Month: August 2018

Enlarge / USB Type-C cable and port. (credit: USB-IF)

EU regulators are planning to investigate if there's a need for a legal mandate to force phone manufacturers to use standard chargers. Should they do so, proprietary chargers—including Apple's non-standard Lightning connector on its phones—could wind up being prohibited.

For the better part of a decade, the EU has been pushing phone manufacturers to standardize the chargers they use in an effort to cut the amount of electronic waste they generate. Phones typically come with a charger, and customers often toss the old charger when they buy a new phone. Ideally, old chargers are recycled, but they often find their way into a landfill, with the EU claiming that some 51,000 tons of waste are generated each year. The EU's long-term goal is that phones and chargers should ultimately be bought separately, with one charger being retained across multiple phone generations.

In 2009, manufacturers including Apple, Samsung, and Nokia, signed a memorandum of understanding to say they would voluntarily standardize on the then-current micro-USB connector. For most hardware, this meant that the phone itself sported a USB connector, often with a USB Type-A connector on the charger brick itself. For Apple, it meant production of a micro-USB-to-Dock connector, as the company wanted to retain its proprietary ports.

Enlarge / Working out how many babies will be born each generation is wickedly complicated. (credit: flickr user: Dave Herholz)

Samir KC is on a mission to get people thinking differently about population growth. The basic idea of predicting future population size is so simple a child could do it. The reality of getting an accurate estimate is fiendishly complex, however, requiring intimate knowledge of how factors like education and migration will affect a given region.

“It’s very easy to do statistical extrapolation,” says KC, a professor at Shanghai University. But accuracy demands local expertise: “You need to understand a lot of things, and not everything is in the data. Only local demographers that are experts in that country can give you the right inputs.”

In a paper published in PNAS last week, KC and his colleagues show how predictions of India’s population over the next century can vary widely, depending on what data gets baked into the calculations. Population data plays a crucial role in planning for healthcare, education, and infrastructure (and in the longer term, climate change), so that variability has clear real-world implications.

Enlarge / Man, I look good eating breakfast. (credit: Getty Images/Shapecharge)

So there I was this morning, wearing my Star Trek "redshirt" bathrobe and Spider-Man slippers as I bent over my eggs and coffee, New York Times crossword puzzle splayed out on the breakfast table beside me, when I saw it.

67 across.

Right between 66 across ("Muy ____!") and 68 across ("Holy Toledo!"). It read: "____ Technica, website for gadget news." The puzzle had space for just three letters.

Enlarge / Pendulums only provide a limited model for quantum oscillations. (credit: Flickr user Andreas)

Here's something you might be familiar with: a performance ends, the audience begins to applaud, and the sound becomes thunderous and continuous. But in your immediate neighborhood, everyone seems to be clapping at the same moment. 

This synchronization is common in the classical world. Attach a few grandfather clocks to a wall and over the course of the day, their pendulums will start to swing in sync. In things like pendulums, the oscillators are not perfect—they lose energy over time. That energy is transmitted through vibrations to neighboring pendulums, where it is absorbed. The mutual emission and absorption of vibrations slowly brings the two pendulums into sync with each other.

Does synchronization work in a quantum system and, if so, how? This is the question a pair of researchers from Switzerland set out to answer.