SCIENCE BOND

It said it had introduced the technology to help people get better results when they search.  Often, it said in a blogpost, the best answers to a query were found in an app rather than a web page.  Initially nine apps have been selected to work with the streaming system as it is tested.  Jennifer Lin, Google engineering manager, said the firm started indexing information found in apps two years ago to bolster its larger corpus of search data.  About 40% of searches done via Google now turn up content found in apps such as Facebook, Instagram, Airbnb or Pinterest, she said.  Until now, Google has only answered queries with information that is available both on the web and in apps. Now, however, it is starting to show results that are only found in apps.  One example of when these results would show up might be when someone is looking for hotels during a spur-of-the-moment trip to an unfamiliar city, wrote Ms Lin in the blog. Google said it was...

Russia's federal anti-monopoly service said that Google abused its dominant position by requiring mobile firms to install the apps. Apps for YouTube and Google's photography and maps services were at the center of the row. Google said no operator was compelled to install its apps and there was plenty of competition for its services.When it reached its decision in September, the anti-monopoly watchdog gave Google until 18 November to change its contracts with phone firms so its apps were not favored. The firm could face penalties of up to 15% of its 2014 revenue in Russia if it did not change its practices.  Google has not complied with this decision and has now published comments on its official Russian blog explaining why. "We intend to challenge the decision in court and explain why we believe it to be unfounded," said Google (link in Russian).  It laid out five reasons why it believed there was little evidence that its own Android ap...

Galaxy S6 Edge The vulnerabilities include a loophole that could have been used by hackers to gain control of a victim's phone.  Most of the issues were fixed after Google notified Samsung, but some have yet to be addressed.  One independent expert said the bugs "significantly weakened the security" of Google's operating system.  "There is definitely a tension between Google and the handset manufacturers because Google wants to protect its Android brand, and when it comes to security, Android has been quite tarnished," added Dr Steven Murdoch, a security researcher at University College London.  "Some of that is down to the extra software that handset manufacturers add." A statement from Samsung said the three remaining bugs would be  fixed via a security update later this month.  "Maintaining the trust of our customers is a top priority", said the company.Details of the bugs were disclosed by Google's Project Zero team, wh...

Yamaha motors  Yamaha Motors has revealed it is developing a robot designed to ride any racing motorbike at high speeds.  The Japanese company unveiled a prototype at the Tokyo Motor Show. At present it is reliant on human operators, but in time the firm plans to have the android make its own decisions about the best course and speed to achieve the best race time around a track.

LG has revealed a phone that takes wide-angle selfies and an updated 4G smartwatch, now running on Android.  The high-end V10 phone has not one but two front-facing cameras allowing the device to take 120-degree shots.  It also has two screens - one as an inset display above the main one, which can show information such as the date, weather or battery life at all times.  An Android smartwatch, the first to feature 4G connectivity, has also been announced.  The V10's dual cameras on its front each has a five megapixel sensor. They are capable of capturing 80-degree selfies or wide-angle ones,  of 120 degrees, with one shot. For this, the phone actually takes two pictures at once which are then stitched together by an algorithm.  The ability to take group selfies without a selfie-stick has never been easier," LG said in a statement .  The smaller of the two screens on the V10 has a 2.1 inch (5.3 cm) display designed to show useful information ...

A security flaw in Android that lets people bypass the lock screen on a mobile device has been discovered by researchers at the University of Texas.  They found that trying to unlock the phone or tablet with an abnormally long password caused the lock screen to crash in certain conditions.  The flaw was limited to Android Lollipop, the most recent version of the mobile operating system.  Google issued a patch for its Nexus devices on Wednesday.  About 21% of Android users run affected versions of the operating system. After crashing the lock screen, the researchers were able to access  the phone's data and apps.  The vulnerability could not be exploited if people had chosen a lock pattern or Pin code instead of a password.  While Google is rolling out its fix for Nexus, other phone manufacturers are responsible for distributing the software to their own handsets.  On releasing the patch, Google said it had not yet detected anybody expl...

Apps that regularly check for updates consume about 30% of the battery power an Android phone loses when in that mode, say the researchers. They have created a free Hush tool that lets only the most-used apps check in while the phone is off. Hush can cut power loss from the apps by almost half, say the team. Hush was created by engineers from Purdue University in Indiana after they carried out a large-scale study of energy use on Android smartphones. The analysis of power-consumption patterns on 2,000 handsets found that a lot of energy was wasted by badly written apps that did not let a phone go back into a sleep state after they checked for updates, said Prof Y Charlie Hu from Purdue. "They are not letting the phone go back to sleep because of  software bugs and, specifically, due to the incorrect use of Android power control application programming interfaces called wakelocks," he said in a statement. The first versions of the Hush tool did a better job of handlin...