Chevy’s 2016 cars can keep charging phones from overheating

Early summer on the East Coast hasn’t been its usual level of brutal this year, but it’s only a matter of time before smartphones start wigging out in the heat. Things only get trickier when you’re charging up in your sweltering car, so Chevy cooked up an “active phone cooling” system to keep gadgets from overheating in their 2016 range of vehicles. Don’t get too carried away, though: That’s just a high-falutin’ name for an air vent that points at a warm phone while it’s wirelessly charging.

It’s a simple solution for sure — you’ve basically got a teensy icebox in your car — but it could go a long way in keeping your phone happy and healthy. Prolonged exposure to heat often means bad news for the lithium-ion cells that keep everything running, and really, the last thing a worried driver needs is their phone shutting off mid-navigation because it’s suddenly running too hot. Chevy claims they’re the first manufacturer to focus on the plight of our nation’s hot smartphones, but the answer they’ve cooked up is so simple we’d be surprised if other car makers didn’t take the hint. Until then, though, you’ll have to own a 2016 Volt, Cruze, Impala or Malibu with the wireless charging option to stay frosty.

Filed under: Mobile

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Via: Windows Central

Source: Chevrolet

Swappa launches Play Store app to check the price of your devices

Swappa is a fantastic website for buying and selling your smart devices. There are tons of smartphones, tablets, and smartwatches listed on the site, and it uses PayPal for security, making it one of the best places to unload your old smartphone or pick up a new one.

Swappa has a fairly decent mobile site, but today they’ve released an app onto the Play Store specifically for checking out prices of devices on the site. You can browse through different devices based on carrier or manufacturer and view detailed pricing on what that particular device has sold for over the past few months. You’ll get an average estimate of what the device is currently worth, as well as a history chart so you can see how well it’s held its value.

Unfortunately, it looks like the app is currently only for viewing the price of devices, not for actually making any purchases or creating a listing to sell your own phones or tablets. You’ll still have to use the website for that.

In the meantime, the app is free, and it could be pretty useful if you like to keep up on how much your device is worth or how much it’ll cost you to upgrade to something else.

Play Store Download Link

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Casio is making smartwatches, too

When America’s greatest actor needed to defuse a bomb mounted to a passenger bus, there was only one name he could trust to keep time: Casio. Like Keanu Reeves, the company’s fallen out of the limelight a bit since then. It has a comeback plan, though: smartwatches. As The Wall Street Journal tells it, the outfit thinks it has what’s necessary to compete in the crowded space too. Namely, a rich history of making watches that do more than tell time. It expects the device to hit “a level of smartwatch perfection” by being durable, easy to put on and generally being comfortable to wear.

The gizmo’s been in development for a few years already and Casio expects it to ship domestically and to Japan next March, tentatively for around $400. Does the storied electronics company have what it takes to hit its lofty $80 million goal for smartwatch sales? That’s anyone’s guess at this point. But hey, if this week’s Top Gun news is any indication, we could at least see Mr. Whoa himself rocking one of the new devices in an upcoming Speed sequel/reboot.

[Image credit: Adam Piotrowski/Flickr]

Filed under: Wearables

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Source: The Wall Street Journal

Bethesda’s Fallout Shelter coming to Android next month

Good news for Fallout fans; Bethesda’s Pete Hines has confirmed that Fallout Shelter, the currently iOS exclusive Fallout game, should be heading to Android next month. Sure, that’s a little delayed, but it’s unfortunately not the only time we’ve seen Android apps delayed from their iOS counterparts.

Anybody else excited to get a taste of Fallout before Fallout 4 comes out this November?

source: Pete Hines (Twitter)

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DNA sequencing shows how woolly mammoths got that way

In what is being called the “most comprehensive” study of its kind, a team from the University of Chicago claims that it has revealed the massive amount of genetic change needed for woolly mammoths to adapt to their arctic environment. The study, which was published on July 2 in Cell Reports, shows that genes controlling everything from skin and hair development to fat metabolism, insulin signaling — even skull shape — differed from their contemporary elephant kin.

“This is by far the most comprehensive study to look at the genetic changes that make a woolly mammoth a woolly mammoth,” study author Vincent Lynch, PhD, of the University of Chicago, said in a statement. “They are an excellent model to understand how morphological evolution works, because mammoths are so closely related to living elephants, which have none of the traits they had.”

And while the woolly mammoth genome has been extensively studied (two other mammoths had their genes sequenced just this April) these efforts have typically only generated limited insight into how the animals evolved. However, in this study, the team found 1.4 million unique genetic variants affecting the proteins produced by some 1,600 genes. These results probably won’t help scientists reconstruct a modern-day mammoth line (at least, not yet) but it will help geneticists better understand the the molecular basis of their evolution.

[Image Credit: Associated Press]

Filed under: Science

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Source: University of Chicago