Google Nexus 6

 

At what point does a phone get so big that it becomes a tablet? Whether you call it a huge phone, small tablet or just a "phablet," Google's Nexus 6 is a beast. Read on, as Gizmag reviews one of the best ... mobile devices of the year. The Nexus 6 has an enormous screen – even by 2014 standards. The latest Galaxy Note, a brand once synonymous with jumbo-sized phones, has a 10 percent smaller display. Measured diagonally, the Nexus' display is the same size as a Kindle e-reader screen (below). And it's almost as big as three iPhone 4s displays combined. Fortunately, though, this isn't some gimmicky phone that exists just to push size boundaries. Its razor-sharp and color-rich Quad HD AMOLED display is the perfect showcase for the new Android 5.0 Lollipop, with its Material Design makeover. This is an ideal marriage of hardware and software: Lollipop's flat design and lively animations coupled with that big and beautiful display. The biggest advantage of buying any phablet is that they're not so much phones as they are tiny tablets that you always have in your pocket. They can potentially void any need you had for a mini-tablet. The Nexus 6's bigger screen takes that same strength and pushes it a little farther than rivals like the Note 4 and iPhone 6 Plus do. They all have big screens, but the closer they get to tablet size, the less you need something like an iPad mini or Kindle Fire. Build quality is good, even if it isn't one of the Nexus 6's highlights. There's a metallic band running around its edge that helps to give the phone a higher-end feel, while its backside is made of a smooth, almost metallic-feeling plastic that reminds us of the LG G3. We'd recommend using a case with the Nexus 6: this is a huge phone with a slightly-slippery finish. If you aren't careful, it could end up on the losing end of a showdown with the nearest ceramic floor. The phone itself is also huge, but, considering how unusually large its screen is, not as big and heavy as you might expect. It has a 19 percent bigger screen than the iPhone 6 Plus, but is only 7 percent heavier. Its front face uses its space economically: it's almost all screen, with narrow bezels above and below. On paper, the Nexus 6 looks like a thick device, but its 10.1 mm (0.4-in) depth is a little deceiving, as that only counts the thickest point of its rounded back. Its edges are much thinner than that, and the sloped back feels comfortable in hand. The Nexus 6's 13 MP camera isn't breaking any new ground, but it also doesn't give you anything to worry about. Compared to other high-end 2014 flagships, it falls smack dab in the middle of the pack. Image quality is great outdoors and respectable in low-lit conditions. It has a dual-LED flash to make flash shots look more even and colorful, Optical Image Stabilization to cut down on the effects of shaky hands, and shooting/focusing speed that could be faster (the iPhone 6 and LG G3 are much better in this respect). In a phone full of positives, camera quality is ... positive enough. Battery life is good. In our stress test, where we stream video with brightness set at 75 percent, it only dropped 12 percent per hour. On average, that has it streaming video for around 8.3 hours before conking out. With more typical use, this is an all-day device with room to spare. The Nexus 6 also uses Qualcomm's Quick Charge 2.0 technology to quickly get its battery back to a respectable state. If the Nexus 6 is running low on juice, 15 minutes on its included charger is all it takes to add an extra (roughly) 6 hours of battery life. The Nexus 6 has front-facing stereo speakers, and, though they sound better than most phones' speakers, we wouldn't recommend getting rid of your headphones just yet. The speakers on the HTC One (M8), which are also front-facing, sound much crisper and more powerful than these. They're a solid bonus, but not a selling feature. In terms of quality, the high-end smartphone market is more competitive than ever. The last few months have been especially kind: the latest iPhones, Galaxy Note 4 and 2nd-gen Moto X can each make a strong claim to the "best smartphone" title. Throw in wild cards like the Verizon-only Droid Turbo and oldies-but-goodies LG G3 and HTC One M8, and you have a tough decision on your hands. And yes, you can now add the Nexus 6 to that list. Why would you choose the Nexus 6 over these other drool-worthy handsets? Two reasons: that bigger screen and Lollipop. The new version of Android marks Google's best UI design by far (I think it's even better-looking than iOS 8), and the Nexus 6's humongous Quad HD screen is the best device to showcase it. The Nexus 6 is a whale of a phone (aptly codenamed "Shamu" during development) and its absurd size will probably push away more than a few customers. But if the last few years have taught us anything, it's that smartphone shoppers like "bigger." If you're still searching for the holy grail of bigger (not to mention better), then the Nexus 6 is where it's at right now. There is one big difference with this year's Nexus: Google axed the budget pricing that we saw on the last two models, and is pricing the Nexus 6 like a flagship (US$650 full retail, $250 on-contract). But compared to its competition, we still think it stacks up pretty well: Consider that when buying at full retail, the Nexus 6 is $50 cheaper than the Note 4 and $100 cheaper than the iPhone 6 Plus (it's also $50 cheaper than both on-contract). We love all three phones, but the Nexus has a bigger screen, only takes up a little more space in your pocket and costs less. "Nexus" may no longer be synonymous with "bargain," but in those ways it does still give you more bang for your buck. Gizmag recommends the Nexus 6 to anyone looking for a powerful phone with a gigantic screen, quite possibly the most beautiful mobile software to date, and seamless performance. Its build quality isn't on par with the iPhone's, and it doesn't use a stylus like the Note, but if those aren't your priorities, you could easily argue that it's the best huge phone/small tablet you can buy today. The Google/Motorola Nexus 6 is available now (though supplies are constrained), starting at $650 off-contract or $250 on. For more on its software, you can hit up Gizmag's Android 5.0 Lollipop review. Product pages: Google, Motorola

World Record for Compact Particle Accelerator

 

Researchers at Berkeley Lab ramp up energy of laser-plasma “tabletop” accelerator. News Release Kate Greene 510-486-4404 • December 8, 2014 A 9 cm-long capillary discharge waveguide used in BELLA experiments to generate multi-GeV electron beams. The plasma plume has been made more prominent with the use of HDR photography. Credit: Roy Kaltschmidt Using one of the most powerful lasers in the world, researchers have accelerated subatomic particles to the highest energies ever recorded from a compact accelerator. The team, from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab), used a specialized petawatt laser and a charged-particle gas called plasma to get the particles up to speed. The setup is known as a laser-plasma accelerator, an emerging class of particle accelerators that physicists believe can shrink traditional, miles-long accelerators to machines that can fit on a table. The researchers sped up the particles—electrons in this case—inside a nine-centimeter long tube of plasma. The speed corresponded to an energy of 4.25 giga-electron volts. The acceleration over such a short distance corresponds to an energy gradient 1000 times greater than traditional particle accelerators and marks a world record energy for laser-plasma accelerators. “This result requires exquisite control over the laser and the plasma,” says Dr. Wim Leemans, director of the Accelerator Technology and Applied Physics Division at Berkeley Lab and lead author on the paper. The results appear in the most recent issue of Physical Review Letters. Traditional particle accelerators, like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which is 17 miles in circumference, speed up particles by modulating electric fields inside a metal cavity. It’s a technique that has a limit of about 100 mega-electron volts per meter before the metal breaks down. Laser-plasma accelerators take a completely different approach. In the case of this experiment, a pulse of laser light is injected into a short and thin straw-like tube that contains plasma. The laser creates a channel through the plasma as well as waves that trap free electrons and accelerate them to high energies. It’s similar to the way that a surfer gains speed when skimming down the face of a wave. The record-breaking energies were achieved with the help of BELLA (Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator), one of the most powerful lasers in the world. BELLA, which produces a quadrillion watts of power (a petawatt), began operation just last year. “It is an extraordinary achievement for Dr. Leemans and his team to produce this record-breaking result in their first operational campaign with BELLA,” says Dr. James Symons, associate laboratory director for Physical Sciences at Berkeley Lab. In addition to packing a high-powered punch, BELLA is renowned for its precision and control. “We’re forcing this laser beam into a 500 micron hole about 14 meters away, “ Leemans says. “The BELLA laser beam has sufficiently high pointing stability to allow us to use it.” Moreover, Leemans says, the laser pulse, which fires once a second, is stable to within a fraction of a percent. “With a lot of lasers, this never could have happened,” he adds. Computer simulation of the plasma wakefield as it evolves over the length of the 9-cm long channel. Credit: Berkeley Lab At such high energies, the researchers needed to see how various parameters would affect the outcome. So they used computer simulations at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) to test the setup before ever turning on a laser. “Small changes in the setup give you big perturbations,” says Eric Esarey, senior science advisor for the Accelerator Technology and Applied Physics Division at Berkeley Lab, who leads the theory effort. “We’re homing in on the regions of operation and the best ways to control the accelerator.” In order to accelerate electrons to even higher energies—Leemans’ near-term goal is 10 giga-electron volts—the researchers will need to more precisely control the density of the plasma channel through which the laser light flows. In essence, the researchers need to create a tunnel for the light pulse that’s just the right shape to handle more-energetic electrons. Leemans says future work will demonstrate a new technique for plasma-channel shaping. “Multi-GeV electron beams from capillary-discharge-guided subpetawatt laser pulses in the self-trapping regime” by W. P. Leemans, A. J. Gonsalves, H.-S. Mao, et al. was published in Physical Review Letters on December 8, 2014. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory addresses the world’s most urgent scientific challenges by advancing sustainable energy, protecting human health, creating new materials, and revealing the origin and fate of the universe. Founded in 1931, Berkeley Lab’s scientific expertise has been recognized with 13 Nobel prizes. The University of California manages Berkeley Lab for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. For more, visit http://www.lbl.gov. DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit http://science.energy.gov/. source : Berkeley Lab

Cicret wristband turns your arm into a touch screen

 

The Cicret Bracelet will project a tablet interface onto the user's arm Image Gallery (7 images) With wearables gaining some traction, smartphones and tablets are by no means the only mobile devices around nowadays. Now, though, Cicret is looking to take things a step farther and turn your arm into a smartphone. Conceived 12 months ago and designed over the course of 6 months, the Cicret Bracelet is a small wristband that looks similar to the Jawbone Up: The Bracelet comprises a pico projector and a row of eight proximity sensors that point towards the user's forearm. It operates as a standalone device and, when activated with a twist of the wrist, projects an Android interface onto the users arm, much like Chris Harrison's Skinput research. The proximity sensors detect where the user's finger or fingers are and allow them to interact with the interface as they would any other Android device. There are potential advantages to turning ordinary objects (or, in this case, limbs) into mobile devices, but projected touch screens typically lack the responsiveness and visual clarity of the glass screens we're used to. This projected keyboard, for example, delivered a poor typing experience. It should be interesting to see if the Cicret Bracelet can improve on the technology, to make something we'd actually want to use. Elsewhere, the Cicret Bracelet features an accelerometer and a vibration module, along with an LED for notifications. Connectivity is provided by way of WiFi, Bluetooth and a Micro USB port. It is expected to be made available in 16 GB and 32 GB models. The device will allow users to send and receive emails, browse the web and play games. It will also be possible for users to pair it with an existing smartphone, answer incoming phone calls and activate the speakerphone functionality on the their smartphone. Cicret is in the process of raising funds for the further development and production of the Bracelet, but Pommier says he expects the device to reach the mass market within a year and a half. The device could cost up to $400, he says, based on what the company's research suggests people would be willing to pay (sounds like a hard sell to us). Cicret co-founder Guillaume Pommier tells Gizmag that the first prototype is due for completion in about three weeks time.   Source: Cicret

Sweet Smell of Success: JBEI Researchers Boost Methyl Ketone Production in E. coli

 

Lynn Yarris - December 1, 2014 Methyl ketones were discovered more than a century ago in the aromatic evergreen rue plant. They are now used to provide scents in essential oils and flavoring in cheese, but JBEI research shows they could also serve as advanced biofuels. (Image from Wikimedia Commons) Two years ago, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) engineered Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria to convert glucose into significant quantities of methyl ketones, a class of chemical compounds primarily used for fragrances and flavors, but highly promising as clean, green and renewable blending agents for diesel fuel. Now, after further genetic modifications, they have managed to dramatically boost the E.coli’s methyl ketone production 160-fold. “We’re encouraged that we could make such a large improvement in methyl ketone production with a relatively small number of genetic modifications,” says Harry Beller, a JBEI microbiologist who led this study. “We believe we can further improve production using the knowledge gained from in vitro studies of our novel metabolic pathway.” Beller, who directs the Biofuels Pathways department for JBEI’s Fuels Synthesis Division, and is also a senior scientist with Berkeley Lab’s Earth Sciences Division, is the corresponding author of a paper describing this work in the journal Metabolic Engineering. The paper is titled “Substantial improvements in methyl ketone production in E. coli and insights on the pathway from in vitro studies.” Co-authors are Ee-Been Goh, Edward Baidoo, Helcio Burd, Taek Soon Lee and Jay Keasling. Methyl ketones are naturally occurring compounds discovered more than a century ago in the aromatic evergreen plant known as rue. Since then they’ve been found to be common in tomatoes and other plants, as well as insects and microorganisms. Today they are used to provide scents in essential oils and flavoring in cheese and other dairy products. Although native E. coli make virtually undetectable quantities of methyl ketones, Beller, co-author Goh and their colleagues have been able to overcome this deficiency using the tools of synthetic biology. The research of Harry Beller (foreground) and Ee-Been Goh of the Joint BioEnergy Institute is boosting the production of methyl ketones by engineered strains of E.coli. (Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt, Berkeley Lab) “In our original effort, for methyl ketone production we made two major modifications to E. coli,” Beller says. “First we modified specific steps in beta-oxidation, the metabolic pathway that E. coli uses to break down fatty acids, and then we increased the expression of a native E. coli enzyme called FadM. These two modifications combined to greatly enhance the production of methyl ketones.” In their latest effort, Beller, Goh and their colleagues made further modifications that included balancing the overexpression of two other E. coli enzymes, fadR and fadD, to increase fatty acid flux into the pathway; consolidating two plasmid pathways into one; optimizing codon usage for pathway genes not native to E. coli; and knocking out key acetate production pathways. The results led to a methyl ketone titer of 3.4 grams/liter after approximately 45 hours of fed-batch fermentation with glucose. This is about 40-percent of the maximum theoretical yield for methyl ketones. “Although the improved production is still not at a commercial level in the biofuel market, it is near a commercial level for use in flavor and fragrances, where certain methyl ketones are much more highly valued than they would be in the biofuel market,” Beller says. “It may be possible for a company to sell a small percentage of methyl ketones in the flavor and fragrance market and use the profits to enhance the economic viability of the production of methyl ketones as biofuels.” The in vitro studies carried out by Beller and Goh provided insights into the pathway, some of which point to even further production gains. One key finding was the confirmation that a decarboxylase enzyme is not required for this methyl ketone pathway. “Several different metabolic pathways have been developed in the past couple of years for methyl ketone production in E. coli, a couple of which use decarboxylase enzymes to catalyze the last step of the pathway,” Beller says. “Our methyl ketone pathway is performing quite a bit better than these other pathways, but it does not include a native or added decarboxylase.” The in vitro studies also addressed concerns about the FadM enzyme being somewhat “promiscuous” in its hydrolyzing (thioesterase) activities. Beller and Goh found that FadM can act on intermediates in the methyl ketone pathway and effectively reduce the flux of carbon to the final methyl ketone products. However, they say that with some informed metabolic engineering, this need not be a problem and knowledge of the phenomenon could even be used to enhance production. “In all likelihood, there is a sweet spot in the level of expression of the FadM enzyme that will allow for maximal production of methyl ketones without siphoning away metabolic intermediates,” Beller says. This research was supported by JBEI through the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. Additional Information For more information about Harry Beller and his research go here For more information about JBEI go here JBEI is one of three Bioenergy Research Centers established by the DOE’s Office of Science in 2007. It is a scientific partnership led by Berkeley Lab and includes the Sandia National Laboratories, the University of California campuses of Berkeley and Davis, the Carnegie Institution for Science, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. DOE’s Bioenergy Research Centers support multidisciplinary, multi-institutional research teams pursuing the fundamental scientific breakthroughs needed to make production of cellulosic biofuels, or biofuels from nonfood plant fiber, cost-effective on a national scale. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory addresses the world’s most urgent scientific challenges by advancing sustainable energy, protecting human health, creating new materials, and revealing the origin and fate of the universe. Founded in 1931, Berkeley Lab’s scientific expertise has been recognized with 13 Nobel prizes. The University of California manages Berkeley Lab for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. For more, visit www.lbl.gov. source of this article : www.lbl.gov.

Supercomputers enable climate science to enter a new golden age

 

Thu, 11/13/2014 - 7:59am Julie Chao, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Not long ago, it would have taken several years to run a high-resolution simulation on a global climate model. But using some of the most powerful supercomputers now available, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) climate scientist Michael Wehner was able to complete a run in just three months. What he found was that not only were the simulations much closer to actual observations, but the high-resolution models were far better at reproducing intense storms, such as hurricanes and cyclones. The study has been published online in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems. “I’ve been calling this a golden age for high-resolution climate modeling because these supercomputers are enabling us to do gee-whiz science in a way we haven’t been able to do before,” said Wehner, who was also a lead author for the recent Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). “These kinds of calculations have gone from basically intractable to heroic to now doable.” Using version 5.1 of the Community Atmospheric Model, developed by the U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) for use by the scientific community, Wehner and his co-authors conducted an analysis for the period 1979 to 2005 at three spatial resolutions: 25 km, 100 km and 200 km. They then compared those results to each other and to observations. One simulation generated 100 terabytes of data, or 100,000 gigabytes. The computing was performed at Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a DOE Office of Science User Facility. “I’ve literally waited my entire career to be able to do these simulations,” Wehner said. The higher resolution was particularly helpful in mountainous areas since the models take an average of the altitude in the grid (25 square km for high resolution, 200 square km for low resolution). With more accurate representation of mountainous terrain, the higher resolution model is better able to simulate snow and rain in those regions. “High resolution gives us the ability to look at intense weather, like hurricanes,” said Kevin Reed, a researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and a co-author on the paper. “It also gives us the ability to look at things locally at a lot higher fidelity. Simulations are much more realistic at any given place, especially if that place has a lot of topography.” The high-resolution model produced stronger storms and more of them, which was closer to the actual observations for most seasons. “In the low-resolution models, hurricanes were far too infrequent,” Wehner said. The IPCC chapter on long-term climate change projections that Wehner was a lead author on concluded that a warming world will cause some areas to be drier and others to see more rainfall, snow, and storms. Extremely heavy precipitation was projected to become even more extreme in a warmer world. “I have no doubt that is true,” Wehner said. “However, knowing it will increase is one thing, but having a confident statement about how much and where as a function of location requires the models do a better job of replicating observations than they have.” Wehner says the high-resolution models will help scientists to better understand how climate change will affect extreme storms. His next project is to run the model for a future-case scenario. Further down the line, Wehner says scientists will be running climate models with 1 km resolution. To do that, they will have to have a better understanding of how clouds behave. “A cloud system-resolved model can reduce one of the greatest uncertainties in climate models, by improving the way we treat clouds,” Wehner said. “That will be a paradigm shift in climate modeling. We’re at a shift now, but that is the next one coming.” Source: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory