Why Amazon wants to replace your mirror with a camera

Years ago, if someone told you that she was buying a camera for her bedroom, you’d imagine she was planning something naughty. But times have changed, and Amazon believes that you’ll spend $200 on a camera that’s both an extension of your smart home and the ultimate fashion accessory. The Echo Look is designed to help you look your best every morning, guiding and improving your style every time it’s used. But what it represents, and what Amazon gets out of it, could be a much bigger deal for the future of fashion.

Echo Look resembles pretty much every other smart home security camera you’d care to find, but it’s not about protecting your property. The unit is designed for fashionable types who like to document their daily outfits and make sure that they’re always looking good. Look comes with a depth-sensing camera, bolstered with four LEDs that’ll turn even the dingiest bedroom into a half-decent photo studio.

If you take a selfie in a full-length mirror before leaving the house each morning, then the Echo Look is its modern-day replacement. Rather than holding a phone across your body, you can simply speak and ask the device to take a picture for you. The unit is voice activated and comes with Amazon’s chatty computing platform, Alexa. In addition, the depth-sensing camera will automatically blur the background to hide how messy your place is.

Now, this sort of setup won’t be good enough for hard-core Instagram types and fashion bloggers, of course. Those folks often have lighting rigs and DSLRs and edit their images before uploading them to social media. But if you’re just in the habit of sharing your outfit choices on the internet, then you’ll find that job much easier with the Echo Look than it was before.

Because the Look comes with Alexa, it’ll pull double duty as a Trojan horse to get Amazon’s voice control platform into your bedroom. If you’ve already spent big on an Echo, you’ve probably left it in the family room or kitchen, where you’d get most use out of it. Those who’ve yet to find a reason to jump onto Amazon’s bandwagon may find Alexa a nice extra feature.

The other half of Echo Look’s sales pitch is Style Check, an app that builds on the company’s Outfit Compare platform to keep your “look on point using advanced machine learning and advice from fashion specialists.” Simply submit two snaps of you wearing different outfits and the system will tell you which one looks best. It’ll do that by crunching what’s trending, what fashion experts are saying, how well it fits you and what colors are in season.

Amazon is, of course, storing every single one of those images, along with hundreds of pieces of contextual information too. That data will be constantly crunched not only to understand what style suits you but also what outfits you pick depending on weather, mood or season. In addition, the information will be used to train a machine learning system that can offer better suggestions for every Echo Look user.

Echo Look will also enable Amazon to start tracking customer habits in ways that the fashion industry will envy. After all, most clothing retailers have no clue if their products are worn once or every day. Meanwhile, retailers with loyalty schemes — like Target — can predict purchasing outcomes based on repeated custom. But most people don’t buy scarves every week, so retailers have no idea if their products are successful in the real world.

Since Amazon will store and track every outfit image you send it, it’ll determine what products are getting lots of repeated use. So Jeff Bezos and friends will know what outfits, styles, patterns and brands you already like and offer similar suggestions. In addition, Amazon might be able to work out when your everyday-use biker jacket starts showing signs of wear and offer up a discounted replacement.

“Smart Mirrors are hugely expensive. You know what isn’t expensive? An AR clothes platform that Amazon can get its users to pay for in their own homes.”

Traditional brick-and-mortar retail is having its lunch eaten by the internet, and Amazon has led that charge for decades. Twenty years ago, Main Street would have had a couple of bookstores, a DVD or games emporium and a place to buy electronics. Even grocery shopping is changing with the Dash button, as Amazon eats into purchases for laundry detergent and toilet paper.

But fashion retail is a tougher nut to crack, since there’s still a preference by some people to go into stores and try before they buy. A 2015 survey by analysis firm TimeTrade found that more than 85 percent of consumers prefer to shop in stores. This is for a variety of reasons, including a desire to feel the product, a dislike of waiting for shipping and because they value human advice.

For the past century, at least, there have been ways to shop without visiting stores, either with catalogs or, these days, going online. Products are ordered and mailed to you, with you returning the ones that don’t fit or aren’t right. The shipping and returns are often free or at negligible cost, since they’re still cheaper than renting and staffing a brick-and-mortar store. But it’s still a burden, since those companies have to overbuy inventory and spend big sums on shipping.

Online stores have a huge advantage in that their inventories can be almost limitless compared to the space constraints of a real store. Retailers have belatedly woken up to this threat by building and installing smart mirrors in their flagship stores. These devices are often used as an attraction, enabling people to use an augmented reality overlay to “try on” outfits that aren’t available in store.

But smart mirrors require time and space to set up and are hugely expensive, and you can only have a couple in store. You know what isn’t expensive? An AR clothes platform that Amazon can get its users to pay for to have in their own homes. There, all they have to do is snap themselves in their underwear and their smartphone will let them “try on” pretty much every piece of clothing on sale in the whole country.

We know that AR is going to be hugely important, and Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and startups like Magic Leap are all working on it. Amazon has already dipped its toe into AR with products like Flow, which was designed as a way for people to identify products to buy without bar codes. Using a depth-sensing camera to clock customers’ measurements and overlaying outfits onto them makes perfect sense.

Amazon has had envious eyes pointed toward the clothing retail market for a while. Amazon Fashion pushed a $15 million ad campaign over the 2016 holiday season to highlight its new in-house clothing lines. These marques, called things like Franklin & Freeman, North Eleven and Scout + Ro, are designed to look like fashion brands in their own right.

But all of these are just toes in the water compared to what Amazon could do when it begins to join up these ideas. It is building fashion brands and learning how to make its own clothes quickly and efficiently. It already has a logistics platform that can deliver goods to people in less than a day. Now it’ll begin documenting the vital statistics and shopping preferences of every one of its customers who owns an Echo Look.

It’s the depth-sensing camera that’s the giveaway, since that technology is clearly going to become vital. Brooks Brothers, for instance, already harnesses the powers of depth-sensing technology to tailor shirts for its customers. Feetz is doing a similar job to create custom-made, 3D-printed shoes for people with problematic feet.

Clearly, the end goal is to have a system whereby Amazon can produce tailored clothes with custom sizing and next-day shipping. At that point, you’d have to wonder why you’d bother trekking down to Nordstrom’s, Barney’s or Bloomingdale’s for an on off-the-shelf number. Or not, because while Amazon may not reveal how many people buy its Kindle readers and Echo products, Echo Look could be a Fire Phone-esque dud. Only the future knows for now.

Google has already lost the hardware chief it poached from Amazon

You probably have food that’s been in your freezer longer than David Foster (nope, still not the composer) stayed at Google after leaving Amazon. After six months, Foster is vacating his position as vice president of Google’s vice president of hardware product development, according to Bloomberg. In case you forgot, he played a role in the launch the Pixel phone and Google Home speaker’s launches. Prior to that, he led hardware development on Amazon’s Echo speakers, the Kindle Paperwhite and Voyage e-readers.

Looking at his resume on LinkedIn, his short stay is something of an anomaly. Foster previously held posts at Apple, Amazon and IBM for almost six years each. Google is where he stayed the shortest amount of time, behind 13-month stints at both Gibson Guitar and SuperMac Technology.

Bloomberg’s sources say that the search juggernaut won’t be replacing Foster either. At least not immediately. Which makes us wonder what Google has up its sleeve for this year’s round of hardware. It’s rumored that the big G will unveil a pair of new Pixel devices this year, and seeing a new version of the Home smart speaker wouldn’t be too surprising either. With I/O around the corner, we might not have to wait long to find out.

Source: Bloomberg

Mixtile Hub Smart Home Bridge Won’t Support HomeKit After All

At CES 2017 earlier this year, Chinese company Focalcrest debuted the Mixtile Hub, a supposedly MFi-certified smart home bridge that promised to bring HomeKit connectivity to various connected home products that would not otherwise be able to interface with Apple’s smart home platform.

Specifically, Focalcrest said the Mixtile Hub would be able to interface with Z-Wave and ZigBee devices and sensors, as well as connect to various smart home devices through Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

As it turns out, however, the Mixtile Hub won’t support HomeKit after all. At some point between CES and now, Focalcrest removed any mention of HomeKit from its press release—see the original for comparison—and the company now plans to launch the Mixtile Hub with Amazon Alexa support only.

In a recent email to MacRumors forum member Macwick, shared with us, Focalcrest said Apple doesn’t permit smart home bridge products to be compatible with other standards or brands such as Z-Wave and ZigBee.

In the past few months, we kept to contact Apple for approval the HomeKit related designs. But this stage really takes a bit long and till now we still don’t get a positive reply from Apple.

From our communication with Apple, we feel that they don’t permit bridge products to compatible with different brand devices upon some uncertain reasons, as you know, our Mixtile Hub is a bridge product too.

While it’s unsurprising that Apple isn’t backing the Mixtile Hub, it’s disappointing that Focalcrest so prominently advertised HomeKit support prior to receiving certification for the product. Focalcrest admitted that it’s uncertain if its “redefined” Mixtile Hub will still be attractive to homeowners.

Tag: HomeKit
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Sean Combs’ Documentary ‘Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop’ to Debut Exclusively on Apple Music This June

In the wake of Jimmy Iovine detailing Apple Music’s ongoing efforts to become “an overall movement in popular culture,” today Sean Combs — aka Puff Daddy — announced that his new documentary Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A Bad Boy Story is coming exclusively to Apple Music on June 25 (via Billboard). The announcement comes after the documentary’s premiere at the TriBeCa Film Festival yesterday.

Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop documents the rise of Combs and his record label throughout the 1990s, and extends to the process Combs went through when he put together the 20th anniversary Bad Boy reunion show tour in 2016. The partnership with Apple Music began when Iovine attended one of those shows.

“I went to the [Bad Boy Reuion] concert and thought it was incredible,” Jimmy Iovine, Apple Music chairman and CEO, tells Billboard. “I think Puff and Bad Boy’s story is incredible and one that a lot of people can relate to in any genre or in any business. His story is powerful. He really overcame a lot to get to where he’s at today and the documentary shows that.”

Apple Music is said to have exclusive rights to the documentary for at least one year. According to Combs himself, he feels “blessed” to be working with Apple to show the impact that the Bad Boys have had on fans throughout the years, including the death of Notorious B.I.G.

“I knew this was a story that should be shared with the world,” Diddy said in a statement “Heather Parry and Live Nation Productions, and Director Daniel Kaufman, helped create this very special documentary. Now I’m blessed to also be working with Apple to showcase the film and share Bad Boy’s history and impact with fans. The support Live Nation, Apple and everyone on the team has given to this project is a true testament to the Bad Boy legacy.”

In his interview with Billboard today, Iovine detailed near-term plans for Apple Music that would focus on original video content with music-related themes, a category that Combs’ Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop fits right into. Brad Paisley also just announced a “visual album” coming as a timed exclusive to Apple Music tomorrow, April 28. Further down the line, Apple Music subscribers will have access to a much wider variety of shows, which might even include content from J.J. Abrams.

Tags: Jimmy Iovine, Apple Music
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Gboard on Android makes it easier to type and tweak your text

Google has made a few seemingly minor tweaks that could make Gboard on Android much easier to use. The keyboard now comes with a new text editing mode with arrow keys that you can use to quickly go to the part of your text that you want to edit or delete. You’ll also find huge select, cut, copy and paste buttons right next to those keys, so you won’t have to long press on the text box and to drag the text pointer around. You can access all these by pressing the G button and tapping the new text edit icon that looks like a “I” in between two pointers.

If selecting, cutting and copying text have never been an issue for you, you may find Gboard’s other new feature more useful. You’ll now be able to resize and reposition the keyboard for when you’re typing with one hand on a big phone or for any other scenario when it’s needed. Simply press G and then tap the triple-dot icon to see the option to choose one-handed mode. That’s where you can customize your keyboard.

In addition to these two changes, Google has added support for 22 Indic languages. The Gboard team even worked with native speakers across India to get enough samples for the more obscure languages of the lot to train its machine learning models. As a result, you can not only type in any of those languages in their native script, but also in the English alphabet. The keyboard has transliteration support for all of them that can convert what you type on the QWERTY keyboard to their native script.

[Image credit: Mariella Moon/Engadget]

Source: Google

Atlus has change of heart over ‘Persona 5’ streaming restrictions

Since launching last month, Persona 5 has already comfortably earned its place among the JRPG greats. Yet for streamers, this highly acclaimed title has become more of an archaic headache than a gaming highlight. Upon launch, developer Atlus forbade fans from streaming any content past a certain point in the game, threatening to hit ‘offending’ fans with copyright claims or even to ban their account. Now, after community outrage, the developer has decided to relax its punitive stance.. slightly.

For the uninitiated, Persona 5 runs on an in-game calendar, letting players choose how best to spend their time. Previously, players were forbidden from showing any content that took place past mid-July in the game world. Now, Atlus has apologized, instead asking streamers not to show anything that happens beyond November 19th in Persona 5. While it’s Atlus’ right to protect its intellectual property, attempting to prevent spoilers in such an aggressive manner feels counter intuitive in 2017. With the game launching in Japan months before it arrived in the west, players could easily find out Persona 5’s ending long before it was streamed.

It begs the question whether preventing spoilers was really Atlus’ true motivation here. Streamers and YouTubers can both command huge audiences, and many publishers have embraced this, seeing people showcasing their games as free marketing. With Persona 5 presumably clocking up a hefty development budget during its lengthy creation time, it’s difficult not to wonder whether the move was simply a bid to forcibly drive more sales.

Either way, it’s good to see Atlus loosening its archaic restrictions and apologizing for the heavy-handed threats. Whether Persona fans will forgive them, however, is another matter entirely.

Source: Atlus

Cassini probe survives first dive between Saturn and its rings

NASA’s Cassini probe has emerged unscathed after its first dive between Saturn and its rings. The spacecraft’s ground team had to spend 20 hours wondering whether the probe was doing well or whether it plunged to its death a few months too early. Thankfully, it got back in contact with NASA at 2:56AM EDT today, April 27th. By 3:01 AM, it started beaming back precious data about the planet’s atmosphere, including the unprocessed images of Saturn’s features above.

The probe flew 1,900 miles above the gas giant’s clouds and around 200 miles away from the innermost rings, a region that has never been explored before. NASA wasn’t even 100 percent sure whether the ring’s particles in the region could hurt the spacecraft enough to cause its premature death. Since it was going to travel at speeds reaching 77,000 mph, the team chose to be careful and used Cassini’s dish-shaped antenna as a shield to protect it. They had to turn the antenna away from the Earth to do that, so it couldn’t beam back data until the probe was out of the 1,500-mile-wide gap.

Cassini Project Manager Earl Maize said in a statement:

“No spacecraft has ever been this close to Saturn before. We could only rely on predictions, based on our experience with Saturn’s other rings, of what we thought this gap between the rings and Saturn would be like. I am delighted to report that Cassini shot through the gap just as we planned and has come out the other side in excellent shape.”

Before the Cassini probe plunges into Saturn’s atmosphere on September 15th, it will perform the same dive 21 more times in the next few months. It’s on a mission to gather as much data as possible, though the info it sends back from the first one will help NASA ensure it can survive until it’s time for the probe to say goodbye.

We did it! Cassini is in contact with Earth and sending back data after a successful dive through the gap between Saturn and its rings. pic.twitter.com/cej1yO7T6a

— CassiniSaturn (@CassiniSaturn) April 27, 2017

Source: NASA JPL

Apple Music’s Original TV Plans Now Include Potential Shows and Videos From J.J. Abrams and R. Kelly

Jimmy Iovine, one of the heads of Apple Music, has given multiple interviews and visions for the future of Apple’s streaming music service over the past few months, mainly detailing how Apple Music will morph into “an entire pop cultural experience” with the advent of original video content. In an interview with Bloomberg posted online today, Iovine continued that pitch by stating, “I’m trying to help Apple Music be an overall movement in popular culture,” detailing plans that include original shows and videos with partners like director J.J. Abrams and rapper R. Kelly.

The expansion of Apple Music beyond streaming new songs and music videos by artists began slowly for Apple, with the company releasing a tour documentary in partnership with Taylor Swift in 2015, as well as a 23-minute short film with Drake in 2016. Those modest beginnings have helped Apple learn what works and what doesn’t, with Iovine stating, “We’re gonna grow slowly no matter what, I don’t know how to do it fast.”

Iovine further mentioned that Apple’s vast resources provide the Apple Music team with enough room for betting on risky projects, so the service can “make one show, three shows” to see what viewers favor.

“A music service needs to be more than a bunch of songs and a few playlists,” says Iovine, 64. “I’m trying to help Apple Music be an overall movement in popular culture, everything from unsigned bands to video. We have a lot of plans.”

Apple Music’s foray into video programming could be a temporary dalliance, but if Iovine succeeds, the world’s wealthiest company could increase its investment, routinely competing for top projects. “We have the freedom, because it’s Apple, to make one show, three shows, see what works, see what doesn’t work until it feels good,” Iovine says.

Those slow-to-build plans apparently include a largely redesigned, “new edition” of the Apple Music app coming to iOS 11 this fall that will “better showcase video.” Because of this update, Iovine said that Apple won’t make the same mistakes that rival Spotify has made in producing original video content, but subsequently not promoting it enough to get people to watch. “We’re going to market it like it’s a TV show,” Iovine mentioned. “You’re going to know this is out.”

Currently, those shows include Carpool Karaoke: The Series and Planet of the Apps, although the former show was recently delayed indefinitely and the latter has only a vague spring launch date. In the immediate future, Iovine said that Apple Music’s video ambitions are still very music-related, including Dr. Dre’s Vital Signs, and Iovine even wants to produce a sequel to R. Kelly’s rap opera Trapped in the Closet.

“For a music streaming service,” Iovine says, “we’re building a very decent slate.”

According to Carpool Karaoke producer Ben Winston, who helped sign the agreement to partner with Apple along with star James Corden, the mere fact that Apple is involved with producing these new shows is all it takes to get people excited to work with them. “If I call LeBron James and I name five networks or cable channels or even different online platforms, I’m not convinced he agrees to sit in a car,” Winston says. “If you say you’re doing a new show for Apple, people get excited.”

But the company’s plans are far bigger than just original content that has a music slant, with Iovine having met with well-known Hollywood creatives to discuss “possible ideas,” including director J.J. Abrams and producer Brian Grazer, although talks with Grazer regarding Imagine Entertainment are said to have “fizzled out” for unknown reasons. Of course, any specific details regarding what a J.J. Abrams-produced series on Apple Music might be were not given.

Previous reports of Apple’s dealings in Hollywood have been largely critical of the Cupertino company’s inability to forge ahead with a consistent, unified vision in the original content space. For Iovine, the almost-two-year-old service still has a ways to go. “Apple Music is nowhere near complete in my head,” he said. Achieving his vision for the future of Apple Music has gotten Iovine in hot water with some of his colleagues, as well.

Some ideas get Iovine into trouble. He’s taken meetings with artists and made arrangements to release music without telling anyone in advance, frustrating colleagues. He’s persuaded artists to release music exclusively with Apple, frustrating record labels. But no one doubts his knack for bringing people together.

Everyone from Apple CEO Tim Cook to Apple Music executive Bozoma Saint John have reinforced Apple’s future with original content coming to its music streaming service. Earlier this year during an earnings call, Cook said that Apple is starting off slow — echoing Iovine’s comment — and has a “toe in the water” testing original content, while Saint John said of Apple Music as a whole: “We’re developing something very special and we just want people to pay attention.”

Tags: Jimmy Iovine, Apple Music
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RoboBees, city sanctuaries, and hot hives could save the world from ‘beepocalypse’

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. Luckily, a range of new technologies might help 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.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, or have had your head buried in an empty mining bee hive, you’ve probably heard about the current “beepocalypse.” Over the past few years, colony collapse disorder (CCD) has ravaged bee populations worldwide. More than 40 percent of colonies in the United States died in 2016 alone, so to call the plight a “decimation” would be a gross understatement.

Nearly one-third of our diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, bees are responsible for 80 percent of that pollination. Needless to say, an enormous portion of our global food network hinges on the well-being of this unsung agricultural workforce. Simply put: If they go, we go.

There are a slew of underlying causes behind this massive die-off, and consequently, there’s no silver bullet that will reverse the trend. The issue is a multifaceted one, and solving such a labyrinthine problem will require a web of complementary efforts.

Luckily, planet Earth already has somebody on the case.

Right now, all over the world, conservationists, engineers, and everyday citizens are leveraging modern technology to help save our buzzing, winged allies. In this article, we’ll take you on a tour of not only the biggest problems facing beekeepers right now, but also some of the amazing solutions people have dreamed up to solve them.

Turns out that pesticides are bad for bees. Who knew?!

Over the past few decades, farmers have looked to genetically modified crops and a new class of pesticides — namely neonicotinoids (or neonics) — to stretch yields to meet our global food demands. Unfortunately, the residual effects of these crops and pesticides have been directly linked to higher rates of colony collapse disorder — a phenomenon in which the majority of worker bees abandon the hive and leave their queen behind.

Even if we stopped using neonics worldwide yesterday, our problems wouldn’t be over.

Therein lies the conundrum. We rely on these agricultural chemicals to produce adequate amounts of food for ourselves, but they’re also killing bees and chipping away at a crucial pillar of our food system. Scientists say we probably shouldn’t keep using neonics, but farmers will likely continue to do so because they boost crop yields. It’s a vicious cycle.

The good news is that lately, more and more countries are beginning to ban some of these pesticides — thereby forcing growers to figure out alternative methods.  However, even if we stopped using neonics worldwide yesterday, our problems wouldn’t be over.

Pesticides are just the tip of the iceberg

Big Ag and the bastardization of beekeeping

Commercial beekeeping has always been a lucrative business. However, in recent years, beekeepers have begun renting out more and more of their hives for pollination purposes (rather than simply making honey) to remain profitable.

This is often done on a massive scale, incorporating semi trucks loaded with hundreds of hives and millions of bees. These beekeepers travel the highways following the pollination cycles across the country and rent out their colonies to the highest bidders.

Bees, however, are quite finicky. If the temperature dips below 50 degree Fahrenheit, or if it’s rainy, particularly windy, or even cloudy, bees are less likely to leave the hive and pollinate. To guarantee a crop is pollinated, farmers will often utilize commercial beekeepers as an insurance policy of sorts.

Honeybees are outrageously efficient pollinators. When they land to gather nectar from a flower, their hairy bodies trap pollen, which is then carried between flowers as the bee continues its work. This facilitates reproduction between flowering plants far more efficiently than any man-made method.

Many will often rent double the necessary number of bees for a given crop in order to ensure it gets pollinated no matter what. Unfortunately, this generally means there is half the amount of food in a given field to adequately nourish the bees. To compensate for this imbalance, many beekeepers will supplement their bees’ diet with alternate food sources. This is usually includes cheap, less nutritious corn syrup to further buoy profitability.

“Just because of the way [beekeepers] have to manage them in high numbers of colonies to make money is detrimental to their health,” says Dr. Francis Drummond, a professor of insect ecology at the University of Maine. “So it’s sort of a catch-22.”

Corn syrup isn’t as nutritious as cane sugar, and cane sugar isn’t nearly as nutritious as nectar from flowers. Similarly, the current system of perpetual transportation is also stressful and detrimental to the overall health of these commercial bee populations, making them more susceptible to disease and parasites.

Like a FitBit for bees, the system uses cameras inside of the hive to monitor activity.

“Anytime you have a population of a host that is infected by a parasite or disease, and also kept at really high densities, they tend to be more prone to acquiring that disease,” said Drummond.

One way to combat this is with better monitoring tech that allows beekeepers to bolster healthy populations and mend sick ones. Take EyesOnHives, for example. Like a FitBit for bees, the system uses cameras inside of the hive to monitor activity and relay data to beekeepers via a smartphone or tablet.

With the help of software, hours of hive surveillance can be broken down into colony activity patterns to provide useful analytics. The application collects data not only on individual bees but also monitors the hive as a cumulative “superorganism.” This allows the app to gauge hive health via analytical spikes and dips so keepers can react to disruptions more quickly.

And boy, are there plenty of disruptions to be worried about.

Fight the mite

The Varroa mite — or Varroa destructor as it is formally known — has ravaged bee colonies worldwide for decades. Since the invasive species’ introduction to North America in the late 1980s, the pest has been responsible for wiping out entire populations of Western honeybees.

It’s easy to see why. Western honeybees are completely defenseless against the mite. The parasite — no bigger than a sesame seed, latches onto a bee and sucks its blood, eventually either killing it outright or making the bee more susceptible to disease and viruses. To make matters worse, beekeepers don’t really have much recourse when it comes to these mites, and are often forced to use everything from acids and bleach to horse tick medicines to combat them. But of course, these too can have negative effects on the colony.

Thankfully, there may be a safe solution to our destructor problem.

The Thermosolar Hive is as simple as it is effective. Unlike honeybees, varroa mites cannot withstand high temperatures. The Thermosolar Hive takes advantage of this by using a rooftop solar panel that’s designed to increase the heat inside of the hive to lethal temperatures for the Varroa mite without harming honeybees.

The creators of the hive claim it accelerates spring colony growth, pollen-collection capacity, and flight activity. The hive is still in the prototype phase at this point, but could be a powerful weapon in the fight against the mite.

Of course, if this simple approach doesn’t pan out, there’s a backup plan. In a future with cornucopias of genetically modified foods, we may also have hives humming with genetically modified honeybees.

Engineering better bees — and building robots just in case

Harvard’s RoboBees might one day be used to pollinate our crops — but right now they must be tethered to a power supply, which severely limits their range.

Another plan to mitigate the Varroa mite problem comes from Mother Nature — with a twist. The idea is to use a technique called RNA interference (RNAi) by feeding bees sugar syrup with synthetic RNA code that’s specifically designed to work against the Varroa mite. When a mite begins to leach blood from these biotech bees, a synthetic RNA enters its system. Rather than being nourished, the pest is instead left with a diminished ability to breathe, eat, or reproduce — and that’s just one of the many clever approaches that researchers are dreaming up.

Harvard University is taking things a step further by planning for an all-out Silent Spring scenario: A world without naturally occurring bees. At the university’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Robots, researchers are designing entire fleets of so-called “RoboBees” that might pollinate our crops in a bee-less future.

These RoboBees (or more accurately, Autonomous Flying Microbots) are not only equipped with wings, but also sensors that mimic the eyes and antennae of bees, thereby allowing the units to both “sense” and respond to their environment. It may sound crazy and far-fetched, but this isn’t just academic vaporware. The team has been developing these robots for more than five years, and believes RoboBees could begin artificially pollinating crops within a decade.

It’s a promising project, and could very well end up saving the day — but it’s also important to remember that us regular Joes aren’t at the behest of the latest technology to reverse the beepocalypse. There are plenty of basic steps cities and citizens alike can take to actually make a difference.

Building bee-friendly cities

One of the most problematic results of both large-scale farming and climate change is the depletion of biodiversity in favor of monoculture. A diet of predominantly one food source is not ideal for optimal bee health. An area dominated by tens of thousands of acres of single, seasonal crops cannot adequately nourish a healthy hive year-round — let alone seasonally.

While cities are constructed for humans, the spaces can be easily adapted to act as bee sanctuaries. An impressive effort underway in Oslo, Norway, could be implemented in cities around the globe to revive colonies locally. They call it the world’s first “bee highway.”

Normally associated with the countryside, beekeeping in urban areas has boomed in popularity over the past nine years. Today, you’d be hard-pressed to find a major metropolis without at least one hive in it. (Credit: ByBi)

As part of the project, citizens are encouraged to use outdoor spaces (parks, school gardens, roofs, etc.) to create bee-friendly habitats around Oslo. Individuals can list and map their planting efforts on a website to encourage others nearby to follow suit with their own habitats and other diversified gardens.

Oslo isn’t the only place where people are rethinking urban design with pollinators in mind. Researchers at the University of Maine are working with a full landfill in Hampden and repurposing portions of the site for a similar project. Maine is primarily dominated by forest ecosystems. Unfortunately, these areas are not exceedingly conducive to bee health. Professor Frank Drummond and others are planting pollinator gardens at the inactive Pine Tree Landfill to identify plants that are most beneficial to bees in the area.

Other U.S. states are also starting to better utilize roadside vegetation in an effort to promote plant diversity specifically geared toward bees. To aid in this endeavor, the U.S. Department of Transportation plans to conduct a study this spring to determine what roadside vegetation pollinators are consuming. The data will be used to promote biodiversity and stronger pollinator habitats along right of ways.

Moving forward

By attempting to create an efficient food supply network, we’ve unwittingly turned the entire apparatus into an unpredictable mess.

“Unfortunately, if you take a really close look at a lot of agriculture, it’s clear that we are very dependent on what you might call outside inputs,” said Drummond. “Whether it’s living organisms like honeybees or petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides, that’s the way large-scale agriculture has gone. It’s just sort of where we are, but it does make our agriculture vulnerable to disruptions. I would say it’s sort of become a fact of life until something happens.”

Fortunately, some ingenious high- and low-tech options are already well underway.

Do we need to build a smarter, more efficient, less destructive global food supply? Absolutely. Will this happen overnight? Don’t hold your breath.  In the meantime, we must take steps to prop up our chief pollinators on a micro level, or we couldbe next on the chopping block.

As truly beautiful as it is to imagine a fleet of RoboBees pollinating the countryside, it might be best to heed the warning of the canary in the coal mine, because our pollinators are dropping like — well, bees, at this point.

LG is learning from its past mistakes in India, but there’s a long way to go

LG has finally figured out how to launch a flagship phone in India.

To say that LG hasn’t fared well in India would be an understatement. The South Korean manufacturer failed to make a dent in the highly competitive budget segment, and its efforts in the high-end segment were steamrolled by the likes of Samsung and Apple. The company is languishing in tenth place in the Indian market, a position that’s “shamefully poor” according to LG India’s MD Kim Ki-Wan.

LG’s mobile woes are in stark contrast to the company’s overall success in India, where it leads the field for TVs and home appliances. LG is now looking to turn things around for its mobile unit, and has stated that its goal in 2017 would be to break into the top three brands in the country. That’ll be a gargantuan task considering Samsung’s continued growth and the steady rise of OPPO, Vivo, and Lenovo.

To counter the decline, LG is turning to local manufacturing and creating India-specific models to attract mainstream buyers. The company is also figuring out the vagaries of the Indian handset market, judging by the recent launch of the LG G6. The phone made its debut for ₹51,999 ($810), and LG offered an enticing ₹10,000 ($150) in cash back to those picking up the phone from Amazon India, its exclusive online partner. The launch-day offer is no longer available, but the company will continue to offer a cash back deal of ₹7,000 ($110) throughout the course of this week.

LG is focusing on local manufacturing, but it is lacking compelling budget devices.

The premium segment in India constitutes a small subset of the overall market, but it dominates the mindshare. And by rolling out attractive offers, LG is effectively undercutting the Galaxy S8 and S8+, which retail for ₹57,900 ($900) and ₹64,900 ($1,010) respectively. This time around, Samsung isn’t offering any cashback deals, instead throwing in a free wireless charger to customers pre-ordering its flagship.

The spec sheet notwithstanding, two factors determine how a phone sells in India — pricing and discounts. E-commerce companies have been rolling out aggressive deals and discounts for years now in a bid to sign up users, and that has led to a mindset where customers are unhappy with paying full price for online goods. And in this context, LG has absolutely nailed the launch of the G6 in India. The phone offers great value for money at ₹45,000, and while it may not have a 10nm chipset, it makes up for it with excellent cameras backed by a gorgeous design, 32-bit Quad DAC, and 64GB storage.

The company can use the G6 as the platform to reinvigorate its India strategy, but LG needs to launch affordable phones that offer great value for money. With the likes of Xiaomi, Huawei, and Lenovo constantly pushing the boundaries in this segment, the South Korean manufacturer needs to have a standout product to affect real change in its market share.

LG G6

• LG G6 review!
• LG G6 specs
• LG G6 vs. Google Pixel: The two best cameras right now
• Everything you need to know about the G6’s cameras
• LG forums

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