Robot vacuums are insanely expensive. A reliable, midrange mapping vacuum like the Shark AI Ultra (8/10, WIRED Recommends) can run you almost a grand. I say that it’s midrange because that’s what the market will bear, but $700 is out of my own budget for a home appliance. Those of us who are plebes must resign ourselves to cheaper bounce-navigation vacuums, or else to a life of constant maintenance.
But what if there was a third option—a vacuum that was just a little dumber, and thus a little less expensive? Enter TP-Link’s Tapo RV10 Plus, which has a self-emptying station, a mop, but a much cheaper navigation system and no mapping to slow it down, give your home details to Amazon, or post pictures of your butt to Reddit. It’s an intriguing value proposition. Personally, I found it to be a little wonky, but if your home is smaller and doesn’t have mixed flooring, this would be a great pick.
Well Done
Tapo is the smart home brand owned by TP-Link, which is well known to us (and possibly you) as a router manufacturer. The RV10 Plus is its first robot vacuum, but this is not TP-Link’s first rodeo when it comes to home appliances. That shows in the hardware’s clean lines and easy setup. No screwing on flimsy plates or stands—I pulled two pieces out of the box, connected the TV10 Plus to the app, and I was done. It also works with Google Home and Amazon Alexa.
The self-empty bin is amazing. The bin on most self-emptying robot vacuums usually has a shutter or a curve in the tube that connects it to the dust bag on the dock. Ostensibly it is to prevent dirt from leaking out, but it usually malfunctions or traps debris. On the RV10 Plus, the bin tube is straight, and there’s no door. Nothing ever gets stuck or trapped. Every time I checked the bin, it was empty. I never had to stick my poor index finger inside the chute to loosen clogs.
It took about 1.5 hours for it to charge from 5 percent to 100 percent. TP-Link claims around three hours of cleaning on one charge, which I found to be accurate. We had run times of up to two hours and 37 minutes at a standard cleaning level (you can set it to one of three vacuum power levels), with power still in the tank.
It also has a mop attachment with a perfectly adequate 300-mL water tank. You can select between three different water levels. To mop, you clip the panel with the washable mop pad on the bottom of the vacuum tank. The lowest water level worked well on my wooden kitchen floor and had about half a tank left when it finished cleaning about 250 square feet.
Rolling Around
Unlike many, even other midrange vacuums, the TV10 Plus uses gyroscope navigation to determine where everything is in your house and the distance between them. There’s a number of advantages to gyroscope navigation. First off, it’s much cheaper and faster than a laser system might be, and it doesn’t have a camera to violate your privacy or send images to Amazon. Few things are more annoying than a low-end mapping robot that wastes endless hours getting stuck and requiring three or four (or even 35) mapping runs to come up with an inaccurate map.
When it did clean a room, the TV10 Plus worked great. It swept over each room in long S-shaped passes that navigated adroitly around obstacles and picked up the big dog hair tumbleweeds that my heeler mix leaves by getting scratches and pets in the middle of the living room. When I mopped my kitchen, laundry room, and bathroom, it cleaned 250 square feet in around 24 to 29 minutes. This is fast and efficient; it cleans up all the Ritz cracker crumbs and powdered sugar under the kitchen table, and it’s a performance comparable to much more expensive mopping robot vacuums that I’ve tried.
However, unlike a mapping vacuum, you can’t program it to clean just one part of your house and stop. So every time I mopped, I had to keep an ear cocked and race to grab it before it dragged a wet, dirty mop pad onto the carpeted parts of my house.
The app does have a remote control, but it’s about 50–50 whether I remember and grab my phone first or the robot vacuum. I asked Tapo whether the company had any tips for setting automatic boundaries and its spokesperson suggested buying magnetic boundary tape ($25). I’ve used this tape before. It’s effective and it’s not particularly hard, but it is unsightly and annoying.
And because gyroscope navigation can get thrown off on low-friction surfaces, it occasionally misses the doorways between completely. That means I can take the trouble to pick up my entire house and it will spend all three hours cleaning only one room. That room is sparkling, but still.
Of course, it’s really easy to imagine a house in which this wouldn’t be a problem. In fact, in my old house, which was all hardwood floors in an open floor plan, I probably wouldn’t have even noticed Tapo’s shortcomings at all. If you have this specific use case, then congratulations! This is your unicorn, a self-emptying robot vacuum-mop combo that doesn’t completely suck and is under $500! For the rest of us, we might still need to spend the extra cash.
Meanwhile, Hanna’s team in Israel was growing mouse embryo models in a similar way, as they described in a paper in Cell that was published shortly before the paper from Zernicka-Goetz’s group. Hanna’s models too were made solely from embryonic stem cells, some of which had been genetically coaxed to become TSCs and XEN cells. “The entire synthetic organ-filled embryo, including extra-embryonic membranes, can all be generated by starting only with naive pluripotent stem cells,” Hanna said.
Hanna’s embryo models, like those made by Zernicka-Goetz, passed through all the expected early developmental stages. After 8.5 days, they had a crude body shape, with head, limb buds, a heart, and other organs. Their bodies were attached to a pseudo-placenta made of TSCs by a column of cells like an umbilical cord.
“These embryo models recapitulate natural embryogenesis very well,” Zernicka-Goetz said. The main differences may be consequences of the placenta forming improperly, since it cannot contact a uterus. Imperfect signals from the flawed placenta may impair the healthy growth of some embryonic tissue structures.
Without a better substitute for a placenta, “it remains to be seen how much further these structures will develop,” she said. That’s why she thinks the next big challenge will be to take embryo models through a stage of development that normally requires a placenta as an interface for the circulating blood systems of the mother and fetus. No one has yet found a way to do that in vitro, but she says her group is working on it.
Hanna acknowledged that he was surprised by how well the embryo models continued to grow beyond gastrulation. But he added that after working on this for 12 years, “you are excited and surprised at every milestone, but in one or two days you get used to it and take it for granted, and you focus on the next goal.”
Jun Wu, a stem cell biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, was also surprised that embryo models made from embryonic stem cells alone can get so far. “The fact that they can form embryo-like structures with clear early organogenesis suggests we can obtain seemingly functional tissues ex utero, purely based on stem cells,” he said.
In a further wrinkle, it turns out that embryo models do not have to be grown from literal embryonic stem cells—that is, stem cells harvested from actual embryos. They can also be grown from mature cells taken from you or me and regressed to a stem cell-like state. The possibility of such a “rejuvenation” of mature cell types was the revolutionary discovery of the Japanese biologist Shinya Yamanaka, which won him a share of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Such reprogrammed cells are called induced pluripotent stem cells, and they are made by injecting mature cells (such as skin cells) with a few of the key genes active in embryonic stem cells.
So far, induced pluripotent stem cells seem able to do pretty much anything that real embryonic stem cells can do, including growing into embryo-like structures in vitro. And that success seems to sever the last essential connection between embryo models and real embryos: You don’t need an embryo to make them, which puts them largely outside existing regulations.
Growing Organs in the Lab
Even if embryo models have unprecedented similarity to real embryos, they still have many shortcomings. Nicolas Rivron, a stem cell biologist and embryologist at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna, acknowledges that “embryo models are rudimentary, imperfect, inefficient, and lack the capacity of giving rise to a living organism.”
The failure rate for growing embryo models is very high: Fewer than 1 percent of the initial cell clusters make it very far. Subtle abnormalities, mostly involving disproportionate organ sizes, often snuff them out, Hanna said. Wu believes more work is needed to understand both the similarities to normal embryos and the differences that may explain why mouse embryo models haven’t been able to grow beyond 8.5 days.
It’s no exaggeration to say that small features in a chat app encode different visions of how society should be organized. If the first reacji in the palette was a thumbs down rather than a heart, maybe we would all be more negative, cautious people. What kind of social vision did Signal arise from?
“Looking back, I and everyone I knew was looking for that secret world hidden in this one,” Marlinspike admitted in a 2016 interview. A key text in anarchist theory describes the idea of a “temporary autonomous zone,” a place of short-term freedom where people can experiment with new ways to live together outside the confines of current social norms. Originally coined to describe “pirate utopias” that may be apocryphal, the term has since been used to understand the life and afterlife of real-world DIY spaces like communes, raves, seasteads, and protests. And Signal is, unmistakably, a temporary autonomous zone that Marlinspike has spent almost a decade building.
Because temporary autonomous zones create spaces for the radical urges that society represses, they keep life in the daytime more stable. They can sometimes make money in the way that nightclubs and festivals do. But temporary autonomous zones are temporary for a reason. Over and over, zone denizens make the same mistake: They can’t figure out how to interact productively with the wider society. The zone often runs out of money because it exists in a world where people need to pay rent. Success is elusive; when a temporary autonomous zone becomes compelling enough to threaten daytime stability, it may be violently repressed. Or the attractive freedoms offered by the zone may be taken up in a milder form by the wider society, and eventually the zone ceases to exist because its existence has pressured wider society to be a little more like it. What kind of end might Signal come to?
There are reasons to think that Signal may not be around for very long. The nonprofit’s blog, meant to convince us of the elite nature of its engineers, has the unintentional effect of conveying the incredible difficulty of building any new software feature under end-to-end encryption. Its team numbers roughly 40; Marlinspike has just left the organization. Achieving impossible feats may be fun for a stunt hacker with something to prove, but competing with major tech companies’ engineering teams may not be sustainable for a small nonprofit with Marlinspike no longer at the helm.
Fittingly for an organization formerly led by an anarchist, Signal lacks a sustainable business model, to the point where you might almost call it anti-capitalist. It has survived so far in ways that don’t seem replicable, and that may alienate some users. Signal is largely funded by a big loan from a WhatsApp founder, and that loan has already grown to $100 million. It has also accepted funding from the US government through the Open Technology Fund. Because Signal can’t sell its users’ data, it has recently begun developing a business model based on directly providing services to users and encouraging them to donate to Signal in-app. But to get enough donations, the nonprofit must grow from 40 million users to 100 million. The company’s aggressive pursuit of growth, coupled with lack of moderation in the app, has already led Signal employees themselves to publicly question whether growth might come from abusive users, such as far-right groups using Signal to organize.
But there are also reasons for hope. So far, the most effective change that Signal has created is arguably not the existence of the app itself, but making it easy for WhatsApp to bring Signal-style end-to-end encryption to billions of users. Since WhatsApp’s adoption, Facebook Messenger, Google’s Android Messages, and Microsoft’s Skype have all adopted the open source Signal Protocol, though in milder forms, as the history of temporary autonomous zones would have us guess. Perhaps the existence of the Signal Protocol, coupled with demand from increasingly privacy-conscious users, will encourage better-funded messaging apps to compete against each other to be as encrypted as possible. Then Signal would no longer need to exist. (In fact, this resembles Signal’s original theory of change, before they decided they would rather compete with mainstream tech companies.)
Now, as the era of the global watercooler ends, small private group chats are becoming the future of social life on the internet. Signal started out a renegade, a pirate utopia encircled by cryptography, but the mainstream has become—alarmingly quickly—much closer to the vision Signal sought. In one form or another, its utopia just might last.
Sam noted how since it would be extremely difficult to determine the weight of the beans the TrueBrew uses nor the original volume of water nor the temperature in the brewing chamber, it’s a bit of a black box in terms of figuring out what’s happening while it makes coffee.
He could, however, measure the total dissolved solids (TDS), the amount of coffee grounds that actually dissolve into your coffee and denote a sense of the drink’s strength. At 3.99 TDS, it was like a half-strength espresso.
From there, we made two consecutive 12-ounce cups, which both poured a little under 10 ounces, which Sam found acceptable.
“Room for cream,” he declared cheerily.
(Note: Some online sources have found the consistency of the TrueBrew’s pour sizes to fluctuate. We didn’t have this problem, but keep an eye on user reviews as more people buy the machine.)
The TDS for both cups was around 1.40, which Sam called “kinda ideal,” but it didn’t taste right.
“Big Truck has a lot of acidity. This is weak and bitter. I want it out of my mouth,” Sam said. “It could be any coffee. You know that workplace coffee that nobody likes? It’s like that.”
Ouch!
We switched from the gold to the bold brew setting, and things got a little better, but it still didn’t taste right. Looking for a culprit, Sam’s mind returned to the machine’s messiness.
“I wonder if we’re getting flavors of over- and under-extraction. It’s dirty in there, so you’re essentially getting a bit of grounds that are going through the brewing cycle twice or more, which can make it taste over-extracted and bitter,” he hypothesized. Then he went further. “It might also be not extracting enough, which could have to do with grind size, water, temperature, and the amount of time water is in contact with the grounds.”
It felt like we were zeroing in on the worst of both worlds, so we switched coffees to Olympia’s William Rojas Pink Bourbon Micro Lot from Columbia to see if we could learn more. We did, but it was not good news.
“This took a really good coffee and brewed a mediocre cup,” Sam said. “It brews what it brews, and I’m confused. This is essentially a one-touch machine, but it doesn’t default to the good stuff. You’re kind of stuck with what it can do. This coffee should be exciting, and it isn’t.”
We had tried espresso-style, regular-coffee-style, light, gold, and bold and even switched the coffee itself, with little effect. We’d run out of ways to tweak our way to a good cup.
A little less than two weeks later, I pulled out the infuser to see how it was looking. A gumdrop-sized mound of wet grounds had accumulated behind the arm that sweeps spent pucks of coffee off of the infuser and into the used-grounds container, along with a scattering everywhere else on top of it. That was enough unexciting coffee for me. I packed up the TrueBrew and sent it back.
Freshly ground and not capsuled? Yes. Convenient? Sure! Perfetto? Sorry, Brad. It should be more exciting, but it isn’t.
The eponymous wine preservation system made by Coravin has been transformative in the wine world, allowing you to extract wine from any bottle sealed with a cork without having to open the bottle or expose it to air. One of its few flaws, however, is that it doesn’t work with sparkling wines. In fact, piercing a champagne cork with Coravin’s needle would likely be catastrophic.
Coravin has finally remedied this issue, but fans of fizz will need to buy a whole new device that’s designed just for preserving sparkling wines. It will also mean mastering yet another wine gadget—the Coravin Sparkling—and as Coravin fans likely know, the company’s products aren’t the most intuitive devices to use.
To that end, the Quick Start Guide for the Coravin Sparkling is a solid five pages of text, and users are well advised to read every word of it and maybe watch a video on how the thing works. Like the original Coravin, the Sparkling is designed to insert gas into a bottle, but the mechanics of the process are entirely different.
Coravin’s new device preserves sparkling wines by pumping the open bottle with CO2.
Photograph: Coravin
Step one: Open the bottle. This may be anathema to Coravin users who can drink an entire bottle of wine without ever removing the cork, but it’s a necessity this time around. There’s just no other way to get to the juice inside unless the bottle is breached.
Step two: Drink all you want.
Step three: Here’s where you’ll need to study up. While the beauty of Coravin is that it’s self-contained, Coravin Sparkling requires a bit more gear. The secret of Coravin Sparkling is found in its custom stopper, a bulky cylinder that clips onto the lip of the bottle. You’ll need to use some force to get the stopper attached; a locking handle slides down to ensure a solid seal, keeping air where it is supposed to be. Next, enter the Coravin Sparkling Charger, a lightsaber-looking device that is loaded up with compressed CO2, much like the original Coravin’s argon canisters. Press the Charger down on the top of the stopper and it dispenses CO2 directly into the bottle through a one-way valve. A small indicator (mechanical, like a tire pressure meter) changes from red to green when you’ve hit the appropriate level of pressure inside the bottle. Release the Charger and you’re done. Your bottle is now re-pressurized and can be stored for two to four weeks, depending on which page on the Coravin website you read, preferably in the refrigerator and on its side (a neat trick, as most aftermarket stoppers will leak if stored sideways).
Five months into my eight-month solitary confinement and right before the Persian New Year, Nowruz, the guards put me in a new cell at the other end of the Evin prison high-security facility in Tehran. Measuring 3 by 3 meters, it was much larger than my old cell, which meant I could walk in a figure eight across the corners. In the absence of anything else to do, continuous walks were my sole routine, and they quickly became an addiction.
I walked and walked. Remembered and imagined, anticipated and planned for all possible scenarios, and often conversed with myself out loud, in any languages I had any knowledge of. During these figure-eight walks, I faced the windows or the half-marble-covered walls. Sunlight seeped into the room, tracing paths of gold over the floor, then scaling the walls. It danced, warmed, then vanished, promising to return tomorrow. The marble canvas revealed images: the curved, nude back of a seated woman, surrounded by profiles of faces and clouds.
Deprived of sights, I sought refuge in sounds. The new cell received less light due to the tall, gorgeous plane and mulberry trees right outside. but it was right next to the main entrance and thus, within Evin standards, more eventful and entertaining—even if only through hearing. I could hear when the bored guards gossiped about their shift supervisors at the end of the hall, or when they responded to other inmates’ requests, or when they watched football or drama on state television. (I never heard any news, since they were strictly advised not to watch the news.) Once, a few seconds of an instrumental version of Radiohead’s “A Punch Up at a Wedding” on a stupid TV commercial made me cry my heart out. I wasn’t sure which I craved more: hugs or books. I suspect it is very rare to be deprived of both at the same time.
My only comfort came from our equality in this misery, or at least the perception of it. The guards and interrogators had always said no one was given books or newspapers in our ward. I had believed them, because I had seen no sight (nor heard any sound) of them.
One afternoon, though, I heard something that shattered this tiny comfort. Four pairs of slippers had appeared outside a cell two down from me, hinting at four inmates who most likely had just come out of solitary to be kept in a large cell together. A few hours later, through the ventilation shafts that connected the cells, I heard newspaper rustling. It broke my heart, truly. That common shaft and what I could hear through it deeply unsettled me for the next three months. Of all the injustices of a high-security prison ward, from the blindfolded walking breaks in the yard to the awful gray polyester uniform and the cheap blue nylon underwear, this one felt the harshest.
But what if there were no shared ventilation shafts between cells via which I heard the other cell? What if the ward were so vast that we never felt the presence of others? What if they could make us deaf as they made us blind? What if they could enclose our senses as they trapped our bodies? Broader questions emerge: If we know nothing about our colleagues’ salaries or where and with which standards they live, can we even know if we are treated fairly? Can injustice be felt if there is not a shared space where we can see and learn about others’ lives?
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