Wednesday, 28 November 2012
Indoor Clouds: Your New Weather Forecast
I usually reserve about as much excitement for weather forecasts as I do for banging my head against a brick wall. However, here's a whimsical puff of prediction that's literally left my head in the clouds.
It's the Nebula 12, a weather forecasting machine that uses meteorological data to generate indoor clouds as a representation of what to expect when you step outside.
Sunday, 25 November 2012
Friction And Static Could Charge Smartphones
Static electricity is good for sticking balloons to walls, but who knew it could be used to prolong the battery life of a smartphone. Sihong Wang and Long Lin, graduate students in Georgia Tech's materials science department have developed a two-layered material that generates power from static electricity and flexing. Nanoprinter Achieves Insane Resolution.
Saturday, 22 September 2012
Lens Focuses Light Without Distortion
For centuries, scientists and engineers have pushed the limits of materials to make better lenses. Inventions such as the Fresnel lens made lighthouses visible from further away and plastics made coke-bottle eyeglasses a thing of the past. Now a research team at Harvard has made another leap: a tiny cone-shaped lens that eliminate distortions in everything from cell phone cameras to ligh signals that travel through fiber optic cables.
Ultra-precise lenses are used in telecommunications to focus the beams in fiber-optic systems and in some cell phone cameras. Making them smaller and flatter frees up space and reduces the weight of devices. But existing solid lenses aren't distortion-free, however, and fixing that usually means using multiple lenses, which adds to weight and size.
Tilted 3-D Screens Coming Around The Bend
Whether for television or mobile devices, most 3-D displays have used autostereoscopic parallax barriers, such as liquid crystal displays, to give users a three-dimensional viewing experience.
However, a team of scientists, led by the University of Bristol, have chosen a different route. They've developed Tilt Displays, a new type of screen composed of nine smaller panels that physically tilt and contort to give the impression of depth.
Laser Beams Shoot from Printer
Lasers are everywhere -- in DVD players, fiber optic communications and even displays. They are so useful it would be great if they were flexible and easy to make, but that hasn't been the case, until now.
Researchers at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. have developed a way to print lasers on a variety of surfaces, using a printer not too far removed from the one on an average desktop.
The team, led by D. J. Gardiner of the Center for Molecular Materials for Photonics, used liquid crystals similar to those used in liquid crystal displays. With the right kind of stimulation, the molecules in liquid crystals emit laser light.
Thursday, 30 August 2012
Mini Camera Gets A Big Brain
Cameras are mounted everywhere in sports these days. During the Olympics we had underwater cams for swimmers and athlete's-eye views for bikes. Now there's a camera that could be mounted on a helmet to record not just the athlete's view but her heart rate, acceleration and loction, too.
Called the INCA, the camera has a processor as powerful as any PC, which allows a lot of functionality crammed into a space less than three inches on a side. The INCA was designed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS.
Gloves Turn Gestures Into Speech
Most hearing people can't understand sign language. A team of students from the Ukraine built a set of electronic gloves to help bridge that gap. A set of sensors in these gloves, including an accelerometer, compass, gyroscope and flex sensors in the fingers, translate movement into signals that a computer converts into speech.
The person wearing the gloves draws a shape in the air. That information is transmitted them via Bluetooth to a smartphone, which matches the shape up against a set stored in memory. A match produces a sound. For example, waving one's hands in one pattern produces "nice to meet you" and another pattern produces "system really works."
Thursday, 23 August 2012
Charge Your Phone With Bacteria-Eating Viruses
Oh how I love piezoeletric materials, the kind that generate electricity when squeezed. Unfortuantely, the best substances that exhibit that characteristic are toxic and hard to work with. So, a group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is developing a greener alternative that uses a bacteria-eating virus instead.
ANALYSIS: First Human Infected with a Computer Virus
The piezoelectric effect has the potential for paper-thin generators that we power with human movements. Unfortunately, the best-performing piezoelectric materials contain lead, a no-no for consumer electronics, as the Swiss National Science Foundation points out. The Berkeley Lab group, led by faculty scientist and U.C. Berkeley associate professor of bioengineering Seung-Wuk Lee, turned to the M13 bacteriophage.
This bacteriophage is a common virus harmless to humans that attacks bacteria. Bioengineers really like it because the phage replicates quickly and can be genetically engineered easily. Turns out that it's also piezoelectric. To create their generator, the Berkeley Lab scientists engineered the phage to boost its electrical output when squeezed and then stacked thin films containing single layers of the virus.
In the lab, the bacteria-based generator successfully converted the force of a finger tap into an electrical charge. They found that it can produce up to 6 nanoamps of current and 400 millivolts of potential, according to their published research, which is about a quarter of a AAA battery's voltage. That's also enough to be used to operate a small liquid-crystal display.
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The group first published their results in Nature Nanotechnology (abstract) last May, but for some weird reason the news was dormant since then. Hat tip to Inhabitat's Timon Singh for shining a light on the development.
In their Nature paper, the scientists write that harmless virus-based piezoelectric materials potentially "offer a simple and environmentally friendly approach to piezoelectric energy generation." I can't wait until they scale it up. Imagine all that frantic keyboard tapping actually charging your laptop
Glasses-Free 3-D Movie Theaters Coming Soon
3-D televisions are available now, and consumer electronics companies have been showing off some glasses-free technologies (as on the Nintendo 3DS). But generally, theaters use a two-projector polarized light system.
DNEWS VIDEO: Gadgets and Gizmos
Each projector displays an image, but the images are offset slightly. The projectors, meanwhile, are sending out light that is polarized. That means that at certain angles half the light is absorbed.
It's possible to see this effect with sunglasses; two polarized lenses. Put one in front of the other and start rotating it, and it's not possible to see through them when one is perpendicular to the other. In movie theaters, the 3-D glasses are polarized so that each eye only picks up one image at a time, giving the illusion of depth. Two projectors, though, can be cumbersome and expensive.
There are single projection methods, but those require even more moving parts, involving physical barriers akin to venetian blinds between the screen and the viewer. Called the parallax barrier method, the barriers limit which image the eye sees, creating a 3-D illusion.
NEWS: Coming Soon: Live 3-D TV Without The Glasses
To fix this, the South Korean team, led by Byoungho Lee, professor at the School of Electrical Engineering at Seoul National University, used polarizers to stop the passage of light after it reflects off the screen rather than doing so at the projector.
The polarizer is a coating called called quarter-wave retarding film. It acts like the polarizers in two-projector systems, except instead of relying on two images, it splits up the single one coming off the screen to the eye. Basically, it moves the 3-D glasses to the screen, so the audience no longer has to wear them.
It will be a while before theaters use this, but it's been shown to work in at least two types of displays, and offers a path to cutting the costs (and the admission prices) of 3D movies.
Monday, 30 July 2012
The Most Anticipated iPhone 5 [Concepts]
It has been a while, a year and a half of waiting for the iPhone 5 or new iPhone to come out of Cupertino since the day Apple introduce the iPhone 4S back in October 2011. Now we learn so many things already since then —-about what we dream of the iPhone 5 should have aesthetically and feature-wise. Fortunately, there are tons of creative minds to give us a preview of what most consumer’s would think of the new iPhone 5. Now what we have here is a collection of new iPhone concepts that has spilled in the internet, check them pass through the break.
Gallery
4K resolution
4K resolution movie sample -
Google Unveils Ultrafast Web Service
- Google unveiled an ultrafast Web service along with an Internet television subscription.
- The service offers one-gigabyte per second speeds -- about 100 times faster than currently available..
Google Fiber superfast broadband network will be available starting in September. Click to enlarge this image. John Lund / Getty Images
Google on Thursday unveiled an ultrafast Web service along with an Internet television subscription in the Kansas City area as part of a pilot project to boost broadband speeds. The Google Fiber superfast broadband network will be available starting in September, with one-gigabyte per second speeds -- about 100 times faster than most current Internet subscriptions.
The wired home project will allow people to replace cable television and Internet with a single subscription to be controlled by a Google tablet computer, which will be offered for free.
"Google Fiber is 100 times faster than today's average broadband," Google vice president Milo Medin said.
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"No more buffering. No more loading. No more waiting. Gigabit speeds will get rid of these pesky, archaic problems and open up new opportunities for the web. Imagine: instantaneous sharing; truly global education; medical appointments with 3D imaging; even new industries that we haven't even dreamed of, powered by a gig."
The packages offered will include not only Internet but "regular TV, the kind you could only get from your cable provider," as well as on-demand programs, Medin told the kickoff event.
Google said it was offering a full ultrafast Internet and television package for $120 a month, with waived installation fees and a free tablet. It also will offer Internet only for $70 a month.
It will also offer free Internet at the current speed of five megabytes per second but will charge an installation fee.
Google asked residents to register to determine the neighborhoods where the project will be introduced in Kansas City, Kansas, and neighboring Kansas City, Missouri.
It was not immediately clear when or if Google would expand the project to other US cities.
Google announced its plan to build an experimental high-speed Internet network two years ago, saying the United States had fallen behind other major nations in broadband speed and access. "Fast is better than slow. On the web, nobody wants to wait for a video to buffer or a website to load," Medin said.
ANALYSIS: Are the Boonies Getting Broadband?
"Abundance is better than scarcity. There's a plethora of rich content available online -- and it's increasingly only available to people who have the speeds and means to access it." Federal Communications Commission chief Julius Genachowski praised the Google effort.
"For the United States to remain globally competitive, we need to keep pushing the boundaries of broadband capabilities and foster testbeds of broadband innovation," he said in a statement.
"Abundance in broadband speeds and capacity -- moving from megabits to gigabits -- will unleash breakthrough innovations in healthcare, education, business services, and more."
Immortality for Humans by 2045
A Russian mogul wants to achieve cybernetic immortality for humans within the next 33 years. He's pulled together a team intent on creating fully functional holographic human avatars that house our artificial brains. Now he's asking billionaires to help fund the advancements needed along the way.
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The man behind the 2045 Initiative, described as a nonprofit organization, is a Russian named Dmitry Itskov. The ambitious timeline he's laid out involves creating different avatars. First a robotic copy that's controlled remotely through a brain interface. Then one in which a human brain can be transplanted at the end of life. The next could house an artificial human brain, and finally we'd have holographic avatars containing our intelligence much like the movie "Surrogates."
Gizmag's Dario Borghino wisely warned that "one must be careful not to believe that improbable technological advances automatically become more likely simply by looking further away in the future." And in the grand scheme of things, 2045 is not that far away. So just how likely is it that this project will succeed? For more insight, let's check in with Ted Williams. Oh, wait.
Recently Itskov published an open letterto the Forbes world's billionaires list telling them that they have the ability to finance the extension of their own lives up to immortality. He writes that he can prove the concept's viability to anyone who's skeptical and will coordinate their personal immortality projects for free. PopSci's Clay Dillowdescribed Itskov in March as a 31-year-old media mogul, but I couldn't find a detailed biography for him.
Avatar Girlfriend Goes On Date
The project's ultimate goal is to save people from suffering and death. While there are smart experts involved, that's no guarantee that human immortality is even a goal worth pursuing. Anyone caught up in the vampire mania that's punctured popular culture has pondered whether, given a choice, you'd actually want to live forever.
For me, there's a world of difference between pursuing a brain-controlled exoskeleton to help paraplegics regain control and wanting to essentially upload a human brain into an artificial body. I read a sci-fi novel involving disembodied live brains once. It didn't turn out well.
Tuesday, 24 July 2012
Crystals You Drink Every Morning: Big Pic
July 19, 2012 -- Almost everyone in the United States drinks some kind of caffeinated beverage daily. Whether it's coffee, tea, a soft drink or an energy drink, you're consuming caffeine, and that means you're consuming these crystalline xanthine alkaloids. This photo is a false-colored image of caffeine crystals taken with a scanning electron micrograph.
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The image was one of 16 winners of the annual Wellcome Image Awards, which were announced on 20 June 2012. Wellcome Images, based in the U.K., is a source for images of medicine, biomedical science and clinical medicine.
HOWSTUFFWORKS: How Scanning Electron Microscopes Work
The image was chosen as a winner because, "It's a bright, intricate image of something that most of us experience every day," said James Cutmore, Picture Editor at BBC Focus Magazine. He explained his decision on the Wellcome website, saying, "What interests me in my professional role is showing our readers images of everyday things from a different, at first unrecognisable, perspective. For that reason, this image really grabbed my attention.
Tuesday, 26 June 2012
Highest Man-Made Temperature: 4 TRILLION Degrees
The honor comes courtesy of the STAR (Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC) collaboration, designed to study the formation and characteristics of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), a state of matter believed to have existed for ten-millionths of a second after the universe's birth.
Monday, 14 May 2012
Max payne arriving this month
Air-Powered car coming to india
In 2007, Mumbai, India-based Tata Motors signed a licensing deal with Motor Development International, a French design firm. The idea was to build a car that could run on compressed air. Now Tata says it has tested two cars with the engines. The next step is setting up the manufacturing plants to actually build them.
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DNEWS VIDEO: FUTURE OF CARS AND TRANSPORTATIONCompressed air engines aren't a new idea. The first models were proposed more than a century ago, and they were used in the mining industry for decades before electric motors became commonplace. Even now, compressed air powers all kinds of tools, notably the pneumatic impact wrenches in auto body shops.
A compressed air car engine works in a way similar to the internal combustion version: Fuel forces pistons to turn a crankshaft and power the car. The difference is that in a compressed air engine, the pistons are moved by air and not gasoline. Researchers in Sweden have experimented with single-cylinder engines of this type.
The only problem is power. Air compression alone only gets a car moving to about 30 to 35 miles per hour. So to supplement that, the car could take in more air as it moves faster, using an onboard air compressor. The air compressor could be electric or, more likely, gasoline-powered. But even that would reduce emissions a lot, since the gasoline engine wouldn't be running at lower speeds
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Wednesday, 9 May 2012
Li-Fi ,the next generation Wi-Fi.
Li-Fi is the term some have used to label the fast and cheap wireless-communication system, which is the optical version of Wi-Fi.The term was first used in this context by Harald Haas in his TED Global talk on Visible Light Communication.
The technology was demonstrated at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas using a pair of Casio smartphones to exchange data using light of varying intensity given off from their screens, detectable at a distance of up to ten metres.
In October 2011 a number of companies and industry groups formed the Li-Fi Consortium, to promote high-speed optical wireless systems and to overcome the limited amount of radio-based wireless spectrum available by exploiting a completely different part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The consortium believes it is possible to achieve more than 10 Gbps, theoretically allowing a high-definition film to be downloaded in 30 seconds.
Li-Fi has the advantage of being able to be used in sensitive areas such as in aircraft without causing interference. However, the light waves used cannot penetrate walls.
Later in 2012, VLC, a firm set up to commercialize Li-Fi, will bring out Li-Fi products for firms installing LED-lighting systems.
Friday, 4 May 2012
Super Moon On May 5-6
The best time to look is when the Moon is near the horizon. For reasons not fully understood by astronomers or psychologists, low-hanging Moons look unnaturally large when they beam through trees, buildings and other foreground objects. On May 5th, this Moon illusion will amplify a full Moon that's extra-big to begin with. The swollen orb rising in the east at sunset should seem super indeed.
Perigee is the point in the Moon's elliptical orbit closest to Earth.
Folklore holds that all kinds of wacky things happen under the light of a full Moon. Supposedly, hospital admissions increase, the crime rate ticks upward, and people behave strangely. The idea that the full Moon causes mental disorders was widespread in the Middle Ages. Even the word "lunacy," meaning "insanity," comes from the Latin word for "Moon."
The majority of modern studies, however, show no correlation between the phase of the Moon and the incidence of crime, sickness, or human behavior. The truth is, the Moon is less influential than folklore would have us believe.
It's true that a perigee full Moon brings with it extra-high "perigean tides," but according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration this is nothing to worry about. In most places, lunar gravity at perigee pulls tide waters only a few centimeters (an inch or so) higher than usual. Local geography can amplify the effect to about 15 centimeters (six inches)--not exactly a great flood.
Super perigee Moons are actually fairly common. The Moon becomes full within a few hours of its closest approach to Earth about once a year on average. The last such coincidence occurred on March 19th, 2011, producing a full Moon that was almost 400 km closer than this one. As usual, no trouble was reported--unless you count a midnight awakening as trouble.
If so, close the drapes on May 5th. Otherwise, enjoy the super-moonlight.
Wednesday, 2 May 2012
KEA Debuts World’s Cheapest Digital Camera Made of Cardboard
It’s official. IKEA has unveiled the world’s cheapest digital camera, and it’s made of cardboard.
But you won’t be able to buy them. KNÄPPA, the eco-friendly lo-fi device, will instead be given away to customers in select stores. The camera uses two AA batteries, and a USB connector that swings out can hold about 40 photos, the BBC reports. It shoots a three-second exposure, and processing lasts about eight seconds. Once users are done shooting, they can transfer and delete photos by holding down a button.
IKEA says it isn’t going into the consumer electronic business. The cameras are designed to promote the PS 2012 furniture collection, urging customers to share images of showroom items on the company’s website.
Tuesday, 1 May 2012
Wear Your Data with the Safety Pin Flash Drive (Photos)
It never hurts to have a flash drive nearby.
These drives come in a variety of forms that make them easy to transport (ever look at a techie’s keys?). Art Lebedev has created a clever and functional form for the USB drive: a safety pin. Yes, you can wear your data.
Smart design — just don’t forget to remove it before the pants go in the wash. No word on whether this is ruggardized.
Saturday, 28 April 2012
ExoHand Boosts Strength, Transmits Touch
ExoHand Boosts Strength, Transmits Touch
Imagine a remotely operated robot hand that imitates the movements of an operator exactly -- picking up objects and manipulating them, perhaps in environments too dangerous for people to work in. Or an exoskeleton that prevents repetitive stress injury.
The ExoHand, from Festo, a German company, may one day do just that. It's an exoskeletal system designed to provide greater strength and dexterity to the user, showcased at a recent trade show in Hanover.
External actuators boost the grip strength of the wearer, and a software algorithm controls the position of the joints. And the ExoHand can do more than make a person's grip strong -- it can also transmit the motions of the wearer in real time to a robot, with a silicone hand fitted where a human one would ordinarily be.
One thing the ExoHand has is feedback -- the operator gets a sense of the pressure exerted on the object grasped. That makes remote operation a lot more precise -- one has a "feel" for the object that isn't there with traditional remote-controlled robot graspers.
Though it is still inthe proof-of-concept stage, it's a big improvement on the claws or mechanical graspers common in robotics and automated systems, as it duplicates the movements of fingers and can grab things more delicately. It's also better than a traditional glove box for handling objects that might be dangerous where more room is needed to operate.
The ExoHand might one day be used in factories where people do repetitive tasks -- by assisting the wearer it reduces the strain on muscles. It could also show up in physical therapy, not unlike the Ekso, an exoskeleton designed for paraplegics.
Plans for an enormous telescope, equipped with a 3.2 billion-pixel camera, are ready for detailed designs, its creators announced on April 24. When built, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will take photos of every inch of visible night sky every week for 10 years in a kind of time-lapse picture that will provide scientists with unparalleled views of the universe.
The telescope’s research team, which received Critical Decision 1 approval from the U.S. Department of Energy, will now begin to make in-depth designs, a schedule and a budget. Department of Energy projects go through five critical decision stages, according to a department document posted online.
The telescope, known as LSST, is a long-planned and long-anticipated project, originally conceived in 1998. “It is tremendously satisfying to finally see this move forward to the point when we can begin to carry out the project,” a LSST project director, Steven Kahn, of the SLAC National Accelerometer Laboratory in Menlo Park, Calif., said in a statement.
The LSST will gather 6 million gigabytes of data annually, and its detailed images will teach astronomers more about dark energy, dark matter, near-Earth asteroids and the Kuiper belt, a region just beyond Neptune’s orbit where Pluto and other icy objects carve their paths in space.
It can also help researchers track asteroids that threaten Earth, according to the LSST’s website. All the LSST’s data will be publicly available, so “anyone with a computer will be able to fly through the Universe, zooming past objects a hundred million times fainter than can be observed with the unaided eye,” the site says.
Though the telescope was originally scheduled for completion this year, SLAC now says construction will start in 2014. Researchers have already started work on its 8.4-meter (27.6-foot) mirror and on preparing its construction site, atop the Cerro Pachón mountain in northern Chile.
Friday, 27 April 2012
3.2 Billion-Pixel Camera Telescope
Plans for an enormous telescope, equipped with a 3.2 billion-pixel camera, are ready for detailed designs, its creators announced today (April 24). When built, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will take photos of every inch of visible night sky every week for 10 years in a kind of time-lapse picture that will provide scientists with unparalleled views of the universe.
The telescope's research team, which received Critical Decision 1 approval from the U.S. Department of Energy, will now begin to make in-depth designs, a schedule and a budget. Department of Energy projects go through five critical decision stages, according to a department document posted online.
The telescope, known as LSST, is a long-planned and long-anticipated project, originally conceived in 1998. "It is tremendously satisfying to finally see this move forward to the point when we can begin to carry out the project," a LSST project director, Steven Kahn, of the SLAC National Accelerometer Laboratory in Menlo Park, Calif., said in a statement.
The LSST will gather 6 million gigabytes of data annually, and its detailed images will teach astronomers more about dark energy, dark matter, near-Earth asteroids and the Kuiper belt, a region just beyond Neptune's orbit where Pluto and other icy objects carve their paths in space.
It can also help researchers track asteroids that threaten Earth, according to the LSST's website. All the LSST's data will be publicly available, so "anyone with a computer will be able to fly through the Universe, zooming past objects a hundred million times fainter than can be observed with the unaided eye," the site says.
Though the telescope was originally scheduled for completion this year, SLAC now says construction will start in 2014. Researchers have already started work on its 8.4-meter (27.6-foot) mirror and on preparing its construction site, atop the Cerro Pachón mountain in northern Chile.
Thursday, 26 April 2012
Ultra thin Motorola Droid Razr.
Saturday, 21 April 2012
World,s smallest single atom transistor
This transistor is made using only one atom of phosphorous.
It is smallest transistor built in Nature Nanotechnology journal.
Michelle Simmons says "the development is less about improving current technology than building future technology".
The biggest problem with it is that it has to be kept at a temperature of minus 196 celsius.
If interested see,
http://www.techpark.net/2012/02/21/worlds-smallest-transistor-created-using-single-atom/