Month: December 2015

(credit: LG)

Ahead of CES 2016, LG is hopping on the smart speaker bandwagon with a new device that looks somewhat familiar. The company announced its SmartThinq Hub today, a smart home hub with an LCD display that can control intelligent appliances and sensors and stream music. It looks quite similar in design to Amazon's Echo, but LG is positioning the hub as a "gateway" to your connected home rather than a voice-activated personal assistant that lives on your countertop.

The cylindrical device has a built-in speaker and a 3.5-inch color LCD display that's positioned on the slanted top of the hub. According to LG, the display will not only show you information like the time and weather, but it will also flash with calendar alerts from your smartphone. It's not immediately clear if the SmartThinq Hub will be able to show you other smartphone notifications, such as text, call, or social media alerts.

(credit: LG)

The SmartThinq Hub is meant to be used as a monitor and controller for all your other smart appliances and products. LG makes a wide range of connected appliances including refrigerators, washing machines, and ovens, all of which can be controlled via the SmartThinq Hub and its companion smartphone app. LG announced its SmartThinq Sensors earlier this year, which can be applied to "normal" objects to make them smart, and those that are connected via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Zigbee can be controlled via the hub, too. LG's products are not the only items compatible with the hub: any smart home device that supports the AllJoyn Alliance open source framework can work with the hub as well.

(credit: Francis Tyers)

A would-be UK bomber and his wife have been found guilty by the Old Bailey court of plotting to carry out an explosion in London to mark the tenth anniversary of the 2005 suicide attacks that took place in the same city. Both been sentenced to life imprisonment: a minimum of 27 years for Mohammed Rehman, and a minimum of 25 years for his ex-wife Sana Ahmed Khan.

A report by The Guardian explains the case: "Mohammed Rehman, 25, who secretly wed Sana Ahmed Khan, 24, intended to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the 7/7 atrocities with blasts that would have inflicted mass casualties in either Westfield shopping centre, west London, or the London Underground."

Remarkably, Rehman took to Twitter to ask for advice on which of those two targets he should choose: "Westfield shopping centre or London underground?" Rehman asked. "Any advice would be appreciated greatly." The post carried a link to an al-Qaida press release about the 2005 London bombings. Sky News reports that Rehman's Twitter name was "Silent Bomber," with the handle @InService2Godd. As if that weren't enough, his Twitter bio read: "Learn how to make powerful explosives from the comfort of ones' bedroom." The Twitter account has since been suspended.

(credit: Arca Space Corporation)

After all the teased products that didn't live up to their promises and the trouble caused by self-balancing scooters, ArcaBoard appears to be the closest we'll get to an actual hoverboard in 2015. Designed by the US-based Arca Space Corporation, the mattress-shaped vehicle packs 272 horsepower and is propelled by 36 ducted fans spinning at 45,000rpm. Buying one will set you back about £13,500 ($19,900).

Arca has begun taking pre-orders for ArcaBoard and promises to start shipping it to the customers in April 2016. The device's speed is limited to 20km/h (12mph) and its flying height to 30cm (1ft). It's powered by a set of Li-Po batteries that account for a significant part of its price: getting a new battery pack after the 1-year warranty has expired will cost you £4,600 ($6,840).

There are two versions of the device: one for riders that weigh up to 80kg (176lbs), and another for riders up to 110kg (242lbs). The lighter option can hover for six minutes, the heavier just three minutes. The lighter rider can theoretically travel up to 2km (1.2mi) on one charge.

Recreation of an Irish Neolithic village, similar to the one where the Ballynahatty woman lived 5,000 years ago. (credit: Irish National Heritage Park)

Farming began in the West roughly 10,000 years ago, with Neolithic villagers slowly domesticating grains in the regions that today we call Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Just a few thousand years later, it had spread throughout Europe. But how did it get there, and who brought it? A new study of ancient DNA from Irish settlers between 5,000 and 3,000 years ago helps to tell this story.

Trinity College geneticist Lara Cassidy and her colleagues describe their work in an article out today from Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. They sequenced the genomes of four ancient Irish people: a Neolithic woman who was buried in a megalithic tunnel grave about 5,000 years ago in Ballynahatty (see video below for what a megalithic grave looks like) and three Bronze Age men discovered in an underground "cist" grave on Rathlin Island from about 4,000 years ago.

The differences between the Ballynahatty woman and the Rathlin men are dramatic—during the millennium that separated their lives, it's likely that Irish people and culture underwent a major upheaval. The Ballynahatty woman likely had dark hair and eyes, with distant kin from the Near East, where western agriculture was born. She also shared genetic similarities with people from the region now known as Spain, which suggests that her ancestors took a southerly route along the coast as they migrated from the Near East to Ireland. The Neolithic peoples of Spain also buried their dead in megalithic tunnel graves, which suggests a cultural continuity between the Ballynahatty woman's people and her ancestors.

(credit: Taylor Creasman)

In the grand tradition of curiosity, some scientists with access to data from a seismometer in Baghdad pulled up October 10, 2006 to see what had been recorded. That day was host to an event slightly different from your run-of-the-mill earthquake: an attack on a US military base seven kilometers away managed to start a chain of explosions that continued for hours inside the base’s ammunition storage—an event that was captured on video (caution: language).

This isn’t that unusual a thing for a seismologist to do, really. The build-out of the global network of seismometers in the 1950s and 1960s came about partly because they could be used to detect and locate secret atomic bomb tests. Learning about the geologic violence of earthquakes was basically a bonus. In this case, the researchers’ curiosity was rewarded with a unique blow-by-blow record of one particular episode of human violence.

The team, led by Ghassan Aleqabi of Washington University in St. Louis, carefully analyzed each wiggle on the seismograph and discovered it could identify a number of different things. The firing of a mortar, for example, was identifiable along with the explosion when the shell landed. Car bomb explosions also stood out, although the bouncing of the shockwave off surrounding buildings made each one a bit different. The team could even identify signals from drones and helicopters and figure out if they were approaching or moving away based on the Doppler shift.