Month: January 2017

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | XiXinXing)

The Federal Communications Commission yesterday voted to give up to $170 million in broadband funding to New York to support a state program that will boost deployment in unserved rural areas.

The money was available because Verizon turned it down. It comes from the Connect America Fund, which draws from surcharges on Americans' phone bills to pay for rural Internet service. Typically, the FCC distributes this funding to specific ISPs, and the ISPs that accept the money must use it to provide home Internet service with at least 10Mbps download speeds and 1Mbps upload speeds. Verizon declined the funding in 2015.

Overall, Verizon would have received $28.4 million annually over six years in New York. The state might still have received some of the money absent yesterday's vote because the FCC always planned to distribute declined subsidies in a competitive bidding process. But New York petitioned the FCC to waive Connect America Fund rules so that the state could add the money to its own broadband reverse auction and achieve "significant cost efficiencies and financial synergies that are not available absent the waiver." New York also said that the FCC's competitive bidding rules "could result in New York receiving very little, or conceptually even none, of the funding originally offered to Verizon in the State."

Enlarge / We're not at the hand-held hologram projector state yet, but we're getting there.

Sometimes it amazes me how fast physics goes from fundamental ideas to producing a new toy. The latest example comes from a bunch of experiments and theory on how opaque materials affect light passing through them, a topic that we have covered extensively in the past. The work had the catnip qualities of being cute and simple and exploring some pretty fundamental physics ideas.

The idea behind the research was simple. Scattering materials, like white paint or sugar cubes, turn light into a chaotic jumble. But if we could control how they scatter light, we could turn them into useful things like focusing devices. I know the researchers who pioneered this idea, and they were all rather conservative about possible applications. And that was appropriate; the ideas that they had—medical imaging, high-resolution imaging, and security applications—have all (with the exception of security) proved to be possible but really difficult.

So I was a bit surprised to see the ideas applied to holographic displays. I have to admit, I never even thought of it, but once you see the idea it is like being slapped silly by Captain Obvious.

(credit: Seagate)

Good news if you like big hard drives: Seagate announced on an earnings call yesterday (as reported by PC World) that it has both 14TB and 16TB versions of its helium-filled spinning hard drives in the pipeline for the next 18 months. A 12TB version of the drive is "being tested" and should be ready sooner rather than later.

And the push for ever-higher capacities will continue after that—Seagate wants to have a 20TB drive ready by 2020, and it would like to push the minimum capacity for drives shipping in new PCs to 1TB. 500GB drives are typical in entry-level models these days.

Seagate still slightly trails some of its competitors here—HGST beat Seagate to market with the 10TB version of its helium-filled hard drive, and HGST already has a 12TB version of the same drive on the market. But Seagate's drives tend to be cheaper than HGST's, and while HGST drives have lower failure rates according to Backblaze's drive reliability data, Seagate's reliability has greatly improved in recent years. Larger hard drives make it possible to increase the capacity of a server or a home NAS unit without actually needing more physical space.

Enlarge / The Verge's LG G6 image. Apparently Cnet also received the same image from a source. (credit: The Verge)

A report from Cnet has a few tidbits about the LG G6 in advance of its debut at Mobile World Congress next month. The report says LG will be one of the last manufacturers to ditch a removable battery. With a sealed-in battery, it's easier to make a water resistant phone, and apparently LG thinks the tradeoff is worth it, there will be no removable battery.

The report also says the LG G6 will be the first-ever non-Google phone to have the Google Assistant. The Assistant is the latest version of Google's voice-command technology, which, for smartphones, has been exclusive to the Google Pixel.

Google's artificial limiting of the Assistant on Android to only the Pixel has forced OEMs to come up with replacement solutions. Samsung bought an assistant company called "Viv"—created by two of the co-founders of Siri Inc. before it was bought by Apple—and is turning it into an assistant called "Bixby." The LG G6 was originally rumored to use Amazon Alexa, but perhaps Google got wind of this and made an exception for LG. Alternatively, we may finally be looking at the full release of Google Assistant. The code for the Assistant is part of the Google app, so it's already on nearly every Android phone out there. If Google wanted to, it could roll the Assistant out across the entire modern Android ecosystem with a simple app update.

A four-week-old pig embryo injected with human pluripotent stem cells. (credit: Salk Institute, JUAN CARLOS IZPISUA BELMONTE)

Scientists have successfully created pig embryos that contain a small fraction of human cells, according to a study published Thursday in Cell.

The study, led by researchers at the Salk Institute in California, represents a significant step toward human-animal hybrids that could one day grow whole new human organs for transplant. Right now, the pig hybrids only contain about one human cell to 100,000 pig cells and were very tricky to make. And due to ethical guidelines, the researchers only let them develop for about a month. But researchers are optimistic that they’ll be able to tackle the technical—and ethical—challenges moving forward.

They certainly have a lot of hints that they’ll be successful.