Posts tagged Technology
Solar powered screen extends battery life by 20%.
French company SunPartner have developed a 300 micron thick transparent layer able to be added above or below a regular touchscreen which can harvest energy from sunlight.
The low cost panel uses stripes of standard thin-film solar cells alternating with transparent film. It then adds a layer of tiny lenses that spread the image coming from the screen to make the opaque stripes disappear and to concentrate rays coming in from the sun.
The company say the panel is currently being tested with a ‘number of manufacturers’ and they hope licensing deals to follow which will see phones using the technology come to market in 2014.
Video: Amazing Resonance Experiment.
Just be sure to turn your volume down a bit!
15 ton electromagnet hits the road.
A 50 foot wide electromagnet (shown above in a scale model) is taking a five week road trip and cruise from its home in Brookhaven National Lab in New York to the Fermi National Accelerator Lab in Illinois.
Initially a truck will carry it to a barge, before shipping down the Atlantic, around Florida, then up the Mississippi River to Illinois.
The US$3 million move is still cheaper than constructing a new magnet which could be up to $30 million. Fermi Laboratory will use the magnet to study particle physics.
Google’s internet balloons launch in New Zealand.
30 balloons were launched from Tekapo, New Zealand this week as part of a larger plan to “connect the 2 out of every 3 people on Earth” who don’t have an internet connection.
The balloons are solar powered, and expand to 15 meters in diameter when fully inflated. At 20km high, the balloons are well above commercial aircraft and most weather activity.
Google chose New Zealand to show how the technology could be deployed in a remote area (and possibly to have a vacation in an awesome spot - I’m going to Tekapo this week too!). The nearby city of Christchurch also suffered power and internet outages after earthquakes in 2010 and 2011, so Google is aiming to show how the system could quickly deploy to provide internet access in a disaster.
The next step in the trial is to have a string of up to 300 balloons forming a ring on the 40th parallel south from New Zealand through Australia, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina.
400 Year Old Moss Brought Back To Life.
A new research paper describes how a team of biologists have successfully regrown four different species of mosses which had been frozen in Greenland’s Teardrop Glacier since somewhere between the years 1550 to 1850. To regrow the plants, the team ground up the frozen stems and leaves, before sowing them in different types of soil and growth media, and kept them watered for a year. 30% of the samples grew new plant material.
The discovery indicates that other plant species could be growing in the wild which could have naturally frozen, thawed, and regrown after a period of extinction.
AMD to release 5GHz CPU.
AMD is hoping to entice gamers away from Intel’s new Haswell range of processors by focusing on higher speeds, with their 5Ghz AMD FX-9590 and 4.7GHZ FX-9370 recently announced.
While price and release date haven’t been confirmed, the company has said the chips will be unlocked, meaning users can push their stock speeds even higher. The company says they will optimise the chips efficiency by using “AMD’s Turbo Core 3.0 technology to optimize performance by spreading workloads across their eight cores”.
Video: Helper robot anticipates your every move.
Cornell’s Personal Robotics Lab have been working on a helper robot which predicts a persons future actions to help them achieve tasks around the home.
Gazing intently with a Microsoft Kinect 3-D camera and using a database of 3D videos, the Cornell robot identifies the activities it sees, considers what uses are possible with the objects in the scene and determines how those uses fit with the activities. It then generates a set of possible continuations into the future – such as eating, drinking, cleaning, putting away – and finally chooses the most probable. As the action continues, the robot constantly updates and refines its predictions.
Photo: NASA suborbital rocket launch.
A NASA Black Brant XII suborbital rocket streaks into the night sky following its launch on June 5, 2013 from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The rocket carried the Cosmic Infrared Background ExpeRiment (CIBER) to an altitude of approximately 358 miles above the Atlantic Ocean by the four-stage rocket. The launch, seen here with multiple stages firing off, was reportedly seen from as far away as central New Jersey, southeastern Pennsylvania and northeastern North Carolina. With CIBER, scientists are studying when the first stars and galaxies formed in the universe and how brightly they burned their nuclear fuel.
FDA approved pill turns your body into a password.
Motorola have shown off a pill which enables the user to transmit authentication passwords to a range of devices through their body, including phones, computers, cars or door locks.
The pill is powered by stomach acids, and according to the FDA it would be safe to swallow 30 of the pills every day for the rest of your life, although the pill lasts about two weeks before it “needs to be replaced”.
Woolly Mammoth Blood Found In Preserved Carcass.
A Russian team say they have found part of the body of an old female mammoth well-preserved in ice on a remote island in the Arctic Ocean. The 60 year old female is thought to have died between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago.
“When we broke the ice beneath her stomach, the blood flowed out from there, it was very dark,” Professor Grigoryev, who is a scientist at the Yakutsk-based Northeastern Federal University, said.
“This is the most astonishing case in my entire life. How was it possible for it to remain in liquid form? And the muscle tissue is also red, the colour of fresh meat,” he added.
Prof Grigoryev said that the lower part of the carcass was very well preserved as it ended up in a pool of water that later froze over. The upper part of the body including the back and the head are believed to have been eaten by predators, he added.
“The forelegs and the stomach are well preserved, while the hind part has become a skeleton.”
The discovery, Prof Grigoryev said, gives new hope to researchers in their quest to bring the woolly mammoth back to life.
“This find gives us a really good chance of finding live cells which can help us implement this project to clone a mammoth,” he said.
“Previous mammoths have not had such well-preserved tissue.”
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