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A conceptual rendering of a “battery case” style introspection engine for an iPhone6. (credit: https://www.pubpub.org/pub/direct-radio-introspection)

Mobile devices have without a doubt brought convenience to the masses, but that benefit comes at a high price for journalists, activists, and human rights workers who work in war-torn regions or other high-risk environments. Now, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has designed an iPhone accessory that could one day be used to prevent the devices from leaking their whereabouts.

Working with renowned hardware hacker Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, Snowden has devised the design for what the team is calling the "Introspection Engine." For now, it's aimed only at iPhone 6 models, but eventually the pair hopes to create specifications for a large line of devices. Once built, the "field-ready" accessory would monitor various radio components inside the phone to confirm they're not transmitting data when a user has put the device into airplane mode. The hardware is designed to be independent from the mobile device, under the assumption that malware-infected smartphones are a fact of life in high-risk environments.

Detecting intoxicated smartphones

"Malware packages, peddled by hackers at a price accessible by private individuals, can activate radios without any indication from the user interface," Huang and Snowden wrote in a blog post published Thursday. "Trusting a phone that has been hacked to go into airplane mode is like trusting a drunk person to judge if they are sober enough to drive."

Is there a patent on the formula that helped generate this beautiful scene?

With No Man's Sky's highly anticipated release just weeks away, a Dutch company is objecting to the game's alleged use of a patented "superformula" to generate landscapes and terrain.

The brewing conflict, first reported earlier this week by Dutch newspaper Telegraaf (Google translation), centers on a geometric transformation formula developed by University of Antwerp professor Johan Gielis in the early 2000s.

The formula's penchant for creating naturalistic shapes with gentle curves using just a few parameters led some to nickname it a "superformula." Gielis received a patent on the superformula in the European Union in 2002 and a US patent was granted in 2009 (in addition to a few other related patents). He then founded Genicap to monetize the formula by "develop[ing] innovative technologies and products for today’s and tomorrow’s world," according to its corporate webpage.

Bubble Zoom in action. (credit: Google)

Reading comic books on a smartphone is a bit of a bummer. Comic books are designed to be read on a 7×10.5" page, which doesn't translate very well to a ~5-inch screen. It's usually pretty hard to see the entire page and read the text, which leads to lots of zooming and panning.

Google is tackling this problem the way it seems to be tackling every problem lately: with machine learning. Google has taught its army of computers to detect the speech bubbles in comic books, allowing you to zoom in on them with just a tap. The bubbles lift off the page and get bigger without affecting the underlying image. This lets you see the entire page while still reading the text. Google calls the feature "Bubble Zoom."

Bubble Zoom is available today in Google Play Books for Android. We'd guess an iOS version is coming later. For now, Bubble Zoom is just a "technical preview" but all Marvel and DC collected volumes are supported. Google says it hopes to eventually bring the feature to "all the comics and manga ever made."

Lux, a xenon-based dark matter detector. (credit: Lawrence Berkeley Lab)

Today, the team behind one of the most sensitive dark matter detectors announced its full experimental run had failed to turn up any of the particles it was looking for. The LUX detector (Large Underground Xenon) is designed to pick up signs of weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, when they engage in one of their rare interactions with normal matter. The null result doesn't rule out the existence of dark matter, but it limits its potential properties.

As their name implies, WIMPs don't interact with normal matter often, but sthey hould on occasion bump into an atom, imparting energy to it. LUX provides a tempting target in the form of 370kg of liquid xenon. The detector is flanked by photodetectors to pick up any stray photons from the interactions, as well as hardware that picks up any stray charges knocked loose.

The challenge is to determine which signals are caused by dark matter and which are the product of cosmic rays or the natural background of radioactive decays. To handle the former, the detector is located nearly 1.5km below the surface in South Dakota's Homestake Mine. It's also partly shielded from the radioactive decays of the surrounding rock by an enormous tank of ultra-pure water. Even so, the scientists behind it had to spend time carefully characterizing the background noise. The success of that effort meant that LUX ended up four times more sensitive than it was originally designed to be.

Facebook's Aquila drone takes off from its launch dolly. (credit: Facebook)

Facebook's Connectivity Lab announced today that the company has for the first time test-flown a full-scale version of Aquila, the solar-powered high-altitude drone that Facebook hopes to use to deliver Internet connectivity to the remotest populated corners of the Earth. The test flight took place June 28 but was only announced today by Facebook.

The low-altitude test flight was originally intended only as a 30-minute “functional check” flight. "It was so successful that we ended up flying Aquila for more than 90 minutes—three times longer than originally planned," wrote Jay Parikh, Facebook's vice president of infrastructure engineering, in a post to Facebook's Newsroom blog published today.

The initial test goals were simply to ensure that the huge Aquila drone—with a wingspan comparable to a Boeing 737 and mass more like an automobile—could even get airborne. To minimize its weight, Aquila doesn't have "traditional landing gear," according to Martin Gomez and Andy Cox of the Aquila team. "We attached the airplane to a dolly structure using four straps, then accelerated the dolly to takeoff speed. Once the autopilot sensed that the plane had reached the right speed, the straps were cut simultaneously by pyrotechnic cable cutters known as 'squibs.'"

(credit: Nature Video/Matthew F. Glasser, David C. Van Essen)

Despite the advances of modern medicine, the wrinkled, twisted expanse of the human noodle has been mostly an uncharted frontier, with sparse territories and regions staked off so far. In the past, scientists have merely cordoned off sections based on a single type of brain feature, such as cell structures, brain topography, or identified functions. But now, in a comprehensive analysis of 210 healthy brains published Wednesday in Nature, researchers have merged such data sets and drawn an inclusive map of the mind's provinces.

The newly inked atlas, hatched from the National Institutes of Health’s Human Connectome Project, more than doubles the identified realms of the human brain’s outer shell, the cerebral cortex. This is the dominant part of the human brain, responsible for our minds’ higher functions, such as language, consciousness, information processing, and problem solving. The map depicts 360 cortex areas or 180 symmetrical, paired regions in each hemisphere, of which 83 were known and 97 are new.

While the new map is still a first draft, to be adjusted and honed with more research, the study's authors are hopeful that the cerebral sketch may quicken the pace toward understanding how the mind’s hardware works. Plus, it may provide a guide for neurosurgeons’ scalpels and more detail for researchers examining how the primate brain has evolved.