Cold winds constantly blow across the wide Martian plains of Elysium Planitia, and NASA unexpectedly recorded the sound of these extraterrestrial gusts. 

Although NASA sent the InSight lander to Mars to study Mars’ earthquakes and geology, the robot’s scientists discovered that one of InSight’s instruments picked up audio of wind gusting against the machine’s metal exterior, and they released the sounds on Friday.

“It’s what it’s like to be there,” Don Banfield, an InSight scientist, said in an interview.

Beginning at the 1:10 mark in the video below, you can hear the Martian wind.

The specific instrument that picked up the sound of wind blowing against the lander is an air pressure sensor, more formally called the Auxiliary Payload Sensor Subsystem. It’s a weather-monitoring device. It’s not a microphone. But it can act like one. 

“It’s much like what a normal microphone does,” said Banfield.

When any noise is made or emanated, perhaps from an amplified Fender Telecaster guitar, this produces pressure changes in the air. These pressure changes are then picked up by a microphone and then turned into an electrical signal. 

The pressure sensor, which Banfield described as a low-frequency microphone, is designed to also take in changes in the air pressure, and then transmit these into electrical signals — which eventually get sent millions of miles back to Earth. 

“Wind or someone hitting a drum or a meteorite exploding in the atmosphere — all these make pressure changes in the air,” explained Banfield.

In the case of the wind, the pressure sensor picked up the wind blowing, but there’s a catch. This specialized instrument was never meant to actually record sound, just air pressure in the natural Martian environs. So it recorded the wind at a very low frequency — outside the range of limited human hearing. 

However, other animals that evolved to hear low-frequency sounds, like whales, would be able to hear the raw tracks from the pressure sensor. “We can record the stuff that elephants and whales can hear if they could survive on Mars,” said Banfield.

But to make it audible to humans, NASA sped up about 2,000 seconds of recorded wind into 20 seconds, which increased the pitch of the sounds 100-fold. Now, we can hear it. 

NASA also released the low-drone sounds derived from InSight’s seismometer, which is intended to measure Martian earthquakes. These can be heard in the above NASA video, starting at around the 50-second mark. 

But the seismometer measured vibrations as the wind blew against the robot’s solar panels. The vibrations, sent back to Earth, are more similar to putting your ear next to a train track and listening to the vibrations of a distant train (you’re not actually hearing the train). It’s a much more indirect way of picking up or interpreting sound. 

In 2020, NASA will send its latest advanced rover to Mars with two actual microphones, specifically intended to record sound. 

The microphones will even record the sound of the rover descending through the Martian atmosphere — and if all goes smoothly — pick up the sound of the robot settling down in the Jezero Crater, an ancient, dried-up lakebed. 

Image: mashable/vicky leta

In 2018, the news and state of the world can pretty much be described as a constant state of NOPE. Trump tweeted? Nope. Another deadly shooting? Nope nope nope. The planet is dying? Wow, nope!

It’s difficult not to get bogged down by the deluge of bad or weird news, but there are moments of pop culture that have been so overwhelmingly good that they had us saying NOPE for different reasons. 

We’re talking things that were so cute you wanted to pass out. Moments so joyful you wanted to arrest everyone involved. This is a valid emotional response, by the way – like wanting to eat a cute baby or cry with joy. These pop culture moments, in no particular order, made us so happy that we verbally canceled them just to restore balance to the universe. Sorry! 

But also…nope!

1. That video of the Jane the Virgin cast reading the Season 4 finale

The actual finale made our mid-year NOPE list, but we keep coming back to this video from the table read. When the show returns, we will have been living with this cliffhanger for almost a year. N O  P E

2. Noah Centineo

The internet’s newest boyfriend won us over, not only with his performance in To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, but with a bashful and humble persona that just won’t quit. His Instagram is both a thirst trap and a love letter. His Twitter is irreverent and sometimes a cry for help. He improvised picking up the popcorn and he’s basically Peter K in real life. NOPE.

3. Nick and Colin in Crazy Rich Asians

This movie was a magical ensemble and the love story of Nick and Rachel, but we couldn’t help rooting for these handsome besties and their island getaway. With Nick’s mother and most of his extended family and community aboard a speeding anti-Rachel train, Colin’s love and loyalty keep our man from losing it – and we know that there’s no one Colin would rather have by his side at the wedding of the century. Nope!

4. American Vandal: The Brownout

Vandal went straight to the point with its Season 2 premiere’s inciting incident: a violent diarrhea breakout at a high school. Between searing visuals of students shitting themselves in the halls and deadly serious retellings of the incident, this is highbrow poop humor, the likes of which our childhood selves — and hell, our adult selves — dream of.

5. This video from Hasan Minhaj:

Minhaj actively and consistently posts videos of himself on social media to promote Patriot Act on Netflix, but this tiny glimpse of him being a dad made us scream. His daughter also featured in clip promoting the year-end episode about content moderation, with Minhaj yelling, “Get off Facebook!” at the infant, who was sitting at a laptop. Help! Nope!!

6. Emma Watson and Tom Felton hangin’ at the beach as buds

They’re still friends after all this time? Always! But also, nope!

7. Antoni Porowski actively thirst trapping a nation

There’s a marked difference between Porowski in Queer Eye Seasons 1 and 2, and that’s that he became the thirst icon of a nation. Then there were the photoshoots, and then there was this. He knows what he’s doing and how to elicit a NOPE!

8. Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas’ wedding

Honestly, everything about this couple – six months ago they were but a rumor and now they’ve tied the knot in a massive, gorgeous, weekend-long celebration. What started as confusion has now turned to pure joy and indignation that they dare be so cute!

9. The Creed II ending montage

Like its predecessor, this movie was better than it had any right to be – excellent, even! The final minutes went for all the emotional punches. Adonis visits his father’s grave while  Rocky reconnects with his estranged son. This montage had everything: An attractive couple, a screen legend, a cute baby, even what we can only interpret as a wink to Gilmore Girls fans that Milo Ventimiglia’s character named his child Logan. Nope!!

10. Skylar Astin on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Astin’s casting alone was enough to elicit gasps from anyone familiar with his singing, on-screen and off — and then we found out who he was playing. We may still be within the statute of limitations for spoiling this one, but his character debut was something else; equally thrilling, terrifying, and pure musical entertainment. We could barely handle it. NOPE!

The smartphone megapixel wars aren’t over yet. 

Chinese electronics company Xiaomi teased a new smartphone with a 48-megapixel camera, a record for the company, and as far as we can recall, an all-time record in popular consumer electronics, beating Nokia’s 41-megapixel 808 PureView phone. 

As noted by Android Central, the phone is also likely to have Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 675 chip. 

As extravagant as 48 megapixels sound, it actually makes a lot of sense. Huawei’s Mate 20 Pro has a 40-megapixel main camera, but, by default, it uses the information gathered by the sensor to create better-looking 10-megapixel photos. If Xiaomi goes the same route, its new phone will likely default to 12-megapixel photos while benefiting from the details gathered by the 48-megapixel sensor. 

We can also take an educated guess at which sensor Xiaomi will use, since Sony launched its 48-megapixel IMX586 image sensor for smartphones in July (Samsung also has a 48-megapixel sensor called ISOCELL Bright GM1). And yes, one of those sensor’s features is combining the light captured from four adjacent pixels to create a bright 12-megapixel image in crappy light conditions. Prepare for some awesome night photos.

The photo of the phone, shared by Xiaomi president Bin Lin on Chinese social network Weibo, doesn’t reveal any other details about the phone except its black color. The photo’s caption, however, claims the new phone is coming in January. 

Given its CPU, the phone is likely to be a mid-ranger with an obvious focus on photography. And judging by Xiaomi’s previous launches, it’ll likely be pretty cheap. 

Image: lili sams/mashable

Listening to the news over a Google Home smart speaker is going to get more useful. On Thursday, Google announced a new effort to personalize the audio news feed available through the company’s digital assistant software.

The goal behind the project is to create a radio station that caters to your interests, Google product manager Liz Gannes said in a blog post. It’ll also be smart enough to avoid repeating the same new stories you’ve already heard during the day.

The company’s AI-powered algorithms on Google News can already personalize text-based articles for you by looking at what topics you like to read and your search history. Now the tech giant is bringing some of the same technologies to the audio realm.

The company partnered with over a dozen media outlets — including the Associated Press, The Hollywood Reporter and USA Today — to create a prototype that uses Google Assistant to deliver the personalized audio content.

“This new experience will bring you an audio news playlist assembled in that moment, for you,” Gannes said. “It starts with a briefing of top stories and updates on topics you care about, and extends into longer-form content that dives deeper into more stories.”

Google Assistant will also be ready with updated audio news when you access it again throughout the day, whether it be during your commute home or on a jog, she added.

Google’s voice assistant can already deliver audio stories when you ask it to play the news. However, the content is usually taken from television or radio casts. So to improve the experience, Google created new guidelines on how media publishers should create audio stories specifically for its voice assistant software.

As result, expect the new audio experience to deliver shorter and punchier content, with less intro music, and for now, no ads. Google’s guidelines also recommend that media publishers keep their short-format stories around 50 seconds long. Medium-format stories, on the other hand, can last from 2 to 15 minutes.

The company is launching the revamped audio news function to a limited number of Google Assistant users in the US before a wider roll out. For now, it’s only available in English. The company is also inviting interested media publishers to join the project.

This article originally published at PCMag
here

Checkmate.

Competitive and casual chess players alike now have a new foe. In addition to computers, there’s a new AI platform called AlphaZero that can totally beat us all.

AlphaZero is from DeepMind Technologies, a subsidiary under Alphabet, which is Google’s parent company. It can tackle not only chess, but also shogi and Go — two equally difficult, if not even more challenging, games. 

AlphaZero comes after many years of research, succeeding AlphaGo Zero from last year, the world’s best Go player. But this time around there wasn’t any human help. AlphaZero taught itself how to play from scratch. 

The neural-net AI studied each of the three games, using a process that’s similar to how a brain is structured. (Neural nets are similar in some ways to neurons in our bodies: It’s essentially the way the computer takes info and works through it, sort of like a very complex equation.) AlphaZero trained for 9 hours on chess, 12 hours on shogi, and 13 days on Go. Playing itself, it thought about the same moves over and over again. And it worked.

The sheer hardware of the AlphaZero is intense (think a Mac Pro on steroids). It used 5,000 tensor processing units, or TPUs, in training alone. These processors are for AI and neural net tasks. Google Photos employs them for AI features within the app. 

All of this shows how advanced computers are becoming. With neural net AI inside, decision-making abilities aren’t far off. 

Image: deepmind technologies

AlphaZero wiped out the competition, including previous iterations of DeepMind’s AIs. It beat Stockfish in chess, Elmo in shogi, and AlphaGo Zero in Go. Its AI backbone and algorithms worked in real time. Pre-planning for every possible move, after training against itself, let it handle whatever the competition played. 

Just 21 years ago, IBM’s Deep Blue was able to beat Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion at the time. This was a supercomputer in every way, with a massive set of processing power for the time frame. In a short amount of time, the tech has advanced a lot.

I’m looking to the future to see what happens next… who knows, it might be able to beat me at Monopoly. 

Things are not looking up for Huawei’s CFO. 

Wanzhou Meng, arrested Dec. 1 in Vancouver and facing possible extradition to the U.S., had a bail hearing today in which it was made clear that she is looking at some serious jail time for allegedly misrepresenting to authorities the relationship between Huawei and SkyCom, which did business in Iran. 

According to AP, the prosecutor said she portrayed the two companies as separate, while the U.S. claims Huawei and SkyCom are connected, and thus Huawei violated U.S. sanctions against Iran. 

Reporters in attendance tweeted details from the hearing, and noted the shocked reaction from the gathered crowd upon learning the possible severity of Meng’s punishment were she to face trial and be found guilty. 

Dave Lee of the BBC reported “[gasps] in the court” when it was announced that Meng could be hit with “multiple charges each with maximum penalty of 30 years in prison.”

According to the Washington Post, Weng was arrested while in transit from Hong Kong to Mexico. 

Deirdre Bosa of CNBC, who was also in attendance, reported on the calculations the court must consider when potentially setting bail for someone of such extraordinary wealth. 

“Meng being released on $1 million bail would be like asking upper middle class Canadian family to cough up $136,” she paraphrased the Crown as explaining, before noting that Meng’s “father has a net worth of $3.2bn.”

There is still a chance Weng will make bail, however, with Bosa reporting the arguments being made in Weng’s favor. 

China, meanwhile, has officially demanded Meng’s release. In a statement reported by the Post, a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry called the detention a human rights violation. 

“To detain someone without giving clear reason is an obvious violation of human rights,” read the statement from spokesperson Geng Shuang.

We’ll soon know if the Canadian courts are amenable to that argument. 

A professor out of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health says that people should only be consuming 6 fries per serving…yes, 6.

Of course, the internet had something to say about it. Still, studies have shown a connection to eating fries and obesity…so it is something to be considered, to an extent.  

Oooohhhhhh, the Epic Rap Battles of History video guys are back after a two-year hiatus, and they’re coming for two of the most shade-able figures in the tech world: Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

Epic Rap Battles is a video series that pits public figures against each other with fictional and non-fictional beefs. In 2016, their two rhyme spitters where none other than, you guessed it, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

This time around, the robotic Zuckerberg faces off against the pompous Musk. Each  brags about their achievements, and rags on the other for their personal and professional, erm, shortcomings.

“I’m making brilliant innovations in a race against the dark ages,” raps fake Musk. “You provide a place to discover your aunt’s kinda racist.”

“I’ll end your story like Snapchat —ghost!” the rapping Zuckerberg spits. “Elon you’re nothing/ but an attention seeking outcast/And your star is faded/like you on a podcast.”

Daanggg.

Musk and Zuckerberg are two CEOs who couldn’t be more diametrically opposed in their public personas. They did feud over a Facebook satellite Elon Musk happened to blow up, once. And Elon Musk took part in the #DeleteFacebook movement by removing some of his company’s Facebook pages. But the two billionaires mostly stay out of each other’s hair. 

Ever dreamed about moving to Japan? The prospect is more enticing than ever because Japan is giving out homes for free, or at a very low price. It may sound too good to be true, but it’s not. There’s just one thing you’re going to need first, and there may be a catch.

Remember Rex Tillerson, Trump’s largely accomplishment-free Secretary of State?

Well he’s back, this time with some long overdue criticism of our Commander in Chief.

On Thursday, Tillerson spoke at a fundraiser for for the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. The former Secretary of State “let loose,” as much as that limestone rock of a man can be loose about anything.

“When the President would say, ‘Here’s what I want to do and here’s how I want to do it.’ And I’d have to say to him, ‘Well Mr. President, I understand what you want to do, but you can’t do it that way. It violates the law. It violates treaty,’” Tillerson said.

Tillerson also complained that it was challenging to move from a “disciplined, highly-process oriented” corporation to work for Trump, “who is pretty undisciplined, doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things.”

In the past, it was rumored that Tillerson once called Trump a “moron.”

Here’s what our normal, mature President had to say in response:

Yes, the president called Tillerson “dumb as a rock” and “lazy as hell.” 

And here’s how Twitter responded:

One person, however, said it better than any of us:

At least Twitter isn’t as dumb as a rock today.