If you have a Samsung phone, leave it home. The Transportation Department is issuing an emergency order banning passengers and flight crews from bringing Samsung Galaxy Note7 smartphones on airline flights. This is in response to reports of the phones catching fire. It says the phone may not be carried on board or packed in checked bags on flights to and from the United States or within the country. Samsung recalled more than 2.5 million of the smartphones and discontinued the product earlier this week. Numerous fires have been reported, including one on a Southwest Airlines flight earlier this month.


Microsoft paint is getting a fresh new coat of cool with tools to create 3D objects. Video demonstrations for this new paint app has been leaked and published on Twitter and YouTube but the app has not been officially announced yet by Microsoft.


Things look bad for Samsung right now. The company recalled the new Galaxy Note 7 last month because some of them were exploding. It sent out replacements. But now, their replacement phones, the ones they said were safe have exploded too. Now, the company has decided to halt production of the Galaxy note 7 entirely. The problem isn’t the phone, it’s the battery.


Most electronics use a lithium-ion battery. Lithium is used because it’s light, but can store a lot of energy. But because lithium can store a lot of energy, it’s in its nature to be unstable. We’ve already achieved almost 90 percent of the maximum battery life even possible from lithium-ion batteries. But that doesn’t stop people from wanting batteries that charge faster and last longer. This creates an “arms race” as manufacturers push the limits for really small gains. And the more you push the battery, the more likely it is to explode. We’re carrying around little bombs of energy and we’re pushing them too far.


Lithium ion batteries are actually pretty simple. There are two electrodes on opposite sides, this is just like a standard battery. One electrode is positively charged and called the cathode. The opposite electrode is called anode and its negatively charged. During charging, lithium ions move from one side to the other. When you use the battery, the lithium moves in the other direction. In between are these chemicals called electrolytes that help ions move more easily between the two sides. Electrolytes are crucial, but they’re also pretty volatile.

Lithium ions need to move from one side to the other. So, the ions have to go back and forth, but the anode and the cathode on the sides should never touch because they’ll redirect energy to the electrolytes in the middle. To keep this from happening, battery makers insert separators in between. In Samsung’s case, the original problem was that the separators were flawed and let the two electrodes touch. Then, all the energy being pumped into the battery goes directly to the electrolytes in the middle. It catches fire and explodes. 

There are other things that cause battery explosion. One way is overcharging. Overcharging happens when too much lithium goes into one side. Luckily, most batteries are designed to automatically prevent overcharging. Then there’s charging too much or too fast. This leads to something called “plating.” This forms needle-like structures called dendrites that can internally short out the battery. But this can be avoided by making sure the charger and the battery are compatible and supposed to be together.

Finally, sometimes companies try to make batteries store more power by increasing voltage, which is a way of measuring force. The higher the voltage, the more power there is. So they try to pump this up by adding elements like nickel to the lithium. But again, the higher the voltage is, the more likely the electrolytes are to combine in a way that makes them catch fire. 

Some scientists are trying to develop a kind of electrolyte that won’t burst into flames as easily. These electrolyte are called “ionic liquids” and need a lot more heat to form flammable gas. So it is a good idea, they are often much safer, but there can be challenges with battery life and they tend to be more expensive. So, lithium-ion batteries are the best we have for now. Honestly, they’re a good solution and they really do get the job done as long as we don’t demand more than they can safely offer.


Amazon now has its own version of Spotify and it's called Amazon Music Unlimited. The subscription music streaming service is similar to what's offered by Spotify, Apple, Google and all the others. You can instantly stream any song you want on-demand starting at $10 a month but Amazon has a twist on the price. If you are a member of Prime, the monthly fee is knocked down to $8 a month and if you want to go cheaper, there's also a $4 a month option but for that crazy low price, there's a catch. You can only listen to songs on Amazon Echo smart speaker. 

The integration with Echo is the real hook here. Echo's assistant Alexa now understands new voice commands to play songs. You can ask to play a mix of genre or mood bass tracks from a specific decade or year and if you don't know the name of the song, well Alexa can still play it if you can rattle off some of the lyrics. If you're thinking, wait didn't Amazon already have a music service? Well, not exactly. Prime subscribers had access to a limited library of music that was complimentary with a Prime membership but it doesn't have access to many songs.


According to the Washington Post, Facebook's trending news story algorithm is still serving up fake stories. After a six-week survey, the post found a number of Linked stories that were categorically false, in addition to many links to items that simply weren't news. It seems Facebook still has plenty of work to do.


It's official: the Galaxy Note 7 is dead. Samsung has finally pulled the plug on the Note 7 with a second recall, telling all owners even those with replacements to shut off the phone and exchange it for a different model. The company has permanently stop production of the premium phone that's prone to catching fire. 

The nightmare of recalling two-and-a-half million phones globally escalated into a mortifying disaster for the brand after so-called safe replacement models also started catching fire. Even though the phone is dead, the drama isn't over yet. Customers now have to deal with the headache of getting refunds or getting carriers to exchange the phone again. 

The whole recall also raises some big questions that Samsung still has to answer. For starters, what is the source of the battery fire malfunction? After the first recall, Samsung pin the blame on a production error from one battery supplier, but there are doubts over that reasoning when safe replacement phone still have the problem even though they had batteries from a different source. Was the rush to produce batteries quickly the cause for more errors at a different factory? There's another layer to the mystery. Several Note 7s phones in China also caught fire even though the Chinese models were said to have batteries from a different supplier. 

For consumers to trust Samsung again, the south Korean company need to break down exactly what went wrong and what steps it is taking to avoid this from happening in the future. There's also a question of how much damage this has done to Samsung financially. Some analysts have estimated to Reuters that it could cost the company as much as 17 billion dollars and then there's the matter of repairing consumer trust. Will Samsung ever make a Note 8 or is this disaster so bad that it won't make anything called a Note again?