Raspberry Pi 3 to get official Android OS Support

It's fair to say the success of the ARM-powered Raspberry Pi computers have surpassed expectations and have been a godsend to hobbyists, hackers, and students.

If you're one of those people looking for unofficial hacks to install Android OS on a Raspberry Pi device, then stop and wait for the official release.

Raspberry Pi computers have largely been Linux affairs, as several Linux distributions have supported this tiny ARM computer.

Now, it seems like Raspberry Pi is ready to get official support for one of the most popular mobile operating systems out there: Android.

Google has recently registered the $35 Raspberry Pi 3 ‒ the newest version of the Raspberry Pi ‒ as a new device 'tree' in its Android Open Source Project (AOSP) repository.

If you're not aware, Raspberry Pi is cheap, credit card-sized, single board ARM computer that looks and feels very basic, but could be built into many geeky projects.

What Google is planning for Android and the Pi is unclear. However, once released, Android support for Raspberry Pi 3 would give programmers access to more than 1.5 million apps, allowing them to mess around with their own custom projects too.

Last year at Google I/O developer conference, the company, announced Brillo OS, a lightweight Android-based operating system for low-power devices built on ARM or Intel i.e. the Internet of Things (IoT).

This might be possible that Android support for Raspberry Pi 3 could be part of Project Brillo.

Interested Raspberry Pi enthusiasts should keep an eye on Google’s Repository.

Mediatek’s Pump Express Can Charge a Phone to 70% in 20 Minutes

Samsung and Qualcomm have been busy bundling their newest smartphones with multiple fast-charging standards but none of them is as fast as the one MediaTek has just announced.

The company has just unveiled the new Pump Express 3.0 standard which will be coming out to its phones later this year. The standard will allow your phone to gain up to 70 percent of its battery life in just 20 minutes which is faster than the competition.

Qualcomm’s fast-charging 3.0 can manage to reach 80 percent of the battery in only 35 minutes although there have been faster standards in between from researchers.

Pump Express 3.0 will make an appearance along with the upcoming Helio P20 chipset phones which will start arriving later this year. MediaTek hasn’t announced the capacity of the phone it was charging though.

It claims to have taken 20 safety protection standards to manage security. It manages overheating through something called “Direct Charging”, a solution which bypasses circuitry by routing the current directly from the adapter to the battery.

This is the first time someone is using this solution through the new Type-C connector, which will provide 4 hours of talk time with just 5 minutes of charging. Pump Express 3.0 has the potential to be a good match-winner for MediaTek, though the company must announce details soon.

Microsoft tries its hand at a news bot with Rowe

Like everyone else these days, Microsoft sure loves its bots. Now, the company has rolled out its own news-finding bot called “Rowe,” which lives inside the latest version of Microsoft’s Bing-powered personalized news reading app, News Pro. Rowe is an experiment with helping you keep up with the news that matches your current interests. You can ask the bot to show you news by typing in a topic, view today’s headlines, ask for other personalized suggestions or read the stories the bot has surfaced for you already.

Rowe, however, seems more like an assistive search engine, rather than a true AI-like bot, as its “personalized” suggestions are not as good as its ability to return articles on a given subject. And even then, its results are a bit limited. For example, if you type in a popular, but broad, subject like “U.S. Elections,” the bot returns just three top stories, one of which currently appears to be more of an op-ed/thought piece rather than hard news. That’s not a great experience.

Below its recommended stories, buttons appear that let you pull up more news articles on the subject, like those focused on “election predictions” or “polls,” in this case.

Meanwhile, if you type a news topic that’s a bit more specific, the selection of stories may improve. For instance, asking Rowe about “Twitter 140” — a reference to Twitter’s plans to distance itself from its strict 140-character count rule — the bot returns popular stories from well-known sites like Yahoo, CNET and PCMag.

Rowe has one other weird and not entirely practical trick, too — if you upload a picture of yourself, it will surface news articles where the person in the story looks like you. Why? Uh, because it can? (Oh, and prepare to be either very flattered or very insulted by its results.)

The bot — initially spotted by the blogMSPoweruser.com following Microsoft’sannouncement — is the latest development from Microsoft’s News Pro app, which first debuted this January. A sort of standard news-gathering app, News Pro is Microsoft’s own take on something like Apple News, or the third-party app Smart News, perhaps.

The app offers users a customized experience by connecting to your Facebook and LinkedIn in order to better understand your interests.

In practice, News Pro doesn’t do a great job at personalization yet, I’ve found. While it accurately suggests stories from areas like “computer hardware” and the “Internet” for me, it misses a number of possible suggestions that could be easily pulled from my ever-growing set of Facebook likes.

Similarly, the bot feels rough around the edges, too. But this is not an “official” Microsoft product, we should point out — it’s an app from the company’s internal R&D incubator, Microsoft Garage.

Microsoft is hardly the only company experimenting with new ways to deliver the news via bots, however. Other efforts in the space include those running on Facebook Messenger’s bot platform, like bots from CNN, The WSJ, Business Insider or even yours truly; Telegram’snews bots; or independent efforts like Quartz’s app, and many more.

The updated app also introduces other features, including groups for discussing the news with others, for example.

Rowe is available in the updated News Pro app on iTunes here.

Nanomaterials could double efficiency of solar cells by converting waste heat into usable energy

An experimental solar cell created by MIT researchers could massively increase the amount of power generated by a given area of panels, while simultaneously reducing the amount of waste heat. Even better, it sounds super cool when scientists talk about it: “with our own unoptimized geometry, we in fact could break the Shockley-Queisser limit.”

The Shockley-Queisser limit, which is definitely not made up, is the theoretical maximum efficiency of a solar cell, and it’s somewhere around 32 percent for the most common silicon-based ones.

You can get around this by various tricks like stacking cells, but the better option, according to David Bierman, a doctoral student on the team (and who is quoted above), will be thermophotovoltaics — whereby sunlight is turned into heat and then re-emitted as light better suited for the cell to absorb.

Sound weird? Here’s the thing. Solar cells work best with a certain wavelength of light — perhaps ultraviolet is too short, while infrared is too long, but let’s say 600nm (orange visible light) is perfect. Only some of the broad-spectrum radiation emitted by the sun is at or around 600nm, which limits the amount of energy the cell can pull out of that radiation — that’s one of the components of the Shockley-Queisser limit.

What Bierman and the others on his team did was to add a step between the sun and the cell: a carefully engineered structure of carbon nanotubes. “The carbon nanotubes are virtually a perfect absorber over the entire color spectrum,” said Bierman in the MIT news release. “All of the energy of the photons gets converted to heat.”

Normally heat is undesirable in a solar cell, as it’s just waste energy that can interfere with normal operation. But in this case, the heat is not allowed to dissipate; instead, the carbon nanostructure converts the heat back into light — at the exact optimum wavelength of the photovoltaic cell.

The result is a huge increase in efficiency, and that’s not the only benefit. Heat, unlike light, is easy to store and move. If the day’s sunlight was entirely converted to heat and stored away, it could be converted to light on demand — like, say, at night. In other words, this technique essentially allows sunlight to be saved for later.

Experimental results bore out the theory, and a prototype TPV cell performed as expected. But the tech still needs to make it out of the lab, and manufacturing the complex carbon nanomaterials in bulk is no simple task. So you won’t be using thermophotovoltaics next year or the year after — but the technique is a tremendously promising one and unlikely to be left on the shelf.

The team’s research was published in the journal Nature Energy.

Google plans to replace your password with Trust API

The importance of increasing online security around personal information has risen due to the increase in cyber attacks and data breaches over recent year.

Now Instead of just relying on uniquely generated PINs, Google intends to use your biometrics data – like your typing patterns, your current location, and more – to strengthen the second layer of authentication with a better, automatic and trustworthy approach.

Project Abacus: Password-free Logins

Introduced at the Google I/O developer conference, the new feature is called the Trust API, which will be available to Android developers by year-end if the initial tests with "several very large financial institutions" next month goes well.

Trust API was first developed under the codename Project Abacus, which was introduced last year at Google I/O 2015 when the company announced that it was working on a new password-less authentication method for Android devices.

Project Abacus is a system that opts for biometrics over two-factor authentication.

A while ago, the company implemented a similar idea, called "Smart Lock," on devices running Android 5.0 and higher.

Smart Locks automatically locks or unlocks your device when you are in a trusted location, or when your device recognizes your facial characteristics or have a secure Bluetooth device connected.

This Trust API is an upgraded and advanced version of Smart Lock. Trust API works by using the phone's sensors to collect data about you such as your voice, typing patterns, the particular times and locations you might use an app, and even facial recognition to derive a "Trust Score".

This Trust Score is then used to authenticate you without any need to enter a password or PIN, the head of Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) unit Daniel Kaufman said Friday at its Google I/O developer conference.

In case your Trust Score is not high enough, apps could revert to asking users for their passwords.

However, the company also said previously that different apps could require different Trust Scores. For example, your bank could require a higher score than a gaming app.

This Trust Score is the new "Trust Score API" or "Trust API" that the company hopes to put in developers' hands by the end of the year..