Science&Tech

China’s first stealth jet goes from strength to strength as U.S. air technology falters (but is it just another Chinese rip-off?)

• China’s first stealth plane spotted on test runs, making China one of three nations with stealth jet technology
• Critics claim this is a rip-off of America’s F-22 jets, which cost $ 66.7billion to develop

By Eddie Wrenn

PUBLISHED: 05:42 EST, 18 May 2012 | UPDATED: 10:22 EST, 18 May 2012

Flying over the skies of Chengdu in southwest China, the Chinese’s latest stealth plane – the J-20 Might Dragon – is a testament to China’s growing prowess in military technology.

The debut flight of the plane may serve as a warning to the U.S. air force, which has been plagued by a list of problems in their jets – including the revelation that some of their jets have a faulty oxygen system which have slowly been poisoning their pilots.

Sightings of the black plane taking off have again led to claims that the plane was developed off the back of stolen U.S. or Russian plans, a claim strongly denied by China.

See anything familiar? The F-22 Raptor has similar canted tail-fins, a similar bubble canopy and nose section, and both have no flat surfaces to help avoid radar detection

Wired claims that the current batch of U.S. fighter jets are struggling due to labour disputes, cost over-runs, and lethal design flaws.

First off, the U.S.’s Lockheed’s F-22 Raptor – the latest stealth fighter which cost $ 66.7 billion to develop – have been poisoning its pilots owing to a faulty oxygen system. Meanwhile, workers at Lockheed’s F-35 factory have gone on strike, with no end in sight.

The F-35 has also been delayed by several years due to design costs – and the delay means that the cost of building thousands of new jets has risen by hundreds of billions of dollars.

China originally claimed the J-20 would not be ready until 2017 at the earliest, and the U.S, countered and said it would likely be 2020 or later.

However, the test flight shows how close to completion the first models are, and Wired points out that China eschews the U.S. system of carefully testing new jets over a decade.

Instead, China holds preliminary tests and then passes the jets over to the military, and reply on feedback to improve the next generation.

The U.S. tried to emulate this model with the F-35 – but encountered design flaws which ended up costing the military billions of dollars.

Wired said the Chinese were using imported Russian engines to power the the J-20, and said this could lead to future issues and delays in rolling out the stealth jets.

And Russia makes three: The MiG jet was built to rival the U.S. stealth programme

Last year China was caught in an international row after the U.S. charged and jailed Indian-American Noshir Gowadia, a former B-2 stealth bomber engineer, for leaking secrets to China. He was jailed for 32 years.

And when the J-20 was unveiled, other nations – incredulous how quickly the Chinese has developed and tested the stealth fighter aircraft – said the technology must have been stolen.

One of the more extraordinary claims was that it had gained invaluable information from parts of an American F-117 Nighthawk stealth bomber that had been shot down over Serbia during the Kosovo War – the only F-117 ever shot down.

The Chinese insist that the country’s J-20 stealth fighter jet was the work of the country’s own designers and engineers.

An unnamed official was quoted as saying: ‘It’s not the first time foreign media has smeared newly unveiled Chinese military technologies. It’s meaningless to respond to such a speculation.’

Chinese pilot Xu Yongling said that the J-20 possesses an advanced supersonic cruise ability and powerful air mobility that are technological breakthroughs for the country.

He added it would have been impossible for China to glean technology from the F-117 as the ‘outdated’ technology was behind the current generation of fighters.

Analyst slaps ‘SELL’ rating on Facebook shares after proclaiming them ‘implausibly priced’ at trading debut

By Snejana Farberov

PUBLISHED: 12:48 EST, 19 May 2012 | UPDATED: 14:12 EST, 19 May 2012

Skeptic: Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research Group in New York, urged investors not to buy Facebook shared, which he labeled ‘implausibly priced’

One day after Facebook rolled out its much-anticipated IPO, some less-than-enthused analysts are already warning their clients against buying the social media site’s shares.

Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research Group in New York, said that Facebook’s shares were implausibly priced, leading him to put a ‘sell’ rating on the stock. 

Facebook’s less-than-stellar debut saw its shares end the day on Friday just 23 cents, or 0.6 per cent, higher than its initial price, at $ 38.23, valuing the company at $ 104.2billion – even though it only made $ 3.7billion last year.

The shares opened up 11 per cent at a respectable price of $ 42.05 in the morning, and jumped as high as $ 45 at one point, only to fizzle out after initial technical difficulties delayed the start of the trading by about two hours.

‘While we like the company, we’re troubled by investors’ perception of the risks,’ Weiser told the Sunday Telegraph. ‘It’s priced for perfection and that’s clearly implausible.’

Fizzle: Facebook’s shares ended their first trading day only 0.6 per cent higher than the IPO of $ 38

Company filings after the market closed on Friday night revealed the extent to which the banks who underwrote Facebook’s massive $ 6 billion IPO were forced to move in and prop up Facebook’s shares to prevent them from nosediving below $ 38, the New York Post reported. 

Morgan Stanley, Facebook’s lead financial adviser, ended the day with 162million Facebook shares worth $ 6.16billion. Other banks, including JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, ended the day with $ 3.2billion and $ 2.4billion holdings, respectively.

According to Wall Street experts, without the ‘bank bailout,’ Facebook’s IPO would have been a dud on Friday.

The heavy buying, however, decreased the banks’ already small fees on the deal: the underwriters agreed to accept just 1.1 per cent of the $ 16 billion Facebook raised in the IPO.

After splitting $ 176 million in fees, the firms likely spent around $ 380 million on the shares, wiping out their already-meager profits. 

Boost: Facebook shares climbed 11 per cent to $ 42.05 in the morning, and reached as high as $ 45 at one point

Doing a post-mortem of the disappointing IPO roll-out, many experts put the blame on the bankers for setting the price too high.

The banks were apparently wary of pricing the shares too low, aiming for a modest first-day gain of anywhere between 5 per cent and 10 per cent, which failed to materialize.

Bailout: Morgan Stanley, Facebook’s lead financial adviser, was forced to buy 162million Facebook shares worth $ 6.16billion to prop up the IPO

Facebook had increased the number of shares being sold in the IPO by 25 per cent, to 425million, with most of the additional float coming from early investors looking to cash out – a move that had raised a red flag among analysts.

It remains to be seen what the future holds for Facebook. The social media giant will be forced to balance the need to feature more advertisements on the site with the risk of alienating its 900million users, whose loyalty is integral to Facebook’s success.

Glitch: Facebook’s debut on the market was marred by technical problems that delayed the start of the trading by nearly two hours

The fact that Facebook will have to make further acquisitions, and has a still unproven advertising model, are two of the reasons why Pivotal argues Facebook stock should have been priced no higher than $ 30.

‘None of this is to take away from the fantastic success of the company,’ said Mr Wieser. ‘It’s just not consistent with the economics.’

When trading resumes at New York’s Nasdaq exchange on Monday morning, investors will be watching closely to see how Facebook shares perform in the heels of the lackluster first day.

Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the financial regulator, has said it will review the technical glitches that marred the roll-out of the IPO to determine the cause of the delay.

Incoming search terms:

• facebook morgan stanley 6 16 billion (1)

The GPS ‘smart shoe’ that can track Alzheimer’s sufferers on Google Maps if they go missing

By Eddie Wrenn

PUBLISHED: 09:11 EST, 18 May 2012 | UPDATED: 09:33 EST, 18 May 2012

GPS technology can help Alzheimer’s sufferers and their carers, with the release of a shoe that tracks the wearer’s position and plots their position on Google Maps.

The GPS Smart Shoe embeds a GPS receiver and SIM card to send the shoe’s position to a private tracking website – helping to find people if they wander off.

With 800,000 sufferers in the UK – which is predicted to expand to one million within the next decade, manufacture Aetrex said they wanted to use technology to enable extra support.

The shoes and the GPS receiver sends co-ordinates to a tracking website, so they can be found if they go missing

The shoes are available for both men and women, with either straps or shoelaces, and goes for around £300 a pair, with a monthly service plan of £30.

The receiver is tucked discreetly into the heel of the shoe

The transmitter is embedded in the base of the right heel and tracks the user’s location in real time, sending that data at specified intervals to a central monitoring station.

If the wearer ever leaves a specified zone, the carer can track their whereabouts on the Aetrex website, which uses Google Maps to plot the position.

When the wearer wanders off wearing the GPS Shoe, their caregiver will immediately receive a geo-fence alert on their smartphone and computer, with a direct link to a Google map plotting the wanderer’s location.

The company is also talking to various Alzheimer associations to explore various partnerships.

If there is a downside to the technology, it is that the battery life of the GPS receiver lasts only two days – so it could run flat if no-one remembers to charge it.

However an email alert is sent to the carer when the battery is low.

The website AllThingsDigital asked Evan Schwartz, the company founder, if there was any risk to the product in terms of surveillance concerns.

He said: ‘It’s all kinds of good and bad and ugly popping up when it comes to GPS tech these days, and that’s definitely a concern.

‘There are enough people who make jokes about tracking a spouse, or what if you threw the shoe in the trunk of someone’s car and they never know it’s being used for that, that sort of thing.

‘But at the same time, this shoe has been designed to serve a purpose, and it’s to help caregivers, so we have a hard time believing someone would abuse this.’

Human-dolphin communication is one step closer: New marine speaker can recreate the animals’ clicks and whistles

By Damien Gayle

PUBLISHED: 10:04 EST, 18 May 2012 | UPDATED: 10:04 EST, 18 May 2012

So long, and thanks for all the fish: Human dolphin communication is one step closer thanks to a new speaker

A revolutionary new underwater speaker is putting man one step closer to communicating with dolphins.

The new gadget will allow marine scientists to reproduce the full range of dolphin sounds, including clicks, whistles and burst pulses well outside of the range of human hearing.

It is hoped that it will help biologists interpret the strange language of the marine mammals, which is thought could be as complex as human language.

Dolphins are able to hear and produce not only low-frequency sounds below 20kHz, like humans can, but they are also high-frequency sounds of up to more than 150 kHz, which are too high for humans to hear.

Not only that, but they are capable of vocalising at a variety of frequencies simultaneously. But to understand these sounds better, marine biologists have to be able to play them back.

A team of researchers led by Yuka Mishima, a graduate student at Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology have created a speaker capable of handling the broad band of frequencies.

The speaker has a frequency response ranging from 6 kHz to 170 kHz via a transducer sandwiched between pieces of acrylic to keep it safe from water.

The Tokyo University team have already conducted playback tests of dolphin sounds in the ocean by using the dolphin speaker prototype and compared the sound spectrograms with natural recorded spectrograms obtained from dolphins.

In a paper about his research to be presented at the Acoustical Society of America meeting this week, Mr Yishima writes: ‘Our next step is to faithfully playback the original sounds of dolphins by using the dolphin speaker.

‘Once the dolphin speaker is completed it will enable us to playback a variety of dolphin sounds to dolphins, which will help to broaden the research of their acoustic abilities.’

The underwater speaker has a frequency response ranging from 6 kHz to 170 kHz via a transducer sandwiched between pieces of acrylic to keep it dry

Earlier this year, a major scientific conference heard calls for dolphins to be designated ‘non-human persons’ and given their own bill of rights.

This would stop them being kept in zoos and waterparks and being harmed by fisheries.

The remarkable animals also communicate though body language, can be taught to understand the basic elements of human language including vocabulary, sentences, questions and demands and will even watch TV and follow instructions delivered on the screen.

Pre-orders for Samsung Galaxy S3 phone shoot up to nine million – meaning phone will sell as many on first day as predecessor sold in six months

By Eddie Wrenn

PUBLISHED: 10:21 EST, 18 May 2012 | UPDATED: 10:28 EST, 18 May 2012

The Samsung Galaxy S3 looks set to follow its predecessor as one of the biggest-selling phones of the year.

More than nine million people have already pre-ordered the Android-powered smartphone, with the phone due out at the end of the month,

The amount is extraordinary, considering the S2 – which battled with the iPhone to be the world’s biggest-selling phone last year – took about six months to sell 10million phones, and 11 months to sell 20million.

Samsung toppled Apple as the world’s biggest smartphone maker earlier this year, helped by its line-up of ‘Galaxy’ devices running on Google’s rival operating system.

The S3 is Samsung’s latest flagship phone, and was unveiled earlier this month. It will face substantial competition from HTC’s One series of phones, and the always strong-selling iPhone range.

The Samsung’s most innovative feature is built-in face-tracking and voice control – allowing, Samsung claims, for a more ‘natural’ control system.

It will also pay tribute to Samsung’s expertise in screens, with a large 4.8-inch Super AMOLED screen running a resolution of 1280 x 720p – far bigger than Apple’s iPhone, and close in size to the smaller end of the tablet market.

Other innovations include what Samsung claims is a ‘more intelligent’ lock system, that keeps the screen ‘awake’ when the phone’s camera senses eyes watching it, rather than turning it off.

The best phones of the moment:

The next iPhone is not due before the Autumn, traditionally launching around October. It is rumoured to come with a four-inch screen, and may be joined by a new addition to the iRange – an iPad Mini.

The S3 will arrive in the UK and Germany on May 29, before rolling out in other countries in the following months.

The newspaper cited an unidentified Samsung official, who also said the company’s smartphone factory in South Korea was running at its full capacity of 5 million units per month.

Samsung declined to comment.

However it said late last month that the new Galaxy smartphone would ‘substantially contribute’ to its second-quarter earnings.