Twitter just announced an update to its mobile site that is meant to bring it up to par with the new version of Twitter the company introduced in December. According to Twitter, the idea behind this update is to “give every person on the planet a consistent Twitter experience.” Because of this, the company says, the new version of the mobile site now uses one-third less bandwidth than the previous iteration and should work significantly better on feature phones, older browsers and low-bandwidth connections.

This new version will start rolling out today.

According to Twitter’s VP of Product Satya Patel, the company aims to “make Twitter the most accessible way to connect with the world, even with the weakest signals and the simplest devices.”

Given that feature phones still represent the majority of mobile phones in use today, it makes sense for the company to try to reach more of this market by optimizing its mobile site for these devices.

The updated version of the mobile site, says Patel, should feel just like a native app and gives users access to all the standard Twitter features, including @mentions in the Connect tab, direct messages and trending stories in the Discover tab.

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Twitter’s Mobile Site Now Uses One-Third Less Bandwidth

This morning, Google officially rolled out Google+ Hangouts On Air to all users worldwide, following the feature’s limited introduction back in September. At the time of its initial release, this live broadcasting feature allowed top Google+ users (like celebs) to stream live video feeds directly to their Google+ fan base. The service kicked off with a Google+ Hangouts stream from will.i.am, but soon saw a number of notable participants, even including the President of the United States, Barack Obama, at one point.

The worldwide rollout of Hangouts On Air, announced today via the official Google Blog, represents an interesting shift for the feature, which before was more about public figures and other types of broadcasters, like news orgs, reaching a large audience of viewers via the social platform. Now, anyone can be a live broadcaster. It’s the same promise made by services like Ustream, Livestream, and and Justin.tv, for example. It’s now also the promise of Google’s own livestreaming property, YouTube.com/live – a property which just opened up to all. Well, all who have a Google+ account, that is.

According to the Google blog post, users can broadcast their live hangout to their Google+ stream…but also to their YouTube channel or their website. It’s those last two items, and primarily the option to broadcast live to YouTube as well as Google+, that makes the general availability of Hangouts on Air so interesting.

Today, YouTube.com/live’s help documentation says that the service is still not broadly available to all of YouTube’s video creators:

We’re slowly rolling out live streaming to our partners with accounts in good standing over time. You can check to see whether live streaming is already enabled on your account by logging in and visiting your Channel page. Look for a promotional message at the top.

Plus, in April, when YouTube Live was celebrating its first anniversary, YouTube’s partner product manager Varun Talwar noted that, while the team had developed new features like pay-per-view and real-time analytics for its broadcasters “with the expectation many more of you will eventually use YouTube Live” (hint, hint?), he also said that, unfortunately, “this process takes time to roll out broadly.”

Well, forget waiting, because it appears that live YouTube streaming is here…for anyone with a Google+ account. Clever, Google. Very clever.

Per the Google+ Hangouts on Air documentation, using Hangouts On Air means you also get to broadcast live on YouTube. It reads:

Broadcast a hangout: Invite circles or individual people to join you in a hangout, then broadcast it to the world. A live player of your hangout will be posted to your Google+ Home page and YouTube channel.

The change is an important one for Google’s growth. Today, Google+ adoption appears to be less organic, and comes from the large number of integrations with other Google properties. Google, too, has been slightly vague with regards to its Google+ numbers, refusing to detail the number of visitors who hit up the plus.google.com directly. Instead, it talks of its “170 million+ users,” with “100 million 30-day actives,” but has so far refused to define “active,” or detail how many are “upgrading to Google+” outside of Google+ proper.

That being said, no one can argue YouTube’s numbers. Its audience of hundreds of millions upload 60 hours of video per minute to the service. And now they can all be live broadcasters, too, via the Google+ funnel? Any guess on how long it will be before we see another announcement regarding Google+’s amazing jump in user numbers?

We’ve reached out to Google to confirm all its Help documentation is correct and current (you never know). We’ll update if need be, if/when Google confirms.

Update: Google wants to point out that, basically, Hangouts are the social counterpart to YouTube Live. Says a company spokesperson:

“Hangouts On Air uses a combination of Google+ and YouTube Live to let you engage with even more people, while YouTube Live focuses more on broadcasting an event to your audience. For example, you’d watch your favorite band play on YouTube Live, but then engage with them backstage in a Hangout On Air.”

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Want To Broadcast Live On YouTube? You’ll Need A Google+ Account For That

Glass has two key properties, one good, one bad. The good one is that it’s transparent, so we don’t have to drive around in cars using periscopes to see. The bad one is that it’s reflective, which can cause glare and other problems. If you’ve ever driven around with a white envelope or piece of paper on top of your dashboard, you know how annoying the reflection is.

The reflectivity issue is a problem with solar panels, where a percentage of that precious sunlight they’re trying to soak up is uselessly bounced away. In an effort to solve this, a team of MIT researchers have found a way to etch the surface of glass in such a way that it “virtually eliminates reflections, producing glass that is almost unrecognizable because of its absence of glare.” A nice side benefit of this is that water and dust will also not stick to the glass.

What the researchers have done is etched a “nanotexture”—essentially a forest of cones—into the surface of the glass, and the scale of this forest is so tiny that water droplets and dust particles cannot get any purchase. They bounce right off of the surface, as you can see in the video below. It also solves the original goal of preventing glare, as the sharp angle of the cones simply obviates the angles of incidence that a ray of light would bounce off of on a perfectly flat surface.

(more…)

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Adding New Surface Texture to Glass to Change Its Properties

In the physical world, when you share a record or a book with a friend, it’s still technically yours. But in the digital world, where documents aren’t so much shared as they are copied, it’s difficult for content creators to maintain control.

Sharing a Word document chock-full of sensitive information isn’t like lending out your beloved old copy of Paul’s Boutique, after all. You can forward that document to multiple people, edit its contents, and print out as many copies as you want. And in most cases, the content creator is likely none the wiser. Clément Cazalot believed there had to be a better—and easier—way to keep such crucial documents in check.

Rather than create a paranoid tool for paranoid people, Cazalot and his cofounder Alex Negrea created DocTrackr, a file tracking service that also gathers usage analytics. The service tracks how and where documents are being viewed and shared—and boasts a handy kill switch to revoke access altogether, if needed—with the hopes of giving creators a better idea of how their content is being used.

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DocTrackr offers file tracking, analytics, without the paranoia

In the physical world, when you share a record or a book with a friend, it’s still technically yours. But in the digital world, where documents aren’t so much shared as they are copied, it’s difficult for content creators to maintain control.

Sharing a Word document chock-full of sensitive information isn’t like lending out your beloved old copy of Paul’s Boutique, after all. You can forward that document to multiple people, edit its contents, and print out as many copies as you want. And in most cases, the content creator is likely none the wiser. Clement Cazalot believed there had to be a better way to keep such crucial documents in check.

Described as “a tool made for paranoid people by paranoid people,” DocTrackr was created by Cazalot and his cofounder Alex Negrea. The service tracks how and where documents are being viewed and shared—and offers a handy kill switch to revoke access altogether if needed.

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DocTrackr: file tracking “for paranoid people by paranoid people”

Ask in any kid, playing in the sandbox is fun enough on its own, but too much moisture will turn your grainy playground into a lumpy mess. Researchers at UC Davis have cooked up one solution: an augmented reality sandbox. The project uses a Kinect sensor in conjunction with a digital projector and a bit of software to overlay topographical data and simulated water over a traditional — and dry — sandbox. The end result is an augmented environment that can be used to teach geographic, geologic and hydrological concepts. The team hopes the project will help them develop hands-on exhibits for science museums, teaching visitors about contour lines, watersheds, catchment areas and more. Check out the video above for a full demo, or scope out the source below for the technical nitty-gritty.

Augmented reality sandbox lets you change the course of rivers, won’t get you wet originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 07 May 2012 04:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Augmented reality sandbox lets you change the course of rivers, won’t get you wet

An anonymous reader writes “Biochemist Pierre Calleja has a solution to reducing carbon emissions that doesn’t require us to cut back on our use of carbon-producing devices. Calleja has developed a lighting system that requires no electricity for power. Instead it draws CO2 from the atmosphere and uses it to produce light as well as oxygen as a byproduct. The key ingredient to this eco-friendly light? Algae. Certain types of algae can feed off of organic carbon as well as sunlight, and in the process produce carbohydrate energy for themselves as well as oxygen as a waste product. Cajella’s lamps consist of algae-filled water along with a light and battery system. During the day the algae produce energy from sunlight that is then stored in the batteries. Then at night the energy is used to power the light. However, as the algae can also produce energy from carbon, sunlight isn’t required for the process to work. That means such lights can be placed where there is no natural light and the air will effectively be cleaned on a daily basis.”

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Biochemist Creates CO2-Eating Light That Runs On Algae

Are you an avid user of OS X’s FileVault encryption and running a recently updated version of Lion? It may be time to consider changing your passwords. According to security researcher David Emry, users who used FileVault prior to upgrading to 10.7.3 may be able to find their password in a system-wide debug log file, stored in plain text outside of the encrypted area. This puts the password at risk of being read by other users or enterprising cyber criminals, Emry explains, and even opens the door for new flaw-specific malware. FileVault 2, on the other hand, seems to be unaffected by the bug. The community doesn’t currently have a way to fight the flaw, so users rushing to change their password now may find it being logged as well. Obviously, we’ll let you all know once we hear back from Apple regarding this matter.

OS X Lion update accidentally outs user passwords in plain text, stumbles over FileVault originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 06 May 2012 12:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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OS X Lion update accidentally outs user passwords in plain text, stumbles over FileVault

Lucas123 writes “Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have shown they can increase the density, performance and the durability of phase-change memory (PSM) by using diamonds to change the base alloy material. Instead of using the more typical method of applying heat to the alloy to change its state from amorphous to crystalline, thereby laying down bits in the material, the researchers used pressure from diamond-tipped tools. Using pressure versus heat allowed them to slow down the change in order to produce many varying states allowing more data to be stored on the alloy. ‘This phase-change memory is more stable than the material used in current flash drives. It works 100 times faster and is rewritable millions of times,’ said the study’s lead author, Ming Xu, a doctoral student at the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. ‘Within about five years, it could also be used to replace hard drives in computers and give them more memory.'”

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Diamonds Used To Increase Density, Performance of Phase-Change Memory

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Brothers Johnnathan and Joshua Gerard call their style of dance Gerardam for obvious reasons. They took dubstep dancing and added elements of mime, contortion, and um, maybe some other stuff, too. Warning: dubstep music. -via The Daily What

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Gerardam: Indian Dubstep