List of All Articles with Tag 'tec'

Amazon has announced plans to start selling cars on its website, marking a major new product category for the online retail giant that made its start selling books. The e-commerce firm said on Thursday that it will launch vehicle sales in the US in the second half of 2024, allowing local car dealers to sell directly to customers on its site. In a joint announcement with South Korean car manufacturer Hyundai, the two companies said Amazon will begin by offering Hyundai vehicles. In turn, Hyundai will name Amazon’s cloud computing unit AWS as its preferred cloud provider and integrate its next-generation vehicles with Alexa, Amazon’s popular voice assistant. The idea, according to Amazon, is to have customers purchase a new car online and pick it up – or have it delivered – from their local dealer. Amazon did not say how many dealers would be participating in the program or if customers across the US would be able to make purchases. An Amazon spokesperson said the company would release more details as it builds the program, which is expected to begin with Hyundai franchised dealers and launch during the later part of next year. Currently, Amazon sells vehicle equipment online and offers a showroom for consumers who want to research different types of cars they may want to buy. But consumers can not directly purchase a vehicle on its platform. The announcement shows Amazon’s ambitions to grow its footprint through dealers in an industry that has strong lobbying forces and heavy state regulations. Nearly all states require manufacturers to sell their vehicles through dealerships to ensure the automakers don’t undercut their own network of franchised dealers. Despite its vision, Amazon might face challenges convincing consumers who might not feel comfortable making such a large purchase on its platform. In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson said customers are increasingly purchasing vehicles online and the company will provide a “range of solutions that add transparency” to the car buying process to help them make an informed decision. The latest move comes as Amazon faces another class action lawsuit over refunds on returned products, with plaintiffs accusing the retailer of failing to issue refunds for returned products. The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Amazon’s hometown of Seattle this week. Additional reporting from agencies. Read More ‘We are broken’: Armenia looks to technology to rebuild Ring to preview security features with abuse charity to boost safety SpaceX is launching the world’s biggest rocket – follow live Battery breakthrough brings ‘unprecedented performance’ to next-gen cells

TOKYO Japan's Panasonic Holdings said on Friday it plans to sell a stake in its automotive systems business

HONG KONG Hong Kong-listed shares of China's Alibaba Group plunged 10% on Friday, wiping about $20 billion off

SHANGHAI (Reuters) -Li Auto said on Friday it will start mass production and delivery of its first fully electric car

By James Pearson LONDON (Reuters) -China's biggest lender, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, paid a ransom after it

By Byron Kaye SYDNEY Australia's second-largest telco, Optus, had no crisis plan when a network-wide outage left nearly

Meta Platforms on Thursday launched two new AI-based features for video editing that could be used for posting

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. government hammered away at its main arguments against Alphabet's Google on Thursday, wrapping up the evidentiary

NEW YORK (Reuters) -The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Thursday urged a federal judge to force billionaire Elon

(Reuters) -Semiconductor equipment maker Applied Materials on Thursday forecast first-quarter revenue above Wall Street estimates, helped by a recovery in

By Zeba Siddiqui SAN FRANCISCO The FBI warned organizations to guard against the Scattered Spider hacking group, which

New technology allows doctors to listen to the gurgle of people’s digestion and other noises to monitor their health. Doctors use sound inside their patients’ bodies to gather a host of information, listening to the air as it moves through their lungs or the beats of their heart, as well as the processing of food. They can provide important ways to understand people’s health – and noticing when they change or stop could be life-saving. But there is no easy way for doctors to monitor those things continually, or from a distance. Now a new breakthrough wearable allows doctors to continuously track those sounds by sticking technology to people’s skin. The soft, small wearables can be attached on almost any part of the body, in multiple locations, and will track the sounds without wires. Researchers have already used the device on 15 premature babies, as well as 55 adults, monitoring people with a variety of different conditions such as respiratory diseases. They found that the devices performed with clinical-grade accuracy – but also that they provided entirely new ways of caring for people. “Currently, there are no existing methods for continuously monitoring and spatially mapping body sounds at home or in hospital settings,” said Northwestern’s John A Rogers, a bioelectronics pioneer who led the device development. “Physicians have to put a conventional, or a digital, stethoscope on different parts of the chest and back to listen to the lungs in a point-by-point fashion. In close collaborations with our clinical teams, we set out to develop a new strategy for monitoring patients in real-time on a continuous basis and without encumbrances associated with rigid, wired, bulky technology.” One of the important breakthroughs in the device is that it can be used at various places at once – with researchers likening it to having a collection of doctors all listening at once. “The idea behind these devices is to provide highly accurate, continuous evaluation of patient health and then make clinical decisions in the clinics or when patients are admitted to the hospital or attached to ventilators,”said Dr Ankit Bharat, a thoracic surgeon at Northwestern Medicine, who led the clinical research in the adult subjects, in a statement. “A key advantage of this device is to be able to simultaneously listen and compare different regions of the lungs. Simply put, it’s like up to 13 highly trained doctors listening to different regions of the lungs simultaneously with their stethoscopes, and their minds are synced to create a continuous and a dynamic assessment of the lung health that is translated into a movie on a real-life computer screen.” The work is described in a new paper, ‘Wireless broadband acousto-mechanical sensing system for continuous physiological monitoring’, published in Nature Medicine. Read More SpaceX is launching the world’s biggest rocket – follow live Instagram users warned about new setting that could accidentally expose secrets SpaceX to launch world’s biggest rocket again after first attempt ended in explosion