Levi's Jacket Now Uses Google Technology

Levi’s is announcing new jackets with Google’s Project Jacquard technology, which turns a portion of the fabric on the sleeve into a touch-sensitive remote control for phones. The Jacquard by Google tag, about the size of a stick of gum, tucks into the jacket sleeve and connects to your device wirelessly via Bluetooth. The My Day feature triggers the time, weather, traffic conditions and your calendar. Always Together will let you know if you left your phone behind. It's easy to take a picture with the Camera feature's visual and haptic countdown. Wearers stay connected with simple hand gestures like swiping, touching and tapping the jacket cuff. Controlling music, calling, messaging, navigation and ride hailing apps is all in the wrist. It's also easy to talk to Google Assistant.

You can program up to four different swipes and taps to do a dozen or so different actions, like play/pause music, silence your phone, drop a pin on a map, or set your phone to read off the time or your appointments. You can also use it to have your phone give you details about your Uber or toggle noise cancellation on headphones. The Trucker and Sherpa Trucker jackets with the tag, for both men and women, will start rolling out Thursday in select Levi's stores in Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US. You can also find them online at Levi.com. The classic Trucker will cost $198.



Credits:
https://www.cnet.com/news/levis-accessorizes-new-smart-jackets-with-googles-jacquard-tag/

Something or Nothing: Rocketbook Ink and notebook

A paper notebook review on a site about gadgets and living the digital lifestyle? Even with the prevalence of smartphones, the Internet, and computers in general, there is a growing “counter-culture” that advocates the benefits of paper or, at the very least, writing things by hand. Rather than take one side to the detriment of the other, the folks at Rocketbook got their heads together to develop solutions, not compromises, that bridge the analog and digital in ways you may never have thought of before. Besides, the Rocketbook Everlast paper isn’t really paper anyway.

What do you do when walls of text fill every page of your notebook to the borders? Simple: Microwave it! For $27, the Rocketbook Wave offers microwave erase functionality and cloud services that let you easily share and save your notes instantly. Every scribble or musing is captured with the Rocket-Book app, which allows you to customize your file destinations as well as the quality and format of each photo. As long as you can get over its limits on reusability (up to five times), not to mention the ugly pen, the Rocketbook Wave is incredibly useful and affordable. To microwave erase, you put the notebook in a microwave with a rotating glass turntable. Then, you place a coffee mug filled three-quarters of the way with water onto the wave symbol and wait for it to disappear. Finally, you wait for it to cool, and then flip it over and repeat the same process. The Rocket-Book app is simple to set up and use. Once you select a destination and fill in the appropriate bubble on the page, just align the camera with the page, and it will automatically capture it.


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Man's iphone Watch Calls 911 after Crash

It has been well documented how the Apple Watch has often warned users about potential health issues which allowed them to get treatment in time. Now, we are also seeing the Fall Detection feature play its part in saving lives. Over the weekend, a man from Spokane, Washington posted on social media the details of how an Apple Watch saved his father’s life. Gabe Burdett says the father and son duo were supposed to meet up at a pre-designated location for some mountain biking at the Riverside State Park. At some point while waiting for his father, Bob Burdett, he received a text on his phone from his father’s Apple Watch, which said that a hard fall had been detected along with a map to his present location. At the same time, the Watch also notified the emergency services who responded immediately.

His Apple Watch had called 911 through the fall-detection feature, which sends out an alert if the wearer is immobile for 60 seconds after a fall. His watch messaged emergency medical services at 12:02 p.m., and an ambulance was there within a minute. “I think it’s just another opportunity for the fire service to leverage technology and use it to improve people’s lives,” Police chief Schaeffer said. As opposed to social media or GPS tracking apps, Schaeffer said the Apple Watch fall-detection feature offers extra reassurance by not relying on a person to alert first responders.

Credits:
https://www.news18.com/news/tech/an-apple-watch-saved-this-mans-life-by-calling-for-help-after-a-bad-fall-2319149.html

NASA to Use 3D Printers to Establish Habitats on the Moon and Mars

If the United States is to return to the moon for a prolonged period of time, then supplies will need to be created at the lunar surface. It would be seriously expensive to take all of the material to the moon, so this is where 3D printing could come in, allowing astronauts to construct whatever their lunar colony needed from raw materials. Much of the excitement around 3D printing in space has focused on using it to construct buildings from lunar rock.

3D printing also has the added benefit of working with minimal human involvement. You can just set it to print and wait for the finished product. This means it can even be operated remotely. In theory, you could send a 3D printer to the moon (or any other space destination) ahead of a human crew and it could start manufacturing structures before the astronauts even arrived. The moon is covered in regolith, a loose, powdery material formed from millions of years of meteors bombarding the moon’s surface. This has slowly transformed the top layers of bedrock into a soil-like material made from grains less than a few millimetres across. This material could be used as the material to use in a 3D printer.

Click here for a video.

Credits:
https://www.space.com/return-to-the-moon-3d-printing-with-moondust.html

Lowe's & Home Depot

Home improvement retailers Home Depot and Lowe’s have become the latest big companies to get swiped by class action lawsuits under Illinois’ biometrics privacy law, as a group of plaintiffs have sought to extend the reach of the law’s potentially big financial awards to those stores’ anti-theft surveillance systems. According to the law suit, the retailers have “augmented (their) in-store security cameras with software that track individuals’ movements throughout the store using a unique scan of face geometry,” the lawsuit said. “Put simply, Defendants surreptitiously attempt to collect the faceprint of every person who appears in front of one of their facial-recognition cameras.”

The two retail giants say they use the security cameras to prevent in store theft. The lawsuit claims the stores do not inform customers of the cameras use. It further argues that the stores track customers as they move throughout the store and also tracks an individual if they visit subsequent stores. While the suit does not list malicious use of the videos, however it does acknowledge the companies do not identify how long the retailers might keep the data. But the lawsuit does claim Home Depot and Lowe’s have shared the facial scan information of its customers with others. The complaint does not assert who those others may be, naming only “John Doe” as a co-defendant. The state of Illinois does have a Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) which requires companies that record images of the public follow certain procedures. The suit charges that the companies have not followed the guidelines outlined in these laws.

Credits:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7486615/Home-Depot-Lowes-secretly-using-facial-recognition-cameras-track-customers-say-lawsuits.html

Robotic fish Scare Invasive Species

Invasive species control is notoriously challenging, especially in lakes and rivers where native fish and other wildlife have limited options for escape. Soaring mosquitofish populations in freshwater lakes and rivers worldwide have decimated native fish and amphibian populations, and attempts to control the species through toxicants or trapping often fail or cause harm to local wildlife. Researchers have published the first experiments to gauge the ability of a biologically inspired robotic fish to induce fear-related changes in mosquitofish. Their findings indicate that even brief exposure to a robotic replica of the mosquitofish’s primary predator—the largemouth bass—can provoke meaningful stress responses in mosquitofish, triggering avoidance behaviors and physiological changes associated with the loss of energy reserves, potentially translating into lower rates of reproduction.

The team exposed groups of mosquitofish to a robotic largemouth bass for one 15-minute session per week for six consecutive weeks. The robot’s behavior varied between trials, spanning several degrees of biomimicry. Notably, in some trials, the researchers programmed the robot to incorporate real-time feedback based on interactions with live mosquitofish and to exhibit “attacks” typical of predatory behavior—a rapid increase in swimming speed. Researchers tracked interactions between the live fish and the replica in real time and analyzed them to reveal correlations between the degree of biomimicry in the robot and the level of stress response the live fish exhibited. Fear-related behaviors in mosquitofish include freezing (not swimming), hesitancy in exploring open spaces that are unfamiliar, and potentially dangerous, and erratic swimming patterns.

Credits:
https://www.futurity.org/invasive-species-robot-fish-2161452/

Community Protests against San Diego's "Smart Lamps"

The city of San Diego has installed 3,200 sensors in street lights all over San Diego that monitors pedestrian traffic, among other movements. This is part of an effort to make San Diego a so-called “smart city,” and last week, city officials met with members of the public for the first time to quell fears about privacy given the rise of facial-recognition technology and license-plate scanners. Some sensors gather atmospheric data, but they are also equipped with video cameras and audio capabilities. The metadata gathered by these sensors will connect to General Electric’s “CityIQ” cloud database, which includes data like “the number of persons who passed a location during a particular time” but would not include “personally identifiable information about those persons.”

But now, a coalition of more than a dozen community groups gathered Tuesday outside San Diego City Hall to call for a moratorium on “smart streetlights” until concerns about privacy and surveillance are addressed. City officials said they can use the data to improve pedestrian safety, optimize mobility planning, help first responders during emergencies and provide other benefits to the community. The smart technology does not have facial recognition, does not read license plates or show private property. All data is overwritten after five days unless police download it, according to the city. Some data can be kept up to seven years.



Credits:
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/watchdog/story/2019-09-17/protesters-call-for-san-diego-to-suspend-smart-streetlight-technology-ci-privacy-concerns

Last Pass Password Manager Vulnerable

The developers behind popular password manager LastPass have patched a loophole that exposed your last used password. Originally discovered in August by Tavis Ormandy, a researcher from Google’s Project Zero, the security flaw allowed malicious websites to trick the browser extension into giving away credentials you entered on a previous site. LastPass says it rolled out an update for the browser add-on on September 13th, two weeks after the vulnerability was first reported by Ormandy.

While the circumstances for the bug’s misuse are limited, these activities are common on the internet and even if they affected a fraction of LastPass’ user base, it would have cost thousands of users their sensitive data. “We quickly worked to develop a fix and verified the solution was comprehensive with Tavis. We have now resolved this bug; no user action is required and your LastPass browser extension will update automatically,” the company added in a blog post.

Credits:
https://www.digitaltrends.com/web/lastpass-password-manager-security-bug-update-credentials/

Seals tell Scientists how deep

Enormous holes in the Antarctic winter ice pack have popped up sporadically since the 1970s, but the reason for their formation has been largely mysterious. Scientists, with the help of floating robots and tech-equipped seals, may now have the answer: The so-called polynyas (Russian for "open water") seem to be the result of storms and salt, new research finds.

Campbell and his team drew data from two robotic, human-size floats that were deployed in the Weddell Sea by the National Science Foundation-funded Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling project (SOCCOM). The floats drift in the currents about a mile below the ocean's surface, Campbell said, collecting data about water temperature, salinity and carbon content. For comparison purposes, the researchers also used year-round observations from Antarctic research vessels and even scientific seals — wild pinnipeds fitted with small instruments to collect ocean data as the animals conduct their usual travels.

Credits:
https://www.livescience.com/65693-mysterious-antarctic-ice-holes-explained.html

Calif Legislature Moves to Ban Facial Recognition

Facial recognition’s first blanket ban arrived in May, when San Francisco became the only city in the nation to bar police and other agencies from using the technology. Now the powerful software, which uses machine learning algorithms to automatically track human faces in digital footage and match them to names, is facing a broader moratorium. State lawmakers just passed regulation barring all California law enforcement officers from running facial recognition programs on body cameras. Other Bay Area cities such as Berkeley and Oakland are considering following San Francisco’s lead in banning all applications for local police. And federal legislators — from both sides of the aisle — are holding hearings on Capitol Hill to examine how federal agencies are using the technology, and whether it deserves more scrutiny and stricter controls.

From social media to smart speakers, technological innovations have upended entire industries and changed the fabric of everyday life, with minimal public debate beforehand and sometimes significant unintended consequences. What makes facial recognition different is an emerging consensus that it poses a unique and alarming threat to basic civil liberties — and once it becomes widespread, it may be too late to stop it. The bill states biometric surveillance is the “functional equivalent of requiring every person to show a personal photo identification card at all times in violation of recognized constitutional rights,” regardless of consent. It runs the risk of creating massive, unregulated databases about Californians never suspected of committing a crime, and “may chill the exercise of free speech in public places” as the identities of anyone in a crowd could be immediately discerned.



Credits: 

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-face-recognition-ban-california-police-body-camera-20190607-story.html

Twitter's CEO has his Account Hacked

A hacker has compromised Jack Dorsey’s Twitter account. A stream of rogue tweets — including racial slurs — were posted to the Twitter chief executive’s own Twitter account just after 3:30pm ET. One of the tweets posted a Twitter handle for someone who purported to take credit for the account takeover. That account was quickly suspended. Dorsey has more than 4.21 million followers. Twitter spokesperson Ebony Turner said the company was investigating. The company also tweeted about the incident:

It’s not immediately known how the account was compromised. However, the rogue tweets were sent via Cloudhopper, a service Twitter bought in 2010 to improve its SMS service, suggesting Dorsey’s account may have been compromised by an authorized third-party app rather than obtaining Dorsey’s account password. It’s not the first time Twitter had to clean up after a high-profile account was hacked. Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg once had his Twitter account hacked because his account didn’t use two-factor authentication. He also had a ridiculously easy-to-guess password. Twitter later said it secured Dorsey’s account.



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India's Lunar Lander Loses Contact With Earth

India’s Chandrayaan-2 orbiter found the nation’s lost Vikram lander on the moon’s surface, according to Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) officials. The Vikram lander, which attempted to touchdown on the lunar surface on September 6, is still not providing a signal at this time, Space.com reported. ISRO chairman K. Sivan announced that the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter spotted the missing Vikram lander on Sunday and efforts to re-establish contact with the spacecraft will continue for at least two weeks, the Times of India noted in a report.

The Vikram Lander followed the planned descent trajectory from its orbit of 35 km to just below 2 km above the surface. All the systems and sensors of the Lander functioned excellently until this point and proved many new technologies such as variable thrust propulsion technology used in the Lander,” the ISRO said in a press statement. “[To] date 90 to 95 percent of the mission objectives have been accomplished and will continue contributing to Lunar science, notwithstanding the loss of communication with the Lander.”

Credits:
https://www.geek.com/news/india-finds-missing-vikram-lander-on-moons-surface-1803329/

The rotation of the Earth

Photographer Aryeh Nirenberg made this 55-second time-lapse video that visualizes Earth’s rotation by fixing the Milky Way as the point of reference and having the landscape spin instead. Nirenberg shot the photos a couple of years ago over a span of a few hours using a Sony a7S II and a Canon 24-70mm f/2.8 on an equatorial tracking mount. He shot 1,100 separate 10-second exposures (at f/2.8 and ISO 1600) with 12 seconds between each shot. It took him 37 minutes of shooting to get 1100 images. This animation is made with 20 images per second, so each image only appears for 5/100s of a second.



Credits:
https://petapixel.com/2019/08/24/a-timelapse-of-earth-rotating-around-the-milky-way/

MIT builds a Snake Robot

In the long list of creatures I'd like crawling inside the crevices of my brain, snakes probably rank somewhere near the bottom. Possibly dead last next to spiders and cockroaches. But that hasn't stopped researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) creating a device in the snake's image. A robot snake, if you will, designed to treat the immediate symptoms of strokes and aneurysms. It's a robotic device, in the shape of a thread, controlled with magnets. The idea: use this terrifying snake-thread to clear the blood clots in the brain that often manifest in the aftermath of a stroke or an aneurysm.

Currently, this sort of surgery is done using catheters manually threaded by surgeons. This snake-like device could be a pathway to a more efficient form of treatment because with this sort of operation time is of the essence. "Stroke is the number five cause of death and a leading cause of disability in the United States," explained Xuanhe Zhao, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and of civil and environmental engineering at MIT. "If acute stroke can be treated within the first 90 minutes or so, patients' survival rates could increase significantly. "If we could design a device to reverse blood vessel blockage within this 'golden hour,' we could potentially avoid permanent brain damage. That's our hope."



Credits:
https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/mit-built-a-snake-robot-that-slithers-inside-your-brain/?__twitter_impression=true

iRobot Releases a Mower Robot

In January, Roomba maker iRobot announced its next autonomous chore-doing robot: a lawnmower called Terra. Autonomous lawnmowers aren’t exactly new, but Terra is different. Unlike most robot lawnmowers, it uses wireless beacons to understand what your yard looks like rather than relying on a long, cumbersome wire that’s around the edges of your lawn. Those beacons may be a seemingly simple way to define a yard for the Terra, but they could be more complex than they appear. One support article says the Terra should be in sight range of three beacons “at all times” to best function, and another article says the number of beacons needed “depends on the complexity of the yard.”

iRobot wouldn’t say how many beacons are required for an average lawn. Unlike some other robot lawnmowers, the Terra user manual says the Terra and its beacons must be installed by a professional so the robot can properly mow your yard. This won’t cost more at launch, though; iRobot says it will initially provide the installation and a training session to customers. After the Terra is done mowing, the user manual says it will return to a charging base. iRobot tells The Verge the base will plug into a standard electrical outlet. It’ll also return if the battery runs low, and continue mowing from where it left off once the battery’s charged again.

Credits:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/30/20839810/irobot-terra-autonomous-lawnmower-roomba-robot-fcc-beta-release-date-2020