Apple is reportedly launching low-cost iPads for schools

Apple is set to unveil a new low-cost iPad model for educators and students next week, according to Bloomberg’s noted Apple reporter Mark Gurman. It’s reportedly also working on an educational MacBook model, but won’t unveil that until later on. Nothing is known yet about the new iPads specs, features or, most importantly, the price. It’s bound to be very competitive, however — Apple is trying to break back into a market that has largely been taken over by low-cost Chromebooks and PCs.

As a point of reference, the cheapest iPad available is the standard $329 iPad with 32GB of RAM. By contrast, many Chromebooks and PCs can be had for less than $200.

Apple used to dominate the educational market, but 60 percent of it is now held by Google-powered Chromebooks or Android tablets, 22 percent by PCs and 20 percent by Macs and devices. The market is worth $17.7 billion worldwide, but it’s not just sales that are the point. Many students continue using the devices they learned on, driving future sales for educational suppliers.

If the rumor is accurate, we’ll learn more details about the devices, and probably a lot more about Apple’s educational plans at its Chicago event next week on March 27th.

Source: Bloomberg

Mark Gurman: New MacBook in Works, Likely Replaces MacBook Air With Price Below $1,000

Apple is working on a new, lower-priced notebook that will likely replace the MacBook Air with a starting price below $1,000 in the United States, according to Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg News.

At first glance, it would appear that Gurman is referring to a lower-priced 12-inch MacBook, as many people believe that Apple will eventually phase out the MacBook Air. However, the “MacBook laptop” wording is perhaps intentionally vague, in case it does end up being a cheaper MacBook Air.

A new, cheaper MacBook laptop is in the works and likely destined to replace the MacBook Air at a price less than $1,000, but it probably won’t be ready in time for next week, the people said. The MacBook Air, introduced about a decade ago, hasn’t seen a major change since 2010, the same year the iPad came out. Although the laptop is popular with college students, it has languished as Apple focuses on more expensive Macs.

Earlier this month, KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said Apple plans to launch a more affordable MacBook Air in the second quarter of 2018, which essentially runs between next week and the end of June. WitsView researcher Yubin Qiu estimated the notebook could start at $799 to $899 in the United States.

Gurman said the new MacBook “probably won’t be ready in time for next week,” suggesting it might not be unveiled at Apple’s education-themed event on Tuesday at Lane Tech College Prep High School in Chicago. Of course, Apple could still announce the notebook at the event, even if orders begin at a later date.

Gurman nor Kuo have elaborated on what we can expect from the new MacBook or MacBook Air, whichever it ends up being, but it’s reasonable to assume that we’ll see a bump to the processors and graphics. If it’s a new MacBook Air, a Retina display is also a possibility, but that may go against the sub-$1,000 price.

The rest of Gurman’s report corroborates widespread rumors about Apple’s plans to introduce its lowest-priced iPad, and more educational software, at its Chicago event. We’ll find out on Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. Central Time.

Related Roundups: MacBook Air, MacBookTag: bloomberg.comBuyer’s Guide: MacBook Air (Caution), MacBook (Caution)
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Amazon drone deliveries may involve lots of shouting and frantic arm-waving

It seems like hardly a week passes without Amazon posting another patent for its Prime Air delivery drone.

Some are wackier than others, and it’s not clear how many of the ideas will ever make it into its final design, but several elements of the features shown in the latest filing actually already exist in some drones already on the market.

Part of the patent focuses on the use of various gestures to guide the drone — complete with the package you’ve just ordered — to a safe landing site. A number of consumer drones like DJI’s Mavic Pro and Mavic Air can already respond to physical gestures given via the controller’s hands, but Amazon’s idea also suggests how the customer could use voice control as the drone nears its destination.

By way of example, the web giant has included one of the most amusing illustrations we’ve ever seen (shown below) in a patent document. Such drawings can often be dry and rather technical, but this one shows a cartoon-like figure frantically waving his arms around and apparently screaming at the drone. There’s an empty speech bubble above him, which you can have fun filling in yourself. It appears to suggest that drone delivery could be a rather stressful affair for some customers, in which case an old-fashioned delivery driver may be preferred.

Amazon

The patent, which was filed in July 2016 and granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office this week, outlines how the customer could instruct the drone to drop the package (on-board sensors will confirm that it’s safe to do so), or use physical gestures to ensure a safe flight path as it comes in to land. In that sense, the customer may end up looking a bit like one of those marshals you see at airports that guide the plane to the gate. Except hopefully you won’t need the batons.

As we said at the top, Amazon has filed a large number of patents in the last few years that focus on the development of a drone platform for delivering items to customers that live close to its fulfillment centers. According to some of its more offbeat ideas, a future drone delivery system could also utilize beehive-like drone towers placed in or near to urban areas for deliveries to city folks, and even giant floating warehouses that the drones buzz to and from as they go about their deliveries.

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Nissan’s stylish street lamp puts old EV batteries back to work

Automakers are increasingly looking at ways to make use of so-called “second-life” batteries that are removed from electric vehicles (EVs) once their storage capacity falls below a certain level.

Despite degrading to a point where they’re no longer suitable for automotive use, the lithium-ion battery packs often still have usable capacity, allowing companies to explore various uses to prolong their life.

Nissan, together with its affiliate 4R Energy Corporation, this week unveiled the “Reborn Light,” a solar-powered street lamp that uses old EV batteries from its electric Leaf car to store excess energy.

The 4.2-meter-tall light, which sports a rather striking design when you compare it to regular street lamps, holds the battery in its base, while the solar panel sit at the top, just above the LED light.

The system is off-grid, so if a disaster like an earthquake knocks out the central power supply for a populated area, Nissan’s lights can keep on burning brightly, helping communities to continue navigating the streets through the dark nights.

As part of a trial, the Japanese automaker is planning to install the Reborn Light in Namie, a town devastated by the 2011 Tohoku disaster that included the meltdown at the nearby Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

Should the trial prove successful, Nissan believes its technology has huge potential, with lighting just the first step in a number of possible applications for its aging EV batteries.

“Still today, 17 percent of the world’s population live without electricity,” the company says on its website. “Reused EV battery and lighting have the potential to change the lives of people in Japan and the world.”

It adds: “Even when batteries no longer serve to power cars, they can be reborn to keep serving humans.”

Nissan is by no means the only automaker to be exploring uses for older EV batteries. BMW, for example, used 2,600 used EV battery modules from 100 cars to build a 2.8-mWh storage system at a charging station in Hamburg, Germany, which can be used as an energy source for peak demand periods. And Renault has also put them to use on its so-called “smart island” in Portugal.

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Thiel-Hogan vs. Gawker saga to get the TV and movie treatment

Two production outfits are planning to make films tackling the Peter Thiel-backed Hulk Hogan case that brought down the once-thriving online media company Gawker. And one of them is exploring the idea of creating a miniseries instead. Modern Family director Jason Winer has just signed on to direct the one being by produced by Neil Meron and Craig Zadan (Chicago, Hairspray, Footloose). It’s currently entitled Gawker v. Thiel, and will focus on players behind the scenes, including Gawker owner Nick Denton, the editor who published the Hulk Hogan sex tape that started it all (A.J. Daulerio) and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who financed Hogan’s legal battle against the website that outed him years ago.

Producer David A. Neuman (former president of Walt Disney TV) is behind the other project, which will be based on a book entitled Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker and the Anatomy of Intrigue by Ryan Holiday. Neuman told Variety that “Conspiracy clearly has the big, compelling story and character elements to make an Oscar-contending film, in the vein of Social Network or Big Short.” He said his project could either be a film or a mini-series, perhaps depending on the budget or who picks it up. Holiday recently hosted a Reddit AMA talking about his interviews with Denton and Thiel, and about the other things that happened away from the public eye, so you can get a glimpse of what this version of the story will be like.

These two aren’t the first to explore the story behind the controversial case. Last year, Netflix released a documentary on the event, focusing on the effects of money on journalism in the US. Thiel first admitted that he bankrolled Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit after the website published a video of the wrestler having sex with the wife of a friend to The New York Times. According to Holiday’s AMA, though, the billionaire has been looking for a plaintiff to back for quite some time, and Hogan just happened to be the perfect candidate. The event raised questions about what the First Amendment means in the digital age, as well as concerns that Thiel could be setting a precedent for other billionaires that want to bring down news organizations they don’t like.

Source: Variety (1), (2)

Now The Church of England takes Apple Pay and Google Pay

What can a church do when its younger parishioners stop carrying coins they can toss into the donation box? In the Church of England’s case, it’s to offer high-tech collection plates that accept Apple Pay, Google Pay and SMS mobile payments. According to the BBC, the Church conducted a trial run of its modern collection method in 40 churches over the summer. Now, it’s planning to launch the option in all 16,000 churches throughout England before the year ends, not just for donation collection, but also for collecting fees for weddings, christenings, concerts and funerals.

The Church’s “collection plate” is actually a portable SumUp Air card reader, which you can see above. It’s still trialing contactless payments before it expands their availability, but one of the issues it sees going forward is that transferring money through Apple or Google Pay takes more time than dropping coins into a bag. It has to find a way to make collection via digital means more practical and viable if it wants to use it for one-off donations.

At least one reverend was thrilled with how things went during the trial period — Margaret Cave from Christchurch in East Greenwich told the BBC that it was “great” and that she is “going to keep” the option. “It makes us feel like we’re part of the 21st century, and we can take payments in a safe and secure way,” Cave added. If other C of E reverends share her view, then more parishioners might see contactless payment options for donation in the near future.

Via: Apple Insider

Source: BBC

A pioneering stem cell treatment restores eyesight in nearly blind patients

A pair of patients with severe vision loss have had their sight restored, courtesy of a pioneering trial using stem cells to regrow crucial tissues in the eye. The first-of-its-kind procedure was carried out on a man in his 80s and woman in her 60s, conducted at the U.K.’s Moorfields Eye Hospital in London. Both patients suffered from visual impairments as the result of a vision disorder called age-related macular degeneration (AMD).

Prior to the operation, both patients were unable to read under any conditions but afterward, they were able to read 60 to 80 words per minute using regular reading glasses. The operation was carried out one year ago, and both have been closely monitored since then.

The trial involved growing a replacement layer of cells called the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE). These are used for supporting the retina cells whose job is to capture light for vision. Loss of vision is caused by the death of the light-sensing retinal cells at the back of the eye, referred to as the macular.

This growth of replacement RPE cells was carried out using human embryonic stem cells, undifferentiated cells which can be prompted to transform into specialized cells, depending on requirements. In this work, the stem cell-based RPE cells were grown on a plastic scaffold, which re-creates the eye’s shapes and structure, before being transplanted into the back of each patient’s eye.

In the past, similar stem cell breakthroughs have been used for everything from giving people with paralysis their sense of touch back to providing a possible cure for Type 1 diabetes.

While this latest vision-related stem cell treatment is very much a trial, the researchers involved hope that this could lead to an “off the shelf” solution based on this study to be available to patients in the future. To reach this point, it will be necessary to carry out other, larger scale clinical trials to further prove the efficacy of the treatment.

A paper describing the work, “Phase 1 clinical study of an embryonic stem cell-derived retinal pigment epithelium patch in age-related macular degeneration,” was recently published in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

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This super-sized drone has several tricks up its sleeve

Aerone’s super-sized drone appears to have come a long way since we last saw it lifting a skydiver high into the air for a jump almost a year ago.

The Latvia-based drone developer has been busy refining the design and equipping the flying machine with various tools that allow it to perform a variety of tasks.

These include wind turbine maintenance, where the drone can wash and de-ice a turbine’s blades using high-pressure hoses. Such work is currently carried out by humans and takes much time and effort to complete, but Aerones believes its drone can revolutionize the process, lowering costs by improving efficiency.

As you can see from the image below, this is more than just a large drone with a hose attached. Aerones’ machine includes multiple sensors for precise angle determination, safety mechanisms such as constant monitoring of motor and battery temperature, ultra-HD and thermal cameras to pinpoint hotspots and aid pilot control, built-in radar technology to avoid obstacles even if shrouded in fog or smoke, and several parachutes in case the drone malfunctions while in the air. In addition, Aerones describes its drone as “rock steady” in strong winds, thanks to its unique stabilization system.

Aerones

The all-important hose runs between the drone and a water supply from down below, which could be supplied via a truck or a ship. Power is supplied via a cable linked to a power source from the same truck or ship and allows the machine to fly for as long as required. It also has an internal battery that enables it to stay airborne for up to 20 minutes.

Depending on the size of turbine’s blades and the wind conditions, Aerones says its system could clean or de-ice 30 blades (10 turbines) in the space of a single day.

The machine can also use its cameras to inspect the blades before and after a clean to identify areas where maintenance may be required. Aerones says a pre-wash inspection flight “gives information on the kind of dirt on the blade, which allows you to estimate the cleaning time, let you see any damage, imperfection, crack or hole in the blade.”

Meanwhile, a post-wash flight lets you confirm the cleanliness of the blade after washing, and could expose damage that was unclear when the blade was dirty.

Aerones is also working on other applications for its drone. These include cleaning the outside of tall buildings, fighting fires in high places, and, with the drone able to lift up to 400 pounds (180 kg), carrying humans to safety in search and rescue efforts in locations where ground-based vehicles and helicopters can’t reach.

The three-year-old company is continuing with efforts to attract funding while developing and testing its technology in a number of countries around the world. The short-term plan is to offer drone services to customers instead of selling the system as a kit, though that approach could change as its work progresses.

A growing number of companies are developing drone platforms aimed at improving efficiency across a range of industries, with a Goldman Sachs report describing it as “a $100 billion business opportunity” over the next five years.

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How a former Kodak janitor built MS Paint, the world’s most popular image editor

Is there any piece of software that’s more well-known than MS Paint? It’s been a staple of the world’s most popular operating system for decades, and surely must be one of the most widely used programs of all time.

Paint’s deceptively simple toolbox and palette interface made it easy for anyone to jump in and start creating. But it didn’t just fall out of the sky – it was the product of fresh ideas in the early days of graphical user interfaces, extensive focus testing, and some masterful engineering behind the scenes.

Before Paint, a program called PC Paintbrush emerged as software that anybody could use — and soon grabbed the attention of the biggest name in the nascent computer industry. A fledgling development studio called ZSoft, helmed by business school graduate and bedroom coder Mark Zachmann, created the bones of a project that’s still thought of fondly by millions today.

Over 30 years after its initial release, Paint remains emblematic of Windows as a whole. People love this software, and it was a labor of love for the people who made it.

Coding for Cash

PC Paintbrush (1984)

ZSoft Publication (1987)

ZSoft Publication (1987)

PC Paintbrush 4 (1990)

PC Paintbrush 4 (1992)

Mark Zachmann’s journey into the world of software development started at Kodak, where he was working as a janitor. Halfway into his second summer scrubbing floors and sweeping staircases, he was offered the opportunity to start programming for the photography giant.

“I ended up programming on this PDP-8,” said Zachmann, speaking to Digital Trends. “It was so early that this was actually the computer that Kodak used to generate their payroll, because they didn’t have very many computers. So, the first thing I did after about two weeks was flip the wrong bit and completely delete their payroll for the week. Luckily, even in those days, they knew what a backup was.”

Zachmann says that he got into programming because it was “way better than cleaning toilets.” He worked at Kodak during his final years of high school, and when he moved on to study at the University of Rochester, he continued to code as a means of making money. For his first year on campus, his room was situated right across from the mainframe computer center, so it was easy for him to spend the wee hours making progress on his various projects.

“I really wanted to get into the business of producing software – I was really into computers,” said Zachmann. He used his trusty XV Sorcerer, a popular home PC, as an APL programming terminal to build business forecasting software for companies like Gillette and Mary Kay.

APL differs from most programming languages because it uses a broad range of symbols to make code as concise as possible. Zachmann needed a program that would let his system display the symbols, so he wrote it. He soon realized other people might need it, too, and would pay for it. The same went for a screen-capture printing program he wrote to help with his thesis.

“I desperately needed these things for myself. This was kind of what programmers in those days did. Today, it’s kind of like GPL – you see something you need, you write it, and you hand it out. In those days, you sold it.”

These two niche programs would embolden Zachmann to start his own software company, ZSoft. His third project would prove to have a much greater reach.

Picking Up Paintbrush

In the late 1980s, Zachmann was working with a company that sold IBM computers on the “gray market,” dodging restrictions on how hardware was sold by buying them up as a corporate order, then selling them individually. He was good friends with the CEO, who convinced him that there was a market for an art program, but he wasn’t excited about the prospect, initially.

“Microsoft was just coming out with mice, and they wanted something to make people buy mice.”

“This was the one case where I didn’t really need it,” said Zachmann. His previous projects had been conceived to solve immediate problems, but this had a very different impetus. The program would be used to help sell hardware like graphics cards, monitors, and an innovative new input peripheral called a mouse.

Zachmann was convinced to produce a paint program, which he named PC Paintbrush. Within a few months of its release, Microsoft got in touch and offered to bundle the software with every single mouse that it sold. PC Paintbrush was a great piece of software to show off the new graphical capabilities of the latest hardware, but it was just as capable of demonstrating the advantages of a mouse, which was still new to most users.

“Microsoft was just coming out with mice, and they wanted something to make people buy mice, because nobody knew what a mouse was,” said Zachmann. “So, for three or four years, every mouse that Microsoft shipped came with a copy of Paintbrush. It gave people something to do, a way to try it out, and make sure that things were working.”

It’s easy to see why this would be appealing to manufacturers making mice, or graphics cards, or any other type of component – but for this strategy to work, PC Paintbrush had to be compatible with a broad swathe of hardware. That’s where the unique framework that underpins the program comes in very handy.

“What Mark really said was, ‘what we’re going to do, is we’re going to do MacPaint with color, and support every piece of hardware out there,’” said Jeff Albertine, one of the very first employees to join ZSoft. “To have that vision at the time, and to figure out a way to do loadable device drivers, that was Mark’s brilliance, and the key to his success.”

Any Color You Like

“I grew up in Rochester, and Rochester is a two company city, or at least it was in those days,” said Zachmann. “One of those companies was Kodak, and the other was Xerox. The second person I hired was a friend of mine from Rochester that worked on the Xerox Star stuff.”

“I wrote this little program called PC Paintbrush and I’m moving down to Atlanta and starting a company”

That person was Albertine, who crossed paths with Mark at a regular card game they attended. “He said, ‘oh hey, I wrote this little program called PC Paintbrush and I’m moving down to Atlanta and starting a company, would you like to come and work for me?,” remembered Albertine.

Albertine jokingly describes the company’s humble beginnings as “rather romantic. They were working out of a basement using cardboard boxes for desks, surrounded by piles of the hardware that the software was intended to push on consumers.

ZSoft was sold PC Paintbrush to several video card manufacturers who were desperate for software that took advantage of their hardware. Zachmann built the program around loadable device drivers, which allowed him to write a new driver for each component that it needed to support, without having to rewrite the entire project from scratch.

“He had the vision to create a loadable device driver graphical program, and then market it to the people who really needed it – he was quite a visionary, at the time,” said Albertine. “The big thing about the IBM PC of course is that they opened up the backplane. They published the specs so that card manufacturers could create their own cards to plug into the backplane of the PC. There was this blossoming new market for that; hardware manufacturers were coming up with these cards, and graphics adapters were the big new thing.”

Zachmann’s use of loadable device drivers meant that PC Paintbrush could keep up with all the new hardware being released. Business was booming, but one partner had grander designs for the program.

The Microsoft Deal

Zachmann describes ZSoft’s early relationship with Microsoft as a “typical OEM deal” that saw the company receive a fixed amount of money whenever a mouse was sold.

“They just bought it, included it in Windows, and we never saw it again.”

“It was pretty good money,” chuckled Zachmann. “ZSoft did fairly well. Microsoft was without a doubt the most famous OEM, but not necessarily the largest, actually. We were also doing business with Hewlett Packard, and piles of other companies – we’d signed a deal with Dell. But Microsoft was always important to me, and I enjoyed doing business with them, honestly.”

Zachmann knew from the earliest versions of Windows that he wanted to make PC Paintbrush available on the operating system, but that proved to be challenging. He described the platform as being “pretty rinky-dink” in those days, with many limitations — like an inability to change the cursor — making it impossible to deliver the right experience.

An ambitious solution to this problem was dreamed up. ZSoft started a “skunkworks project” that created a duplicate version of the Windows OS the team could program to, and had the capabilities required.

“We knew we wanted to be there, we just couldn’t do it with what we had,” explained Zachmann. “As much as I had a very good relationship with Microsoft and even the higher-ups, I had limited influence on the Windows group. Yes, they agreed to do some things to help us, but they were futures – there was no way I could change version 2.x at that point.” The groundwork that had been laid made it trivially easy to port the existing version of PC Paintbrush to Windows when the next version of the OS was released. By that time, Microsoft was looking for its own competitor to the likes of MacPaint.

Children of the future will never know the joy of spending hours doing this on Microsoft Paint #MSpaint pic.twitter.com/IY6kDxPdc4

— Fiona (@McDoFi) July 24, 2017

“We were making plenty of money off them and other people, and I didn’t necessarily want them including a paint product [with Windows],” said Zachmann. “There was a lot of discussion about this, and we ended up not doing Paintbrush as a port – partly because it was more product than they wanted, and partly because I wanted to make money off it.”

ZSoft was on version 4.0 of PC Paintbrush, which Zachmann says was closer to Photoshop than MacPaint. At Microsoft’s request, they streamlined the software to produce the package that would be known as MS Paint. It ultimately wasn’t based on the Skunkworks project, but was built from the ground up. And that’s where ZSoft’s ties to the software came to an end.

“Unlike everything else, we sold it to them,” said Zachmann. “They just bought it, included it in Windows, and we never saw it again.”

Finger Painting

Today, Paint is known as the most straightforward image editing software around, but that’s not how it was perceived at release. Programs with a graphical user interface of any kind were still in their infancy. “People were using these IBM PCs just in DOS; they’d boot off a floppy and they’d get this C prompt that would just sit there and blink at them,” said Albertine. “Now, it opened up this whole graphical user interface where they would run a program and boom, it would turn into graphics with a pointer on the screen.”

With that in mind, the team at ZSoft knew how important it was for the program to feel approachable and easy-to-use. It was meant to demonstrate the capabilities of the user’s new hardware, so learning how to operate it wouldn’t feel like hard work.

“We did focus groups with kids,” Zachmann told me. “Our feeling was that if a kid couldn’t run the software, we were doing something wrong. I continue to this day, producing software, believing that it’s really important to watch people use the software.”

ZSoft typically held one or two focus group sessions per version of PC Paintbrush. There were strict rules in place. No one from the company could give testers the slightest help or hint. Participants were given a task and then observed. In many cases, they weren’t even watched. Video footage was taken for analysis after the fact, as Zachmann didn’t want their behavior to be influenced by eyes burning a hole in the back of their neck.

“Our feeling was that if a kid couldn’t run the software, we were doing something wrong.”

Apparently, ‘obvious’ was a word that the team kept at the forefront of their minds. “Oh, hell yeah,” Zachmann replied when I asked whether it was important that the software didn’t require the user to consult the manual. “As soon as somebody opens the manual, everybody’s losing money. It’s just a really bad thing for an app like that – one of our goals was to make it so that you could ship it without documentation, which was a really big argument in the early computer days.”

One of the ways ZSoft accomplished that was by offering more than one way to accomplish tasks. That set it apart from MacPaint, which relied almost entirely on the mouse. PC Paintbrush typically offered three different solutions to any given problem; the mouse, the keyboard, and a third, scripted option. Just by tinkering with what was on-screen, most people could figure out a way to complete the task at hand, whether they were eight years old, or eighty.

Anyone who grew up with a computer in the house since PC Paintbrush or MS Paint became commonplace will have wiled away at least one afternoon creating colorful chaos using the software. The fact children can use it with ease is no accident, and it’s the reason for Paint’s lasting legacy.

Layers of Paint

Though Zachmann no longer played a role in the development of MS Paint after the first version was handed over the Microsoft, he kept a watchful eye over his software. “I actually watched them pretty carefully,” he said. “I actually watch them to this day, I feel a little bit committed to it.”

In 2017, there were widespread reports that MS Paint was set to be discontinued, which later turned out to be erroneous. People were outraged by the idea that the stalwart software might be retired, Zachmann among them.

“I was rather happy to hear that they didn’t discontinue it, even if it isn’t really my product anymore,” said Zachmann. “We spent our souls creating this stuff – you’ve got to understand, this was the early days of computers. We had a tiny little team, and we worked our asses off to try and produce the world’s best in whatever we were producing. The fact that it is still so popular, yeah, it’s very heartwarming.”

I asked Zachmann whether he ever saw something drawn using PC Paintbrush or MS Paint that surprised him, and he laughed as he said that it happened many, many times. “I saw numerous things created with Paint where I said, ‘can you really do that?’”

It’s the software equivalent of a set of Crayola wax crayons.

An artist named Neal White III that was employed by ZSoft, and remains a friend of Zachmann’s to this day, was responsible for several of these standout artworks. He tackled programming for the company, but he never failed to impress his co-workers with the things he could do with the software.

“I remember working with an artist that we hired to do additional artwork, and he was working at the unbelievably high resolution of 1,024 by 768, which we’d never seen before,” joked White when I spoke to him on the phone last month. “He was doing the Statue of Liberty, and what I remember most is that I amazed the artist with the really good visual acuity I had at the time. I’d point at the screen and say, ‘you missed a pixel,’ and he’d be like, ‘no!’ He’d zoom in and, sure enough, he’d missed a pixel.” White recalled a few of his own creations, including a standout goldfish created using one of the later versions of PC Paintbrush.

MS Paint is that rare creative tool that doesn’t have any barrier to entry. It’s the software equivalent of a set of Crayola wax crayons. In the hands of an artist you might get something remarkable, but even a child will be able to produce something worthy of display on the kitchen fridge.

ZSoft built something that didn’t just facilitate creativity but encouraged it – and people still appreciate that 30 years later.

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Beer made with gene-edited yeast provides hoppy taste without the hops

Craft beer drinkers love their bitter, hoppy brews, making pale ales and IPAs a big part of the craft brewery bubble. But hoppyness comes at more of a cost than a brewery on every other gentrified corner. It can also be surprisingly unsustainable.

It can take 50 pints of water to grow enough hops for one pint of craft beer, and that’s without even considering the fertilizer and energy needed to grow and transport the crop. But now, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, have developed new strains of yeast that can instill a hoppy flavor without the need for hops.

Most beer is made up of four key ingredients: water, yeast, hops, and barley. Varieties like pale ales and IPAs are known for their strong hoppy notes, which gives them refreshingly bitter flavors and aromas, but, as it is with all good things, there’s a catch.

“Growing hops requires a lot of natural resources,” Rachel Li, a UC Berkeley doctoral candidate who co-led the research, told Digital Trends. “Water for irrigation and energy for processing, transporting, storing, and refrigerating.” With the aim to lessen the environmental impact of growing hops, Li and her team landed on a genetically engineered yeast with hoppy flavors. “By using these yeast strains, hoppy beers can be produced more sustainably than they currently are.”

In a paper published this week in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers describe how they used the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 to engineer yeast that contains hop-like characteristics. They then had Charles Bamforth, a brewing expert from the University of California, Davis, use three of their best strains to craft a few beers, only using hops at the initial stage to add bitterness without flavor.

CRISPR works like a DNA scissor, snipping out a precise part of the genome and allowing new genetic information to be introduced. The tool has already been used to develop drought-resistant crops and cattle. Now, Charles Denby, Li’s colleague and business partner, said it’s helping make hoppy beer without the hops.

“By inserting genes from mint and basil, genes that are also found in hops and that are responsible for the production of molecules that impart hoppy flavor to beer, we have developed a strain of yeast that can produce hoppy-flavored beer without hops,” Denby said. “Taste tests of the beer brewed with our strains confirmed that the yeast added hoppy flavor and aroma to the beer. In fact, our beer was rated as hoppier than two beers that were dry-hopped.”

Li and Denby recently launched a startup called Berkeley Brewing Science, through which they aim to market their genetically engineered yeast strains to brewers. Beyond making hoppy yeast, Li said they’re hoping to use gene-editing to add more natural and unique flavors, while “enhancing the performance of industrial brewer’s yeast for more sustainable brewing.”

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