Month: February 2021

You can now pay for parking and bus fare in Google Maps. In some regions, the new tools can even replace the digital transit fare and parking apps your city already uses, meaning you can now plan, travel, and pay all within Google Maps.

Google Maps’ in-app parking payments are rolling out for Android users now and will arrive on iOS in the near future. At launch, over 400 U.S. cities accept Google Pay parking payments including Boston, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington D.C.

As for buying bus and train tickets, Google says over 80 public transportation agencies worldwide will start accepting fares in Google Maps over the coming weeks.

How to pay for parking in Google Maps

1. Use Google Maps to navigate to your destination.
2. A “Pay for Parking” button will appear when you near the end of your trip. Find a parking spot then tap the button to begin the payment process.
3. Input your parking meter number and how much time you’re paying for.
4. Tap “Pay” to complete the transaction with Google Pay.

How to buy public transportation fare in Google Maps

1. Plan your trip in Google Maps using the Public Transportation option.
2. If you can pay in Google Maps, you’ll see a Google Pay icon next to a route. Select the route, then tap “Pay.”
3. Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the payment.
4. Depending on where you live and the mode of transportation, you’ll either pay your fare in the app and receive a digital ticket to show drivers and transit officers, tap your phone to a fare booth to pay, or add funds to digital cards in cities like San Francisco.

Now that you can pay for parking and bus tickets in Google Maps, it seems it’s quickly becoming the all-in-one public transportation service. The app can also give you estimates on how full each train or bus is and has several features that can help you navigate to new locations safely.

With Texas, the biggest truck market in the country, currently in the middle of a nasty winter storm and subsequent widespread power outages, we’ve been wondering if anyone has put the generator capabilities of the 2021 Ford F-150 PowerBoost hybrid to the test. The answer is, unsurprisingly, yes. A few users at F150Gen14.com shared photos and experiences using the generator function, and they’re all rather glowing.

The user that kicked off the thread offered the most comprehensive review. He mainly powered household appliances, citing a space heater, toaster oven, coffee maker, lights, TV and refrigerator. He apparently let it run at least 10 hours a day for around three days, mainly for the refrigerator to keep the freezer section frozen. Besides keeping the appliances running, he noted that the truck was significantly quieter than some of his neighbors’ power generators. The truck’s large fuel tank meant he could run it a long time without refueling, which could have been an issue as local gas pumps weren’t working. We would bet that the truck also produces far fewer emissions than those outdoor generators, too.

Two other users chimed in with their experiences. One of them hooked up the house furnace to it the past few days so that the blower and igniter would work. Another was running household appliances like the original poster, and has had it running non-stop for 72 hours. He noted that the truck has gone through a quarter tank of fuel, so he could probably keep relying on it for some time to come.

All of these owners said they had purchased the hybrid with the upgraded 7.2-kW generator capability, though all hybrids come standard with 2.4-kW generator ability. The non-hybrid trucks can provide 2-kW. As cars continue to get more robust electrical systems, we’ll be curious if these generator functions will become more common. There are examples of similar features in both current and upcoming vehicles. The Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV has 1,500 watts of electrical power that can be used when the crossover is switched off, and the upcoming Hyundai, Kia, Ioniq and Genesis electric cars built on the E-GMP platform will be able to provide up to 3.5 kW of power for electrical appliances.

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Open-ear audio is having a moment. JLab and Bose both have sunglasses that double as discreet headphones, but perhaps the most intriguing open-ear technology I’ve seen so far is the SoundBeamer, a device that can supposedly beam sound directly into your ears and your ears alone.

Israeli startup Noveto designed the device to sit on your desktop and use a 3D module to identify and track your ears. Noveto CEO Christophe Ramstein said the device then creates “invisible sound pockets” on either side of your head. It doesn’t matter if you have long hair, a thick beard, glasses, or even a face mask—the gadget can supposedly recognize individuals and keep up with them in real-time.

The wild part is Noveto claims the audio is private. Unlike regular speakers, which are meant to fill a room with sound, the SoundBeamer is designed to be a device that delivers personalized audio. Ramstein said this is possible because the device has a high level of acoustic attenuation. Put simply, the sound is dampened so it gets quieter by about 20dB over a distance of three feet. Normal speakers, according to Ramstein, only dampen sound by about 3dB across an entire room. So with the SoundBeamer, if you’re listening to music at roughly 75dB, someone standing fairly close to you might be able to tell you’re listening to something, but not exactly what. If you were listening at a quieter volume, they might not hear anything at all.

For these reasons, even though the SoundBeamer might look like a mini speaker or soundbar for your desk, it’s really more akin to a pair of headphones.

“What happens is we’re using the ability of the non-linearity of the air to convey inaudible sounds and then the ability to create audible sounds at one precise location in space,” Ramstein explained to Gizmodo over video. “What that means is we’re creating two pockets of sounds exactly based on where your head is. We create those pockets of audible sounds and each of them is independent, which means that our technology acts like invisible headphones.”

Some initial reports about the SoundBeamer came out a few months ago, but today Noveto is announcing some new hardware and software features. Now the device has a new AI-based built-in voice, which is capable of facial and gesture recognition as well as monitoring ambient sound.

Ramstein explained that the AI isn’t like the digital assistants we’ve become familiar with.

“We’re not building the engine to play music. I’m not saying, ‘Play my music or tell me a joke.’ We don’t do that,” Ramstein said.

The AI is there so that the device can better intuit what you’re asking for so you can get a better overall experience. Ramstein also added that no data collected via the SoundBeamer will be uploaded to the cloud, as everything is built-in and on-device.

This stuff sounds like it’s straight out of sci-fi. With other open-ear audio devices, generally, you can clearly see the speaker component and it’s placed close to the ear. While the audio quality might not end up being to your preference, it’s easy to understand how audio travels from the open-ear headphone to your ear. This is a much harder gadget to wrap your head around, and in the pandemic era, it’s also a gadget that’s impossible to demo. Personalized, sound-beaming audio doesn’t exactly translate well over a Zoom call. We can’t say for sure that it works as advertised until we try one for ourselves. Still, it would be pretty cool if instead of having to slip on headphones every time my husband takes a business call in our tiny studio apartment, a device could just beam his Zoom audio straight into his ears.

The first iteration of this device is meant to be stationary for a single person. However, Ramstein said that a second version may be able to support multiple users at once. As for potential future applications, Ramstein is ambitious. Envision, say, treadmills that can beam audio to your ears so no one at the gym has to wear headphones at all. Or going to a night at the movies and being able to send audio in different languages to each person. Or art museum tours where you can specify how much you want to hear about a particular painting in the language of your choice.

Alas, right now the SoundBeamer is only available for preorder on Kickstarter and is expected to retail for $595 later this year. (Early backers will get a discounted price of $345.) We usually caution against crowd-sourced gadgets that can easily turn out to be vaporware, leaving backers empty-handed after months of waiting. However, Ramstein is confident Noveto will be able to deliver the device in Q4 this year, and said the company is partnering with Foxconn—yes, Apple’s iPhone manufacturing partner Foxconn—to manufacture the device. And he’s optimistic that this tech won’t be limited to Noveto devices only.

“The good news is that when it’s ready, it’s also going to be ready for OEMs and the big tech companies,” Ramstein said. “Going from the Noveto-branded product that we’re shipping this year to anybody else who can integrate is going to be fairly easy. All the parts are produced by Foxconn and our partners, and we have all the intelligence being packaged in the chipsets, plus the software that comes with it will make it very easy to integrate.”

Needless to say, we are very curious to try it out for ourselves.

When we reviewed the PocketBook Color last year, we loved the device and the fact that true e-readers could finally display color, but its six-inch screen made it hard to use for reading comic books and magazines which work much better on tablets. The new PocketBook InkPad Color tries to remedy that with a larger 7.8-inch screen that uses E-Ink’s next-generation color electronic paper technology.

The InkPad’s larger screen, which makes it look more like an iPad Mini and less like an Amazon Kindle, is what’s going to draw more people to color E-Ink devices because it allows documents that can’t easily be resized (change the size of text and it can reflow to fit a screen, but that’s not an option with illustrations) to be enjoyed without having to constantly zoom in and out to make text legible. On a device that’s powered by a 1 GHz process and just 1 GB of RAM, zooming and panning large documents isn’t the smoothest of experiences, so while the InkPad isn’t as pocketable as the original PocketBook Color, the actual reading experience should be much improved.

PocketBook is the first company to introduce an e-reader using E Ink’s new Kaleido 2 screen technology, but it’s not a quantum leap for color electronic paper. In black and white mode the InkPad’s screen offers a resolution of 1872×1404 pixels at 300 PPI. But in color mode, it can still only muster a third of that resolution, just 624×468 pixels at 100 PP. Color reproduction is also still limited to just 4,096 different shades, compared to the 16 million+ colors an LCD can reproduce. But according to those who’ve gone eyes on with the new InkPad, with Kaleido 2 E Ink has improved the color accuracy and saturation of the screen, while also improving the performance of the black and white mode. The changes under the hood might be minor, but they apparently make a big difference to the eyes.

Other improvements made to the new PocketBook InkPad include an upgraded color filter array (the tech that makes color electronic paper possible) that’s optimized for the device’s white LED sidelights so colors still pop while reading in the dark, and a USB-C port for charging and syncing, although documents can also be loaded using a microSD card allowing the tablet’s 16GB of internal storage to be infinitely expanded.

In North America, at least, PocketBook isn’t a brand as well known as Kindle or Kobo, but if you don’t get your e-books through online stores like Amazon or Rakuten, or mostly use these types of devices for perusing work or academic documents, it’s a brand potentially worth considering because it supports almost every digital document format imaginable: including EPUB, MOBI, CBZ, CBR, and PDFs. The InkPad also includes Bluetooth for streaming audiobooks or really any digital audio file to a pair of wireless headphones, as well as a text-to-speech function that works in 16 different languages.

The original PocketBook Color was $230, but because of the larger size and screen, the new PocketBook InkPad is slightly more expensive at $329, available now from online stores like NewEgg. We’ll be going hands-on with the tablet next week to see if the InkPad is the perfect e-reader for comic books and magazines, so keep an eye out for our full review.

Could food grown in space greenhouses save us here on Earth? 

Commercial space services company Nanoracks plans to use orbiting greenhouses to create super-resilient crops that would thrive in the harshest environments on Earth and help to ward off the looming food crisis resulting from climate change, the company announced in 2020. 

The company, based in Houston, Texas, signed a contract with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO) to open a space farming research center in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that would research resilient crops, fly them in space and subsequently test the ability of the crops to grow in arid conditions on our planet.

According to Nanoracks CEO and co-founder Jeffrey Manber, this work builds on decades of research that shows that new mutations in the DNA of plants can emerge in the harsh environment of space that could then lead to the creation of new varieties capable of thriving even in challenging conditions on Earth. 

Related: Astronauts harvest 3 different crops and try new gardening tech

“There have been many published papers over the years showing specific instances where, in the harsh environment [of space], some interesting biomass products emerge that can do quite well even in desert conditions,” Manber told Space.com.

“These plants evolve in space either through changes on the genetic level or through the effects of radiation, the absence of gravity or a combination of all these factors.”

According to Professor Liu Luxiang, of the Institute of Crop Science of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, China, China has developed and approved more than 200 space-mutated crop varieties for agriculture use since the 1990s. In fact, the second most popular wheat variety currently grown in China, Luyuan 502, was developed through space breeding.

“Through flying seeds and other plant material in space on recoverable satellites, manned space missions and high altitude platforms, we have developed varieties of various crops including vegetables, wheat, maize and soybean,” Liu told Space.com. “Through the DNA mutations that occur in space and subsequent selection and breeding, we have created varieties that have higher yields, better nutritional profiles and resistance to diseases, and also require less water or tolerate higher temperatures.”

China, Liu added, invests into the various plant breeding technologies to ensure it will be able to feed its nearly 1.4 billion population amid the progressing climate change.

The UAE, which, according to Manber, currently imports 90 percent of the nation’s food, is looking to space for similar reasons. With 80 percent of the country made up of deserts and an overall lack of freshwater resources, only about 5 percent of the UAE is currently cultivated, according to The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations data from 2016. 

“Research in food production under the extreme conditions of space may hold the key to improving our capabilities in desert and arid climates,” ADIO spokesperson told Space.com. “That is why we support Nanoracks as it explores agriculture innovation in space that can be applied to food production in extreme climates on Earth.”

The StarLab Space Farming Centre that ADIO will create with Nanoracks aims to study and develop new types of bacteria, microbes, biofilms and plants that would subsequently be sent to space either to the International Space Station or as part of other cooperations that Nanoracks plans to develop. 

“We hope that at the end of 2021, we will be able to send our first research from StarLab to the ISS,” said Manber. “We might set up a small greenhouse in our Bishop airlock and use it as a test bed and then maybe go into a stand-alone orbiting autonomous platform greenhouse in the next five years.”

Manber said that, while researchers all over the world are looking at ways to grow food in space for astronauts on the Moon and Mars, the StarLab research project is quite unique as it aims to use space for the benefit of those on Earth. 

“Covid and the climate change really opened our eyes to the fragility of food security in both the developing and the developed world,” Manber said. “We believe that there is a research pathway, where space could be one of the contributing solutions to how we can overcome climate change and the increasing hazards of the Earth climate.”

The StarLab Space Farming Centre will also develop robotic and automated systems for the maintenance of greenhouses in space, which could also be used to improve the efficiency of terrestrial farming, Manber added.

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