Crowdfunding a war: Ukraine's DIY drone-makers

We arrived in Krasnoarmiysk, Ukraine, at 3am. Two soldiers wearing balaclavas and holding Kalashnikov assault rifles came out to meet us, instructing us to suit up in body armour and stay alert during the trip in their truck. We rolled passed checkpoints and sped down deserted, cratered streets. In the distance, we could see the lights of a large city I assumed to be Donetsk, and an hour later they told us we had arrived at a base called Sector B.

Game developers on Apple Watch: smartwatches are all about context

When many people think about smartwatch games, the first thing they imagine are tamagotchi-style virtual pets jabbering away on your wrist looking for your attention all day.

Happily, the real potential of these devices for gaming is more interesting, and less annoying. Even if it may not seem like this in the early days.

“When smartphones first came out, we saw a lot of companies try and take popular social games from Facebook and other platforms and sloppily port them to smartphones, resulting in some pretty bad games,” says Harlan Crystal, chief technology officer at publisher Pocket Gems, which has just launched an Apple Watch app for its War Dragons game.

“It’s possible that a similar process will happen from smartphones to smartwatches. For a game to be truly great, it has to be built from the ground up for the platform that it’s on. If someone tries to simply shrink a popular smartphone game so people can play it on their wrist, it’s probably not going to be a great experience.”

“Games can’t be built in the same way that console, PC or even mobile games have been,” agrees Paul Virapen, chief executive of wearable games startup WearGa, which had a hit on the Pebble smartwatch with its Pixel Miner game, and has just released Cupcake Dungeon for the Apple Watch.

“Apple Watch features like fully customisable long-look notifications can be incredibly powerful for games. The difference between a simple text-based notification and a full-screen animated notification, which looks and feels like the game, is huge,” he continues.
Games in ‘a hundred five-second sessions a day’

Developers talk a lot about play patterns on smartwatches, and particularly the fact that people won’t be squinting at their wrists for long gaming sessions. Or even medium-length ones for that matter.

Virapen talks about “games for playing in a hundred five-second sessions a day” for example, while Petri Järvilehto, chief creative officer for Best Fiends developer Seriously, talks about games existing “in your peripheral vision” throughout the day.
Apple's smartwatch can be a games platform – and here's why
Read more

“We saw games go from high-intensity and highly demanding console experiences into much more accessible and ‘always available’ mobile games, and saw games finally break into the mainstream,” he says.

“I believe that next we’ll see a similar [change over time] from mobile games to ultra-casual games that anyone can enjoy in short glances. While a lot of the smartwatch gaming discussion focuses around short sessions, this can go even further and translate into the game being present on some level through your entire day.”

Bossa Studios, whose smartphone games include Surgeon Simulator, Thomas Was Alone and Twelve a Dozen, has developed a new game for the Apple Watch called Spy_Watch, which puts people in charge of their own virtual espionage agency.

“If we average out play patterns for phone games, you would typically be making a decision to interact with a game every few hours and engaging for a few minutes,” says chief operating officer Vince Farquharson.

“When we started to design Spy_Watch, the one thing we knew for definite was that these play patterns would not work on the watch, as this is not how people use them and it’s not how that device has been designed. The watch is a device that you’re typically going to be looking at every 20-30 minutes for a few seconds.”
The trailer for Best Fiends’ smartwatch extension.
Smarter notifications for players to take action

In other cases, smartwatches will be used mainly for checking in on progress in existing social games, and perhaps quickly tapping on a notification to take action accordingly.

Crystal talks about Pocket Gems’ War Dragons, where players can see when their guild has declared war on another guild, and thus decide whether to join the fray. He adds that games with changeable economies could also update players to ensure they don’t miss a good deal.
Will Apple Watch spark a wave of popular smartwatch games? Not so fast
Read more

“I think the most exciting thing is enabling a limited, but more personal interaction space where you can prompt a player to perform a quick action without intruding as much,” says David Marsh, co-founder of developer NimbleBit, whose Letterpad word game can be played on Apple Watch.
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“It’s a lot easier to get a buzz on your wrist and choose an action than to get a notification on your phone, take it out of your pocket, unlock it, and load the app the notification came from.”

Notifications are one of the most interesting smartwatch features for games developers, especially when they enable players to take actions rather than simply decide whether to pull out their smartphone.

Javier Ferreira, chief operative officer of Scopely, explains that its Yahtzee With Buddies game has a chat notification for Apple Watch that players can read and respond to using voice dictation or simply an emoji, before continuing with whatever they were doing.

Bossa Studios’ Vince Farquharson adds that smart notifications were a “eureka moment” for Spy_Watch. “This opened up a whole new avenue for the game as it allowed us to really double down on the idea that you were actually communicating with an agent in the field with your Spy_Watch, as we could handle his messages and your interactions in the same way as messages from your friends,” he says.

“We always described the experience internally as being like one of your friends you were chatting with was a spy and you’d communicate with him in exactly the same way you would with your real friends.”
Notifications overload ‘a design issue, not a platform issue’

Is there a danger of notifications overload? It’s already an issue on smartphones, where games seem to be one of the most aggressive kinds of apps in terms of pinging their players at regular intervals – whether it’s an in-game event or a plea to return to an abandoned title.

This, surely, could be even more intrusive on a smartwatch than on a smartphone? “If developers just spam players to come and play without any context, it’s going to be intrusive wherever they’re seeing it. That’s a design issue, not a platform issue,” says Crystal.

“If someone uses notifications too intrusively, then people will just toggle them off,” says Järvilehto, who expects there to be a learning curve for developers, as they figure out what players will and won’t stand for on their smartwatches.

“It’s better to start from creating a compelling experience and letting the player choose instead of trying to push things to the player,” he says.

NimbleBit’s Marsh thinks that the glanceable nature of smartwatches will reduce any annoyance for players, compared to smartphones that (if allowed) will buzz in your pocket identically for every new notification.

“Just being able to tell at a glance that the notification you got was from a game and deciding to take action on it or not without stopping what you are doing is a pretty big upgrade,” he says. “So I think it will make notifications even less intrusive.”

“The watch is all about context. Notification and glances can become a key component of user interaction on the watch as long as they fit into the user context. Make them relevant at the right time and right place and they won’t be intrusive,” adds Itamar Lesuisse, chief executive of brain-training apps firm Peak.
The trailer for Spy_Watch.
The importance of simplicity (especially for battery life)

It’s an obvious thing to note that, as with other devices, the current crop of smartwatch platforms are starting off relatively restricted in terms of how developers can access the native hardware and software, but are likely to open up over time.

Even so, games developers are aware of the limitations – particularly with the current Apple Watch software development kit (SDK). “A lot of developers don’t realise how limited the SDK is. You can’t really do much with it, although you can show stuff,” says Adrian Hon, chief executive of fitness games startup Six to Start.

“The more exciting stuff is going to come when we have more control of the hardware: I think Apple is going to do a native SDK later this year. I’m amazed it’s happening that quickly to be honest.”
20 Apple Watch apps worth trying on launch day – in their developers' words
Read more

He adds that he understands Apple’s motives. “If you were to run something complex on an Apple Watch, you’re going to kill the battery, and that’s going to be a bad experience.”

Many developers relish creative restrictions, of course. “The initial WatchKit SDK is a little limited, particularly when you look at it from a game development point of view. Some things you take for granted when developing games, like moving sprites around the screen, aren’t fully supported yet,” says WearGa’s Virapen.

“It’s actually been brilliant for us. These kind of limitations gave some structure to the design process and led to some really exciting decisions.”

“I think it’s fine to have such a limited SDK at first, especially before people even have access to the hardware,” says Marsh. “I can’t imagine how many buggy and broken apps there would be if developers were able to dig very deep on the platform without actually having hardware to test on.”

Farquharson admits to being “bemused” at criticism of SDK limitations at this stage, suggesting that a richer, native SDK for a device like the Apple Watch might encourage more developers to simply squash down their smartphone games.

“You are going to hit your head against a brick wall if you see the watch as a small phone on your wrist, it simply isn’t, and if you try and make a phone game for it then you are going to constantly find you’re swimming against the tide,” he says.

The alternative: working within the limitations to make something new and fitting for the platform. “Having gone through that process you end up with something which feels very different to a game designed for a phone and that’s exactly why we find it so exciting.”

Apple's smartwatch can be a games platform – and here's why

Games are a remarkably agile medium – they can squeeze in anywhere. Whenever a new digital platform emerges, whether its a tablet, augmented reality headset or smart home security system, games are never far behind. Humans, like most animals, are natural players.

With the gradual, lumbering rise of the smartwatch, however, games have so far played a limited role. The stores on the Pebble and Android Wear devices are mostly filled with fitness and convenience applications, which is sensible considering the form factor of these things: they’re small, they’re attached to you and they have accelerometers to track movement. Hence, dozens of gamified jogging apps.

Google Maps hides an image of the Android robot urinating on Apple

Google Maps hides an image of the Android robot urinating on Apple

Someone at Google is probably getting fired.

A small patch of terrain in Google Maps just south of the Pakistani city of Rawlpindi has been found to contain a bizarre image of the Android robot urinating on the Apple logo.

The image, which apparently was by an end-user helpfully “suggesting” an edit, has now been removed, Google says. “We’ve terminated the Android figure involved in this incident, and he’ll be disappearing from Google Maps shortly.”
The image in its original location

Second robot captures glow inside stricken Fukushima plant

This file photo from February 2015 shows the same robot that was sent into the damaged reactor inside the Fukushima nuclear plant.

Tokyo (CNN)A second robotic probe sent into the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant has captured images of a strange green glow.

Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) deployed the second remote-controlled robot last week after the first one broke down.

The robot detected lower radiation levels and temperature than expected, an indicator that cooling systems were working effectively, according to a statement released by TEPCO.

New look inside Fukushima 01:08

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"It is a great step forward towards the decommissioning work as we can earn necessary data for the next investigation," said Akira Ono, the chief of Fukushima Daiichi plant.

TEPCO said the yellow seen on the images seemed to suggest a discoloration of the grating, though the cause was unknown. It said the green glow could not be seen when filmed from other angles.

The shape-shifting robots were sent in to assess the damage in one of the reactors that suffered a meltdown after a devastating earthquake and tsunami in March 2011. TEPCO says the site's still too dangerous for workers to enter.

The first robot, which was sent in on April 10, stalled after moving about 10 meters, according to a statement released by TEPCO. A report and footage from the robot shows that a fallen object had blocked its path and left it stranded.

TEPCO decided to cut off the cable connected to the device on April 12 as it had already collected data on radiation levels in 14 of the 18 targeted locations, completing around two-thirds of the originally planned route.

This file photo from February 2015 shows the same robot that was sent into the damaged reactor inside the Fukushima nuclear plant.

The second robot was sent in on April 15 and collected data from all 11 points, as scheduled.

Four years after the devastating nuclear crisis, the radiation levels inside the three damaged reactors are still extremely high and remain unsafe for people to enter.

Decommissioning work is estimated to cost $50 billion and will take years to complete.

TEPCO called the robotic probe an "unprecedented" experiment.

Tokyo (CNN)A second robotic probe sent into the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant has captured images of a strange green glow.

Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) deployed the second remote-controlled robot last week after the first one broke down.

The robot detected lower radiation levels and temperature than expected, an indicator that cooling systems were working effectively, according to a statement released by TEPCO.

New look inside Fukushima 01:08

PLAY VIDEO

"It is a great step forward towards the decommissioning work as we can earn necessary data for the next investigation," said Akira Ono, the chief of Fukushima Daiichi plant.

TEPCO said the yellow seen on the images seemed to suggest a discoloration of the grating, though the cause was unknown. It said the green glow could not be seen when filmed from other angles.

The shape-shifting robots were sent in to assess the damage in one of the reactors that suffered a meltdown after a devastating earthquake and tsunami in March 2011. TEPCO says the site's still too dangerous for workers to enter.

The first robot, which was sent in on April 10, stalled after moving about 10 meters, according to a statement released by TEPCO. A report and footage from the robot shows that a fallen object had blocked its path and left it stranded.

TEPCO decided to cut off the cable connected to the device on April 12 as it had already collected data on radiation levels in 14 of the 18 targeted locations, completing around two-thirds of the originally planned route.

This file photo from February 2015 shows the same robot that was sent into the damaged reactor inside the Fukushima nuclear plant.

The second robot was sent in on April 15 and collected data from all 11 points, as scheduled.

Four years after the devastating nuclear crisis, the radiation levels inside the three damaged reactors are still extremely high and remain unsafe for people to enter.

Decommissioning work is estimated to cost $50 billion and will take years to complete.

TEPCO called the robotic probe an "unprecedented" experiment.

Real Madrid hit by injuries but Atlético keen to play down favourites tag

 

 

 

The first man down was Gareth Bale, holding his calf. Next came Luka Modric, rubbing his knee. And on Tuesday morning it was confirmed that Karim Benzema has not recovered from a knee ligament injury that led to him missing the game against Málaga in which his two team-mates fell. They already knew about Marcelo: a yellow card in the first leg means he’s suspended. But the Real Madrid manager, Carlo Ancelotti, insisted that it was important to focus on the men who will play in tonight’s Champions League quarter-final second leg against Atlético Madrid, not on the men who won’t.

David Moyes at Manchester United, one year on: was it as bad as we thought?

The David Moyes mantra since being sacked as Manchester United manager 12 months on Wednesday is that he was not allowed time to succeed. The Scot maintains any chance to discover if he could do the job was thwarted when Ed Woodward, the executive vice‑chairman, tore up his six-year contract on 22 April of last season, 10 months into his tenure.
Yet in doing so Woodward – and the Glazers – were effectively saying to Moyes’s plea for more time: “How soon is now?” The prescient answer might actually have come two months earlier. Because, by the time the trigger was finally pulled, Moyes’s United were in seventh place on 57 points from 34 games, 13 points from a Champions League berth.
The harsh truth is that the alarm bells had been clanging since a dismal spring night in Athens. On 25 February, Moyes’s side lost a Champions League last-16 opening leg 2-0 to Olympiakos in what was the poorest display from a United side of recent memory. This was the moment Moyes was terminally damaged in the eyes of the boss

Thousands are bypassing the post office with this app

The shipping process is incredibly inconvenient. You know this, I know this, and Silicon Valley investors do too.

That's why prominent venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers just led a hefty new round of $50 million funding in Shyp.

The startup, which launched in March 2014, takes care of the pesky logistics involving with shipping: from packaging to pickup to returning.
Using the Shyp app, users can take a picture and click a few buttons. Like magic, or within 20 minutes, the package will be taken care of ... meaning one of Shyp's couriers will pick it up, package it and ship it off using the best carrier option: FedEx, DHL, UPS or the U.S. Postal Service.
The new round of financing brings Shyp's funding total to $62.2 million.
To be sure, the on-demand delivery and logistics business is a crowded one. There's grocery delivery startup Instacart, shipping service Parcel, and on-demand everything companies WunWun and Postmates, among others. But many are focused on the "last mile" of delivering things to customers. Shyp is focused on the "first-mile."
Shyp co-founder Kevin Gibbon says the new round poises the company to continue improving its technology, explore new products (it launched "returns" service last month), and expand to new markets.
"It's repeating what we've already proven works in different cities," said Gibbon, who noted that Shyp's base of customers grows at a rate of 20% each month. And it's increased its number of shipments by nearly 500% since July.
Shyp is available in San Francisco, New York and Miami. This week, it added Los Angeles. For now, it's only available in beta; "tens of thousands" of people have already signed up, said Gibbon.
The service costs a $5 flat fee, plus the cost of shipping. According to Gibbon, many users have realized its worth their while to ship out multiple things at once, so they'll wait until they have three or more items before opening up the app.

Shyp counts 50 employees, not including its contract workers who serve as couriers. It makes money by getting discounts on volume from the shipping services and cashes in on the difference.
But Shyp's investors aren't too concerned about it pushing through to profitability any time soon.
"You're not looking for profitability [yet], you just want to expand to more markets," said Scott Stanford, co-founder of Sherpa Ventures.
Sherpa led Shyp's previous round of funding for $10 million in July 2014 and participated in the new round.

Liquid engineering: Meet the man who builds houses with water

A sheet of water moves around in between the inner layers of the house which equalizes the temperature across the building.

Story highlights

• Matyas Gutai is pioneering the use of water as an insulator for sustainable architecture
• Reacting to its surroundings, the water keeps the house at a comfortable temperature

(CNN)Would you build a house with water?

Hungarian architect Matyas Gutai believes that water is the perfect material for keeping a house at a comfortable temperature.

And while that doesn't mean that he can do away with traditional materials like bricks, cement, and plaster, his system promotes a whole new idea of engineering.

Gutai built a prototype house in his hometown of Kecskemet, south of Budapest, with his high school friend Milan Berenyi, after years of research and development.

The house was built with a grant from the EU, and showcases the "liquid engineering" concepts Gutai has written about extensively.

How does it work?

Panels, some of steel, and some of glass, make up the structure of the house and a sheet of water is trapped between the inner layers, which equalizes the temperature across the building.

The house is actually able to reheat itself, when its hot excess heat is stored either in the foundations of the building or in external storage, to be brought back to the walls when the temperature drops.

The indoor temperature can also be modified using a monitoring system similar to central heating.

It saves energy: it's a very clean and sustainable solution

Matyas Gutai

This is a very efficient and sustainable system: the house can produce its own energy and be more independent of energy suppliers, which could reduce carbon emissions.

"Our panel can heat and cool the building itself -- the water inside the panel does the very same job as heating," says Gutai.

"It saves energy, when you compare it to a similar building with large glass surfaces -- it's a very clean and sustainable solution."

The initial idea

While studying sustainable architecture at the University of Tokyo, in 2003, Gutai got the idea for his water house from a visit to the open air hot baths.

Despite the snowfall outside the pool, Gutai remained comfortably warm inside it -- it was then he realized the importance of water's surface temperature and its potential use in architecture.

A sheet of water moves around in between the inner layers of the house which equalizes the temperature across the building.

"As an architect I think it's really important that this building tries to redefine permanence, which has been a key concept in architecture for thousands of years. Our approach to permanence hasn't changed much at all, but now instead of making something very strong that tries to resist everything, we are making something that adapts to its environment.

"Architecture is really changing in our time. We've reached our limits when it comes to solid architecture, now it's reasonable to look for a new system."

Risks

Architecture is really changing in our time: it's now reasonable to look for a new system

Matyas Gutai

"This research dates back seven or eight years," explains Gutai. "I started it at the University of Tokyo and it took us almost six years to get the building done. There are plenty of structural problems involved -- a lot of important questions were raised such as what happens if it's so cold outside that the water freezes or what happens when one panel breaks."

"We now mix the water with natural solvents, that do not cause pollution but lower the freezing temperature to an acceptable level. This practically means, that even if the reheating technology fails, the water cannot freeze."

"In case of cold climates, like in Hungary, we also add some external insulation to the structure, to protect it from freezing."

And if a panel were to break? "We designed special joint units. The joint elements allow slow flow, but block faster flows," he explains.

This means that if one panel breaks, it will be sealed from the remaining ones instantly. This effect is based on fluid dynamics, and not computers or monitoring system -- which minimizes the chance of failure.

Gutai has worked in cooperation with universities and manufacturers to make sure the building is viable, and while the prototype house is only a small space (eight square meters in total) it demonstrates the power of this new technology.

Future plans

"Our goal should be to use less energy and materials, and take cities off-grid as much as possible. The water house is one way to do that," said Gutai, who currently works as a researcher at Feng Chia University in Taiwan.

Constructing houses in this way is moderately more expensive than traditional designs, but this prototype aims to slash our energy needs and Gutai is working with factories and companies across Europe on projects using this technology.

To make water the building material of a greener future.

Scientists confirm existence of largest 'structure' ever found -- a supervoid

(CNN)Scientists have confirmed the existence of what one said might be "the largest individual structure ever found by humanity" -- a supervoid in space with far fewer galaxies than is usual.

The confirmation shows that traditional models of physics can explain what has long been known to be a cold spot in space, and "exotic, non-standard models" do not have to be invented, said Edward Bloomer, an astronomer with the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, in London. Bloomer was not involved in the recent research.

"The universe does seem to work the way our model says it does," Bloomer told CNN.

Cold spot in space

Scientists had been aware since 2004 of a cold spot in space but were uncertain how to explain it. At least part of the explanation appears to be that light, which takes hundreds of millions of years to pass through the supervoid, loses some of its energy in the process.

The new study was carried out by a team of astronomers led by Istvan Szapudi of the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The results were published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. It was Szapudi who said the void might be the largest structure ever discovered by mankind.

"Using data from Hawaii's Pan-STARRS1 (PS1) telescope located on Haleakala, Maui, and NASA's Wide Field Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite, Szapudi's team discovered a large supervoid, a vast region 1.8 billion light-years across, in which the density of galaxies is much lower than usual in the known universe," the article says.

Supervoid formed by accelerating expansion of universe

Asked whether a void -- or semi-void -- could be called a structure, Bloomer compared it to finding the largest cave in the world or perhaps the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon is a void in a way, but what formed it is still interesting, he said.

What formed the supervoid, he said, was the accelerating expansion of the universe.

Bloomer acknowledged that the findings are theoretical rather than practical.

"It's not going to change what you're up to next week or next month," he said. Instead, the new study serves to fill in the gaps in our understanding of physics, he said.

(CNN)Scientists have confirmed the existence of what one said might be "the largest individual structure ever found by humanity" -- a supervoid in space with far fewer galaxies than is usual.

The confirmation shows that traditional models of physics can explain what has long been known to be a cold spot in space, and "exotic, non-standard models" do not have to be invented, said Edward Bloomer, an astronomer with the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, in London. Bloomer was not involved in the recent research.

"The universe does seem to work the way our model says it does," Bloomer told CNN.

Cold spot in space

Scientists had been aware since 2004 of a cold spot in space but were uncertain how to explain it. At least part of the explanation appears to be that light, which takes hundreds of millions of years to pass through the supervoid, loses some of its energy in the process.

The new study was carried out by a team of astronomers led by Istvan Szapudi of the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The results were published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. It was Szapudi who said the void might be the largest structure ever discovered by mankind.

"Using data from Hawaii's Pan-STARRS1 (PS1) telescope located on Haleakala, Maui, and NASA's Wide Field Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite, Szapudi's team discovered a large supervoid, a vast region 1.8 billion light-years across, in which the density of galaxies is much lower than usual in the known universe," the article says.

Supervoid formed by accelerating expansion of universe

Asked whether a void -- or semi-void -- could be called a structure, Bloomer compared it to finding the largest cave in the world or perhaps the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon is a void in a way, but what formed it is still interesting, he said.

What formed the supervoid, he said, was the accelerating expansion of the universe.

Bloomer acknowledged that the findings are theoretical rather than practical.

"It's not going to change what you're up to next week or next month," he said. Instead, the new study serves to fill in the gaps in our understanding of physics, he said.

(CNN)Scientists have confirmed the existence of what one said might be "the largest individual structure ever found by humanity" -- a supervoid in space with far fewer galaxies than is usual.

The confirmation shows that traditional models of physics can explain what has long been known to be a cold spot in space, and "exotic, non-standard models" do not have to be invented, said Edward Bloomer, an astronomer with the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, in London. Bloomer was not involved in the recent research.

"The universe does seem to work the way our model says it does," Bloomer told CNN.

Cold spot in space

Scientists had been aware since 2004 of a cold spot in space but were uncertain how to explain it. At least part of the explanation appears to be that light, which takes hundreds of millions of years to pass through the supervoid, loses some of its energy in the process.

The new study was carried out by a team of astronomers led by Istvan Szapudi of the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The results were published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. It was Szapudi who said the void might be the largest structure ever discovered by mankind.

"Using data from Hawaii's Pan-STARRS1 (PS1) telescope located on Haleakala, Maui, and NASA's Wide Field Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite, Szapudi's team discovered a large supervoid, a vast region 1.8 billion light-years across, in which the density of galaxies is much lower than usual in the known universe," the article says.

Supervoid formed by accelerating expansion of universe

Asked whether a void -- or semi-void -- could be called a structure, Bloomer compared it to finding the largest cave in the world or perhaps the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon is a void in a way, but what formed it is still interesting, he said.

What formed the supervoid, he said, was the accelerating expansion of the universe.

Bloomer acknowledged that the findings are theoretical rather than practical.

"It's not going to change what you're up to next week or next month," he said. Instead, the new study serves to fill in the gaps in our understanding of physics, he said.

Sony Pictures condemns Wikileaks release of documents from hackers

Sony Corp's Sony Pictures Entertainment objected to the online release by WikiLeaks on Thursday of a searchable database of more than 30,000 documents that were obtained by hackers in a massive cyber attack last year.

A logo is pictured outside Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, California December 19, 2014. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni

LOS ANGELES: Sony Corp's Sony Pictures Entertainment objected to the online release by WikiLeaks on Thursday of a searchable database of more than 30,000 documents that were obtained by hackers in a massive cyber attack last year.
"The cyber-attack on Sony Pictures was a malicious criminal act, and we strongly condemn the indexing of stolen employee and other private and privileged information on WikiLeaks," the company said in a statement.
Sony Pictures said it "will continue to fight for the safety, security, and privacy of our company."
The documents stolen by the hackers were made available to the media last year. They included embarrassing emails by then- Co-Chairman Amy Pascal and personal information such as salaries and Social Security numbers of employees.
The release of 30,287 documents and 173,132 emails on WikiLeaks makes the information widely available and searchable.

China's incredible shrinking factory

Eight years ago, Pascal Lighting employed about 2,000 workers on a leafy campus in southern China. Today, the Taiwanese light manufacturer has winnowed its workforce to just 200 and leased most of its space to other companies: lamp workshops, a mobile phone maker, a logistics group, a liquor brand.

A man works at Pascal Lighting in Huizhou, Guangdong province, April 13, 2015. REUTERS/Alexandra Harney

  Johnny Tsai, Pascal's general manager, stands inside Pascal Lighting in Huizhou, Guangdong province, April 13, 2015. REUTERS/Alexandra Harney

HUIZHOU, China: Eight years ago, Pascal Lighting employed about 2,000 workers on a leafy campus in southern China. Today, the Taiwanese light manufacturer has winnowed its workforce to just 200 and leased most of its space to other companies: lamp workshops, a mobile phone maker, a logistics group, a liquor brand.
"It used to be as long as you had more orders, you could get everything you needed to expand your factory, and you could expand," says Johnny Tsai, Pascal's general manager.
No longer. The Chinese factory – an institution that was once so large, it was measured in football fields – is shrinking.
Rising labor costs, higher real estate prices, less favorable government policies and smaller order volumes are forcing Chinese plants to downsize just to survive.
Their contraction suggests a new model of light manufacturing emerging from China's economic slowdown: smaller plants are replacing the vertically integrated behemoths that defined Chinese manufacturing in the early 2000s.
Cankun, an appliances factory in southern China featured in the documentary Manufactured Landscapes, had more than 22,000 manufacturing employees in 2005, according to its annual report. Today, that number has shrunk to just 3,000, according to a senior executive. Some Hong Kong-owned factories in southern China have cut their staff numbers by 50-60 percent, according to Stanley Lau, chairman of the business lobby Federation of Hong Kong Industries.

US Air Force moves towards common satellite control system

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.: The U.S. Air Force is studying how to develop a common ground system to track, communicate with and control all the satellites it operates, a move that would save money and improve cybersecurity, the head of Air Force Space Command said on Thursday.

General John Hyten said in an interview that several options were under discussion that would free up money to focus on the sensors on different satellite systems that are used for communications, navigation, missile warning and other missions.

He said the options included using an existing Air Force ground system developed for research satellites a decade ago; developing a larger system in-house; signing a services-based contract to handle the work, or hiring a contractor to design a single new system that would be used for all spacecraft.

"We have to figure out what baseline pipe everything is going to operate on, and then we need to go build that baseline pipe and define the interfaces," Hyten said at the annual Space Symposium conference.

China’s DJI drones flying high among US companies

Chinese drone maker SZ DJI Technology Co Ltd has established a strong early lead in the U.S. commercial market as companies turn to its inexpensive, light-weight flying devices for a host of uses from shooting films to mapping and site inspections.

A Phantom drone by DJI company, equipped with a camera, flies during the 4th Intergalactic Meeting of Phantom's Pilots (MIPP) in an open secure area in the Bois de Boulogne, western Paris, March 16, 2014. REUTERS/Charles Platiau

May the force-field be with you: Boeing granted patent for 'shock wave attenuation

Boeing has been granted a patent for a force field-like defense system, leading excited sci-fi fans to herald the advent of something previously seen only in the realms of "Star Wars" or "Star Trek."

Filed in 2012, the USPTO has granted the aerospace giant a patent for a "method and system for shockwave attenuation via electromagnetic arc."

On first look, it seems that they're onto something similar to "Star Wars'" deflector shields. The patent describes a system that would detect the shockwave from a nearby explosion and create an area of ionized air -- a plasma field -- between the oncoming blast and the vehicle it was protecting.

The method works, says the patent, "by heating a selected region of the first fluid medium rapidly to create a second, transient medium that intercepts the shockwave and attenuates its energy density before it reaches a protected asset."

By creating a temporary, superheated parcel of air with a laser, microwave or electrical arc, researchers believe that the shockwave would, in theory -- it hasn't been determined how far along Boeing's research into this has got -- dissipate once it hit the plasma field, leaving whatever was on the other side unaffected, or for the blast to at least be mitigated.

"Explosive devices are being used increasingly in asymmetric warfare to cause damage and destruction to equipment and loss of life. The majority of the damage caused by explosive devices results from shrapnel and shock waves," the patent says.

However, at this stage, Boeing's force field would be powerless to protect against shrapnel or other debris flung out by an explosion, so the troops of the future would still need to keep their body armor firmly strapped on.

Devices with feeling: new tech creates buttons and shapes in mid-air

UltraHaptics is a young company with a big dream: changing the way we interact with electronic devices.

Their technology creates tactile three-dimensional shapes literally out of thin air, using ultrasound. The company's tagline says it all: "Feeling without touching."

Through an emission of sound waves, sensations are projected through the air and to the user.

Changes in air pressure are perceived as suspended tactile surfaces, creating invisible -- but tangible -- interfaces.

This already sounds quite intriguing, but paired with another rising technology it has the potential to become a game changer.

Enhancing virtual reality

The rising tide of virtual reality seems unstoppable: Facebook's Oculus Rift and Magic Leap are leading the pack, but several other companies are readying devices in a field that could shake the foundations of electronic entertainment.

But even though it is incredibly convincing, virtual reality completely bypasses the sense of touch: applying UltraHaptics' technology to it would allow users to not just see the virtual world projected in front of their eyes, but to touch it as well.

Tom Carter, UltraHaptics' CTO, sees potential in the merging of these technologies: "The ability to put on your virtual reality goggles and not just explore visually and through your headphones, but also touch what you can see, is a really exciting possibility," he told CNN's Nick Glass.

Nearly 1 million new malware threats released every day

Companies are struggling to fend off cyber attacks as hackers get faster, sneakier and more creative.

New reports from the Internet security teams at Symantec (SYMC, Tech30) and Verizon (VZ, Tech30) provide an alarming picture of how difficult it's becoming for computer users to stay safe online.

Last year was a big one for high-profile cybercrime, from the Heartbleed bug to major corporate attacks, and Sony's embarrassing hack.
Symantec's analysis of security threats in 2014 revealed thieves are working faster than companies can defend themselves, and launching more malicious attacks than in previous years.
More than 317 million new pieces of malware -- computer viruses or other malicious software -- were created last year. That means nearly one million new threats were released each day.
But hackers actually relied on incredibly old computer bugs that companies just haven't gotten around to fixing yet, according to Verizon's 2015 Data Breach Investigations Report.
In nearly 90% of cases, hackers relied on computer bugs that have been around since 2002. The third most popular option for hackers is a glitch in the way an IT manager remotely manages corporate PCs -- one that's existed since 1999. Companies could and should be patching this stuff, but they don't.
"While it seems like a no brainer for fix some of these things, organizations care more about making widgets," said Verizon security data scientist Bob Rudis. "They just don't have the manpower or time."

Surprise! 1 in 5 people use Bing

Bing crossed the 20% threshold in search for the first time in March.

That's according to a new U.S. desktop search report from comScore, released this week.

But wait, it gets even more surprising. Since Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30) also serves Bing results on Yahoo (YHOO, Tech30) sites, the effective number of Americans using Bing is actually closer to 1 in 3.
Google (GOOGL, Tech30) remains the dominant search platform for desktop users, but its share slipped slightly late last year and has since leveled off at 64%.
Yahoo's share of search meanwhile has been declining since 2007, hitting a low of 10% last year. Its share saw a small spike in December, January, and February, helped in part by Firefox's decision to default its search engine to Yahoo for U.S. users.

Watch a chimp knock down a drone

Even chimpanzees hate drones and their creepy cameras.

On Friday, a zoo in the Netherlands posted a YouTube video that showed how a chimpanzee -- annoyed at the drone zipping by her -- used a tree branch to knock that sucker to the ground.

According to the Royal Burgers' Zoo, the drone was being used to film the second season of an animal TV show.
"Once the intelligent apes discovered the spying plane ... they immediately armed themselves with long sticks," the zoo posted on its YouTube page.
In the video, a female chimp sitting on a tree limb lunges forward as the drone files by. Her first swing, a powerful downward stroke, misses. But she nails the copter with a backstroke.
The drone spins out of control and comes crashing down. Then an ape -- maybe the same one -- runs over and inspects the GoPro camera underneath the drone.
The zoo said the drone was destroyed.
Human beings inclined to do the same thing can use a drone net gun. And drone hunting by private-minded, pissed off farmers was almost a real thing in Deer Trail, Colorado last year -- until voters there voted down the idea.

The world's biggest aircraft: Giant airship gets closer to take-off

Look to the skies above London and you'll see the usual suspects -- rainclouds, planes and pigeons. But by the end of the year, you might just see something else.

Longer than a soccer pitch and filled to the brim with helium, at 302 feet long, the Airlander 10 will be the world's biggest aircraft. Part blimp, part plane, part helicopter, it was originally created by British design company Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV) for military surveillance by the U.S. Army.

But budget cuts doomed the project and HAV bought the airship back across the pond, where it seemed set to remain on solid ground until the company received a £3.4 million ($5.1 million) grant from the UK government. Thanks to this recent injection of financing, designers and engineers are now readying the craft for first flight tests scheduled for later this year.

Old concept, new tricks

While the concept has been around for nearly a century, airships fell out of fashion following the Hindenburg disaster in 1937, when the German passenger craft erupted into flames while trying to dock, killing 36.

While an airship might seem like a craft from a time long passed, it has been given a 21st century design overhaul and HAV hopes to have airships back in the skies over the UK by 2016.

Chris Daniels, HAV head of partnerships and communications, said: "The sole problems existing old-style airships had (were) having lots of ground crew, limited ability to carry payloads and to be susceptible to weather conditions. We solved all those problems with a new concept -- a hybrid aircraft. So a mix between a wing and an airship."