Month: July 2016

(credit: Donald Trump)

On Wednesday evening, Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, took to Reddit for an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) session.

Trump didn’t extensively answer many science and technology-related questions—responding to just 12 total questions during the hour—and ignored other crucial issues, such as intellectual property law and Edward Snowden. His answers were very short and sounded very similar to previous things he’s said on the campaign trail.

In response to “What role should NASA play in helping to Make America Great Again?” Trump answered: “Honestly I think NASA is wonderful! America has always led the world in space exploration.”

This photograph, like nearly all of Carol Highsmith's, is donated to the public via the Library of Congress. (credit: Carol Highsmith / This is America! Foundation)

A well-known American photographer has now sued Getty Images and other related companies—she claims they have been wrongly been selling copyright license for over 18,000 of her photos that she had already donated to the public for free, via the Library of Congress.

The photographer, Carol Highsmith, is widely considered to be a modern-day successor to her photographic idols, Frances Benjamin Johnston and Dorothea Lange, who were famous for capturing images of American life in the 19th and 20th centuries, respectfully.

Inspired by the fact that Johnston donated her life’s work to the Library of Congress for public use in the 1930s, Highsmith wanted to follow suit and began donating her work "to the public, including copyrights throughout the world," as early as 1988.

Enlarge / Over one billion of these things have been sold. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple has sold fewer iPhones in the last two quarters than it did last year, but it's still selling plenty of them. Apple CEO Tim Cook proclaimed today that the company has sold one billion iPhones since the launch of the original device back in 2007.

Recent slump aside, the iPhone's astronomical growth rate means that nearly half of those iPhones have been sold within the last two years; about 472 million of those phones were sold between Q3 of 2014 and Q3 of 2016.

For his part, Cook expects the iPhone's slump to be temporary, and he has blamed the year-over-year drop on the abnormally high number of upgraders who bought an iPhone 6 after it came out—the 6 and 6 Plus were Apple's first large-screened phones and there was a lot of pent-up demand. New iPhones (possibly without headphone jacks) are due in the fall, and we'll need to wait until then to see if new models can restart the phone's steady growth.

(credit: Delaware.gov)

Soft, juicy, delicious tomatoes were a feature of my childhood and are still available from the plants I grow each summer. However, they've largely vanished from stores. The ripe fruits don't hold up well to shipping, so producers have focused on growing variants where mutations have partially blocked the ripening process. These tomatoes stay firm longer, but it comes at the cost of texture and flavor—as well as a decline in their nutritional value.

Now, researchers seem to have identified an enzyme that specifically helps soften the tomato during the ripening process. By knocking its activity down, they've interfered with softening while leaving other aspects of the ripening process intact. The result is a ripe fruit that can sit at room temperature for two weeks and still remain firm.

In some ways, the surprise of these results isn't that they happened; it's that they took so long. A high-quality tomato genome sequence was first published in 2012, and it allowed researchers to identify more than 50 genes that were likely to encode proteins that could modify the plant cell wall. Four of these genes appeared to be active at high levels in the ripening fruit, and so these genes were targeted through genetic engineering.

Back in the day, if you wanted a specially colored game controller, too bad. Gamers were stuck with the system default (unless you bought a cruddy third-party pad, of course). The N64 was the first system to buck that trend, launching 20 years ago with six default controller colors. This many years (and consoles) later, the novelty has worn off.

Or, has it? At this year's E3, Microsoft announced that players could head to Xbox Design Lab to really customize their Xbox One controllers by letting them pick seven discrete color options spread across its body and buttons. We had a chance to see a few sample pads during the conference, and now we've gone and gotten ourselves a pair of fully customized pads.

As a result, we've observed exactly how Xbox Design Lab's $80-$90 controllers look from Web-store interface to couch-combat reality—but we've also gotten to see their biggest Bluetooth-related shortcoming for now.

Back in January at CES, Intel showed us a full range of mini desktop PCs that it has been releasing steadily over the course of the year. The first was a new, inexpensive version of its Compute Stick, followed by a new, mainstream Skylake NUC, and finally a quad-core NUC box that wasn't quite like anything the company had done before.

Now Intel has sent us the last device we learned about at the beginning of the year: a Core m3-powered version of the Compute Stick that sits somewhere between the Atom version and the Skylake NUC on the price and performance spectrum. It looks more or less like the Atom version we've already seen, but it introduces a few neat ideas (and enough performance) that it's actually plausible as a general-use desktop computer.

The bad news is the price tag, which at $380 (with Windows, $300 without, and XXX with Windows and a Core m5) is pretty far outside the sub-$150 impulse-buy zone that the other Compute Sticks exist inside. So how well does it work? What compromises do you make when you shrink a decent laptop's worth of power into a stick? And how big is the niche for a relatively powerful, relatively expensive stick-sized desktop, anyway?

Overnight, the Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi announced that it's jumping into the laptop market with the launch of the definitely-not-Macbook-inspired Mi Notebook Air. For now, the Windows 10 devices only have a release date in China.

The 13.3-inch version is about $750 (RMB 4999) and has a 2.3GHz Intel Core i5-6200U (Turbo up to 2.7GHz), 8GB of DDR4 RAM, an Nvidia Geforce 940MX, a 256GB PCIe SSD with a factory expandable SATA SSD slot, and 802.11AC Wi-Fi. The 13-inch version measures 309.6mm x 210.9mm x 14.8mm (12.18" × 8.3" × 0.58") and weighs 2.82 pounds (1.28kg). Xiaomi is claiming a "9.5 hour" battery life.

If you're looking for something a little smaller, there's the $525 (RMB 3499) 12.5-inch model. That version has an Intel Core M3 with integrated graphics, 4GB of RAM, a 128GB SSD, and 802.11AC Wi-Fi. The device weighs (1.07kg), measures 292 x 202 x 12.9mm (11.5" × 7.95" × 0.51"), and has a claimed "11.5 hours" battery life.

A once-upon-a-time company called "BusCall" advertised its product in a video, pictured here. Its patents have become the basis for hundreds of lawsuits against companies that use vehicle and package tracking. (credit: BusCall)

The three biggest patent trolls of 2015 will all soon face new legal challenges to their most valuable "inventions."

Unified Patents, a company that focuses on invalidating patents through the use of the inter partes review (IPR) process, has filed challenges against patents belonging to the three most litigious "non-practicing entities" of 2015. In late June, the company challenged Uniloc's patent on DRM. Last week, it filed papers against a company called Sportbrain Holdings, which makes wide patent claims over fitness tracking devices. On Monday, Unified challenged Shipping & Transit LLC, formerly known as ArrivalStar, a company that has demanded payments from hundreds of small companies—and even city transit systems—for using GPS vehicle tracking or sending package tracking numbers in e-mail.

The IPR process, created in 2012, has proven effective at knocking out patents that the Patent Office says shouldn't have been issued in the first place. Many private companies have used IPRs, as have third-party organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which challenged the podcasting patent.