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BB pal Super-Awesome Sylvia, the teenage maker superhero, has released a fantastic book, "Sylvia's Super-Awesome Project Book: Super-Simple Arduino." Read the rest

Posted by Alex Gawley, Director of Product Management

Back in October we introduced a new type of inbox—one that works for you. Since then you’ve told us what you like best about Inbox by Gmail, as well as how we can make it better. And we want to say thank you.

Because of your feedback, we’re improving many of your favorite features, and launching your most highly-requested ones. So sit back, relax and enjoy all the updates.
More ways to stay organized with Trip Bundles
For starters, you’ve mentioned how much you like seeing key information at a glance, like when your package is arriving. So today Inbox is adding Trip Bundles: All of your emails about a trip will now be bundled together and the most important details (like flight times and hotel reservation numbers) will be available the instant you open Inbox.
More control with Undo Send, Swipe to Delete and Signatures
Being able to control your inbox, like setting your custom Snooze times, is also something you’ve told us matters. So today Inbox is helping you be more productive:

• With Undo Send—now for the first time on your phone—you can take back an email right after sending in case you spotted a mistake, or have second thoughts
  
• If you’d rather get rid of messages, you can make ‘Delete’ the default swiping action
  
• If you want to personalize your sent messages, you can now add a custom signature

More ways that Inbox saves you time
You’ve also let us know how much you appreciate a little extra help every now and then—like when Inbox adds phone numbers to Reminders, or finds that flight time in under a second. Today Inbox is adding a few more ways it can be of service:

• When you create Reminders in Keep, they’ll now appear in Inbox
  
• When someone emails you a to-do, Inbox might suggest adding a Reminder so you don’t forget
  
• When you get an email from HotelTonight or Eat24, you can now open your reservations and food orders within their app, directly from Inbox

Reminders created in Keep now appear in Inbox

Open your order or booking directly from Inbox

No more invites: Inbox is now open
Finally, you’ve asked for invites. And we’d like to say yes to all of you, all at once. So as of today, Inbox is open to everyone—no invitation required. All your Gmail messages are ready and waiting. So if you haven't tried Inbox yet, download the app today, and start getting back to what matters.

p.s. While we’re still in the early stages of bringing Inbox to work, today we’re also expanding the Inbox early adopter program so any Google Apps for Work customer who wants to join can do so.

 Get ready for a new livestreaming metric: Content years. Periscope CEO Kayvon Beykpour took the stage today at the Code conference in Southern California and announced that Periscope has broadcasted 380 years of content since it launched 8 weeks ago, at 10 years of content per day. But the big question with livestreaming is how good, how “watch worthy” is that content? And how… Read More

Every second of every day, people around the world are capturing their memories through photos and videos. Humankind has already taken trillions of photos and will take another trillion this year alone.

But the more moments we capture, the more challenging it becomes to relive those memories. Photos and videos become littered across mobile devices, old computers, hard drives and online services (which are constantly running out of space). It’s almost impossible to find that one photo right at the moment you need it, and sharing a bunch of photos at once is frustrating, often requiring special apps and logins.

We wanted to do better. So today we’re introducing Google Photos—a new, standalone product that gives you a home for all your photos and videos, helps you organize and bring your moments to life, and lets you share and save what matters.
A home for all your photos and videos
Google Photos gives you a single, private place to keep a lifetime of memories, and access them from any device. They’re automatically backed up and synced, so you can have peace of mind that your photos are safe, available across all your devices.

And when we say a lifetime of memories, we really mean it. With Google Photos, you can now backup and store unlimited, high-quality photos and videos, for free. We maintain the original resolution up to 16MP for photos, and 1080p high-definition for videos, and store compressed versions of the photos and videos in beautiful, print-quality resolution. For all the storage details, visit our help center.
Organize and bring your moments to life
Google Photos automatically organizes your memories by the people, places, and things that matter. You don’t have to tag or label any of them, and you don’t need to laboriously create albums. When you want to find a particular shot, with a simple search you can instantly find any photo—whether it’s your dog, your daughter’s birthday party, or your favorite beach in Santa Barbara. And all of this auto-grouping is private, for your eyes only.
The app can also help you quickly enhance photos and combine them in new ways to help you relive your life’s moments. In one tap, get instant adjustments tuned to the photo’s color, lighting, and subject to make each photo look its best. Press the “+” button to create your own collages, animations, movies with soundtracks, and more.

If you swipe to the left, you’ll open the Assistant view, where we’ll suggest new things made with your photos and videos, such as a collage or a story based on a recent trip you took. After previewing the creation, you can choose to keep, edit, or discard it.
Easily share and save what matters
With Google Photos, you have the choice to share your photos and videos however you want across any service you choose, from Hangouts to Twitter to WhatsApp. But even then, it’s still remarkably difficult to share a lot of photos just with friends and family and keep the ones shared with you—it usually involves a lot of downloading and re-uploading across a number of different services. We wanted to make sharing much simpler and more reliable.

You can now take any set of photos and videos, or any album, and simply create a link to share hundreds of photos at once. The recipient can see what you shared without a special app or login, then immediately save the high-quality images to their own library with a single tap. So now it’s easier to hang on to the photos you care about even if you weren’t the one holding the camera.
If you want to give Google Photos a whirl, it's available now on Android, iOS and the web. With this launch we've made a lot of progress towards eliminating many of the frustrations involved in storing, editing and sharing your memories. But we have a lot more in store—so as you keep snapping photos and capturing videos, we’ll keep working on making them even easier to store, share and bring to life.

Posted by Anil Sabharwal, Head of Google Photos

Another year, another attempt by Google to get mobile payments right. Today, at its I/O developer conference, the company unveiled a new app, called Android Pay, that will take the place of Google Wallet on your phone.

Android Pay will power in-app and tap-to-pay purchases on mobile devices. Google Wallet will stick around, but it will power Play Store purchases outside Android, say on the web, and facilitate peer-to-peer payments you can make through the app and on services like Gmail. Confused? Let the new branding wash over you, and stop worrying so much.

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Google is rejoining the Internet of Things platform wars. Today at its I/O conference, the company announced Brillo, the "underlying operating system for the internet of things," with a developer preview coming in Q3 of this year. Brillo is "derived" from Android but "polished" to just the lower levels. It supports Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy, and other Android things.

Additionally there's Weave, the (cross platform) common language that will let Brillo devices, phones, and the internet all talk to one another — that's coming in Q4. Android devices will auto-detect Brillo and Weave devices. Here's a helpful chart to explain the relation — plus some code, because after all it is Google I/O:

Up until this point, Google has...

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Google Now is getting even smarter. At the company's I/O 2015 keynote moments ago, Google unveiled a new feature that lets Android's personal assistant examine whatever is happening on your screen and automatically take relevant actions. Basically, Google Now is being infused into every piece of the Android operating system.  "You’re deluged with a lot of information on your phones," said Google SVP Sundar Pichai. The evolution of Google Now is aiming to fix that. "We have the biggest investment in machine learning over the last few years, and we believe we have the best capabilities in the world," Pichai said. He then handed things off to Aparna Chennapragada, Google Now's product director.

"We want to proactively bring you answers,"...

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 Today, GoPro announced that it was working on an array that combines 6 GoPro Hero cameras for spherical shots all at once. CEO Nick Woodman says that when Facebook bought Oculus, the ‘gauntlet was dropped’ and GoPro started work on a spherical setup that could generate content for virtual reality and augmented reality systems. Woodman also said that the company has software in… Read More

Lenovo is the biggest PC seller in the world, but it apparently isn't content just hawking laptops. At today's Lenovo Tech World event — the Chinese company's own Beijing-based conference — it showed off concepts for a dual-screen smartwatch and a laser projector smartphone, signalling its intent to move into new consumer tech markets currently occupied by competitors such as Apple.

The Magic View smartwatch is perhaps the weirder of the two prototypes. The wearable, detailed on stage at the show, features a small second screen that pokes down over the strap from below the watchface. Lenovo says the screen lets wearers see images blown up to 20 times the size possible on a regular watch face, solving the problem of the smartwatch's...

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The Pentagon this week said that it accidentally sent live anthrax samples to government and private laboratories in at least nine states, and to a US military base in South Korea. As the Associated Press reports, the samples originated from a Department of Defense lab in Utah, which was supposed to send out killed samples. The labs were not equipped to handle the live spores they received instead, though military officials say there is no indication that the potentially fatal bacteria poses a broader health risk, and exposed workers are undergoing treatment.

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Well over three years have passed since Megaupload was shutdown, but there is still little progress in the criminal proceedings against the operation.

The United States hopes that New Zealand will extradite Kim Dotcom and his colleagues, but the hearings have been delayed several times already.

Meanwhile, several domain names including the popular Megaupload.com and Megavideo.com remain under the control of the U.S. Government. At least, that should be the case. In reality, however, they’re now being exploited by ‘cyber criminals.’

Instead of a banner announcing that the domains names have been seized as part of a criminal investigation they now direct people to a Zero-Click adverting feed. This feed often links to malware installers and other malicious ads.

One of the many malicious “ads” the Megaupload and Megavideo domain names are serving links to a fake BBC article, suggesting people can get an iPhone 6 for only £1.

And here is another example of a malicious ad prompting visitors to update their browser.

The question that immediately comes to mind is this: How can it be that the Department of Justice is allowing the domains to be used for such nefarious purposes?

Looking at the Whois records everything seems to be in order. The domain name still lists Megaupload Limited as registrant, which is as it was before. Nothing out of the ordinary.

The nameserver PLEASEDROPTHISHOST15525.CIRFU.BIZ, on the other hand, triggers several alarm bells.

CIRFU refers to the FBI’s Cyber Initiative and Resource Fusion Unit, a specialized tech team tasked with handling online crime and scams. The unit used the CIRFU.NET domain name as nameserver for various seized domains, including the Mega ones.

Interestingly, the CIRFU.NET domain now lists “Syndk8 Media Limited” as registrant, which doesn’t appear to have any connections with the FBI. Similarly, CIRFU.BIZ is not an official CIRFU domain either and points to a server in the Netherlands hosted by LeaseWeb.

It appears that the domain which the Department of Justice (DoJ) used as nameserver is no longer in control of the Government. Perhaps it expired, or was taken over via other means.

As a result, Megaupload and Megavideo are now serving malicious ads, run by the third party that controls the nameserver.

This is quite a mistake for one of the country’s top cybercrime units, to say the least. It’s also one that affects tends of thousands of people, as the Megaupload.com domain remains frequently visited.

Commenting on the rogue domains, Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom notes that the people who are responsible should have known better.

“With U.S. Assistant Attorney Jay Prabhu the DOJ in Virginia employs a guy who doesn’t know the difference between civil & criminal law. And after this recent abuse of our seized Mega domains I wonder how this guy was appointed Chief of the Cybercrime Unit when he can’t even do the basics like safeguard the domains he has seized,” he tells TF.

“Jay Prabhu keeps embarrassing the U.S. government. I would send him back to law school and give him a crash course in ‘how the Internet works’,” Dotcom adds.

Making matters worse for the Government, Megaupload.com and Megavideo.com are not the only domain names affected. Various poker domains that were previously seized, including absolutepoker.com and ultimatebet.com, also link to malicious content now.

While the Government appears to have lost control of the old nameservers, it can still correct the problem through a nameserver update at their end. However, that doesn’t save those people who had their systems compromised during recent days, and it certainly won’t repair the PR damage.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and anonymous VPN services.

Flushing's PS 120 asked kids to contribute $10/each to a carnival held in the school-yard during school hours, and kids who couldn't pay had to sit in the auditorium watching old Disney movies and listening to the shrieks of delight from outside. Read the rest

Ten years after Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner published Freakonomics, the most fun book about economic incentives you'll ever read, have published a greatest hits collection from their fantastic blog, titled When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants.

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 Bellabeat, a company that makes a line health trackers and other devices aimed at women, including especially moms and moms-to-be, today begins shipping its first wearable: a piece of “smart jewelry” called the Leaf. The device, which can be worn as a brooch, necklace or bracelet, allows women to record their activity, sleep, stress and reproductive health with the help of an… Read More

 For the last two years, Google has been showing Android users relevant content from apps they have installed on their phones and tablets. Now, it’s also bringing this feature to iOS users and apps. Last month, Google started showing results from Android apps that users didn’t have installed on their phones, something it will now also do for iOS users. Read More

Office Lens, which was released in a semi-private beta in April, is now widely available through the Play Store. The app had been on Windows Phone for quite a while and, continuing their pattern, Microsoft decided they wanted it on Android as well. Office Lens uses your phone or tablet's built-in camera to scan documents or whiteboards and convert them to PDF or office document formats. Here's an example of how it's supposed to work from the app info:

Of course, lots of things will affect how well it works in your experience.

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Microsoft Office Lens, An App For Scanning Documents With Your Camera, Is Now Available As A Stable Release was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

The Canal & River Trust painted the markings on towpaths in London, and other large cities, to remind us we share the space with nature: "It just wouldn’t be possible to paint lanes on the towpath for all our different visitors," an organizer told Quartz, "so we thought the ducks could have one instead." Read the rest

https://twitter.com/JewelStaite/status/603325588120739840

Her poor pup loses his place in December, apparently.

Six top executives of international football's (notoriously corrupt) governing body were arrested at the crack of dawn in their Zurich hotel by Swiss police acting on a US criminal corruption warrant. Read the rest

 As expected, the newly elected U.K. Conservative government has confirmed its intention to push for broader powers to capture online communications, announcing a forthcoming Investigatory Powers Bill in its legislative plan for the five-year Parliament, revealed today in the Queen’s speech. Read More

More than 60% of Americans still wash their laundry in warm water. It’s a practice that’s as costly as it is environmentally unfriendly. What’s more, it doesn’t make our clothes appreciably cleaner. Here’s why you should make the switch to cold water.

Illustration by Tara Jacoby.

Given that we all have to do it, it should come as little surprise to learn that laundry exerts a significant global footprint. Of the total energy use and greenhouse-gas emissions produced by a single load of laundry, approximately 75% of it comes from warming the water itself.

There’s also the cost to consider. According to Consumer Reports, doing laundry in cold water will save you upwards of $60 per year (or more if you live in an area with higher-than-average electricity rates), assuming an average of 300 loads per year. That may not sound like much, but it’s significant when considering the pressure placed across the entire electrical grid.

Think of it this way: If every Las Vegas household switched to cold washing for an entire year, the amount of energy saved could power its famous Strip for nearly a week. If every household across the U.S. switched to cold water for an entire year, that would save the same amount of energy produced by the Hoover Dam in 20 months.

Credit: H.A.M. Phtgrphy/Flickr/CC.

As noted by Leigh Krietsch Boerner at The Sweet Home, “[U]nless you have a really good reason for washing in warm or hot, such as really stinky clothes or cloth diapers, go for cold. It saves energy, and your clothes will last longer.”

Indeed, cold water is actually good for certain clothes. Lower temperatures protect the dyes, and therefore the color of clothes, while also helping to preserve the fit of the clothes by preventing shrinkage, particularly along the seams. What’s more, some stains, like blood, should only be washed in cold water. Warm water just makes blood stains set in.

So aside from some rare instances, there’s really no reason for you to keep washing your clothes in warm water. The Laundry Goddess offers some practical tips:

Personally, I have found that you can wash everything in cold water successfully, as long as you follow a few basic rules: Only use liquid detergent, as most powders need warm water to completely dissolve and clean successfully. Use the proper amount of detergent – too little and your wash load will not come clean, and too much will leave a soapy residue behind on your wash.

Also, do not overload the washer; be sure to leave room for items to move around in the water.

Substituting for Warmth

Now all this said, warm water does play an important role in helping to make your clothes clean. Well, provided you use high performance detergents and washing machines — and provided you follow the manufacturer’s instructions. Using too much or too little detergent can result in sub-optimal performance, as can using the detergent at the wrong temperature. Using a standard warm-water detergent in cold water, for example, may not get you the results you want. So, unless you opt for a specifically cold water detergent, you may not notice that the warm water is cleaning better. But the fact of the matter is that you can get just as clean with cold.

Laundry involves a number of chemical reactions — reactions that go faster at higher temperatures. So, along with chemicals and mechanical energy, the thermal energy produced by warm water helps to get rid of stains, dirt, and residue on our clothing. Until very recently, most detergents were designed with this in mind. Owing to a demand for more environmentally friendly solutions, detergent manufacturers have now found ways to create detergents that work remarkably well in cold water. But to do so, they had to get around some very tricky chemical constraints.

One of the biggest challenges to developing detergents that work in cold water, or regular “tap water,” is that tap water temperatures are inconsistent across geographical locations and seasons. For example, “cold” water in Florida during the summer months is ~80 degrees F, while “cold” water in Minnesota during the winter months can dip as low as ~40 degrees F. Consequently, cold water detergents need to work effectively across a surprisingly large spectrum of temperatures.

To complicate things even further, surfactants — the so-called “work-horse” of detergents — don’t perform as well in cold water. These chemicals, which comprise upwards of 30 to 40% of the weight of detergents, lift and removesstains. They involve a class of chemicals known as linear alkylbenzonesulfates — long chains of a chemical called a dodecane.

Credit: FluffLoveUniversity.

Writing in C|Net, Richard Baguley and Colin McDonald explain how surfactants work:

[Dodecane] readily forms long chain molecules, quite similar to petrochemicals like oil. Attached to this is a benzene ring, with a sulfate molecule attached. These two parts fundamentally disagree about something: how they feel about water. The dodecyl chain hates it, doing all it can to get away from it. The benzosulfate bit, however, loves water and wants to get close to it. Chemists call these properties hydrophobic (water-hating) and hydrophilic (water-loving), and this conflicting nature is what makes detergents so powerful. Dodecyl chains hate water, but like each other, and also like other chemicals like fats, sugars, proteins and others. In other words: all of the things on your clothes that you want to get off. Dodecyl chains also like each other: give them a chance, and they will gather together and complain about how much they hate water.

It’s this tension that works to clean our clothes; the hydrophilic part mixes with the wash water while the hydrophobic part of the molecule lifts up and absorbs stains and dirt so they can be rinsed away. Surfactants work the same way when exposed to different temperatures, but as Mary Johnson, Fabric Care Principal Scientist for Tide and Downy, told me, surfactants “can become super-sluggish in colder water temperatures – leading to stained and dingy clothes.”

To get around this problem, Procter & Gamble chemists — who get the credit for developing this innovation — created a specially formulated surfactant system, which can be found in Tide Cold Water Clean and Tide PODS. Their system overcomes these limitations in three ways. Here’s how she explained it to me over email:

1. We use a variety of different surfactant types and within each type we use a variety of chain lengths. This makes the surfactant system super-fast and super-responsive across a broad range of temperatures — even in temperatures as cold as 40 degrees F.

2. We also use polymers – long chain molecules – at high concentrations that act as cleaning boosters to help remove more stains – even greasy stains in cold water.

3. We use enzymes to help break up stains which can then be lifted away by the surfactants.

Indeed, enzymes are another important component of modern laundry detergents. Enzymes, which are comprised of biological components, break down stains that are otherwise hard to remove with conventional surfactants alone. Fascinatingly, P&G uses enzymes that were inspired by the evolved systems of organisms found in cold ocean water — systems that don’t get sluggish when exposed to cold water.

Cellulase 1JS4, a common enzyme found in detergents Credit: Pratulka/cc.

“In addition to using a wide variety of surfactants while adding polymers and enzymes – we also increased the amounts of these ingredients to... clean in even the coldest wash temperatures,” added, Johnson, who says Tide’s Cold Water Clean works better in cold water than its base Tide liquid product.

In addition to the products already listed, other cold water detergents include Arm & Hammer Cold Water, and Purex Coldwater. Encouragingly, washing machine manufacturers are getting involved as well; Whirlpool’s Maytag Bravos XL is a washer designed to work with cold-water detergents.

But as noted, you may not need to resort to these specialized products in most instances. So what are you waiting for? It’s time to start cleaning your clothes in cold water.

Sources: New York Times | Consumer Reports | CNet | Dr. Chemical (2)| BBC

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Contact the author at george@io9.com and follow him on Twitter

Sometimes, you come across an episode of a podcast you want to hear, but you might not want to subscribe to the series as a whole. Latr.fm lets you add individual podcasts episodes to a single feed so you can remember to listen without subscribing. Essentially, it’s like Pocket for podcasts.

All you need to do is head to a URL of a specific podcast episode, click the Latr.fm bookmarklet, click on the audio file, then the web app adds it to an RSS feed that you can subscribe to from your podcast player of choice. This way, you can add as many individual episodes of a podcast as you want without subscribing to the full feed.

Latr.fm | via One Thing Well

Microsoft is officially confirming today that it’s bringing Cortana to iOS and Android. The software giant is planning to release separate apps for each mobile operating system to enable its digital assistant to run outside of Windows. Microsoft is only providing an early look at those apps today, but the company notes that you’ll be able to make the same queries and ask the same questions using Cortana across Windows, iOS, or Android. The Cortana companion will be available for Android in late June and iOS later this year.

While Cortana on iOS or Android won’t be as powerful as the Windows variant, due to various integrations, Microsoft is still providing notification support. You’ll get notifications for sports results, flights, and...

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Ford had already been testing a very small car-sharing operation in London called City Driving On-Demand, but now it's getting substantially larger with the launch of GoDrive, a one-way service (meaning you don't need to return cars to their original spots like Zipcar) with guaranteed parking at your destination that charges by the minute. Overall, GoDrive sounds a little like Car2Go, the car-sharing subsidiary of Daimler that deploys fleets of pay-per-minute Smart cars to major urban centers.

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Periscope, the promising live-streaming app owned by Twitter, arrives on Android today. Like its cousin on iOS, which debuted two months ago to the day, Periscope for Android lets you watch and record broadcasts from your mobile device. Reaching 1 million users in its first 10 days, Periscope has so far proven a hit with celebrities and media personalities, but is also being used for acts of citizen journalism and pirating pay-per-views.

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Microsoft is planning to release a special phone companion app for Windows 10 that's designed to convince smartphone owners to bridge the gap between their handset and PC. The software maker is clearly hoping that its new companion app will convince iPhone and Android phone owners to install a number of apps and services on their devices. Once installed on a Windows 10 PC, the phone companion app works like a hub to direct phone owners to download apps like Skype, OneDrive, OneNote, Outlook, Office, Xbox Music, and even the recently announced Cortana app.

It doesn’t appear to enable any specific features that sync a phone and PC because all of the separate apps it points to are designed with that in mind. OneNote syncs notes across...

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