Month: November 2017

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Formula 1 e-sports now more exciting than the real thing—and that’s a problem

On Sunday, the 2017 Formula 1 season drew to a close with the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. It was a deathly boring end to a season that started with so much promise back in March. The series had a new owner, Liberty Media, which promised to stop ignoring things like the Internet and 21st century. The cars were wider and had more grip than seasons past. And there was the threat of actual competition between Mercedes-AMG and Ferrari as opposed to starting each race weekend knowing that a win by the three-pointed star was a foregone conclusion.

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Thanks to the Play Store, Microsoft Office arrives on Chromebooks

  • Word on an Android tablet. Pay for Office 365, and you’ll get this version on a Chromebook.


    Microsoft

  • Excel.


    Microsoft

  • Powerpoint.


    Microsoft

Through the magic of the Play Store, the official Microsoft Office apps have arrived on Chromebooks. It has been a long journey to get here, with random individual Chromebook models gaining and losing Office support for the past year, but now, according to a report from Chrome Unboxed, the office suite is live on all Chromebooks. You need an Office 365 subscription to actually save and edit a document, but if you’re paying the $7-per-month fee, you can now fire up the apps on a Chromebook.

The Play Store on Chromebooks brings Android apps to the formerly “web only” platform. For Microsoft Office, this means Chromebook users get the Android tablet version of Word, Excel, Outlook, and Powerpoint. Unlike nearly every other Android tablet app in existence, Microsoft’s tablet apps are actually great! They offer a big-screen optimized interface that looks a lot like the Windows apps, but with a smaller feature set. The Office apps are actually way better than Google’s own Drive apps on a tablet, which are just stretched-out phone apps (although on Chromebooks, you’d use the Drive website.)

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Closer to a Cure: Combating Alzheimer’s With New Compute Technology

The human brain remains a complex mystery. But, if we dare to dream big—and have the proper tools and data to fuel those ambitions—we may one day discover cures for diseases as devastating as Alzheimer’s. At the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), more than 1,000 neuroscientists are using the latest technology to identify biomarkers that can predict the onset of Alzheimer’s. Using HPE Memory-Driven Computing architecture, researchers have the ability to identify patterns within vast collections of data 100x faster than ever before, accelerating progress towards finding a cure.

[Great Big Story]

The post Closer to a Cure: Combating Alzheimer’s With New Compute Technology appeared first on Geeks are Sexy Technology News.

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Bitcoin Soars Toward Another Benchmark: $10,000

Bitcoin prices have spiked since October — and the cryptocurrency is now closing in on $10,000, leading the way for digital currencies that have seen huge gains in 2017.

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images


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Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Bitcoin prices have spiked since October — and the cryptocurrency is now closing in on $10,000, leading the way for digital currencies that have seen huge gains in 2017.

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Bitcoin’s price has already spiked more than 1,000-percent in the past 12 months. Now it’s flirting with another landmark: a $10,000 price for a single unit of the cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin’s rise has been both meteoric and volatile, with surges in valuation often being driven by positive reports about its status. Earlier this year, for instance, Japan recognized bitcoin as an official method of payment. It has also continued to attract interest from investors.

In early October, a single bitcoin cost less than $5,000 on currency exchange sites. A year ago, one could be had for around $730. But it crossed as of 7 a.m. ET on Monday, the price for a bitcoin was $9,770, according to data from the Coinbase currency exchange.

The digital currency slipped below $9,700 after reaching that mark; the analyst site Coindesk (which is affiliated with Coinbase) says it expects bitcoin to pass “the psychological milestone of $10,000 today,” citing recent momentum. The price roared past $9,000 over the weekend.

“Bitcoin’s price has been helped in recent months by the announcement that the world’s biggest derivatives exchange operator CME Group would start offering bitcoin futures,” Reuters says. “The company said last week the futures would launch by the end of the year though no precise date had been set.”

Another factor has been the move to split the original bitcoin segment into two currencies — bitcoin classic and bitcoin cash. That change, which became official in August, has allowed large trades in the currency to occur more frequently, while also promising to bolster its infrastructure.

When bitcoin surpassed $4,300 in August, the CryptoCoins News site declared a “flippening” was taking place, as bitcoin, with a market size of more than $70 billion, had gained “a greater total valuation than payment-processing behemoth PayPal.”

Citing the current rise, CryptoCoins says the total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies — led by bitcoin and its rivals, ethereum and Ripple — has now topped $300 billion for the first time, making them more valuable than Bank of America, which has a market cap of around $280 billion.

Investment analysts have often split on the issue of cryptocurrencies, citing their status as a both an emerging technology and an emerging form of exchange and investment.

CNBC quotes Bob Doll, chief equity strategist at Nuveen Asset Management, saying, “I confess it’s an area of that to me feels speculative, but you might call me old or old-fashioned. It’s been an amazing run, has it not?”

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NASA’s New Titanium Airless Tires Are Nearly Indestructible

Stretch a Slinky toy too far, and eventually the metal coil will be warped so much it won’t be able to return to its original spring shape. That’s a problem also faced by the metal spring tires designed to roll across our Moon, and other planets our rovers are exploring. But NASA has created an alternative, made from titanium, that can tackle any terrain and always return to its original tire shape.

Because puncturing an inflatable tire while driving around the surface of the Moon would have been a disaster, the Lunar Rover, delivered by Apollo 15, instead featured airless tires made of hollow metal springs. They absorb bumps like a rubber air-filled tire does, but over time, those metal springs get warped and deformed until they’re misshapen and don’t roll as efficiently.

What’s happening is that over time, the bonds between the atomic structures that make up the materials in a metal spring tire are stretched to the point where they can’t return to their original arrangement, which is a problem when repair technicians are millions of miles away from a vehicle.

The solution to the problem is a new type of metal spring tire made from a nickel titanium alloy whose atomic bonds are instead re-arranged as the tire deforms and stretches when rolling over uneven terrain. Known as “shape memory alloys” the metals are assembled in what looks like a tire made from chain mail whose structure can be compressed right to the hub and still spring back to its original shape afterwards.

The advantage to using a tire like this here on Earth is immediately obvious, especially if you’ve ever had to change a flat tire on the side of the road in the cold of night. But having a tire that can last for years with minimal maintenance is even more important when sending rovers to the other planets in our Solar System. The tires used for the Curiosity Rover deteriorated faster than expected, and when you’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars to send an autonomous explorer to another world, the last thing you want to derail your experiment is a damaged tire.

[Vimeo via designboom]

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What Amazon Echo and Google Home Do With Your Voice Data—And How to Delete It

Amazon Echo and Google Home—and other devices that have Alexa and Google Assistant built in—are some of the most promising new technologies to come along in years. And they’re genuinely useful to have around, whether it’s to settle a bet or help out with a recipe. But it can also feel a little creepy to have a speaker in your house that’s always listening. What exactly is it doing with that info? Where does it go?

Here’s the good news. While their microphones are always on, Google Home and Alexa don’t actually do anything with your voice until you say their “wake word,” which is usually just ‘OK Google’ or ‘Alexa’. Despite the occasional viral story that suggests otherwise, Amazon and Google truly aren’t keeping track of every single thing you say.

After you say your wake word, though, your Alexa and Google Assistant do start recording, and then whisk those clips away to the cloud. The hardware itself is pretty dumb. In order to let you know with a snap who the 23rd president was, or what the weather will be like tomorrow, or to play a Dokken deep cut, voice assistants need to be able to pull information from the entire internet. That means a faraway server somewhere is what actually handles your request.

And on that server they’ll stay, unless you actively delete them. Which, fortunately, isn’t all that hard. Amazon and Google let you see what requests they’ve logged. In your Alexa app, go to Settings > History to see what Amazon has on file, and to delete them one by one. If you’d rather do a mass purge, head here and go to Your Devices > Echo Dot > Manage voice recordings. A pop-up will give you the chance to clear out the whole stash.

For Google Assistant, go to myactivity.google.com. That’s also where you can delete your voice requests, if you don’t want them lurking on corporate servers somewhere. Click on the three-dot line in the upper-right corner, then Delete activity by. From there, you can set a date range—today, yesterday, last 7 days, last 30 days, all time, or custom—and the service whose interactions you want to nuke. Click on All products, then Voice & Audio, then hit Delete. You’ll get a pop-up that asks if you’re absolutely positively sure you want to go through with it. Click OK, because you do. Then do the same for Assistant while you’re in there, just to be thorough. (There are 19 additional categories, ranging from Ads all the way down to YouTube, if you want to linger and take stock of just how much time you’ve spent with Google lately.)

And if you’re still anxious about Echo and Home, remember that both come equipped with a handy mute button. The Echo’s is on top; Google Home’s is in the back. Just remember that if they can’t listen to you at all, they’re basically fancy paperweights.

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Tesla Should Consider Building This Car Powered By a Giant Mouse Trap

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On its quest to free the world from the burden of fossil fuels, Tesla has unfortunately hit some speed bumps with the production of its Model 3. So instead of relying on batteries and electricity for power, perhaps the company should consider this four-wheeled contraption which runs on a gigantic spring-powered mouse trap.

Based on a simple science experiment that many of us tried in grade school, Kevin Kohler—aka the Backyard Scientist—used the oversized mouse trap he built earlier this year as the engine for a very-basic roadster. Its top speed is disappointing and its range is abysmal, but you’ll never need to remember to plug it in at night, or fill it up every few days. Even better, as far as I know, there’s no waiting list to get one.

[YouTube]

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