Google is adding a super secret new folder to its Files app (Credits: Getty Images)
Google is adding a new PIN-protected folder to its popular files application, internet reports have suggested.
According to 9to5Google, the folder will be encrypted and its contents protected from being accessed by other apps.
The folder will be stored locally on your phone, so there’s no option for its sensitive contents to be spied during transmission to a server or other cloud service.
‘Importantly, to ensure the security of your files, there is no built-in method to recover the password if you ever happen to forget it — or if a bad actor tries to get to your files,’ reports 9to5Google.
The existence of the new folder hasn’t been acknowledged by Google so it may just be internet gossiping. But it would jive with a more privacy-focused approach Google is pursuing with the next version of its Android operating system.
Google’s Android 11 update will be more privacy-focused (Google)
‘Android 11 has even more granular controls for the most sensitive permissions,’ said Dave Burke, the VP of Android engineering at Google.
‘With one-time permissions you can grant apps access to your microphone, camera or location, just that one time. The next time the app needs access to these sensors, it will have to ask you for permission again.
‘In addition, if you haven’t used an app for an extended period of time, we will “auto-reset†all of the permissions associated with that app and notify you of the same. You can always choose to re-grant the app permissions the next time you open the app.’
Later this year, if all goes well, the International Space Station will receive a very important delivery: a new and improved toilet system.
It has a fancier name, of course; officially, the commode is NASA’s Universal Waste Management System (UWMS). The system is designed to bridge the gap between current lavatorial space technology and what humans will need to make extended visits to, say, Mars, in comfort. But there’s nothing like a plumbing problem to make any trip seem much longer than it is, so before engineers take UWMS that far from the comforts of home, they want to test it in orbit.
The launch is targeted for no earlier than the fall, a NASA spokesperson confirmed to Space.com, although the agency is still determining what spacecraft will carry the new plumbing up.
In the long term, the new toilet is meant to prepare waste-management engineers for some of the challenges experts anticipate on future missions, Jim Broyan, a deputy program manager for Environmental Control and Life Support Technology and Crew Health and Performance at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, said during a meeting of the Committee on Space Research, or COSPAR, on May 20.
The meeting focused on what human missions to Mars mean for planetary protection, the practice of looking to protect both Earth and the rest of the solar system from cross-contamination by living organisms. Waste collection and storage are ripe for such cross-contamination, of course, since human waste is full of microbes. So future Mars visitors won’t necessarily be able to take the approach of Apollo astronauts on the moon, who simply left bags of human waste on the lunar surface.
For Mars missions, which by necessity will be much longer flights, volume is another challenge. Broyan said that current estimates suggest Mars missions would need to manage about 600 lbs. (270 kilograms) of solid waste, about 75% of which is water.
Those challenges mean that before humans head to Mars, waste-management experts have, well, a bucket list, Broyan said. “Our future goals are to stabilize and dry the metabolic waste to make it microbially inactive and possibly reuse that water, reduce the amount of consumables for the potty, because it does really accumulate on a long mission, and we’re also looking at, Can we reuse some of the waste?”
A prototype of the Universal Waste Management System. (Image credit: NASA)
And while the current standard practice of adding stench-dampening charcoal to fecal containers and storing those containers on the ship works now, for longer missions it is less appealing and may require too much mass.
The new station-bound toilet won’t tackle all of those challenges single-handedly, but it will improve on previous NASA designs for the shuttle and space station and incorporate crew feedback about those systems. The UWMS is also crucial to support the larger population on the U.S. side of the space station that the coming rise in commercial crew missions will facilitate, according to NASA.
The toilet currently on offer on the U.S. side of the space station was designed in the 1990s and based on its shuttle counterpart, according to a detailed review of space toiletry. But the apparatus has its flaws. It can be clunky to use, particularly for women, and it is “sensitive to crew alignment on the seat,” sometimes resulting in messes, according to that review.
So NASA has tried to keep the aspects that have gotten positive reviews while trimming mass and volume and making some design changes, like adjusting the shape of the seat and replacing the apparatus that compresses the waste.
Another change mimics a feature of the toilet on the Russian side of the space station, where astronauts simply hook their feet into toe bars, rather than the thigh bars used on the American equivalent to anchor the astronaut in the microgravity environment.
The UWMS will remain on the space station for the rest of the orbiting laboratory’s lifetime, and a second toilet of the same model will fly on the Orion capsule that astronauts use to fly around the moon on the first crewed Artemis mission in NASA’s ambitious lunar return plan, according to the agency.
As COVID-19 cases surge in Mexico, a doctor in Mexico City and nurse in Tijuana — the two virus hotspots — talk about the strains and grief of treating patients over the last several weeks.
Actor Sushant Singh Rajput was found dead in his apartment in Mumbai on Sunday. On Monday, the police confirmed that the cause of death is suicide. Choreographer and filmmaker Remo D’Souza has seen Sushant’s rise from a TV artiste to a movie star. While talking to a news agency, Remo said that the actor had it in him to make it big in the movies.
Remo D’Souza was one of the judges of the reality dance show Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa season 4 of which Sushant was a contestant. Remo, who has made several dance films, was in talks with Sushant for a dance film. The filmmaker revealed that Sushant had once told him that he is such a good dancer and yet he has not cast him any of his dance films. At that time, Remo told him that he will be making many dance films and that they will work together in the future. Remo told him that they will sit and discuss a film when their schedules get cleared and the dates get sorted.
Remo said that he still cannot believe what happened. He said that even though on-screen they shared the relation of a judge and contestant, off-screen they were good friends. He said that Sushant had all the qualities of a potential movie star when he was on Jhalak: looks, body, danced well and was well-spoken.
The emergency preparedness activities now underway to combat the coronavirus pandemic offer insight about our readiness to deal with a dangerous incoming asteroid, experts say.
Humanity can learn some valuable lessons about planetary defense from the things that have gone right and wrong in the coronavirus fight, according to asteroid scientists and an authority on emergency preparedness.
“Speaking for myself, the novel coronavirus is a good case study of mistakes to avoid when planning to prevent an asteroid impact,” said Thomas Jones, a scientist, author and retired NASA astronaut who flew on four space shuttle missions to Earth orbit. He chairs the Association of Space Explorers’ Near Earth Objects Committee.
The global response to the virus has illustrated some cooperation through the World Health Organization, Jones said, but as some of the data given to the WHO has been spurious, false or incorrect, that organization’s response was stymied and delayed somewhat.Â
Most nations have chosen their own path — granted, with international expertise and consultations — in responding with their own interests uppermost. Resources and manufacturing priorities were allotted individually, nation to nation, with subsequent delays, Jones said.
Experts have held tabletop exercises to help coordinate responses to potential strikes by dangerous asteroids and comets. (Image credit: The Aerospace Corporation, via NASA/FEMA)
“This is understandable, but it’s not a good model for dealing with an asteroid impact threat. A fragmented, staggered and uneven response to an impact threat is a recipe for delay and inaction, foreclosing options to deflect the asteroid,” Jones told Space.com.
“We’ll need transparent sharing of all observations of the object, and international vetting of all the impact predictions,” he added. “Any required deflection campaign will only succeed if an internationally supported consortium develops and carries out the effort, with ongoing, shared insight into every step of development.”
Jones said that, without that shared confidence, nations will defend themselves unilaterally, leading to lost time, wasted resources and increased risk of failure. “Open cooperation gives us the best chance to assess the threat properly, mount a series of credible deflection missions (if needed) and turn away an impact catastrophe.”
This schematic of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) mission shows the impact on the moonlet of asteroid (65803) Didymos. Post-impact observations from Earth-based optical telescopes and planetary radar will, in turn, measure the change in the moonlet’s orbit about the parent body. Also shown is a planned ride-along cubesat, the Italian Space Agency’s Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroid. (Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab)
Early detection
There are some parallels between the pandemic the globe is experiencing and the hazardous asteroid concern, said Lindley Johnson, NASA’s Planetary Defense Officer and Program Executive of the space agency’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO).
“The first is, of course, the importance of early detection,” Johnson told Space.com. “The earlier you detect the threat, the more chance you have to take actions to prevent it before it can have significant impact.”
Then there is the same aspect of being adequately prepared for an event that, at some point in the future, is inevitable. A devastating asteroid impact is going to happen, just as another dangerous disease is going to emerge, Johnson said. “The question is just when. This makes prudent actions important to be prepared — stockpiling of medical supplies and equipment in the case of pandemics; having adequately tested several measures for deflection in the case of asteroids.”
Johnson added that funding needed for planetary defense, perhaps about $200 million per year, “is probably significantly less than what might be prudent for preparation against a pandemic.”
NASA’s proposed Near-Earth Object Camera mission would make a comprehensive inventory of small bodies (asteroids and comets). (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Technological preparedness
Linda Billings, a consultant to NASA’s Astrobiology Program and the PDCO, also points to technological preparedness, particularly the need for a space-based near-Earth object survey telescope. “The small-bodies community has been saying this for years,” she said.
Furthermore, better ground-based observing systems and more missions to demonstrate deflection techniques are also needed, Billings said. As for lessons learned given the pandemic, “be prepared and don’t wait till a disaster occurs,” she said.
In the communications area, Billings said “there must be clear, concise, consistent messaging, which we do not have in the pandemic situation.” The near-Earth object awareness strategy and action plan lays out “who’s in charge of what in the event of an actual impact threat,” she said.
Early detection of an incoming space rock would allow deflection of the hazard. (Image credit: The Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Space Policy and Strategy)
“Potential asteroid impact and pandemics both demonstrate that low probability/high consequence events are really hard to get people to care about and prepare for,” Ropeik said. “We’ve known about both for a long time, but knowing and caring are two different things.”
By definition, rare events are infrequent, and as time passes since the last one, the threat loses its emotional valence, Ropeik said. “Without that it turns into an abstraction, only an idea that doesn’t feel viscerally real and threatening, and that’s what it takes to get the major investments required to prepare for something with large consequences. Sadly, and as proof of the point, this has been said many times before, about many risks, almost always in retrospect,” he said.
Only when the threat maintains its emotional valence, Ropeik added, does preparation begin to match the danger.Â
Ropeik said that Hong Kong was more ready for the COVID-19 pandemic because of how hard severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) hit there nearly 20 years ago. We are more prepared for an asteroid impact because of the 2013 Chelyabinsk asteroid event in Russia, he said, and before that the spate of catastrophe movies featuring some near-miss controversies.
“When the fear is deep enough, and real enough, we prepare more. Usually, however, it’s not,” Ropeik concluded.
Leonard David is the author of “Moon Rush: The New Space Race,” which was published by National Geographic in May 2019. A longtime writer for Space.com, David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. Follow us on Twitter@Spacedotcom orFacebook. This version of the story published on Space.com.
Saturn’s bold rings are not its only signature feature.
Saturn also boasts a six-sided feature at its north pole, which scientists first noticed when NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft visited Saturn in 1981. Saturn’s hexagon is mesmerizing but also odd: the strange phenomenon only appears at the planet’s north pole. In a new study, a researching duo investigated the dynamics of Saturn’s churning gas to figure out what sorts of planetary fluid dynamics are creating this mystifying structure.Â
Last year, Rakesh Yadav and Jeremy Bloxham from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, performed a monthlong computer simulation to understand the physics behind Saturn’s hexagon.Â
According to their paper, atmospheric flows within Saturn create large and small vortexes near the ringed planet’s north pole. A strong horizontal jet that runs about 60 degrees latitude above the equator gets pinched and confined by these vortexes, which defines the rim of the hexagon.Â
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured this natural-color view of Saturn’s north pole at a distance of approximately 611,000 miles (984,000 kilometers) away, on July 22, 2013. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)
One of the main points of the paper, according to Yadav, is that the vortexes do exist, but churn deep beneath the cloud tops and are therefore mostly invisible to spacecraft that have flown over Saturn like Voyager 2 and, more recently, NASA’s Cassini mission. After the Voyager 2 data came back to Earth, scientists hypothesized that the hexagon could have been caused by subsurface cyclones like this new study suggests.Â
Although Cassini’s observations of Saturn from 2004 to 2017 helped scientists learn more about the planet’s fluid dynamics, the theory about subsurface vortexes didn’t hold much footing when the spacecraft didn’t spot prominent signs of their existence, Yadav said.Â
Yadav performed model simulations of deep turbulent compressible convection, a phenomenon that happens when material at the bottom of a thick, multilayered substance of liquid or gas is hot at the bottom and cool at the top. That difference in temperature causes material to move in a circular up-down motion. Convection is pervasive throughout nature and is what creates hurricanes and tornadoes on Earth.
Yadav said the phenomenon is similar to what happens when someone puts cold water into a pot, ignites their stovetop and begins to heat up this water. The heat from the bottom of the pan stirs up the water as the water transfers heat upwards to the colder surface.Â
This movie, made from images obtained by Cassini’s imaging cameras, is the first to show Saturn’s hexagon in color filters and the first movie to show a complete view from the north pole down to about 70 degrees north latitude. One vortex at the lower left corner of the hexagon is visible, but the new simulation from researchers Rakesh Yadav and Jeremy Bloxham shows the numerous invisible vortexes that might be creating the hexagon. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/Hampton University)
Yadav said their simulation captured the physics behind the one-pole hexagon and offered up the possibility that in the past, Saturn may have had a hexagon in the south pole and not in the north pole, or maybe a hexagon at each pole.Â
The simulation didn’t achieve a hexagonal shape; it produced an angled object with nine sides instead of six. But the mechanics behind their simulation suggest that subsurface vortexes are behind the geometrical feature, Yadav said. “It’s very possible that with different conditions we can easily get six edges instead of nine.”
The computer simulations were challenging to run and researchers can only do small studies within existing parameters. This paper reported one case and Yadav hopes that researchers can run more cases in the future to better understand Saturn’s beauty mark.
The paper detailing this work was published June 8 in the journal Proceedings on the National Academy of the Sciences.Â
James Brokenshire announced Monday that the U.K. government now intends to start exchanging suspects’ data held in Britain with EU countries | Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP via Getty Images
Council of the EU had warned UK could be excluded from crime-fighting system if it didn’t ‘review’ its data-sharing policy.
LONDON — The British government plans to grant the EU access to data on British-based criminal suspects, after years of pressure from the bloc.
Security Minister James Brokenshire announced Monday that following a review of the policy of limiting data sharing via the so-called Prüm system of law enforcement, the U.K. government now intends to start exchanging suspects’ data held in England, Wales and Northern Ireland with EU countries.
It will also consult with the Scottish government whether to do the same for data held there, since this policy is a devolved competence for Scotland.
The Prüm system has become a crucial tool in the fight against crime in the EU, and includes DNA profiles and vehicle registration data, among other things, for law enforcement purposes.
The U.K. has taken part in it since July 2019, after then Prime Minister Theresa May agreed to share DNA profiles of British-based criminals with the EU, but not of criminal suspects. This decision did not go down well with other EU member countries, since London was still able to access information on suspects from them.
The Council of the EU had asked the U.K. to review its policy for data sharing by June 15 and warned the country could be excluded from the system within three months if it did not comply with the rule of reciprocity. “In order to meet that deadline, [U.K. Ambassador to the EU] Tim Barrow will shortly be instructed to notify the European institutions” of the U.K.’s decision, Brokenshire said in his written statement to parliament.
The leaders of the 27 EU countries had proposed allowing the U.K. to remain in the system after Brexit, but the European Parliament and the European Commission had pressed for the U.K. to start sharing data of suspects.
Brokenshire argued that law enforcement agencies have identified “risks and missed opportunities†associated with not sharing suspects’ data, and added that recent developments in data protection in the U.K. make it possible to share suspects’ information without the risk of innocent U.K. citizens “being caught up inappropriately in overseas criminal investigations.â€
“The Government has considered the impact of sharing suspects’ data as it concerns individual freedoms,†he said. “However, I am reassured by protections applicable to England and Wales which carefully govern the retention of biometric data, and which confer protections to data from individuals who have not been convicted.â€
Home Secretary Priti Patel is expected to expand on the policy change in a parliamentary statement later Monday.
Google said the error had occurred when it tried to change the photo.
His image was missing from the information box which appears on the right hand side of searches for his name, and also from lists drawn together by Google which featured him, such as British Prime Ministers.
In a series of tweets Google explained that in late April it had received criticism that the photograph which was being used, and had been selected automatically, was of a young and less-recognisable Churchill.
We’re aware an image for Sir Winston Churchill is missing from his Knowledge Graph entry on Google. We apologise for any concern. This was not purposeful & will be resolved. Images in such panels are automatically created & updated. During an update, they can briefly disappear….
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) June 14, 2020
End of Twitter post by @searchliaison
Its human reviewers determined that the image was indeed “not the most representative” of the former British PM, and blocked it in order for the system to automatically replace it with another.
“Normally, the image would update quickly. In this case, a bug in our systems prevented a new representative image from updating,” Google said.
“As a result, Churchill’s entry lacked an image from late April until this weekend, when the issue was brought to our attention, and resolved soon after.”
Image copyright United States Library of Congress
Image caption
The image has now been replaced with this one.
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