Month: July 2016

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Inhabitat’s Week in Green: A modular airplane, and more!

Is the age of the solar-powered car upon us? Hanergy thinks so. The Chinese company just debuted four new vehicles that source all of their energy from the sun. Meanwhile, Clip-Air announced plans to test a crazy modular airplane that carries passengers and cargo in detachable pods. Eleven electric cars set off on a 15,534-mile race across 20 countries and three continents. And cycling infrastructure made huge strides as Paris launched its first bicycle superhighway and the US made progress on a colossal bike path connecting the entire East Coast.
Most wind turbines have three blades, but Vestas just unveiled a gigantic wind power tower with a whopping 12 blades and four rotors. In other energy news, a new breakthrough could enable researchers to extract enough uranium from seawater to power cities for thousands of year. The Smartflower POP is a novel solar power system that can produce 40 percent more energy than flat photovoltaics. California has managed to boost its solar capacity 1378 percent in just five years, and a new parabolic solar cooker is fighting energy poverty in Africa.

What’s the world’s best new building? This week the World Architecture Festival announced 343 contenders — and we rounded up the best of the best. Meanwhile, China completed construction on the world’s largest radio telescope, and they’re planning to use it to search for alien life. In other innovative architecture news, we showcased 11 green building materials that are way better than concrete, and Walden Studio built a luxurious tiny home that lets its owner live off-grid and rent-free.

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iOS version of Pokémon Go is a possible privacy trainwreck

If you sign into Pokémon Go on iOS, you may be giving it more access than it needs. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

A word of warning if you’re playing Pokémon Go on iOS: signing into the app through Google currently gives the game full access to your Google account (hat tip to Adam Reeve for discovering the issue). External apps that you sign into with Google often ask for a small subset of permissions based on what they need to do—view your contacts, view and send e-mail, view and delete Google Drive documents, and so on. But Niantic’s Pokémon Go iOS app doesn’t ask, and with full account access, it can theoretically do all of those things and more. You can check on and revoke permissions for Pokémon Go and any other external app on this page.

We’ve independently verified that the game requests full account access on iOS, but the Android version doesn’t appear to have the same problem; you can sign in with Google but the app doesn’t show up on the permissions page. And, of course, you don’t need to use a Google account to play Pokémon Go—an account created through the Pokémon site will also work. However, that site is currently having server problems and you may not be able to create an account right now if you don’t already have one.

It’s very likely that this is an oversight or an error rather than an intentional, malicious move on Niantic’s part, but we’ve contacted the company for more information and will update the article if we receive a response. (Update: "No comment to share at the moment.") Hopefully an app update can resolve the privacy and security issues.

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VIDEO: Texas Inmates Escape Holding Cell — To Save Jailer

When a jailer suddenly slumped forward and lay motionless, a group of Texas inmates burst out of a holding cell. Still shackled, the inmates were able to make enough noise to summon help for the guard in distress.

“A jailer may very well be alive tonight thanks to the inmates he was guarding at the Parker County courts building,” WFAA-TV reported.


Associated Press
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The incident involving at least eight inmates was captured on surveillance video released by The Associated Press. You can see the ailing guard slumped in the corner of the video. After unsuccessfully calling for help, the men burst out of their holding room and found the guard had no pulse, as WFAA reported.

So, they made noise to alert the other deputies. “They thought it was a big old fight going on down there,” one of the inmates involved told the channel.

Sgt. Ryan Speegle, noting that the guard in distress had keys and a gun, said, “It could have been an extremely bad situation.” The confused deputies burst in to the area and corralled the inmates back into their cell. Paramedics performed CPR and the man regained a pulse as the inmates looked on, WFAA reported.

Nick Kelton, one of the inmates involved, described the guard as a “good man” in an interview with WFAA. “It never crossed my mind whether he’s got a gun or a badge,” Kelton said. “If he falls down, I’ll help him.”

According to the AP, the unnamed jailer “continues to recover from an apparent heart attack.”

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No Man’s Sky’s 18 Quintillion Planets Take Up Just 6 GB on Disc

No Man’s Sky, a game that its developer says has 18 quintillion planets to find and explore, takes up just 6 GB of data on the PlayStation 4‘s Blu-ray disc.

That figure was provided by Sean Murray, founder of No Man’s Sky developer Hello Games and a programmer. Posting on Twitter, Murray explained much of that 6 GB is actually taken up audio.

This is likely achieved thanks to the fact that much of the content in No Man’s Sky is procedurally generated, which means there’s less space taken up on disc. Or it could all be witchcraft.

Continuing, Murray revealed on Twitter that No Man’s Sky had passed certification in Europe, United States, and Asia. It is currently being submitted for certification in Japan.

Additionally, the studio is "already busy on Update 1" for the space exploration game. Details on what it will include were not discussed.

No Man’s Sky went gold on July 7 and Hello Games celebrated with a selfie.

No Man’s Sky is scheduled to launch on August 9 in North America, followed by August 10 in Europe, and August 12 in the UK. Hello Games recently settled a three-year legal battle over the No Man’s Sky name, allowing the title to stay the same.

For more on No Man’s Sky, you can check out GameSpot’s "Making Sense of No Man’s Sky’s Massive Universe" feature.

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Armed Robbers Target Pokemon Go Players, Police Say

Following a report about a woman finding a dead body while playing Pokemon Go comes another wild story about the hugely popular mobile game.

Authorities in O’Fallon, Missouri today wrote on Facebook that armed robbers are targeting Pokemon Go players. Here is the statement:

"This morning at approximately 2 AM we responded to the report of an armed robbery near the intersection of Highway K and Feise Road. We were able to locate four suspects occupying a black BMW a short time later and recover a handgun. These suspects are suspected of multiple armed robberies both in St. Louis and St. Charles Counties. It is believed these suspects targeted their victims through the Pokemon Go smartphone application."

According to the statement, authorities believe the armed robbers used Pokemon Go to "add a beacon to a pokestop to lure more players. Apparently they were using the app to locate people standing around in the middle of a parking lot or whatever other location they were in."

Asked by GameSpot sister site CNET about how police determined the suspects were using Pokemon Go, Sgt. Robert Kendall wouldn’t say. He did have this to say, however:

"We arrested all four suspects and recovered a handgun. We felt it important for our residents’ safety to share what we did know and remind them to be cognizant of their safety and surroundings."

Be careful out there. Also, don’t play Pokemon Go while driving.

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The Army’s Self-Driving Trucks Hit the Highway to Prepare for Battle

As the convoy traveled down Interstate 69, regular Michigan motorists might have not believed they were driving next to the future of warfare. But for all their humdrum khaki looks, these were platooning, semi-autonomous army trucks, moving as one organism.

Late last month, the army dropped these four beta trucks into real Michigan traffic, with human drivers aboard as backups. Over seven miles, the vehicles used cameras and LIDAR to watch the road. They used dedicated short-range radio, also known as vehicle-to-vehicle communication, to chat with each other and even with infrastructure Michigan’s DOT installed for the purpose, getting advance notice of things like changing speed limits and closed lanes ahead.

The US Army’s Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center is not the only big organization experimenting with autonomous trucks. Peloton Technology, Daimler, and a new startup called Otto are working in this space, too. But the US Army’s involvement could make armed conflict a lot safer for soldiers.

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US Army TARDEC

The trucks drove as a convoy of one, also called a platoon: When the leader braked, the others braked, too. That instant responsiveness allowed them to travel so closely together, each drafted off the truck in front of it, enjoying the limited wind resistance like Tour de France cyclists.

In 10 to 15 years, Army engineers say, fully autonomous truck convoys will be ready to serve in conflict zones. The reasoning’s obvious: “We do want to get soldiers out of the convoy vehicles, in case they could be on roads with IEDs,” says Alex Kade, who helps direct the Army center’s research in ground vehicle robotics. Robo-trucks could hump supplies around bases, or resupply soldiers at far-flung outposts.

Despite ethical questions around robotic warfare, the military is pushing ahead on autonomous technology, with everything from self-flying helicopters to robo-snipers, not to mention Predator drones.

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US Army TARDEC

But, for the trucks at least, there are challenges ahead. Like most other autonomous vehicles, the technology will need to reliably spot obstacles and use advanced computation to make split-second decisions, just like human drivers. It’ll have to navigate places where they can’t communicate with infrastructure, and where markings, signs, and pavement are out-of-date and poorly maintained. It’s a big challenge, but a nice reminder that fancy engineers and computers support the troops, too.

Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.

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Clouds Of Water Detected Outside The Solar System

Astronomers have located water clouds around the coldest-known object outside the solar system, a brown dwarf 7.2 light-years from Earth.

Brown dwarves are stars that never got off the ground, too small to fuel heat- and light-making nuclear fusion. Discovered in 2014, WISE 0855 is the chilliest body that astronomers have been able to detect; it’s nearly as frigid as our own neighboring gas giant planets. “Its extremely low temperature makes it the first object after Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn likely to host water clouds in its visible atmosphere,” wrote the team, who published their findings in May in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

They now have robust evidence of these clouds. WISE 0855 is too cold and faint for the normal technique used to study brown dwarves, infrared spectroscopy. Instead, the team used the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii to detect light in a fine window of wavelengths that has also been observed coming from Jupiter.

“Our spectrum shows that WISE 0855 is dominated by water vapor and clouds, with an overall appearance that is strikingly similar to Jupiter,” coauthor Andrew Skemer, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in a statement. This information will give astronomers a jumping-off point to learn more about what’s happening in WISE 0855.

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