Truefinder is free website based in India and Focused customer across the globe. Find Latest movies, Music, Videos, Live TV, Latest coupons and offers, Shopping deals etc...
Drone flew 'within wingspan' of plane approaching Heathrow
A drone flew within 20 metres of a plane on the approach to Heathrow, while another shocked pilots by appearing at 3,000 metres (10,000ft), a monthly update on near-misses has revealed.
Commercial jet pilots reported two “category A” incidents, the most serious class of near-miss, involving unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), known as drones.
In one case, an Airbus A320 pilot on the approach to Heathrow in October last year spotted a drone within just 20 metres, or “possibly within the wingspan” of the aircraft.
Investigators concluded that the drone had flown so close to the passenger jet that “providence had played a major part in the aircraft not colliding”. They also noted that the “blue and disc-like” craft appeared to be custom-made, rather than a commercially available model.
In the second of two serious UAV incidents, an A320 pilot taking off from Heathrow saw a red drone overhead, about 50 metres away from his right wing at about 1,000 metres.
The pilot noted that there would have been a “distinct possibility of damage” had a collision occurred, while investigators found that “a collision had only been narrowly avoided and chance had played a major part”.
A third drone sighting, deemed a less serious category B incident, involved an unmanned aircraft at an altitude that surprised pilots, who had “no time to react”.
The UK Airprox Board, which issues monthly reports on the threat of mid-air collisions, reported a pilot saying: “Was that a drone? At 10,000 ft!”
Large drones are not permitted to fly above 120 metres, or close to airports.
The “large drone”, which appeared to be stationary, came within 60 metres (200ft) of the aircraft, a distance deemed less risky than the category A incidents, but nonetheless “a situation where safety was not assured”.
A fourth drone sighting, involving a pilot on a sightseeing trip near the Binevenagh mountain in Northern Ireland, was deemed to be at the lowest level of risk, category E.
In all four cases, police were alerted but the operator of the drone could not be traced.
Pilots believe a collision with an airliner could be catastrophic and that the impact of a drone strike on a light plane or helicopter would almost certainly bring it down.
The British Airline Pilots Association has warned that the number of incidents could soar as people fly drones received as Christmas presents, often with little or no handling experience or understanding of the rules.
There have been 59 drone near-misses reported in the past 12 months. Drone sightings were among 21 incidents reported to the UK Airprox Board, six of which were deemed to be in the most serious category.
In pictures, the new Samsung Galaxy S8 doesn’t look that different from the Galaxy S7 Edge that preceded it. The chin and forehead of the device have been radically foreshortened, yes, but the really eye-catching aspect of the device remains its wraparound screen, which curves over the left and right edges to provide a completely bezel-free effect.
But in the hand, the rationale for shaving off those extra millimetres from the top and bottom becomes clear. For the first time since phone screens broke five inches, the Galaxy S8 is, almost, comfortable to use one-handed.
Space has been secured at the top of the screen through shoving the selfie camera far to the right, alongside the main speaker grill. At the bottom, meanwhile, the loss of the home button lets the screen extend down to around half a centimetre from the base of the device. In practice, that means that if you’re holding the phone one-handed, less of your thumb’s reach is wasted extending past a bezel, and so more of it can be used to navigate around the actual phone.
It’s still not perfect for those of us who like smaller phones, with the top left of the screen remaining resolutely out of reach for all but the largest-handed of users, but it’s certainly far more ergonomically acceptable than what came before it.
The back of the device, including fingerprint sensor (right) and camera. Expect to smudge the lens a few times while trying to work this one out.Photograph: Alex Hern for the Guardian
That’s helped by the other major change in the physical dimensions of the device: the decision to go for an odd 18.5:9 aspect ratio for the screen. That means, in portrait orientation, a long, thin screen with a lot of space for the main content.
The trade-off is landscape mode. Samsung was eager to use movies to demonstrate the screen’s video capabilities, and it’s obvious why: the super-wide screen is perfect for cinematic aspect ratios, eliminating the letterboxing that you get on most phones. But watching films on phones feels like a niche pursuit, and most material you will be watching – TV shows and web series – is shot in 16:9 these days. That means the full width of the gorgeous screen gets wasted.
The same problem is present in a few apps as well, prompting Google to urge developers to increase the maximum aspect ratio they support – until they do, some apps will have the same ugly letterboxing. Such is the price of progress.
While Google is helping Samsung out on this issue (though the long LG G6 suffers from the same issue), more generally, the S8 sees the clash between Samsung and Google growing stronger than ever. Samsung’s new virtual assistant, Bixby, is one of the major selling points of the new phone. At the launch of the S8, Samsung couldn’t resist throwing shade at Google and Amazon, telling reporters that “some assistants are optimised for e-commerce and some are optimised for search”, but that Bixby was different, being created to help you whatever you’re doing.
The Galaxy S8’s new Snapchat-styled camera in action.Photograph: Alex Hern for the Guardian
It achieves that goal by being heavily integrated with a number of apps, as well as offering a screen search functionality akin to Google Assistant. Bixby is built into the notification feed, the voice assistant (in the US and Korea only, for now), and even the camera, with a dedicated button on the phone for launching it.
Unfortunately, it also requires you to throw yourself into the Samsung ecosystem: only 10 Samsung apps are supported at launch. That means if you want to replace Samsung’s camera, calendar or email app with Google’s, say goodbye to full integration of your virtual assistant. Or just replace that, too: the S8 comes with Google Assistant, as part of Android Nougat.
It’s a shame, because Samsung’s put some thought into those apps, and how they should work in its new device. Take the camera, for instance: as well as Bixby integration (so you can point your camera at a bottle of wine and find reviews or, less compellingly, point it at a Coke can to find out it’s a Coke can) it’s been updated with a load of Snapchat-style filters, and a control scheme rethought for one-handed use.
Despite some niggles, though, the S8 is the most exciting new phone I’ve held in years. The smartphone market is a mature one now, with little chance for revolution (which is why we all freak out over weird distractions like the ‘new’ Nokia 3310), but as iterations go, the S8 gets it right.
The script called for the lead actor, a Nobel prize winner, to seize control of a country, bring peace where there was conflict and prosperity where there was poverty. A nation emerging from years of military dictatorship was to become a beacon of hope not only for its cowed population but also for much of a fractured and turbulent south-east Asia.
But like many political dramas – especially over the past 12 months – the script has not been followed by Myanmar and its de facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.
Instead, it is of drastically escalating ethnic conflicts that have simmered and sporadically exploded for decades; a new Rohingya Muslim insurgency that has prompted an army crackdown some say may amount to crimes against humanity; a rash of online defamation cases that have fostered a panic over freedom of speech; and a repressive legal framework that allowed the generals to jail so many still being in place. And all the while, Aung San Suu Kyi is accused of remaining mostly silent, doggedly avoiding the media.
Interviews by the Guardian with more than a dozen diplomats, analysts and current and former advisers reveal frustrations with a top-down government struggling to cope with immense challenges. Aung San Suu Kyi’s questionable leadership style, her inability or unwillingness to communicate a vision, and her reluctance to speak out against the persecution of minorities have raised the question of whether the popular narrative is misplaced.
And although some defend her, saying it takes time to right the wrongs of decades, others see a fundamental misunderstanding of the woman herself.
“Many of the people who led the campaign [to free Aung San Suu Kyi] … were more on the liberal side of the spectrum,” one diplomat put it. “I think she’s closer to a Margaret Thatcher.”
It’s a stark contrast to the Aung San Suu Kyi who, during 15 years of house arrest at her lakeside villa on University Avenue in Yangon, stood on rickety tables and delivered speeches about human rights over the gate.
Aung San Suu Kyi in 2010, when she was freed from 15 years of house arrest.Photograph: STR/EPA
“And she was electric,” said David Mathieson, a longtime Myanmar researcher for Human Rights Watch who is now an independent consultant. “She was funny. She was informative. She was principled … And I think it’s lamentable that she’s not doing the equivalent of that now.”
‘Sole decision-maker’
Five hours north by car from Yangon, Myanmar’s dystopian capital Naypyidaw stands surrounded by densely forested mountains.
It is here, in the so-called Abode of Kings supposedly built to insulate Myanmar’s generals from attack, amid a landscape of deserted 20-lane highways and grandiose hotels, that Aung Sun Suu Kyi lives her life in power.
The 71-year-old is a disciplined ruler. Her habit, established during imprisonment, is to wake before dawn and meditate in the house she shares with her pet dog and a small retinue of maids.
She has breakfast with an adviser, often Kyaw Tint Swe, a former ambassador who spent decades defending the junta’s actions.
An aide, Win Htein, says Aung San Suu Kyi eats every little. “The amount of food she is taking is like a kitten,” he said. “She doesn’t eat carbohydrates. Fruit and vegetables. No pork, or mutton, or beef. Only fish.”
Her few indulgences include a vast wardrobe of luxurious silk longyis and evening film viewings, musicals being her favourite. Win Htein recently gave her a copy of La La Land.
But mostly she works. And there is a lot of work.
As well as state counsellor – a position created to get around the military-drafted constitution that bars her from the presidency – she is foreign minister, minister of the president’s office and chair of numerous committees.Widely described as a micromanager, she pores over documents after hours. A source close to the attorney general’s office says she asks to see a copy of every draft bill before it is submitted to parliament. Ministers routinely pass decisions upwards.
“The problem is there are no policymakers in her cabinet,” said Burmese political analyst Myat Ko.
People who know her say Aung San Suu Kyi inspires both devotion and fear. She is variously described as charming and charismatic, and sharp and authoritarian. “She feels like a real leader,” one diplomat said. “Intelligent, quick-witted, quite funny.” At the same time, he added: “I would say that she has appeared to be very keen to be the sole decision-maker to have no chance of establishing rival power centres.”
Echelons above her subordinates in stature, the state counsellor is often depicted as living in a bubble, surrounded by a cabal of advisers who are too nervous to convey hard truths. A Yangon-based analyst working on the peace process said bad news often does not reach her.
“In meetings, she is dismissive, dictatorial – in some cases, belittling,” said a senior aid worker who, like many others interviewed for this story, insisted on anonymity because he works with the administration. The government, he said, has become “so centralised, there is complete fear of her”.
A bumpy transition
This is not the administration many hoped for when the National League for Democracy (NLD) took over the government last year following victory in the 2015 election. The circumstances of this seismic shift in Myanmar has admittedly been far from ideal for cohesive, effective government. The army has retained control over key ministries as well as the security forces. But the election and transfer of power from the previous military-backed government were smooth.
“Most transitions end badly: the Arab spring and many other examples,” said Richard Horsey, a Yangon-based political analyst. “At the same time, transitions are always bumpy and I think Myanmar is going through a particularly bumpy moment in its transition.”
Before those bumps, the first few months brought good news for the new administration. Aung San Suu Kyi released scores of political prisoners. She announced the creation of a Kofi Annan-led advisory commission on Rakhine state, where the minority Rohingya Muslim community has been persecuted for decades. Major peace talks were held in August with armed groups. By mid-September, the US pledged to lift all sanctions.
But cracks were there from the start. The announcement of her cabinet was met with ridicule when it emerged several of her new ministers had phoney degrees.
Aung San Suu Kyi did not have much choice. The only people with experience in government were from the previous regime. But she is said to have a small network and is slow to trust people, a legacy of her house arrest and persecution.
Obsession with party loyalty soon became a theme. NLD legislators were told not to speak to the media in the run-up to the election and then were ordered not to raise tough questions in parliament.
The silence held through October, as a fresh crisis unfolded in Rakhine state, and November, when four ethnic armed groups formed a new alliance in the north.
Peace was Aung San Suu Kyi’s priority, she said before taking office. But conflict has escalated to unprecedented levels in Shan and Kachin states, with tens of thousands of refugees driven over the border into China.
As a Bamar Buddhist, Aung San Suu Kyi hails from the dominant ethnic group. “The Lady”, as she is lovingly referred to across the country, built a following across Myanmar’s fractured ethnicities by taking trips to the border regions since 1989, often wearing local dress.
But ethnic leaders have recently questioned the extent of her sympathies with minorities. Her government has put out statements condemning abuses by ethnic armed groups, ignoring aggressions from the military. In one case it labelled a major ethnic organisation a terrorist outfit. The peace process analyst said she has one strategy: “to have good relationships with the Tatmadaw [army]”.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s squeaky-clean image had already begun to blur in 2012, when she did not speak out after a surge in sectarian violence that led to the deaths of hundreds of people, mostly Rohingya Muslims, in Rakhine state. In an apparent concession to domestic racist factions, her party blocked Muslims from running for parliament in 2015.
Many people put her ruthlessness down to political expedience and fear of an unpredictable military. Win Htein, her adviser, cited something she told him in 1988: “She told me, since she decided to get involved with politics, she would change everything. Any criticism directed towards her, she wouldn’t care.”
‘Potential for genocide’
The biggest moral challenge of her leadership is posed by Rakhine state, a tinderbox of tension between minority Rohingya Muslims and majority Buddhists.
The northern part of the region exploded into violence on 9 October after nine police officers were killed on the western border with Bangladesh by Rohingya armed with swords and makeshift rifles.
Aung San Suu Kyi got the news in the middle of the night. The morning after, she convened a sombre meeting with government and police officials. “She was not worried, [but] she was not calm. She was upset,” Win Htein recalled.
Soldiers sealed off the remote corner of the country, barring media and aid access. Tens of thousands of Rohingya, whom many in Myanmar regard as illegal “Bengali” immigrants from Bangladesh, fled across the border to refugee camps. They have recounted mass killings and rape, accusations which the military denies. One woman who spoke to the Guardian said troops raped her, killed her husband and seven of her children. One child survived, she said.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s government has angrily dismissed many of the claims as “fabrications”. The words “fake rape” were plastered over her official Facebook page. A report by a government-appointed committee cited the presence of mosques and “Bengalis” to dismiss the accusations. It was a clumsy response. “We have had conversations about messaging,” said one diplomat.
Yet the foreign ministry last week said a UN resolution to send an independent international fact-finding mission to Myanmar “would do more to inflame, rather than resolve, the issues at this time”.
A south Asian envoy said three months passed before Aung San Suu Kyi’s deputy at the foreign ministry visited the Bangladesh embassy. According to the diplomat, they offered to repatriate some Rohingya but made no reference to hundreds of thousands of others living in Bangladeshi camps since fleeing previous waves of violence.
“I can say that the government is only round about a year old but we haven’t seen a concrete indication towards really addressing the situation as far as Rakhine state is concerned,” the diplomat said. The Myanmar foreign ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Shelters destroyed by fire at a camp for internally displaced Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine state.Photograph: Soe Zeya Tun/Reuters
And then a personal blow. In December, more than a dozen fellow Nobel laureates wrote an open letter to the UN security council warning of a tragedy “amounting to ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity”. It cited the “potential for genocide”.
‘Not the change they promised’
Few people who know her believe Aung San Suu Kyi is prejudiced, though they do say she is afraid of being painted as cosy with Muslims by powerful, radical Buddhist influencers.
“I think she sees it sort of like older white guys in America: they’re not racists but they don’t prioritise [race],” said one diplomat.
Ko Ni, a constitutional lawyer who helped create the state counsellor position, was shot dead on 29 January as he stood outside Yangon international airport, holding his grandson in his arms. For a month, Aung San Suu Kyi made no public comment. She did not even call the family.
It was only after she attended his memorial service at the end of February that she made her first public statement on the matter.
The immense authority retained by the military means the state counsellor has limited power over what happens in conflict areas. But even in sectors well within its purview, the government is seen to be falling short.
Foreign investment is set to plunge 30% for the year ending 31 March, according to a report in the regional business publication the Nikkei Asian Review. The downturn is attributed in part to a vague economic vision.
The NLD’s parliamentary majority gives it the ability to amend and remove oppressive laws, including the notorious 66D clause in the telecommunications law that has been used to jail scores of people for Facebook posts critical of the government and army. But, instead, senior NLD officials began using it with an order to pursue some of the cases against critics coming from the highest levels of government.
By the start of 2017, at least 38 people had been charged with online defamation, some unrelated to the NLD, including two men who allegedly went on a drunken rant about Aung San Suu Kyi and one who called her puppet president, Htin Kyaw, an “idiot”.
Champa Patel, Amnesty International’s regional director for south-east Asia and the Pacific, said: “This is not the change the NLD promised to deliver during last year’s elections.”
Meanwhile, western diplomats continue to give Aung San Suu Kyi the benefit of the doubt. Few supported the establishment of a UN-backed commission of inquiry – the highest level of probe – on the Rohingya crisis.
“There’s a belief by some important actors that we just need to support her to steer the country,” said the analyst who works on the peace process. “That’s not been successful.”
Misplaced expectations
Aung San Suu Kyi’s aides turned down requests for an interview. Win Htein, who also works as the NLD spokesperson, praised her silence as politically astute and said media interviews were too “time-consuming”.
Win Htein – a man in his mid-70s who sleeps with an oxygen tank – has a reputation as the party disciplinarian.
Speaking at his home, a military-style dormitory for MPs in Naypyidaw, he added: “Please tell those who are disappointed in Daw Aung San Suu Kyi or in us just [to] look at the history … More than 27 years we have struggled. Through real hardship. So this point is too early. They have too high expectations.”
So far, the government has successfully clamped down on corruption and fostered a climate of free speech, he said, adding that “there is an argument for both sides” for the 66D clause. He said claims that Aung San Suu Kyi was the sole decision-maker in her cabinet were “rubbish”.
Governance, he said, has meant constant negotiation with the army. Members of the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development party have told him they plan to challenge Aung San Suu Kyi’s state counsellorship as unconstitutional.
Win Htein’s views on the Rohingya reflect common prejudices in Myanmar. He said the “Muslim lobby” exaggerates the plight of the group, even though 120,000 have been confined to camps in Rakhine state since 2012. He said the “illegal immigrants are flowing into our country like a stream since many decades ago” and that Islamic practices are incompatible with Buddhist beliefs.
Win Htein cannot speak for Aung San Suu Kyi. But it seemed pertinent to ask if he thought she might have private sympathy for the Rohingya.
SpaceX launched its first “pre-flown” rocket on Thursday, marking the first time anyone has relaunched a booster into space in what CEO Elon Musk called “a milestone in the history of space”.
“This is going to be ultimately a huge revolution in spaceflight,” Musk said on a SpaceX broadcast of the launch.
He said that accomplishment – to “fly and re-fly an orbital-class booster” – was like finally achieving reliable aircraft rather than throwing away an airplane after every flight.
“It’s taken us a long time, a lot of difficult steps along the way,” he said, “but I’m just incredibly proud of the spaceflight team.”
The success is a step toward vastly less expensive spaceflight, which some hope can revolutionize travel in the solar system and take humans to Mars. While Nasa for decades used reusable spacecraft – its famous space shuttle fleet – the space agency has found that the intense maintenance the shuttles need makes them more expensive than rockets, at least with current technology.
“No one has ever done anything like this before,” SpaceX CEO Gwynne Shotwell said in a company broadcast before the launch. “We’re not one-way trip to Mars people. We want to make sure that whoever we take can come back.”
Under clear skies at the Kennedy Space Center, near Cape Canaveral, Florida, SpaceX launched its partially recycled Falcon 9 rocket at 6.37pm local time. A few minutes later the booster separated from its payload, to raucous cheers from engineers at the space center.
Then the rocket sank downward back toward the earth, burning back through the shield of the atmosphere, on its way toward its destination: a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean, called the Of Course I Still Love You.
The equivalent of a 14-story building, the rocket hurtled downward at nearly a mile a second, thrusters firing to slow down, until finally it landed, secure and upright on the ship, to a final burst of applause.
The rocket had already secured its place in SpaceX’s history: in April 2016 it became the first rocket to successfully land on a droneship in the Atlantic, after a supply mission to the International Space Station. The booster – the nine-engine base of the rocket – was then taken back to the mainland and refurbished.
The booster carried a communications satellite for the Luxembourg company SES, which reportedly received a discount on the launch, which normally cost around $60m per launch. Reliable, reusable rockets could dramatically lower that cost, making it easier for space agencies and private companies to get satellites, telescopes, supplies and, eventually, people into space.
SpaceX first landed one of its Falcon 9 rockets in 2015, a month after another tech billionaire, Jeff Bezos, and his company Blue Origin landed. A smaller rocket has reached the lower edge of outer space – still far below the orbital zones reached by SpaceX missions. SpaceX has launched and landed eight of 13 attempted rocket launches, with several explosive failures over the years. Blue Origin has launched and landed four rockets, and this month Bezos unveiled a new, larger rocket booster as well as a planned tourist capsule.
Two would-be space tourists have already signed up to travel with SpaceX, Musk revealed last month, without any details about who the “private citizens” were or what “significant deposit” they paid to fly around the moon. He said they are aiming for a 2018 mission, even though SpaceX has yet to test the heavy rocket that would carry people, or to take any humans into space.
Musk’s ambitions have costly risks. One of SpaceX’s rockets exploded on its launch platform last September, destroying the booster, the spacecraft and its cargo – a multimillion-dollar satellite, in part owned by Facebook – setting back the company’s plans to relaunch a used rocket. The explosion also underscored the dangers for human passengers on private spacecraft, and a government audit released this year questioned whether SpaceX could safely resolve rocket problems or realize some of its lofty goals.
Ever optimistic, Musk has said that he believes most rocket parts can be used dozens of times, and that even heat shields could survive more than 10 burning passages through the atmosphere.
Nasa is working on its own new rocket, called the Space Launch System, whose designs would make it the most powerful rocket yet devised. The agency hopes to use the SLS to send explorer spacecraft and robots into deep space, and humans to an asteroid and Mars.
Those rules, drawn up by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), were scheduled to take effect by the end of 2017 and would have forced ISPs to get people’s consent before selling their data to advertisers and others.
Now that they have been scrapped, ISPs such as Comcast, Verizon and AT&T are free to track all your browsing behavior and sell it to advertisers without consent. ISPs have access to literally all of your browsing behavior – they act as a gateway for all of your web visits, clicks, searches, app downloads and video streams. This represents a huge treasure trove of personal data, including health concerns, shopping habits and porn preferences. ISPs want to use this data to deliver personalized advertising.
Fortunately, there are a number of options for protecting your browsing history.
Use a different ISP
Not all ISPs want to harvest their users’ data. In fact, a list of some of the smaller players – including Sonic, Cruzio Internet and Etheric Networks – wrote a letter opposing the repeal of the FCC’s privacy rules. The problem is, most Americans, particularly those in rural areas, have very little choice of broadband provider. Around 80% are stuck with just one or two options, so even if they wanted to change, they couldn’t.
Opt out
Without the privacy rules in place, ISPs can track and sell your browsing data by default, but should offer a way for users to opt out. However, they haven’t always been clear about how and when they’ve been tracking users.
We know that AT&T already tried to use consumer data to inject personalized advertising into their browsing experience and then tried to charge an extra $744 per year to opt out, but the program was killed just before the FCC introduced the new privacy rules. Meanwhile, Verizon attempted to insert undetectable “supercookies” into all of its mobile customers’ traffic, which allowed them to track all their browsing behavior – even if a web user was browsing in incognito mode or clearing their cookies and history. The company was sued for $1.35m by the FCC for not getting customer permission to track them.
A VPN redirects your internet traffic to disguise where your computer, phone or other device is when it makes contact with websites. It also encrypts the information you send across the internet so that it’s unreadable to anyone who wants to intercept that traffic – including ISPs.
This creates a second layer to the problem: what if the VPNs choose to sell your real browsing behavior? Reputable VPNs won’t do this, but you need to be careful about which one you choose. Generally it’s wise to avoid the free ones – if you’re not paying for it, they must be making money out of you somehow. In 2015, free VPN service Hola was revealed to be selling its users idle bandwidth to paying customers, including possible botnets. Cloak and TunnelBear are good options.
Unfortunately VPNs typically slow down your internet speed and prevent you from using some web services, such as Netflix (which is trying to prevent people from accessing content not licensed in their home countries).
Tor
Tor creates browser software that prevents people from learning your location or tracking the sites you visit. It does this by bouncing web traffic through “relays” run by thousands of volunteers around the world.
Tor can be a little fiddly to set up and so adds complexity to browsing. It also leads to slower average internet speeds and needs regular updates to ensure the connection is secure. This is not an option for technophobes.
Samsung has unveiled the Galaxy S8 and S8+, the company’s first flagship phones since the Note 7 debacle in 2016 threatened to sink its brand in the eyes of the public.
The new phones’ most eye-catching feature is an almost completely bezel-free display, running the full width of the device, even curving around the edge (akin to the screen on Samsung’s Galaxy S7 Edge), and shrinking the chin and forehead of the front screen to tiny slivers. Samsung’s calls this the “infinity display”, and even the home button has been removed, replaced with a pressure-sensitive section at the bottom of the screen.
Launching on 28 April (though pre-order customers will receive theirs a week early), the Galaxy S8 will retail at £689 and the S8+ at £779. Those prices are £10 and £40 cheaper than the respective iPhone models Samsung is competing with, but leave the S8 £120 more than the S7 and the S8+ £140 more expensive than the S7 Edge. Two colours will hit Britain, “Midnight Black” and “Orchid Grey”, and Samsung is still decided whether to launch a third colour, “Arctic Silver”.
That allows the two devices, with screens of 5.8in and 6.2in respectively, to occupy the body of a phone with a much smaller display. The Galaxy S8, for instance, has dimensions of 148.9 x 68.1 x 8mm, roughly a centimetre shorter and narrower (though 0.7mm thicker) than an iPhone 7 Plus, despite having a screen 0.3in larger.
The Samsung Galaxy S8, with tiny bezels and no physical home button.Photograph: Alex Hern for the Guardian
The screen, with a resolution of 2960 x 1440 pixels on both models, is also the first on a mobile phone to be rated as Mobile HDR Premium, certifying it as meeting a certain standard for high dynamic range content – showing blacker blacks, brighter whites and a generally larger range of brightness than most phones.
Inside the devices is an octacore chip (with four cores clocked at 2.3Ghz and four at 1.7Ghz), the first in a smartphone to be made in a 0.1 micron production process, along with 4GB of Ram and 64GB of flash storage. Also present an expansion slot for microSD cards: while Samsung removed the slot for the Galaxy S6, from the S7 onwards, owners have been able to slot in an SD card for extra storage.
The back of the Galaxy S8.Photograph: Alex Hern for the Guardian
Although largely similar apart from their screens, the two sizes do have one other difference: a larger battery in the larger model, rated at 3,500mAh, while the smaller phone has storage of 3,000mAh.
The Galaxy S8 will ship with Android 7, Nougat, which is currently the most recent version of Android. It is due to be superseded in the third quarter of 2017 by Android O.
The cameras on the two devices remain largely similar to those in the Galaxy S7: A 12MP rear-facing camera, with optical image stabilisation, and an 8MP selfie camera, both with an F1.7 aperture. Also included is a fingerprint sensor on the back of the device, next to the camera, and a face unlock feature.
The base of the Galaxy S8, with headphone jack.Photograph: Alex Hern for the Guardian
One thing that’s survived the upgrade is the headphone jack. Six months after Apple took the heat for shipping the iPhone 7 without a standard 3.5mm plug, the Galaxy S8 still has room for the old port.
The release comes at a crucial time for Samsung. Following the Note 7 disaster, which saw devices recalled after a number spontaneously caught fire, the company embarked on a period of retrenchment, releasing adverts trumpeting its reputation for safety and attempting to limit the wider damage to its brand.
“The brand lost prestige and consumer trust with the debacle of the Galaxy Note 7,” says Thomas Husson, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester. Additionally, “Samsung only has a window of opportunity of several months before the launch of the 10th anniversary iPhone,” currently expected to arrive in September with a similarly bezel-free design.
“The launch of Samsung’s new flagship smartphone is thus key for the brand, even though it has managed to reduce its business dependency on smartphones, contrary to Apple,” Husson said. “The launch of the new device must be perfectly executed for Samsung to gain innovation leadership and to gain market share in the high-end smartphone segment.”
Alongside the new phones, Samsung is releasing or updating a number of related products. Its Gear VR headset, a co-production with Facebook’s Oculus division, gains a wireless gesture-based remote control, while the Gear 360 camera is upgraded with the ability to live-stream 360˚ video, something the company claims could be “one of the tipping points” for widespread adoption of virtual reality.
The Galaxy S8 will also launch with Samsung’s new virtual assistant, Bixby, intended to compete with Google’s Assistant and Apple’s Siri (Confusingly, Google Assistant is also available on the S8). Bixby offers a similar multi-modal feature set to Google Assistant, able to be invoked through voice or through the camera and interact with items onscreen (allowing a user to say, for instance, “set this as my wallpaper” while looking at a picture), but the full service is initially launching only in Korea and, from May, the USA. Users from other countries will still be able to use the camera and text aspects of the service, however.
The Galaxy S8 docked in DeX mode.Photograph: Alex Hern for the Guardian
Another major new feature that will see a worldwide launch is Samsung DeX, short for Desktop Experience, which allows users of the S8s to dock their phone and use it as a full-blown desktop computing environment, with keyboard and mouse control, and access to suites such as Office and Autodesk through a virtual desktop service.
A man who was paralysed from below the neck after crashing his bike into a truck can once again drink a cup of coffee and eat mashed potato with a fork, after a world-first procedure to allow him to control his hand with the power of thought.
Bill Kochevar, 53, has had electrical implants in the motor cortex of his brain and sensors inserted in his forearm, which allow the muscles of his arm and hand to be stimulated in response to signals from his brain, decoded by computer. After eight years, he is able to drink and feed himself without assistance.
“I think about what I want to do and the system does it for me,” Kochevar told the Guardian. “It’s not a lot of thinking about it. When I want to do something, my brain does what it does.”
The experimental technology, pioneered by the Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, is the first in the world to restore brain-controlled reaching and grasping in a person with complete paralysis.
For now, the process is relatively slow, but the scientists behind the breakthrough say this is proof of concept and that they hope to streamline the technology until it becomes a routine treatment for people with paralysis. In the future, they say, it will also be wireless and the electrical arrays and sensors will all be implanted under the skin and invisible.
“Our research is at an early stage, but we believe that this neuroprosthesis could offer individuals with paralysis the possibility of regaining arm and hand functions to perform day-to-day activities, offering them greater independence,” said Dr Bolu Ajiboye, lead author of a paper detailing the research in the Lancet medical journal.
“So far it has helped a man with tetraplegia to reach and grasp, meaning he could feed himself and drink. With further development, we believe the technology could give more accurate control, allowing a wider range of actions, which could begin to transform the lives of people living with paralysis.”
Functional electrical stimulation (FES) of the muscles and nerves has been tried before in patients with paralysis, but they have had to use whatever movements they have left, such as shoulder shrugs or head nods, to trigger it. Kochevar, however, only has to think about what he wants to do.
He underwent brain surgery to implant sensors in the motor cortex area responsible for hand movement, linked to a computer. Kochevar went through four months of training, thinking about the turn of the wrist or grip of the fingers that he needed in order to bring about the movement of a virtual reality arm, so that the computer could recognise the necessary signals from the motor cortex.
Then he had 36 muscle-stimulating electrodes implanted into his upper and lower arm, including four that helped restore finger and thumb, wrist, elbow and shoulder movements. These were switched on 17 days after the procedure, and began stimulating the muscles for eight hours a week over 18 weeks to improve strength, movement and reduce muscle fatigue.
Then the whole system was connected up, so that signals from the brain were translated via a decoder into electrical impulses to trigger movement in the muscles and nerves in his arm.
“It was wow – I can do that now!” he said. “In the future I will be able any time I want to take a drink of something or feed myself.”
Kochevar lost all power of movement after an accident during a charity bike ride in Cleveland for the MS Society. He was riding behind a mail truck, he said, when it stopped suddenly. “I went head first into it,” he said.
Ajiboye said he wanted Kochevar to be able to move his arm easily. “That is the goal – to make the technology seamless to him, in the sense of he thinks about him moving his arm and it moves,” he said.
The limitation for now was the number of muscles that could be stimulated and the wires that extrude. The slowness of the movement was not something that bothered patients, he said. “If you ask the users what their primary goal is, it is function not speed.”
There is no question of curing paralysis through this technology – it circumvents the injury instead.
“The goal is futuristic: a paralysed individual thinks about moving her arm as if her brain and muscles were not disconnected, and implanted technology seamlessly executes the desired movement … this study is groundbreaking as the first report of a person executing functional, multi-joint movements of a paralysed limb with a motor neuroprosthesis,” said Dr Steve Perlmutter from the University of Washington, in a linked comment in the Lancet.
“However, this treatment is not nearly ready for use outside the lab. The movements were rough and slow and required continuous visual feedback, as is the case for most available brain–machine interfaces, and had restricted range due to the use of a motorised device to assist shoulder movements … Thus, the study is a proof-of-principle demonstration of what is possible, rather than a fundamental advance in neuroprosthetic concepts or technology. But it is an exciting demonstration nonetheless, and the future of motor neuroprosthetics to overcome paralysis is brighter.”
In about four years, the ExoMars rover will open its eyes on the surface of Mars. After a brief look around, its wheels will slowly crunch onto the frozen ground, beginning its journey on another planet.
Later today we should be one step closer to knowing where it will open its eyes. It has taken the last three years to narrow down the choice from eight, to four, to just three possible locations, each with their own unique selling points. And by the end of today the choice will be reduced to the final two sites.
One candidate site that I and others have spent a long time working on has made it to this late stage and we hope that it is interesting and safe enough to make it to the final.
The final three ExoMars landing sites (red stars) on a global elevation map of Mars. The ancient river channels marked in black mostly occur in the southern hemisphere, whereas the equally ancient but recently discovered inverted channels bridge a previous gap to the northern lowlands.Photograph: Data: Nasa/JPL/GSFC; Map: Peter Grindrod
As we prepared our case for the next workshop at the European Space Agency, my mind drifted towards what it could feel like to actually explore this area that we’ve come to know so well from orbit, but this time through the eyes and instruments of a rover.
It’s a site that I expect will be simultaneously familiar, and yet completely alien to us. River-worn pebbles could litter the ancient river channel, now a flat-topped ridge, but we’re hoping for finer rewards.
There are likely mudstones that we hope to drill, as we think that they could be good at preserving and even concentrating evidence of past, ancient microbial life — if it was ever present on Mars to begin with.
We’ve got some idea of what exploring an area like this will involve. Last year, a large group of scientists and engineers took part in a Mars rover trial, sending some of the ExoMars instruments out to the Utah desert to test both machine and people.
This endeavour was led by the UK Space Agency, but was carried out in parallel with teams from the Canadian, German and US space agencies. As it happens, the site chosen for all of these tests was one that is almost directly analogous to our site on Mars.
The landscape in this part of Utah has rather unusual geological features, at least for Earth. Rivers that dried up, turned to rock and were then buried have since been eroded back by the wind. Meanwhile, the softer floodplains on the river margins erode more easily, leaving an upstanding or inverted river channel. Such features are much more common on Mars.
Exploring an inverted channel on Earth has opened our eyes to the potential of a similar site on Mars. But doing the same for a rover on another planet comes with added pitfalls. How troubling is a little hill? The slopes can’t be too steep upon which to land or drive. The area has to be almost as flat as a mill pond, but rather harder one hopes.
What views will soon form the background scene of the ExoMars rover?Photograph: Esa/ATG medialab
As it happens, some of the best places for ExoMars to explore are actually very flat, having only been recently exposed by wind erosion, at least in geological terms. For example, we think the likely mudstones at our site have only been uncovered for a few hundred million years or so. This is a good thing, as with a thin atmosphere and no magnetic field for shielding, the surface of mars is bombarded with radiation from the sun and cosmic rays, which breaks down the organic chemistry that will be our evidence for life.
It is no trivial task to look for evidence of the earliest forms of life on Earth, even with repeated fieldwork and the latest laboratory techniques. But somewhat paradoxically, Mars might actually be an easier to place to find evidence of early life because it hasn’t gone through the same tumultuous plate tectonic activity as Earth, which metamorphoses and even destroys the oldest, life-bearing rocks. And it’s been a few billion years since Mars had a thick atmosphere and surface water altering the landscape. So the evidence could be well preserved.
The best chance of finding evidence of life elsewhere in the Solar System in the next couple of decades is with Mars. And if ExoMars finds a tantalising hint of life, then the case for bringing samples back to Earth will be even stronger. Because once in the laboratories of Earth, the great analytical precision will mean that we should have extraordinary evidence of an extraordinary claim.
The largest known dinosaur footprints have been discovered in Western Australia, including 1.7 metre prints left by gigantic herbivores.
Until now, the biggest known dinosaur footprint was a 106cm track discovered in the Mongolian desert and reported last year.
At the new site, along the Kimberley shoreline in a remote region of Western Australia, palaeontologists discovered a rich collection of dinosaur footprints in the sandstone rock, many of which are only visible at low tide. The prints, belonging to about 21 different types of dinosaur, are also thought to be the most diverse collection of prints in the world.
Steve Salisbury, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the University of Queensland told ABC News: “We’ve got several tracks up in that area that are about 1.7 metres long. So most people would be able to fit inside tracks that big, and they indicate animals that are probably around 5.3 to 5.5 metres at the hip, which is enormous.”
The prints, found along the Kimberley shoreline, belong to about 21 different types of dinosaur, and are thought to be the most diverse collection of prints in the world.Photograph: Damian Kelly/AFP/University of Queensland/Getty Images
Salisbury said the diversity of the tracks was globally unparalleled and made the area the “Cretaceous equivalent of the Serengeti”. He also dubbed it “Australia’s own Jurassic Park”.
“It is extremely significant, forming the primary record of non-avian dinosaurs in the western half the continent and providing the only glimpse of Australia’s dinosaur fauna during the first half of the early Cretaceous period,” he said.
“There are thousands of tracks,” said Salisbury. “Of these, 150 can confidently be assigned to 21 specific track types, representing four main groups of dinosaurs.”
The largest tracks belonged to sauropods, huge Diplodocus-like herbivores with long necks and tails. The scientists also discovered tracks from about four different types of ornithopod dinosaurs (two-legged herbivores) and six types of armoured dinosaurs, including Stegosaurs, which had not previously been seen in Australia.
At the time the prints were left, 130m years ago, the area was a large river delta and dinosaurs would have traversed wet sandy areas between surrounding forests.
The latest investigation was prompted after the region was selected as the site for a liquid natural gas processing precinct in 2008. The area’s traditional custodians, the Goolarabooloo people, who were aware of the prints, contacted Salisbury and his team and asked them to investigate. The scientists from Queensland University and James Cook University, along with Indigenous representatives, spent 400 hours documenting the prints.
“Dinosaur tracks have been known through that area, probably for thousands of years. They form part of the song cycle,” Salisbury said told ABC News.
“We got contacted to come in and have closer look, and it didn’t take long for us to realise that … there was a spectacular dinosaur track fauna preserved there that was at risk.”
Uber will shut down its operation in Denmark next month following the introduction of new taxi laws, the company has said, marking the latest European setback for the US ride-booking service.
A company spokesman, Kristian Agerbo, said on Tuesday Uber “must take the consequences” of the new rules, which among other things will require cabs to be fitted with seat occupancy sensors and fare meters.
Uber has faced problems in cities including Madrid, Frankfurt, Paris and London, and is awaiting a decision from the European court of justice that could determine how it is regulated on the continent: as a transport service or a digital platform.
The company, which says it has 2,000 drivers and 300,000 people using its app in Denmark, said it would not be able to operate unless the regulations were changed, but added it would “continue to work with the government … to enable Danes to enjoy the benefits of modern technologies like Uber”.
As has happened elsewhere in Europe, taxi driver unions, cab operators and politicians have argued that Uber does not comply with the legal standards for established taxi firms and its service represents unfair competition.
Danish prosecutors last year in effect accused the company of operating an illegal taxi service, indicting it on charges of assisting its drivers – two of whom have also been fined – in breaking applicable national taxi laws.
Since arriving in Europe in 2011, the San Francisco-based firm has faced numerous legal and other challenges. Its drivers have been physically attacked in Paris, where two of its most senior European executives were also put on trial on charges of running an illegal transport service.
Courts in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands have banned Uber’s low-cost UberPop service, which uses non-professional drivers, while an employment tribunal in London ruled its licensed drivers should be classed as workers with access to the minimum wage, sick pay and paid holidays.
The company is appealing against the ruling, in which the tribunal dismissed as “faintly ridiculous” the idea that Uber was “a mosaic of 30,000 small businesses linked by a common ‘platform’. Drivers do not and cannot negotiate with passengers … They are offered and accept trips strictly on Uber’s terms.”
In Brussels, the European commission has called for restraint from member states in their approach to the disruptive start-up, saying they should consider bans only as a last resort since the EU also had a duty to “encourage a regulatory environment that allows new business models to develop”.
But that has cut little ice, particularly with traditional taxi operators, who have filed suits accusing the Californian company of dodging local licensing and safety laws and offering unfair competition.
The court’s ruling, expected later this year, could be critical for Uber’s future – and that of the wider “gig economy” – in Europe: if it decides the company is a transport service, it will have to comply with existing labour and safety legislation, and meet all the rules that apply to traditional taxi associations.
If, on the other hand, the judges decide Uber is an “information society service” – essentially, an online platform that connects independent drivers with passengers – it will be free to develop other low-cost and unlicensed services of the kind already banned in many European countries.
Uber has also been hit by recent problems in the US following allegations of sexual harassment and the emergence of video of an abuse-filled row between its CEO, Travis Kalanick, and one of the company’s disgruntled drivers.
It was also revealed that the company used a secret programme to evade law enforcement. Uber’s president, Jeff Jones, resigned last week after just six months in the job, saying working at Uber was incompatible with his values.
Posts
