Transparent butterfly wings could inspire low-reflectivity displays

Researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany have studied the wings of glasswing butterflies in an effort to determine what causes their low-reflective nature. It's believed that the findings of the study could lead to less reflective screens on mobile phones, tablets and other devices.

Best Buy to accept Apple Pay for purchases

Best Buy shoppers can now use Apple Pay to complete purchases made through the electronics retailer's app, a coup of sorts for Apple in the intense mobile-payments business.

For now, Apple Pay transactions are limited to Best Buy's app, but the companies expect consumers to be able to use the mobile payment method for in-store purchases later this year, the retailer announced Monday. Best Buy was a major supporter of the Merchant Customer Exchange, or MCX -- a consortium of retailers led by Walmart that has developed a competing mobile-payments system.

"Today's consumers have many different ways to spend their money and we want to give our customers as many options as possible in how they pay for goods and services at Best Buy," Best Buy said in a statement announcing the partnership.

Apple Pay, which launched in October on theiPhone 6 and 6 Plus, is a key feature of the new Apple Watch, which hit the market last week. Its NFC technology allows users to tap their devices at payment terminals in stores to buy merchandise and pay for services.

Apple faces stiff competition from other companies that offer similar mobile payments services. Samsung offers its new Samsung Pay feature on the new Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge and has unveiled a mobile payments service called Android Pay. PayPal, the digital payments unit being spun off from eBay later this year, plans to acquire Paydiant, a startup that helps companies such as Subway and Capitol One build mobile payments options.

Best Buy is one of several retailers part of MCX, which aims to challenge Apple Pay with its own CurrentC mobile-payments system. Apple Pay had opposition from a large group of MCX merchants early on, with some members of the consortium deciding to disable consumers' ability to use Apple Pay, in anticipation of the launch of MCX's alternative payments service.

The group denied encouraging the Rite Aid and CVS drugstore chains to block Apple Pay by disabling NFC terminals. CurrentC, which now uses QR codes instead of NFC, is expected to launch widely later this year.

MCX said Monday afternoon that Best Buy remains an MCX partner and supporter of CurrentC.

"We understand -- and strongly support -- our merchant partners' quest to do what's best for their customers," Scott Rankin, MCX's chief operating officer, said in a statement. "As we have stated in past, we are of the firm belief that there need to be at least 2 to 3 major players within the mobile payments ecosystem for it to succeed."

Apple first introduced the capability with about 500 financial-institution partners and 220,000 US merchant locations that take mobile payments via NFC's short-range, secure wireless capabilities. In its first three months on the market, Apple Pay expanded to availability in more than 700,000 locations, Apple CEO Tim Cook said last month.

Earlier Monday, the credit card Discovery announced that its 61 million card holders would be able toadd their Discover card to the Apple Pay system later this year, giving Apple access to a large pool of potential Apple Pay customers. With the announcement, Discover joins previous partners Visa, MasterCard and American Express, giving Apple a lock on all four major credit cards in the US.

Facebook Messenger app adds free video calls, works over both LTE and W-Fi

Facebook is now going after Skype.

The social network has launched a free video calling feature for Messenger, allowing you to have face-to-face conversations with your friends from across the world. Just tap the video icon in the top-right corner within an existing Messenger conversation to start a video call. The free feature, which works over both LTE and Wi-Fi, will directly rival not only Skype, but also Google Hangouts and Apple's FaceTime.

"Video calling in Messenger is available for calls made from a mobile phone to another mobile phone, even if one person is on iOS and the other person is on an Android device," explained Facebook in a blog post published on 27 April. "It’s fast, reliable and high quality."

Facebook introduced desktop video calling in 2011 via a Skype partnership, but it has since built its own voice-over-internet infrastructure. Video calling is now available within the Messenger for iOS and Android apps in the following countries: Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, France, Greece, Ireland, Laos, Lithuania, Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Poland, Portugal, UK, US, and Uruguay.

Facebook promised to expand video calling to other regions over the coming months.

NASA is about to solve a major mystery about dwarf planet Ceres

Back in January astronomers got one of their first close-up glimpses of dwarf planet Ceres, and they were baffled.

The tiny planet is the largest chunk of rock in the asteroid belt that hangs between Mars and Jupiter, and those close-up images, captured by NASA's Dawn spacecraft, revealed two huge, and hugely mysterious, bright spots on the surface.

The problem is that no one knows what in the world they are — and the more we observe and photograph them, the more complicated and confusing they get.

And people have some crazy theories about what they might be.

Maybe they're some kind of hybrid water volcano:

Air Into Water

Johathan Ritchey has invented the Watermill, which is an atmospheric water generator. It converts air into fresh water.
This latest technology invention produces fresh water at a cost of about 3 cents a liter (1 quart). Originally designed for areas that do not have clean drinking water, the Watermill is for households that prefer an eco-friendly, cost effective alternative to bottled water.
Atmospheric water generators convert air into water when the temperature of the air becomes saturated with enough water vapor that it begins to condense (dew point).
"What is unique about the Watermill is that it has intelligence," says Ritche. This makes the appliance more efficient. It samples the air every 3 minutes to determine the most efficient time to convert the air into water.
It will also tell you when to change the carbon filter and will shut itself off if it cannot make pure clean water.

Vein Identification

Another technology innovation is the biometric identification and security device known as PalmSecure.

It works by identifying the vein pattern in the palms of our hands.

Similar to our fingerprints, vein patterns are unique to each individual. The purported advantages of this technology is that it is less expensive, easier to manage, and is more reliable than traditional methods of identification.

10TB solid state drives may soon be possible

An innovative new process architecture can extend Moore's Law for flash storage – bringing significant improvements in density while lowering the cost of NAND flash.

Intel Corporation – in partnership with Micron – have announced the availability of 3D NAND, the world's highest-density flash memory. Flash is the storage technology used inside the lightest laptops, fastest data centres, and nearly every cellphone, tablet and mobile device.

3D NAND works by stacking the components in vertical layers with extraordinary precision to create devices with three times higher data capacity than competing NAND technologies. This enables more storage in a smaller space, bringing significant cost savings, low power usage and higher performance to a range of mobile consumer devices, as well as the most demanding enterprise deployments.

As data cells begin to approach the size of individual atoms, traditional "planar" NAND is nearing its practical scaling limits. This poses a major challenge for the memory industry. 3D NAND is poised to make a dramatic impact by keeping flash storage aligned with Moore's Law, the exponential trend of performance gains and cost savings, driving more widespread use of flash storage in the future.

"3D NAND technology has the potential to create fundamental market shifts," said Brian Shirley, vice president of Memory Technology and Solutions at Micron Technology. "The depth of the impact that flash has had to date – from smartphones to flash-optimised supercomputing – is really just scratching the surface of what's possible."

One of the most significant aspects of this breakthrough is in the foundational memory cell itself. Intel and Micron used a floating gate cell, a universally utilised design refined through years of high-volume planar flash manufacturing. This is the first use of a floating gate cell in 3D NAND, which was a key design choice to enable greater performance, quality and reliability.

The data cells are stacked vertically in 32 layers to achieve 256Gb multilevel cell (MLC) and 384Gb triple-level cell (TLC) dies within a standard package. This can enable gum stick-sized SSDs with 3.5TB of storage and standard 2.5-inch SSDs with greater than 10TB. Because capacity is achieved by stacking cells vertically, individual cell dimensions can be considerably larger. This is expected to increase both performance and endurance and make even the TLC designs well-suited for data centre storage.

Key product features of this 3D NAND design include:

• Large Capacities – Triple the capacity of existing technology, up to 48GB of NAND per die, enabling 750GB to fit in a single fingertip-sized package.

• Reduced Cost per GB – First-generation 3D NAND is architected to achieve better cost efficiencies than planar NAND.

• Fast – High read/write bandwidth, I/O speeds and random read performance.

• Green – New sleep modes enable low-power use by cutting power to inactive NAND die (even when other dies in the same package are active), dropping power consumption significantly in standby mode.

• Smart – Innovative new features improve latency and increase endurance over previous generations, and also make system integration easier.

The 256Gb MLC version of 3D NAND is sampling with select partners today, and the 384Gb TLC design will be sampling later this spring. The fab production line has already begun initial runs, and both devices will be in full production by the fourth quarter of this year. Both companies are also developing individual lines of SSD solutions based on 3D NAND technology and expect those products to be available within the next year.