FDA approves using genetically-modified mosquitos to fight Zika

The Zika virus and related illness outbreak has been top-of-mind as of late — in the US, that’s particularly true in parts of Florida where the virus has spread. It looks like there may be a rather unusual way of fighting further spread of the virus, however. Today, the FDA just finished an environmental assessment of a technique cooked up by biotech firm Oxitec. The FDA has given approval for Oxitec conduct a field trial in which it releases genetically modified mosquitos that should “suppress” the population of infected mosquitos.

The plan Oxitec cooked up involves releasing genetically modified Aedes aegypti male mosquitos that would pass off a gene that’s fatal to any offspring produced with wild female insects, thus trimming the population of infected mosquitos. Specifically, the FDA has stated that Oxitec’s plan wouldn’t cause any harm to the local environment, but the biotech firm still needs to work with a number of local, state and federal agencies before the field trial begins.

Oxitec also has to come to an agreement with the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District before enacting its field trial, something the FDA’s approval will likely help with. Fusion notes that some have concerns about what removing a large portion of the Aedes aegypti mosquito population from the environment would have. The Florida Keys Mosquito Control District will speak with residents and then vote on the proposal — if it passes it sounds like the field trial won’t happen until late this year.

Via: Fusion

Source: FDA

Pokémon Go’s battery-hogging ways doubled external battery pack sales

Pokémon Go has helped to double the sales of external battery packs in the U.S., according to a new report from the NPD Group.

The popularity of the augmented reality game has come at the cost of a faster draining battery for smartphone owners, which in turn has caused them to seek out ways to extend their play time. The NPD Group says that while portable battery packs sales grew by just 4% year-over-year for the six weeks prior to the launch of Pokemon Go, they were up by a massive 101% between July 10 and July 23, with unit sales of 1.2 million in that time period.

“Pokémon Go is the summer’s hottest game partly because it utilizes features like location, motion sensors and augmented reality in your smartphone- however, these features consume more of the phone’s battery life,” said Ben Arnold, executive director, industry analyst for consumer technology at The NPD Group. “As a way to compensate for the extra battery usage, consumers are buying portable power packs so they can continue to play, uninterrupted.”

More: Best external battery packs for Pokémon Go

Pokémon Go: How to choose the best eggs to incubate!

You need to know which egg to incubate.

One of the more exercise-focused aspects of Pokémon Go is hatching eggs. Each egg has a distance meter next to it, and when you put that egg in an incubator it becomes active. When you walk the distance marked on the egg while playing the game, the egg will hatch and you’ll get a brand new Pokémon with a bunch of Pokémon Candy for that creature.

The difficult thing here isn’t the walking, it’s choosing which egg to incubate next. You only get one incubator with unlimited uses, and every other incubator — whether purchased or received from a level up — has a five use limit. The best way to choose which eggs go in which incubator is to know which Pokémon are in the egg to begin with. While there’s no what to know exactly which creature is in your specific egg, here’s a list of Pokémon and the egg types they show up in.

001	Bulbasaur	2km
004	Charmander	2km
007	Squirtle	2km
010	Caterpie	2km
013	Weedle	2km
016	Pidgey	2km
019	Rattata	2km
021	Spearow	2km
025	Pikachu	2km
035	Clefairy	2km
039	Jigglypuff	2km
041	Zubat	2km
074	Geodude	2km
129	Magikarp	2km
023	Ekans	5km
027	Sandshrew	5km
029	Nidoran♀	5km
032	Nidoran♂	5km
037	Vulpix	5km
043	Oddish	5km
046	Paras	5km
048	Venonat	5km
050	Diglett	5km
052	Meowth	5km
054	Psyduck	5km
056	Mankey	5km
058	Growlithe	5km
060	Poliwag	5km
063	Abra	5km
066	Machop	5km
069	Bellsprout	5km
072	Tentacool	5km
077	Ponyta	5km
079	Slowpoke	5km
081	Magnemite	5km
083	Farfetch’d	5km
084	Doduo	5km
086	Seel	5km
088	Grimer	5km
090	Shellder	5km
092	Gastly	5km
096	Drowzee	5km
098	Krabby	5km
100		5km
102		5km
104		5km
108		5km
109		5km
111	Rhyhorn	5km
114	Tangela	5km
115	Kangaskhan	5km
116	Horsea	5km
118	Goldeen	5km
120	Staryu	5km
128	Tauros	5km
137	Porygon	5km
095	Onix	10km
106	Hitmonlee	10km
107	Hitmonchan	10km
113	Chansey	10km
122	Mr. Mime	10km
123	Scyther	10km
124	Jynx	10km
125	Electabuzz	10km
126	Magmar	10km
127	Pinsir	10km
131	Lapras	10km
133	Eevee	10km
138	Omanyte	10km
140	Kabuto	10km
142	Aerodactyl	10km
143	Snorlax	10km
147	Dratini	10km

And that’s it! From here you can plan out which eggs would be best for you to hatch right now. For example, focusing on 2km eggs is great if you are hoping to quickly level up a starter Pokémon, and 10km eggs are great if you want something unique. The only uncertainty with these eggs is Candy.

The amount of Candy you get from each Egg is random, somewhere between 5 and 35 Candies. That could mean you get an Eevee with everything you need to evolve it on the spot, or it could mean you get a Pidgey with 5 Candy that makes you sad on the inside. Either way, hatch as many as you can!

Pokémon Go

• Join our Pokémon Go forums!
• How to deal with GPS errors in-game
• Which team should you choose?
• How to play without killing your battery
• The Ultimate Pokémon Go Game Guide!
• Listen to the Pokémon Go podcast!

Grab this compact waterproof Bluetooth speaker for $11 right now!

Right now, Vtin is offering its waterproof Bluetooth speaker for just $11 with a coupon code at Amazon, a savings of $9. Whether you are looking for a speaker to take on the boat, near the pool or even in the shower, this is worth considering. It’s powerful 5W driver will offer high-quality audio, and with its 800mAh battery you should get around 8 hours of playback per charge.

Only the blue and orange are on sale, and each has its own coupon code. They are:

• Orange: PK9LUN5Y
• Blue: KZLX28NI

You will need to use the corresponding coupon code for the color that you decide to pick up. Which one will be your next speaker? Let us know in the comments!

See at Amazon

Android Central 300: Galaxy Note 7 Special!

The Android Central Podcast has reached a special milestone — 300 episodes! Thanks for joining us through the years!

This week, it’s all about the Galaxy Note 7. Alex, Andrew, Jerry, and Daniel chat about Samsung’s latest big phone, and how it stacks up to the competition.

And there’s also a new Android version coming out soon — Nougat. But will its release look a bit different compared to previous years?

Podcast MP3 URL: http://traffic.libsyn.com/androidcentral/androidcentral300.mp3

The top 6 tweaks you need to make on your Huawei or Honor phone

Essential tweaks to make EMUI more friendly and useful.

Huawei’s EMUI software — used on its own phones, and handsets sold under the “Honor” brand — has improved a lot over the past year. But even in its most polished form, the current EMUI 4.1 release still has its quirks. If you’re used to the way Android looks and works on Google or Samsung-designed phones, there are a few things you’ll want to tweak to get things looking just right. And at the same time, EMUI doesn’t always make it easy to discover some of its most useful custom features.

That’s why we’ve put together a list of the first few things you should tweak on your new Huawei or Honor phone.

1. Disable the carrier name in your status bar

This one’s a no-brainer. You know which carrier you’re using. You send them money every month. So turn off the annoying persistent carrier text in your status bar by going to Settings > Notification panel & status > Display carrier name and toggling the option off. (Or just search for “carrier” in the search box in the Settings app.)

2. Got a fingerprint scanner? Enable the extra shortcuts!

Fingerprint security is a convenient way to unlock you phone, but the scanner on the back of Huawei phones can be used for a bunch of other neat shortcuts. Go to Settings > Fingerprint ID to view the available shortcuts.

The most useful one, in our experience, us swiping down on the scanner to open the notification shade. You can also swipe left and right to browse through photos, and holt to take photos or answer a call. Each of these shortcuts can be enabled or disabled individually.

3. Check performance settings

Unlike most Android phones, Huawei and Honor devices let you choose whether to favor performance or battery life in day-to-day use. Go to Settings > Advanced settings > Battery manager > Power plan to see the available modes. “Ultra power saving” disables all the but most basic features of your phone, so you probably don’t want that unless you’re extremely low on power.

As the names suggest, toggling between “Performance” and “Smart” modes can help you maximize performance in demanding apps and games, or squeeze a bit more life out of your phone’s battery. Newer Huawei models tend to default to “Performance,” but the default can vary from model to mode, so it’s worth checking at least once.

4. Stockify your icons

The very latest versions of EMUI no longer customize most third-party apps’ icons. But if you’re on an older version of Huawei’s software, you may find certain Google app icons are old, and third-party apps get shoehorned into an ugly rounded border. Fortunately there’a simple way to bring some sanity to your app icons — the Stockify theme by MoDaCo’s Paul O’Brien.

The theme restores apps’ icons to their default, free from rounded rectangles, and changes EMUI’s own icons to something closer to Google’s Material Design. It’s definitely worth a shot if you’re not feeling any of the bundled themes.

More: Download Stockify theme

5. Tweak your “View mode” setting

Some larger Huawei phones like the P9 Plus let you tweak the way apps and menus are displayed to show more or less on screen at a time. Check under Settings > Display to see if you have this option. “Large” makes everything appear bigger (and easier to see).

“Small” shows more stuff on-screen, improving information density. And as you’d expect, “Medium” is somewhere in the middle. (It’s similar to the native display scaling feature in Android 7.0 Nougat.)

You’ll need to restart to change this setting, but setting it to “Small” or “Medium” can help you make the most out of a big-screened Huawei phone.

6. Set your “Protected Apps”

EMUI is aggressive about stopping apps draining your battery in the background — really aggressive. If you want to guarantee an app won’t be automatically killed when you power off your screen, go to Settings > Advanced settings > Battery manager > Protected apps and toggle on the apps you want to be able to run when the display is off.

Most popular messaging apps are already “protected” by default, but it’s still worth checking that the list of apps here makes sense for you. Missing notifications from an app? This is your most likely culprit.

Huawei and Honor owners, be sure to hit the comments and share your own tips and tricks!

‘Jason Bourne’ is embarrassingly dumb about tech

Jason Bourne, the latest film featuring Matt Damon’s amnesiac assassin, isn’t just a bad movie — it’s woefully ignorant about almost every aspect of technology. And that’s a big problem when tech underpins almost everything in the film, from the social media company with a billion users that the U.S. government is secretly involved with, to the hacker collective trying to access and leak sensitive data from the CIA. We’re used to seeing Hollywood dumb down technology in movies, but that’s harder to stomach in a series focused on high-level government intelligence. And in a world where Mr. Robot has shown that you can balance technical accuracy with a compelling narrative, Jason Bourne simply has no excuse.

(Major spoilers for Jason Bourne ahead.)

Worst. Hackers. Ever.

I knew the film was going to give me a headache from incessant eyerolling almost from the start. An early scene involves Nicki Parsons (Julia Stiles), one of the few recurring characters in the Bourne series, entering a secret hacker hideout in a dingy European city. In the background, someone mentions corrupting a database with SQL. Uh oh. SQL is a database programming language, but it’s not something hackers would refer to as a tool of their trade. The film’s writers, (director) Paul Greengrass and (editor) Christopher Rouse, were probably trying to refer to a simple SQL injection attack, which involves plugging malicious SQL commands in data-entry fields.

But the fun doesn’t stop there. Parsons ends up using a decades-old CIA-issued device to somehow gain access to the agency’s network, where she’s able to find a collection of important files in a folder labeled “Black Operations.” (Because what better place is there to store your most damning data?) Even if you can buy the plausibility of sensitive data being accessible remotely, why didn’t anyone at the CIA kill access credentials to that device? That’s IT security 101.

Back at CIA headquarters in Langley, a rising star in the agency, Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander), manages to stuff some “spyware” into the files as they’re being downloaded (using one of the most generic screen interfaces I’ve seen in years). Parsons eventually loads the black ops files on an encrypted flash drive. The movie is very clear about that fact, since the drive has “Encrypted” written right on it.

Once it’s handed off to Bourne, he takes it to a supposedly sophisticated German hacker who promptly sticks it into his computer — without any questions or malware scanning. Never mind that he doesn’t know where the drive comes from and that his computer is connected to the internet.

If you take one thing away from this article: Don’t plug strange things into your computer. And if you want to be a star hacker when you grow up, learn to love “air gapped” computers, which are physically isolated from any sort of network connectivity. Even if Bourne’s contact actually had his computer air gapped and just never mentioned it, he still made it vulnerable by placing his smartphone right beside it. (Which is how the CIA eventually tracks the files with the spyware bundled into the disk.)

A CIA without intelligence

Ignore the fact that this is the fourth film where high-ranking CIA officers have the hubris to think they can catch Bourne, only for him to one-up them at the end (a trend I like to call “getting Bourned”). There are bigger problems afoot. For one, the film’s writers have clearly never heard of the “zoom and enhance” meme. At one point, Agent Lee stares at an incredibly blurry photo of Parsons, shouts “Enhance!” and the image is magically cleared up. So many sighs.

If you take one thing away from this article: Don’t plug strange things into your computer.

Then there’s the fact that the CIA appears to be using operating systems designed for children, with simplistic interface and large bold letters. Sure, movie UIs have to be simplistic enough for audiences to understand, but we’ve seen them handled far better in Marvel films. Worst of all? The basic directory structures make it seem like just about anyone can easily access black ops files.

Later in the film, when Lee ends up siding with Bourne, she tweaks the clearance of his fake passport to help him travel from Europe to the US. Of course by that point, he’s practically one of the most wanted men in the world. Bourne doesn’t set off any other security triggers as he speaks to immigration and simply strolls into Las Vegas, without wearing any sort of disguise.

The world’s most generic social media company

Being a film vaguely about information and intelligence in 2016, it was inevitable that social media would play a role in Jason Bourne. Deep Dream — a vaguely suspicious name for a company, if there ever were one — idealistically promises that it’ll never share its users’ information. Of course, we learn that it has ties to the U.S. government. During a fake tech conference, the company’s CEO (played by the fantastic Riz Ahmed), dramatically announces a new platform that will “personalize” users’ experiences based on their preferences to rapturous applause. Never mind that that’s something every company does these days. If that was a pitch that landed in my inbox, I’d delete it without a second thought.

At no point in the film do we even learn what Deep Dream does. Contextually, we can assume it’s like a Google/Facebook hybrid, but we never see people using it, and its CEO never explains what makes it special. It’s more akin to Silicon Valley’s Hooli — a tech titan that doesn’t actually do much — than anything in real life. It’s almost as if the writers have only heard the term “social media” and assume that’s enough to describe a company that has over a billion users. It’s no surprise that Greengrass has admitted he doesn’t do social media.

Bourne is better than this

It might sound like I’m nitpicking, but it’s hard to ignore glaring technical inaccuracies when they’re so essential to a film’s narrative. What’s most disappointing is that the first Damon-led Bourne films, which were written by Tony Gilroy, were actually smart about tech. They were ideal post-9/11 spy films, tying into the impact of extensive surveillance to combat foreign threats. Jason Bourne, unfortunately, wastes every opportunity to bring Bourne into a world where everyone has smartphones, and Snowden’s leaks proved all of the series’ earlier fears to be true.

(Photo credits: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures)

Mercedes will reportedly challenge Tesla with four new EVs (confirmed)

Executives from Mercedes-Benz haven’t been coy about the company’s EV plans — it wants to go head-to-head with Tesla. As part of this strategy, Bloomberg reports that Mercedes is getting ready to introduce four electric vehicles, including two sedan models and two SUVs. The new fleet is said to be the starting point of a new sub-brand for Mercedes, although the German automaker still hasn’t decided what that will be called. Last month, Mercedes’ David McCarthy revealed that a concept electric would be shown sometime in September. In other words, it won’t be long before we see what Mercedes has up its sleeve.

Update: Daimler AG, Mercedes-Benz’s parent company provided the following statement to Engadget:

We can confirm that we are working on a large EV with a range between 400 and 500km (250-310 miles) based on a completely new architecture. Of course, we will have more cars to follow.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Bloomberg