China’s largest ride-hailing company is investing in bicycles

The largest ride-hailing service in China just made a big investment in a different kind of transportation program: bicycle sharing. According to a report from TechCrunch, DiDi Chuxing is kicking off a “multi-layered partnership” with Ofo — an app-based bicycle sharing outfit with a network of over 70,000 bikes in 20 cities. The details of the investment are pretty bare, but DiDi Chuxing says the companies will “explore strategic cooperation in urban rideshare, including offering a quality bike-sharing experience on DiDi’s platform.” In other words, the company’s ride-hailing app may include a bicycle rental option in the near future.

Bike sharing in China is nothing new — the country is actually the world leader in bicycle share programs — but a lot of those are state sponsored. DiDi Chuxing’s investment in Ofo casts the company in a new light, pitting a major transportation firm as privatized competitor to the nation’s public bike programs. Can a private bike sharing program integrated into a major platform outperform state-sponsored sharing services? At this point it’s hard to say, but it’ll be interesting to see how Ofo fares in the long term.

Via: Fast Company

Source: TechCrunch, Shanghai Daily

Scientists catch a classic quantum experiment on camera

If you know a bit about quantum physics, you’ve likely heard of the Schrödinger’s Cat concept used to explain superpositions: a cat in a box with a poison flask is at once alive and dead until you look inside. Researchers have produced this oddball state in the lab before, but they’re now using it to create the most detailed X-ray movies of molecules they’ve seen so far. A team at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory first blasted an iodine molecule with an optical laser, splitting the molecule into simultaneous excited and relaxed states. When the scientists hit the molecule with X-rays afterward, the light scattering off of both states created an X-ray hologram showing the excited state. After that, the SLAC group only had to capture enough of these holograms to create a movie.

And when we say detailed, we mean it. The footage captured the molecular activity down to a resolution of 0.3 angstrom (less than the width of an atom) at timescales so small (a few trillionths of a second) that you can watch the atoms build up to a frenzy and eventually relax. You see direct evidence of the Schrödinger’s Cat paradox, too — the atomic bonds in the molecule at once break and stay together.

The technique could be used to image other molecular systems, which could help make sense of biological functions ranging from photosynthesis to vision. That, in turn, could help the scientific world harness molecular-level behavior and apply it in fields like energy and medicine. This is just a first step, but it’s an important one.

Via: Gizmodo

Source: SLAC, ArXiv.org

Debate venue offering journalists $200 ‘bargain’ for WiFi

At one point or another, we’ve all paid too much to access Wifi when we’re out and about. Well, ahead of tonight’s first presidential debate of the general election between Republican candidate Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton, journalists will apparently have to shell out $200 to connect to Hofstra University’s wireless network. That’s according to a tweet from Slate political reporter Jim Newell. Personal WiFi hotspots are prohibited as well, with Newell adding that he isn’t sure exactly how the venue will enforce the edict.

As a bit of confirmation, Vocativ’s social media specialist Ryan Beckler posted a tweet with the following image, presumably from within the university:

$200 for WiFi at tonight’s debate. $600 for a seat, WiFi, and Ethernet. #Debates2016 pic.twitter.com/U1LPVzSGc0

— Ryan Beckler (@RyanBeckler) September 26, 2016

$200 for WiFi access, $75 for a seat in the media filing room (without internet access) or $325 for a hardline connection and a seat in the media filing center. Sounds like a veritable circus of value. However, given that nearly every modern smartphone can act as a modem, the chances of this keeping journalists offline are pretty slim. That doesn’t mean the event’s staffers aren’t trying.

A tweet from Politico’s Kenneth P. Vogel shows an AIrcheck WiFi Tester in use for detecting any unauthorized networks. If you’re on the ground and reading this, know that using USB tethering will sidestep the $2,000 tool’s methods.

Technicians patrolling #debatenight press file using this device to detect & shut down hotspots, so they can sell $200 wifi accounts instead pic.twitter.com/JzbkzlZR1g

— Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) September 26, 2016

Source: Ryan Beckler (Twitter), Jim Newell (Twitter), Kenneth P. Vogel (Twitter)

NASA observes possible water geysers on Europa

Hubble’s extended mission continues to pay off: NASA announced today that a team of astronomers using the space telescope have spotted what appear to be plumes of high-altitude water vapor spewing from the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Researchers have long believed that Europa holds a global ocean beneath a thick, potentially miles-deep, layer of ice, but the new observation indicated it could be possible to sample the ocean without landing or drilling on the moon itself.

“Europa’s ocean is considered to be one of the most promising places that could potentially harbor life in the solar system,” Geoff Yoder, the acting associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate said in a statement. “These plumes, if they do indeed exist, may provide another way to sample Europa’s subsurface.”

According to NASA, the plumes are estimated to be around 125 miles (200 kilometers) high and were spotted by William Sparks of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore as his team was looking for an extended atmosphere around Europa. In 10 different images taken over 15 months, Sparks’ team saw evidence of plumes in three of them.

In 2012, a team of researchers in San Antonio also detected evidence of vapor plumes on Europa using the Hubble Space Telescope’s spectrograph, but used a different method to arrive at the same conclusion. While the size and location of the plumes seem to match between the two observations, NASA isn’t ready to confirm that the observed phenomenon are jets of water vapor.

However, the agency is already plotting out new missions to study the phenomenon. When it launches in 2018, NASA plans to use infrared camera on the James Webb Space Telescope to confirm the vapor activity. Looking even further into the future, NASA is mulling a plan to send a payload to Europa that could confirm and study the plumes from a much closer distance.

Source: NASA

A new Huawei Nexus tablet? Here’s what the branding difference could mean

Whether or not there are any longterm plans for Nexus, the idea of a new Huawei-built tablet isn’t completely crazy.

It’s been a pretty wild day for Google hardware and software rumors. Aside from Chromecast Ultra, “Andromeda” OS and a possible next-gen Pixel in 2017, there’s now a report suggesting that despite Google moving to Pixel for this year’s phones, the long-rumored Huawei/Google tablet will actually use the Nexus brand.

9to5Google reports that the Google plans to “launch” the rumored Android-based Andromeda OS on a Huawei-built, Nexus-branded slate. The outlet doesn’t claim 100 percent certainty over the branding, but states that it’s heard the name from multiple sources.

The HTC/Pixel deal would appear to be a classic ODM arrangement — different from a Nexus partnership.

Keeping the Nexus brand around for a tablet while Google’s phones (and the previous Google tablet) are Pixels might seem counter-intuitive, but it’s not impossible that the Nexus brand could live on, at least in the short term. The Pixel brand has always been Google’s, and with the new phones being referred to as “made by Google,” it looks likely that the arrangement with actual manufacturer HTC is a traditional ODM (original device manufacturer) setup. Essentially, HTC just handles the design and manufacturing of Google’s phones to Google’s spec — in exchange for money, which HTC badly needs. That’s a bit different to how the Nexus program works, where the manufacturer shares the limelight with Google, and neither party really makes any money.

In that context, the idea of Huawei making a Nexus tablet, not a Pixel, looks a bit more credible. For Huawei, Nexus is a prestige project — a way to spread their brand in the West, in particular the United States. A Pixel ODM agreement wouldn’t satisfy that need, whereas another Nexus certainly would. (The situation is the opposite of HTC’s, where the financial incentive of being Google’s ODM outweighs the loss of brand exposure.)

Crazier still is the possibility of this Nexus tablet being a launch device for Andromeda, the rumored Android-based, PC and tablet-centric OS reportedly shipping in 2017. Given the timings involved, it might be surprising to see Andromeda on the tablet, as opposed to plain old Nougat. It’s also possible that the tablet might arrive with Nougat before becoming one of a handful of devices to get an Andromeda preview build ahead of the rumored 2017 launch. (It’s possible we’ll see it at Google’s October 4 event, but by no means certain.)

As for how things play out in future years, that’s anyone’s guess. The rumors surrounding Andromeda, if true, will likely significantly shake up the Android tablet scene.

So when might this new tablet, Nexus or otherwise, break cover? Prolific Evan Blass has previously said that Google-branded, Huawei-built slate will be out “before the end of the year.” That makes Andromeda out of the box appear less likely, but who knows. We’re into new, crazy, uncharted waters when it comes to Google devices.