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The New Horizons probe blew past "Ultima Thule" on News Year's Day in 2019, and managed to snap an image of the object on the way. Unfortunately, bandwidth is limited when the probe is so far away that radio signals take 6 hours to reach Earth, so scientists only got a partial, fuzzy image in the following days. Fortunately, the probe eventually managed to transmit the full image, which NASA just processed and released.

The oblique lighting of this image reveals new topographic details along the day/night boundary, or terminator, near the top. These details include numerous small pits up to about 0.4 miles (0.7 kilometers) in diameter. The large circular feature, about 4 miles (7 kilometers) across, on the smaller of the two lobes, also appears to be a deep depression. Not clear is whether these pits are impact craters or features resulting from other processes, such as "collapse pits" or the ancient venting of volatile materials.

Discussion
Posted by alphaatlas January 25, 2019 10:45 AM (CST)

Pictures of the water ice in the Korolev crater on Mars have been released by the European Space Agency. The icy interior of the crater is maintained by a phenomenon know as an 'ice trap'. This occurs naturally when "the air moving over the deposit of ice cools down and sinks, creating a layer of cold air that sits directly above the ice itself." The cold air acts as a shield to keep the ice from heating up and disappearing. Since air is a poor conductor of heat, it exacerbates the effect and keeps the environment permanently icy.

These images are an excellent celebration of such a milestone. Taken by the Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC), this view of Korolev crater comprises five different ‘strips’ that have been combined to form a single image, with each strip gathered over a different orbit. The crater is also shown in perspective, context, and topographic views, all of which offer a more complete view of the terrain in and around the crater.

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Posted by cageymaru December 21, 2018 4:12 PM (CST)

Twitter user @nachoypistacho has uploaded images of what is supposedly the Nintendo 64 Classic from an unnamed, inside contact. Some believe these are just clever fakes due to the port design, however, which seem both fragile and impractical.

...the pictured extending old school socket doesn't seem like something Nintendo would do, as it would be very fragile and thus potentially a problem for it. The NES classic notably had something similar, but it didn't pop out nearly that far. Meanwhile, the mock controller ports, which have been cut from the picture, would essentially prevent you from inserting the controller. So, there's that as well.

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Posted by Megalith October 14, 2018 9:40 AM (CDT)

At this point, there are probably no surprises left for Google’s October 9th hardware event: images of the search giant’s Chrome OS tablet, the Google Pixel Slate, have now leaked, showing a dark blue device supporting a detachable keyboard and stylus. The processor used has managed to remain a secret, however.

There are black areas on both the sides of the device, and it could hint towards cellular connectivity, but we’re not sure about it. There appears to be a power button at the top and it could feature a built-in fingerprint reader. There’s also a USB Type-C port on one of its sides. The tablet also appears to feature front-facing stereo speakers.

Discussion
Posted by Megalith October 06, 2018 3:35 PM (CDT)

As part of the changes Alphabet is making to its various services, Google is now showing creator and copyright metadata in Google Images results. Every image will have an "image credit" button that users can click to see where it came from. This follows a recent EU crackdown on search providers allegedly distributing copyrighted images, as well as independent efforts to control it. As part of this initiative, Google "partnered" with CEPIC, which represents over 600 photo agencies across Europe, and with the International Press Telecommunications Council, which includes organizations such as AP, the New York Times, and the BBC. Just for reference, the image below did come from Paul Sawers at Venturebeat.

For context, Google has incurred the wrath of many agencies and photographers for scraping images from the original source and displaying them in high-resolution format rather than as thumbnails. Getty filed a complaint with the EU several years ago over the practice, though earlier this year Getty and Google declared a truce by entering a licensing partnership. So today is another step forward for Google in terms of building bridges with the photography world.

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Posted by alphaatlas September 27, 2018 12:16 PM (CDT)

The second iteration of the Surface Laptop has leaked ahead of Microsoft’s October 2 hardware event. While it is unknown how the specifications and features will differ, mobile phone site MySmartPrice has managed to get images of the device, some of which show the laptop in black.

Most of the changes in the Surface Laptop 2 are meant to be internal. The company will most likely use the latest-generation processors from Intel and a faster memory to go with it. We expect Microsoft to equip its upcoming laptop with 8th Gen. Intel Core series processors, LPDDR4 RAM, and SSD storage. An SD card slot and a USB Type-C port would’ve been nice, but we don’t always get what we want, do we?

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Posted by Megalith September 16, 2018 10:05 AM (CDT)

A Russian Telegram account owner has leaked images and an unboxing video of the upcoming Google Pixel 3 XL. It features USB-C headphones and 4GB of ram. More specifications and images are in the articles.

A hardware specifications app again confirms the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor with 4GB of RAM and 1440 x 2960 display for 494 PPI. The SIM card slot is located at the bottom-left of the phone next to the USB-C port.

Discussion
Posted by cageymaru August 08, 2018 11:43 AM (CDT)

The Very Large Telescope array (VLT) can now take images of distant objects with the same sharpness as the Hubble Space Telescope. It's able to do this by using an adaptive optics unit called the GALASCI. This technology filters out almost all of the atmospheric blurring encountered by terrestrial based telescopes. Because of their new capability this will enable astronomers to study areas of the sky that were otherwise understudied due to lack of Hubble telescope time. To top things off the new Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) will utilize this capability when it comes online. I can't wait to see what kind of discoveries come next.

Adaptive optics is a technique to compensate for the blurring effect of the Earth’s atmosphere, also known as astronomical seeing, which is a big problem faced by all ground-based telescopes. The same turbulence in the atmosphere that causes stars to twinkle to the naked eye results in blurred images of the Universe for large telescopes. Light from stars and galaxies becomes distorted as it passes through our atmosphere, and astronomers must use clever technology to improve image quality artificially.

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Posted by Montu July 19, 2018 10:45 AM (CDT)

Samsung is set to unveil the new Galaxy S9 and S9+ next week at Mobile World Congress 2018. Attendees of the show, and those wishing to view the event's livestream were encouraged to download an app called Unpacked 2018. Hidden away in the app is an Augmented Reality feature that allows people to scan the Samsung logo or box to see some teasers, a reddit user was able to decompile the app and find 3d models of the new Galaxy S9 hidden within. The full set of pictures can be found on XDA Developers. It looks like a Samsung Galaxy. Woo. At least the Bixby button is still there for all you Bixby fans.

This modification was not easily done, though, as the models are not inside the actual app but available on Samsung’s website. Thus, it required a modification to the Unpacked 2018 app and a proxy to download the 3D models. However, /u/thesbros was able to get it done, and we were able to access the Augmented Reality 3D models in order to show off what the Samsung Galaxy S9 will look like.

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Posted by rgmekanic February 21, 2018 3:57 PM (CST)

I am fairly sure that many of you have seen a large picture that is posted to a social media account, and then the content system crops that down to a small thumbnail. Many times you might have noticed, especially if you are the person making the post, that the thumbnail does not really show what you wanted to with the larger picture. The new-way and the old-way comparison below is a good example of what needs to be improved on, and Twitter seems to have figure out how to do this in real time.

Together, these two methods allowed us to crop media 10x faster than just a vanilla implementation of the model and before any implementation optimizations. This lets us perform saliency detection on all images as soon as they are uploaded and crop them in real-time. These updates are currently in the process of being rolled out to everyone on twitter.com, iOS and Android. Below are some more examples of how this new algorithm affects image cropping on Twitter.

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Posted by Kyle January 26, 2018 1:47 PM (CST)

Met police in London will be using AI to scan for images of child abuse/porn on suspects phones/devices in the next 2 to 3 years. They plan to move to this technology so their officers won't have to look at the approximately 53K devices per year for evidence. Once this technology is in action it will save human officers from the psychological trauma of having to wade through very distrubing images as well as speed up the task of doing so. Excellent use of AI as long as it doesn't miss anything.

The Met's digital forensics team uses bespoke software that can identify drugs, guns and money while scanning someone’s computer or phone. But it has proven problematic when searching for nudity. "Sometimes it comes up with a desert and it thinks its an indecent image or pornography," Mr Stokes said.

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Posted by Montu December 18, 2017 11:30 AM (CST)

Half a century after its construction, the Space Needle is about to undergo its biggest renovation yet: flooring in the restaurant will be replaced with glass, giving diners a view of Seattle Center 500 feet below; the observation deck will be retooled, its outside, cage-like enclosure replaced entirely with glass panels; and another set of elevators will be added. I’ve already lost my appetite.

The multi-year, $100 million Century Project is under way now at the 55-year-old icon, and the Seattle design firm Olson Kundig has released a series of dramatic images showing what changes to the observation deck and restaurant will look like. Want a glass of water or wine with your meal? It’ll pair well with the glass tables, chairs, windows and rotating floor in the reimagined space. Dropping a fork in this place is going to be a newsworthy event!

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Posted by Megalith October 05, 2017 1:10 PM (CDT)