Report says Apple Watch 2 will include one of the most sought-after missing features

The current Apple Watch may not have hit the market with the resounding bang that many of us expected, but it's still far too soon to call Apple's wearable a flop. After all, it's worth noting that the Apple Watch during its first year of availability actually sold better than both the iPhone and the iPod.
That aside, there's a whole lot to get excited about with respect to future versions of the Apple Watch. For starters, watchOS 3 looks incredible and finally delivers a range of fixes to a number of problems that seemingly made the first incarnation of the Apple Watch seem like a beta product. Not only is performance on watchOS 3 blazing fast, but the entire UI has been completely overhauled, leaving us with a much more intuitive and user-friendly interface. This is critical because even ardent fans of the original Apple Watch couldn't ignore the somewhat clunky and convoluted implementation of watchOS 1 and 2.

So that's all well and good from a software perspective, but an impending hardware update -- rumored to take place in September -- is seemingly poised to take the Apple Watch from a niche product into the mainstream in an emphatic way.

Will the Apple Watch 2 sport faster hardware? No doubt. Will the Apple Watch 2 have improved battery life? It's a safe bet. And to top it all off, now comes word via 9to5Mac that the second-gen version of Apple's wearable will feature GPS functionality.

Citing a source purporting to be familiar with Apple's plans, the Apple Watch 2 will include a GPS chip. If true, such a feature would instantly make the Apple Watch a legit fitness tracker. The Apple Watch does a few things well from a fitness perspective, but its lack of GPS makes it a less than ideal device even for casual runners.
Notably, John Gruber during a recent episode of The Talk Show podcast relayed a blurb he heard from Apple during WWDC, namely that fitness tracking is far and away the function people primarily use the Apple Watch for. That being the case, it would make perfect sense for Apple to hone in on fitness-oriented features for the second iteration of the device.

One other rumor we've seen make its way through the rumor mill suggests that the Apple Watch 2 may include a front-facing FaceTime camera.

China keeps trying to prove its glass bridge is safe, so it drove a 2-tonne SUV over it

Just in case the public wasn't sufficiently convinced by a journalist smashing the world's longest and highest glass bridge with a sledgehammer (and surviving), the owners of the Zhangjiajie Grand Canyon bridge in China decided to prove its safety by upping the ante over the weekend.

In its latest media-directed "safety test" of the 430-meter bridge, suspended a heart-stopping 300 meters above a gorge, the Zhangjiajie national park's owners had 20 volunteers swing sledgehammers at the glass, making visible cracks in the top layer.
Then, a Volvo XC90 SUV carrying 11 people rolled over the cracked panels, Xinhua reported.
Like many other glass bridges and viewing structures across the world, the Zhangjiajie bridge's glass panels are made of multiple layers, so visible cracks don't mean the panels will give way.

Zhangjiajie's three-layered glass panels measure 3m by 4.5m, and each layer is 15mm-thick.
The organisers are staging all of these safety "showcases" ahead of Zhangjiajie's grand opening slated for July.

The bridge, designed by Israeli architect Haim Dotan, was built at a cost of about 460 million yuan ($69 million), and the national park's operators are keen to assuage the public's fears of the bridge being unsafe.

It hasn't been too long since another glass bridge in China cracked, after all. The Yuntai Mountain Geological Park's glass bridge cracked back in Oct. 2015, after a tourist dropped a mug on one of the panels on the walkway. People on it noticed the crack and, understandably, started screaming.

While the park's spokesperson said that only one of three layers of glass on the panel broke, it freaked people out enough that the skywalk has been closed since.

WhatsApp may soon add music sharing, bigger emojis

Facebook-owned instant messaging platform WhatsApp has hinted that it may add two new features - music sharing and larger emojis - soon after adding the file sharing feature. According to a report published in German website Macerkopf, the new features will be a part of the iOS app and users will be able to share music and larger emojis just like mentions and group invite links. The report claims that Apple users will be soon be able to share songs which are either stored locally on their iPhones or send a link of the music file if it is on Apple Music. Currently shared ‘audio’ files do not have this functionality. In case of larger emojis, the IM company’s move comes after Apple unveiled larger emojis as a part of the iOS overhaul. Another feature recently spotted in the WhatsApp Beta for iOS changelog was gif image support. However, general WhatsApp for iOS users haven’t received gif image support so far.

Scientists have new theory on how 'climate' affects 'violence'

Scientists have long struggled to explain why cool heads won't be able to prevail in a hotter world and now, a team of researchers has come up with a model that could help explain why. Developed by Paul van Lange of Vrije Universite it Amsterdam along with Maria I. Rinderu and Brad Bushman,this new model, called CLASH (CLimate Aggression, and Self-control in Humans), goes beyond the simple fact that hotter temperatures seem to be linked to more aggressive behavior. The researchers believe that hot climates and less variation in seasonal temperatures leads to a faster life strategy, less focus on the future, and less self-control - all of which contribute to more aggression and violence."Climate shapes how people live, it affects the culture in ways that we don't think about in our daily lives," said lead author Van Lange. "We believe our model can help explain the impact of climate on rates of violence in different parts of the world."Many studies have shown that levels of violence and aggression are higher in hot climates. "But the two leading explanations of why that is so aren't satisfactory", Bushmansaid. The General Aggression Model (which Bushman helped develop) suggests hot temperatures make people uncomfortable and irritated, which make them more aggressive. "But that doesn't explain more extreme acts, such as murder," he said. Another explanation (Routine Activity Theory) is that people are outdoors and interacting more with others when the weather is warm, which leads to more opportunities for conflict. But that doesn't explain why there's more violence when the temperature is 95 degrees F than when it is 75 degrees F - even though people might be outside under both circumstances. The CLASH model states that it is not just hotter temperatures that lead to more violence - it is also climates that have less seasonal variation in temperature. "Less variation in temperature, combined with heat, brings some measure of consistency to daily life", Rinderu said. That means there is less need to plan for large swings between warm and cold weather. The result is a faster life strategy that isn't as concerned about the future and leads to less need for self-control."Strong seasonal variation in temperature affects culture in powerful ways. Planning in agriculture, hoarding or simply preparing for cold winters shapes the culture in many ways, often with people not even noticing it. But it does shape how much a culture values time and self-control," Van Lange said. "If there is less variation, you're freer to do what you want now, because you're not preparing foods or chopping firewood or making winter clothes to get you through the winter. You also may be more concerned with the immediate stress that comes along with parasites and other risks of hot climates, such as venomous animals."People living in these climates are oriented to the present rather than the future and have a fast life strategy - they do things now. "We see evidence of a faster life strategy in hotter climates with less temperature variation - they are less strict about time, they have less use of birth control, they have children earlier and more often," Bushman said. With a faster life strategy and an orientation toward the present, people have to practice less self-control, he said. That can lead people to react more quickly with aggression and sometimes violence."We believe CLASH can help account for differences in aggression and violence both within and between countries around the world," Van Lange said. "We think it provides a strong framework for understanding the violence differences we see around the world."The study appears in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

Parts of Beijing Sinking at 8-11 Centimeters a Year

Besides being a heavily polluted city, Beijing is sinking. Studies made by a Spanish engineer, Roberto Tomas of the University of Alicante, and Chinese academics, Chen Mi of the Capital Normal University in China and Li Zhenhong of Newcastle University in UK, of the movements under the capital city found that in some parts, the soil was sinking at 8 to 11 centimeters a year. The study used satellite radar technology by comparing images of the city’s landscape between 2003 and 2011, reported RT.com. They found that the worse affected area was in the city center, in Chaoyang District, while in heavily populated residential communities, there was ongoing gradual displacement. The researcher explained the sinking to overuse of groundwater. They added that since 1935, Beijing has been suffering from land subsidence. To avert the negative impact that could result from the situation, the group is assessing the potential threat to roads, buildings and critical infrastructure such as high-speed railways. Because Beijing rests on a dry plain which had accumulated groundwater over the past thousand years, the wells eventually were drilled, causing the water table to drop and the underlying soil to compact. The situation is similar to a sponge that was dried out, reported The Guardian. It is estimated that there are thousands of water wells throughout Beijing used for landscaping and farming. Ma Jun, a leading environmentalist in China and director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs in Beijing, noted that the state has some regulations and oversight power over the installation of wells, but its application is inconsistent and enforcement dubious.Beijing uses about 3.5 billion cubic meters of water annually. To source additional water resources for China’s growing population, the government has a $62-billion water diversion projects that would bring in 44 billion cubic waters per year from the Yangtze River to north China where urbanization is moving at a fast pace.

Driverless car dilemma: Is passenger or pedestrian safety more important?

Driverless cars are throwing up moral issues. Should it be passenger safety first, or should that be sacrificed to avoid an accident that would claim more lives?Driverless cars should sacrifice their passengers if it means avoiding a disastrous accident that would claim more lives, the majority of people questioned in a survey have said.At the same time, the poll found that few motorists would want to travel in such an "ethical" vehicle.Because of the conflicting responses, designers of future driverless cars find themselves in a moral maze from which there is no easy way out, say experts.Study author Dr Iyad Rahwan, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in Boston, US, said:"Most people want to live in in a world where cars will minimise casualties, but everybody wants their own car to protect them at all costs."Autonomous vehicles (AVs) with intelligent computer software have the potential to eliminate up to 90% of traffic accidents, but the way they are programmed presents a huge ethical dilemma.A driverless car carrying a single passenger could, for instance, be designed to swerve and crash in order to avoid a crowd of 10 pedestrians.Alternatively it could protect its occupant at all costs, even ifit results in mass casualties.The US researchers investigated attitudes to AV ethics in a series of six online surveys in which almost 2,000 people were asked to balance self interest and public safety.The results, published in the journal Science, revealed a fundamental conflict of opinion.While people put public safety first as a general rule, they did not want to risk their own lives or those of their loved ones in driverless cars programmed to make sacrifices.One survey found that 76% of those questioned thought it would be more moral for an AV to sacrifice one passenger rather than kill 10 pedestrians.At the same time, there was a strong reluctance to own or use autonomous vehicles programmed to avoid pedestriansat the expense of their own occupants.One question asked respondents to rate the morality of a driverless car capable of crashing and killing its own passenger to save 10 pedestrians.The rating dropped by a third when people considered the possibility of being the sacrificial victim.Participants were also strongly opposed to the idea of government regulation of driverless cars to ensure they are programmed with utilitarian principles - or the "greater good" - in mind.Writing in the same journal, psychologist Professor Joshua Greene, from Harvard University, said the design of ethical autonomous machines was "one of the thorniest challenges in artificial intelligence today".He added: "Life-and-death trade-offs are unpleasant, and no matter which ethical principles autonomous vehicles adopt, they will be open to compelling criticisms."Manufacturers of utilitarian cars will be criticised for their willingness to kill their own passengers. Manufacturers of cars that privilege their own passengers will be criticised fordevaluing the lives of others and their willingness to cause additional deaths. "

Twitter lets you see tweets from specific locations

Micro-blogging website Twitter has rolled out a new feature that will let users see tweets from a specific place, like a business, sports stadium or music festival, a media report said. Foursquare, a search and discovery service mobile app, is powering precise place identification for this new Twitter feature. In exchange, Foursquare gets prominent branding, links back and the ability to improve its own database, technology website Techcrunch.com reported on Saturday. The new location feature is available to all iOS users and will go on other platforms later."We're excited about this integration which has been getting deeper over time. Location can provide important context for any moment, and our location intelligence is best-in-class. We're proud to support Twitter in the US, Canada, Brazil and many other geographies. Stay tuned for more to come," Techcrunch.com quoted Jeff Glueck, CEO, Foursquare, as saying. When users tag a specific location (powered by Foursquare), it will be visible in the main Twitter timeline.If users click through to the tweet detail and then click the location, they will be brought to a location feed with a map up top.There users will see a tab of tweets from that place or city, with the option to check tab dedicated to media such as photo from there, the report added.

Harry Styles solo: One Direction split rumours mount as singer signs deal withColumbia Records

Harry Styles could follow in Zayn Malik's footsteps by quitting One Direction as the singer has signed a solo contract with Columbia Records. Since the boy band began their hiatus in December 2015, fans have worried it could be the end for the British group, and now fresh rumours are rife that Styles will be the second member to leave. Details of Styles' reported contract, including a release date for his debut album, are yet to be revealed but it is a solo venture without bandmates Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson and Liam Payne, Billboard says. The Columbia Records move comes after Styles, 22, reportedly registered four songs with the American Society Of Composers, Authors and Publishers in December 2015. At the time, The Telegraph reported that Styles listed himself as solo performer of songs 5378 Miles, Already Home, Endlessly and Coco. Snow Patrol rocker Johnny McDaid also confirmed Styles' solo material by telling The Associated Press in May 2016: "I've been friends with Harry for a long time, and we've written together a lot. Harry is a really prolific artist and a super-talented guy."He's really authentic and he has an incredible voice, so we've been writing a lot of songs. We've been writing songs for years together. I'm really excited by the way he's sounding at the minute, he's such a talent. I think the world is going to be really shocked at what he comes up with."Fuelling speculation that Styles will leave One Direction, the Worcestershire-born star is gearing up for the release of his first movie Dunkirk. The WWII movie boasts a star-studded cast including Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy and Mark Rylance, and willfeature Styles playing asoldier.It could be the beginning for the singer's acting career as reports have suggested he is a favourite to star as Mick Jagger in a film about the making of The Rolling Stones' album Exile On Main Street. A source allegedly told the Daily Star:"He's about 10 years too young but make-up and special effects can sort that out."

Intel just helped make an exoskeleton which is straight out of the future

The Cyberdeyne HAL system utilised the Intel hardware to offer a cyborg like robotic assistance, to those with missing or damaged limbs. This works with bio-electric-signals (BES) which can be detected faintly on the skin. The HAL system is reportedly capable of supporting a person up to 86 kg in weight and can work for between 60 and 90 minutes at a time. A single limb version can replace or augment lower or single legs and those can last up to two hours at a time. The company Cyberdyne also produces a full body version which is designed for use in disaster relief scenarios or potentially for those with full body paralyses. HAL is designed to augment human capability, said Paul Tapp, director of technology for Intel. “Within the HAL robot exoskeleton, there’s an embedded Intel Atom processor,” he said. “That’s really the central processing unit for all of the different sensors and microcontrollers that are taking nerve signals from the human body and interpreting them and feeding back that data.” Tapp said the robot technology is the futurist fodder used in old movies.

Users are using WhatsApp to make 100 million calls a day

WhatsApp has announced that its users are making over 100 million calls via WhatsApp every single day. This would translate to 1,100 calls being made every second.“Today, more than 100 million voice calls are made every day on WhatsApp – that’s over 1,100 calls a second! We’re humbled that so many people have found this feature useful, and we’re committed to making it even better in the months to come,” says WhatsApp. WhatsApp is currently the most ubiquitous messaging platform with a user-base that’s crossed the one billion mark a long time ago. In fact, only recently a report was published claiming that WhatsApp was installed on 95 percent of smartphones in India and 94 percent of smartphones in Brazil. The platform also offers data compression services for voice transmissions, allowing for leaner transmissions that work even on 2G networks. The latter must indeed be contributing to the growth of their voice services in bandwidth-starved countries like India. WhatsApp was founded by Brian Acton and Jan Koum in 2009. It was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for a staggering $19.3 billion. Starting off as a simple messaging platform with a subscription fee of $1 a year, the platform is now free, the most popular messaging platform in the world and offers end-to-end encryption, voice calling, photo and document sharing capabilities and more.

Elon Musk Plans to Create $1 Billion AI Robot Butler

From rocket ships to electric cars, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO ElonMusk continues to explore the possibilities of the tech industry. Now, he wants to build a butler, an AI robot butler that is.AdvertisementIt looks like the entrepreneur will not run out of tricks from his sleeve anytime soon. His non-profit artificial intelligence research company wants to build a domesticated robot for the homes to dothe dreaded boring house chores.Musk has also been involved in the field of artificial intelligence aside from his commercial space and renewable energy endeavors. His company, OpenAI, made news earlier this year when he opened a free "AI gym" with virtual environments where developers can train their artificial intelligence programs.AdvertisementThe main purpose of his $1 Billion AI robot butler is to redefine a machine's ability to perform and complete specific tasks. Musk plans to do it by purchasing robots and customizing them to perform house chores. ADVERTISEMENT"More generally, robotics is a good test bed for many challenges in AI," Elon Musk said in ablog entry.The move is part of OpenAI's dream of building artificial intelligence bots that are safeto be around mankind and can take part in a larger community.Musk's young AI research company was only launched in December 2015 according toBusiness Insider.CNETmentions that part of OpenAI's announcement on its blog is to measure their progress in artificial intelligence development by creating a machine that can comprehend natural language and is capable ofplaying sophisticated games.If Elon Musk can send a rocket ship to space and back, landing ona barge in the middle of the ocean, then it artificial intelligence fanatics and the public in general are also expecting his new dream intelligent robot butler program to succeed. If that happens, people may not need to do boring house chores ever again.

Volcanoes go quite silent before eruption

Seismic quietness occurs immediately before volcanoes erupt and can, thus, be used to forecast an impending eruption for restless volcanoes, say researchers. The findings showed that the duration of the silence could indicate the level of energy that will be released when eruption occurs. Further, the longer the quiet phase preceding an explosion, the more energy was released in the ensuing explosion."Our work has now quantified that quiet periods can be used for eruption forecasts and that longer quiet periods at recently active volcanoes could indicate a higher risk of energetic eruptions," said Diana Roman, Volcanologist at Carnegie Institution For Science, a US-based research organisation. The quiet periods ranged from six minutes before an explosion to over 10 hours (619 minutes) for the largest explosion, said the paper published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters. The correlation between duration of quiet periods and amount of energy released is tied to the duration of the gas pathways being blocked.The longer the blockage, the more pressure builds up resulting in more energy released, the researchers said. "It is the proverbial calm before the storm. We can use these quiet periods to forecast the amount of energy released," Roman added. For the study, the team monitored a sequence of eruptions at the Telica Volcano in Nicaragua between 2009-2011. Out of the 50 explosions that occurred, 35 had preceding quiet periods lasting 30 minutes or longer.

Double happiness as China welcomes first giant panda twins of 2016

Two healthy baby giant pandas were born at a Chinese breeding research base on Monday, the first twins of the endangered species born this year, media said. The two females, weighing 144 grams (0.14 kg) and 113 grams, are the first offspring of mother Yali, who gave birth at the Chengdu giant panda breeding research base in southwest China's Sichuan province. The unnamed twins are being kept in an incubator and taken out periodically to be fed, according to state broadcaster CCTV."The twins are quite healthy, their voices are quite clear, relatively speaking their fur and physical traits are all quite healthy," said one of their feeders, Tang Juwen. Giant pandas have seen their numbers hit by human encroachment on the highlands where they survive almost entirely on a diet of bamboo. But world nature organization WWF said a survey in 2014 found 1,864 giant pandas living in the wild, almost double the number of the late 1970s. While pandas struggle to reproduce in captivity, better knowledge of their needs has seen an increase in births in recent years with seven born at the Chengdu base last year.

Scientists discover ‘mini-moon’ orbiting Earth

The new ‘moon’ is a small asteroid that has been orbiting us for some time and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, according to boffins at Nasa. The asteroid – named 2016 HO3 – is orbiting too far from our home planet to be considered another moon as it often reached points that are closer to the Sun than the Earth, which is why Nasa has deemed it a “near-Earth companion” or a “quasi-satellite”.Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object (NEO) Studies at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said: "Since 2016 HO3 loops around our planet, but never ventures very far away as we both go around the sun, we refer to it as a quasi-satellite of Earth. "One other asteroid – 2003 YN107 – followed a similar orbital pattern for a while over 10 years ago, but it has since departed our vicinity.

Asian millionaires now the wealthiest in the world

Asian millionaires now control more wealth than their peers in North America, Europe and other regions, according to a new World Wealth Report from Capgemini, a consulting group. Asian millionaires saw their wealth jump by 9.9% in 2015, while poor performance in the equity markets in the United States and Canada slowed growth in North America to a sluggish 2.3% last year. Latin American millionaires, meanwhile, suffered a decline in net worth of 3.7%, driven by political volatility and a turbulent stock market in Brazil. Europe's growth was steady, with a 4.8% increase led by Spain and the Netherlands. Asians' net worth has soared over the past several years. The total wealth of Asia's richest residents totaled $17.4 trillion in 2015, up from $8.4 trillion in 2006. North America's wealthy have $16.6 trillion socked away, up from $11.2 trillion in 2006.Asia also surpassed North America in terms of the number of millionaires in 2014. And their ranks grew even more last year, soaring 9.4%.Of the 5.1 million Asian millionaires in 2015, 2.7 million came from Japan and 1 million were from China. There were 4.5 million U.S. millionaires. China had the fastest growth last year, hitting 16.2%, and is expected to expand even further in coming years. Wealth in Asia is driven mainly by the financial services, high tech and health care industries. And it's coming more from those owning start-ups than from those running long-standing businesses."It's a more entrepreneurial source of wealth," said Bill Sullivan, head of global financial services market intelligence at Capgemini. North American millionaires, meanwhile, saw their ranks inch uponly 2%, while Europe's climbed 4.8% and Latin America's fell 2.2%.Globally, the wealthy have seen their net worth explode in recent years, skyrocketing from $16.6 trillion in 1996 to $58.7 trillion in 2015. That surge has mainly been powered by the rise of manufacturing and economic activity in China. Capgemini expects worldwide wealth will surpass $100 trillion by 2025.

Sweden inaugurates world's first electricroad

Sweden inaugurated a test stretch of an electric road, making it one of the first countries in the world to conduct tests with electric power for heavy transports on public roads. The test will be conducted on parts of road E16, and involves a current collector on the roof of the truck cab feeding the current down to a hybrid electric motor in the truck, according to a press release from the country’s transport administration Trafikverket, Xinhua reported.“Electric roads will bring us one step closer to fossil fuel-free transports, and has the potential to achieve zero carbon dioxide emissions. This is one way of developing environmentally smart transports in the existing road network. It could be a good supplement to todays road and rail network,” said Lena Erixon, director general of Trafikverket.“Electric roads are one more piece of the puzzle in the transport system of the future, especially for making the heavy transport section fossil fuel-free over the long term. This project also shows the importance of all the actors in the field cooperating,” said Erik Brandsma, director general of the Swedish Energy Agency. The tests will continue up through 2018. They will provide knowledge of how electric roads work in practice, and whether the technology can be used in the future. The experiment is based on the governments goal of energy efficiency and a fossil fuel-free vehicle fleet by 2030, and will contribute to strengthening Swedens competitiveness. Three government agencies, Swedish Transport Administration, Swedish Energy Agency, and the country’s innovation agency Vinnova, are partially funding the project, while the participants are paying for the rest.

For last 100 years or so, Earth has celestial companion

Our planet has a celestial companion for the past 100 years or so,flying through the cosmos in an orbit around the sun that has kept it in lockstep with Earth. It has been called as a new ‘mini moon’ by some experts. In the scientific community, the ‘quasi-satellite’ is named as 2016HO3. It is around 120 to 300 feet across, as per NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory researchers. Technically, the asteroid has been orbiting the sun, but it is apparently circling our planet as well, which makes it the most stable instance of a space companion discovered so far. In a statement, Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, said that another asteroid 2003 YN107 followed a similar orbital pattern for some time over last decade, but since then, it has departed our vicinity. Chodas added, “This new asteroid is much more locked onto us. Our calculations indicate 2016 HO3 has been a stable quasi-satellite of Earth for almost a century, and it will continue to follow this pattern as Earth's companion for centuries to come”.NASA said that scientific skygazers discovered 2016 HO3 back in April with the help of the Pan-STARRS 1 asteroid survey telescope on Haleakala, Hawaii. Its annual orbit keeps it nearer to the sun roughly half the time, but the rest of the time, it flies through space maintaining pace with us. Chodas added that the loops of the asteroid around our planet drift slightly ahead or behind from year to year, but the time they flow quite far forward or backward, the gravity of Earth is sufficiently strong to reverse the drift and hold onto the asteroid. A report published in News Wire said, "The Earth has a small companion that has accompanied it on its path around the Sun for almost a hundred years now, NASA astronauts have discovered. Although the actual size of the 2016 HO3 asteroid has not yet been firmly established, the object is considerably small at approximately 120 to 300 feet across, and is constantly orbiting the Earth, like a "quasi-moon", since it mimics the movement of the moon."Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object (NEO) Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, explained that calculations indicate that the 2016 HO3 has been a stable quasi-satellite of Earth for almost a century, and it will continue to follow this pattern as Earth's companion for centuries to come. It was first discovered on April 27, 2016, using a telescope Pan-STARRS 1 from the University of Hawaii at Haleakala National Park, and funded by NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office. This is not the first discovery of an object that follows the Earth. The asteroid 2003 YN107 followed a similar orbital pattern for a while over 10 years ago, but it has since departed our vicinity. This new asteroid is much more locked onto us, NASA expert Paul Chodas explained. According to a story published on the topic by Inverse, "In the upcoming sequel to the 1996 summer blockbuster Independence Day, a massive alien force comes to Earth to avenge losses sustained at Will Smith’s hand 20 years earlier. Aware that this might happen, the planet has spent the previous two decades preparing: creating Earth Space Defense, an international defense program and warning system with bases on the moon, Mars, and Saturn’s moon Rhea, and a lot of laser guns built using repurposed alien technology. The whole thing looks very Hollywood high budget, but, in reality, it represents a paltry effort."Defending Earth from alien invaders will require a lot more than some outposts and a Hemsworth brother. Still, even that’s better than what we’ve got. As it stands, we possess neither of the two things we’d need to repel an extraterrestrial attack: a system to find and assess alien threats and a means to destroy incoming ships. We’re way closer on the former than the latter. Tracking technologies, like the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer space telescope, would let us know if an alien battalion were en route to Earth long before it reached the planet — provided the aliens were in a pretty big ship and traveling slow enough to give us time to parse the patterns. The issue with WISE,from a strategic defense perspective, is just how easy it would be for aliens to destroy. It is a scientific instrument and, as such, not designed to be combat ready.

Google Gboard brings the power of Google to your iPhone's keyboard

Google’s Gboard keyboard for the iPhone has finally arrived on the App store. It will allow you to share Google search results from within the keyboard app itself. At first glance, the keyboard looks like any other keyboard, but the secret to its power lies in a little G button on the top row. Hitting that button gives you access to all the power of Google search within the keyboard itself. You can search for locations, contacts, trailers, images, and gifs, anything that you’d look for on Google, and simply drag it into your chat window. Google says that the Gboard will be much more convenient than a traditional keyboard, because you won’t have to get out of your app just to search for something like an address. You’ll also be saved the hassle of copy-pasting stuff on your tiny screens. Flight times, news articles and even emojis can be found using the keyboard and all the results will appear as cards for easy drag and drop. If that wasn’t enough, the keyboard also comes with Glide typing, which is just another term for swipe input.

Chrome is bad for your laptop's battery, claims Microsoft

It's no big secret that Google's Chrome browser is a bit of a battery hog. The native browsers on both Windows and macOS (Edge and Safari) are widely reported to outlast Google's offering. In its latest campaign, Microsoft is quantifying this difference: in a test that cycles through some common sites including Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Amazon, Microsoft's latest browser lasted 7 hours and 22 minutes on a Surface Book system. Chrome lasted just 4 hours and 19 minutes. Between these extremes were Firefox, at 5 hours and 9 minutes, and Opera in battery-saving mode, at 6 hours and 18 minutes. Microsoft has gone a step beyond just measuring how long each system runs by measuring the power draw of the Wi-Fi, CPU, and GPU during its test workload. A task that drew 2.1Win Edge pulled 2.8W in Chrome, 3.1W in Opera, and 3.2W in Firefox. This lower draw translates to the longer battery life. The Windows 10 Anniversary update is making further changes to improve Edge's power efficiency. Some of these tweaks are surprisingly small—for example, changing how certain animations are performed in the toolbar to allow greater offloading to the GPU—whereas others are larger. Flash content that is not deemed to be central to a page's content will become click-to-play, which is something that other browsers also do. Background tabs will also use fewer resources by making their JavaScript timers fire less frequently and by using coalescing to ensure that they all fire together and hence reduce the number of times that the processor must be woken up. This shouldn't interfere with listening to music or, say, checking for mail in a background tab, but it should reduce the overhead due to spurious animations and so on. Microsoft is also making some networking changes in Edge and the Anniversary update to speed up the initial connection to a server and to allow larger data packets to be used sooner. Edge will also more aggressively re-request data that appears to be timing out. These changes mean that the Wi-Fi connection can be put into low power mode more aggressively. Edge's rendering engine does a good job of showing pages, and aspects like the power consumption are certainly desirable for mobile users. But in spite of these changes, many of us will continue to use Chrome. Edge is currently deeply feature-deficient when compared to Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. The Anniversary update takes some important steps toward rectifying the problem, with pinned tabs and support for extensions. These types of steps help Edge move toward being a practical day-to-day browser. For mobile users, at least, Edge will be well worth checking out. If Microsoft's figures are representative of normal Web usage—and they certainly reflect our own experiences—then there are enormous gains to be had from using Edge instead of Chrome or Firefox. With Edge going some way toward filling the feature gap and having a substantial lead in power efficiency, it's going to keep you browsing for much longer than the alternatives.

'Electric wind' blamed for lack of water on Venus

A strong "electric wind" may have played a significant role in stripping Venus, Earth's twin planet, of its oceans, says a new study by NASA and University College London researchers. Venus has an "electric wind" strong enough to remove the components of water from its upper atmosphere, the study said."It's amazing, shocking," said Glyn Collinson, scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland."We never dreamt an electric wind could be so powerful that it can suck oxygen right out of an atmosphere into space," Collinson, who is the lead author of a paper about this research, noted. The findings are based on ESA's (European Space Agency) Venus Express mission by NASA-funded researchers. Venus is in many ways the most like Earth in terms of its size and gravity, and there is evidence that it once had oceans worth of water in its distant past. However, with surface temperatures around 460 degrees Celsius, any oceans would have long since boiled away to steam and Venus is uninhabitable today. Yet Venus' thick atmosphere, about 100 times the pressure of Earth's, has 10,000 to 100,000 times less water than Earth's atmosphere. Something had to remove all that steam, and the current thinking is that much of the early steam dissociated to hydrogen and oxygen: the light hydrogen escaped, while the oxygen oxidised rocks over billions of years. Also the solar wind -- a million-mile-per-hour stream of electrically conducting gas blowing from the sun -- could have slowly but surely eroded the remainder of an ocean's worth of oxygen and water from Venus' upper atmosphere. The team discovered Venus' electric field using the electron spectrometer, a component of the ASPERA-4 instrument, aboard the ESA Venus Express. The team found that the field was at least five times more powerful than at Earth. The findings were published in the journal Geophysical research letters."We don't really know why it is so much stronger at Venus than Earth, but, we think it might have something to do with Venus being closer to the sun, and the ultraviolet sunlight being twice as bright," Collinson said. The researchers believe that another planet where the electric wind may play an important role is Mars. NASA's MAVEN mission is currently orbiting Mars to determine what caused the Red Planet to lose much of its atmosphere and water. Taking the electric wind into account will also help astronomers improve estimates of the size and location of habitable zones around other stars."This is something that definitely has to be on the checklist when we go looking for habitable planets around other stars," Collinson noted.

Putin Walks Back Trump Praise, Says U.S. Is the Only Superpower

Russian President Vladimir Putin walked back some of his previous praise for U.S. presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump on Friday at a forum, where he also called the United States the world’s only superpower.
“America is a great power — today probably the only superpower. We accept that,” Putin said in Russian at the International Economic Forum in St.
Petersburg, according to a translation by Reuters.
“We want to and are ready to work with the United States.”
Asked about previous comments in which he complimented Trump, Putin said they were misinterpreted, saying he had only ever called Trump “flamboyant,” Reuters reported.
“He is, isn’t he?” Putin said Friday, smiling and prompting applause from the audience. “I did not give any other assessment of him.”
Putin made the comments in Russian during an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. The full interview will air Sunday on the network.
CNN translated Putin’s remarks as: “I only said he was a bright person. Isn’t he bright?”
In December, Putin called Trump “flamboyant,” “talented,” and an “absolute leader in the presidential race.” Trump has returned the
compliments, saying he would get along “very well” with Putin.
Putin also said Friday that he welcomes Trump’s plan to restore U.S.-Russia relations. While he said he had not worked with presumptive Democratic
nominee Hillary Clinton personally, he said he appreciated “warm relations” he had with her husband, former president Bill Clinton, according to Reuters.

Pakistani Woman Throws Acid at Man Who Refused to Marry Her

A woman in Pakistan was arrested
for allegedly throwing acid on a man who refused to marry her, police said Friday, marking an unusual case in a country where rates of violence against women are high.
Local police official Bashir Ahmed said the 32-year-old woman, Monil Mai, was arrested Thursday, hours after she attacked her boyfriend Sadaqat Ali when he went to her home in the Mukhdoom Rashid neighborhood of Multan, a city in central Pakistan.
Ahmed said that Mai had been having an affair with Ali for several years. She wanted him to marry her so that she could divorce her husband, he said.
Ali was being treated at a hospital in Multan, in the eastern Punjab province, Ali said.
Acid attacks and other so-called honor crimes against women are not unusual in Pakistan, but women are rarely the perpetrators of such attacks.
“It is a rare incident in which a woman has been accused of throwing acid on a man,” said Zohra Yusuf, who heads the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. She urged the government
to take steps to stop the sale of acid to
unauthorized persons.
“There is a need to make checks on the availability of acid to common people to prevent such future attacks against men or women,” Yusuf said. Acid is easily available at markets in many parts of
Pakistan, although the government says it was tightening controls to stop illegal sale of chemicals.

Nine Years After Banning It From iPhones, Apple Banishes Flash From Desktops

While Google only recently got on the Adobe Flash hate train , Apple has been riding it for nearly a decade. iOS, and thus the iPhone and iPad, have never allowed Flash anywhere near them, due to the inherent security risks of having Flash anywhere near your computer. But you could still use Flash on Safari on your desktop, if you wanted. That,
however, is about to change.
Apple has announced that as of the update that turns OS X into MacOS, Flash will need to be specifically enabled, website by website. The team
behind Safari claims it’s because Flash is a “legacy plug-in” due to HTML5 serving all the same functions, lumping Flash in the same category as QuickTime, Silverlight, and Java. Safari
will be Flash-enabled, it will just tell websites that Flash isn’t installed to get them to default to the HTML5 version. And here you thought computers
couldn’t be passive-aggressive!
By itself, this wouldn’t be that big of a deal. Flash has dealt with Apple for years, and the iPhone blocking it didn’t stop web developers from using Flash. But with Chrome, Safari, and Firefox all
blocking Flash, that means roughly half the people on the Internet won’t see the program at all. That’s going to have an impact, at least on Flash on the web. But on the bright side, your local restaurant
might finally offer you text you can copy and paste.

Freakishly Huge Lizard Shows Up at Family's Front Door, Tries to Turn the Knob

A family in Nonthaburi, Thailand, came home one afternoon to find what appears to be a giant monitor lizard, standing on its hindlegs and appearing to reach for the knob on their front door.
According to reports, the man in the Viralhog video yells out: "It's in our house. It's f**king huge!"
A dog barks in the background, and sporadically, the video captured women screaming at its sudden movements.
The family continued to discuss how to deal with their version of Godzilla, and finally, a man threw a rope over the creature, and pulled the lizard away.
The family later said the enormous lizard, who is thankfully not fatal to humans, periodically shows up at their home. They have since named it Selena.

Apple Ordered to Suspend iPhone 6 Sales in Beijing

A Chinese regulator has ordered Apple Inc . to stop selling two versions of its iPhone 6 in Beijing after finding they look too much like a competitor, but
Apple says sales are going ahead while it appeals.
The ruling by an intellectual property tribunal is the latest legal stumbling block for Apple in its second-biggest global market following the suspension of its iTunes movie service in April. The company also faces rising competition from local brands including Huawei and Xiaomi, which have gained market share.
The order by the Beijing tribunal said the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus looked too much like the 100C model made by Shenzhen Beili, a small Chinese brand. The order was issued in May but reported this week by the Chinese press.
Apple said a Beijing court stayed the administrative order on appeal and the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus still were on sale.
Apple suspended its iBooks and iTunes Movies services in April, which news reports said was due to an order by Chinese regulators. The company said it
hoped to resume service soon.
In May, Apple suffered another setback when a court ruled that a Chinese company is allowed to use the iPhone trademark on bags, wallets and other leather goods. Apple said it would appeal.

Facebook’s suicide prevention tools will now be available to all users

Facebook has updated its suicide prevention tools and is now making them available worldwide. The tools, which let people flag posts from friends who may be at risk for self-harm or suicide, were previously available only for some English-language users. Other users could report posts through a form, but the new tools make the process quicker and less complicated. In an announcement, Facebook said its suicide prevention resources will be available in all languages supported by the platform. The company’s global head of safety Antigone Davis and researcher Jennifer Guadagno wrote that the tools were “developed in collaboration with mental health organizations and with input from people who have personal experience with self-injury and suicide.”The tools were first made available to some users in the United States last year with the help of Forefront, Lifeline, and Save.org. Facebook said it will continue to partner with suicide prevention and mental health organizations in different countries. Users everywhere will soon be able to flag a friend’s post from a drop-down menu if they are worried about self-harm or suicide. Facebook gives them several options. For example, a list of resources, including numbers for suicide prevention organizations, can be shared anonymously, or a message of support can be sent (Facebook suggests wording).The post may also be reviewed by Facebook’s global community operations team, which may then “reach out to this person with information that might be helpful to them,”according to its Help Center. If someone is at immediate risk of hurting themselves, however, Facebook warns that police should be contacted. Facebook’s suicide prevention tools may help save lives—or at least raise awareness of an important issue. Increasing rates of suicide around the world means that it has become public health crisis in many countries. In the U.S.,suicide rates are at their highest in three decades, particularly among men of all ages and women aged 45 to 64.The company, however, has to balance suicide prevention with the privacy concerns of its1.65 billion monthly active users—especially since Facebook posts are already seen as a treasure trove of research data by many psychologists. Facebook itself was forced to apologize in July 2014 for conducting psychological experiments on users. In fall 2014, United Kingdom charity Samaritans suspended its suicide prevention app, which let users monitor their friends’ Twitter feeds for signs of depression, just one week after its launch, following concerns about privacy and its potential misuse by online bullies. TechCrunch has contacted Facebook for comment on how it will balance helping people with respecting their privacy.

Twitter Invests $70 Million in SoundCloud Streaming Business

Twitter Inc. has invested about $70 million in SoundCloud Ltd. to help the Berlin-based music streaming business expand its paid offering. The investment is part of a larger financing round expected to amount to about $100 million, valuing the company at about $700 million, according to a person familiar with the situation.“We can confirm that Twitter has made an investment,” SoundCloud said in an e-mailed statement Wednesday, declining to comment on specifics or the valuation. It said it will use the money to “continue the global roll-out of many company initiatives such as our recently launched subscription service, SoundCloud Go. While SoundCloud’s massive, engaged user base has tantalized the recorded music industry for years, it had been under increasing pressure to develop a paid service after failing to turn its reach into sustainable revenue streams. SoundCloud, which says it has 175 million monthly users, released the premium service in March and has completed deals with major music labels, as well as publishers and independent labels. Twitter has previously tried to integrate music into its product and in 2014 considered buying SoundCloud, people familiar with the situationsaid at the time. Twitter has invested in startups including smart headphones developer Muzik and mobile marketing platform Swirl.

Sony Addresses The Power Gap Between PS4 Neo and Xbox One Scorpio‘It’s not the be-all, end-all of the gaming experience.’

The chips are now on the table- we know that the PS4 Neo and the Xbox One Scorpio both exist, and even though specs for both have not fully been officially confirmed yet, we also know that the Xbox One Scorpio is truly a beast of a machine, and far outstrips the PS4 in terms of power. In a way, it is an amusing reversal of roles- where the PS4 was the more powerful machine over the Xbox One for so long, a difference that Sony made sure to play up when they got the chance, something that definitely contributed to their dominance in the console market currently, now we are seeing the PS4 being left behind by Microsoft’s upgrade to the Xbox. What does Sony have to say about this? In an interview with Time magazine, Sony’s Shawn Layden discussed Sony’s PS4 Neo, with respect to Microsoft’s Scorpio.“We’re seeing apparently Microsoft taking a similar course to ours, which is to innovate within the life cycle of the console,” Layden said. “It’s nothing that’s ever been done before, so there is no road map to how to do that. Both companies are trying to find the right way to bring that to developers, to bring it to market, to talk about it. But seemingly they’re doing similar things to what we want to do, which is to bring more power to developers, to bring more weapons for them to create games with, to create an enhanced experience. Again I think it’s good for gaming, so it’s good for us.”Specifically when asked about the power gap, he tried to downplay it as much as possible.“Is that going to be the end-all, be-all of the gaming experience? No,” he said. “I think more than anything else today, we’re seeing the power of narrative move the gaming business forward more than ever before.”Well, that’s… that’s an interesting deflection, Mr. Layden. Do you think that ‘power of narrative based games’ also nullifies the lead in hardware power the PS4 has over the Xbox One, then?

Coffee struck from list of possible cancer-causing agents

Go on, have another cup. Coffee is now off the list of things that could possibly cause cancer. Experts convened by the World Health Organization's cancer research arm declared Wednesday that there isn't enough proof to show that the brew is linked to cancer. But in the same report, they warned that drinking "very hot" beverages of any kind could potentially raise your risk of the disease. In particular, it cited countries including China, Iran and those in South America, where teas such as the bitter herbal infusion mate are traditionally drunk at extremely high temperatures — above 65 or 70 degrees Celsius (150 or 160 Fahrenheit) — considerably hotter than drinks would normally be served in cafes across North America and Europe Experts convened by WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer, or IARC, concluded there was inadequate evidence to suggest that coffee might cause cancer, according to a letter published in the Lancet Oncology. The caffeinated drink was originally added to IARC's list of possible carcinogens in 1991 based on a small number of studies that suggested a possible link to bladder cancer. In its latest evaluation, the agency said that some studies showed coffee drinkers had a lower risk for cancers of the liver and womb. For more than 20 other cancers, the evidence was inconclusive."I'm not really sure why coffee was in a higher category in the first place," said Owen Yang, an epidemiologist at Oxford University who has previously studied the possible link between coffee and cancer. He was not part of the IARC expert group. "The best evidence available suggests that coffee does not raise the cancer risk," he said. Drinking very hot beverages, however, just might. Dana Loomis, deputy head of the IARC program that classifies carcinogens, said they began to look into a possible link after seeing unusually high rates of esophageal cancer in countries where drinking very hot beverages is common. He said that even at temperatures below 60 degrees Celsius (140 Fahrenheit), hot beverages can scald the skin, and that consuming drinks at even higher temperatures could be harmful. Loomis said very hot drinks might cause a "thermal injury" in the throat that could eventually promote the growth of tumors, but that evidence was limited. He said there wasn't enough data to suggest if eating very hot food might also be risky. Other experts said that people should remain focused on the leading causes of cancers including of the esophagus and that there were more important changes they could make other than waiting for their drinks to cool."Quitting smoking and reducing alcohol consumption are much more significant for reducing cancer risk than the temperature of what you're drinking," said Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society. Brawley said the cancer risk of drinking very hot beverages was similar to that posed by eating pickled vegetables. Still, he welcomed the news that coffee would no longer be deemed a possible carcinogen."As a heavy coffee drinker, I have always enjoyed my coffee guilt-free," he said. "But now there is scientific evidence to justify that."

Innovation that sucks carbon dioxide out of the air seeks to be a climate-change solution

"This is like sewage," says Klaus Lackner. "This is like garbage. And you cannot just dump it in the atmosphere."That, of course, is exactly what we've been doing for a very long time: dumping it into the atmosphere. Lackner, the director of Arizona State University's Center for Negative Carbon Emissions, is talking about carbon dioxide. He and his fellow researchers at ASU have developed, in essence, a synthetic tree that sucks CO2 out of the air. The carbon that is vacuumed up can then be stored underground, released into greenhouses or even used to make carbon-based products. Many climatologists worried about a warming planet say the answer to climate change is to phase out the use of fossil fuels,but that goal is proving difficult to achieve. Which could open the door to the broad-based development of the work of the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions. The center's innovation, Bloomberg News writes, "can collect roughly 1,000 times as much CO2 as a real tree of comparable size." Watch the business news outlet's video about the development:

Tom Hiddleston & Taylor Swift Reportedly Romantically Involved

After only two weeks since splitting from her DJ boyfriend Calvin Harris, superstar pop artist Taylor Swift was spotted kissing The Night Manger actor Tom Hiddleston. 26-year-old Swift and 35-year-old Hiddleston immediately hit it off while recently dancing at the Met Gala. The pictures revealing Hiddleston and Swift getting cozy with another were taken at Misquamicut Beach not far from Swift's mansion in Watch Hill, Rhode Island. The duo went out for a romantic beach date while overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. An onlooker told the Sun: "They were all over each other - hugging and kissing - even though there were 20 people coming and going from the beach. They looked like any young couple madly in love without a care in the world."The couple walked along the rocky stretch of beach while holding hands, and the chivalrous Hiddleston offered Swift his jacket while the couple took a break to sit upon the rocks. Rumors first started swirling around of a possible budding relationship between Swift and Hiddleston after a video was posted of the duo dancing together at the Met Gala. Hiddleston told thePress Association: "I was at a table with Taylor Swift, and The Weeknd was playing, and she said, 'The thing about these parties is nobody gets up to dance'. She as a musician, was like, 'We've got to dance for The Weeknd.' So we got up and danced."Taylor Swift's reps have stated that the relationship between Hiddleston and Swift had nothing to do with her recent Calvin Harris' break up announced on June 1. Harris clearly felt there was no love lost either as he tweeted after the breakup: "The only truth here is that a relationship came to an end & what remain is a huge amount of love and respect". While Swift's dating history has been well-documented in the media, Hiddleston has also recently been linked to actress Elizabeth Olsen.

Woman gives birth on board Saudi plane

A woman has delivered a premature baby girl on a Saudi Arabian Airlines flight to New York. Flight SV21 was en route to New York JFK Airport from the Red Sea city of Jeddah when the woman, who was not named, went into labour. The pilots declared an emergency. According to British media, the plane was flying over Northern Ireland and the flight was diverted to Heathrow Airport in London. The pilots were instructed to dump fuel before landing the Boeing 777.A picture of the airline staff happily holding the new-born baby inside the cabin emerged on social media. A Saudi Arabian Airlines public officer confirmed the mid-flight birth, saying that “a happy event forced the Jeddah-New York plane to land in London”.Abdul Rahman Al Fahad said that the passenger was in her seventh month and had a report that allowed her to board the plane. “Both the mother and the baby girl are doing fine,” Al Fahad said, quoted by Saudi daily Okaz on Thursday. He added that the airline crew were trained for such emergency cases.

Netflix Adds Picture-In-Picture Support to iPad App

Although multitasking has been available on newer iPads since last year, developers have to add support for the feature in order for it to work. A number of companies have signed on, from Twitter and Skype to Slack Andy YouTube, and now you can add Netflix to that list. The latest version of Netflix's iOS app adds support for iOS 9's Picture-In-Picture feature, which lets users play videos in a small window on the screen while they use other apps. It's not a major update, but it's a useful one for those who want to do something else while watching a Netflix movie or TV show. Picture in Picture works on iPad Pro,iPad Air or later, and iPad mini 2or later. Those iPads also must be running iOS 9.3.2 or later. When playing a video on an app that supports Picture in Picture, a small icon should appear on the bottom right side of the screen. Press that to shrink the screen size down, and you should be able to drag it around your screen to a desired location. According to iMore, "Picture-in-picture mode will also launch automatically if you leave a PiP-enabled app while the video is playing."According to 9to5Mac, which earlier reported on the update, the feature isn't currently working in Apple's iOS 10 beta, though that will likely be addressed before the operating system's launch later this year.

Tesla Pops Into Nordstrom Store In Los Angeles

Last July, Tesla hired Ganesh Srivats, a former senior vice president at Burberry, as its North American sales manager. The move was widely seen as an attempt by Tesla to confirm its position as a major player in the luxury car market. While at Burberry, Srivats had many opportunities to work with Nordstrom, an upscale North American retailer. Now that association has turned into a partnership between Tesla and Nordstrom. Between now and the end of the year, Tesla will have a car on display at a 400-square-foot boutique within the Nordstrom store at The Grove, the hottest, trendiest, hippest shopping mall in the Los Angeles area. There, Nordstrom customers will get to ogle a Tesla up close and talk to company representatives about Tesla automobiles. No vehicles will actually be sold at the store. Until Tesla obtains a sales license for its boutique, interested parties will be referred to sales representatives offsite who will provide test drives upon request. People will also be directed to the Tesla website, where the majority of orders for its new cars are placed.“[We’re] bringing Nordstrom customers a Tesla experience, and I think for Nordstrom as well, it’s like, How can we target Tesla’s audience?” says Ganesh Srivats. For its part, Nordstrom tells Fast Company that it will evaluate the partnership for the rest of this year. “We’re focused on listening to our customers and seeing how they respond to this type of differentiated experience,” Nordstrom says. It has 121 retail locations in the U.S. and Canada. Srivats says the Nordstrom experiment is all part of his company’s commitment to selling its cars directly to its customers without the need of franchise dealers, a philosophy that has engendered a great deal of animosity from dealer organizations in several states.“This kind of innovation is just not going to be possible if we don’t have a direct sales model,” Srivats says. “Because ultimately we’re going to be restricted by the dealerships from engaging in the new playful ways that we’re able to do because we own our business.”

To beat SMS, Facebook Messenger eats SMS

With this near-global rollout of the SMS feature, Facebook is touting ease, as you won’t have to jump back and forth between chat interfaces if your friends are split between them. “There are other SMS clients out there. Some are quite popular, focused on customization,” says Facebook product manager Andrea Vaccari. Apps like GO SMS Pro and QKSMS let you select special color themes and more. “But what we think we can provide is convenience,” Vaccari tells me. By absorbing people’s text threads for one-stop management, then highlighting the ability to Facebook-message someone over the option to SMS them, it could ease users into the transition to all Messenger, all the time.
Facebook SMSsenger
Facebook first integrated SMS into Messenger for Android in 2012, showing texts in both the default messages app and Messenger. But it dropped the feature in 2013 after weak traction, likely in a gambit to focus on boosting Messenger usage. Then in February 2016, Messenger started testing its modern version of SMS in Messenger. Starting today in most countries, users can open Messenger for Android, go to their settings, select “SMS” and turn on “Default SMS App.” All your SMS conversations will then appear in Messenger as purple threads, alongside your blue Facebook chats. You’ll still be able to receive and read SMS in other apps, including the standard Android system, but you’ll only be able to send from SMS. Standard SMS fees still apply. Users on any platform can receive SMS sent through Messenger,and they won’t be able to tell it wasn’t sent from a standard texting app. But since Apple doesn’t provide as much flexibility for developers, iOS provides no option to change your SMS client, and there are no plans to bring this Facebook feature to the iPhone.
Ingesting the status quo
Once you connect SMS to Messenger, you’ll be able to send Facebook Stickers as well as images, videos and audio as text messages. SMS can also appear and be answered through Chat Heads, the Messenger feature that overlays chat bubbles atop other apps you’re using. However, you’ll only be able to send money, GIFs, make VoIP voice and video calls, or use third-party apps for ride-sharing and more inside actual Messenger threads.“A lot of Android texting apps didn’t keep up with the evolution of messaging, so we felt like we truly had to make Messenger the best SMS client for Android,” Facebook’s head of Messenger David Marcus explains. Eventually, Facebook could highlight the fact that chatting on Messenger is nearly free, incurring only small data rates, compared to the relatively expensive per-SMS fees some carriers charge. To protect privacy, Facebook does not process your SMS or store your conversations through its servers, only on the phone. “The data does not go to Facebook,” Vaccari says. Facebook also won’t merge your SMS threads into Messenger threads with the same person. That could cause chat timeline chaos if you’ve ever accidentally ended up Messengering and SMSing with someone at the same time. Vaccari says Facebook might make thread merging an option down the line, but for now, “We’re not trying to change how your SMS behaves. You’re just using a different client or shell.”Still, Facebook does one little trick to favor its own threads. When you type in a name to compose a new message, it will surface your Facebook friends with that name above their phone number contact from your address book. This subtly pushes people to Facebook chat with friends instead of SMS them. Facebook is disabling messaging in its mobile web app to push people to Messenger The dehumanization of Facebook Messenger Meanwhile, Facebook is much less subtly forcing people onto its Messenger native apps. It began eliminating Chat in the main Facebook app in 2014, only offering it in the Messenger companion app. Then earlier this month, it stopped letting people chat from its m.facebook.com mobile site. The company sees messaging as the future of social, and it doesn’t care if it ruffles some feathers to win. With Messenger at 900 million users and the Facebook-owned WhatsApp at over 1 billion, Facebook dominates the chat-over-data business. Outside of China where WeChat rules, there’s no serious third-party competitor. The status quo of SMS is what people slip back to. But now, they could just slide right into Messenger.

Quantum Computing, AI And More: How The Future Of Technology Is Shaping Up, As Per Andy Rubin

Andy Rubin is not only the co-founder of Android, but also the man who ignited Google's robotics efforts. He did leave Google in 2014, but that does not make him less of a presence in the field of cutting edge technology. Rubin recently gave a talk at the Bloomberg's Tech Conference in San Francisco, where he pointed out the possibilities stemming from merging AI advancements and quantum computing. The biggest promise of such a marriage would be conscious intelligence capable of powering up every piece of technology."If you have computing that is as powerful as this could be, you might only need one," Rubin says. He goes on to say that the entity "just has to be conscious." Not ominous at all, right? Rubin controls the Playground Global investment fund, which bets on companies that put every effort into transforming this idea into a reality. One of the purposes of the fund is to offer support to companies that are testing new ways of how computing can interact with the real world. The AI expert notes that there are quantum computing firms that are almost ready to build consumer ready quantum devices. The big news is that such companies will use today's manufacturing processes. By tapping into the probabilistic nature of atoms and molecules, quantum computing is able to deliver exponential boosts in processing power, something that traditional hardware evolution cannot provide. Moore's law, among other limitations, can be bypassed by dwelling into the potential of quantum computing. Rubin estimates that the next big thing will be a mélange of quantum computing, robotics and AI. He mentions that the blooming growth of AI in the consumer sector will be data-dependent. This means that companies that will learn how to use robots to gather data from the real world will get an edge over their competitors. He makes clear that those who are foolish enough to rely on cloud data alone will get"trapped in the cloud.""Robots ... can sense their environment and interact and learn from those interactions," Rubin affirms. Another opportunity arises from the blending of AI and quantum computing because both are great pattern matching tools, with high ability to complement one another. During the conference, Rubin addressed more ardent concerns, such as encryption. The technology veteran also pacified the audience, assuring them that the scenarios of Skynet coming online are farfetched."You should be worrying about what it means to compute at these magnitudes," Rubin notes.

Kevin Hart's House Robbed, Police Confirm

This is no laughing matter. Comedian Kevin Hart's California home was robbed over the weekend, West Valley Division Police Department confirm to E! News. While the actor was in Miami, the house was broken into and watches, jewelry, clothing and other personal items were stolen, the police confirm. Fortunately, no one was home at the time of the burglary and police do not believe it was an inside job, though the investigation is ongoing and they are currently reviewing indoor and outdoor surveillance footage from the property to determine the culprits. The house is located in a gated community in Tarzana, Calif. with two security guards at the entrance. Hart called authorities to report the robbery when he returned home Monday morning.

New species of 200 mn-year-old marine reptile discovered

Scientists have identified a new species of an extinct marine reptile, that lived at the same time as the dinosaurs about 200 million years ago. Similar-shaped to dolphins and sharks, ichthyosaurs - often misidentified as swimming dinosaurs - swam the seas of Earth for millions of years during the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. The fossil found in the UK is from the earliest part of the Jurassic Period -- 200 million years ago -- and only a handful of ichthyosaur species are known from this period, making the discovery very significant. It is also the first time a species of this geological age has been found outside of Dorset and Somerset. The specimen is relatively complete, consisting of a partial skeleton including a skull, pectoral bones, limbs, pelvis bones, ribs and vertebrae. However, the bones are disorderly - it appears that the carcass nosedived into the seabed before it became fossilised, researchers said."It displays features in the bones - especially in the coracoid (part of the pectoral girdle) - that I had not seen before in Jurassic ichthyosaurs anywhere in the world," said Dean Lomax, from The University of Manchester, who examined the specimen Dean has named the new species Wahlisaurus massarae in honour of two palaeontologists Judy Massare and Bill Wahl who have contributed significantly to the study of ichthyosaurs. The specimen is the first new genus of ichthyosaur from the British Early Jurassic to be described since 1986.Thousands of specimens from this time are known, and many of these have been examined - and continue to be re-examined in light of new knowledge and technologies. However, as the specimen is from a practically unknown location for the discovery of ichthyosaurs, any new discovery could be of real scientific significance. This new species is also important for our understanding of ichthyosaur species diversity, and their geographical distribution during the Early Jurassic.

Twitter Now Lets Users Retweet Themselves In Case The First Time Wasn’t Enough

There are probably some users who look back on their Twitter timeline from time to time and think about just how funny, witty and amazing their tweets are. If only their followers saw that hilarous tweet at that moment it was posted it would have surely been liked and retweeted so many more times. Now users can pull a Kanye and show the world that they believe they are best — at least when it comes to crafting tweets — by being able to show some love to themselves on the social network. Twitter announced on Tuesday that users can now retweet or quote tweet themselves. Perfect for when a user composes a tweet so good they want to send it again, or just in case their followers missed it the first time, this new feature allows them to share an oldie but goodie 140 character message again. Now you can easily Retweet or Quote Tweet yourself with just a few taps. Pick an old favorite and give it a try! There tweet button was previously unavailable for users to tap or click on their own tweets. This could only be done on tweets from other accounts. But now the feature is available both on the desktop versions and after updating the mobile app. The self retweet functionality works the same way a traditional retweet does. Click or tap on the arrow icon and a window will pop-up that allows the user to simply share the tweet again or quote it by adding a comment. Although it may sound silly, users may like the fact that they can add new thoughts on something they previously tweeted that is relevant again, or can get more eyes on tweets that mattered to them but was now hidden underneath other retweets and random thoughts. Then again, maybe the user just wants to say whatever it was again because the first time just wasn't enough to get their point across. Either way, users can now bring back their favorite tweets. Other users should just prepare themselves for others potentially self promoting like crazy. This self-retweet feature is part of series of new updates Twitter announced last month. In that announcement, the social network revealed that @names and media attachments will not count toward the 140 character limit, and a period will no longer be needed before the "@" when mentioning a user.

Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth HoldHands on NYC Date Night -- See the Pics!

As speculation about their possible rekindled engagement continues, Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth hit the town in New York City on Tuesday, holding hands during a date night. The lovebirds were snapped outside exclusive members-only hot spot Soho House. The 23-year-old Australian star was in town promoting his new flick,Independence Day: Resurgence. While Hemsworth was casually dressed in black pants, a black top and a maroon jacket, 23-year-old Cyrus’ colorful attire couldn’t distract from the glittering bling that she continues to wear on her left-hand ring finger. With engagement talk shadowing the pair, the actor recently told GQ Australia that people will “figure out” the status of their relationship on their own

Common insult might actually be a compliment "You bird brain!"

Maybe it’s time we toss that little putdown out the window,a new study released Tuesday says. Here’s why: The brain of a macaw, about the size of a walnut, is much smaller than the lemon-size brain of a macaque, but the bird is probably more intelligent than the primate. The part of the brain associated with intelligent behavior is front-loaded with far more neurons in the tiny bird than the big, hairy mammal, the study says.“Bird brain.”Toss out that insult, too, says the study’s senior author, Suzana Herculano-Houzel, a Vanderbilt University neuroscientist.“For a long time having a ‘bird brain’ was considered to be a bad thing: Now it turns out that it should be a compliment,” she said. On the heels of an earlier study showing that trained pigeons can detect malignant tumors in mammograms with the pinpoint accuracy of human radiologists, Herculano-Houzel’s report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is another nod to the higher intelligence of birds. Recognition goes not only to the technicolor talking macaw, but also to the pint-sized zebra finch, the towering emu and more than 20 other birds. For about a decade, humans, with their big brains, have been trying to figure out why birds with brains like garlic cloves “perform complicated cognitive behaviors,” said a statement released by Vanderbilt announcing the study. Birds generally have more neurons than some mammals, but parrots and songbirds packed twice as many neurons on average than primate brains, the study showed. Herculano-Houzel and her co-author, Pavel Nemec, a researcher at Charles University in Prague, used a brain measuring device called an isotropic fractionator to determine the number of neurons in specific regions of the brains of birds. They found that birds generally have more neurons than some mammals, but parrots and songbirds packed twice as many neurons on average than primate brains, “indicating that avian brains have higher neuron packing densities than mammalian brains,” the study said.“Additionally, corvids and parrots have much higher proportions of brain neurons located in the pallial telencephalon,” a part of the brain that controls emotions, hearing, vision, personality and more. The authors imply that the high density of neurons in this area contributes to the basis of avian intelligence.“We’ve been underestimating birds for a longtime because people would look at their brains and say they have bird brains,” Herculano-Houzel said. “I certainly didn’t expect the finding that they would be packed with so many more neurons. That’s pretty incredible, but it’s real.”The neurons could endow birds with better sensory abilities and motor skills. But other potential functions reasoning and planning for the future, for example – are a mystery. “Sure you have a lot of neurons,” the authors asked, but what do they do?What isn’t a mystery is that size doesn’t always equal higher cognitive ability when it comes to brains. “In designing brains, nature has two parameters it can play with: the size and number of neurons and the distribution of neurons across different brain centers,” Herculano-Houzel said. The authors note in the statement that the relationship between intelligence and neuron count has not yet been firmly established. The study’s importance is that it demonstrates that there are more ways to build large brains. In the past, neuroanatomists thought that brains had to be bigger to hold more and larger neurons.“But bird brains show that there are other ways to add neurons: Keep most neurons small and locally connected and only allow a small percentage to grow large enough to make the longer connections. This keeps the average size of the neurons down,” she explained. She said she hopes that these findings will lead to more studies on the cognitive processes of birds and less assumptions that they lack the brainpower of mammals. There are other questions that Herculano-Houzel will seek to answer in her next study: What is the cost to birds for having so much more brainpower than humans realized.“If they really pack this many neurons in such small brains … and can only get so much food, that may be the reason birds are limited to a certain body size. They can’t get enough calories because of flight and the brains’ neurons,” she said. “It could actually pose such a burden on a species that they can only be so big. That’s something we have to investigate now.”

Hubble Space Telescope Spots Solitary Dwarf Galaxy

The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted an irregular dwarf galaxy. This type of galaxy does not have the distinct regular shape of elliptical and spiral galaxies. It is also slightly smaller and more chaotic in appearance when compared with other galaxies. Dubbed UGC 4879, the galaxy is also very isolated being located about 2.3 million light-years away from its closest neighbor, Leo A. The isolation of UGC 4879 means that it has not interacted with other galaxies, which makes it an ideal laboratory for astronomers to study how stars form without the complications of interactions with other galaxies."UGC 4879 is an irregular dwarf galaxy — as the name suggests, galaxies of this type are a little smaller and messier than their cosmic cousins, lacking the majestic swirl of a spiral or the coherence of an elliptical," ESA described UGC 4879. Studies of this galaxy have shown that a significant amount of star formation has occurred within the first 4 billion years after the Big Bang, which was followed by a bizarre 9-billion-year pause in star formation that ended 1 billion years ago, a behavior that still baffles scientists. The galaxy, though, is anticipated to provide astronomers with ample materials so they can better understand the mysteries behind the birth of stars across the universe. The Hubble Space Telescope, a project of the NASA and the European Space Agency, was launched into orbit in 1990. Although it is not the first space telescope, the Hubble is among the largest and most versatile that astronomers use for research. Using the Hubble, researchers were able to make significant discoveries about the universe. Earlier this month, a group of researchers examined supernovas and stars using the space telescope so they can measure the distance between objects in the universe. Their findings revealed that the universe grows between 5 to 9 percent faster than scientists initially estimated. While Hubble has undeniably served as a significant tool for research in the field of astronomy over the past 26 years, a more powerful space telescope is set to be launched soon. TheJames Webb Telescope, a joint project of the NASA, the Canadian Space Agency and ESA, is expected to be launched in 2018 from French Guiana aboard an Ariane 5 rocket. In a statement, NASA said that the Webb will study the formation of solar systems that can support life on planets that are similar to ours and the evolution of our own galaxy, among others.

Apple’s Swift Playgrounds app teaches anyone how to code

Apple has introduced Swift Playgrounds, a new app for the iPad, especially for those who wish to learn to code. It is supposed to include Apple developed programming lessons where in students can learn to write code and also includes built-in templates to encourage users to express their creativity and create real programs respectively. It will teach students how to learn ore coding concepts, such as issuing commands, creating functions, performing loops and using conditional code and variables. The company will regularly release standalone challenges so students can refine their coding abilities as their skills develop too. Swift Playground also comes with built-in templates and students can modify and built on these codes, to make it their own by adding graphics and touch interactions."I wish Swift Playgrounds was around when I was first learning to code,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. "Swift Playgrounds is the only app of its kind that is both easy enough for students and beginners, yet powerful enough to write real code. It’s an innovative way to bring real coding concepts to life and empower the next generation with the skills they need to express their creativity.”