‘Just go outside!’ You can help NASA scientists by taking pictures of clouds

From now through April 15, NASA is enlisting citizen scientists and amateur cloud-gazers around the world to help validate satellite data on cloud formations. Anyone who wants to participate can simply point their phone at the sky and snap a photo.

The initiative is part of the GLOBE (Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment) program, an international education effort to encourage students and anyone interested in science to participate in data collection.

Marilé Colón Robles from the Langley Research Center explained that the data helps scientists classify cloud formations in satellite images. “The GLOBE Program is offering this challenge to show people how important it is to NASA to have citizen scientist observations; observations from the ground up,” she said. “We’re going from winter to spring, so the types of storms will change, which will also change the types of clouds.”

If you’d like to be a part of it, you can download the GLOBE Observer app from its website. Participants can submit up to ten cloud photos per day, and those with the most observations will be recognized in a NASA video.

NASA is asking for on-the-ground observations now because data is coming in from a new CERES (Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System) instrument. CERES, which launched into orbit in November, uses a variety of sensors to monitor the Earth below.

Even with advanced technology, it can sometimes be difficult to tell the difference between wispy cirrus clouds and patches of snow on the ground, for example. “Looking at what an observer recorded as clouds and looking at their surface observations really helps us better understand the images that were matched from the satellite,” said Colón Robles.

NASA recommends that you wait 10-15 minutes between observations for atmospheric changes. You can use the app to see when satellites are overhead and when your photos might be most useful.

The website also has some tips for photographers, as well as some basic information on the different cloud types. Colón Robles noted that you don’t need to be an atmospheric scientist or avid photographer to participate, NASA is interested in all the data they can collect. “Just go outside,” she said.

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7 weird high-tech foods you might chow down on in the not-so-distant future

Whether it’s drone delivery, recipes created by A.I., or robots working in the kitchen, high tech is changing the world of food preparation and delivery as we know it.

But what about the actual foodstuff itself? After all, from the Klingon delicacy of Gagh (basically a plate of worms) to the delicious, sustainable Soylent Green (spoiler: it’s people), science fiction has long shown us that a key part of any high tech world is the wacky food people eat in it. How is technology changing what we’ll be heaping onto our plates? Here are seven examples of what our future meals may look like.

Lab-grown meat

Memphis Meats

You can’t see the words “cutting edge food company” without talking about Memphis Meats. (Well, technically you can, but we’re trying to establish its overall importance here!) Memphis Meats creates lab-grown meat that’s manufactured by putting living animal cells into bioreactor tanks and then feeding them oxygen, sugars, and minerals until they divide and grow.

The result? Meat that looks and, more importantly, tastes like the real thing, but without having to kill animals to create it. So far, the company’s creations have included lab-grown meatballs, chicken and duck. It’s still too expensive per pound to make into a commercial product, but that cost creeps down every day. Look for its products to hit shelves around 2021.

Seafood made from algae

Do you want to eat like a Googler? If so, you may be interested in sampling the shrimp which have previously been served at the search giant’s famously high-end cafeteria. While these look and taste like regular shrimp, they’re actually made from specially-engineered red algae by the San Francisco biotech startup New Wave Foods.

As the startup points out, for every pound of shrimp caught up to 15 pounds of other animals — including endangered dolphins, turtles, and sharks — reportedly die. Sustainable “shrimp” would therefore represent a big step forward.

Bleedable veggie burgers

Impossible Foods

You know what would toughen up those soy latte-drinking, wispy moustache-wearing vegetarians? Veggie burgers that bleed, dammit! Fortunately, such vegetarians (which includes myself) can enjoy the animal-free burgers created by the startup Impossible Foods. Not only do they taste more beefy than regular vegetable patties, while containing no cholesterol, hormones, or antibiotics, but they actually bleed too.

The burgers are currently for sale. According to its creators, the Impossible Burger requires just one-quarter of the water used to produce the same burger from a cow, a twentieth of the land, and an eighth of the greenhouse gas emissions.

Jellyfish chips

Few things signal to the rest of the world that you work for a swanky Silicon Valley startup more than chowing down on unusual foodstuffs like jellyfish chips. While they’re not yet available to buy, tasty jellyfish chips may soon be available, courtesy of work carried out by a Danish physicist at the University of Southern Denmark.

“We developed a method for preparing jellyfish for eating with inspiration from how gels behave in different solvents,” creator Mie Thorborg Pedersen told Digital Trends. “When we immerse jellyfish in 96 percent ethanol we observe how the gel of the jellyfish collapse, in line with theories concerning gels. After 2 to 3 days we can then let the alcohol evaporate and get this paper-like jellyfish chip.”

As with other foods on this list, sustainability is the name of the game. Jellyfish are abundant compared to a lot of the other overfished seafood populations in the ocean. While there’s no commercialization on the immediate horizon, this could be a great alternate food source in the future.

Grub’s up!

Speaking of slightly unusual sustainable food, U.K.-based startup Entocycle wants to get us all eating grubs — or more accurately the larvae of black soldier flies.

To help breed them, the company is using some cutting-edge technologies, such as growing them in smart pods which gather constant analytics about the insects and their development. While in the short term Entocycle is focusing on the animal feed market, longer term it plans to expand into the human dietary market too.

“Once people are over the ‘ick’ factor — which is only really a prevailing attitude in the west — then there is nothing to stop insects becoming part of a person’s regular, healthy diet,” CEO Keiran Olivares Whitaker told Digital Trends. “It would take a great shift in attitudes and behavior, and I think we would very much one day aim to be a part of that.”

A nice glass of algae

Erik Jepsen/UC San Diego Publications

Worried about keeping a plate of black soldier fly larvae in your stomach? No problem: you could just wash it down with a nice lukewarm mug of soupy, genetically engineered algae. That’s what researchers from the University of California, San Diego and renewable energy company Sapphire Energy have been working on — and it could turn out to be the answer sustainable farmers are looking for.

“It’s sustainable because we can grow algae on non-arable land using non-potable or even salt water,” Stephen Mayfield, director of the California Center for Algae Biotechnology at UCSD, told Digital Trends. “Algae are also more productive than crop plants so we can produce protein, which the world really needs, in a more efficient way, and stop cutting down our rainforest to grow soybeans.”

Plus it can be used as a biofuel, too. It’s like the eco-friendly version of that Saturday Night Live sketch about a dessert topping that also’s a floor wax!

3D-printed food

3D printed food is a broader category than anything else on this list, but no list of cutting edge food-tech should be without it. There are a number of 3D food printers available, such as the ChefJet from 3D Systems, which crystalizes thin layers of fine-grain sugar into different shapes, or pasta-maker Barilla’s 3D printer, which creates noodles using water and semolina flour.

While 3D printing with food is still relatively new, long term it should make it possible to engineer some exquisite new meals that wouldn’t be possible in any other way. Plus, who wouldn’t want to get home from the office, and just print off that evening’s meal, without having to toil away in the kitchen to make it?

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Apple is developing its own MicroLED displays for the Apple Watch

Prykhodov/123RF

Apple is developing new displays that would make its mobile devices “slimmer, brighter, and less power-hungry,” marking the first time for the company to design and develop the component in-house, according to a report from Bloomberg on Sunday, March 18.

Unnamed sources with knowledge of the project said the tech giant has been conducting small-scale tests with next-generation MicroLED screens at a secret facility in Santa Clara, California. If the reports are accurate, it will be Apple’s most determined effort yet to take display design and development away from its partners.

Sunday’s news appears to confirm reports last year that Apple is experimenting with MicroLED displays, and suggests the company is making full use of its 2014 LuxVue acquisition. LuxVue developed a high-quality display that requires far less power than current OLED technology, a design that could provide a significant boost to the battery life of Apple’s gadgets.

The sources told Bloomberg that the technological challenges faced by the team in building the displays are so significant that Apple almost ditched the plan last year. But its ongoing efforts have now brought the displays to an “advanced stage” that have included the successful creation of an Apple Watch MicroLED prototype that could launch within “a few years.”

The project is reported to be code-named T159 and is being led by Lynn Youngs, a long-time Apple engineer who worked on displays for the original iPhone and iPad, and who over the years has submitted a slew of display-based patents. Youngs is believed to be in charge of a team of around 300 engineers working on the development of the MicroLED screens.

The 62,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Santa Clara is “the first of its kind” for Apple, but is too small for any kind of mass production effort. Bloomberg speculates that the tech company could ultimately turn to other suppliers to produce the displays, but wants to keep its work out of the hands of partners until it’s completely ready.

With Samsung reportedly set to make more than $20 billion from the sale of OLED displays used in the recently launched iPhone X, it’s little surprise that Apple is looking to develop its own displays for future versions of the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, as well as any new display-equipped devices it’s yet to create.

Samsung is also developing the MicroLED technology, and this summer is aiming to launch The Wall television incorporating the system.

Editors’ Recommendations

• iPhone X beats Samsung’s Note 8 and 7 Edge in OLED display burn-in test
• Samsung could make $22 billion from OLED displays for the iPhone X
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• First products from Facebook’s secret Building 8 lab could target Echo Show
• Apple iPhone 11: News, rumors, specs, and more

Boeing 737 MAX 7 aircraft graces the skies for the first time

Boeing

Boeing’s latest 737 MAX passenger aircraft took to the skies for the first time on Friday, March 16. The successful test flight means the plane is on course for delivery to its first customers next year.

The single-aisle 737 MAX 7 joins the larger MAX 8, 9, and 10 in Boeing’s MAX family, and can carry up to 172 passengers. At 3,850 nautical miles, this latest model has the longest range of any MAX aircraft.

Boeing’s first MAX plane was flight tested at the start of 2016 and is the latest iteration of the company’s successful 737 aircraft, which first went into service in 1968.

Friday’s test flight was piloted by Boeing test and evaluation captains Jim Webb and Keith Otsuka, and lasted just over three hours. Taking off from Renton Field in Renton, Washington, and landing at Seattle’s Boeing Field, the new aircraft was put through its paces with a range of tests on its flight controls, along with checks of its systems and handling qualities.

“Everything we saw during today’s flight shows that the MAX 7 is performing exactly as designed,” said Keith Leverkuhn, vice president and general manager of the 737 MAX program.

Boeing claims “superior performance” over the competition with the MAX 7, pointing out that the plane can carry 12 more passengers 400 nautical miles farther than the A319neo, on 7 percent lower fuel costs.

The 737 MAX planes incorporate the distinctive Advanced Technology split-tip winglets with a downward-pointing aerofoil that works to maximize the overall efficiency of the wing. They’re powered by the latest CFM International LEAP-1B engines featuring a carbon fiber fan blade and titanium leading edge. Chevrons at the rear of the engines serve to reduce the aircraft’s noise footprint.

Trevor Mogg

The pilots can access all of the important flight information via four displays (pictured above) that are considerably larger than those found on the MAX’s predecessor (the “Next Generation”), thereby offering a less-cluttered layout for easier data interpretation.

Passengers can make use of touchscreen attendant control panels and enjoy the comfort of wider seats, while redesigned overhead bins with a slight vertical expansion creates space for more bags so you won’t have to head farther down the plane in search of somewhere to put your carry-on luggage.

It’s features like these that have helped the 737 MAX to become the fastest-selling airplane in Boeing history, so far securing more than 4,300 orders from 93 carriers around the world.

Editors’ Recommendations

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Billionaire to build world’s biggest battery, beating Elon Musk’s effort

Tesla

Elon Musk’s Tesla company last year built the world’s most powerful battery, but a new project means it could soon be out of the record books.

British billionaire Sanjeev Gupta is behind the development of a 120 megawatts/140 megawatt-hours storage facility, which will be larger than the 100 megawatt/129 megawatt-hours battery constructed by Tesla in Jamestown, South Australia, last year.

The new battery storage facility will be built at a location less than 100 miles from Tesla’s effort and be linked to a new solar farm at the Whyalla Steelworks, a site recently acquired by Gupta’s Liberty House firm when it bought Australian mining and materials company Arrium last year, ABC News reported.

The plan for another mega-battery reflects South Australia’s ongoing interest in renewable energy that was largely motivated by a widespread power outage that hit the state in 2016 during a huge storm. Described as a once-in-every-50-years weather event, the storm temporarily cut power for 1.7 million residents in Adelaide and the surrounding area, and served to focus the minds of local officials as they sought an effective solution to ensure that such serious outages could never happen again.

South Australia currently sources nearly 50 percent of its power from wind and solar, and according to outgoing South Australia premier Jay Weatherill, the new battery will “help underpin the long-term viability of the Whyalla steelworks, as well as provide additional benefits to the South Australian grid.” Construction will begin later this year.

Musk’s big battery

Tesla’s need for batteries to power its cars led the company to diversify into the field and explore the home and commercial energy markets. It now manufactures batteries at its Gigafactory in Nevada, believed to be the largest facility of its kind in the world.

Always up for a challenge, Musk wrote on Twitter last summer that if his company failed to build South Australia’s battery system within 100 days, he would foot the approximate $50 million bill and the local government could have it for free. Tesla crossed the line with about a week to spare.

The battery, which is paired with a wind farm run by French renewable energy provider Neoen, stores excess energy created by the wind turbines and is used as a backup source of power.

Editors’ Recommendations

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Trulia’s ‘What Locals Say’ feature gives homebuyers neighborhood insights

Your home is only as good as your neighborhood, and no one understands that quite as well as online real estate portal Trulia. And now, the company is launching a new product feature called What Locals Say in the hope of helping buyers and renters alike discover a community that will make a house feel like a home.

“More than 10 years ago, Trulia revolutionized the way people found homes by making real estate listings searchable online. Fast-forward to 2018, house hunters now expect to see listings on the Internet,” said Tim Correia, senior vice president and general manager of Trulia. “We understand that neighborhoods matter. Our new mission will guide Trulia to deliver even more innovative products to help buyers and renters discover and understand what it’s really like to live in a home and neighborhood before they move in, much like a trusted friend or neighbor.”

With What Locals Say, house hunters will be able to glean neighborhood insight tips from their potential new neighbors. Already, the new feature boasts over 6 million answered polls and write reviews by locals that seek to provide a sense of what it would be like to live in a neighborhood.

Reviews focus on the best aspects of a community, while polls provide quantitative information about how easy it is to find parking, how often folks decorate their homes, how dog-friendly an area may be, and other such details. On average, Trulia says that locals are submitting around 100,000 poll responses and reviews a day, and this number is only expected to grow as the feature takes off.

Last year, Trulia found that a whopping 85 percent of homebuyers planning to buy a new home in the next year and a half said that the neighborhood would be as important or more important than the house itself. And 76 percent of those buyers noted that their motivations for moving was a neighborhood or lifestage-related reason. So if you’re part of that statistic and looking for insights as to what new community may be best for you, Trulia and its What Locals Say functionality may be a real game changer.

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Large smartphones vs. small ones – which is best?

Both form factors serve their own purposes.

If there’s one thing you can say about the smartphone market, it’s that it offers a little something for everyone. Differences in price, features, and design all contribute to this, but one of the most important factors has to do with size.

Large phones like the Galaxy Note 8 and LG V30 have become incredibly popular over the last few years, but there’s absolutely still people that prefer smaller phones such as the Pixel 2, Sony Xperia XZ2 Compact, etc.

One of our forum users says that they’ve recently been using Google’s Pixel 2 for a few days, and while they like the phone, it’s taking them a while to adjust to the size difference coming from the Note 8.

When asking other members if they think the Pixel 2 is too small of a phone, these are a few of the responses they got.

cbreze
03-17-2018 12:36 PM

“

My phone history has 3 phab sized phones in it and I for one am doubtful I’d ever get another large phone. Smaller/larger being better is just a matter of opinion. I hear Apple is coming out with a 6.5″ phone later this year. Yikes, that’s really huge.
I recall many, many moons ago when larger phones were kind of disliked and rare as a general rule. I had a 3″ screen on my windows pro device…

Reply

DMP89145
03-17-2018 01:14 PM

“

I could actually stand it a hair smaller, tbh.. I’ve never liked big phones for pocketability reasons mainly. I generally keep a tablet in my tech lineup if I need a bigger screen.

Reply

Armeniandave
03-17-2018 02:01 PM

“

I have the Pixel 2 XL and just had the Pixel 2 and an Essential phone. In terms of size the Essential was perfect. 5.7″ phone in a compact size was awesome. Unfortunately the signal strength made me sell it. The regular Pixel 2 was just too small a screen for the size of the phone. It was almost the same size as the Essential but much smaller screen. The regular Pixel 2 XL is a little bigger but…

Reply

Nubwy
03-17-2018 07:42 PM

“

I prefer the Pixel 2 in the smaller size personally. Sold my Note 8 and have been using this ever since. The battery life took a hit, but I’ve reduced my useage and I’m chugging along just fine. There was an article recently about how battery life on most phones is good; we just need to get off our phones more.

Reply

With all that said, we’d now like to hear from you – What do you like better, big phones or small phones?

Join the conversation in the forums!

These are the U.S. carriers that have updated the Galaxy S8 to Android Oreo

Available now on Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint.

Android Oreo has been rolling out to unlocked models of the Galaxy S8 and S8+ since February 22 after Samsung fixed a bug with its initial build, but there’s been no word as to when U.S. carriers would begin updating their versions of the phone. Thankfully, that’s starting to change.

Verizon

Verizon recently updated its official support page for the Galaxy S8, indicating that Oreo started being pushed to the phone on March 15, 2018. The build number for the S8 is G950USQU2CRB9, whereas the one for the S8+ is G955USQU2CRB9.

Similar to what we’ve seen for past updates, Oreo adds picture-in-picture, the Autofill API, and much more to the S8/S8+. This changes the Samsung Experience to v9.0, and it also adds the February 2018 security patch. I’m not sure why we didn’t get the more recent March patch, but I digress.

T-Mobile

Just a day after Verizon started pushing Oreo to the Galaxy S8, T-Mobile was quick to follow in its footsteps. We’ve received multiple tips from our readers (thanks to everyone who let us know!) that T-Mobile is now updating the S8 and S8+ to Oreo, and with it comes version 9 of the Samsung Experience and the February 2018 security patch.

Sprint

Sprint is the latest U.S. carrier to start updating the Galaxy to 8.0 Oreo, and it comes with all the same features we’ve seen from the Verizon and T-Mobile updates.

Along with updating the Samsung Experience to v9.0, Oreo also adds the February 2018 security patch to the S8.

There’s still no word as to when AT&T will push its update, but I’d expect it to be sooner rather than later.

If you’ve got a Galaxy S8 or S8+ on Verizon, have you gotten the Oreo update yet?

Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+

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• Join our Galaxy S8 forums

Verizon
AT&T
T-Mobile
Sprint
Unlocked

Updated 3/19/18: Added Sprint to the list!

Deal: Get a $200 discount on the Pixel 2 XL when purchased on financing

You can also get a free 18W charger (normally $35).

As great of a phone as the Pixel 2 XL is, there’s no getting around its high price. Spending $850+ on a new gadget is a lot of money, but thanks to a new promo the Google Store is running, you can currently get it for $200 off.

Between now and March 31, 2018, you can get a $200 statement credit on the Pixel 2 XL when you purchase it through the Google Store’s financing program. You’ll need to have a decent credit score in order to be approved for the financing option, but assuming you are, you’ll pay 0% interest as long as you make your monthly payments on time.

The 64GB Pixel 2 XL costs $35.38/month for 24 months at its regular $850 price tag, but the $200 discount (which is applied within two billing cycles) will help to put a good dent in what you owe.

In addition to this, buying a Pixel 2 or 2 XL by March 31 will also make you eligible to get a free 18W USB-C power adapter. This is the same charger that’s included with the Pixel 2 out of the box, but having a second one never hurt anyone. Unlike the deal above, you don’t have to finance your new phone in order to take advantage of this.

See at Google Store

Google Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL

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• Google Pixel 2 vs. Pixel 2 XL: What’s the difference?
• Join our Pixel 2 forums

Best Buy
Verizon
Google Store
Project Fi

Is the Honor View 10 still worth buying four months after it was announced?

They say time heals all wounds, but that doesn’t do anything to fix a botched release.

When we reviewed the Honor View 10, we found it to be one of the best affordable flagships for just $500 — it held its own against the similarly priced OnePlus 5T, and you could even make the argument that it’s a better value than the more premium Huawei Mate 10 Pro. But that was all the way back in January.

Since the View 10 was announced last December, Honor has been pretty quiet regarding its release date and even U.S. pricing — we only just got that info a few days ago. In that time, plenty of other great phones have been announced, including the Galaxy S9, Nokia 7 Plus, and many more. Older phones have had time to drop in price in the last few months, too; the original Google Pixel can easily be found for under $500 these days.

Four months after its announcement, the View 10 still features top-end specs and a modern design.

With all of this in mind, what makes the Honor View 10 still worth buying? Well for one, it still carries extremely capable specs; the Kirin 970 inside is Huawei’s highest-end chipset, and the same one found on the Mate 10 Pro, including the Neural Processing Unit for AI enhancements. In addition, the View 10 is one of the few phones with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of expandable storage for just $500.

The rest of the hardware is no slouch, either — even four months after its announcement, the View 10 still looks modern thanks to its 18:9 display and dual camera module around back. Interestingly, the fingerprint sensor still rests below the screen, a location that’s mostly been replaced with rear-mounted sensors these days (even on other Honor and Huawei devices), but if fingerprint sensors aren’t your thing, you can always unlock the View 10 with facial recognition.

In the U.S. at least, the View 10 is also one of the few phones to ship with Android 8.1 Oreo out of the box, bringing it up to date with phones like the Pixel 2 — though the software experience is noticeably different. The View 10 features Huawei’s EMUI software interface, which adds a number of quirks to the UI — some good, some bad.

As always, it all comes down to user preference, and EMUI 8.0 is the most mature and cohesive version of the software yet. Unless you’re a diehard stock Android fan, you probably won’t mind the View 10’s software too terribly.

So is the View 10 still worth buying? Unless you’re planning on holding out for something like the Nokia 7 Plus, I’d say absolutely. Especially at $500, the View 10 is still a hell of a deal, and thanks to a powerful spec sheet it runs just as smoothly as a top-dollar flagship. But if you need features like wireless charging or water resistance, or you just can’t live with EMUI … well, there’s been a lot going on in the last four months.

Have you ordered a View 10, or do you have your sights set elsewhere? Let us know in the comments below!

See at Honor