Android M: Top New Features in the Next Major Android Release

Google on Thursday at its eighth I/O annual developers' conference, held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, revealed the next version of Android operating system dubbed Android M alongside announcing a new standalone service called Google Photos, which will store photos and videos for free.

The Mountain View company also released the new Android M developer preview, just like how Android Lollipop was released as Android L at last year's I/O conference. Similarly, the official name of the new OS version will only be revealed at the time of the next Nexus device launch, expected in October. Google also stressed that for Android M, the company has focused on improving the core experience of Android and has made some changes to the fundamentals of the platform apart from fixing several bugs. During the Google I/O keynote, the company also revealed that this time it will provide a clear timeline for Android M Developer Preview for testing and feedback to the preview build.

Here are biggest changes to Android that Google has introduced with Android M.

App Permissions
One of the biggest additions that Android M brings to the Android platform is the revamped app permissions. The company, as rumoured previously, announced increased user control of app permissions in the M release. Android M also changes existing permissions system by breaking down user permissions into specific categories, and having apps ask the user for permission at the time access to a feature is required. 

 This changes how apps handle permissions, with apps now prompting requests for permissions when running, which means popups will flash in the right context and let users grant permissions for specific features. Additionally, users can manage all their app permissions in settings. The company has advised developers to design their apps in a way that they prompt permission requests in context, and even account for permissions that are not granted. "As more devices upgrade to M, app permission behavior will be a critical development flow to test," writes Google.

Now on Tap
With Android M, Google Now gets a major revamp with the Now on Tap feature. It brings a major overhaul to how Google can provide contextual information within an app itself. It works within any app and automatically searches the context present on the screen by just long pressing the home button. 

The Now on Tap search (see below screenshot) is different from conventional search as it presents cards with data and actions. Google gives an example of a texting app where you receive a text from a friend asking about dinner at a new restaurant - now you can ask Google Now to search about the new place without leaving the app. The company wants developers to implement App Indexing for Google Search to let users discover and re-engage with apps through Now on Tap.

Web Experience
Google at I/O 2015 also revealed a new Chrome feature that will change the Web experience for Android users, called Chrome Custom Tabs. Instead of embedding a Web view in an app, developers can enable a Google Chrome overlay on top of the active app. 

This overlay or Custom Tab will give users the convenience of Chrome's power and security along with their saved settings and passwords. The feature will become available on a stable version of Chrome for Android sometime in Q3 2015.

App Links
The next improvement in the latest Android M release is intended towards handling Web links. This means Google wants its OS to easily handle links between apps with its Android M release. Until now, clicking a link within an app prompted a popup message asking user to open it within the app or to open it in a Web browser. Instead, with Android M, developers can have the operating system verify whether a link should open within an app or open via a new one. Google details that developers can add an auto Verify attribute to their app manifest so that users can be linked deep into the native app without any disambiguation prompt.

Mobile Payments
Google was rumored to be working on its new Android Pay mobile payment system for a long time and the company made it official at the I/O conference. The company revealed that Android Pay was developed on its work with Near Field Communications (NFC) in Android Gingerbread (v2.3) and Host Card Emulation in Android KitKat (v4.4). Android Pay will allow users to pay via their Android smartphones in stores or even in Android Pay partner apps. The new system will securely store details of credit cards, loyalty cards, and other payment-related data on the device. Google did not reveal the timeline of Android Pay's roll out but said it would be available on Google Play for download soon.

Fingerprint Support

Fingerprint scanning technology on smartphones has been around for some time; though has been limited until now to select OEMs and their individual implementations. Google with its Android M release wants it to change and has added fingerprint APIs for developers to add into their apps. Google believes that native fingerprint support enhances the Android Pay feature that will allow users to confirm the purchase with their fingerprint. Apart from Android Pay, the feature will allow users to sign-in or authenticate themselves on apps, as well as on websites via Google Chrome.

Power Management
Every year we see Google coming up with a new feature in its latest Android release to improve upon battery usage. Last year it was Project Volta and this year Google is coming up with a new feature called Doze. The company believes that the new feature will make Android devices smart about managing power. With Android M release, the OS will realise via tracking motion detection whether the device has been left unattended for a while. Following this, Android will limit or 'exponentially' back off background activity of an app with the purpose of extending battery life. The best example of this can be the Twitter app which keeps on adding new tweets on top for the user to see only to use more data or Wi-Fi thus affecting the battery life. This will change with Android M.

New RAM manager
Google is also bringing a new RAM manager that will offer more details about memory usage than just readouts for running apps. The new RAM manager in the Android M Developer Preview will be available in Settings > Apps. The manager will now show users how much memory recent apps are eating up and will rate them "good" and "average". Much like before, it will show individual app information. This new feature will let users recognize the most memory-hungry apps installed on the system and can help them to get rid of them.

Adoptable Storage Devices
We already know that Google for several reasons forgoes an SD card slot for its Nexus range of devices. However, the Adoptable Storage Devices feature might be the first sign that Google is changing its strategy to add some more space into the device 'smartly.'

With Android M, Google is adding the Adoptable Storage Devices feature which will treat external storage devices such as SD cards as internal. In order to do this, Google wants you to format your micro SD card adding encryption which will make it only work on your device. The company will then let you use your micro SD card on stock Android devices either as a portable storage or an internal storage. If the latter, users can then choose to store apps, app data, and other data on the SD card. As for external storage devices like USB drives, the new feature will let users assign as portable storage, and use it with the native file manager and get notifications for quick actions on the drive.

New App Drawer
The Android M Developer Preview also brings redesigned app drawer. With Android M, the app drawer along with widget picker will scroll vertically instead of sideways in previous generations. The color design and icons looks similar to Android Lollipop.

Auto Backup and Restore for Apps
With Android M, Google will also be bringing what may be one of the most useful features for users often migrating between devices or formatting their smartphones - auto backup and restore for app data. With Android M, users will get their all apps backed up automatically to Google Drive - specifically settings and app data less than 25 MB in total.

The company confirmed that the automatic backups will occur every 24 hours and will not count towards the user's personal Drive storage share. Interestingly, the data of the app is uploaded to the user's Google Drive account after encryption. The feature would allow people signing into their Google account on new Android devices, or on a device after a factory reset, to recover all their app settings and app data once they reinstall their apps and sign-in.

USB Type-C Support
Google at I/O 2015 also announced that Android M will support USB Type-C ports. While this is great in terms of reversibility, and that with new Android devices with the port built-in users will never have to worry about which way their cable is facing, it also adds some other features. Since the standard allows for transfer of power, video, and audio in both directions, users can rely on just one port for their A/V needs, and, also charge other devices - this last was emphasized by Google at the announcement as well. With the new USB standard, users will also be able to charge their Android devices 3-5 times faster than earlier. Alongside, Android M will also get USB support for Midi devices.

Much like Android L, the new Android M Developer Preview includes an updated SDK with tools, system images for testing on the official Android emulator. It will be available for testing on Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 9, and Nexus Player devices.

Aspen (Colorado): Physicists working at CERN's Large Hadron Collider said today that they had discovered a new particle that looks for all the world like the Higgs boson, a long sought particle that is a key to understanding why elementary particles have mass and indeed to the existence of diversity and life in the universe.

"I think we have it," said Rolf Heuer, the Director General of CERN in an interview from his office outside of Geneva. His words signaled what is probably the beginning of the end of the longest most expensive manhunt in the history of science and, if scientists are lucky, could lead to a new understanding of how the universe began. 

Dr Heuer and others said that it was too soon to know for sure whether the new particle, which weighs in at 125 billion electron volts, the heaviest subatomic particle yet, fits the simplest description given by the Standard Model, the theory that has ruled physics for the last half century, or whether it is an imposter, a single particle or even the first of many. The latter possibilities are particularly exciting to physicists since they could point the way to new deeper ideas, beyond the Standard Model, about the nature of reality.

Nasa's New Horizons Spacecraft Sends Back Fresh Images of Pluto

Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft, on way to meet Pluto, has taken fresh images of the mysterious planet that reveal more detail about its complex and high contrast surface.

The images were taken from just under 77 million kilo meters away, using the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on New Horizons.

"As New Horizons closes in on Pluto, it is transforming from a point of light to a planetary object of intense interest. We are in for an exciting ride for the next seven weeks," said Jim Green, Nasa's director of planetary Science.

Pluto rotates around its axis every 6.4 Earth days and these images show the variations in Pluto's surface features during its rotation.

A technique called image DE convolution sharpened the raw, unprocessed pictures beamed back to Earth.

"These new images show us that Pluto's differing faces are each distinct; likely hinting at what may be very complex surface geology or variations in surface composition from place to place," added Alan Stern, New Horizons' principal investigator.

These images also continue to support the hypothesis that Pluto has a polar cap whose extent varies with longitude.

The astronomers will be able to make a definitive determination of the polar bright region's iciness when they get compositional spectroscopy of that region in July.

The images New Horizons return will dramatically improve in coming weeks as the spacecraft speeds closer to its July 14 encounter with the Pluto system, covering about 750,000 miles per day.

Following a January 2006 launch, New Horizons is currently about 2.95 billion miles from home.

The spacecraft is healthy and all systems are operating normally.

Security Enthusiasts May Revive TrueCrypt Tool After Mysterious Shutdown

A team of security experts may seek to restore and improve a popular computer encryption system after its developers mysteriously shut it down, claiming "unfixed security issues," a leader of the effort told Reuters on Thursday.

TrueCrypt, one of a number of programs that encrypt all of a user's hard drive, had gained popularity after fugitive former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden praised it and law enforcement officials complained of their inability to crack it.

The software's code has been publicly available for years, but its developers have not spoken publicly and their true identities are unclear. After Snowden's revelations, supporters contributed some $70,000 to an effort to verify the security of the code.

TrueCrypt had passed the earliest testing, so it shocked many technologists Wednesday when the TrueCrypt website announced it would discontinue encryption support and urged users to move to rival software.

"WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues," the notice said."You should migrate any data encrypted by TrueCrypt to encrypted disks or virtual disk images."

Speculation has mounted over the cause of the reversal, with some suggesting that the developers had tired of the decade-long project and others guessing that U.S. authorities had demanded a back-door key from the programmers, as happened with anonymous email provider Lavabit.

As that debate raged Thursday, an audit team funded by the $70,000 was preparing to announce that it would continue its quest to determine the security of TrueCrypt and would seek to fix legal issues with the license to the code, said Matthew Green, a Johns Hopkins University cryptography professor helping lead the effort.

If the license issues are resolved, the group could continue to develop and improve the software, though Green said "we're not going to commit to a fork yet." A fork is a split in development, where code can be steered in a new direction.

God particle: What is the Higgs Particle and what it does?

Scientists at the CERN research centre have found a new subatomic particle that could be the Higgs boson, the basic building block of the universe. 

Joe Incandela, spokesman for one of the two teams hunting for the Higgs particle told an audience at CERN near Geneva: "This is a preliminary result, but we think it's very strong and very solid."

What is the Higgs Boson?

The Higgs is the last missing piece of the Standard Model, the theory that describes the basic building blocks of the universe. The other 11 particles predicted by the model have been found and finding the Higgs would validate the model. Ruling it out or finding something more exotic would force a rethink on how the universe is put together.

Scientists believe that in the first billionth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was a gigantic soup of particles racing around at the speed of light without any mass to speak of. It was through their interaction with the Higgs field that they gained mass and eventually formed the universe.

The Higgs field is a theoretical and invisible energy field that pervades the whole cosmos. Some particles, like the photons that make up light, are not affected by it and therefore have no mass. Others are not so lucky and find it drags on them as porridge drags on a spoon.

Picture George Clooney (the particle) walking down a street with a gaggle of photographers (the Higgs field) clustered around him. An average guy on the same street (a photon) gets no attention from the paparazzi and gets on with his day. The Higgs particle is the signature of the field - an eyelash of one of the photographers.

The particle is theoretical, first posited in 1964 by six physicists, including Briton Peter Higgs.

The search for it only began in earnest in the 1980s, first in Fermilab's now mothballed Tevatron particle collider near Chicago and later in a similar machine at CERN, but most intensively since 2010 with the start-up of the European centre's Large Hadron Collider.

What is the Standard Model?

The Standard Model is to physics what the theory of evolution is to biology. It is the best explanation physicists have of how the building blocks of the universe are put together. It describes 12 fundamental particles, governed by four basic forces.

But the universe is a big place and the Standard Model only explains a small part of it. Scientists have spotted a gap between what we can see and what must be out there. That gap must be filled by something we don't fully understand, which they have dubbed 'dark matter'. Galaxies are also hurtling away from each other faster than the forces we know about suggest they should. This gap is filled by 'dark energy'. This poorly understood pair are believed to make up a whopping 96 percent of the mass and energy of the cosmos.

Confirming the Standard Model, or perhaps modifying it, would be a step towards the holy grail of physics - a 'theory of everything' that encompasses dark matter, dark energy and the force of gravity, which the Standard Model also does not explain. It could also shed light on even more esoteric ideas, such as the possibility of parallel universes.

CERN spokesman James Gillies has said that just as Albert Einstein's theories enveloped and built on the work of Isaac Newton, the work being done by the thousands of physicists at CERN has the potential to do the same to Einstein's work.

What is the Large Hadron Collider?

The Large Hadron Collider is the world's biggest and most powerful particle accelerator, a 27-km (17-mile) looped pipe that sits in a tunnel 100 metres underground on the Swiss/French border. It cost 3 billion euros to build.

Two beams of protons are fired in opposite directions around it before smashing into each other to create many millions of particle collisions every second in a recreation of the conditions a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, when the Higgs field is believed to have 'switched on'.

The vast amount of data produced is examined by banks of computers. Of all the trillions of collisions, very few are just right for revealing the Higgs particle. That makes the hunt for the Higgs slow, and progress incremental.

What is the Threshold for Proof?

To claim a discovery, scientists have set themselves a target for certainty that they call "5 sigma". This means that there is a probability of less than one in a million that their conclusions from the data harvested from the particle accelerator are the result of a statistical fluke.

The two teams hunting for the Higgs at CERN, called Atlas and CMS, now have twice the amount of data that allowed them to claim 'tantalising glimpses' of the Higgs at the end of last year and this could push their results beyond that threshold.

CERN experiments observe particle consistent with long-sought Higgs Boson

Geneva: One of the two independent teams at the world's biggest atom smasher said today that it has found strong evidence of a new subatomic particle that looks like the one believed to give all matter in the universe size and shape.

Here's what CERN had to say on the development:

At a seminar held at CERN today as a curtain raiser to the year's major particle physics conference, ICHEP2012 in Melbourne, the ATLAS and CMS experiments presented their latest preliminary results in the search for the long sought Higgs particle. Both experiments observe a new particle in the mass region around 125-126 Gev

"We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of 5 sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV. The outstanding performance of the LHC and ATLAS and the huge efforts of many people have brought us to this exciting stage," said ATLAS experiment spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti, "but a little more time is needed to prepare these results for publication."

"The results are preliminary but the 5 sigma signal at around 125 GeV we're seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it's the heaviest boson ever found," said CMS experiment spokesperson Joe Incandela. "The implications are very significant and it is precisely for this reason that we must be extremely diligent in all of our studies and cross-checks."

"It's hard not to get excited by these results," said CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci. " We stated last year that in 2012 we would either find a new Higgs-like particle or exclude the existence of the Standard Model Higgs. With all the necessary caution, it looks to me that we are at a branching point: the observation of this new particle indicates the path for the future towards a more detailed understanding of what we're seeing in the data."

The results presented today are labelled preliminary. They are based on data collected in 2011 and 2012, with the 2012 data still under analysis.  Publication of the analyses shown today is expected around the end of July. A more complete picture of today's observations will emerge later this year after the LHC provides the experiments with more data.

The next step will be to determine the precise nature of the particle and its significance for our understanding of the universe. Are its properties as expected for the long-sought Higgs boson, the final missing ingredient in the Standard Model of particle physics? Or is it something more exotic? The Standard Model describes the fundamental particles from which we, and every visible thing in the universe, are made, and the forces acting between them. All the matter that we can see, however, appears to be no more than about 4% of the total. A more exotic version of the Higgs particle could be a bridge to understanding the 96% of the universe that remains obscure.

"We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature," said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. "The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle's properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe."

Positive identification of the new particle's characteristics will take considerable time and data. But whatever form the Higgs particle takes, our knowledge of the fundamental structure of matter is about to take a major step forward.

A new particle could be Physics' Holy Grail

Aspen (Colorado): Physicists working at CERN's Large Hadron Collider said today that they had discovered a new particle that looks for all the world like the Higgs boson, a long sought particle that is a key to understanding why elementary particles have mass and indeed to the existence of diversity and life in the universe.

"I think we have it," said Rolf Heuer, the Director General of CERN in an interview from his office outside of Geneva. His words signaled what is probably the beginning of the end of the longest most expensive manhunt in the history of science and, if scientists are lucky, could lead to a new understanding of how the universe began. 

Dr Heuer and others said that it was too soon to know for sure whether the new particle, which weighs in at 125 billion electron volts, the heaviest subatomic particle yet, fits the simplest description given by the Standard Model, the theory that has ruled physics for the last half century, or whether it is an imposter, a single particle or even the first of many. The latter possibilities are particularly exciting to physicists since they could point the way to new deeper ideas, beyond the Standard Model, about the nature of reality.


Joe Incandela, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and spokesperson for one of two groups reporting data, Wednesday called the discovery, " very, very significant. It's something that may, in the end, be one of the biggest observations of any new phenomena in our field in the last 30 or 40 years, going way back to the discovery of quarks, for example."

Here at the Aspen Center for Physics, a retreat for scientists that will celebrate its 50th birthday Saturday, bleary-eyed physicists watched their colleagues read off the results in a webcast from CERN. That was a scene that was duplicated in Melbourne, Australia, where physicists had gathered for a major conference, to Los Angeles to Chicago to Princeton, New York City, London, and beyond, everywhere that members of a curious species have dedicated their lives and fortunes to the search for their origins in a dark universe.