Earthlings get a chance to own NASA’s Golden Records

Back in the 70’s, famed astronomer Carl Sagan and a team of scientists and artists put together a collection of golden phonograph records, which were sent to space aboard Voyager 1 and 2. They contain greetings in 55 languages, a plethora of animal sounds, traditional music from around the world, Mozart’s and Bach’s masterpieces, as well as Blind Willie Johnson and Chuck Berry tracks. Now, a Kickstarter campaign wants to give us lowly Earthlings a chance to own a copy of the Voyager Golden Records as a box set.

The campaign, launched by Boing Boing’s David Pescovitz, aims to raise $198,000, which definitely looks doable. Its 1,094 backers already pledged $130,000 as of this writing. Most of what Pescovitz and his team will make from Kickstarter will be used for royalties and to pay for the snazzy-looking box set’s production. See, the team decided to remake the records as three gold LPs in a cloth-covered box with gold foil.

The set will also come with a hardbound book containing the records’ history, as well as a copy of the original diagram depicting how to play them. You know, as some sort instruction in case aliens ever get their hands on the spacecraft. Both Voyagers are still alive ’till this day, and 1, in particular, left our solar system and crossed into interstellar space a few years ago. If there’s any spacecraft that has the potential to reach intelligent beings from other worlds, it’s the Voyager.

But let’s get back to the copy we Earthlings can get. You’ll have to pledge $98 to get one box set, though you can also snag a digital copy for $25 if you don’t care for the physical LP records and their fancy packaging. Take note that NASA already released some of their tracks on SoundCloud, though. The team is aiming to ship all rewards out by August 2017, exactly 40 years after NASA’s Voyager spacecraft embarked on their journey.

Via: Gizmodo

Source: Kickstarter, Boing Boing

Hydrogen fuel cell train offers pollution-free rail trips

Hydrogen fuel cells aren’t gaining a huge amount of traction in cars, where there’s a steady move toward electric. But what about regional railways, where long ranges and a lack of powered rails makes electric trains impractical? Alstom thinks that makes plenty of sense — the French firm has introduced one of the first hydrogen fuel cell trains, the Coradia iLint. The 300-passenger locomotive can travel up to 497 miles at a reasonably brisk 87 miles per hour, all the while spewing nothing more than water. Hydrogen gives it the freedom to run on non-electrified rails, and it’s considerably quieter than diesels — helped in part by batteries that store unused energy.

There are plans to put it into service relatively quickly. The first Coradia iLint should reach a rail line in northern Germany in December 2017, and it won’t be surprising if other customers follow suit. The biggest challenge is infrastructure. Train service operators will have to upgrade all their relevant garages and stations with hydrogen filling systems, which could be more than a little expensive when spread across an entire rail network.

Via: Tracks

Source: Alstom

Facebook Messenger Gains iOS 10 CallKit Support in Latest Update

Facebook has updated its Messenger app to support Apple’s CallKit framework, which was introduced earlier this month with iOS 10.

The CallKit SDK allows incoming calls from third-party VoIP apps to appear on the iOS lockscreen just like a standard cellular ID does.

Incoming Messenger calls show the caller’s Messenger profile information alongside controls like mute, keypad, and a speakerphone toggle. On answering a call, users are taken to the Messenger app.

CallKit also enables Messenger users to answer calls through CarPlay, just like a FaceTime or cellular call.

The update follows similar CallKit integrations last week by the likes of WhatsApp and Viber, which have also integrated SiriKit, allowing users to ask Apple’s personal assistant AI to perform app-specific actions, like sending a message to a WhatsApp contact.

Facebook Messenger is a free download for iPhone and iPad on the App Store. [Direct link]

Tag: Facebook Messenger
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Hisense 75M7900 4K TV review: Budget sense, but HDR nonsense

The 10-inch difference between a 65-inch TV and a 75-inch TV is more than just a measurement. It marks the difference – at least in any fairly regular-sized living room – between just watching television and stepping into the world of home cinema. Unfortunately for home cinema fans, though, the step up to a 75-inch TV is usually also the point at which their wallets cough, splutter and die.

Today, though, the traditional mega-screen price barrier is about to fall. For the Hisense 75M7900 is an unbelievable £2,500. That’s less than half the price of, say, Sony’s 75-inch KD-75XD9405. In fact, it’s even substantially less than the prices of a number of this year’s 65-inch TVs.

You don’t just get a bog-standard 75-inch screen for your money either; you get a native 4K resolution, HDR support, and even a few smart TV features. Surely such a TV has to be too good to be true, right?

Hisense 75M7900 4K TV review: Design

The 75M7900 isn’t an especially glamorous TV by today’s standards. It’s just a massive rectangle, really, with a pair of surprisingly insubstantial feet attached to each end of its bottom edge – meaning you’ll need a seriously wide piece of furniture to sit it on. The build quality is pretty robust, though, and the screen frame is fairly thin considering how much screen it supports.

Connectivity is outstanding for the 75M7900’s price. Its four HDMI and three USB ports match what you get on high-end TVs this year, while its built-in Wi-Fi supports streaming from DLNA devices as well as access to Hisense’s online service.

Hisense

This service has expanded nicely over the past few months, and now offers a solid number of the UK’s most widely used video content apps. Amazon and Netflix are both there in their 4K (although not HDR) incarnations, and you also get BBC iPlayer, YouTube, Deezer, Wuaki.tv, Viewster and Chilli Cinema among others.

It’s a pity, though, that at the time of writing the 75M7900 doesn’t support the ITV Hub, All4 or My5. Hopefully Hisense’s localisation team is working on a more comprehensive UK Catch up TV solution as we speak. Saying that, however, such absences aren’t uncommon – with even the top-end Samsung KS9500 having some gaps too.

Hisense 75M7900 4K TV review: Limp brightness for HDR

A scan of the 75M7900’s screen specifications reveals a couple of concerns. First, pictures are illuminated by LEDs ranged around the screen’s edges, rather than placed directly behind it. This could be an issue given how far the edge lighting has to travel on such a large TV – and it’s the reason a lot of other 75-inch panels aren’t illuminated this way, hence their cost.

The other concern is that the screen’s brightness is only rated at around 400 nits – a fairly paltry number for a TV that claims to be capable of playing back HDR content. That’s not exactly HDR when TVs with a UHD Premium badge are upwards of 1,000 nits; indeed the Samsung KS9500 is around a full 1,000nite brighter than this Hisense.

Hisense

The edge LED lighting is supported by local dimming, though, where different segments of the LEDs can output their own independent light levels to improve contrast.

Also, while 400 nits raises questions about the 75M7900’s HDR performance, it can actually be helpful to its standard dynamic range performance, making it less likely than it would be with a very bright TV that you’ll see backlight clouding and striping problems caused by the edge LED local dimming.

Hisense 75M7900 4K TV review: Standard delivery

The 75M7900 supports 3D playback – and actually its large size could be helpful in boosting 3D’s immersive effects. As usual, though, no 3D glasses ship for free with the TV, so we couldn’t test the 75M7900’s 3D efforts.

After installing a required HDR firmware update from USB (the same update should be available for public download by the end of September), we dived straight in with a selection of Ultra HD Blu-rays to see how well the 75M7900 worked with the highest quality source currently available. And sadly, if not surprisingly, we weren’t exactly blown away.

Hisense

The main problem, predictably, is that the 75M7900 just isn’t bright enough. It only delivers a slight sense of extra brightness with HDR’s peak elements, rather than elevating them to the sort of ‘real world’ levels you see with the best HDR TVs. There’s also a marked loss of detail in the brightest HDR areas.

The dark end of HDR’s expanded brightness spectrum is relatively limited too, thanks to the way parts of the picture that should look black instead look a fairly milky grey as the 75M7900 tries to add more brightness without having the backlight controls to deliver this brightness locally enough.

You can improve black levels with HDR if you activate the local dimming system (which, unusually, defaults to off with HDR sources). But doing this sees subtle details going AWOL in dark areas, as well as a drop in the intensity of the image’s HDR peaks. Peaks which were already, remember, only barely worthy of the name.

It’s worth adding, too, that the 75M7900 suffers with quite marked colour banding issues when fed Ultra HD Blu-rays in HDR from Panasonic’s UB900 deck. This banding mercifully disappears, though, when using an Xbox One S or Samsung K8500 for UHD BD duties.

Hisense 75M7900 4K TV review: Without HDR

If you reckon you can live without HDR, though, the 75M7900 becomes a much more accomplished proposition. Its standard dynamic range images look far more balanced in terms of both colour and contrast, with no part of the picture drawing undue attention to itself to the detriment of the rest.

Detail levels look more consistently high with native 4K content too, as there’s none of the tonal clipping in bright areas that you get with HDR.

Colours look more natural in SDR mode too, and the screen’s backlight handling is greatly improved, with minimal trouble from general clouding or haloing around bright objects.

Hisense

The local dimming system becomes surprisingly effective with SDR too, delivering deeper black levels than we would have expected for the 75M7900’s money without leaving bright parts of predominantly dark pictures looking dull and lifeless.

Even better, the local dimming achieves this while throwing up only the occasional faint distracting bar of light around bright objects, and without causing heavy loss of detail in dark SDR areas.

Given how consistently enjoyable SDR playback is on the 75M7900, we would suggest partnering it with either the Panasonic UB900 or the Xbox One S Ultra HD Blu-ray players, since these allow you to turn HDR off while Samsung’s K8500 does not. This means the Panasonic and Xbox players enable you to enjoy the 4K part of UHD Blu-rays on the 75M7900 without having to struggle with the HDR part.

While the 75M7900’s handling of SDR images is strong enough to make Hisense’s giant TV look like a bargain despite its HDR shortcomings, there are a couple of significant SDR weaknesses to point out.

First, the set’s upscaling of HD sources is rather basic. It adds detail, yes, but without any great understanding or awareness of context, meaning the extra sharpness and detail can sometimes look rather noisy and forced.

Hisense

The other consistent weakness of the 75M7900 is its motion handling, which finds fast-moving objects and camera pans routinely looking soft compared with the strong sharpness you get with relatively static (especially native 4K) content.

Hisense 75M7900 4K TV review: Ample sonics

The 75M7900 gets back to pleasantly surprising with its sonics. Its speakers produce more volume and dynamic range than its slender design and affordable price would lead you to expect, and these strengths are delivered without the sound becoming harsh or cramped at high volumes.

The scale of the soundstage actually manages to feel like a match for the vastness of the 75-inch images, and you couldn’t really ask for more than that from such an affordable giant.

Verdict

Provided you accept and are prepared to work within the 75M7900’s limitations – namely that it can’t really do serious justice to HDR images that it’s supposed to be capable of handling – it’s actually a much better TV than you might expect for the money.

As such the 75M7900 puts Hisense on the UK TV map in fairly spectacular fashion, and should be enough to cause the more established brands to start looking nervously over their shoulders.

Huge scale without huge brightness will be plenty good enough for many who want the biggest screen available for £2,500, though, which is exactly the accolade achieved here.

CoWatch smartwatch is the Amazon Echo for your wrist

We’re only just about to get Amazon Echo and Amazon Echo Dot in the UK for the first time, with the Echo coming on 28 September and the smaller Dot arriving a month later, but US customers have had access to Alexa-enabled devices for more than a year.

That’s why there are already plenty of third-party hardware that can also use Amazon’s voice assistant to tell the weather, browse for information and generally be a robotic chum.

The latest is the CoWatch, a smartwatch entirely designed around the Alexa experience. It is now available in the States through Amazon.com from $279 (£215) and is compatible with iOS and Android.

• Amazon Echo: What can Alexa do and what services are compatible?
• White Amazon Echo in pictures, get it for £50 off
• Amazon Echo review: Ace assistant, average speaker
• Amazon Echo vs Amazon Tap vs Echo Dot: What’s the difference?

The watch has a dual-core 1.2GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of built-in storage and a Super AMOLED round display, with a resolution of 400 x 400.

The body is stainless steel and zirconia, and there’s a heart rate sensor on the rear. It is water resistant and the company claims the battery can last up to 32 hours.

It uses the Cronologics operating system, so don’t expect many third-party apps at this time, but it does have its own swathe of software, including calendar access, weather, step counter, heart rate and plenty of the usual candidates.

It will also be IFFFT compatible through an upcoming over-the-air update, so will be able to interact with smarthome devices.

But it’s the Alexa integration that should impress most. Alexa is able to understand millions of words and phrases, spoken in general English, in order to check for information across a vast number of subjects: sports scores, traffic status, you can even order a pizza through it.

Two colours are available: silver and black.

If you thought clamshell phones were dead, take a look at this Samsung SM-W2017 Android monster

It’s been a long time since we last owned a clamshell phone, most likely a Motorola Razr of some description, but Samsung is merrily cracking on with the form factor. And it must be said that its latest, the Samsung SM-W2017 is a rather tasty little number.

Leaked photos of the smartphone show a high-end device with two displays, with one on the rear for when the device is closed. But more impressive still are the rumoured specifications.

The phone is said to comes with a 4.2-inch Full HD (1920 x 1080) internal screen, a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor, Adreno 530 graphics, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage.

It allegedly has a 12-megapixel camera on the rear, with a 5-megapixel snapper on the front. And it even has a fingerprint scanner for security.

A 2,000mAh battery with Quick Charge 3.0 support is also touted.

Sadly, it is claimed that the SM-W2017 is destined for the Chinese market only – much like the W2016 we reported on last year. Still it’s good to see that Samsung is continuing with the form factor. You never know, it might one day decide to test one in these waters too.

Let’s just hope it gets the pricing right if it does, because as it stands the new model is rumoured to cost RMB10,000 in China. That’s more than £1,150 with the current exchange rate. Yikes.

Lockheed Martin’s bioenergy plant turns waste into clean power

When it’s not taking forever to deliver the F–35 or creating new blimp inspection drones, Lockheed Martin is hard at work finding ways to turn actual trash into useable clean energy. At its Owego, New York facility, where the company builds space-flight gear and military helicopters, the group has partnered with Germany-based Concord Blue to unveil a 250 kilowatt “advanced gasification plant” that will convert 3,650 tons of bio waste into electricity for the facility every year.

Waste-to-energy technology can work in two ways: either by burning bio waste directly or by heating solid waste material until it becomes a gas that can be converted it synthetic fuel. In the case of the Owego plant, the eventual goal is to build a sorting facility that can take municipal waste headed for the landfill, remove the recyclables, and convert the remaining biomass to fuel using Concord Blue’s Reformer technology. Because the biomass fuel is heated in an oxygen-free environment, Lockheed says it far exceeds environmental requirements.

For now, however, the plant has already helped reduce carbon emissions by 9,000 metric tons per year by recycling discarded wood chips from nearby lumber mills into fuel for a wood-fired biomass system. While burning wood sounds like a downright low-tech solution, Lockheed claims this locally sourced energy is carbon-neutral and has saved the facility $1 million per year in heating and cooling costs. The company is also working to install a small-scale version of the system at a Veterans Affairs Hospital in upstate New York, enabling the hospital to provide its own heat and power. Meanwhile, in Herten, Germany, Concord Blue and Lockheed Martin are working together to build a 5 megawatt biofuel power plant that will convert 50,000 tons of feedstock into power for 5,000 homes and businesses.

Source: Lockheed Martin