Smartphones could soon be printed on t-shirts

Smartphones could soon be printed on t-shirts

Researchers are investigating a new version of “spaser” – a nano-scale laser or nano-laser technology which could mean that mobile phones become so small, efficient, and flexible that they could be printed on clothing. A team of researchers from Monash University’s Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering (ECSE) has modelled the world’s first spaser (surface pleonasm amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) to be made completely of carbon.

A spaser emits a beam of light through the vibration of free electrons, rather than the space-consuming electromagnetic wave emission process of a traditional laser. PhD student and lead researcher Chanaka Rupasinghe said the modeled spaser design using carbon would offer many advantages. Chanaka said other spasers designed till date are made of gold or silver nano particles and are semiconductor quantum dots while our device would be comprised of a graphene resonator and a carbon nano tube gain element.

Bluetooth Digital PEN: How it works

* When one writes or draws on a standard paper form, the pen's camera captures, stores and saves all handwritten information as snapshots and coordinates. 

* These snapshots are uploaded to the host server via Bluetooth pairing the digital pen to a compatible mobile or via a USB docking station connected to a PC. 

* The information collected by the pen is converted into PDF format and integrated into database & workflow system. 

* The PC uses the internet to connect to the server while the mobile phone acts like a modem, sending the pen's captured electronic data. 

AirMouse: Next Generation Computer Interaction

AirMouse: Next Generation Computer Interaction  The founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, spoke some now famous words when he stated that touchscreens will never be a good fit for regular desktop screens. They are just too oddly placed to utilize this feature no matter how you implement it. Some people disagree with him and still venture out looking for a solution that will incorporate the touch controls into our regular screens. Of course it’s highly unlikely that we will see this new breed of screens on the market, at least if you look at how it would be implemented. Some people have said that we’re on the edge of finding new ways to interact with our computer, and that it has nothing to do with any device that is attached or otherwise connected to the gadget we are trying to control. It will simply be a kind of visual interaction that is way more accurate than the Kinect for example. What in the world could this device be and when will we get to take a look at it? Some developers are trying to answer that question by giving us a little peek into what they have developed so far. The solution seems to come from Mad Design Labs and is pretty much based on air. Well, not exactly, but since it’s called the AirMouse, it is exactly what you think of when you first hear about it. There have been a million and one attempts to replicate the Minority Report computer interface since the movie was introduced in 2002, but few have been able to pull it off in an efficient enough way to make it a long term solution. The world is in desperate need of a new solution so that we can once and for all get rid of the mouse, the one gadget that has injured more people than American football probably has. The AirMouse was first introduced back in 2010, but it has just recently gotten some traction. It’s basically a glove that you put on which interacts with the computer and enables you to move and work just like you usually would with a mouse, but in mid air. This solution is way less likely to strain your wrists, so it is a better choice for many people who haven’t been able to use a computer since they were injured.  Is this the future of computer interaction? Well, I guess that is all up to us users to decide. What do you think?

16M Color Scribble Pen : Capture the Hue of Any Object

16M Color Scribble Pen : Capture the Hue of Any Object












The "Scribble" pen is being marketed as an implement that goes far beyond the standard black and blue ink that most current pens are limited to. Thanks to a 16-bit RGB color sensor inside the pen, Scribble can write in any color your heart desires.

In fact, you can even replicate colors you see in your everyday life, colors that Crayola has not come up with a name for even in its famed 64-packs. Are you a fan of a certain shade of lipstick? Perhaps you're looking for the shade of green that is only found on dollar bills. Simply hold Scribble up to these colors and scan it in. The result will be a specific color "stored" on your implement, resulting in an identically-colored ink. 

Have you ever felt limited by the colors contained inside a box of Crayons?

Imagine, instead of being forced to resort to "Forest Green" for the grass in your next masterpiece, you could take Photoshop's "eyedropper" tool to extract the color from a single, blade of grass and turn that color into ink.
Scribble is a new device that lets you do just that. The pen matches hues from the world around you and transfers them onto paper or a mobile device. For the latter, the tool works in conjunction with a stylus and a mobile app to sync the colors that attract you onto your phone or tablet. Pretty cool.

The pen is armed with a 16-bit RGB color sensor that stores the colors you tell it to. Hold the device up to your friend's gorgeous blonde hair, a vibrant flower or the pizza crust on your plate and Scribble will analyze the color and reproduce it with ink from its refillable cartridges.

Say, for example, you were enticed by the bright, pungent orange sitting on your countertop. You'd start by simply holding your Scribble pen up to the fruit.

Then, after the pen analyzed the specific orange of this particular orange, you could take the tint to paper.

Both the ink pen and and the stylus are a little more than six inches, rely on bluetooth wireless technology and have a rechargeable battery.

Until now, the closest you've even gotten to this magical resource of color concoction was probably through something similar to Bic's assorted ball point.

Scribble, of course, offers more options than Bic's royal blue for when you want to draw the sky. The only limitation here, it seems, is your imagination.

The pen retails for just under $150 and the stylus -- for digital use -- under $80. 





Whats your view about such technology towards creativity....????

Wireless Light Switch

Wireless Light Switch

With the introduction of the Wireless Light Switch, now there lies a possibility of carrying your very own switchboard on the palm of your hands. Operating under the controls of wireless technology, this light switch lets you turn on/off your lights from a distance of around 100ft. That fairly means you do not have to walk to the switchboard everytime you need a hand on the light switch. By simply attaching the remote component to the fixture of your choice, you’ll have the power to switch on or off your light from wherever you feel like inside the house. Quite an enchanting experience for those who are too lazy to head towards the switchboard when required.

Japanese Wrist-Mounted Finger Piano is very portable

Japanese Wrist-Mounted Finger Piano is very portable If you love the piano and want to play it wherever you go, there already tons of apps available on your smartphone for you to do so. However, playing the piano on a touchscreen just doesn’t do the instrument any justice, and it’s never as fun to do. Well, the Japanese Wrist-Mounted Finger Piano aims to change all that. Looking like some sort of weird glove used in some virtual reality system or archaic gaming console, the Japanese Wrist-Mounted Finger Piano is exactly what you’d imagine it to be.

Smart Lighter Will Help You Quit Smoking

Smart Lighter Will Help You Quit Smoking A new Internet-connected lighter called Quitbit will light your cigarette, but wean you off a smoking habit too. A new Kickstarter campaign called Quitbit takes the same monitoring principles embedded into fitness trackers and helps users track and cutdown on smoking. In a nod to the name, it’s like a Fitbit for smoking. Users can set custom plans — so they can trim on intake at whatever pace they want — and see much money they’ve saved by cutting back on packs along the way. It also reveals the time since your last smoke, how many were consumed within a certain period of time and lets you call out the times you shared a cigarette with a friend (or let someone borrow the lighter). Although there are countless apps on the market that help smokers quit, this is the first solution that includes hardware.

Scientists turns light into matter

In a breakthrough, scientists have for the first time discovered a revolutionary technique to turn light into matter, a feat thought impossible when the idea was first theorised 80 years ago. Three physicists at the Imperial College London's Blackett Physics Laboratory worked out a relatively simple way to physically prove a theory first devised by scientists Breit and Wheeler in 1934. 

                          

Breit and Wheeler suggested that it should be possible to turn light into matter by smashing together only two particles of light (photons), to create an electron and a positron - the simplest method of turning light into matter ever predicted. The calculation was found to be theoretically sound but Breit and Wheeler said that they never expected anybody to physically demonstrate their prediction. It has never been observed in the laboratory and past experiments to test it have required the addition of massive high-energy particles. 

The new research, published in Nature Photonics, shows for the first time how Breit and Wheeler's theory could be proven in practice. This 'photon-photon collider', which would convert light directly into matter using technology that is already available, would be a new type of high-energy physics experiment. This experiment would recreate a process that was important in the first 100 seconds of the universe and that is also seen in gamma ray bursts, which are the biggest explosions in the universe and one of physics' greatest unsolved mysteries. 

The scientists had been investigating unrelated problems in fusion energy when they realised what they were working on could be applied to the Breit-Wheeler theory. The breakthrough was achieved in collaboration with a fellow theoretical physicist from the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, who happened to be visiting. 

"Despite all physicists accepting the theory to be true, when Breit and Wheeler first proposed the theory, they said that they never expected it be shown in the laboratory. Today, nearly 80 years later, we prove them wrong. What was so surprising to us was the discovery of how we can create matter directly from light using the technology that we have today in the UK. As we are theorists we are now talking to others who can use our ideas to undertake this landmark experiment," said Steve Rose from the Department of Physics at Imperial College London. 

The collider experiment that the scientists have proposed involves two key steps. First, the scientists would use an extremely powerful high-intensity laser to speed up electrons to just below the speed of light. They would then fire these electrons into a slab of gold to create a beam of photons a billion times more energetic than visible light. 

The next stage of the experiment involves a tiny gold can called a hohlraum (German for 'empty room'). Scientists would fire a high-energy laser at the inner surface of this gold can, to create a thermal radiation field, generating light similar to the light emitted by stars. 

They would then direct the photon beam from the first stage of the experiment through the centre of the can, causing the photons from the two sources to collide and form electrons and positrons. It would then be possible to detect the formation of the electrons and positrons when they exited the can. 

"Although the theory is conceptually simple, it has been very difficult to verify experimentally. We were able to develop the idea for the collider very quickly, but the experimental design we propose can be carried out with relative ease and with existing technology. Within a few hours of looking for applications of hohlraums outside their traditional role in fusion energy research, we were astonished to find they provided the perfect conditions for creating a photon collider," Lead researcher Oliver Pike said. 

Laser KeyBoards

 


Without your computer keyboard, whether it's part of a desktop or a laptop, it might've been fairly difficult to get to this article. Sure, maybe you've bookmarked the Web site and you used your mouse to click around between several links, but most of the time, you probably type the Web site address into your browser to get here. Most of us with personal computers use a keyboard almost every day to compose e-mails, type out word processing documents, visit Web sites and perform searches. And as easy as it may seem, typing is a skill we have to learn and practice in order to perform properly. Most students take typing classes as early as elementary school, and word processing is one of the most common skills listed on a job-seeker's resume.


Without keyboards, communicating between family, friends and businesses would be a much less streamlined affair. Today, even smartphones come equipped with smaller keyboards. Phones that are more focused on e-mail and text messaging, like the BlackBerry or several of the slider phones, offer these as a more straightforward way of typing out text. On a typical cell phone with a three-by-four numeric keypad, for instance, where at least three letters are assigned to a number, you often have to punch through each key several times to get one word on the screen. Some people are remarkably adept at this -- just watch some people on a train or at the airport rifle through several text messages in a matter of no time -- but for some, the act is cumbersome and takes far too long. Miniature keyboards, however, attempt to solve that problem by giving users a complete QWERTY setup to type e-mails, text messages and reminders.

Laser keyboard is an innovative product that lets you convert any surface into a keyboard. The keyboard connects to any device with a bluetooth such as your iPad or cellphone.

Whats your opinion on this innovation?

This microSD card from Sandisk has 128GB storage?

If you thought the HTC guys were kidding you when they said the phone can support external storage of up to 128GB, then you obviously had no clue what Sandisk was up to.

SanDisk Corporation has announced the new 128GB SanDisk Ultra microSDXC UHS-I memory card, the world’s largest capacity microSD card, in India. The card lets you use smart devices as dumps for all your movies, pictures and songs.

Stuart Robinson, director, Handset Component Technologies, Strategy Analytics, said: “Until now, consumers had to spread out their content between multiple products because the memory on those devices was not able to hold enough data in one place. This 128GB microSD card is going to be popular as the preferred removable storage option, giving users fast, secure and reliable access to their personal data archives.”

Designed for Android smartphones and tablets, the new SanDisk Ultra microSDXC card is ideal for shooting Full HD video and high-quality pictures.

A new version of the SanDisk Memory Zone app lets users easily view, access, and backup all of their files from their phone’s memory in one convenient place. SanDisk is also releasing OptiMem, a new feature that allows Android users to enhance their phone’s internal memory by automatically transferring some of their old photos and videos to their microSD card.

Computer simulation supports 'holographic' theory describing a black hole

A research group composed of four researchers has tested numerically a "holographic" theory, which was conjectured to describe accurately the dynamical phenomena occurring in a black hole.

Masanori Hanada, Ph.D., an associate professor at Kyoto University; Yoshifumi Hyakutake, Ph.D., an associate professor at Ibaraki University; Goro Ishiki, Ph.D., an assistant professor at Kyoto University; and Jun Nishimura, Ph.D., an associate professor at KEK were the main people working on this project.

As a new approach to solve this problem, Juan Martin Maldacena, a professor of Princeton University proposed a theory which describes gravity including the center of the black hole. According to this theory, dynamical phenomena occurring in a curved space-time like black holes can be described by a theory on a flat space-time, just as a hologram can record the information of 3D objects on a plane.

In the present research, the mass of a black hole was computed on a computer based on Maldacena's theory, and the results were compared with the results obtained by approximate calculation based on conventional superstring theory, which incorporate the quantum gravity effects.

Denoting the number of elements composing the black hole by N, previous works mainly studied the case in which N is so large that the quantum gravity effects near the black hole can be neglected. In the case of small N, on the other hand, whether the theory really describes the black hole correctly was an open question.

Based on the observation that the two different theoretical results agree, it has been concluded that the results obtained by the calculation in Maldacena's theory include the quantum gravity effects correctly as the calculation in conventional superstring theory does.

This work tested Maldacena's theory concerning a new description of black holes using a "hologram." While previous works provided various tests under the situation in which the quantum gravity effects near the black hole can be neglected, this work made a step forward and succeeded in performing a test including the quantum gravity effects, which is considered a significant progress.

The obtained results strongly suggest that Maldacena's theory describes the interior of the black hole even in the case in which the quantum gravity effects near the black hole cannot be neglected.

How Black Holes Are Formed

A partnership of the UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country, Ikerbasque and the CSIC-Spanish National Research Council is participating in the detecting, for the first time, of circular light coming from a recently created black hole.

On 24 October 2012 observatories across the world were alerted about a huge stellar explosion, the GRB121024A, which had been located just hours before in the Eridanus constellation by NASA’s Swift satellite. However, only the European Southern Observatory using its Very Large Telescope (VLT) located in the Atacama desert in Chile managed to take accurate polarimetric measurements of the phenomenon.

The data obtained on that explosion, which took place about 11,000 million years ago, have made it possible to reconstruct how a black hole is formed.

For the last decade astrophysicists have been in possession of strong evidence that LGRBs occur when the so-called massive stars burst; these are huge stars with masses of up to hundreds of times bigger than that of the Sun and which, moreover, spin rapidly on a rotation axis.

The energy given off by this gigantic explosion would be emitted in two jets displaying a high level of energy and which would be aligned with the rotation axis of the dying star.

What is more, all these stars have magnetic fields. And these are intensified further if they rotate rapidly, as in the case of the LGRBs. So during the internal collapse of the star towards the central black hole, the magnetic fields of the star would also swirl around the star’s rotation axis. And during the collapse of the star, a powerful “magnetic geyser” would be produced and be ejected from the environment of the black hole that is being formed; the effects of this can be felt at distances of billions of kilometres.

This complex scenario led one to predict that the light emitted during the explosion of the star must have been circularly polarized as if it were a screw. And that is what, for the first time, the authors have detected in Chile: a circularly polarized light that is the direct consequence of a black hole “recently” created on the outer reaches of the Universe and which has been confirmed by the theoretical model.

The study has been published in the journal Nature.

Welcome to OpenBIOS

The OpenBIOS project provides you with most free and open source Open Firmware implementations available. Here you find several implementations of IEEE 1275-1994 (Referred to as Open Firmware) compliant firmware.

Among its features, Open Firmware provides an instruction set independent device interface. This can be used to boot the operating system from expansion cards without native initialization code.

It is Open Firmware's goal to work on all common platforms, like x86, AMD64, PowerPC, ARM, Sparc and Mips. With its flexible and modular design, Open Firmware targets servers, workstations and embedded systems, where a sane and unified firmware is a crucial design goal and reduces porting efforts noticably.

Open Firmware is found on many servers and workstations and there are several commercial implementations from SUN, Firmworks, CodeGen, Apple, IBM and others.

In most cases, the Open Firmware implementations provided on this site rely on an additional low-level firmware for hardware initialization, such as coreboot or U-Boot.

NASA Recreates Cosmic Dust in a Lab

Recently NASA scientists have managed to recreate dust particles that are strikingly to that of those found in outer space in the exterior layers of stars that are dying. Researchers at the ASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, have managed to recreate the processes that happen in the atmosphere that lead to the formation of interstellar dust. They have used a expert facility called the Cosmic Simulation Chamber (COSmIC). This was developed and visualized at Ames and this enabled scientists to recreate and conduct this study in a laboratory. If you’re wondering what scientists plan to achieve from recreating this stellar dust; they want to gather as much information as they can about the composition and evolution of the universe. Cosmic dust grains that form around dying stars are expelled into the interstellar medium lead, they make up the very component of the evolution of the universe. “The harsh conditions of space are extremely difficult to reproduce in the laboratory, and have long hindered efforts to interpret and analyse observations from space,” said Farid Salama, project leader and a space science researcher at Ames. She went on to say, “Using the COSmIC simulator we can now discover clues to questions about the composition and the evolution of the universe, both major objectives of NASA’s space research programme.” The team of researchers initiated the process with small hydrocarbon molecules. They lengthened these with a cold jet spray in the Cosmic Simulation Chamber and further exposed it to high energy in an electric discharge. During the experiment they were able to notice nanoparticles and measured they width, structure and diameter. They did this sampling for a large size of the grains produced. The results of these experiments have important implications not just for the study of astrophysics but even for planetary sciences. This will help understand the composition and formation of planets and the dust around the stars.

A smarter way to power smart devices

Researchers at Rice University have managed to build an ultra-slim, ultra-flexible battery that could be the key to powering smartwatches and fitness bands for longer and to creating folding phones. Building a battery small enough to fit inside a wearable tech device, be it smartglasses or a smartwatch, isn’t difficult. However, creating one small and light enough that can actually offer the user more than a few hours’ continued use is still a huge challenge.
Likewise, Samsung and LG might have wowed the world with their first flexible-display smartphones this year, but until the battery that powers their screens is equally open to movement, new and exciting phone shapes and designs are still years away from becoming a reality. What separates the cell created by the team lead by Rice chemist James Tour from other attempts is not its impressive size, it’s a hundredth of an inch thick, but that it behaves like a lithium-ion battery, it charges quickly, discharges slowly and is tough enough to survive 10,000 charging cycles. Yet, the battery is lithium-free.

The best materials for making batteries tend to be less than flexible and the best materials for making flexible cells tend not to offer a high storage capacity or the power to run something as big as a smartphone, for example. Therefore, there is great interest around the Rice University team’s work and the fact that it might have identified a material that offers the best of both worlds. ”This is not easy to do, because materials with such high capacity are usually brittle,” said Tour. “And we’ve had really good, flexible carbon storage systems in the past, but carbon as a material has never hit the theoretical value that can be found in inorganic systems, and nickel fluoride in particular.”

The battery they have created is made from a layer of nickel and uses an electrolyte of potassium hydroxide in polyvinyl alcohol. It can be built up, layer by layer to increase capacity based on what it is going to be used for, a fitness tracker, smartphone or tablet. “The numbers are exceedingly high in the power that it can deliver, and it’s a very simple method to make high-powered systems,” Tour said. “We’re already talking with companies interested in commercializing this.” Tour’s paper, co-authored by Rice graduate student Changsheng Xiang and postdoctoral researcher Gunuk Wang, is published in the latest edition of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Toshiba's new microSD memory cards are the world's fastest

Toshiba has just announced its latest microSD memory cards and they are pretty fast, well, fastest in the world. The new memory cards from Toshiba are apparently the first ones to come with High-Speed UHS-II Interface Standard.


Toshiba has launched new 32 GB and 64 GB cards. The 64 GB microSD memory cards offer a whopping maximum read speed of 260MB/s and a maximum write speed of 240MB/s. The new 32 GB card offers a maximum read speed of 145MB/s and maximum write speed of 130MB/s, which is an improvement of 8x in write speed and 2.7x in read speed improvement when compared to Toshiba’s current 32 GB memory cards. 

These new memory cards from Toshiba come with UHS Speed Class 3 (U3), that should make sure high-quality 4K video can be captured with ease, with a constant minimum write speed of 30MB/s. 

Toshibas hasn't revealed the pricing and availability of these new memory cards yet but it should happen soon, considering sample shipments for chipset vendors and manufacturers are available now.

Scientists explain how memories stick together

Scientists at the Salk Institute have created a new model of memory that explains how neurons retain select memories a few hours after an event.
                        
                        This new framework provides a more complete picture of how memory works, which can inform research into disorders liked Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, post-traumatic stress and learning disabilities.
"Previous models of memory were based on fast activity patterns," says Terry Sejnowski, holder of Salk's Francis Crick Chair and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. "Our new model of memory makes it possible to integrate experiences over hours rather than moments."
Over the past few decades, neuroscientists have revealed much about how long-term memories are stored. For significant events—for example, being bit by a dog—a number of proteins are quickly made in activated brain cells to create the new memories. Some of these proteins linger for a few hours at specific places on specific neurons before breaking down.
This series of biochemical events allow us to remember important details about that event—such as, in the case of the dog bite, which dog, where it was located, if it required an emergency room visit, and so on.
One problem scientists have had with modeling memory storage is explaining why only selective details and not everything in that 1-2 hour window is strongly remembered. By incorporating data from previous literature, Sejnowski and first author Cian O'Donnell, a Salk postdoctoral researcher, developed a model that bridges findings from both molecular and systems observations of memory to explain how this 1-2 hour memory window works. The work is detailed in the latest issue ofNeuron.
Using computational modeling, O'Donnell and Sejnowski show that, despite the proteins being available to a number of neurons in a given circuit, memories are retained when subsequent events activate the same neurons as the original event. The scientists found that the spatial positioning of proteins at both specific neurons and at specific areas around these neurons predicts which memories are recorded. This spatial patterning framework successfully predicts memory retention as a mathematical function of time and location overlap.
"One thing this study does is link what's happing in memory formation at the cellular level to the systems level," says O'Donnell. "That the time window is important was already established; we worked out how the content could also determine whether memories were remembered or not. We prove that a set of ideas are consistent and sufficient to explain something in the real world."
The new model also provides a potential framework for understanding how generalizations from memories are processed during dreams.
While much is still unknown about sleep, research suggests that important memories from the day are often cycled through the brain, shuttled from temporary storage in the hippocampus to more long-term storage in the cortex. Researchers observed most of this memory formation in non-dreaming sleep. Little is known about if and how memory packaging or consolidation is done during dreams. However, O'Donnell and Sejnowski's model suggests that some memory retention does happen during dreams.
"During sleep there's a reorganizing of memory—you strengthen some memories and lose ones you don't need anymore," says O'Donnell. "In addition, people learn abstractions as they sleep, but there was no idea how generalization processes happen at a neural level."
By applying their theoretical findings on overlap activity within the 1-2 hour window, they came up with a theoretical model for how the memory abstraction process might work during sleep.