Month: February 2016

The Unha-3 rocket, the platform for North Korea's (sort of) successful satellite launch in 2012. Another launch has been announced for February.

Watch the skies. In an alert filed with the United Nations' International Maritime Organization, the government of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (otherwise known as North Korea) announced plans to launch a satellite sometime in February. The nation also provided warnings for the areas where its boost stages might plummet back to the surface. Japan's Ministry of Defense has since announced that Japan will shoot down the rocket if it flies toward Japan.

The launch, from North Korea's western coast near its border with China, will likely be the latest version of North Korea's Kwangmyŏngsŏng ("Bright Star") satellite series, aboard the latest version of the Unha ("Galaxy") rocket. The splash locations given by North Korea for the launch—the first stage landing in the Yellow Sea between South Korea and China and the second in the Philippine Sea east of the Philippines—are nearly identical to those of North Korea's last orbital effort.

The launch announcement comes just a month after a surprise nuclear weapons test in which the regime of Kim Jong-un claimed to have detonated a thermonuclear bomb. North Korea also claims to have developed a miniaturized nuclear warhead that could be placed atop a ballistic missile, though US intelligence officials have downplayed those reports.

(credit: Fitbit)

Fitbit isn't starting off 2016 slowly. The company announced the new Blaze fitness watch at CES last month, and another device is coming from the king of the activity-tracker world. Today Fitbit announced the $129 Alta, a slender activity tracker with customizable bands meant to appeal to those who don't want to be identified as "that person wearing a tracker on their wrist."

Let's examine the Alta in comparison to its price twin, the $129 Fitbit Charge. First and most important is the difference in design. While the Charge's plastic band comes in various bright colors, the Alta comes with a few colored plastic options, but you can buy $99 metal and $59 leather accessories as well. The Charge has a small digital display and companion button for scrolling through time, activity progress, and call alerts. The Alta is Fitbit's first lower-cost tracker with a full OLED touchscreen that you can tap to see similar information. The Alta will also show you a few more notifications, including text and calendar alerts, which are synced from your smartphone.

In terms of what they track, the Alta and the Charge are nearly identical. They both monitor steps, workouts, and sleep, although the Alta will send you inactivity alerts. The Alta also has the Smart Track feature, which will automatically recognize when you're doing a specific activity like running, cycling, playing soccer or basketball, and more. Interestingly, the Charge lists an altimeter in its spec list, which helps it track stairs climbed, while the Alta does not. Also, the Alta has a slightly shorter battery life compared to the Charge—just five days compared to seven to 10 days—but that can likely be attributed to its full touchscreen.

If I seem a little obsessed with dark matter at the moment, it's only because there is so much interesting stuff going on right now. But I can give it up any time—really! As I reported last month, there has been a lot of excitement among astrophysicists and cosmologists because there seems to be more gamma rays than expected coming from various places, including near the center of the Milky Way and other galaxies. Unfortunately, as I also reported, it seems very difficult to absolutely rule out other possible sources for these extra gamma rays. In particular, there is the problem of unresolved sources. These could be gas clouds or other emitters that we simply haven't spotted in other observations.

The obvious solution is to simply keep looking, using other telescopes that look at the sky at other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum to rule out each and every possible source. Some new research tells us how the gamma ray signal may hold much of the evidence already, however. We just need to look closely.

Watching matter move

The idea comes down to how matter moves. The fact that dark matter doesn't really do anything but suck, gravitationally speaking, means that it doesn't really follow the cool kids around, either. When ordinary matter gets close to another bit of ordinary matter, it says hello. It does the equivalent of standing in the middle of the supermarket aisle having a long conversation about the health and happiness of both parties' electrons. Along with gravity, this meeting doesn't just cause matter to clump together, it also causes it to move together. So in our spiral galaxy, it isn't just the stars that rotate around a common center of mass. All the ordinary matter rotates around that common center of mass, too.

Benson Leung, the Google engineer who moonlights as a tester of dodgy USB Type-C cables, has sadly performed his last act of tech vigilantism—at least for now. When testing a Surjtech 3M USB A-to-C cable, the cable was so bad that it fried his Chromebook Pixel laptop and two USB PD (power delivery) analysers.

At the time of publishing, it looks like the Surjtech cable has already been removed from Amazon, but Leung's review lives on. Basically, as soon as the cable was plugged in and turned on, it completely fried the Vbus line on the Twinkie USB PD analyser. "This is permanent damage. I tried resetting the Twinkie analyzer and having the firmware reflashed, but it continues to exhibit this failure," Leung wrote.

Not only did the cable kill the analyser, though, but it also fried both USB Type-C ports on Leung's Chromebook Pixel: "Neither would charge or act as a host when I plugged in a USB device such as an ethernet adapter."

Microsoft has confirmed that it has acquired the London-based startup SwiftKey, maker of the popular predictive smartphone keyboard of the same name. According to a press release, development for both iOS and Android platforms will continue, even as Microsoft explores “scenarios for the integration of the core technology across the breadth of our product and services portfolio.” Microsoft is believed to have paid about £170 million ($250 million) to acquire SwiftKey.

The acquisition is neither a new nor unexpected development for Microsoft. SwiftKey is easily one of the most popular keyboard apps available with over 300 million devices utilizing its functionalities and Android support for over 100 languages. Not only that, the company has the distinct pride of having developed a special language model to assist physicist Stephen Hawking.

SwiftKey also has what it calls GreenHouse, a place “to seed ideas and help them grow.” Currently, it features a range of experimental Android apps, such as the SwiftKey Neural which is reportedly the first of its kind to use neural networks. All things that fit perfectly with Microsoft’s desire to “develop intelligent systems that can work more on the user’s behalf and under their control.”