The plethora of electronic devices in your home may plug into the same walls and draw electricity from the same source, but each has a unique signature or fingerprint that helps distinguish it from the rest. To a sophisticated sensor, the refrigerator, the curling iron and the TV look quite different.

Those fingerprints can also unlock energy information about the entire home, one company claims.

Earth Networks, a weather data analytics company in Germantown, Md., has created a smartphone-size sensor that adheres to the front of your home's breaker box and plugs into a nearby wall socket. After that simple installation, chief executive Robert Marshall said, the sensor can track the energy consumption and usage patterns of each appliance and device in the home.

The homeowner can then use that information to determine where energy could be conserved, whether devices have been left on unintentionally, or whether an appliance appears on the verge of failure. Action is up to the homeowner, however. Once the sensor has detected the dryer vent is clogged or the coffee maker was left on, it's up to you to remedy the situation the old fashioned way.

But as connected home technology becomes more popular, Marshall expects that will change.

“This unlocks the connected home. The connected home is going to continue to progress, but slowly. Once you know that you've left your curling iron on, you should then get a smart [power] switch and it will automatically turn off,” he said.

The concept of a completely automated home - one that brews your coffee in the morning and powers off your lights at night - has yet to be fully realized for most American households. Despite the attention these technologies have received, these tasks are still part of a very manual routine for most homeowners.

That's beginning to change, albeit gradually. Consumers have begun flocking to individual smart home technologies, with voice-activated assistants like Amazon Echo and Google Home becoming especially popular in a short period of time, according to ABI Research. The market research firm estimates that 600 million smart home devices will ship in 2021, up from 40 million devices just six years prior.

But having even a few smart devices does not a smart home make. Marshall predicts most household appliances will remain disconnected for the foreseeable future, and his company's sensor could start to bridge the gap between those dumb devices and a smart home, he said.

“Everything is so disjointed right now,” Marshall said. “There's not any one platform that understands the home in detail.”

The Earth Networks sensor was developed in tandem with Oakland, Calif.-based Whisker Labs, a start-up that Earth Networks has now acquired for an undisclosed sum. Marshall expects the sensor will be available to business partners, such as utility and insurance companies, early next year, and will go on sale to homeowners toward the end of 2017. A retail price has not been set.

While relatively few consumers may know the name Earth Networks, millions have interacted with the weather forecasting app WeatherBug that the company operated until last month. Earth Networks sold the brand for an undisclosed sum to add money to its coffers and focus more intently on its data business, Marshall said.

Earth Networks runs the largest private network of weather sensors in the world, providing key climate and atmospheric information to governments, businesses and other large institutions. That means processing large volumes of data in real time, and delivering it in a way that's easy for its customers to understand and act on. In that way, the new home energy sensor isn't a stretch for the company, he said.

“We're now monitoring the energy in your home using that same core competency,” Marshall said.

Apple Watch 2: New wearable to have bigger battery and smaller body, report claims

Apple is about to release its second Apple Watch – with a bigger battery and a smaller body.

The new watch isn’t set to bring many new features, and instead be more of a refinement of the existing watch than a whole re-design of the phone. But it will fix some of the biggest complaints that people have about the existing model – that it’s too big and the battery dies too quickly.

Various reports have said that the battery life will receive a huge upgrade. One rumour suggested that the second version of the watch will see a 35 per cent battery boost, and an electronics shop that claims to have got hold of the watch says that the capacity has been increased to 1.28 WH from 0.98 WH.

It’s not clear whether that extra capacity will actually lead to a longer battery life. The new version of the Watch operating system, which is expected to come out at the same time as the hardware, borrows more computing power from the watch and so might use up more battery – meaning that the extra battery could actually keep the same time between charges, rather than adding extra battery life.

The same report from Byte – which claims to have seen leaked components – also said that the new Watch will have a “noticeably thinner” panel than the existing watch. The display itself is unchanged, but being less deep the watch could be smaller and flatter on the arm, the report says.

In all, the Apple Watch has seen far fewer leaks than the iPhone 7 that it will be introduced alongside. It is reported that it will focus far more on health than other features, and that some long rumoured additions including technology to allow it to work independently of the phone might actually be left out of the model revealed next week.

Twitter adds a hidden ‘night mode’, in what might be a preview of the next iPhone

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.

iPhone Sales Plunge But Apple To Look At Apps And Services Like Pokemon Go

Apple has a big plan to grow. And it’s not, it turns out, by selling more  iPhones.

For the second time in a row, Apple has announced sales of iPhones are slumping, apparently in large part because too many people have them already. But this time around, people didn’t seem to much mind.

Part of that was because Apple had flagged in advance this time that sales were likely to slow down. But it was also because Apple has a big plan for life after the iPhone.

That mostly revolves around selling apps and services. The company has always been huge in software – establishing the idea of the App Store and using it as a central selling point of its iPhone – but now those phones could making money from apps, rather than the other way around.

And the financial markets, usually so punishing of Apple, appear to have liked it – despite the company telling a very similar story the last time it announced its results. Despite the negative results, Apple’s shares were pushed up 5 per cent in late trading.

Much of that was helped by growth, rather than outright numbers – and it is growth that the financial markets are worried about, since it appears to have stalled. But Apple hopes that those service markets will continue to get bigger even if the sales of iPhones and other devices fall – since the nearly 600 million people who own Apple devices can keep spending money on apps, which they do to the tune of an average $68 a year.

In all, the service segment’s sales were pushed up by 19 per cent. That includes all of the company’s online services: everything from stores like iTunes and the App Store to people paying for extra iCloud storage.

The increase pushed the full sales to $6 billion. That’s more than Apple made from the sales of either iPads or Macs, and far bigger than most other large tech companies in itself.

None of that money actually comes directly from making things and selling them. Instead, it’s mostly made by providing the infrastructure that does so – taking a cut as it does so.

That means that what Apple really needs, in its new strategy, is not to sell more iPhones. Instead it needs more apps like Pokemon Go – which makes money through in-app purchases, all of which Apple takes a portion of, and through which it stands to make billions of dollars.

Mr Cook even addressed the popularity of Pokemon Go during the earnings call, saying both how pleased he was that the app was doing so well and that Apple would be looking into the same things.

"It also does show that AR can be really great,” he said in a conference call with analysts. “We have been and continue to invest a lot in this. We are high on AR for the long run, we think there's great things for customers and a great commercial opportunity.

"The number one thing is to make sure our products work well with other developers' kind of products like Pokemon, that's why you see so many iPhones in the wild chasing Pokemons."