Google has announced its comprehensive list of the best movies, apps, music, TV shows and games. From Interstellar, to Adele, Fifty Shades of Grey and to my favorite of all Game of Thrones, Google’s best of lists are pretty spot on. Although I take issue with The Interview as I found that movie to be downright horrible, but I’m clearly in the minority. And the best books of the year were graced four times by Fifty Shades of Grey for 200 total shades, although I can’t argue with those selections as almost half of the females I know could not stop blabbering about the series.
Here are Google’s top five lists for Movies, TV shows, Albums and Books.
BUILD THE PERFECT VAULT
Create a brighter future…underground! Select from a variety of modern-day rooms to turn an excavation beneath 2,000 feet of bedrock into the very picture of Vault Life.
From rage-filled Barbarians with glorious mustaches to pyromaniac wizards, raise your own army and lead your clan to victory! Build your village to fend off raiders, battle against millions of players worldwide, and forge a powerful clan with others to destroy enemy clans.
DomiNations is an epic combat strategy game of advancement, exploration, and conquest from legendary game designer Brian Reynolds. Choose your Nation from among the greatest civilizations of the world, and lead it to ultimate victory throughout all of human history – from the Stone Age to the Space Age! Build a capital city, train your army and dominate rival Alliances to become the most powerful ruler on the planet!
Explore randomly generated worlds and build amazing things from the simplest of homes to the grandest of castles. Play in creative mode with unlimited resources or mine deep into the world in survival mode, crafting weapons and armor to fend off the dangerous mobs.
Welcome to Empires & Allies, an all-new modern military strategy game that puts the weapons of modern war at your fingertips in a never-ending battle to conquer the world.
Alphabear is an original word puzzle game by Spry Fox, the developer of the award winning game Triple Town.
In Alphabear, you spell words by selecting letters on a grid. When you use letters that are adjacent to each other, bears appear! The more letters you use, the bigger the bear gets, and the more points you earn!
HBO NOW is the new standalone streaming service that gives you all of HBO—every season, every episode of HBO’s original series—plus more of the biggest and latest movies than any other streaming service. All you need is the internet.
YouTube Gaming keeps you connected to the games, players, and culture that matter to you. Featuring videos and live streams with chat — including let’s plays, reviews, speedruns, trailers, and more from your favorite gamers and publishers — you can explore the games you care about more deeply than ever before.
With videos covering Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto, League of Legends, Call of Duty, Garry’s Mod, and tens of thousands more, it’s all on YouTube Gaming.
Retrica is a simple photo taking and sharing app with a near infinite combination of live filters, layout, editing, social and secret sharing options. You can shoot the same moment a million ways and share it with the world, that special someone or anyone you want.
Looking for a more powerful and flexible launcher that oozes Material Design? Action Launcher 3 to the rescue! Action Launcher 3 replaces your homescreen with a colorful, customizable and speedy app you’ll quickly learn to love.
The highly customizable, performance driven, home screen
Accept no substitutes! Nova Launcher is the top launcher for modern Android, embracing full Material Design throughout.
Google Photos is the home for all your photos and videos. Automatically organized and searchable, you can find photos fast and bring them to life. It’s the photo gallery that thinks like you do.
The apps and games listed above are just a sampling from the best of 2015 lists. As the year winds to an end and you take some time off of work, check out some of these apps, games, movies, books and more. Google’s lists really are quite good.
The internet of things is a nice idea, but there’s one big catch: you have to power all those smart devices, which is no mean feat when some of them might not even have room for a battery. Dutch researchers think they have a solution, though. They’ve built an extra-small (2 square millimeters) wireless temperature sensor that gets its power from the radio waves that make up its wireless network. All it needs is energy from a nearby router — once there’s enough, it powers up and starts working.
Right now, the sensor can’t be further than an inch from its host, which isn’t exactly practical. Thankfully, this isn’t the end of the story. The team hopes to extend that range to nearly 10 feet within a year, and ultimately to 16 feet. If the network-based power takes off, you could see smart homes full of virtually invisible sensors that control all your devices. You could have lights that turn on the moment you enter any room (not just those you care about the most), or heating that shuts off as each room warms up. The best part may be that these sensors would be very cheap, at about 20 cents each. At that price, it wouldn’t cost a fortune to make the upgrade.
[Image credit: Bart van Overbeeke/Eindhoven University of Technology]
Not that Verizon has issues with connectivity, as it is has fantastic coverage in the U.S., there are times when you might need to make a call over WiFi if your signal has dropped out.
Starting December 8th, Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 edge users on Verizon will get an over the air update which will enable voice and video calls over WiFi. The selection is highly limited now, but Verizon has plans to expand compatibility to more Android and iOS devices in early 2016. All calls made within the U.S. are free of charge, and international calls are billed at international long distance rates. Prices vary according to each country.
How to Get Advanced Calling with Wi-Fi Calling
To activate Wi-Fi Calling on Android, customers must first download and install the latest software update and turn on Advanced Calling from the settings menu.
Once Advanced Calling is enabled, customers can activate Wi-Fi Calling.
When a customer uses Advanced Calling on Verizon’s 4G LTE network and travels outside of coverage, the call will seamlessly transfer to a known Wi-Fi hotspot when available.
Popular photo sharing website 500px has just begun rolling out a rather attractive update for its official Android client via the Play Store. The upgrade brings a much-needed Material Design overhaul to the application, in addition to a new gallery feature, which makes it easier than ever to view collections of images.
To install the update on your Android-powered smartphone simply open up the Play Store, toggle the hamburger menu by swiping in from the left-hand side of the screen, select ‘My Apps’ and click on 500px, then tap the update button. Alternatively, you can hit the link below to initiate the download on your handset from the Web.
Amazon Underground has been gaining momentum since launch, and even big name developers can stand to benefit from putting their games on the service. Rovio, for example, published several big titles to Amazon Underground, including Angry Birds Rio, Angry Birds Stella, Angry Birds Space, and Bad Piggies, and saw their revenue triple for those titles just by being on Amazon Underground.
While Amazon makes the apps (and their in-app purchases) free for users, it also reimburses developers for every minute that the apps are used. That means that Rovio made some money off of users that probably wouldn’t have purchased anything to begin with, which is a pretty big deal in a time when monetizing mobile apps is extremely difficult.
Now to keep things in perspective, these apps tripled their revenue compared to what was previously being made in Amazon’s own App Store. That doesn’t include the revenue from the Play Store and Apple’s App Store, both of which are certainly bigger pools than Amazon’s fairly limited storefront. But Amazon’s Kindle ecosystem makes up a big enough portion of the pie that it was still probably a fairly profitable move for Rovio to make, and it might entice other developers to follow suit.
During a meeting with NASA’s advisory panel, William Gerstenmaier (the agency’s chief of human spaceflight) has pretty much confirmed that the agency isn’t working on a successor to the ISS. NASA isn’t even thinking of funding the current one beyond 2024 (2028 at the latest), because its new primary goal is to bring humans to the moon’s orbit a.k.a. cislunar space. “We’re going to get out of ISS as quickly as we can,” Gerstenmaier said, according to Ars Technica. “Whether it gets filled in by the private sector or not, NASA’s vision is we’re trying to move out.” The agency has no choice but to leave low Earth orbit (LEO) behind, because it can’t afford funding both projects at the same time.
NASA is apparently hoping for the private sector — the same space companies ferrying supplies to the ISS — to take its place in low Earth orbit. But since the agency can’t help or force them to make an ISS 2.0, it’s now telling companies to take advantage of microgravity research while it’s still shouldering most of the costs of sending studies to the space station. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden is even trying to convince the government to give tax incentives to companies that ask them to test materials or products in zero-g.
The agency’s move to cislunar space doesn’t come as a surprise: NASA has been talking about taking us farther out into space until we reach Mars for a long time. In fact, its new gargantuan rocket (the Space Launch System) could fly to the lunar orbit with four crew members aboard the Orion capsule as soon as 2021.
Sony has just released its standalone PlayStation Messages application for Android. The app makes it extremely easy to send messages to other members of the PlayStation community using either a smartphone or tablet.
With regards to its appearance, the application looks pretty similar to Facebook’s popular instant messaging service. There are tabbed menus at the top of the display for navigating through inboxes, and even an array of stickers, which are pretty entertaining.
Google has slashed the price of Huawei’s smartwatch on its online store. The device carries a retail price of $499 for the silver model and $579 for the black variant. However, once a $50 discount has been applied at checkout, the cost will drop down to $449 and $529, respectively.
Just in case you need a refresher on its specifications, the Huawei Watch features a 1.4-inch 400 x 400 pixel AMOLED display, a 1.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 400 processor, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of internal storage and a 300mAh battery. It also sports a gyroscope, accelerometer, heart rate sensor and barometer.
Microsoft’s Age of Empires: World Domination is finally seeing a launch on Google’s Play Store, although only in a few countries at first. The app is free to play and has many real time strategy elements, much like the original AoE installments.
World Domination was developed by KLab Games and has a ton of features in tow, including limitless customization, over 100 heroes, and what’s supposedly a well-designed interface and control scheme to take advantage of touch screens. That last part is important, as I can’t really imagine that playing an older Age of Empires game would be fun on a 5-inch touchscreen.
The description for the game makes it seem like it’s going back to what started Age of Empires’ timeless real time strategy experience, as opposed to the newer Clash of Clans style strategy game that’s so popular now. Unfortunately for most of us, it’ll be awhile before we can actually find out, since the game is only launching in select countries at first. I’ve personally been unable to download the game on any of my Android devices in the US, but hopefully that changes sooner rather than later.
Hit the link below to check out some screenshots and video of the game, and a link to see if you’re able to download it yet.
Arms and legs aren’t the only appendages that American servicemen lose to IEDs but, thanks to a pioneering surgical technique, injured soldiers will soon have the option of replacing their war-damaged wedding tackle. A team of surgeons from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine announced on Sunday that within a year (more likely, just a few months) their facility will begin performing penis transplants. American veterans will be their first patients.
“These genitourinary injuries are not things we hear about or read about very often,” Dr. W.P. Andrew Lee, chairman of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Johns Hopkins, told the NY Times. “I think one would agree it is as devastating as anything that our wounded warriors suffer, for a young man to come home in his early 20s with the pelvic area completely destroyed.”
According to the Department of Defense, more than 1,300 servicemen sustained some form of genital trauma between 2011 and 2013. And while prosthetic penises are now a thing, they don’t restore the full range of function that a donor member would. Similarly, crafting a replacement from the patient’s own cells is possible, but still about 5 years out from being practical. Even the reattachment procedure itself is wrought with peril. The team estimates that each surgery will take over 12 hours to complete and, should anything not work, feel or look quite right, the psychological damage could be enormous.
During a meeting with NASA’s advisory panel, William Gerstenmaier (the agency’s chief of human spaceflight) has pretty much confirmed that the agency isn’t working on a 
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