Is a waterproof phone enough of an upgrade over the iPhone 6S?
Let's get right down to it: if Apple had launched the iPhone 7 in place of the iPhone 6S last year, it would probably have been the phone of the year.
iPhone 7 price and release date
Launched on September 16
Price for 32GB starts at $649 (£599, AU$1,079)
Cheaper than iPhone 7 Plus by $120 (£120, AU$150)
The iPhone 7 price starts at $649 (£599, AU$1,079) for the 32GB model. If you fancy upping your storage to 128GB you'll need to shell out $749 (£699, AU$1,229) – which is the same cost as the 64GB iPhone 6S when it launched.
Power users, meanwhile, will want to check out the $849 (£799, AU$1,379) iPhone 7 with an iPhone-first 256GB of storage, giving you masses of storage space.
The iPhone 7 inherits the same pricing structure as the iPhone 6S when it launched back in September 2015 – at least in the US and Australia it does; for those in the UK the aftershocks of Brexit are being felt, with a £60 price hike for the iPhone 7 over the 6S.
Solar energy is the cleanest, most abundant renewable energy source available. The U.S. has some of the world’s richest solar resources. Today's technology allows us to harness this resource in several ways, giving the public and commercial entities flexible ways to employ both the light and heat of the sun.
There are three primary technologies by which solar energy is commonly harnessed: photovoltaics (PV), which directly convert light to electricity; concentrating solar power (CSP), which uses heat from the sun (thermal energy) to drive utility-scale, electric turbines; and heating and cooling systems, which collect thermal energy to provide hot water and air conditioning.
These solar technologies directly produce electricity which can be used, stored, or converted for long-distance transmission. PV panels can be manufactured using a variety of materials and processes and are widely-used for solar projects around the world.
These technologies generate thermal (heat) energy for water & pool heating and space heating. Some people are surprised to learn that SHC technology can also be used for cooling. Solar heating technologies are cost-effective for customers in a variety of climates.
Using reflective materials like mirrors and lenses, these systems concentrate sunlight to generate thermal energy, which is in turn used to generate electricity. Similar to traditional power plants, many CSP plants are hundreds of megawatts (MW) in size and some can continue to provide power after sunset.
SpaceX Falcon 9 Returns Without a Hitch After Dragon Launch
Falcon 9 rocket on Sunday returned safely to Earth, touching down at Landing Zone 1 after launching the Dragon spacecraft into low-Earth orbit.
This is the second such landing at Cape Canaveral by a returning Falcon 9 rocket. The first was Falcon 9 Flight 20's return on Dec. 22. SpaceX also accomplished three successful drone-ship landings this spring.
"As with previous first stage land and drone-ship landings from SpaceX, this achievement is a testament to the leadership and innovation of America's commercial space industry," NASA spokesperson Cheryl Warner told TechNewsWorld.
The Dragon's 5,000-lb. payload included science and crew supplies, a space suit, and an international docking adapter that will enable commercial spacecraft to dock to the station when transporting astronauts as part of NASA's upcoming Commercial Crew Program.
The ISS crew will use the station's 58-foot robotic arm to reach out and capture the Dragon spacecraft, and attach it to the station at 7 a.m. ET on Wednesday.
Reusable Rockets on the Way?
"This is an exciting time, as we will all soon find out whether reusability really is the key to unlocking lower launch costs and higher levels of space activity, but it will probably be at least another year before early results can be measured and properly analyzed," noted Micah Walter-Range, director of research and analysis at theSpace Foundation.
"Before I say this is the age of reusable rockets, I would want to see them being reflown with paying customers or cargo aboard, and the companies making a higher profit as a result," he told TechNewsWorld.
"If it turns out that the cost of inspecting and refurbishing flown hardware eats up the cost savings from not having to build new hardware, there's no net gain," Walter-Range noted.
"In real terms, the cost to lift a pound into orbit has declined by about 90 percent since the beginning of the Space Age," noted Michael Jude, a program manager atStratecast/Frost & Sullivan.
"Launch costs will need to decline by nearly as much," he told TechNewsWorld. "Part of this will be the cost of launch hardware, but the real cost driver is the overhead associated with assembly, management and payload deployment."
Been There, Done That
There were two efforts to make reusable rockets in the 1980s, noted Jim McGregor, a principal analyst at Tirias Research.
One was a single stage to orbit -- a single-stage rocket that could launch and land in one piece. The other was the National Aerospace Plane, or NASP -- the Rockwell X-30.
The NASP was designed to "replace the space shuttle and be able to fly directly into space at Mach 25 (25 times the speed of sound)," McGregor told TechNewsWorld. "Unfortunately, the Clinton administration killed both efforts."
The return of the Falcon 9's first stage to land safely at Landing Zone 1 shows SpaceX "should reduce the number of future failures to recover the booster," he suggested. "It's a step in regaining lost momentum in our space technology, [and] will make delivering people and equipment to space less expensive."
What does SpaceX's success imply for NASA's future?
"NASA is really becoming irrelevant in terms of launch capability," Jude suggested. It's definitely the high-cost carrier."
NASA "is probably much more useful providing an incentive for commercial launch operations," he said. "If commercial carriers begin taking astronauts to the ISS, its costs will decline," and that might lead it to contract for most of its space initiatives.
The Next Challenge for SpaceX
SpaceX is planning an unmanned mission to Mars in 2018 or 2019, Jude said. NASA "is ponying up some money to help, but it will be a SpaceX operation."
The Mars mission will require a "fully functional Falcon 9 Heavy and a substantial number of improvements on the Dragon capsule," Jude noted. "If it can accomplish this, then it will be ahead of the competition."
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Our most manageable: IT can manipulate BIOS settings and configure systems with ample flexibility that organizational IT infrastructures require. You hold the keys: Dell Client Command Suite free tools allow flexible and automated BIOS or system configurations for your desktop fleet. Offsite? No sweat: Intel® vPro™ technology enables remote system management. Packaged to perform: Factory installed with Dell Command | Update automatically presents updates. Serves organizations of all sizes: Dell KACE System Management solutions available to meet demanding IT management needs.
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Ports and slots
Universal Audio Jack | Line out | USB Charge port | P2/Serial or Video port* | USB smart power on | Industry standard security slot | USB 3.0 ports | DP | HDMI
*Optional feature
This week on The CultCast: reports point to a big Mac event coming in October! We’ll tell you why we expect more than just overhauled MacBook Pros… Plus: we remember Steve Jobs, and what made him so damned good; why the jet black iPhone 7 is impossible to find; and stay tuned for drone chat, where we discuss the super cool new drones hitting the market.
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The Moto Z Play from Lenovo has the best battery life of any smartphone I’ve ever used. It’s so good and so superior to the competition that this
— the third member of the Moto Z family — just became my top recommendation if battery life is your most important criteria in choosing a smartphone. Smartphone makers have claimed again and again that their devices can last for “up to two days” on a single charge. It’s almost always braggadocio and overpromising. Inevitably you find yourself reaching for a charger by 6PM or, in the case of phablets, at the end of the night. But not this time.
Lenovo found an approach that allowed the company to make a phone you can charge up overnight, unplug the next morning, and use for two days straight. No asterisks. No buts. It’s been such a refreshing thing to experience over the few weeks I’ve spent with the Moto Z Play. And it turns out the formula is pretty simple! You combine a big battery, a new, mid-range Qualcomm processor that slowly sips power, and then “settle” for a 1080p screen and 3GB of RAM.
But the Moto Z Play rarely feels like you’re doing much settling. Even when you add together the negatives like an average camera, Verizon’s annoying bloatware, and Lenovo’s poor track record with software updates, the Moto Z Play’s affordable price, zippy performance, and unbelievable battery life still add up to something very compelling. And yes, unlike the Z and Z Force, there’s even a headphone jack built in. Forget the Z’s before it; this is the practical Moto Z that most people should get. It’s available exclusively from Verizon Wireless for a limited time for $408, but starting in October you can get it unlocked on GSM carriers (and free of carrier bloat) for $450.
The Moto Z Play is being positioned as the affordable Moto Z, but there’s little that's budget about its design. It's got a colorful 5.5-inch 1080p Super AMOLED display. The foundation remains a glass and aluminum sandwich with the same splash-proof coating as its pricier siblings. But this is the thickest (6.99mm) and heaviest (5.82oz) member of the Moto Z family, and it can feel a little clunky at times. There’s a USB-C jack on bottom with a headphone jack beside it — allowed by those thicker proportions — and the volume and power buttons on the phone’s right side feel just as nice and clicky here as on the other Zs. They’re still placed a little high and confusingly close together, though. The fast, not-a-home-button fingerprint sensor is also carried over from the main Moto Z.
You could probably argue that the Z Play feels slightly more premium than the flagship Moto Z; the glass looks a little classier than the pinstriped metal that’s on back of the regular model and Z Force, and fingerprints are much easier to wipe away. One odd thing I’ve observed is that the glass on front and back of the Z Play scratches more easily than other phones I’ve used recently. Also, I somehow wound up with a little tiny crack near the front-facing camera on my review unit, so don’t expect this to be anywhere near as durable as the Moto Z Force.
The ugliest thing about this design is the MotoMod connector pins, which are lined up in a rounded rectangle near the bottom of the phone’s backside. It’s much more of an eye sore than the subtler rows of dots on the other Zs. But since you’ll almost always have a case, style shell, or one of the MotoMods attached, you’ll never really have to look at it. Interestingly, MotoMods don’t latch onto the Moto Z Play quite as tightly as they do the other phones; they’re still not going to fall off unexpectedly, but you can wiggle them a little bit. I’m not going to spend much time on MotoMods here. They’re fun and "just work" as the old tech adage goes, yes. But the speaker remains the only one I’d maybe consider buying. The Moto Z Play is your cheapest option for checking MotoMods out, but "modular" attachments aren’t a convincing reason to buy this phone.
Neither is the camera. The Z Play has a 16-megapixel sensor with f/2 aperture, laser / phase detect autofocus, and 4K video recording on board. But the results are average for this $400ish price point: you’ll get okay-to-good shots in decent lighting conditions, but things get more iffy in other scenarios. The camera’s software tricks like "best shot" and a low-light mode (where you’ve got to hold the phone still for a couple seconds) can help out in some instances, and the shutter fires fairly quickly. But the Moto Z Play loses out to the OnePlus 3 and last year’s Nexus 5X in overall picture quality. It’s serviceable, but better options exist if you put camera performance above all else. Again, most people will be buying this phone for the battery first and foremost.
Inside the Moto Z Play is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 625 processor. It’s not the Snapdragon 820 used in top-tier smartphones — and it benchmarks accordingly. But in day to day use, it’s extremely difficult to pinpoint any performance issues. The Moto Z Play does just about everything briskly without noticeable hiccups. This is a dramatic difference from the Snapdragon 617 processor used in other midrange devices like the Moto G4 and BlackBerry’s DTEK50, where lag can become a frequent source of frustration.
For 90 percent of tasks, the Moto Z Play feels like a flagship-class device. The main exception is gaming, where the phone will struggle and stutter if you’re playing the latest titles, since the graphics horsepower just isn’t there. Stuff like Pokemon Go, The Room, Monument Valley, Two Dots, and Lara Croft Go is certainly playable, if not always perfect. The phone’s memory (3GB of RAM) means that background apps will need to reload more often when you return to them in multitasking, but it rarely stood out to me as an issue.
Compared to a speedier processor, the Snapdragon 625’s tradeoff in performance is usually imperceptible. But the gains in battery life are enormous. The endurance of this phone is unlike anything I’ve experienced before. Our Verge battery test would be rather useless in this situation since it would just spit out a marathon figure that's hard to contextualize.
So instead, I've been using the amount of time that the Z Play’s display is turned on as my measure of choice. The large majority of Android phones die somewhere between four and five hours of screen-on time for me, and many never even hit the latter mark. That's usually good for a day-ish of battery life on each charge. But the Moto Z Play hit new highs that changed my perception of how long a phone can and should last. Its display could be powered on at around 75 percent brightness for seven to eight hours between charges. That's just plain staggering. No one's going to look at their phone for eight hours per day, obviously. I'm an admitted smartphone addict and that number usually spread across two entire days for me — and sometimes into a third.
At times late in the day when I'd usually start getting anxious about my phone dying, I'd glance at the Moto Z Play and see that it still had an 80 percent charge in the tank. What?How? The Moto Z has the usual mix of battery saving modes and optimization settings, but I never turned any of that stuff on and was still left with my jaw on the floor. Nothing compares. Not a Galaxy S7 Edge. Not an iPhone 7 Plus. Those devices are far more technically advanced, but the Moto Z Play starts to make you wonder whether things like a 2K display or souped up processor are really worth it.
This kind of battery life opens up a different level of freedom in using your phone how you want on the go. Sure, stream a bunch of YouTube videos or a movie on Netflix; you’ll be fine. Don’t even worry about plugging it in if you need turn-by-turn directions in the car. The thing could probably chug through a cross-country flight without blinking. Separate from its supreme endurance, the Moto Z Play is just a pleasant phone to use thanks to Moto’s great software features on top of Android 6.0 Marshmallow. You’ve got Moto Voice and Moto Display here – just like on the other Moto Zs. Lenovo has said it will bring Android Nougat to the Z family sometime in Q4, but you really can’t count on the company for timely security patches. That’s disappointing, as is Verizon’s obnoxious level of crapware. But useless apps can be disabled; device security is a larger concern to think about.
Even with those caveats, I’m still a big fan of the Moto Z Play. Especially for $400! It’s bound to be overshadowed by the new iPhones, the ongoing Note crisis, and Google’s upcoming Pixel phones. And that’s a shame, really. Looking at this series alone, I think buying the ultra-thin Moto Z or toughened Moto Z Force over the Z Play would be a mistake. If you’re tired of being tethered to a phone charger or battery pack, the Moto Z Play is probably the phone for you. It’s nowhere close to perfect. But frankly, a phone that really lasts two entire days doesn’t need to be.
Oh… here’s the catch: one of the glasses contained bottled water, while the other was very recently fresh sewage, filtered using Gates’ latest philanthropic effort, the Omni Processor.
Omni Processor Water Purifier
In retrospect, it seems incredibly obvious that the solution to the question “how do we get potable water to all of Africa?” ended up being this process which involves high school level chemistry. On some level it’s very simple, hearkening back to basic principles that have been understood for centuries.
How much of a solution are we talking about? Well according to the Omni Processor’s website this machine can process a moving van’s worth of sewage each day and turn it into 10,800 liters of water a day. If you use the calculations from the Institute of Medicine, that’s enough drinking water to keep 3700 people healthy, per day!
Human beings need about 2.6 liters (11 cups) of water per day to stay healthy.
The energy from the generators seems to be a bonus! (I could produce enough energy for 50 small households per year.)
Let’s learn a bit more about the science behind the Omni Processor
The long and short of water purification
When you heat something up to dry it, pure water is separated in the form of steam and can be used to drive a generator creating electricity. Remember the invention of the steam engine in the 1800s!
To get the heat to dry the feces, they are burning that same dry waste as fuel. This is actually nothing new either; poop burns, and burns well, and for thousands of years in arid regions of the planet where there are no trees for firewood, people have been collecting, drying and burning animal dung to cook their food.
When the steam circulates through the generators, you can capture it and turn it back into liquid water. No pathogens can survive the temperatures that the steam goes through so the water comes out perfectly safe to drink!
Other than the initial energy needed to dry that very first batch, it’s a completely closed loop! (This is something we will be hearing more and more about as we try to re-vamp how resources are used on our planet.)
If you’d like to learn more about that exciting horizon, we have two fabulous articles that demonstrate the best of the Closed Loop possibilities. Check out our article called Cow Power, and then we will share with you this absolutely amazing new movement to end our Throw-away mentality in the most extraordinary way. That article is called How Far is Away?.
Scroll down to the bottom of this page to see a few more articles that will surprise and delight you.
The world really is going to be OK. Here at EverWideningCircles.com, we’ve written articles like this one to prove this is still an amazing world, despite what the negative news cycle tells us.
Join us daily for a bit of hope, fun, insight and innovation!
The Next Big thing? The memristor, a microscopic component that can "remember" electrical states even when turned off. It's expected to be far cheaper and faster than flash storage. A theoretical concept since 1971, it has now been built in labs and is already starting to revolutionize everything we know about computing, possibly making flash memory, RAM, and even hard drives obsolete within a decade.
The memristor is just one of the incredible technological advances sending shock waves through the world of computing. Other innovations in the works are more down-to-earth, but they also carry watershed significance. From the technologies that finally make paperless offices a reality to those that deliver wireless power, these advances should make your humble PC a far different beast come the turn of the decade.
In the following sections, we outline the basics of 15 upcoming technologies, with predictions on what may come of them. Some are breathing down our necks; some advances are still just out of reach. And all have to be reckoned with.
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