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Limestone dust: Cheap carbon capture with built-in ecosystem benefits

Gizmag news -

A technique originally developed to combat acid rain has the potential to pull an enormous amount of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere – while helping to deacidify oceans, restore rivers and boost biodiversity and fish populations.

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Category: Environment, Science

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500-mile camper bus looks to blow open electrified RVing in USA

Gizmag news -

With recent premieres like the Grounded G2, Tesla Cybertruck Camp365 and VW ID. Buzz Peace mini-camper, the American market has been slowly catching up with Europe on the all-electric RV front. But it still lacks plug-in hybrid RV options, which many buyers would consider a necessary intermediary step for an RV. Camper giant Thor Industries and electric commercial chassis builder Harbinger Motors are looking to change all that. Their all-new Class A motorhome promises a robust 500 miles (805 km) of range from a combination of 140-kWh battery pack and petrol range extender.

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Category: Automotive, Transport

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Watch: Incredibly versatile active ball-joint gear is mind-bending

Gizmag news -

At its core, this system developed at Yamagata University in Japan uses a "simple" cross-spherical gear paired with a monopole gear to control pitch, roll, and yaw. Essentially, the same full range of movement you'd see in a rotator cuff (the shoulder) of a human. With clever gearing, coupling, and sliding motions, the ABENICS gear is extremely precise in its movements.

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Category: Technology

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Ricoh now sells a software 'Grad ND' for recent Pentax DSLRs in the US

Digital Photography Review news -

When you use DPReview links to buy products, the site may earn a commission. Image: Ricoh

Ricoh is now selling a software graduated ND filter for select Pentax DSLRs. The 'Premium Feature,' which you unlock on your camera using an activation code, lets you make certain parts of your image darker than others, similar to how you can with a physical graduated ND filter.

The 'Grad ND' feature has a good level of flexibility, letting you definite the gradient's position and angle, as well as the transition distance. The intensity of the ND effect can be varied from -0.3EV to -5.0EV in 1/3EV increments.

The 'Grad ND' has several customizations you can make in-camera.

Image: Ricoh

According to an Instagram post by Ned Bunnell, former president of Pentax US, the effect works by taking two exposures and compositing them together. Images taken using the feature can be saved as both Raws and JPEGs.

According to Ricoh's site, the Grad ND feature is available for the K-1 II, K-3 III, and K-3 III Monochrome; it's not available for previous versions of the K-3. You'll also need to update your camera to the latest firmware to use the feature. Ricoh warns it can take up to a week to get your activation code, but Bunnell reports that his arrived the day after he placed his order.

It costs $79.95 to activate the feature, which is done on a per-serial number basis; that means if you have multiple cameras you wish to use the feature on, you'll have to buy an activation code for each one. Ricoh's website contains a long list of warnings and instructions about purchasing the feature, so be sure to read them carefully if you're considering it.

Apple says photographs should be of things that 'really, actually happened'

Digital Photography Review news -

Apple Intelligence can do many things, but the company limits how you can use it to edit photos for now.

Image: Apple

Apple has said that the pictures its devices take are meant to depict "something that really, actually happened," a view that starkly contrasts how many of its competitors are approaching photography in the age of generative AI. The quote comes courtesy of The Verge, which asked Apple's vice president of camera software engineering about what the company was trying to achieve with the pictures its phones take.

Here's his full response, which was published in The Verge's iPhone 16 Pro review:

Here’s our view of what a photograph is. The way we like to think of it is that it’s a personal celebration of something that really, actually happened.

Whether that’s a simple thing like a fancy cup of coffee that’s got some cool design on it, all the way through to my kid’s first steps, or my parents’ last breath, It’s something that really happened. It’s something that is a marker in my life, and it’s something that deserves to be celebrated.

And that is why when we think about evolving in the camera, we also rooted it very heavily in tradition. Photography is not a new thing. It’s been around for 198 years. People seem to like it. There’s a lot to learn from that. There’s a lot to rely on from that.

Think about stylization, the first example of stylization that we can find is Roger Fenton in 1854 – that’s 170 years ago. It’s a durable, long-term, lasting thing. We stand proudly on the shoulders of photographic history.

Let's compare that to what Google has said. Isaac Reynolds, a product manager for the Pixel Camera, told Wired that the company is "not just inserting [itself] into this narrow slot built for cameras" during a discussion about its phones' myriad AI-powered features. "You could have a true and perfect representation of a moment that felt completely fake and completely wrong. What some of these edits do is help you create the moment that is the way you remember it, that's authentic to your memory and to the greater context, but maybe isn't authentic to a particular millisecond."

"These edits... help you create the moment that is the way you remember"

Google's phones give you several tools to "help you create the moment that is the way you remember it." The Pixel 9 series is able to use AI to 'expand' a photo, generating imagery beyond the borders of what your phone's camera captured. It can look at a series of group photos and create a composite where everyone is smiling and has their eyes open. It can add the photographer to a group picture. And perhaps most strikingly, it can help you 'reimagine' a photo by adding in AI-generated imagery.

Samsung, Apple's main competitor, has a set of features similar to Google's. The company's Head of Customer Experience told TechRadar that it's trying to serve two different needs: the need to capture a moment as it happened and the need to create something new. Talking about the company's generative AI-powered editing, he said: "When people go on Instagram, they add a bunch of funky black and white stuff – they create a new reality. Their intention isn’t to recreate reality, it’s to make something new."

His explanation of how Samsung meets that first need wasn't free of AI mentions either: "One intention is wanting to capture the moment – wanting to take a picture that’s as accurate and complete as possible. To do that, we use a lot of AI filtering, modification and optimization to erase shadows, reflections and so on. But we are true to the user's intention, which was to capture that moment."

He also addressed the controversy of Samsung phones potentially adding detail to people's pictures of the moon, clarifying what the company considers to be true to the user's intention: "There is no such thing as a real picture. As soon as you have sensors to capture something, you reproduce [what you’re seeing], and it doesn’t mean anything. There is no real picture. [...] You can try to define a real picture by saying, ‘I took that picture’, but if you used AI to optimize the zoom, the autofocus, the scene – is it real? Or is it all filters? There is no real picture, full stop."

We encourage you to read both Wired and TechRadar's interviews in full, but by now, it should be obvious that Apple is thinking about photos very differently than Samsung and Google. Or, at the very least, it wants to give the impression that it is.

Arguably, the iPhone's photos aren't exactly "authentic to a particular millisecond" either; its imaging pipeline stitches together several shots to create images with detail, tones, dynamic range and noise levels that its relatively small sensor wouldn't be able to capture otherwise. That's even true when you're shooting in its supposed 'Raw' mode.

However, even this advanced level of processing isn't the same as letting you move people around in your photos or add a photorealistic herd of cows to them with the tap of a button. And while Apple's planned 'Image Playground' feature will let you use AI to generate images of your friends and family whole-cloth, it will only do so in a cartoonish or illustrated style, at least for now.

That's not to say that Apple has completely opted out of AI photo editing. The company is currently working on launching a feature called 'Clean Up,' which uses Apple Intelligence to remove a subject from a picture, be it a photobombing bird or someone in the background who distracts from whatever or whoever you were trying to take a picture of. The feature is remarkably similar to Google's Magic Eraser, which the company has included on its phones for years.

Before: An unedited photo taken with an iPhone 15 Pro.

Photo: Mitchell Clark

To make matters even more uncomfortable, the AI-edited photos do have a metadata watermark, but YouTuber Evan Zhou has already demonstrated that it can be easily removed by editing the EXIF. It is worth noting that the feature is currently in beta, so that may not be the case by the time it's publicly released, though at time of writing that's theoretically only a month away.

After: people in the background were erased using a beta version of Apple's AI 'Clean Up' feature. Is this still a moment that really, actually happened?

The existence of Clean Up is already a little hard to square with the phrasing of 'something that really, actually happened.' Perhaps that's why the company specified that its photos are meant to be a 'personal celebration' of those moments (emphasis ours). But where this quote may really come back to bite Apple is if it adds more extensive generative AI features into its photo editing experience. If the company keeps this stance, it has to decide what amount of editing will make it so a picture no longer represents something that actually happened.

Speaking of tough decisions, Apple will also have to weigh that stance against its ability to compete with other phones. If, in a few years' time, every Android phone comes with a suite of AI tools that let people turn their 'photos' into whatever they want, Apple will have to add similar features if it doesn't want to seem woefully out of step with the times – just like it did with Clean Up...

... won't it? Looking at how much attention tech companies are paying to AI features, you'd think that consumers are beating down their doors, demanding the ability to ask a personal AI to whip up a custom emoji or reduce what used to be minutes or hours of Photoshop work into a task that takes seconds. It seems inevitable that people will start to use and value this tech now that it's built into almost every phone.

It's not clear yet if generative AI-powered editing is a clear win for the companies feverishly adding it to their products

And yet generative AI features – especially ones related to creative pursuits like writing, drawing and photography – are currently contentious in a way that technology usually isn't outside of early 1800s England. The comments sections of articles covering the tech are filled with boosters, but there are just as many, if not more, detractors who view companies' work on generative AI as genuinely harmful. Researchers at Washington State University recently published a report showing that adding the term 'artificial intelligence' to a product or service's description made people less likely to say they'd buy it.

In other words, it's not clear yet if generative AI-powered editing is a clear win for the companies feverishly adding it to their products. And while that list certainly includes Apple, which said its new iPhones were 'built from the ground up' for its AI features, the company has, for now, planted a flag on how it views the tech's role in photography. It remains to be seen whether that flag is planted in granite or sand.

Psilocybin equal to SSRI for depression, but better for overall well-being

Gizmag news -

After comparing the long-term effects of the psychedelic psilocybin and a commonly prescribed antidepressant, new research found that both significantly reduced depression. However, psilocybin provided something more: a significant boost to quality of life.

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Category: Psychedelics, Medical Innovations, Body & Mind

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The Blue Hour: DPReview Editors' Challenge

Digital Photography Review news -

Hot air balloons inflate during the blue hour at the 'Balloons over Bend' balloon festival in central Oregon.

Canon EOS R3 + EF 24-70mm F2.8 L II | 24mm | ISO 25,600 | 1/100 | F2.8
Photo: Dale Baskin

It's time to prepare for another DPReview Editors' Choice photo challenge. This time, we're celebrating the 'blue hour', a period shortly before sunrise or after sunset when the sun is below the horizon but still provides enough light to make the sky appear deep blue in photos.

For this challenge, shoot and submit one or more blue hour photos. They don't need to be taken someplace exotic, but creativity is encouraged. You can enter up to three photos in this challenge.

How it works

DPReview editors will review every photo you upload to an Editors' Challenge. We'll publish our favorites in a gallery and share your work on the DPReview homepage.

If you miss participating in this one, please look out for our next Editors' Challenge.

How to submit your photos

Submissions will open on September 29, and you have until Saturday, October 5 (GMT), to submit entries. User voting will begin after that and will help inform DPReview Editors' picks, but will not select them. They are one factor in our evaluation of submissions.

Enter your photos here

Challenge details

Processing rules:

  • Post-processing is allowed, but this is a photo contest, not a post-processing contest. Please, no composite, altered or fabricated images.

Capture date rules:

  • Images must be shot after the announcement date of the challenge.

Additional rules:

  • Photos must be at least 2400 pixels long on one edge.
  • Include a title for your photo.
  • Include a caption that tells us the story behind the photo, including when and where it was taken.
  • Share what gear was used and your camera settings. If you used an interchangeable lens camera, please tell us what lens was used.
  • Tell us about any edits you made in post-processing beyond basic things like white balance, exposure adjustments, etc.
  • Please ensure your account's contact information is current; we may contact you if your photo is selected as an Editor's Pick. User voting will inform DPReview Editor's Picks, but will not select them. They are one factor in our evaluation of submissions.
  • Our standard copyright and privacy terms and conditions policy applies.

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