Welcome to Indie App Spotlight. This is a weekly 9to5Mac series where we showcase the latest apps in the indie app world. If you’re a developer and would like your app featured, get in contact.
Apple Watch, allowing users to learn more about Apple Watch bands and keep track of their collection.
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It’s finally time to upgrade for many owners of the earliest Amazon Fire TV devices, as Netflix is ending support for them next month, reports German outlet Heise.
The cutoff for US users is June 3rd, according to ZDNet, which writes that the company has been emailing those who would be affected by the change. Netflix is specifically ending support for the 1st-generation Fire TV streaming box and Fire TV Stick, as well as the 2016 Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote, ZDNet writes. If you didn’t get the email but want to be certain whether your Fire TV device is one of those reportedly losing Netflix, the outlet writes that you can check the “About” section under Settings > My Fire TV.
According to Heise, Amazon is offering discounts on new Fire TV Sticks to those affected by the change. Amazon didn’t immediately respond when The Verge reached out to ask whether that’s true for US users, as well.
In a FAQ added to a Netflix help page sometime in the last couple of months (March 15th is when it first showed up on The Internet Archive), the company says it may end support for devices that “can no longer get necessary updates from its manufacturer or support new features.” The company also added new references to error codes R4, R12, and R25-1.
Netflix did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.
The Fall of Builder.ai: The First AI Domino Builder.ai, a $1.2 billion AI startup that promised anyone could build apps without writing a single line of code using its assistant “Natasha,” has filed for bankruptcy. Just months ago, it looked […]
The post Builder.ai, a Microsoft-backed AI startup once valued at $1.2 billion, files for bankruptcy: Is AI becoming another .com bubble? first appeared on Tech Startups.
After testing in recent months, the Google Search app on Android has now widely rolled out an “Activity” tab in the bottom bar.
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This coming weekend is a special one for most motorsport fans. There are Formula 1 races in Monaco and NASCAR races in Charlotte. And arguably towering over them both is the Indianapolis 500, being held this year for the 109th time. America's oldest race is also one of its toughest: The track may have just four turns, but the cars negotiate them going three times faster than you drive on the highway, inches from the wall. For hours. At least at Le Mans, you have more than one driver per car.
This year's race promises to be an exciting one. The track is sold out for the first time since the centenary race in 2016. A rookie driver and a team new to the series took pole position. Two very fast cars are starting at the back thanks to another conflict-of-interest scandal involving Team Penske, the second in two years for a team whose owner also owns the track and the series. And the cars are trickier to drive than they have been for many years, thanks to a new supercapacitor-based hybrid system that has added more than 100 lbs to the rear of the car, shifting the weight distribution further back.
Ahead of Sunday's race, I spoke with a couple of IndyCar drivers and some engineers to get a better sense of how they prepare and what to expect.
© Brandon Badraoui/Lumen via Getty Images
Users of Whoop’s fitness trackers have been reporting that their Whoop MG fitness trackers are turning unresponsive, in some cases within under an hour of setting them up. Now, the company is apparently replacing the trackers, in some cases before the users even ask, TechIssuesToday reports.
Launched alongside the Whoop 5.0 earlier this month, the Whoop MG (which stands for “Medical Grade”) comes with EKG capabilities and blood pressure insights and requires a premium Whoop Life subscription that’s $359 per year. Users started reporting issues with the tracker almost immediately.
On May 11th, a user reported in the Whoop community forum that their MG “stopped working overnight after working for 8 hours. No green light, no bluelight nothing. It won’t now pair with the app.” Others replied to say the tracker failed even sooner for them, with one person reporting that it went inert after just half an hour of use. Some also report that their 5.0 has failed.
Whoop recommends a few troubleshooting steps — the usual things like making sure your device is charged or trying to reset it — but users in the community thread say it didn’t work.
The company appears to be trying to rectify the situation by sending out replacement units, sometimes without users even asking for one, as the Reddit user who posted the screenshot above wrote further down in the thread. The same goes for a user who posted two days ago to say they got the same notification despite having not noticed any problems with their MG. Some in that thread even write that the company replaced their MGs without ever telling them it would be doing so.
It’s already been a troubled launch for Whoop. Earlier this month, some users were outraged when Whoop said they would need to add another 12 months onto their memberships to avoid the upgrade fee for the Whoop 5.0. Previously, users only needed to have 6 months left on their subscription to get a Whoop 4.0. The company soon walked its new terms back, posting on Reddit that those who had at least 12 months left would be eligible for an upgrade.
Whoop did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.
For a limited time, Apple is offering new Apple Card users a special sign up bonus through Nike. Now through June 15th, users can receive $150 in cash back after spending over $150 on Nike purchases in the first 30 days of account opening.
This stacks on top of the limited time 6% cash back offer that started earlier this month.
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Memorial Day marks the unofficial start of summer, and if you somehow managed to skip your spring cleaning earlier this year, the turning of the season offers a fresh chance to declutter your space. Thankfully, the Twelve South HiRise 3 Deluxe offers a stylish way to organize your desk or bedside table, and it’s currently available for a new low of $79.99 ($20 off) from Amazon and Twelve South.
Twelve South’s sturdy HiRise 3 Deluxe is a great 3-in-1 charging stand for a number of reasons. Not only can it deliver up to 15W of power to MagSafe-compatible iPhones, but it’s also capable of fast-charging an Apple Watch Series 7 and newer models. It includes a 7.5W wireless charging pad as well, which you can use to top off a pair of AirPods or any other Qi-compatible device you might have on hand, including a second phone, a Samsung Galaxy Watch, or other electronics.
What truly sets it apart from a lot of other 3-in-1 chargers, though, is its design; instead of placing the charging pads side-by-side, Twelve South has arranged them in a front-to-back layout to reduce desk clutter. Plus, thanks to the charger’s support for StandBy mode — an ultra-handy feature Apple first introduced in iOS 17 — you can also use your phone as a mini smart display when you place it horizontally on the adjustable charging pad, allowing you to quickly check the time, view your daily schedule, and take advantage of useful widgets with ease.
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There’s a lot of hype around AI right now. Every product is “AI-powered” and every app promises to help you do more by doing the work for you. However, I think that real productivity improvements don’t come with bolted-on functionality. They come from building smarter tools that live where people already work and letting them focus on what humans do best. That’s why I think Spike’s new AI Feed is a solid example of workplace AI done right.
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With the expected release of the iPhone 17 Air later this year and the recent release of the S25 Edge from Samsung, it looks like the theme of 2025 is all about thinness. Companies are doing all they can to flex their design and physics-defying muscles to show off just how thin they can make products without sacrificing significant features. Now, accessories companies are getting in on the fun, and Kuxiu’s new X41Q charger is impressively thin while staying efficient and powerful. Here is what you need to know!
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Welcome back to the Abstract!
We begin this week with some scatalogical salvation. I dare not say more.
Then, swimming without a brain: It happens more often than you might think. Next, what was bigger as a baby than it is today? Hint: It’s still really big! And to close out, imagine the sights you’ll see with your infrared vision as you ride an elevator down to Mars.
Fighting the Climate Crisis, One Poop at a Time
The path to a more stable climate in Antarctica runs through the buttholes of penguins.
Penguin guano, the copious excrement produced by the birds, is rich in ammonia and methylamine gas. Scientists have now discovered that these guano-borne gasses stimulate particle formation that leads to clouds and aerosols which, in turn, cool temperatures in the remote region. As a consequence, guano “may represent an important climate feedback as their habitat changes,” according to a new study.
“Our observations show that penguin colonies are a large source of ammonia in coastal Antarctica, whereas ammonia originating from the Southern Ocean is, in comparison, negligible,” said researchers led by Matthew Boyer of the University of Helsinki. “Dimethylamine, likely originating from penguin guano, also participates in the initial steps of particle formation, effectively boosting particle formation rates up to 10,000 times.”
Boyer and his colleagues captured their measurements from a site near Marambio Base on the Antarctica Peninsula, in the austral summer of 2023. At times when the site was downwind of a nearby colony of 60,000 Adelie penguins, the atmospheric ammonia concentration spiked to 1,000 times higher than baseline. Moreover, the ammonia levels remained elevated for more than a month after the penguins migrated from the area.
“The penguin guano ‘fertilized’ soil, also known as ornithogenic soil, continued to be a strong source of ammonia long after they left the site,” said the team. “Our data demonstrates that there are local hotspots around the coast of Antarctica that can yield ammonia concentrations similar in magnitude to agricultural plots during summer…This suggests that coastal penguin/bird colonies could also comprise an important source of aerosol away from the coast.”
“It is already understood that widespread loss of sea ice extent threatens the habitat, food sources, and breeding behavior of most penguin species that inhabit Antarctica,” the researchers continued. “Consequently, some Antarctic penguin populations are already declining, and some species could be nearly extinct by the end of the 21st century. We provide evidence that declining penguin populations could cause a positive climate warming feedback in the summertime Antarctic atmosphere, as proposed by a modeling study of seabird emissions in the Arctic region.”
The power of penguin poop truly knows no earthly bounds. Guano, already famous as a super-fertilizer and a pillar of many ecosystems, is also creating clouds out of thin air, with macro knock-on effects. These guano hotspots act as a bulwark against a rapidly changing climate in Antarctica, which is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. We’ll need every tool we can get to curb climate change: penguin bums, welcome aboard.
A Swim Meet for Microbes
The word “brainless” is bandied about as an insult, but the truth is that lots of successful lifeforms get around just fine without a brain. For instance, microbes can locomote through fluids—a complex action—with no centralized nervous system. Naturally, scientists were like, “what’s that all about?”
“So far, it remains unclear how decentralized decision-making in a deformable microswimmer can lead to efficient collective locomotion of its body parts,” said researchers led by Benedikt Hartl of TU Wien and Tufts University. “We thus investigate biologically motivated decentralized yet collective decision-making strategies of the swimming behavior of a generalized…swimmer.”
The upshot: Decentralized circuits regulate movements in brainless swimmers, an insight that could inspire robotic analogs for drug delivery and other functions. However, the real tip-of-the-hat goes to the concept artist for the above depiction of the team’s bead-based simulated microbe, who shall hereafter be known as Beady the Deformable Microswimmer.
Big Jupiter in Little Solar System
Jupiter is pretty dang big at this current moment. More than 1,000 Earths could fit inside the gas giant; our planet is a mere gumball on these scales. But at the dawn of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago, Jupiter was at least twice as massive as it is today, and its magnetic field was 50 times stronger, according to a new study.
“Our calculations reveal that Jupiter was 2 to 2.5 times as large as it is today, 3.8 [million years] after the formation of the first solids in the Solar System,” said authors Konstantin Batygin of the California Institute of Technology and Fred Adams of the University of Michigan. “Our findings…provide an evolutionary snapshot that pins down properties of the Jovian system at the end of the protosolar nebula’s lifetime.”
The team based their conclusions on the subtle orbital tilts of two of Jupiter’s tiny moons Amalthea and Thebe, which allowed them to reconstruct conditions in the early Jovian system. It’s nice to see Jupiter’s more offbeat moons get some attention; Europa is always hogging the spotlight. (Fun fact: lots of classic sci-fi stories are set on Amalthea, from Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s “The Way to Amaltha” to Arthur C. Clarke’s “Jupiter Five.”)
Now That’s Infracredible
I was hooked on this new study by the second sentence, which reads: “However, the capability to detect invisible multispectral infrared light with the naked eye is highly desirable.”
Okay, let's assume that the public is out there, highly desiring infrared vision, though I would like to see some poll-testing. A team has now developed an upconversion contact-lens (UCL) that detects near-infrared light (NIR) and converts it into blue, green and red wavelengths. While this is not the kind of inborn infrared vision you’d see in sci-fi, it does expand our standard retinal retinue, with fascinating results.
“Humans wearing upconversion contact lenses (UCLs) could accurately recognize near-infrared (NIR) temporal information like Morse code and discriminate NIR pattern images,” said researchers led by Yuqian Ma of the University of Science and Technology of China. “Interestingly, both mice and humans with UCLs exhibited better discrimination of NIR light compared with visible light when their eyes were closed, owing to the penetration capability of NIR light.”
The study reminds me of the legendary scene in Battlestar Galactica where Dean Stockwell, as John Cavil, exclaims: “I don't want to be human. I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter.” Maybe he just needed some upgraded contact lenses!
Hold the Door! (to Mars)
This week in space elevator news, why not set one up on the Martian moon Phobos? A new study envisions anchoring a tether to Phobos, a dinky little space potato that’s about the size of Manhattan, and extending it out some 3,700 miles, almost to the surface of Mars. Because Phobos is tidally locked to Mars (the same side always faces the planet), it might be possible to shuttle back and forth between Mars and Phobos on a tether.
“The building of such a space elevator [is] a feasible project in the not too distant future,” said author Vladimir Aslanov of the Moscow Aviation Institute. “Such a project could form the basis of many missions to explore Phobos, Mars and the space around them.”
Indeed, this is far from the first time scientists have pondered the advantages of a Phobian space elevator. Just don’t be the jerk that pushes all the buttons.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
