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Category: mobile phones – Page 153

Europe’s Galileo satellite navigation system can now not only receive, relay, and locate distress beacon signals, it can also respond to the SOS, sending back an acknowledgement to those awaiting rescue that their location and call for help has been received and search and rescue services are responding. The new function became operational during the 12th European Space Conference in Brussels, which ran from January 21 to 22, 2020.

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) have come a long way since the US Military introduced the first, Transit, in the 1960s. The technology not only revolutionized navigation to the point where anyone with a smartphone can pinpoint their location with the touch of an icon, but it’s also having an increasing impact as more functions are added to that of basic navigation.

Today, there are four global satellite navigation systems and Galileo is a key part of the Cospas-Sarsat system founded in 1979 by Canada, France, Russia, and the US, with 24 out of the 26 Galileo satellites carrying an 8-kg (18-lb) search and rescue package next to the main antenna. According to ESA, the ability of the Galileo satellite constellation to receive and relay SOS signals saves up to 2,000 lives per year.

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Tech giant Apple has acquired Xnor.ai, an artificial intelligence startup that came from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s research lab. The acquisition suggests that Apple may be planning to Xnor.ai’s machine learning tools int iPhones and iPads in the future, with processing on-device instead of in the cloud.

GeekWire first broke the news earlier Wednesday, citing sources with knowledge of the deal. According to GeekWire, the deal is reportedly worth up about $200 million. Apple paid the same $200 million for another Seattle-based AI startup, Turi, in 2016.

Unlike traditional AI that runs in massive data centers and requires network connectivity, XNOR makes AI highly efficient by allowing deep learning models to run directly on phones, IoT devices and low power microprocessors. XNOR’s technology enables AI experiences that are up to 10x faster, 200 percent more power efficient, and use 15x less memory.

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Fast forward 10 years and Li’s life has completely changed. No longer in finance, he communicates via WeChat and uses apps on his iPhone XS to order food, hail taxis, pay bills, and shop.

Most of the apps that permeate the daily life of Li and hundreds of millions of other Chinese had their beginnings at the start of the decade.

The 2010s will be remembered as the decade when smartphone apps became ubiquitous, spawning new Chinese tech giants whose platforms forever changed the way people live.

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If robots are to help out in places like hospitals and phone repair shops, they’re going to need a light touch. And what’s lighter than not touching at all? Researchers have created a gripper that uses ultrasonics to suspend an object in midair, potentially making it suitable for the most delicate tasks.

It’s done with an array of tiny speakers that emit sound at very carefully controlled frequencies and volumes. These produce a sort of standing pressure wave that can hold an object up or, if the pressure is coming from multiple directions, hold it in place or move it around.

This kind of “acoustic levitation,” as it’s called, is not exactly new — we see it being used as a trick here and there, but so far there have been no obvious practical applications. Marcel Schuck and his team at ETH Zürich, however, show that a portable such device could easily find a place in processes where tiny objects must be very lightly held.

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Circa 2019

A gamma-ray burst registered in December of 2017 turns out to be “one of the closets GRBs ever observed”. The discovery is featured in Nature – and it has yielded valuable information about the formation of the most luminous phenomenon in the universe. Scientists from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen helped carrying out the analysis.

Jonatan Selsing frequently receives text messages from a certain sender regarding events in space. It happens all around the clock, and when his cell phone goes ‘beep’ he knows that yet another gamma-ray burst (GRB) notification has arrived. Which, routinely, raises the question: Does this information — originating from the death of a massive star way back, millions if not billions of years ago – merit further investigation?

“GRBs represent the brightest phenomenon known to science – the luminous intensity of a single GRB may in fact exceed that of all stars combined! And at the same time GRBs – which typically last just a couple of seconds – represent one of the best sources available, when it comes to gleaning information about the initial stages of our universe”, explains Jonatan Selsing.

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How do you all feel about this?

Strips you pee on at home and then scan with your phone to see if you are dealing with any deficiencies. The test results provide food recommendations, supplement recommendations, and lifestyle recommendations intended to help improve the way you “look, feel, and perform…”

Probably rudimentary but I like where their head is at.

With Bloom you can track 15 health metrics from the comfort of your home and get personalized food, supplement and lifestyle recommendations to help you feel your best.

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Amazon.com Inc. wants to make your hand your credit card.

The tech giant is creating checkout terminals that could be placed in bricks-and-mortar stores and allow shoppers to link their card information to their hands, according to people familiar with the matter. They could then pay for purchases with their palms, without having to pull out a card or phone.

The Times

  • Unruly
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    Today, countless electronic devices have touchscreens, including smart phones, tablets and smart home appliances. Touchscreen interfaces have become some of the most common means for users to communicate with and browse through their devices.

    With this in mind, a research group at imec in Belgium has recently carried out a study exploring the potential of interfaces for enabling the simple transfer of data to and from devices connected to the internet. In a paper published in Nature Electronics, the team showed that commercial touchscreens can be used as reader interfaces for capacitive coupled data transfer using a 12-bit, thin-film identification tag powered by a battery or photovoltaic cell.

    “Our field of expertise is for IoT and Internet of Everything applications,” Kris Myny, principal scientist at imec and one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore. “In this field, we look into thin-film circuits, i.e. flexible RFID tags that can be embedded in objects and communicate to RFID and/or NFC readers. Based on this, our next step was to investigate whether we could expand the number of readers.”

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    With 360 video, IEEE Spectrum takes you behind the scenes with one of the world’s first drone-delivery companies. Zipline, based in California, is using drones to deliver blood to hospitals throughout Rwanda. At an operations center in Muhanga, you’ll watch as Zipline technicians assemble the modular drones, fill their cargo holds, and launch them via catapult. You’ll see a package float down from the sky above a rural hospital, and you’ll get a closeup look at Zipline’s ingenious method for capturing returning drones.

    You can follow the action in a 360-degree video in three ways: 1) Watch on your computer, using your mouse to click and drag on the video; 2) watch on your phone, moving the phone around to change your view; or 3) watch on a VR headset for the full immersive experience.

    If you’re watching on an iPhone: Go directly to the YouTube page for the proper viewing experience.

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