Microsoft’s 15-year-old MSN Messaging service will soon be a part of computer lore. It has been shut down in most places for over a year , but Microsoft kept it running in China where it was still quite popular. However, with the advent of Tencent’s QQ , Line and other services, Redmond recently emailed Chinese users (on their Hotmail accounts, naturally) that the service would ride into the sunset on October 31st. To give you an idea of how old it is, the service was created in 1999 by Microsoft to compete against AOL’s AIM chat service. However, we doubt too many users will get misty-eyed about its demise — the only nostalgia most folks likely have is how difficult it was to get rid of. Filed under: Software , Microsoft Comments Via: The Verge Source: Technode

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MSN Messenger will finally, definitely be dead in October

It doesn’t yet have a name, but Ecuador’s new government-backed virtual currency is coming. That’s the thrust of a new report from the Associated Press , anyway — the country’s Central Bank is said to be gearing up for a launch sometime in December, though the juicy technical details and the mechanics of how citizens can get their metaphorical hands on these things are still shrouded in mystery. What does seem clear at this point is that Ecuador’s current cash (in the form of US dollars) isn’t going anywhere, and that people will be able to conduct transactions with each other from their mobile phones without big fees eating into them. If everything goes according to plan, this’d be the first time a national government has launched its own official digital currency, though that’s not to say some cryptocurrency nuts haven’t aimed to affect change on a national scale. Enthusiasts in the Czech Republic launched the CzechCrownCoin a few days ago in a bid to bolster online business in the country, and the Auroracoin folks made the virtual equivalent of $380 available to all the fine folks of Iceland… only to see its value tank over time. Comments Source: AP (PhysOrg)

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World’s first government-backed digital currency to launch in December

When Keuring Green Mountain announced that it would cut out third-party pods for the next-generation of its popular single-serve machines, other coffee outfits were up in arms. One particular company, TreeHouse Foods, claimed that it would take a short time for the code to be cracked (and filed a lawsuit , too). Well, Mother Parker’s Tea & Coffee has done just that with its RealCup capsules. The company’s coffee and tea pods will work inside the recently released Keurig 2.0 brewers capable of brewing both single cups and carafe-sized batches. Keurig has licensing deals in place with big name coffee outfits like Starbucks, Peet’s, Caribou, Krispy Kreme, Twinings of London and others, but it’s the other not so well-known suppliers and the private label clientele that are set to suffer under the exclusivity. [Photo credit: m01229/Flickr] Filed under: Household Comments Via: Techdirt Source: Mother Parkers Tea & Coffee (PDF)

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It didn’t take long for a company to crack Keurig’s K-cup lockdown

Want to make sure your newborn baby’s jaundice-free? There’s an app for that! A team of researchers from the University of Washington have developed an app that can diagnose jaundice among infants just by taking their pictures. Since the condition’s typically diagnosed by the excessive yellowing of one’s skin, it’s not too odd to develop a tool that can detect it with just a snapshot, just like that app that can spot skin cancer through a smartphone. You simply place a color calibration card (which helps the software determine lighting and flash conditions, as well as account for the baby’s skintone) on the baby’s tummy, take a picture and then upload it to the cloud for analysis. The algorithm quickly does its job, and you get the results and the baby’s bilirubin levels almost instantly. Bilirubin’s the yellowish byproduct of red blood cell breakdown that’s usually processed by the liver. Since newborns’ livers don’t function like adults’, over 60 percent of infants experience elevated levels of bilirubin, or in other words, jaundice. While some babies can rid of the excess bilirubin themselves, others need treatment and medication, as jaundice left untreated for a long time could be lead to brain damage or to a serious disease called kernicterus . Although blood tests are still more accurate, the team’s goal it to replace other types of screening techniques with their diagnostic tool, and to make it work on babies of every ethnicity. Before that happens, though, they still have to test it on 1, 000 infants, especially those with darker skins — and hope that it gets FDA clearance in the future. Filed under: Science Comments Source: University of Washington

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Experimental app can detect jaundice in newborns with just a snapshot

Earlier this year, Amazon said that its 2014 original series lineup would be shot and eventually streamed in 4K to Samsung UltraHD TVs, and now we know when — sometime this October. It was Samsung that actually revealed the date, saying it would support Amazon’s Prime Instant Video UHD streaming on most Samsung 4K TVs . There’s no word if Amazon’s 4K service will hit other manufacturer’s UltraHD models, but Samsung noted it has also expanded 4K content in Europe to Netflix, Wuaki.tv, Chili and Maxdome. Like Sony , Samsung has other plans to make sure you’re not wasting all those pixels, as well. It recently did a live 4K stream of a Placido Domingo opera in Europe and released a 500GB drive with 40 recent 4K movies and documentaries. Filed under: Home Entertainment , HD , Samsung , Amazon Comments Source: Samsung

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Amazon’s original shows will stream in 4K starting this October

3D printing has taken root in a variety of disciplines, and medicine is no stranger to leveraging its tool kit . At Boston Children’s Hospital, surgeons are using printed models to prep for the operating room. “With 3D printing, we’re taking a step that allows experienced doctors to simulate the specific anatomy of their patients and allows the best of the best become even better, ” says Peter Weinstock, MD, PhD. Dr. Weinstock is working on an in-house service that’s capable of constructing the models in short order. Using scans from the hospital’s radiology department and a 3D printer capable of super high resolution output (16 microns, to be exact), the models allow doctors to examine details of a baby’s skull or brain. What’s more, the machine can use multiple materials to sculpt the final result, simulating the unique facets bone, skin and blood vessels individually. For surgeons-in-training, the custom-made prints can illustrate the details of a medical condition rather than an average look. Filed under: Misc Comments Via: ABC News Source: Boston Children’s Hospital

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Boston Children’s Hospital preps surgeons with custom 3D-printed models

Instagram has already revealed a bit about how Hyperlapse turns your shaky handheld footage into smooth time-lapses, but what if you really want to know what makes it tick? Don’t worry — the company will happily satisfy your curiosity with a deep dive into the app’s inner workings. Ultimately, you’re looking at a significant extension of the Cinema tech used in Instagram itself. It’s still using your phone’s gyroscope to determine the orientation of the camera and crop frames to counteract any shakiness. The biggest change is in how Hyperlapse adjusts to different time-lapse speeds. It only checks the positioning for the video frames you’ll actually see, and that crop-based smoothing effect will change as you step up the pace. Importantly, Instagram’s approach contrasts sharply with what we saw in Microsoft’s similarly-named technique . There, Microsoft is calculating a 3D path through the scene and stitching together frames to create a seamless whole. That approach is potentially nicer-looking, but it’s a lot more computationally intensive; Instagram is taking advantage of your phone’s built-in sensors to create a similar effect without as much hard work. You don’t need to know the nitty-gritty about Hyperlapse to appreciate the effect it has on your clips, but the post is definitely worth a read if you have unanswered questions. Filed under: Cellphones , Internet , Mobile , Facebook Comments Via: 9to5Mac Source: Instagram Engineering Blog

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Instagram shows how Hyperlapse stabilizes your jittery videos

Typically, we send rovers to our planetary neighbors one at a time — but what if we sent a small team of smaller, less impressive robots instead? That’s the idea NASA is exploring at Kennedy Space Center with Swarmies: a quartet of four autonomous robots designed to work together to complete a single mission. Working as a colony of insects might, the four machines use a combination of WiFi, GPS and webcams to survey an area, assess its value and contact the other robots if assistance is needed. The robots are less advanced than a typical rover might by, but working in tandem allows them to cover more ground. It also serves as a security measure: if one rover fails , there are three left to complete the mission. “For a while, people were interested in putting as much smarts and capacity as they could on their one robot, ” says Kurt Leucht, one of the engineers working on the project. “Now people are realizing you can have much smaller, much simpler robots that can work together and achieve a task” Right now the machines are just prototypes, but if all goes well they may one day be used in search and rescues missions, or even scaled up for use in space. “Assuming this pays off, ” Leucht says, ” we know somebody’s going to take this and extend it and go beyond the four or five rovers we have here.” [Image credit: NASA/Dmitri Gerondidakis] Filed under: Robots , Internet Comments Source: NASA

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NASA’s ‘Swarmies’ are a squad of smaller, less intelligent rovers

DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-3 satellite has only been in space for less than half a month, but it’s already proven itself capable of shooting high-res images just like the company promised. Just a few days after Lockheed Martin flew it to orbit, the satellite quickly went to work, snapping pictures of Madrid, Spain. As you can see in the gallery below, it’s pretty easy to spot vehicles, rooftops and landmarks in these images. DigitalGobe says its services can benefit companies and governments that want to assess vehicles and monitor a region’s development (housing, infrastructure and road networks), among other things. Conservationists can also use it to monitor natural resources. While these first set of images are already great, the company will start delivering even clearer, closer satellite snapshot to all its customers by February next year. Comments Source: DigitalGlobe

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High-res imaging satellite shows off with crystal clear pics of Madrid