Via halo.wikia.com

Cortana, seen in Halo: Combat Evolved, working inside a completely different operating system.

I’ve known Cortana for a long time. Fans of the video game Halo will remember the spunky, feminine AI as a wartime companion, who has since been translated into real code conscripted into Windows 10. In the game, Cortana was a quick-witted, near-omniscient guide; in real life, not so much.

From my time spent talking to the AI-turned-personal assistant, I’ve felt exultant, frustrated, neglected and misunderstood. I may be too personally invested in technology, but there’s a very real emotional need to be understood when speaking to something, and repeated failure is harrowing. Now, this is just me speaking out loud to Cortana — I’ve had the opposite experience when using her text search features.

There are some things Cortana does very well— “she” is great at recognizing when to listen, reciting basic information like stock tickers and the weather, and like I said, text searching is great. (I know it’s silly, but I’ll refer to the software as a “she” for this article, as Microsoft does.)

Screenshot/ Windows 10

The new Windows 10 desktop with Cortana.

There are two modes of using Cortana: voice-activated search and text search. Launching Cortana herself is incredibly easy, she responds quickly and naturally to “Hey, Cortana” after you enable that feature in the settings. Computer peripheral maker Satechi is even marketing a Bluetooth “Cortana Button” that launches the personal assistant from afar.

To search by text in Windows 10, you can either select Cortana's dock with your cursor, or just hit the Windows 10 key. From there, Cortana will predict which application, document or web search you’re looking for each time you hit a new key, and you execute the search by hitting the Enter key. I found myself using this to launch apps more than the fan-favorite Start menu, but that’s also just how I prefer to launch apps normally. As a Mac user who uses Spotlight Search, and previously used the app Quicksilver since 2011, it’s great to see Windows incorporating this idea of being able to launch specific apps and documents with just a few keystrokes.

Screenshot

A look at Cortana.

You can also tell text Cortana all of your favorite sports teams, types of cuisine, stock to watch, and meetings on a feature called your Notebook, and she’ll keep you updated on that information in her bar next to the start button. If I were naming this area of the program, I would call it “Cortana’s Corral,” because that’s fun and most of the user experience isn’t. If Cortana doesn’t understand something, or can’t find it locally, it becomes a web search. That’s a feature that spans over text and speech, which I found to be the software’s biggest issue.

Anything I would ask Cortana that she didn’t understand became a simple web search. And Cortana didn’t understand a lot. Luckily, each search starts a new tab so previous browsing isn’t interrupted, but after trying to get directions home eight times in a row, the tabs start to accumulate. Then you have to close those tabs, which is a small yet time consuming task, and I only have so many seconds in my day. I would average asking a question five to eight times before I would get frustrated or finally figure out what Cortana wanted to hear. I also never got the feeling that voice Cortana was informed by the interests I had programmed into my Notebook, like the kinds of food or sports teams I liked. If I had to sum it up, the voice aspect of Cortana is like living with an omniscient significant other who never remembers your interests, but you know they could if they just tried. This would be a terrible thing to say about a human being, but I guess I hold computer programs to higher standards.

Cortana takes up some of the most envied software real estate in the world.

Cortana takes up some of the most envied software real estate in the world, right next to the Windows Start button. Microsoft has more than a 85 percent marketshare in the operating system market, and users are jumping over to the free Windows 10 upgrade at around 16 people per second. (If that number is the average today, more than 1,300,000 people will install Windows 10 in 24 hours.) All in all, Microsoft made a good move putting Cortana in the middle of Windows 10. As she improves (which she definitely will), and “artificial intelligence” becomes a more intelligent, Microsoft might see itself ahead of the curve, somewhere they haven’t been in quite a while. Plus, it's already way better than Clippy, Microsoft Office's initial attempt at a digital helper.

I’m putting Cortana through her paces because she has stark competition. When I thought I was being too intense with the questions I asked, like how to get home after work, I would run the same question by Siri, Apple’s AI assistant for the iPhone, and get an instant result. Siri has had more time to “get to know me,” but Cortana didn’t even ask where home was. And that’s what we want in a digital personal assistant that we carry everywhere, right? That's what all these programs like Google Now, Siri, and even latecomers like Hound are striving for. We want something that can keep track of our life with the precision of a machine, and knows what information it needs to give our hectic days little more continuity. And it’s coming. But it’s not here now.

Seoul National University

A water strider next to the first robot to use surface-tension dominated water jumping

Since Biblical times, people have been fascinated with the idea of walking on water. Now researchers have built a robot that can jump on it.

In a study published today in Science, researchers from Seul University and Harvard University built an insect-sized robot that mimics the way that water striders, also known as "Jesus Bugs," jump on the surface of a body of water.

The team collected water striders from a local pond, and used high-speed cameras to record the insects jumping on water in buckets in the laboratory. They noticed that the insects don’t simply push down on the water, but gradually accelerate their legs so as not to break the surface tension. The striders also sweep their legs inward before each jump, to maximize the amount of time they touch the surface, which increases the force of their pushes.

Using these principles, the researchers developed an ultra light robot with a 2 centimeter long body inspired by origami. Its 5 centimeter long wire legs are curved at the tips like a real water strider's and coated with a material that repels water. A flea-inspired jumping system called a torque reversal catapult launches the robot from the surface of the water up to 14.2 centimeters in the air, which is similar to water striders. At the moment, the strider-bot can only jump once, and can’t land upright. But it's still quite impressive.

“Looking at nature is a good starting point to improving robot systems because they have already optimized their behavior through millions of years of evolution,” says Je-sung Koh, co-lead author of the study.

Although Koh and his team were driven by the mere challenge of successfully building a robot that can jump on water, he said that they would like to build upon this design to develop a robot that can not only jump on the water, but that could also swim and perform other complex tasks. A future strider-bot might be used in swarms for environmental monitoring on rivers or oceans, for search and rescue in disaster areas, or even military surveillance, he says. However, other technologies would also have to be miniaturized and lightweight so that the robot's weight could still be supported by water tension.

The first robot that was able to jump on water was built in 2012 by engineers at Harbin Institute of Technology in China. However, unlike the new tiny strider-bot, the older robot is six inches long and about 1,000 times as heavy. The older jumping robot also has a different design. It uses six paddle-like feet made out of water repellant nickel foam, which allows it to balance and float on the water, as well as hop 14 centimeters high and 14 inches forward.

Although many articles at the time compared it to a water strider, the hopping mechanism is closer to basilisk lizards, which don’t use surface tension, but rather water pressure that resists its motion as it pushes off the water with its feet.

Koh’s strider-bot is the first ever to use surface-tension dominated jumping like real water striders. The simple design of the robot also allows it to be made at relatively low cost.

“It was an amazing research experience for me,” Koh says, “We can make anything we can imagine in the world.”

Aclima/ Screenshot

The three Google Street View cars used to monitor air pollutants in Denver.

The latest news with Google’s Street View cars isn’t about mapping for its eventual autonomous successors, or even taking new photos of the world: it’s about pollution.

Environmental monitoring company Aclima announced a partnership with Google Tuesday, to deploy Street View cars that measure a wide array of pollutants in the air. The cars will now use sensors developed by Aclima to measure nitrogen dioxide, black carbon, ozone and particulate matter, amongst others. The data isn't being published as of now, but Google's lead on the Aclima partnership, Karin Tuxen-Bettman, told NPR that it will be made available on Google Earth and other tools in the future.

Initial tests by the two companies were carried out in August 2014, when three Street View cars tested Denver’s metro area during a study for NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency. The cars drove for 750 hours, plotting 150 million data points, and sensed chemicals like carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitric oxide, and methane. Aclima created a detailed profile of Denver’s pollution throughout the day, and their next efforts will focus on testing the San Francisco Bay Area.

Aclima/ Screenshot

A look at Aclima's "Day in the Life of the City"graphic.

Google has worked with Aclima in the past indoors as well; 21 Google offices are outfitted with an array of sensors, and process 500,000,000 points of indoor environmental quality data every day.

This partnership also comes on the heels of a Google pledge to reduce its own environmental impact. The company joined 12 other industry leaders in signing the American Business Act on Climate Pledge on Monday, pledging to power its Bay Area headquarters on 100 percent renewable energy and reduce water consumption.

You can watch more about the 2014 Denver pollution survey here:

The European Space Agency has just released a slew of new images from Philae, the little lander that was supposed to touch down on a comet earlier this year. But the history-making moment didn’t go quite as planned. After failing to anchor into Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the spacecraft bounced around a few times until finally skidding to a halt on the rim of a crater. The Rosetta mission team hasn't managed to get a stable communication link with the battered lander.

The images from its initial descent, which we’ve combined into a gif, were snapped approximately every ten seconds. The first shows Philae’s view from a distance of almost two miles, and the last from a distance of about 30 feet. For a size reference, the big boulder in a few of the images measures 16 feet high.

Philae did manage to conduct some science experiments, despite its rocky (no pun intended) landing. It even managed to detect organic molecules before entering a long hiberation.

Facebook

A look at Facebook's new internet-beaming aircraft, Aquila.

While Project Loon found an initial home in Sri Lanka, Facebook has its own update for its plan to provide wireless internet from the skies.

Mark Zuckerberg announced the completion of Aquila, Facebook’s first full-scale aircraft designed to deliver wireless internet with lasers, as a part of their project with Internet.org. Aquila is solar-powered, weighs “less than a car,” and has the wingspan of a Boeing 737, according to the Facebook post. Mock-ups we’ve seen in the past make it look like a giant boomerang, but the full design resembles more of a slimmed down B-2 stealth bomber. "Aquila" is also a constellation, named after the bird that carried Zeus' thunderbolts to battle in Greco-Roman mythology.

Facebook has teased the technology they’re using to send the signal, long-range lasers, but today Zuckerberg gave some solid statistics. Aquila will be able to send data at 10 gigabits per second at a distance of more than 10 miles. The internet-providing drone is supposedly precise, too, being able to connect with “a point the size of a dime” at that 10-mile range. In an accompanying video, engineers say that the drone will fly from 60,000 to 90,000 feet above the Earth and stay in the sky 3 months at a time, comparable to Google’s Project Loon balloons. NASA has used lasers to beam information to the moon, but that wasn't from a mobile, solar-powered drone circling remote regions.

“Using aircraft to connect communities using lasers might seem like science fiction. But science fiction is often just science before its time,” Zuckerberg writes.

Facebook will be testing Aquila over the coming months, and hopefully we can see it in action soon.

Black holes are full of conundrums. Like, what would happen if you threw a book inside one of these gravity wells? The theory of general relativity (the physics laws that govern really big things in the universe) predicts that the book would disappear forever. But quantum mechanics (the laws that govern really small things) says that's impossible--that energy, matter, and information can neither be created nor destroyed. They can get transformed, but the total amount has to stay the same.

To try to solve this paradox, a team of physicists has come up with a way that someone could theoretically recover information from a black hole. There’s a catch though: the experiment only works on one bit of quantum information (or qubit) at a time. That’s not a lot of information.

Although the study hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet, it is posted on arXiv so the researchers could collect feedback from their colleagues before submitting it to a journal. It’s also not the kind of experiment scientists are likely to try out--it’s just meant to be a fun thought experiment. “In essence, our protocol amounts to a teleportation scheme,” they write.

Here’s how it works.

“In essence, our protocol amounts to a teleportation scheme.”

Let’s pretend Alice is just casually hanging out near a black hole, measuring its properties, when all of a sudden—oops!—she drops an electron into the black hole. That electron was originally spinning in a specific direction--say either up or down--and Alice wants to find out which. Is that information, its spin state, lost forever? No, says Aidan Chatwin-Davies, a grad student at Caltech. According to his team’s paper, Alice needs to collect some Hawking radiation in order to find out the electron’s spin state.

Hawking radiation is thermal radiation that scientists think might leak out of black holes. Although nothing can escape a black hole, that does not prevent a black hole from emitting radiation. Physics theory suggests that if you stopped feeding a black hole, it would eventually shrink and vanish because it loses mass through this type of radiation. Stephen Hawking originally posited that this radiation would contain no information--just heat--but the majority of scientists, including Hawking himself, no longer think that.

“A prevailing opinion is that Hawking radiation isn’t totally thermal,” says Chatwin-Davies. It might contain some information, “so if you examined it, you’d be able to reconstruct whatever you tossed into the black hole.”

The black hole is constantly generating Hawking radiation. But the interesting thing here is that, according to theory, for every Hawking particle that leaves the black hole, another version of that particle falls into the black hole. The two particles exist on separate sides of the black hole’s event horizon, or boundary. They are physically separated, but their properties are linked, or entangled. No matter how far apart they are, their properties will always be opposite. So if the Hawking particle on the outside spins up, for example, then the particle on the inside will spin down, and vice versa.

Although nothing can escape a black hole, that does not prevent a black hole from emitting radiation.

That means that when Alice collects one Hawking particle on the outside of the black hole, it can tell her something about its partner on the inside of the black hole.

So she collects one Hawking particle. She also measures the black hole again. She can measure its charge, mass, and spin, which would have changed slightly when the electron and the Hawking radiation particle fell in.

By finding the difference between the black hole’s original state and its current state, Alice can tell how much the two particles changed the black hole. Then she can measure the spin state of Hawking particle that came out (which remember is linked to the Hawking particle that got eaten by the black hole). By subtracting the spin of the Hawking particle, she knows exactly the spin state of the electron she threw in—without ever having measured it directly.

Voila! The total information in the universe is conserved. That wasn't so hard, right?

Small Galaxy, Big Hole

NASA, ESA, STScI-PRC14-41a

Artist's illustration of a black hole inside the dwarf galaxy M60-UCD1.

This isn’t the first technique scientists have proposed to extract information from a black hole, and it certainly won’t be the last.

This particular method only works for one bit of quantum information at a time—so just one particle’s spin or polarization, for instance. If Alice threw in two or three particles, or tried to measure more than one property at the same time, it wouldn’t work. But she could measure one first and then the other.

The idea also doesn’t work if the black hole has a firewall—a theoretical wall that burns up anything that crosses into the black hole. If the firewall exists, it would be impossible for the Hawking radiation particles to carry much useful information.

Not to crunchy, not too soggy... but just right

cyclonebill via Wikimedia Commons

You’d have to be crazy not to love cereal in milk. But the longer those crispy puffs or flakes sit in that milky bowl, the soggier they become, and our enthusiasm gives way to disgust. Now a researcher from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst has figured out when and how that happens, according to a review study published yesterday in Journal of Food Science.

When you pour cereal from the box to your bowl, the cereal is brittle and easy to break (otherwise known as crunchy). Once you add the milk, the cereal soaks up the moisture, losing its brittleness. Somewhere in between the dry, brittle cereal and its soggy state where it’s falling apart, the cereal becomes tougher—the moisture from the milk increases the amount of force the cereal can take without buckling, which the study author dubbed “moisture toughening.” Most people don’t know about that part because cereal, like other dry foods, doesn’t suddenly change from brittle to soggy—rather, it loses its crunchiness over a period of time, as moisture increases.

Looking at the results of several experiments conducted over decades, the study author looked at the crunchiness for Peanut Butter Crunch, cheese balls, and pork rinds also known as “chicharon” when put in water. These three are “crunchy foods that have very different chemical composition,” the author wrote, which made them good points of comparison. When placed in water, all three showed the typical transition from crunchy to soggy over time, but the cereal and cheese puffs had similar “tough” states in between, the reason for which can’t be determined from what’s known about their chemistry.

This kind of information could be useful for food manufacturers working to get that crunch just right. It might be good for you to know, too, so that you can find your cereal’s sweet spot between brittle, tough, and soggy.

Red and White Fleet ferry, San Francisco

Hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles are beginning to hit California roads in small numbers, and soon one or more will be traversing its waters too.

Sandia National Laboratories and the Red and White Fleet ferry company plan to operate a "high-speed" hydrogen fuel-cell ferry boat in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The project will also require the world's largest hydrogen fueling station, the partners say.

Called the SF BREEZE--for "San Francisco Bay Renewable Energy Electric vessel with Zero Emissions"--the boat will be purpose built, rather than converted from an existing vessel.

It was determined that modifying an existing passenger ferry would not be practical.

The fuel cells and hydrogen storage tanks that will be used will be heavier than a comparable internal-combustion propulsion system, so one of the project's goals will be to create a suitable design to accommodate them.

Red and White Fleet ferry, San Francisco

The boat will also be fast--all the better to compete with cars, public transportation, and other ferries.

Funding for a feasibility study will be furnished by the U.S. Maritime Administration, while naval architecture firm Elliot Bay Design Group will design the vessel, with input from the U.S. Coast Guard and Bureau of Ships. All of the entities involved believe fuel cells have a place on the waves.

They claim fuel-cell ships will not only reduce air pollution, but also lessen the risk of environmental contamination from fuel spills.

Of course, like fuel cell cars, a fuel-cell ferry will need a source of hydrogen.

The SF BREEZE will consume an estimated 1,000 kilograms (2,204 pounds) of hydrogen per day, and will be supported by a station that can dispense 1,500 kilograms (3,306 pounds) per day.

That will make this station about twice the size of the current largest hydrogen fueling station in the world, officials say. It will also be the first of its kind to support both land and marine use.

Program backers hope the economy of scale from dispensing such large amounts of hydrogen will lower overall prices on the local market, too.

Once an initial feasibility study is completed, design and construction of the ferry boat and fueling station will start.

The parties involved did not discuss a timeline for the launch of hydrogen-powered ferry service, but noted that they will need to secure additional funding for it to proceed.

Ampere battery-electric ferry in operation in Norway

Meanwhile, in Norway, the world's first passenger and car ferry powered solely by a battery entered service last month.

Constructed for ferry operator Norled by Norwegian shipbuilder Fjellstrand, the ferry covers 6-kilometer (3.6-mile) route 34 times a day.

Each trip takes about 20 minutes--but consumes only 150 kWh per route.

Ampere battery-electric ferry in operation in Norway

The electric ferry is viewed as the first test of a technology that could ultimately meet the needs of more than 50 existing ferry routes.

Siemens and Norled together built three battery packs, each of 260 kilowatt-hours. One powers the boat itself; the other two are located on piers at each end of the route.

The local grid is weak enough that the pierside batteries effectively trickle-charge from the grid during the day, then recharge the ferry's onboard pack when it docks.

That pack is recharged directly from the grid at night, when service has stopped and local demand is at its lowest.

The energy cost of running the route has dropped 60 percent, Norled said, and total annual electric consumption is estimated at 2 million kWh.

A traditional diesel ferry running the same route would burn at least 1 million liters of diesel fuel each year, emitting 15 metric tons of nitrous oxides and 570 tons of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.

Ampere battery-electric ferry in operation in Norway

More From Motor Authority
Clarkson, Hammond, May Confirmed For New Show On Amazon Prime
Ford Says Shelby GT350R Lap Times Match 911 GT3, Beat Camaro Z/28
2016 Ford Focus RS Price Leaked, Might Start At $35,730
2016 Mazda MX-5 Miata First Drive

Cessna 172 About To Crash

NASA/David C. Bowman

Yesterday, in Hampton, Virginia, about three hours south of Washington, DC, NASA researchers slung a plane into a harness and then sent it crashing into the ground. The researchers were specifically testing Emergency Locator Transmitters, which notify rescuers in the event of a crash. And what a crash they got!

Here’s the crash in .gif form:

Again, slower and from the other side:

This test was the second of three. In the first, the airplane was at a lower height and crashed onto cement, which tested the plane's impact and meant the plane skidded forward somewhat. For this test, the plane hit sand and ate dirt. Soil, it turns out, is really good at absorbing high-energy impacts, which is bad news for the crash test dummy pilots, who were forcefully jostled about as the plane slammed into the ground. In a real life crash like this, it’s likely the people onboard the plane would need immediate medical attention--on account of all the limbs they broke.

The test was successful, in that the plane broke and the emergency locator transmitters on board blasted the plane's location. When NASA has finished the third round of testing, the information gained from all three will enable them to recommend better ways and places to install the transmitters on planes.

Watch the full crash, over and over again from many angles, below:

[NASA]

Planet HD 219134b, a super hot rocky world just 21 light years away

NASA/JPL-Caltech

The galaxy is a pretty big place, so NASA's announcement today that scientists have discovered a solid, rocky planet located just 21 light years away from our own solar system is the cosmic equivalent of suddenly noticing a longtime neighbor just down the street. The world, unflatteringly named HD 219134b, is 1.6 times the size of Earth, but it's 4.5 times as massive. And it's much hotter, with a surface temperature estimated to be about 800 degrees Fahrenheit (427 Celsius), as the AFP reported — far too hot to support life as we know it.

The reason for the high surface temp is primarily because the planet orbits much closer to its star than Earth is to the Sun, with a year equivalent to just three Earth days.

Still, the discovery — made using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the HARPS-North instrument on the Galileo National Telescope in the Canary Islands — is quite exciting, especially because it's the closest planet yet found that can also be seen passing in front of its star (transiting). This makes it possible for scientists to study it in fine detail using telescopes on the ground and in space, which is exactly what they plant to do next, potentially uncovering the chemical composition of its atmosphere and other features about conditions on its surface. "This exoplanet will be one of the most studied for decades to come," said Michael Werner, Spitzer project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a statement.

There is a closer exoplanet (that's a planet orbiting another star than the Sun) called GJ674b that's just 14.8 light years away, but it hasn't been observed transiting, making it more difficult to study. All the more reason to raise a celebratory toast to our new neighbor, HD 219134b.

Comet 67P, "The Rubber Ducky Comet"

ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM – CC BY-SA IGO 3.0

The Rosetta orbiter took this pic on July 14, 2015.

The little spacecraft that couldn’t quite land on a comet has nevertheless sent back a wealth of data. The Philae lander was supposed to become the first spacecraft to touch down on a comet in November, after a 10-year journey, but things didn't go as expected. The spacecraft bounced away from its original landing site, eventually coming to rest in a dark area near the edge of a crater. Without enough sunlight to charge its solar panels, Philae operated for about 60 hours on battery power, then entered a long hibernation.

Well, it turns out Philae put those 60 hours to good use. Today Science published seven whole papers full of juicy information about Comet 67P. Here are the most important things we learned from the data deluge.

• Philae’s landing was actually too soft. Like a sandbox, Philae’s original landing site appears to have been covered in several inches of a powdery dirt, the New York Times notes. The loose material made it hard for the lander’s foot screws to gain purchase. That, combined with the failure of its harpoon system and downward thrusters, meant the lander couldn’t secure itself to the comet’s surface.

• Other parts of the comet are not soft at all. Although the comet’s soft dirt may be up to 6.5 feet deep in some places, in other places, like the spot where Philae came to rest, are hard as rock. This isn’t super surprising, because comets tend to be stuck-together balls of rock, dust, and ice. Nevertheless, Philae’s experience could someday help in asteroid mining, as Wired points out.

• The comet is sort of like a sponge. Do you ever feel empty inside? Well, Comet 67P does. Philae shot some radio waves through the comet to probe its internal structure, and found that up to 85 percent of its interior is empty. In other words, the comet is full of holes.

• It’s rich. In organics, that is. That’s not a super big deal because, really, organics are everywhere these days. The Rosetta orbiter and Philae itself detected organics last year, but the latest results indicate that there are even more organic compounds there than we thought. Philae found 16 in total, including 4 that have never before been detected on a comet. The new findings lend support to the idea that comets could have seeded life on Earth (though there’s no way to say for sure whether that’s what actually happened).

Not bad for a broken lander! And who knows, there may be more to come.

In June, Philae woke up from its 7-month hibernation to say hello. That’s about all it was able to say, because the Rosetta orbiter can’t establish a good enough communication link with Philae to receive all its data. But the scientists haven’t given up yet, and with any luck the situation may change as the comet nears its closest approach to the sun in August.

Philae Is Bad At Taking Selfies

ESA/Rosetta/Philae/CIVA

From its final landing site, Philae snapped this picture of its foot

Apple

Apple Music, the tech giant's streaming service, launched June 30.

Apple Music, the streaming service launched in late June, was supposed to be the company’s simple solution to music: you pay, and can stream the music you want from a robust library. But now it's come to light that the service may be a little more confusing, and a lot less powerful, than advertised.

iTunes Match was Apple’s answer to cloud streaming music before Apple Music existed. You could upload your music, and for $24.99/year, access that music from all your iDevices. It used “acoustic fingerprinting” to analyze each song, and give it the appropriate title, album, genre, etc.

It turns out that the new Apple Music is only using tags (little bits of metadata with information about songs, such as title and artist) to identify the music files it plays, as opposed to the “acoustic fingerprinting” used in iTunes Match. Acoustic fingerprinting analyzes a song's audio and creates a special unique identifier correlated with that song.

So what? Not using fingerprinting means that Apple Music has little way to tell the difference between different versions of the same songs, live and studio albums, and maybe even covers. They're all getting mixed around in Apple Music servers. When you request a track, you might not get the music you want, or think you were going to get.

Kirk McElhearn, who first posted about how Apple Music matching worked, says that no matter what the song was titled, iTunes Match would still know what it was.

“It doesn’t matter what tags files have: you could have, say, a Grateful Dead song labeled as a song by 50 Cent, and iTunes Match will match the Grateful Dead song correctly,” he wrote. When McElhearn tested Apple Music's matching by renaming files, Apple Music would delete his original files and replace them with the wrong songs.

Other users have been saying the same thing: Reddit user Technicolours reported all of their live albums were being played as studio versions through Apple Music.

Even Macworld executive editor Susie Ochs had similar difficulties with the service, which replaced live tracks with studio versions.

Twitter/ Susie Ochs

Apple has never been known for their easy-to-use cloud services. Try to figure out the difference between iCloud Photo Library and Photo Stream on an iPhone, and you’ll see why. But the question remains: why has Apple decided to move away from a backend service that worked?

Marco Arment, co-host of the Accidental Tech Podcast and developer of the Overcast podcast app, wrote in a blog post that users shouldn’t let these “cloud matching ‘features’” near their music collection.

“It’s as if nobody who made this implementation decision had ever encountered remasters, re-recordings, clean versions, live performances, or the many other extremely common reasons why two very different audio recordings might have the same artist and title,” Arment wrote.

Sectran Security armored truck

Have you ever thought about the carbon footprint of your money?

Everything we use has to be transported from place to place, including the cash in our wallets.

And the big, hulking diesel armored trucks that move money around are hardly the most fuel-efficient vehicles.

Hoping to temper the all-important emphasis on security with some green thinking, three companies have just unveiled a cleaner alternative to the traditional armored truck.

The 26,000-pound vehicle is a plug-in hybrid with a natural-gas internal-combustion engine, according to Autoblog.

Six trucks were converted by Efficient Drivetrains Inc. and North American Repower, and will begin hauling valuables around the Los Angeles area with Sectran Security next year.

Clean Energy Fuels natural gas refueling station Long Beach, California.

Efficient Drivetrains has already tried to market a plug-in hybrid SUV in Asia, while North American Repower specializes in natural-gas conversions.

An armored truck seemed like a good platform for the joint project because these vehicles most of their time in urban traffic, making many stops for deliveries.

During stops, a standard truck's diesel engine is typically left idling for security purposes.

However, California regulations limit idling to 5 minutes, the partners say. The powertrain's electric component offers a way around that issue, while the natural gas power helps to reduce emissions while running the engine.

The demonstration fleet of six trucks will conserve 31,000 gallons of diesel per year, and cut emissions by 99.9 percent, the companies claim.

2015 Chevrolet Impala Bi-Fuel Natural Gas

Natural gas has proven to be more acceptable as a fuel for fleets than individual passenger cars.

The lack of public fueling stations makes owning a natural-gas car somewhat inconvenient, but fleet operators can secure supplies of the fuel to distribute to their vehicles.

After 15 years of selling a natural-gas powered Civic sedan, Honda has withdrawn that model for 2016 after concluding that prospects for natural gas-fueled passenger vehicles remained dim.

Since most fleet vehicles operate within confined service areas, operators count on them not straying too far from a centralized fueling source, often "back at base" every night.

The armored-truck project received a $3 million grant from the California Energy Commission, along with a matching amount of private funds.

While this project will only demonstrate these unusual vehicles, perhaps more will be built if security companies show interest.

More From Green Car Reports
2016 Cadillac CTS-V First Drive: Video
Ford GT Race Car Undergoes Testing, Sounds Nasty: Video
Youxia Electric Tesla Clone From China: So Bad It Makes Us Laugh
Tesla Model 3, To Be Revealed In March, Might Have 300-Mile Range: Report

Edgerton Lab/UCLA

A 42-year-old man who was paralyzed following a wrestling injury was able to voluntarily move his legs with a new approach from researchers at UCLA.

Researchers at UCLA have done something they didn’t think was possible: without the use of surgery, they helped people with severe paralysis voluntarily move their legs — something that's never been accomplished before. While it may be years before this new approach could be widely used, the researchers now think patients with severe spinal cord injuries may be able to recover multiple body functions, which could greatly improve their quality of life. The research was published yesterday in the Journal of Neurotrauma.

The video below shows one patient's movement before and after treatment.

Over the past few years, researchers have been looking for ways to stimulate muscle movement in paralyzed patients. Last year, V. Reggie Edgerton, the lead author of this study, used epidural electrical stimulation to help paralyzed patients move their legs, hips, ankles, and toes. However that procedure requires a surgically implanted device to work.

Earlier this year, Edgerton and another group of researchers were able to allow partially paralyzed patients to move their legs on their own using a new treatment that didn’t require a surgical implant. Seeing this, Edgerton eagerly tried out a similar approach on patients with severe paralysis.

The study was extremely small, only five patients were tested. However, Edgerton believes the results may lead to major advances for the 6 million Americans who live with paralysis and the almost 1.3 million who have spinal cord injuries.

“The potential to offer a life-changing therapy to patients without requiring surgery would be a major advance; it could greatly expand the number of individuals who might benefit from spinal stimulation,” said Roderic Pettigrew, director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, the organization that funded the study, in the UCLA press release.

For the study, Edgerton and his team used a technique called transcutaneous spinal cord stimulation where they placed electrodes on a patient’s lower back and sent a unique pattern of electrical currents through the electrodes. The patients' legs were held up by braces that hung from the ceiling. After a few sessions, the patients were able to voluntarily extend their legs during the stimulation. To increase this movement, the researchers gave them a drug called buspirone, which had been found to induce leg movement in mice with spinal cord injuries, during the final four weeks of the study.

By the end of the study, all five patients, while on the drug, were able to voluntarily move their legs without needing stimulation. Edgerton thinks they were able to achieve this so quickly because the stimulation had “reawakened” dormant, but functioning, neural connections.

According to the press release, Edgerton thinks this new approach could be more accessible to patients as it doesn’t require surgery and it’s likely to cost one-tenth the amount that the current surgical procedure costs. In the future, Edgerton hopes to use this approach on people who have severe, but not complete paralysis as they think that set of patients is likely to improve even more from this treatment.

Ebola virus infects a monkey cell.

NIAID/Flickr

At this time last summer, the horrific and often fatal disease Ebola was ravaging West Africa in the deadliest outbreak of its kind in recorded history, even causing undue panic around the world in areas at low risk, such as the United States. While the worst spread of the disease has been contained, the threat of a future Ebola outbreak persists. But in an extremely promising medical advance, scientists are now saying that an experimental Ebola vaccine with 100 percent effectiveness has been developed.

A paper published today in the British medical journal Lancet reports that the vaccine, which has been tested in Guinea since March 2015, has shown extraordinary results so far, with 4,123 people voluntarily vaccinated and all safe from the disease.

The joint study—conducted by international teams from the World Health Organization, the Guinean Health Ministry, Doctors Without Borders, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health and the nonprofit Epicentre research center, among many others—has been 100 percent effective in vaccinated individuals. “This is an extremely promising development,” said Dr. Margaret Chan, the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), in a statement issued earlier today. However, she and the reviewers of the study are keen to point out that these are preliminary results, and advise the trial to continue.

The medical authorities carrying out the trial have been using what’s known as a “ring vaccination strategy” to test the vaccine’s efficacy. This involves inoculating all known contacts of an infected individual, thereby creating a ‘ring’ of inoculation around the disease and stunting its spread. This technique was used to tremendous success in the eradication of smallpox.

John-Arne Røttingen, Director of the Division of Infectious Disease Control at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, also noted in the WHO's statement that it was this strategy in particular that has allowed for them to follow the dispersed epidemic in Guinea, which has dwindled significantly (The WHO reported seven cases in the affected region of West Africa last week—the lowest number of new patients in over a year) and to continue testing.

Furthermore, while VSV-EBOV has shown 100 percent efficacy in individuals, more conclusive evidence is necessary to prove the vaccine’s ability to protect larger populations from the disease, according to the WHO. This trait, known as “herd immunity,” is especially vital in order for the vaccine to be truly successful.

The trial faced some obstacles in the beginning, particularly for using no placebos, and for carrying out testing and research in the midst of an emergency.

Some have argued that the results could be skewed positively because volunteers knew they were receiving the actual vaccine. This raised a number of questions on ethical and scientific grounds, but were ultimately dismissed by the medical teams involved for practical reasons.

Jeremy Farrar, director of Wellcome Trust, a major supporter of the research, commented on this in an interview with the New York Times saying the fact that the trial still achieved positive results in spite of various constraints and limitations, actually vindicates the design and approach taken to the study.

The latest Ebola outbreak in West Africa —centered largely on Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea— is the most widespread and deadliest in recorded history, having killed over 11,000 people in the span of less than two years. Although the outbreak is down significantly today, there have been a number of high risk instances in Sierra Leone and Guinea recently, with over 2,000 contacts still within their 21 day monitoring period, so the early success of VSV-EBOV could be instrumental in bringing this current outbreak down to zero.

This month, the WHO is expected to review the results of the study and make recommendations for future use. It is expected that this vaccine will likely be used to stop future outbreaks rather than vaccinate whole populations.

Regardless of the specifics of how it is to be used in the future, the significance of this trial on emergency health strategies going forward cannot be understated. The speed and efficiency with which this vaccine was developed and tested in the midst of a global medical emergency is unparalleled. As WHO's assistant director general Marie-Paule Kieny said in today's news release: "This record-breaking work marks a turning point in the history of health research and development."

F-35B On The Deck Of The USS Wasp During Testing

Anne Henry, USMC, via Wikimedia Commons

Today the United States Marine Corps declared the F-35B “operational.” Costing between $1.04 billion and $1.34 billion, depending on who’s doing the estimating, a 10-plane squadron is the first unit of F-35s the military feels comfortable saying its ready. It’s a major milestone for one of the longest-running and most expensive programs in the Pentagon’s history. Oh, and it means America now has a new fighter that can do bunny hops like this:

The F-35B is one of three variants of the fighter. Designed to replace the Marine’s aging fleet of Harrier Jump Jets, it can take off from short distances and even land vertically. That’s technically impressive, though it didn’t come without cost. In 1994, the unit price of the plane was estimated at just $35 million. In 2014 dollars, that’s $56 million, which is just over half the price $104 million unit price the F-35 maker Lockheed states today. It’s much less than the $134 million figure Lieutenant General Chris Bogdan, the head of the F-35 joint program office, provided in March. Government Accountability Office figures reflect a similar trend, with the plane’s unit price climbing from $69 million in 2001 to a peak of $137 million in 2013, before declining slightly.

Indeed, when the Joint Strike Fighter contract award was announced in 2001, the value of the contract was estimated to be in excess of $200 billion. In April, the GAO estimated it at $400 billion for acquisition alone, with a lifetime cost of $1 trillion for the program. The Pentagon estimated the cost of the cheapest F-35 version at $40 million, and the Marine version at under $50 million. That same press conference estimated an initial fleet of 465 fighters, with the first operational in 2008.

Seven years later, with a program that has quintupled in cost, the Pentagon currently plans a total fleet of 2,443 F-35s, though that number may decrease.

In a statement emailed to reporters by F-35 maker Lockheed Martin, they quote Lieutenant General Jon Davis, the Deputy Commandant for Aviation of the Marine Corps, as saying: “The squadron's aircraft performed well in all five IOC operational scenarios: Close Air Support, Air Interdiction, Armed Reconnaissance, Offensive Counter Air and Defensive Counter Air. This included live ordnance deliveries.” Translated out of the jargon of defense bureaucrats, it means that in tests the F-35B put explosives on targets, and did the multiple jobs expected of the plane.

The Marine version of the F-35 is the first declared operational, with the Air Force variant expected next year and the Navy version later this decade. Because it’s operational, it is technically possible that the F-35 could be sent to the middle east to fight against ISIS, but that’s unlikely for a while at least. After all, the F-35 is first and foremost a highly advanced stealth fighter. Despite what it’s proponents might say, it wasn’t built to fight ISIS.

Screengrab via Trekcore.com

By the time Gene Roddenberry passed away due to a blood clot in 1991, the Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation creator had long been enshrined in science fiction's cannon. Roddenberry's creative vision had no limits, inspiring Trekkie conventions, fan fiction, and films, and even now, his work made it impossible to see William Shatner and not think, 'There goes Captain James T. Kirk!' (Or, similarly, Patrick Stewart and Captain Jean-Luc Picard.)

But according to Shatner, an actor whose vocal cadence still sounds trapped in the 23rd century, not all was well during the second residency aboard the USS Enterprise. A new documentary titled Chaos On The Bridge, was released this month, and Shatner, who directed, wrote, and narrated the film (which is now available for purchase through Vimeo), deep dives into the then controversial reboot of the Star Trek franchise.

Some of this territory has been well-covered, but Shatner had access to seemingly every executive connected to TNG, from Jeffrey Katzenberg to even John Pike (then head of Paramount Network Television), and their candidness is illuminating.

Whenever you bring back a fan favorite, there is bound to be some gossip. During the second season, after Gates McFadden (Doctor Beverly Crusher) had been fired (only to be rehired for season three) and replaced by Diana Muldaur (Doctor Katherine Pulaski), there were numerous awkward moments between the new doctor and the rest of the cast. According to Muldaur, who appeared on the original Star Trek cast in two non-recurring roles, her new shipmates did not have the acting chops she came to expect from her first Enterprise voyage. "It was a vast technical world with just some characters placed in it," she says in the doc.

The doc's main digs, though, are reserved for Roddenberry, and how the creator nearly derailed TNG. Roddenberry's inner circle constantly cycled throughout the set, and their meddling, always on the behalf of Roddenberry, sowed numerous seeds of discord throughout the cast.

During one telling scene, Roddenberry's longtime lawyer Leonard Maizlish managed to get into a screaming match with Pike during which the ex-chief yelled at Maizlish, "I hope you die." (One writer went so far as to fantasize about pushing Maizlish out a window.)

Interestingly, the doc reports that Roddenberry had little to no desire to even relaunch the franchise, and only decided to sign on once Paramount prepared to unveil TNG without him. Once he did re-up, Roddenberry's creativity had lost much of its patina. Claiming he was friends with Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, Roddenberry insisted on a utopian world, which hamstrung the show's writers, who struggled to create drama in a 23rd century without greed, jealousy, violence, or any other hook that breeds story arcs. (The ratings, though, did not suffer.)

There are some lighter moments too -- for example, Patrick Stewart was not the initial choice for Picard (Yaphet Kotto was the top option), and he only became captain after auditioning with a wig that had been FedEx'd from London to his Los Angeles audition -- and Shatner's documentary patches together the story of a fading legend who, in spite of his efforts, created another cult classic.

[Via io9]

Fill 'er up!

Jenn Durfey/Flickr, CC by 2.0

Beer waste products are being used to create cleaner gasoline.

Generally, beer and moving cars don't work well together. But in a few places, companies are recycling the detritus of the beermaking process into a clean gasoline additive that allows cars to get from A to B without using as much of the precious fossil fuel.

The latest venture comes from New Zealand where for a short time, motorists can fill up their cars with beer. Or, more precisely, a substance that comes from beer. One of the leftovers of the brewing process is a slurry of yeast that didn't get used in the fermentation process. This yeast can be re-used to create more alcohol (aka ethanol), which can then get distilled and refined into an ethanol version that is of a high enough quality to put in your gas tank. (Don't pour your drink into the gas tank. It won't power your car. And you will have wasted a drink.)

Using ethanol to power cars isn't new. In the United States, some corn is grown exclusively for the purpose of being turned into the biofuel. Brazil, taking a slightly greener approach, has been recycling sugarcane waste to create ethanol for years. And on the beer front, Molson Coors, a brewing company giant, has been making ethanol from beer since 1996, and in 2008 all cars at the Democratic National Convention in Denver ran on their version of the beer-based biofuel.

Their blend had one advantage over the Brewtroleum being made in New Zealand. While the New Zealand blend was 90 percent gasoline and 10 percent beer-derived ethanol, the blend created for the 2008 convention was 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline. The reason for the lower percentage? Many cars still can't run on such high proportions of ethanol to gasoline. Using the wrong fuel can cause problems in engines particularly small ones like chainsaws or lawn mowers.

Brewtroleum is only available for a limited time and the people who came up with this idea only started thinking about it in February of this year. If all goes well, they might extend the lifetime of the product. Creating a cleaner fuel from leftover beer reduces waste, and reduces gasoline usage. We can all drink to that.

Trees Delivery Drone

Screenshot by author, from YouTube

Trees is a Bay-area startup that combines the novelty of selling box kits with the functionality of California’s medical marijuana industry and the enduring gimmick of drone delivery. Watch their brief promo video, set to Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” below:

Prices for the boxes range from $59 to $149, and each contains at least a few grams of product. The boxes are themed around flavor and convenience, with the mini boxes highlighted as “for those that need a small amount of cannabis on the go, perfect for concerts or going on a hike.” Trees notes that drone delivery is a future service, and might not be available in all the areas they currently deliver.

While most drone delivery efforts are either one-off stunts or take their time getting FAA approval, Federal bans on the trade, sale, and possession of marijuana, even for medical purposes, make it unlikely that Trees drone delivery operation will go that route. Instead, they’ll exist in that hazy gray area common to much of the unlicensed drone industry and the medicinal marijuana industry: illegal on some level, but operating as though it’s a normal and permitted part of the economy already.