Intel Recalls ‘Basis Peak’ Activity Tracker Due to Overheating Issues

Intel is recalling its Basis Peak sleep and activity tracking watch due to overheating issues, and says it is shuttering the acquired startup behind the technology “immediately”.

The chip company initially reported the overheating problem in June after some Basis users complained of blistering and burns caused by the wearable device. Intel told its customers not to use the watch until a firmware update was deployed to solve the issue. The update never materialized, however.

“We had hoped to update the software on your watch to address the problem,” the company said in a statement on the Basis website. “Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we aren’t able to develop such a solution without completely compromising the user experience. As a result, we are asking that you return your Basis Peak watch and authorized accessories for a full refund at your earliest convenience.”

The recall and subsequent closure of Basis Science is a blow for Intel’s ambitions in the wearable tech sector. Intel bought the San Francisco startup in March 2014 in a deal said to be worth more than $100 million. However, Basis failed to exceed its 1 percent share of all smartwatch sales, according to market research firm Canalys.

Basis Peak owners will be able to access their activity data from the watch until the end of the year, according to the company. Further refund information can be found on the support section of the Basis website.

Tag: Intel
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Pokemon Go Battery Saver mode returning to iPhone, bugs removed

Earlier this week an update for the iOS version of Pokemon Go removed a couple of features that were broken, now one of the them is returning.

The Battery Saver mode, which dimmed the screen when you didn’t hold your phone aloft, is being reinstated. And iPhone users should find it reappear as part of a new update rolling out in a few days.

Battery life has been an issue for Pokemon Go players from the start, with the game sapping charge rapidly. It has prompted some to invest in battery packs, just to keep their gaming sessions rolling on.

Android phone owners still have Battery Saver mode but Niantic pulled the iOS version because it was causing glitches and issues. It seems to have fixed those bugs now, however.

“We have been hearing the feedback loud and clear about the removal of the Battery Saver mode on iOS devices,” it said on the official Pokemon Go Facebook page.

“We had removed this feature as several users were experiencing it to be buggy, but we are fairly confident that a fix for this should roll out within the next several days.”

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It has also launched the app in Central and South America, just in time for the Rio Olympics in Brazil. Some competing athletes complained that they couldn’t play the game upon arriving. Now they can.

Niantic has confirmed that it will continue to roll out the title in other countries soon.

Dust-sized wireless sensors could control prosthetics someday

See that minuscule component in the image above? That’s a wireless sensor, and someday, doctors could slip it into our bodies to monitor our organs like a microscopic Fitbit or even to give quadri- and paraplegics the power to control robotic arms or legs. A team of scientists from the University of California, Berkeley have developed an early iteration of the sensor that’s about the size of a grain of rice. Each sensor has a piezoelectric crystal that can convert ultrasound vibrations into energy. It also allows the teensy device to beam back data collected from nerve cells in the brain if it’s used to control bionic limbs.

While the current version, which is only 3 millimeters long with a 1 millimeter cube attached to it, is already tiny, the team plans to shrink it down further. They’re looking to create a version that’s half the width of human hair — they are calling the sensors “neural dust,” after all — using components that can last inside a human body forever. That way, people who need prosthetics won’t have to deal with relatively humongous implantable electrodes that can only last for a year or two.

As team member Ryan Neely said:

“The original goal of the neural dust project was to imagine the next generation of brain-machine interfaces, and to make it a viable clinical technology. If a paraplegic wants to control a computer or a robotic arm, you would just implant this electrode in the brain and it would last essentially a lifetime.”

Besides monitoring organs and controlling prosthetics, the team believes the sensors could also be used to keep an eye on tumors and even on the efficacy of cancer therapies. They also think a version of the sensor could be developed to stimulate nerves and muscles or even to treat disorders like epilepsy. It would most likely take some time before they can develop all these applications, though. They’ve already (successfully) tested the current version on lab rats, but they still have to figure out how to achieve their 50-micron target size.

Via: PopSci

Source: University of California, Berkeley, Neuron

BBC to show the Olympics live in 360-degree video

Watching the Olympics on TV? That’s so 2012, apparently. The BBC is launching an “experimental” service on Friday that will broadcast the action in 360-degree video instead. It’s not a complete replacement — only 100 hours will be shown throughout the tournament. But it’s more than a token gesture, with one live event and a highlights package planned for each day. They’ll be accessible through a new BBC Sport 360 app for iOS, Android and Samsung’s Gear VR headset. Coverage will also be available through BBC Taster, a website for the BBC’s off-the-wall projects.

The live events will include beach volleyball, boxing, basketball and fencing. Both the opening and closing ceremonies, which bookend the tournament on August 5th and August 22nd, will also be broadcast in 360-degree video. Up to four different camera angles will be available during each event, so you can move around the court, ring or stadium to get a better look at what’s happening. The BBC says it’s all possible due to some trials that it held during the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.

If the experiment is successful, it could pave the way for more frequent and extensive VR coverage. The format is unlikely to replace traditional TV viewership — for many people, the Olympics is a time to get people together and watch athletics as a group — but the medium has its advantages, and could appeal to fans who want to feel like they’re in the host city, cheering on their nation’s best from the sidelines.

Britney Spears’ New Album ‘Glory’ to Stream Exclusively on Apple Music

Britney Spears has announced that Glory, her first album in three years, will be available on Apple Music from August 26, in what looks like another high-profile exclusive for the streaming service.

Spears revealed the news yesterday through her Twitter account and called the fresh release “the beginning of a new era”, as she notified fans they could pre-order the album on iTunes from midnight Wednesday Eastern Time.

While it’s unclear if Glory will remain exclusive to Apple Music, the album’s streaming debut is another victory for Apple in its battle for music service supremacy, coming quick on the heels of news that R&B singer Frank Ocean’s long-awaited album Boys Don’t Cry will also be released exclusively on the service this Friday.

Other recent high-profile exclusive Apple Music releases have included Drake’s Views album, Taylor Swift’s 1989 World Tour LIVE film, and Katy Perry’s single “Rise”.

Rival streaming service Tidal has tried to fight off Apple’s competing service with its own album exclusives, but a series of tweets by Tidal co-owner Kanye West last week suggest the company is looking to negotiate a buyout deal with Apple.

Earlier in the year, Kanye said his new album The Life of Pablo would stay exclusive to Tidal and “never” be made available on Apple Music, only for it to appear on Apple’s streaming service the following month.

Tag: Apple Music
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LG V20 will be unveiled on September 6

LG announced that the V20 will be the first phone to offer Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box, and now we have an announcement date. The upcoming flagship will be unveiled on September 6 in San Francisco.

The invitation features a colorful pop-up book with a “Play More” tagline, hinting at the phone’s multimedia capabilities. LG is one of the partners for Google’s Daydream VR platform, and we could see the company’s efforts in this segment with the V20.

With Samsung rolling out its second flagship in the Galaxy Note 7, it will be interesting to see what LG has in store with the V20. With just over a month to go and LG’s propensity to serve up details before the official announcement, we should know more about the phone in the coming weeks.

IBM researcher builds a phase-change capable artificial neuron

Computers have long been compared to artificial brains, but now IBM has followed the comparison and built a working artificial neuron. The tech giant’s research center in Zurich created 500 of them to simulate a signal transfer similar to how the process works in an organic brain.

As other research in artificial signaling demonstrate, the real milestones are had when elements can be shrunk down to microscopic scale and still work. That’s what makes IBM’s accomplishment significant: their faux neurons are built out of well-known materials that can scale down to a few nanometers but can still activate with low energy, points out Ars Technica.

Organic neurons have membranes acting as signal gates that take a certain amount of energy to absorb. In the IBM version, that role is taken by a square of Germanium-Antimony-Tellerium (GST), a common ingredient in optical disks. Heat the GST enough and it changes its physical phase, from an amorphous insulator to a crystalline conductor. In other words, signal passes through when the faux membrane is hit with enough electricity to change into its crystal phase, then it resets to its amorphous one.

But the scientists needed the artificial neuron to have another characteristic of its organic counterpart: stochiasticity, or some randomness in when signals will fire. IBM says its neurons achieve this because its GST membranes never reset to the same configuration. This lets groups of them unexpectedly accomplish things that they could not if their results were perfectly predictable.

With these neurons, scientists may be able to create computers mimicking the efficient, parallel processing design of organic brains and apply its style of approach to decision-making and processing sensory information, suggests Ars Technica. But as they point out, constructing it might be the easy point: writing software for that kind of setup will be another challenge entirely.

Via: The Economist, Ars Technica

Source: IBM press

NASA maps the thawed parts of the Greenland ice sheet

NASA has created the first map of the bottom of the Greenland ice sheet, showing which parts have begun thawing and which remain frozen as ever. This is the first time what’s underneath the surface of the massive block of ice has been mapped, because the only access scientists have to it is a few bore holes. They’ve been trying to find out what’s going on underneath for a long time, since it’s essential for predicting the sheet’s movements in the future. “If the ice at its bottom is at the melting point temperature, or thawed,” said NASA Goddard glaciologist and team leader Joe MacGregor, “then there could be enough liquid water there for the ice to flow faster and affect how quickly it responds to climate change.”

See, the ice sheet is in the Arctic, which is believed to be rapidly warming up, so it’s vulnerable to climate change. And since it covers around 80 percent of the country’s surface, global sea levels could rise by 24 feet if it were to melt.

In order to conjure up the map, NASA had to combine four different methods:

The team studied results from eight computer models that predict bottom temperatures, which are tens of degrees warmer than temp on the surface.
They looked at the ice sheet’s layers detected by the NASA Operation IceBridge aircraft’s radars.
They examined the ice surface speed measured by satellites. The team then determined whether it’s exceeding the max speed at which it could flow and still be frozen and anchored to the rock underneath.
They looked for rugged parts on the sheet’s surface that indicate ice sliding over a thawed bed using images taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometers on the NASA Terra and Aqua satellites.

The result? As you can see below, NASA still didn’t get enough data to come to a conclusion for a third of the ice sheet. However, they gathered enough to determine that the southwestern and northeastern areas are already thawed, while the central and western areas remain frozen.

Source: NASA