Bluetooth has proven to be an incredibly useful innovation that has enabled wireless connections between devices over short distances with minimal power consumption. However , some engineers have been working on a new Wi-Fi technology that could also replace Bluetooth while consuming even less power, called passive Wi-Fi , the technology has been with a power consumption that is 10,000 times lower than existing Wi-Fi chipsets and 1,000 times lower than Bluetooth LE and Zigbee.
It was developed by team of computer scientists at the University of Washington who will be discussing their recent work at the 13th USENIX symposium on networked systems design and implementation in March.

The main innovation in the use of Passive Wi-Fi is only a digital baseband in Wi-Fi chips , where as most of today's Wi-Fi chips use both digital and analog RFs.

"The key insight of passive Wi-Fi is to use reflections to create Wi-Fi packets", one of the University of Washington researchers explains in video about the technology. "A plugged- in device generates the continuous wave RF signal. The baseband processor on the passive device selectively reflects this RF signal to generate Wi-Fi packets which can be decoded on existing devices, including smartphones."

Don't expect this technology to deliver the same speeds that you get from your regular home Wi-Fi , however , as it has a maximum transfer rate now of 11Mbps. That's still a lot faster than current Bluetooth connections, and passive Wi-Fi technology could be used as the glue that powers the Internet of Things in our homes in the future . After all, all our connected devices will need a to communicate with one another that doesn't have the limitations of traditional Bluetooth. 

With each new innovation, NASA seems to dwarf its previous accomplishments, and this certainly appears to be the case for the agency’s latest and greatest space telescope. Promising to make Hubble look like child’s play, the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) will be every bit as precise and powerful as the Hubble Space Telescope, but will have 100 times the field of view. The goal? To better understand the dark matter and energy that seems to be the secret of the universe.

“This mission uniquely combines the ability to discover and characterize planets beyond our own solar system with the sensitivity and optics to look wide and deep into the universe in a quest to unravel the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter,” said John Grunsfeld, head of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C. in a statement earlier this week. With a single image, the WFIRST will be able to see millions of galaxies. The mind truly boggles.
















In a press release, NASA noted that WFIRST has two primary missions — first, to answer “fundamental questions about the structure and evolution of the universe,” and second, to “expand our knowledge of planets beyond our solar system.” To aid in these grandiose efforts, NASA also plans on launching the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which is slated to take to orbit in 2017 with the mission of finding and examining new planets.

A year later, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the real heir to the Hubble Telescope, is expected to lift off after a number of significant delays and budget adjustments (that project alone has cost $8 billion — significantly more than the originally allocated sub-$2 billion price tag). The purpose of JWST will be to explore some of the farthest reaches of the universe in hopes of discovering the secrets of their formation.

Then, by the mid-2020’s, NASA hopes it can get WFIRST off the ground and into space, bringing all this incredible research full circle. Currently, the anticipated cost of the project is $2 billion, but given what happens with JWST, it’s unclear just how accurate those numbers (both in terms of launch date and price) really are. But when you’re unlocking the meaning of the universe, what’s time and money got to do with it?


#Peace

Samsung wants mobile gaming to feel much like desktop gaming as possible, and with the Galaxy S7 it's pushing to deliver on that mission.

But there's saying "we take games seriously" and then there's delivering meaningful features that make a real difference to what people want to do when playing games. The good news is that in the Galaxy S7 , launched at the mobile world congress here in Barcelona , Samsung has integrated deep hardware and software tools back up the claim.

Games push processors harder that anything else , so the first big upgrade from Samsung is water cooling like you'd find in a serious desktop gaming system . Obviously the scale is miniature compared to desktop water cooling, but the sealed copper cooling system will still do its best to shift excess heat away from the S7's processor when games push things to the phone's thermal limits.

The galaxy S7 lets you adapt game settings to balance how good your games look against your battery life.

In other low level updates ,the S7 also supports the Vulkan API for game development. You don't need to care about the details , but what it means is that many new games are coming soon to take better advantage of modern multicore processors . The S7 is ready to support these games , and when they arrive they should look and play much better than almost anything you've seen on Android before.

Samsung needs the Galaxy S7 to reignite consumer's interest in its phones. Although it remains top dog in mobile , it's not biting off as much of that market as it used to :
About 23% of all smartphones shipped last year came from Samsung , down from 25%  percent in 2014 and 31% in the year before.Consumers aren't rushing the way they once did to acquire new phones , and when they do upgrade, they're increasingly opting for cheaper devices from companies like Huawei and Xiaomi .

A new "no alerts" mode means launching a game to suppress all notification pop ups so you can play uninterrupted. Anyone who has ever has a high score ruined by a rogue calendar reminder will love this. You can also lock the recent and back keys so your cant accidentally bump something and knock yourself out of a game.

YouTube lets play videos of console and desktop games are a huge industry now and Samsung is also making it easy to record mobile gameplay on the S7. Launching game recording will also trigger the front camera so your can commentate over the top of your gameplay with a picture in picture mode.

Finally Samsung also offers the ability to tweak graphics performance between three setting so you can dial things back a little if you want to put battery life ahead of gameplay. The standard setting will run games at maximum resolution and at 60 frames per second.

These features are all launched from a new "game tools" icon that can lurk inconspicuously at the edge of your screen during game play so taking screenshots, recording videos or tweaking settings are all just a tap away !

#Peace

Here's the thing about browsing the web on your mobile: 
It kind of sucks. Between what passes off as 4G in India and modern websites that are bogged down with tracking scripts and ads, opening web pages on your smartphone is often as exercise in frustration.

Technology companies have been trying to solve this, but in most cases , their solutions are simply to bypass the mobile web entirely.
Apple lets media companies publish stories directly to Apple news , a brand new app that it launched with iOS 9 , the latest version of its operating system for iPhone and iPad.
Facebook's instant Articles hosts publisher's stories directly within the Facebook app, which means they open instantly when you tap them.

These solutions work, but the implications are dangerous. The verge's Nilay patel writes :
"Apple news and Facebook instant articles are the saddest refutation of then open web revolution possible ; they are incompatible proprietary publishing systems entirely under the control of huge corporations"

Enter Google. The company which depends almost solely on the open web for most of its revenues , has a vested interest in giving you a fast browsing experience on mobile. Its solution is called AMP (short for Accelerated mobile pages), and unlike Apple and Facebook's walled-garden approach, it is completely open source. Anyone can use it to speed up their mobile pages.

"Mobile is our main focus because web browsing on phones can be a poor experience", says Rudy Galfi , Google's product manager for the AMP project, who spent the last four years building personalized content recommendation experiences in products like Google and Google+ . "And a lot of content on mobile is soloed away in apps".

Google announced the AMP project in October 2015.
"we want web pages with rich content like video, animations and graphics to work alongside smart ads, and to load instantaneously", wrote the company on the blog.

SPECIFICS 
Under the hood, AMP is essentially a simplified version of HTML, the standard language that all web pages are built in. Web developers can build their web pages in AMP and maintain control over how their pages look using Google-provided tools. Publishers essentially create two versions of their web pages - one in standard HTML that serves desktops and tablets , and another one written in AMP-HTML that is stored in a Google cache and pushed out instantaneously to a mobile browser or a third party app that supports AMP (Twitter does, and so do Pinterest and Nuzzel ).

The result is kind of mind blowing. Google isn't saying when it will officially roll out a AMP ( a company spokesperson said "shortly" ) , but you can try out a demo by going to g.co/amp on your mobile. Search for something and tap on one of those stories in the carousel with a lightening bolt symbol on them. See how fast they load ?
"Speed is really important", says Galfi. "We found that 40% of the people who browse the web on their phones abandon any website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load".
And more importantly , AMP supports most existing ad-tech and analytics solutions including Parsley, Chartbeat, Adobe Analytics, and Google's on Google Analytics among others.

#Peace

HSBC has become the first bank in the UK to roll out voice