Ava DuVernay’s Central Park Five series is headed to Netflix

Ava DuVernay, the director and co-writer of Selma and director of the upcoming A Wrinkle in Time, is teaming up with Netflix for a limited series about the Central Park Five case. DuVernay, who worked with Netflix on her Oscar-nominated documentary 13th, will write and direct the five-episode series.

In 1989, five teenagers from Harlem were accused and convicted of attacking and raping a jogger in Central Park. After spending years in prison, the five men were released when DNA evidence proved they weren’t the culprits. “The story of the men known as the Central Park Five has riveted me for more than two decades. In their journey, we witness five innocent young men of color who were met with injustice at every turn — from coerced confessions to unjust incarceration to public calls for their execution by the man who would go on to be the president of the United States,” DuVernay said in a statement. Cindy Holland, Netflix’s VP of Original Content, said, “After powerfully reframing the public conversation about criminality and injustice in 13th, Ava now turns a new lens to a case that exposes deep flaws in our criminal justice system.”

The series’ timeframe will span from when the teenagers were first questioned in 1989 to their exoneration and settlement with New York City in 2014. Each episode will focus on one of the five teenagers and it’s slated for release in 2019.

Source: Variety

Xiaomi Mi Mix 2: News and rumors

Why it matters to you

Xiaomi was ahead of the curve in terms of smartphone design with the Mi Mix. The Mi Mix 2 could follow suit and set a new standard.

Xiaomi’s Mi Mix smartphone is just a taste of what’s to come in smartphone design — a large, gorgeous display with next to no bezels. Even though the Mi Mix only came out last fall, Xiaomi may already be working on a successor.

There is not a lot of information to go on just yet, but here is everything we think we know about the Mi Mix 2.

Specs

India Today

Much about Xiamoi’s upcoming flagship remains a mystery, but we can glean hints from the benchmarks that have leaked so far.

In early July, India Today spotted a Mi Mix 2 unit on benchmarking website GFXBench with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 6.4-inch IPS LCD display. It sports a 5-megapixel selfie camera embedded in the bottom, and runs an Android 7.1.1 Nougat-based operating system.

Design

The Xiaomi Mi Mix made headlines for one reason — the huge display that covered almost the entire front of the phone. Recent GIFs that leaked on the Weibo network and were shared by XiaomiToday indicate the company is looking to cover even more surface area with the Mi Mix 2.

The animations depict a phone that is virtually bezel-free on the top and sides, with an extremely thin bottom bezel. XiaomiToday reports the second-generation Mi Mix will continue the ceramic construction of the original, though this time the display will comprise 93 percent of the front of the device, up from 90 percent in the previous model. The screen is also expected to employ AMOLED technology. Bear in mind these are only renderings — not shots of an actual device — and we cannot verify their authenticity.

Moving to the back, the leak suggests dual cameras above a rear fingerprint sensor, the latter of which XiaomiToday says will utilize the same ultrasonic module found in Xiaomi’s Mi 5s.

A report from GizmoChina earlier in March corroborates XiaomiToday’s 93 percent screen-to-bezel-ratio claim, as well as the AMOLED display rumor — though GizmoChina said the panel would be curved. The low quality of the GIFs makes it impossible to tell if there’s any curve along the sides of the model’s screen.

What made the Mi Mix unique — apart from nearly nonexistent bezels — was the use of Elliptic Labs’ ultrasound technology to replace the proximity sensor on the front of the screen. This allowed for the phone’s screen to go black during a call when the device was lifted up to the ear — an action usually performed by the proximity sensor.

Using ultrasound technology allowed Xiaomi to eliminate the bezel on the top of the device. It’s highly likely we’ll see this again, but perhaps the company will take it a step further and attempt to remove the bottom bezel as well.

Xiaomi founder Lei Jun said in a Weibo update that he is working again with Philippe Starck, the French designer that helped design the Mi Mix. From rough translations, there seem to be no specific mention of the Mi Mix 2, but Jun said the two are looking to see how they can make “these exciting innovations [a] reality.” Jun posted a picture of the two standing in front of a Mi Mix advertisement.

It seems likely that Jun is referring to the second-generation Mi Mix, though we cannot confirm this.

Update: Added in leaked benchmarks which appear to show the Mi Mix 2’s processor and screen size. 

Titan’s lakes are calm and might be perfect for probing

Why it matters to you

Titan is one of our best bets for finding life off Earth and this new study suggests it would offer a probe a relatively smooth landing.

Titan is a special place. It’s the biggest of Saturn’s 62 moons, it’s the only one with a dense atmosphere, and — other than Earth — it’s the only object in space where scientists have found clear evidence of liquid lakes and seas.

Oh and, maybe above all else, Titan is thought to be rich in complex organic compounds, making it a top prospect in the search for extraterrestrial life.

“Titan is a fascinating real-scale laboratory for those interested into the mechanisms that lead to the apparition of life,” Cyril Grima, a geophysical researcher at the University of Texas, told Digital Trends. “It is full of organic molecules that are synthesized into more complex macromolecules, some of which are known to be building blocks for life as we can observe on Earth.”

NASA and ESA’s Cassini–Huygens probe arrived at Titan back in 2004 and revealed massive lakes of liquid methane. Just over a decade later, NASA toyed with the idea of sending a submarine to the moon to study its depths.

That idea looks even more tempting now that Grima and his team have published a study showing that some of Titan’s seas are almost completely calm.

“There is the science motivation to confirm the Titan’s seas are very flat as suggested by previous studies,” Grima said. “That way it could help to improve climate models and also to bring additional information for helping current concepts in their design for Titan’s landers.”

Grima and his team focused on measuring wave-height on Titan’s three largest bodies of water: Punga mare, Ligeia Mare, and Kraken Mare, where NASA proposed to send the submarine probe. The researchers analyzed data that was collected by Cassini during the early summer and found that waves were never higher than four inches and never longer than eight inches. They were often under a half inch high.

“So it tends to show that small waves are the most common during this season,” Grima said. This was a surprise. The researchers expected this to be the windiest time of the year, so they anticipated to spot some bigger waves.

There are some caveats, Grima admits: “It is important to note that our measurement technique, together with the instrument capabilities, is sensitive to the global … waves that populate the seas. So we cannot rule out that smaller patches of higher waves, not sustained over long period of time, might exist.”

Either way, the study suggests Titan might welcome a probe with a relatively gentle landing, into a sea whose depths could be teeming with life.

Could we stream HD video across the galaxy? This astrophysicist thinks so

Why it matters to you

It may be ambitious, but this proposal could give us live HD video streaming from Alpha Centauri. Well, kind of live.

Last year, the Russian billionaire Yuri Milner committed to spending $100 million on “Breakthrough Starshot,” a massive engineering project with the intention of developing a fleet of miniature spacecraft capable of travelling to our nearest neighboring star system, Alpha Centauri — some 20 to 30 years away from Earth travelling at less than a quarter the speed of light.

One of the most tantalizing aspects of travelling to Alpha Centauri is investigating its Proxima Centauri B exoplanet, which possesses an Earth-like mass and orbits within the system’s habitable zone — meaning that it has the potential to harbor life. So far, so good.

The problem is getting the data back from the lightweight solar sail that Breakthrough Starshot aims to send. Radio, for instance, is impossible. An independent astrophysicist named Michael Hippke thinks he has a solution, however — and he’s published a couple of papers online to explain what it might entail. The TLDR version? It involves using an effect called gravitational lensing and the sun’s gravity to amplify signals from the probe for some sweet interstellar space streaming.

“In the first paper of my series, I show that we can communicate with such a probe near Proxima at low data rates, in the vicinity of bits per second, when using large Earth-based telescopes,” Hippke told Digital Trends. “This allows for the transfer of a few images over the course of months, but nothing more. In the second paper, I analyze how to improve the data rate. This can be done using our sun as a telescope. The gravitational field bends the light and a telescope can be put in its focus to collect the signal photons. This allows for much higher data rates.”

According to Hippke’s calculations, the gravitational lens telescope could increase data rate by a factor of one million. That would mean data transfer rates sufficient for live HD video streaming. (“Although live is relative,” he points out. “The speed of light still applies, and it takes the photons 4 years for the journey.)

The coolest part of Hippke’s suggestion is that it uses a lot of existing technology — although it still requires the use of a spacecraft being launched further into space than any we’ve launched before.

“The receiver itself it off-the-shelf established technology,” he said. “A telescope like the Hubble Space Telescope would be totally sufficient in terms of aperture and quality. It would need to be equipped with a coronagraph, also standard technology, and a fast photon detector. The difficult part is to bring the device, which would be 1 to 2 meters, to to a distance of 600 astronomical units — roughly the distance from Earth to the Sun — which takes many decades with classical rockets. However, there are some NASA studies that show options for gravitational swing-bys and high-velocity rockets to make it possible in 30-50 years.”

Plus, there’s that tiny matter of getting a probe near to Proxima in order to send us the data in the first place, of course!

Georgia Tech’s 3D-printed heart valve models could be a genuine lifesaver

Why it matters to you

3D-printing lets surgeons pick the right heart valve for surgery, helping avoid potentially fatal leakage.

Long-term, the dream of 3D-printed objects is to use additive manufacturing to be able to bioprint entire functional organs for use in transplant surgeries.

While we are not at that point just yet, that does not mean there is not some massively exciting work happening in the field, however. The latest example? Research carried out at Georgia Institute of Technology and the Piedmont Heart Institute in Atlanta, where investigators have created 3D-printed heart valves, designed for use in the planning of lifesaving surgeries.

“The Georgia Tech and Piedmont Heart Institute team has developed an integrated materials design and 3D-printing technique for making heart valves that can closely mimic human heart valve functions,” Georgia Tech engineering professor Chuck Zhang told Digital Trends. “These 3D-printed valves can be used by doctors or surgeons for surgery planning, such as selecting the most matching prosthetic valve, and determining the location of the stent to be inserted in the aortic valve in a transcatheter aortic valve replacements (TAVR) procedure.”

As with other applications of 3D printing, the big advantage of the technology here is the high level of customization it offers. Replacement valves which don’t fit properly can cause leakage-related complications, potentially resulting in the death of the patient. By creating 3D-printed models from CT scans of patients’ hearts, cardiologists will be able to test valve models for fit prior to surgery taking place.

So far, the researchers have done in vitro testing of the technology retrospectively on 18 patients. Although these patients had received previous heart valve replacements, the researchers were able to manufacture 3D-printed valves and study them to see how well they functioned in test conditions. The study showed that the 3D-printed valves were able to predict not only the occurrence of post-TAVR (transcatheter aortic valve replacement) paravalvular leaks, but also its location and severity.

“The next step is to further refine the technique and perform more tests,” Zhang said. “We also plan to work with companies to commercialize this technique so that it can be available for surgeons to use in related operations in the near future.”

The work is described in a paper published in the journal ACC: Cardiovascular Imaging.

Google Blocks makes it easy for anybody to create VR objects in 3D

Why it matters to you

You now have an easier way to create 3D objects for VR environments — all you needs is an HTC Vive or Oculus Rift headset.

Augmented and virtual reality continue to make meaningful strides in terms of the hardware that makes the experiences possible. At the same time, software and content need to continuously keep up or all of that hardware will go to waste — a fact that isn’t lost on companies like Google and Microsoft that are heavily invested in AR and VR technology.

Google has taken a particular approach to induce developers and creative professionals to create the tools and assets that can bring AR and VR worlds to life. Specifically, Google has focused in part on making it easier to create artwork and 3D objects for use in AR/VR environments and then sharing them with the world. Its newest offering is an app called Blocks, which is aimed at creating 3D assets in its most natural environment — that is, from within VR headsets themselves.

Blocks, as Road to VR reports, differs from many of the tools currently used to create the 3D objects that populate a VR environment. Those tools typically are created on traditional PCs using 2D displays, while Blocks follows Google’s earlier artist-focused Tilt Brush app in being utilized within the VR headset and environment itself. And like Tilt Brush, Blocks is intended to be easy enough to use for anyone with access to the right VR equipment.

Simply put, Blocks allows creative types to create simple 3D objects using their VR “hands,” with a selection of tools, shapes, and textures that can be applied to add some flair to each individual creation. The process is described as easy enough for non-technical users without significant artistic talent to use to create objects, which can then be exported to Google’s Blocks showcase for use by anyone who’s building a VR environment.

So far, Blocks works on the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, and it is completely free to use. The resulting objects can be utilized in other VR applications, including Tilt Brush and the Windows-based 3D Builder app. You can check out some creations now at the Blocks showcase, and create your own 3D objects by grabbing the Blocks app from Steam or the Oculus Store.

Amazon Prime Day Live Blog: All of the best deals in real-time

Prime Day 2017 is finally here, and the Thrifter team will be covering all 30 hours of it with you right here!

That’s right. Team Thrifter will be bringing you complete coverage of all things Prime Day right here, and we hope you’ll join us. Our live coverage of the fun will begin on July 10 at 7 p.m. EST. Amazon will have a mix of all-day and Lightning deals going on, and we don’t want you to miss out on any of them, so we’ve created this live blog to help everyone out. Lightning deals have been known to sell out in just minutes (sometimes less), so this is the quickest way to be alerted of these deals as they are happening!

Read more at Thrifter

Motorola hosting #hellomotoworld in NYC on July 25

Motorola will announce a number of new products at a press event on July 25.

In what is probably the least surprising event announcement of the summer given all the recent leaks, Motorola is hosting a press event in New York on July 25 to shine a light on some of its latest products.

Dubbed #hellomotoworld — Motorola really likes its hashtagged event names, doesn’t it? — the event should be the place the company announces what is believed to be its 2017 flagship, the Moto Z2 Force, along with a number of new Moto Mods that were, for some reason, pre-announced at an event in Ghana last week. Also possibly on the docket is the Moto X4 which, along with the Moto Z2 Force, may sport a dual camera setup among other niceties like IP68 water resistance and more.

At the beginning of June, Motorola announced the Moto Z2 Play and three new Moto Mods for the Z series, along with additional information about a GamePad Mods that would be available towards the end of the summer. Well, the heady days of summer are here, and it wouldn’t be a surprise to get a firmer release date for that highly-anticipated Mod alongside the Moto Z2 Force.

We’ll know lots more in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

Moto Z2 Play Review: Bad sequel, better smartphone

Last year’s Moto Z Play was a smartphone with legendary battery life that didn’t break the bank. So, for the sequel, Motorola decided to shrink the battery … and bump up the price. Because … capitalism?

I was as irritated as anyone to see Motorola make that choice, since I really admired the original Z Play’s unique package of affordability and endurance. But what surprised me is that, even despite its shrunken battery (and my accompanying consternation) the Motorola Z2 Play is still a really good phone. Even more surprising: it’s also a pretty good deal — as long as you get it from Verizon.

Curiosity piqued? Click on through to MrMobile’s Moto Z2 Play Review! Then be sure to follow it up with Android Central’s Moto Z2 Play review for the deeper dive, and if you want the full take on all the new Moto Mods coming down the pike … we’ve got that too.

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Healbe’s GoBe 2 calorie tracker teases the future of wearables

Shortly before Apple’s most recent developer conference, rumors began to circulate about the next generation of its watch. Sources suggested that the device would demonstrate a form of noninvasive glucose monitoring — a way to check blood sugar levels without breaching the skin. If possible, the Apple Watch Series 3 would become an essential product for 29 million American diabetics, overnight. It came to nothing, of course, but people are still wondering if there’s a way for smartwatches to sniff our blood and tell us their findings. Thing is, there’s already a watch that professes to do a similar task: the controversial Healbe GoBe.

In order to see what the future of medical wearables could be like, I’ve spent the past few weeks with the new GoBe 2 strapped to my wrist. The device was soft-launched to a group of pre-order customers a few months ago, with more going on sale at some point this fall. If the name tickles a synapse at the back of your brain, it’s because Healbe burst onto the scene in 2014. The company launched an Indiegogo campaign to build a watch that could track how many calories you’d eaten each day. Not your blood sugar, but close enough.

Imagine it: You’d never have to think about logging your calorie intake again; your watch would do it all for you. The claim was ridiculous, but the company managed to secure more than $1 million in backing. Medical professionals and journalists weighed in, saying that the idea was about as feasible as capturing a unicorn fart. Thanks to sites like PandoDaily, the name Healbe became synonymous with companies that tried to sell you a dream and run off with your cash.

A post shared by Healbe (@healbe) on Apr 11, 2017 at 2:37am PDT

The device finally launched a year later, with its signature tracking feature kinda sorta working, but not very well. When we reviewed it, we felt that the watch had too many rough edges to justify people buying it, despite its vastly superior sleep and fitness tracking features. Perhaps the company rushed its first release in response to public pressure, which ostensibly explains why it failed. Now, Healbe believes that its second-generation device is finally ready for prime time and able to do what was promised.

As for the science, Healbe claims that it uses a piezoelectric impedance sensor to push high- and low-frequency signals through your wrist. Shortly after eating, the cells in your bloodstream begin releasing water as they absorb the new glucose. The device, so the company says, can use the impedance signals to look at the size and shape of the cells, and track the change in water. From there, it’s just a case of using fancy math to calculate the amount of food you’ve noshed in a sitting.

One thing that Healbe’s representatives went to great pains to explain is that the human body isn’t as simple as you may expect. The initial pitch mistakenly hinted that, at some point after you’d eaten a sandwich, the watch would simply ping and tell you that you’d consumed 233 calories. But most meals take between four and six hours to digest as the slurry of chewed food churns through our bodies. Rather than looking at the micro, I was told, I needed to see the GoBe 2 as a way of understanding the macro.

The device itself is a little more elegant than its predecessor, although that’s not saying much. It still just fits under a shirt sleeve, although you’ll be unable to pretend it’s anything but a clunky-looking wearable. The new model’s case is all black, and gone is the top layer of metal that demarcated the display in the first generation. A single button activates the display and cycles through the various screens, from telling the time to measuring your calorie balance.

Most of the interesting bits are contained within its companion app, which elegantly shows off your vital statistics. It’s broken down into five subsections: “Energy Balance,” Hydration, Heart Rate, Sleep and Stress. The first one combines activity tracking and calorie monitoring to provide you with a single figure, showing whether you’re in calorie credit or deficit each day. It’s calculated by subtracting the activity you’ve completed against the food you’ve consumed, so, depending on how good you’ve been, it’ll be a plus or minus figure.

The Healbe GoBe 2 Dashboard

Daniel Cooper

As for the calorie counting itself, you get a series of figures breaking down the calories taken in, and how many are fat, carbs and protein. A graph then shows you absorption over the past day, running from midnight to midnight. It’s good to note that you’ll see spikes in calorie burn in the small hours of the morning too, as your body works through the day’s food.

Unlike the first-generation GoBe, you don’t need to tell the device when you’re going to eat; it does it all automatically. So looking at the graph for an average day, there’s a lot of burning as I sleep, and then a big spike shortly after I eat breakfast. Then the graph spikes shrink through the morning before shooting back up again at lunchtime, and so forth. While I wasn’t expecting a constant and precise record of my consumption, I found the tracking to be pretty close to my handwritten notes.

Hydration is another issue, and the watch is obsessed with ensuring that I get enough fluids, even though I thought I was a good drinker. It will often buzz at me, instructing me to take on more water, even if I’m on the cusp of falling asleep — at least until I’d set its reminder window to remind me to drink only during daylight hours. After all, at one point I was full to bursting after I chain-drank the better part of three liters of green tea, and I was still being advised that I needed to drink more.

Similarly, the sleep tracking is some of the most accurate I’ve seen, outlining periods of REM sleep, stress and anxiety through the night. Similarly, it’s the first “stress”-counting wearable that has actually worked, vibrating with the warning “Emotion” during a particularly fractious conversation with my other half. It all adds up to a device that actually kinda does what was promised, which is probably the biggest surprise of all of this.

The questions that linger are simple: whether Apple will adopt a technology like this in a future version of its watch, and if it can be tweaked to calculate blood sugar. On the first point, the biggest obstacle to its use would be the GoBe’s atrocious battery life — it lasts 24 hours between charges. The Watch itself has an even shorter lifespan, and it would take a radical redesign to make it practical.

As for whether the technology could be used to track blood sugar levels, that will come down to how well the algorithms can be tweaked. If Healbe’s Flow technology is legitimate, and it does turn out to be capable of tracking food consumption, then it’s entirely plausible and possible. Although Apple will be held to a vastly higher standard than Healbe, especially given the latter company’s lack of credibility.

Testing this device, I expected very little from it, believing that its signature feature was simply too impossible to work. But the Healbe GoBe 2 is a very good health and fitness tracker, offering insights and proactive advice that I appreciate in a wearable device. It offers lifestyle metrics that other companies would dream of being able to offer, and reading my stats has become a mild obsession. As a consequence, the company has earned a second chance at a first impression.

Source: Healbe