How, where and when to get the Moto Z, Moto Z Force

How, where and when to get the Moto Z, Moto Z Force

The Moto Z and Moto Z Force are coming, and here's what you need to know about getting one in your hands.

Lenovo on Thursday announced two new Motorola smartphones, the Moto Z and Moto Z Force. The two devices breakaway from the Moto X design we've seen for the last few years, and add hot-swappable modules, Moto Mods.

When using Moto Mods, you can add a projector, external battery or a JBL speaker to your Moto Z without having to turn the device on or off, thanks to a magnetic connection on the back of the phone.

The promise of adding capabilities to a phone long after you've purchased one is welcome -- but more importantly, when will the Moto Z and Moto Z Force be available?

Well, it depends on where you live and your wireless carrier.

Verizon exclusive

The Moto Z Droid and Moto Z Force Droid will be available on Verizon wireless "this summer" according to Motorola.

It's important to note, the Moto Z Force, which has a better camera and bigger battery will only be available on Verizon. Hashtag sad face, indeed.

Unlocked version

An unlocked version of the Moto Z will be available through Moto.com and various retail channels (but it's unclear which, exactly) this fall. According to Motorola, the unlocked version will work on GSM networks such as AT&T or T-Mobile here in the US.

Global

Keeping to the theme of telling us as little as possible about launch plans, Motorola has only indicated that the Moto Z will be available worldwide in September.

Mods

Moto Mods announced during Thursday's event will be made available at the same time as the Moto Z Droid and Moto Z Droid Force on Verizon Wireless this summer. Those Mods include the previously mentioned battery pack, JBL SoundsBoost and a Moto Insta-Share Projector capable of projecting the Moto Z's display onto a 70-inch screen.

Pricing for Moto Mods as well as either handset wasn't revealed during today's announcement.

As details start to emerge in the coming months leading up to the official launch, we'll update this post.

source: www.cnet.com

Uber will give you $2 if it makes you late

Uber will give you $2 if it makes you late

Uber is guaranteeing to get users to their destinations on time with uberPOOL.

If not, the ride-sharing service will give you $2.

uberPOOL is the transportation company's carpool option. It matches those requesting a ride with others who are traveling in the same direction to the same location or locations close by.

Uber announced "Arrive By" in a Tuesday blog post. It is a new feature on uberPOOL that guarantees that users will arrive at their destinations before the quoted time, or they will get $2 off their next uberPOOL trip.

"The time that we show you is a fairly conservative one," uberPOOL senior product manager Brian Tolkin told Tech Insider. "The vast majority of the time you'll get there earlier."

The feature is launching first in Los Angeles.

Eventually, the "Arrive By" guarantee will expand to all cities where Uber Pool is available.


source: www.ajc.com

Samsung plotting two bendable smartphones for 2017

Samsung plotting two bendable smartphones for 2017, report says

One of the two rumoured mobiles is said to fold in half like a makeup compact.

Two new Samsung phones with folding screens could be unveiled next year, if reports concerning the South Korean tech giant's smartphone plans are to be believed.

Samsung is mulling the release of two smartphones with bendable screens as soon as next year, according to a report in Bloomberg, which cites anonymous sources "familiar with the matter."

One of the phones, which could reportedly see the light of day in early 2017, is said to fold in half like a makeup compact. The other could serve as a 5-inch smartphone, but fold out into a larger tablet-style gadget.

Samsung's official comment is, "We can't comment on market speculation." It's sensible to take this rumour with a pinch or two of salt, but Samsung certainly has form when it comes to pushing the boundaries of display tech. We were great fans of the company's S7 Edge smartphone , which features two curved edges at the sides of the screen. 
Meanwhile Samsung has been showing off futuristic curving screens as far back as 2013.

source: Cnet

UK gets first insurance policy for driverless cars

UK gets first insurance policy for driverless cars

Available to owners of vehicles with autonomous features.

Adrian Flux's policy says that drivers won't be able to take naps at the wheelnd turn on the autopilot

AN INSURANCE BROKER has launched the UK's first driverless car insurance policy aimed owners of cars that have driverless or autonomous features.

The company, Adrian Flux, explained that it designed the policy for people who already own a car kitted out with autonomous tech, and for those who may be thinking of buying a new car with autopilot features, such as Tesla's forthcoming Model 3.

The new policy shares many similarities with a typical car insurance policy, but covers additional factors relating to driverless technology.

Car owners are covered for loss or damage if updates or security patches for elements like the driverless operating system, firewalls, electronic mapping and journey planning systems haven't been installed in the vehicle within 24 hours of the owner being notified by the manufacturer or software provider.

They are also covered if the car gets hacked or an attempted hack results in loss or damage, and if there are satellite failures that affect the navigation systems or the manufacturer's operating system or other authorised software failures.

The final point covers loss or damage caused "by failing when able to use manual override to avoid a collision or accident in the event of operating system, navigation system or mechanical failure".

Aside from the technical aspects of driverless cars, insurance is one of the biggest talking points because the introduction of such vehicles will place greater scrutiny on the vehicle manufacturer than the owner in the event of an accident. The UK government said last month that self-driving car manufacturers will be held responsible for accidents.

Meanwhile, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the US has said that it considers Google's autonomous driving software as the driver. But this contradicts a previous ruling in California which found that a fully licensed driver must be present in the car.

A number of factors would be considered when it comes to liability for an accident or collision to answer what Adrian Flux called "a $64m question".

The driver may not bear any responsibility if the car's driverless technology or its supporting systems are shown to have failed or caused some other disruption resulting in an accident, collision or other type of damage, it said.

But, importantly, the policy states that the driver "will always need to be able to take control of the car at any point in their journey", meaning that a driver cannot turn on the autopilot and nap at the wheel or be intoxicated while in the driving seat. µ

source: www.theinquirer.net

Artificial leaf could one day power your car

How an artificial leaf could one day power your car.

Harvard University researchers say they've created a half-chemical, half-biological system to generate liquid fuel using air, water, and sunlight. And as if that weren't enough, it takes climate-changing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in the process.

A study published Thursday in the journal Science advances research led by Daniel Nocera, a professor of energy at Harvard who has spent years trying to best nature's original workhorse technology-photosynthesis. Nocera has been developing what he calls an "artificial leaf."

Trees and other vegetation act as atmospheric filters, sucking in carbon dioxide and locking it in their trunks and branches (a process that's suddenly reversed by wildfires). The new system announced Thursday is 10 times more energy efficient than natural organisms, according to the paper.

The artificial leaf looks nothing like a leaf, though. Pamela Silver, a Harvard biochemistry professor who co-authored the paper with Nocera, said visitors to her lab seem disappointed when they realize this. "It's just a jar with wires coming out of it," she said. "It looks like science."

The core technology is really a catalyst, cobalt phosphate, used to perform a neat trick: When placed in water and hit by sunlight, it splits water into its component elements-one part oxygen and two parts hydrogen. That's what plants, trees, and some bacteria, do for a living. It's the first step in photosynthesis, the process by which plants take CO2 out of the air, add hydrogen taken from water, and emit oxygen.

What the plants make is carbohydrate: the basic natural purpose of photosynthesis that gives plants the energy to grow. It's biology's premiere chemical storage system for solar energy, and, under one of its more common names, the bane of well-fed humans. If coal is "buried sunshine," sugar is "sweet sunshine."

Nocera's team builds on the original leaf concept, first published in 2008, which was limited to just splitting up the oxygen and hydrogen atoms of water. In their new work, the team mirrors the making of carbohydrates. They take the hydrogen split off by the artificial leaf and use it to grow an artificial microbe. Ralstonia eutropha breathes in the hydrogen and eats CO2 out of the air, growing and reproducing.

Like everything else, if something goes in, something comes out. In this case, the bio-engineered microbe pumps out PHB, a precursor to biodegradable plastic, or burnable alcohols, like isobutanol and isopentanol. In other words, a cousin of gasoline. Fossil fuels will eventually be exhausted, or too expensive to extract. Cheap gas prices notwithstanding-the artificial leaf offers the promise of fuel as renewable as the sun's remaining 5 billion years is long.

Step 3 in the artificial leaf process may be to figure out how to use this new fuel source without putting the CO2 right back in the atmosphere, but one thing at a time.

In a sense, the new work comes out of the failure of the rest of the world to catch up with the initial purpose of the artificial leaf.

The first few years of the 21st century were filled with visions of a "hydrogen economy," in which the most abundant element in the universe fed cars and homes powered by quiet, pollution-free fuel cells. Problem solved? Not quite, since splitting water was until now an energy-intensive process that required a lot of fossil fuels, which kind of defeated the purpose. The clean hydrogen economy could only take off if hydrogen was liberated from water using methods that didn't create destructive byproducts. The artificial leaf is an end-run around that central problem.

Around 2013, Nocera met Silver, who had been looking for a different path by engineering an organism to take hydrogen from water. If the new research is scalable, oil exploration would theoretically no longer be necessary, Nocera said. Bacteria could just make it.

But there are some problems to making use of this technology. The first is the one faced by climate change activists, namely an entrenched, $8 trillion dirty energy system. Any new energy production method has to compete with something that works and is relatively inexpensive. (Nocera hopes India may be a more receptive market, where 300 million people have no access to modern energy.)

The second problem is that commercialization will be hard and expensive. The last several years have seen liquid-fuel technologies embraced by venture capitalists. A few transited from production to factory-level with great fanfare, only to slip away. Once promising fuel companies, Gevo Inc., in Englewood Colorado, and Kior, in Pasadena, Texas, have faltered.

That doesn't mean renewable-to-liquid-fuels has no future. It's just a long game. Nate Lewis is a prominent chemist at the California Institute of Technology who belongs to the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, a research consortium organized in 2010 with support from the Department of Energy. Lewis calls artificial photosynthesis "an inevitable technology, in that it takes the biggest energy source known to man, the sun, and stores it" in the densest form outside an atomic nucleus-chemical fuels.

The next steps for the technology is to scale up what's been achieved so far, and to find catalysts (or in Nocera and Silver's case, engineered genes) that can produce fuels that the economy wants and that take some of the carbon out of the air-until you burn them.


Source: Chicago Tribune

Google teaches car to honk; flipping the bird next?

Google teaches car to honk; flipping the bird next?

This month’s report on Google’s autonomous car fleet reveals two new features coming to the company’s prototype car, the ability to honk the horn and a hum similar to most non-electric cars.

The sound of a car horn might be the stuff of nightmares for frequent drivers, but Google believes it can be a powerful tool that may prevent accidents on the road. For the first few months, the car honked internally, but Google recently made the honk audible to nearby cars.

“Our self-driving cars are designed to see 360 degrees and not be distracted, unlike human drivers, who are not always fully aware of their surroundings. Our self-driving software is designed to recognize when honking may help alert other drivers to our presence — for example, when a driver begins swerving into our lane or backing out of a blind driveway,” said Google in the report.

Honk if you love attention

The self-driving system has two types of honk: two short honks as a friendly heads up to the other driver, and one long honk for urgent situations. Google’s testers report back to engineers on all honks, to make sure that the car is not being obnoxious on the road.

Google also wants to make sure pedestrians, cyclists, and visually impaired drivers know the car is active, and has added a ‘hum’ that is similar to most non-electric cars.

During the testing phase of the hum, Google explored a variety of sounds, including ambient art sculptures, consumer electronic products, and ocra noises. We hope when the car is available, Google adds these fake engine noises in a variety pack.

Google’s autonomous fleet, which totals 70 cars, reported one crash this month on May 3. The crash, according to the report, happened when a human driver was in control and nobody was hurt.


Source: readwrite

Factories in Space in an Attempt to Save Earth

Amazon Founder, Jeff Bezos, Wants to Build Factories in Space in an Attempt to Save Earth.

Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos

Mankind is staring to explore the possibilties space can offer to Earth. Projects such as "asteroid mining" and "moon village" are being considered to expand the habitable space and to harvest more resources from near-Earth objects. Recently, Amazon founder and billionaire, Jeff Bezos, suggested the factories should be built and operated in space to save Earth from further damage.

The founder of Amazon also created his own aerospace manufacturer and spaceflight services called Blue Origins. His rationale for the company is that the commercial space industry is worth developing for the benefit of Earth and mankind.
"So when it comes to space, I see it as my job - I'm building infrastructure the hard way. I'm using my resources to put in heavy-lifting infrastructure," said Bezos in an interview with Forbes. "So the next generation of people can have a dynamic, entrepreneurial explosion into space," Bezos added.
But before it can be accomplished, he said that the price of space travel should be decreased, thus Blue Origin's work in reusable space shuttle technology. And unlike Elon Musk, Bezos believe that Mars shouldn't be the priority. He wanted to focus on bringing factories off the Earth and to create solar panels in space.

According to Bezos, the Earth is the best planet to live in. "Energy is limited here. In at least a few hundred years ... all of our heavy industry will be moved off-planet,' Bezos said in a statement.
Recently, Blue Origin landed a contract with NASA to become one of its partners in transporting new technologies off the Earth, according to a report by The Verge. The partnership is in line with NASA's Flight Opportunities Program which gives an opportunity to new emerging space technologies and companies.

With Bezos entering the commercial space industry and his attempt to further develop reusable space shuttle, it looks like Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, has found himself a competition. But in all industries, competition is good, for as long as their space programs, as Bezos put it, are geared towards "saving the Earth."

source: natureworldnews