The Morning After: Peloton's unfortunate cameo in the 'Sex and the City' reboot

Warning: If you’re planning to watch the Sex and the City revival, And Just Like That, avert your eyes for this intro — spoilers are incoming. Peloton probably wished everyone did just that.

Yes, the ubiquitous, expensive exercise bike featured in a major plotline in the first episode of the new series, which itself isn’t particularly shocking. The shock came when Carrie's husband, Mr. Big, died of a heart attack after he finished a 45-minute Peloton class on the company's Bike (with real instructor Jess King in a fictional role as… a Peloton instructor).

The plotline hit Peloton’s stock price over the weekend — something the company has seen over the last year as many folks head back to their gyms or perhaps, like me, just don’t want to stay in their homes to exercise anymore.

Peloton was also caught unawares — the company knew HBO would feature a Peloton in the episode and that King would portray an instructor, but "confidentiality reasons" prevented it from learning it would kill off a character.

It released a statement saying that Big’s death was probably due to his “extravagant lifestyle” — the guy was smoking a cigar earlier in the episode and had previously suffered a heart attack.

I doubt the result of Peloton’s appearance on the show will be a net negative — it’s arguably the most talked-about twist from the premiere of a highly anticipated TV show. It’s definitely a test of the adage: Is any publicity good publicity?

— Mat Smith

NASA's new sleeping bags could prevent eyeball 'squashing' on the ISS

It sucks fluid out of astronaut's heads and toward their feet.

More than half of NASA astronauts that went to the International Space Station (ISS) for more than six months have developed vision problems. Researchers from UT Southwestern Medical Center have developed a sleeping bag that could prevent or reduce those problems.

Fluids tend to accumulate in the head when you sleep, but on Earth, gravity pulls them back down into the body when you get up. In the low gravity of space, though, that fluid collects, applying pressure on the eyeball, leading to vision impairment. The researchers have made a sleeping bag that effectively sucks fluid out of astronauts' heads.

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Someone 'briefly compromised' the Indian prime minister's Twitter account

It's the latest attempt to hijack a major politician's social media profile.

An intruder temporarily seized control of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Twitter account over the weekend. The attacker tweeted a claim that India had adopted Bitcoin as legal tender and pointed users to a (broken) scam website. For followers of Modi’s account — or anyone familiar with his stance on cryptocurrency — it was obvious something had gone wrong.

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Amazon explains outage that took out a large chunk of the internet

The company also promised an easier way to track failures in the future.

Amazon has explained the Web Services outage that knocked parts of the internet offline last week. As CNBC reports, Amazon revealed an automated capacity scaling feature led to "unexpected behavior" from internal network clients. Devices connecting that internal network to AWS were swamped, stalling communications. The AWS division has temporarily disabled the scaling that led to the problem and won't switch it back on until there are solutions in place. A fix for the glitch is coming within two weeks, Amazon said.

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How a VR startup took users’ money and ran to the metaverse

And it’s still going on.

The tech word of 2021 is definitely “metaverse,” crowbarred into the collective conscious when Mark Zuckerberg revealed Facebook’s new name, Meta.

Metaworld founder Dedric Reid has been selling his interpretation of the metaverse for the past five years. His vision is a decentralized space, a “10,000-square-mile vast-scale simulation, owned by community and run by community,” according to Reid.

But the story of Metaworld is one of patchy crowdfunding, communication silence, fake promotional assets and some understandably angry backers. To borrow from The Matrix, read Senior Editor Jessica Conditt’s full report to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

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