Month: September 2017

Enlarge (credit: Qualcomm)

A few weeks ago, I wondered whether connected cars might end up using LTE modems for Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communications rather than the 5.9GHz Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) protocol. Although the DSRC bandwidth was allocated in 1999 and the 802.11p spec outlined in 2002, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been very slow to act, and here in 2017 we're still waiting for automakers to actually add it to any of their vehicles.

By contrast, 4G LTE is becoming pervasive across new car lineups with no reason to believe it will be any different when 5G LTE arrives. But today Qualcomm revealed a new chipset for OEMs that will let us have our connected car cakes and eat them too, as it were.

Due in the second half of 2018, it's called the Qualcomm 9150 C-V2X chipset, and the name sort of gives it away. C is for cellular, for it will work with 4G and emerging 5G networks. And V2X—Vehicle-to-Everything—means it also uses the 5.9GHz DSRC protocol that is meant to directly connect to other cars, traffic lights, and even pedestrians. The C-V2X chipset also has an integrated global navigation satellite system built in, and Qualcomm has also come up with a C-V2X reference design that pairs the chipset with an application processor running its Intelligent Transportation Systems V2X stack and a hardware security module.

Enlarge (credit: Cooper Neill/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Do you have apps on your phone? More than one? Can you imagine if the different apps could actually talk to each other?

Of course you can—because they do, all time time. It's nothing special. But that didn't stop the nation's biggest bank, JP Morgan Chase, from getting a patent that describes exactly that process, titled "System and method for communication among mobile applications."

The language of the primary claim in US Patent No. 9,747,468 describes a mobile app asking a user for permission to get information from another app; then, having acquired that permission, it goes ahead and gets the information.

Enlarge (credit: flickr user: Andrey Belenko)

Climate change poses a unique set of threats to the world’s forests. Forests are vital for ecosystems, water and nutrient cycles, and carbon management, so dying trees are a worrying prospect. And increased temperatures and droughts certainly have the potential to kill trees.

But a paper in this week’s PNAS suggests that the increased CO₂ and humidity that will accompany climate change may go some way toward offsetting the risks to forests—and identifies which forests are likely to fare better and worse.

Feed the tree

What kills a tree? As with humans, the options are endless, but climate change creates some specific risks. Decreasing annual rainfall in certain regions is an obvious problem, but it’s also about when the rain falls, not just how much of it does. Drought in the growing season is a bigger problem than at other times of year. Higher temperatures also mean that trees lose more water from their leaves. On the other hand, higher humidity and more CO₂ in the air allow trees to operate more efficiently. That might allow them to compensate for drought and heat.