This electric skateboard can hit 25 mph and charges itself when you brake

Why it matters to you

The choice is getting better all the time if you’re looking for an electric skateboard, and here’s another one to check out.

If you’re yet to hop on a souped-up skateboard but rather like the idea of tearing around the streets on something other than your boring old bicycle, then you might want to take a couple of minutes to check out the IvoryBoard.

The stylish-looking, battery-powered personal transporter offers an impressive top speed of 25 mph — that’s a shade faster than the popular Boosted board that YouTube star Casey Neistat uses for his hair-raising outings on the streets of Manhattan.

With an impressive 18-mile range, you’ll be just fine for the bulk of your trips, though here’s the neat part — the battery receives a charge every time you brake, increasing its range in the process. Still concerned about juice? Then buy an extra battery and swap it out in a few seconds when the original runs flat.

Anyway, there may be times when you want to use it sans electrical power. In that case, you’re all set, as its creators have designed it to work “exactly like a standard longboard when powered off,” giving riders “a frictionless ride that glides smoothly like a regular skateboard.”

As you’d expect, the board comes with its own remote speed controller, designed with a ring-like finger-hold so it doesn’t slip off when you’re making a sharp turn.

Drawbacks? Well, the machine tips the scales at 17 pounds, which is a little heavier than many of the other electric skateboards currently on the market, so if you think you’ll be carrying it about a fair bit and you prefer to keep things light, then you might want to look at the alternatives on the market.

More: 12 electric skateboards that let you skate without the sweat

Recently racing through its Kickstarter goal, the Aussie-based startup behind the IvoryBoard is planning to send out the first units as early as next month.

There is one snag for early adopters, though. The accompanying iOS and Android app, which offer information on speed and battery level, is unlikely to launch with the board, instead arriving “within six months” of March 23, the date the campaign ends.

Shipping to anywhere in the world, the IvoryBoard is expected to retail for about $1,180, though make a pledge now and you can secure one for $755.

The autonomous robot sub with a really silly name is about to begin its maiden voyage

Why it matters to you

Even though it has a silly name, Boaty McBoatface’s advanced technologies means oceanographers should soon gain new knowledge about Earth’s polar regions.

A high-tech, remotely controlled submarine called Boaty McBoatface is setting out on its first mission in the icy cold waters of Antarctica this week.

As you may recall, the bizarre moniker was the result of a public campaign launched last year by the U.K.’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) to choose a name for its gleaming new £200 million (about $243 million) polar research ship.

The NERC had encouraged “inspirational” suggestions linked to “environmental and polar science, to help us tell everyone about the amazing work the ship does.”

But the council clearly hadn’t accounted for the Brits’ sometimes bonkers humor, with one particular name — Boaty McBoatface — attracting way more votes than any other choice offered in the online poll.

Other suggestions included Onion Knight, I Like Big Boats & I Cannot Lie, and It’s Bloody Cold Here.

Clearly horrified at the thought of having to give its lovely new vessel such a daft name, the NERC reminded everyone that it would have the final say. After some thought, it ended up naming the ship after a British naturalist and broadcaster — a man with the far more sensible name of David Attenborough — who placed fifth in the poll. However, not wanting to completely disregard the people’s carefully considered choice, the council said it’d give the absurd Boaty name to the ship’s robot sub instead.

Boaty gets to work!

This week Boaty McBoatface begins its maiden mission aboard the the British Antarctic Survey research ship RRS James Clark Ross, which the RRS Sir David Attenborough will replace in 2019.

The autonomous underwater vehicle is a 3.62-meter-long, 700-kg “autosub” capable of traveling under ice at depths of up to 6,000 meters. Data gathered by Boaty will be sent back to scientists on the ship via a radio link when the sub periodically surfaces.

“Boaty and similar autonomous vehicles will help oceanographers investigate the processes driving change in the polar regions, including the extent of the ice melt, and conduct a range of research in the Arctic and Antarctic oceans without the need for the constant presence of a research ship,” NERC explains on its website.

In the coming years, Boaty is expected to attempt the first-ever crossing of the Arctic Ocean under ice, a mission that “has the potential to deliver a step-change in scientists’ ability to observe change in this vital region.”

More: The super rich don’t burn cash, they sink it into these insane personal submarines

The advantage of the sub’s silly name is that it’s helped to generate publicity for oceanographer’s work far beyond what they could’ve imagined before the public campaign started.

The U.K.’s National Oceanography Centre has even come up with a cartoon version of Boaty McBoatface to get kids interested in marine research, and, according to the Guardian, is also creating a large inflatable of Boaty that’ll publicize its work at special events around Britain.

Xiaomi sells over 1 million units of the Redmi Note 4 in India

Xiaomi sold a million units of the Redmi Note 4 in just 45 days in India.

Xiaomi has announced today that is sold over 1 million units of the Redmi Note 4 in India. Xiaomi achieved the milestone in just 45 days, making the Redmi Note 4 the fastest device to get to the million mark in the country. As noted by the company on Facebook, that equates to one sale every four seconds.

It’s easy to see why the device is doing so well in the country. The Redmi Note 4 offers a compelling set of features on a budget, and Xiaomi retooled the camera and introduced a more premium design. The company also overcame last year’s supply constraints, selling over 250,000 units of the device in the first sale.

• Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 review
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 vs. Redmi Note 3

The Redmi Note 3 was one of the best-selling devices in India last year, and its successor is well on its way to meet that goal. That said, there are phones on the horizon — particularly the Moto G5 — that will take the fight to Xiaomi.

Motorola is all set to launch the Moto G5 Plus in the country tomorrow, and the device shares the same internal hardware — Snapdragon 625 along with 4GB of RAM and 64GB storage — as the Redmi Note 4 while offering a far better software experience and a significantly upgraded camera.

For now, however, the Redmi Note 4 is the device to beat in the budget segment in India.

Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S3 won’t be cheap

U.S. pricing starts at $600, and other countries are equally pricey.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 is being pitched as a premium tablet, with iPad-like pricing to match. A Best Buy pre-order page for the device, in Wi-Fi-only flavor, lists it with a $599.99 price tag. The LTE-capable Tab S3 isn’t listed by the retailer, but typically you’d be looking at a premium of $100 or more to add cellular connectivity.

Over in Canada the Wi-Fi-only Tab S3 is up for pre-order for C$799.99, in line with the current exchange rate. And Brits can expect to pay a little more for Samsung’s latest tablet, with retailer John Lewis listing the Wi-Fi-only Tab S3 for £599.99 with availability coming in early April.

The company will be hoping to build momentum behind its new Tab before Apple’s upcoming iPad Pro upgrades land. Samsung’s big rival is expected to unveil new tablets of its own at a special event in the next couple of weeks.

See at Best Buy

More: Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 preview

Life at the ‘end of the world’ isn’t all looting and pillaging

Typically, end-of-the-world scenarios involve rioting, looting and chaos. Those depictions are from pop culture, though, and not based on any sort of real world data. For an idea of how an apocalyptic situation might actually play out, scientists pored over some 270 million action records from the South Korean massively multiplayer game (MMO) ArcheAge, according to a paper (PDF) spotted by New Scientist.

Players knew their information and stats would be wiped at the end of the beta, and as such, the researchers wanted to see how in-game behavior changed as the end of their world approached. “Apart from a few outliers who became more murderous toward the end of the test, they found that most players didn’t resort to killing sprees or antisocial behavior,” New Scientist notes.

“People don’t really go off the deep end, they just stop worrying about the future,” researcher Jeremy Blackburn says. For the most part, the players spent almost no time grinding for progression or finishing quests, and instead favored just hanging out and talking with friends in the game.

If you think about it, then, it’s a lot like the run-up to the final section of Mass Effect 3: lots of time spent in quiet moments bonding with your crew, versus a bloodbath.

The researchers fully admit that this isn’t analogous to a real-world apocalypse. They say that there was no “apparent pandemic behavior changes,” but that the limitations of it being a video game (and one that had a handful of betas prior) and the lack of any real people perishing diminishes what can be gleaned from the experiment. The test wasn’t entirely without merit, though.

“It would be naive of us to claim a one-to-one mapping with real world behavior,” the paper reads. “However, players do invest substantial time and energy into their characters, and it is quite common for virtual property to be worth real-world money these days, so there are some real consequences.”

Further studies using ArchAge will focus on criminal justice, using the game’s jail system and player-run courts. Awhile back there was a group of hardcore Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas modders who role-played out prison sentences in a hacked version of the game’s multiplayer. It’s not quite the same thing, but the players actually treated their sentences like you’d imagine people in the real world did.

Via: New Scientist

Source: Arxiv (PDF)

Laser pulse study could lead to ultrafast computers

Computers that run 100,000 times faster than current ones can change life as we know it. They could help discover distant planets more quickly or diagnose illnesses much, much earlier than usual, among other things. A team of researchers, including engineers from the University of Michigan, believe they’ve found a way to achieve that goal using extremely short laser pulses. The researchers have demoed a method to control “femtosecond” (one quadrillionth of a second) pulses of light that can move electrons quickly and efficiently. U of Michigan says it’s a step toward “lightwave electronics,” and eventually, quantum computing.

In current computers, some of the electrons moving through semiconductors bump into each other and release energy in the form of heat. That’s not very efficient computing. The researchers used crystals called gallium selenide as semiconductors and shone short laser pulses into them. These pulses move electrons into one higher energy level to the next. When the electrons move back from the higher energy levels, they emit even shorter pulses.

These extremely short pulses can be used to quickly read and write information to electrons, but to be able to do that, you need to be able to control the pulses. The team found that changing the orientation of the crystals allowed them to control where the electrons go and how they move. U of Michigan explained that “because femtosecond pulses are fast enough to intercept an electron between being put into an excited state and coming down from that state, they can potentially be used for quantum computations using electrons in excited states as qubits.”

While a lot of work needs to be done before we see the method used in actual working lightwave or quantum computers, this is a big step towards that goal. As Rupert Huber, lead researchers and physics professor at the University of Regensburg, said:

“In the past few years, we and other groups have found that the oscillating electric field of ultrashort laser pulses can actually move electrons back and forth in solids. Everybody was immediately excited because one may be able to exploit this principle to build future computers that work at unprecedented clock rates — 10 to a hundred thousand times faster than state-of-the-art electronics.”

Source: Nature Photonics, University of Michigan

Creators Update includes a few features for Windows Defender

Microsoft’s built-in security suite for Windows isn’t getting left out of the upcoming Creators Update for Windows 10. The new Windows Defender features start with memory and kernel sensors to detect nefarious activity going on in those parts of your machine. It’s something a post on the Microsoft Secure Blog says the company has been doing to defend against zero-day attacks on Windows already.

Windows Defender is using machine learning in a novel way too. “Our historical detection capability ensures new detection rules apply to up to six months of stored data to detect attacks that previously went unnoticed,” the post reads.

More than that, Windows defender has a few new tricks for security teams to see what’s going on at the time of an attack. The new tricks even allow them to ban a particular file from a network and grab forensic info off of a particular computer using what sounds like bait. An investigation package in the official parlance.

If you’re interested in your machine joining the some two million others with Defender installed, or, just want a peek at the future, you can register for beta access at the source link below.

Source: Microsoft Secure blog

Apple Rumored to Unveil 10.5-Inch iPad Pro at Early April Event

Apple is planning to unveil its rumored 10.5-inch iPad Pro at an event set to be held in early April to “mark the inauguration” of its Apple Park campus, reports Taiwanese site DigiTimes citing supply chain sources.

DigiTimes previously said the 10.5-inch iPad Pro would not be available until May or June, but now claims Apple has “moved ahead the production” of the rumored tablet.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve heard a lot of speculation about when Apple will debut the 10.5-inch iPad Pro and its sister tablet(s). Rumors originally suggested the company would hold an event in March, but that has been in question as it is nearly mid-month with no hint of an event.

Earlier today, a reliable supply chain source told MacRumors that Apple would announce products later this month, likely between Monday, March 20 and Friday, March 24. There was also a rumor circulating suggesting Apple would hold an event on April 4, but that was incorrectly based on an erroneous interpretation of Personal Pickup dates for the 12.9-inch iPad Pro.

While we haven’t yet nailed down a specific timeline for the unveiling of new iPads, the prospective launch window is narrowing and rumors suggest we’re going to see them within the next month. Just today, new iPad models were spotted in device logs gathered by Fiksu, suggesting a release is indeed on the horizon. Fiksu, like our unnamed supply chain source and DigiTimes, believes a launch is imminent.

If an event takes place in April, it could potentially be held at Apple’s new campus, Apple Park, but there’s one snag in that plan. Apple is going to open the campus in April, but the company’s press release said the auditorium where events will be held, now dubbed the Steve Jobs Theater, will open “later this year.” The wording makes it unclear if the theater will be ready for Apple Park’s grand opening, and thus ready for an event.

According to today’s report from DigiTimes, Apple plans to target the education and business sectors with both the rumored 10.5-inch iPad and a refreshed 12.9-inch model, which the site says will be Apple’s “mainstream products” for the mid-tier to high-end tablet market in 2017.

While DigiTimes believes the 10.5-inch iPad Pro will now see an April debut, the site says the production schedule for the 12.9-inch iPad Pro “still remains unclear” with volume production perhaps delayed until May or June.

Rumors suggest that the new 12.9-inch iPad will feature a modest refresh, but the 10.5-inch model is rumored to have a nearly bezel-free edge-to-edge display and a body that’s actually the same size as the existing 9.7-inch iPad Pro. There have also been rumors suggesting Apple plans to release a lower-end 9.7-inch iPad Pro and a 7.9-inch model, but whether those rumors are true remains to be seen as the focus has mainly been on Apple’s larger upcoming tablets.

Related Roundup: iPad Pro
Buyer’s Guide: 12.9″ iPad Pro (Caution)
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NASA tests life-detecting tools for Mars in the Atacama Desert

NASA wanted to find out whether the Mars 2020 rover can truly drill for samples and look for signs of life at the same time. So, a team of scientists spent the whole February testing tools using a practice rover called the KREX-2 in one of the driest places on Earth: the Atacama Desert. It’s the perfect location to trial instruments NASA plans to use on Mars, since it’s as dry as the red planet and under constant assault from ultraviolet radiation. Microbes in the Atacama live underground or inside rocks — if there’s life on Mars, NASA expects to find it in similar locations.

This is the Atacama Rover Astrobiology Drilling Studies (ARADS) team’s second time testing Martian tools in the desert, following their first season in February 2016. This year, they took three life detection instruments with them, feeding them samples straight from the rover’s transfer arm.

One of the three is a modified Wet Chemistry Laboratory, which was also part of the 2007 Phoenix mission to Mars. They also tweaked the Signs of Life Detector they took with them last year. It was donated by Spain’s Center for Astrobiology and can search for biological compounds by conducting various biochemical tests. The third tool called Microfluidic Life Analyzer, however, is a completely new addition. NASA JPL scientists created it to isolate amino acids, the building blocks of life, from very small liquid samples.

ARADS Principal Investigator Brian Glass said “The drill, rover and robot arm combination behaved beautifully in the field.” They’re not quite done with their work, though: the team will come back for two more seasons until 2019. Next year, they plan to attach the instruments onto the rover to see if it can properly operate the drill alongside the life-detecting tools.

Source: NASA

New York City sues Verizon over its fiber rollout

When New York City said it was upset with Verizon for allegedly backtracking on a promise to bring FiOS service to every household in the city, it wasn’t joking around. The city has sued Verizon, accusing the telecom of failing to live up to a cable franchise agreement that required fiber to pass by all residences in the city by mid-2014. The company also didn’t complete some requested installations, according to officials.

Not surprisingly, Verizon takes issue with the lawsuit. A spokesperson talking to Ars Technica claims that the company met the terms of the agreement “100 percent,” and calls on Mayor Bill de Blasio to help fight landlords who won’t let it build fiber into tenants’ homes. It has also proposed investing an extra $1 billion in New York City fiber over the next 4 years in a bid to sweeten the pot. The reality appears to be more complicated, however.

Verizon’s main objections revolve around interpretations of the term “pass.” It claims that there wasn’t a firm definition of the term in the 2008 agreement, and that NYC’s current government is using a different definition than what the two sides were using 9 years ago. The telco believes that passing meant running its fiber network alongside the same routes used for old-school telephone lines, not a literal effort to reach every residence in the city. However, the lawsuit points to a 2008 Verizon statement agreeing that its fiber would have to be run “past all of the residence locations in the city” — that sounds rather clear.

The suit also notes that while there are 36,000 requests for installations at locations that can’t easily get FiOS, the actual number of people who can’t get service is higher.

Verizon does have some stronger claims against the city. It notes that landlords won’t always let it install fiber, and that the city hasn’t provided a requested “competitively-neutral” letter to give to landlords when it wants access. However, there’s evidence to suggest that the carrier isn’t telling the whole story. NYC has previously accused Verizon of insisting on either bulk service agreements or even exclusive agreements (violating FCC rules) to wire up an apartment, forcing landlords to accept unfair terms if they want FiOS at all. In short: while NYC’s case isn’t airtight, Verizon can’t exactly claim to be a victim.

Via: Ars Technica

Source: NYC.gov