Could Google's inescapable Glass specs really be the next iPhone?

Whether you like it or not, there will likely be tens of millions of Google's Glass on the streets within the next few years and one analyst believes its impact will be as great as Apple's iconic smartphone.

If analysts are on the money, it will be near impossible for people to avoid the Glass gaze in future — and Google's networked specs could be the next iPhone.

There could be millions of networked spectacles worn on the streets and in workplaces in coming years if numbers from analyst house Forrester's recent Glass survey are realised.

Canvassing the opinions of 4,600 adults in the US, the analyst firm found that 12 percent of Americans (21 million people) would be willing to wear augmented reality glasses if they come from a trusted brand.

"We have no doubt that in time, Glass will be the next iPhone — the next great platform for engaging consumers and workers," writes Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps.

Exactly when, she doesn't say, but BI Intelligence recently predicted Glass sales will climb from 831,000 in 2014 to 21 million devices in 2018, with prices to fall to $600 by 2016. That could mean as many as 40 million Glass devices in the wild within the next five years. 

So far, Glass has been limited to Explorer developers and is being rolled out to about 8,000 winners of the #ifihadglass competition, so most respondents to Forrester's survey are likely have never worn the product or seen the reaction from others who perhaps don't want their image and location uploaded to Google's servers.

Study reveals plants’ maths skills

PLANTS do complex calculations to make sure they have enough food to get them through the night, new research published in journal eLife shows.

Scientists at Britain’s John Innes Centre said plants adjusted their rate of starch consumption to prevent starvation at night when they were unable to feed themselves with the sun’s energy. They could even compensate for an unexpected early night.

“This is the first concrete example in a fundamental biological process of such a sophisticated arithmetic calculation,” mathematical modeller Martin Howard said.

During the night, mechanisms in the leaf measure the starch stores and estimate the time until dawn. Information comes from an internal clock. 

Source: http://www.iol.co.za

New lease of life for hobbled planet-hunter Kepler

Reports of the death of our principal planet hunter have been greatly exaggerated. The prolific Kepler space telescope may instead be entering early retirement, spending its golden years seeking out planets with a gravitational magnifying glass.

Since its launch in 2009, NASA's Kepler mission has discovered 132 exoplanets and thousands of other possible worlds, making it one of the most celebrated exoplanet missions.

To catch sight of far-off worlds, Kepler must stare at stars with an unwavering eye, looking for tiny dips in starlight when a planet transits, or crosses in front of, its host star. To do this, the craft needs at least three orientation-controlling reaction wheels to stabilise its vision. Two of its four wheels have now failed.

Shaky eyesight doesn't have to mean curtains for Kepler, says Keith Horne of the University of St Andrews, UK. He and Andrew Gould at Ohio State University in Columbus suggest that the hobbled telescope can use its gear to take up microlensing, an alternative way to spot planets.

Colder quarry

When two stars align in our line of sight, the gravitational pull of the closer star bends and magnifies the light of the further star. If the nearer star has orbiting planets, their gravity provides added magnification.

"The signals from planets are quite large in this case, sometimes even a 100 per cent change of brightness of the star, so it's relatively easy to see these things," says Horne.

The Red Queen was right: Life must continually evolve to avoid extinction

The death of individual species shouldn’t be the only concern for biologists worried about animal groups, such as frogs or the “big cats,” going extinct. A University of California, Berkeley, study has found that a lack of new, emerging species also contributes to extinction.

“Virtually no biologist thinks about the failure to originate as being a major factor in the long term causes of extinction,” said Charles Marshall, director of the UC Berkeley Museum of Paleontology and professor of integrative biology, and co-author of the report. “But we found that a decrease in the origin of new species is just as important as increased extinction rate in driving mammals to extinction.”

Image: As the Red Queen told Alice, “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” Similarly, animals and plants must continually adapt and evolve just to avoid going extinct. (Illustration by Sir John Tenniel from Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking-Glass,” 1871)

The effects of such a decrease would play out over millions of years, Marshall said, not rapidly, like the global change Earth is experiencing from human activities. Yet, the findings should help biologists understand the pressures on today’s flora and fauna and what drove evolution and extinction in the past, he added.

The results, published June 20 in the journal Science Express, come from a study of 19 groups of mammals that either are extinct or, in the case of horses, elephants, rhinos and others, are in decline from a past peak in diversity. All are richly represented in the fossil record and had their origins sometime in the last 66 million years, during the Cenozoic Era.

Lost Maya city found in Mexican jungle

Image: A National Institute of Anthropology and History worker shows the remains of a building at the newly discovered ancient Maya city Chactun in Yucatan peninsula. ( INAH/Reuters )

Scientists have discovered what was once likely a prominent city in the booming Mayan empire.

Just weeks after a similar find was made in Cambodia, archaeologists have uncovered an ancient Maya city that been hidden for hundreds of years in the Yucatan’s jungle-covered Campeche province, a find that researchers said could tell us more about how the advanced, still mysterious empire presided over its vast lands at its height.

The abandoned city, called Chactun, is one of the largest ever found in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, teeming with some 30,000 or 40,000 people during the late Classic period of Maya civilization between 600 and 900 AD, after which year the civilization spun into decline. That would have made it somewhat smaller than Tikal, the fabled Mayan city once home to some 90,000 in what is now Guatemala, Reuters reported.

"It is one of the largest sites in the Central Lowlands, comparable in its extent and the magnitude of its buildings with Becan, Nadzcaan and El Palmar in Campeche," said archaeologist Ivan Sprajc in a statement from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History, translated from Spanish by LiveScience.

Early Mars atmosphere 'oxygen-rich' before Earth's

The study dealt with differences between rocks from Gusev Crater on Mars (above) and meteorites

Mars' atmosphere could have been rich in oxygen four billion years ago - well before Earth's air became augmented with the gas.

That is the suggestion put forward by the author of a study in Nature journal, which outlines an explanation for differences between Mars meteorites and rocks examined by a robot rover.

Dr Bernard Wood said the idea fits with the picture of a planet that was once warm, wet and habitable.

But other scientists were sceptical.

While the rise of atmospheric oxygen on Earth was probably mediated by life, Martian oxygen could have been produced through the chemical "splitting" of water.

Prof Wood and his colleagues from Oxford University looked at the chemical composition of Martian meteorites found on Earth and data from Nasa's Spirit rover, which examined surface rocks at Gusev Crater on Mars.

Both are igneous rocks (of volcanic origin), but they show major geochemical differences. For example, the Gusev Crater rocks are five times richer in nickel than the meteorites.

This had posed something of a puzzle, casting doubt on whether the meteorites were typical volcanic products of the Red Planet.

Battery Made From Wood — Efficient, Long-Lasting, Environmentally-Friendly Battery Developed

An environmentally-friendly, efficient, and long-lasting battery created out of wood? Sounds too good to be true? Well it may not be — researchers say that they have now developed just such a battery.

The tiny new battery — composed of a sliver of wood coated with tin — appears to have great potential, already showing itself to be among the most long-lasting of all sodium-ion nanobatteries. The researchers think that batteries based on this new technology would be best suited for large-scale energy storage — such as storing the excess energy produced by some renewable energy installations — due to the relatively low cost of the materials involved.

With regards to the inspiration for the battery design — the researchers had noted that wood fibers are naturally designed to hold mineral-rich water, water that is very similar to the electrolyte in batteries… Why not explore the use of wood as the base of an experimental sodium-ion battery? This would help to address to reality “that today’s batteries often use stiff, non-flexible substrates, which are too rigid to release the stress that occurs as ions flow through the battery.”

Huawei's new Ascend P6 touted as world's slimmest smartphone

Bigger is not always better in the smartphone industry, and the brass at Huawei is hoping that notion can help vault its new flagship device into the upper echelon of the mobile market.

Marking its first standalone launch event, the Chinese manufacturers unveiled the Ascend P6 on Tuesday, boasting their new device as the world's slimmest smartphone. The Ascend P6 is a measly 6.18 mm thick; quite a bit thinner than the iPhone 5 (7.7 mm) and the Samsung Galaxy S4 (7.6 mm), two industry-leading devices that Huawei is hoping to rival.

"Huawei P6 is darn thin," tweeted industry analyst Ben Wood shares in a Reuters report.

Much like the iPhone, the Ascend P6 features sleek, aluminum edges along the sides and top of the phone. The device is rounded out at the bottom, adding a little bit of original flair to its aesthetic appeal. The 4.7-inch 720p display, 8-megapixel camera on the back and 5-megapixel front-facing camera make this phone ideal for everyday photos, Skype calls or the ever popular selfie.

Inside the device you will find 8GB of storage, a 1.5GHz quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM. The Ascend P6 also features Huawei's customized version of Andriod's Jelly Bean operating system.

Source: http://ca.news.yahoo.com

China unveils Milky Way-2, the world’s fastest supercomputer

The Tianhe-2 supercomputer is now the fastest in the world.

A new supercomputer, Tianhe-2, was just named fastest in the world by TOP500, surprising the computing world after being delivered two years ahead of schedule by China's National University of Defence Technology.

The newly-built Tianhe-2 — which is Mandarin for Milky Way-2 — reached a sustained computing speed of 33.86 quadrillion 'floating-point operations per second', or 33.85 petaflops, nearly double the speed of Titan — the U.S. Department of Energy's supercomputer that sustained a speed of 17.59 petaflops to come out as #1 on last November's TOP500 list. Tianhe-2 achieved this remarkable speed by linking together over 3 million Intel computing cores (Titan only used around 560,000).

For a little perspective, a standard home computer or laptop typically runs at gigaflops speeds, or roughly a million times slower than Tianhe-2, whereas a really good home computer, or the new Sony Playstation 4, can get up into the low teraflops speeds, which is still about 10,000 times slower than this new supercomputer.

Extraterrestrial Life Forms are Communicating With Earth - If Crowd Sourcing Messaging To Intelligent Life Is A Success

YouTube, Twitter, and Face book are no longer in demand. If you want to communicate with Extraterrestrial Life forms you have to do it through a new project called “Lone Signal.” This project has been build as a crowd sourcing messaging to intelligent life (METI) platform in order to communicate with earth. Some sources already believe that Extraterrestrial Life forms are communicating with earth, but that we don’t fully understand it yet, or that we can’t respond properly. You can try now to communicate with them as well, all you need is Internet access, and you are ready to create, and transmit messages to strategic targeted stellar systems. Today is a historical day because “Lone Signal” will have access to “Jamesburg Earth Station” in Carmel CA, in order to contact “Goldilocks zones.” (These zones, circumstellar habitable zones, are known places were there might be Extraterrestrial Life forms waiting to communicate with earth.)