BMW’s redesigned 8 Series is cleaner, more aggressive

At the Monterey Car Week BMW just unveiled two new concept vehicles. Both are previews of planned production models of the Series 8 and Z4 Roadster. If the versions you’ll find on the forecourt are even close to these concepts, there are going to be a lot of very happy movie producers and hedge fund managers (thanks to the probable high price and outstanding, but aggressive looks).

Both cars show off the automaker’s new cleaner design language with fewer but sharper lines. The result is beautiful. They look like they’ll slice through the wind with hardly any turbulence thanks to the smoother surface. But the Z4 with its larger footprint but shorter bonnet is especially magnificent. When it does become available, it’ll be in high demand.

The Series 8 concept sees the return of that line after an 18 year hiatus. It, along with the larger more aggressive Z4 signal the return of “sports cars” to the BMW family.

While the cars are built for speed, we expect them to be filled with the current tech found in the rest of the line-up, including BMW’s semi-autonomous adaptive cruise control with “Stop & Go” feature for heavy traffic.

Also don’t be surprised to see the gesture-control feature that lets you turn up the volume by spinning a finger make an appearance — at least in the Series 8 when it drops in 2018. It might be a bit tougher to get the cameras and sensors needed for that feature to work on the open air Z4 though.

Both of the cars look outstanding and while we only have to wait about a year for the Series 8, when we’ll see a final version of the Z4 is still up in the air. Hopefully it’s sooner rather than later.

Source: BMW

Facebook demotes video clickbait posts to improve your feeds

In a bid to promote “authentic communication,” Facebook will now demote clickbait stories that present static images as video along with images with fake playback buttons in them. While the former practice just ends up confusing users, the latter actually tricks people into clicking through to a website. Both techniques are frowned upon by the social network, which says it wants to “improve the integrity of information on Facebook.”

Facebook has been working to halt the spread of hate speech and fake news for a while now. It shut down an internal forum for harassment earlier today, recently started using AI to detect fake ads, began adding facts to fake news shares, acquired a startup’s technology to fight video piracy, disabled modified link previews, and added a set of educational guides to counter fake news. The company has had its missteps, of course, like when it shut down a black activists account for posting threats that she herself had received.

Source: Facebook

Skype’s new look arrives on the desktop in preview form

Skype is making a preview version of its new desktop design available for users to try out. Available today, Mac and non-Windows 10 PC users can download Skype Preview and see the new features that are in the works.

Skype says the changes are made with the larger screen of desktop in mind. Chats are getting a notification panel and you’ll be able to see conversations that @ mentioned you while you were away. There’s also a new media gallery in chat that helps you find images, links or documents that were shared with you through the feature. Group calls are getting some tweaks as well. You’ll be able to use in-call reactions like emojis and the redesign offers real-time screen and photo sharing.

Skype recently made similar changes to its mobile app, but those haven’t been met with much love. Many users really don’t like the look. Some of these desktop changes have already started to roll out to Windows 10 users. And with this desktop preview, Skype is asking users to share their feedback, which you can do via the heart on the Skype menu or through its community forum. Skype Preview is available for download here.

Source: Skype

Apple Now Selling Refurbished 2017 27-Inch iMac Models

Apple today updated its online store for refurbished products to add the new 27-inch iMac models that were first released in June of 2017.

This is the first time those particular machines have been available through the refurbished store since their introduction at the 2017 Worldwide Developers Conference. The iMacs feature Kaby Lake processors, faster SSDs, and AMD discrete graphics.

Apple has a dozen refurbished iMac models available at the current time, with prices discounted by approximately 15 percent. An entry-level model with 8GB RAM, a 1TB Fusion Drive, a 3.5GHz i5 processor, and a Radeon Pro 575 is priced at $1,699, for example, a $300 discount off the standard price.

Apple has a range of configurations available, from low-end to top-of-the-line. As with all refurbished products, stock will fluctuate regularly based on the machines Apple is getting in for repair.

All of Apple’s refurbished products go through a rigorous refurbishment process before being offered for sale, which includes inspection, repairs, cleaning, and repackaging. Refurbished Macs come with a one-year warranty that can be extended with an AppleCare+ purchase. For more tips on purchasing a refurbished product, make sure to check out our guide.

Related Roundups: iMac, Apple Deals
Tag: refurbished
Buyer’s Guide: iMac (Buy Now)
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Apple and Aetna Talked Data Privacy, Cost and More in Apple Watch Meeting

Apple and insurance provider Aetna met last week to discuss ways to offer discounted Apple Watch models to Aetna’s 23 million subscribers, and CNBC has shared details on some of the topics that were discussed at the meeting, attended by Aetna employees, Apple executives, and health providers from major hospitals.

Aetna is aiming to determine whether the Apple Watch can be used by subscribers to improve health outcomes by encouraging them to exercise, eat better, and better manage health issues. Info on the meeting came from Mandy Bishop, an attendee who founded startup Lifely Insights. Much of the meeting consisted of feedback from Aetna employees who have been testing the Apple Watch.

Data privacy, including who had access to what data, was a major topic of discussion, with Apple explaining that Apple Watch health data can only be shared with third-party apps and companies with express user consent.

The Apple Watch’s lack of situational awareness was brought up as a pain point, such as when the device delivers a stand notification when a user is on a plane or in another environment that makes standing difficult. Cost was also a significant topic of discussion.

One theme that emerged during the event, she said, is that many of those who were enrolled in the program wanted to get healthy alongside their families. But many couldn’t afford to spend upwards of $1,000 on devices for their spouses and children.

The cost issue wasn’t entirely resolved, she said, but it proved to be a sticking point. It remains unclear whether Aetna will extend its discounts from employees and/or members to their family-members.

Apple and Aetna are said to be planning to implement some kind of Apple Watch program in early 2018, which would see the company offering free or discounted Apple Watches to its subscribers.

Aetna already has a program that provides a free Apple Watch to its 50,000 employees and it already subsidizes the cost for some subscribers, with data from that program being used to determine if an expansion is worth it.

Related Roundups: Apple Watch Series 2, watchOS 3, watchOS 4
Tag: Aetna
Buyer’s Guide: Apple Watch (Caution)
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iOS 11’s SOS Feature Allows You to Temporarily Disable Touch ID and Require Passcode

In iOS 11, Apple has added an “Emergency SOS” feature that’s designed to give users a quick and easy way to summon emergency services should the need arise. As it turns out, there’s a secondary benefit to Emergency SOS – it’s also a way to quickly and discretely disable Touch ID.

Emergency SOS is activated by pressing on the sleep/wake button of an iPhone five times in rapid succession. When the requisite number of presses is complete, it brings up a screen that offers buttons to power off the iPhone, bring up your Medical ID (if filled out) and make an emergency 911 call.

Along with these options, there’s also a cancel button. If you hit the sleep/wake button five times and then hit cancel, it disables Touch ID and requires a passcode before Touch ID can be re-enabled. Touch ID is also disabled if you actually make an emergency call.

This is a handy hidden feature because it allows Touch ID to be disabled discretely in situations where someone might be able to force a phone to be unlocked with a fingerprint, such as a robbery or an arrest. With Touch ID disabled in this way, there is no way to physically unlock an iPhone with a finger without the device’s passcode.

It’s also worth noting that there’s no real way to tell that Touch ID has been disabled in this manner. Once you hit the sleep/wake button and then tap cancel, it’s locked in the same way and with the same message that the iPhone uses when it’s been more than 48 hours since a device was last unlocked with a fingerprint.

Apple’s Emergency SOS feature will be available on all iPhones that run iOS 11. Along with disabling Touch ID, SOS can also be used to summon emergency services and alert your emergency contacts when an accident occurs.

iOS 11 is available to developers and public beta testers at the current time and will be released to the public in September alongside new iPhones.

Related Roundup: iOS 11
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Part of a disembodied lung just arrived at the International Space Station

Why it matters to you

By growing a lung in space, researchers hope to better their understanding of regenerative medicine and how the body responds to long-term space travel.

Human lung tissue arrived at the International Space Station via a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft yesterday. Astronauts aboard the ISS will now attempt to grow a functioning lung in microgravity, using the tissue as a kind of seed. If the experiment is successful, researchers will use the lung to study how lung tissue is affected by long-term spaceflight. The project may have big implications for regenerative medicine and could help keep future space travelers healthy during a trip to Mars.

“Our research team has been working to produce bioengineered lung tissue as model systems to examine human responses to injury, infectious disease, or toxin exposure for the last five years,” Joan Nichols, an associate director for research at the University of Texas Medical Branch who is helping lead the study, told Digital Trends. “The experiment we are sending to the ISS uses the microgravity environment of space to test strategies for growing new lung tissue, and will assist Earth-based efforts to develop complex bioengineered tissue that can be used to repair damaged organs or reduce organ rejection in the future.”

Nichols and her team prepared a bioreactor for the astronauts, complete with stem and progenitor cells, the type of cells that enable us to breathe. Now that the cells have reached the ISS, astronauts will place them onto a scaffold, a lung that has had all of its dead and damaged cells removed. From there they hope the cells will propagate.

“The scaffold is the skeleton of the lung and supports the cells as they grow and form tissue,” Nichols said. “We then add human lung progenitor cells to the scaffold piece as well as growth factors needed to support tissue development. Tissues are grown over several weeks’ time in a supportive bioreactor environment.”

By growing these cells on a lung in space, the researchers hope to further their understanding of how a healthy lung functions and how microgravity affects the body’s repair mechanisms.

“In the microgravity of space, stem cells retain their ability to reproduce without maturing to final stage cell types, Nichols explained, “so a few lung stem cells isolated from a person could be used to produce a lot of cells in microgravity. That would mean that we could eventually develop methods to produce a lung for anyone who needs one that matches their genetic and tissue profile without the need to give drugs to suppress the immune response to the transplant.”

The research may have implications for people on Earth, where patients with incurable lung diseases would benefit from a lung transplant but don’t have access to an organ. Stem cell growth in microgravity offers a promising approach to large-scale production of these organs.

Brother makes buying toner less of a bother with intelligent refill subscriptions

Why it matters to you

Ordering ink is less of a hassle with the Brother Refresh program.

Buying toner can be a pain, but now Brother is allowing users to get new cartridges automatically with predictive software and a signal from the printer. Brother Refresh is an automatic toner service — it’s like Amazon Dash, but without even needing to push that button.

More than 70 Brother printer models, including photo printers, are equipped with the tech that predicts when the user will run out of ink, automatically triggering an order before that happens. The system works both through in-printer tech that monitors toner levels and predictive algorithms that determine how much longer that ink will last. The program then automatically orders and ships the correct cartridges.

The manufacturer says the new program was developed to take the hassle out of reordering ink. “We’ve all been there – you need one more page to print when the out of ink or toner message finally proves true, undoubtedly at the worst time,” said Rafi Haqqani, the director of genuine supplies and auto-fulfillment services, Brother International Corporation. “When you have Brother Refresh, you eliminate that frustration and always have replacement ink or toner ready to go. We’re excited to offer this new service to enhance your end-to-end printing experience.”

The company says there are no surcharges or fees for the service compared to ordering online direct from Brother. The program uses genuine Brother Ink, which the company recommends for optimum performance, quality, and protection for the printer.

Signing up for the program involves a simple registration process, the company says, listing the ink and toner cartridges, shipping address and payment method. After registration, the program begins using the built-in printer tech to ship when the current cartridge is running low.

The service is the only direct-from-the-manufacturer fulfillment service for both ink and toner that doesn’t require a contract or subscription fee, Brother says. The new services is a next step after the company became the first ink supplier for Amazon Dash.

The Brother Refresh program is available for both home and businesses, the company says, covering a wide range of printers and ink types, including inkjet, laser, color, and black and white. The auto fulfillment service continues to run along with the Amazon Dash option.

These self-healing robots could be our smartest bad idea yet

Why it matters to you

Giving robots the ability to heal will not only make them more durable, it could fundamentally change how we design them.

The body’s ability to regenerate itself when it suffers various scrapes and abrasions is one of the most important tools we have, allowing us to live long and healthy lives. Up until the present, however, it is not a trait that’s been shared by robots. That could be changing, thanks to research coming out Belgium’s Vrije Universiteit Brussel. What engineers there have developed is a new self-healing material designed for allowing soft robots to overcome injuries, such as those inflicted by a knife.

“Baymax, the inflatable robot in the Walt Disney movie Big Hero 6 was a soft robot,” professor Bram Vanderborght, from the university’s robotics and multibody mechanics research group, told Digital Trends. “In the movie, this robot got damaged and repairs itself in the police station with tape. Were he built out of [our] self-healing material, he would have been able to repair himself like animals and humans can do.”

The breakthrough material will not just make existing robots far easier to repair, but could also have a fundamental impact on how future robots are designed and built — since making them extra large and heavy duty to avoid suffering damage will not be so much of a necessity.

The material developed by the researchers is a jelly-like polymer. When it is heated up for 40 minutes at a temperature of 176 degrees Fahrenheit, a so-called “Diels-Alder” reaction takes place and the material repairs itself by melding together. After a 24-hour period at room temperature, the robot’s strength and flexibility are then restored. The material has so far been tested on a robot gripper that is used for picking up objects, an artificial muscle, and a robot hand. In all cases, the damage was healed completely after a full day, without any weak spots present.

An article describing the research was published in Science Robotics Journal.

“We think [there are] many possibilities,” Vanderborght said, concerning the researchers’ plans going forward. “This includes new fabrication technologies like printing, adding sensor network to detect health status and intelligence to control the device and new materials.”

While this is very much a proof-of-concept right now, we can only imagine the results that could be achieved were material like this to be combined with the robot, developed by researchers from Pierre and Marie Curie University and the University of Wyoming, that is able to work out how to continue moving even after being badly damaged.

Our only question now is whether there is going to come a point in history when we question the wisdom of building robots able to repair themselves. Somewhere in the future Terminator’s John Connor is probably yelling at us.

Waiting for the dawn of a new Android theming era

Theming on Android doesn’t require rooting, but theming Android itself almost always does.

We can use third-party launchers to theme our home screens. We can theme our most-used apps to get rid of that searing white and spice things up with some color. We can do so many things to customize Android and make it our own, but theming the Android system itself requires one of two things: a phone with a robust theming engine like the Samsung Galaxy S8 or root.

Theming Android at the system level is intoxicating, but most people don’t have the patience, practice, or prowess to invest in root theming. Even I don’t bother with the hassle of root theming, and I’m a girl who will spend hours dialing in custom icons and widget colors on her home screen. System theming isn’t worth root tinkering, but soon, root might not be required to theme Android.

Here’s why we think there’s a light at the end of this long, custom-skinned tunnel.

The RRO Framework: Thanks, Sony

The groundwork for native theming on Android began years ago. Sony contributed the Runtime Resource Overlay framework to AOSP back in 2014 and implemented it on many of its devices to allow users to theme the Android system and apps on its Sony phones via Xperia Themes. RRO allows you to skin Android apps without modifying their source code, enabling users to change the way all apps on their phones looked without going to much trouble or breaking apps on their phones.

RRO was first discovered as developers dug through the Android M Developer Preview. You may remember Android M as the first year that Google taunted us with a dark theme during the Developer Preview, then pulled it before the stable release, and that had to do with Android testing out the RRO Theme Engine it had incorporated. The next year, the dark theme returned with the Android N Developer Preview, and again, it was pulled before Android Nougat pushed to stable in the fall.

Why do you tease me so, dark theme?

This year, we got the Android O Developer Preview, but we did not get our experimental dark theme back. Instead, as developers went digging for easter eggs and other hidden goodies, they stumbled on the first instances of RRO themes being used by the Android system.

So what changed this year?

In the earlier Android O Developer Previews, there was a setting under Display called Device Theme, where you could choose between Pixel and Inverted themes, with Inverted being the default. The problem was, as with previous years’ theme settings, this was very limited in scope, only changing the Quick Settings shade from Inverted’s brain matter gray back to a darker tone. And, as with previous years, the Device Theme setting has been pulled from the Android O Developer Preview 4.

Googlers have been testing and pulling these dark themes based on the RRO Theme Engine for years via the Developer Previews and Beta program, but this May, developers, bloggers, and theming nerds all started getting their hopes up again. That’s because this year, enterprising code-diggers found that those two themes were indeed RRO themes, proving that Google hasn’t given up the ghost on system-wide themes on its version of Android. The now-pulled Device Theme setting was the interface that allowed users to tap into the RRO Theme Engine and select a (mostly useless) theme, and it was a means to use an RRO theme without root, and it was the last major technical piece of the puzzle.

What we’re still missing

Even if Google was to put this setting back with the final release of Android O, we’d still be missing a few things, as Google’s Engineering Team outlined in a reddit AMA. Google Play lacks a proper theme store, but even more importantly, Android is still missing proper APIs to ensure theming is consistent across devices and apps. Without those APIs, there’s no real way to make sure that what the RRO themes are doing isn’t breaking apps left and right. Even for Google’s own dark theme in Developer Previews they ran into trouble theming Android’s core apps, and Google has to achieve consistency across millions of apps on thousands of different device models.

I’m gonna beg for a dark theme until Google gives it back to me, especially in apps like Google Play Music, but at the same time, I accept how hard it is to theme things consistently when Android is so customizable and diverse as it is. It’s one thing to hit the Invert button and turn white to black, but you can’t do that with hot pink or pumpkin orange or Twitter blue, and until Google gets the kinks worked out, it’s better to have a working, boring system theme than a sea of RRO themes can could make your favorite apps unusable.

For now, we just have to accept that there’s a robust theme engine just sitting under the hood of Android… and no one can seem to steal the keys to it.