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Google has added a number of family-oriented features in recent years, and now it's bringing it all together under "family groups." This feature plugs into family sharing for YouTube TV, Google Play Family Library, and adds easy family sharing to a few other Google services. Setting up a family group is easy, but there are a few restrictions.

To set up a family group, just head to the Google family page.

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Google family groups make it easy to share photos, calendars, Keep, YouTube TV, and more was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

What's the point of having smart home devices if you can't control them with your preferred voice interface? Ikea's Trådfri  lights are a little cheaper than Phillips Hue, but they don't work with Assistant right now. That's going to change soon, though. Now if only you could pronounce it.

The press release on the news is only available in Swedish at the moment, and Google Translate does rather mangle that language. From what we can gather, the update for the Trådfri Gateway will roll out during the summer or fall.

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Ikea Trådfri smart lights will get support for Assistant and Alexa later this year was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

I love using my Google Home to control smart devices in my home office, but I’ve yet to expand that to the rest of the home due to the cost. Options like LIFX and Philips Hue are undeniably fantastic, but nowhere near affordable. IKEA, maker of the best cheap furniture, is preparing to step into the smart home arena with extremely affordable new bulbs and more, and now, we’re finding out that the products will have Assistant compatibility.

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Roger Moore, famous for his portrayals of master spy James Bond and master criminal Simon Templar, is dead at 89, reports the BBC.

Sir Roger's family confirmed the news on Twitter, saying he had died after "a short but brave battle with cancer". The statement, from his children, read: "Thank you Pops for being you, and being so very special to so many people."

 In a move that may seem like an early step toward hitting a ridiculously high valuation, Pinterest is now adding the ability to recognize complete dishes to its Lens camera search. Next time you’re out at a restaurant and you find something that you thought was delicious at the first bite, Pinterest is now going to give you a way to take a quick photo of that dish through its Lens… Read More

Though animals born with one eye rarely survive into adulthood, so far this young goat is doing better than expected.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2s-R4v8wiY

A transit officer in Minneapolis, whose main job is to ask "Tickets, please!", was filmed May 14 wanting "Papers, please!".

The video posted on Facebook on May 20 has over 1 million views. In the clip, the officer asks the man, “Do you have a state ID?” The man appears to shake his head no.

“Are you here illegally?” the officer asks next.

Morales then intervenes and asks the officer, “Are you guys authorized to act as immigration police?”

“No, not necessarily,” the officer says.

Morales tells the officer, “Then I would stay out of that. It’s very touchy legal territory.”

After the video went viral, Metro Transit Police Chief John Harrington released a statement assuring travelers it was not Metro policy to inquire about immigration status and promising an investigation.

“It is the policy of the Metro Transit Police Department that all members make personal and professional commitments to equal enforcement of the law and equal service to the public. Confidence in this commitment will increase the effectiveness of this department in protecting and serving the entire community and recognizing the dignity of all persons, regardless of their immigration status.”

Never trust someone wearing a shiny badge: they think they have all the other ones, too.

While typing support in Google Assistant only began rolling out last week at I/O 2017, the feature is already seeing its first update. The initial iteration kept Gboard’s native suggestions row, but Assistant now uses a customized bar that lists full search phrases.

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 The race to control the TV is on, and today comes some news out of Europe underscoring Amazon’s ambitions in that department. The e-commerce giant announced the launch of Amazon Channels in the UK and Germany — its two biggest markets in the region — which will see Amazon, for the first time, offer close to 50 live and on-demand streamed channels to the region as part of… Read More

 Snapchat is deepening its Bitmoji integration – your Bitmoji, if you have one set up, will now appear within your Snapcode, and users can also now change their Bitmoji’s expression to reflect their mood when making edits to their cartoonish avatar in the app’s settings. This seems like a small change, but the new offering from Snapchat actually gives you a lot of reason to… Read More

 Sad! Patent trolls, who’ve benefited from a 30-year-old legal standard that made it possible for patent holders to sue companies in almost any U.S. jurisdiction — including a federal district in east Texas that’s notorious for serving as a favorable venue for patent holders — just lost their ability to bring infringement lawsuits in such plaintiff-friendly places. Read More

Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so.

Featured App

Paralign - Aligning Thoughts

Today's roundup is presented by Paralign - Aligning Thoughts from Paralign.me.

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12 new and notable Android apps and live wallpapers from the last week (5/16/17 - 5/22/17) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

The Instagram account GoldenRetrievers shared this adorable footage shot by GoldenLeia.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BNj4mgOB39Z/

Because ladybug hindwings are covered by an opaque outer shell called an elytra, scientists were not sure how the wings' folding mechanism worked until Kazuya Saito created a clear replacement shell that allowed them to film the process in super slow-motion. (more…)

Bombs away!

The earth is round and travels in an elliptical orbit around the sun which is also round. There are many natural objects that take on a round or circular shape. Let’s see how these 21 photographers captured a few of them.

The post Round and Round – 19 Images of Circular Things by Darlene Hildebrandt appeared first on Digital Photography School.

A Rat Lover's Tour of the World: 15 places where rodents are celebrated, feared, preserved, and studied.

The Android beta program gives us a chance to see the latest features of Android, some of which don't actually work yet. That was the case when the first developer preview came out with an option to automatically switch WiFi on when you get near a trusted network. The toggle was non-functional in the first dev preview, but it works in DP2.

This option is available in Network and internet > WiFi > WiFi Preferences.

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Android O feature spotlight: You can automatically enable WiFi near trusted networks, and it now works in DP2 was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

UK Prime Minister and noted authoritarian Theresa May has promised that if she wins the upcoming general election, her party will abolish internet access in the UK, replacing it with a government-monitored internet where privacy tools are banned and online services will be required to vet all user-supplied content for compliance with rules about pornography, political speech, copyright compliance and so on -- and search engines will have to emply special British rules to exclude banned material from their search results. (more…)

Depths of Antiquity is Julius Horsthuis' hypnotic slow-motion dive into fractals generated from images of churches, castles and other imposing edifices of yesteryear. It's perfectly complemented by Beethoven. (more…)

Yesterday at I/O Google had an interesting talk called Background Check and Other Insights into the Android Operating System Framework. It's a long name, but really it's about improving battery life in Android. It went on at great length as to how, exactly, they plan on doing that, and it's quite worth a watch. We have the video here, but if you don't have the half-hour to check it out, then you are welcome to read below.

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How Google plans to tackle power consumption even more aggressively in Android was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

There are a few reasons why your phone or tablet stops getting Android updates. One reason could be that the maker of your device's processor (e.g. Qualcomm or MediaTek) never updated the drivers for newer versions of Android. This is why no phones or tablets with the Snapdragon 800/801 chip ever officially received Android 7.0 Nougat, including the Nexus 5.

Google announced Project Treble a week ago, which aims to solve this particular problem by separating the Android OS from the 'Vendor interface' (the part with all the low-level drivers and binary blobs).

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The current Google Pixel/Pixel XL will support Project Treble, possibly meaning longer support was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

As we noted in a past teardown of the Google app, IFTTT integration was in the works for Assistant. That functionality has now popped up on one of our devices, and it allows users to easily make new commands and manage existing ones.

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During an award ceremony at I/O, Google has announced the 2017 winners of the annual Play Awards. Highlights include Woorld for best AR Experience and Mushroom 11 for Standout Indie.

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Old Man's Journey is billed as a game about life, loss, and hope. It is also a mixture of point and click adventuring and environmental puzzle solving. Throughout this expedition, you will be using touch controls to manipulate the environment in order to direct the old man forward.

After watching the trailer it was pretty difficult not to want this game. The art is beautiful, the soundtrack even more so, and the controls look perfect for a touch screen.

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Old Man's Journey rambles onto the Play Store for $5 was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

If anyone needs a little break from all the Google I/O related news, Microsoft chose an opportune day to announce an overhaul of its note-taking app. The OneNote redesign relates to every platform it's available on, including Android, and promises enhanced usability, simpler navigation, and a more consistent experience across devices.

Usability for everyone seems to be the key point here, with optimizations made in the new update that specifically focus on users with disabilities.

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Microsoft announces redesign of OneNote across all platforms was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Apparently scientists tend to think of themselves as more rational, objective, and intelligent than non-scientists. Makes sense. And laypeople tend to think that of scientists too. But the scientists surveyed in a new study from Tilburg University in the Netherlands apparently see themselves as much more rational, objective, and intelligent than non-scientists. Are they overconfident or, well, right? From Scientific American:

The team surveyed both scientists and highly educated nonscientists and asked them to rate the two categories of people in terms of objectivity, rationality, integrity, open-mindedness, intelligence and cooperativeness.

Both groups rated scientists higher on every one of these measures, yet scientists perceived bigger differences between the two groups than laypeople did. “That surprised us,” says psychologist Coosje Veldkamp, the study's lead author. “We expected scientists to have a more realistic picture, but they see a larger difference,” she says. (Some of these perceptions may be accurate, of course, but other research would be needed to determine that.)

The scientists' positive self-ratings may be partly explained by the human tendency to judge members of groups we belong to more favorably than others. Further investigation showed that established scientists judged their established peers more positively than those at earlier career stages, and female scientists rated researchers of their own gender more highly. “People who identify more strongly with their group display more in-group bias,” Veldkamp explains. “Women are still a minority in science, and minority-group members have been found to identify more strongly with their group.”

We've already taken a brief look at Google's new PayPal-like payment API which was introduced during a session at I/O today. Potentially the coolest application for this is going to be the ability to send payments to friends and others with Google Assistant.

During Gerardo Capiel and Varouj Chitilian's session on Google's commerce technologies, they introduced the new API and then proceeded to show us "something really cool that no one's seen before".

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Google Assistant will soon support sending money with your Google account was written by the awesome team at Android Police.