AM signals: Virtual reality, Zumwalt rescue mission, cellphone drop test

Keysight is offering new application note, The Internet of Things: Enabling Technologies and Solutions for Design and Test, which discusses the nature and scale of internet-based objects. Internet of Things (IoT) and the industrial Internet are enabling greater automation and increasing flexibility and efficiency in manufacturing processes. Keysight understands the intricacies of IoT design and test and provides engineers with hardware and software test solutions for the many RF and high-speed digital technologies used in IoT. The application note and a new IoT webcast are available at www.keysight.com/find/IoT-Insight. Registration is required.

Samsung may be playing catchup in the smartphone marketplace, adding features already found on other manufacturers’ phones. The Wall Street Journal reports the new Galaxy S7, expected to be launched during the Mobile World Congress in February, may have a pressure-sensitive display, retina scanner, and USB Type-C port. It is expected to go on sale in the U.S. in mid-March.

The Navy’s new Zumwalt destroyer has yet to prove its prowess in battle, but, reports the Portland Press Herald, “The Navy’s new stealth destroyer endured a real life-and-death test Saturday when crew members aboard the future USS Zumwalt helped rescue a Maine fisherman suffering a medical emergency at sea.”

In related news, David Axe at Reuters reports on other efforts of the Navy to respond to non-military emergencies. “The $500-million Expeditionary Mobile Base vessel—784 feet long from bow to stern—combines all the most important features the military believes ships will need to respond to the more frequent and more severe natural disasters,” he writes.

At FiveThirtyEight, the political/sports statistics blog on ESPN, Oliver Roeder poses this question: You are to determine how many stories a cellphone can fall and still function. You are given two models of the phone and a 100-story tower from which to drop them. If you drop one and it doesn’t break, you may drop it again from a higher floor. The question is, “Using the two phones, what is the minimum number of drops you need to ensure that you can determine exactly the highest story from which a dropped phone does not break?” (And as a bonus, how does the answer change given a 1,000-story tower?) FiveThirtyEight’s answer is coming soon. However, I’m not sure the answer Roeder gives will take in all the relevant parameters.

Virtual and augmented reality companies have raised $408 million in the first nine months of this year—up from $145 million in the same period of 2014, according to the New York Times. The companies have names like Magic Leap, Jaunt, and 8i. Making the investment craze speculative, the Times reports, is the fact that few consumers have tried virtual-reality products.