device that folds in half, one that could potentially run on an ARM processor, would be something of a return to mobile for Microsoft. Qualcomm has also been making mobile chips that are designed to compete directly with Intel’s Core processors for PCs.
For now, though, Panay is throwing all his chips behind the Surface Go, and making a big bet that this little device is the one that will make the masses fall in love with Surface. He tends to chalk up past Surface products, even the ones that didn’t do well, as simply before their time. Now, with the Go, he says, “it’s time.”
Tread gently on the planet with a versatile pack made mostly from recycled materials.
Mafia Deep Blue Bag
Best for:Vacationing sea monsters
The shell of the Deep Blue gets its crinkly feel from recycled spinnaker sails. This strong ripstop nylon is designed to spend all day in the wind, so you can pack the ultralight bag for any oceanic excursion. A waterproof compartment keeps your wet swimsuit and flip-flops separate from your Kindle. A collaboration between Mafia and designer Yves Béhar, nearly every piece of material is reclaimed from climbing ropes, seat belts, and even old wet suits.
The ultradurable, resin-fiber-reinforced sailcloth exterior of Truce’s bag is made from sails that once powered racing yachts. Add a seam-sealed liner fashioned out of leftover fabric from dry suits—like a wet suit for diving, but you don’t get wet—and you have a waterproof shell that can shed even the hardest rain. Compression straps help stabilize the load, and a moisture-wicking lumbar pad helps keep your back dry during steamy hikes to remote waterfalls.
In the west of Belgium, near the French border, the A19 motorway ends in a four-lane, unfinished overpass. There’s no mountain here, no ocean, no city center. Nothing to explain why the heavy machinery stopped paving through the farms, and the traffic gets diverted to surface streets.
What stopped the Belgian government from paving over this landscape in the early 2000s was the insight that this land contained evidence that might reveal what it was like to live through one of humanity’s greatest horrors. During World War I, this stretch of pastoral landscape, which the generals (and now historians) called the Ypres Salient, was one of the most heavily trenched, mined, mortared, bombed, gassed, pillaged, burned, and bullet-riddled places along the Western Front.
For the archaeologists charged with recovering this landscape’s memories, digging into the past with a vast shovel-and-pickaxe party was out of the question. Not only is the Ypres Salient huge, its scars are so dense they practically form a contiguous strata in the soil. “And, this is an area where people live and plow,” says Birger Stichelbaut, an archaeologist at both Ghent University and the In Flanders Fields Museum. “Our goal was not to turn it into a World War I Disneyland.” They needed non-invasive ways to survey the landscape, identify important sites from the war, and plan for the best way to preserve or protect the artifacts therein.
So, like the armies of Europe a century earlier, they took to the field with the latest tech they could muster: lidar, aerial photography, and geophysical sensors. Their efforts, along with the stories and artifacts those efforts produced, are now featured in an exhibit at the In Flanders Fields Museum (through September) and an accompanying book, both titled Traces of War.
Amateurs and hobbyists had been digging up bullet casings, bones, and bunker material for decades. But the field of professional archaeology had never taken World War I seriously—it happened too recently and left a surfeit of historical evidence. That changed in the early 2000s, when the Belgian government planned to complete the long-delayed extension of the A19, connecting the city of Wieltje to a small town called Steenstraete, and then onward to the coast. However, the Belgian minister in charge of archaeological heritage recognized that meant cutting through what had once been one of the liveliest sections of the Western Front. This slice of the Ypres Salient hosted three major battles, including the one where German forces first used poison gas against the Allies.
So, the politician tasked archaeologists to scout the motorway’s planned route. What they came back with was staggering—trenches, artifacts, bodies. The government canceled the construction project and effectively declared the landscape to be a single, sprawling archaeological site. In the 2009 book Contested Objects: Material Memories of the Great War, Marc Devilde and Nicholas J. Saunders note the significance for the field:
“It is difficult to overestimate the significance of this political intervention, or its consequences for the archaeology of the war … After some 85 years of amateur ad hoc digging and land clearance—and in the space of just over 12 months—a modern scientific archaeology of the Great War had arrived in a legally constituted and academically acceptable form.”
Their most valuable resources were aerial surveillance photographs taken during the war. Thousands of these images, taken by both sides, survive. By comparing them to historical documents and modern aerial photography, Stichelbaut and his colleagues could identify areas of interest—a skirmish here, a sortie there. They found miles of forgotten trench lines, identified overgrown moonscapes of bombed out craters, and discovered evidence of supply lines, training grounds, and other key logistical points of interest.
The photographs, though, couldn’t capture every moment of the churning chaos, the horrors happening between each click of the shutter. Nor could modern flyovers find even a fraction of the war’s traces. Again, this part of Belgium is rural, covered by tree canopies, crops, and wrinkled with low ridges. As luck would have it, in the early 2010s, the Belgian government ordered a new aerial bombardment of the entire country.
Except these planes weren’t dropping bombs. They were firing lasers. Called lidar—think sonar, but with lasers—each beam of light bounces off the landscape below, and some of its photons return to the aircraft. By timing how long it takes those photons to make the round trip, the sensor calculates the elevation of whatever those photons touch. Geographers knit the resulting clouds of results into a 3-D map. The one the Belgian government released—for free!—in 2013 was accurate down to 30 centimeters.
Because some of those billions of photons slip past the trees and grass, geographers can also make maps of what the landscape would look like without vegetation. Maps archaeologists can use to look for traces of war without the cost, time, or intrusiveness of exploring by foot. And here, they got results. “This data has shown us that 12 percent of the landscape in our research area still bear features of the war, especially in woodland and pasture,” says Wouter Gheyle, an archaeologist at Ghent University who specializes in lidar imagery.
This 12 percent is pristine stuff. Many of these wooded areas hadn’t been messed with since the war. In one of the more remarkable lidar finds, Gheyle identified traces of where a small group of Allied soldiers made camp for the night, including the protective sandbags around the tents, in a copse of trees some seven miles behind the front.
Lidar found traces in farmland, too. Most of the trenches that zig zagged throughout this landscape were filled in and plowed over after the war. But when the lasers bounced off grassland they saw what had been hidden for decades—squiggles of trenches, divots of bomb blasts. “Now that the generation who actually witnessed the war has passed away, our only way to get in touch with the war is through the landscape,” Stichelbaut says.
Many of those witnesses remain with the landscape. Archaeologists have found hundreds of human remains; tens of thousands are still in the soil. The archaeologists have even been able to identify some and add their names to Ypres’ Menin Gate, memorializing the war’s dead. In 2016 they found the remains of Henry John Innes Walker, an army captain from New Zealand, whom they identified through a combination of archaeological evidence and historical record. He was killed in 1915. And while most of the dead remain anonymous, they still receive proper burials.
Stichelbaut is careful when discussing the scope of the Ypres Salient archaeological mission. “We are not interested in a single trench, rifle, or set of remains, but instead how the landscape is holding the story,” he says. The horrors of war reveal the humanity of those who participated.“This shows how life in the trenches really went, how soldiers dealt with the material culture they lived with,” says Stichelbaut. So no matter what road you take to visit, prepare to be stopped in your tracks.
