Twitter has added a “night mode” to its app, in a move that might be a preview of the next iPhone.

The new setting lets people turn their background and text opposite colours – making the writing white and the app itself a dark blue.

And it might well be a preview of what’s coming in future devices. The iPhone, for instance, has long been rumoured to be getting a night mode across its apps.

That wouldn’t just help with not being dazzled when looking at apps in the dark, and by making apps look slightly cooler. It would also be important if Apple rolls out an OLED screen.

OLED screens have to work less hard to produce blacks, and those blacks themselves are far richer, meaning that designing apps to use darker colours helps preserve battery life and looks better.

But the feature has only been rolled out to some apps so far, and only by developers. Twitter is one of the first major apps to offer it.

The new setting is accessed by heading to your own profile by selecting the “Me” tab in the app, and clicking the cog in the top right hand corner. When that’s done, a big list of options will come up – one of which will be “Turn on night mode”.

The feature can be turned off in the same way.

Some people joked that using Twitter at the sort of time that would require the night mode probably means that you shouldn’t be on Twitter at all.

The feature is available in both the iOS and Android versions of the app.

Sony Launches New UHD TVs, Ready For The Olympics And 4K Premier League

It’s summer, the sun’s shining, who wants to watch TV? Well, next month sports fans will be looking forward to spending time indoors. They’ll be watching the Olympics and Sky’s screening of Premier League football in Ultra HD resolution.

For the latter you’ll need a TV that’s UHD (or 4K) compatible. Luckily, last week Sony announced its latest screens and though they may not be on sale in time for the first games of the season, when they do arrive they’ll have all the tech capability, in frames that are snazzily designed. Most importantly, they will have jaw-droppingly good picture quality.

The Independent saw the new TVs behind closed doors in London a few days ago and first impressions were favourable. Not only do the new screens offer UHD and HDR (High Dynamic Range), a technology designed to show rich detail in both dark shadows and bright skies at the same time, some of them also include a Sony speciality: Backlight Master Drive.

This was first announced at the CES trade show in Las Vegas back in January. I thought it looked good then but now it’s extremely impressive. Backlight Master Drive uses multiple LEDs behind the screen, with each one separately controllable. Most screens have a small number of LEDs, often just one, which is why images can be a bit bland.

When you have many LEDs, the leap forward in contrast and the depth of black colours on screen is very striking. OLED TVs, where each pixel is individually lit, can manage the same effect but here it’s a lot brighter, so you don’t need to plunge your living room into darkness and hire ushers with torches.

Sony won’t reveal how many LEDs are on its screens though it looks to be in the high hundreds at least. The CES prototype had 1,000 zones of control, for instance. Whatever the number, the resulting level of detail and contrast is undeniable.

The flagship range is called Bravia ZD9, available in sizes from big to almost preposterous: 65in, 75in and, seriously, 100in. In demonstrations of the screen’s capabilities and comparisons with rival brand’s TVs, the Sony level of detail was remarkable.

A bright, sunny surfing video looked splashily good. Staring more closely at the sun, however, made clear that on the Sony display it was smaller. This wasn’t a fault, it was because the screen could show more subtle gradations of sky around it, instead of simply bleaching the screen.

A similarly bright scene of a white building in direct sunlight showed levels of grey detail that other screens couldn’t manage.

As more UHD and HDR content becomes available, this level of richness will become more important. The Sony screens will probably be the most advanced of their kind when they go on sale in September. You might want to start saving now, though, as the 65in model will cost around £4,000, the 75in will set you back £7,000 and the massive 100in model is a snip at about £60,000.

The design of the TV has been thought through in great detail, too. The frame around the picture is barely noticeable but the top and side edges feature a carefully chosen gold trim that is subtle but deeply attractive. The back of most TVs are a maze of sockets and cables. On the ZD9 range, the designer has taken pride in fitting a neat, patterned cover over all the connectors, with removable panels providing access. It means you can have the TV away from the wall without it looking a mess from behind.

In fact, on the enormous 100in model there’s even scope for a wire-free look: it’s designed so the power cable can slide unseen down the TV’s leg and out under the floorboards. If you’re spending that much on a telly, you’ll be grateful for that attention to detail.

Sony has historically has exceptional picture quality in its TVs. These screens offer the strongest 4K images the company, or perhaps any manufacturer, has yet delivered.

Black Holes Are ‘doors’ To Another World, Scientists Say

Black holes are doors to other parts of the universe, according to a new study. But you wouldn’t ever get to come back.

Anyone who managed to get through one of the mysterious doors would end up “spaghettified”, and stretched out like a long strand of pasta, according to the research. They’d get squished back down to size once they reached the other side, but it’s unlikely they’d be alive to see it.

Previously, scientists have held that all matter inside of a black hole is destroyed and so there would be no way of ever actually making it through. But the new research suggests that it could act as a doorway or a tunnel – as in a sci-fi story.

Black holes are places where matter has been squashed to such a density by gravity that the normal laws of physics break down.

The new theory rejects the view that at the centre of a black hole spacetime curves to an infinite point known as a "singularity" and all matter is destroyed.

Instead, it proposes that the heart of the simplest type of electrically charged, non-rotating black hole, is a very small spherical surface. This acts as a "wormhole" - a doorway or tunnel through the fabric of spacetime of the kind seen in countless sci-fi stories.

In the movie Interstellar, a team of astronauts travel through a wormhole in search of a new home for humanity.

Dr Gonzalo Olmo, from the University of Valencia in Spain, said: "Our theory naturally resolves several problems in the interpretation of electrically-charged black holes.

"In the first instance, we resolve the problem of the singularity, since there is a door at the centre of the black hole, the wormhole, through which space and time can continue."

The wormhole predicted by the scientists' equations is smaller than an atomic nucleus, but gets bigger as more electrical charge is stored in the black hole.

A hypothetical traveller entering the black hole could be stretched thin enough to fit through the wormhole, like a strand of cotton threaded through the eye of a needle.



The new model also gets round the need for "exotic" energy or matter to create a wormhole.

According to Albert Einstein's theory of gravity, a wormhole can only appear in the presence of matter with highly unusual properties, possessing negative energy, pressure or density. Such "exotic matter" has never been observed.

"In our theory, the wormhole appears out of ordinary matter and energy, such as an electric field," said Dr Olmo.

The research is published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.