July 11 can't come soon enough. We now know that as the day when the oft-rumored iPhone 3G will land in US stores. Revealed earlier today during Steve Jobs' keynote address at the Apple WWDC, the iPhone 3G could very well turn the mobile phone market on its head with its laundry list of features and incredible price point. Here's a breakdown of the new device:
• 3G cellular network resulting in much faster download speeds compared to EDGE.
• GPS integrated with maps. Location-based software will redefine how we interact on the go, and Apple wants to be at the forefront.
• Enterprise support for push email, calendar, and contacts with Microsoft Exchange.
• MobileMe replaces Apple's .mac service as a personal version of Exchange, supporting push email, calendar, and contacts.
• Other miscellaneous details: iPhone 2.0 firmware, 300 hours of standby battery life, 8-10 hours of 2G talk battery life, 5 hours of 3G talk battery life, 7 hours of video battery life, 24 hours of audio battery life, all plastic back.
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the new iPhone is its price: the 8GB model will cost only $199 with a contract, while a 16GB model will be available for $299. Having just picked up a Nokia N82 last week for almost double the price of an 8GB iPhone 3G, you'd better believe that sucker is getting returned for Apple's new hotness. Sure the camera is a downgrade, but at that price who cares? It makes you wonder how Nokia and other premium handset makers will adapt their pricing model, now that Apple is packing most of their features into a phone that generally costs about half the price. In the end, no one but the consumer benefits the most.
Poor AMD. Two years ago, Intel's Core architecture was unveiled and it absolutely decimated AMD's offerings. They've been playing catch-up ever since. Though their latest release, Phenom, didn't go as smoothly as possible, they at least have a somewhat competitive offering for mid-range and low-end builds. Unfortunately, most users would still be better off going with an Intel branded processor. It seems that AMD's only hope would be for Intel to severely drop the ball with its new architecture, Nehalem, giving AMD time to release their own new architecture and become competitive.
Unfortunately for AMD, it appears that those hopes have been dashed. Intel has done it again if the latest numbers coming in from Computex in Taipei are any indicator. Anandtech got there hands on two samples, and their site is currently being hammered by all of the benchmark-hungry nerds. Long story short: Nehalem is 20-40% faster than Intel's current architecture at the same clock speeds.
Time to pack up and head home, AMD. 2009 is going to be 2007 all over again, with consumers being foolish to buy anything running on AMD processors. Hit the jump for more details.
Once again a communications breakdown between the Mars Odyssey orbiter and the Phoenix Lander has occurred, delaying today's planned scientific dig until Thursday, at the earliest. If this sounds familiar it's because the same thing happened last week. NASA seems to believe that high-energy particles zipping through space have collided with Mars Odyssey, temporarily placing the communications device responsible for relaying commands to Phoenix into Safe Mode.
"The lander is fine," Edwards said.
Phoenix set down in Mars' northern latitudes to study whether the polar environment is capable of supporting primitive life. It communicates with Earth through Odyssey and the Reconnaissance Orbiter, which make daily passes over the lander to send commands and beam back images.
With Odyssey temporarily out of service, engineers told the Reconnaissance Orbiter to be the middleman between the lander and Earth.
Phoenix had planned to dig the first of three shallow pits north of where it landed and dump the dirt into a tiny oven, where it will be baked and studied this week. The earliest the lander can start the excavation will be Thursday, when new commands will be sent up.
The green light to scrape the Martian surface came after an extensive check of Phoenix's 8-foot robotic arm and other scientific instruments.
"It's absolutely an incredibly science-rich location," said chief scientist Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, who heads the three-month, $420 million mission.
Answer: Hedy Lamarr,who appeared in numerous movies throughout the 1930s and 40s, including such classics as Boom Town, White Cargo and Tortilla Flat. What isn't so well known is Hedy's co-invention of the Frequency-Hopped Spread Spectrum, something that was hoped would be used to make radio-guided torpedoes nearly impossible to detect. Unfortunately, the idea was ahead of its time and impractical due to the state of technology in the 40s.
It wasn't until 1962 that Hedy's invention was put to use by U.S. ships during the blockade of Cuba. Unfortunately, the patent had expired by this time and Hedy never saw a penny from her work, despite the fact her spectrum invention is used in current cell-phone technology and WiFi networks.
In honor of Hedy Lamarr, a new play is currently showing in New York called Frequency Hopping, which has a musical score performed by an army of 25 robots. The play runs until June 29th at the 3LD Art & Technology Center.
Dean Kamen is a national treasure, a driven inventor that continues to push beyond boundaries and deliver on his promises. As if solving the world's water supply problem isn't enough, he's now unveiled his new robot arm that can be used by amputees. This isn't a small step past current technology....it's one giant leap.
Back in 1989, a team of physicists, Fleischmann and Pons, claimed to have discovered cold fusion, the holy grail of energy research. In a short amount of time, the research was discredited and cold fusion became a bad word, something akin to UFOs and alien abduction. In the nearly 20 years that have followed, not much has been heard of cold fusion.
All that changed on May 22, when Japan's leading and esteemed physicist, Yoshiakiu Arata, presented a demonstration to 60 invited guests from around the world, including representatives from six major newspapers. According to those in attendance, the demonstration was a success with the common belief that Arata's work will be easy to duplicate and verify.
In their experiment, the physicists forced deuterium gas into a cell containing a mixture of palladium and zirconium oxide, which absorbed the deuterium to produce a dense "pynco" deuterium. In this dense state, the deuterium nuclei from different atoms were so close together that they fused to produce helium nuclei.
Evidence for the occurrence of this fusion came from measuring the temperature inside the cell. When Arata first injected the deuterium gas, the temperature rose to about 70° C (158° F), which Arata explained was due to nuclear and chemical reactions. When he turned the gas off, the temperature inside the cell remained warmer than the cell wall for 50 hours, which Arata said was an effect of nuclear fusion.
While Arata´s demonstration looked promising to his audience, the real test is still to come: duplication. Many scientists and others are now recalling the infamous 1989 demonstration by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, who claimed to produce controlled nuclear fusion in a glass jar at room temperature. However, no one - including Fleischmann and Pons - could duplicate the experiment, leading many people to consider cold fusion a pseudoscience to this day.
James Dow, an evolutionary anthropologist at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, has written a computer program called Evogod that attempts to answer this fundamental question: How did religion evolve? The question in and of itself is sure to irritate many, but for those of us who lack religious thoughts, it's a very important query.
From the Abstract:
Religious people talk about things that cannot be seen, stories that cannot be verified, and beings and forces beyond the ordinary. Perhaps their gods are truly at work, or perhaps in human nature there is an impulse to proclaim religious knowledge. If so, it would have to have arisen by natural selection. It is hard to imagine how natural selection could have produced such an impulse. There is a debate among evolutionary scientists about whether or not there is any adaptive advantage to religion at all (Bulbulia 2004a; Atran and Norenzayan 2004). Some believe that it has no adaptive value itself and that it is just a hodge podge of behaviors that have evolved because they are adaptive in other non-religious contexts. The agent-based simulation described in this article shows that a central unifying feature of religion, a belief in an unverifiable world, could have evolved along side of verifiable knowledge. The simulation makes use of an agent-based communication model with two types of information: verifiable information (real information) about a real world and unverifiable information (unreal information) about about an imaginary world. It examines the conditions necessary for the communication of unreal information to have evolved along side the communication of real information. It offers support for the theory that religion is an adaptive complex and it disputes the theory that religion is a byproduct of unrelated adaptive processes.
Be sure to read the full report, as it is chock-full of interesting insight, not the least of which is that non-believers in religious thought have actually helped religion flourish.
Elizabeth Royte has written a new book titled Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It, which details the impressive marketing campaign that duped an entire nation into thinking they needed bottled water. Here's a brief excerpt, from her post on Alternet.
The outrageous success of bottled water, in a country where more than 89 percent of tap water meets or exceeds federal health and safety regulations, regularly wins in blind taste tests against name-brand waters, and costs 240 to 10,000 times less than bottled water, is an unparalleled social phenomenon, one of the greatest marketing coups of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But why did the marketing work? At least part of the answer, I'm beginning to understand, is that bottled water plays into our ever-growing laziness and impatience.
Americans eat and drink more on the run than ever before. The author Michael Pollan reports that one in three American children eat fast food every single day, and 19 percent of American meals and snacks are eaten in the car. Bottled water fills a perceived need for convenience (convenience without the calories of soda, that is): hydration on the go, with bottles that fit in the palm of the hand, in a briefcase or purse.
According to research conducted by the Container Recycling Institute (CRI), between 1960 and 1970 the average person bought 200 to 250 packaged drinks each year-mostly soda and beer-and many of those were in refillable bottles. When I was growing up, my family drank only from the faucet and from family-size containers. We quenched our thirst, when out and about, with water from public fountains. Either that, or we waited till we got where we were going. On picnics, we might have a big plastic jug of lemonade, homemade. Sure, the grown-ups occasionally bought beer, but the idea of single-serve beverages were considered, by and large, frivolous.
Netflix announced today a partnership with Roku, which will allow the movie rental juggernaut to begin selling a set-top box that will allow subscribers to stream films from PC to TV.
Netflix said that it and partner company Roku will offer a device that lets Netflix subscribers "stream" movies and television episodes to their TVs. The player costs $99.99, Netflix said in a press release.
There are no extra charges or viewing restrictions and people can "watch as much as they want and as often as they want without paying more or impacting the number of DVDs they receive," Chief Executive Reed Hastings said in the statement.
The player is about the size of a paperback book and requires an Internet connection. It also works with wireless Internet connection systems through Wi-Fi technology.
Users can fast-forward and rewind the video streams with a remote control, Netflix said.
Discovery Magazine has some juicy details about General Electric's plans to introduce a consumer-level holographic storage medium by 2012. A single CD-sized disc will be able to contain 1 terabyte of data, or the equivalent of 110 DVDs.
To store data holographically, a laser beam (1) is split in two (2). One half of the beam passes through an array of hundreds of thousands of gates (3). Each gate can be opened or closed to represent a binary 1 or 0. The gates either block or pass the beam, filtering it into a coded pattern, or signal. The other half of the beam, known as the reference beam, is bounced off a mirror (4), so that the reference beam and the signal beam encoded with digital information intersect somewhere within the plastic storage medium (5). Light waves from the two beams interfere with each other, imprinting into the plastic a hologram—a three-dimensional pattern. By varying the angle of the mirror, millions of holograms can be created in the same piece of plastic. To read data from storage, the reference beam alone is used to illuminate the hologram. The resulting image can be read by a sensor and converted back into 1s and 0s.
Scientists at the University of Konstanz and the National Institute of Standards and Technology are showing off a new, ultrafast laser that could improve the sensitivity of astronomical instruments that search for Earthlike planets in the universe.
Among its applications, the new laser can be used in searches for planets orbiting distant stars. Astronomers look for slight variations in the colors of starlight over time as clues to the presence of a planet orbiting the star. The variations are due to the small wobbles induced in the star’s motion as the orbiting planet tugs it back and forth, producing minute shifts in the apparent color (frequency) of the starlight. Currently, astronomers’ instruments are calibrated with frequency standards that are limited in spectral coverage and stability. Frequency combs could be more accurate calibration tools, helping to pinpoint even smaller variations in starlight caused by tiny Earthlike planets. Such small planets would cause color shifts equivalent to a star wobble of just a few centimeters per second. Current instruments can detect, at best, a wobble of about 1 meter per second.
When the Chaiten Volcano in southern Chile erupted on May 2, it ended an amazing 9,000 years of slumber. It apparently woke up on the wrong side of the bed, as the plume rose as high as 55,000 feet and forced the evacuation of 4,000 people. Images from the ground have been stunning, but nothing says perspective like an image taken by NASA's Terra Satellite, which you see below.
The image above is that of a toy soldier, photographed by a Quantum Camera that did not create the image by absorbing light. Instead, it recorded photons via a quantum link to others cameras that did absorb the photons.
Ghost imaging works a bit like taking a flash-lit photo of an object using a normal camera. There the image forms from photons that come out of the flash, bounce off an object and into the lens.
The new technique also uses a light source to illuminate an object. However, the image is not formed from light that hits the object and bounces back. Instead, the camera collects photons that do not hit the object, but are paired through a quantum effect with others that did.
In Shih's experiments a toy soldier was placed 45 centimetres away from a light source, which was split into two beams. One was pointed at the toy and the other at a digital camera. A photon detector was placed near the soldier, able only to record when a photon bounced off.
As fascinating and mysterious as this is, not all believe the results:
Not everyone agrees that quantum effects are at work in ghost imaging, though. Baris Erkman and Jeffrey Shapiro of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, US, point out in a recent paper that classical physics says light sources produce numbers of uncoordinated photons, not correlated quantum pairs.
They suspect ghost images might be produced without a quantum link between photon pairs, purely because some photons are just similar.
Spammers are quickly shifting gears, ditching previous promises of a free Xbox, PS3, iPod, iPhone as a marketing lure in exchange for GTA IV.
Spam-blocking firm ClearMyMail reported that more than half of the junk mail being blocked by its service this week is Grand Theft Auto IV related.
The vast majority offer the opportunity to 'win' a PlayStation 3 complete with the game on opening the email, and others invite the victim to pornographic websites which link to viruses.
Dan Field, managing director of ClearMyMail, said: "We are seeing unprecedented levels of spam in relation to the game.
"More than half of the spam our service is blocking is related to Grand Theft Auto, most of which contain viruses and spyware.
"Spammers are like conmen: they are the ultimate opportunists and like nothing more than to prey on the susceptible.
"My advice to anybody who receives these emails is to refrain from opening it, and to wait until they can legitimately purchase the game, even if disappointed by the record sales of this morning."
Want to know how much spam is clogging the Internet every second? Perhaps you're interested in knowing how many people have died today, or how much the global population has risen? How many computers have been sold this year? How many lightning strikes? Abortions? One website has all the answers and it's displayed in real time, which is both fascinating and depressing.
Head over to Worldometers and watch the world in action, via live statistics.
