Feb 04
Feb 04
'Super' Sci-Fi Sports, Blocking Tech Giants, and the Worst Planet: Best Gizmodo Stories of the Week
Posted in: Today's Chili
It’s Super Bowl Sunday! There will be drinking (if you partake)! And wings (also if you partake)! And fervid screaming about sports! It’s one of the biggest of days of the year for many sports fans. But reader, if this isn’t you, no worries. Around here we know “super” pairs best with sci-fi, and this week we brought…
Feb 04
Feb 04
Vivo APEX 2019 concept smartphone
Posted in: Today's Chili
If there is one thing that everyone loves about concepts, it would be the very idea that you can basically think of everything that you would like to include without having to worry about whether it is feasible or possible or not just yet. Enter Vivo’s APEX 2019 concept smartphone that was recently announced. The APEX 2019 is the first 5G smartphone from Vivo that arrives in an elegantly simple and uniquely recognizable design, boasting of a curved surface waterdrop glass without any openings, seams or bezels whatsoever in order to present a minimalist concept.
Aiming to offer consumers a glimpse into the future of smartphone design and development with its super unibody design and Full-Display Fingerprint Scanning technology, such ideas that is possible to be implemented has certainly shown just how far Vivo has come as a smartphone manufacturer. The bezel will soon be a thing of the past with the FullView design, and without a single physical button, it is truly a unique user experience. How then does one turn it on? Well, there is Touch Sense technology that will merge capacitive touch and pressure-sensing capabilities together. Using well designed programming logic and software, the pressure sensors will be able to figure out whenever a user is pressing the frame while the capacitive touch determines its position for added accuracy.
There will no longer be any more USB ports but a MagPort will replace it instead. The MagPort is a magnetic power connector which will enable both charging and data transfer functions, offering a more streamlined user experience. The display itself can also be transformed into a speaker via Body SoundCasting technology, courtesy of its screen vibration function, hence doing away with the need for a speaker grill.
Powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 chipset with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of internal memory, this 5G handset is certainly drool-worthy. Now we can only sit tight and wait for word of an official release as the concept is realized as well as pricing details when it is officially revealed at MWC later this month.
Press Release
[ Vivo APEX 2019 concept smartphone copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]
Feb 04
Adam Levine Shows Nipples At Super Bowl, And Janet Jackson Fans Demand Justice
Posted in: UncategorizedThe Maroon 5 frontman’s exposed chest apparently isn’t a “wardrobe malfunction.”
Feb 04
With the recent cold snap here in the midwest, I’ve been downing cups of tea like they’re going out of style. At times, I even imagine taking a swim in some chai or mint tea since it smells so good. Of course, if you’re going to fill a swimming pool with tea, you’re going to need some pool floaties. Or is that Float-Teas?
The wacky minds over at Fred came up with these cute and clever tea infusers that look like inflatable pool floats. But not to worry about keeping these ones filled with air. They’re actually made from stainless steel, and offer a compartment inside for your loose tea. Simply fill, and float in a mug of hot water, and your mini pool will soon be filled with a delightfully-fragrant beverage.
The Float-Tea is available in pink flamingo, unicorn, and swan designs, and they’re just $15 each from Fred. Now if only tea water was blue or green instead of brown…
Feb 04
Machine learning and all its related forms of “AI” are being used to work on just about every problem under the sun, but even so, stemming the alarming decline of the bee population still seems out of left field. In fact it’s a great application for the technology and may help both bees and beekeepers keep hives healthy.
The latest threat to our precious honeybees is the Varroa mite, a parasite that infests hives and sucks the blood from both bees and their young. While it rarely kills a bee outright, it can weaken it and cause young to be born similarly weak or deformed. Over time this can lead to colony collapse.
The worst part is that unless you’re looking closely, you might not even see the mites — being mites, they’re tiny: a millimeter or so across. So infestations often go on for some time without being discovered.
Beekeepers, caring folk at heart obviously, want to avoid this. But the solution has been to put a flat surface beneath a hive and pull it out every few days, inspecting all the waste, dirt and other hive junk for the tiny bodies of the mites. It’s painstaking and time-consuming work, and of course if you miss a few, you might think the infestation is getting better instead of worse.
Machine learning to the rescue!
As I’ve had occasion to mention about a billion times before this, one of the things machine learning models are really good at is sorting through noisy data, like a surface covered in random tiny shapes, and finding targets, like the shape of a dead Varroa mite.
Students at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland created an image recognition agent called ApiZoom trained on images of mites that can sort through a photo and identify any visible mite bodies in seconds. All the beekeeper needs to do is take a regular smartphone photo and upload it to the EPFL system.
The project started back in 2017, and since then the model has been trained with tens of thousands of images and achieved a success rate of detection of about 90 percent, which the project’s Alain Bugnon told me is about at parity with humans. The plan now is to distribute the app as widely as possible.
“We envisage two phases: a web solution, then a smartphone solution. These two solutions allow to estimate the rate of infestation of a hive, but if the application is used on a large scale, of a region,” Bugnon said. “By collecting automatic and comprehensive data, it is not impossible to make new findings about a region or atypical practices of a beekeeper, and also possible mutations of the Varroa mites.”
That kind of systematic data collection would be a major help for coordinating infestation response at a national level. ApiZoom is being spun out as a separate company by Bugnon; hopefully this will help get the software to beekeepers as soon as possible. The bees will thank them later.
Feb 04
Crypto Exchange Says It Can't Repay $190 Million to Clients After Founder Dies With Only Password
Posted in: Today's Chili
Canadian crypto exchange QuadrigaCX says it cannot repay most of $190 million in client holdings after its 30-year-old founder Gerald Cotten, the only person who knew the passwords to its “cold storage,” unexpectedly died in India in December 2018, Coindesk reported on Friday.
Feb 04
Feb 04
A recent rumor claims that Canon has a major announcement that could take place this month. Now according to a report from Canon Watch, it seems that the upcoming camera announcement from Canon could be for a budget EOS R model that could be priced around the $1,600 mark.
Now we know that $1,600 isn’t exactly cheap, but it will be cheaper than the current EOS R offering and it is pretty affordable as far as full-frame mirrorless cameras are concerned. This is actually a bit of a surprise as most of the rumors we have been hearing so far have been talking about a high-end EOS R camera with a 100MP sensor.
Canon has been rumored to launch two EOS R bodies this year, so we suppose that one of them being a budget offering doesn’t come as a surprise. Canon launched the first EOS R camera last year which apparently was not the flagship model and is actually a mid-ranger, which is why the rumors are claiming that the company might actually have a budget and high-end model to cater to the different needs and budgets of various photographers.
Details about this budget EOS R are scarce at the moment, so take this report with a grain of salt for now but do check back with us in the middle of the month if you’d like more updates.
Canon’s Next EOS R Announcement Will Be For A Budget Model , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
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