Treasure to Trash and Back Again

According to Erin Merani, Hatch’s vice president of marketing, this series of events was not, in fact, a planned marketing stunt, and Hatch is still figuring out the ramifications of the demon discourse. While Merani is glad the ads and programming “caught people’s attention,” she wants to clarify they were all meant for fun, and she’s heartened by how many users have rushed in to defend Hatch.

“We saw a lot of community jumping into the comments and saying, ‘Wait a minute, we missed the plot here!'” she says. “This is a Halloween-themed ad about their adult—not baby—product actually being the thing that will save you from the real evil: your phone. Your phone is actually keeping you up at night.’” To be clear, Hatch makes two devices, one specifically for kids and the other for adults. Any pop culture references, like Twilight, are exclusive to adults only via Hatch’s Restore 2 and 3 devices—they can’t be accessed on the Hatch Baby.

Then, a new trending topic arose about 48 hours later: “If you’re going to throw your Hatch device away, send it to me.”

Hatch took it and ran with it. “We used the cues of the community and sort of rode that wave with this idea of, ‘Hey, we know this is happening, and we wanted to address this while also pointing at having a little bit of fun with it,” Merani says.

Enter Hatch’s new “RePossession Program.” “We saw this overwhelming outreach of people who wanted to be ‘repossessed,'” Merani says, “so we were able to point people to our refurbishment program, to be able to keep those devices out of landfills and send ‘repossessed’ units out.”

So far, Hatch has had more than 10,000 related social media inquiries about receiving “repossessed Hatch devices,” and only 10 requests to send Hatch devices back to the company.

Ultimately, if you have a Hatch device and would like to send it back, you can contact customer service to arrange a return. On the other hand, you can now purchase refurbished machines (from the repossessed campaign and otherwise) here. No matter what side of the conversation you find yourself on, we can all agree on one thing: sleep is important, and you should definitely spend less time on your phone.

In a letter to a House committee last month, legal counsel for Alphabet, YouTube’s parent company, claimed that president Joe Biden’s administration sought to “influence” the company to crack down on Covid-19 misinformation. Republicans celebrated the letter as an apparent admission of Democratic censorship.

But Democrats seem to be throwing cold water on the allegations. In a new letter to YouTube CEO Neal Mohan first reported by WIRED, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee Jamie Raskin shares half a dozen excerpts of transcripts with 20 Alphabet employees. According to the letter, none of them claim they were ever pressured to suppress or remove content at the behest of the Biden administration. The interviews come from several years of conversations with Youtube employees focused on policy and health, and in trust and safety roles; they appear to undercut years of GOP accusations of the Biden administration censoring social media platforms during the pandemic.

“As thousands of pages of transcripts of testimony make clear, not a single one of Alphabet’s employees testified about any coercion or undue pressure from the Biden administration,” Jamie Raskin, the committee’s top Democrat, says in the letter. “Are you now asserting that all of these witnesses lied to or misled the Committee? Is it more likely that all of these 20 witnesses got together to plan and provide false testimony or that you wrote an unsworn letter contradicting all of them to placate President Trump and his servants?”

The release of the full transcripts would need to be approved by Republicans on the committee, a spokesperson for the Democrats tells WIRED. (Congressman Jim Jordan’s office did not respond to a request for comment. He is the GOP leader of the committee.)

“Jim Jordan’s quest to find evidence of a censorship regime that never existed is well into its third year, and he continues to suppress the testimonies of the many, many witnesses who contradict his fantasy,” claims Renée DiResta, a disinformation expert and associate research professor at Georgetown University.

A week after counsel on behalf of Alphabet sent that letter to the committee in September claiming that they were pressed by the Biden administration, YouTube agreed to dismiss and settle a lawsuit involving the suspension of President Donald Trump’s account on the platform after the January 6 US Capitol riots (YouTube, which paid $24.5 million, admitted no fault in the settlement).

According to the International Council on Clean Transportation, as of early 2024, there are approximately 40 million electric vehicles (EVs) in operation worldwide. Among them, verified battery-related fires in light-duty EVs number just over 500 between 2010 and mid-2023, corresponding to a fire risk of roughly 1 in 100,000 vehicles.

While this rate is substantially lower than that for internal-combustion-engine vehicles, EV battery fires remain a major concern because once thermal runaway occurs and a fire ignites, they can be extremely difficult to extinguish and may reignite.

A research team from POSTECH (Professor Soojin Park, Dr. Dong-Yeob Han, Gayoung Lee) and Chung-Ang University (Professor Janghyuk Moon, Seongsoo Park) has developed a novel three-dimensional porous structure that significantly improves both the lifespan and safety of lithium-metal batteries (LMBs). Their work is published in Advanced Materials.

Lithium metal batteries promise much higher energy density than today’s lithium-ion batteries and could dramatically extend EV driving range. However, the main barrier to commercialization has been the tendency of lithium metal to deposit unevenly during charging and discharging, forming needle-like “dendrites” that can pierce separators and cause internal short-circuits or even explosions.

The team’s solution is simple yet effective: they engineered a porous host structure with straight, low-tortuosity channels and a built-in lithiophilicity gradient enabling uniform lithium deposition from the bottom up. Think of a parking garage: if the entrance is narrow and lanes are winding, cars tend to bunch at the entrance. But if you build wide straight ramps and make lower floors more spacious, vehicles naturally fill the lower floors first. Their electrode design applies this principle to lithium ions in the battery.

Using a nonsolvent-induced phase separation (NIPS) process, they created the porous host by mixing a polymer matrix with carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and silver (Ag) nanoparticles to enhance electrical conductivity, while introducing an Ag layer on a copper substrate to induce lithium nucleation at the base. As a result, bottom-up lithium deposition with fully suppressed dendrite growth and greatly improved structural stability.

In tests, batteries built with this host achieved an energy density of 398.1 Wh/kg and 1,516.8 Wh/L, far exceeding typical lithium-ion batteries (~250 Wh/kg, ~650 Wh/L). Even under commercial-level conditions with low electrolyte content, a thin lithium anode, and real-world cathodes such as NCM811 and LFP, they demonstrated outstanding stability without short circuits or capacity collapse. If applied to EVs, this improvement could potentially extend driving range by roughly 60–70% (for example, a vehicle that currently travels ~400 km per charge might reach ~650–700 km).

Professor Park stated, “This research presents a new way to simultaneously control ion transport pathways and lithium growth behavior inside electrodes, without relying on complex manufacturing processes. Designing both the ‘path’ and the ‘direction’ of lithium movement will be a turning point in advancing toward the commercialization of safe, high-energy lithium-metal batteries.”

Professor Moon added, “Our process allows simultaneous control of microstructure and chemical gradients through a simple fabrication route, making it highly scalable for industrial production.”