Posts tagged tech
ARKYD stretch goals announced on Kickstarter.
Planetary Resources claim their ARKYD space telescope is the ‘first publicly accessible space telescope’, and with 13 days left on their Kickstarter campaign there’s still time to support the project and have a say in how the telescope is used.
The campaign is about to reach it’s US$1,000,000 goal, and if they can double that the telescope will be modified to allow it to search for exoplanets.
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.
Video: Thought powered quadrocopter.
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