The November midterms are just weeks away, and following efforts from Instagram and Twitter to engage users in the voting process, Snapchat has now joined the fold. Starting today, all US Snapchat users aged 18+ will see a voter registration link on their user profile page. Tap it, and you’ll be taken to a made-for-Snapchat TurboVote mobile site, where you can register to vote quickly and easily, as well as get all kinds of other info about the election. Team Snapchat will send a video message to all of its 18+ US users, encouraging them to sign up, and those that do get a special filter. Everything will be available in Spanish, too.
Like other platforms, Snapchat was also involved in the 2016 election, using targeted ads and creative tools to encourage young people to vote. But this is the first time Snapchat has coded registration directly into the app. Voter turnout for young people is historically low — only 17.1 percent of 18-24 year olds voted in the 2014 midterms. However, this generation of young Americans are more politically-engaged than ever before. According to Harvard’s latest youth poll, 37 percent of Americans under 30 indicated they would definitely be voting in this election. Hopefully the efforts of Snapchat and friends will help bump this number up even further.
Looking through conversations in chat apps in an attempt to locate shared photos or address can be a real pain. In a move announced this week, Android Messages is getting a comprehensive search feature, allowing you to pinpoint the exact information you’re looking for.
With this update, you’ll be able to search via content type as well as by contact. For example, an image sent from your mom six months ago will be easily tracked down with this feature.
After tapping on the search icon, you’ll be able to select a specific contact and see your messaging history with them, including one-to-one and group conversations, and all the photos, videos, addresses or links you shared with each other.
Google says this search functionality is rolling out this week to users.
In May, Vector launched a full-scale prototype of the Vector-R rocket.
Vector
For a long time Rocket Propellant-1, or RP-1, reigned supreme as the fuel of choice for the first stage of rockets. This highly refined form of kerosene, which was derived from jet fuel, powered the Saturn, Delta, Atlas, Soyuz rockets throughout the 20th century. It even served as fuel for modern rockets like the Falcon 9.
RP-1 has the benefit of being dense, which means a lot of fuel can be packed into a relatively small tank. However, RP-1 isn’t the most effective fuel at creating thrust, a measurement known as specific impulse. Liquid hydrogen, by contrast, has a really high specific impulse. But because it is not at all dense, it can’t efficiently be used as a first stage fuel.
This is one reason why a number of major new rocket engines developed during the last decade, including SpaceX’s Raptor and Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines, have been designed to use methane as a fuel. It represents a compromise between RP-1 and hydrogen—not quite as dense as the former, and with not quite as high a specific impulse as the latter. Methane is also useful if you want to go to Mars, because it is relatively abundant in the red planet’s thin atmosphere and could be used to refuel an ascent vehicle.
However a long-time rocket scientist named John Garvey believes there is another viable fuel for rockets, propylene, and he has been working with it for more than a decade. After Garvey co-founded Vector in late 2015 along with Jim Cantrell and Eric Besnard, he got a chance to put his propylene fuel into action for a real orbital rocket.
And now, he says, propylene has proven itself. Vector has received a patent for its liquid oxygen-propylene rocket engine and is nearing the first flight of its orbital Vector-R rocket, which is powered by three of these engines.
Scaling up
In an interview, Garvey said the company has succeeded in scaling up from experimental engines to the LP-1 engines in the Vector-R rocket, each of which produces about 6,000 pounds of thrust. “The biggest challenge has been optimizing the startup mode,” he said. Essentially, Garvey and the other engineers have had to do a lot of tinkering to ensure that, during the final seconds of countdown, the igniter works properly, and the engine quickly reaches full thrust without damaging the engine itself.
For a small rocket like the Vector-R, designed to deliver payloads of 26kg or less to low-Earth orbit for under $3 million, a fuel like propylene is essential, Garvey said. It is almost as dense as methane, but has a higher performance. This means that the Vector-R can keep its first stage diameter to just over a meter in size, with smaller fuel tanks. The propylene fuel also allows the engine design avoid the use of turbopumps, which are used to increase the fuel pressure in most rocket engines.
With no turbopumps, the engine design can be simpler, and the designers don’t have to worry about bubbles, or cavitation, in the propellant. “For us, every little bit of extra performance we can get matters,” Garvey said.
The company is still working toward a maiden launch of its Vector-R rocket this year, from a launch site in Alaska. Every day, Garvey said, engineers at Vector are evaluating risk and performance. How hard should they push the Vector-R on its first flight? How much risk should they accept that something could go wrong?
“We’re getting there,” he said. “Part of the trade we’re evaluating all of the time is the risk. Now that we’re getting into bigger vehicles, we’re still pretty risk aggressive, but we’re not like in the old days.”
AT&T is joining the ranks of carriers that can bring a whole suite of connected car technology to older passenger vehicles. It’s launching the Harman Spark, an OBD-II dongle that adds diagnostics, tracking and LTE data to cars from 1996 and beyond. Unlike the old ZTE Mobley, this isn’t just about internet access. It can alert you to car trouble (including theft), help you find and pay for roadside help and locate your vehicle.
It could also be particularly helpful to watchful parents. You can create geofences that warn when the car leaves a certain area, and provide driving scores to teens who are a little too enthusiastic with the pedals.
The Spark will be available Sept. 28 for $80, although what you’ll pay for service will vary. You can spend $5 per month if you’re not interested in a hotspot, or buy a data plan (either stand-alone or attached to your phone service) if you want to get your kids’ tablet online. Although this won’t be a slick as buying a car with cell data built-in, it could serve as a valuable tool if you aren’t in a rush to replace your existing wheels.
A huge Airbus A350-900ULR is being delivered to Singapore Airlines today where, once in service, it will make the longest continuous flight in the world, from Singapore to Newark airport—a flying time of just under 19 hours.
The ULR in the name of the craft stands for “Ultra Long Range,” which is an apt name, considering this beast can cruise for 9,000 nautical miles (or 9,537 miles). The A350-900 is capable of flying further than any other commercial aircraft, with a maximum flying time of around 20 hours.
No one needs to be on a plane that long. That’s just ridiculous.
The plane will enter service starting October 11, and is the first of seven aircraft ordered by Singapore Airlines to increase direct travel between Singapore and Newark, two citiesthat are quite literally half a world away from each other. Airbus was able to accomplish this long flight time with just a few tweaks to the fuel system, allowing the plane to carry 165,000 liters of fuel, an increase of 24,000 over normal A350 planes. That gives the A350-900 1,600 miles of extra range. Aerodynamic updates also reduced fuel needs for the A350-900 by 25 percent over other Airbus models.
Of course, the extra weight requires extra fuel—a problem well known to aerospace engineers. The bigger the plane, the less fuel efficient it is because it has to haul all that extra fuel. It’s a circular problem where more fuel is needed to haul the extra fuel that will propel the plane farther. The largest commercial plane in the world, the Airbus A380 Super Jumbo, has 500 seats and usually scores about 65 miles to the gallon per seat, according to the Wall Street Journal. Smaller planes are more efficient on longer flights so the A350-900 comes with a twin-aisle wide body style, with two classes for flyers to choose from—67 seats in business and 94 in economy.
“It takes fuel to carry fuel,” Airbus spokeswoman Mary Anne Greczyn told the Journal.
The company believes that the roomier aircraft will be comfortable enough for the nearly day long flights, providing customers a quieter cabin and more space to stretch and move around.Air inside the cabin is recycled every two minutes to make flyers more comfortable and cut down on the effects of jet lag, Airbus claims. There’s also a whole suite of entertainment opinions and wifi as well, but with a 19-hour flight, you might just want to bring a big bottle of Ambien if you don’t want to end up counting your teeth over and over for hours on end. If you’re already a misanthrope, 19 hours on a plane probably won’t cure you of your hate for humanity, but is perfect if you hate connections more.
This isn’t Singapore Airlines’ first foray into long-distance flights. From 2004 to 2013, the airline flew to Newark airport from Shanghai on an Airbus A340-500. That flight required 222,000 liters of fuel—10 times the weight of the passengers aboard, according to The Guardian. That flight was an 8,900 nautical mile trip over the North Pole. The flights were eventually canceled due to revenue losses.
Several plane manufactures are taking up the challenge of long-haul, non-stop flights, which allowed airlines to serve underserved areas rather than relying on connecting flights to get people to flyers destination. Right now, the longest continuous flight crown belongs to the Boeing 777 that runs from New Zealand to Qatar, a distant of 9,025 miles with 16 to 17 hours of travel. So far, ultra long flights have been limited by engineering problems. Problems companies are now over coming with more efficient machines. Fuel is the second-highest cost airlines face, and getting fuel economy right can mean the difference between a huge bonus for airline CEOs and a mega-huge bonus.
Of course, less seats in a plane means higher costs of tickets. These flights are aimed at high-earning business people who are willing to pay for the most direct route possible. Expect even “economy” to run a pretty penny. There’s no information yet on what exact path the plane will take.
Singapore Airlines also plans to use the plane on its trans-Pacific flights from Los Angeles and San Francisco to Singapore. The company will take delivery of six more Ultra Long Range planes in the next year, and plans to ramp up direct flights to and from the U.S. from 40 to 53 by December, according to CNBC.
Google announced changes for image searches on mobile this week, with the company stating that it is bringing Google Lens to the service to help dive deeper into image results.
Written in its blog, “In the coming weeks, we’ll bring Lens to Google Images to help you explore and learn more about visual content you find during your searches.”
Once this happens, should you come across an image in Search that you want to find other relevant info on, you can tap on a new Lens button right below the image. Once tapped, Lens will analyze the image, then provide additional information, such as other photos and product links. Furthermore, Google will allow users to draw on any part of a photo to be analyzed, just in case the part of a photo you want scanned wasn’t picked up properly by Lens.
Again, Google says this Lens functionality in Image Search will be available in the coming weeks.
After a series of bugs plagued iOS 11, Apple reportedly decided to slow down on adding new features to iOS 12 in order to focus on improving performance and stability. In general, that strategy seems to have worked, with multiple sites reporting that iOS 12 runs faster on nearly every supported iPhone and iPad, even five-year-old devices like the iPhone 5S.
However, it appears that at least one noteworthy bug still managed to make its way into the general release of iOS 12, with users on Reddit, Twitter, and elsewhere reportedly seeing muted or “washed out” colors after updating their devices from iOS 11 to iOS 12. Gizmodo was not able to duplicate this apparent bug.
The majority of complaints center around colors generally looking “off” on the iPhone X, with some users theorizing that Apple may have tweaked or adjusted the display profile for iPhone X’s OLED screen as part of the update.
Unfortunately, the true cause of the apparent issue has been difficult to pin down, because other changes in iOS 12 such as a new filtering technique (confirmed by Apple senior vice president Craig Federighi) used by Apple to “improve text legibility” on some wallpapers and a new darker shade of gray for folders has lead to confusion between users when trying to identify potential problems.
Still, these reports are a bit of a bummer since, as the first iPhone with an OLED display, one of the iPhone X’s biggest selling points was its much wider color gamut and improved contrast when compared to older iPhones with LCD screens.
We’ve reached out to Apple for a comment on the matter and we’ll update this story if we hear back. But in the meantime, how has your update to iOS 12 gone? Have you run into any color issues, or have you encountered an entirely different issue? If so, feel free to send us a tip at sam.rutherford@gizmodo.com.
