the_newsbeagle writes: The stethoscope is a ubiquitous medical tool that has barely changed since it was invented in the early 1800s. But now a team of engineers, doctors, and public health researchers have come together to reinvent the tool using adaptive acoustics and AI. Their motivation is this statistic: Every year, nearly 1 million kids die of pneumonia around the world, with most deaths in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The death toll is highest among children under the age of 5. The researchers, from Johns Hopkins University, designed a smart stethoscope for use by unskilled workers in noisy medical clinics. It uses a dynamic audio filtering system to remove ambient noise and distracting body sounds while not interfering with the subtle sounds from the lungs. And it uses AI to analyze the cleaned-up signal and provide a diagnosis.

UltraViolet, one of the entertainment industry's first attempts at creating a comprehensive digital locker service, is shutting down on July 31st. Users should link their libraries to the service of at least one retailer which can then be used to access their films and TV shows after the shutdown. From a report: UltraViolet's days were numbered ever since Disney, the only major Hollywood studio not to join, launched its expanded Movies Anywhere locker service in 2017. Not only did it offer broad studio support, but it could also be connected to major digital retailers like iTunes, Amazon, and Google Play, unlike UltraViolet. Additional resources: How to safeguard your UltraViolet library.

Columbia Engineering researchers have made a major advance in robotics by creating a robot that learns what it is, from scratch, with zero prior knowledge of physics, geometry, or motor dynamics. Initially the robot does not know if it is a spider, a snake, an arm -- it has no clue what its shape is. After a brief period of "babbling," and within about a day of intensive computing, their robot creates a self-simulation. The robot can then use that self-simulator internally to contemplate and adapt to different situations, handling new tasks as well as detecting and repairing damage in its own body. From a report: The work is published today in Science Robotics. To date, robots have operated by having a human explicitly model the robot. "But if we want robots to become independent, to adapt quickly to scenarios unforeseen by their creators, then it's essential that they learn to simulate themselves," says Hod Lipson, professor of mechanical engineering, and director of the Creative Machines lab, where the research was done.

For the study, Lipson and his PhD student Robert Kwiatkowski used a four-degree-of-freedom articulated robotic arm. Initially, the robot moved randomly and collected approximately one thousand trajectories, each comprising one hundred points. The robot then used deep learning, a modern machine learning technique, to create a self-model. The first self-models were quite inaccurate, and the robot did not know what it was, or how its joints were connected. But after less than 35 hours of training, the self-model became consistent with the physical robot to within about four centimeters. The self-model performed a pick-and-place task in a closed loop system that enabled the robot to recalibrate its original position between each step along the trajectory based entirely on the internal self-model. With the closed loop control, the robot was able to grasp objects at specific locations on the ground and deposit them into a receptacle with 100 percent success.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Foxconn, the giant Taiwan-based company that announced plans for a $10 billion display-making factory in Wisconsin, now says it is rethinking the project's focus because of "new realities" in the global marketplace (Warning source may be paywalled; alternative source). The company said Wednesday that it remained committed to creating as many as 13,000 jobs in Wisconsin, and continued to "actively consider opportunities" involving flat-screen technology. But it said it was also "examining ways for Wisconsin's knowledge workers to promote research and development." "The global market environment that existed when the project was first announced has changed," Foxconn said in a statement. "As our plans are driven by those of our customers, this has necessitated the adjustment of plans for all projects, including Wisconsin." But the company said its presence in Wisconsin remained a priority, and said it was "broadening the base of our investment" there. The statement followed a Reuters report quoting Louis Woo, a special assistant to Foxconn's chairman, Terry Gou, as saying that the costs of manufacturing screens for televisions and other consumer products are too high in the United States. "In terms of TV, we have no place in the U.S.," Mr. Woo told Reuters. "We can't compete." Some Wisconsin Republicans blamed the company's change in plans on the election of Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, to succeed Mr. Walker, a Republican, in November. In a joint statement, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and the Senate majority leader, Scott Fitzgerald, said it was "not surprising Foxconn would rethink building a manufacturing plant in Wisconsin under the Evers administration." The lawmakers added: "The company is reacting to the wave of economic uncertainty that the new governor has brought with his administration."

dryriver writes: Whether you are into consumer electronics, cars, furniture or other manufactured things, one aspect of them doesn't change -- the physical design or "look" of the product tends to age badly in our perception as newer products are released. When you first buy the product it looks "sexy and new"; 5 years down the road, it just looks kind of "old" or "less sophisticated" compared to the newer, sleeker products. To the question: Could you get an artificial intelligence powered by a neural network to train on hundreds of product designs created over the last 20 years -- possibly by laser-scanning products in 3D or providing 3D CAD files -- and learn with great sophistication how product design or "product looks" evolve as time passes? Could that AI then be coaxed into making fairly educated guesses about how a particular product might look if it were designed in the future, in say 2030? In other words, could a suitably trained AI give a laptop, car, or designer chair to be manufactured in 2020 the "design look of the 2030s" ten years early by extrapolating forward from the training dataset of past product designs?

secwatcher shares a report from Threatpost: A gamut of kids' GPS-tracking watches are exposing sensitive data involving 35,000 children -- including their location, in real time. Researchers from Pen Test Partners specifically took a look at the Gator portfolio of watches from TechSixtyFour. The Gator line had been in the spotlight in 2017 for having a raft of vulnerabilities, called out by the Norwegian Consumers Council in its WatchOut research. "A year on, we decided to have a look at the Gator watch again to see how their security had improved," said Vangelis Stykas, in a Tuesday posting. "Guess what: a train wreck. Anyone could access the entire database, including real-time child location, name, parents' details etc. Not just Gator watches either -- the same back end covered multiple brands and tens of thousands of watches." "At issue was an easy-to-exploit, severe privilege-escalation vulnerability: The system failed to validate that the user had the appropriate permission to take admin control," reports Threatpost. "An attacker with access to the watch's credentials simply needed to change the user level parameter in the backend to an admin designation, which would provide access to all account information and all watch information."

Samsung has started mass producing what it says is the industry's first one terabyte embedded Universal Flash Storage (eUFS) technology for smartphones. "It will give the company's mobile devices PC-like storage without the need for large-capacity microSD cards," Engadget reports. "It'll be incredibly useful if you use your phone to take tons of photos and HD videos -- Samsung says it's enough to store 260 10-minute videos in 4K UHD." From the report: "The 1TB eUFS is expected to play a critical role in bringing a more notebook-like user experience to the next generation of mobile devices," said Cheol Choi, EVP of Memory Sales & Marketing at Samsung Electronics. As ZDNet notes, Samsung's upcoming flagship devices, such as the S10, will most likely come with a 1TB option thanks to its new eUFS technology. After all, Samsung started mass producing its 512GB storage technology back in December 2017 and then debuted it with its new phones early on in the following year.

In addition to offering massive storage, the new eUFS was also designed to be faster than typical SSDs, microSDs and previous revisions of the technology. It has a 1,000-megabyte-per-second sequential read speed, twice that of the usual SSD and faster than its 512GB predecessor. Despite all those, Samsung says it'll come in the same package size as its 512GB flash memory, so it won't have to make its big phones even bigger.

Apple plans to launch iPhones with a more-powerful 3-D camera as soon as next year, stepping up the company's push into augmented reality, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. From the report: The rear-facing, longer-range 3-D camera is designed to scan the environment to create three-dimensional reconstructions of the real world. It will work up to about 15 feet from the device, the people said. Apple's new system uses a laser scanner, rather than the existing dot-projection technology which doesn't work as well over longer distances, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing unreleased features. That's just one of many new features -- including a third, more advanced camera, enhanced photo-capture tools and a more powerful chip -- that Apple plans to include in coming generations of iPhones, the people said.

[...] For 2019, Apple plans successors to the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max -- code-named D42 and D43 -- and an update to the iPhone XR, said the people. The larger of the new high-end iPhones will have three cameras on the back, and other handsets could eventually come with the upgraded system, too, the people said. [...] Apple's next operating system update, iOS 13, will include a dark mode option for easier nighttime viewing and improvements to CarPlay, the company's in-vehicle software.

Krystalo writes: iRobot is best known for making vacuum cleaner robots: the infamous Roomba lineup. But the company also makes mopping robots (Braava lineup), pool cleaning robots (Mirra lineup), a bot to help clean gutters, and even programmable robots (Create lineup). So, what's next for your home? A lawn mower robot. Queue the "get off my lawn" jokes.

The Hanford Vit Plant in Washington state, a $17 billion federal facility for treating and immobilizing radioactive waste, is now on track to begin "glassifying" low-activity nuclear waste as soon as 2022, reports IEEE Spectrum. This is "a year ahead of a court-mandated deadline." From the report: Still, an air of uncertainty surrounds the project. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has proposed reclassifying some of the nation's radioactive waste as less dangerous, and it's unclear how that could affect the Hanford facility's long-term prospects. Hanford houses about 212 million liters of high-level waste, the leftovers of the U.S. nuclear weapons program.

However, higher-level waste has a longer timeline. Separate pretreatment and vitrification facilities aren't slated for commissioning until 2033. All parts of the Vit Plant are legally required to begin fully operating by 2036, under a consent decree between Washington, Oregon, and the federal government. The DOE hasn't said whether, or how, its proposal to reclassify nuclear waste would affect existing plans at Hanford if adopted. The agency is not making any decisions on the classification or disposal of any particular waste stream at this time, a DOE official said by email. [...] Though current law defines high-level radioactive waste as the sludge that results from processing highly radioactive nuclear fuel, the DOE is considering slapping a new, potentially less expensive label on it if it can meet the radioactive concentration limits for Class C low-level radioactive waste. Reclassifying nuclear waste would allow the federal government to sidestep decades of cleanup work, saving it billions of dollars. The relabeling might even enable the DOE to bypass costly vitrification and instead contain tank waste by covering it with concrete-like grout, as the agency does at other decommissioned nuclear sites. Officials and citizens in Washington and Oregon oppose this method for Hanford, "citing the risk of long-term soil and groundwater contamination and the challenges of moving and storing voluminous grout blocks," reports IEEE Spectrum. "Earlier federal studies found that grout 'actually performed the worst of all the supplemental treatment options considered.' (A 2017 report to Congress, however, suggested both vitrification and grout could effectively treat Hanford's low-activity waste.)"

An anonymous reader writes: Today, System76 unveiled its latest laptop -- the 15.6-inch (full-HD) "Darter Pro." It is thin, but not overly so -- it still has USB-A ports (thankfully). The computer is quite modern, however, as it also has a USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 port. It supports Pop!_OS 18.04 LTS (64-bit), Pop!_OS 18.10 (64-bit), or Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (64-bit) operating system. It comes in two variants, with the following processor options: 8th Gen Intel Core i5-8265U: 1.6 up to 3.90 GHz -- 6MB Cache -- 4 Cores -- 8 Threads, or 8th Gen Intel Core i7-8565U: 1.8 up to 4.60 GHz -- 8MB Cache -- 4 Cores -- 8 Threads, with either coupled with Intel UHD Graphics 620 GPU, and up to 32GB Dual Channel DDR4 @ 2400 MHz, and M.2 SATA or PCIe NVMe SSD for storage. As for ports, there is USB 3.1 Type-C with Thunderbolt 3, 2 USB 3.0 Type-A, 1 x USB 2.0, SD Card Reader. The company says it will announce the pricing at a later stage,

Four new iPad models and a 7th-generation iPod Touch have been found in upcoming iOS 12.2, and seven new iPad models were discovered in the Eurasian Economic Commission Database, reports MacRumors. From the report: Developer Steven Troughton-Smith speculates that the iPad model numbers could be new iPad mini devices, which would be in line with rumors suggesting a new iPad mini 5 is in the works. According to Troughton-Smith, none of the iPads have Face ID, which is what we would expect as a new iPad mini is likely to be positioned as an affordable, lower-end device. There's also a reference to "iPod 9,1," which does not match up with any known iPod touch devices, suggesting it is a new next-generation model. The current sixth-generation iPod touch is "iPod 7,1," for reference. The iPod listed in iOS 12.2 does not appear to have Face ID or Touch ID, which is in line with the current iPod touch.

Previous rumors have indeed suggested Apple is working on a 7th-generation iPod touch, an iPad mini 5, and a new version of the lower-cost 9.7-inch iPad, which may actually be upgraded to 10 inches in its next iteration. There's been mixed information about what to expect from an iPad mini update. A case leak suggested a vertical camera and quad speakers, but a photo of an unreleased iPad mini, which could be the new iPad mini, featured an older A9 processor and a design that's similar to the fourth-generation iPad mini.

Recode's Rani Molla shares the findings of a new study from the Brookings Institution, which finds that automation will impact men at a higher rate than women. Here's an excerpt from the report: Young people -- especially those in rural areas or who are underrepresented minorities -- will have a greater likelihood of having their jobs replaced by automation. Meanwhile, older, more educated white people living in big cities are more likely to maintain their coveted positions, either because their jobs are irreplaceable or because they're needed in new jobs alongside our robot overlords. The Brookings study also warns that automation will exacerbate existing social inequalities along certain geographic and demographic lines, because it will likely eliminate many lower- and middle-skill jobs considered stepping stones to more advanced careers. These jobs losses will be in concentrated in rural areas, particularly the swath of America between the coasts.

However, at least in the case of gender, it's the men, for once, who will be getting the short end of the stick. Jobs traditionally held by men have a higher "average automation potential" than those held by women, meaning that a greater share of those tasks could be automated with current technology, according to Brookings. That's because the occupations men are more likely to hold tend to be more manual and more easily replaced by machines and artificial intelligence. Of course, the real point here is that people of all stripes face employment disruption as new technologies are able to do many of our tasks faster, more efficiently, and more precisely than mere mortals. The implications of this unemployment upheaval are far-reaching and raise many questions: How will people transition to the jobs of the future? What will those jobs be? Is it possible to mitigate the polarizing effects automation will have on our already-stratified society of haves and have-nots?

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is adding a new device to its suite of miniature computers for industrial and enterprise customers. From a report: The charity today unveiled the Pi Compute Module 3+ (CM3+), successor to the two-year-old Compute Module 3 (CM3). The Pi Compute Module 3+ comes in four variants, starting at $25. The Raspberry Pi Compute Module is derived from the CM3 board but offers better thermal behavior under load. That's possible because of the Broadcom's 64-bit BCM2837B0 application processor, which was also used in last year's Raspberry Pi 3B+, and 1GB of LPDDR2 RAM. The difference between the four variants resides in their storage limits. The CM3+ Lite does not offer a built-in eMMC Flash, whereas other variants include 8GB ($30), 16GB ($35), and 32GB ($40) of eMMC Flash. These eMMC flash chips are more reliable and robust than normal SD cards, the foundation claims.

A reader shares a report from Business Insider: Arthur Ashkin, the world's oldest Nobel Prize winner, [...] has turned the bottom floor of his house into a kind of laboratory where he's developing a solar-energy-harnessing device. Ashkin's new invention uses geometry to capture and funnel light. Essentially, it relies on reflective concentrator tubes that intensify solar reflections, which could make existing solar panels more efficient or perhaps even replace them altogether with something cheaper and simpler. The tubes are "dirt cheap," Ashkin says -- they cost just pennies to create -- which is why he thinks they "will save the world." He's even got his eye on a second Nobel Prize.

Ashkin's lifelong fascination with light has already saved countless lives. He shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics for his role in inventing a tiny object-levitating technology called optical tweezers, which is essentially a powerful laser beam that can "catch very small things," as Ashkin describes it. Optical tweezers can hold and stretch DNA, thereby helping us probe some of the biggest mysteries of life. [...] Ashkin has already filed the necessary patent paperwork (he holds at least 47 patents to date) for his new invention, but said he isn't ready to share photos of the concentrators with the public just yet. Soon, he hopes to publish his results in the journal Science.

On Thursday, Tim Cook took to Twitter to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the Macintosh, recalling how it changed the world. "35 years ago, Macintosh said hello. It changed the way we think about computers and went on to change the world. We love the Mac, and today weâ(TM)re proud that more people than ever are using it to follow their passions and create the future," Cook tweeted. The Register provides a brief history lesson on how the Mac changed how users interact with computers. Here is an excerpt from the report: After the disastrous debut of the Lisa, and the abject failure of the Apple III, it was down to the Steve Jobs-led Macintosh project to save the day for the troubled computer manufacturer. Rival IBM had launched the Personal Computer XT just under a year earlier, in March 1983, with up to 640KB of RAM and a mighty Intel 8088 CPU. It also included PC-DOS 2, which would go on to underpin Microsoft's operating system efforts in subsequent decades. IBM had started to rule the PC industry, but what the IBM PC XT did not have was a graphical user interface, sticking instead with the sober command line of DOS. The Macintosh, on the other hand, had a GUI lifted from Apple's ill-fated Lisa project, except (and unusually, as things would turn out) retailed at a lower price of $2,495 (just over $6,000 in today's money). It ran faster than the Lisa too, with its Motorola 68000 CPU clocked at 7.8MHz.

The good news ended there. The machine shipped with a woeful 128KB of RAM, which was shared with the black and white 512 x 342 pixel display built into the box. That 128KB was resolutely not upgradable, and fans would have to wait until September for Apple to unleash a 512KB version for another $300. The only storage provided was a single 400KB 3 1/2;-inch disk, an improvement over the 360KB 5¼-inch floppies of IBM's PC XT and the nature of the box meant that any extra storage would have to be external. Users became quickly accustomed to swapping floppies in order to do what little useful work the pitiful 128K would afford. Third parties eventually launched hard drives for the machines, which had to be attached via the serial port. Apple would make a 20MB drive in the form of the Hard Disk 20 available in September 1985 for the 512KB Mac at a cost of $1,495. Owners of the original 128K Mac, however, needed not apply. The limited RAM made the new Hierarchical File System a non-starter.

Germany has laid out a $91 billion plan to phase out its use of coal by 2038, a government-appointed commission said Saturday. "Under the plan, half of the up to $91 billion will go to the regions shuttering plants in the west and east of the country, while the other half will be spent on preventing electricity prices from rising," ABS-CBN News reports. From the report: The commission agreed to the deadline after months of bitter wrangling as pressure mounts on Europe's top economy to step up its commitment to battling climate change. The panel, consisting of politicians, climate experts, unions and industry figures from coal regions, announced the deal after a final marathon session ended on Saturday morning. The commission's findings will now be passed on to the government, which is expected -- barring a surprise -- to follow the recommendations of the panel it set up. The plan will be discussed at a meeting between Chancellor Angela Merkel, Finance Minister Scholz and regional leaders on Thursday, national news agency DPA said.

Several plants using lignite or brown coal, which is more polluting than black coal, would be closed by 2022. Other plants will follow until 2030, when only 17 gigawatts of Germany's electricity will be supplied by coal, compared to today's 45 gigawatts. The last plant will close in 2038 at the latest, the commission said, but did not rule out moving this date forward to 2035 if conditions permit. The affected regions, where tens of thousands of jobs directly or indirectly linked to brown- and black-coal energy production, will receive 40 billion euros as compensation over the next two decades. Two billion euros will also be spent each year over the same period to stop customers from facing rising electricity prices.

With Apple offering a clearance sale on the iPhone SE earlier this week, The Verge's Nick Statt decided that it was "the appropriate moment to hop on the backup phone bandwagon" and pick one up. He writes: I've always appreciated the classic 5S design, with its overtly rounded corners and its sturdy, not-so-delicate dimensions. It never felt like it really required a case, and its smaller screen and more comfortable, one-handed use is something I've thought far too much about as I've ferried around an iPhone X and now an XS over the past year and a half. Plus, it's got a headphone jack. Would you agree that the iPhone SE is "the best minimalist phone right now," or do you think that title belongs to a different device? Why or why not?

An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post: Bill Gates thinks he has a key part of the answer for combating climate change: a return to nuclear power... Gates, who founded TerraPower in 2006, is telling lawmakers that he personally would invest $1 billion and raise $1 billion more in private capital to go along with federal funds for a pilot of his company's never-before-used technology, according to congressional staffers. "Nuclear is ideal for dealing with climate change, because it is the only carbon-free, scalable energy source that's available 24 hours a day," Gates said in his year-end public letter. "The problems with today's reactors, such as the risk of accidents, can be solved through innovation."

Gates's latest push comes at an important turn in climate politics. Nuclear power has united both unpopular industry executives and a growing number of people -- including some prominent Democrats -- alarmed about climate change. But many nuclear experts say that Gates's company is pursuing a flawed technology and that any new nuclear design is likely to come at a prohibitive economic cost and take decades to perfect, market and construct in any significant numbers... Edwin Lyman, a nuclear expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said TerraPower is one of many companies that is raising the public's hopes for advanced nuclear reactor designs even though they're still on the drawing boards and will remain unable to combat climate change for many years.
Jonah Goldman, of Gates Ventures, stressed to The Post that Gates was not advocating for TerraPower alone, according to GeekWire.

"Gates thinks the U.S. has 'the best minds, the best lab systems and entrepreneurs willing to take risk,' Goldman told the newspaper. 'But what we don't have is a commitment on Congress' part.'"

An anonymous reader quotes Fortune: The future is now: Starting this week, Amazon is testing autonomous package delivery with adorable little robot vehicles in a northern Seattle suburb. Six of the Amazon Scouts, the company announced yesterday, are now delivering packages in Snohomish County in a trial run that complements its existing delivery options... The six-wheeled vehicles are fully electric and will move at "walking pace," for the time being only during daylight hours on weekdays while accompanied by Amazon employees for safety's sake.... [C]onsidering the drone delivery Prime Air program never got off the ground, Amazon Scout already seems like a more sensible solution to the last-mile problem: the time-intensive activity of getting packages from distribution centers to homes.

Wired points out some particular problems, though: "A delivery robot can't open gates without hands, and it can't climb steps to get right to your door. And if the robot requires the customer to enter a PIN to get the package out, how can the robot leave the package if you're not home?" And compared to the orderly structure of roads, sidewalks are pure chaos, with people, pets and objects sharing the space. Whether autonomous delivery vehicles are allowed to share the sidewalks varies by state and by city too; San Francisco has severely restricted them since 2017. Amazon's road test in Seattle may determine whether the delivery method finally arrives.