From a report: A new robot can navigate without GPS, using the same light-sensing abilities as desert ants. Desert ants survive in searingly hot conditions in the Sahara. They sometimes have just a few minutes to forage for food before they risk burning to death. As a result, they are very efficient navigators, using bands of polarized light, invisible to humans, to get around. They also carefully count their steps. These two tactics help to keep them alive. AntBot: The bot, described this week in Science Robotics, is fitted with UV light sensors that can detect polarized light from the sun. This is known as a "celestial compass" and is designed to mimic the way desert ants see the sun's light. This helps it work out the direction it's going in. The robot also counts its steps, much like its desert muse. In tests, it successfully managed to complete an outdoor homing task, where it was required to go to several checkpoints and then return to a fixed location within a range of 14 meters.

Nvidia has predicted that the year ahead would be a good one for the company, with demand for laptop gaming gear remaining strong. From a report: Looking forward, Huang said it would be a big year for gaming laptops, as Nvidia knows that more than 40 Turing-based gaming laptops (based on the GeForce RTX 2060) are poised to launch during the year. Those laptops use mid-range RTX cards based on graphics processing units (GPUs) using Nvidia's new Turing architecture -- the GeForce RTX graphics cards that can do real-time ray tracing -- that are battery efficient.

Huang acknowledged that visibility is limited. I asked him if cloud gaming would be a disruptive force during the year. But he noted that Nvidia had been providing its own cloud gaming solution, GeForce Now, with relatively little impact on the market for three years. So he said it remains to be seen if cloud gaming and the "Netflix of games" would make an impact on the market. In the meantime, he said that gaming laptops would launch.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: In a not-too-distant future, renewable energy becomes the world's biggest source of power generation. A quarter of the distances that humans travel by vehicle will be in electric cars. U.S. dominance in the oil market begins to wane, and OPEC's influence is resurgent, as crude demand finally peaks. That is the vision laid out by British oil and gas giant BP on Thursday in its latest Annual Energy Outlook. The closely followed report lays out a vision through 2040 for Earth's energy future, provided government policy, technology and consumer preferences evolve in line with recent trends. BP forecasts that the world's energy demand will grow by a third through 2040, driven by rising consumption in China, India and other parts of Asia. About 75 percent of that increase will come from the need to power industry and buildings. At the same time, energy demand will continue to grow in the transportation sector, but that growth will slow sharply as vehicles become more efficient and more consumers opt for electric cars. But despite the increase in supply, BP thinks two-thirds of the world's population will still live in places with relatively low energy consumption per head. The takeaway: The world will need to generate more energy. The report says natural gas consumption will grow by 50 percent over the next 20 years, increasing in virtually every corner of the globe. "Throughout most of that time, the world will continue to consume more oil year after year, until demand ultimately peaks around 108 million barrels per day in the 2030s," reports CNBC. "This year, OPEC expects global oil demand to reach 100 million bpd."

Meanwhile, coal consumption is forecasted to flatline, as China and developed countries quit the fossil fuel in favor of cleaner-burning and renewable energy sources. "However, BP sees India and other Asian nations burning more coal to meet surging power demand as the nations become more prosperous," reports CNBC.

New research from The NPD Group reveals that the smartwatch market overall is growing at an impressive rate and that the Apple Watch remains the best-selling wearable on the market. "Specifically, year-over-year smartwatch unit sales in the U.S. jumped by 61% while revenue jumped by 51%," reports BGR. "As for specific revenue figures, the report relays that smartwatch revenue from November of 2017 through November of 2018 checked in at $5 billion. One particularly interesting data point is that 88% of all smartwatch sales can be attributed to Apple, Samsung, and Fitbit." From the report: "Over the last 18 months smartwatch sales gained strong momentum, proving the naysayers, who didn't think the category could achieve mainstream acceptance, had potentially judged too soon," NPD analyst Weston Henderek said in a press release. "The ability to be truly connected via built-in LTE without the need to have a smartphone nearby proved to be a tipping point for consumers, as they now recognize the value in being able to complete a wide range of tasks on the device including receiving notifications, messaging, accessing smart home controls, and more."

Indeed, Apple executives have pointed to the inclusion of LTE connectivity on the Apple Watch Series 3 as a huge selling point. Notably, Apple Watch sales during the 2017 holiday quarter were record-breaking. More recently, Tim Cook said that revenue from Apple wearables line jumped by 50% "thanks to strong sales of both Apple Watch and AirPods."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Allstate, one of the largest insurance companies in the United States, just made a curious purchase. Through its subsidiary SquareTrade, the insurance giant bought iCracked, one of the largest independent smartphone repair companies in the country. The acquisition means that Allstate has become one of the most powerful proponents of right to repair legislation in the United States. According to Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of Repair.org, which is pushing for the legislation, the company has already loaned a lobbyist to the effort in New Hampshire.

This is potentially big news for the right to repair movement, which is trying to get laws passed in 15 states this year that would make it easier for independent repair professionals to get repair tools and parts for consumer electronics. Thus far, it's been largely a grassroots effort from organizations like Repair.org and iFixit. Companies such as Apple, John Deere, Facebook, Microsoft, and trade organizations that represent huge tech companies have used their considerable political power to lobby against these bills. But Allstate's purchase of iCracked is a potential gamechanger. iCracked is a giant chain that does a lot of third party repairs. A change in the laws would benefit it, and now Allstate, as much as the average consumer. "iCracked has been a major supporter of right to repair, and we really appreciate their valuable contribution to the fight for freedom," Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, told Motherboard in an email. "I'm optimistic that this partnership will elevate the visibility of the work that we're doing together."

"SquareTrade continues to work with manufacturers as well as the independent repair community," Jason Siciliano, VP and Global Creative Director of SquareTrade told me in an email. "As this issue evolves, we will maintain good relationships and continue to listen to the key players on all sides of the debate and will work towards sensible solutions whether they are led by the industry or regulators."

LG's next upcoming flagship smartphone is the LG G8, which is expected to debut at Mobile World Congress at the end of the month. While much of the phone is similar to last year's model, LG yesterday announced some news on the phone's audio capabilities. "The phone uses the same 'Crystal Sound OLED' branding that LG has used on some of its TVs before; this means that the entire display will vibrate to work as a speaker, which was previously rumored," reports The Verge. "The news also confirms that the G8 will be the first flagship G-series phone not to use an LCD." From the report: The G8 still has a bottom-facing speaker for louder use cases like speakerphone calls, and LG says this can be paired with the top part of the screen for 2-channel stereo sound. Elsewhere, the signature quad DAC from LG's recent flagship phones returns -- which means there'll be a headphone jack -- as does the "Boombox Speaker" functionality that produces surprisingly bassy sound when the phone is placed on a table. LG has already confirmed that the G8 will have a front-facing 3D camera with a time-of-flight sensor, while rumors suggest there could be an optional second screen accessory.

A group of programmers and device hackers are working to bring proper support for Ubuntu to Arm-powered Windows laptops, starting with first-generation Snapdragon 835 systems, like the HP Envy x2 and Asus NovaGo. From a report: The aarch64-laptops project provides prebuilt images for the aforementioned notebook PCs, as well as the Lenovo Miix 630. Although Ubuntu and other Linux distributions support aarch64 (ARMv8) by default, various obstacles including the design and configuration of Qualcomm Snapdragon processors make these default images not practically usable. The aarch64-laptops project developers are aiming to address these difficulties, though work is still ongoing. Presently, the TouchPad does not work properly on the Asus, with all three lacking proper support for on-board storage and Wi-Fi, which rely on UFS support. According to their documentation, this is being worked on upstream.

Zorro shares a report from The Register: Older satnavs and such devices won't be able to use America's Global Positioning System properly after April 6 unless they've been suitably updated or designed to handle a looming epoch rollover. GPS signals from satellites include a timestamp, needed in part to calculate one's location, that stores the week number using ten binary bits. That means the week number can have 210 or 1,024 integer values, counting from zero to 1,023 in this case. Every 1,024 weeks, or roughly every 20 years, the counter rolls over from 1,023 to zero. The first Saturday in April will mark the end of the 1,024th week, after which the counter will spill over from 1,023 to zero. The last time the week number overflowed like this was in 1999, nearly two decades on from the first epoch in January 1980. You can see where this is going. If devices in use today are not designed or patched to handle this latest rollover, they will revert to an earlier year after that 1,024th week in April, causing attempts to calculate position to potentially fail. System and navigation data could even be corrupted, we're warned. U.S. Homeland Security explained the issue in a write-up this week. GPS.gov also notes that the new CNAV and MNAV message formats will use a 13-bit week number, so this issue shouldn't happen again anytime soon. The site recommend users consult the manufacturer of their equipment to make sure they have the proper updates in place.

A reader shares a report from Ars Technica: Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University published a paper in Nature Sustainability this week that looks at the emissions and economic costs associated with recycling automotive batteries. They specifically addressed batteries with three types of cathode chemistry: nickel manganese cobalt oxide (NMC), nickel cobalt aluminum oxide (NCA), and iron phosphate (LFP). The first two cathode chemistries are common in passenger vehicles, and LFP is common in buses (bus maker BYD uses LFP batteries, for example). Since the packaging of batteries is important to the recycling method, cylindrical batteries (the types of cells that Tesla makes) are compared to pouch cell batteries in the analysis. The researchers also compared recycling methods. These include pyrometallurgical recycling (exposing the valuable parts of the battery to high temperatures and then recovering those metals as alloys), hydrometallurgical recycling (leaching valuable metals from batteries and separating the desired metals from the resulting solution), and "direct cathode recycling," where the battery's cathode is retained as-is, but new lithium is added in such a way that the battery regains its original performance.

Ultimately, LFP-cathode batteries were not able to avoid additional emissions under any recycling circumstances. The iron materials used in those bus batteries are already efficient to mine, the paper notes. This results "in a smaller GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions offset from the recovered materials that is insufficient to offset the energy and GHG emissions associated with the recycling processes considered." For now, new bus batteries seem to be cheaper and better for the environment than recycled bus batteries. The story is more complicated for electric passenger vehicle batteries, however. For both NMC and NCA cells, hydrometallurgical and direct cathode removal recycling methods do result in a reduction of GHG emissions, but only recycling via direct cathode removal with pouch cells shows a statistically significant reduction in emissions.

In a blog post today, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company is building new data centers and offices and expanding several key locations across the U.S., spending $13 billion this year. CNBC reports: Pichai outlined the plans, which include opening new data centers in Nevada, Ohio, Texas and Nebraska, the first time the company will have infrastructure locations in those states. The company is also doubling its workforce in Virginia, providing greater access to Washington, D.C., with a new office and more data center space, and expanding its New York campus at Hudson Square.

Google is showing its willingness to further open its wallet, after a year in which capital spending more than doubled to $25.46 billion. The company didn't say home much each location will cost or provide information on tax incentives from local communities. Pichai said the plans will likely create tens of thousands of construction jobs across Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Texas and Virginia, as well as Oklahoma and South Carolina, where the company is expanding existing data centers. Google didn't say how many new jobs the data centers and business offices would create. Pichai also said that the company is adding new office buildings in Texas and Massachusetts, building out more space in Illinois, Wisconsin, Washington state and Georgia, and redeveloping California locations near Los Angeles and in the Bay Area, including the Westside Pavillion and Spruce Goose Hangar.

Raspberry Pi is finally ready for the full Windows 10 experience. From a report: A new installer lets you put Windows 10 on Arm, including the Pi. And it's made by the same people who got Windows 10 on Arm onto Lumia 950 and 950 XL handset. You can find the Github page here, in which developer Jose Manuel Nieto Sanchez call the tool "super easy to use" and "no-hassle." It requires a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B or B+, a microSD card (he recommends an A1 rating) and a Windows 10ARM64 image, which is linked to from the page where you get the download instructions.

For those hoping the next iPhone would ditch the Lightning port in favor of the more versatile USB-C port, you'll surely be disappointed by the latest rumor. "Japanese site Macotakara says that not only will the 2019 iPhone use Lightning, Apple will also continue to bundle the same 5W charger and USB-A to Lightning cable in the box," reports 9to5Mac. "This is seen as a cost saving measure. It seems that customers wanting faster iPhone charge times will still have to buy accessories, like the 12W iPad charger." From the report: The site explains that Lightning port is not going anywhere and Apple is resistant to changing the included accessories to maintain production costs. Apple can benefit from huge economies of scale by selling the same accessories for many generation. As such, Apple apparently will keep bundling Lightning EarPods, Lightning to USB-A cable, and the 5W USB power adaptor, with the 2019 iPhone lineup. This is disappointing as Apple began shipping an 18W USB-C charger with its iPad Pro line last fall, and many expected that accessory to become an iPhone standard too. Even if the iPhone keeps the Lightning port, Lightning can support fast-charging over the USB Type-C protocol. It's not clear if the cost savings of this decision would be passed on to consumers with lower cost 2019 iPhone pricing.

"Microsoft is expected to announce the next generation HoloLens headset at an already announced event on February 24, and the company's doing a bit more to stoke the flames," reports TechCrunch. One of the key people behind the original HoloLens, Alex Kipman, tweeted a video showing "vague forms of chips and cables [that] take shape out of melted ice, rocks and air," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The original headset was ahead of the mixed reality wave, but now that AR is starting to catch on all over the industry, the timing could be right for a big second-generation launch. Reports have suggested a Qualcomm 850 chip and new Project Kinect Sensors. The headset is also said to be cheaper and smaller than its developer-focused predecessor, which could put Microsoft in prime position to push augmented reality forward.

Jose Pontes of EV Volumes and CleanTechnica has crunched some numbers and found that the Tesla Model 3 is now the best selling plug-in vehicle in the world. "In fact, the Model 3 was approximately 55,000 sales above the #2 BAIC EC-Series, an extremely popular Chinese model," CleanTechnica reports. "The Model 3 gobbled 7% of the plug-in vehicle market, while the #2 EC-Series and #3 Nissan LEAF each had 4%." From the report: After those top three, as the chart shows, the Tesla Model S and Model X were #4 and #5, respectively. They were followed by three Chinese models and then the Toyota Prius Prime and Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV. The Model 3 (and others) helped push the world plug-in vehicle share up to 2.1% in 2018. (Double that 4 times and we're at about 30% market share.) [...] Remember, 93% of plug-in vehicle sales in 2018 were not Model 3 sales. Nearly 2 million non -- Model 3 electric cars, SUVs, and crossovers made it into consumers' parking spots. Still, there's clearly a new king of the hill, and its young Tesla's 4th model.

dryriver writes: For those who are unfamiliar with the story, from 1901-1902, inventor Nikola Tesla had a 187-foot-tall experimental wireless electricity transmission tower called the "Wardenclyffe Tower" built in Shoreham, New York. Tesla believed that it was possible to generate electrical power on a large scale in one part of the world and transmit that electrical power to electrical receivers in far away parts of the world wirelessly, using parts of Earth's atmosphere as the conducting medium. Tesla had huge problems getting the project financed -- powerful banker J.P. Morgan didn't play along and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson didn't help a pleading Tesla either. An excerpt from a Wardenclyffe documentary shows the tower finally being dynamited and sold for scrap in 1917. The Wardenclyffe Tower never reached operational status; wireless electrical transmission between continents never happened; Tesla became an emotionally broken man who died regretting that he did not manage to finish his life's work; and to this day nobody knows exactly how the Wardenclyffe Tower was supposed to function technically. To the question: Do you believe that Tesla's dream of electrical devices anywhere in the world essentially being able to draw electrical power from the sky with a relatively simple antenna could have worked, had he gotten the necessary funding to complete his experiments?

Motherboard's Joseph Cox and Jason Koebler report of the underground industry where thieves, coders, and hackers work to remove a user's iCloud account from a phone so that they can then be resold. They reportedly are able to do this by phishing the phone's original owners, or scam employees at Apple Stores, which have the ability to override iCloud locks. The other method (that is very labor intensive and rare) involves removing the iPhone's CPU from the Logic Board and reprogramming it to create what is essentially a "new" device. It is generally done in Chinese refurbishing labs and involves stealing a "clean" phone identification number called an IMEI. Here's an excerpt from their report: Making matters more complicated is the fact that not all iCloud-locked phones are stolen devices -- some of them are phones that are returned to telecom companies as part of phone upgrade and insurance programs. The large number of legitimately obtained, iCloud-locked iPhones helps supply the independent phone repair industry with replacement parts that cannot be obtained directly from Apple. But naturally, repair companies know that a phone is worth more unlocked than it is locked, and so some of them have waded into the hacking underground to become customers of illegal iCloud unlocking companies.

In practice, "iCloud unlock" as it's often called, is a scheme that involves a complex supply chain of different scams and cybercriminals. These include using fake receipts and invoices to trick Apple into believing they're the legitimate owner of the phone, using databases that look up information on iPhones, and social engineering at Apple Stores. There are even custom phishing kits for sale online designed to steal iCloud passwords from a phone's original owner. [...] There are many listings on eBay, Craigslist, and wholesale sites for phones billed as "iCloud-locked," or "for parts" or something similar. While some of these phones are almost certainly stolen, many of them are not. According to three professionals in the independent repair and iPhone refurbishing businesses, used iPhones -- including some iCloud-locked devices -- are sold in bulk at private "carrier auctions" where companies like T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, and cell phone insurance providers sell their excess inventory (often through third-party processing companies.)

David Aguila, a 19-year-old bioengineering student at the Universitat Internacional de Catulunya in Spain, has built himself a robotic prosthetic arm using Lego pieces. David was born with Poland syndrome that affects his right peck and right arm. From a report: Once his favorite toys, the plastic bricks became the building material for Mr Aguilar's first, still very rudimentary, artificial arm at the age of nine, and each new version had more movement than the one before. He uses the artificial arm only occasionally and is self-sufficient without it, with all the versions on display in his room in the university residence on the outskirts of Barcelona. In November 2017 Mr Aguilar, who uses Lego pieces provided by a friend, proudly displayed a fully functional red and yellow robotic arm, built when he was 18, bending it in the elbow joint and flexing the grabber.

The latest models are marked MK followed by the number -- a tribute to comic book superhero Iron Man and his MK armor suits. The MK II was a predominantly blue model built from a Lego plane set, including a motor, while MK III was created from a set for a piece of mining equipment. After graduating from university, he wants to create affordable prosthetic solutions for people who need them.

Wave723 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: A new kind of magnet, theorized for decades, may now have been experimentally proven to exist. And it could eventually lead to better data storage devices. In a normal magnet, the magnetic moments of individual grains align with each other to generate a magnetic field. In contrast, in the new "singlet-based" magnet, magnetic moments are temporary in nature, popping in and out of existence. Although a singlet-based magnet's field is unstable, the fact that such magnets can more easily transition between magnetic and non-magnetic states can make them well-suited for data storage application. Specifically, they could operate more quickly and with less power than conventional devices, says Andrew Wray, a materials physicist at New York University who led the research. Now, Wray and his colleagues have discovered the first example of a singlet-based magnet that is robust -- one made from uranium antimonide (USb2). "It ends up taking very little energy to create spin excitons for uranium antimonide," Wray says. "This is essential for the singlet-based magnet, because if it took a lot of energy, then there wouldn't be enough spin excitons to condense, stabilize one another, and give you a magnet." The research has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

According to new job listings (first spotted by Android Police), it looks like Google may start building its own wearable devices. "A job listing posted two days ago on the Google Careers site calls for a Vice President of Hardware Engineering for Wearables," reports Android Police. The description reads, "As the VP of Hardware Engineering for Wearables, you'll work collaboratively with the Senior Leadership team for Google Hardware and will be responsible for the design, development, and shipment of all Google's Wearable products. You will lead and enable the effectiveness of a large engineering organization primarily based in Mountain View to develop multiple next-generation wearable products simultaneously." From the report: Google's only current wearable product is the Pixel Buds, which hasn't been a runaway success. It seems extremely unlikely that the company would want a Vice President dedicated to producing earbuds, so it's safe to assume Google has plans for other wearable products, like fitness trackers and/or smartwatches. Another listing is for a "Wearables Design Manager," but the description is more vague. "As the Design Manager of the Wearables design team within the award-winning Google Hardware Design organization, you will be a critical leader and contributor to guide the efforts in defining and evolving what it means to hold 'Google in your hand.'"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple will design its own modems in-house, according to sources that spoke with Reuters. In doing so, the company may hope to leave behind Intel modems in its mobile devices, which Apple has used since a recent falling out with Qualcomm. According to the sources, the team working on modem design now reports to Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of hardware technologies. Srouji joined Apple back in 2004 and led development of Apple's first in-house system-on-a-chip, the A4. He has overseen Apple silicon ever since, including the recent A12 and A12X in the new iPhone and iPad Pro models.

Before this move, Apple's modem work ultimately fell under Dan Riccio, who ran engineering for iPhones, iPads, and Macs. As Reuters noted, that division was heavily focused on managing the supply chain and working with externally made components. The fact that the team is moving into the group focused on developing in-house components is a strong signal that Apple will not be looking outside its own walls for modems in the future. In recent years, Apple has been locked in a costly and complex series of legal battles with Qualcomm, the industry's foremost maker of mobile wireless chips. While Apple previously used Qualcomm's chips in its phones, the legal struggles led the tech giant to turn instead to Intel in recent iPhones.