Android Turns 5 Years Old Today

Today in 2008, Google executives stood on stage and announced the much-rumored T-Mobile G1 (also known as the HTC Dream). It was the first commercial product to run a new, Linux-based operating system called Android. It turned out pretty OK.

Des Smith, one of the members of the original Android team, shared some of his recollections on Google+. Things were different then.

When Was the Last Time You Switched Cell Carriers?

Everyone hates their carrier, right? That's just a thing. They're either so huge that you get ripped off and can't get any customer service, or they're so small that their service coverage is weird and their handset options are lousy. But it increasingly seems like there are viable alternative options. Like Republic Wireless's $20-a-month unlimited plan. It's actually solid and now the company is offering the Moto X. Is that tempting? Do you have some crazy grandfathered plan from the late 90s or do you move from deal to deal every few years? Jump ship or stay loyal below.

iPhone 5 vs. iPhone 5C Teardown: Just How Different Are They?

This video tears down the 5 and 5C simultaneously, to see exactly how they differ. Maybe it'll help you decided which one to plump for.

First iPhone 5S and 5C Drop Test: Only One of Them Shatters

Android Authority tested the two devices by dropping them from chest level on their backs, sides, and fronts. In the end, no surprise here—the cheaper phone ended up being less sturdy and its face shattered. On the other hand, with its aluminum housing, the 5S looks like it can take a little more abuse.

This Bicycle's Frame Acts As a Shock Absorber

When you ride your bike to and from work every single day, you're going to want to make sure it's as comfy as possible. And that's exactly what Alter Cycles is promising commuters with its unorthodox take on shock absorbers. Instead of integrating them into the front forks, the company's replaced the down tube on its bikes with a flexible bow that promises varying degrees of comfort.

By swapping in interchangeable down tubes of varying flexibility, a biker can fine tune their cycle's ride—from soft to stiff—depending on the terrain they face on their commute. When eventually available to the public, the Alter Cycles bike should sell for around $800, while the various down tube options should run anywhere from $75 to $100, with off-road versions also enroute.

So what do you think? Could this actually be a better alternative to front fork suspension systems? Or is this just another novel design that doesn't quite offer enough innovation to take the biking world by storm? More here.

A Salad Spinner With a Turbo Button—Who Wants To Wait For Salad?

The allure of a shiny new gadget is easy to overcome when it costs hundreds of dollars and comes with a multi-year contract. But cheaper contraptions, like the stuff you'll find in a kitchen store, are almost impossible to resist. Does anyone really need a salad spinner with a turbo button that promises 50 percent faster rotation speeds? No. But anything with a turbo option is just too tempting. Whether it's cars, computers, or EMSA's new Turboline salad spinner.

You can't go wrong with a stylish stainless steel bowl, but it's the pull string spinning mechanism—complete with that turbo mode which switches up the gearing on the fly—that suddenly has gadget fiends interested in drying produce. And at $45 without a contract—except maybe a personal contract to eat more healthy—salads suddenly seem a lot more appealing. More here.

Why Does Arm Exercise Make Your Legs Tired?

Strenuous activity wears you out. No news there. But it turns out that exercising your biceps will make your legs just as tired as working out your quads. And for the first time, researchers seem to know why.

Researchers at Britain's Nottingham Trent University tested subjects on two different exercise setups: one group did two rounds of intense leg exercises, the other did arms followed by legs. Each group's second set of exercises showed about a 33% decline in performance — despite half of the subjects starting with fresh legs. Physiologically, this is puzzling: each muscle contains its own fuel (glycogen, ATP and phosphocreatine, for you science types), and your arms can't steal energy stored away in your legs. So what gives?

The hypothesis is that, while fuel use is contained to the muscle being exercised, the buildup of metabolites in the blood affects the whole body. In other words, the lactate, hydrogen and potassium your arms spit out while you're blasting curls will slow down your "fresh" legs almost as much as if you were grinding out squats, despite your quads having a full tank of fuel. So while exercise enthusiasts tend to work on each muscle group as its own ecosystem, it turns out the human body operates more like one integrated machine. More here.

Is the Data on Your SSD Secure?

SSDs are wonderful things that take up next to no space and are incredibly fast to boot. But while most people understand the basics data security on HDDs, the same isn't necessarily true of solid state storage.

Deleting files may not mean they're gone, overwriting them isn't safe, and a thorough scrub is at the whim of a micro controller, not the user. In this video, Professor Derek McAuley explains just how secure the data on your SSD is.

How Do You Like iOS 7 So Far?

iOS is out. Provided you made it through updating purgatory, your iPhone is up and running on the new software. How do you like it so far?

iOS 7 is beautiful and colorful, and everything looks different—like your apps. But a new operating system takes some getting used to. There are going to be things you notice right off the bat that you really like, and others that you just don't, and there might be some bugginess you have to deal with. More here.

The First 3D-Printed Gun Is Already in a Museum

Not just one, but two of the guns were purchased by London's V&A Museum for an unknown price. It could have just printed out its own and called it a day, but instead it opted to purchase a pair actually fired by Texan law student Cody Wilson. You know, the real deal.


The V&A described the purchase this way in a statement about the gun:

The invention of this so called ‘wiki weapon’ sparked intense debate and upended discussions about the benefits of new manufacturing technologies and the unregulated sharing of designs online. The V&A has acquired two Liberator prototypes, one disassembled gun and a number of archive items to enhance its collection of 3D printed objects and represent a turning point in debates around digital manufacturing.

True enough. But it also goes to show that a 3D-printed replication isn't quite as good as the real thing. But you can't 3D-print history. Yet. More here.

The Extra Glow Of Charcoal Candles Is Really Mesmerizing

Some people are all about candles. Dinner, baths, soy-based, scented. It's a whole thing. But candles can seem like more trouble than they're worth. These charcoal candlesticks from Japanese designer Eisuke Tachikawa have gravitas, though. There's something calming about them.

Tachikawa runs the design firm Nosigner and is currently showing home decor pieces in the French trade show Maison et Objet. No word on pricing or availability yet. The candles blend wax and charcoal to get the right look and warm glowing burn. Tachikawa likes to comment on memory in his pieces, and the candles reference materials used in heating and lighting rooms. And before they're burned the candles look even more like chunks of charcoal. They're pretty great looking. More here.

Intel Has Made a Processor That's Powered By Wine

The Intel Developer Forum is coming to an end, meaning its execs get to go wild and show some of the oddball concepts under way at the tech giant. These include a processor so efficient it can pull all the energy it needs to run from a glass of red wine.

Intel’s Dr Genevieve Bell plonked two electrodes into a glass of wine, that then reacted with the acetic acid in the booze to create a tiny current enough to power an incredibly low power chipset. Intel believes these ultra low power chips are the future, especially when it comes to connecting people in less developed countries. There are billions of people out there who are yet to be effectively monetised through mobile advertisements, after all.

Another clever little Intel innovation involved a sensitive accelerometer configured to recognise the walking style of the person holding it. If your phone knows it’s being held by you, it’ll unlock things quicker as it knows it’s you and there’s a reason you want to hurriedly page through the photo gallery and SMS history. More here.

You Can Pre-Order the iPhone 5C Right Now

iPhone 5C pre-orders just went live and if you want to brighten up your life with some colorful plastic and if you want to avoid waiting in a silly line, you can head over to Apple.com to get your new iPhone.

The carriers are all taking pre-orders too (along with others), so hopefully you have an easy time landing the exact color you want.

Usually in times like this the Apple website gets hammered to oblivion and spurts out nothing. If history has taught us a few tricks in handling these iPhone pre-orders, it'd be to maybe give the Apple Store App a try if Apple.com fails you. More here.

The Audio Cassette Is 50 Years Old Today

The humble cassette tape, beloved of 80s music lovers, may now be defunct—but it's hardly surprising given that the once-revolutionary medium turns 50 today.

The natural descendant of the 8-track—which used similar magnetic tape but housed it in a much bigger, bulkier frame—the audio cassette was the brainchild of engineers at Philips. It's precise birthday is open to some debate, but Philips is insistent that the format was officially launched at its Amsterdam HQ on September 13th, 1963. Containing a length of audio tape 3.15 millimeters wide that ran at 1-7/8 inches per second, it was originally designed to replace reel-to-reel tape for dictation—but became far more popular than that.

While the tape is now an object that would confuse teenagers worldwide—superseded initially by CDs and all manner of new technologies since—for many of us it's both an iconic object and a source of misty-eyed nostalgia. Whether it be compiling a mix tape with expert precision, queueing at the music store to pick up that copy of Nevermind, or cruising a highway while popping one into your car's dash, there's surely no shortage of fond memories to recall.

Remember how your cassette player used to chew tapes up with seemingly now warning? How they slowly deteriorated in quality when you listened to them over and over? The way you had to time songs in order to make them fit on your mix tape? Or that horrible noise they used to make on rewinding? Ah, those were the days. Long live the cassette tape. More here.

It's Official: Voyager 1 Has Left the Solar System

After months of back and forth, scientists now agree that NASA's Voyager 1 has become the first manmade object to leave the solar system. And it only took 36 years to make the 12 billion mile-long journey.

It's obviously a major milestone for space exploration which is probably why scientists have been arguing for months over whether or not Voyager 1 had crossed the threshold into interstellar space. In the end, it all came down to the plasma surrounding the spacecraft. After a burst of solar wind and magnetic fields caused the plasma around the spacecraft to oscillate in April, researchers realized plasma was also 40 times denser at that point than it was in the heliosphere. This was a sign that the Voyager 1 had entered interstellar space, and the team ultimately determined that the spacecraft crossed the line in August 12 of last year. (Listen to the sound of interstellar space below.)

"Voyager has boldly gone where no probe has gone before, marking one of the most significant technological achievements in the annals of the history of science, and adding a new chapter in human scientific dreams and endeavors," said NASA’s associate administrator for science John Grunsfeld. "Perhaps some future deep space explorers will catch up with Voyager, our first interstellar envoy, and reflect on how this intrepid spacecraft helped enable their journey."

In the meantime, all eyes are on Voyager 2, which is nipping at its sibling's heels, speeding fast into interstellar space. (That is, if 2 billion miles can be considered nipping at its heels.) Either way, Voyager is now on its way to another star. At it's current speed of 100,000 miles per hour, it'll only take her 40,000 years. More here.

iOS 6.1.4 Is Finally Jailbroken

The Evasion jailbreak for iPhones running iOS 6.x was patched up real well by Apple in iOS 6.1.3—but now, a dev has managed to finally crack version 6.1.4 on the iPhone 5.

iOS 6.1.4 rolled out in May for iPhone 5 users, offering bug fixes and stymying jailbreaks. But developer Winocm now has iOS 6.1.4 running Cydia on an iPhone 5. Details are prettythin on the ground, but Winocm has at least uploaded some of the code required to make the jailbreak work for iOS 6.1.4, and forums seem to suggest that some people have successfully managed to use it.

Sadly, though, it's quite an involved process: you'll need to wrangle with your own kernel exploits, as well as using Wincom's code, to jailbreak your iPhone 5 with iOS 6.1.4. One for the more technically minded, then. More here.

A Lightning Cable's Always Close at Hand With This iPhone 5 Case

There's rarely a time when your smartphone couldn't use a bit of a charge. And to save you from always having to carry a cable in your back pocket, South Korea's LAB.C has cooked up an iPhone 5 case with a short, flexible Lightning adapter on the back.

It assumes you'll always have access to a computer or some kind of powered USB port, and that you don't expect your iPhone to wander far from said port with its two-inch cable. But these are small compromises to make—including an estimated price of around $20 to $30—when your phone's battery is on death's door. More here.

The iPhone 5S Home Button Ring 2013

While it seems pretty certain that the next iPhone will come with a fingerprint scanner, what it will look like remains an open question. A "silver ring" around the home button (see below) is the prevailing theory.

Sure, these are just renders. But they're an excellent hint at what the Eye of Sauron Siri will look like in practice. And it's likely to be just about the only difference you'll notice between the iPhone 5S and the one that came before it. More here.

R2-D2 spotted in Star Trek Into Darkness

Star Wars droid R2-D2 made a cameo in the 2009 Star Trek movie, which left some fans wondering if the little guy made it into Star Trek Into Darkness. Now that the film is out on home media, R2-D2 has been spotted. Hi there!

Reader Rafael Oca passed along this screen shot, from somewhere around the one hour, 17-minute mark. After the Vengeance fires on the Enterprise while the ships are in warp, poor R2 gets sucked out of the ship with other members of the crew. I'm sure this plucky fellow will find a way back into the next film, though. More here.

New Connectors Let Solar Cells Withstand the Power of 70,000 Suns

The power of 1,000 suns? Pfft. That ain't nuthin'. A recent breakthrough in solar panel connections has allowed scientists to create arrays of solar cells that can stand strong under the blazing glare of 70,000 suns. Not that they'd ever have to, but still.

Stacked solar cells—which are exactly what they sound like—are some of the most efficient solar-sucking power generators on the market today. In general, they can turn just less than half of the sunlight they absorb into pure power. But stacked cell is only as strong as its weakest part; you have to connect the stacked cells in such a way that the energy doesn't get wasted in the connections. That gets especially hard under a lot of light.

Scientists at North Carolina State University recently discovered that a thin film of gallium arsenide in the solar cell junctions can stop virtually all voltage loss, and let the cells work efficiently under the power of 70,000 suns. Yeah, we only have one sun, but thanks to lenses we can beef that up to at least a few thousand in concentrated power.

Dr. Salah Bedair, a senior author of the study, described the accomplishment to PhysOrgthis way:[It] is more than sufficient for practical purposes, since concentrating lenses are unlikely to create more than 4,000 or 5,000 suns worth of energy. ...This should reduce overall costs for the energy industry because, rather than creating large, expensive solar cells, you can use much smaller cells that produce just as much electricity by absorbing intensified solar energy from concentrating lenses. More here.