Month: March 2016

(credit: Kārlis Dambrāns)

As expected, federal prosecutors in an iPhone unlocking case in New York have now asked a more senior judge, known as a district judge, to countermand a magistrate judge who ruled in Apple’s favor last week.

Last week, US Magistrate Judge James Orenstein concluded that what the government was asking for went too far. In his ruling, he worried about a “virtually limitless expansion of the government's legal authority to surreptitiously intrude on personal privacy.”

The case involves Jun Feng, a drug dealer who has already pleaded guilty, and his seized iPhone 5S running iOS 7. Prosecutors have said previously that the investigation was not over and that it still needed data from Feng's phone. As the government reminded the court, Apple does have the ability to unlock this phone, unlike the seized iPhone 5C in San Bernardino. Moreover, as Department of Justice lawyers note, Apple has complied numerous times previously.

BMW

The Vision Next 100 is inspired by BMW designers' dreams of the future.

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BMW announced a concept car today that will be on display this year as part of the company’s 100-year anniversary celebration. The car, a sedan that BMW is calling the “Vision Next 100," eschews excessive homage to the past and leans hard on a future-focused aesthetic. It almost looks as if the car is wearing one of those gold-and-silver jumpsuits that will be the uniform of the citizenry in 2100.

In a statement, Chairman of the Board of Management of BMW AG Harald Krüger said that the concept was meant to embody how BMW is looking forward to the next century of auto trends. “We have demonstrated on many occasions throughout our history that we are capable of learning fast and taking bold steps,” Krüger said.

The Vision Next 100 is a vehicle with both autonomous and manual driving options, something that’s been popular in concept cars from automakers in the past year (check out our article on Volvo’s autonomous/manual hybrid car for reference). It seems automakers are anticipating a world where autonomous driving is an option, but not the only option. In the future, dealers can still up-sell customers on how well a car drives because customers won’t want to be driven by a computer all the time, or so luxury automakers are betting.

(credit: Jenn Vargas)

Prison phone companies today were granted a judicial stay that halts implementation of new, lower rate caps on inmate calls. The court did not halt new limits on certain ancillary fees related to inmate calls, though, so the overall price of prison calling should go down.

Global Tel*Link (GTL) and Securus Technologies had asked the US Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia to stay new price regulations until a lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission is decided, arguing that they have a high likelihood of prevailing in the case. The companies argue that the FCC overstepped its authority and that the new limits fall short of what prison phone companies are contractually obligated to pay in "site commissions" to correctional facilities. Despite protest from the FCC, the court today partially granted the stay request.

"While the DC Circuit stayed implementation of new, lower rate caps, and a related rule limiting fees for certain single call services, the Court otherwise declined to delay critical reforms including implementation of caps and restrictions on ancillary fees," the FCC said in a response to the ruling. New ancillary fee limits will take effect on March 17 in prisons and on June 20 in jails.

(credit: Windell Oskay)

For a bunch of mind-controlled mice, walking into a magnetic field has never felt sooo good.

The imperceptible force that the genetically tweaked rodents wandered through fired up the reward-related circuits in their brains, likely conjuring the pure pleasure experienced when, for instance, they ate a yummy treat, researchers report Monday in Nature Neuroscience. Of course, this meant that the mice didn’t want to leave that happy magnetic field.

While getting mice to congregate in specific, magnetized areas may be useful for pest control, the experiment demonstrates a much more powerful point: that researchers can remotely control specific brain circuits in living animals with just magnets. The finding paves the way for magnetic mind control to help study the functions and malfunctions of the brain—plus the use of ‘magneto-genetic’ therapies to treat brain disorders, the authors report.