‘Futurefon’ Crowdfunded on Indiegogo Was Part Of a Multimillion-dollar Scam

“The crowdfunded phone of the future was a multimillion-dollar scam,” reports the Verge: In 2014, Jeffrey Tschiltsch opened an email from Indiegogo and saw the future of computing. The email showed something called the “Dragonfly Futurefon,” a kind of computer-phone hybrid. The Futurefon’s page showed a sleek, palm-sized touchscreen that slotted into a laptop dock, then folded flat and flipped open…

Hyundai Releases Car With Solar Panel Roof

Hyundai has released a version of its Sonata hybrid that has solar panels to help charge its battery. The BBC reports: The Korean car maker said up to 60% of the power for the car’s battery could be supplied if the solar roof was used for six hours a day. The panels would provide enough power to propel the Sonata for…

The Hottest Phones For the Next Billion Users Aren’t Smartphones

Millions of first-time internet consumers from the Ivory Coast to India and Indonesia are connecting to the web on smart feature phones that cost only about $25. “[T]hese hybrid phones, fueled by inexpensive mobile data, provide some basic apps and internet access in addition to calling and texting,” the Wall Street Journal reports. From the report: While global smartphone sales began…

Japan Approves First Human-Animal Embryo Experiments

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Nature: A Japanese stem-cell scientist is the first to receive government support to create animal embryos that contain human cells and transplant them into surrogate animals since a ban on the practice was overturned earlier this year. Hiromitsu Nakauchi, who leads teams at the University of Tokyo and Stanford University in California, plans to…

Largest Hybrid Electric Plane Set To Take Flight

Ampair, a Los Angeles clean tech company in my neck of the woods, is set to begin accepting orders for a hybrid electric aircraft at the EAA AirVenture airshow in Wisconsin next week. Dubbed the EEL, the aircraft is in fact a retrofit of a Cessna 337, an aircraft that has a forward-mounted prop engine that pulls and a rear-mounted prop…

Weird whale may be a hybrid of a narwhal mother and beluga father

DNA analysis of an unusually shaped skull found in West Greenland suggests the creature was a hybrid male whale, with a narwhal mother and beluga father Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2207013-weird-whale-may-be-a-hybrid-of-a-narwhal-mother-and-beluga-father/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…