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Supermassive black holes found spiraling in at seven percent light speed

Simulation of the pair of supermassive black hole binary system, PG 1302-102. The smaller shines more brightly because it’s farther from the center of mass, and thus closer to the outer disk of gas. This gas accretes onto the black hole, heating up as it falls in, and thus emits more light. The more massive black hole, therefore, is starved of gas and doesn’t glow as brightly. (credit: Zoltan Haiman, Columbia University ) Data from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer ( GALEX ) and the Hubble Space Telescope has confirmed the presence of a pair of supermassive black holes orbiting each other so closely that they’re moving at relativistic speeds—a significant fraction of the speed of light. Supermassive black holes are expected to come in pairs pretty often. That’s because every galaxy has its own supermassive black hole, and galaxies often merge, bringing the two together. These mergers are very slow processes that distort both galaxies until their stars settle into new orbits (a process known as “violent relaxation”). While this is happening, extremely heavy objects, such as supermassive black holes, will tend to move in toward the center of the new galaxy. The new galaxy would end up with two supermassive black holes, one from each original galaxy, orbiting each other at its core. Objects have been observed which look a lot like supermassive black hole binaries, matching the prediction. These objects have a lot of mass—billions of times the mass of the Sun, as we’d expect from a pair of supermassives—and they’re periodic, meaning the amount of light the object produces rises and falls with a predictable time period. Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Supermassive black holes found spiraling in at seven percent light speed

Finally, game cartridges you can plug in to your smart phone

Downloading games directly to your smartphone and playing them immediately is convenient, I suppose. But this ephemeral, bloodless process is missing a familiar tangibility gamers might remember warmly from the last millennium: that comforting, solid, life-affirming feeling of jamming a game cartridge into a console slot. Enter Pico Cassette , a Japanese outfit that says it’s bringing back “the next retro” with tiny game cartridges that plug in to a smartphone’s headphone jack. The tiny “cassettes” (the general Japanese term for cartridges) are built on PlugAir technology , which uses a specially designed iPhone or Android app to draw power from the headphone jack and send data using specially modulated sound waves. Those coded sound waves are then used to unlock access to content that’s stored in the cloud, according to a PlugAir explanation video . That would seem to remove one of the main conveniences of the physical cartridge format—namely, distributing and storing data permanently without an Internet connection—but there’s nothing technical preventing the actual game data from being stored on the cartridges as well. In any case, there’s something about the simplicity of being able to share a game with a friend simply by handing them a physical thing that plugs in to the phone (though the need for a special app is a bit of an impediment to immediate ad-hoc sharing). Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Finally, game cartridges you can plug in to your smart phone

Compared To the Rest of the World, US 4G (Unsurprisingly) Sucks

We’re always being told the U.S. is now lagging behind other, more industrious nations in science and technology and basically anything that isn’t spending on the military. How much are we lagging? Here is a depressing graph to help quantify that. Read more…

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Compared To the Rest of the World, US 4G (Unsurprisingly) Sucks

How the Newest Generation of Credit Cards Protects Your Information From Getting Stolen

Have you had your credit card info stolen recently? You’re not alone. It’s happened to me a couple of times in the past year, and it’s annoying as hell. Thankfully, credit card companies are finally tackling this issue head on, with technology that’s just now reaching the U.S. in full force. Read more…

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How the Newest Generation of Credit Cards Protects Your Information From Getting Stolen

AmpMe daisy-chains a bunch of phones to create a multi-speaker setup

Generally speaking, if you thought you might want to blast music while out and about, you’d invest in a Bluetooth speaker. If the sound quality there wasn’t quite robust enough, you’d either get yourself a bigger speaker , or maybe even link together a few smaller ones . Either way, prepare to spend a few hundred dollars. Or not. A new app called AmpMe promises to achieve the same effect, except instead of asking you to shell out for new hardware, it daisy-chains an unlimited number of smartphones so that they stream the same song in sync, combining each handset’s speaker into something… cacaphonous.Slideshow-322368 The free app, available for iOS and Android, doesn’t use Bluetooth or WiFi, but rather, plays an audio “fingerprint” on the host device (a series of beeps, to the human ear) that gets picked up by the mic on the receiving phone. Everyone involved needs to have the app installed, and anyone joining in needs to request a passkey for the music party before receiving that unique audio code. The host can shut down the party at any time with the push of a button, whereas receivers can pause the music for, say, a phone call, and pick back up with the rest of the group, wherever they happen to be in the song. For now, the app only works with Soundcloud. Founder Martin-Luc Archambault says that’s because Soundcloud is free, making it accessible to the most people, but that his team is working on inking deals with other streaming services as well. Ultimately, he says, he wants it to be “Sonos for cellphones.” In a brief demo last week, the various phones and tablets that were paired together did indeed play music in sync, without any latency on any of the devices. AmpMe has clearly shown, then, that it’s possible to turn a series of mobile devices into an ad hoc multi-speaker setup — no small feat. The problem is that the audio quality on most phones and tablets is frankly terrible. Unless you happen to have, say, an HTC phone with BoomSound , you’re probably working with tinny, contained audio that only gets more distorted as you crank the volume. Or, in this case, create a chorus of equally tinny-sounding devices. It’s great to know that the technology has evolved such that it’s possible to daisy-chain phones like this and have them stream music perfectly in sync. Now we just need to wait the phone makers to catch up. Source: iTunes , Google Play

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AmpMe daisy-chains a bunch of phones to create a multi-speaker setup

For the first time, a paraplegic has walked without a robotic suit

A paraplegic has walked without robotics using his own brain waves, thanks to research done at Southern California’s UC Irvine . Scientists used a computer to “link” 28-year-old Adam Fritz’s brain to his legs over a Bluetooth connection, bypassing the severed region of his spinal cord. An EEG then picked up signals from his brain, which were relayed by a “brain-control interface” (BCI) computer to electrodes on his knee, triggering walking movements. Though Fritz was supported and only walked haltingly for 12 feet, the research is being heralded as a milestone — so far, paralyzed patients have only be able to walk using suits like that from Ekso Bionics . It wasn’t just a matter of strapping on the EEG cap and taking a stroll. Prior to the attempt, Fritz underwent extensive physical rehab to strengthen his muscles and learned to control a virtual avatar using the BCI device. He also made similar movements in the lab while suspended slightly above the floor. During a conversation with Sky News , Fritz dubbed the interface a “mind walker, ” and said, “it’s complete concentration. You have to think about every single step when you’re doing it.” Despite the success, the team said there’s still a lot of work to be done before patients can gain any mobility. The next step is to reduce the EEG components enough that they can be implanted in the brain, which could give patients more precise control the and the ability to “sense” pressure. Meanwhile, Fritz described the experience as “incredible, ” saying, “when you’re first injured, you’re sitting in hospital hoping you’ll walk again, but when it actually happened it was a dream come true.” Source: JNER

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For the first time, a paraplegic has walked without a robotic suit

Songwriter tells US House he made $5,679 from 178 million Spotify streams

The songwriter who co-wrote Megan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” alleged on Tuesday that he only cleared $5,679 from over 178 million streams of the song on Spotify. (credit: YouTube ) A Tuesday copyright roundtable discussion, hosted by Nashville’s Belmont University and led by the House Judiciary Committee, opened with one of the past year’s most successful songwriters announcing just how little money he’d made from over 178 million streams of a song he co-wrote: $5,679. That means Nashville songwriter Kevin Kadine, the co-writer of the hit 2014 Megan Trainor song “All About That Bass,” made close to $31.90 for every million streams. According to a report by The Tenneseean , Kadine didn’t clarify to the roundtable’s five members of the House of Representatives exactly how the songwriting proceeds were split between himself and Trainor (who shared songwriting credits on “Bass”), but he did allege that the average streaming-service payout for a song’s songwriting team is roughly $90 per million streams. “That’s as big a song as a songwriter can have in their career, and number one in 78 countries,” Kadine said. “But you’re making $5,600. How do you feed your family?” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Songwriter tells US House he made $5,679 from 178 million Spotify streams

We’ve Discovered a Lost World of Snow Dinosaurs 

The image of a dinosaur tramping around in the snow feels totally wrong — these behemoths ruled a tropical world. But one duck billed dinosaur, at least, managed to endure long, dark winters far north of the Arctic Circle some 69 million years ago. Read more…

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We’ve Discovered a Lost World of Snow Dinosaurs 

The 19 Worst Movies Mystery Science Theater 3000 Ever Riffed

Although Mystery Science Theater 3000 was dedicated to making fun of bad movies, not all the movies the show featured were truly awful. Many were merely crappy, but some of them were so ineptly made, so heinous, so unwatchable that trying to imagine viewing them without Joel, Mike and the ’Bots is terrifying. Here are the most wretched movies they had to sit through—and no, Manos: The Hands of Fate is not #1. Read more…

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The 19 Worst Movies Mystery Science Theater 3000 Ever Riffed