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SMILE, CAMERA, ACTION: Marjorie Mabini takes a selfie with her niece Jaydah Mabini and son Jaren in front of the Urban Light lampost installation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles. They were visiting from Oahu, Hawaii. By Deborah VankinIn one photo, a tourist in a baseball cap stands heroically, face scrunched with effort, raising a 340-ton boulder above his head. In another, a spindly yogi, flat on her back and legs in the air, balances the rock on her feet.“The Boulder Holder” pose, a selfie that museum-goers take with artist Michael Heizer’s “Levitated Mass” sculpture at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is so popular that one Instagram count of pictures of the artwork under the lacma hashtag potentially reached 175,000 people in a week.The museum selfie is having a moment. Institutions around the globe — even some that once frowned on photography or that have banned the selfie stick — are creating even more selfie opportunities, sans stick, as a way to attract visitors, especially millennials.Some museums are even designing architecture that encourages the phenomenon.At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, an expansion set to open next year includes terraces with views partly designed to encourage selfies. The museum’s curators are also discussing ways to incorporate selfie-friendly moments into exhibitions.“It’d be foolish for museums not to actively consider this. It plays such an essential role in terms of word of mouth,” said the museum’s chief content officer Chad Coerver. “We are definitely looking at what those iconic selfie moments are going to be at the new SF MOMA.”During its recent Jeff Koons retrospective, the Centre Pompidou in Paris placed stickers on the floor guiding visitors to the best selfie spots with the artist’s shiny Hanging Heart.The Broad museum, which will open in downtown Los Angeles in September, didn’t consider selfies when configuring its architecture, founding director Joanne Heyler said. Nonetheless, a selfie meme associated with the Grand Avenue building is already emerging.“The best selfie spots seem to come about organically,” Heyler said. “We’ve recently seen pictures of people taking selfies outside the building and mimicking the ‘oculus’ — a place where the veil of our building indents into the museum.” The pose: Making a fake dimple by pressing a finger into your cheek.With their visual focus, art museums are natural places for the trend to flourish. Just ask Beyonce and Jay Z, who in October famously posted selfies with The Mona Lisa at the Louvre in Paris.The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s selfie spots are its “Rocky” statue and the inspiring run up its stone steps, fists overhead. The National Gallery in Oslo has Edvard Munch’s The Scream, glutting the Internet with agonised selfies.There’s even an interactive art museum in the Philippines, Art in Island, that opened in December dedicated to taking selfies with artworks.“The upside is that people share their experiences, word spreads, more people come, young people can relate,” said Ann Philbin, director of the Hammer Museum in West Los Angeles. The downside: They don’t often have intimate or contemplative experiences with the art, she said. “That’s what we’re giving up.”Though the selfie speaks to a culture that values uniqueness and self-expression, it could also be a reaction to the digital world, where experiences are virtual rather than tangible. The selfie screams: “I was actually here!”“Social media put a huge premium on the instant sharing of experience,” said Kate Flint, a University of Southern California art history professor. “And not just with immediate family and friends, but with a whole network of people who, it’s implicitly assumed, will be somewhere between envious and admiring that you’ve actually made it into the Louvre or the Uffizi.”Among major museums, LACMA was among the first to embrace the selfie trend. Its Urban Light installation by Chris Burden went up in the pre-Instagram year of 2008, and almost immediately began attracting cellphone-wielding self-portraitists.The sculpture is now the museum’s crowd favourite for selfies, spawning nearly 10 times the photos on Instagram compared with Heizer’s rock star.In its most interactive social media campaign to date, LACMA’s portrait exhibition Faces of America asks visitors to take selfies with artworks, then projects selected images back to visitors on monitors.Everyday LACMA looks for selfies to re-post, said Scott Tennent, who oversees the museum’s social media. “It helps lower the intimidation factor that so many museums have to wrestle with, and it inspires creativity.”Like many museums, the Hammer once barred picture-taking inside its galleries. Then in February last year it reversed the policy to allow flash-free photography.“We saw it as a necessity and also as an opportunity,” Philbin said. “In the last five years, museums have loosened up around this issue. People want to photograph things to remember them. Cameras are an extension of our bodies at this point.”The Hammer’s spinning chairs in its main courtyard — which invite visitors to take a whirl — have become the unexpected selfie standout. Since they were installed in February as part of Provocations: The Architecture and Design of Heatherwick Studio, hundreds of visitors a week have unleashed their inner child, twirling on the chairs and documenting it in pictures.“Once we noticed it, we created a hashtag, spunday,” Philbin said. “Now every Sunday we post our favourite pictures in one of the Spun chairs.”At the Getty Museum in Brentwood, curators last month rearranged the ornamental mirrors in the South Pavilion decorative arts galleries to make mirror selfies easier to achieve. In January, the Getty launched MusePose, asking visitors to imitate specific artworks each month and share their selfies on Instagram. Last week alone, MusePose appeared 618,000 times in users’ Instagram streams.“It’s about observing what visitors are already enjoying, noticing what they’re noticing, and facilitating that — showing them it’s not this stuffy quiet place you can’t have fun in,” digital engagement manager Annelisa Stephan said.Not everyone, however — like the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena — is chasing the selfie op.“We see other museums do that, but that’s not the Norton Simon style,” said Leslie Denk, director of public affairs. “It’s a serene contemplative experience here, especially in our sculpture garden. We certainly enjoy that visitors take the time to capture and share their experiences, but we don’t coordinate any efforts to encourage that.”At a Brooklyn exhibition last year, a sculpture by artist Kara Walker depicting an African-American “mammy” as an Egyptian sphinx led to graphic selfies of visitors seemingly touching various nude body parts.“It was really disturbing and stupid and distracted from the meaning of the piece,” said Art in America corresponding editor Michael Duncan. “Museums don’t need to be Disneyland. They need to be places where you experience art, and selfies get in the way.”Duncan’s view was at odds with British blogger Mar Dixon, who last year launched @MuseumSelfieDay.“It just went crazy, the hashtag started trending worldwide,” Dixon said, adding that museums in Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Germany and beyond picked up on her campaign. “Some even made selfie stations with signs saying, ‘This is a good place to take a selfie.’”The art website Hyperallergic, however, wrote that the second Museum Selfie Day on January 20 this year “will forever be remembered as a plague on our social media feeds.” The site called Dixon “the official ringleader of this vast criminal enterprise.”But that “criminal enterprise” at least got people into museums, SF MOMA’s Coerver said.“We fundamentally believe that everything we do digitally is still designed to get a human being in front of a physical artwork,” Coerver said. “If selfies encourage that to happen, that’s a good thing for museums. It reinforces this idea that you have to be there.”— Los Angeles Times/TNS

EXPERIMENT: Dan Wetmore demonstrates Thync, a bluetooth connected wearable device. An electrode strip goes from the forehead to behind the ear or neck.  Right: IN THE FRAME: Infrared photography can show how the device heats up areas of the face and neck.By Heather SomervilleGrandmothers are wearing Fitbit, Jawbone bracelets pack the shelves of big-box stores and Apple’s smartwatch is expected to be one of the most coveted Christmas gifts this year.Wearable technology — wireless-connected gadgets that come in the form of eyeglasses, bracelets, wristwatches and other small accessories for the body — have gone from nerdy and outlandish devices to popular purchases for the average consumer, a sign of how comfortable we have become with tracking our daily activities, whether it’s how well we sleep or how many calories we burn.Now entrepreneurs are working to push the technology to new heights, creating gadgets that don’t simply collect data on the body but can alter the user’s physical and mental state. It’s a largely underexplored area that offers the potential to alleviate pain and improve brain functionality, but also carries a host of concerns about whether using startup technology to change our body chemistry poses unnecessary risks.Thync, a startup based in the Bay Area town of Los Gatos, launched publicly early this month with a device that sends electricity to the user’s nerves to alter their mood and mental state. The user has two options: become calmer or more energised. The mood-altering fix is delivered through a Bluetooth-connected headpiece, a strip attached to the neck or behind the ear to stimulate nerves that emerge directly from the brain, and a smartphone. Leave your yoga mat or Red Bull at home.“Are people looking for some sort of stimulant to alter their mental state? Unequivocally, yes,” said Luis Rincon, co-founder and CEO of Wearables.com, a research and review site. “So there absolutely is a consumer appetite for this, and that’s been the case for millenniums. What’s new is we are now entering a phase where technology can provide that stimulant.”Mind and body manipulation can be scary terrain, but easy-to-use devices such as Fitbit have paved the way for wearables 2.0. With a growing market and explosion of new companies — not to mention the gorilla of consumer electronics storming onto the scene in April with the Apple Watch — companies such as Thync are looking to stand out from the crowd.“All wearables today are trackers,” said Thync co-founder and CEO Isy Goldwasser. “Our wearable is working in synergy with the body.”Other companies are going a step further to offer medical treatment or therapy. Massachusetts-based Quell, for instance, sells a wearable that uses electrodes to provide chronic pain relief for those with fibromyalgia, sciatica, arthritis and other ailments.The Consumer Electronics Association predicts 10.8 million wearable devices will ship in 2015, up from more than 3 million last year. Technology research firm Gartner predicts that 70 million to 100 million devices will be purchased in 2016. While not yet as ubiquitous as the smartphone, wearables are on their way.Tech investors have thrown their collective hat in the wearable ring — to the tune of $635 million from July 2014 through June 1, according to PitchBook, a research and data provider. That’s a nearly fourfold increase from the previous year, when VCs invested $172 million in the space.“That level of investment shows us that it’s not just a fad, and it’s something that’s going to be around for a long time,” Rincon said.Thync has raised $13 million from investors including Khosla Ventures. Its founders, Jamie Tyler, a neuroscience expert and Arizona State University associate professor, and Goldwasser, a longtime tech executive, have spent the last year and a half testing the device on 3,500 people.“We spent a very long time trying to beat the placebo effect,” Goldwasser said. “People can put it on and we don’t have any doubt that it’s working.”They have tracked changes in users’ temperature, body chemistry and facial expressions — all of which are altered as electrical pulses from an iPhone are transmitted into the skin and through the nerves that act as superhighways to the brain. The idea, the founders said, was to give busy people an alternative to alcohol or Red Bull — which many professionals use to wind down or rev up. The device starts at $299.“Most people don’t meditate; most people don’t have the time,” Tyler said. “It’s sad, but that’s the world we live in.”The San Jose Mercury News tried Thync, finding the “calm” vibrations did indeed have an effect: Breath slowed, anxiety disappeared, facial tension relaxed and worries gave way to a still mind. But unlike meditation, the sensation arrived as an outside force and felt inauthentic, and therefore slightly unnerving. And the sedateness lasted only briefly — less than an hour — perhaps due to keeping the strength of the electrical stimulation at a minimum. These are, after all, electronic currents from a cellphone going directly into one’s forehead.“It’s probably no more crazy than taking a bunch of supplements that you don’t really know anything about,” said Steve Holmes, Intel’s vice president of new devices. “But just to do it recreationally, I would be cautious.” — San Jose Mercury News/TNS

People touch specially woven Project Jacquard fabric during a demonstration at Google's annual developers conference in San Francisco. AFP/San Francisco Google announced on Friday that it is working with iconic US jean maker Levi Strauss to make clothing from specially woven fabric with touch-screen control capabilities. The Internet titan used its annual developers conference in San Francisco to reveal its so-called Project Jacquard and to spotlight Levi Strauss as its first partner. Named after a Frenchman who invented a type of loom, Project Jacquard is in the hands of a small Google team called Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP), which is different from the Google (x) lab that develops big-vision innovations such as self-driving cars. "We are enabling interactive textiles," Emre Karagozler of ATAP said as the smart fabric was shown off in an area set up to look like cloth coming out of a loom. "We do it by weaving conductive threads into fabric." The special threads can be woven into a wide array of fabrics, and be made to visually stand out or go unnoticed depending on designers' wishes. Conductivity can be limited to desired parts of fabric or spread across entire cloth. "It is stretchable; it is washable," Karagozler said as people controlled lights or computer screens with finger strokes on a blue cloth covering a table in the display area behind him. "It is just like normal fabric." Project Jacquard makes it possible to weave touch and gesture interactivity into any textile using standard, industrial looms, according to Google. Anything involving fabric, from suits or dresses to furniture or carpet, could potentially have computer touch-pad style control capabilities woven. Conductive yarn is connected to tiny circuits, no bigger than jacket buttons, with miniaturised electronics that can use algorithms to recognise touches or swipes, ATAP said. The data can be sent wirelessly to smartphones or other devices, enabling actions such as making phone calls or sending messages with brushes of fabric. "In our hyper-digital world, people constantly struggle to be physically present in their environment while maintaining a digital connection," said Levi Straus's head of global product innovation Paul Dillinger, who took part in a Google presentation at the gathering. "The work that Google and Levi's are embarking upon with Project Jacquard delivers an entirely new value to consumers with apparel that is emotional, aspirational and functional."

MAKING UP A MONSTER: Jill Dunbar of Computer Sciences Corp. stands next to racks of SGI servers that make up the huge Pleiades supercomputer in the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility at the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in Mountain View, California.By Pete CareySilicon Valley is famed for spawning the desktop, mobile and cloud computing revolutions. What is less well known is that it’s one of the nerve centres for building the world’s fastest number-crunchers.Once confined to big national laboratories, supercomputers are now in demand to crunch massive amounts of data for industries such as oil exploration, finance and online sales.The valley’s strong hand in that business was highlighted in April when Intel landed the prime contract to design a $200 million supercomputer named Aurora to be housed at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.Aurora, developed in partnership with Cray of Seattle, will likely become the world’s fastest supercomputer when it goes online in 2018. With Aurora’s new architecture, the Santa Clara chip company appears to be taking aim at a bigger slice of what will soon be a $15 billion to $20 billion commercial market for “high-performance” computers that can give a company a competitive edge.“Right now in the oil and gas industry, there’s an arms race to see who can get the biggest supercomputer,” said analyst Steve Conway of the research firm International Data Corp., citing one industry that has been especially aggressive in buying the machines.Energy companies use supercomputers to pinpoint oil deposits. Car companies use them to crash virtual cars in safety tests. Procter & Gamble uses high-performance computing to design detergents and shampoo and even potato chips. Supercomputer maker Cray says “at least one” Major League Baseball team uses one of its machines to see, among other things, how batters fare against different types of pitchers.Among the valley’s supercomputer makers or component suppliers:Silicon Graphics International in Milpitas makes systems for national laboratories — there’s one at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View — and private industry, including PayPal. In one case, a query that took 14 minutes to run on an older system was accomplished in less than a second on an SGI supercomputer, according to Ryan Quick, principal architect in advanced technologies at PayPal.“One of SGI’s big initiatives is to leverage much of the experimental work we’ve done in developing the biggest, baddest systems out there and democratising that into a package well-suited for the enterprise world,” said Brian Freed, vice president of in-memory architecture.Intel already supplies the chips for close to 95 percent of all high-performance machines, which includes supercomputers and their slightly less powerful cousins, according to Intersect360, a Sunnyvale consulting firm. In the mid-1990s, Intel benefited from a move by system makers to using industry-standard parts such as Intel’s processors, according to Addison Snell of Intersect360.Hewlett-Packard ranks just ahead of IBM as a supplier of the world’s fastest supercomputers, according to a Top 500 list maintained by Berkeley researchers. It had 35 percent of the revenue from high-performance systems sold last year, according to International Data Corp.Nvidia, in Santa Clara, supplies accelerator chips — something like the turbocharger in a car — used in a growing number of supercomputers. Its “Tesla” processors are used in machines at Google, Facebook and Baidu for speech, video and image recognition. With $279 million in high-performance computing revenue last year, “we are just beginning this era,” said Sumit Gupta, Nvidia’s general manager of the Tesla accelerated computing business.AMD, headquartered in Sunnyvale, makes the Opteron processor that powers the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and is used in Cray’s powerful XE6 supercomputer.Mellanox Technologies, in Sunnyvale, makes leading-edge networking gear for high-performance computers and is combining with IBM and Nvidia to build two new supercomputers for the US Department of Energy’s labs at Oak Ridge and Livermore, Calif.Think of a supercomputer as a cluster of tens of thousands of Mac workstations performing together like a symphony orchestra to process billions and trillions of bits of data every second, sometimes for hundreds of users.Supercomputer prices run from $500,000 to more than $100 million. Some are general purpose machines that can perform tasks like 3-D modelling while hosting large numbers of users at the same time. A second type is used for one task, such as running a cloud-based service.“A whole class of things start to become practical as the cost of computing drops,” said Alan Gara, an Intel fellow at the giant chip firm’s Santa Clara headquarters and lead system architect for the Aurora system.“There used to be a few hundred supercomputers sold in the world each year because the prices were so high — $10 million and up,” said analyst Conway of IDC. But prices have fallen so sharply for powerful machines that “these days, companies and small organisations that wouldn’t think of getting one before can do so.” Nowadays, thousands of high-performance machines are sold every year.Since they can provide an edge over competitors, some companies don’t want their supercomputers publicised.“Some of the bigger companies really depend upon supercomputers to do lot of their work,” said Bill Mannel, head of HP’s Apollo server team in Houston, who added that “whether it’s the oil, auto or aircraft industry, it’s become such a core part of their development that they won’t even share details of how much they have or who they buy from.”Most companies with valley headquarters have far-flung research and manufacturing sites, but this area is a key centre of innovation said Scot Schultz at Mellanox Technologies. “I think it’s largely because most of the core tech providers have a presence here and have been a part of the Bay Area community here for so long.”Google — whose operations require massive amounts of computing power — is pushing the frontiers in a collaboration on a quantum computer project with NASA Ames and the Universities Space Research Association. The hope is to develop a radically different computer that in theory could do certain problems in a few days that would take today’s computers “millions of years” to perform.“If you thought IBM’s Watson on Jeopardy was impressive,” Conway said, “where things are headed will totally leave it in the dust.” — San Jose Mercury News/TNS

TOUCHING STORY: Jessie Lorenz of the Independent Living Resource Center in San Francisco, who is visually impaired, touches the two-seater prototype of Google’s self-driving car at the Mountain View, California.By Matt O’BrienAfter a year of testing its bubble-shaped driverless cars on the empty roads of a shuttered military base, Google is about to deploy its fleet on the busy streets of Silicon Valley.For now, the cars must have safety drivers ready to grab the wheel or hit the brakes if something goes wrong. But self-driving software could soon move from test cars to consumer vehicles as the California Department of Motor Vehicles puts finishing touches this month on new operational rules for autonomous cars, making it the first government in the world to create a detailed handbook for robots on the road.“Our goal is to create something safer than human drivers,” said Google co-founder Sergey Brin, speaking this week as his company’s two-seater prototype zoomed around a rooftop parking lot in Mountain View. “And keep improving from there.”Citing his engineering team’s major advancements in the past six months in understanding a bicyclist’s hand signals and other real-world scenarios, Brin stood by his prediction that the technology is “still roughly on track” for consumers boarding fully autonomous cars by 2017. But a scholar advising the DMV on its new rules believes a car that can safely navigate by itself through crowded San Francisco streets is still “many decades” away.“There’s not going to be some sudden burst of new things that pop onto the market as soon as the new regulations are out there,” said Steve Shladover of the University of California, Berkeley’s Institute of Transportation Studies. “The progress will be quite gradual and incremental.”Unlike Google, most of the companies with permits to test self-driving cars in California — including Mercedes-Benz, Delphi Labs, Tesla and Audi — are aiming to advance and sell products that assist human drivers rather than fully take over.The competing predictions, and varying degrees of robot control, leave regulators with the challenge of balancing the rules that are needed now — as the technology still has unforeseen hiccups — with a future when fully autonomous vehicles become more common.“This is our very first time we’ve had to do something like this, and not many states are in our situation,” said Bernard Soriano, the DMV deputy director in charge of drafting the new rules. “There are a lot of eyes on what we’re doing.”The draft rules — due several months ago — will be released soon, Soriano said, and will be followed by a public hearing this summer. Nevada, Michigan and Florida also have established rules, but mostly for testing and none as detailed as what California is preparing.Seven companies have had permission since September to test-drive autonomous vehicles in the state. Even before those rules were in place, Google had spent years test-driving Lexus SUVs outfitted with self-driving software.But “in the next month or so,” Google will be launching its own 25 prototype cars onto Mountain View public roads for test drives. They will be restricted to neighbourhood roads, with speeds capped at 25 miles per hour.The public experiment is designed to see how the cars interact with people, said Chris Urmson, who reports to Brin as the head of Google’s self-driving car project.Those cars have already spent a year navigating over potholes and through obstacle courses, but this will be the first time they will have to respond to pedestrians who aren’t Google employees. Their movements through Mountain View will be based not only on the car’s radars, lasers and cameras, but also on a kind of memory — the car’s software already contains a meticulously detailed map of the city’s suburban streets.Last Wednesday, Urmson’s team showcased the cars to a small group of reporters, along with Mountain View residents and people who are visually impaired or physically challenged and are eager for the day when a self-driving car can get them around.To make its vehicles safe, Google has made them conservative. That means, for instance, that they are programmed to wait for a second and a half before moving through a green light.The caution can also make them jittery, causing the cars to brake for perceived dangers that a human driver would know to be harmless. A mingling crowd of onlookers on the roof of Google’s garage was calculated to be a threat, though to a human eye none showed signs of darting out.That also raises another concern: What if the cute car’s cautious demeanour grates on impatient commuters in a hurry to get to their Silicon Valley jobs?“We’ve been honked at a few times,” Urmson said, speaking of the Lexus SUVs that have been riding through the area for years. “We’ve had people gesticulate, but overall it’s been incredibly positive. We’d had more thumbs up than fingers up.”Google engineers are also pleased with the car’s caution. Believing that self-driving cars will make roads safer and less congested, Urmson disagreed with Shladavor’s prediction that the technology is still decades away.“I’m an optimist, and it’s just too important,” Urmson said. “There are 90 people every day dying on America’s roads. We should be impatient about this technology.”

AFP/New York Instagram, which has quickly become a favourite social media platform for stars, on Wednesday launched a channel dedicated to music. The account @Music - a first-of-a-kind dedicated content channel run by Instagram - will each week highlight an up-and-coming artist or offer a behind-the-scenes look at a more established musician. The new account will be "dedicated to exploring music around the globe, from those who create it to the community around it," Instagram co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom wrote in a blog post. Instagram, with its focus on visuals, has witnessed soaring growth since its launch in 2010 thanks in part to the worldwide fad of selfie pictures, the rising quality of smartphone cameras and regular user-engaging themes such as "#ThrowbackThursday." Musicians have embraced Instagram as a way to communicate with fans, offering everything from professional photos to snapshots of their day-to-day lives. Facebook, which has more than one billion users but has seen its growth mature, in 2012 bought Instagram for an estimated $1bn. Fellow social media giant Twitter has meanwhile struggled to find a strategy for music that brings in revenue. Sunil Singhvi from Twitter's British division said this week that he would come to the US headquarters to take charge of the company's music section.

Apple Watch's first customer shows off his new watch at an Omotesando store of Softbank Mobile Co. in Tokyo on Friday. AFP/Tokyo Apple Watch made its debut in some Asian markets on Friday, but with sales limited to those who had pre-ordered online it was a low-key start with none of the fanfare and fuss usually seen for a launch by the tech titan. Previous launches of the firm's products such as the iPhone and iPad have seen queues beginning to form more than a week in advance, with many wearing fancy dress waiting for a throng of store staff to throw the doors open with loud whoops and cheers. But official outlets in the Japanese capital were quiet on Friday, with none of them stocking the smartwatch that the California company is hoping will give it a leading position in the world of wearables. While the device has been much anticipated the only lines seen in the firm's Asia stores were of those customers who had pre-ordered it in Japan, Hong Kong, China and Australia, where it has launched. However, at least one non-Apple outlet in Tokyo was selling them to walk-up customers, an AFP reporter witnessed. Those who got their hands on a watch declared themselves pleased. "I'm happy. I want to wear it all the time," said Makoto Saito, a 23-year-old who appeared at the store in the chic Omotesando area, wearing a giant cardboard Apple Watch on her head. Saito said she took the day off work to pick up the gadget. Takuya Kajigaya, 32, said he was "thrilled" with his purchase. "I want to make phone calls (with the watch) once I'm back home," he said, adding it would be a little embarrassing to talk to the device on his wrist. While most of the buyers at the Softbank store preordered the watch, 39-year-old programmer Yuichiro Masui said he had been waiting outside since Thursday night. "I want to try the fitness application because I'm concerned about my weight," he said. And in China, which is expected to be a key market, new owners went online to give their views. "It is awesome! The Apple ecosystem is so strong, a large batch of applications can be used on the Apple Watch," said one happy recipient on the country's Twitter-like Sina Weibo. Another posted: "Have received the apple watch, have done some research but still couldn't get used to it. Give it time, I really like it!" Apple says the watch will connect wirelessly to a user's iPhone and will be the interface for messaging, calls and apps, especially ones geared toward health and fitness. Users can also send a real-time display of their heartbeat to another Apple Watch. Prices start at $349, with a limited-edition gold version costing $10,000.

AFP/Washington Ten years after its launch, YouTube has become a household name for online video but faces an array of rivals in the market and lingering questions about its business model. The first video uploaded April 23, 2005 - an 18-second clip of co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo - offered little indication the service would become the leader in Internet video and a key part of the Google empire. A decade later, YouTube has more than one billion users, with localised service in 75 countries and 61 languages. Some 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and "every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views," according to the YouTube statistics page. Google is reserving its 10-year anniversary celebration for May 10, marking the day the site went public, a spokesman told AFP. But analysts and others were talking about the milestone. "Everyone in the world knows YouTube, even my mom," said Dan Rayburn, analyst at Frost and Sullivan who also writes a blog about streaming media. YouTube played a key role in the Arab Spring uprisings and other political movements. It has faced bans in some countries, and has faced criticism for being used to distribute unauthorised copyrighted content. Seeking a business model Rayburn said that even though YouTube is immensely popular around the world, it is not clear if it has a real business model. Google bought YouTube in 2006 for some $1.6bn in stock - raising eyebrows about what was then the Internet firm's biggest acquisition - and now generates considerable revenue, but also has high costs. "Even today, Google will not say if YouTube is profitable," Rayburn noted. "But 90% of analysts say it is not profitable." Rayburn said that even though YouTube popularised the idea of online video, the videos are mainly "user generated content" that does not attract revenue from users or advertisers. "To stream premium content like films and television programs, people go to Netflix or Hulu or iTunes," he said. "YouTube has struggled to find its core business. The vast amount of content on it cannot be monetiased." But a report by Morgan Stanley analyst Benjamin Swinburne earlier this year said YouTube is "a high-growth, valuable asset" for Google with tremendous potential. The report said YouTube generated some $4.7bn in revenue in 2014, and that it can do even better by investing in premium content - such as the paid video channels it recently unveiled and other kinds of subscriptions. "Given Google's hefty resources, we have been surprised it has not been willing to invest more directly in premium content," the report said. Most popular YouTube videos Among the billions of videos seen on YouTube since its launch a decade ago, these have been the most popular: 1. Gangnam Style, the music video by South Korea's Psy - accompanied by a horse-riding-like dance that became a global sensation - has been viewed more than 2.3bn times. 2. Justin Bieber's Baby music video with rapper Ludacris, viewed 1.15bn times. 3. Katy Perry's Dark Horse music video with Juicy J, 917mn views. 4. Katy Perry's Roar, 889mn views. 5. Party Rock Anthem by the electronic dance music group LMFAO, 856mn views.

  AFP/ Paris Physicists said on Tuesday they have fine-tuned an atomic clock to the point where it won't lose or gain a second in 15 billion years -- longer than the universe has existed. The "optical lattice" clock, which uses strontium atoms, is now three times more accurate than a year ago when it set the previous world record, its developers reported in the journal Nature Communications. The advance brings science a step closer to replacing the current gold standard in timekeeping: the caesium fountain clock that is used to set Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the official world time. "Precise and accurate optical atomic clocks have the potential to transform global timekeeping," the study authors wrote. Accurate timekeeping is crucial for satellite navigation systems, mobile telephones and digital TV, among other applications, and may open new frontiers in research fields like quantum science. The world's official unit of time, the second, has since 1967 been determined by the vibration frequency of an atom of the metallic element Caesium 133 -- a method of measurement similar to monitoring the pendulum swings of a grandfather clock. The instrument used to set international time is the caesium fountain clock, which has improved significantly over the decades and can keep time to within one second over 100 million years. But new, experimental optical clocks that work with strontium atoms at optical frequencies much higher than the microwave frequencies used in caesium clocks, have been shown in recent years to be even more accurate. The clock in the latest study, developed by scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado in Boulder, measures time by detecting the natural vibrations or "ticks" of strontium atoms in red laser light, said the team.   - No freezing required - The clock's stability -- how closely each tick matches every other tick, "has been improved by almost 50 percent, another world record," said an NIST statement. "This enhanced stability... brings optical lattice clocks closer to the point of replacing the current standard of measurement, the caesium fountain clock," said a Nature press summary. The clock is also sensitive enough, the researchers said, to measure tiny changes in the passage of time at different altitudes -- a phenomenon predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago and studied ever since. Einstein's relativity theory states a clock must tick faster at the top of a mountain than at its foot, due to the effects of gravity. "Our performance means that we can measure the gravitational shift when you raise the clock just two centimetres (0.78 inches) on the Earth's surface," said study co-author Jun Ye. The team had built a radiation shield around the atom chamber of their clock, which means it can be operated at room temperature rather than in cryogenic conditions. "This is actually one of the strongest points of our approach, in that we can operate the clock in a simple and normal configuration," said Ye.

By Steff GaulterHuge tornadoes have swept across the US causing widespread damage and endless heartache. The devastating twisters rolled through Illinois, Iowa and Missouri, the states just to the southwest of the Great Lakes, on April 9. A total of sixteen tornadoes were reported, which made it the largest outbreak in the US so far this year.The majority of the tornadoes were from one single storm cloud. As you can imagine, it had to be an enormous storm to generate such a large number of tornadoes, and this type of system is known as a ‘supercell’. Supercells are highly organised thunderstorms which often produce large hail and damaging winds. In this case, the supercell generates not only giant hailstones, but also a large number of tornadoes. In the evening of April 9, one of the twisters roared across the plains to the northwest of Chicago. A small village called Fairdale sustained the majority of the damage, with every single structure reportedly being damaged and many of them being completely destroyed. The tornado responsible measured just under a kilometre, or half a mile, across and travelled along the ground for 25 to 30 km (15 to 20 miles). For a tornado, this is a long way, and thankfully very unusual. However, for the residents of Fairdale, its rarity was little consolation. As well as being long lived, the tornado was also powerful. The exact strength of the winds is unknown as a tornado is unlikely to travel over an anemometer, which measures wind, and even if it did, the winds would probably break it! Instead an estimation of the wind speed is calculated, based on the damage that it leaves behind in its wake. In this case, some of the houses in Fairdale were swept off their foundations, so the storm was estimated to be an EF4 tornado. This is one notch below the most severe classification on the Enhanced Fujita scale, which is used in the US to measure their strength. This would mean that the winds would have been between 290 and 320 kph (180 and 200 mph), and with winds that strong, it’s a wonder that only two people were killed.The two people who lost their lives were neighbours, which is no surprise. Tornadoes are relatively small features, no more than 1.5 kilometres across (1 mile), and therefore their impact is usually very localised. Their small scale, and the fact that many complex process lead to their formation, also ensure that they cannot yet be forecast. In fact, it is fair to say, with our current models and the limitations of computer power, that accurate predictions of a tornado is still a long way off.Instead, the best a weather forecaster can do, is to say that certain conditions are conducive to the development of tornadoes, and look out for these conditions. Then on a day when those conditions are present, meteorologists will keep a close eye on their radar screens and look for a storm which develops a rotation. This rotation is the tell-tail sign that a storm is threatening to produce a tornado and the forecaster will then issue a warning for the towns ahead of this storm.The forecast of a tornado is therefore still fairly rudimentary, but twisters are more common than most people think, in fact I’ve even seen a photo of a tornado here in Qatar. Every single continent has seen a tornado, with the exception of Antarctica. Whether that’s because there are very few people in Antarctica to see it, we can’t be certain. However, as tornadoes are triggered by the interaction of two contrasting air types, it seems unlikely, as there is no source for the warm air.Thankfully, the vast majority of the world’s tornadoes are pretty feeble and don’t cause a lot of damage. The US, however, sees some of the most powerful ones due to the battle between two very different types of air. In the south is the warm and humid air which flows up from the Gulf of Mexico, and in the north is the icy cold air which jets down from Canada. Where these two airmasses meet is the setting for some of the most destructive weather that we see, and the greater the contrast in temperature, the more explosive the result.The tornadoes in the US can occur in any month, but they are most common in late spring. This is when the region is recovering from its bitter winter, so not only is the contrast between the frigid northern air and the tropical southern air most pronounced, but also the ground is heating up quickly, giving extra energy to the atmosphere and the weather. More energy produces more severe weather.Unfortunately it’s almost certain that this won’t be the last outbreak of thunderstorms that the US sees this year. As the winter finally begins to relinquish its hold on North America, and the temperatures begin to rise, the weather will also turn more violent.

The emergence of wearables offers a new platform for the news media. AFP/Washington With the Apple Watch expected to sell in the millions, news organisations are refocusing their efforts to become part of that tiny screen. In the news business, this is now called "glance journalism." The Apple Watch, expected to catapult to the leading item in wearable technology, opens up new possibilities to a news industry seeking to connect with audiences in the digital era. The New York Times says its app for the Apple Watch will be "a new form of storytelling" and that "editors on three continents" will update notifications. Readers will be able to "hand off" an article to view on an iPhone or iPad. Yahoo will have four apps for the Apple device, including a news digest updated hourly with "microsummaries" of major stories, as well as apps for fantasy sports, weather and one specifically for Hong Kong news. CNN and National Public Radio also have apps for the Apple Watch, and others are expected to follow. The new technology means more bite-size news being directed at consumers, say media analysts. "We are about to enter the era of 'at a glance journalism'," says Mario Garcia, a consultant with Garcia Media and faculty member at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, in a blog post. Garcia, who is also participating in a research project on news for smartphones with Arhus University of Denmark, said he is "fascinated" with the possibilities. "It is more difficult to pull an iPhone out of one's pocket or a purse in a crowded New York City subway that it would be to glance at one's watch," he said. "So, I predict that we will be doing a lot of glancing, as in reading seductive headlines and deciding if we read or not." New formula needed   The emergence of wearables offers a new platform for the news media - one that is fast, personal and always on, says Robert Hernandez, who teaches mobile journalism at the University of Southern California. "The ability to access knowledge will be quicker with the watch," Hernandez told AFP. For newsrooms, it is "a new opportunity to be part of this person's body," Hernandez said. And journalism will find a way to use the smartwatch, he said: "When Twitter came out people were saying 'you can't do journalism in 140 characters,' but it has now become an essential tool." Gilles Raymond, founder and chief executive of the News Republic application, says he believes the smartwatch will be an important source for news and that the Apple Watch will be an important test. "When there is breaking news you want access to it immediately, so the watch is the ideal tool to do that," said Raymond, who is based in San Francisco for the French-based firm which offers smartphone and tablet news apps. He said smartphone users now glance at their handsets more than 100 times a day, and with the smartwatch that could become 300 or 500 times: "It will be very addictive," he said. Raymond said there is only limited experience with news on smartwatches now but that news organisations and apps are prepared for the possible widespread adoption of Apple Watch. "The question is will you read only the first line and then take your phone out or will you read the full article on the watch?" he said. "Both scenarios are credible but I think people will want to read the article on their watch. They can adapt." News organisations will need to adapt as well, Raymond said, by developing content easily viewed on the small screen but could be rewarded with "a new way to build a relationship" with readers. Understanding mobile   But media organisations need to find the right formula for delivering short news alerts and notifications without being obtrusive or annoying. Wears of the watch are likely to fine-tune these systems to their liking. Alan Mutter, a former Chicago newspaper editor who is now a digital media consultant, says news organisations need to think creatively about how to use new devices like the smartwatch. "The insanely small screen cannot be just an extension of what's on the mobile phone," Mutter said. "You have to think about how consumer uses the device and how can you do something that's valuable." Mutter said most traditional news organisations failed to successfully navigate to the Web, but now have an opportunity with mobile and smartwatches. "They need to develop their mobile presence, they need to understand it's not just a passive device," Mutter said. "If they do mobile right, they will be able to do Apple Watch."

* FireEye says attacks ongoing since 2005* Attacks notable for scale, duration* Attackers go for govt, military, commercial targets* China rejects accusations it backs attacks  Reuters/California Hackers, most likely from China, have been spying on governments and businesses in Southeast Asia and India uninterrupted for a decade, researchers at internet security company FireEye Inc  said. In a report released on Monday, FireEye said the cyber espionage operations dated back to at least 2005 and "focused on targets - government and commercial - who hold key political, economic and military information about the region." "Such a sustained, planned development effort coupled with the (hacking) group's regional targets and mission, lead us to believe that this activity is state-sponsored - most likely the Chinese government," the report's authors said. Bryce Boland, Chief Technology Officer for Asia Pacific at FireEye and co-author of the report, said the attack was still ongoing, noting that the servers the attackers used were still operational, and that FireEye continued to see attacks against its customers, who number among the targets. Reuters couldn't independently confirm any of the assertions made in the report. China has always denied accusations that it uses the Internet to spy on governments, organisations and companies. Asked about the FireEye report on Monday, foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei said: "I want to stress that the Chinese government resolutely bans and cracks down on any hacking acts. This position is clear and consistent. Hacking attacks are a joint problem faced by the international community and need to be dealt with cooperatively rather than via mutual censure." The Cyberspace Administration of China, the Internet regulator, didn't immediately respond to written requests for comment. China has been accused before of targeting countries in South and Southeast Asia. In 2011, researchers from McAfee reported a campaign dubbed Shady Rat which attacked Asian governments and institutions, among other targets. Efforts by the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to build cyber defences have been sporadic. While ASEAN has long acknowledged its importance, "very little has come of this discourse," said Miguel Gomez, a researcher at De La Salle University in the Philippines. The problem is not new: Singapore has reported sophisticated cyber-espionage attacks on civil servants in several ministries dating back to 2004.   UNDETECTED The campaign described by FireEye differs from other such operations mostly in its scale and longevity, Boland said. He said the group appeared to include at least two software developers. The report did not offer other indications of the possible size of the group or where it's based. The group remained undetected for so long it was able to re-use methods and malware dating back to 2005, and developed its own system to manage and prioritize attacks, even organising shifts to cope with the workload and different languages of its targets, Boland told Reuters. The attackers focused not only on governments, but on ASEAN itself, as well as corporations and journalists interested in China. Other targets included Indian or Southeast Asian-based companies in sectors such as construction, energy, transport, telecommunications and aviation, FireEye says. Mostly they sought to gain access by sending so-called phishing emails to targets purported to come from colleagues or trusted sources, and containing documents relevant to their interests. Boland said it wasn't possible to gauge the damage done as it had taken place over such a long period, but he said the impact could be "massive". "Without being able to detect it, there's no way these agencies can work out what the impacts are. They don't know what has been stolen." Pornchai Rujiprapa, Minister of Information and Communication Technology for ASEAN member Thailand, said the government was proposing a new law to combat cyber attacks as existing legislation was outdated. "So far we haven't found any attack so big it threatens national security, but we are concerned if there is any in the future. That's why we need a new law to handle it," he told Reuters.  

By Steff GaulterYou may have noticed that the Weather Addict had gone AWOL over the last few weeks. That’s because I was happily holidaying in the UK showing off my huge pregnant stomach, when suddenly there was a rumble in the jungle. It turns out that my little bun in the oven didn’t want to wait for his due date and was arriving all in a hurry. I just about made it to the hospital in time (and it was touch and go), but despite his best efforts, my poor husband didn’t stand a chance. Instead my exceptionally squeamish mother had to be my birthing partner, but it all went smoothly in the end! I’m proud to say that we’re now parents of a little bundle of joy who we believe is the most beautiful little boy in the world…but we might be biased.We returned to Doha at the beginning of March, enjoying the warm weather of Doha, taking little baby Mylo for walks along the Corniche and in trips to MIA park, until April struck. April abruptly brought an end to our outside adventures, on April Fool’s Day bringing the worst sandstorm that I’ve ever seen.In the eight years that I’ve been in Doha, I can honestly say I’ve never seen a sandstorm like it. I knew there was a storm forecast, but didn’t appreciate how severe it was going to be. Despite all the doors and windows being shut, the dust still managed to seep into our house. I knew it had hit because I could taste it in the air, and alarmingly when we looked across the room we could even see the particles streaming past one of our lamps. At this point we realised it must be a monster of a storm, so looked out the window, but couldn’t even see across the road.We decided to call it a night, as the dust wasn’t as bad upstairs, but at 2am, when baby Mylo woke up to feed, I realised that the air was horribly polluted. I wanted to put a damp flannel over my face, but what could I do to help my baby, with his tiny lungs? My husband sprang into action, sealing the window with cling film and putting wet towels under the doors. Meanwhile I sprayed the room with water to help the dust settle. Our actions certainly helped, but on the shopping list we added an air purifier.The duststorm rolled into Doha around 9:30pm, so being dark we couldn’t see it approaching. However, some of you may have seen the pictures from Riyadh of the wall of dust that engulfed that city. This was the same storm that hit us, it had hit the Saudi capital eight hours earlier while it was still light.A huge wall of dust like this is called a haboob and they’re not as uncommon in Doha as you may think. We usually get two or three of them every year; the trouble is we often don’t see them as they often strike after dark. If you do see one, however, a haboob is a daunting sight. It can stretch up to 100 kilometres wide and 1000 metres high, and as it rolls over you, the temperature drops, the winds pick up and of course the visibility reduces drastically.I once saw one of these haboobs rolling across the sea, while I was in a boat sailing near West Bay Lagoon. As this wall of dust rolled over us, the winds picked up, the temperature dropped several degrees, and darkness fell. It was pretty scary to see the weather change like that, especially when you’re on a very small boat. Fortunately the storm that hit that day was nowhere near as bad as that of April this year, otherwise I think the boat would have capsized!Haboobs are usually created when a thunderstorm collapses and air from high up in the cloud comes racing down to earth kicking up any loose particles. Unfortunately for us, there hadn’t been a significant dust storm in Doha since the end of February, but there had been quite a bit of rain. This rain water would have washed dirt and dust across the landscape, shifting the sand and soil and exposing plenty of fine particles. As the rain cleared, and the ground dried out, these particles were primed and simply waiting for a gust of wind to send them airborne.Then on April 1 came the wind that the particles were waiting for. A cluster of thunderstorms drifted south from the Mediterranean, bringing heavy rain and strong winds. They drifted across Jordan and into Saudi Arabia, turning more intense as they did so. Arar reported 61mm of rain, which quickly dampened any dust, but the rain evaporated before the system reached Riyadh. This ensured that in the Saudi capital, there was nothing to dampen the dust and the storm continued to gather particles.We all witnessed the result here in Doha, and we all had to clear up! It still amazes me how the dust can enter closed rooms and closed cupboards, and how it can coat everything. Now the only lasting damage from the storm is a feeling of dust in my chest, which I suppose means a trip to the doctor is in order. I bet the doctors have had seen a major jump in patients over the last few days…at least someone has benefited from the storm!

A sales representative displays the new Samsung Galaxy S6 (left) and S6 Edge during its launch by SingTel in Singapore on Friday. Samsung said it expected its new flagship smartphone to shatter sales records and pull the company out of a recent profit slump that saw it lose ground to arch-rival Apple and cheaper Chinese makers. AFP/Seoul Samsung rolled out a new smartphone on Friday in a bid to regain market dominance as arch-rival Apple, eyeing the next generation of wearable technology, opened pre-sales for its first watch. Samsung's Galaxy S6 and its curved-edge variant, the Galaxy S6 Edge, went on sale in South Korea, home of the electronics giant, as well as Europe, the US and markets in the Asia-Pacific such as Australia, Singapore and India. Samsung, labouring under successive quarters of plunging profits and booming sales of Apple's iPhone 6, is hoping the new phone will reverse its fortunes. The range of S6 models has won strong reviews from tech pundits, with the Wall Street Journal calling them "the most beautiful phones Samsung has ever made". "Given the response from the market and clients... we expect the S6 to set a sales record for all Galaxy models," Lee Sang-Chul, the vice head of Samsung's mobile unit, told reporters. Joo Seung-Bin was one of the first in line to buy an S6 in Seoul on Friday morning. "It's a great design, and it's just got a great feel," the 23-year-old said. "It's not cheap, but then I'm not one of those people who upgrades their phone every year. There's been a lot of buzz about this model, so I thought I'd check it out," Joo said. The S6 retails at around 858,000 won ($800) in South Korea, while the S6 Edge comes in at 979,000 won, broadly in line with their Apple counterparts. Both models are powered by Google's Android operating platform and, in a break from their-plastic-backed predecessors, feature metal and glass bodies. Hitting back   However, the S6 had to contend on launch day with the Apple Watch, which will connect wirelessly to a user's iPhone to facilitate messaging, calls and apps - especially ones geared toward health and fitness. The first generation of smartwatches from the likes of Motorola, LG and Samsung itself failed to gain much traction with consumers. But experts say the Apple Watch may have an edge given its design quality and universe of apps. The US company on Friday started taking pre-orders for the watch both in selected territories and online. First deliveries will begin in nine countries on April 24. Would-be early buyers queued for a "trial fitting" at the Apple store in Tokyo's chic Omotesando area. "I'm very keen to buy it," said Kazuki Miura, a 43-year-old technology writer, as he slipped the device onto his wrist. Apple Watch prices will start at $349, with a limited-edition gold version costing $10,000. Jan Dawson at Jackdaw Research expects Apple to sell around 20mn of the devices this year, which will "catalyse the overall smartwatch market and help other vendors even as Apple comes to enjoy levels of market share it hasn't had since the iPod". Tech firms are betting heavily on wearables as the next frontier in consumer electronics. Luxury Swiss watchmaker TAG Heuer announced last month it was joining forces with Google and Intel to develop a rival to the Apple Watch. Fierce competition But, despite fierce competition on various market fronts, there are signs that Samsung is beginning to fight back. Samsung suffered a dramatic slide in profits last year, hit by slowing demand in an increasingly saturated and competitive smartphone market that it had largely dominated since 2011. The company struggled to fend off a double challenge from Apple in the high-end market and rising Chinese firms such as Lenovo and Xiaomi in the fast-growing mid and low-end markets. Samsung rarely discloses handset sales figures but analysts say the Galaxy S4, released in 2013, set the firm's sales record of 70mn units globally.

Pedestrians walk past an advertisement board for Apple Watch outside the Isetan department store in Tokyo on Thursday, a day before the shop starts accepting reservations for the watch. Reuters/San Francisco Apple Inc said on Thursday it expected the "tremendous interest" in its new smartwatch to result in demand outstripping supply when the gadget hits stores on April 24. Apple said it would take orders for the watch exclusively online during the initial launch period. The watch will be available for preview and preorder on Friday. Based on a survey in the US on consumer interest in buying the Apple Watch, BMO Capital Markets has cut its estimate for sales to 39mn units though September 2016. Previously, the analysts had estimated sales of 55.5mn units. About 735 people responded to the survey. The watch, the first new product to be launched by Apple under Chief Executive Tim Cook, has been given poor marks by reviewers for its relatively low battery life and slow-loading apps. Apple is among several companies, including Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Sony Corp, that are jumping into the nascent market for wearable devices. The watch, when paired with an iPhone, allows users to check email, listen to music and make phone calls. There is also an app that helps people monitor their health, for example by tracking heartbeats and footsteps. "We believe in the next five years, the watch will revolutionise the way we interact with objects around us," Oppenheimer analysts wrote a note on Thursday. Apple shares were up 0.3% at $125.98 in early trading on Thursday. 

  Reuters/London US scientists said they have invented a cheap, long-lasting and flexible battery made of aluminium for use in smartphones that can be charged in as little as one minute. The researchers, who detailed their discovery in the journal Nature, said the new aluminium-ion battery has the potential to replace lithium-ion batteries, used in millions of laptops and mobile phones. Besides recharging much faster, the new aluminium battery is safer than existing lithium-ion batteries, which occasionally burst into flames, they added. Researchers have long tried but failed to develop a battery made of aluminium, a lightweight and relatively inexpensive metal that has high charging capacity. A team lead by chemistry professor Hongjie Dai at Stanford University in California made a breakthrough by accidentally discovering that graphite made a good partner to aluminium, Stanford said in a statement. In a prototype, aluminium was used to make the negatively-charged anode while graphite provided material for the positively charged cathode. A prototype aluminium battery recharged in one minute, the scientists said. "Lithium-ion batteries can be a fire hazard," said Dai. "Our new battery won't catch fire, even if you drill through it." The new battery is also very durable and flexible, the scientists said. While lithium-ion batteries last about 1,000 cycles, the new aluminium battery was able to continue after more than 7,500 cycles without loss of capacity. It also can be bent or folded. Larger aluminium batteries could also be used to store renewable energy on the electrical grid, Dai said.      

  AFP/ Geneva The world's largest particle smasher restarted on Sunday after a two-year upgrade that will allow physicists to explore uncharted corners of the matter that makes up the universe.  "After two years of intense maintenance and several months of preparation for restart, the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, is back in operation," the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN)said. Experiments at the collider have been seeking to unlock clues as to how the universe came into existence by studying fundamental particles, the building blocks of all matter, and the forces that control them. The upgrade -- which saw the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) shut down in February 2013 -- was intended to nearly double the collider's maximum collision capacity. Its previous highest power was eight  teraelectronvolts (TeV) reached in 2012, but after the two-year overhaul, it will first reach 13 TeV and can potentially be cranked up to a maximum 14 TeV. CERN said earlier that if all went well with the start-up particle collisions "at an energy of 13 TeV" could start as early as June. During the next phase of the LHC programme, researchers will probe a conceptual frontier called new physics, including antimatter and dark matter. The latter is a theoretical type of matter that cannot be seen with telescopes but is thought to make up most of the universe. Ordinary, visible matter comprises only about four percent of the known universe. In 2012, the LHC was used to prove the existence of Higgs Boson, the particle that confers mass, earning the 2013 Nobel prize for two of the scientists who, back in 1964, had theorised the existence of the "God particle".   - Speed of light - As part of the recommissioning process, engineers at LHC successfully introduced two proton beams, the source material for sub-atomic smashups. All systems would be checked over coming days before the energy of the beams was increased, CERN said in a statement. "Today (Sunday) at 10:42 am (0842 GMT) a proton beam was back in the 27-kilometre (17-mile) ring, followed at 12:27 pm by a second beam rotating in the opposite direction," it added. CERN director for accelerators and technology described the LHC as "in great shape". "But the most important step is still to come when we increase the energy of the beams to new record levels," he said. A short-circuit in one of the LHC's magnet circuits eight days ago had delayed the eagerly-awaited restart of the facility in a ring-shaped tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border. The LHC allows beams containing billions of protons travelling at 99.9 percent the speed of light to shoot through the massive collider in opposite directions. Powerful magnets bend the beams so that they collide at points around the track where four laboratories have batteries of sensors to monitor the smashups. The sub-atomic rubble is then scrutinised for novel particles and the forces that hold them together. More than 10,000 scientists work directly or indirectly on the LHC's four experiments while the facility itself operates on a budget of nearly one billion euros (dollars) a year.  

FUN AND WORK, TOGETHER: Emily Pokoik, a member of the LockerDome publisher activation team, heads out for a walk with a fellow employee’s dog, Spencer, at the company headquarters on Washington Avenue in downtown St Louis.By Paul HampelThe headquarters of tech start up LockerDome blurs the line between work and play.The 6,800-square-foot office in downtown St Louis has a lounge where drinks are free. The lounge adjoins a recreation area with basketball hoops.Employees who need a siesta can grab a bunk in one of its two bedrooms.Workers can bring pets to work. And free breakfasts are catered daily. The reaction most outsiders have to such amenities is to ask if LockerDome is taking applications.In fact, the company does expect to expand soon. But anyone hoping to land a job there should not expect an all-play and no-work environment.“The nice elements in this office are more a reflection of how committed our staff is to working together here as a team and to completing projects, no matter how hard the job is or how long it takes,” Nick Apperson, 30, the chief technology officer, explained recently.To that end, the bunk beds are most often used by “hackers” to crash in at the end of shifts that start early in the morning and sometimes run well past midnight.The lounge is typically a place where employees quickly wash down takeout dinners with soft drinks before hurrying back to their workstations.And the catered breakfasts began last year as survival-mode nutrition for computer-coders who took to living at the office for weeks on end — one of them brought a basket of laundry and stayed 81 straight days — in a push to launch a new website.As LockerDome CEO Gabe Lozano recently said, it’s a workplace culture that’s not for everyone.“When people come to LockerDome, I tell them up front that if your goal is to have a 9-to-5 job and get the best bang for your buck in terms of how much you earn per hour, this is a terrible place to be,” said Lozano, 32. “But if your goal is to be on the right side of history, you have made the right choice.”That historical reference reflects Lozano’s contention that St Louis will emerge as one of the nation’s premier tech centres.By moving downtown in 2012, LockerDome blazed a trail on the Washington Avenue tech corridor that now counts more than 100 start-ups among its tenants.“We’ve become an example of what’s possible for other tech companies in St Louis,” Lozano said. “I’m not saying we’re the whole reason for the ecosystem there, but we were the first tech start-up that moved onto Washington.”LockerDome began in 2008 as a social network organised around sports. Last year, it expanded beyond sports content to create an online environment designed to “learn” about its users’ likes and habits and then customise site content to match those profiles.In the past two years, the company has raised $18 million from investors, including $10 million in December. It plans to bolster the roster of 33 employees by adding up to 10 staff in its New York office and hiring more engineers and other employees at the St. Louis headquarters.Meanwhile, the site’s popularity has exploded from 20 million monthly unique visitors in December 2013 to 75 million today.Before LockerDome moved into its current space, Lozano visited the headquarters of two tech giants based in San Francisco, Twitter and Square. He incorporated office elements from those firms into his own.“The reality is, you want people to work where they feel productive. And to that end, we have areas to sleep — either for a nap or for all night. We have a lounge, so you can kick back and have a drink. We have a rec area where you can play bags (a bag-toss game) or pop a shot. And we don’t have a dress code, so come as you are,” Lozano said.That is not to say that Lozano has eschewed all traditional elements of American workplace culture.The employee handbook forbids working remotely. “It’s easier to learn when you are sitting next to your peers,” it states.The handbook also requires employees to answer every phone call “regardless of the time of day” and demands their prompt attendance and unwavering attention at meetings.The “LockerDome Manifesto” also addresses employee attitudes. A section headed “Humility and Respect” reads: “Arrogance is limiting. While we value intelligence, we recognise that intellectuals are the norm in the tech world, not the exception. We translate this awareness into listening to all new ideas and respecting both our teammates and our competitors alike.”Chris Simmons, a senior development manager at LockerDome, said he knew what he was getting into before accepting a job there.“It’s been one of the most difficult challenges of my life,” said Simmons, who previously worked in customer service for Sprint. “But at the same time, that’s what makes it fun, overcoming different challenges and continuing to grow as a company.”Management and workers would not discuss salaries, but all are offered stock in the company as part of their compensation.“Having shares in the company is important,” said Simmons. “But, honestly, the bigger part is feeling that I can make a suggestion here that may lead to a change, as opposed to Sprint, which was so big that I felt like I had zero chance of making a difference.” —   St Louis Post-Dispatch/TNS

AFP/Washington Americans love their smartphones and rely on them as a key way to go online, but many find the cost too steep, a survey showed on Wednesday. The Pew Research Center found some 64% of American adults owned a smartphone as of the survey last year, almost double the percentage of 2011. And 15% of those surveyed said they had a smartphone and "limited" access to the Internet from other sources. About 10% in the survey said they had no broadband Internet at home. In sum, the figures mean around one out of 14 Americans is "smartphone dependent," with no high-speed Internet at home and little access elsewhere, Pew said. A large number of these "smartphone-dependent" users are young adults: some 15% of those in the 18-29 age group fit that description, the survey found. Those with lower incomes and lower educational attainment were also more likely to depend on their handsets. "Compared with smartphone owners who are less reliant on their mobile devices, these smartphone-dependent users are less likely to own some other type of computing device, less likely to have a bank account, less likely to be covered by health insurance and more likely to rent or to live with a friend or family member rather than own their own home," the Pew report said. But because these people have lower incomes, many have had trouble paying their smartphone bills, according to Pew. Around 23% of smartphone owners said they had to cancel or suspend their service for financial reasons, and 15% said they often reach the maximum amount of data allowed on their plan. "The connections to online resources that smartphones facilitate are often most tenuous for those users who rely on those connections the most," said Aaron Smith, a Pew researcher. "A substantial minority of Americans indicate that their phone plays a central role in their ability to access digital services and online content, but for many users, this access may not be available when they need it due to financial stresses or technical constraints." Although 93% said their smartphone is useful, less than half - 46% - claimed they "could live without" their device, and 54% said it was "not always needed." Wide range of uses   While smartphone users access the Internet on their handsets for a variety of things, low-income and smartphone-dependent users are especially likely to use their phone for work, or to help find a job. Overall, the study found 62% of smartphone owners have used their phone to look up information about a health condition, and 57% for online banking. More than four in 10 used their phone to look up real estate listings or other information about a place to live, or to find information about a job. And 18% used their phone to submit a job application. More than two thirds of smartphone owners said they used the devices to follow breaking news, with 33% saying that they do this "frequently." And 67% said they used their phones at least occasionally as GPS devices while driving, with 31% using this feature often. Among younger adults, 91% said they used their smartphones for social networking such as Facebook or Twitter, but the figure was much lower (55%) for users over 50 years old. The report is based on telephone surveys conducted in December 2014 among 2,002 adults, with some data from surveys in October and November. The margin of error was estimated at 2.5 percentage points.

The Surface Pro 3 was introduced last year. AFP/Washington Microsoft on Tuesday unveiled a low-cost version of its Surface tablet computer, cutting the screen size of the device which starts at $499. The new Surface 3 will cost less than the $799 starting price for the Surface Pro 3 introduced last year, but will also have a less powerful processor and lack some other features. The new device comes with a screen of 10.8 inches, making it smaller than the earlier 12-inch screen versions of Surface, and gives Microsoft a new tablet that aims to compete with Apple's iPad Air. "Surface 3 brings what customers love about Surface Pro 3 to more people, delivering the premium design and productivity of Surface in a more affordable device," said Panos Panay, who heads the Surface division for Microsoft. The new Surface will have an optional feature not available on its predecessors - the ability to connect to wireless carriers with a high-speed connection. Microsoft touts the Surface as a tablet that can replace a laptop. With sales topping $1bn for the first time in the last quarter of 2014, analysts said the tablet appeared to be swinging to profitability.