The Google project to put an aquarium full of water bears inside a phone | Hacker News Reader

The Google project to put an aquarium full of water bears inside a phone

venturebeat.com

175 pointsseycombi84 comments

The main thrust of the comments so far are negative, but in my opinion this was a great idea.

Phones are personal devices. Plenty of time is spent on smoothly machined surfaces, wood cases, etc. A little biosphere is a beautiful idea, and likely cost a fraction of the overall project.

This is like the rumor of 1970's platform shoes filled with water and fish floating inside.

But to be serious here are some of the other modules they planned on:

http://www.modularphonesforum.com/news/yezz-another-28-modul...

And yeah some look pretty cool, a scale, iris detector, a better microphone and speaker, laser range finder, smoke detector (but could imagine perhaps other hazardous materials). Might think of other specialty application, but the problem is in any of those fields, there are probably higher quality tools already available not tied to an experimental expensive phone. They'd have to first make the phone as ubiquitous as an iPhone then start selling add-ons. Not make add-ons as as a major feature of the phone.

But tardigrades just seems like a way to get someone in management to notice and say "Wait wut, we are spending the money on this? Somebody, please defund this project".

I saw that in a list of Ara modules. They had real trouble coming up with useful modules to justify the thing.

I can think of plenty of use for modules. The problem is that none of them are general purpose. There are tons of niche applications though. They should have made an industrial phone for $1000. Lots of people would have bought them for interesting use cases that Google never would have thought of.

The challenge is that a hackable industrial strength phone is not a ten billion dollar business, which is what Google wants.

there are so many things that google markets poorly, or to the wrong audience.

glass would have been amazing for industrial or many professional jobs, wave was a collaboration tool released to individuals, and now this where people want "an input device" for a niche application and would currently pay tens of thousands of dollars for such a thing.

it's really quite upsetting that all these fantastic technologies are wasted because of this push for "social" and mass market.

Looking from the outside in, it seems the problem is with management. I have never worked at Google, but I know many people who have. None of them have said positive things about their managers. Obviously this is anecdotal, but I see little reason to believe otherwise.

One big thing here is that Ara was part of ATAP which was acquired from Motorola (back when Google owned Motorola). So the culture of this project is an unusual one, even for Google. The heavy dependence on outside contractors probably made for a complicated setup, but I don't think that was the problem. From the outside, it feels like ATAP/Project Ara just ran the clock out. If they'd have gotten the phone done and ready to ship faster, maybe things would be different today.

I work at Google, and have had several managers during my two stints at the company, all of whom I consider to be quite good.

Glass is now being used for medical and industrial purposes

Really? I was under the impression that Glass was discontinued. Can you provide any links?

https://developers.google.com/glass/distribute/glass-at-work

Found this! :D

Anything niche but important enough to warrant a $1000 phone that could take another $xxx component is also something that could easily have a $xxx USB-C component.

> a $xxx USB-C component

Which you plug into your laptop. Which is a technological device that everyone has, and which is (to a degree) extensible. Or it's a PCIe card, and it slots into your PC.

The idea behind Ara is that your phone could do what the laptop or PC can do.

I'm running an LG G5 with the Cam+ adapter right now. It's a fantastic idea, but hamstrung by the fact that there are only a handful of modules and they're all proprietary.

Phones can use already USB peripherals. Just look at the FLIR One and Seek thermal cameras, which start at $200 compared to ~$600 for a mediocre phone with a thermal camera or ~$500 for a dedicated thermal camera device.

No, I think the person you replied to meant that you can make a USB-C accessory for the phone. USB-C ports are on phones, in fact the majority of new Android phones now have them.

Yes, but that also has the advantage of not tieing you to the phone, and not tieing you to a specific phone. At the very least, if someone wants to make a componentised phone like this, they should make (at least a subset of) the interface electrically compatible to USB C, so you could have a cheap/simple mechnical adapter to use most modules with any USB C capable hardware to widen appeal.

Some sort of standardized form factor for small embeddable hardware with dimensions that makes it feasible for one of the "carriers" could be a phone would be interesting.

In fact, doing it by starting with creating some dev boards with various functionality + the adapter first, and only considering a phone if/when it gets traction could make it viable for someone to bootstrap or do on kickstarter.

The problem was going straight for a phone which has pretty much no advantages applicable to a large enough group of users to be viable until/unless there's a large ecosystem of interesting modules first.

> At the very least, if someone wants to make a componentised phone like this, they should make (at least a subset of) the interface electrically compatible to USB C, so you could have a cheap/simple mechnical adapter to use most modules with any USB C capable hardware to widen appeal.

Good point.

I see the Ara project as trying to pioneer PCIe for phone modules. If a lot of phones had Ara-compatible modules, that would be great. It's just that there's only Ara right now.

Many of the things you might want to attach don't fit into the flush form factor. A credit card reader. An ultrasonic scanner for imaging. Various medical sensors.

A phone where you could clamp sizable accessories onto one end might be more useful.

Indeed. Even having to figure out a way to hold my phone while it's external battery pack is plugged in is a pain. I used to just swap batteries, back when that was possible. My phone is capable of having a lot of things plugged into it, but it stops working well as a handheld device at that point.

All the modularity one would ever need is a robust mechanical interface for the back side cover and a ribbon connector standard for internal USB (a convention might even be enough, e.g. "microSD with wires"), or at least power.

The mechanical challenge of integrating your combined pong controller wheel/tire pressure gauge (or whatever your personal long tail use case might be) into a custom made back cover would be the excuse for existence all those dust-gathering 3D-printers have been waiting for.

Yep would have been amazing in the industrial industry. However industrial industry is all about low volume high unit cost.

As for an example industrial phone here's an RFID reader Android phone for 2.5k. https://www.atlasrfidstore.com/trimble-juno-t41-rugged-rfid-...

How about starting with discrete radio and modem? Maybe a real LAN? Gaming GPU?

What we need is for Android device manufacturers to agree on a standard mounting point to attach a single external module. Something like a rail or magnet on the back at a fixed position relative to the USB port so that we can securely attach a peripheral without having it fall off.

Put a Picatinny rail on the top end of the phone. That's a standard way to attach stuff to guns, and there are lots of things which attach to it. Car mounting becomes easy.

Not sure if you're serious but a Picatinny rail would be way over engineering for small phone peripherals. Consumers wouldn't accept something so bulky and sharp. And the mounting point should be at the bottom of the phone next to the USB port to allow for a secure electrical connection.

The line between microdosing and tripping balls is thinner than many people realize.

I suppose you meant to comment on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13731931

No.

Not to mention that once you've crossed the line, you may lose sight of it forever.

These sealed aquatic systems are really cool. How do you go about finding out how much of everything you need to put in them for long term survival?

Can the biological processes of these simple organisms be modeled as checmical equations and all you need to do is balance them out and solve for the mols of everything you need to pour in?

Guessing it's a bunch of trial and error right now - these systems are pretty hard to predict in general and I'm not aware of a whole lot of research into closed ecological systems. Which is a shame really.

A self-sustaining system like we'd want should come to its own dynamic equilibrium, given a decent enough starting state, which does make the trial and error slightly more feasible, and of course they have to have some idea of the inputs and outputs of the various organisms.

There is some research on these ecosystems [1], and there dynamics [2,3]. The ecosystem is made up of a photosynthetic algae as a producer, a protozoa as a consumer, and a bacteria as a decomposer, and can be stable for over 1,000 days.

[1] http://ir.obihiro.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/10322/221/1/Prot.Vo...

[2] http://www.cell.com/cell/pdfExtended/S0092-8674(12)00515-6

[3] http://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.5.0410...

Stable for 1000 days is not the same thing as 'will remain clean for 1000 days'. Have this phones a undisclosed problem with overheating that would suggest to add water as heat buffer?

> I'm not aware of a whole lot of research into closed ecological systems

I'm sure NASA and SpaceX have to be doing something like this.

> These sealed aquatic systems are really cool.

I find them more cruel, as you knowingly doom your pet world to die a few years later.

It could be worse: https://www.thedodo.com/live-animal-keychains-china-12256846...

https://www.thedodo.com/watch-holds-captive-ants-1057364913....

The keychain thing reminds me of this: https://medium.com/the-mission/a-visit-to-the-dead-tiger-war...

“…humans are monsters.”

“Yeah…” she replies. “We really are.”

That's why I haven't made one yet. I'd like to make one that contains a correctly proven amount of every nutrient and will, for a fact, stay alive for a long long time.

Ironically, we're doing it to ourselves at the global scale, to ourselves and tons of other organisms. It's only when the scale is so small that we can hold it in our hands, that we start to empathize.

We might have hit peak phone. As much as I try I don't get the reasoning on this one. How is it that these top techs could not find a better idea?

Forget the aquarium, how about a really strong microscope. Or a portable testing lab or a television or some kind of art project.

I'd say that aquarium counts as some kind of art project (art product?). Which seems like the thing you'd hire such an agency for, after you've run out of more sensible ideas.

Sad to see Ara die. I don't understand why they took three years to realise the path they were pursuing didn't work. Why couldn't they figure out earlier so they still had time to do something that works?

Google should have pursued a less ambitious and more practical version of the idea. Instead of making everything replaceable, maybe just identify one component that would be. Like the camera. Why do I have to buy a new phone if all I want is a new camera? Would a phone with only one or two replaceable components be feasible to build, and not impose too many tradeoffs?

The Ara team pursued the "everything should be replaceable" dream for too long, and failed. I wonder if a limited version would have been feasible.

It doesn't make sense that you should buy a new smartphone, priced at as much as ₹80K ($1000) even if all you want is one new component. Imagine if you had to buy a new laptop for more storage for your movies, and external hard discs didn't exist. Or a bigger screen, when you could use an external monitor. And so on.

The problem with that is that it's not just one or two components that are new iterations when you upgrade your phone - CPU, GPU, display (or, more likely, generation of protective tech on display, at this point), camera, maybe speakers, the antenna(e) could be workable barring something like a 4G->5G iteration if they covered enough to start with...and that's all ignoring the custom-shaped battery, which would get smaller to fit the modular slot.

Plus the one upgradable component that stops having feature-parity often long before the rest - software stack. The number of problems with getting random bugs out would get worse by the number of modular parts, and few Android vendors that I've seen keep phones updated for even 3 years, let alone 6.

It's been the case for a long time that you lose customization when you shrink the form factor, as you start squeezing every component down to its minimal essentials, and because it lets you start making tradeoffs you can only make if you know intimate details of the entire platform.

I would, quite fervently, like for a modular smartphone to work, and to not have to do the equivalent of paying hundreds of dollars every few years when my phone gives up the ghost or is EOL (or both). I just don't see the technology advancing that way until we get way better at miniaturization, such that fitting functionality into the phone form factor is no longer a strong pressure constraint.

Any component could theoretically cause someone to want to upgrade their phone, but in practice, some would be more frequent driving factors than others. Have you done market research to identify these?

If you were to make only those replaceable, you'd derive much of the benefit, but only incur some of the cost. A phone with only some modular parts would hopefully be not as thick as one with all parts modular. You'd have fewer random bugs, since there are fewer combinations.

Regarding software updates, that would be taken care of by a phone made by Google, like Nexus.

Concretely, how much thicker would the Pixel be if the camera were replaceable? 1mm? I'd take that tradeoff, particularly since the additional mm of thickness would result in better battery life.

I do work for Google, but not on anything phone-related, and have no more information about what goes into phone design decisions than most others randomly sampled on HN.

Consequently, no, I have no market data on what drives phone replacement, though my own limited circle of personal experience suggests either catastrophic failure or a threshold of the device performing unusably poorly as the most common reasons, more than wanting a shiny upgrade.

The phone would probably be more than 1mm thicker in order to accommodate a sturdy mount for the modular thing to slot into alone, let alone whatever additional wiring overhead might be involved for having enough bandwidth to speak arbitrary optical device protocols encapsulated in some standard - and then you might have a failure as version 1.x can only speak up to 2K resolution, 2.x 4K, and so on, so you might end up needing a phone upgrade _anyway_ to get that 4k camera.

Yes, paying upfront for a device like the Pixel buys you X years of device updates, but there are plenty of people who can't afford to buy a phone for the upfront price all at once, even if it might offer cost savings on modular upgrades later.

I might also take that tradeoff, but then, I prioritize durability in my phones over tiny size, since I have relatively large hands and a habit of breaking my phones.

Those poor tardigrades would be killed by all of the dangerous radiation coming from the phone.

Just kidding, they'd be killed by the dangerous conduction from the phone. The little guys can't handle the rapid heat changes caused by the battery and CPU.

Really? I seem to recall these organisms being almost indestructible.

They can withstand temperature ranges from 1 K (−458 °F; −272 °C) (close to absolute zero) to about 420 K (300 °F; 150 °C)

Battery and CPU heat output of a phone couldn't be more than 40 degrees C in variation, at a guess.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade

No one ever reads the article.

> It turns out the myths about tardigrades — how they’re indestructible — are true, under the right circumstances. “They go into cryptobiosis. They shed up to 90 percent of their body water, turn into a little grain of rice, and that is the thing that survives in space, and that’s what survives in ice cores for 300 years, and you add water and they revive. Cryptobiosis requires very narrow environmental ranges in order to begin,” said Feehan. But a sudden change in temperature? Lab-bred tardigrades are no match for that.

From the HN guidelines:

Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article.

How does that guideline apply if someone asks a question that is directly and clearly answered in the article? Is it OK to point out that the article covers that as long as one is polite about it? I'm not sure I understand if the rule is "you're allowed to correct people using information from the article as long as you don't tell them it was in the article" which is obviously silly - or "just don't be a dick about it" which seems covered by the general rule of "don't be a dick".

The guidelines include an example of how to do this:

"Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thanks. How ironic that my question about how to handle "not reading the article" comments could have been resolved if I'd read the article on how to handle mentioning reading the article.

I'm just off to dive into a singularity of self-reference. See you later.

It would be cool if in the future a device can scan (real life scene, blood, piece of chalk) anything and tell you the composition and everything you ask. Think Pokedex and those fictional gadgets in sci-fi movies.

There is a company who is trying to do that with a spectrometer but they product is controversial:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/16/scio-the-pocket-sized-mole...

Would make an interesting random number generator (which are tough to find on some systems). Waterbears are rad hard as well :) Would be tough for Mallory to "reduce their entropy."

Actually true random number generators are cheap and to integrate into Silicon. The question is do you trust them? :-)

Can't trust them -- I've seen too much.

If you don't trust the hardware, adding tardigrades doesn't really help.

> Would be tough for Mallory to "reduce their entropy."

According to the article, Mallory could just burn 100% CPU for a while to "reduce their entropy" forever.

> One pitch outlined a module that transmits touch, like a high-tech version of the heartbeat feature in the Apple Watch.

Seems unfair to group this with the far fetched ideas. I for one think this is a killer feature in a world that could use more opportunities for meaningful connections.

Coming across the Lapka concept for Project Ara[0] made me realize that the problem was to market this as a "phone" in the first place.

Few people are willing to take the risk on a phone with an entirely new form factor, let alone an entirely novel premise, and no one would carry two phones around in their pocket.

It seems like they missed an opportunity to position this as a customizable mobile computing platform. Or perhaps they did and thought it was too niche.

[0] https://medium.com/@my_lapka/lapka-x-project-ara-78fc5fe9f50...

Another crazy idea. Why not integrate a soldering iron?

Soldering irons that are powered via USB with 1500mA and 5V exist and are basically just a heating element plus a 555 timer chip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-8D5t6TJYU

Seven engineers? Isn't that a million dollar a year project?

These are google engineers so wouldn't be surprised if the burdened annual cost per engineer is $300k so upwards of $2M+

Is this the innovation that's supposedly lacking at Apple under Tim Cook?

You mean innovation like the Touch Bar?

And "Dongle-Christmas"?

Sounds like they are doing great things with investors' money.

Yeah, but not just investors money. One of the sad things about Google is that it seems to soak up so many bright, highly paid minds - then puts them to work on relatively useless things.

It's inefficient allocation of humanity's intellectual resources.

I daydream sometimes that lightning strikes and both google and facebook suddenly go out of business.

So many of the world's best and brightest software engineers work at those companies. Suddenly out of work they'd be motivated to start those little business they've always wanted to have. I think we'd see an explosion of cool new ideas & businesses pop up in the tech community.

A bit like the ending of "God Emperor of Dune".

I have nothing but great things to say about the quality of the engineers at Google . . . but I do think our purposes are suboptimal.

I can't wait for the day I get to search by IP address.

Not just Google. Trust me, it happens at lots of large companies that have plenty of money to waste.

Courter point: The team here developed some interesting new mobile microscopy techniques. It's possible, had the project completed development, that some other cool things could have come from a "useless" tech-art project.

Yeah, they must be doing really well.

"Hey, the Ara is going nowhere, but it would be a shame to not get any return from it... Lets see how many click bait blog articles we can generate from it!"

Ara's been gone since August. I sourced the story myself, not sure how it's click bait tbh! Did you read it?

To be clear, that line was something I imagined someone at Google saying prior to the developments mentioned in the article. But, "put an aquarium full of water bears in your phone"? That's a nonsense, fluff headline if I ever heard one. That they went so far as to actually do it, I will admit, redeems it somewhat! But not so much that I'll believe that the project had any goal beyond generating press. :D

One: Ara is dead. Two: how is the article clickbait?

Cruelty to animals. I eat meat but do not like seeing anything suffer for purposes of amusement. These are small, but mistreating even insects can be a crime in the US (specifically if you film it). Give them a digital version and leave the actual animals out of such displays.

The creators of this project told me they actually wondered if PETA would take offense. Ideally, though, the tardigrades would have had plenty of algae and room to swim around/reproduce.

Just in case you're not joking I'll point out that water bears do not suffer in any meaningful sense because they have far fewer neurons than even a mosquito.

> I eat meat but do not like seeing anything suffer for purposes of amusement.

Far worse things happen to the animals you eat than ever happened to these critters in their aquarium.

I'm a meat-eater too, but I try to be honest with myself about it.

There's a banned user that posted the right answer to this comment - lol. Where to even begin?

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