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.

No phone left behind: Charge four devices at once with this $14 car charger

Our friends at Thrifter are back again, this time with some great deals on Anker’s charging accessories!

Update: You can also pick up Anker’s dual-USB Quick Charge 3.0 wall charger for just $18.99 for a limited time.

Going on a road trip these days can be brutal with everyone wanting to charge their phone all at once and just one single cigarette lighter to plug a charger into. Thankfully, you can pick up an Anker car charger with four USB ports for just $13.99 at Amazon, a nice savings of $3 off the price its had for almost a year now.

With PowerIQ technology, this product has a charge speed of 2.6 amps per port. With its 48 watts of power, you can charge four tablets, smartphones, or other devices at full speed simultaneously. It also features MultiProtect which protects your device from low voltage, output and input current surges, voltage surges and short-circuiting issues.

This car charger comes with an 18-month warranty and has a 4.6 out of 5-star ranking on Amazon.

If you’re also looking for a nice charger to use while at home, this wall charger from Anker features 6 USB ports for $24 and has a 4.7 out of 5-star ranking on Amazon.

See at Amazon

More Stories from Thrifter:

• It’s smarter to buy physical games instead of digital downloads
• Which warehouse shopping club is for you?

For more great deals be sure to check out our friends at Thrifter now!

Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact Leaks

The Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact has leaked, showing a compact phone with a lot to offer.

Yesterday, we showed off images of the alleged Sony Xperia XZ1. As Sony has done for the last few years, that phone looks to use the same design as the current Xperia XZ. Today, we have images and specifications for the new Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact, thanks to @Onleaks and 91Mobiles.

The device uses the same design language carried over from last year, including the side mounted fingerprint sensor that probably won’t work in the U.S. According to 91Mobiles, the device will feature a 4.6-inch screen, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, 4GB of RAM and a 2,600 mAh battery. For those that want a super powerful phone in a small chassis, this may be perfect for you. For comparison’s sake, Sony’s last compact device used a midrange Snapdragon 650 processor paired with 3GB of RAM with a 2,700 mAh battery. That device was announced at IFA 2016, so we could see this year’s compact phone announced at IFA 2017 in two weeks.

Here is a gallery of images:

Would you be interested in a Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact? Let us know down below!

Learn more about the Sony Xperia X series!

Tribeca’s TV Festival aims to be a curator for television’s ‘golden age’

A lot has changed since the Tribeca Film Festival debuted in 2002. Netflix and Amazon, for instance, hadn’t even launched their video-streaming services — and now they’re both two of the biggest players in the TV and movies industries. The event, founded by Robert De Niro and producer Jane Rosenthal, welcomed 153,000 attendees to 530 screenings and celebrity-filled panels to its most recent event, in April. Now, inspired by its past successes, Tribeca is launching a new TV Festival that promises to highlight the best projects from the world of television.

The Tribeca TV Festival, which takes place in New York Sept. 22nd through the 24th, is set to screen previews from traditional networks such as ABC, Fox and NBC alongside show premieres from streaming services like Amazon. YouTube will have a presence too: Creators for Change is a conversation about what personalities from its platform are using their voice to tackle issues including extremism, hate speech and xenophobia. You’ll also have the chance to experience Look But With Love, a virtual reality documentary series that follows “fearless and passionate” Pakistani citizens as they try to make an impact on the country’s sociopolitical challenges.

Jane Rosenthal and Robert De Niro

All in all, the festival promises to have an interesting mix of content, stemming from both conventional broadcasters and industry disruptors. Unlike with its film counterpart, there will be no awards given here, namely because the first-year lineup was curated by invitation and Tribeca did not have a call for submissions. To learn more about it, we spoke to co-founder Jane Rosenthal, who told us how the event came to be and what else we can expect from the Tribeca TV Festival.

Engadget: Why launch the Tribeca TV Festival now?

Jane Rosenthal: Well, one could tell you, “Why not now?” When you look at the world of content, there’s so much good stuff that’s out there, but it’s hard to find and you need a cultural curator to help you through it. The film festival for the past several years has been doing stories on every platform. To a certain extent, the festival has been screen-agnostic. We’ve been screening good stories, no matter if it’s a game like L.A. Noire or some of the work that we’ve been doing in VR. To be able to highlight the extraordinary work that’s being done on the small screen — this was sort of the perfect time to do it.

Engadget: How long has this project been in the works? When was the moment you and De Niro said, “OK, we have to do this?”

Rosenthal: We’d been talking about doing a separate television festival for a long time. We really decided after this year’s festival, where we had so much success and there were a lot of things that we couldn’t program, and we just said, “OK, let’s do it.” So here we are.

Engadget: You obviously have plenty of experience running a successful event, but were there any challenges in getting this one out the door?

Rosenthal: Anytime you’re doing anything for the first time, there’s always challenges — when you start just thinking about logistics, whether you’re talking about ticket prices or the type of programming that you’re putting together, especially when you look at where we are in the world right now. That said, this is in some ways easier than doing a film festival, where there is competition and submissions. This is really a place for us to showcase some of the extraordinary work that is being done [in TV].

You look at this generation, people are screen-agnostic.

Jane Rosenthal, co-founder and executive chair of Tribeca

Engadget: De Niro says that “10 years ago we wouldn’t have needed a TV festival.” Do you feel like streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon changed that?

Rosenthal: Certainly when you look at not just Netflix and Amazon but you look at how movies have changed and people are going back and forth between whether it’s an HBO or Showtime show and a feature or a VR piece. I mean, Kathryn Bigelow had a VR piece that was at the festival about the rangers of Congo, which was primarily a documentary VR piece. Look at who put together The Night Of that Steven Zaillian, Richard Price and [John] Turturro — they’re all major feature writers and just got nominated for an Emmy for Wizard of Lies, which we do with Bob [De Niro], Michelle Pfeiffer and Barry Levinson, and that was done for HBO. There’s no longer any boundaries. It’s exciting because as a creator, as a producer, you can have [content] on a platform that is best for whatever that story is that you want to tell.

Engadget: It’s clear that Amazon, Netflix and Hulu have changed the way we consume TV. What do you think their long-term effect will be on the industry?

Rosenthal: I don’t have a crystal ball, but I am starting a movie with [Martin] Scorsese, De Niro, [Joe] Pesci and [Al] Pacino that I had developed for Paramount 10 years ago, and I’m now doing that for Netflix. You look at this generation, people are screen-agnostic. An audience wants it whenever they want it. I think the thing that, certainly, Amazon and Netflix have done has just [been] binge-watching. One could say that a film festival was the first binge-watching experience. You look at where the industry is going — you need differentiators and brands to help you find the good that’s out there.

Engadget: And competition is always good, right?

Rosenthal: I came into the business when there were four television networks, so look how that has changed. Again, speaking from a point of view as a producer, I have more places I can take the stories I want to tell. There’s certainly more room for short content [and] documentaries now than there’s ever been. There’s a real thirst for content. The big question is, how do you find it? How do you find everything? You may know what you want to watch, but again, there’s so many different platforms and how do you find what you want to see? How do you find the best in all of that?

Engadget: Is that where you hope to come in with the Tribeca TV Festival?

Rosenthal: That’s what we’ve certainly been doing with the [film] festival over these past 17 years and what we hope to do with the TV Festival too.

Engadget: What about showing content from apps like Snapchat, which is becoming a hub for unconventional original shows? Do you also see that playing a role in the Tribeca TV Festival?

Rosenthal. Absolutely. We’ve done a Snapchat competition for the past two years [in the Tribeca Film Festival]. We did a Vine competition [too]. We’ve always looked at telling stories on any screen as long as they’re good, whether it’s going to make you laugh, cry or elicit some kind of an emotion.

Engadget: We’ve seen virtual reality become a big part of the Tribeca Film Festival in the past few years. What is it about the medium that makes you want to include it in the program?

Rosenthal: In terms of VR, certainly the documentaries have been extraordinary. Most people talk about VR, but very few people have really seen good VR content. Very few people have seen stories that you can immerse yourselves in, whether it was something like Chris Milk’s piece Clouds Over Sidra and what it was like to live in the largest refugee camp or Kathryn Bigelow’s piece about protecting the rangers in the Congo, The Protectors. In VR, you have a chance to walk in somebody else’s shoes. Some of the amazing pieces that are done in animation that are coming out of Baobab Studios and Eugene Chung’s studio Penrose, those are ways to completely immerse yourselves into these fantastical worlds. The distribution for VR is still a ways off, and we’re still a ways off from seeing a full-length movie in VR. But you want to give these creators an opportunity to express themselves and for an audience to see some of the best that’s out there.

Engadget: Do you think we’ll ever get to that point, where we can see a full-length VR feature?

Rosenthal: Completely.

Engadget: So what do you think is holding VR back right now?

Rosenthal: The tech’s got to become more accessible and the pricing’s got to become more accessible. Every day there is something new that is being created, and certainly when you’re able to experience it, when you can have multiple people be able to experience VR at the same time, [that] will be exciting.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Reply to Instagram messages with pictures and video

Instagram users have a new means of expressing themselves via direct messages as of Thursday. They can now reply to shared Direct posts with images and video of their own.

The process is simple: Just hit “reply” and snap a selfie of the image you’d like to include. Instagram will automatically include a sticker of the original post for reference. Even better, users are now also able to create split-screen composite images wherein they might replace their heads with that of a bespectacled dog proudly declaring “it me”.

Reddit is letting some users upload video right to the site

Reddit has grown and maintained its internet prominence by staying simple, meaning it has to be cautious about introducing new features (its users, erm, aren’t fans of change). Last year, the platform added native image hosting to let users avoid the hassle of posting photos outside the site and linking back. Unbeknownst to many, they’re doing the same with video, having opening a beta program in June for certain communities to try out uploading movies directly to Reddit.

Like the move to host images last year, Reddit is adding native video because that media is becoming a big portion of the site’s content pie. And given how large those files are, it’s much more of a pain to upload videos elsewhere (say, YouTube or Gfycat for GIFs) and re-post them to Reddit. Making it easier to share video means Redditors might start posting for more casual reasons — like asking others what haircut they should get.

What type of haircut do yall recommend I get? from Hair

Over 200 Subreddits have already been inducted into the beta with more added as the feature slowly rolls out, but expect the feature to evolve as the platform gathers feedback and tweaks the process. Once it’s ready, Reddit is planning a simultaneous release on desktop and its mobile app. To try it out now, follow the instructions on the platform’s blog announcing the feature.

Source: Reddit