Andrew

Apple has just announced it sold 9 million iPhones over the weekend. That is significantly higher than the 5 million iPhone 5's sold in their first weekend of release last year. As expected, Apple did not break down iPhone unit sales by model, so there's no way to know what percentage of that 9 million were iPhone 5s's and iPhone 5c's.

Either way, 9 million iPhones in once weekend almost doubles their previous record and shows there is no sign of waning interest in Apple's flagship devices. AAPL is already up over 4% on the news.

iPhone sales go through the roof: 9 million sold this weekend originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 23 Sep 2013 08:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sugarcane is harvested for conversion into ethanol at the Addex Bioenergy Project in Sierra Leone. (Image: Addex Bioenergy)

The biofuel industry has enjoyed tremendous growth over the past decade, sparked by the ongoing search for renewable energy sources and government incentives for private sector investment. But ethanol and other biofuels have come under increased criticism in recent years, with some questioning their long-term environmental benefits, and others linking them to far more urgent disasters: food shortages in the world's poorest countries.

ActionAid, a UK-based charity, lashed out at Addax Bioenergy earlier this month, accusing the Swiss company of engaging in a biofuels “land grab” that has diminished food supplies...

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Once in a while we stumble across a great archive of public domain or creative commons imagery that just blows us away. Sometimes it’s historical photos, other times beautiful photos from space, but this time around it’s neither.

Thanks to the US Geological Survey’s Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab Flickr, we now have access to over 1,200 gorgeous macro photos of bees and other insects.

Given the name, you would think you’d only be looking at photos of bees, but that’s not the case. In addition to the hundreds of species of bee pictured, there are also photos of butterflies, ants, flowers and beetles in the archive.

The Flickr is curated by USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center Biologist Sam Droege, who seems to be on his game, given that the most recent photos were uploaded 21 hours ago.

Below we grabbed some of our favorites. Twenty photos that depict ten total bee species mug shot-style … meaning one photo from the front, and another from the side:

You can find a ton more photos where these came from, all in glorious high-resolution and available to download and use free of charge just as long as you properly credit the USGS as we have bellow.

To download a few for yourself (or spend a few hours browsing the collection) head over to Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab Flickr stream by clicking here.

(via Boing Boing)

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Image credits: Photographs by the US Geological Survey

Compressed air batteries have long promised truly clean energy storage, but they haven't scaled large enough in recent years to be viable companions to renewable power sources. That changes now that SustainX has switched on the first modern air battery large enough to join an electrical grid. The company's new ICAES (Isothermal Compressed Air Energy Storage) system in Seabrook, New Hampshire can hold 1.5 megawatts of power versus the kilowatt-level capacities of its rivals. Despite its size, ICAES is sustainable; it doesn't require 'dirty' energy for either compression or releasing air to its generator, and the supply won't degrade like that of a chemical battery. The New Hampshire system is just a demonstrator to attract interest, but SustainX expects to have its first commercial battery running in China next year. If ICAES (and technology like it) proves successful, we could see more solar and wind farms that keep delivering electricity when they're otherwise idle.

Filed under: Misc, Alt

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Via: GigaOM

Source: SustainX

Thirty-two people were killed when the cruise ship Costa Concordia crashed and eventually capsized on January 13th, 2012. More than a year later, an ambitious mission to pull the ship upright is now underway. The Concordia must be righted by about 65 degrees before the ill-fated vessel can finally be towed away and turned into scrap metal. That process — known as parbuckling — is regularly used in these situations, but never for a boat quite the size of Concordia.

Engineers have used stabilizing blocks to anchor the ship to the sea floor, with 12 retaining turrets also installed to help balance Concordia as it's turned upright. Once that sling-like motion is complete, the ship will rest on an underwater platform erected 100 feet...

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In a crushing blow to Jurassic Park enthusiasts worldwide, the odds of successfully extracting genetic information from fossils preserved in amber appears to be downright nil. That's the verdict from a team of UK scientists who used highly sensitive sequencing techniques in an effort to detect ancient DNA molecules in fossilized insects.

"Because these fossils were captured in amber, there was a possibility that their DNA might resist degradation and be available to extract," says study leader David Penney, PhD, a biologist at the University of Manchester. "Unfortunately, we've shown that this is not the case."

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In a move I honestly never thought would happen, Seagate is announcing today plans to brings its 5mm 2.5" Laptop Ultrathin HDD to Android tablets. The drive will come as a part of Seagate's mobile enablement kit and offered to OEMs looking to cost effectively scale tablet storage beyond what's realisticaly possible with NAND alone.

Seagate's reference design still includes a small amount of NAND (8GB) on the tablet in addition to the 500GB Ultra Mobile HDD. The HDD itself has been modified to include an additional gravity sensor, making the drive a bit more robust as the physical usage model with a tablet can be a bit more intense than a traditional notebook. The mobile enablement kit also includes Seagate's Dynamic Data Driver for Android, effectively an SSD caching layer. The combination of NAND flash and Ultra Mobile HDD will present themselves to the user as a single volume, with the Dynamic Data Driver choosing what data to keep on NAND and what to keep on the HDD. The driver also communicates sensor data from the tablet to the HDD itself, allowing it to better prepare itself in the case of a drop.

One of the reasons for the current success of modern day tablets and smartphones is because they don't rely on mechanical storage, which can deliver a poor user experience for random (or pseudo-random) accesses that are common in client workloads. As is the case with all NAND caching solutions, success is  really a matter of the OEM putting enough NAND on board to effectively cache everything but large media transfers. In the PC space, we don't see a lot of that, but in tablets where the amount of NAND you need is pretty small to begin with I feel like there's more of a chance of this not being horrible. Peak sequential performance from the Ultra Mobile HDD is around 100MB/s, making it better than most eMMC solutions in tablets today. Random IO is obviously the problem, but a properly sized cache should help make sure most random requests are serviced by the NAND in the system.

There are other downsides of course. Although Seagate's Ultra Mobile HDD is only 5mm thick, it's still a 2.5" drive - which does eat up valuable real estate inside a tablet. Battery life can also be affected. Seagate claims no impact on battery life since the Dynamic Data Driver can spin the HDD down when it's not in use, but when the drive is in use you're looking at a power penalty of 500mW to 1.4W. That's about the range of power consumption (idle to web browsing) for the entire SoC in the 2013 Nexus 7.

Overall it's an interesting idea but one that I don't expect to gain tons of traction, at least not in traditional Android tablets. In convergence devices, maybe. Perhaps the bigger question here is: what does the future of mechanical storage look like in ultraportable client computers? Our recommendation for years now has been SSD + large HDD if you can fit them both, otherwise just an SSD + external/cloud storage. Do you guys see the market, particularly cost sensitive portions of it, evolving any differently?

Attention amateur concert photographers: are you really being as annoying and disruptive as you could be? Because an attendee at a Major League Baseball game may have just set a new high/low at a recent Tampa Bay Rays home game.

Last week, a fan inside the Tropicana Dome was determined to capture every moment of the game with her smartphone. In order to do this properly, she chose to leave the flash turned on to, you know, even out the lighting in the 41,000-seat shed … or something like that.

As the fan was seated right behind home plate, the visiting Los Angeles Angels had a little problem with the random bursts of light throwing off their timing on defense. The coach huddled with the umpire and, after a brief delay of the game, the umps had ushers track down the offender and ask her to turn off the flash and/or phone in one of the most public gadget fails ever.

The game resumed — the culprit showing not the slightest bit of embarrassment — and the Angels went on to win the game 2-0.

The question now is how this might affect MLB rules. The home team can be forced to forfeit if fans seriously disrupt a game, so should there be some lesser penalty for egregious camera misuse?

Random iPhone-toting fan gets to visit the home locker room? Opposing pitcher gets three tosses to try to knock the camera out of the offender’s hands? Away team players get a copy of Instagram’s ultra-secret “‘Roid Rage” filter? All of the above? We’ll let you be the judge.

(via Fansided)

The Hugo awards were presented last night, providing recognition to the best science fiction of the past year. The award for Best Novel was presented to John Scalzi for Redshirts, a comedic work playing on the trope of low-ranking officers frequently getting themselves killed in sci-fi works. Best Novella went to Brandon Sanderson for The Emperor's Soul, and Best Novelette went to The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi by Pat Cadigan. Best Graphic Story was awarded to the creators of Saga. Best Dramatic Presentation (long form) was given for Joss Whedon's The Avengers movie, and (short form) was presented for the "Blackwater" episode of the Game of Thrones TV show. The Best New Writer was Mur Lafferty. Here's a full list of the nominees and winners.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BlackBerry's Q10 has been a complete and utter commercial flop, at least according to The Wall Street Journal. In a report painting sales of the QWERTY device as "dismal," the Journal cites carrier executives and US retail sources to back up its narrative that the Q10 isn't performing to expectations. "We saw virtually no demand for the Q10 and eventually returned most to our equipment vendor," said one owner of 16 authorized Verizon Wireless reseller locations. An unnamed high-up at a Canadian carrier makes the situation sound even more bleak. "I think we'd all say that the Q10, the one we all thought was going to be the savior, just hit the ground and died."

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Hong Kong’s tourism industry brings in about $37 billion in revenue for the city each year, and many of the tourists who contribute want to get a picture with the beautiful Hong Kong skyline and Victoria Harbor in the background while they’re there.

But what are they supposed to do if their only chance to get that shot is on a hazy/smoggy day in Hong Kong? The government has the answer: giant fake skyline banners.

As you can see in these pictures, the plot seems to be working. Given no visually appealing alternative, tourists will pose in front of the tarp skyline and pretend they’re enjoying a sunny day on Victoria Harbor.

As long as the shot is framed right and you don’t happen to catch any of those obvious creases and cut-offs, you may even manage to fool your Facebook friends:

As you can see, not everyone is playing along. Some see it as a better photo-op to get a picture with both the tarp and the regular murky skyline, which might make for a more interesting composition.

The photos were taken by Hong Kong-based photojournalist Alex Hofford for ChinaFotoPress. To see more of Hofford’s work (including a beautiful shot of the actual skyline … or maybe it’s just a really good sunset fake) head over to his website by clicking here.

(via The Atlantic)

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Image credits: Photographs by Alex Hofford and used with permission.

These were so fun to think up. If you wanna share any of your own, you can do so here!

Full HD displays? Eat your heart out, handset manufacturers. LG Display has just laid claim to the world's first Quad HD (2,560 x 1,440) smartphone display, which also boasts the highest pixel density of a mobile device, clocking in at 538ppi. The firm's panel measures up at 5.5-inches and is only 1.21mm thick, and just 1.2mm at its bezel. According to LG, that makes it the world's slimmest and narrowest panel, stealing the crown from hardware it showed off last month. Thanks to its use of AH-IPS tech and Low Temperature Poly-Silicon (LTPS) substrate, the screen features 430 nits of brightness. If the Quad HD math is throwing you off, that's four times as many pixels as a 1,280 x 720 display. This isn't 4K on a portable display, but we'll take it.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, LG

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OK, so I lied. I am going to make a comment: this is one of the most inane crowdfunding projects ever. A group is seeking US$50,000 on Indiegogo to build a statue of Steve Jobs to be located "somewhere in the Bay Area." That $50K figure is based on a life-sized statue of El Jobso, but the people behind this project have big dreams and with tongues firmly implanted in cheek, say that if funding is beyond their wildest dreams they'll "aim for Statue of Libery and Colossus of Rhodes proportions."

So, what do you get as perks at various funding levels? $100 will get you a copy of Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, which you can buy in hardback for about $21 on Amazon. For $200, you get a black turtleneck shirt for "Jobs' signature look." Jobs actually wore black mock turtlenecks designed specifically for him by Japanese designer Issey Miyake. At the $25 level, your donation gets you an 8" x 10" glossy picture of Steve Jobs. C'mon, really? The list goes on, and it ain't pretty.

Personally, I think the best monuments to Steve Jobs are the products that we carry with us all the time, or those that we spend our working and leisure hours with. The new "spaceship" headquarters building in Cupertino, one of the last projects that Jobs had a direct hand in, will truly be a lasting and impressive monument to the man.

At publication time, the project had raised a whopping $108.

No comment: "Let's build a statue of Steve Jobs" originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 16 Aug 2013 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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After rising to prominence in the eighties, Choose Your Own Adventure books have fallen out of favor, somewhat replaced by increasingly narrative-driven video games. The makers of those original books are today launching a Kickstarter that aims to merge what was great about the old books with the immediacy of video games. Choose Your Own Adventure Choose 'Toons is a planned iPad app that takes an already-existing book in the series — Your Own Robot — and turns it into an animated adventure game.

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If you're planning a road trip, there are plenty of things you want to take with you, and a good GPS should be one of them. Last week we asked you for the best, and then we looked at the five best car GPS units. We put them to a vote, and now we're back to highlight the winner.

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A couple of days ago, we shared the news that NBC’s Sunday Night Football was going to show you pro football like you’ve never seen it before: in bullet time. Details were a bit thin, but it looked like a 24-camera bullet time rig would be installed in each end zone, providing Matrix-like replays that would do their best to blow your mind.

As it turns out, the technology is called ‘freeD’ and was developed by Replay Technologies. And Patrick Myles of Teledyne DALSA (the company providing the 4K cameras for the system) got in touch with us to share some of the juicy details, which we now get to pass along to you.

First, for a few corrections. This system has actually already been deployed several times in the worlds of golf, gymnastics and baseball. Called “YESVIEW,” it was most recently available on the YES Network for Yankees home games. Check out this demo to see the freeD system in action in New York:

Also, the rigs will consist of 12 (not 24) 4K Teledyne DALSA Falcon2 CMOS cameras each, and will be placed around each teams red zone (not end zone). This means that from the 20-yard line in, NBC will be able to freeze any shot, move around it, and even zoom in quite a bit while maintaining an extremely clear picture.

“Replay’s freeD system utilizes powerful cameras and sophisticated algorithms to create three-dimensional photo-realistic real-time scenes,” explains Teledyne. “This information is stored as a freeD database that can produce (render) any desired viewing angle from the detailed information.” And that “rendering” is fast, taking only 30 seconds on average.

Here’s a quick overview that explains “how the magic happens,” so to speak:

As you might imagine, NBC is excited to get these rigs going: “Being able to seamlessly move from side to side and around an entire play without switching shots will entertain and inform the fans in Cowboys stadium and the National TV audience on NBC,” said Sunday Night Football producer Fred Gaudelli. “Fans will think they’re playing a video game or watching a Sci-Fi movie, but they’ll actually be viewing real NFL football as never presented before.”

So far, only the Dallas Cowboys stadium has the system installed, but Teledyne and Replay Technologies are confident that freeD will be adopted nationwide before long — especially once fans get ahold of the system on September 8th. For more information about how the system itself works, check out the short video above or visit Replay Technologies website here.

Most everyone is at least somewhat familiar with films like Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the original Star Wars trilogy; DVD extras have typically sated those who want to go a bit deeper into a film. But for those who really want to get to the heart of these films might want to look documentaries from filmmaker Jamie Benning — back in 2006, he made his own documentary covering The Empire Strikes Back, and since he's become a noted maker of these "filmumentaries." Variety sat down with Benning to talk about the inspiration behind his work, which originally stemmed largely from dissatisfaction with the extras included with the original Star Wars trilogy release, as well as the massive amount of work that goes into tracking down all...

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Tis the season for annoying bug bites, but a surprisingly simple remedy exists that can eliminate all of the itch within minutes.

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On June 1st, Twitter created beautiful maps visualizing billions of geotagged tweets. Today, the social network is getting artsy once agsain, using the same dataset — which it calls Billion Strokes — to produce interactive elevation maps that render geotagged tweets in 3D. This time around, Twitter visualized geotagged tweets from San Francisco, New York, and Istanbul in maps that viewers can manipulate.

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One of these actors has signed up to be in this film. Guess which one. 20th Century Fox

Cinephiles, rejoice: director Roland Emmerich has announced details on his long-anticipated sequel to 1996's summer blockbuster Independence Day. Sequels, actually: according to Entertainment Weekly, Emmerich and co-writer Dean Devlin have penned two full scripts for the follow-up, which will be set twenty years after the events in the first movie and will again feature the return of Independence Day's IT-challenged squid-headed monster antagonists.

"The humans knew that one day the aliens would come back," Emmerich explained to EW. The invading tentacular horde from the first movie managed to send out a distress signal before being implausibly hacked by Jeff Goldblum's PowerBook and... actually, you know what? I'd probably better just stop using words like "implausibly" right now, because otherwise this article is never going to get written.

Twenty years after the first movie, Earth is a changed place: glowy-blue organic alien technology from the vast ships implausibly knocked out of the sky by plucky human resistance fighters...damn it, there I go again. Um, alien tech has been incorporated into the everyday lives of the people of Earth, but not without difficulty: the technology can be scavenged and used, but not recreated from scratch. "We don’t know how to duplicate it because it’s organically grown technology, but we know how to take an antigravity device and put it in a human airplane," explained Emmerich. Emphasis added by me, because in a fascinating twist, Emmerich has created a future where portable electronics actually represent a legitimate threat to commercial aviation.

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South African photographer Anthea Pokroy is a self-proclaimed “ginger,” and has been on a mission to photograph other redheaded people in order to create a series of images about identity, prejudice, racial classification, segregation, and elitism.

The project is titled “I Collect Gingers,” and has grown to over 500 portraits since it launched in August 2010. Red hair is a relatively rare trait that occurs naturally in 1-2% of the human population.

Pokroy writes that she’s drawn to the “beautiful, romantic colour palette of a ginger person,” and that there exists an “innate sense of community and collective experience” among redheaded people.

Each of the portraits was shot in a studio with stark lighting and white clothing. Pokroy intentionally aims for a look that resembles passport photographs that are intended only for documentation.

You can find the entire collection of photographs over on the project’s website.

I Collect Gingers by Anthea Pokroy (via Flavorwire)

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Image credits: Photographs by Anthea Pokroy and used with permission