News

A few years ago, drones where those really expensive gadgets that had cameras mounted on them and were focused on the photography market. Fast forward and you see drone racing leagues and the market is saturated in new drone toys that promise drone fun without the expense and hassle of purchasing a larger one.Next Page »

Think back to the 80s when you say Predator. Whatever happened to those fancy IR cameras and why don't we see them all over the place. Turns out that IR imaging is very expensive to do and fairly low resolution. FLIR has been in the business for awhile and the consumer products have finally come to a price point that makes sense. If you've got a smartphone that is compatible, you too can have an IR camera.Next Page »

What do you do when you want to teach a kid how to fly a RC quad copter? Sure, you can hand over your expensive drone and watch it crash. However, there are toys on the market that are fun and teaches RC flight in a small and easy to use package. Enter the JETJAT Nano-C from MOTA. It's a tiny camera drone!Next Page »

Starbucks is trying to reduce the burden of credit card payments (CC companies take a big chunk of small sales) by encouraging the use of gift cards and this new payment system. If it works, this might be a big deal for payments of the future. I just can't see using a device that may lose internet access when you're trying to pay and you're out of luck.

Quote

Here's how it works. Simply take any Starbucks gift card you've ever received - or get a new one at any Starbucks store - and then register that card online. That card then becomes your primary source of payment for all your Starbucks transactions. Online, you can use a credit card to refill your Starbucks card. You can even have it set to auto-refill after it dips below a certain amount. Then, download the Starbucks iPhone app. When you go to your neighborhood Starbucks, simply load the app, click "touch to pay," and then scan the phone at a custom scanner at the register. The purchase will be deducted from your Starbucks gift card.

http://www.tgdaily.com/mobility-brief/53621-starbucks-iphone-payments-going-nationwide

You are on vacation and just remembered that you forgot to turn down the heat. In the past, this was a problem. You're wasting money and energy while nobody is at the house. The 3M-50 has the solution for you with the Marvell provided WiFi module. Now you can go to a website to control your thermostat directly. Problem solved.Next Page »

Reported by Science Daily, October 20, 2010:

Is it possible to treat cancer with light? Well, at University of California, Irvine, they believe it may be true to treat cancer cells using LED's and photosensitizing chemicals that absorb light.

Here is what Science Daily has to say about this:

Quote

In PDT, photosensitizing chemicals that absorb light are injected into a tumor, which is then exposed to light. The chemicals generate oxygen radicals from the light energy, destroying the cancer cells. PDT is currently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of esophageal and lung cancer.

Rolf Saager, who works in the lab of Anthony Durkin at the Beckman Laser Institute at UC Irvine in collaboration with Kristen Kelly, M.D., and Modulated Imaging Inc., believes that PDT could also be used to treat skin cancer. But one obstacle to this application is the lack of a detailed imaging technique to target and monitor the effectiveness of PDT.

For the full read, jump over to the article at Science Daily

Many people need an external drive. This has been a fact now for some time, and many people want a reliable drive to take back and forth with them to work. With that said, Iomega has introduced a new pocket sized USB 3.0 Solid State external hard drive. ZDnet has a short news article about the drive, and gives some of Iomega's performance claims about the drive.

Lets take a look at one of the paragraphs about this new exciting external drive!

Quote

Speaking of speed, Iomega’s new SSD flash drive boasts speeds up to 10 times those used via USB 2.0, and Iomega asserts that these drives will act twice as fast as a 7200 RPM SATA hard drive operating with the same USB 3.0 interface.

As we can see, these are some pretty impressive speed claims!

To read further information, and see some links to Iomega's official site, follow the link below:

Iomega USB 3.0 SSD external drive

Ever wondered the history of the television? Today, there are high-resolution, large-height, large-width, low-depth, and relatively low-power compared to what it would be if you were to proportionally increase the size of the first televisions. Heck, CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) televisions can still be purchased, but they're not as common as they once were. Looking back to September 1928, it's truly amazing how much the technology of the television has advanced since its initial debut. (Note: This article is a shortened version of the one by Gawker, which is comprised of summaries and links to Popular Science articles from the magazine's archives.)


January 1929 - Your First Television Set
There's a reason they called it a "set" - it's far more difficult than a "kit" could ever dream of being...

Quote

Back in the Great Depression, and before we had third world nations to do all our icky manual labor, you had to work if you wanted to watch television. Not that there was much on (and you thought winter Saturday figure skating was bad?), but if you wanted a glimpse of the future, it required sweat, a high quality radio and some neon tubes. Also, holding your thumb against a disk to keep the picture straight, and the ability to adjust motor rheostats, whatever that means.

April 1934 - Myriads Dots of Light Give New Television
When it came out, CRT was the thing to have! It may seem hard to believe, but back then, CRT was the latest and greatest invention to hit the world, or at least the geeks thought so.


December 1942 - Television Program Gives Housewives Hints from PSM

Quote

Before there were soap operas and Ellen Degeneres to keep the little lady occupied while she kept house, there was a gigantic, horribly sexist robot that coldly reminded women how to properly toil in domestic servitude.

August 1944 - Post-War Television
Predictions of television someday being able to provide live coverage of a sporting event, on a screen as big as 24 inches started to arise; fortunately, their estimates were not limitations, but rather a landmark in the history of television.

Quote

"Entertainment has remained the most important function of the mass communication services. It is important to instruct people, but in a nervous and complex civilization like ours it is even more important to amuse and thrill them." Suck it Tom Brokaw, even the Greatest Generation needed their Jersey Shore fix. Or something like that.

February 1962 - Is Color TV Worth It?
Can you imagine only being able to watch all of your favorite online videos in shades of gray, but no R, G, or B? I couldn't, either.

Quote

What is that, you say? The proposition of color television? Ha! A mere passing trend, flashing opiates for the masses! Hardly a reason to replace the old, trusty tube and cabinet, what with its distinguished gray tones that produce classic, distinguished programming.

September 1991 - Little Dish TV

Quote

So here came small dish satellite TV, bringing the base entertainment of regional superstations into the homes of even the boldest frontiersmen. While big satellites littered crazy people's homes since the 70s in America, the smaller dishes, new wavelengths and compression technology (boring!) was new to our shut ins and shut outs. With seven regional superstations and audio channels and access to Pay-Per-View movies, a $300 fee to buy a dish (or an installation and monthly rental fee) and a $35 monthly subscription was totally a great deal!

Wait, you mean people that didn't work for NASA used to have big satellite dishes?


That's all for here; Gawker has the full version of the article.

The year is 2010 and CES is now over. The exhibitor count was even less than last year, even though attendance was a bit higher. There were some interesting bits, but most of the fancy 3D TVs are just so-so technology. We take out some of the very interesting things seen on the show floor.Next Page »

There are properties of nature that even Moore's Law cannot break through. The so-called "Law" was made up by Gordon Moore working at Intel. He said that integrated circuits would pack twice the number of transitions every two years or so (people assume he said performance would double, not the case).

There are physical constraints to the doubling that happens. Soon, we won't be able to make faster computers! OH NO!

Quote

If components are to continue shrinking, physicists must eventually code bits of information onto ever smaller particles. Smaller means faster in the microelectronic world, but physicists Lev Levitin and Tommaso Toffoli at Boston University in Massachusetts, have slapped a speed limit on computing, no matter how small the components get. "If we believe in Moore's laW ... then it would take about 75 to 80 years to achieve this quantum limit," Levitin said. "No system can overcome that limit. It doesn't depend on the physical nature of the system or how it's implemented, what algorithm you use for computation … any choice of hardware and software," Levitin said. "This bound poses an absolute law of nature, just like the speed of light."

Though, we could do some crazier things that we don't know about today to break through this wall.

CES 2009 may have come and gone, but there was a few items in the last day of the show that caught our interest at ASE Labs. While the entire show was very light, there were some spotlights.Next Page »

CES 2009 reflects the situation that started in September of last year. It is really telling of where the world stands now.Next Page »

Triple channel memory? It wasn't too long ago that dual channel was the newest thing. How much of a performance increase will you get with triple channel? It depends.Next Page »

So, Google Chrome came out yesterday, and most people blindly flocked to it en masse. However, many began noticing a disturbing message written in the EULA that made it sound like anything you do with the browser is the property of Google.

Today, Google said that was a mistake.

Quote

Google's new web browser Chrome is fast, shiny, and requires users to sign their very lives over to Google before they can use it. Today's Internet outrage du jour has been Chrome's EULA, which appears to give Google a nonexclusive right to display and distribute every bit of content transmitted through the browser. Now, Google tells Ars that it's a mistake, the EULA will be corrected, and the correction will be retroactive.

As noted by an attorney at Tap the Hive and various and sundry other sites, the Chrome EULA reads like a lot of Google's other EULAs. It requires users to "give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and nonexclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services."

Linky.

I dunno if I like the idea of a Google web browser, especially with the Feds constantly trying to get Google to turn over private information. I'm glad that they clarified what everything meant in the EULA, but it also seems to me like they still have that information regardless. I think I'll stick to using Google only as a search engine.

My parents always disagree with me that prosthetics is a field that will surpass human body parts quickly. The human-machine interface is already shaping up nicely. Next is power and flexibility. I bet within the next 20 years, you will see people undergoing voluntary surgery to either add a new robot arm, or replace a body part. It will happen. It just is a matter of time.

Quote

For Miguel Nicolelis, a professor of neuroscience at Duke University Medical Center, the backbone of mind-machine interfaces is the ability to analyze neural activity. Sure, the system demonstrated at Pitt in May accessed information from 100 neurons at once. But Nicolelis’s lab has managed five times that amount, with data coming from up to 10 different brain structures. "We're able to look at brain dynamics on a scale that no one else has been able to," he says. "You're transferring information into motion. When more neurons are recorded, it allows you to extract many more parameters from the brain, to look for more elaborate output." The result is more fine-tuned movement for devices-and more data recorded from a given subject-to help researchers analyze the relationship between brain signals and physical activity.

It would be cool to be able to have a Doctor Octopus like appendages.

The new version of the Eee supports multi-touch on its trackpad. The technology that has been around for years has finally made it to a PC.

Quote

Better still, the mouse trackpad supports multi-touch gesture inputs -- even in Windows XP. A pinching motion lets you zoom in on images, stretching lets you zoom out, and a two-finger vertical stroking motion allows you to scroll up and down through documents. MacBook Air and iPod touch users have enjoyed this feature for some time, but it's the first we've ever seen it implemented on a Windows laptop.

The 900 still comes with Linux, but XP is an option with a crappier machine.

Piezoelectric is a great property of some materials. Just think, soon you'll be going about your daily life and charging your cell phone at the same time. Yeah, by your shirt!

Quote

In 2007 Zhong Lin Wang, a materials scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, US, developed a generator composed of a forest of piezoelectric zinc oxide nanowires topped by a flat conductive plate. As the plate is pushed down, the wires bend, producing a voltage that induces current to flow into the plate. Now Wang has turned this idea into an electricity-generating thread, which he plans to weave into a fabric. His team figured out how to grow the nanowires on a strand of Kevlar fibre instead of a flat surface, so that the wires stick out from the fibre like the bristles on a pipe-cleaner.

That's what is being said by one of Intel's open source guys at an open source conference. Linux alone will see huge increases in installs. This is really thanks to Ubuntu. Power users may be fighting it, but the easier the distro is to use (AND INSTALL SOFTWARE), the more pervasive Linux will get.

Quote

However, he also warned that the prospect of moving from being Windows-centric to supporting over 200 flavours of Linux could sound unnecessarily daunting. Therefore, educating vendors, particularly smaller manufacturers, about what’s actually involved in going open source is essential to combating misunderstandings. "They don’t understand that once you’re in the upstream kernel you’re ok," he said. Hohndel pointed out that companies were also often misinformed about the legal risks of going open source, or were afraid of damaging their reputation. Another concern cited by hardware companies was a fear that their products would be damaged.

I wonder who is spreading all the FUD...?

Day 4 coverage of CES 2008: One of largest consumer electronics shows in the world. The Sands has some very intersting things to show off.Next Page »

Day 3 coverage of CES 2008: One of largest consumer electronics shows in the world. Day 3 was pretty light on interesting things but there are some highlights.Next Page »

Day 2 coverage of CES 2008: One of largest consumer electronics shows in the world. Day 2 provided interesting looks at emerging technologies.Next Page »

Day 1 coverage of CES 2008: One of largest consumer electronics shows in the world. CES is one of the best shows and is impossible to do the entire show in the four days. Next Page »

As if driving wasn't annoying enough, there are places in Japan that make your car into a jukebox. I don't expect to drive to hear music.

Quote

Motorists used to listening to the radio or their favourite tunes on CDs may have a new way to entertain themselves, after engineers in Japan developed a musical road surface. A team from the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute has built a number of "melody roads", which use cars as tuning forks to play music as they travel. The concept works by using grooves, which are cut at very specific intervals in the road surface. Just as travelling over small speed bumps or road markings can emit a rumbling tone throughout a vehicle, the melody road uses the spaces between to create different notes.

Verizon is trying to be the single point of contact between you and everyone else. They want to control all lines of communication including IM. The future doesn't look so bright to me. I don't trust any one company to have my information all to themselves to do what they want with it. Look at what AT&T did.

Quote

Today presence, which is mostly associated with IM, is managed manually. Users have to tell the IM client if it is busy or available and the user's status is displayed in his buddy list. Using a combination of IP Multimedia Subsystem or IMS, an architectural framework for delivering IP multimedia to mobile users, and Web 2.0 technologies, Verizon can extend this notion of presence so that the network automatically knows if you are not to be disturbed because you're watching the final game in the World Series. Or it can tell if you've turned on your cell phone and are ready to accept calls on that device instead of on your home or office phone. Of course, the biggest issue with services that use this level of intelligence to detect presence is privacy. Verizon executives said any service that offered this kind of information about where and which devices subscribers used would also have the option to go "off network," so that a user's presence could not be detected.

Notice how it is go "off network" and not just offline without quotes. That means they want you to stay connected and get charged up for every second.

Interesting concepts coming out. A company can deliver a solar panel by pouring crystal on a substrate. That's pretty impressive and cuts costs.

Quote

The key is that the resulting solar cell has efficiencies--or the amount of sunlight the solar cell can turn into electricity--that are closer to crystalline silicon solar cells than thin-film alternatives such as amorphous silicon or copper indium gallium selenide or CIGS. Crystalline solar cells have higher efficiencies than thin films. Commercial crystalline panels can convert up to 22 percent of sunlight into electricity, without concentrators. CIGS makers are initially shooting for the mid to low teens. The catch is that making crystalline solar cells is expensive. The patterning and other processes is similar to what is used in making LCD panels. Innovalight says it could conceivably cut the production price by around 50 percent or more. Many start-ups, however, had hit bumps in bringing new (albeit different) manufacturing techniques for solar cells to market.

There will be a new nuke plant in South Texas soon. This will be the first in 30 years.

Quote

Armed with the backing of the White House and congressional leaders-and subsidies, such as $500 million in risk insurance from the U.S. Department of Energy- the nuclear industry is experiencing a revival in the U.S. As many as 29 new reactors may be added to the current U.S. fleet of 104, according to Bill Borchardt, director of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) office of new reactors. "It is going to be significantly different than it was in the 1970s," he says.

NASA has developed Silicon Carbide ICs that can withstand very high heat. The new circuits can be used in high heat environments like jets and such.

Quote

The new silicon carbide differential amplifier integrated circuit chip may provide benefits to anything requiring long-lasting electronic circuits in very hot environments such as jets, spacecraft and industrial machinery. In particular, NASA said SiC applications will include energy storage, renewable energy, nuclear power, electrical drives. The use of the high temperature packaging and operation of SiC power modules for its power electronics equipment will bring about the benefits of increase in power density, reduction in heat sink requirements (thus smaller size and mass), and higher frequency operation that also results in lower mass for the filters and transformers.

The USA is stupid for using corn-based ethanol for fuels. Cellulosic-based ethanol can use nearly any plant by-product for ethanol production. This mean that food prices won't increase because of fuel. And don't get me started on how wasteful getting ethanol from corn is.

Quote

Making ethanol from forestry or agricultural waste does not involve the same intensive farming as corn, which requires more water and labor, cellulosic ethanol proponents say. Also, in the ongoing food-versus-fuel debate, cellulosic ethanol advocates say that forests don't compete for land with food crops. The Soperton, Ga., plant will be using wood cast away by loggers. Trees are hauled to a central point where their tops and branches are cut off, providing the material for Range Fuels' multi-step thermochemical process. Tree branches will go into a large tank where enough heat and pressure are applied to the mix to turn it into a gas. That synthetic gas is treated and then passed through a chemical catalyst which converts the gas to alcohol. Finally, the alcohol gas is converted to fuels and then turned into liquid.

Scientists made a breathalyzer that can detect certain diseases. The device can be used for a quick diagnosis, but shouldn't be used to make a 100% claim.

Quote

According to the device's maker, Menssana Research, the BCA has been able to detect breast cancer with the same accuracy as a mammogram. And initial findings have shown that the BCA detects pulmonary tuberculosis. As a cheap, rapid alternative to modern-day sputum testing, the device could have a huge impact in TB-ravaged developing countries. The BCA can also supposedly detect lung cancer, certain kind of heart disease and diabetes. And it's been approved by the FDA for clinical use in detecting heart transplant rejection. All of which sounds suspiciously miraculous, but with funding from both DARPA and the U.S. National Institute of Health, the BCA will continue to be tested at universities and hospitals in the U.S. and abroad.

Are we floating on a sea of too much technology? Has our society begun to burst at the seems due to this influx of terrible technology? Or not...Next Page »