Facebook parent company Meta has acquired Luxexcel, a Dutch startup specializing in smart eyewear. News of the purchase was first reported by De Tijd and later confirmed by TechCrunch. “We’re excited that the Luxexcel team has joined Meta, deepening the existing partnership between the two companies,” a Meta spokesperson told the outlet. The company did not disclose the financial terms of the deal.
Founded in 2009, Luxexcel began life as a prescription lens manufacturer. More recently, the company has made a name for itself in the augmented reality space. At the start of 2021, for instance, it partnered with WaveOptics, the display manufacturer Snap paid $500 million later that same year to buy. As TechCrunch points out, there are also rumors Luxexcel previously worked with Meta on the company’s Project Aria AR glasses.
The acquisition comes as Meta faces regulatory scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission over its purchase of Supernatural developer Within. The agency sued Meta in July to block the deal. The social media giant also faces criticism over just how much it’s spending to further its metaverse ambitions. In October, a month before the company laid off 11,000 employees, Meta told investors Reality Labs, its virtual and augmented reality unit, lost more than $9 billion in 2022. It went on to predict the division’s operating losses were likely to “grow significantly year-over-year” in 2023.
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When doctors need to confirm an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, they often turn to a combination of brain imaging and cell analysis. Both have their downsides. The latter involves a lumbar puncture, an invasive and painful procedure that’s more commonly known as a spinal tap. A doctor will insert a needle into the lower back to extract a sample of the patient’s cerebrospinal fluid. A lab technician then tests the sample for signs of progressive nerve cell loss and excessive amyloid and tau protein accumulation. MRI scans are less invasive but they’re often expensive and accessibility is an issue; not every community has access to the technology.
The next best tool for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease is a blood test. While some can detect abnormal tau protein counts, they’re less effective at spotting the telltale signs of neurodegeneration. But that could soon change. This week, in the journal Brain, a multinational team made up of researchers from Sweden, Italy, the UK and US detailed a new antibody-based blood test they recently developed. The new test can detect brain-derived tau proteins, which are specific to Alzheimer’s disease. Following a study of 600 patients, the team found their test could reliably distinguish the illness from other neurodegenerative diseases.
Dr. Thomas Karikari, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh and one of the co-authors of the study, told The Guardian he hopes the breakthrough could help other researchers design better clinical trials for Alzheimer’s treatments. “A blood test is cheaper, safer and easier to administer, and it can improve clinical confidence in diagnosing Alzheimer’s and selecting participants for clinical trial and disease monitoring,” he said. There’s more work to be done before the test makes its way to your local hospital. To start, the team needs to validate that it works for a wide variety of patients, including those who come from different ethnic backgrounds.
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Whether you just got your hands on a new phone or want to give your current device a makeover, the easiest way to make the most of your smartphone is to try out new apps. The tricky part is not going overboard and installing too many. Below you’ll find a dozen of the best smartphones apps we think you should try.
Bitwarden
Bitwarden
If you only take one piece of advice away from this article, it’s that you should download a password manager. If you’ve never used one before, it’s hard to go wrong with Bitwarden. It won’t wow you with beautifully designed apps, but you’ll appreciate its fair business model. The best part of the Bitwarden experience is that all of its core features are free to use. Without paying a cent, you can use Bitwarden on as many devices as you want. By comparison, LastPass charges $3 per month for that same functionality. If you want to support Bitwarden, the $10 per year Premium plan is well worth the money as you get access to features like advanced two-factor authentication.
FireFox
Firefox
If it’s been a few years since you last used Firefox, now is a great time to revisit it. Partway through last year, Mozilla overhauled the Android version of its browser to bring over many of its best desktop features to mobile. That release saw Mozilla add more robust support for third-party add-ons. It also brought over its Enhanced Tracking Protection feature, which stops trackers from misusing your browsing data. Separately, with Apple allowing you to change your default browser since the release of iOS 14, there’s never been a better time for iPhone users to liberate themselves from Safari.
Headspace
Headspace
I subscribed to Headspace at the start of the pandemic. Since then, it’s become one of the few apps I use every day. Yes, Headspace is a meditation and mindfulness app, but it’s also so much more than that. You’ll find it also has a mix of music designed to help you focus and workouts for unwinding at the end of a long day. Across the board, everything it offers is excellent, and you’ll find yourself turning to it for more than just peace of mind.
Notion
Notion
Notion is one of the most powerful productivity tools you can download right now, and if your goal for 2023 is to organize your personal and professional lives, I can’t recommend it enough. What makes Notion so powerful is an interface that looks simple but offers a lot of flexibility. I’ve used Notion to create to-do lists, write notes and features and manage personal projects. It can be a bit overwhelming at first. My suggestion is to head over to YouTube to see how other people have used Notion’s features to organize their lives.
Libby
Libby
If you want to do more reading in 2022, forget about buying books through Amazon and download Libby instead. If you’re not familiar with the app, it allows you to borrow ebooks, digital magazines and graphic novels from your local library. All you need is a library card, which most systems across the US offer for free. Sometimes you have to wait to borrow the books you want to read most, but you’ll find Libby will dramatically expand your reading list.
Transit
Transit
There’s nothing worse than waiting for a bus on a cold winter’s day or watching three go by one after another. Avoid both situations with one of the best public transit planning apps on Android and iOS. Transit excels where other apps in the category fail thanks to its clean, easy-to-use interface that highlights all the options near you. It also has one of the better algorithms for predicting departure times, so you’ll know exactly when you need to run out of your house or apartment to catch the next bus, train or streetcar.
Paprika
Paprika
Paprika is the best $5 you can spend to make feeding yourself even easier. At its core, it allows you to download recipes from your favorite websites and make them accessible on all your devices. You can also use it to scale the size of the meal you’re about to cook and convert between metric and imperial measurements. Add to that a meal planner, shopping lists and a tool for tracking the ingredients in your pantry, and you have an indispensable app for home cooks.
Pocket Casts
Pocket Casts
With podcasts becoming ever more popular with each passing year, there’s a good chance you already have a handful of favorite shows you listen to every week. As much as Spotify would like to convince you it has the best podcast app, that distinction goes to Pocket Casts. We like it because it offers a consistently great experience across every system it supports. And if you use a mix of platforms from Apple, Google and Microsoft, you don’t have to worry about syncing, either. It’s also nice to use software that doesn’t feel caught between two worlds in the way that Spotify does. Pocket Casts isn’t trying to be anything more than an app for listening to podcasts. That’s not something you can say of Spotify, and it’s often a source of frustration for those who turn to it for music.
Pocket
Pocket
Another way to read more in 2022 is to download Pocket. It’s among the most popular read-it-later apps out there, allowing you to save articles you find online. Much like Pocket Casts, what makes this app compelling is that it offers a consistently excellent device-agnostic experience, making it a great option for those who haven’t gone all-in on one ecosystem. Whether you use Chrome, Safari or Edge, you can install a browser extension to save articles you stumble upon. You can then read them later without distractions on your phone or tablet. Just don’t forget to make a dent in your Pocket reading list occasionally.
Signal
Signal
We understand, asking your friends and family to install another messaging app on their phone can sometimes feel like a Sisyphean task, but the effort has also never been more worth it. In Signal, you’ll find one of the most secure chat apps on the market. It has all the features you would expect from a messaging program, including support for stickers and Snapchat-like Stories, but more important are the ways Signal is different from rivals like WhatsApp and Telegram. Signal is a nonprofit and is one of the few apps committed to privacy rather than revenue via data collection. That means you won’t see any ads in the app, nor will the company sell your data to third-party marketers.
Tunnelbear
Tunnelbear
After a Password manager, one of the best tools you can use to safeguard your online privacy is a VPN. Again, there are many options out there, but we like TunnelBear for its simplicity and whimsical ursine theme. A VPN isn’t as essential as a password manager, but you’ll want to get one if you frequently find yourself traveling or using the public WiFi at places like cafes and libraries. Using a VPN in those contexts will ensure your connection is protected with encryption so that any information you send over remains safe and private.
Snapseed
Snapseed
Most recent phones come with great cameras. Still, even with the latest iPhone, Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel, almost every photo can benefit from an edit before you share it. The options you have for photo editing apps are nearly endless, but if you want something that works well, look no further than Snapseed. It’s an old favorite that offers a comprehensive suite of editing options but never gets bogged down in too many sliders and dials. Best of all, it makes it easy to save edits to your camera roll and upload them to apps like Instagram.
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The Federal Trade Commission has ordered Mastercard to start providing competing payment networks with the information they need to process debit card payments. In a proposed enforcement action announced on Friday, the FTC said Mastercard had allegedly violated a provision of the Dodd-Frank act known as the Durbin Amendment by prohibiting merchants from routing transactions over alternative networks.
The action targets “tokenization,” the technology that underpins mobile payment applications like Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay. When you go to make a debit or credit card purchase with your phone’s mobile wallet, the software substitutes sensitive information, including the primary number associated with your account, with a separate set of single-use “tokens.” Mastercard and Visa say the practice prevents fraud since tokens contain no exploitable information when they’re in transit. It’s only when they arrive at Mastercard or Visa’s servers, and they’re mapped back to their original account holder, that they point to someone.
According to the FTC, Mastercard has historically stopped competing networks from accessing its token vault. That means whenever consumers decided to pay with a mobile wallet, merchants had to route the transactions over Mastercard (or Visa) and pay the company’s transactions fees, which are typically higher than that of its competitors. The Durbin Amendment calls for banks to support two competing payment networks on all debit cards. It was a provision Congress introduced to promote competition among networks. The FTC didn’t say if it reached a similar agreement with Visa.
“While we are taking these steps to bring this matter to a close, there should be no question that tokenized transactions provide an increased level of protection to both consumers and merchants,” Mastercard spokesperson Seth Eisen told Bloomberg. “This focus on security guides our efforts in a highly competitive market and provides the incentive for us to continue investing in innovations that promote the peace of mind every person expects.” Eisen added Mastercard would “continue to work to update our processes to comply with the consent order and provide even greater choice.”
The FTC plans to collect comments from the public before voting to finalize the order against Mastercard.
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