NASA scientist and Advanced Propulsion Team Lead Harold White has the
kind of job thousands dream of and few achieve — he’s in charge of the
space agency’s efforts to determine if a faster-than-light warp drive is
actually possible and, if it is, how we might create one. Now, in
conjunction with artist Mark Rademaker, White has unveiled a new
starship model that illustrates how our consideration of the concept has
evolved over the decades.
on Thursday 12 June 2014
Despite a flood of Sunday morning hype, it’s questionable whether computers crossed an artificial intelligence threshold last weekend.
However, the news about a chatbot with the personality of a 13-year-old
Ukrainian boy passing the Turing test did get us thinking: Is tricking
every third human in a text exchange really the best way to measure
computer intelligence?
on Wednesday 11 June 2014
The promise of virtual reality is true immersion—the idea that we’ll be
able to step into a whole new digital world and feel like it’s actually
real. This simply can’t be realized if we’re holding a game controller
in our hands. Last year, a Canadian startup called Thalmic Labs showed
off the Myo motion-sensing, muscle-reading armband, which gets us one
step closer to the VR of our dreams—by freeing up our hands. Now the
company has a final hardware design for the $149 Myo, and says that it
will begin shipping in September.
Imagine
owning an upmarket, 25-jewel, Swiss-movement mechanical watch. Now
imagine one that that can display text messages, notify you of incoming
calls and let you remotely control your smartphone or tablet. That may
seem a bit farfetched, but Kairos Watches aims to combine a luxury
mechanical watch with the functionality of a smartwatch in one seamless
device.
Research reveals a bright future for a new lighting technology
A flexible, lightweight panel made by GE provides diffuse light. The
panel is made of organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs. This kind of
lighting could be more efficient and versatile than old-style light
bulbs.
Flick on a light at home and chances are a glass bulb or tube will
start to glow. The two most common types of electric lights —
incandescent and fluorescent — have worked pretty well for a long time.
Make that too long: Both types are so last century.
The team behind the Department of Energy’s solar program SunShot internally calls one of its projects “the Steve Jobs solicitation.” That’s the one officially named “Plug and Play Photovoltaics,” which is using $21 million to support projects that try to turn the process of installing solar panels on rooftops into an easy, simple and ultimately one-step product — a far cry from the current lengthy and relatively complicated process it is today.
on Tuesday 10 June 2014
As talk heats up about the expected 3D head tracking of
Amazon’s smartphone, don’t count Microsoft out of the handset gestures
game. The company is working on a way to navigate around Windows
Phone without touching the screen, using Kinect-like gestures to work
with apps and games. A Monday morning report from The Verge suggests
that Nokia’s successor to the Lumia 1020 (below), codenamed McLaren,
will be the first Windows Phone with these features.
Apple revealed a lot of news at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference this year, but it didn’t discuss or show off any iWatch. Still, a new report from Japanese newspaper the Nikkei says that
an iWatch is indeed on its way, with a targeted ship date of October.
The gadget will include a curved OLED screen and health tracking
functions, and be powered by iOS 8, Nikkei reports.
A new type of invisibility cloak that hides objects from light in
diffusive media such as a cloudy liquid – rather than a clear medium
such as air – has been unveiled by physicists in Germany. Based on the
same physical principle used in cloaks that shield objects from heat,
the device has been created by Robert Schittny and
colleagues at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Although
applications of the device are limited, the researchers say that it
could be used to create aesthetically pleasing yet burglar-proof glass.
on Monday 9 June 2014
Researchers
at Stanford University have developed a new way to safely transfer
energy to tiny medical devices implanted deep inside the human body. The
advance could lead to the development of tiny "electroceutical" devices
that can be implanted near nerve bundles, heart or brain tissue and
stimulate them directly when needed, treating diseases using electronics
rather than drugs.
Researchers
at the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) have developed a
lab-on-a-chip device that can detect protein cancer markers in a drop of
blood, working as a very early cancer-detection system. The device can
detect very low concentrations of markers and is reliable, cheap and
portable, making it attractive for deployment in remote areas of the
world.
When it comes to driver awareness, we all know how hard it can be to
keep an eye on every pedestrian and moving vehicle in our vicinity,
particularly when driving in a busy city area. Couple this with the
upcoming Kids and Transportation Safety Act in the US that dictates that
all cars built from May 2018 onwards must be fitted with rear view cameras as
standard, and it becomes doubly important that on-board vehicle cameras
are used to their best advantage. To help in this regard, Fujitsu
Semiconductor Limited is set to introduce software that assists in
detecting and identifying cars, people, and other moving objects and
alerts the driver of their position and direction of travel.
A
new online tool aims to create a real-time emotional map of how people
all over the world feel, from analyzing how cheerful or depressed
different countries might be, to how budget cuts or other news might hit
people emotionally. Called "We Feel," the tool analyzes 32,000 tweets a
minute to monitor people's collective mood swings and how their
emotions fluctuate over time globally.
on Friday 6 June 2014
Do you have a stack of speakers or stereo system at home collecting
dust due to their inability to wirelessly connect to your digital music
collection? The folks at Motorola have decided it’s time to modernize
your antiquated audio system with the release of a portable wireless
adapter called Moto Stream, which brings wireless audio streaming
capabilities to older units.
Facebook announced in a blog post on Thursday that
it has upgraded the Apache HBase database with a new open source system
called HydraBase. Facebook is an avid HBase shop, using it to store
data for various services, including the company’s internal monitoring
system, search indexing, streaming data analysis and data scraping. What
makes HydraBase better than HBase is that it is supposedly a more
reliable database that should minimize downtime when servers fail.
Have you ever wished you were an alien or a shark? Well, sorry, but
you're never going to get to be one. The free Nito app, however, does
let you appear as those characters or others, in recorded 15-second
videos. It tracks your facial features and movements as you talk, and
reproduces them in real time via an animated avatar of your choice.
Though smartwatches and Google Glass have
made for some bold and interesting products, you could easily argue
that the best wearables so far have been fitness trackers. But are these
US$100+ accessories worth the price of admission?
on Thursday 5 June 2014
When it comes to virtual reality headsets, their remit so far has
primarily been for use in gaming or for game-like experience, but soon
you could be able to watch whole movies with one of these devices
strapped to your head. This is thanks to a new 360-degree camera called
the Panopticam developed by a team of British VR experts.
While Sony’s flagship Z-line handsets
are all about high-end specs and waterproofing, it’s taking a slightly
different approach with the mid-range sector. With the new T3
smartphone, Sony is providing one of the skinniest devices on the
market, while still packing in some solid internals.
It used to be that the only way you could get a speeding ticket was if a
police officer personally witnessed your overly-fast driving. Then
photo radar came along. Well, when it comes to drunk driving,
lasers could soon be the equivalent of photo radar. Polish researchers
at the Military University of Technology in Warsaw have demonstrated how
the high-intensity beams of light can be used to detect the presence of
alcohol – even exhaled alcohol – in passing vehicles.
With
the world seemingly transferring everything online to apps and cloud
services, we're losing touch with how our actions trigger reactions.
Bttn, a physical button that can be used in any way its owner sees fit,
is an attempt to bring back a tactile element to the way we connect with
everyone and everything around us.
on Wednesday 4 June 2014
Researchers
working at TU Delft's Kavli Institute of Nanoscience in the Netherlands
claim to have successfully transferred data via teleportation. By
exploiting the quantum phenomenon known as particle entanglement,
the team says it transferred information across a 3 m (10 ft) distance,
without the information actually traveling through the intervening
space.
The trouble with existing 3D imaging technology is that – at the
consumer level, at least – it tends to struggle with distances beyond a
few feet. Put even a third of the width of a basketball court between
yourself and a Microsoft Kinect sensor, for instance, and it won't pick
up your movements at all. Researchers at the University of California,
Berkeley, claim to have developed a Lidar (light radar)-based system
that can remotely sense objects across distances as long as 30 feet (10
m), which could have widespread benefits in fields as diverse as
entertainment, transportation, robotics, and mobile phones.
At its WWDC developer event yesterday, Apple surprised all of the developers in the audience by launching a new programming language called Swift. This new language seems to be poised to replace Objective-C as the main programming language on Apple’s platforms.
The tractor beam is a staple of science fiction. Aliens use them to
haul up unwilling earthlings into flying saucers for probing, and
spacecraft use them to seize enemy ships or tow captured objects around
in space. Now a group of researchers working at the University of Dundee
actually claim to have built one. But instead of lasers, it uses
ultrasonic waves to pull macroscopic objects in.
Scientists
at the Fudan University in Shanghai, China, have developed a
high-performance Li-ion battery made of carbon nanotube fiber yarns.
Roughly one 1 mm in diameter, the fiber shaped lithium-ion batteries are
reported lightweight enough to create weavable and wearable textile
batteries that could power various devices. The researchers say that the
yarn is capable of delivering nearly 71 mAh/g of power, and can also be
woven into existing textiles to create novel electronic fabrics.
on Tuesday 3 June 2014
At the Code Conference in California this week, Intel revealed that its 3D-printed Jimmy Research Robot, which debuted at Maker Faire NYC last year,
will be available through its 21st Century Robot Project later this
year. Users will be able to download the files required for printing.
Artificially replicating the biological process of photosynthesis is a
goal being sought on many fronts, and it promises to one day improve
light-to-energy efficiencies of solar collection well beyond what's
possible with photovoltaic cells. One of the first steps on the road to
achieving this objective is to imitate the mechanisms at work in the
transfer of energy from reception through to output.
MacBooks can
make for great notebook PCs, but their speedy solid-state drives don't
give you much storage bang for your buck. So why not do something with
that SD card slot, and give yourself some extra (semi-permanent)
storage? That's the thinking behind Transcend's JetDrive Lite.
on Monday 2 June 2014
The privacy of the data that we put online has been a hot topic over
the last year. In order to protect against unwanted snooping, a group of
scientists has created a new secure email service. ProtonMail provides
end-to-end encryption, meaning that even the company itself can't even
see the content of your messages.
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