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Google’s Gemini AI has been getting upgrade after upgrade, now being able to handle data analysis in Google Sheets and using your past conversations with its chatbot to inform better responses. One of Google’s latest offerings lets Gemini generate an original background during your virtual meetings for a personal touch before getting down to business.

What are Google Meet’s AI backgrounds?

Google Meet lets you tap into Gemini to make AI-generated backgrounds based on whatever prompt you feed it. You can enter prompts like a “luxurious living room interior” or “a magical sunny forest glade,” as Google suggests, or you can get creative with suggestions like “a gym full of cakes” or “a coworking space in Studio Ghibli style.” This AI feature is currently available on desktop and Android devices, but has some requirements whether you’re using it on a computer or smartphone.

How to create an AI background in Google Meet

This feature requires either an eligible Google Workspace or Google One AI Premium subscription, or entry into Google’s early access testing program called Workspace Labs.

To start on a computer, open up meet.google.com and join a meeting by punching in the specific code, or join via link. Before hitting the blue “Join now” button, navigate to the bottom-right corner of your self-view and click “Apply visual effects” and then “Generate a background.” You then have to provide Gemini with a prompt, which can be as simple as “a cozy coffee shop with flowers” like Google suggests, then hit “Create samples.” You can select an art style to better customize your background, and Google recommends including specific instructions like a setting and objects in your prompt to get the best results.

Gemini’s first attempts at an AI background might not be exactly what you’re looking for, so you can click “Create other samples” to refresh the results. If your initial prompt needs some tweaking, you can edit it by navigating to the top of the panel on the right, then hitting the “Create other samples” button. Once you land on the AI-generated background you want, just click on it and hit the “Close” button on the Backgrounds window to get on with your meeting.

All of this can be done when you’re already in a meeting, too. If you’re using an Android device for Google Meet, you have to open the Meet app and tap the “Effects” button on the bottom of your self-view and navigate to the Backgrounds tab instead of the “Apply visual effects” button on computers. Make sure you have a compatible smartphone, like a Samsung Galaxy S9 or newer or a Google Pixel 3 or newer, that’s running at least Android version 9. For iPhone users, this feature isn’t currently available.

How to remove your AI background

It’s worth mentioning that using these Gemini-generated backgrounds on Google Meet can increase battery usage. If you want to preserve battery life or go back to a more basic background, you can reset everything by navigating to the Effects panel and clicking the Stack button on the bottom right side of your self-view. After you click the Stack button, you can choose which effects to remove or completely reset your background with the “Remove All” button.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/how-to-use-gemini-to-generate-unique-backgrounds-in-google-meet-130000553.html?src=rss 

Spoilers for “The Story and the Engine.”

Doctor Who lives and dies by the quality of its writing and acting far more than almost anything else on TV. Audiences may demand big explosions and trippy visuals but its best work is often done in small rooms. The Disney era began with an episode that, for all its glossy excess, rested its big moment on Catherine Tate’s acting. Now, as the Disney era potentially draws to its end, it’s once again highlighting what a smart script and great actors can do. “The Story and the Engine” is a stellar episode and a sign of what Doctor Who could look like a year or two from now.

To get Belinda home, the Doctor takes the Vindicator to Lagos, Nigeria, to piggyback on the country’s communications network. But there’s another reason — he wants to visit his favorite barbership, Omo’s. The TARDIS can cut the Doctor’s hair, but it’s not the same — especially now he’s living for the first time (that we know of) as a Black man. A trip to Omo’s is a chance to both get a trim and feel accepted, telling stories and laughing with his friends.

Belinda stays in the TARDIS while the Doctor heads out, past missing people posters and signs warning people to stay away. As soon as the Doctor crosses the threshold into Omo’s, the TARDIS begins blaring red alert, much to Belinda’s confusion. The missing people are here, in the barbershop, but Omo is no longer in charge, having lost control to the mysterious (and unnamed) Barber.

The Barber has kept the men hostage, cutting their hair on a regular basis, with each one telling him a story as he does. Each story is broadcast on the inside of the shop’s window, and as soon as they’re done, their hair grows back. The stories aren’t for entertainment, but to fuel an enormous robot spider traversing a metaversal web. Only one person is allowed to leave the shop, Abena, who brings the men food each day to keep them alive.

Naturally, an immortal time traveler is a fantastic resource for stories, but his first tale is that of Belinda staying behind after work to save a woman’s life. Whereas the other men’s stories are rendered in animation, we actually see Belinda’s story as live action. And, once the Doctor’s hair is shorn, it grows back, ready for his next turn to be an unwilling storyteller. Belinda, after asking the TARDIS to show her where to go, heads to Omo’s, where the Doctor is surprisingly happy to see her as she, too, gets trapped in the barbershop.

Abena is hiding a secret, and has been hostile to the Doctor ever since she met him. That’s because she’s really the daughter of Anansi, the spider-esque trickster god of Akan folklore. Her father defeated the Doctor many (many!) lifetimes ago, insisting they marry her, but the Doctor skipped town, leaving her on her own. [Casual viewers totally lost as to what was going on at that point and why the Doctor suddenly turned into someone else, head down to Mrs. Flood Corner for an explanation.]

At some point in history, Abena teamed up with the Barber, who isn’t a god himself, but a form of fiction-weaving figure. He told tales to entertain and sustain the gods, designing the dimensional web his giant spider robot is currently traversing. At some point, he’d outlived his usefulness and was cast out by his masters, and so he is using people’s stories to power his story engine. When it reaches its destination, he’ll wipe out all the gods of myth and legend and take their place.

Abena, horrified that her own family will be wiped out in the Barber’s revenge, opts to switch sides and tends to the Doctor’s hair. She tells the story of how African people under slavery would braid messages and maps as cornrows to evade detection. The Doctor’s hair is now a map of the story engine’s mazelike corridors, leading him to its beating heart. When the Barber tries to stop him, he (wrongly) invokes Hemingway, talking about the power of his six word story.

Oh, but we’re five minutes from the end, so the Doctor saves the day by, uh, playing a highlights reel of all his prior incarnations. The Barber, however, is a changed man, and comes back with the Doctor as the story engine itself collapses under the sheer weight of the Doctor’s life story. With everyone free, Omo declares he’s retiring, and hands the role to the Barber, who will use his powers for good. Abena opts to part ways with her friend, and the Doctor and Belinda head back to the TARDIS.

“The Story and the Engine” is a phenomenal debut from British-Nigerian poet and playwright Inua Ellams. The rules of the barbershop and premise of the story is clear enough to grasp before the title sequence has rolled. And little time is wasted getting the Doctor through the door of Omo’s shop, enabling him to engage with the problem at hand. If there’s an issue, it’s the same one that’s dogged every episode this season: the overstuffed narrative that picks up and drops ideas in minutes that another series would have milked for weeks on end.

The narrative and thematic density here includes nods toward folklore versus the mechanical reproduction of storytelling. An exploration of the nature of community, family, safety, betrayal, love and the value of revenge. Hell, the antagonist is a writer who’s pissed off their overlords cut ‘em loose and took the credit that was theirs to claim. Not to mention, Doctor Who is having to make a case for its own continued existence given the behind the scenes rumors. That’s so much to cram into 45 minutes that you just want everything to slow down and let things breathe.

As much as Doctor Who might be seen by the majority of its audience on a streaming platform, it’s still constrained by its broadcast runtime. Like the rest of this run, this episode is just begging for more time to allow its textures to be better explored. In fact, as I lay in bed after watching the episode, I was thinking about how many of these episodes would work well in the old-school half-hour format. Three half-hours would give us more time in the barbershop and a more earned ending. “The Story and the Engine” is already a chamber piece — make the CGI spider a barely-seen matte painting and use stock footage of Lagos and this could have easily been done in the ‘80s. Again, given the rumors that, without Disney’s cash, the BBC can’t afford to produce Doctor Who, we’re seeing how great it can be when it’s just got five or six actors in a single room.

That’s not to say the extra money isn’t welcome: I also want to, again, single out how much great work the rest of the production team is doing this year. The story engine’s heart, a beautifully-made heart-tree-brain sculpture, was another great piece of design work. And any episode of anything that uses Blick Bassey’s “Aké” as a needle drop deserves a round of applause.

A Nigerian barbershop is not the usual place for an episode of Doctor Who to play out, but it’s also absolutely perfect. After all, one of the richest seams of inspiration the show has is to find the magic in the edges of the mundane. What could be more magic than people sitting around, telling stories and forming communities through nothing more than the cutting of hair.

Mrs. Flood Corner

Mrs. Flood gets a tiny cameo this episode, popping into the hospital during the Doctor’s tale of Belinda’s heroism. It’s ambiguous if the Doctor knows Mrs. Flood was there, or if her presence was only for the audience’s benefit. Given the more standalone nature of this episode, we shouldn’t ask too much of Mrs. Flood this week.

It’s certainly interesting to see what Belinda does and doesn’t know about how the world of the Doctor works. My assumption is still that the Doctor briefed Belinda on the basics and even the more advanced details off-screen. Belinda’s smart and capable enough that she’d ask the right questions to learn that the TARDIS wardrobe is also able to style hair.

I am curious, however, about why the Doctor was so happy to see Belinda as she walked into the trap. And why Belinda knew what to do when the Doctor made his break for the story engine in the conclusion. That the costumes have changed since “The Well” implies that time has passed for these two, so maybe their rapport has grown in the interim.

If you’ll allow me to go out on a limb, what if the real identity of Mrs. Flood or this season’s big bad is in fact Fenric? Hear me out: “The Story and the Engine” shares a premise with 1988’s “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy.” In that episode, the Gods of Ragnarok have occupied a circus to fuel their hunger for entertainment, killing anyone who displeases them. The Barber in this story mentions he wrote stories for several Norse gods and tries to pass himself off as one of them before his real identity is revealed.

Now, if you recall, another Norse god the Doctor tussled with in that era was Fenric, the villain from 1989’s “The Curse of Fenric.” Which was one of the classic-series stories highlighted for the 60th anniversary’s Tales of the TARDIS run. Given Davies’ shot an additional episode of that run to introduce new viewers to Sutekh before he appeared in last year’s finale, maybe the groundwork was already laid to bring Fenric back.

Yeah, you’re right, it’s not going to be Fenric.

When was the Doctor a Black woman?

The 2020 season of Doctor Who made a number of controversial changes to the foundation of the series. Showrunner Chris Chibnall opted to dump the series’ original deliberately ambiguous backstory in favor of something a little more stock sci-fi. Before then, our lead character was an outsider who left their world and stumbled around learning to become something of a hero. The show’s first four seasons build to the moment when the Doctor says “There are some corners of the universe which have bred the most terrible things. Things which act against everything we believe in. They must be fought.” Like a lot of early Doctor Who, the character’s development over time wasn’t necessarily visible until you look back on the era as a whole.

Chibnall threw all of that out, insisting that the Doctor wasn’t just the most Special Time Lord Of All Time, but the figure who gave the Time Lords the power of regeneration in the first place. In one season, he’d turned the Doctor into the equivalent of Adam and Eve and Jesus all at once. He also eliminated the series’ longstanding regeneration limit, saying the Doctor can change their body an infinite amount of times. Which rather undermines the action and saps the dramatic tension from episodes like “The Caves of Androzani” and “The Eleventh Hour.”

These changes gave the Doctor an entire as-yet unseen first and second act, with the adult Doctor working for the Time Lord equivalent of the CIA before having their memory wiped before the start of the series proper. The episode “Fugitive of the Judoon” revealed the identity of one of these doctors, The Fugitive Doctor, played by actress Jo Martin — the only time the Doctor had been played by a Black actor before Ncuti Gatwa and only the second time (canonically) they’d been played by a woman after Jodie Whittaker. The Fugitive Doctor’s place in the series’ history is left ambiguous, and she mostly spent that time on deep cover missions.

When Davies’ return was announced, I was privately hoping he would very loudly unwind much of Chibnall’s Timeless Child story arc. Trapping the Doctor in the hacky sci-fi role of chosen one felt like an act of near-fatal violence against the series. There have been many other secret origin stories for the Doctor over its sixty-year tenure, but the others were mostly content to sit in implication rather than bellowed from the rooftops.

It’s here I must offer yet more praise for Russell T. Davies, who opted to Yes-And Chibnall’s hackiest impulses. He has managed to integrate the Timeless Child story in a way that serves the character of the Doctor supremely effectively. Rather than focusing on the ancestral history he’s focused on the Doctor as an orphan, taken advantage of by cruel aliens. It gives greater weight both to his relationships with his companions, and to the need for belonging that takes him to Omo’s. And the events of the Flux miniseries have broken the universe so utterly that it’s opened the door for the pantheon of gods to enter it. Not to mention, it offers a vehicle through which we can get more stories of the Fugitive Doctor that gets it out from under the more reactionary storytelling under which she was created.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/doctor-who-the-story-and-the-engine-review-just-a-trim-thanks-190010762.html?src=rss 

The Food and Drug Administration has approved a new device called the Teal Wand, which its creator describes as an “at-home vaginal sample self-collection device for cervical cancer screening.” It could be especially useful for women who find pap smears uncomfortable, painful and even traumatic, as well as for those who may not have time to go to a doctor or have disabilities preventing them from traveling to consult one. Users who get the Teal Wand will have to swab their vagina with the sponge tool at its tip. They then have to send the swab in to test it for HPV, or human papillomavirus, which causes most cervical cancers. 

Since the user isn’t scraping cells from their cervix like what’s done with a speculum during pap smears, there are no samples to analyze for abnormality under a microscope. But as The New York Times noted, some authorities are now recommending HPV testing as the primary screening for cervical cancer. Last year, the National Cancer Institute launched a clinical trial network called the Cervical Cancer ‘Last Mile’ Initiative and teamed up with Roche, which provided a similar self-collection solution for participants. The cancer institute explained at the time that cervical cancer is highly preventable with HPV vaccine and regular screening, but half of all diagnosed cases in the US are of individuals who have never been or are infrequently screened. A self-collection device can vastly expand access to cervical cancer screening. 

Teal Wand users will be able to dial into the company’s telehealth services, with providers who can give them instructions on how to use the device. Users will then have to detach the swab from the wand, put it in a vial, label it and then mail it for testing. Teal Health claims that its solution was proven to be as accurate as in-clinic screening during its clinical study. The company will start shipping out wands to California residents in June before expanding availability across the country. It doesn’t have pricing for the device yet, but it said it’s working with insurance providers so that the wand could be covered by their plans. The company also intends to work with donors to subsidize costs for people without insurance, as well as to offer flexible payment options.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/fda-approves-at-home-pap-smear-alternative-device-for-cervical-cancer-screening-170025767.html?src=rss