Study: NASA can’t afford a trip to Mars, but deserves the cash to do it
It’s no secret that NASA’s long-term goal is to get people to Mars. But how realistic is that objective, really? Unfortunately, the prospects aren’t looking good right now. The National Research Council has conducted a review of NASA’s space program that suggests its budget isn’t practical for anything more than trips to lunar space, and might not even stretch that far. So long as the administration’s finances aren’t keeping up with inflation, any attempt to push past low Earth orbit would “invite failure” and “disillusionment,” the Council says.
However, the NRC doesn’t believe that NASA should scale back its ambitions. Instead, it suggests that the US government should loosen its purse strings to make sure those dreams come true; a budget growth of rate 5 percent per year could be enough to get humans on Mars with minimal risk. It won’t be as simple as getting more cash, mind you. The Council also wants NASA to set clear milestones so that it has a sense of its progress, and it should warm up to international collaboration to both take advantage of pooled resources and improve the US’ political standing. That last piece of advice may tough to follow given the space agency’s chilly attitudes toward China and Russia.
The study contends that it would easily be worth overcoming those challenges. Besides fulfilling short-political and scientific aims, maintaining plans to set foot on Mars could inspire students, unite humanity under a common cause and even save the species from extinction. It’s tough to know if the White House will heed the advice in an era of budget cuts, but it’s apparent that NASA at least has one major ally in its corner.
[Image credit: Pat Rawlings/NASA]
Filed under: Transportation, Science
Via: Washington Post
Source: National Academies
Take a sunny Street View tour of Brazil’s World Cup stadiums
If heading out to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil weighed too heavy on your wallet, Google’s latest Maps update might help you experience some of the fútbol magic from the comfort of your own home. With the tournament just days away, the search giant is kicking things off a little early by adding all 12 of Brazil’s World Cup stadiums, including the revamped Maracanã, and the vibrantly-colored boulevards that surround them to Street View. For those who managed to grab a ticket, Google’s also made sure to update its mobile app with transit data in each of the host cities, as well as indoor maps and turn-by-turn navigation (perfect for those embarking on a dream road trip). If that wasn’t enough, Maps now includes Peru, Chile, Colombia and Mexico, letting you explore Latin America whenever the feeling takes you.
Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Internet, Software, Mobile, Google
Via: Google Lat Long
Source: Google Maps
Computer trickery makes these shadows ‘dance’
You know how to turn crooked vases into an interesting art installation that remind us of Beauty and the Beast’s singing pots and candlesticks? We’d like to say magic, but since we don’t live in a Disney movie, the right answer is motion tracking and real-time 3D rendering. The installation’s creators, artist Laurent Craste and digital agency Dpt., used a hidden projector to make the vases’ shadows dance whenever a viewer swings the lamp above them. Their movements even depend on the lamp’s swing, so side-to-side swinging triggers the same animation, while a more circular one also shows the lamp’s shadows going in circles. Sadly, you can’t see this in person anymore (it was displayed at a festival in Montreal in May), but you can watch the video after the break.
Filed under: Misc
Via: Laughing Squad, Colossal
Source: dpt, Laurent Craste
Nova Launcher Gets ‘Okay Google’! Google Hangouts Brings Custom Message Tones! – App Updates
Hump Day is here, and more Google core apps have been updated. Today we saw Google Hangouts and YouTube get updates and hopefully you have updated those apps. The Play Store secretly updated the past week too, or maybe I am just the only one that didn’t have the current version. Nova Launcher finally integrated “Okay Google” to their launcher, which is really the only reason why you should be still using the Google Launcher. Try it out, it works beautifully.
App Updates
Google Hangouts update
YouTube update
Google Play Store update
Nova Launcher update
Talon update
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Softbank Japan has robots that recognize how you’re feeling, and will sell them next year
Japanese telecom Softbank and its CEO Masayoshi Son have never been afraid to push the envelope, and now the exec is presenting a new development: robots. Presented at a press conference going on right now in Japan (take a peek at the live video stream embedded after the break) it’s dubbed the Pepper Robot, and uses technology acquired from the French robotics company Aldebaran. Those are the folks behind the Nao humanoid robots we’ve been covering for years, from their first steps to the inevitable dance-offs that followed. Aldebaran CEO Bruno Maisonnier credited Son for believing in its vision, saying robots that can recognize human emotion will change the way we live and communicate. The robots will debut at two stores tomorrow in their customer service capacity, but Softbank is planning to put them on sale to the public next year.
Developing…
The “Pepper” robots can communicate through emotion, speech or body language. They’re equipped with both mics and proximity sensors, and Maisonnier claims this will be the start of a robot revolution that rivals the rollout of the PC and smartphone. According to him “With Pepper, the future begins today.”
Filed under: Cellphones, Robots, Mobile
Source: Engadget Japanese
Samsung Z is Galaxy on the outside, Tizen on the inside
While Samsung has been a loyal proponent of Android for quite some time, it’s also spent the past few years cooking up its own open-source mobile operating system called Tizen. After several prototypes and revisions, the company finally saw fit to unveil the Samsung Z — its first ever Tizen smartphone — a couple of days ago. It was easily the star of the show at the Tizen developer conference here in San Francisco, so we were eager to take it for a spin.
At first glance, you’d be forgiven if you mistook the Samsung Z for one of the company’s other Galaxy S handsets. It’s all very familiar, from the Samsung logo at the top right down to the single physical home button at the bottom. Flanking the button on either side are hot keys for the menu and back functions respectively, which, again, mirrors its Android cousins. Flip it around, and you’ll find that the rear is covered in that familiar faux leather material we’ve seen on other Samsung devices too. It does have sharper edges than either the recent S5 or the Note 3, however, with flatter sides and a far blockier aesthetic.
Still, the Z itslef felt pretty solid from our few minutes handling it, and that 4.8-inch 720p HD AMOLED display remained sharp and vibrant under the show floor’s fluorescent lights. On either side of the phone are buttons for volume and power, while an 8-megapixel camera with LED flash sits on the back. Other specs include a 2.1-megapixel front-facing cam, 16GB of storage, a microSD card slot, a generous 2,600mAh battery plus a 2.3GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. It even has a power saving mode, a fingerprint sensor and a heart rate monitor — you know, like that Galaxy S5.
But enough of the hardware. Let’s get down to what sets this phone apart from the rest of Samsung’s mobile lineup — the Tizen operating system. We’ll just say it upfront: It looks quite a bit like Android, or at least, the TouchWiz version of Google’s mobile OS. The app drawer, notification tray and settings page are very similar in look and feel to what we’ve seen on the GS5. Like the prototype we saw a few months ago, you can even fill the home screen with Tizen’s “Dynamic Boxes,” or what the rest of us call customizable widgets. You can apparently have as many as nine different home screens, and adding or removing these dynamic boxes is as simple as pressing and holding on the touch screen. Further, the camera app is almost identical to that of other Samsung devices, with similar settings such as “Best photo” and “Beauty face.”
There are a few uniquely Tizen touches that stand out, however. The most obvious one is that instead of just four or five favorite apps along the bottom of the home screen, you have as many as eight. Additionally, when you swipe up on those favorite apps, you’ll pull them to the top, revealing a split screen of the rest of your apps underneath. From there, you can navigate your app drawer as per usual by swiping left and right. You can also group apps together in a see-thru folder that look very similar to the ones on iOS. Also, when you’re in split-screen mode like this, you can easily swap out your favorite apps by dragging and dropping them around as you see fit. Though it’s a rather small thing, we also liked that you could change the interface’s color theme just by swapping out the wallpaper.
Understandably, there weren’t that many apps that we could play around with on the Z, as Tizen is such a young OS. Tizen apps are essentially web applications, built on standards such as WebKit and HTML5. A quick glance at the Tizen Store revealed a surprisingly healthy number of apps, though not ones from recognizable publishers. As you might expect, the Z supports most of Samsung’s own applications, such as S Health, S Voice and S Translate, all of which we saw on our show floor model.
There’s no word yet on pricing of the Z, but that shouldn’t be a concern to most of you, because it will only be available in Russia in the third quarter of this year. Samsung sees it as a test market of sorts, and will be launching an app challenge in that country to help the Tizen effort along. When we asked a Samsung spokesperson as to how the company hopes to market Tizen next to Android, all we received was a rather non-committal answer that it’s a “multi-platform company” that wishes to give its customers as many choices as possible. Still, we can’t help but wonder if Tizen, and the Z, are further signs of Samsung attempting to step out of Google’s software shadow.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Samsung
This is the wild work of art the internet asked for
The internet produces some strangely wonderful things when you ask it for input — just ask anyone who saw Twitch play Pokémon. If you need more proof, though, you don’t need to look any further than artist Ben Redford’s crowdfunded opus, Internetopia. The bizarre-yet-beautiful drawing is the result of Redford agreeing to draw whatever online contributors wanted in the space they were willing to pay for; every dollar paid got a 1.5 by 1.5 inch piece of paper. It took three months to finish, but it’s arguably worth the effort. You’ll see Futurama-style heads, a plea to save a racetrack, and seemingly everything else in between. Only a fraction of the final piece is visible above, but you can check out the project in all its glory at the source link. And before you ask: despite the internet’s propensity toward porn, all but three of the requests are safe for work.
Filed under: Internet
Via: Wired
Source: Internetopia
YouTube Updates to v5.7 Bringing in Video Quality Streaming Options [Download]
Wednesday is usually a happy day in the Android Community. Google loves to update their core apps, and we surely love them for doing so. YouTube also gets a nice little update today, by updating to version 5.7. The added feature in this update includes the ability to choose the quality of video you are streaming. Before it was either HD or not, but now you have a choice from 720p and lower just like you have on regular YouTube on your desktop. Yes, you can’t get 1080p, but do you really need all that on your device? I don’t think you do, but some will disagree. If you don’t have the new YouTube update, click the link below to grab the apk download. Let us know what you think of it.
Download here: YouTube v5.7
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Apple Begins Asking Developers to Turn On Family Sharing for iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite Apps
Just a couple days after announcing Family Sharing, a feature that allows families to share iTunes and App Store purchases, Apple has begun emailing developers to ask them to turn on the feature in their iTunes Connect developer portal.
While Family Sharing is a significant addition to the App Store, the opt-in requirement for developers could see some declining to allow their apps to be shared amongst as many as six accounts with no extra charge.
To make your apps available as part of Family Sharing, agree to the updated iOS Paid Applications and/or Mac Paid Applications agreement in Contracts, Tax and Banking on iTunes Connect. To ensure that Family Sharing is also enabled for previously purchased apps, leave the appropriate checkbox selected on the agreements page.
Family Sharing also allows families to share calendars, reminders, photos and locations. It also allows parents to monitor and approve downloads and purchases made by their children remotely. The feature is likely to get turned on and tested in the iOS 8 betas before going live when iOS 8 is available for the public later this year.
Apple’s New iPhone TV Ad ‘Strength’ Focuses on Fitness Accessories and Apps
Apple has debuted a new TV ad called “Strength” during the first game of the Stanley Cup finals, focusing on fitness accessories and apps for iPhone 5s.
The ad uses the song “Chicken Fat” by Robert Preston, which was created in 1961 to get schoolchildren to more daily exercise. It also showcases accessories like Misfit’s Shine activity tracker and apps like weightlifting trainer Stronglifts, showing how users can use the iPhone 5s to increase their health.
The ad once again ends with the tagline “You’re more powerful than you think”, which debuted alongside Apple’s “Powerful” ad in late April.
AIVAnet 