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UPS experimenting with delivery drones, set to challenge Amazon’s Prime Air

When Jeff Bezos went on 60 Minutes and mentioned that Amazon was experimenting with delivery drones , we knew it was only a matter of time before other companies revealed similar plans. And, one day later, sources at UPS have told The Verge that the delivery giant has its own unmanned flying couriers in the lab. Publicly, the company is largely keeping silent, saying only that “the commercial use of drones is an interesting technology and we’ll continue to evaluate it.” But Ryan Calo, a law professor specializing in drones, isn’t afraid to speculate about what the program might look like. While he doesn’t rule out Amazon’s ambitious vision of an octo-copter dropping a package at your doorstep, he believes the first versions will be much more limited in scope. For example, he foresees a company like UPS using the self-piloted vehicles to move packages from airports and major cities to more remote pickup points. It wouldn’t be quite as convenient as having a robot bring your family’s Christmas gifts to your home, but it would certainly speed up delivery while keeping the cost in check. It would hardly be a surprise if UPS beat other delivery firms and Amazon to the punch on this one, as it invests quite heavily in R&D. According to a spokesperson, “UPS invests more in technology than any other company in the delivery business, and we’re always planning for the future.” That’s hardly a surprise coming from the company that already offers 3D printing services at some of its retail locations. Filed under: Robots , Transportation Comments Source: The Verge

How to Pick Your Next Android Phone: 2013 Edition

Put simply, there are too many Android phones out there. The only way to know which ones are worth your time is to follow tech news every day. For those that have other things to do, here’s what matters when buying a new device. Read more…

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How to Pick Your Next Android Phone: 2013 Edition

The Dramatic Differences in Male and Female Brain Connectivity

By creating highly detailed connectome maps of nearly 1, 000 men, women, boys, and girls, neuroscientists have shown the dramatic extent to which male and female brains are “wired” differently — cognitive variations that may help to explain why men and women fare better at certain tasks. Read more…

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The Dramatic Differences in Male and Female Brain Connectivity

KitKat claims 1.1 percent of Android device share a month after launch

KitKat may be the new kid on the Android block, but it’s already faring quite well. Google’s latest OS dashboard reveals that 1.1 percent of active Android devices are running the new platform roughly a month after it became available. Not that its arrival is slowing down Jelly Bean’s growth , mind you. The older software now represents 54.5 percent of all Android use, thanks in part to a two-point surge in devices running Android 4.3. However well Jelly Bean is doing, we expect KitKat adoption to rise quickly — both the Nexus 5 and the first official KitKat upgrades have only been around for a few weeks at most, and there are more updates on the way . Filed under: Cellphones , Tablets , Mobile , Google Comments Via: PhoneDog Source: Android Developers

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KitKat claims 1.1 percent of Android device share a month after launch

There’s a Naturally Occurring Nuclear Fission Reactor in West Africa

In May 1972 in a uranium enrichment plant in France, scientists examining ore from a mine in Gabon, West Africa, discovered that a natural nuclear reactor had spontaneously manifested in that region in the Earth’s primordial past, churning out approximately 100 Kw worth of energy continuously for a few hundred thousand years about 1.7 billion years ago. In order to understand how the natural nuclear reactor came about, it helps to understand a little of the history and science of nuclear reactions. Read more…

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There’s a Naturally Occurring Nuclear Fission Reactor in West Africa

YuFu Is A Range Of Bluetooth 4.0 Styli For Pro Digital Artists & Amateur Scribblers

Hex3 , the company behind a successfully Kickstarted pressure-sensitive stylus called JaJa , and a follow-up stylus for tablets, called Nota , which had a (relatively) fine 3.7mm tip to make scribbling on a slate more precise, is expanding its line-up with three new stylus products – under a new brand name, YuFu. Once again, the startup has taken to Kickstarter to get the required minimum orders to fire up production of the YuFu, YuFu Pro and YuFu Focus. It’s seeking to raise $25,000, and is more than half way there with 30 days left on its campaign. If successful it’s aiming to ship to backers next April. It’s a couple of years since pressure sensitive styluses arrived so the YuFu is definitely facing more competition than Hex3′s earlier JaJa . Which presumably is why it’s spreading its bets with multiple models, as well as focusing on a premium, hardwearing build, with the YuFu rocking a slim, metal-case design that resembles a mechanical pencil. The YuFu Pro – aimed at “serious artists” – has 4,048 levels of pressure sensitivity, with the function built into the pen, rather than the tip so you vary how much you squeeze it, rather than how hard you press it against the glass (to limit fatigue). It also has tilt sensors for shading and calligraphy, optional gestures such as tap and shake to erase, plus an ultrafine tip (1.9mm). This model is $65 for Kickstarter backers, but will retail for $99 in future. The mid-range YuFu Focus has 64 levels of pressure sensitivity and the same ultrafine 1.9mm tip. Hex3 says this model is for “creative business and art school use”. It’s $49 for Kickstarter early birds, rising to $79 retail post-Kickstarter. While the basic YuFu – aimed at “anyone who uses a tablet for notes or drawing” but doesn’t need pressure sensitivity to vary the flow of digital ink or an ultrafine tip – offers the same hardwearing metal construction and interchangeable tips (with brush, teflon or rubber tips) that all the models have but is designed for less precise scribbling. This model is up for grabs at an early bird Kickstarter price of $25, rising to $39 retail post-Kickstarter. The YuFu styli are powered by 1x AAAA battery apiece. They use Bluetooth Low Energy to connect to the tablet, so are compatible with the iPad 3 and above, and the iPad mini. They will also work with other tablets that have support for BLE, according to Hex3 – so some Android tabs might also work. What apps can you use YuFu with? Hex3 hasn’t listed compatible apps by name, rather it says it will support “all of the Apps you could need”. And includes the below graphic depicting currently supported apps. It’s worth noting that functions such as the YuFu Pro’s Gyro sensor (to support shading) will only work with “integrated apps”. So if your art app of choice doesn’t appear below you may want to ask if they’re planning to support it before pledging any cash.

PayPal launches digital gift card store, boasts iTunes as its first partner

PayPal must not have been content to let you add pre-paid gift cards to your digital wallet, because now it’s selling them directly. The online-payment juggernaut is kicking off this new program — dubbed PayPal Digital Gifts — with none other than iTunes, whose digital gift certificates come in $15, $25, $50 and $100 denominations. With this, the firm hopes to streamline online gift-card giving while adding its trademark layer of security for good measure. The company admits the digital storefront is a bit sparse at the moment, but says it will be announcing more partners soon. Unfortunately, the offer is only available in the US — space tourists will have to shop elsewhere. Comments Via: The Next Web Source: PayPal (1) , (2)

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PayPal launches digital gift card store, boasts iTunes as its first partner

Beware This Simple But Incredibly Effective Point-of-Sale Skimmer

Card skimmers are getting way more common , to the point that they’ve even started appearing on point-of-sale card machines . And, boy, if this thing is anything to go by, they’re getting better and better. Read more…

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Beware This Simple But Incredibly Effective Point-of-Sale Skimmer

How a Pill Filled With Bacteria Could Actually Make You Better

Usually, you knock back pills packed with drugs; cocktails of chemicals which have been painstakingly proven to help make you better. Soon, though, you might be swallowing tablets filled with something you might not expect: bacteria. Read more…

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Terabyte laptop SDDs for $435!

For the second half of the 1990s, my standard advice to people buying computers was to max out the RAM as the cheapest, best way to improve their computers’ efficiency. The price/performance curve hit its stride around 1995, and after decades when a couple gigs of RAM would cost more than the server you were buying it for, you could max out all the RAM slots in any computer for a couple hundred bucks. Operating systems, though, were still being designed for RAM-starved computers, and when you dropped a gig or two of RAM in a machine, it screamed . It’s still good practice to max out your RAM, but it doesn’t get you much of a dividend. The turbo-charger of the 2010s is solid-state disk-drives, and they’re screaming up the same price/performance curve that RAM traversed twenty years ago. Two years ago, I traded my laptop drive for a 400GB SDD, spending as much on the drive as I had on the machine, and it was worth every penny. My laptop battery-life nearly doubled, and I stopped getting watch-cursors altogether; no matter what task I performed, it was done instantly. In October, I bought a one terabyte SDD for a ridiculous $435 — about a third of what I paid for a 600GB drive a little over a year ago! — and having run it for two months now, I’m prepared to pronounce it good. I wasn’t familiar with the manufacturer, Crucial, but they got very good reviews on Amazon, and at that price I was prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. My machine — a Thinkpad X230 running Ubuntu 13.10 — chugs along with nary a beach-ball, and I can go six to eight hours on a six-cell battery with full brightness, and continuous Wifi and Bluetooth usage. I’m rough on my computer, and it’s taken plenty of knocks and bumps without any noticeable impact on the drive. To accompany the new drive, I bought a pair of $78 Toshiba USB3 1TB drives (one for backing up at the office, the other for my travel bag). They’re nothing near as fast as the SDD, but combined with the USB3 bus, they’re plenty quick for daily incremental backups, which take less than five minutes. If your storage needs aren’t as massy as mine, there’s a whole line of Crucial SDDs, 480GB for $269 , 240GB for $140 and so on. They all come with three year warranties, though I haven’t had cause to get service for my drive yet (knock wood). The drive is 7mm high, and comes with an easy-to-fit adapter for 9mm enclosures. I was less impressed with the adapter I bought to copy the files over; it was fiddly and prone to losing its connection. Ultimately, I slapped the new drive into a case in order to make the transfer. Crucial M500 960GB SATA 2.5-Inch 7mm (with 9.5mm adapter/spacer) Internal Solid State Drive CT960M500SSD1

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Terabyte laptop SDDs for $435!

Ken May

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