All-female engineering team builds a solar-powered tent for the homeless

Leave it to the ladies to solve one of the most pressing issues in our society today — housing the homeless. An all-female team of high-school engineers from San Fernando High School in California have designed and created a solar-powered tent meant to protect the state’s homeless population from the elements.

The 12 remarkable young women were brought together by DIY Girls, a nonprofit that trains ladies from low-income communities in engineering, math, and science. While none of them had ever coded, soldered, sewn, or 3D printed before deciding to embark upon a mission to create this solar-powered tent, they quickly learned the necessary skills, and were awarded a $10,000 grant from the Lemelson-MIT Program to develop their invention. And this summer, the team will have the opportunity to present its tent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as part of the university’s young inventors conference.

Thus far, there have been two prototypes of the tent made. The first has been completely destroyed, as the team tested it thoroughly to ensure that it was tough enough to withstand the great outdoors. The dozen budding engineers took turns tearing at it with a knife, pouring water on it, and stomping on it. The women have spent six days of every week working on their project, even during school breaks, and as Mashable reports, “They often come home after hours of sewing to find loose needles falling off their clothes.”

But to these 12 team members, the hours of work are well worth it. The homeless population in San Fernando has burgeoned by 36 percent in one year alone, and there are now over 7,000 people living in the streets of the Los Angeles suburb. “Because we come from low-income families ourselves, we can’t give them money,” Daniela Orozco, a high school senior and team member told Mashable. But now, Orozco and her friends may be offering something even better than a few dollars.

But aside from its potential to help the homeless, the tent has also opened new doors of possibility for the young engineers. “You’re learning new things you’ve never even heard of or even thought of,” Chelly Chavez, who learned the C++ programming language to improve the tent told Mashable. And as Paola Valtierra noted, “[There are] only two junior girls in our AP calculus class, which has way more guys than girls. But we’re gonna change that.”

Editors’ Recommendations

• The best laptops for high school students you can buy
• Here’s everything you need to know about the 2018 Honda CR-V
• The ‘Heathers’ reboot TV series gets a vicious red-band trailer
• iPhone X reportedly assembled with illegal student labor at Foxconn plant
• Want to learn to drag race the Dodge Demon? School is now in session

LED-studded ‘electronic skin’ monitors your health, makes you look like a cyborg

In many ways, the future of healthcare will depend on “self care,” or patients caring for their own health using all technologies at their disposal. That might mean scouring the internet for nutrition facts about a meal, strapping a fitness tracker to your wrist before a jog, or reviewing a doctor’s recommendations based on a DNA test. Either way, people who take hold of their health will tend to live healthier lives.

Around the world, researchers are developing wearables to put power in patients’ hands and help them monitor physiological conditions, from heart rate to blood alcohol level.

This “electronic skin” display uses nanomesh electrodes to pick up on electrical signals from the heart.

Now, a team of engineers from the University of Tokyo has developed an ultrathin, breathable, and stretchable display that can be worn directly on the skin. This “electronic skin” display uses nanomesh electrodes to pick up on electrical signals from the heart, allowing it to monitor cardiovascular health and display data for the patient to view in real time via micro LEDs. The data can also be transferred wirelessly to a smartphone.

“Global aging is widely perceived as one of the most significant risks to global prosperity,” Takao Someya, an engineer and head of the University of Tokyo’s Someya Research Group, who developed the display, told Digital Trends. “In order to find the possible solutions to this pressing issue, home healthcare system in which people are responsible for their own health is getting more and more important. To build a home healthcare system, we need to foster age-friendly accessibility to information.”

Many of these wearable sensors are either relatively narrow in their ability to collect biometric data or else a bit bulky to wear, but the goal is to develop these wearable sensors to be broad in scope and practically unnoticeable to wear. The displays developed by the Someya Research Group fits into the “narrow but not bulky” category, in that it serves as an electrocardiogram but attaches unobtrusively to the skin.

2018 Takao Someya Research Group

2018 Takao Someya Research Group

“Our skin display can be nicely fitted on the skin due to its stretchability,” Someya said. “It exhibits simple graphics with motion including an electrocardiogram waveform measured with our skin sensors. It is the first stretchable display to achieve superior durability and stability in air. We have combined skin sensors with skin displays. Skin sensors realize comfortable, accurate, and safe data collections, [while] skin displays achieve natural, intuitive, and safe feedback.”

Moving forward, the researchers will work to refine the performance and reliability of their wearable, including increasing its resolution and aiming to make it full color. But, with these challenges complete, Someya sees devices like his ushering in more accessible and empowering healthcare.

Researchers want devices like these
to usher in a more accessible and empowering healthcare.

“Skin electronics will enhance information accessibility for the elderly people or people with disabilities, who tend to have difficulty operating and obtaining data from existing devices,” he said. “The current aging society requires user-friendly wearable sensors for monitoring patient vitals in order to reduce the burden on patients and family members providing nursing care. Our system could serve as one of the long-awaited solutions to fulfill this need, which will ultimately lead to improving the quality of life.”

Someday presented his findings last week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas.

Editors’ Recommendations

• Apple Watch heart-rate sensor can detect diabetes with 85 percent accuracy
• Managing Type 2 diabetes gets easier thanks to UnitedHealthcare and Dexcom
• WSU’s system monitors seniors’ activities to help them live independently longer
• Blink to click? Nanotube-coated tissue paper sensor can track eyeball movement
• FDA approves algorithm that predicts sudden patient deaths to help prevent them

Physicists create a new type of light, and it’s heavier than before

Remember the whole bit in Ghostbuster about “crossing the streams” when two or more proton streams converge to form a new kind of beam? Well, it turns out that a not dissimilar effect can be created when it comes to crossing over beams of light under certain conditions. OK, so it won’t destroy Gozer, but it may just lead to a revolution in quantum computing.

Ordinarily, crossing light streams (such as shining two flashlights so that they converge) does nothing out of the ordinary. This is because the individual light particles, aka photons, do not interact with one another. However, physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University have found a way to change that by forcing groups of up to three photons to bound together in a way that forms a completely new kind of photonic matter.

“In a vacuum or in regular materials, photons do not interact with each other, and mostly just pass through one another,” Vladan Vuletic, the Lester Wolfe Professor of Physics at MIT, told Digital Trends. “Using a laser-cooled atomic gas we have created a medium where one photon interacts very strongly with another — so strongly that they can, in fact, bind together, and travel together at a speed 100,000 times smaller than the regular speed of light in vacuum. We have found that not only can two photons bind together, but also three. This is analogous to two oxygen molecules forming molecular diatomic oxygen (O2), but also ozone (O3). This can be thought of as forming tiny droplets of light.”

Inventing a whole new type of light is pretty cool in its own right, but it may have practical application, too: Potentially in quantum computing.

“Light is very good for transporting information over long distances through fibers, but without interactions, light can only transport information, not do anything more interesting like computing,” Vuletic continued. “So a prerequisite for quantum computing using light is to induce interactions between photons, which we have done.”

A more easily realizable short-term goal than quantum computing is to make “optical transistors,” transistors where light directly switches light. These transistors could be potentially faster than a conventional transistor and may dissipate less power. However, Vuletic notes that this is still early days and that even this feat is technologically challenging.

“So far, we have only made attractive interactions between photons, but in many respects, repulsive interactions, where photons bounce off each other like little hard balls, are more interesting,” he said. “We have made first progress in this direction. Then we will try to make a single-photon optical transistor where one photon switches on or off a stronger light beam.”

A paper describing the work was recently published in the journal Science.

Editors’ Recommendations

• CMOS camera sensor inventor returns with an extreme-low-light follow-up
• Awesome tech you can’t buy yet: Heated gloves, smart bike lights, tiny Game Boys
• ‘Dragon Ball FighterZ’ review
• How ‘speed breeding’ will supercharge farming to save us from starvation
• The world is coming to a fiery end in Hulu’s new original series ‘Hard Sun’

Jeff Bezos is building a giant mechanical clock that will run for 10,000 years

You may know Jeff Bezos best for sitting at the helm of Amazon, the e-commerce giant that is slowly but surely establishing full control over the entire world. But in a few millennia, we may know Bezos for something else — his role in building a 10,000-year clock. The executive has invested $42 million in this project, and it’s now being built inside a mountain in West Texas.

Installation has begun—500 ft tall, all mechanical, powered by day/night thermal cycles, synchronized at solar noon, a symbol for long-term thinking—the #10000YearClock is coming together thx to the genius of Danny Hillis, Zander Rose & the whole Clock team! Enjoy the video. pic.twitter.com/FYIyaUIbdJ

— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) February 20, 2018

Standing 500 feet tall and deriving its power from the Earth’s thermal cycles, the 10 millenium clock is meant as a “symbol for long-term thinking,” Bezos said in a tweet. And while installation of the impressive piece of hardware has only just begun, the concept is actually quite well-established. In fact, the project was initially conceptualized by Danny Hillis (the founder of Thinking Machines Corporation) in 1989, nearly three decades ago.

As Bezos wrote in a blog post, “[Hillis] wanted to build a clock that ticks once a year, where the century hand advances once every 100 years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. The vision was, and still is, to build a clock that will keep time for the next 10,000 years.” For the last six or so years, Bezos has been involved in the project, and considering that building a clock within a remote mountain is a “big task,” it’s quite lucky that one of the world’s wealthiest individuals is now involved.

“As I see it, humans are now technologically advanced enough that we can create not only extraordinary wonders but also civilization-scale problems,” Bezos continued in his blog post. “We’re likely to need more long-term thinking.”

Thus far, there have been a few prototypes of the enormous clock built, but this version — which Hillis is designing and Bezos is funding — will be the first that will be functional on a full scale. For the last few years, the team has been making the parts of the machine and drilling into the mountain in order to begin laying the groundwork. And now, installation of the hardware has actually begun.

Theoretically, once the clock is finished, curious visitors will be able to check out the landmark, though you’ll have to really want to see it. As the website notes: “The nearest airport is several hours away by car,” and you’ll then have to traverse a foot trail around 2,000 feet above the valley floor. But seeing as you have at least 10,000 years to see this clock in action, there’s really no rush.

Editors’ Recommendations

• Apple AR glasses: News and rumors about ‘Project Mirrorshades’
• Samsung Galaxy X: Everything We Know So Far
• Here’s everything you need to know about the Huawei P20
• Don’t be left out in the cold! Plan ahead with the best weather apps for Android
• Here’s everything we know about ‘The Predator’ movie

Whatever you do, don’t mess with Boston Dynamics’ SpotMini robot

If the robot uprising starts anywhere, it’s going to be in Boston Dynamics’ workshop in Waltham, Massachusetts. And looking at the latest video from the team, it may have already begun.

It shows SpotMini, a dog-like robot first shown off in 2016 and improved upon with a new design in November last year. Earlier this month, Boston Dynamics unveiled version 3, featuring an extendable arm first seen with the original SpotMini but removed for the second iteration. The arm rises up from the top of its torso and is agile enough to open doors, an ability that will look cute to some though extremely worrying to those with darker thoughts about where this could all be leading.

A new video posted on Tuesday shows how this impressive four-legged robot deals with what Boston Dynamics describes as “disturbances.” A disturbance could be something like a terrified human using Elon Musk’s flamethrower to take on SpotMini, though in this particular case involves a calm engineer prodding it with a stick.

In the video, we see SpotMini once again trying to open a door. Despite the engineer’s efforts to stop it, the unflappable dog-bot remains very much focused on grabbing the handle.

There’s a bizarre moment where the man suddenly pulls a leash from its butt, a feature that appears to be a sort of kill switch, though if it is, it didn’t work very well. For whatever reason, the man drops the leash and the robot effortlessly opens the door before entering the neighboring office to (possibly) wreak havoc. The video fades before we hear any screams.

Boston Dynamics has released few details about SpotMini, preferring instead to scare the bejeezus out of anxious types by posting a series of short videos instead.

But this week’s clip does offer a little insight into its latest robotic effort. SpotMini, you’ll be pleased to learn, isn’t entirely autonomous (yet), as the video had an off-camera human with a remote controller guiding the robot to the door. However, when it reaches it, SpotMini flips into autonomous mode.

“A camera in the hand finds the door handle, cameras on the body determine if the door is open or closed and help navigate through the doorway,” the team explains in a message accompanying the video. “Controllers provide locomotion, balance and adjust behavior when progress gets off track. The ability to tolerate and respond to disturbances like these improves successful operation of the robot.”

The message ends with: “This testing does not irritate or harm the robot.” We’re not sure whether to take this as an animal welfare quip or as an ominous reference to SpotMini’s remarkable abilities.

Editors’ Recommendations

• Boston Dynamics’ SpotMini robot now has a terrifying appendage
• Robot skiers race in PyeongChang, but they’re not at Olympic level just yet
• Harvard’s insect-inspired HAMR robot scuttles like a cockroach on meth
• Airbus’ delivery drone takes packages to ‘parcel stations’ run by robots
• Here’s everything we know about ‘Days Gone’ so far

Qualcomm announces new AI Engine ahead of MWC 2018

The Snapdragon gets smarter.

Mobile World Congress 2018 will soon be underway, but a few short days before the convention officially kicks off, Qualcomm has announced its latest venture – the Qualcomm Artificial Intelligence Engine.

Referred to as the simpler “AI Engine”, this is a new platform that combines both hardware and software tools for more impressive AI experiences on mobile devices. Qualcomm’s AI Engine will support the Snapdragon 660, 820, and 835. The company’s latest 845 chipset will also support the new engine, and it’ll do so in addition to its own on-device AI processing.

On the software side of things, the Qualcomm AI Engine is made possible thanks to the Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine, Android Neural Networks API, and the Hexagon Neural Network. Speaking about this, Qualcomm’s Director of Product Management, Gary Brotman, said:

On-device AI demands multiple hardware architectures, software tools, and frameworks to meet developer demand and performance thresholds for the myriad of AI-powered features and apps arriving on smartphones this year. The AI Engine capabilities of select Snapdragon mobile platforms have and will continue to fuel AI innovation among our OEMs and ecosystem partners, engineered to result in the accelerated development and delivery of rich, seamless and compelling features for consumers.

Companies like Xiaomi, Motorola, OnePlus, and others have already been tapping into certain parts of the AI Engine for their products, and this has resulted in things like face unlock, scene detection, and bokeh portrait shots with just a single camera.

During this year’s MWC, Qualcomm will be demoing its AI Engine tech with demonstrations from Deep Portrait, Inner Magic, Animoji from Face++, and more.

Qualcomm increases NXP offer to $44 billion amidst Broadcom drama

Are you still happy with your Samsung Galaxy Note 8?

To switch or not to switch.

Without a doubt, Samsung’s Galaxy Note 8 is one of the best phones you can buy right now. It’s got a gorgeous display, fantastic camera package, zippy performance, and more than enough features. It’s one heck of a device, and for people that bought it as soon as they could, they’ve been rocking the Note 8 for just about six months at this point.

Six months isn’t that much time in the grand scheme of things, but in the world of mobile tech, that’s identical to a millennium. Some Note 8 owners in the Android Central forums recently started talking about whether they’re still content with the phone or if they’ve been thinking about switching to something else, and this is what they had to say.

amyf27
02-16-2018 05:44 AM

“

As a daily device, no itch. For me personally, this is the best phone out there. I mean… maybe another Note 8 in a different color? Lolo. I do wish it were wider. It would be fun to doodle around with another phone but none come close to the Note for me.

Reply

areyes163
02-16-2018 06:04 AM

“

I got the itch and got the 8 plus and the X. Then went came back to the Note. Feels good. Like all is right.

Reply

dov1978
02-16-2018 06:36 AM

“

Yep itchy here. Just about jump ship to the Pixel 2 XL or the Huawei Mate 10 Pro. Not sure which yet, I’ll probably end up tossing a coin

Reply

zoomis
02-16-2018 09:45 AM

“

No itch – yet. But I will likely get the Note 9 this fall. That’s the current plan, at least.

Reply

Now, we’d like to hear from you – If you’ve got a Galaxy Note 8, are you still happy with it?

Join the conversation in the forums!

Samsung Galaxy Note 8

• Galaxy Note 8 review
• Galaxy Note 8 vs. Galaxy S8+
• Which Note 8 color is best?
• Complete Galaxy Note 8 specs
• Join our Galaxy Note 8 forums

Verizon
AT&T
T-Mobile
Sprint
Best Buy

Uber officially launches ‘Uber Express Pool’ in select cities

After being piloted in Boston and San Francisco, Uber is officially launching Express Pool in those two cities along with Los Angeles, DC, Miami, San Diego, Philadelphia and Denver. The ride-hailing company plans on launching the service in more cities soon.

Express Pool, like Uber Pool matches a driver with riders along a similar route during a trip. But instead of the door-to-door service found in Pool, Express Pool requires riders to walk a block or two to a location to maximize the efficiency of a trip. It then drops those riders near their locations, also within walking distance.

Uber says these Express Pool trips will be up to 50-percent cheaper than Uber Pool and 70-percent cheaper than Uber X. That’s a substantial savings for commuters willing to hoof it down the street for a ride.

When you hail an Uber Express Pool, the app will take an additional minute or two while it figures out the best route, pick up location, driver and other riders. It’ll then direct you to a location taking into account the time needed to walk to that location. The ideal ride is basically a straight line to your destination while accommodating others.

Uber says it’s been working for a year on the technology powering Express Pool and that some of the tech will be used to power Pool soon. But don’t fret fans of having a car come to their home filled with strangers, the company has no plans to discontinue Uber Pool.

The Morning After: Spotify plots its own smart speaker

Hi there! Watching the PyeongChang Winter Olympics? Been watching them in VR? We have. We also have news of a Burnout comeback (The Best Driving Game) and Amazon brings its Prime rewards to Whole Foods shoppers.

This is how the robot revolution starts.
Boston Dynamics’ robots won’t be held back by puny humans

Are you looking for the exact moment robots decide to turn on their human creators? You might want to mark this day on your calendar. Boston Dynamics has posted video of a SpotMini test where it gauged the bot’s ability to adjust to interference — in this case, from a pesky human.

It needs hardware.Spotify might be building a smart speaker of its own

Spotify might be working a smart speaker, according to new job listings. “Spotify is on its way to creating its first physical products and set up an operational organization for manufacturing, supply chain, sales and marketing,” one ad states. So far, it has relied on other products like Google’s Assistant, Amazon Echo and Sonos One to stream its service. However, Apple recently launched its HomePod speaker with only native Apple Music support, showing Spotify’s need to take action on its own hardware.

The ads show the new operations manager, senior product manager: hardware production and project manager: hardware production and engineering would be handling manufacturing and supply for the new product. It all sounds like it’s closer to being made, whatever form it takes.

Rivals like NextVR have set the bar much higher.
If NBC can’t improve its VR Olympics coverage, it should just stop

If you’re watching the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics on TV like a normal person, you may not realize there’s another option. Steve Dent tested the VR waters with NBC, here’s how he fared.

Improved graphics, 60 frames per-second and that sweet, sweet online mode.
‘Burnout Paradise’ is back March 16th with a $40 4K remaster

Burnout Paradise was one of those rare racers that transcended its genre and was just so good. If its recent 10th birthday had you feeling nostalgic, then we’ve got good news: Come March 16th, you’ll be able to hit the streets of Paradise City once again, with the complete original soundtrack, and all 150 cars and eight main expansion packs — including the Big Surf Island premium DLC. Burnout Paradise Remastered will run in native 1080p on PlayStation 4 and Xbox hardware, and EA promises 4K resolution and 60 frames per-second on PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X.

Five percent return on purchases at both Amazon and Whole Foods.
Amazon will reward Prime members for shopping at Whole Foods

Amazon says its Rewards Visa will now offer users the same level of reward when they shop at Whole Foods as they receive at Amazon itself. Eligible Prime members will now receive a flat five-percent bonus on all purchases at Whole Foods, just as they do online. By comparison, shopping beyond Amazon’s universe will net you two percent back at restaurants, gas stations and drugstores and a single percent elsewhere.

Whether or not it’s easy is another matter.
Modders turn Nintendo Switch into a full-fledged Linux tablet

For all of its Nintendo customizations, the Switch is ultimately a tablet running a garden variety NVIDIA Tegra processor — and that means it can potentially handle the same software as other mobile devices. To prove that point, the fail0verflow team has shown a Switch running honest-to-goodness Linux. The touchscreen, networking and accelerated 3D graphics are all functioning, but you’re not about to run Steam games on it (many Linux apps aren’t built for ARM-based chips), but you could theoretically use the Switch as a basic computer.

But wait, there’s more…

• HoloLens adds mixed reality to a Japanese national treasure
• Existing EV batteries could be recharged five times faster
• Google Pay is the new Android Pay
• The ESA says preserving old online games isn’t ‘necessary’
• Netflix: ‘Stranger Things’ directors aren’t leaving the show
• Jessica Jones confronts her anger in new season two trailer

The Morning After is a new daily newsletter from Engadget designed to help you fight off FOMO. Who knows what you’ll miss if you don’t Subscribe.

Craving even more? Like us on Facebook or Follow us on Twitter.

Have a suggestion on how we can improve The Morning After? Send us a note.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 streams music to multiple Bluetooth devices

Qualcomm’s newest flagship platform, the Snapdragon 845, already promises a lot of things to be excited about in terms of its graphics, camera support and AI processing, and now the company has announced a Broadcast Audio function, which will let users stream music to numerous Bluetooth devices simultaneously. So a group could listen to the same music via Bluetooth headphones, for example, or you could play a podcast throughout your house via multiple speakers. And with automatic retransmission and packet-loss concealment, the feature promises near-perfect synchronization.

This kind of one-to-many sound broadcasting pushes the capabilities of traditional Bluetooth in a way that makes it a viable alternative to platform exclusive smart speakers, especially if you’re all about multi-room playback. Why commit to multiple HomePods or Echos if you want to listen to Classic FM on a Sunday morning while you potter around the house, when you can just stream to your existing devices? Putting smart speakers to one side, though, Broadcast Audio lets users share and participate in sound in a way that brings people together, which is what music is all about, so it’s surprising that Snapdragon didn’t get this feature sooner.