Month: December 2017

A DJI Phantom 4 at a launch event in 2016. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

On September 21, 2017, just as dusk fell, Vyacheslav Tantashov launched his DJI Phantom 4 drone from a spot near Dyker Beach Park in Brooklyn, just southeast of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Tantashov wanted to see some spectacular views, he said, and he flew the drone nearly 280 feet up in the air and well out of his line of sight. The drone hovered over the shipping channel near Hoffman Island, some 2.5 miles from the launch site. Tantashov maneuvered the craft a bit, watching the images displayed on his Samsung tablet, and then punched the “return to home” button. The drone, which had a rapidly dying battery, made a beeline back toward the launch site.

But it never arrived. After waiting 30 minutes, Tantashov assumed there had been a mechanical malfunction and that the drone had fallen into the water. He returned home.

On September 28, Tantashov received a call at work. It was an investigator from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), calling to asking if Tantashov was the owner of a Phantom 4 drone. He was, he said, though he had lost it recently near the Verrazano Bridge.

Enlarge (credit: Christian Gloor)

The mantis shrimp, which isn't a shrimp, gets a lot of attention for its visual acuity and powerful punch. But there are actual shrimp that are equally impressive. There are various species of snapping shrimp that can close their claws fast enough that it produces a jet of water that undergoes cavitation, where the extreme turbulence creates pockets of low pressure where the water vaporizes. As these bubbles collapse, they reach temperatures above 5,000K and emit light along with a powerful snapping noise.

This, not surprisingly, can be valuable both on offense and defense, which is probably why there are over 500 known species of snapping shrimp. But how did this ability evolve in the first place? To find out, an international team of researchers obtained the claws of nearly 70 different species of snapping shrimp and subjected them to CT scans to identify their structure and musculature. After 3D printing models of what they found, they conclude that a surprisingly minor set of changes led to a big mechanical difference.

The study gets at a common conundrum in evolution. It's easy to see how generation after generation of small changes can refine a useful feature. It's harder to understand how a feature shows up in the first place, since any antecedents to the feature wouldn't be useful in the same way. So it is with snapping shrimp. Until the claws managed to produce powerful jets of water, it's not clear what could possibly be refined.

Enlarge / The many lives of Hotmail. (credit: Sean Gallagher)

Twenty years ago this week—on December 29, 1997— Bill Gates bought Microsoft a $450 million late Christmas present: a Sunnyvale-based outfit called Hotmail. With the buy—the largest all-cash Internet startup purchase of its day—Microsoft plunged into the nascent world of web-based email.

Originally launched in 1996 by Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia as "HoTMaiL" (referencing HTML, the language of the World Wide Web), Hotmail was initially folded into Microsoft's MSN online service. Mistakes were made. Many dollars were spent. Branding was changed. Spam became legion. Many, many horrendous email signatures were spawned.

But over the years that followed, Hotmail would set the course for all the web-based email offerings that followed, launching the era of mass-consumer, free email services. Along the way, Hotmail drove changes in Windows itself (particularly in what would become Windows Server) that would lay the groundwork for the operating system to make its push into the data center. And the e-mail service would be Microsoft's first step toward what is now the Azure cloud.

Enlarge / Pixelbook folded into "entertainment" mode. (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Smoothly running Android apps on Chrome OS has been a work in progress for years now. Google has done a lot to improve the experience of running mobile apps on its browser-based operating system, and it appears a forthcoming software update could fix one of the remaining problems. A report by Chrome Unboxed details a new feature in Chrome 64 beta called Android Parallel Tasks that lets Android apps run continuously in the background even when you're actively using another program.

Chrome OS has always allowed users to have multiple programs open at one time, including Chrome OS and Android applications. However, Android apps pause when you click or tap out of their windows. That means the app essentially stops working until you tap back into it to continue using the program. There are some exceptions like Spotify, which will continue to play music even when you're not actively using the app, but other programs pause all activity until you resume using them.

While this makes sense for smartphone apps, it doesn't translate well to a desktop. On a traditional PC, one expects to be able to open multiple programs and have them all running continuously, no matter which one is being used at any given moment. Chromebooks, like Google's expensive Pixelbook, couldn't do that with Android apps, but it appears Android Parallel Tasks fixes that issue. Each program or app that you have open will run continuously until you manually pause it or close it entirely.