NASA is talking about a new joint project it’s going to be conducting with the Naval Research Laboratory that’s dedicated to studying the origin of solar energetic particles. The mission is called the UVSC Pathfinder, UVSC is short for Ultraviolet Spectro-Coronagraph Pathfinder. The mission is ready to launch and will head into orbit by tagging along with STPSat-6, which is … Continue reading
GM is hoping to take charging headaches out of EVs, with a plan to install more than 40,000 destination chargers around the US and Canada and potentially give some communities their first taste of electric vehicle infrastructure. The Dealer Community Charging Program will see each dealership across GM’s brands given up to 10 chargers each to deploy, at key locations … Continue reading
Adobe has unveiled its latest Photoshop update on desktop and iPad for its Adobe Max 2021 event, and as with the last few versions, the most interesting features are powered by AI. Chief among those is the “Hover Auto-masking Object Selection Tool” that allows you to select a scene object simply by hovering your mouse over it.
The feature is really as simple as that, as Adobe’s Sensei AI kicks in to determine the edges of an object and select it automatically with a single click. Adobe has promised that selections made either with the hover or other object selection tools “are now more accurate and preserve more details in the edges of a selection,” helping users save time.
The tool can detect most but not all objects in a scene, and Adobe said it’s constantly improving it to include additional object categories. If an object is not detected or only partially detected, you can drag a marquee over the areas you’d like to select, which is how the tool worked previously.
Along the same lines is another new feature called “mask all objects.” Also powered by Sensei AI, it simply scans the scene and automatically selects and masks every object in the scene. It can then create masks or objects without the need to do a lick of tedious masking work.
Last year, Adobe introduced Neural Filters that let you do things like smooth skin or make a photo look like a Van Gogh painting. For 2021, it has introduced more of those filters in beta, most notably the Landscape Mixer, Color Transfer and Harmonization. Landscape Mixer can essentially blend multiple landscape to create a new scene with desert elements replacing a seaside coastal scene, for example.
The most useful one, however, sounds like Color Transfer. It lets you take the colors, contrast and other elements from a photo you like and apply it to another photo, or “make this image look like that,” as Adobe puts it. That would remove a lot of the tedium or trying to match a photographer’s style, or at least give you a starting point toward the look you’re aiming for.
The last one, the Harmonization neural filter, makes it easier to composite two images. It overlays a foreground image onto a background, while automatically adjusting the hue and luminosity of the foreground image to match. Adobe also improved the existing neural filters, adding more realistic blurs to Depth Blur, while also improving the Superzoom, Style Transfer and Colorize filters.
Other new updates improved gradients, color management and HDR capabilities. Finally, Adobe has improved interoperability between Photoshop and Illustrator, letting you copy vector shapes from Illustrator and paste them into Photoshop, “all while maintaining editable attributes in Photoshop like fill, stroke, blend mode and opacity.” And when Photoshop can’t maintain editability from Illustrator because it doesn’t support a feature, “we try to maintain visual fidelity.”
Amazon’s internet satellites will be put to work expanding rural broadband coverage. CNBCreports Verizon is teaming with Amazon to improve fixed wireless internet access in rural areas in the US. The alliance will initially concentrate on expanding Verizon’s LTE and 5G service using Amazon’s Project Kuiper for “backhaul,” boosting coverage in areas with little or no high-speed data.
Amazon and Verizon later hope to offer unified internet access for industries worldwide, including smart farms and transportation. For now, they’re establishing technical requirements for rural broadband using Project Kuiper antenna tech already in development.
The two didn’t provide a timeline for this satellite-augmented service. Amazon recently lined up rocket launches for Project Kuiper, but it doesn’t expect to have half its satellites in low Earth orbit until 2026. The full constellation is expected no later than July 2029.
There’s an enemy-of-my-enemy aspect to this deal. Amazon and Verizon are racing to compete with SpaceX’s rapidly developing Starlink service — they both risk losing customers if Starlink claims too strong a foothold, including corporate clients like Google. All the same, Americans might not mind if this brings fast internet access to more parts of the country. Rural internet coverage is still far from complete, even with the FCC investing billions in 5G — this could fill in the gaps without having to wire as much of the countryside as before.
You might have seen headlines last year about a smart ring being used by NBA and WNBA players as part of reopening plans to keep athletes safe during the the pandemic. Maybe you read a few studies that mentioned a smart ring that might be able to detect infections—including covid-19—early. Or perhaps you saw it on …
Sony may have been the first big company to get ebook readers with electronic ink screens into the hands of consumers, Amazon’s Kindle has since become the de facto e-reader of choice for most buyers. The newest Kindle Paperwhite, the fifth generation of Amazon’s flagship e-reader, remains the best E Ink device you…
Benedict Cumberbatch reports on the status of Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Emilia Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor are teaming up for a new sci-fi romantic comedy. Meet Claire Redfield in a new Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City featurette. Plus, updates from Doctor Who, Percy Jackson, and…
The “13 Minutes” star called herself “patient zero in cancel culture.”
Most descendants of German Jews, however, are not so sentimental about the old country.
Virtual reality games and hardware have increased in popularity over the last few years, leading many fans of VR to hope for improved hardware. Pimax has revealed a new virtual-reality headset with impressive specifications called the Pimax Reality 12K QLED. That headset has eye-tracking, full-body tracking, and up to 200-hertz refresh rates. Pimax says the goals with its new headset … Continue reading
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