GPS Signals Will Improve Thanks To Massive $8bn Overhaul

Despite fears last year that the US Air Force wouldn't be able to afford many more GPS satellites, a massive $8bn upgrade is being planned for overhauling the satellites, replacing each of the 24 satellites over the next decade.

The Los Angeles Air Force Base in El Segundo will be working on the upgrade (said to be three years behind schedule), with 24 going "upstairs" and six being kept back in case of damage. The new satellites will be targeting outages, and will triple the signals available for commercial use—meaning that accessing Google Maps on our phones, using Sat-Navs in our cars, or even withdrawing money from ATMs will be faster and more accurate than before.

Google: The Next 6 Months of Android Will "Blow Your Mind"

Android 2.2 is out, and it's pretty nice! But what's next for Android? A better keyboard? More sexy? And how exactly does Google decide what goes into each version of Android anyway? Let's ask Lead Android Andy Rubin.

The highlights, if you don't want to read the interview below (which is fairly interesting if you're into Android, if I do say so myself):

• It's actually "pretty random" what goes into every version of Android, and
they don't plan more than one release out
• There's not much they can do about phones with custom UIs lagging behind on
new versions of Android
• They know the keyboard could use some work
• HTC may very well be on their own with Apple's patent lawsuit
• The next 6 months will "blow your mind"

Gizmodo: So my personal thing, the one question I want to ask personally, is when is the keyboard going to get better?

Andy: I mean, it does need a little bit of improvement. I think we did a pretty good job given that it's pretty generic for all different screen sizes—you have small screens, big screens, you have landscape, you have portrait. But what I think you start needing is more specific for the device. It's a framework—pretty generic—and we need to do a little better job. The voice team, I think, did a good job of basically making the keyboard kind of optional in some areas. I speak to my phone when I'm sending SMSes. I speak to it, and correct it a little bit with the keyboard. My primary use case is voice, but I think you're right, we do need to be kind of reviving it a little bit.

A lot of that, it's not necessarily the software—a lot of the time it's the type of touch screen the OEM uses. You've seen all those tests where they have like the Droid touchscreen, the Nexus touchscreen—they're all a little different and it's hard to make one keyboard work across all those different flavors of touch screens.

Gizmodo: We're up to Froyo 2.2 now, but we have devices with custom interfaces, which often lag behind latest version of Android. People with, say, a Droid Eris or a Hero waited around 6 months or longer just to get to 2.1, and now 2.2 is coming. So how do you address that sort of issue and where does Google stand on that type of thing?

Andy: I mean, if I was like a dictator I would enforce this stuff and everyone would have to have the same version at the same time and there would be a big switch with great fanfare, but it's just not in the cards. So we'll do a great version, and if they decide to adopt it, they'll adopt it. The difference between those two models: The first model, it's really hard for people to differentiate, everybody gets the same thing. So you are kind of commoditizing a whole slew of companies in the process and that's painful because people will literally go out of business potentially. In our model, it allows differentiation. At the platform layer, it is still compatible, so the apps in the marketplace will still run in the platform. But yeah, they have to modulate how quickly they can put their differentiating features on top of the base platform, and that's a race.

Gizmodo: But if you're not running 2.1, for instance, you can't get the official Twitter app.

Andy: I mean there are apps written for Vista, just like Photoshop CS5 does not run on Windows 3.1. I mean it's just a fact, there's nothing new here. This is how it has always been and that's why I made the distinction of legacy. We have legacy and if somebody wants to use a feature that's in the new OS, they really can't run that app on an older OS. So it's just things are happening so quickly that it becomes really obvious that we went from 2.0 to 2.2 in a very short time frame. I think that will slow down a little bit. I'm actually advocating coming out with releases around the buying seasons, May and September, October.

Gizmodo: So how does the update process go? How do you decide what goes into each release?

Andy: It's pretty random. We roadmap one release out, so we don't plan out the year, or two years or five years like a lot of other people do. It's more run like an internet company would run it, so there's a lot of iteration and what we are finding is innovation comes from all over the place. Like the Simplify Media guys, that was a company we acquired and now their stuff is in the Froyo release.

Gizmodo: HTC been in a sort of interesting position in terms of patents—they're licensing technology from Microsoft. That kind of actually makes Android not free for them to use. Are you worried about that in the future?

Andy: If I do an implementation of an MP3 codec, down the line, the guy selling the device—the guy that's making the money—he's going to have to pay a royalty to the MPEG association, the guys who own that intellectual property around that. If I implement the ActiveSync protocol and talked to Exchange servers, somebody's going to have to pay Microsoft for the royalty. And that happens in phones today—there's no difference between Android or something else.

Gizmodo: What is it you want to fix or add to an Android next? Like what's on your list of "Things I Wished I Could Have Done"?

Andy: Well, even to me, when we released the first version, it didn't feel like a 1.0, it kind of felt like a 0.8. If you look at where we were 18 months ago and where we are today, that just makes the future brighter. Because the rate at which we went from that kind of 0.8 to 2.2 was so fast that we're just earning how to master that type of engineering—that type of iterative engineering—and all of the innovation, I mean it's game on. There is going to be stuff that's just going to blow your mind. In 6 months. Before it was 18 months, now it's 6 months.

Gizmodo: So where do you want to see Android in a year or two, in terms of bigger goals?

Andy: For Android it's a numbers game. It's an end product with end OEMs and product categories today, but what we demonstrated at IO was pretty unique. We demonstrated big screen and small screen; we demonstrated ARM processor and Intel processor, and we demonstrated stuff from different OEMs: HTC, and Sony on the TV side. So look, we're cross product category, cross manufacturer, cross CPU architecture, agnostic, and we have all the services pointed to the platform, and the platform is just going to go pretty broad across those product categories. It's never been done before.

If you look at it as a graph, we're right in the middle of a hockey stick right now. You don't realize that you're right in the middle of it until after the fact and you're looking at it—oh that's where it was, but we're right in the middle of it right now. So I think it's just going to be exponential in the amount of adoption.

Thanks to Google VP of Engineering, and head of Android Andy Rubin for talking to us!

Send an email to matt buchanan, the author of this post, at matt@gizmodo.com.

Eureka

And thus, dear students, we have arrived at the Formula for understanding women!

Oil Reporter App Makes Sure No Toxic Sludge Goes Unnoticed

Oil Reporter isn't a public shaming campaign for BP—no, that'll take care of itself just fine, thanks. This iPhone app, which lets Gulf Coast residents record every oily bird and patch of ruined swampland, is about fixing things.

Oil Reporter isn't that different from any other crowd-sourced reporting app, technically speaking. I mean, in terms of raw functionality, it's not that different from, say, the app AT&T has its customers use to report dropped calls: Each report contains relevant information about the location, time and circumstances of the incident, which presumably help the recipient fix the problem.

Oil Reporter sends its decidedly more urgent reports to an organization called CrisisCommons, which is dedicated to aggregating massive amounts of crowd-sourced data to help NGOs, relief organizations and corporations and government agencies involved understand the scope and severity of a given problem. (And honestly, most stories about the Gulf oil spill are actually about changes in the known scope and severity of the disaster, right?)

Oil Reporter is free, obviously, and if you live on the Gulf Coast, or in any of the areas where the spill is projected to contaminate, you should be put off by its minimal set of launch features—CrisisCommons developed Oil Reporter first and foremost as a framework for other disaster relief apps, so features like native geotagging are on their way, hopefully (scratch that: probably) before the earth stops vomiting its blood into some of the most fragile ecosystems in the country. [iTunes via 148Apps]

This is the end of the world!

Creature comfort: the British 'safari jet' that transforms into a plush viewing platform

There are some people who want the comforts of home with them - even when 'roughing it' on safari in Africa. For these five-star campers, BAE Systems and Design Q have come up with the ultimate in travel luxury. The four-engined Avro Business Jet Explorer Four has been designed to land on short runways and uneven landing strips, delivering its wealthy passengers directly into wildlife areas. Then, with the flick of a switch, a door on the side of the jet opens and a viewing platform extends from the fuselage - offering spectacular open-air views!

For a cool £16 million, A-list animal lovers will get the chance to by the 'safari jet', which has room for two pilots and eight passengers and crew. Inside the aircraft, a galley kitchen can deliver gourmet meals to an eight-seat dining area, and large sofas fold out to provide on-board beds. To top it all off, once passengers have had their fill of the good life and wildlife in any given area, they simply transform the aircraft back into its 'flying mode' and jet off to the next destination.

The 100ft aircraft is being built to order in the UK, and a spokesman for BAE/Design Q says the aircraft will 'offer a new level of sophistication for the discerning customer'. With marble floors and quality finishes throughout, the interiors can be modified and designed to suit the individual needs of the owner. For more remote locations and rougher landing grounds, the jet can be fitted with stronger and bigger tyres, and the fuselage can be strengthened to cope with the extra strain. The finished product, will look like these images, based on BAE designs.

IVF, Fertility Drugs Might Boost Autism Risk

Children whose mothers took fertility drugs were almost twice as likely to have autism as other children, new research finds. Being conceived by in vitro fertilization (IVF) or born prematurely also seemed to up the risk of autism, according to another study.

In the first study, researchers asked 111 women taking part in the Nurses' Health Study II who had a child with an autism spectrum disorder about their history of fertility problems and use of ovulation-inducing drugs, such as Clomid or gonadotropins.

About 34 percent of moms with an autistic child had used fertility drugs compared to about 24 percent of some 3,900 mothers without an autistic child, the researchers found.

Clomid and gonadotropins are often used as a first-line treatment for infertility, defined as trying for a year or longer to get pregnant without success, said lead study author Kristen Lyall, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Nearly 47 percent of moms of autistic kids reported infertility, compared to about 33 percent of the other mothers, her team found.

One caveat to those statistics is that older women are both more likely to have fertility problems and to take ovulation-inducing drugs, and prior research has shown older moms are also more likely to have autistic children.

In the study, the median maternal age at the time the first child was born was 35, compared to about 25 for the general U.S. population, Lyall noted.

Even so, when the age of the mother and pregnancy complications were taken into account -- which can also heighten the risk of autism -- women with infertility and who used ovulation drugs still had a twofold greater chance of having a child with an autism spectrum disorder.

The absolute risk for any one mother to have a child with autism remained relatively low, the authors noted. In the study, about 4 percent of mothers who took fertility drugs had a child with an autism spectrum disorder, compared to about 2 percent of moms who didn't take fertility drugs.

Still, "we found that a history of infertility and use of ovulation-inducing drugs was significantly associated with an increased risk of having a children with an autism spectrum disorder," said Lyall, who noted that the findings are preliminary, involved a relatively small sample of women and needed to be confirmed by future research.

The autism risk was less pronounced among younger mothers who took fertility drugs, Lyall added. Among women aged 25 to 34, about 3.1 percent who had infertility and took fertility drugs had an autistic child, compared to 2.6 percent of women in that age group who didn't.

The study was to be presented last week at the International Meeting for Autism Research in Philadelphia.

Another study to be presented at the meeting, this time by Israeli researchers, found that in vitro fertilization and pre-term birth were both associated with an increased risk of autism in offspring.

About 10.2 percent of 461 children diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder were conceived using IVF, while about 3.5 percent of children in the general Israeli population are conceived that way, according to the study.

Moms who had IVF tended to be older, with a median age of 32.6 years compared to just under 31 years of age for mothers who didn't get IVF, the study authors noted.

Nearly 4 percent of the kids with autism were born prematurely, while nearly 5 percent had a low birth weight, compared to about 1 percent in the general population.

"Prematurity and low birth weight also adversely affect the child's functioning in adaptive skills," noted study lead author Dr. Ditza Zachor, who is director of the Autism Center at Assaf Harofeh Medical Center at Tel Aviv University. "This means that these two risk factors act as 'second hits' that affect the child more than just having autism."

Zachor stressed that the findings are preliminary and more widespread research is needed. "This will give us the answer if these procedures carry any risk for the baby."

So what does all this mean for couples struggling to conceive? Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, director of medical research at Kennedy Krieger Institute's Center for Autism and Related Disorders in Baltimore, said that women taking fertility drugs or undergoing IVF should not be unnecessarily alarmed.

The vast majority of children conceived in this way will not end up with autism, and most children who have autism were not conceived using IVF or with the help of fertility drugs, he said.

However, many physicians who work with kids with autism have remarked that lots of their patients seem to have been conceived via IVF. Prior to these studies, the observation was largely anecdotal, he said.

"I don't think we are at a point yet where we can make recommendations, but we are getting to a point where we are beginning to understand there probably is a relationship," Zimmerman said.

The reasons for the connection are not known, but it may be something about the process of in vitro fertilization, in which a sperm and egg are joined outside the womb, an embryo is created and implanted, or sometimes frozen and stored, then thawed for later use. Taking fertility drugs in early pregnancy could also contribute, Zimmerman said.

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that's characterized by problems with social interaction, verbal and nonverbal communication, and restricted interests and behaviors.