Uber to Make Passenger Ratings More Visible on iPhone and iPad

Uber today announced that passenger ratings will be displayed more prominently within its iPhone and iPad app.

Now, a rider’s rating will be displayed right under their name in the app’s menu that slides out from the left. Previously, riders had to visit an unadvertised Uber support document and sign into their account to view their score, likely resulting in some riders not even knowing the feature existed.

While most Uber users are likely familiar with rating drivers on a five-star scale after a trip, drivers can also rate passengers. If a rider eats in the car without permission, slams the door, or tries to pile in more people than seat belts, for example, a driver could give that passenger a low rating.

By making these rider ratings more visible, Uber hopes it will remind riders that “mutual respect is an important part” of its Community Guidelines.

Ratings are always reported as averages, and neither riders nor drivers will see the individual rating left for a particular trip.

Uber for iPhone and iPad [Direct Link] was updated earlier this week, but the rider rating change still appears to be in the process of rolling out.

Tag: Uber
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EU court rules selling pre-loaded pirate boxes is illegal

The European Court of Justice (CJEU) has today handed down a judgement that could drastically affect how multimedia streaming boxes are sold across the continent. In a case involving Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN and local online store Filmspeler.nl (Movie Player), it agreed with concerns regarding the sale of hardware that comes pre-loaded with addons that deliver protected sports and movie streams, ruling that it constitutes copyright infringement .

For a number of years, one-man business Filmspeler has sold various media players that run open-source software. They were pre-configured with add-ons that are capable of delivering illegal sports, movie and TV show streams, without the consent of the original rights holders.

In 2015, BREIN sued Filmspeler owner Jack Frederik Wullems before the District Court of Central Netherlands, arguing that sales of the pre-configured players constituted a “communication to the public,” contrary to Dutch copyright law. Wullems disagreed, stating that Filmspeler had no involvement in such add-ons and that they were already publicly available.

The District Court of Central Netherlands referred the case Europe’s highest court, asking specifically whether it was legal for retailers to sell pre-configured streaming boxes with links to pirated content and if individual users can be liable for accessing such material. According to the CJEU, sales of dedicated pirate streaming boxes are considered communication to the public.

“Mr Wullems, in full knowledge of the consequences of his conduct, pre-installs, on the multimedia player add-ons that make it possible to have access to protected works and to watch those works on a television screen,” the ruling states. “Such actions are not to be confused with the mere provision of physical facilities, referred to in the directive. In that regard, it is clear from the observations submitted to the Court that streaming websites are not readily identifiable by the public and the majority of them change frequently.”

It was argued that Filmspeler rose to prominence because it took care of the hard work — i.e. installing the add-ons. Buyers, the court said, knew they’d get a “free and unauthorised offer of protected works deliberately and in full knowledge of the circumstances”.

Various European courts have been tasked with clarifying the legality of such hardware. In the UK, the Premier League — with support from BT, EE, Sky and Virgin — was successfully granted a court order to block websites and services offering free football (or soccer) streams.

Mr Justice Arnold noted at the time:

“The skill and effort required to find and use such devices and apps to access infringing content has fallen dramatically. Devices such as set-top boxes and media players are easy to connect to domestic televisions. Software to access suitable streams (in particular, software known as Kodi together with third-party add-ons) has become much easier to find and install. Indeed, it is increasingly easy to purchase set-top boxes and other devices which are already loaded with such software. Moreover, sources of infringing content often update automatically.”

Unsurprisingly, today’s ruling could have a significant impact on the sale of so-called “Kodi boxes”. The makers of the neutral open-source software have moved to distance themselves fully-loaded setups, but continue to be associated with illegal streaming, even though the infringing add-ons are provided by third parties. Amazon has gone as far as to block the sale of pre-loaded hardware.

Dutch courts can now issue a definitive ruling on the Filmspeler case and it’s likely to set a precedent for other European courts to follow. It’ll also be music to the ears of rights holders, which have been campaigning against the online sharing of copyrighted content for many years.

Source: Court of Justice of the European Union

The UK is worried fake news will impact General Election result

UK politicians are worried fake news will have an impact on the outcome of the General Election in June. Speaking with The Guardian, Damian Collins, a Conservative MP and the chairman of the culture, media and sport select committee, has warned that misleading information threatens “the integrity of democracy in Britain.” Voters need to be reliably informed, and false reporting could affect their decision at the ballot box. “The risk is what happened in America,” he said. “The top 20 fake news stories in the last three months of the election were shared more than the top 20 most shared stories that were true.”

Collins is urging Facebook to do more about the problem. He said the company should be quicker to react to viral stories and those flagged by users. “They should then be able to check whether that story is true or not and, if it’s fake, block it or alert people to the fact that it’s disputed.”

The comments cut to the heart of the debate surrounding Facebook and its role as a news distributor. The company has been hesitant to wade in and make judgments about the journalism, or content masquerading as such on its platform. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said on BBC Newsnight: “I don’t think we have to be the publisher and we definitely don’t want to be the arbiter of the truth. We don’t think that’s appropriate for us. We think everyone needs to do their part. Newsrooms have to do their part, media companies, classrooms and technology companies.”

Facebook and Google are, however, taking action to fight fake news. Facebook is using a “disputed” tag to highlight stories that have been flagged by users and debunked by fact-checkers such as PolitiFact and Snopes. It’s also introduced a beginner-friendly guide to spotting fake news, which sits at the top of the News Feed and directs readers to relevant resources in the Facebook Help Center. The company has published similar tips in full-page newspaper ads and, just yesterday, debuted a “Related Articles” section that will show fact-checker stories more prominently.

Google has made similar strides to flag and down-rank fake news in its search results. Still, critics say the pair hasn’t gone far enough. The UK’s culture, media and sport select committee is already investigating the rise of fake news, and British newspapers have called on MPs to take a closer look at Facebook and Google’s role. Germany is holding an election in September and many of its politicians share the same concern as Collins. They’re proposing a law that would fine Facebook and other social networks up to 50 million euros ($53 million) for failing to offer adequate flagging tools, or refusing to remove illegal content.

All of this is built on concerns that fake news had influence on the US presidential election last year. A spokesperson for Facebook said: “Improving news literacy is a global priority and false news runs counter to our mission to connect people with the stories that they find meaningful. We understand that we need to do our part to help people understand how to make decisions about which sources to trust.”

Source: The Guardian

Nomiku Sous Chef essentially offers TV dinners for foodies

Nomiku debuted nearly five years ago with a pretty innovative idea: affordable sous vide cooking in your own home. Back then, machines that did sous vide — a way of cooking vacuum-packed foods in a temperature-controlled water bath — was still a pretty new concept. In 2012, Nomiku launched a successful Kickstarter for its first immersion circulator (raising $586,061 in 30 days) and has since made a WiFi version that you control with your smartphone. Today, the company is ready to announce yet another sous vide machine, but with a twist: it comes with a food program that sends you precooked frozen meals.

The new machine is called the Nomiku Sous Chef, and the food program is called Nomiku Sous Chef Meals. The exterior of the Sous Chef looks identical to that of the original WiFi Nomiku with a temperature dial and a touch-screen display on the front. The big difference is its interior; it has a whole new logic board along with a new RFID reader that is designed to work with the frozen meal packages. Simply wave the RFID label on the package over the front of the machine, and it’ll automatically know what meal it is.

Drop it in the water and the heating algorithm will kick in — instead of a specific temperature, it’ll adjust the heat according to the food and the number of packets. Wait for approximately 30 minutes, and voila, your meal is done. You’ll even get an app notification that your food is ready. “You’re heating it up to a precise temperature,” says CEO Lisa Q. Fetterman. “This is the way Michelin star chefs heat up their food.” You can even leave it in for a day and it’ll still be warm. Think of it as a microwavable meal, but way, way fancier.

The Nomiku Sous Chef will retail for $149 and in order to get it, you need to buy into the food program too. Entrees are priced around $8 to $14, while side dishes are around $4 to $6, and you can mix and match them to your liking. The meals can be tailored to a variety of dietary preferences, like vegan, gluten-free and paleo. Some sample menu items include sweet potato grits, chickpea masala and pork shoulder with chipotle. Nomiku suggests you start out with $80 worth of meals in order to qualify for free shipping.

Unlike other food subscriptions on the market like Freshly and Sprig, Nomiku doesn’t bill you weekly or monthly. Instead, the machine keeps track of your inventory (since you’re using RFID to scan it) and will automatically replenish your default order once you’re down to your last four packages of food. This way, you can go for weeks without using the frozen meals, and you won’t get charged or have to store extra food. If you don’t want the automatic reorder for whatever reason, you have 24 hours to cancel or modify it.

And here’s the kicker: After you spend about $300 worth of food (that’s roughly 20 meals), Nomiku will credit you $149, which essentially makes the machine free. If you want, you can also cancel the food program at any time. Even without it, the Sous Chef still works as a regular sous vide machine, which is more than you can say for a Keurig (won’t work without those pods) or a Juicero (works only with those produce packs).

Oh, and if you already bought a WiFi Nomiku in the past six months and you’re feeling a little bit of buyer’s remorse, Nomiku has a trade-in program that’ll let you swap your old one with the new model at no charge to you. Anything older and you’re out of luck, though since the Sous Chef is “free,” it’s not too bad a deal regardless.

I tried out a prototype version of the Sous Chef at Nomiku’s office in San Francisco last week, and it works as promised. Fetterman scanned a bag of sweet potato grits with the RFID reader and the machine immediately recognized it, showing the name of the meal on the display. The Sous Chef was already attached to a container of water, so she just dropped the packet in and the machine started to heat it up. In 30 minutes, we took the packet out, cut it open and poured the grits into a waiting bowl. It was delicious.

Still, there are a few downsides. For one thing, you can’t get the Sous Chef and the food program separately — in order to get one, you need to buy into the other. You can cancel the food program afterwards, of course, but you do need to order at least the initial batch to get the machine.

Additionally, if you already own a rival sous vide machine (say an Anova or a Joule), you won’t be able to participate in the food program by itself. Of course, you’d probably want to use the food packets with the new Sous Chef anyway because of the RFID and its unique heating algorithm. But as an existing sous vide user, I would’ve preferred the flexibility of a standalone food program. If you want your frozen food to replace microwaveable meals, then it should be able to work with all sous vide machines, not just one.

Interestingly, both the Sous Chef and the meals are all developed and made in California. Indeed, Fetterman tells me that the Sous Chef is the first of Nomiku’s devices that was made start to finish in the US. The food was created and developed by an in-house chef, and is made and packed in a USDA-certified and FDA-certified facility. All of the ingredients are sourced from local farms.

But why not just use a microwave? “Microwaved food tastes awful!” says Fetterman. “The reason they do is because of the uneven heating. And there’s no appliance that is better at reheating than a sous vide machine, because of the precise temperatures.”

Still, Fetterman knows the convenience of using a microwave is pretty attractive. That’s one of the reasons she developed the food program. “What made the microwave take off in the ’70s was microwaved meals, because at last, there was a definite use case,” says Fetterman. “Reheating is a concept that everyone is now aware of. Now, we want to make it not suck. We want food to taste delicious.”

Sweet potato grits with a sous vide egg, cheese and ramps.

Fetterman likens the Nomiku Sous Chef and accompanying meal program to how Apple revolutionized the MP3 industry. It existed before the iPod came along, but what Apple did was tie it into the iTunes ecosystem. All of a sudden if you wanted to use iTunes or buy music from the store, it was just easier to use the iPod too. “We want to be the iTunes for your mouth,” laughs Fetterman.

The Sous Chef Meal program will only be available in California to start, with a nationwide rollout planned for later this year. It sounds like a pretty good deal, but Nomiku does have its work cut out for it with the other food delivery options on the market. It’s still a lot easier to order food on Grubhub or Seamless, and the microwave will probably reign supreme for a long while. But if you don’t feel like cooking — which meal kit services like Blue Apron and Hello Fresh will still have you do — and you want healthy good-for-you food that actually tastes good, then Nomiku’s Sous Chef could be the solution.

“Our tagline is ‘Food tech for people who love to eat,” says Fetterman. “I want to eradicate every obstacle between you and a delicious plate of food.”

UberEats food deliveries come to Edinburgh

After launching in London last summer, Uber’s food delivery service UberEats has expanded to Manchester, Birmingham, and recently, it added the useful option of scheduling post-pub burger drop-offs ahead of time. Tomorrow, UberEats is heading further north to its first Scottish city of Edinburgh, where deliveries from over 70 partner restaurants will be available from 11AM (no breakfast option yet, we’re afraid). Deliveroo has been operating in Edinburgh for the best part of two years now, so expensive on-demand grub isn’t entirely new to its residents, but more choice is never a bad thing.

If you don’t live close enough to the city centre to be covered by the launch zone, UberEats asks you not fret. It expects to begin adding more restaurants to the service and expanding the delivery area within a matter of weeks, with a launch in Glasgow also not “far behind.”

Source: UberEats

‘White Collar’ crime tracker mocks police profiling bias

As Police forces edge ever closer to realizing the plot of Minority Report, a new art-slash-research project aims to point out inequality in our society. With White Collar Crime Risk Zones, three artists come researchers are reworking predictive policing tech to highlight police bias. Instead of utilizing heat maps to predict where street crime could occur, this software flags potential financial crime hotspots. Using an algorithm based on historical white collar offences committed since 1964, it assesses the risk of financial crime in any given area, even predicting the most likely offense.

Cleverly, the project simultaneously points out that predictive algorithms are a worrying policing trend while also highlighting that financial crime often goes unpunished. Taking a further jab at the questionable algorithms US police use to make arrests, White Collar Crime Risk Zones takes 7,000 LinkedIn photos of financial industry executives to generate mugshots of ‘offenders’. Unsurprisingly, when tested in New York, The Financial District, Trump Tower and Midtown Manhattan were all flagged as likely financial crime hotspots.

While the tech is currently only accessible via browser, the trio are eventually planning to integrate the software into an iOS app. With predictive policing tech reportedly showing in-built racial bias, this project brilliantly turns the worrying police algorithms on their head. Still, with most bankers responsible for almost collapsing the world economy still walking free, it’s nice to see artists also drawing attention to such gross inequality.

Via: Vocativ

Source: White Collar Crime white paper

Tweetbot for Mac Updated With Ability to Send Photos in Direct Messages, Username Reply Changes

Tweetbot for Mac has been updated with support for a number of changes that Twitter has introduced in recent months.

The most notable change is that users can now send images within Direct Messages, in line with official Twitter platforms. Clicking on the new camera button to the left of the message field within a Direct Message brings up a Finder window for selecting images, which are displayed in-line within the conversation.

Meanwhile, when replying to a Tweet, the usernames of the people you are replying to no longer count against Twitter’s 140-character limit. Tweetbot still provides the option to do a “classic” reply, where usernames are included within the Tweet, by holding down the Control key while clicking the Reply button.

The app’s developer Tapbots has also fixed an issue where a fullscreen Tweetbot window may not have resized when a Mac’s screen resolution changed, fixed a potential crasher when viewing collections for a user that had a large number of collections, and fixed an image-related issue in tweet detail view.

Tweetbot for Mac version 2.5 is a free update on the Mac App Store [Direct Link] for existing users. The app initially costs $9.99.

Tags: Twitter, Tweetbot for Mac
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Will vertical farming continue to grow, or has it hit the greenhouse ceiling?

Agriculture has come a long way in the past century. We produce more food than ever before — but our current model is unsustainable, and as the world’s population rapidly approaches the 8 billion mark, modern food production methods will need a radical transformation if they’re going to keep up. But luckily, there’s a range of new technologies that might make it possible. In this series, we’ll explore some of the innovative new solutions that farmers, scientists, and entrepreneurs are working on to make sure that nobody goes hungry in our increasingly crowded world.

A pair of lab workers, dressed head to toe in bright white biohazard suits, patrol rows of LED-lit shelves of lettuce, quietly jotting down a series of numbers and readings. Stacked some 15 to 20 feet high, the shelves cover nearly every inch of a massive 25,000-square-foot facility. As the lab hands pass by each row of lettuce, some in the germination phase, some ripe for picking, a psychedelic pink glow wraps around them, painting an almost extraterrestrial setting.

This isn’t a scene plucked from Alfonso Cuarón’s latest blockbuster; it’s an everyday occurrence at a vertical farm in eastern Japan.

The farm was built in the wake of a devastating magnitude 9.1 earthquake that rocked Japan in 2011 and led to a temporary food crisis in the affected area. After seeing the chaos, Japanese plant physiologist Shigerharu Shimamura decided to develop a more consistent, reliable model for manufacturing lettuce. He ended up turning an old Sony-backed semiconductor facility into the planet’s largest vertical farm – a huge operation that now churns out an astounding 10,000 heads of lettuce per day.

“We’re talking coming in and supplying 10, 20, 30 percent of the food supply of an entire city.”

Recently, the facility (and others like it) has become a poster child for indoor farming. There’s now a rapidly expanding movement to bring this type of food production to urban centers all over the globe.

It’s easy to see the appeal. In theory, indoor farms could allow us to grow food 24 hours a day, protect crops from unpredictable weather, and even eliminate the use of pesticides, fertilizers, and herbicides. If these farms were built in cities, we could potentially mitigate crop loss due to shipping and storage, and cut down on fossil fuel usage because food wouldn’t need to be transported very far after harvest.

But of course, the idea of indoor farming isn’t without its detractors. Critics are quick to point out the method’s shortcomings when it comes to efficiency, effectiveness, and cost. In their eyes, vertical farming simply isn’t something that can be deployed on a large enough scale, and therefore isn’t a viable solution to our problems.

So, who’s right? Should we start building giant, garden-stuffed skyscrapers in our cities, or abandon the idea and devote our efforts to improving existing (horizontal) farms? Could vertical farming legitimately help us meet the world’s growing demand for food, or are we chasing the proverbial pie in the sky?

Upward trajectory: the benefits of growing vertically

In his seminal book, The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century, Dr. Dickson Despommier puts forth the theory that vertical farming is a prime candidate to help solve the growing food, water, and energy crisis in the United States.

As populations continue to rise in urban centers around the globe, Despommier sees no other solution.

“As of this moment, the WHO (World Health Organization) and the Population Council estimate that about 50 percent of us live in cities and the other half, of course, live somewhere else,” Despommier said in a video. “Another thing we can learn, from NASA of all places, is how much land those 7 billion people — half urban, half rural — actually need to produce their food every year. It turns out to be the size of South America. So, the size of South America, in land mass, is used just to grow our crops that we plant and harvest. I’m not even talking about herbivores like cows, goats, or sheep.”

When the book was first published in 2011, the indoor farming industry essentially stood as a barren landscape, with few companies setting out to literally put vertical farms on the map. Now, with Despommier’s written blueprint in the wild, the concept has recently gained a good deal of popularity.

“It’s estimated that by around 2050, roughly 80 percent of the world’s population will reside in urban city centers.”

Aside from Despommier, a growing number of people strongly believe in a prominent future for vertical farms. Today, there exist throngs of vertical farming companies all geared toward making this innovative technology a reality. Unsurprisingly, it’s with Despommier and these upstart companies that the industry’s appeal rings the loudest.

Companies such as Bright AgroTech and AeroFarms have set out to educate and inform small farmers to grow locally in urban areas, while other firms like Freight Farms and Edenworks lean on unique and innovative growing concepts — such as shipping containers or rooftop aquaponics — to bring the idea to life. Thus far, there’s no real right or wrong way to go about it, and the recent influx of startups should only prove advantageous to the industry in the long run.

“I do believe there are a few players coming to the table that look poised to supplement local food supplies to a really significant degree,” aquaponics expert Dr. Nate Storey told Digital Trends. “We’re talking coming in and supplying 10, 20, 30 percent of the food supply of an entire city. So, you have this future where you have indoor growers taking on that task, and you have small guys that are kind of collaborating and cooperating to sell to niche markets, really high-value products. Then you have the big boys who are really kind of going head-to-head with some of your field producers, who are growing at much larger scales and interested in replacing that wholesale product.”

As Despommier states on his website, it’s estimated that by around 2050, roughly 80 percent of the world’s population will reside in urban city centers, with the population of the world ballooning by an additional 3 billion people over that time. To Storey’s point, the diversity of vertical farms should allow these urban areas to continue to function as they do today. That is, access to food should remain a basic function of society, as opposed to it serving as a luxury should food production dwindle in the future.

Like the Green Revolution from the 1930s to the 1960s, Storey believes the world sits poised for yet another research and development breakthrough regarding vertical farming.

“When you step back a bit, you begin to realize that we’re kind of on the verge of another Green Revolution,” he added. “I think that indoor agriculture plays a huge role in that. So, the 40,000 feet in the air perspective is it’s not just about supporting local demand for food, it’s about controlling the environment completely. This means eventually taking things out of the field entirely and putting them indoors.”

Dr. Nate Storey is the founder of BrightAgrotech — a company that designs and develops vertical farming technologies, such as the ZipGrow hydroponic system pictured above. (Credit: Bright Agrotech)

Bringing a high-flying idea back down to Earth

While the upstart vertical farming community largely agrees with Storey’s stance, there also exists a wing of detractors who point to indoor farming’s inefficiencies.

The loudest voice among these critics is former United States Department of Agriculture biologist Stan Cox. After serving for the USDA  for 13 years as a wheat geneticist, Cox joined the Land Institute as a senior scientist in 2000, specifically focusing on plant breeding in greenhouses and fields. An author of several books looking at the past, present, and future of all things agriculture and food, Cox is an expert in the field — which is why his view of vertical farming as a scam is a perspective that should give anyone pause.

“This will never be able to supply any significant percentage of our food needs.”

Vertical farming’s largest hurdle — a concept Cox thinks should’ve “collapsed under its own weight of illogic” and that he says remains incredibly difficult to overcome — concerns its scale. Cox posits that to be truly effective, vertical farms would require an incredible amount of floorspace. Despommier envisions indoor farming as a means to avoid the degradation of soil, but turning currently cultivated land into soil-preserving indoor farms would require an almost unfathomable amount of space.

To get a true picture of this, Cox breaks down the floorspace requirement for growing just vegetables — which clocks in at roughly 1.6 percent of cultivated land in the U.S.

While that number may not sound like much, turning that 1.6 percent of cultivated land into a functioning indoor or vertical farming operation demands the relative floorspace of around 105,000 Empire State Buildings. As Cox also points out, even with that much dedicated space, 98 percent of U.S. crops would continue to grow at outdoor farms.

“A colleague and I originally did some back of the envelope calculations that show if we grew grain- or fruit-producing crops [in vertical farms], it would take half of the country’s electricity supply or tens of thousands of Empire State Buildings,” Cox told Digital Trends. “These huge numbers would show that this may be fine for growing, on the small side, fairly expensive leafy greens to be used in restaurants or local areas. But the two things we have to always keep in mind is the amount of energy and resources being put into each unit of food, and the second is the scale. This will never be able to supply any significant percentage of our food needs.”

Despite Cox’s calculations painting a grim picture for large-scale urban production of grain or vegetables, he did emphasize that he’s “all for” urban gardening, or growing food as close to a population center as possible. To Cox, it just “makes sense.” Unfortunately, small urban gardening operations won’t likely have any shot at replacing the more than 350 million acres of rural U.S. cropland that consistently churn out America’s food supply.

“We can only grow enough crops within cities to substitute for a very tiny portion of [our food supply],” Cox added. “We’re still going to depend on rural America for growing the bulk of our food. There’s no big problem with that, really. We certainly want for perishable food, like fresh produce, to grow as much as we can close to where we live. But for grains, dry beans, food legumes, oil seeds, quinoa, all of these dry, nutrient-dense foods with a lower moisture content that can be shipped with very little energy or cost (by rail), that’s still going to be grown around our rural areas.”

Plain and simple, Cox doesn’t see a way around the issue of energy as it pertains to vertical farms — at least for the sustained growth of something like grains or fruit. Because leafy greens require less light to grow sufficiently, it makes much more sense to operate vertical farms geared solely around these foods. Conversely, growing something like corn or wheat — which produce much more dry matter — just doesn’t seem like a feasible option if there’s an intention to keep energy, production, and food costs down.

Growing up: The future of vertical farming

With the vertical farming industry still very much in its infancy, its future remains somewhat murky. Despite the growing number of startups committed to nurturing the idea, its hindrances and drawbacks pointed out by critics like Stan Cox carry just as much clout. Because of this, it’s hard to confidently put stock in either its failure or success.

“The Achilles’ heel of vertical farming or gardening is that it just does not work out energetically.”

Vertical farming’s best shot at a lasting legacy may be to simply pump the brakes on continued advancement. As it stands today, the startups that currently run operations geared toward producing heaps of leafy greens might want to think long and hard about introducing anything capable of completely shutting down momentum — i.e., fruits, grains, etc. In this case, energy usage is the bane of vertical farming’s existence.

“The Achilles’ heel of vertical farming or gardening is that it just does not work out energetically,” Cox points out. “The amount of energy put into [vertical farming] per unit of food you get out of it is very tiny. That’s why almost everything you see being grown this way is some type of leafy green that doesn’t require as much light to produce.”

Now, this isn’t to say vertical farming won’t continue to exist, or even that any of the startups dedicated to its advancement won’t try to introduce fruit or grain to their production. Perhaps there comes a time when someone finds a solution to the energy dependence issue, but for now, leafy greens are the vertical farming industry’s ceiling.

OnePlus 5 render shows off dual cameras and metal body

OnePlus’ upcoming flagship is rumored to sport dual rear cameras.

OnePlus is getting ready to launch its 2017 flagship, which will allegedly be called the OnePlus 5. Tetraphobia — the fear of the number 4 — is a common superstition in Asian countries, and in Chinese culture the number is considered unlucky as it sounds similar to the Mandarin word for “death.” Anyway, it looks like OnePlus doesn’t want to jinx its upcoming phone, so it’s skipping a number.

As for the device itself, a render leaked by India Today suggests the phone will have a dual camera setup at the back along with a brushed aluminum body similar to what we’ve seen on the OnePlus 3T.

The render comes from “people who have seen the phone and have possibly worked on the OnePlus 5,” with the publication stating that the device will make its debut within the next two months with simultaneous launches planned for China and India.

Chinese manufacturers have introduced various implementations of the dual camera system — Huawei used the secondary lens as a monochrome sensor on the P9 and this year’s P10, and Xiaomi decided to offer a telephoto lens with the secondary sensor in the Mi 6. It looks like OnePlus will leverage the technology to improve the device’s low-light shooting capabilities.

There aren’t any details when it comes to internal hardware, but it is likely the OnePlus 5 will be powered by the Snapdragon 835.

Refurbished Galaxy Note 7 could go on sale in South Korea in June

Refurbished Note 7 will be $250 more affordable than the original.

Samsung announced at the end of last month that it would bring back the Note 7 as a refurbished device in select markets. The refurbished model was spotted undergoing Wi-Fi certification earlier this week, and a report out of South Korea suggests the phone will be available at the end of June.

The refurbished Note 7 will feature a smaller 3000mAh battery, but the rest of the components will be unchanged from last year’s model. Samsung has around 3 to 4 million units of the Note 7, and plans to sell 10% of them — or 300,000 units — in its home market. The phone is likely to be called the Note 7R, and is estimated to go on sale for 700,000 won ($620), which is $250 less than what the Note 7 retailed for last year.

As of now, there’s no information regarding other markets where the phone will be made available, but it is possible Samsung will bring the Note 7R to other Asian countries.

Samsung Galaxy Note 7

• Galaxy Note 7 fires, recall and cancellation: Everything you need to know
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• Samsung Galaxy Note 7 review
• The latest Galaxy Note 7 news
• Join the Note 7 discussion in the forums!