Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week’s most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us — it’s the Week in Green.
Japan is the birthplace of high-speed rail, and it continues to be a leader train travel — officials just unveiled the nation’s new magnetic-levitation train to the public for the first time! The new train can hit speeds of up to 311 MPH using “L-Zero” technology, and it will be able to zip passengers from Tokyo to Nagoya in just 40 minutes. In other transportation news, Tesla is gearing up to unveil something big this week — Elon Musk recently tweeted a mysterious photo of the upcoming project, although we’ll have to wait until Thursday for the full details. China’s Foxconn may be best known as the manufacturer of Apple products, however the company is getting ready to throw its hat into the EV ring with a $15,000 electric car. And Spanish firm Opbrid is aiming to revolutionize public transportation with a new system that can recharge an entire electric bus in five to eight minutes flat.
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Ever suspected that a hotel was forcing you to use its paid WiFi by making your mobile hotspot unusable? Apparently, your hunch has some grounding in reality. Marriott has paid a $600,000 fine to settle a complaint that it blocked third-party hotspots at a Nashville hotel to make convention attendees and exhibitors pay for the venue’s commercial WiFi access — not exactly cheap at $250 to $1,000 a pop. As the FCC explains, the hotel was effectively asking users to either pay twice for internet access or else risk going offline whenever they approached the convention center.
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You probably think of matter and antimatter as mortal enemies, since their equivalent particles (such as protons and antiprotons) normally destroy each other on contact. However, there are now hints that the two might get along just fine in the right circumstances. Researchers claim to have successfully imaged a Majorana particle, which exists as both matter and antimatter at the same time. The team created it by placing a string of iron atoms on top of a lead superconductor, forming pairs of electrons and antielectrons — except for one lone electron at the end of the chain, which exhibited properties of both.
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If you’ve wanted to shoot 13-megapixel selfies with your phone, you’ve usually had to get either a knock-off or a one-of-a-kind device like Oppo’s N1. You might not have to look very hard if a handful of leaks are correct, however. Both HTCFamily.ru and @upleaks have posted pictures of what’s reportedly the HTC Desire Eye, a relatively conventional upper mid-range Android phone that would pack 13-megapixel cameras on both the front and back. They’d even have flashes to help with those dimly-lit dance club snapshots.
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Back in 2004, companies weren’t fighting over NASA contracts and nobody was selling tickets for suborbital space flights just yet. The commercial space industry was still in its early stages, and it wasn’t until October 4th that year when one of its earliest and biggest victories took place. On this day, a decade ago, SpaceShipOne reached space for the third time, winning the $10 million Ansari X Prize and proving that there’s future for privately-funded extraterrestrial endeavors in the process. The first Ansari X Prize challenged teams worldwide to build a reusable spacecraft that can carry up to three people to the boundary of space, or 62 miles above sea level. SpaceShipOne, the 28-foot-long vehicle created by Mojave Aerospace Ventures (backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen), flew half a mile higher than the minimum in June that year and repeated the feat two more times.
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The weekend is here, and you know what that means? It’s time to catch up on all the best tech news from the last seven days — we went hands-on with Windows 10, explored the world of vape modding, launched our own web series, and more. Oh, and be sure to subscribe to our Flipboard magazine!
The Paris Auto Show is the biggest in the world and the event for car makers’ most madcap models and concepts. We saw Lamborghini’s 910HP Asterion hybrid, the first supercar that can get groceries on battery power. Another crazy hybrid was Citroen’s Cactus Airflow 2L, which stores braking energy as compressed air to get 115mpg. Finally, we took a look at two different connected car takes, with Honda going all-in on Android and Nokia showing off new Here Auto tech. But what about the rest of the show? Some of the wildest crossover designs we ever saw (like the Peugeot Quartz, above) were flaunted, along with plenty of interesting EV and hybrid tech — and, of course, supercars. If you haven’t already skipped over there, hit the gallery below for more.
If you thought that Redbox Instant would have trouble competing against a streaming video behemoth like Netflix, you were right. The Verizon-backed service is telling customers that Instant will shut down just before midnight on October 7th, roughly a year and a half after it got off the ground. Should you be a customer, you’ll get a notice about any relevant refunds on October 10th. The closure isn’t entirely surprising — Outerwall (Redbox’s parent company) wasn’t happy with Instant’s subscriber numbers, and a credit card fraud incident prevented it from taking new customers for three months. Still, this isn’t good news if you liked Redbox’s unique hybrid of online and kiosk-based rentals.
[Thanks, Mike]
I had the full attention of Engadget’s San Francisco office as I unpacked Epson’s latest augmented reality headset, the Moverio BT-200. The glasses make for one heavy, awkward wearable: Coke-bottle thick lenses with inlaid transparent displays hovering in front of each eye. My coworkers and I passed them from desk to desk anyway, snapping goofy images for Instagram and musing over what to do with them. The glasses aren’t Engadget’s typical review fare — it’s not a product intended for consumers, and I wonder out loud how I’m going to explain the lenses to my readers. Without missing a beat, my editor Christopher Trout looks me square in the eye and gives me an answer. “Wear them,” he says. “For a week. That’s an assignment. You’re doing it.” Hoo boy.
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Google surely has a lot of tricks in store for the Now app: one of the latest to surface, for instance, reminds American voters to register for November’s general elections. Residents in Michigan, Pennsylvania and likely other states recently received Now pop-ups about the registration deadline on October 5th. Some of those who reported seeing the card claimed they haven’t even done a search for anything election-related in recent years, so it’s possible that the app flashes the reminder based on your location. It’s unclear whether this is a national rollout or just something the company’s testing, though, since Google hasn’t officially announced it yet. We first caught a glimpse of this new feature when developer Zhuowei Zhang released his UnleashTheGoogle app in September, which shows all the cards the company’s currently testing. Since among the rather lengthy list is an API called “Election info,” we might see similar Now cards in the future.
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