Month: September 2016

Enlarge / Samsung says it will change the battery status bar icon to green.

Samsung has issued another update on the explosive Galaxy Note 7 situation, this time informing consumers how they can differentiate fixed devices from unfixed devices. Through a software update, Samsung says it is going to give non-explosive Note 7s a green battery icon, giving people a quick way to tell a Note 7 is no longer dangerous. There's just one problem with the green battery icon: it's against the rules.

The core Android platform is open source, but Google's Android apps—like the Play Store, Gmail, YouTube, and others—must be licensed from Google. Licensing these apps means adhering to several terms from Google, including complying with the Android Compatibility Definition Document (CDD), which in turn ensures that devices are "Android compatible." APIs need to work the way developers expect them to, hardware needs to meet Google's minimum requirements, and OEMs need to follow Google's security recommendations.

In the CDD, Google also defines some of the interface design—usually the parts apps need to interact with, like the System UI and shared theme assets. This includes mandating the color of the status bar icons, which seems to throw a wrench in Samsung's publicized plans. The section titled "3.8.6. Themes" reads (emphasis ours):

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This past week, thousands of HP Inc. printer owners were notified by their printers that their ink cartridges were "damaged" and needed to be replaced. The reason, according to a statement from HP, was a firmware update intended to "protect HP's innovations and intellectual property." But some users report that even HP's own cartridges failed in their printers—and that they weren't able to get the printer to respond in order to remove the offending ink.

"I turn it on, it complains about a damaged cartridge, so I open the front door to replace." one HP OfficeJet user complained. "When I open the door, the carriage does NOT move, and the error message now says to close the door to print. I close the door, and the original damaged cartridge error message returns."

The change in firmware was triggered early last week, with a wave of complaints hitting companies selling "private label" ink and refilled HP cartridges on September 13. Dutch ink cartridge retailer 123inkt.nl investigated the problem with cartridges sold by the company and was told by the manufacturer of the chip used on its ink cartridges that the problems were worldwide—and the manufacturer was already producing new chips to get around the firmware.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Sony's PlayStation 4 Pro (launching in November) and Microsoft's Xbox One Scorpio (launching late next year) are giving the pixel-counters out there a new, 4K-sized battlefield to fight over. Now, Microsoft is drawing a line in the sand in that developing battle, with Microsoft Studios Publishing General Manager Shannon Loftis telling USA Today that "any games we're making that we're launching in the Scorpio time frame, we're making sure they can natively render at 4K."

The word "natively" is important there, because there has been a lot of wiggle room when it comes to talking about what constitutes a truly "4K" game these days. For instance, according to developers Ars has talked to, many if not most games designed for the PS4 Pro will be rendered with an internal framebuffer that's larger than that for a 1080p game, but significantly smaller than the full 3840×2160 pixels on a 4K screen (the exact resolution for any PS4 Pro game will depend largely on how the developer prioritizes the frame rate and the level of detail in the scene). While the PS4 Pro can and does output a full 4K signal, it seems that only games with exceedingly simple graphics will be able to render at that resolution natively.

Sony says the PS4 Pro's internal rendering pipeline and some proprietary upscaling techniques will improve lower resolution base signals to take fuller advantage of a 4K display. But no amount of upscaling can fill in those missing 4K pixels as well as hardware (and a game engine) that natively generates images at full 4K resolution—or so the argument goes.

Enlarge / We've come a long way from this technology. (credit: NIH)

Most of the world of biology, and, indeed, a significant part of physics, is focused on trying to generate a clear image of really tiny stuff. For many reasons, it simply isn't possible to get better images. Still we keep trying, and a recent success reminded me that sometimes all you can do is stare in awe at utter genius.

I present to you a microscope that is a hybrid of Michael Phelps and an arcade game. It's a swimming lens that you steer over a surface, bringing back fascinating views of the terrain below. It goes one better than Phelps, in that it gets its energy locally, so there's no need to drag it out of the pool for food and recreational drugs. And, finally, it's really, really simple. So simple that if you have a decent microscope already, you can probably use one of these swimming lenses with a few minor modifications.

Enhance my image

As always, to reveal the full beauty of the idea, we need to see why an ordinary version of the technology fails. The basic ideas behind a microscope's failure go back to two things: conservation of energy and conservation of momentum. Light consists of waves that have a certain energy and momentum, depending on the frequency and wavelength of the light. When light scatters off a surface, the frequency and wavelength don't change, which means that the total momentum and energy of the light is unchanged.

Enlarge (credit: Cornell University)

Geothermal energy—energy drawn from the internal heat of the Earth—has long been the purview of mountainous, volcano- and earthquake-prone regions like the western United States or Iceland. The US’ eastern states, on the other hand, have been generally disregarded as geologically unfit for geothermal projects because the rock beneath them rarely has the natural fractures or water sources necessary to easily build a geothermal system. But that’s not stopping Cornell University—based in upstate New York—from thinking it can warm its Ithaca campus in winter by tapping into heat from “basement rock,” two to four miles underground.

Cornell announced a new project, called “Earth Source Heat,” this month. The university will research and potentially execute a system that will involve drilling deep into the rock near the campus, circulating fluid to capture the naturally-occurring underground heat, and using that fluid to directly heat the campus (rather than change the heat into electricity, as many geothermal plants do).

The project would be considered an “enhanced geothermal system,” or an EGS, which differs from a regular geothermal system in that the reservoir of hot rock into which fluid is injected is man-made, rather than naturally created. EGS projects have been very limited in the US. In 2014, when Ars toured a geothermal plant outside of Reno, Nevada, Karl Gawell, the executive director of the Geothermal Energy Association, called EGS a "tough business" because funding for projects was difficult to come by and private companies found such an endeavor far too expensive to be economically feasible.