Android Oreo now shows WiFi network speeds before you connect

Ever hop on a WiFi hotspot to save mobile data or boost speed, only to find out that it’s so slow that you might as well have stayed on cellular access? If you’re using Android 8.1 Oreo, that shouldn’t be a problem going forward. After several weeks of teasing, Google is rolling out a feature that gauges the speed of WiFi networks before you connect. It’s not giving you exact bandwidth readings — instead, it’s lumping the overall performance into categories that give you an idea of what to expect. You may want to avoid a "slow" (under 1Mbps) or "OK" (1-5Mbps) network unless you have no choice, but "fast" (5-20Mbps) and "very fast" (20Mbps and above) should do the job if you’re catching up on YouTube.

The ratings are a bit conservative, and might not help much if you’re hoping to stream 4K or download a multi-gigabyte app. However, it should help you make more informed decisions. You might skip that overloaded airport connection instead of wasting minutes trying to visit a basic page. Now if only this prompted hotspot owners to improve the quality of their connections…

Source: Google Support, Android (Twitter)

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Google’s Hangouts Meet video calls are now available on tablets

Google has extended support for video calling on Hangouts Meet, its enterprise version of the chat service, to iOS and Android tablets. This comes almost a year since the company split Hangouts between Chat, for casual users, and Meet, which is geared toward corporate videoconferencing.

Enabling video calling is an obvious boon for folks using Meet, especially as it’s been the better part of a year since Google integrated Hangout calls into iOS’ Callkit. It’s the latest step in the company’s efforts to specialize its chat services, dating back to June 2016 when it officially killed Gchat to let Hangouts, Allo and Duo inherit stronger roles.

Via: VentureBeat

Source: Google blog

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SpaceX gets good news from the Air Force on the Zuma mission

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The launch of Zuma was pretty, but the aftermath has been anything but.

A little more than two weeks have passed since the apparent loss of the highly classified Zuma mission. Since then, SpaceX has publicly and privately stated that its Falcon 9 rocket performed nominally throughout the flight—with both its first and second stages firing as anticipated.

Now, the US Air Force seems to be backing the rocket company up. “Based on the data available, our team did not identify any information that would change SpaceX’s Falcon 9 certification status,” Lieutenant General John Thompson, commander of the Space and Missile Systems Center, told Bloomberg News. This qualified conclusion came after a preliminary review of data from the Zuma launch. That’s according to Thompson, who said the Air Force will continue to review data from all launches.

However tentative, this statement buttresses the efforts by SpaceX to say that, from its perspective, the mission was a success. The statement also adds to the concerns of Northrop Grumman, which built the Zuma payload and the adapter that connected it to the Falcon 9 rocket. Northrop Grumman was also responsible for separating after the second stage of the Zuma rocket reached space. The aerospace veteran has yet to publicly comment on specifics of the Zuma mission since the launch.

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Making tools gives crows a big food boost

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A crow gets to work manufacturing a tool.

Tool use among animals isn’t common, but it is spread widely across our evolutionary tree. Critters from sea otters to cephalopods have been observed using tools in the wild. In most of these instances, however, the animal is simply using something that’s found in its environment, rather than crafting a tool specifically for a task. Tool crafting has mostly been seen among primates.

Mostly, but not entirely. One major exception is the New Caledonian crow. To extract food from holes and crevices, these birds use twigs or stems that are found in their environment without modification. In other environments, however, they’ll remove branches from plants and carefully strip parts of the plant to leave behind a hooked stick. The behavior takes over a minute, and the crows will typically carry the tool with them when they explore new sites, and they will sometimes store it for future use.

Understanding how this complex behavior came about in crows requires us to understand the evolutionary advantages that might be had from a good tool. A group of researchers, mostly from the University of St. Andrews, has now done just that: the researchers have quantified how tool manufacture influences food harvesting. The results show that the use of bird-crafted tools can increase food extraction by up to 12 times the rate the crows could achieve by using unmodified sticks.

New Caledonian crows in action.

The researcers’ approach was simple. They constructed a series of logs with drill-holes of various sizes and stuffed food into the bottom of the holes. The crows were either provided with chunks of a bush from which they typically manufacture tools, or the birds were given a bunch of straight sticks that could be used as tools, but not modified. The researchers tracked how long the food in the bottom of a hole stayed there after the birds started trying to extract it. This “survival time” should provide a rough measure of the efficiency of the tool being used.

Overall, there was no contest. Crow-made tools were anywhere from three to 13 times more effective at pulling out food than the twigs the researchers provided. If the researchers hand-made a crow-style hooked tool, then that was between six and nine times more efficient than an unmodified twig. While the range of outcomes was narrower with the human-made tools, the average efficiency was statistically indistinguishable from what the crows achieved when they made their own tools.

The authors say this clearly demonstrates a significant advantage for manufactured tools. And that, they argue, means that toolmaking could be under evolutionary selection.

“Could,” however, doesn’t mean “is.” The authors are excited about toolmaking being a genetic trait that’s directly selected for, since that would be relatively easy to search for. But we don’t know anything about the origin of toolmaking among these crows, and we do know that other birds learn socially, including learning involving tools (that’s been seen in cockatoos). So there’s the chance that social behaviors have been under selective pressure and the ability of tool use to spread in the population was just a non-specific side effect.

Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2018. DOI: 10.1038/s41559-017-0429-7  (About DOIs).

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