Supermassive black hole dust is denser than we thought

The majority of galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their core. And, like our own Milky Way version, most of these black holes are relatively quiet. However, a minority of supermassive black holes are incredibly active, consuming dust, gas, and other matter at an extraordinary rate and emitting large amounts of energy. Scientists call these black holes active galactic nuclei.

Generally, these active galactic nuclei all look the same, with a donut-shaped ring of dust, or a torus, surrounding the black hole. Now, scientists have determined that the tori around active supermassive black holes are actually much smaller than originally theorized. The study will be published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The team used the SOFIA telescope (a Boeing 747SP modified to carry a 100-inch diameter telescope) to examine the infrared emissions of 11 different active galactic nuclei over 100 million miles away. They discovered that the peak infrared emissions are at even longer wavelengths and that the tori are more compact, to the tune of 30%, than scientists originally thought.

While this is certainly an interesting observation, it has larger implications for future detection and observation of black holes. By pinpointing these longer wavelengths that tori absorb and reemit energy at, scientists are able to determine the best way to observe them. Water vapor actually obscures these longer wavelengths within the Earth’s atmosphere, so future work on active galactic nuclei should be mostly conducted through SOFIA or other telescopes that operate above our planet’s water vapor. The team’s next step is to determine whether all of these emissions indeed originate from tori, or whether there’s something else within the structure of active galactic nuclei that is responsible for part of these signals.

Via: NASA

Source: arXiv.org

GOP-hired data company leaked information on 198 million citizens

Data from the largely conservative Deep Root Analytics, a company that strategizes how to target audiences for political advertisements, was exposed this month. Information on nearly 200 million US citizens, over 60 percent of the population, was contained in the leak.

Discovered by an analyst with the cybersecurity company UpGuard, the data was stored on a publicly accessible Amazon server. More than a terabyte of that data was not password protected. The data included citizens’ contact information, addresses, birthdays, and analyses used to predict how they felt about controversial political topics like gun control and abortion.

The Republican National Committee paid Deep Root nearly a million dollars last year for their work during the election. While some of the data came from Deep Root itself, a lot of it was aggregated from outside sources such as other data firms, Republican super PACs, and even Reddit. One subreddit the company compiled data from was the now banned r/fatpeoplehate, which according to FiveThirtyEight is where a lot of r/The_Donald subreddit members spent time when not discussing politics.

The exposure occurred when Deep Root updated its security settings at the beginning of the month and the company has hired a cybersecurity firm to investigate the issue. But the company doesn’t think any malicious parties accessed the data during the 12 days that it was exposed. In a statement, Deep Root said, “Since this event has come to our attention, we have updated the access settings and put protocols in place to prevent further access.”

“While the scale and significance of this data exposure is nearly unprecedented, misconfigurations of the type that rendered the database public are not. With cyber risk increasingly endemic on all digital platforms, this exposure is a reminder that we must all begin fostering cyber resilience, or risk a future of these kinds of breaches,” said UpGuard in a statement.

Source: Gizmodo

Niantic Reveals Major Pokémon Go Update With Revamped Gyms, Co-op Raid Battles Coming Soon

Niantic and The Pokémon Company today revealed an all-new gym system heading to the popular mobile app Pokémon Go soon, as well as announcing a new cooperative “Raid Battle” update coming in the future. For gyms, the developer said that its goal was to encourage more players to head to friendly gyms because now they’ll be able to interact with them in new ways.

Notably, gyms will now act as PokéStops and include a spinnable disc that gives players unique items like Poké Balls. The basic structure of a gym is being altered as well, so now six Pokémon can occupy a gym and each one must be unique, preventing duplicates of the same Pokémon from appearing multiple times in one gym battle. Enemy teams will battle these Pokémon in the order they were added to the Gym, not in the order of their combat power as before.

Pokémon will also need to be motivated to stay inside a gym with the new “motivation system.” Over time, each Pokémon will lose motivation naturally and as they are defeated in battle, temporarily lowering its combat power so enemy teams will be able to more easily defeat the gym. To help keep up a Pokémon’s motivation, friendly team members can feed it berries.

Niantic said that all of these updates will feed into the new gym badges system as well, which will reward players for taking part in battles and feeding berries to Pokémon.

Now you’ll be able to earn Gym Badges when interacting with the many Gyms around the world. Gym Badges serve as mementos of your Pokémon GO adventures and reflect your contribution to a Gym’s success.

You’ll be able to level up your Badges by battling, giving Berries to the Pokémon in the Gym and spinning the Gym’s Photo Disc. You can earn the opportunity to receive bonus items and increased rewards from Gyms by raising the level of your Gym Badge.

In the coming weeks, players will be able to take on new “Raid Battles” at gyms, which Niantic described as a cooperative experience that forces trainers to work together to take down a Raid Boss. Before a Raid Battle begins, Pokémon at the gym in question will return to their trainers and a large egg will appear on top of the gym with a countdown clock.

When the countdown reaches zero the Raid Boss is revealed and players will be able to take on the challenge as long as they have a Raid Pass, which can be obtained each day by visiting a Gym, but only one can be held at a time. Up to twenty players can be in a Raid Battle at once, working together to take down the boss, similar to the original announcement trailer for the game back in 2015.

If the boss is defeated in under five minutes, each participant will have a chance to catch an “extra powerful Pokémon,” as well as a few new items.

After defeating a Raid Boss, you’ll receive a collection of rewards, including some new items obtained only by defeating a Raid Boss: Rare Candies, Golden Razz Berries, and two types of Technical Machines—Fast and Charged. A Rare Candy is a mysterious candy that, when used on a Pokémon, turns into that Pokémon’s Candy. Golden Razz Berries will greatly increase your chances of catching a Pokémon you encounter in the wild and can also be given to a Pokémon assigned to a Gym to fully recover its motivation meter. Technical Machines are items you can use to permanently teach a Pokémon a new Fast Attack or Charged Attack.

Niantic said that the gym update will begin rolling out to players around the world “very soon” (until then, gyms are disabled in the game), and Raid Battles will show up over the next few weeks, beginning in beta form. Recently, Niantic revealed some events occurring out in the real world to celebrate the one year anniversary of the app, which debuted in July of 2016, while Niantic CEO John Hanke commented on Apple’s upcoming ARKit developer platform and how it will change Pokémon Go and AR apps in general.

Tag: Pokémon GO
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Atari confirms it’s working on a new console, possibly called Ataribox

After releasing a teaser for a new product called the Ataribox, Atari CEO Fred Chesnais has confirmed to GamesBeat that the retro games company is working on a new console. Without giving away too many details about the console, Chesnais simply said: “We’re back in the hardware business”.

Atari posted a video of what appeared to be console-like device with a wood-grain surface and slatted black plastic top last week. The video is titled “First look: A brand new Atari product. Years in the making.”

A very simple website for the Ataribox is also now live, but it merely shows the short teaser video and absolutely nothing else. We hoped it would appear at E3, but unfortunately nothing was announced.

• Atari ET excavation finds 30-year old game
• Xbox documentary series to unearth Atari’s E.T. urban legend in 2014
• The PS4 we all really want: A homage to the Atari VCS

Whilst Atari has mainly stuck to republishing classic titles, licensing out its name, and developing random, one-off, Atari-branded products, the confirmation that a new console is on the way has come as a bit of a surprise. 

However, with the announcement of the Xbox One X at E3, and 4K gaming in general becoming more popular, will a new Atari-branded console be able to tug the nostalgia strings enough for it to be a success?

Varjo promises a VR headset with ‘human eye-resolution’

A Finnish company called Varjo that has been working in secret until now has unveiled a new type of VR and AR headset code-named “20/20.” It supposedly has a display with “human eye-resolution” quality of over 70 megapixels versus around 1.2 megapixels per eye for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.

Varjo (which means “shadow” in Finnish), says it achieves that feat using “patented technology that replicates how the human eye naturally works, creating a super-high-resolution image to the users gaze direction.” It was supposedly developed by scientists that “formerly occupied top positions at Microsoft, Nokia, Intel, NVIDIA and Rovio.” While the resolution is much higher than current headsets, the 100-degree field of view is the same.

The headset also uses video see-through technology for “unparalleled AR and MR capabilities,” Varjo says. In an early beta video, they showed rendered objects like cars, planets and free-form artwork overlaid on top of a real room, much like Microsoft’s Hololens or the so-far-unreleased Magic Leap AR headset.

So how does it work? The information is pretty vague, but Varjo says it combined a context display, focus display, optical combiner and gaze tracker into a “bionic display” for human-eye resolution in VR, AR and XR. The company adds that the system has low computing requirements thanks to “foveated eye tracking.”

We take that to mean that the 70-megapixel resolution is limited to what you’re looking directly at, while anything in your peripheral vision renders at a lower resolution. That’s just a guess, however, as the company hasn’t even showed what the headset itself looks like. It did show off some images that come with it, though, and as you can see above, they’re of significantly higher resolution than the Oculus Rift or Vive, something that would no doubt make the VR and AR experience more immersive.

Varjo says its tech “pushes VR technology 10 years ahead of the current state-of-the-art,” but there are a lot of questions left unanswered, such as the latency, frame rate and how they plan to produce and display content at such a high resolution. As it stands now, it takes a reasonably high-end PC to view content on a Vive or Rift.

Hopefully we’ll know more soon and get a demo, as the company has promised to ship “Varjo-branded products specifically for professional users and applications starting in late Q4, 2017.”

‘Pokémon Go’ to get raid battles and simplified gyms

A year after Pokémon Go captivated the world with its location-based catch-athon, Niantic is making some changes. The biggest is raid battles, a concept that was teased in the very first trailer for the game. They’ll launch “in the coming weeks” and take place at existing gyms, allowing groups of players to take on rare and powerful Pokémon together. At first, you’ll see an egg and a countdown timer, as well as one to four boss icons which indicate the creature’s difficulty. When the meter drops to zero, the Pokémon will appear and you’ll have a limited time to catch it.

Raid battles can be performed with public and private groups of up to 20 people. A simple lobby lists the players and Pokémon that will be joining the fray, giving you ample time to prepare while everyone else shows up and sorts out their party. Unsurprisingly, raid bosses have huge health bars and you’ll need to tap furiously to inflict meaningful damage. It’s a race against the clock — if the timer runs out, your chance to catch the Pokémon is gone. Until that happens, however, there’s always a chance to push through and succeed. Even if your party is defeated, for instance, you can hop out, heal up and dive straight back in to help the rest of the group.

If you successfully defeat the boss Pokémon, you’ll be rewarded with special bonus items including rare candies, golden razz berries and two types of technical machines, fast and charged. The game will also deal out some Premiere Balls, the number of which will vary depending on the team that controls the gym, the damage you contributed and the total damage from your team. You’ll then have the chance to capture the Pokémon, just like a regular encounter, using berries and Premiere Balls exclusively. In short, if you do better in the battle section, you’ll receive more balls and have a better chance of catching the Pokémon.

A developer for Niantic shows off a raid version of Aerodactyl.

AOL

The feature is designed, however, so that everyone can contribute and have a reasonable chance of catching a powerful monster. Seasoned players will, of course, want to team up with equally talented trainers, which is where the private groups come in. If you set one up, the app will give you a shareable code (three Bulbasaur icons, for instance) so that other people can easily find and join your group. In the future, Niantic will also offer exclusive, invitation-only raids for the best players in the world. These will take place at specific gyms and provide a chance to catch the rarest and most powerful Pokémon in the game, including legendaries.

There’s one small catch to the new feature: Raid passes. To join a cooperative battle, you’ll need to supply one of these single-use passes upfront. You can grab one every day by visiting a gym, otherwise you’ll need to buy them through the in-app store. Restricting participation makes sense, as it will help each raid feels special. If you want to be cynical, however, it’s easy to see this as a money-making venture that encourages in-app purchases whenever a tough-to-catch Articuno shows up.

Before the raid battle update, Niantic is giving its gym system a complete overhaul. The developer admits they were needlessly complicated before and overwhelmed casual players. The replacement ditches the gym level and prestige systems entirely, and changes how players challenge the Pokémon left by other trainers. Now, every gym will have six available slots, and all of them must be inhabited by a different kind of Pokémon — no duplicates allowed. When you challenge a gym, you’ll also take on the Pokémon who has been there the longest first, rather than the weakest.

Creatures left at the gym will have a motivation meter which falls alongside their CP, or strength, over time and as they participate in battles. Stronger Pokémon will also lose motivation faster than weaker ones. Trainers can restore motivation with berries, but the idea is that higher-level Pokémon will be booted out of gyms more quickly than before.

“We’re really hoping that we can broaden the scope to encompass both levels of play,” Edward Wu, director of software engineering at Niantic said. “That’s part of why the motivation system exists. If you have a fully fed, and highly motivated Pokémon who the player is constantly giving berries to, that will still provide a top-tier challenge for the folks who expect a top-tier challenge. But in addition, as they weaken and get demotivated, that will give more casual players or, trainers who might not have fully levelled up yet, the chance to actually battle and win at those gyms.”

Like the original games and anime, gyms will soon have badges too. As you battle Pokémon and participate in other activities, they’ll level up through bronze, silver and gold. Higher-ranked badges will give you items, experience points and other bonuses every time you revisit the gym.

If you’re disinterested in battling, fear not: Niantic has you covered too. Every gym will now also serve as a Pokéstop, allowing you to collect items and rank up badges like everyone else. If you give your Pokémon treats in the gym, you’ll also receive some extra Stardust.

With a year under its belt, Niantic is focusing on features that encourage real-world socialising and collaboration. At some point, that will include Pokémon trading too. “We’re absolutely interested in it,” Wu said. “But as we’ve alluded to before, there are some really tough challenges associated with it. Since we have this single coherent world, where everybody is on the same instance, that’s really quite unique in MMO games. So being able to make sure that trading mechanic is balanced and is fair, and does justice to our players when we have these particular challenges, is something we have been working on and will continue to work on.”

LG’s enhanced G6+ has more storage and premium sound

LG’s G6 is a nice smartphone that has sold pretty well so far, but with the arrival of Samsung’s stellar Galaxy S8, it’s trying to keep consumers interested with a few changes and a new model. First off, it has launched the G6+, an identical model to the original but with more onboard memory (128GB) and “premium sound.” It gets the latter option via a new 32-bit HiFi quad DAC that has been available in South Korea since launch, but oddly, never came to North America.

LG is also throwing in a set of unnamed Bang & Olufsen earphones that fully support the DAC so that you have something to appreciate it with. Some models will also get wireless charging, a feature that has been available in the US from the get-go. However, and again this is pretty weird, LG didn’t say which regions will get which features, and where exactly it’ll be sold — but we imagine North America will be high on the list.

Aside from the G6+, current G6 owners will get a bunch of new features, most notable “Face Print” a way to unlock the phone just by holding it up to your face. LG promises that “unlocking occurs as soon as the registered face is recognized, usually in less than one second on average.” Another new feature, “low power consumption” might help users get more mileage out of the G6’s fairly feeble battery, and a “covered lens warning” will tell you if your finger is in front of the wide-angle rear camera.

Other sites have reported that LG will start shipping a version of the G6 with 6GB of RAM, but LG didn’t mention that in its PR, and if that’s accurate, it would likely only be available in Korea — much like the 6GB version of Samsung’s Galaxy S8.

Finally, LG has launched some new colors for the LG G6 and G6+, “optical marine blue” and “optical terra gold.” The LG G6+ will launch in South Korea early next month and come to other regions after that. — hopefully we’ll learn more about pricing and who gets which features, soon.

Source: LG

Tim Cook and Other CEOs Meeting With Trump Today to Discuss Using Tech to Reduce Government Spending

Apple CEO Tim Cook and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos are among a group of technology leaders meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House today, with plans to discuss how the government can begin cutting waste and improving services.

The Trump administration believes there is an “economic opportunity” to save as much as $1 trillion over the next ten years, and is seeking the advice of a group of tech CEOs on the best way to reduce government spending through technology (via Reuters).

Methods looked at by the Trump administration are said to include cutting government information technology costs, reducing government costs through improved IT services, leveraging government buying power, and reducing fraud across government agencies.

President Donald Trump will meet with the chief executives of technology companies including Apple Inc and Amazon.com Inc on Monday as the White House looks to the private sector for help in cutting government waste and improving services.

White House officials said on a conference call on Friday that the administration believed there was an “economic opportunity” to save up to $1 trillion over 10 years by significantly cutting government information technology costs, reducing government costs through improved IT, leveraging government buying power and cutting fraud across government agencies.

The meeting with nearly 20 chief executives comes as the White House pushes to shrink government, cut federal employees and eliminate regulations. Many business executives are eager to work with the new administration as they face numerous regulatory and other policy issues.

Other companies attending the meeting include Alphabet, Microsoft, MasterCard, Intel, Qualcomm, Oracle, Adobe, and more. The meeting, which was announced earlier this month, follows a few other efforts by the Trump administration in modernizing the government with the help of CEOs from tech companies, including the “White House Office of American Innovation” and “American Technology Council.”

Other topics up for discussion will be the United States work visa program, which has been a major point of contention as it directly affects tech companies trying to hire foreign workers, as well as cyber security. Before directly meeting with President Trump, it’s said that the CEOs will discuss the issues on hand with Vice President Mike Pence, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, and White House official Chris Liddell.

Many tech leaders decided to leave the White House’s various advisory councils after Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accords. In a new statement, the White House said the decision had little effect on today’s meeting and that it was full to capacity, resulting in some leaders being turned away. According to Axios, the meetings will run all the way to Thursday with topics further including drones and other IoT devices, which will end what the White House is calling “Technology Week.”

For Apple’s part, Tim Cook last week pointed out numerous ways he disagrees with Trump, but stated that his personal beliefs weren’t enough to make him walk away from the Trump administration’s councils, because he felt the need to keep the bigger picture in mind. “At the end of the day, I’m not a person who’s going to walk away and say, “If you don’t do what I want, I leave.” … But I care deeply about America. I want America to do well. America’s more important than bloody politics from my point of view.”

Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.

Tag: Donald Trump
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PayPal CEO Doesn’t Think Apple Pay’s Peer-to-Peer Payments Update Will Hurt Venmo

In a new interview with The Telegraph, PayPal CEO Dan Schulman discusses a wide range of topics covering the origins of the company, its history with eBay, and potential competition with Apple in the peer-to-peer payments space. PayPal owns Venmo, one of the most popular P2P payments apps available today across iOS, Android, and the web, and Schulman cited this availability across various operating systems as a “powerful advantage.”

Schulman said that many users have a variety of devices sold by different companies, and the ability for Venmo to be on all of them is where it will stand out from Apple Pay’s upcoming P2P update, which will be able to send money through Messages only on Apple devices.

Image via The Telegraph

“We’re technology agnostic,” he said in an interview with The Telegraph. “Many individuals are [a] multi-operating system; they can have an Android phone, a Microsoft PC and an Apple tablet. You don’t want a different payment methodology on each of those things … you want a consistency across that.

“We try to offer a consistent value proposition, that’s end-to-end, across operating systems and device type. It’s a powerful advantage we have.”

PayPal and Venmo also control several parts of a payment process made through its apps, including risk assessment and customer protection. Shulman stated that the company owns “the full value proposition” of a payment made between users on Venmo, while Apple “can only provide what they hope is a good user interface.”

Unlike Venmo, Apple’s service will not work on Android phones or Windows laptops, and whereas Apple has to work with credit card companies to make payments, PayPal controls several parts of the payments process, such as risk assessment and customer protection.

“We own the full value proposition, Apple can never do that because they don’t do the risk associated with it, they don’t do the onboarding, they can only provide what they hope is a good user interface. We try to provide that end to end value proposition and very importantly we do it across operating systems.”

Apple Pay’s P2P update is set to launch this fall with iOS 11. During the announcement at WWDC, Apple said that when users get paid they will receive money in a new “Apple Pay Cash” account, which they can then use instantly to make a purchase using Apple Pay in stores or online, send as a payment to someone else, or transfer it from Apple Pay Cash to their bank account.

Related Roundup: Apple Pay
Tags: PayPal, Venmo
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We dive into the Surface Pro and Laptop with Microsoft’s device czar, Panos Panay

Microsoft’s Surface device lineup is bigger than ever. On June 15, the company launched the Surface Pro, the fifth iteration of its now famous 2-in-1 tablet, as well as a strangely familiar device: the Surface Laptop. They join the Surface Book, a laptop that also snaps apart to be a tablet, and the Surface Studio, a giant, 28-inch desktop built around touch. But what is Microsoft’s overall direction here, as well as its goals for the Surface Laptop and Pro? To find out, we talked to the man himself: Panos Panay.

Panay is in charge of all hardware at Microsoft, including Surface devices, accessories like mice and keyboards, and even the brand-new Xbox One X. He led the charge when Microsoft began working on the first Surface, which hit shelves half a decade ago, and isn’t one to shy away from the struggles the Surface division faced in its first few years. He’s also known as a very passionate advocate of Microsoft products, and a perfectionist when it comes to product construction.

We saw that passion firsthand as Panay joined us in the Digital Trends office in New York City for an impromptu show-and-tell. Answering questions along the way, he gave us a detailed look at the design points and reasoning behind the Surface Pro and Surface Laptop, as well as Microsoft’s overall strategy toward its Surface line.

“When we first built [Surface], it was just going to be a stage for Windows,” Panay told Digital Trends, reflecting on the last five years. “Now, it’s a stage for all the software, it’s about change, it’s about bringing those magical experiences to people. We’re now in a place where this hardware really does start to disappear. You have instant on. You have long battery life. You have the beauty of Windows 10 in the product, the beauty of Office in the product — tuned for Skype. So you can see how, over time, in the generations, it has changed, and the focus has been around experiences and how we’re going to bring software to life.”

For Panay, 2017 is when the Surface lineup is really coming together. He explained how proud he is of Microsoft’s varied lineup, which you can now see at retailers like Best Buy.

“This is kind of a dream of mine,” explained Panay. “You have these three different “Who are you? What do you do? What do you believe in?” devices, so now when somebody walks in [to a store, they] have that choice.”

“We have the most versatile laptop on the planet — and this is the one you can use anywhere, anytime, — you don’t need a tablet or a laptop, this is the one,” Panay said. “But if you’re just a laptop user who wants the classic form factor, and you wanted something personal and beautiful, now we have that choice, too … and then you have the Book, so you have the most performant laptop.”

Be sure to read our full review of the 2017 Surface Pro and our first impressions of the Surface Laptop.