Diet app Lose It introduces DNA-based weight loss plan

Last year, calorie-tracking app Lose It launched a feature called Snap It, which promised to identify the foods you were eating just from a photo. By adding machine learning and computer vision to the mix, it turned the ordinary act of food logging into a high-tech affair. Now, the company is ready to take its app up another level with the introduction of more tech: personal genetics. Today, Lose It is introducing embodyDNA, a weight loss plan that’s based on your actual, well, DNA.

To get started, you’ll have to order a kit from embodyDNA.com for $189.99. When you get it, you’ll provide a saliva sample through a swab and send it off to Helix, a personal genomics company that’s in partnership with Lose It. After about six to eight weeks, Helix will then deliver the results through the Lose It app to your account. And if you’re an existing Lose It user, the app will look at your food log history to identify patterns and then make recommendations based on the results of your DNA test.

The embodyDNA test will essentially give you a series of insights about your body when it comes to diet and fitness. It’ll figure out what your metabolism is, what your fitness levels are, and if you have any sensitivities to certain foods like gluten or dairy. If you have a family history of diabetes, for example, you might find that you’re particularly reactive to sugar. It’ll also tell you if you’re genetically predisposed to a high BMI, if you should do more or less exercise, and what kinds of exercise you should do. As the technology gets more advanced, it’ll be able to tell you even more about your body and the weight loss strategy that is best for you.

Lose It’s embodyDNA is not the first program that has sought to alter people’s fitness strategies based on genetics. DNAFit, for example, offers tailored diet and exercise plans based on an examination of your DNA, including a meal planner and information on specific exercises you should do to suit your body type.

We’ve yet to give Lose It’s version a go, but hope to do so in the near future. In the meantime, you can try it out for yourself by going to embodyDNA.com.

Apple Buys Specialist Machinery to Set Up OLED Panel R&D Line in Taiwan

Apple has acquired specialist machinery from Sunic System to build its own OLED panel research and development line in Taiwan, according to a report on Monday.

Korea-based Sunic manufactures systems for OLED display production and supply for both pilot and mass production lines. According to ET News, Apple has purchased chemical vapor deposition (CVD) machines from the company to reduce its reliance on Chinese suppliers as it ramps up its R&D into OLED panel and related technology.

CVD is a technique for the fabrication and synthesis of thin films of polymeric materials, which have a broad range of application, including the production of OLED panel coatings with barrier properties.

Japanese Canon Tokki is currently the primary supplier of CVD machines and is said to ship the bulk of its output to Samsung, the biggest producer of OLED panels, but Apple’s acquisition of the machines from Sunic could undermine Canon Tokki’s dominant position in the CVD market going forward.

Samsung has bought five sets of OLED manufacturing equipment from Canon Tokki so far in 2017 and has signed contracts to buy five out of 10 such machines to be rolled out by the Japan-based machinery company in 2018, said the Commercial Times.

Samsung’s own CVD purchases likely feed into its plan to construct the world’s biggest OLED display manufacturing plant, which could begin mass production in 2019.

Apple has reportedly signed a two-year contract with the Korean company for the supply of up to 92 million curved OLED panels, at least some of which are expected to be used in this year’s redesigned iPhone, variously referred to in the media as “iPhone 8”, “iPhone Pro”, and “iPhone X”.

Apple is thought to be offering the OLED iPhone as a premium option alongside typical upgraded “S” cycle iPhone 7 handsets that will retain LCD displays. Rumors suggest that all iPhones in Apple’s line-up could come with OLED displays by 2019.

Today’s report suggests Apple is accelerating its research into bespoke OLED technology with the aim of eventually reducing its heavy reliance on Samsung in years to come, although whether it would actually manufacture its own OLED panels is unclear. LG has also reportedly purchased two CVD machines from Canon Tokki and has begun shipping OLED panels to Xiaomi and Google, and although LG’s panels have not yet been validated by Apple, the two companies are said to be negotiating an OLED supply deal in time for 2019.

(Via DigiTimes.)

Related Roundup: iPhone 8
Tag: OLED
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Rival Mobile Makers Reduce Chip Orders in Anticipation of ‘iPhone 8’ Debut

Mobile chip suppliers in Apple’s supply chain are reportedly seeing a drop in orders from rival handset makers as other companies adopt a “wait-and-see” approach in anticipation of what the “iPhone 8” might bring, according to a new report on Monday (via DigiTimes).

While chip makers saw Apple’s orders pick up last month, demand from non-Apple customers has been slow, according to sources at backend houses, which don’t expect orders to rise substantially until the fourth quarter.

The A10 chip, which powers Apple’s current iPhone line-up

Fabless firms including MediaTek and HiSilicon continue to slow down their pace of orders, said the sources, which warned of disappointing handset-chip shipments from the non-Apple camp in the third quarter.

Chip orders from rivals were reportedly expected to have picked up in the beginning of April and grown through August, but orders are said to have been delayed as companies await Apple’s redesigned “iPhone 8”, which many rivals believe will come with revolutionary features.

Meanwhile, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has seen non-Apple customers express more interest in the firm’s 12-nanometer node manufacturing process, which is said to be a smaller, enhanced version of its 16nm process, rather than its 10nm process, which Apple is relying on for the A11 chips in its iterative “iPhone 7s” and “iPhone 7s Plus” updates, along with the premium-tier OLED iPhone.

10nm is supposed to yield chips that are more power efficient and offer faster end user experiences. Apple’s iPhone sales are expected to sustain demand for TSMC’s 10nm mobile chips through the first quarter of 2018, the sources added. Meanwhile, the 12nm node process should serve as a more modest enhancement to fill the competition gap before more suppliers are capable of building faster 10nm chips.

Apple has a major iPhone redesign in the works this year, with a glass body and edge-to-edge OLED display, wireless charging, enhanced cameras with 3D sensing technology, and new authentication features including facial recognition. The OLED iPhone is expected to launch in the fall alongside upgraded (but standard) 4.7 and 5.5-inch iPhones.

Related Roundup: iPhone 8
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HTC U11 gets Alexa in the UK

App update brings Amazon’s virtual assistant to British U11 phones.

HTC has updated its Alexa app for the U11, bringing Amazon’s virtual assistant to UK models of the phone.

As we saw a week ago when the service launched in the U.S., the app effectively turns the HTC U11 into a portable Amazon echo, responding to voice commands, and living harmoniously alongside Google Assistant, which shipped on the phone at launch.

When it’s equipped with the HTC Alexa app, the U11 can access skills just like a full-blown Amazon Echo, including interfacing with any Alexa-enabled smart home devices you may have.

There are a few limitations in the app right now, as Andrew Martonik discovered in his time with Alexa on the U.S. unlocked HTC U11:

The fact that Alexa on the phone works just like your Echo at home is a big deal for those who are already familiar with it, but there are also clear limitations to this setup.

Nothing about Alexa on the phone takes advantage of the fact that it’s on the phone. Unlike Google Assistant, Alexa can’t control items on your phone like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, can’t give you directions to things that open up Google Maps, can’t transition to showing you things on the screen and perhaps most importantly can’t let you just type to it. It really is just an Echo virtualized into an app on your U11 — and that means at launch it lags behind Google Assistant in terms of raw capabilities and features that feel native to the phone.

British U11 owners can get Alexa on their devices by heading to Google Play and updating the preloaded HTC Alexa app: Go to Play Store > My apps and games and tap update. Once updated, you’ll need to open the HTC Alexa app to run through setup and get started.

If you’re playing around with Amazon Alexa on your HTC U11 for the first time today, hit the comments and let us know how you’re getting along. HTC says the next country to get Alexa will be Germany, though there’s no word on precise timings just yet.

More: Amazon Alexa on the HTC U11 Impressions

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• HTC U11 review
• HTC U11 specs
• Manufacturing the U11: Behind the scenes
• Join our U11 forums
• HTC U11 vs Galaxy S8
• HTC U11 vs LG G6

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Nanomaterial charges everyday batteries in seconds

If you want a battery that charges in seconds rather than hours, you go for a supercapacitor. There are some catches to that, though: either you give up the long-lasting energy of a chemical battery (like the lithium pack in your phone) or have to resort to exotic storage tech to get a long lifespan. Drexel researchers think they have a better balance. They’ve developed electrodes based on a nanomaterial, MXene, that promise extremely quick charging times for chemical batteries. The near-2D design combines an oxide-metal ‘sandwich’ with hydrogel to create a structure that’s extremely conductive, but still lets ions move freely as the battery builds up a charge. In the lab’s design, you can charge MXene electrodes within “tens of milliseconds” — you could top up a phone in seconds or an electric car in minutes.

As is often the case, the big challenge is scaling this up to production-quality energy cells. It could be years before this reaches something you can buy. However, its very focus on supporting chemical batteries makes it more practical. Factories would only have to adapt to the new electrodes, rather than throwing out their existing battery know-how. If nothing else, the existence of the MXene design shows that ultra-fast charging is becoming more realistic.

Via: ScienceAlert

Source: Drexel University, Nature

Telegram Encrypted Chat App Gains Self-Destructing Video and Photo Messages

Encrypted messaging app Telegram received an update on Sunday that makes it the latest chat platform to embrace Snapchat-style disappearing messages.

Up until now, Telegram users have only been able to send text-based “secret chats” that self-delete, but in version 4.2 of the app they can now share videos and photos armed with a self-destruct timer.

Timers are set using the clock icon in the media picker and can be anything up to one minute long. The countdown starts the moment the recipient opens the photo or video that’s sent, and the sender is notified if the recipient tries to take a screenshot of the disappearing media.

Elsewhere in the update, there’s an improved photo editor and a speed boost for media downloads from large public channels, thanks to new encrypted content delivery networks.

Lastly, users can now add a bio to their profile in settings, so that people in large group chats know who they are. Telegram is a free download for iPhone and iPad from the App Store. [Direct Link]

Tags: privacy, Telegram
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Work starts on a massive underground neutrino experiment

Neutrinos are notoriously difficult to understand, but work is underway to know them a little better. Researchers have officially broken ground on the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility, the home to the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. When it’s finished 10 years from now, the South Dakota project will be the largest-ever US experiment built to study the subatomic particle — teams will remove 870,000 tons of rock to create the caverns needed for the facility’s centerpiece liquid argon detector. All that excavation should pay off, though, as it promises to shed light on some of the mysteries of the universe.

The facility will look for changes in neutrinos shot from both Fermilab (near Chicago) as well as exploding stars. Differences between neutrinos and antineutrinos could explain why the cosmos is dominated by matter, for instance. And looking to the stars could both help detect phenomenons (such as the births of black holes and neutron stars) and explain whether or not protons ever decay. Ultimately, it could help establish a unified scientific theory that explains… well, everything. However much time and money it takes to build LBNF, it could pay huge dividends down the road.

Via: Gizmodo

Source: Fermilab

Citizen scientists find a failed star in the Sun’s neighborhood

Citizen scientists may not have the time and equipment of their pro counterparts, but their dedication can sometimes lead to discoveries that would otherwise be impractical. Case in point: a NASA-backed citizen science initiative, Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, has found a brown dwarf (effectively, a failed star) relatively close to the Sun at 110 light years away. Rosa Castro and three other amateur observers combed through a “flipbook” of images from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer to spot the dwarf as it traversed through space. The discovery is notable for a few reasons, and not just because dedicated astronomers didn’t catch it.

While it would have been tempting to simply have computers scan the images for changes, that’s difficult with brown dwarfs. They tend to be faint, and it’s all too easy for a machine to gloss over that info or spend too much time on useless data. Castro and crew not only detected something a computer would likely miss, they found a particularly faint brown dwarf — it’s possible that a full-time astronomer would have overlooked it.

You might see more discoveries like this in the future. Backyard Worlds is expected to continue for several more years, so there will be plenty of chances. And since you’re searching through images, just about anyone with a keen eye can participate. NASA even suspects that there may be brown dwarves closer than the 4.2 light years between the Sun and Proxima Centauri. Humanity may have a fuller understanding of its cosmic neighborhood thanks to people working in their spare time.

Via: SyFy

Source: NASA, IOP

Billionaire space prospectors are racing to mine the moon, and that’s a good thing

Right now, as you read these words, there’s a galactic gold rush brewing that will make 1940s California look like a rehearsal dinner. At this very moment, a handful of billionaire-backed companies are planning to mine outer space for ungodly reserves of precious metals and other untapped treasures. On the moon alone, quadrillions of dollars of interplanetary paydirt are at stake.

This isn’t just a high-flying, hopelessly optimistic plan, either. Things are already in motion. The rockets are built and the FAA has already given certain companies the all-go for launch. The cosmic golden nuggets are ripe for the picking and fortune, as the saying goes, favors the bold.

Whether we like it or not, some of the wealthiest venture capitalists on Earth will soon launch mining operations on the Moon — and if we ever hope to become a multi-planetary species, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

The cosmic gold rush

The treasures these space-age prospectors seek are myriad. The lunar surface is brimming with not only precious metals and rare isotopes, but also a litany of other natural resources.

Some of these are ridiculously valuable. Helium-3, for example, currently has a projected value of $40,000 per ounce. To put that in perspective, gold is currently being traded at about $1,200 an ounce. This incredibly high valuation comes from the isotope’s relative scarcity here on earth, as well as its potential as a fuel source. Helium-3 could be used as an efficient, alternative fuel source in fusion reactors, and about 220 pounds of it could theoretically power Dallas for an entire year.

About 220 pounds of Helium-3 could theoretically power Dallas for an entire year.

Not all the Moon’s treasures are quite so exotic, however. In addition to rare isotopes and precious metals, there’s also cold, hard cash for the taking. Google has set aside $30 million in prize money for its Lunar X Prize Competition, in an effort to challenge privately funded engineers and entrepreneurs to develop lost-cost methods of space exploration. In other words, whoever gets to the moon first not only gets unfettered access to its resources, but also millions of dollars just for arriving first.

Google also offers individual prizes for completing certain milestones — including a Water Detection Bonus Prize. As it turns out, water may be the most valuable resource not only on the moon, but also in the solar system. Once frozen water has been located, the hydrogen and oxygen can easily be separated — and if you have hydrogen and oxygen, you have rocket fuel. Just imagine how much money the first lunar gas station could charge per gallon!

To top it all off, even the moon’s dirt (known as regolith) is highly valuable. Due to the high per-pound cost of sending materials into orbit, anyone hoping to set up a mining operation on the moon will need to “live off the land” as much as possible. With this in mind, a team at Virginia Tech has already used simulated regolith to create bricks that could be used for lunar construction projects. Similarly, the European Space Agency has developed a synthetic regolith that, when mixed with magnesium oxide, yields a material with 3D printing potential. Why ship a moon base brick-by-brick when you could just as easily print it — or better yet, sell the bricks to a lunar construction company?

Meet the Miners

Believe it or not, there are already a handful of private space companies racing each other toward the launchpad. In late 2016, Moon Express — arguably the world’s foremost lunar mining company — received approval to launch a moon mission. This marks the first time the government has approved a private mission beyond Earth orbit.

“We go to the moon not because it is easy, but because it is profitable,” jokes Naveen Jain, co-founder and chairman of Moon Express, invoking John F. Kennedy’s famous Rice University moon speech.

NASA

That isn’t just a clever quip, though. Moon Express has already raked in one million dollars in X Prize money for being the first private company in the competition to present and test a lunar lander vehicle. The company could cash in on other X Prizes as early as November of this year; that’s when the company hopes to land on the moon.

To compete for the $20 million first-place prize, all a privately funded company needs to do is successfully place a spacecraft on the moon, travel 500 meters across the lunar surface, while transmitting high-definition images and video back to Earth. Easy enough, right?

DSI hopes to use a fleet of “harvesters” to the latch onto resource-rich asteroids and extract water.

Thing is, Moon Express isn’t the only outfit in town. It’s currently in a race against a handful of other space mining companies — the most notable of which are Deep Space Industries (DSI) from Mountain View, California, and Planetary Resources from Redmond, Washington. While not explicitly focused on the moon, both companies are carving out their own slice of the burgeoning space mining market by developing technologies to survey and extract resources from Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs).

Due to their proximity to Earth, many water-rich NEAs are much easier to access than the moon. For this reason, Planetary Resources has dubbed these bodies as the “low hanging fruit of the solar system” and is developing a space telescope platform to analyze NEAs to determine their makeup. This data will then be used to pinpoint which prospects to mine for raw materials (namely water and Platinum Group Metals). The company plans to launch its asteroid prospecting system in 2020.

Similarly, DSI Will use its Prospector-1 spacecraft to rendezvous with a NEA to determine its composition and subsequent value. The company hopes to eventually use a fleet of “harvesters” to the latch onto resource-rich asteroids and extract water. After processing, thrusters will supposedly be able to use this water as a propellant to tow the asteroid back to near-Earth space where these assets can then be processed. The company is set to launch its prototype Prospector-X spacecraft later this year.

Finders keepers; losers weepers

It used to be that laying claim to space rocks was tricky business, but thanks to some forward-thinking legislation enacted in recent years, many of the legal hurdles standing in the way of these space mining operations have been ironed out.

Up until recently, there weren’t many ratified international laws or treaties regarding resources found outside of our planet. In 1967, we got the Outer Space Treaty, which establishes broad parameters about the use of space for peaceful purposes, and also specifically states that no country can own anything outside of Earth. Obviously, this agreement isn’t exactly ideal for anybody looking to set up a moon mining operation.

But the game changed two years ago. In 2015, the Obama administration pushed forward the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act. This legislation essentially works around the semantics of existing treaties, and enables individuals to recover resources in space without outright claiming sovereignty over the lunar land that the resources were taken from.

“Think of these planets as international waters,” says Jain. “Nobody gets to own the underlying things, but they can use the private resources,” “They [can] own the fish and the oil … we as a private company are flying under the U.S. flag, in some sense then, we are a ship in international waters.”

With the legal framework in place to determine who owns the rights to any resources recovered on the moon and beyond, the doors of opportunity have been flung wide open. There’s a massive hoard of loot floating over our heads, and whoever gets there first basically has carte blanche to mine it — we just have to make the trip.

The technology is underway

It might seem like all this space mining business is still multiple decades away from coming to fruition, but Ian A. Christensen, a Project Manager with the Secure World foundation, believes this new era is closer than you might think.

“In the next couple of years, we will see companies fly technology demonstrations and early “prospecting” missions, in Earth’s orbit, to asteroids, and on the lunar surface,” he explains. “Commercial demonstration and validation missions for the actual resource extraction technology are possible within a decade.”

Former NASA researcher, Dr. Phil Metzger, shares a similar sentiment. “The main challenge for this concept,” he explains, “is neither technology nor cost, but simply convincing people it is realistic.”

As futuristic as it may seem, the technology is already in development. NASA has partnered with machinery giant Caterpillar Inc. as part of the Innovative Partnerships Program. The joint collaboration looks to develop “regolith moving operations” such as trenching, strip-mining, boring, and excavating.

NASA’s Resource Prospector mission — which could be launched as soon as the early 2020s — will utilize a rover to search for subsurface lunar resources. Once a deposit has been located, the vehicle will deploy a drill to extract materials up to one meter deep.

A single meter might not sound like much, but on the moon, many of the most valuable materials don’t require massive excavation projects to obtain. Due to millions of years of impacts, the surface of the moon itself is covered in rich deposits.

At the beginning of the California gold rush, gravel beds were so concentrated with gold, the early forty-niners could pan by hand for these resources in streams without heavy extraction methods. The uncolonized moon will likely be similar, which is precisely why Jain dislikes using the term “mining” as it pertains to the lunar surface.

“Mining has such a negative connotation, people think you’re drilling a hole and destroying things,” Jain explained in an interview with The Guardian. “This is more like collecting or harvesting.”

Space travel is getting cheaper by the month

Not too long ago, sending something into space cost a lot of money. In fact, it still does. But that cost is rapidly decreasing, thanks in large part to innovation and competition amongst private-sector launch providers like SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, and Orbital ATK. Right now, it costs roughly $10,000 per pound to launch something into orbit. SpaceX hopes to bring that down to $1,000 in the next few years.

“NASA has been building rockets for god knows how long. It took Elon Musk to build a reusable rocket.”

“NASA has been building rockets for god knows how long. It took Elon Musk to build a reusable rocket,” says Jain. “NASA didn’t do it … Elon disrupted the rocket industry by bringing the cost of the rocket down from 200 million [dollars] to 70 million [dollars]. I know people that are building rockets for a million [dollars]. And those rockets will come to cost thousands of dollars.”

He’s not exaggerating. Moon Express is working with companies on the bleeding edge of space travel. The company currently has a contract with a company called Rocket Lab, and plans to use the company’s Electron rocket system for its inaugural moon mission. The Electron utilizes Rocket Lab’s revolutionary Rutherford engine for both stages of propulsion. The body is created out of carbon composite, greatly reducing overall weight. The engine itself is made almost entirely out of 3D printed components. Normally it takes months to build a rocket engine from scratch, but Rocket Lab can build its engine in just three days.

“It’s not [NASA’s] job to innovate,” according to Jain. “Their job it to create the foundation of science and the foundation of research. It’s the job of the entrepreneur to go out and commercialize and reduce the cost and create the businesses around it.”

Boomtowning

As soon as one of Earth’s intrepid space prospectors sets up the first outpost on the moon, the floodgates will open up. After one group builds the lunar infrastructure necessary to support a mining operation, it will also pave the way for other companies to follow suit.

Moon Express has its sights set on much more than mining the moon’s untapped resources, The company’s endgame is to set the foundation for a lunar supply chain. As such, Naveen Jain sees himself as less of moon marauding space pirate and more of a space-age Steve Jobs.

“What Moon Express is really doing is building the iPhone of the moon, and that iPhone will obviously have an app store,” Jain explains. “We’re going to build a bunch of apps and we are going to let third parties build a bunch of apps too. When we land on the moon and we build the underlying iPhone infrastructure, what will be the Pokemon Go of the moon and who will build that?”

From harvesting rare-earth elements, to building moon motels made of regolith, to building a lunar gas station; the moon is ripe with economic potential.

This is more than a space-age cash grab, though; it’s a necessary step for humanity if we ever hope to become a multi-planetary species. Oddly enough, handing over the keys to the universe to literal corporate golddiggers — as off-putting as it may be — might just be the most viable and economical step toward establishing humanity’s first extraterrestrial colony.

“In 15 years, the moon will be an important part of the Earth’s economy, and potentially our second home,” Jain notes. “Imagine that.”

Your Telegram chats now include disappearing photos

Telegram’s messaging app is better known for its security than catering to Snapchat fans, but it’s blurring those lines. The company has updated its mobile apps with support for disappearing photos and videos in any private chat. All you have to do is set a timer for your media and it’ll vanish. If the recipient gets sneaky and takes a screenshot, you’ll know right away. In short: much as with services like Snapchat or iMessage, you shouldn’t have to worry that a sensitive pic will leak to the public.

The upgrade also brings faster media in some cases. If you’re part of a very large channel with 100,000 or more members, Telegram will lean on a distributed content network to speed up your downloads wherever you happen to be. And if you use stickers, you can expand the scrolling area to pick just the right image to make your point. None of these additions will sway you if you’re well-entrenched in another social app, but they may give you fewer reasons to switch away.

Source: Telegram, App Store, Google Play