Month: August 2020

Enlarge / May the Dread Wolf take you! (credit: BioWare)

Fans of BioWare's Dragon Age series got a nice little surprise today, as the studio dropped a four-minute highlight reel at the all-virtual Gamescom 2020 promising players that the next game is still in development, and that it's still going to be Dragon Age, even if we do have to keep waiting for approximately a million more years.

Dragon Age enthusiasts (me) have been waiting for concrete news about the next game in the series since 2015, when the Trespasser DLC for Dragon Age: Inquisition all but literally offered itself up as a prologue. Although the existence of some kind of Dragon Age 4 was an open secret, it took years for the studio even to admit publicly there was indeed a new game in development. Instead, BioWare focused on science-fiction properties like Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem.

• 

  Given what we know from Trespasser and Tevinter Nights, odds are high this city is in Tevinter. Minrathous, perhaps?

The four-minute video features an array of studio leadership talking in very high-level terms about the game's development. Everyone featured promises that the game will be chock-full of characters we'll love, hate, or love to hate; epic boss fights; sweeping scenery; and all the fanciest technology the next console generation has to offer, all of which you'd expect to hear.

Enlarge / The Fairphone 3+ pictured here is a bit bulkier than a standard smartphone—but that bulk makes it far more repairable, and as of today's news, even upgradeable. (credit: Fairphone)

Last year, repair guide site iFixit tore down the Fairphone 3 and gave the modular-designed a rare, perfect 10/10 repairability score. Today, Fairphone demonstrated just how far its philosophy of modular phone design can take its users, by offering the massively-upgraded cameras from its newly-released Fairphone 3+ model to owners of the earlier Fairphone 3.

Fairphone designs are noticeably bulkier than typical smartphone designs—but they have a reason to be. Its components have been split into seven replaceable modules in order to extend the service life of each Fairphone. Battery getting weak? It's replaceable. Dropped your phone and broke the screen? Not only replaceable, guaranteed replaceable—and for reasonably technical end users, user-replaceable—with easily purchased parts from the factory.

Imagine being able to upgrade a phone piecemeal, like you would an older but still solid PC. (credit: Fairphone)

The original Fairphone 3 launched with a 12 megapixel rear camera and an 8 megapixel front camera. The newly-released Fairphone 3+ is essentially the same phone, but it offers a refresh on the camera modules, bringing the rear camera to 48 megapixels and the front to 16 megapixels. Owners of the original Fairphone 3 can upgrade by simply purchasing replacement modules from the Fairphone store and replacing them.

Enlarge / How much switchgrass could we grow for biofuels? (credit: Michigan State University Extension)

One of the options to help us get our balance of greenhouse gas emissions down faster is to actively remove some CO₂ from the atmosphere. The idea is that it can be cheaper and easier to start CO₂ removal while our energy systems are transitioning than to attempt to make that transition happen quickly enough to reach our climate goals. Obviously, there’s never a free lunch, and these ideas have attracted lots of scrutiny because of their side-effects and feasibility.

Crops vs. BECCS

Three studies published this week examine some of the issues of negative emissions in detail. The first focuses primarily on BECCS—bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. This is a technically attractive strategy that would involve growing biofuel crops, burning them to generate electricity, capturing the CO₂ leaving the power plant’s exhaust, and storing that CO₂ somewhere (probably deep underground). The added value from electricity generation makes this look cheaper than many methods that could pull similar amounts of CO₂ out of the air. As a result, many emissions scenarios that manage to halt warming at 1.5°C or 2°C rely on sizable deployments of BECCS to get there.

The primary downside is the potential competition for land with food crops or forests. To get a much clearer picture, the study first set aside the land projected to be used for crops before working out the global potential for BECCS. They focused on crops like switchgrass and sugarcane, or woody plants like fast-growing poplar, and assumed that any carbon in vegetation present on land converted to this use was lost at the start (burned, for example). They ran the numbers for BECCS as well as liquid fuels like biodiesel or ethanol, for which much of the resulting CO₂ is released rather than captured.

Enlarge / Illustration of a OneWeb satellite. (credit: OneWeb)

Amid a bankruptcy and a pending sale, OneWeb has secured US approval to offer broadband service from 2,000 satellites.

OneWeb already had Federal Communications Commission approval for a 720-satellite constellation that was green-lit in June 2017. In an order released yesterday, the FCC gave OneWeb approval for another 1,280 satellites.

The first 720 satellites, of which OneWeb has launched 74, are for low Earth orbital altitudes of 1,200km. The additional 1,280 satellites were approved for medium Earth orbits of 8,500km. Both are much lower than the 35,000km geostationary orbits used by traditional satellite-broadband networks, which should result in lower latency and a better experience for Internet users.

• 

  Amazon Halo. [credit: Amazon ]

Amazon has announced Halo, a combination subscription service, app, and fitness wearable that promises to use some of the same technology the company developed for Alexa to add a new dimension to personal health tracking—tone of voice.

The product's announcement copy makes the case that "strong social connections are just as important to long-term health as adequate sleep, being fit, having a good diet, or even not smoking."

Using machine-learning-driven speech processing, the device intermittently records your voice and analyzes its tempo, rhythm, pitch, and intensity to make judgments about "the positivity and energy of your voice" where "positivity is measured by how happy or sad you sound, and energy is how excited or tired you sound."

• 

  Pictured: Gotham's reckoning. [credit: LG ]

Big Tech is here to save us from COVID-19! With every responsible, compassionate person running around with a mask on nowadays, it seems inevitable that the phrase "wearable technology" will soon regularly include overly complicated high-tech face masks. One of the first major tech companies out of the gate with a questionably useful product is LG. The "LG PuriCare Wearable Air Purifier" is a battery-powered face mask that the company says will "supply fresh, clean air indoors and out."

The mask really is a tiny air purifier and features a fan+HEPA filter combo on the left and right side. A "patented Respiratory Sensor" detects "the cycle and volume of the wearer’s breath and adjusts the dual three-speed fans accordingly." The fans are supposed to automatically sync up with your breathing by speeding up when you inhale and slowing down when you exhale, which LG says will "make breathing effortless." (If your breathing is not currently effortless, please visit your healthcare provider and/or local COVID-19 testing center.)

The mask looks absolutely huge in LG's heavily photoshopped picture. LG says you can "wear the unit comfortably for hours on end" but that the 820mAh battery is only good for "eight hours of operation in low mode and two hours on high." There's no word on how much it weighs. When it does come time to recharge your face mask, the included case will also disinfect the mask somewhat with UV-LED lights. There's also an app—of course there's an app—that will alert you when the mask filters need to be replaced.