Jurors are still deliberating over the fate of Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of defunct biotech company Theranos. They’re deciding if she intentionally misled investors, patients, and doctors about what her company’s blood testing technology could do. Because despite big promises, the tech the company claimed to have invented… didn’t actually exist.

And the technology might never be a reality — at least not in the way Holmes described it. In this episode of our three-part series on Theranos, we look at what researchers actually think is possible in the field of blood testing and what the future could look like.

A decade before Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, a tiny team of renegades imagined and tried to build the modern smartphone. Nearly forgotten by history, a little startup called Handspring tried to make the future before it was ready. In Springboard: the secret history of the first real smartphone, The Verge’s Dieter Bohn talks to the visionaries at Handspring and dives into their early successes and eventual failures. 

It’s a half-hour-long documentary featuring the key players at Palm and Handspring: Donna Dubinsky, Jeff Hawkins, Ed Colligan, and more. It’s one of our most ambitious video projects to date, and we can’t wait to show it to you.

Handspring may no longer be a household name, but it was briefly one of the fastest growing businesses in American history, selling Visor personal digital assistants. But the company had bigger aspirations: it saw a mobile future and took the first steps toward what would become the modern smartphone — even as it faced skepticism from the entire industry.

The dream of the Handspring Treo turned out to be too far ahead of its time — before either the technology inside smartphones or the industry that sold them was ready for it. And a number of bad internal decisions and outside disasters would stall Handspring long enough that Apple would go on to do what Handspring couldn’t.

Springboard is also a look at an earlier time in tech — when the dot com bubble was bursting, but big tech hadn’t coalesced into five or six titanic monoliths. It was a time when many futures seemed possible, even one where a tiny startup could win the coming smartphone wars.

Springboard is now streaming worldwide. You can watch it on The Verge’s YouTube channel or our new app on Android TV, Amazon Fire TV, Roku, or Apple TV.

To watch on your TV, visit your preferred streaming device’s app store and search for “The Verge,” or follow the instructions for each of the streaming devices you can use:

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APPLE TV

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WHERE TO WATCH

Palladium is a precious metal that is more valuable than gold, and its price has skyrocketed over the last couple of years. In 2018, it was worth nearly $1,000 an ounce. Now, a single ounce is worth nearly $3,000. But as its value has risen, devices that use palladium have become magnets for thieves.

The metal is primarily used inside of a catalytic converter, a device that converts harmful emissions such as carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide into less harmful ones before being released into the atmosphere. Since their adoption into the automobile industry in the 1970s, catalytic converters have led to a significant drop in carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide emissions. And the more palladium they use, the more efficient they are at combating these emissions — making them the perfect target for thieves.

Over the years, catalytic converter theft has drastically risen due to the increasing value of palladium. According to a study of reported thefts, on average, 108 catalytic converters were stolen per month in 2018. That number rose to 282 monthly thefts in 2019 and 1,203 thefts per month in 2020.

With more and more manufacturers trying to reduce their impact on the environment and as stricter emissions regulations come into effect in places like Europe and China, the demand for palladium will only continue to escalate.

Verge Science spoke with a chemical engineer and one of the leading recyclers of catalytic converters in the country to find out what makes palladium so valuable — and what it would take to find new alternatives for this precious resource. Watch our latest video to see what we discovered.