Does this outfit suck? Alexa can take your photo and tell you
Amazon introduced the new Echo Look this week—a camera (it also takes video) so you can do full-size selfies and, better yet, it can evaluate your outfit and make style suggestions. It’s basically your standard Echo, so it will control your smart home devices, tell you the weather, play your music, etc., but enhanced with a camera. But, since the Echo raises some people’s privacy hackles, the camera only adds to the concern. (My vote is t
hat this is just creepy, but I’m an old Gen X’er, so maybe my age is showing.) (Image: Amazon)
About those new circles in Pinterest…
If you’re a pinner, don’t ignore those new circles showing up the bottom of your feed images—they’re an awesome new feed personalization “button”/feature. If you press one, Pinterest “instantly injects around a half-dozen pieces of similar content right below it.” But the rest of your feed is still there so the change isn’t permanent. IMO a clever way to do a few deeper dives without trying to trick some kind of feed algorithm. (And to answer the question on the pin: yes, I had one of those as a kid.)
Is it just me, or does this look Matrix-like?
Fetal lambs spent four weeks an external artificial womb to finish growing —and they turned out just fine. 
(Seriously, you can’t tell me this doesn’t remind you of the Matrix battery farm a little bit!) 
The researchers created the Biobag (yeah, that’s what it’s called) that has a pump-less circulatory system, recreating the very complex environment of a real womb. The hope is that this is the first step towards developing a solution for premature infants. The Verge has the full story and a video.
New “flying car” that looks more like a flying spiderweb/drone
Google founder Larry Page put his money behind Kitty Hawk, a flying car company. This week they introduced the Kitty Hawk Flyer prototype (with plans to sell it later this year). Designed to fly over water without a pilot’s license, you can check it out in their video here (which has a woman leaving her house and flying it, and a man arriving, so that flyer must be pretty darn fancy 😉 ).
Nintendo’s surprises everyone with a new device
The tech blogs were all taken by surprise yesterday—Nintendo announced a new Nintendo portable on the heels of closing production on the NES Classic. Specifically, Nintendo will be rolling out a 2DS XL that’s just like the 3DS XL (so nice and big) but it only displays games in, you guessed it, 2D. It will launch July 13, come in two colors, and will cost $150. (Image: Nintendo)
Other interesting stories you might find interesting:
- A new paleontology/archaeology find may make us throw out what we thought we knew about human history.
- Twitter is actually doing much better, financially speaking.
- Alien fans: there’s a new movie clip of Alien: Covenant out!
