Thought you needed giant headphones, a $3,000 mixing board and a spiky haircut to be a DJ? Not so. Tonium’s new Pacemaker 2 should do the trick.
Marketed as “the pocket-sized DJ system,” Tonium has taken the Pacemaker it introduced in 2008 and given it a price tag and feature set a little more appropriate for “aspiring” DJs with the Pacemaker 2. It gets a color display, multi-touch control pad, and crossfader, all allowing amateurs to mix between two independent channels on the go – a kind of portable version of the USB DJ getups that have become so commonplace recently.
Unlike the original Pacemaker, which stored an impressive 120GB of music for careful mixing and remixing, the new version carries on 60GB. It also has a simplified user interface, which might be a good thing considering how complex the original was. Tonium claims newbies can now learn to mix in under two minutes.
After editing, you can even upload your custom mixes to the Pacemaker community to show them off, and download the works of others for inspiration.
An exact release date for the updated version and a clear price tag haven’t yet been announced, but rumor has it the device will come in under $500 (compared to $874 for the original). More information can be found at Tonium.
Google has been finding more ways to make Gemini a part of your daily routine, from putting together playlists to ordering groceries through your favorite apps. Now it's expanding those capabilities to more services, with Google Search joining in, too.
The company has announced a new Connected Apps Platform that makes it easier for developers to bring their services to both Gemini and Search. Alongside this, Google is adding new partners to its growing lineup, bringing more of the apps people already use into its AI ecosystem.
In the broad context of AI and its perceived harms, health and medical risks often pop up in the conversation. The warnings even come from frontier AI labs, such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have warned about misusing AI to cook up bioweapons. Security experts have already spotted a few such incidents in the wild, especially with the usage of AI models without any solid guardrails.
Well, it appears that the risks run deeper. As per an analysis appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), AI bots are now being deployed to influence public policies governing health risks to citizens. In this instance, an attempt was made using AI bots to thwart regulations that aim to restrict the sale of disposable vapes, all while disguising the manipulation efforts as a response from real humans.
What if checking your drinking water for dangerous chemicals were as simple as plugging a tiny gadget into your smartphone? Researchers in Japan have developed a compact sensor that could make that possible, potentially bringing sophisticated water contamination testing out of expensive laboratories and into people's hands.
Scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have created a portable device capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of PFAS, commonly known as "forever chemicals." The findings were published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, which demonstrate how an inexpensive sensor and a smartphone could make identifying potentially harmful chemicals in water a lot easier.