Samsung has unveiled the Galaxy Tab S5e, its lightest and thinnest tablet ever made. "At $399, it's not only far more affordable than the flagship $649 Samsung Galaxy Tab S4, it's arguably surpassed it in some ways," reports The Verge. From the report: For starters, the Tab S5e has the thinnest and lightest metal unibody of any Galaxy Tab, measuring 5.5mm thin and weighing just 400 grams -- even compared to the 11-inch iPad Pro at 5.9mm thick and 468 grams, the Tab S5e is both lighter and thinner. The company also claims they've maximized space with the Tab S5e's massive 81.8 percent screen-to-body ratio, which on paper, is an improvement over the Tab S4's lower 79 percent ratio. It's also right on the heels of the 11-inch iPad Pro's ~82.9 percent screen-to-body ratio.

And unlike Samsung's previous attempt to make its 10.5-inch tablet more affordable, this slate doesn't skimp on the screen and not nearly as much on the processor. Samsung's Tab S5e is a 10.5-inch Super AMOLED device with a 16:10 aspect ratio and 2560 x 1600 resolution, while its octa-core Snapdragon 670 processor should provide solid mid-range performance. Samsung's also promising up to 14.5 hours of battery life. The Tab S5e is also the first tablet from the Korean tech giant to ship with Pie, the latest version of Android, along with the new Bixby 2.0 virtual assistant and information tool. Samsung is also carrying features like Dex, a desktop-style Android environment, over from other Galaxy devices, like the Note 9 and Tab S4. It allows users to interact with their device using the screen, a mouse, keyboard, or all three. Other features include AKG-tuned, quad surround sound speakers, 64GB of internal storage (microSD expandable to 512GB), with 4GB RAM (upgradable to 6GB RAM/128GB storage), and 13-megapixel back and 8-megapixel front-facing cameras. Cellular models will follow the Wi-Fi versions later this year.

"It's the end of the line for the biggest passenger jet ever built: the A380 is going to cease production," writes Slashdot reader Required Snark, citing a report from CNN. From the report: The European plane maker said Thursday that it will stop delivering A380s in 2021 after its key customer, Dubai-based airline Emirates, slashed its orders for the huge jetliner. "We have no substantial A380 backlog and hence no basis to sustain production, despite all our sales efforts with other airlines in recent years," Airbus CEO Tom Enders said in a company statement. The company has delivered 234 of the superjumbos to date, less than a quarter of the 1,200 it predicted it would sell when it first introduced the double-decker aircraft. Its plans were undermined by airlines shifting their interest to lighter, more fuel efficient passenger jets that have reduced the need to ferry passengers between the big hubs. "Passengers all over the world love to fly on this great aircraft. Hence today's announcement is painful for us and the A380 communities worldwide," Enders said. "But keep in mind that A380s will still roam the skies for many years to come and Airbus will of course continue to fully support the A380 operators."

Titanium "has long been touted as the metal of the future," writes Dwell, "due to its strength, rust resistance, and amazing lightness." But can careful atom-stacking lead to something better?

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers have discovered a way to create a new "metallic wood" material that is as strong as titanium, but five times lighter, reports Dwell. "So far, the researchers have built a sheet of nickel with nanoscale pores that is almost 70 percent empty space... It was created by building tiny plastic spheres, suspending them in water, allowing the water to evaporate, and then electroplating the spheres with nickel. Researchers then dissolved the plastic spheres, producing an incredibly strong, porous metal that floats on water."
Researchers are also considering the possibility of filling its empty space with an energy-storing material. "For example, a prosthetic leg made from this material and infused with anode and cathode materials, could also be a battery."

Thelasko shares a report from Electrek: Tesla hasn't been known for making many acquisitions, but we've now learned that it has reached an agreement to acquire ultracapacitor and battery component manufacturer Maxwell based in California. The all-stock transaction worth over $200 million was announced by Maxwell this morning and we reached out to Tesla to confirm the news. [...] Tesla's acquisition of Maxwell might have little to do with ultracapacitors. The automaker might be more interested with Maxwell's dry electrode technology that they have been hyping recently. Maxwell claims that its electrode enables an energy density of over 300 Wh/kg in current demonstration cells and they see a path to over 500 Wh/kg. This would represent a significant improvement over current battery cells used by Tesla and enable longer range or lighter weight, but that's not even the most attractive benefit of Maxwell's dry electrode. They claim that it should simplify the manufacturing process and result in a "10 to 20% cost reduction versus state-of-the-art wet electrodes" while "extending battery Life up to a factor of 2." Many companies have been making similar claims about batteries. Tesla, specifically Elon and JB, have often complained that they couldn't verify those claims. If Tesla is willing to pay $200 million for Maxwell, I have to assume that they verified the claims and they believe the technology is applicable to their batteries. On a semi-related note, Tesla has also reached a deal with Electrify America to deploy Powerpacks at over 100 charging stations operated by the latter. "Demand charges, a higher rate that an electric utility charges when a user's electricity needs spike, are resulting in incredible costs for charging station operators," reports Electrek. "The use of energy storage at charging stations in order to shave the peak usage is a solution to those demand charges."

"[Electrify America] announced today that they will deploy Tesla Powerpack systems consisting of 'a 210 kW battery system with roughly 350 kWh of capacity' at over 100 charging stations," the report says. "The system will be designed to be modular in order to increase the capacity if needed."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Over the last two years, Amazon has aggressively marketed its facial recognition technology to police departments and federal agencies as a service to help law enforcement identify suspects more quickly. Now a new study from researchers at the M.I.T. Media Lab has found that Amazon's system, Rekognition, had much more difficulty in telling the gender of female faces and of darker-skinned faces in photos than similar services from IBM and Microsoft. The results raise questions about potential bias that could hamper Amazon's drive to popularize the technology.

In the study, published Thursday, Rekognition made no errors in recognizing the gender of lighter-skinned men. But it misclassified women as men 19 percent of the time, the researchers said, and mistook darker-skinned women for men 31 percent of the time. Microsoft's technology mistook darker-skinned women for men just 1.5 percent of the time. For the latest study, [co-author of the study, Ms. Buolamwini, said] she sent a letter with some preliminary results to Amazon seven months ago. But she said that she hadn't heard back from Amazon, and that when she and a co-author retested the company's product a couple of months later, it had not improved. "It's not possible to draw a conclusion on the accuracy of facial recognition for any use case -- including law enforcement -- based on results obtained using facial analysis," Matt Wood, general manager of AI at Amazon Web Services, said. He added that the researchers had not tested the latest version of Rekognition, which was updated in November.

"Amazon said that in recent internal tests using an updated version of its service, the company found no difference in accuracy in classifying gender across all ethnicities," the NYT reports. The new study is scheduled to be presented Monday at an artificial intelligence and ethics conference in Honolulu.

Catalin Cimpanu, writing for ZDNet: Every major user interface (UI) redesign project is a hit and miss game, and Google's new Chrome UI appears to be a colossal miss. Designed with mobile devices in mind, the new Chrome user interface style was officially rolled out in September this year, with the release of Chrome version 69. Not all users liked the new UI, and this was clear from the beginning, with some users voicing their discontent online even back then. However, those users who didn't appreciate the new lighter-toned Chrome interface had the option to visit the chrome://flags page and modify a Chrome setting and continue using Chrome's older UI.

But with Chrome version 71, released earlier this month, Google has removed the Chrome flag that allowed users to use the old UI. As you might imagine, this change did not go well, at all. Chrome's new UI might have been developed with a mobile-first approach in mind, but the UI is problematic on laptops and desktops, where its lighter tone and rounded tabs make it extremely hard to distinguish tabs from one another, especially when users open multiple tabs. Since being able to distinguish and switch between tabs at a fast pace is an important detail in most of today's internet-based jobs, many users have been having trouble adapting to the new UI both at work and at home, especially if they're the kind of people who deal with tens of tabs at the same time.

An anonymous reader shares a report (may be paywalled): Every morning, time once was, a giant roar from Heathrow Airport would announce the departure of flight BA001 to New York. The roar was caused by the injection into the aircraft's four afterburners of the fuel which provided the extra thrust that it needed to take off. Soon afterwards, the pilot lit the afterburners again -- this time to accelerate his charge beyond the speed of sound for the three-and-a-half hour trip to JFK. The plane was Concorde.

Supersonic passenger travel came to an end in 2003. The crash three years earlier of a French Concorde had not helped, but the main reasons were wider. One was the aircraft's Rolls-Royce/Snecma Olympus engines, afterburners and all, which gobbled up too much fuel for its flights to be paying propositions. The second was the boom-causing shock wave it generated when travelling supersonically. That meant the overland sections of its route had to be flown below Mach 1. For the Olympus, an engine optimised for travel far beyond the sound barrier, this was commercial death.

That, however, was then. And this is now. Materials are lighter and stronger. Aerodynamics and the physics of sonic booms are better understood. There is also a more realistic appreciation of the market. As a result, several groups of aircraft engineers are dipping their toes back into the supersonic pool. Some see potential for planes with about half Concorde's 100-seat capacity. Others plan to start even smaller, with business jets that carry around a dozen passengers. The chances of such aircraft getting airborne have recently increased substantially.

dryriver writes: As anyone who buys professional computer monitors knows, the dynamic range of the display device you are looking at can be expressed quite usefully in terms of percentage sRGB coverage and percentage AdobeRGB coverage. The higher the percentage for each, the better and wider the dynamic range of the screen panel you are getting. People who work with professional video and photographs typically aim for a display that has 100 percent sRGB coverage and at least 70 to 80 percent AdobeRGB coverage. Laptop review site Notebookcheck for example uses professional optical testing equipment to check whether the advertised sRGB and AdobeRGB percentages and brightness in nits for any laptop display panel hold up in real life.

This being the case, why do quote-unquote "High Dynamic Range" capable TVs -- which seem to be mostly 10 bits per channel to begin with -- not have an sRGB or AdobeRGB rating quoted anywhere in their technical specs? Why don't professional TV reviewers use optical testing equipment that's readily available to measure the real world dynamic range of HDR or non-HDR TVs objectively, in hard numbers? Why do they simply say "the blacks on this TV were deep and pleasing, and the lighter tones were..." when this can be expressed better and more objectively in measured numbers or percentages? Do they think consumers are too unsophisticated to understand a simple number like "this OLED TV achieves a fairly average 66 percent AdobeRGB coverage?"

A sensor that can spot the wind direction from miles away will let DARPA's surveillance balloons hover at the very edge of space in one spot indefinitely. An anonymous reader writes: DARPA, the US military's research arm, is currently testing a wind sensor that could allow devices in its Adaptable Lighter-Than-Air (ALTA) balloon program to spot wind speed and direction from a great distance and then make the necessary adjustments to stay in one spot. DARPA has been working on ALTA for some time, but its existence was only revealed in September. "By flying higher we hope to take advantage of a larger range of winds," says ALTA project manager Alex Walan. ALTA will operate even higher than Loon at 75,000 to 90,000 feet (22,900 to 27,400 meters or 14 to 17 miles), where the winds are less predictable. That shouldn't be a problem if the balloon can see exactly where the favorable winds are.

The wind sensor, called Strat-OAWL (short for "stratospheric optical autocovariance wind lidar"), is a new version of one originally designed for NASA satellites. Made by Ball Aerospace, OAWL shines pulses of laser light into the air. A small fraction of the beam is reflected back, and the reflected laser light is gathered by a telescope. The wavelength of the reflected light is changed slightly depending on how fast the air it bounced back from is moving, a change known as doppler shift. By analyzing this shift, OAWL can determine the speed and direction of the wind. Unlike other wind sensors, OAWL looks in two directions at once, giving a better indication of wind speed and direction.

While LG technically announced the LG V40 ThinQ last week in Korea, it left many surprises for its October 3rd event in the U.S. We have now learned that the company's new flagship sports a total of five cameras, a 6.4-inch display, headphone jack with hi-fi Quad DAC, and Snapdragon 845 processor with 6GB of RAM. The Verge reports: [T]he V40 has a very premium price and will range between $900 and $980 from US carriers when it's released on October 18th in black or blue color options. The 6.4-inch, notched OLED panel doesn't have the same "super bright" mode you can find on the G7, with brightness topping out between 500 and 600 nits. But LG says the phone is noticeably lighter -- more than an ounce -- than both the Note and XS Max. The new three-camera setup on the back of the V40 offers a lot of versatility. It includes:

- Standard f/1.5 12-megapixel camera with 1.4um pixels that are 40 percent larger than the G7. Remember that bigger pixels are a key reason for the improved camera performance in the iPhone XS, so hopefully LG fans will see a similar uptick in quality over the G7.
- Super-wide-angle f/1.9 16MP camera with 107-degree field of view. Identical to G7.
- 12MP f/2.4 telephoto/portrait camera, which basically amounts to a 2x optical zoom compared to the regular lens. LG has added new lighting effects such as "natural, studio, contour, stage, stage mono."

With the move to three sensors, LG is also introducing two additional software features that take advantage of this system. A new "triple preview" feature will show you a live preview from all three cameras simultaneously, letting you quickly pick the right one for the shot you're trying to get without having to switch between them. And "triple shot" captures all three angles with a single press of the shutter button; it saves a GIF of the transition between them and also saves each individual shot. [...] If you're curious about battery life, the V40 has a 3,300mAh battery that LG says delivers longevity that's only around 10 percent less than the Note 9. Other specifications include an IP68 water and dust resistance, Qi wireless charging, and Android Oreo that's upgradeable to Android Pie, although there's no official timeline available yet.

In a study published in Science Advances, researchers in Drexel's College of Engineering describe a method for spraying invisibly thin antennas, made from a type of two-dimensional, metallic material called MXene, that perform as well as those being used in mobile devices, wireless routers and portable transducers. Phys.Org reports: The researchers, from the College's Department of Materials Science and Engineering, report that the MXene titanium carbide can be dissolved in water to create an ink or paint. The exceptional conductivity of the material enables it to transmit and direct radio waves, even when it's applied in a very thin coating. Preserving transmission quality in a form this thin is significant because it would allow antennas to easily be embedded -- literally, sprayed on -- in a wide variety of objects and surfaces without adding additional weight or circuitry or requiring a certain level of rigidity.

Initial testing of the sprayed antennas suggest that they can perform with the same range of quality as current antennas, which are made from familiar metals, like gold, silver, copper and aluminum, but are much thicker than MXene antennas. Making antennas smaller and lighter has long been a goal of materials scientists and electrical engineers, so this discovery is a sizable step forward both in terms of reducing their footprint as well as broadening their application.

Residents of Scottsdale, Arizona will be able to receive autonomous grocery deliveries from Kroger-owned Fry's Food Stores. The technology required to make this all possible is supplied by Nuro, a self-driving vehicle startup founded by two veterans of Google's self-driving car project. Ars Technica reports: Kroger says that deliveries will have a flat $5.95 delivery fee, and customers can schedule same-day or next-day deliveries. Initially, the deliveries will be made by Nuro's fleet of modified Toyota Priuses with a safety driver behind the wheel. But Kroger expects to start using Nuro's production model -- which doesn't even have space for a driver -- this fall. That vehicle, known as the R1, is significantly smaller and lighter than a conventional passenger car. When we talked to Nuro cofounder Dave Ferguson back in May, he argued that the R1's design had significant safety benefits. A smaller, lighter vehicle would do less damage if it ever ran into something. The vehicle's maximum speed of 25 miles per hour also makes serious injuries less likely. And the fact that the car is dramatically narrower than a traditional car gives it significant safety benefits, Ferguson argued.

Okian Warrior shares a report from Science Magazine: Hopes for an easier regulatory road for genetic engineering in European agriculture were dashed by the Court of Justice of the European Union. In a closely watched decision, the court ruled that plants created with new gene-editing techniques that don't involve transferring genes between organisms -- such as CRISPR -- must go through the same lengthy approval process as traditional transgenic plants. Many researchers had argued that regulators should take a lighter touch when evaluating products created with the new technologies, but environmental groups and their allies successfully argued that they should be subject to the same EU rules that apply to other genetically modified organisms.

The case focused on crops that have been made resistant to herbicides without transferring genes from other species. The French government had passed a law exempting these new gene-edited crops from regulation under the European Union's directive on genetically modified organisms (GMOs), which requires an assessment of risks to health and the environment, as well as labeling, tracking, and monitoring of the products. Confederation Paysanne, a French union in Bagnolet representing small farms, and eight other groups, sued and charged that the plants modified with gene-editing techniques should be regulated under the GMO directive, because they could cause significant harm. The court decided that gene-editing techniques are covered by the GMO directive because they "alter the genetic material of an organism in a way that does not occur naturally." (The court exempted conventional mutagenesis -- the unnatural use of chemicals or radiation to create mutations for plant breeding -- because it has "a long safety record.") It also said the new gene-editing techniques have risks that could be similar to those of transgenic engineering.

Owen Williams, writing for Motherboard: The pursuit of thinner, lighter laptops, a trend driven by Apple, coinciding with laptops replacing desktops as our primary devices means we have screwed ourselves out of performance -- and it's not going to get better anytime soon. Thermal throttling is not something that Apple alone suffers from: every laptop out there will face thermal constraints at some point, but whether or not that's perceivable depends on a number of different variables including form factor and cooling capacity. When you're shopping for a laptop, you'll notice that manufacturers like Apple use phrases like "Turbo Boost" and "Up to 4.8 GHz" without really explaining what that means. The 4.8 GHz processor clock speed, which Apple quotes for the 15-inch MacBook Pro, is a 'best case' processor speed that's only achieved in short bursts when your computer requests it, subject to a number of conditions.

If you're playing a game like Fortnite, for example, the game will request your processor provide faster performance, and the processor will attempt to increase its operating frequency gradually to deliver the maximum available performance within the thermal envelope of your machine. That maximum is restricted by both power and thermal limits, which is where we run into issues: laptops tend to get hot because they're thinner, with limited space to dissipate that heat through the use of fans and heatsinks.

Today Comic-Con attendees were treated to new trailers and previews for a slew of upcoming geek-friendly movies. An anonymous reader writes: Besides footage from Wonder Woman 1984, there were also trailers for DC's Aquaman movie, plus a new DC superhero franchise with a lighter tone, Shazam. (And there was also a very apocalyptic preview of Godzilla: King of the Monsters.)

Numerous celebrities were on-hand to tout their upcoming films. Johnny Depp introduced the trailer for Fantastic Beasts 2: The Crimes of Grindelwald -- in character -- while Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson introduced the trailer for M. Night Shyamalan's Glass. Jamie Lee Curtis even plugged her return to the Halloween franchise 40 years after the original, revealing that her character has been waiting all these decades to kill Michael Myers after his release from prison.

TV Guide has collected most of the trailers for TV shows, including season 11 of Doctor Who, the revival of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and new seasons of Marvel's Iron Fist and Fear the Walking Dead. There was apparently also a trailer for Marvel's mutant series The Gifted -- and a preview for the 30th season of The Simpsons featuring this Halloween's "Treehouse of Horror XXIX", which includes a parody of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

An anonymous reader writes: Linux 4.18 development is going strong with recent 4.18-rc1 release. This kernel cycle has dropped 107,210 lines of code so far but Linux 4.18 is adding many new features. The kernel is coming in lighter as a result of the LustreFS code being removed and other code cleanups. On the feature front, Phoronix reports, "ew AMDGPU support improvements, mainlining of the V3D DRM driver, initial open-source work on NVIDIA Volta GV100 hardware, merging of the Valve Steam Controller kernel driver, merging of the BPFILTER framework, ARM Spectre mitigation work, Speck file-system encryption support, removal of the Lustre file-system, the exciting restartable sequences system call was merged, the new DM writecache target, and much more."

"A giant egg equipped with rotors and 'Transformers'-style robots are among some of the creative designs submitted in a $2 million dollar contest to dream up new ways of flying," reports CNN.

"GoFly, a $2 million competition to design personal flying machines backed by Boeing, has announced its first round of most promising designs out of 600 entries from around the world," writes harrymcc . "Proposed vehicles need to fly for at least 20 miles, at 35 miles an hour; many of the ideas look a bit like airborne motorcycles." Fast Company reports: "There's been a convergence of all of these breakthrough technologies that makes this the first moment in time where we have the ability to make people fly," says Gwen Lighter, who dreamed up the GoFly prize, recruited Boeing to bankroll it, and now serves as CEO. Many of the advances come from the world of drones -- "high-efficiency motors, high-capacity batteries, and cheap navigation and stabilizing technologies that keep even newbies on course and out of danger....

Their prototypes have to achieve vertical takeoff and landing (called VTOL), eliminating the need for an airport runway... The craft have to be small enough to fit within an 8.5-foot circle, and they have to be safe and manageable for anyone to operate -- "not just engineers or daredevils... GoFly's Lighter emphasizes that safety is a key requirement in judging. She says that whatever wins will be well on the way to meeting requirements of the FAA -- and regulatory bodies in other countries -- for mainstream operation. FAA staffers (in a non-official capacity) are even among GoFly's expert advisors.
Best of all, every participant -- even those who win the prize money -- "are free to take their innovations anywhere. They retain all intellectual property rights."

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the future, you could find yourself booking an Emirates flight without a real window seat. The airline has just unveiled a new first class suite on board its latest aircraft that features "virtual windows" instead of real ones. The President of Emirates, Tim Clarke, is hoping it will pave the way for removing all windows from future planes, which he says will make them lighter and faster. "What we may have [in the next 20 years] is aircraft that are, and I hate to say this to a number of passengers, windowless," he told the BBC. So there's no windows on the outside ... But Mr Clarke says on the inside there will be "a full display of windows," which will beam in the images from the outside. This will be done using fibre-optic camera technology. So, instead of being able to see directly outside, passengers will view images projected from outside the aircraft -- which is almost like the real thing.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Ossic raised more than $3.2 million in crowdfunding for its Ossic X, which it touted as the "first 3D audio headphones calibrated to you." But after delivering devices to only about 80 investors who'd paid at least $999 to for the "Developer/Innovator" rewards level on Kickstarter, Ossic announced Saturday it had run out of money -- leaving the more than 10,000 other backers with nothing but lighter wallets.

Ossic, which The San Diego Union-Tribune notes was founded by former Logitech engineers Jason Riggs and Joy Lyons, had excited gamers, audiophiles and other sound consumers by creating headphones that used advanced 3D audio algorithms, head-tracking technology and individual anatomy calibration to "deliver incredibly accurate 3D sound to your ears," according to its funding campaign on Kickstarter. In less than two months in 2016, it was able to raise $2.7 million from more than 10,000 backers on Kickstarter. It raised another $515,970 on Indiegogo. "This was obviously not our desired outcome," the company said in a statement. "To fail at the five-yard line is a tragedy. We are extremely sorry that we cannot deliver your product and want you to know that the team has done everything possible including investing our own savings and working without salary to exhaust all possibilities."

Boeing received FAA approval today for its folding wingtips, which will let the planes stop at airport gates big enough to accommodate typical 777 models. "Once the 777X lands, the wingtips will rotate until they point upwards," reports Engadget. "Bloomberg notes that the plane will be the only commercial model in widespread use to have such a feature." From the report: The 777X's wingtips are so novel that U.S. regulators had to draw up new standards for them. The agency was concerned that the wingtips could cause safety issues -- some plane crashes occurred after pilots did not secure flaps on wings before takeoff. The FAA required Boeing to have several warning systems to make sure pilots won't attempt a takeoff before the wingtips are locked in the correct position. The FAA also wanted assurances that there was no way the tips would rotate during flight, and that the wings could handle winds of up to 75 miles per hour while on the ground.

The new wings are made from carbon-fiber composites that are stronger and lighter than the metal Boeing uses in other wings. That lets the company increase the wings' width by 23 feet to 235 feet, which makes flying more efficient. These are the widest wings Boeing has attached to a plane, surpassing the 747-8's 224 feet. However, it doesn't hold the record for a commercial plane: the Airbus A380 has a 262-foot-wide wing, which forced some airports to install gates specifically to accommodate it.