This revolutionary material could be the key to self-repairing smartphone screens

Why it matters to you

A major scientific discovery could pave the way for self-healing smartphone screens.

Dropping your phone is a virtual inevitability, and if you live dangerously — i.e., don’t use a case — it can end badly. A nicked, scratched, or shattered smartphone screen usual means a visit to the local repair shop, but scientists at the University of California may have developed a better alternative: A display that can repair itself.

Chemists at UC Riverside have developed material that can repair itself from cuts and scratches. They’ve torn it in half and observed it stitching itself back together in less than 24 hours, and they’ve stretched it to 50 times its original size, only to see it remain functional.

More: Video shows how the LG Flex can repair itself and health from scratching

The secret is a forgiving chemical bond between molecules.

Two bonds exist in materials, Chao Wang, a chemist leading the self-healing materials research, explained to Science Daily: Covalent bonds, which are strong and don’t readily reform once broken; and non-covalent bonds, which are weaker. The hydrogen bonds that connect water fit into the former, non-covalent category — they break and reform constantly, giving water its fluid property.

The polymer that Wang’s team developed is held together by an ion-dipole bond, a force between charged ions and polar molecules. A polar, stretchable polymer and an ionic salt link tightly together — enough to pull the material together when it breaks.

This material is especially well suited to smartphones because it conducts electricity, Wang told Business Insider. Capacitive touchscreens have electrodes underneath that complete a circuit when in contact with conductive material. That’s how phones recognizes taps, touches, and swipes.

More: Self-healing clothes? It could be a possibility thanks to a squid protein

Self-healing smartphone materials aren’t new — the back cover of LG’s G Flex can heal itself from small scratches. But they couldn’t conduct electricity.

Going forward, the researchers hope to improve the material’s properties. They’re testing it in harsh conditions, such as high humidity. “Previous self-healing polymers haven’t worked well in high humidity,” Wang told Science Daily. “Water gets in there and messes things up. It can change the mechanical properties. We are currently tweaking the covalent bonds within the polymer itself to get these materials ready for real-world applications.”

Wang predicts that this new self-healing material will make its way into phone screens and batteries by 2020.

More: Self-healing thread changes from firm to flexible with just a bit of voltage

“Self-healing materials may seem far away for real application, but I believe they will come out very soon with cellphones,” he told Business Insider. “Within three years, more self-healing products will go to market and change our everyday life. It will make our cellphones achieve much better performance than what they can achieve right now.”

This Android malware could be the most sophisticated we’ve seen yet

Why it matters to you

If malware like this makes its way to your phone, it could be devastating to both your phone and your data.

It looks like Android owners have yet another hack to worry about. Security researchers from Google and Lookout are warning of a new malware that’s “one of the most sophisticated and targeted mobile attacks” we’ve seen yet. It’s called Chrysaor, and it was actually first developed as a zero-day iOS exploit called Pegasus. It was previously used to spy on a human rights activist from the United Arab Emirates. Now, however, there’s an Android version of the exploit, too.

Once installed, the malware allows hackers to spy on things like calls, texts, emails, the camera, and even the keys that you type on your device — so it’s not a hack you want on your phone.

More: MacOS isn’t immune to malware! Let these antivirus apps give your system a booster shot

The iOS and Android versions have some major differences. The iOS version, for example, was first developed to jailbreak devices using a total of three zero-day exploits. Zero-day exploits are basically hacks that expose small vulnerabilities in the code of a device. Thankfully, however, Apple patched the vulnerabilities in August, rendering the hack useless.

On Android, Chrysaor works slightly differently. If it can’t root the phone, it instead requests permissions from unknowing users that will still allow it to eventually steal your data. On top of that, the malware is programmed to uninstall itself if it can be spotted, meaning that you may never know that your device was hacked.

Chrysaor isn’t widespread, but it could be devastating if gets installed on your phone. So how do you avoid it? The researchers noted that no apps with Chrysaor have been discovered on Google Play, so users should avoid downloading apps from third-party sources. Google Play has always been, and remains, the safest way to download and install apps on your Android phone. Not only that, but Google has contacted users it thinks were infected with the malware, so if you never got a notice, then it’s likely you weren’t infected.

The best cheap smartphone you can buy

Well over a billion smartphones were sold across the world in 2015. One of the great things about the fierce competition in the smartphone market is that prices are tumbling down. The average selling price declined to less than $300 last year, and it will fall further, according to the IDC. That makes buying a smartphone outright, without being locked into a two-year contract, a realistic possibility for everyone under the sun.

The tricky part is finding the right phone for you, but don’t worry, because we’re here to help. We’ve been testing out the best budget smartphones and this is our short list.

Our pick

Why should you buy this: It’s a true flagship killer with high-end specs, great processing power, and a sharp camera — all wrapped up in a sleek metal package.

Our Score

The best

ZTE Axon 7

An all-metal body, great display, powerful dual speakers, and all the bells and whistles make this a compelling bargain.

$399.98 from Best Buy

$399.98 from B&H

Who’s it for: Anyone who wants a great Android phone at a relatively low price

How much will it cost: $400

Why we picked the ZTE Axon 7:

Nothing about the ZTE Axon 7 suggests a budget price. This is a classy piece of tech, sporting an attractive all-metal design with prominent dual speaker grilles flanking a gorgeous 5.5-inch AMOLED screen. It looks and feels expensive and it can compete with some of the best Android phones on performance.

Things don’t get any less impressive when you pop the hood, because there’s a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor with 4GB RAM and a whopping 64GB internal storage inside. There’s also a more expensive 128GB version with a whopping 6GB of RAM, and you get a MicroSD card slot for further expansion in both models.

You won’t be disappointed by the camera, either. It features a 21-megapixel camera sensor with electronic and optical image stabilization. The front-facing camera is rated at 8-megapixels. Both take great pictures and offer manual settings. A 3,140mAh battery ensures that the Axon 7 will get through an average day with juice to spare.

Then there’s the front-facing stereo speakers with Dolby Atmos technology for unrivaled smartphone sound. If you’re looking for the compromise, you’ll be hard pressed to find it. Even ZTE’s MiFavor UI is mercifully close to stock Android and the manufacturer has pushed out Android 7.0 Nougat, the latest and greatest Android version from Google.

One thing to watch out for is that the ZTE Axon 7 is not officially supported on Verizon or Sprint. It is technically capable of working with their networks, and some people report limited success, but your mileage may vary. It’s also slippery, it’s not water resistant, and there’s no wireless charging support, but we’re nitpicking because this is an unparalleled phone for the money.

Our first impressions

Experts claim Galaxy S8’s display is the most impressive they’ve seen in a phone

Why it matters to you

Samsung’s improved display in the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus should benefit everything from gaming and watching movies to simply using the phone outdoors.

One look at Samsung’s new Galaxy S8 and you know the company spent a great deal of time perfecting the screen. From the nearly nonexistent bezels to the elegant curves at both edges, and the way the panel dominates the surface of the phone, the S8’s screen might be its most singularly defining feature. And now, experts at DisplayMate have awarded it with the highest rating they have ever handed out.

In its report, DisplayMate calls the new Samsung flagship’s 5.8-inch AMOLED screen the “most innovative and high performance” the company has ever lab tested and was particularly impressed by the device’s color accuracy and a wider spectrum of colors. The analysts found that the S8’s display could reproduce 113 percent of DCI-P3 and 142 percent of sRGB / Rec.709 color gamuts. Coupled with the Mobile HDR Premium certification, it reportedly outperforms the S7’s screen by almost every measure, but especially when used in high ambient light conditions or for watching 4K UHD content.

More: Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus: Our first take

DisplayMate also notes the sub-pixel rendering technique Samsung used on the 2,960 x 1,440 panel makes the display look significantly sharper. As explained in the report, sub-pixel rendering treats each component of a pixel — the red, green, and blue elements — as independent, rather than constrained in the same cluster. This results in images that can appear to have up to triple the resolution of whatever the screen is rated at. Bear in mind, the S8 already packs 570 pixels per inch.

The S8 set several records in DisplayMate’s testing, the most notable being a peak brightness of 1,020 nits — 17 percent brighter than the S7 — which the report claims are necessary for viewing HDR content as intended. But even when using the phone under normal conditions, the improved viewing angles and automatic brightness setting offered by the S8’s front and back dual ambient light sensors should result in a better experience. The rear sensor measures the light behind the device that you typically see in the periphery, making it a more accurate measure of surrounding conditions to adjust the display.

What makes these improvements even more remarkable is that Samsung apparently didn’t increase the power going to the display with the S8. In other words, the phone is accomplishing all of these enhancements — higher brightness, wider color gamut, and improved sharpness — while sapping the same energy as 2016’s model. As impressed as we were with the S8’s screen when we had some hands-on time with it at Samsung’s Unpacked event, the hard data helps put things into perspective.

This awesome arctic doomsday vault for data has ultra-safe storage down cold

Why it matters to you

Paranoid about losing your cat photos, or something even more important? This underground vault stores data as photosensitive film to keep it safe from any possible attack.

You know what’s cooler than a doomsday vault for storing the world’s most valuable data? A doomsday vault for storing the world’s most valuable data that looks like the villainous lair from a James Bond movie, and opened for business this month.

What we’re referring to is the newly opened Arctic World Archive, a data vault which shares a mountain headquarters with Global Seed Vault, a giant archive of the world’s plant seeds. Located in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole, it promises to be the safest place for your data on the entire planet.

More: How the father of the World Wide Web plans to reclaim it from Facebook and Google

“We’ve developed a unique new technology for the long-term preservation of digital data for future generations,” Katrine Thomsen, project manager for the Arctic World Archive, told Digital Trends. “We needed a really secure place, which turned out to be a mine in Svalbard. In the mine, there are perfect conditions, between negative-5 and negative-10 degrees Celsius, and with the right amount of humidity.”

The technology being used by the Piql, the archiving company which is running the vault, involves writing data onto ultra-durable photosensitive film, much like a massive QR code. By not only not being online but no longer even in digital form, the data is safe from cyber attacks — while the former coal mine bunker is deep enough to survive nuclear attacks, too.

“When you want to retrieve it at some point in the future, you simply scan the film using one of our scanners or use some magnifying light and a means of capturing it like a camera, and you get your data back to re-create the program,” Thomsen continued.

Already, Piql is receiving some fascinating material for archiving — such as history documents relating to the constitution in Brazil, as well as historical documents from Mexico, which date back all the way to the Incas. That doesn’t mean the company isn’t available to private companies or citizens, though. If you’re so inclined, you can store your precious snaps of the cat wearing his adorable Christmas coat.

“We can store any kind of data, from pictures and sound to text,” Thomsen said. “When we receive data from someone, which can be sent to us either over the internet or through some other storage method, we run it through our software and print it on film. In the long-term, our solution is much more affordable than other digital storage solutions, where people have to migrate the data all the time.”

Our only question now is how long it takes for this place to show up as a location in a future Dan Brown novel? We give it a couple of years — tops.

This awesome arctic doomsday vault for data has ultra-safe storage down cold

Why it matters to you

Paranoid about losing your cat photos, or something even more important? This underground vault stores data as photosensitive film to keep it safe from any possible attack.

You know what’s cooler than a doomsday vault for storing the world’s most valuable data? A doomsday vault for storing the world’s most valuable data that looks like the villainous lair from a James Bond movie, and opened for business this month.

What we’re referring to is the newly opened Arctic World Archive, a data vault which shares a mountain headquarters with Global Seed Vault, a giant archive of the world’s plant seeds. Located in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole, it promises to be the safest place for your data on the entire planet.

More: How the father of the World Wide Web plans to reclaim it from Facebook and Google

“We’ve developed a unique new technology for the long-term preservation of digital data for future generations,” Katrine Thomsen, project manager for the Arctic World Archive, told Digital Trends. “We needed a really secure place, which turned out to be a mine in Svalbard. In the mine, there are perfect conditions, between negative-5 and negative-10 degrees Celsius, and with the right amount of humidity.”

The technology being used by the Piql, the archiving company which is running the vault, involves writing data onto ultra-durable photosensitive film, much like a massive QR code. By not only not being online but no longer even in digital form, the data is safe from cyber attacks — while the former coal mine bunker is deep enough to survive nuclear attacks, too.

“When you want to retrieve it at some point in the future, you simply scan the film using one of our scanners or use some magnifying light and a means of capturing it like a camera, and you get your data back to re-create the program,” Thomsen continued.

Already, Piql is receiving some fascinating material for archiving — such as history documents relating to the constitution in Brazil, as well as historical documents from Mexico, which date back all the way to the Incas. That doesn’t mean the company isn’t available to private companies or citizens, though. If you’re so inclined, you can store your precious snaps of the cat wearing his adorable Christmas coat.

“We can store any kind of data, from pictures and sound to text,” Thomsen said. “When we receive data from someone, which can be sent to us either over the internet or through some other storage method, we run it through our software and print it on film. In the long-term, our solution is much more affordable than other digital storage solutions, where people have to migrate the data all the time.”

Our only question now is how long it takes for this place to show up as a location in a future Dan Brown novel? We give it a couple of years — tops.

Playback issues frustrate some Google Play Music users

Why it matters to you

Google Play Music is one of the world’s leading music streaming platforms, so these issues could affect a large number of users.

Users on the Google Play Help Forum are reporting issues with playback in Google Play Music, specifically about songs that intermittently stop. The issue in question actually dates back to July of last year, but was unearthed again this week following a post on Reddit.

The problems seem to differ from one account to the next. Some users cite songs that stop playing just before the end. Others, like the first post on Google’s forum, describe being able to play several songs successfully before the fourth or fifth one cuts out during the first few seconds.

More: Some Google Pixel phones have a microphone issue, but Google implemented a fix.

What’s more, the issues don’t seem to be constrained to a single device. That initial post references a Samsung Galaxy S5 Neo, and many others involve Pixel phones running the latest Android firmware. It also doesn’t seem to matter where the music is stored, be it locally or on Google’s streaming platform.

The attempted solutions are wide-ranging and don’t appear to be universally successful. Some have suggested rolling back to a previous version of the Google Play Music app, while others have fixed the bug by clearing the cache. One user even said the issue disappeared after upgrading his account to a 30-day free trial. Certain conditions, like Bluetooth streaming, have also been identified by some to exacerbate the problems; conversely, charging appears to prevent it, indicating power management issues.

These kinds of glitches are really the worst type of problem you can encounter on Android, in that they are platform-wide and seemingly don’t adhere to a set, consistent behavior. It’s challenging to develop a solution to a problem that affects a wide range of devices and presents in a myriad of ways.

Thankfully, the issue appears to be gaining visibility, increasing the likelihood that Google will have a fix out soon. If you’re affected by it, be sure to keep an eye out here as well as on that forum thread. You can also report your experience to the company via chat or phone.

Sprinkles is a new app from Microsoft that uses AI to caption your photos

Why it matters to you

Sometimes, half the battle of posting a good picture lies in the caption. Sprinkles wants to help with its AI capabilities.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the right words underneath a picture? That’s priceless. That, at least, appears to be the bet Microsoft is making with its latest photo app. It’s called Sprinkles, and it claims to “make your photos fun in two seconds.”

For now, it’s an iOS-only application but it already appears quite popular, having made its way into the “New apps we love” section of the App Store. Taking aim at a younger generation of users, Sprinkles gives you everything you need to decorate your photos (like stickers, emojis, and more), but differentiates itself by adding a bit of artificial intelligence to the mix.

More: Confirmed: Microsoft will unveil Project Scorpio this week

You see, Sprinkles is able to detect faces, figure out how old the photograph’s subject is, how he or she is feeling, and thereby suggest captions for you. Because we can’t all feel clever all the time. Sprinkles can even tell you who your celebrity look-a-like is, which could go a long way in helping you determine what to write under your image.

While none of these features in and of themselves are brand new (Microsoft previously helped you find your celebrity resemblance with CelebsLike.me, and guessed your age with How-Old.net), it’s notable that all these tools are now living under a single roof in a single app. Not only can Sprinkles suggest captions based on the content of the photo, but it can also draw inspiration from where or when the photo was taken (like a TGIF caption for your end-of-the-week snapshot).

Once you’ve sufficiently jazzed up your picture, you can share the masterpiece via text, Facebook, Twitter, email, among other methods. So if you are looking for another photo app to distract you, Sprinkles may be a good way to go.

Black women in tech make 79 cents for every $1 a white man makes in the same job

Why it matters to you

Everyone deserves to make the same amount for the same job — and gender, race, and sexuality shouldn’t influence that.

We live in the 21st century, and as such you would hope that gender, race, and sexuality doesn’t impact how much a person can make. Unfortunately, however, it seems as though we still have a long way to go when it comes to pay equality.

A recent study published by Hired suggests that almost two in three women are paid a lower salary for the same job than their male counterparts. While that’s a little better than last year, when 69 percent of women were paid less compared to 63 percent this year, the figures show that there’s still a lot of work to be done.

More: ‘Oh! THAT memo.’ PayPal plans gender equality program with all-male panel

For the study, Hired looked at data from 120,000 salary offers to 27,000 different candidates at 4,000 different tech companies. In general, 75 percent of the applicants were men — and Hired found that a whopping 53 percent of the time companies only interviewed men, compared to 6 percent of the time when only women were interviewed.

In general, women were paid 4 percent less than men for the same job, but gender isn’t the only differentiator that researchers looked at. Asian men were paid 96 cents for ever dollar a white man made, while Latino men were paid 92 cents. White women were paid 90 cents, and black men were paid 88 cents. Asian women made 87 cents, and Latina women made 83 cents. Finally, black women made only 79 cents for every dollar a white man made.

In addition to the inequality in gender and race when it comes to pay in the tech industry, researchers also looked at sexualities, finding that LGBTQ individuals made less than their non-LGBTQ counterparts.

Of course, its in the companies’ best interests to pay people the same for the same job. For example, the report noted that by paying less to nonwhite men, companies are harming their job retention rate.

Things may be getting slightly better, but better really isn’t good enough. It’s long past time for pay inequality to be a thing of the past.

New AI assistant makes sure your selfies aren’t revealing more than they should

Why it matters to you

Are your selfies revealing private information you’re unaware of? This AI assistant would let you know before it’s too late.

You don’t need to be reading conspiracy theories about global elites secretly being shape-shifting reptiles to become deeply paranoid online. In fact, a quick glance at your favorite computer science academic journal (and everyone’s got at least one, right?) will be enough to convince you that, when it comes to keeping yourself safe and secure, you’ve been doing everything all wrong.

There are a plethora of potential identifiers in virtually every picture, from obvious ones like faces which be recognized by machines to ones that sound like they come straight from a James Bond movie, such as extracting fingerprints from high-res photos that show your hands. Fortunately, researchers at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Informatics are on the case, and in a newly published paper, they reveal their solution: An AI which proactively scans every image you prepare to post and alerts you whether it’s secretly revealing data you really don’t want to share.

More: Facial recognition systems could be confused by these guerrilla T-shirt designs

The system they describe would involve a deep learning neural network trained to recognize revealing patterns in large amounts of data, and then to search for those same patterns in subsequent images. For their work, the Max Planck Institute researchers collected thousands of images, and then filtered them into 68 different privacy categories, based on information they’re revealing.

arXiv/Orekondy et. al.

They also conducted surveys into how much data people were happy to share online, and how much they thought particular photos were revealing — thereby highlighting the fact that we, as puny humans, really aren’t that good at parsing this particular task.

The AI would therefore be a weight off users’ mind, as we would be alerted of potential privacy issues without having to scour every picture, Where’s Waldo?-style, for obscure revealing clues.

No, the privacy-minded Siri isn’t ready yet — with a large part of the reason being that some of the technology described isn’t yet up to the necessary performance standards. But with privacy an increasingly big issue, and deep learning advancing at an astonishingly rapid rate, it’s good to know that people are thinking of new ways to keep us safe.

Who knows? In 10 years time, a tool like this could be as ubiquitous as spell check!