Innholdsfortegnelse for #250 i Techlife News

The 2 million-square-foot building where Bell Labs scientists helped launch modern cellular networks before it became one of the country’s largest vacant office buildings is drawing companies with the lure of working at a complex surrounded by technological history. A water tower in the shape of a transistor, which the company’s scientists created in 1947 as part of their continuing mission to improve and expand communications, stands over the Bell Works complex in Holmdel, near the site where the Big Bang theory of the universe was proven. With that history, the developer who acquired the building in 2013 after it sat vacant for seven years is hoping to lure tech entrepreneurs and others to the glass and steel structure originally designed by Eero Saarinen, who also designed St. Louis’ Gateway…

“What’s a computer?” For a company that has made its name on its MacBook and iMac range, asking such a question is quite a statement, but we all know that Apple doesn’t like to follow the rules. As part of a new advertising campaign for its iPad Pro range, Apple is taking shots at the Microsoft Surface and focuses on the functionality and performance of its latest blockbuster tablet device. In it, we see how the iPad can be used for a whole variety of uses – including in the office, as a replacement for a drawing pad, and on the go. It’s typical Apple – clean photography, a classic white backdrop and a confident statement, but can Apple really convince the general public to ditch their notebooks? THE iPAD…

Criminal As a last resort to stop a diabolical plot, a death row inmate has the memories, secrets, and skills of a dead CIA operative implanted into his brain in the hope that he will complete their mission. FIVE FACTS: 1. Nicolas Cage turned down a lead role. 2. Brian Tyler scored the movie, having previously worked on the likes of Iron Man 3, Fast & Furious, and Rambo (2008). 3. In this movie, Reynold’s character dies and his memories are transplanted to another person. In Selfless, an old man was about to die and had a surgery to become younger person played by him. And in Deadpool, his character is terminally ill and has a procedure to become immortal. In RIPD, he dies and takes the form of another…

NBC said its Olympic audience reached parity with the London Games for the first time on the third night of competition. But there’s an asterisk involved in the claim. The network said that its “total audience delivery” was 31.5 million for the Olympics on Monday night in prime time, compared to the virtually identical 31.6 million who watched on the corresponding night in London in 2012. The “total audience delivery” figure is a statistic NBC hurriedly invented when it saw sharp declines in its traditional ratings for the first couple of nights of the Rio de Janeiro Games. The Nielsen company said the television audience on NBC on Monday was 28.9 million - strong, but short of London levels. But NBC is adding the viewership for primetime telecasts on cable’s…

The idea of taking apart a rat’s heart and transforming it into a tissue-engineered stingray first came to Kevin Kit Parker during a trip to the New England Aquarium with his daughter. Four years later, a robotic ray that swims toward light has made the cover of Science Magazine and is pushing the limits of what’s possible in the design of machines powered by living cells. A research team based at Harvard University’s Disease Biophysics Group, which Parker directs, created the translucent, penny-sized ray with a gold skeleton and silicone fins layered with the heart muscle cells of a rat. It’s remote-controlled, guided by a blinking blue flashlight. Each burst of blue sets off a cascade of signals through the cells, which have been genetically-engineered to respond to light. The…

A suburban New York university is using drone technology to improve the health care of people in remote parts of Madagascar. Stony Brook University, which has been working in the island nation off the coast of Africa for nearly three decades, has teamed with a Michigan startup company called Vayu Inc. to transport medical samples by drone for laboratory analysis. The team made its first successful run of the drone technology in late July. Diagnosis of ailments, like tapeworm disease, which causes life-threatening seizures and contributes to malnutrition in villages on the island, can now be completed within a few hours, said Dr. Peter Small, founding director of Stony Brook’s Global Health Institute. The drones are about the size of a large picnic table and have two sets of wings.…

Not so long ago, the notion of home-based 3D printing might have seemed fanciful... and yet, it now appears to be the ‘next big thing’ as far as many people are concerned. Certainly, here at Apple Magazine, we wanted to get a sense of what all of the fuss was about, so we decided to test for ourselves one of the must-have ‘beginner’ 3D printers on the market: the Printrbot Simple Metal. To explain the Printrbot Simple Metal, it’s perhaps worth giving a quick rundown of the history of Printrbot itself. It is - yes, you’ve guessed it - yet another of the burgeoning technology startups to have pretty much defined the 2010s, based in - yes, you’ve guessed it again - California. More specifically, the firm is based in…

The FBI’s director said Friday the agency is collecting data to present next year in hopes of sparking a national conversation about law enforcement’s increasing inability to access encrypted electronic devices. Speaking Friday at the American Bar Association annual conference in San Francisco, James Comey said the agency was unable to access 650 of 5,000 electronic devices investigators attempted to search over the last 10 months. He said the problem is only going to get worse without a discussion about the technology. Comey says encryption technology makes it impossible in a growing number of criminal cases to search electronic devices. But he said it’s up to U.S. citizens, rather than the FBI or government officials, to decide whether to modify the technology to help law enforcement access the devices. Comey’s…

Facebook is blocking ad blockers on the desktop version of its service, saying well-made, relevant ads can be “useful.” At the same time, the world’s biggest social media company says it is giving users easier ways to decide what types of ads they want to see - unless, of course, the answer is “none.” Ad blockers filter out ads by refusing to display page images and other elements that originated with a known ad server. But Facebook has found a way around this. Beginning Tuesday, the desktop version of Facebook will show users ads even if they have ad blockers installed. The changes don’t affect the mobile Facebook app, which brings in the bulk of the company’s advertising revenue. As with most new Facebook features, the changes are being rolled…

Suicide Squad: The Album Various Artists One of the most anticipated movies of the year gets a soundtrack to match, featuring artists such as Panic! At the Disco, Eminem, and Grimes. FIVE FACTS: 1. The first comic-based movie to feature a team of super villains as the main cast of characters. 2. It has been suggested that because of the dark and tormenting nature of this movie, an on-set therapist was hired to keep the cast grounded. 3. The soundtrack also features tracks from Queen, The White Stripes, and The Rolling Stones, although they are not featured on this album. 4. The first non-Batman movie to star The Joker. 5. The song “Without Me” by rapper Eminem was featured in this movie. In the music video of the song, Eminem…

Some “Pokemon Go” players are asking participants to bring a canned food item or cash for charities to gatherings for the popular game. Players in Concord and Manchester, New Hampshire, have started Poke-Aid. The Facebook group asks fellow players searching for the digital creatures on their smartphones to bring the donations to Pokemon meetings in parks and other public places. There’s a similar effort in Connecticut. Pat O’Mara noticed how people started gathering at designated “Pokecrawls” in Manchester and organized two “Play it Forward” events in Livingston Park. “I started thinking, ‘This many people in that area just to play ‘Pokemon Go.’Why not set up food drives and also clothes because we’re getting closer to winter,’” the 20-year-old organizer said Tuesday. “There’s a lot of homeless. ... I wanted to…

With all their modern scientific equipment and state-of-the-art computer models, researchers trying to better understand the effect of algae growth in Lake Tahoe are searching for new tools to aid in their mission - old photo albums. Experts at the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center said in an annual report last week that the mountain lake is still getting warmer, regional winters are still getting shorter and snowfall is still on the decline. Water quality also has worsened a bit. What is less clear, however, is the trend in longterm algae growth. “Everyone wants to know if there’s more of this stuff, but we don’t know,” said Geoff Schladow, a professor of water resources and environmental engineering at UC Davis. Researchers study algae growth because it is linked to…

Thailand’s telecommunications regulator has approved in principle a plan to issue special SIM cards to foreign tourists so they can be tracked through their mobile phones. Officials at the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission said the plan would apply to tourists only, backtracking on an earlier announcement that it would cover all foreigners, including resident aliens on longterm visas, the Bangkok Post and other media reported Wednesday. The commission said the plan would be studied further after its endorsement Tuesday. Foreign and Thai users are already required to register when purchasing SIM cards. State surveillance of online activity is high under the military government installed after a 2014 coup, and there have been dozens of arrests of people for political material posted on Facebook and other sites. NBTC Secretary-General Thakorn…

Facebook is taking another stab at ridding users’ news feeds of “clickbait,” the links and headlines that ask readers to “guess what happened next” but don’t provide any useful information, tempting people to click if they want to find out anything. The world’s largest social media company last tried this in 2014, when it announced that it was improving users’ news feed to help them find what was “interesting and relevant” and weed out “spammy” stories. It looks like that didn’t work as well as it should have. Facebook Inc. said on Thursday it is now using a system that identifies phrases commonly used in “clickbait” headlines. These range from “... and his reaction was priceless!” to “... What happens next is hard to believe.” It will also consider items…

Twice in less than a month, a major airline was paralyzed by a computer outage that prevented passengers from checking in and flights from taking off. Last month, it took Southwest days to recover from a breakdown it blamed on a faulty router. On Monday, it was Delta’s turn, as a power outage crippled the airline’s information technology systems and forced it to cancel or delay hundreds of flights. Delta employees had to write out boarding passes by hand, and at one airport they resurrected a dot-matrix printer from the graveyard of 1980s technology. Why do these kinds of meltdowns keep happening? The answer is that airlines depend on huge, overlapping and complex IT systems to do just about everything, from operating flights to handling ticketing, boarding, websites and mobile-phone…

Hulu is dropping the free TV episodes that it was initially known for as it works on an online television service to rival cable TV. Free episodes - typically the most recent four or five episodes from a show’s current season - will be gone from the site within a few weeks. Instead, Hulu is making free episodes available through Yahoo . While Hulu started as a free site, supported by advertising, free video has become increasingly more difficult to find as Hulu tries to lure viewers into a subscription - $8 a month for a plan with ads, and $12 without. In recent months, visitors to Hulu.com have been presented with prominent links to subscribe, with links to free video buried in a menu after signing in. And free…

DC Comics flashed the box-office might of Marvel at the weekend box office, where its “Suicide Squad” set a record for an August debut with $133.7 million, according to final tallies Monday. The Warner Bros. release, like March’s “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” was lambasted by critics. But David Ayer’s antihero team-up film nevertheless became one of the summer’s biggest hits. A steep slide on Saturday, after fans flocked theaters on Thursday and Friday, however, could signal further steep declines for the $175 million film starring Will Smith, Margot Robbie and Jared Leto. The top 20 movies at U.S. and Canadian theaters Friday through Sunday, followed by distribution studio, gross, number of theater locations, average receipts per location, total gross and number of weeks in release, as compiled Monday…

Michael Phelps woke up on the morning of the first race of his fifth Olympic Games with some soreness in his right shoulder. At 31 years old, the swimming superstar could not afford to have anything slowing him down. So he went to a Team USA athletic trainer for some cupping therapy, a treatment he has been receiving for years to help relax his muscles and ease soreness. “The trainer hit me pretty hard with one and left a couple of bruises”Phelps said. With large purple circles dotting his shoulder and back, Phelps delivered a performance for the ages to lead the 4x100-meter freestyle relay team to victory, giving him his 19th career gold medal. Phelps swam the fastest 100 meters of his life, a blazing 47.12 seconds on the…

Seattle-based Amazon is unveiling its first branded cargo plane, one of 40 jetliners that will make up the e-commerce giant’s own air transportation network as it takes more control of its delivery process. The latest push to speed delivery of its products comes as the company ships an increasing number of packages worldwide. Amazon’s parcel volume was an estimated 1 billion packages in 2015. By way of comparison, in the 2016 fiscal year FedEx delivered about 3 billion packages for hundreds of thousands of customers. Amazon has had issues with the reliability of air freight services. In 2013, it offered refunds to customers who received their Christmas orders late after bad weather and a jump in online shopping caused delays for UPS and FedEx. Analysts say it makes sense for…

A Missouri man says his Tesla Model X’s autopilot mode helped him get to a hospital when he suffered a pulmonary embolism. Joshua Neally told the Springfield News-Leader (http://sgfnow.co/2aLiMYD) that he felt pain in his chest and abdomen for days before it became excruciating on July 26 as he drove from Springfield, Missouri, on U.S. 65. “It was excruciating pain,” Neally said. “I’ve never had such pain in my life.” At first, Neally thought his pain might be due to a pulled muscle, and that the pain would pass. Then he realized he was having difficulty breathing and sometimes couldn’t see, so he turned on the autopilot, merged onto the highway and headed for an emergency room. He said the pain subsided enough that he could see by the time…