ICYMI: Boeing’s swanky new space suits and 3D-printable skin

Today on In Case You Missed It: Boeing debuted its next-generation flight suit that astronauts will be wearing aboard its Starliner CST-100 when the spacecraft takes off in 2018. They’re cooler, lighter and far more fashionable than the ones US Shuttle crews had to wear into space. Plus, who doesn’t want to look like Benny the blue LEGO space guy?

That’s not all, a team of Spanish researchers have announced that they can now “print” human skin from their prototype 3D bioprinter. Simple culture some cells, feed them into the printer and this thing will spit out functional human skin. If only this technology were around in 1990, Liam Neeson wouldn’t have had to go and kill all those folks who burned him alive.

And finally, we got your TL;DR right here, folks. As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.

Porn doesn’t need a XXX hologram

In December, the internet exploded with news of a XXX hologram. CamSoda, a small adult-cam site was bringing a holographic cam girl to the 2017 AVN Adult Entertainment Expo. I had to see it for myself.

Decades of work have gone into the pursuit of true, full-color video holograms as sophisticated as Princess Leia’s cry for help in Star Wars. I didn’t expect a porn conference to be the place where more than a half-century of scientific research would bear fruit. But two weeks after CES, I was on my way back to Las Vegas for porn’s premier event. I was fully expecting an industry stuck in the past, but hoping for something more.

When I arrived, AVN CEO Tony Rios greeted me and quickly assured me that despite what I might have heard, the show was bigger and better than ever. He took us up to the “Real World” suite, where a 2011 season of the MTV show was shot. As we walked the halls, Rios hinted at the party that had happened there the night before. The suite had an AVN-branded bowling lane and a giant, raised en-suite bath. I had the strange sensation of being on the defunct set of an MTV reality show now serving as the late-night playground for porn’s biggest stars.

Wild nights aside, Rios showed no signs of fatigue as he defended the industry and the event. Not only was he expecting a record 25,000 attendees, but the Hard Rock had also built an entire new wing specifically for AVN’s adult-novelty exhibitors.

That might come as a surprise for those who’ve followed porn’s recent history. After the stock-market crash of 2008, reports of the industry’s demise became commonplace. A mix of a weakened economy, the growth of free tube sites, and an ongoing battle with online piracy crippled the Hollywood-style studio system of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s.

According to Rios, reports of porn’s death were premature. All I had to do was hit the show floor to see that the industry had evolved. It was now more nimble, diverse and technologically advanced than ever.

“We’re going to continue to see huge growth in cams, and I’m excited to see what happens with VR,” Rios said. “It’s still in its infancy and, you know, a lot people think they know what’s going to happen, but I’ve been around long enough—you just have to wait and see what actually bubbles up to the top.”

That “see what bubbles up” approach is why I was at AEE to begin with. The holographic cam girl is one of a series of often-bizarre experiments to come out of CamSoda’s labs. CamSoda is a relatively new startup in an established and booming segment of adult entertainment focused on connecting users to entertainers through live video and chat. Like Snapchat, Twitter and Facebook, porn’s new heavyweights aren’t content creators first but social-networking platforms.

And like their mainstream counterparts, CamSoda realizes iteration is key. In the space of a year, it introduced live 360-degree sex shows, an “iTunes for blow jobs” and, most recently, OhRoma, a VR peripheral that lets you smell your porn. In talking about the hologram and the company’s more practical pursuit of 360-degree live video, CEO Daron Lundeen employs the Silicon Valley cliché, “fail fast, fail often.”

“We’re the site that’s gonna experiment,” Lundeen told me. “If you got a new idea, a new technology that’s out there, we want to grab it, and try it, and use it.”

Compared to other, more established cam sites, like AEE title sponsor MyFreeCams.com and Chaturbate, CamSoda’s booth is relatively small, but no less kinetic. Women in plunging CamSoda-branded bathing suits line a horseshoe-shaped arrangement of tables. Some of the site’s most successful models are here signing autographs and performing for audiences at home at the same time. To the right of the booth is a series of experiments from the CamSoda labs. The crown jewel, like some outsize precious stone, is an inverted, rotating glass pyramid that appears to have a tiny stripper trapped inside.

Pay no attention to the lap dancing woman behind the curtain …

This is the “hologram” that we’d been promised, but it isn’t a hologram at all. As I’d suspected, CamSoda’s “invention” is a take on a parlor trick called Pepper’s Ghost that first appeared in 1862. It employs a series of angled glass panels to give the illusion of a full-color, 3D hologram. It’s the same trick that’s given life to dead celebrities like Elvis and Tupac and given increased visibility to living legends like Al Gore, Mariah Carey and even the prime minister of India.

In order to make your own porno Pepper’s Ghost, you’ll need to shoot your subject from four different angles. Once you have the video, just position your glass pyramid on top of your iPhone and press play.

Illustration by D. Thomas Magee

Anyway, I’d come to Vegas to find the future of porn, and while I was pretty sure this wasn’t it, I was ready for my demo. I was introduced to Alexis Monroe, who would be transformed into my own private hologram performer. She gave me a hug and quickly ran back to a small, makeshift studio outfitted with green fabric and a series of four cameras that would capture her movements in real-time and display them on the four sides of the rotating pyramid on the show floor.

I was placed in front of a microphone, pointed directly at the display, with a vibrating saddle donning a fleshy silicone nub at my feet and a petite fuck machine thrusting into thin air just behind me. The microphone was meant to enable two-way communication but was useless due to the surrounding noise. I stood mostly still as I attempted small talk with Monroe, who writhed around a plastic folding chair. She was like a small, soft-core stripper version of the Wizard of Oz on mute. It was, by far, the most bizarre lap dance I’ve ever experienced.

When pressed Lundeen admits that his holograms are more gimmick than true technological breakthrough—something fun to draw people in. He says the real attraction isn’t the medium but the models, and that his real focus is on simultaneous 2D and 360-degree live video broadcasting. But, he says, the spirit of experimentation that drives CamSoda is exactly why porn has been at the forefront of so many technological trends.

“I think that’s where adult probably has a leg up on most other industries,” Lundeen said. “We can put something like the hologram together very quickly without a whole lot of red tape.”

A quick sweep of the Hard Rock revealed an industry that emerged from a crisis more nimble and focused on the future than I expected. Surviving pioneers like Hustler, Evil Angel and Penthouse bumped up against cam sites like MyFreeCams.com and Chaturbate that were either nonexistent or in their infancy when the industry tanked. Rios points to the growth of virtual reality at the show as a sign of its vitality. VR exhibitors at AEE 2017 were up to more than 20, nearly double the number in 2016, he says. By contrast, CES, the world’s biggest technology showcase, put its official VR exhibitor count at 70. It has seven times the number of attendees.

But the most striking change on display at AEE wasn’t inside a headset: It was everywhere, in the blue glow of a laptop screen. At the Hard Rock hotel, big-name stars like Joanna Angel and Nina Hartley were lost in a sea of fresh young talent. These women, coiffed with every color of neon and pastel hair, giggled into tiny desktop cameras, pursed brightly painted lips and pushed together barely covered breasts. They offered a new face of a business once stuck in a mirror image of mainstream media. Like tech giants Facebook and Twitter, the big names in porn are banking on live streaming video, and like the latest batch of social-media celebrities, there’s no formula for a successful cam model.

Before our interview ends, Lundeen tells me what’s next for CamSoda labs. There’s “the whole T. rex strategy,” which, from what I can tell is a plush mascot that crashes events and cam sessions, and a new character called POV guy, equipped with cameras, battery packs and a cellphone for live video capture and real-time chat. But the least sexy of the three is the one that caught my attention: live, mobile broadcasting. This is the future of porn.

Lundeen knows you have to give people what they want. What they want right now is a connection unencumbered by creative camera angles, cheesy scripts and big-budget sets.

The people want live, frictionless tits. But what’s new?

The Engadget Podcast Ep 26: The Sounds of Science

Managing editor Dana Wollman and senior editor Nathan Ingraham join host Terrence O’Brien on the latest episode. First Dana and Nathan face off in the latest installment of Flame Wars, tackling the latest news around Google Voice, struggling streaming service Tidal and the Note 7. Then all three will try to unravel the first week of Donald Trump’s presidency and what it means for science in particular.

Relevant links:

• Why is Sprint throwing money at Tidal?
• Sprint buys a 33 percent stake in Tidal’s music service
• With its Note 7 apology, Samsung finally gets something right
• Samsung blames two different battery flaws for the Note 7 fires
• Google Voice gets a long-overdue visual refresh
• Trump’s plans for the EPA will stifle scientific research
• Agriculture Department lifts USDA gag order after public outcry
• Scientists prepare their own march against Trump
• Trump administration freezes grants and contracts at the EPA
• National park tweets, then deletes, climate data after gag order
• Reuters: Trump admin telling EPA to pull climate change info

You can check out every episode on The Engadget Podcast page in audio, video and text form for the hearing impaired.

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Apple moving international iTunes arm to Ireland next month

In a note sent out to developers, Apple has confirmed it’s moving its international iTunes business from Luxembourg to its European hub in Ireland effective February 5th. The company pre-empted the move last September, when it transferred all developer contracts and an estimated $9 billion in assets between the countries in preparation. And from next month, responsibility for Apple’s iTunes arm serving over 100 countries (not including the US) — and covering the iTunes, iBook and App Stores as well as Apple Music — will formally transfer to its offices in Cork, Ireland.

What’s particularly interesting about the commitment is the European Union’s kerfuffle with Apple over its favorable tax arrangements in Ireland clearly hasn’t put the company off expanding its operations in the country — Luxembourg is something of a tax haven itself, of course. At the end of August last year, the EU Commission concluded Apple must pay €13 billion (just shy of $14 billion by current exchange rates) plus interest in what are effectively back taxes, arguing that a seriously low tax deal agreed with the Irish government amounted to an illegal competitive advantage (aka “state aid”).

Apple CEO Tim Cook has called the ruling “total political crap,” while Ireland believes the EU is overstepping its authority and misconstruing local law. Both are working together to appeal the ruling, and it’s perhaps this solidarity that has convinced Apple to progress with its plans to ship its iTunes business out of Luxembourg.

Via: Ars Technica

Source: Steve T-S (Twitter)

Seven Years Ago Today: Steve Jobs Introduces the iPad

After teasing fans to “come see our latest creation” in the weeks leading up to one of its famous media events, seven years ago today former Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the first-generation iPad to the world. The iPad was announced as a larger-screen counterpart to the company’s three-years-old iPhone, with Scott Forstall pointing out during the conference that the tablet could run “virtually every” iPhone app thanks to an on-screen button that users could press to scale the app’s resolution up and down on a whim.

The original iPad launched with a 9.7-inch 1024 x 768 resolution touch screen, in 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB capacities. The 1.5lb tablet included Apple’s A4 chip and was priced at $499, $599, and $699 for Wi-Fi only models, and $629, $729, and $829 for Wi-Fi + 3G models in each respective capacity. The Wi-Fi version debuted on April 3, 2010, while users interested in Wi-Fi and 3G had to wait until April 30 for Apple’s new tablet.

Steve Jobs on the iPad:

“iPad is our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iPad creates and defines an entirely new category of devices that will connect users with their apps and content in a much more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before.”

After the event in 2010, initial reactions to the iPad were largely positive, with sites like Engadget calling it “blazingly fast” and remarking that the tablet had no lag when hopping around its various apps. The screen was thought to be “stunning” and the iPad’s iBooks application impressed, thanks to its flipping page animations and library-inspired bookshelf space for eBooks that upheld Apple’s then popular skeuomorphic iOS design.

The original iPad’s largest drawback centered on its substantial 1.5lb weight, as well as the lack of Flash in its operating system, no multitasking, and no camera. Seven years later, Apple has iterated on its original design and addressed most of these user complaints with each update to the iPad.

The current 12.9-inch iPad Pro weighs about the same as the original iPad at 1.57lbs, and still runs a larger version of iOS, but it’s thinner (6.9mm vs 13mm) and is the “most capable and powerful” iPad yet, according to Apple, putting it on par with desktop-class machines.

While the iPad saw strong early adoption, Apple has experienced sales declines in the past few years, with users replacing their iPads less frequently than iPhones. Most commonly, users update their iPhones every year or two, while finding their iPads remain serviceable for longer.

In the company’s annual earnings report last October focusing on the fourth fiscal quarter of 2016, iPad sales were down slightly to 9.3 million from 9.9 million in the same year-ago quarter. Although they were also infamously down in sales in 2016, Apple still sold 45.5 million iPhones in the same quarter, down from 48 million in the fourth quarter of 2015.

New iPads are consistently part of the Apple rumor cycle, and 2017 has been no different, with current reports pointing towards the launch of three new iPad Pro models sometime during the calendar year. Apple is believed to put out a new 9.7-inch and 12.9-inch iPad, but the exact screen size of a mysterious middle size model has been up for debate, including 10.1, 10.5, and 10.9-inches.

When it launches, the new 10-inch model may look very different from the 2010 iPad, reportedly doing away with the iconic Home Button, further reducing the size of the tablet’s bezels with an edge-to-edge display, and include the usual iterative bumps to camera resolution and speed. One of the ports that the 2017 iPad is rumored to keep intact from its seven-year-old progenitor is the 3.5mm headphone jack, which the iPhone 7 ditched last year.

The full press conference covering Steve Jobs’ introduction of the iPad can be viewed on YouTube here.

Related Roundup: iPad Pro
Tag: Steve Jobs
Buyer’s Guide: 12.9″ iPad Pro (Caution)
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Microsoft Says Windows PC Makers Seeing ‘Continued Growth’ in Premium Market Led by Apple

Microsoft on Thursday reported a 5% increase in revenue from licensing Windows to PC makers as part of its latest quarterly earnings results.

In a subsequent conference call, Microsoft’s chief financial officer Amy Hood said its “partner ecosystem continued to see growth and share gains in the Windows premium device category,” according to Business Insider. The comment has been interpreted by some as Microsoft stepping up its game against the Mac.

Microsoft reportedly defines “premium devices” as computers that are in the $900-plus price range, which equates to the higher end of the market traditionally led by Apple products such as the MacBook Pro. By its own definition, this includes Microsoft’s latest Surface Book and Surface Studio desktop.

Last month, Microsoft said “more people are switching from Macs to Surface than ever before” following “the disappointment of the new MacBook Pro.” The company has not released actual sales numbers to back that claim, however, while Microsoft’s latest results include licensing to all Windows PC vendors.

While research firm Gartner says the worldwide PC market continues to decline, Mac sales grew by 2.4% in the fourth quarter. Lenovo, HP, and Dell, the top three vendors, saw an estimated 5.4%, 4.3%, and 1.6% growth respectively during the quarter as well, while Asus, Acer, and others faced declines, according to Gartner.

Tags: Microsoft, Windows
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First hydrogen metal created on Earth draws critical doubt

Scientists from Harvard University say they’ve ended an 80-year quest by compressing hydrogen into a potentially superconducting metal. Using a diamond-tipped anvil, the team squeezed a hydrogen gas sample to 71 million PSI, more than the pressure at the Earth’s core. “It’s the first-ever sample of metallic hydrogen on Earth, so … you’re looking at something that’s never existed before,” says research lead Isaac Silvera. However, other scientists have reservations, saying it’s possible the solid material they created (pictured above) is actually aluminum oxide that came from the anvil’s diamond tips.

It has long been thought that hydrogen could be compressed into a metallic form, where it could conduct electricity and possibly act as a superconductor. What’s more, it may remain “metastable” as a solid, even when cooled to room temperatures and pressures. If so, it could act as a superconductor without being chilled or compressed, resulting in cheap energy and new types of transportation.

Hydrogen can be cryogenically frozen into a liquid, and by ramping up the pressure, transformed into a non-metallic, non-conductive solid. In 1935, Princeton physicists Eugene Wigner and Hillard Bell Huntington predicted that with enough pressure, solid hydrogen would become metal and conduct current. However, at higher pressures, hydrogen is forced into defects on a diamond’s surface, causing it to crack. What’s more, lasers used to measure the pressure and confirm the presence of a metal can cause excessive heating, further stressing the diamonds.

Ranga Dias and Isaac F. Silvera

To overcome those issues, the Harvard team fitted their diamond anvil into a cryostat cooled to just above absolute zero. They also perfect a new diamond-polishing technique that would eliminate surface irregularities. That enabled them to crank the vice up to 495 billion pascals (71 million PSI), the highest pressure achieved so far. By shining a low-powered laser that wouldn’t harm the diamonds, they detected a change in the hydrogen’s reflectance. “Then suddenly, it becomes a lustry, reflective sample, which you can only believe is a metal,” Silvera says.

However, other researchers are not convinced that the Harvard team saw hydrogen metal. Rather, they think that the team may have misjudged the pressure, and that the shiny material glimpsed could be alumina residue from the anvil’s diamonds. “I don’t think the paper is convincing at all,” French physicist Paul Loubeyre told Nature. “If they want to be convincing, they have to redo the measurement, really measuring the evolution of pressure.”

However, Silvera’s team only had one cryostat available, and wanted to avoid doing more tests for fear of breaking their specimen. “Now that that paper has been accepted, we’re going to do further experiments,” he said. Despite the skepticism, the team is confident of the findings. “It’s a tremendous achievement, and even if it only exists in this diamond anvil cell at high pressure, it’s a very fundamental and transformative discovery,” Silvera said. Pending further testing, you might want to temper your own excitement, however.

Via: Reuters

Source: Harvard University

Apple Formally Announced as ‘Partnership on AI’ Founding Member

Apple has formally joined the Partnership on AI as a founding member, confirming an earlier report, the organization announced today.

Apple has joined the Partnership on AI as a founding member. The company has been involved and collaborating with the Partnership since before it was first announced and is thrilled to formalize its membership alongside Amazon, Facebook, Google/DeepMind, IBM, and Microsoft.

Siri co-founder Tom Gruber, who heads advanced development of the assistant at Apple, will serve on the Partnership’s inaugural Board of Trustees.

The Partnership on AI is a non-profit research consortium established in September to “study and formulate best practices, to advance the public’s understanding of AI, and to serve as an open platform for discussion and engagement about AI and its influences on people and society,” according to its website.

Apple has always been notoriously secretive, but it recently started allowing its AI and machine learning researchers to publish papers. The company’s contributions to the broader artificial intelligence research community could help it attract top talent that would not otherwise want to join the tech giant.

Apple has been recruiting talent and acquired several AI-related companies in recent months, including Turi, VocalIQ, Perceptio, and Emotient, to build out its in-house AI team led by Carnegie Mellon professor Russ Salakhutdinov.

Apple is rumored to be working on “enhanced” Siri capabilities for next-generation iPhones to keep up with competitors such as Amazon’s Alexa.

Tag: artificial intelligence
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Huawei P10: News and rumors

Why it matters to you

Huawei smartphones are getting better and better, and the successor to the excellent P9 is looking like another winner

The Huawei P9 was one of our favorite smartphones released in 2016, due to its superb dual-lens camera produced with the help of camera experts Leica. We’ve subsequently been even more impressed by the Huawei Mate 9, and if the rumors turn out to be accurate, the P10 is coming to challenge it for supremacy in the company’s range. Here’s what we think we know about it so far.

Design

Huawei’s P-series smartphones are always the stylish ones, compared to the business-like Mate series, blending good-looks with high-quality materials, for a fashion-forward result. Leaks have shown the P10 may look similar to the P9, with a metal body, and a glass or other material section housing the camera lenses on the back. Interestingly, a Weibo-sourced leak points to Huawei shifting the fingerprint sensor from the back of the phone to the front, in a home button beneath the screen. This is a new design direction for the P-series.

More: Everything we think we know about the Huawei Watch 2

The front fingerprint sensor also appears on a leak that shows a phone said to be the P10, but with a curved screen and back panel, making it look quite similar to the Porsche Design Mate 9. It doesn’t entirely match other leaked pictures of the P10, aside from an image linked to a post quoting Huawei CEO Richard Yu. However, while none of this has been confirmed yet, but the possibility of a P10, a P10 Plus, and a Porsche Design P10 can’t be ruled out.

Another leak, this time originating from Chinese social network Weibo, shows the P10 in additional colors — a minty green, a champagne, and a purple — where a curved edge is definitely visible on the back of the phone. The source isn’t well know though, and its accuracy can’t be judged yet. Huawei did add a gorgeous blue and red color option to the P9 after launch though, so we know it’s not afraid of experimenting outside of the usual silver, black or white options.

Release date

When will the P10 be announced? The Huawei P9 was revealed in April 2016, and the P10 is likely to follow a year afterwards. A quote attributed to Huawei CEO Richard Yu says the P10 will arrive in March or April 2017. This would put it after Mobile World Congress, which takes place at the end of February, and does fall in with Huawei’s preference for launching a P-series phone at a separate, usually glitzy event.

Specifications

The P9 may have an awesome camera, but the other specifications won’t stand up to the competition in 2017, so what’s Huawei planning for the successor? Specs supposedly for the P10 were found in a log of GFXBench, and they give some insight into what we should expect. In the log, we can see the phone being referred to as LON-L29. This year’s P9 had a model number of LON-L19, so the model number found in the benchmark log most likely refers to what will eventually be the P10.

More: Porsche Design Huawei Mate 9: Our first take

So what exactly does the benchmark log reveal? Well, for starters the device will have a 5.5-inch display with a resolution of 2,560 x 1,440 pixels — that’s a bump up from the full HD display on the P9. On top of that, we should expect a new 2.3GHz octa-core Kirin 960 processor, as well as a hefty 6GB of RAM — an amount that very few phones, including the OnePlus 3, have today. The P9 has only 3GB of RAM, so the bump up to 6GB represents a pretty major upgrade. When it comes to onboard storage, the device listed boasts a whopping 256GB.

A further leak repeats the chance of a 5.5-inch screen with a 2560 x 1440 pixel resolution, but also mentions a standard P9 model with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, indicating the 6GB/256GB version will be a premium-style model for limited release.

Camera

The camera was the P9’s standout feature, so we’re hoping the P10 uses the Mate 9’s second generation Leica dual-lens setup, or even better. The benchmark report also mentions the camera, suggesting it as 12-megapixels, however the log doesn’t say whether it has two lenses. The front-facing camera apparently has 8-megapixels.

Software

The only leak mentioning the software so far indicates the device will ship with Android 7.0 Nougat. We’re hoping for EMUI 5 or later, and all the improvements it brings with it, to be placed over the top. Additionally, Amazon’s Alexa digital assistant may be onboard, following its debut on the Mate 9.

Overall, the phone seems to be shaping up to be pretty darn impressive. We’ll keep you updated with all the news and rumors here.

Article originally published November 2016. Updated on 01-27-2017 by Andy Boxall: Added in new leaked pictures, specifications, and launch date rumors.