Tech & Science Archives - Page 41 of 114

Siri Will Finally Be Integrated in the Next Version of the OS X

February 25, 2016 By Kenneth Scott Leave a Comment

It’s unknown why Apple feels it’s necessary to test out the intelligent assistant for several years before its implementation in a full-fledged computer operating system, but it seems that Siri will finally be integrated in the next version of the OS X. After four years of testing, it would seem that Siri will finally be added with full capability on the upcoming OS X 10.12, that’s due to be released in about seven months from now.

Judging from what we have learned so far about the PC version of Siri, it won’t be a feature that comes enabled from the very start. Instead, users will have to enable in in the system. This can be done either via its native icon next to the Spotlight Search and Notification Center in the menu bar, or directly from the keyboard via an activation shortcut.

Naturally, Siri will be fully customizable through the system preferences, just as it is on the mobile platform operating system and will also make its appearance through the colorful voice soundwaves in a small window that will stay on the top-right of the screen (probably customizable to either change position or not even show).

And computer Siri will pretty much act just like its mobile version. As long as you have a microphone plugged in or you’re using your inbuilt microphone on Macbooks, you’ll be able to call out Siri just the way you do on your phone, for example. By simply saying “Hey Siri”, the voice assistant will be activated automatically and you can skip right ahead to starting to use it.

The Siri integration is part of the upcoming new version of the Apple Mac operating system, so far code named Fuji, which may be subject to change if the company decides on a different OS name. The OS X 10.12 ‘Fuji’ isn’t exactly a full-fledged operating system, but instead only comes to bring several changes to the system, as well as minor user interface tweaks across core system application windows.

However, at this point there’s not much known regarding the Apple Mac OS X 10.12. Other than the obvious fact that it won’t be a major overhaul or a brand new iteration of the operating system just like the OS X Yosemite was, and some rather generic pieces of information, Apple has not yet released much on the topic so far.

However, more is expected to be showcased at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference – also known as WWDC – later this year, in June 2016, mere months before the operating system’s release.

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HTC Teases the Public with the Power of 10

February 25, 2016 By Roxanne Briean Leave a Comment

Anyone who has subscribed to the newsletter of HTC has probably been a little surprised yesterday morning when their inbox was graced by a mysterious teaser sent by the Taiwanese manufacturer. And just few hours later, a short and ambiguous tweet featuring the same image and tagged as #Powerof10 became the pinned post of the official HTC Twitter account.

As you may have already figured out yourself, there’s only one thing that this can mean. The HTC One M10 is coming. And because the Mobile World Congress 2016 was not the event to showcase the upcoming flagship coming from HTC, the press event scheduled to take place on April 11^th in London will most likely be the moment of unveiling in the true sense of the word.

It was a little surprising to see that HTC chose to only showcase the Desire series at MWC 2016. While all the other manufacturers were quick on their feet to present their latest endeavors such as the Samsung Galaxy S7 and LG G5, HTC bid its time to give us this snippet of what suggests to be a shadowed outline of the next HTC One smartphone.

While there’s no telling if any other details regarding the HTC One M10 will make their way out of confidential confines and to the public until the press event in April, there are various rumors suggesting the juicy details of the next flagship of the company. Those include a 12 MP Sony IMX377 camera, featuring 1.55um lens, phase detection auto focus and a laser autofocus, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 quad-core processor that was showcased at CES 2016, 4 GB of RAM and 64 or 128 GB inbuilt storage options. Not to mention that it will come with pre-loaded Android 6.0.1 Marhsmallow – or a later iteration if it, depending on what is the final release date that HTC decides on.

The HTC One M10 is believed to be the rumored project Perfume that piqued the interest of fans all over the world back when it was first leaked. And now that we have an apparently innocent teaser image to work with, there’s a little more we can deduce from what we’ve got so far.

The image behind what is most probably going to be the slogan of the HTC One M10 – #Powerof10 – appears to look a lot like the edge of a phone. If you look closely, you can almost tell it’s metallic in build and chamfered around the edges. If we’re to observe closely, the edges appear to be in relief and a lot sharper than we’ve seen on a huge number of phones so far.

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New Progress in the Search for Planet Nine

February 24, 2016 By Deborah Campbell Leave a Comment

Researchers have come with news of new progress in the search for Planet Nine. Knowledge of our own solar system is the first step of understanding and merely considering beginning our trek through outer space. And over the length of time things changed considerably. What was initially believed to be the ninth planet of our solar system ended up getting demoted to the status of a dwarf planet part of the Kuiper belt. Certainly that was the story of Pluto starting with the year 2006.

Pluto’s class of dwarf planets was joined by 2 more officially deemed planets bodies all the way in the outer reaches of our solar system – Haumea and Makemake – and for a long time that was considered to be the end of the planetary system. However, scientists have suspected the presence of a ninth planet for nearly a month now.

It all started when scientists noticed some strange effects happening on the outer skirts of our solar system when mathematical models and simulations would result in signs of gravitational effects of one more body, not visible to us however, onto the other objects in the Kuiper Belt. This intrigued scientists to study the phenomenon even further and theorize what kind of planet this is.

So far, Planet Nine remains a mere guess as it has never been spotted. But calculations suggest that it is a planet 10 times the mass of Earth, close in size to the exoplanets from our solar system. It was believed to be 600 times further away from the Sun than Earth is. This would result in an orbit that takes about 10,000 and 20,000 years to complete.

The evidence that supports this idea is the peculiar manner in which Kuiper Belt objects orbit around the sun. Unlike most planets that display a nearly circular orbit around the star of our solar system, the Kuiper Belt objects have wildly elongated orbits that suggest another object, and most likely one that is much larger in size, pulling on them.

Even since the discovery, scientists have been at work with trying to find a method to spot the elusive Planet Nine. Given its extremely long orbit time, narrowing down where to look for it would take ridiculous amounts of time. However, a group of scientists from France have concluded that a way of lowering the amount of sky searching they need to do to spot it is to study the data sent by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.

The spacecraft is currently orbiting Saturn, and by ensuring that the mysterious Planet Nine is not within its visual reach, they could exclude two zones form the very beginning. Thanks to a number of mathematical models that can narrow down the planet’s currently position, scientists say that they have reduced the search area by 50%.

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Scientists Are Looking for Milky Way Newborn Solar Systems

February 24, 2016 By Cristopher Hall Leave a Comment

There has been a tremendous amount of star gazing, galaxy hunting and dreams of expeditions in outer space lately, not to mention that scientists are looking for Milky Way newborn solar systems. But while prospects may seem like distant goals for mankind to anyone not in touch with the scientists’ sheer ability to perform these studies, they are far from it. Just recently, plans of telescopes being built in China or sent out to orbit in outer space promise us capabilities that we hadn’t even thought of before, extending the reach of our eyes at least to the vast grandeur of the universe we live in.

While just recently scientists reported their discoveries regarding a different galaxy that lies about 55 million light years away, another group took a glance at a place that’s a little closer to us – the Milky Way. After a long session of photographs and prolonged studies of our galaxy that started years ago, astronomers have just managed to complete a detailed map of the dense and cold gas in our galaxy. The reason behind it? The gasses in question are the places where new stars are made. In other words, scientists marked the places where new solar systems will once day form.

Everything was done with the help of the Apex telescope that rests at an altitude of 5,100 meters in the Atacama Desert. Over the length of many years, it slowly looked around and mapped as far as it could see inside our own Milky Way. In between its extensive search for answers and insight into the activity of our galaxy, it found an extremely long strip of star-forming gasses in the southern sky.

The way this was achieved was by making use of a special detector, known as a super-chilled thermometer that reads radiation between radio and infrared waves. But it’s most important feature is the Large Bolometer Camera (Laboca) that it has; consisting of 295 sensors that are maintained at a temperature of 0.3 degrees above absolute zero, it is the ‘weapon of choice’ for the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment.

The map that was created with the help of Laboca was dubbed Atlasgal and provides a great amount of information regarding the high-mass stars and clusters that will appear in the Milky Way Galaxy over the next hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. The map rendered covers an area of sky that is 140 degrees long and merely 3 degrees wide but provides a good starting point for future descoveries.

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LG Brings the Type of Robot We Will Have in Our Homes Soon

February 24, 2016 By Roxanne Briean Leave a Comment

While Boston Dynamics is working on the type of robot that does an amazing job at either running as fast as a cheetah or carrying up to 400 lbs of weight while balancing on any type of terrain, LG has slightly different concerns when it comes to robotics.

Surely, LG’s Rolling Robot is not as capable as the Atlas, for example, but has much more realistic utility in your lives or mine than the former. And while the LG Rolling Bot has a lot more simplistic and small build, it does an equally great job at maintaining its balance too.

The LG Rolling Bot is a contraption that you may have seen earlier this year at CES 2016 if you were there for the show. While it can be used for a number of things, one use that most people who have seen it and even the designers themselves seem to agree on is the fact that the LG Rolling Bot can be used as a remote camera and ‘entertainer’ for your cat.

When you first set your eyes on it, you may feel like there’s an uncanny resemblance between it and BB-9 from Star Wars: The Force Awakens. But frankly, the only similarity is the motion mechanism they employ to move around. Although the name suggests it, the Rolling Bot doesn’t exactly roll, but instead uses a set of two wheels underneath it to move around. Similarly, you’d expect a spherical thing like that would use its own shape to its locomotive advantage but really, the robot’s position and facing will remain the same nearly all the time.

So what is the LG Rolling Bot good for? It features an 8 MP camera that can steer and move up, down, left or right to up to 15 degrees, giving you a way to look around whenever you need to. Thanks to the camera and inbuilt remote controls that you’d be using off of your smartphone, you can use it to check things around your home even when you’re away. Not to mention that thanks to a couple of embedded infrared remote sensors will let you set them up in order to control various home appliances such as lights, television sets or air conditioners.

The reason they say you can use this as a cat cam is because you can easily use the LG Rolling Bot as a home monitoring tool and if not that, a method to keep your pets entertained. With the use of the inbuilt microphone and stereo, you can straight up make your cats feel less lonely when you’re not there to provide them with the affection they need in person.

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Sony Is Hosting Its Own Press Event Next Month

February 24, 2016 By Nancy Young Leave a Comment

It would seem that March is going to be an incredibly eventful month for tech giants all over the world. Apple is organizing a press event that everyone believes will be the moment when the company showcases its next iPad and the fabled iPhone 5se. IBM is staring its very own, personalized trek down the VR path down in Tokyo with its next generation VRMMO alpha testing of Sword Art Online: The Beginning.

It would appear that Sony has a few things to show us as well, as the company just started sending out invites to their exclusive PlayStation VR press event. This event will be taking place during the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco on March 15^th. While in no way a surprise, it seems that Sony is having their own run on the virtual reality highway, and what has been announced so far regarding it seems pretty promising.

Not to mention that Sony originally unveiled their VR project – at that time dubbed Project Morpheus – all the way back in 2014 and has been bringing improvements to their PlayStation VR headset since. Apparently, one of the latest updates to it was the addition of a 120 Hz capable OLED display together with re-projection technology that will allow users to transform their experiences.

However, ever since that moment, the company went rather quiet on what they were preparing with the virtual reality headset, to only speak out now. The PlayStation VR is scheduled to be released in the second half of this year, only a little later than competitors’ own releases (Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, etc.). However, the company is keeping things rather hushed up until the fateful day of the press event that has been planned.

The invitations that have been sent out so far read that this is an invitee-only event that will begin at 2 PM PT and include hands-on demonstrations of what the new PlayStation VR is truly capable of. The event is scheduled to last roughly 4 hours, with the doors opening an hour prior to the presentation.

This will mark the first time in nearly half a year when Sony is willing to talk about their endeavors in the area of virtual reality since their last announcement that was made at Paris Games week in October 2015. Now, the only problem for individuals who are trying to stay up to date and present in the world of technology would be which event to attend, as Apple is holding its own on the very same day.

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The Unsettling Army of Robots from Boston Dynamics

February 24, 2016 By Michael Turner Leave a Comment

A series of recent videos are showcasing the unsettling army of robots from Boston Dynamics, featuring their rather frightening set of abilities. This time around the robots in question are actually full-fledged, differently shaped machines that display different sets of abilities. From the very first glance you take on any of these robots manufactured by the company supported by Google, you will notice that the trademark feature of them all is locomotion.

The main idea behind all of these robots is a new method that allows them to move, walk and even run very similarly to how the factor of inspiration behind their construction does. Some of the robots are human-like, like Atlas and PETMAN, while others mimic various types of animals such as dogs, cheetahs and horses. Each robot that Boston Dynamics has built was made for a particular study reason.

For example, the LS3 is a four legged robot designed to go anywhere marines and soldiers would go on foot, being able to walk on any time of damaged terrain and carry huge amounts of weight – up to 400 lbs and able to walk for as long as 20 miles or 24 hours on a single fuel charge.

The PETMAN, on the other hand, is a robot that was designed to test chemical protection clothing and was made in such a manner that it would be agile and very flexible in order to suit its purpose. The fact that the PETMAN is able to balance itself is not even the most stunning ability that the robot is capable of. In fact, the robot is capable of simulating human reactions and controls temperature, humidity and sweating according to the tasks he is put up to.

But Boston Dynamics is up to a lot more than that. So far they’ve also designed wall-climbing robots, leaping robots, robots that can run as fast as 29 miles per hour on level ground and much more.

But while the concepts themselves are astounding to read about, watching the videos posted on the Boston Dynamics website is a whole different story that the word ‘unsettling’ can hardly describe. While the demonstrations done by the scientists manage to make their point well to showcase the robots’ ability to maintain their balance or get back up after they have been shoved and fell over, it’s hard to get over just how wrong it feels.

All of these robots may be obviously human-made, but their likeliness to live and sentient beings becomes frightening to say the least, especially when the demonstration needs to get a little rougher in order to show just how capable the robots are. Anyone watching these videos will at least once think about how the robots would feel about all of this if one day they become truly conscious.

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The Fireball That Hit the Atlantic Ocean Without Anyone Noticing

February 23, 2016 By Kenneth Scott Leave a Comment

If you’re in touch with the NASA newsfeed, you may have recently read about the baffling event regarding the fireball that hit the Atlantic Ocean without anyone noticing. The report read a fair amount of scary sounding facts that only become even more frightening to think about once you realize that mankind was particularly lucky without even realizing it.

The event in question seems to have taken place on February 6^th at 1:55 PM UTC; a rather quiet Saturday for anyone on the east coast of the United States and South America for sure. It would appear that at the same time that individuals were peacefully having their lunches, a meteor with roughly the same explosive power as a nuclear bomb descended from space, was set on fire by its travel through the Earth’s atmosphere and exploded right over the Atlantic Ocean.

Luckily, this occurred above the ocean and very far away from any sort of land, preventing the event from becoming catastrophic in any way for human settlements. Not to mention that thanks to the fact that it exploded before any collision, it did not end up affecting ocean currents or risking tidal waves.

Even so, scientists say that the fireball occurrence recorded on February 6^th this year was hardly worrying even if it had exploded above a populated area. Astronomer Phil Plait reminded us of the Chelyabinsk meteor that exploded over Russian territory in 2013. The Chelyabinsk meteor was estimated to have had the explosive power of 500,000 tons of TNT, while the one that dropped over the Atlantic Ocean only had the same potential as 13,000 tons of TNT.

Scientists say that had it exploded over a city such as New York, it would have surely rattled windows and scare the bejesus out of anyone who was there to see it leave a scorched trail in the sky before exploding, but not much else.

Plait also added that individuals are hardly aware of just how exposed the planet really is. The scientist stated that on average, about 100 tons of meteor debris fall onto the Earth on a daily basis. The reason behind that is the fact that most pieces of debris end up disintegrating during their fall through the atmosphere, reaching 10 to 100 kilometers per second.

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The HTC Vive Was a Little Late for a Good Reason

February 23, 2016 By Deborah Campbell Leave a Comment

While the past weeks have been all about the VR hype with the Oculus Rift preorders coming online, the HTC Vive was nearly forgotten in the absence of news; however, the HTC Vive was a little late for a good reason, it would seem, because it just came out into the daylight with a huge series of good and surprising news.

While in essence, the HTC Vive is pretty much the same thing as the Oculus Rift, and more specifically a virtual reality headset that promises to host the upcoming advancement of VR technology applications, there seem to be some differences. At least in what the bundle purchase and included items are concerned.

Firstly, the HTC Viva was announced to come with two handheld controllers over the Oculus Rift’s included Xbox controller. The two, separate controllers have inbuilt motion sensors that will allow the user’s movements to be tracked across a room and mimic them in the virtual reality experience. This will be the kind of feature that allows for a much higher level of immersion in future games coming out for the virtual reality platform, for example.

And while we’re on the topic of immersion, it seems that HTC has put a few extra ounces of effort in raising its bar as high as possible. The HTC Vive adopts a design that is slightly different from what we had originally seen in the pictures and on displays. Apparently, the upgraded model also includes a brighter display that was made to provide its users an even deeper sense of immersion.

The HTC Vive demonstrates the ability to combine both realities without losing touch of either.

But HTC seems to be tame and thoughtful when it comes to the long-term effects of being completely immersed in a virtual reality game or experience. The headset includes a front-facing camera that will allow you to see the outside world on the account of a switch if you want to take a break from using the gear. The company itself stated that this addition “demonstrates the ability to combine both realities without losing touch of either”.

This could also hold some valuable implications in what augmented reality is concerned too as it will open up some gates for smaller scale of virtual reality applications – with some utility found in things such as engineering, construction and so on.

However, the HTC Vive has also just announced its price and it would seem that the extra additions will have their fans whipping out their wallets for the sum of $799, $200 more than its direct competitor, the Oculus Rift, will cost. Not to mention that in order to be able to run the HTC Vive, you’ll have to make sure that your computer is performant enough to run VR applications to begin with.

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Studying Galaxies 55 Million Light Years Away from Us

February 23, 2016 By Karen Jackson Leave a Comment

When you stop to think how unfortunately grounded mankind is to their home planet still, you can’t help but be amazed when you hear stories about scientists studying galaxies 55 million light years away from us. But that is hardly a joke or an overstatement: scientists at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research are currently just free out of a new discovery that was made regarding galaxy NGC 4569.

The NGC 4569 galaxy, situated in the Virgo cluster and also known as Messier 90, is a spiral galaxy that was named the largest and brightest of the ones observed so far, thanks to its absolute magnitude of -22. However, the NGC 4569 is what scientists call a prototype of an anemic galaxy due to its seemingly scarce star formation in its midst.

Thanks to using the super sensitive camera on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, scientists decided to give this particular galaxy a little more attention than before when, between intermittent studies, the NGC 4569 seemed to have lost a fair amount of its quantity of gas, as it had been noticed prior. However, no previous observations were able to elucidate where the missing gas had done.

After a longer-term observation of the galaxy, scientists were awed to find that the galaxy was actually leaving a 300,000 light year long trail of gas in its wake. The galaxy seems to be moving through the cluster at an average speed of 1,200 kilometers per second, and because of this velocity, gas is gradually stripped from it and left behind as it moves.

This thoroughly explains the missing mass of the NGC 4569 and also explains the same phenomenon that has been noticed in other galaxies across the observable space.

The explanation that the scientists found for the phenomenon was the fact that big clusters of galaxies tend to trap a large amount of hot gas. Afterwards, when a galaxy such as the NGC 4569 enters a cluster, it is subjected to the pressure of all the present gasses that act just like a powerful, hot wind for the galaxy. Because of the strength of these ‘winds’, the newcomer galaxy ends up having matter stripped from it under the impact.

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