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Happy weekend, folks. Here's our weekly roundup of the headlines in tech, from NPR and beyond.

ICYMI

Ms. Smith Goes To Washington: In our profile of the new U.S. Chief Technology Officer, Megan Smith, she talks about unconscious bias, how she fell in love with science and how being in tech over the past few decades as changed her.

Amazon Introduces Echo: The e-commerce giant's answer to Siri is Echo, a contextually aware virtual personal assistant that looks like a cylindrical speaker that you place in your home. You say "Alexa" before asking it a question about your schedule, instructing her to play music or to search something on the Web. (And the "Alexa" promotion has already inspired a parody...)

Talk To The Animals: Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a dog harness, equipped with speakers and vibrating motors, that could be used in search and rescue or to improve dog training.

The Big Conversation

Silk Road 2.0 Goes Down: The original Silk Road went down after the FBI captured "Dread Pirate Roberts," a.k.a. Ross Ulbricht, who officials believe is the mastermind behind it and is currently in jail awaiting trial. The FBI seized the latest Silk Road this week, and according to Ars Technica, had been selling $8 million worth of drugs each month. Arrests in connection with underground online markets extended to 16 European countries.

No To Net Neutrality Hybrid: Demonstrators in two dozen American cities rallied against a proposal from the Federal Communications Commission that could allow Internet service providers to charge for paid "fast lanes" to their consumers. In Philadelphia, our member station WHYY reports about 30 protesters showed up at Comcast headquarters, with one sign reading "The lions are at the door."

Curiosities

The Awl: Sympathy for the Nerd

What does it mean to be a nerd, really? A touching piece on the breadth of nerds, and of human alienation.

Quartz: This Week's Top New iPhone App Is Helping Kids Cheat On Math Homework

I'm torn between thinking, "Yikes, this is terribly dishonest" and "Why wasn't this around when I was a kid?" You point your phone camera at an equation, the PhotoMath app solves the problem for you and gives you the step-by-step process on how to solve it.

The Washington Post: The controversial GPS device that helped police catch an alleged abductor

A GPS device planted in the suspect's car by the dealership that sold him the vehicle helped police find the man and his alleged victim, a woman whose abduction in Philadelphia was caught on surveillance video. The dealership had installed the GPS device because of his poor credit.

tech week

When Tom Magliozzi, cohost of NPR's Car Talk, died this week from complications of Alzheimer's disease, he left behind a fan base that extended far beyond the United States. Tom and Ray, his younger brother, took calls from and gave advice to people all over the world.

Take, for example, the mother-daughter duo who wrote in about buying a car for a yearlong trip around the African continent. Tom and Ray responded via their blog, telling the women to skip buying and instead invest in a guide with a car. They recommended finding someone with a Toyota Land Cruiser, the "official vehicle of sub-Saharan Africa." That way, the tourists will have "an experienced driver, an on-board mechanic, a local translator, a cultural attach and someone to help you with whatever else comes up during your adventure — like hungry lions."

Related NPR Stories

Remembrances

'Car Talk' Executive Producer Remembers Tom Magliozzi

Remembrances

Tom Magliozzi, Popular Co-Host Of NPR's 'Car Talk,' Dies At 77

Remembrances

'We Have Learned Absolutely Nothing': Tom Magliozzi On Decades Of 'Car Talk'

The Car Talk community message boards are filled with internationally-focused discussions about cars, mechanics and expat life in general. Many of the conversations are about experiences with repairmen in far-off places: Is it really ok for this South African mechanic to disable my temperature regulator? Do I need mud tires to drive in Nicaragua during the rainy season? Can I find diesel fuel in India?

While the brothers didn't always get into these discussions, the loyal fans offered more than enough advice. For every question, there's at least one contributor with some experience on this issue.

The fans were so loyal that many tried to jump on the car-humor bandwagon themselves. A couple from Maine wrote their take on "Road Rules: India versus New England," which the brothers read on the air. While pedestrians have the right of way in Maine, in India, "Cows have the right of way. Pedestrians usually stay out of the road. If you see one, it is considered polite to honk your horn several times before and after you hit them."

And the brothers themselves knew enough about cars to debunk local legend, even when "local" meant Gabon, a country in Central Africa. A Peace Corps volunteer wrote in asking about a trend she'd noticed: Drivers put their fist to their windshield when passing a truck on the road. The idea was that if the truck sent a rock flying, the fist would stop the glass from shattering.

Unless the driver's fist was exactly where the rock hit, Tom said, the technique wouldn't do much. "Lots of folk remedies have legitimate bases in science," is how Tom put it. "This ain't one of them."

Tom Magliozzi

India

Africa

Car Talk

I've learned a lot about physics this week at movie screenings, and let me start by saying I've no idea how much of it is accurate. All I can swear to is that it comes vetted by (or at least associated with) some very high-powered theoretical physicists.

Chief among them is Stephen Hawking, the subject of a biopic called The Theory of Everything, which starts with him as a young collegiate type, bracing for skepticism from his Cambridge professors about his doctoral dissertation. He needn't have bothered. They can scarcely contain their smiles as they query him about black holes, before telling him he'll henceforth be Dr. Hawking.

The young physicist then sets about trying to come up with a singular theory to prove space-time singularity, or ... something. Happily, The Theory of Everything is centered on Eddie Redmayne's terrifically physical performance, which (as ALS takes over Hawking's body) slowly reduces Redmayne to conveying emotion almost entirely through his eyes — a decent distraction from the film's inability to deal with science, especially the science of black holes.

Science!

Science

Stretch Or Splat? How A Black Hole Kills You Matters ... A Lot

13.7: Cosmos And Culture

Do Black Holes Exist?

13.7: Cosmos And Culture

Voyage To The Center Of A Black Hole

For that this week, you need to head for either San Fransokyo in Disney's animated Big Hero 6, or the outer rings of Saturn in Christopher Nolan's Interstellar. San Fransokyo being closer, let's head there first, in the company of an animated teen robotics nut named Hiro, and his five nerdier-than-thou, ethnically diverse buddies: Wasabi, Gogo, Honey Lemon, Fred, and an inflatable health robot named Baymax.

They're on a mission to stop a guy who's determined to suck them all into a wormhole — which is to say an Einstein-Rosen bridge between two black holes on opposite ends of ... well, I'm already out of my depth here. But the filmmakers consulted with Cal Tech's theoretical cosmologist Sean Carroll, who specializes in dark energy and relativity, so while Big Hero 6 is still a cartoon, it's not an uninformed one. Kids watching will have a leg up when they hear about this stuff in their science classes a decade from now.

Of course, that's assuming this stuff will still be taught in science classes a decade from now, a notion on which the movie Interstellar very quickly casts some doubt. Nolan's sci-fi epic portrays a near-future earth that has — in the wake of unspecified disasters that have unleashed drought and blight, and left a much diminished population unable to feed itself — grown science-averse. This is a problem because, as the title suggests, humankind needs to head to inhabitable planets elsewhere, and soon.

Although purged textbooks might keep students of the future from understanding this, the Laws of Physics say getting to other stars in time would be all but impossible. But a wormhole would fix that problem, and happily, one appears — extremely well vetted by physicist Kip Thorne, who is not only Interstellar's executive producer, but is also a friend of Stephen Hawking. An early treatment of the film's story reportedly had Hawking as a character, but that was scrapped. Instead, the filmmakers used his theories to accurately visualize a rapidly rotating black hole, so that Matthew McConaughey and friends could plunge into it.

Nolan's script goes so deeply into explaining black holes and their effect on time that if I were 19 and Interstellar were my 2001: A Space Odyssey, I'd be, um, over the moon. But I'm not, and it's not, so I contented myself with admiring its special effects. Which are indeed special, and precise enough, apparently, to inspire dissertations in their own right.

Wouldn't it be nice if Stephen Hawking weighed in?

Whether you viewed this week's midterm elections as exhilarating or bruising, you're probably ready to move on at this point, which makes the timing problematic for Roberto And's lightweight election comedy, Viva La Libert (Long Live Freedom).

Not that opening the week before local elections last year did much for it at the Italian box office. Perhaps party scandals don't register as they once did. The film begins with Enrico Oliveri, a leftist politician who's used to losing, arriving at a party function feeling listless and out-of-sorts. His opposition party's poll numbers are in the tank. And his dull, bureaucratic speeches don't fire up crowds. They sometimes even get shouted down, and that's what happens with this supposedly friendly audience.

So, without telling a soul, including his wife, Enrico packs a suitcase and disappears to the out-of-country home of a somewhat startled ex-girlfriend he hasn't seen in years, determined to lay low for a few days and see what his party does without him.

Knowing the press will have a field day with the disappearance, his campaign manager frantically tries to find him, even contacting Enrico's brother Giovanni, who's just out of a mental institution. Enrico's identical twin brother, as it happens, and ... well, you see where this is headed. Unlike his political sibling, who never says anything remotely controversial to a reporter, cheerfully unbalanced Giovanni is a walking soundbite.

"Fear is the music of democracy," he tells a journalist who shows up while he and the campaign manager are dining in a cafe. "And in the chamber of deputies, not one idiot knows he's an idiot."

The interview makes headlines — good headlines for a change — and the campaign manager decides to see if Giovanni can deliver an actual speech, only to have him crumple it up and say he'll just improvise.

"You must be crazy," sputters the manager.

"So they say," chuckles the imposter, who is soon charming union leaders, whipping campaign crowds into a frenzy, and dancing barefoot with a previously skeptical Madame Chancellor, quite literally sweeping her off her feet ... along with the electorate.

The film's writing isn't as pointed as it might be. Giovanni rallies his leftist troops with speeches every bit as bromide-filled as most political chatter. And director And doesn't worry much about what having an actual madman in office might do to Italian politics. He seems content to let actor Toni Servillo lark about, alternately depressively and irrepressibly, as the two brothers. As for the party-that-never-wins having to actually govern — that's a scenario that might be fun to watch ... playing out harmlessly on screen.