Archive for December, 2008
2009 Global Internet Map
“TeleGeography’s new Global Internet Map draws upon their annual Global Internet Geography research to provide a unique view of the world’s Internet backbone architecture. The map’s global projection traces the intercontinental links between the countries of Europe, Asia, North and Latin America, and Africa. Regional close-ups provide insight into key routes within each region. Nine accompanying figures and tables present valuable data on Internet bandwidth by country, regional and global Internet capacity growth, backbone providers, traffic by application, wholesale pricing, and broadband user growth.”
visualcomplexity.com
One screen, two images
“Remember lenticular printing, where two different images were printed on a single piece of striated plastic? You could tilt the plastic to one side for a sort of ghetto animation effect. [...] Mercedes Benz will be incorporating a more high-tech version of that, called Splitview, in their car dashboards. [...] The idea is that the driver can look at maps while the passenger watches something else. For just driving around it sounds like overkill to us, but we wish this tech had existed when we were children; with only one TV, What To Watch was the ultimate and epic sibling battleground.”
Core77
“Walking City” kinetic dresses
“This dress by Ying Gao reacts to it’s environment by integrating proximity sensors. I would love to see this type of clothing being worn on the streets of NYC.”
MAKE
Prototype Scanner Gives Middle Finger To Drunk Driving
“The device combines an identification security system with fingerprint testing. A driver places his middle finger inside a scanning box which analyzes the grooves of the fingerprint, as well as the chemical properties of the skin (such as oils or sweat). Within twenty seconds, the board reveals whether the driver’s condition is suitable to drive. If the blood-alcohol level is above the legal limit, the engine will lock up. The gadget also serves as a theft prevention device. The finger print scanner has a database of people allowed to drive the car, so no one can break in and take it for a ride, even if they’re sober.”
Wired.com
Quantifying myself
“As[...] I track myself – 40 things about my body, mind, and activity – every day. The fact that I do this tracking seems to interest people. [...] I found two interesting trends or patterns in my data, one of which surprised me. The first trend was that my mood went up significantly on days that I did more exercise. My highest mood days were during Tai Chi workshop weekends, when I did 5-6 hours of Tai Chi each day. The second, more surprising one for me was that on days when my mood was down, I ate a lot more – up to 3,170 calories one day instead of my usual average of about 2,050! This suggested to me that I use eating to process emotional upsets, which I always knew subconsciously but had never been forced to face.”
The Quantified Self
Plushie: An interactive design system for plush toys – stuff animals
“We use a sketching interface for 3D modeling and also provide various editing operations tailored for plush toy design. Internally, the system constructs a 2D cloth pattern in such a way that the simulation result matches the user’s input stroke. Our goal is to show that relatively simple algorithms can provide fast, satisfactory results to the user whereas the pursuit of optimal layout and simulation accuracy lies outside this paper’s scope. We successfully demonstrated that non-professional users could design plush toys or balloon easily using Plushie.”
MAKE
Wireless Orbita Mouse Scrolls onto the Scene
“The biggest claim to fame for the mouse is its scroll capability where you actually rotate the mouse rather than a wheel. By turning the mouse clockwise you can scroll down a page at whatever speed you desire by turning faster or slower.”
I4U News
Scallop Imaging wide-angle security cams look to the sea for inspiration
“Boston’s own Scallop Imaging, a Tenebraex subsidiary that has developed a “low-cost” security camera that sees 180 degrees of view without fisheye distortion or the lag present in pan-and-tilt alternatives. Additionally, the multi-eyed cam automatically stitches and downsamples images, and can capture a new 7-megapixel still to transmit over Ethernet “every second or two.” It’s small enough to be placed into a light socket-sized hole, and it’s powered by the same Ethernet cable that links it into a building’s surveillance system.”
Engadget
Keeping Tabs on Tools
“Tool Link’s core technology is an RFID reader built into the truck bed that reads microchips on the tools to sense which ones the bed contains. Each microchip, or RFID tag, is fitted with an antenna so that data can be sent between the reader and the tag. In this case, the reader might request the number of the tool from each tag contained in the truck bed. The RFID reader provides all the power in the transaction, meaning that the tags on the tools don’t need any sort of battery supply. Similar RFID systems are used by many large companies for inventory purposes. What makes Tool Link unique is the application and ThingMagic’s focus on embedding RFID into the object. The antennas, for example, are manufactured to look like the rest of the truck bed so that they can blend in seamlessly. In the future, Maguire says, the truck bed itself might be the antenna.”
Technology Review
KidZui is a Kid Friendly Web Interface
“KidZui is a child-safe internet front end that calls upon an enormous whitelist of websites, pictures, videos, and games that have all been reviewed by a group of volunteers composed of parents and educators.”
Lifehacker
Do you own your stuff?
“A group of car dealers in Oregon apparently attached GPS devices to cars sold to customers with poor credit so as to be able to track them down more easily in the event of repossession. …this practice also relates to an emerging phenomenon wherein sold property remains oddly connected to the seller as though it were merely leased. Whereas once we purchased an album and did with it as we please, today we need to register (up to five) devices in order to play our songs.”
Dan Lockton
BookCrossing Tracks Your Books In The Wild
“After signing up for an account you can begin tagging your books and releasing them. Give them to friends, leave them on airplanes or coffee shop tables, anything to put them out where they can be found and enjoyed. Each book you release will have a unique ID number that allows future readers to visit BookCrossing and track where the book has been and what other people have to say about it.”
Lifehacker
Marathon to SMS Those Too Lazy to Run In It
“This Sunday, the Dallas White Rock Marathon will implement a pretty cool feature for participants and their friends/families. While most modern marathons track runners with (RFID?) chips attached to their shoes, this marathon in Dallas will take that data and send it out, texting or emailing split times and finishing results to anyone who registers with a particular runner.”
Gizmodo
Kickbee : Twitter from the womb
“The Kickbee is a wearable device made of a stretchable band and embedded electronics and sensors. Piezo sensors are attached directly to the band, and transmit small but detectable voltages when triggered by movement underneath. An Arduino Mini microcontroller transmits the signals to an accompanying Java application wirelessly via Bluetooth. [...]The Java application receives the sensor values and analyzes them. When a kick event is detected, a Twitter message is posted via the Twitter API. I chose to use Twitter because it is easy to initiate an SMS message to any mobile phone when a kick is detected. It also acts as a data log that can be accessed programmatically for visualization or archiving.”
MAKE
Track&Trace: A New Backstory Tool
“Visit the MADE-BY site and enter a code printed on the garment’s label to pull up a history of the product that describes the places it’s been and the people who played a role in its creation. [...] The Track&Trace backstories take you step by step from the clothing brand company to the actual garment manufacturer, the workers who spun the yarn, the farmers who grew the cotton. Each step along that journey is illustrated with a photograph of an actual person, and a snippet of an interview talking about the labor and commerce at that level.”
Worldchanging
New Technology Could Display Your Dreams on Screen
“In a nutshell, the device converts electrical signals sent to the visual cortex into images that can be viewed on a computer screen. In their experiment, they showed test subjects the six letters in the word neuron and succeeded in reconstructing the word on screen by measuring their brain activity. As the technology progresses, it could be possible to “see” what people are thinking, what they dream about and record it for posterity.”
Gizmodo
Lasers, Cameras and Mirrors Turn You Into a Pool Shark
“Do you suck at pool? Well, this fancy system involving lasers and cameras shows you exactly where each ball on the table will go depending on where you’re pointing the cue.”
Gizmodo
Social Networks and “Happiness Clusters”
“Nicholas Christakis and James Folwer recently published a paper in the British Medical Journal, suggesting that offline social networks have “happy” and “unhappy” clusters. In that study, they found that a person’s happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends… in other words, up to 3 degrees of separation. In addition, they also found that happy people were more likely to be at the center of their offline social networks, and that each additional happy friend increases your chance of being happy by about 9%.”
PSFK
Turf Bombing: Location-Based Game for Exploring the Real World
“More recently we came upon Turf Bombing, a game that forms players into loosely associated “gangs” through shared zip codes, and whoseultimate goal is to control the most territory. Participants complete these tasks by exploring different neighborhoods, cities and even countries in real time, setting “time bombs,” game play devices that appear on the map, along the way. When these “bombs” explode, the particular area in dispute is taken over by the collective group who performed the action. Simultaneously, rivals are given the opportunity to find and diffuse these mechanisms, in order to maintain control of their respective domains.”
PSFK
Warhammer to erect (virtual) statues of top players
“Mythic’s introducing a rather cool little addition to Warhammer Online, aimed at making outstanding players feel more like ineluctable legends of the game lore. Starting with patch 1.1, Mythic will reward the top ten players on each realm with statues of their characters in the main city centers.”
Boing Boing
Virtual world for Muslims debuts
“Aimed at Muslims in Western nations, Muxlim Pal’s creators hope it will also foster understanding among non-Muslims. “We are not a religious site, we are a site that is focused on the lifestyle,” said Mohamed El-Fatatry, founder of Muxlim.com – the parent site of Muxlim Pal. “This is for anyone who is remotely interested in the Muslim culture and the Muslim lifestyle,” he said.”
BBC NEWS
Inside Ford’s SmartGauge Design
“Reena Jana and I have been reporting on the design work behind Ford’s upcoming Fusion Hybrid. The new vehicle, which will debut next year as a 2010 model, features an innovation digital dashboard that Ford hopes will catapult it to the front of the green pack. Check out this video tour of the new system, provided by Ford”
BusinessWeek
Controlling a rover with your eyes
“Controlling a robot simply by looking at your desired location is pretty freaking awesome. A web camera pointed at your face, analyzes your movements and pupil direction to send the bot signals. Look at a location and the bot goes, change your expression to send other commands to the bot.”
Hack a Day
H-Bouya USB “toy” blinks, accuses you of procrastinating
“His name seems to be H-Bouya and he’s a USB device who blinks every time you type “h” — as in “Hello there, my hairless, large-headed cohort (that’s five, we can probably do better than that). He might do some other things like make random noises or cry when you unplug him, but he’s probably just destined to take his place on your desk next to that framed photo of Han Solo and the mini-Mulder doll, silently accusing you of “not doing any work.”"
Engadget
220 Feet on 60 Minutes
“The display is ambient in the sense that nobody’s actually using the larger version to do real work (you can see relevant portions replicated on individuals’ monitors). It seems to serve as a means of knowing what everyone in the room is up to (or as a deterrent against firing up Solitaire — I’m looking at you Ahmad). But more importantly, it’s there for visitors, especially visitors with video cameras, and people who write about visualization and happened to catch a segment about their info palace since it immediately followed the Patriots-Seahawks game.”
ben fry
TN Games HTX Helmet Delivers Virtual Headshots, Lawsuits With Force Feedback
“The HTX Helmet is worn in conjunction with the 3rd Space Gaming Vest and delivers blows to the head when you are fired upon. Feel bullets whizzing by your helmet or the impact of getting shot in the head. The helmet will communicates with compatible games to give precise, 3 dimensionally accurate impacts where it happens, as it happens.”
Gizmodo
Hard data on adult video game players
“Older gamers, particularly seniors, tend to play games more frequently. Over one-third (36%) of gamers 65 and older say they play games everyday or almost everyday, compared with 19% of adults aged 50-64, 20% of adults aged 30-49, and 20% of adults aged 18-29. Senior gamers may play more frequently because they have more time to play than younger gamers, as 77% of senior gamers reported being retired.”
Boing Boing
Back-Button to the Future
“A user can peer back in time through Zoetrope in several ways. Simply pulling a scrollbar at the bottom of the browser winds a Web page back to show what it looked like hours, days, or months ago. Or, if the user is interested in one specific piece of information, like the price of a certain product, he or she can draw a “lens” over that area of the page to see how it changes. An experienced user can perform even more-advanced analysis. For example, configured correctly, Zoetrope will recognize a price as it goes up or down and will show the results as a graph. It’s also possible to draw lenses on different websites and sync them in order to carry out a historical comparison.”
Technology Review
Brain Surgery Helps a Mute Man Speak
“After implanting the electrode, the team began decoding the signals emitted from the man’s brain, using a computer model they’ve been developing for the past 15 years. So far, the model has been able to discern three vowels as the patient was thinking them, producing them as quickly as in normal speech. Guenther says that his long-term goal is to have the patient produce words directly within five years.”
The Future of Things
StyleHop Matches Social Gaming With The Fashion World
“instead of using a Hot-Or-Notesque stream of outfits to gather ratings, StyleHop offers a series of social games, each of which ask for a few ratings at a time so users don’t get bored. Included among these games is a Price Is Right-style Flash game that asks users to guess how much they think an individual item of clothing costs (between each round users are asked to rate a few outfits). To help instill a competitive atmosphere the site keeps track of how other users fare, which presumably leads players to continue playing the game (and rate more clothes). StyleHop also plans to offer games across popular social networks like Facebook and MySpace, so it can gain a large user base.”
TechCrunch
Grippity back-typing keyboard is one step closer to existing
“The unit boasts a full QWERTY keyboard, for use with eight-finger typing from the back, plus two triggers on the back that function as the mouse buttons. As if that wasn’t wild enough, it also boasts an orientation sensor that allows the 60 QWERTY keys to double as hot keys when the unit is flipped over.”
Engadget
Microscopic wheel will spin straight to your heart, literally
“Two scientists from the Universities of Sheffield and Barcelona, Ramin Golestanian and Pietro Tierno, hope to change that by turning your bodily fluids into pathways for their tiny devices. The things are comprised of two beads, measuring 1 and 3 micrometers, attached to each other using strands of DNA. A magnetic field gets ‘em spinning in the right direction and the increased surface area of the larger bead moves the contraption forward at a blistering 1 micrometer per second (shown in a short but sweet video below).”
Engadget
Easy Energy Yogen Max foldable, man-powered laptop charger prototype complete
“They’ve just completed a protoype for the Yogen Max laptop charger, and though details are particularly spartan about the actual workings of the device, as you can see from the mock-up, it’s going to involve a human foot pumping juice directly into your laptop. Unlike some other devices we’ve seen, the Yogen Max has no external battery, plus it’s way more foldable and boasts a totally awesome font.”
Engadget
ZuiPrezi zooming presentation editor
“ZuiPrezi is a zooming presentation editor which allows you to easily create stunning presentations. With the help of ZuiPrezi you can create dynamic and visually structured zooming maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings. ZuiPrezi has a very intuitive interface and support for online sharing.”
ZuiPrezi
Experiment provides “body swapping” experience
“Here we report a perceptual illusion of body-swapping that addresses directly this issue. Manipulation of the visual perspective, in combination with the receipt of correlated multisensory information from the body was sufficient to trigger the illusion that another person’s body or an artificial body was one’s own. This effect was so strong that people could experience being in another person’s body when facing their own body and shaking hands with it. Our results are of fundamental importance because they identify the perceptual processes that produce the feeling of ownership of one’s body.”
Boing Boing
Animated photo printing for everyone
“The US-based service, which is the brainchild of Israeli HumanEyes Technologies, is the only one we’re aware of that offers lenticular printing on-demand, in small runs and at low cost. Prices are comparable to conventional stationary products, with a single greeting card costing USD 3.99 and notebooks sold for USD 15.99. One to bring to other parts of the photo-printing, novelty-seeking, gift-giving world?”
Springwise
Jam by Jozeph Forakis, Jihee Chun, Sung Hyun Kyung, Kerri Moskow
“The central hub records and wirelessly links Jam together, while the touch sensitive finger-taps store and play sound clips. It goes further by allowing changes in pitch by vertically dragging it on a surface and regulating the volume with the force applied to each tap.”
Design
Cell Phones That Never Need To Be Charged? Sound Wave-powered Devices Possible
“When materials are brought down to the nanoscale dimension, their properties for some performance characteristics dramatically change,” said Cagin who is a past recipient of the prestigious Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology. “One such example is with piezoelectric materials. We have demonstrated that when you go to a particular length scale – between 20 and 23 nanometers – you actually improve the energy-harvesting capacity by 100 percent.”
ScienceDaily
Visualising SMS Messages: Patterns in the City – Amsterdam New Years Eve
“The video above captures the number of SMS messages sent from Amsterdam in the run up to New Years Eve. With data supplied by KPN Telcom you can see the city almost breath over time with a huge peak at the cross over to New Years Day.”
Digital Urban
Enhanced Photos Can Bypass Any Face-Recognition Software
“To enroll in the face recognition software, the built-in webcam on the laptop scans the face for prime areas, such as the eyes or more conspicuous facial features. The special photo, which does not have to be of high quality, is processed so that the key areas are enhanced and the contrast levels are adjusted to the expectations of the software.”
Gizmodo
Wearable sniper detection to be deployed in Iraq
“The Soldier-Wearable Acoustic Targeting System (SWATS) can pinpoint the location of snipers after a single gunshot, audibly informing soldiers of the point of origin. Part of QinetiQ’s Ears Gunshot Localization System family, the 6.4-ounce acoustic sensor takes just a fraction of a second to locate the source of sniper fire. It works in a 360-degree radius, isn’t confused by ambient noise and can be used in a moving vehicle.”
Gizmag
Night Camera iPhone App Picks the Decisive Moment via Accelerometer, Eliminates Shaky Hands
“When you press the shutter button with Night Camera, the app starts taking accelerometer readings for three seconds; when the sensor determines that you’re holding the camera steadily, Night Camera triggers the shutter at that exact moment. Accelerometer sensitivity and sensor reading time are all configurable.”
Gizmodo
Pioneer shows off 16-layer 400GB Blu-ray Disc, affirms compatibility with current players
“Currently, the 400GB disc is slated to hit mass production sometime between now and 2010, while rewritable versions won’t hit until 2010 to 2012. Not like it really matters though — a 1TB disc is on track for 2013, and you know you’ll be waiting for the latest and greatest.”
Engadget
Warner Home Video Announces First BD-Live Movie
“Warner Home Video announced that the latest Batman film titled The Dark Knight would be its first BD-Live movie offering content accessible via the internet. The BD-Live content will allow owners to host their own Live Community Screenings with friends as well as record and post their own commentaries over the film using the My WB Commentary feature. The My WB Commentary feature allows viewers to post picture-in-picture commentary right over the movie as it plays. BD-Live content is only accessible over Internet-connected Blu-ray players and the PS3. Director Christopher Nolan will be hosting a BD-Live Community Screening at a date to be specified later.”
I4U News
GE Ceases Investing in Incandescent Technology
“GE was actually working on a program to make incandescents more efficient. But now they have completely ceased all research and development into the bulb. Instead, GE will redouble its efforts on LED and OLED technology (pictured.) Along with the announcement that they are ceasing incandescent development, they announced that they hoped to have their white OLEDs for sale by 2010. OLEDs have the ability not just to kill the bulb, but to kill the entire idea of a lamp, as they can be flat, bendable and even transparent.”
EcoGeek
First Light-Driven Nanomachine
“Tang and his colleagues sent a light signal through the integrated circuit, then shone laser light onto the nano-optical modulator, causing it to oscillate up and down. These oscillations modulate the speed of the light traveling through the beam. The Yale team is the first to demonstrate the existence of this optical force on an integrated circuit–and the first to exploit it to make a working device. “The light force can be put to real use,” says Tang. His group has also demonstrated that it can make arrays of hundreds of working resonators on a single chip.”
Technology Review
State of the Art – New Nikon Holds a Secret
“On this camera, though, I tried Nikon’s $500 fish-eye lens, and filmed a complete 180-degree vista without having to turn or pan. With a macro lens, I filmed a bumblebee, huge and clear as though it were in a National Geographic documentary. With a huge telephoto lens, sitting in my bleachers seat at the Pilot Pen tennis tournament, I was suddenly filming what other people could capture only as still images.”
NYTimes.com
Geotagging Literature: Senghor on the Rocks
“Benda’s first novel has already broken new ground with its use of Google maps. Senghor on the Rocks tells the story of Austrian camera assistant arriving in the Senegalese capital of Dakar. Readers are taken on a verbal and visual journey, the location changing with the story using updated satellite view Google maps. The book (in German), was originally written from 2002 to 2005, and was later adapted for the latest geo-novel edition.”
PSFK
Duo Wireless Penmouse Adds Touchscreen Tablet Tech to Laptops Cheaply
“The two-piece device has a sensor you pop on top of your monitor or laptop screen and a wireless pen sensor—in combination they can give you that tablet-PC-alike pen-control performance you may have been yearning for, though only if you’re running a PC with XP or Vista.”
Gizmodo
Moto Concept by Joseph Liang
“Next in a long line of contenders for the so-called “Smart Phone.” Featuring a very limited button selection, camera, color screen, and hiding feature, (and not much else,) here comes the “Cute Phone!” It requires only one more feature to be true to the culture: a hole to hang colorful keychains and blinky beads!”
Yanko Design
This Little Piggy Bank Became a Videogame
“one of the hottest toy trends out of thrifty Japan is piggy banks that turn stockpiling yen into a game. In 2006, the Tomy company launched its Jinsei Ginko (“Life Bank”), a coin repository with an electronic version of the board game Life. It was such a hit that today there’s a range of increasingly sophisticated banks, tailored for both genders and encompassing several genres.”
Wired
Power.com: For Social Networking Power Users
“Log into one or more social networks on the Power.com site. Friends, messages, updates, photos and other information are either scraped from the site or obtained via the API (it varies by site), and aggregated on the Power dashboard. Users can respond/comment on this content directly from Power. And if they like, they can send messages and updates to all of their social networks at once. Or send a message to just one friend, but have it sent to all of their different social networks (and if they are a Power user, to their email, SMS, instant message, etc., per their settings).”
TechCrunch
Door-O-Matic
“Crestview doors make custom mid-century and modern doors, and they have a tool called Door-O-Vision on their site that allows you to try any of their 46 designs on your own house. You can play around with color and style, single or double doors. The door pictured is the Lexington B door in Sprout.”
dwell.com
Grandma’s on the Computer Screen
“Some grandparent enthusiasts say this latest form of virtual communication makes the actual separation harder. Others are so sustained by Web cam visits with services like Skype and iChat that they visit less in person. And no one quite knows what it means to a generation of 2-year-olds to have slightly pixelated versions of their grandparents as regular fixtures in their lives. But at a time when millions of people around the world are beginning to beam themselves across the ether, the Web cam adventures of the nursery school set and their grandparents offer a glimpse at what can be gained — and what may be lost — by almost-being there.”
NYTimes.com
Friday Fun: Solve Puzzles to Help Out Scientists
“The number of different ways even a small protein can fold is astronomical because there are so many degrees of freedom. Figuring out which of the many, many possible structures is the best one is regarded as one of the hardest problems in biology today and current methods take a lot of money and time, even for computers. Foldit attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of humans’ puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins.”
LifeHacker
Brains More Distracted, Not Slower with Age
“The researchers used electroencephalography to record electrical signals from the participants’ brains in milliseconds during the task. In contrast to the younger adults, the older group could not suppress distracting stimuli during the first 200 milliseconds after exposure. “At later time points, the ability to ignore does show up,” Gazzaley says. “It’s not abolished, just delayed.” By then, however, the irrelevant information had interfered with the memory task, making the older group less accurate overall than the younger group.”
Scientific American
BYK-mac Can Analyze and Match Your Car’s Paint Color Perfectly
“The device has a spectrometer that not only analyzes color, but also can pick apart the texture of any paint. Texture is referred to as paint components that affect the appearance, but not necessarily the color—most of the time these are the glittery or sparkle effects in the paint, which can change the appearance of a paint job depending on what angle you view it at. All these colors and textures in the database of the BYK-mac have mathematical values attached to them, and fiddles around with all these different colors until it can match what it reads in the spectrometer perfectly.”
Gizmodo
Honda’s color-changing speedometer to drive out bad driving habits
“the technology’s ECON Mode works with the CVT and engine to “support more fuel-efficient driving.” The real kicker, however, is the color-based “guidance function” — drive like a granny, your speedo lights up green, drive a little wilder, and things get a bit blue, and if you toss fuel economy to the wind and let ‘er rip, expect a full-on blue screen and the voice of God to come thundering through your sound system instructing that those horses be held”
Engadget
TrueMotion 3D enables true motion control
“Rather than relying solely on an accelerometer, this controller uses a magnetic field to track both your hands’ positions in 3D space. With a refresh rate of ten milliseconds and accuracy up to a millimeter, and interest from developers including Activision and EA”
Engadget
Atlantic Records Says Digital Sales Surpass CDs
“Atlantic, a unit of Warner Music Group, says it has reached a milestone that no other major record label has hit: more than half of its music sales in the United States are now from digital products, like downloads on iTunes and ring tones for cellphones.”
NYTimes.com
Cyborg leaf makes working solar power plant
“A team of US chemical engineers has extracted photosynthetic molecules from plants and attached them to thin sheets of gold, creating a photosynthesising cyborg.”
New Scientist
In hard times, nostalgic toys strike a chord
“‘Retro’ or ‘nostalgia’ toys can be viewed as the ‘comfort food’ of the toy industry and I do think folks naturally gravitate to what made them happy when they were young, or what is familiar to them,” said Anita Frazier, a toy analyst at NPD Group, a market research firm. Though most sales will occur over the next few weeks, Moe said Junior TinkerToys, Lincoln Logs and toy instruments have been among the big sellers in the past few months.”
MAKE
Amazing Hydrogen Fuel Tank Being Made Of Buckyballs And Graphene
“…storing dangerous H2 is tricky: something a team at the University of Crete thinks it’s solved. The US Department of Energy reckons a tank should store 6% H2 by mass, and current tech can only do about 2%. The Greek team’s tank is amazing: it’s constructed of two wondermaterials. Carbon Buckytubes connect layers of graphene to make a huge matrix—so far they’ve built a tank with Buckyballs instead of tubes, but they’ll have that finished by Christmas. And theoretically it can store 6.1% H2.”
Gizmodo
Color Quantum-Dot Displays
“Researchers at MIT have shown that they can use rubber stamps to deposit quantum dots–tiny light-emitting crystals–on a surface. The technique lets them put rows of different-colored dots next to each other, a crucial step in the development of color quantum-dot displays, which promise to be thinner, more flexible, brighter, sharper, and more power efficient than flat-panel LCDs.”
Technology Review
