Source: http://gizmodo.com/these-fish-look-like-theyre-casting-spells-1628491822
When you think about mechanisms that animals use to avoid becoming dinner, clever adaptations like poisons or pointy spikes come to mind. But the Ostracod, a type of zooplankton, uses something a little more magical.
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/08/30/dell-curved-monitor-u3415w/
What good is having an ultra-powerful PC if you're still connecting it to a dusty old monitor? We reckon doing so would be pretty silly. Good thing that alongside the new Alienware Area 51, Dell's pulled the curtain back on its 34-inch Ultrasharp U3415W display then. It boasts a wider-than-widescreen 21:9 aspect ratio that's paired with 3,440 x 1,440 lines of resolution (just under 4K's 3,840 x 2,160) and a curved screen. Dell says that the monitor's wide field of view mated with its curves will give gamers a leg up on the competition because, compared to flat monitors, less eye movement is needed to take advantage of the player's peripheral vision. Intrigued to test that claim? You can do so come this December. We're hoping that regardless of size, though, a curved screen doesn't necessarily equate to an expensive screen -- Dell hasn't announced pricing for these displays just yet.
Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD, Dell
The biggest names in technology — Apple, Samsung, and Google, among others — will unveil their next-generation smartphones starting in September. So before the new smartphone season officially begins, we thought it’d be interesting to take a look at the current landscape and see where it’s moving.
Based on company data charted for us by Business Insider Intelligence, Samsung is the current market leader in terms of smartphone shipments, thanks to the growth of Android, while Apple’s market share has started to shrink, giving away some of its lead to emerging low-end smartphones from LG, Huawei, and Xiaomi, in particular. Still, as the competition heats up thanks to the newest cheap handsets coming out of China, Samsung and Apple maintain strong positioning as they head into the fall quarter and ever-important holiday season.
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Built into the app is a feature called Cinema, which acts as a gyroscope that continuously crops the external frame around an anchored a central image. The edges of the fixed white frame never cross the warped, shaky frame, meaning when the images are collated together, all of the effects of camera shake are removed:
Instagram yesterday outlined how this neat algorithm works. The gyroscopic samples and frames are first fed into a stabilizer to generate a new set of camera orientations as an output. Each input frame is changed by the IGTrackStabilizer until it is in the right camera orientation.
Cinema also has an adaptive zoom feature, which picks the zoom of the camera based on how shaky the recorded video is. If there is a small amount of shake, the camera will zoom in more - as not much room is needed to counteract the shake. If there is a lot of shake, the camera will zoom in less, as a lot of space will be needed to make sure the shake doesn't mar the picture in the central frame.
The end product is smooth video playback, regardless of whether you are able to hold a camera steady or not.
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/08/27/samsung-gear-s-3g/
Samsung is taking the wraps off of yet another new smartwatch, but the Gear S (not Solo) has a twist: there's a 3G modem inside. While it may not be especially fast, that means that even when outside the range of a Bluetooth-connected phone or WiFi, it can still send and receive messages or make calls. It has a 2-inch AMOLED screen plus a dual-core 1GHz CPU inside along with GPS, heart rate and motion sensors, all powered by a 300mAh battery Samsung says can last up to two days. It runs Tizen instead of Android Wear, with pedestrian navigation available from from Nokia's HERE and support for Facebook. In the run up to IFA next week Samsung is also bringing the Gear Circle headset (yes, we also figured they'd save that name for a round watch) that pairs with a phone over Bluetooth, letting users hear notifications, use voice commands or listen to music through the earbuds.
Both devices will go on sale in October, although there's no word on a price for either. The Gear S is outfitted for all kinds of fitness tracking, either through Samsung's S Health or Nike+ Running, it's IP67 dust and water resistant, packs 4GB of storage and 512MB RAM. The Gear Circle has a magnetic clasp so it fits around your neck while not in use, a touch sensor and battery with up to 11 hours of talk time. So will either of these wearables break into our gear bag or wardrobe? We'll have a better idea next week after getting our wrists/necks on them during the IFA 2014 show in Berlin.
Filed under: Wearables, Mobile, Samsung
Source: Samsung
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