Tech Digest daily round up: Nissan ‘quits talks’ with Apple over driverless car

Nissan has quit talks with Apple over its secretive Project Titan electric autonomous vehicle project. Discussions didn’t reach an advanced stage, the Financial Times reports, with the two companies apparently disagreeing about branding. Nissan said today (Monday 15th February) it wasn’t in talks with Apple about developing self-driving cars, after Hyundai also denied reports it was involved with the iPhone maker.

Jaguar has said it will re-invent itself to become an “all-electric luxury brand” by 2025 and a net-zero business by 2029. It has confirmed all Jaguar and Land Rover models will be available in pure electric ranges by the end of the decade. The first all-electric Land Rover will hit forecourts in 2024 with a further six pure electric cars set to become available over the next five years. See story here: https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/cars/1398062/jaguar-land-rover-news-electric-car-announcement

Google and Facebook are ‘very close’ to agreeing on deals with major Australian media to pay for news, a top government official said today, as the tech giants scramble to avoid landmark regulation. Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said talks with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai had made ‘great progress’ in resolving a standoff being closely watched around the world. See full story here: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9261981/Google-Facebook-close-agreeing-deal-Australian-media-pay-news.html

The Guardian has a review of Anker’s Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro earbuds and is impressed. According to the paper they ‘offer good sound, long battery life and noise-cancelling’ at almost half the price of Apple’s AirPods Pro. Costing £130, they undercut models from big-name competitors such as Apple, Samsung, Sony, Jabra and Bose, although their ‘design doesn’t reinvent the wheel’. See full story here: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/feb/15/soundcore-liberty-air-2-pro-review-cut-price-noise-cancelling-earbuds

The first-ever Arab interplanetary mission has snapped a couple of images of Mars during its journey so far, but nothing quite like what it delivered yesterday (February 14th), claims CNet. From a distance of about 15,500 miles (25,000 kilometres), the probe’s camera — officially known as the Emirates eXploration Imager (EXI) — captured a picturesque view of Mars as a yellowed semicircle against the black curtain of space. See picture above. 

The accidental discovery of marine organisms on a boulder on the seafloor beneath 900 metres (3,000ft) of Antarctic ice shelf has led scientists to rethink the limits of life on Earth, writes The Guardian.  “It’s slightly bonkers,” said Dr Huw Griffiths, a marine biogeographer at the British Antarctic Survey. “Never in a million years would we have thought about looking for this kind of life, because we didn’t think it would be there.”