Philippe Starck’s Electric Mountain Bikes Boost You Up Hills in Style

For riding in wet dirt, Starck took advantage of Moustache’s differentiated diameter wheel setup. Mud’s 29-inch front wheel is made to get the bike over roots and large rocks, while the 27.5” rear wheel assures high levels of torque when it’s time for the electric pedal assist to kick in. Starck Network

For riding in wet dirt, Starck took advantage of Moustache’s differentiated diameter wheel setup. Mud’s 29-inch front wheel is made to get the bike over roots and large rocks, while the 27.5” rear wheel assures high levels of torque when it’s time for the electric pedal assist to kick in.

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The battery will take this bike and a 155-pound rider as far as 100 miles on a flat road, but it’s best used for powering up mountains—so it can be taken back down again. Starck Network

The battery will take this bike and a 155-pound rider as far as 100 miles on a flat road, but it’s best used for powering up mountains—so it can be taken back down again.

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Made for riding on actual paved surfaces, it’s no surprise Asphalt is the quickest of the set: The base version will hit 15 mph, but the faster model will be capable of doing 28. It’s range is impressive, too: Up to 75 miles, on a flat road at a pedestrian 12 mph. Starck Network

Made for riding on actual paved surfaces, it’s no surprise Asphalt is the quickest of the set: The base version will hit 15 mph, but the faster model will be capable of doing 28. It’s range is impressive, too: Up to 75 miles, on a flat road at a pedestrian 12 mph.

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The dual suspension frame, 26-inch rims, and saddle made by Fzik should keep the rider comfortable even in the most pothole-riddled areas. Starck Network

The dual suspension frame, 26-inch rims, and saddle made by Fzik should keep the rider comfortable even in the most pothole-riddled areas.

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For Sand, Starck went with shocks designed by Bluto to fit over the huge tires from Schwalbe, to keep the rider on top of the sand rather than knee deep in it. To keep the sand from mucking everything up in bad weather, the bike comes with a protective cover. Starck Network

For Sand, Starck went with shocks designed by Bluto to fit over the huge tires from Schwalbe, to keep the rider on top of the sand rather than knee deep in it. To keep the sand from mucking everything up in bad weather, the bike comes with a protective cover.

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Depending on what mode the rider uses, the wind, and the gradient, the battery take the bike between 19 and 37 miles on a charge. Starck Network

Depending on what mode the rider uses, the wind, and the gradient, the battery take the bike between 19 and 37 miles on a charge.

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Cold weather is no friend to lithium ion batteries, so Starck slapped synthetic fur frame on the Snow bike. Who knows how well it works (and if does a solid job, automakers may want to consider the idea for their electric cars), but at least it’s eye-catching. Starck Network

Cold weather is no friend to lithium ion batteries, so Starck slapped synthetic fur frame on the Snow bike. Who knows how well it works (and if does a solid job, automakers may want to consider the idea for their electric cars), but at least it’s eye-catching.

Starck Network

The bike sits on the same huge Schwalbe tires used on the Sand model to provide lift and traction. The single-fork frame should keep snow from building up in the bike. “I wanted the bike to be able to go over all kinds of terrains and especially infinite and poetic territories,” Starck says. Starck Network

The bike sits on the same huge Schwalbe tires used on the Sand model to provide lift and traction. The single-fork frame should keep snow from building up in the bike. “I wanted the bike to be able to go over all kinds of terrains and especially infinite and poetic territories,” Starck says.

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Philippe Starck has designed everything from buildings and wind turbines to furniture and food. Now he’s turned his attention to battery-powered bicycles.

Electric bicycle maker Moustache Bikes tapped the French designer to create the M.A.S.S. collection, a series of four bicycles designed for different terrain: mud, asphalt, snow, and sand. The bikes, presented last month at the Eurobike trade fair, can be pedaled like any other bike but have an electric motor to help tackle those monstrous hills or lazy moments.

The bikes are powered by a Bosch lithium-ion battery that weighs 5.3 pounds and can be fully charged in 3.5 hours. How far you can go depends upon what you’re riding and where, but you’ll get at least 18 miles from the pack. Propulsion comes from your legs, of course, and a 250-watt Bosch motor that has five modes: Eco, tour, sport, turbo, or walk assist. Run it flat-out and you’ll zip along at 15.5 mph—28 mph if you’ve thrown a leg over the road-specific Asphalt model. Wheeeeeee!

How Apple Pay Will Destroy the Online-Offline Shopping Divide

Alex Washburn/WIRED

Apple chief exec Tim Cook says that the company’s new mobile payments service, Apple Pay, “will forever change the way we buy.”

Certainly, you should take this with a grain of salt. We’re so very close to our credit cards. Changing our entrenched habits takes some doing, even for a company like Apple, which already controls so many of the pieces needed to make this happen. “It will still be many years before mobile payments reach critical mass,” says Denée Carrington, an analyst with the Massachusetts-based research firm Forrester Research. But if Apple Pay is successful, it will change the way we buy in more ways than you might expect. It will meld online buying and offline buying into one.

Unveiled on Tuesday and promised as an integral part of the latest iPhones and the new iWatch, Apple Pay isn’t just a way to pay for stuff at places like McDonald’s, Walgreens, and Macy’s. It’s a new way to pay for stuff inside mobile applications like Uber, which lets you instantly order a car ride, and Instacart, which lets you instantly order groceries. In short, it equips your phone with a single way to pay for anything—online, offline, or in that new netherworld between the two recently pioneered by the likes of Uber, an app that lets you pay for an immediate offline experience using an online tool.

“People traditionally drew a really sharp distinction between off-line and online payments. Face-to-face, you would swipe your card, and online, you typed in your credit card details,” says John Collison, the co-founder of Stripe, a startup whose technology dovetails with Apple Pay, helping to power transactions via the service. “But those lines are starting to get blurred—starting to go away.”

Yes, as Carrington points out, others offer payment services that seek to blur these same lines, including Google and PayPal. But unlike these players, Apple seems to have bootstrapped a service that can reach the mainstream much quicker, that can instantly allow an enormous number of people to pay for an enormous numbers of goods and services across both apps and physical stores.

The difference is not just that Apple offers the service on a new phone that will quickly wind up in thousands of pockets. It’s not just that, with 800 million credit cards on file with its existing iTunes store, it can so easily activate the service for so many people. It’s also that these advantages—together with the company’s general clout—have allowed Apple to convince so many big name merchants to accept the service from day one.

“You need so many points of acceptance to make mobile payments work, and Apple has made that happen, striking partnerships with top national brands across a variety of categories that will give consumers plenty of opportunity to use the service,” says Carrington, who tracks the mobile payments market for Forrester. “That’s what’s distinctly different.”

Again, these merchants operate both online and off. You can pay in Subway shops and Whole Foods stores, and you can pay inside apps like Groupon and Tickets.com. Starbucks is on the list of merchants—but, as if to show the versatility of Apple’s service, it’s on the app side of things.

You could even argue that delineating “the app side of things” doesn’t do the service justice. Whether you’re paying in a store or in app, it works in much the same way: You press your finger to Touch ID, Apple’s fingerprint sensor, which verifies your identity. The only difference is that, if you’re in a store, you also hold your phone to a physical reader at the counter.

Carrington believes that the fingerprint sensor will serve as a kind of comfort blanket for consumers—another means of driving adoption of the new payments service. “It will make consumers feel it’s more secure,” she says, “even if they don’t understand the technical details.” But it also serves as a guidepost—a sign that the two types of payments will be merged into one.

The Apple Watch Is Steve Jobs’ iPod Launch All Over Again

Inspecting the new Apple iWatch. Alex Washburn / WIRED

The CEO isn’t quite new anymore, but he still has something to prove. He stands before an audience of passionate fans and promises a new digital device that, though not the first of its kind, will redefine its category so thoroughly that all predecessors will become irrelevant. The device even has a scroll wheel and costs a little less than $400.

That CEO was Steve Jobs, and the device was the first-generation iPod. Its launch would jumpstart Apple’s rise into the world’s most valuable company. But the scenario almost equally describes current Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiling the Apple Watch on Tuesday—except the room Jobs was in when he revealed Apple’s groundbreaking digital music player was much smaller. Also, during the long fallow period between the first Mac and the iPod, a new Apple product didn’t carry the expectation that its launch would force a fundamental rethinking of personal computing. Thanks to the iPod—and the iPhone and iPad—that’s the legacy the Apple Watch inherits, and the threshold for success it must match.

Fortunately, Apple’s earlier hits have created a reliable template for achieving world domination: don’t be the first, just be the best. Mediocre MP3 players existed before the iPod, just as mediocre smartwatches exist now. Apple achieved its current dominance by eviscerating that mediocrity to utterly own the categories in which it competes. With the Apple Watch, the company is returning to the same playbook. The question is whether it will succeed with a very different kind of device.

No One Has Found the Recipe

Back in 2001, Jobs described a competitive landscape for digital players that uncannily resembles the state of wearable tech in 2014. “In this whole new digital music revolution, there is no market leader,” Jobs said. Startups like Sonic Blue and Creative had their MP3 players, he said, as did gadget giants like Sony, but none had become hits. “No one has really found the recipe yet for digital music.”

Truer words were never spoken about the wearables market now. Device makers have yet to serve up a category-defining product, a gadget that makes plain why mass-market wearable tech should exist at all. Scrappy startups like Pebble and giants like Samsung and Motorola are trying. But the market is still so wide open that Apple could make everyone soon forget it didn’t invent the smartwatch all by itself.

A smartwatch’s reason for being isn’t so clear, especially since so much of what it can do requires being tied to a phone in the first place.

Certainly the iPod created that kind of amnesia. Who can name, or even picture, an MP3 player prior to the iPod? (I have dim memories of owning a portable CD player in the late 1990s with some kind of MP3 interface grafted on.) From the iTunes store to the click-wheel, the iPod finally got the digital music recipe right, and no one need bother to remember what came before.

The Apple Watch is clearly Apple’s attempt to be that definitive again, as evidenced—along with its deeply thought-out design, specs, and features—by just how long Apple took to launch it. Since taking over following Jobs’ death in 2011, Cook has been hammered by critics and by Wall Street for leading Apple through such a long stretch without releasing a new product, as opposed to updated products with new features. He could have rushed out a watch sooner to quell the angst, but that really wouldn’t have been the Apple way.

Instead, Apple took the time not just to build a better technology, but to interrogate the entire concept of “wearable.” And what the company came away with was the “personal.” “Apple Watch is the most personal device Apple has ever created,” Cook said. The watch is technology that literally touches you, and that, because it can always be seen, says something about you in a way that a phone that’s mostly in your pocket does not. Hence features ranging from “taptic” touch notifications against your skin to the range of customizable faces, bands, and materials. More than any other hardware it has made, Apple wants you to feel like the Apple Watch is “yours.”

A Different Kind of Device

The rub is that all this care still doesn’t quite answer the more basic question of what a smartwatch exists to do. That was not the case with the iPod.

The purpose and advantages of the iPod were easy to explain. “Music is a part of everyone’s life. Everyone. Music’s been around forever. It will always be around,” Jobs said in launching the thing. “This is not a speculative market.” The iPod was for playing music, and it holds 1,000 songs—an epic feat at the time. But a smartwatch’s reason for being isn’t so clear, especially since so much of what it can do requires being tied to a phone in the first place.

More than any other hardware it has made, Apple wants you to feel like the Apple Watch is ‘yours.’

At the same time, the criticism of the Apple Watch as a gratuitous change in form factor that doesn’t mean much on its own sounds a lot like the mockery of the iPad tablet when it first launched in 2010. It’s just a big iPhone, many of us said. It wasn’t until tablets became available on a mass scale that users started to figure out that tablets were better at some things—browsing, video, reading—than phones were. Smartwatches could turn out to be the same. They just haven’t been on enough wrists yet.

The Apple Watch also has so many features that it opens itself to charges of bloat, of lack of focus. But that same alphabet soup could be seen as an advantageous open-endedness. Perhaps Apple is tacitly acknowledging that no one quite knows what the killer use case is for wearables. Instead, it’s offering all kinds of options, all kinds of ways to use the watch. Once it’s out in the world, distributed at scale, all of us—Apple included—will get to see which uses stick.

Everyone Knows What A Watch Is

Another advantage working for Apple is that, compared to any other hardware the company has released, it doen’t have to teach people what a watch is. The global market for watches in 2013 came to about $62 billion, with purchases divided fairly evenly between budget ($1,000). By making a base version available for $349, Apple makes its watch a competitive option not just for would-be smartwatch buyers, but anyone shopping for a watch, period.

The Apple Watch’s appearance itself also reflects a reach for that broadest possible market. More than other smartwatches released to date, the Apple Watch looks like a watch, not a phone strapped to your wrist. It doesn’t appear to call attention to itself as a gadget. By making it less conspicuous, Apple is telegraphing that the Watch isn’t new tech you need to learn to live with but an extension of tech you already know. It’s sort of like a watch. It’s sort of like your iPhone. And its 100 percent Apple.

“We think not only can we find the recipe but we think the Apple brand is going to be fantastic, because people trust the Apple brand,” Jobs said shortly before showing off the iPod to the public for the first time. Whether that trust extends to tech that we wear on our wrists will define the future of Apple as a company, and of wearable technology itself.

Project to Turn Bitcoin Into an All-Powerful Programming Language Raises $15M

Vitalik Buterin. Vitalik Buterin

A year ago, Vitalik Buterin was a teenaged college dropout dabbling in the bitcoin digital currency. Now, he’s the founder of a futuristic programming project that just got backed to the tune of $15 million.

The project is called Ethereum—an effort to transform the kind of technology used in bitcoin into something that can help you build, well, anything—and after a two-month Kickstarter-style crowdfunding campaign, it has raised 30,000 bitcoin, or close to $15 million at today’s bitcoin prices. According to Buterin, Etherum could represent the future of the blockchain—the cryptographically backed distributed public ledger that drives bitcoin—and apparently, many others agree with him.

The tool is part of a sweeping movement to remake internet services using a blockchain—software that’s controlled not by a central authority but by a worldwide network of machines. Developers are building everything from secure chat services to social networks, hoping to remove common tools from the control of big corporations like Google and Twitter. But Ethereum seeks to widen the scope of this effort even further.

Buterin and his cohorts will build their own blockchain, but instead of simply logging financial transactions, the Etherium blockchain will come with a Python-like scripting language that will let you do all kinds of fancy programming. You could write games, online storage services, or even algorithmically determined smart contracts. “You can write anything that you would be able to write on a server and put it on to the blockchain,” says Buterin. “Instead of Javascript making calls to the server, you would be making calls to the blockchain.”

Instead of Javascript making calls to the server, you would be making calls to the blockchain.

Buterin and crew have also funded the project in a unique way. Those who donated bitcoins to the project received something else in return: Ethers, the digital currency that will be mined by the Ethereum software when it officially goes online, sometime in the next few months.

Bitcoin are valuable because they’re both useful as a currency and in short supply. Only 21 million bitcoin will ever be created. That’s not the case with Ethers. Buterin and company plan to produce 15 million of them each year on their blockchain. There’s another important difference too. You will need to use Ethers in order to run software on the Ethereum network. Buterin calls it the platform’s programming “fuel.” The 30,000 bitcoin sale is a bet that people will actually want to do this.

As far as Buterin is concerned, it’s also seed money for his new project. There are already about 20 core developers working on Ethereum, which is backed by about eight bitcoin-rich investors. Now, he is going to hire some more. “We intend to spend the bulk of the money to work on the core code,” he says.

Close to 200 other hackers are playing around with the Ethereum code. They’ve build software such as domain name registrars, online voting apps, crowd-sourcing platforms, and even simple computer games on an Ethereum test-bed. Those early test programs will get their chance to run on the real Etherium platform when the project starts mining its genesis block in the next few months.

Bacteria harbor secret weapons against antibiotics

The ability of pathogenic bacteria to evolve resistance to antibiotic drugs poses a growing threat to human health worldwide. And scientists have now discovered that some of our microscopic enemies may be even craftier than we suspected, using hidden genetic changes to promote rapid evolution under stress and developing antibiotic resistance in more ways than previously thought. The results appear in a new paper in the journal Biomicrofluidics, from AIP Publishing.

In the paper, researchers from Princeton University in New Jersey describe how they observed two similar strains of E.coli bacteria quickly developing similar levels of antibiotic resistance using surprisingly different genetic mutations. Developing different solutions to the same problem shows the bacteria have a diverse arsenal of genetic "weapons" they can develop to fight antibiotics, potentially making them more versatile and difficult to defeat.

"Bacteria are clever -- they have hidden ways to respond to stress that involve re-sculpting their genomes," said Robert Austin, a biophysicist at Princeton who led the research team.

Realizing how effectively bacteria can survive drugs is a sobering thought, Austin said. "It teaches us that antibiotics have to be used much more carefully than they have been up to this point," he said.

Accelerating Evolution

Austin and his colleagues specialize in developing unique, fluid-filled microstructures to test theories of bacterial evolution. Instead of using test tubes or Petri dishes -- uniform environments that, Austin notes, exist only in the "ivied halls of academia" -- the researchers build devices that they believe better mimic natural ecological niches.

The team uses a custom-made microfluidic device that contains approximately 1,000 connected microhabitats in which populations of bacteria grow. The device generates complex gradients of food and antibiotic drugs similar to what might be found in natural bacterial habitats like the gut or other compartments inside a human body.

"In complex environments the emergence of resistance can be far more rapid and profound than would be expected from test tube experiments," Austin said.

From previous experiments with the complex microfabricated devices, the researchers knew that some ordinary, "wild-type" strains of E.coli bacteria quickly evolved antibiotic resistance. They wondered if a mutant strain called GASP, which reproduces more quickly with limited nutrients than the wild type, would develop the same type of antibiotic resistance when exposed to the same drug.

Secret Weapons Revealed

By sequencing the genomes of wild type and GASP bacterial colonies that has been exposed to the antibiotic ciprofloxacin (Cipro), the researchers found different genetic mutations could lead to similar levels of antibiotic resistance. For example, two different mutant strains emerged: one of the antibiotic-resistant GASP strains evolved in such a way that it no longer needed to make biofilms in order to survive stress. It did so by "borrowing" a piece of leftover DNA from a virus that infects bacteria. The other strain did not do this excision, indicating that in evolution the strains can hedge their bets.

Viruses routinely inject their own DNA into bacteria and sometimes DNA sequences remain that no longer seem to have any function in terms of viral replication. Under normal circumstances the leftover DNA may neither help nor hinder the bacteria, but in times of stress the bacteria can use the new DNA to rapidly evolve antibiotic resistant mutations.

The results demonstrate the subtlety and diversity of the tools that bacteria have to fight stress, said Austin. He wonders whether our remaining effective methods for killing bacteria, such as using ethanol to disinfect surfaces, are also vulnerable, and his team plans to test whether bacteria in their devices can evolve ethanol resistance.

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The above story is based on materials provided by American Institute of Physics . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.