Hasta La Gadget!

You might not have to pay to charge the Kia EV6 if you take it on a road trip — but you might want to dial back your expectations. Kia and Electrify America have launched a deal that gives EV6 buyers 1,000kWh of free charging at any of EA’s US stations for up to three years. That offers around 3,500 to 4,000 miles of driving, depending on your model and road conditions.

The promo might be helpful if you’re in a hurry. If you happen to find one of Electrify America’s 350kW chargers, you can reach an 80 percent charge as quickly as 18 minutes.

As you might have guessed from the numbers, though, the deal isn’t quite as sweet as it sounds. If you’re driving the longest-ranged EV6, the 310-mile “Wind” trim, you’ll get around 11 to 13 full charges before you start paying. That’s fine for cross-country jaunts, but it won’t help much if you’re hoping to save money during your commutes. You might want to spring for the Ioniq 5 (which promises unlimited 30-minute charges for two years) if you want a Hyundai group EV without paying for frequent top-ups.

Nonetheless, this might be a useful offer. It could soften the initial blow of EV ownership, particularly if you’re unsure about the costs of driving long distances. To some degree, it’s also a competitive necessity — Tesla’s Supercharger network is still larger than Electrify America’s equivalent, and this may persuade you to buy the Kia if you were otherwise hesitant.

While we humans can’t agree where we stand on tracking devices, one group of birds assertively came out against the technology. In The Conversation, Dominique Potvin, an Animal Ecology professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia, said he and his team recently witnessed a mischief of magpies display a rare cooperative “rescue” behavior when they attempted to track the birds.

As part of their study, Potvin’s team developed a seemingly ingenious way of collecting data on a group of five magpies. They developed a lightweight but tough harness the birds could wear like backpacks and carry a small tracker with them as they went about their daily lives. They also created a feeding station that would wirelessly charge and download data from the trackers. It even had a magnet for freeing the birds of the harness. “We were excited by the design, as it opened up many possibilities for efficiency and enabled a lot of data to be collected,” Potvin said.

Unfortunately, the study fell apart in mere days. Within 10 minutes of Potvin’s team fitting the final tracker, they saw a female magpie use her bill to remove a harness off of one of the younger birds. Hours later, most of the other test subjects had been freed of their trackers too. By day three, even the most dominant male in the group had allowed one of his flock to assist him.

“We don’t know if it was the same individual helping each other or if they shared duties, but we had never read about any other bird cooperating in this way to remove tracking devices,” Potvin said. “The birds needed to problem solve, possibly testing at pulling and snipping at different sections of the harness with their bill. They also needed to willingly help other individuals, and accept help.”

According to Potvin, the only other example they could find of that kind of behavior among birds involved Seychelles warblers who helped their flockmates escape from sticky Pisonia seed clusters. Visit The Conversation to read the full story.

GM has told its customers it’s shutting down the Marketplace app, which allowed drivers to pay for goods and services through the infotainment system. The app, which arrived in 2017, let them buy things like gas and coffee and make hotel and restaurant reservations via the dashboard. The company will wind down Marketplace starting in March.

“We routinely evaluate our services to ensure they provide the best experience for our members,” GM told owners in an email. “In this spirit, we have decided to discontinue our Marketplace services.”

The automaker brought the app to millions of its vehicles in the US, but it seems drivers didn’t really take to it. According to CNBC, an engineer said that after the feature launched, the active user rates were in the “thousands.”

Mediatonic has revealed Sweet Thieves, the next “Fall Guys” game mode. Even better, the title finally has full crossplay support for PC and PlayStation.

Back when Snapchat was at the height of its popularity, Meta-owned Instagram announced a feature similar to Snapchat Stories and it became a hit. Then when TikTok started to gain traction, Instagram announced a similar feature called Reels, and given that Meta owns both Facebook and Instagram, it shouldn’t be surprising that Reels will be coming to Facebook as well.

For those who are unfamiliar, Reels is essentially the same in concept as TikTok’s videos, where users can film short videos of themselves dancing to songs, adding fun and unique effects, as well as remixing other Reels to create pseudo collaborations. It used to be a feature only available on Instagram, but soon Facebook users can see it as well.

According to Facebook, “You can share public reels to Stories on Facebook, making it easy to share favorite reels with friends and giving creators more visibility and reach. You’ll also be able to create reels from existing public stories.” Facebook also notes that Reels will be available in the Watch tab, and also at the top of your feed, similar to Facebook’s Stories.

Facebook will also recommend Reels inside of your feed itself, so users will be able to discover more content. Given how Instagram’s Stories eventually found its way onto Facebook, we can’t say this news really comes as a surprise.

Reels Will Be Coming To The Facebook App

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