The Man has his hand in your inbox, cops are intimidating citizens who film them beating other citizens, it's only logical to want to keep the private contents of your SD card, well, private. The Covert Coin from CCS Spy Gear is a precision-machined piece of retired US currency that are nearly indistinguishable from the real thing when closed. Which is great, until you accidentally deposit 16GB of files into a parking meter. More here.
For the most part, we humans are better at things than we were thousands of years ago. But there are some things the ancients had down pat. Roman concrete, for instance, is just way better than anything we can whip up today. Finally, after some 2,000 years, modern-day scientists have figured it out. And it's a secret worth knowing.
Concrete, while often not exactly pretty, is a super important tool of city-building today. We've been using Portland cement (an ingredient in concrete) as a binder for nearly 200 years as a building block of modern architecture, but it just can't hold a candle to that old Roman stuff. There are concrete harbors in Italy that are still doing pretty well after thousands of years. Meanwhile, a modern-day Portland cement structure is lucky to last 50 years when exposed to saltwater.
Now, after years of research in labs across the US and Europe, scientists have figured out that the most robust Roman concrete is a specific mixture of lime and volcanic rock, the details of which have been published in this month's issues of the Journal of the American Ceramic Society and American Mineralogist.
The researchers described it this way in a press release on the subject:
The Romans made concrete by mixing lime and volcanic rock. For underwater structures, lime and volcanic ash were mixed to form mortar, and this mortar and volcanic tuff were packed into wooden forms. The seawater instantly triggered a hot chemical reaction. The lime was hydrated – incorporating water molecules into its structure – and reacted with the ash to cement the whole mixture together.
And it gets even better. Portland cement is environmentally messy to produce, accounting for some seven percent of the C02 modern industry produces. Roman concrete? Much, much greener. There's still a lot of work to be done in adapting traditional Roman construction techniques to today's needs. But the recipe is as good as ever. We just have to get cookin'. More here.
Jun 14, 2013
While solar power promises a lot, it's only ever going to help satisfy our energy needs if it becomes efficient enough. Fortunately, Sharp has just made the world's most efficient solar cell, which converts a staggering 44.4 percent of incident light into electricity. Take that, fossil fuels.
The cell uses a special lens-based concentrator system, which focuses sunlight onto the cell to help improve the efficiency Once the light's focussed, a stack of three photo-absorption layers convert it into electricity. Even then it's no mean feat to squeeze out an efficiency of 44.4 percent, and the process saw Sharp invest a huge amount of time in tuning the device's dimensions to focus the light properly and reduce losses between layers.
While it's impressive, you probably won't see one strapped to the roof of a house any time soon. Devices this exotic are more likely to end up on a spacecraft in the first instance, where efficiency trumps cost every time. That's not to say it won't ever make it to the domestic market—it might just take a little time. More here.
Any task requiring the use of clear tape would be a lot easier if you could snatch a strip of the sticky stuff with just one hand. And while there have been many complicated contraptions that promise exactly that functionality, Black+Blum have found a simpler approach that takes advantage of that perpetual force known as gravity.
For starters, the On a Roll tape dispenser is made from cast iron, and weighs in at a hefty 2.3 pounds. So no matter how hard you pull and yank on a strip of tape, its weight and grippy rubber feet guarantee the tape will break before the dispenser budges. And further taking advantage of gravity, the angled support keeps the roll in place without requiring additional components. Simplicity is the name of the game here, and if you want a tape dispenser that could probably survive a nuclear blast, this would be $44 well spent. More here.
Amazon Japan's official Twitter account even jokingly tweeted that the Ideaco garbage can "was not the new Mac Pro".
The gag worked. That tweet was retweeted over thirteen thousand times and favorited nearly three thousand times. And currently, this garbage can is ranked number deux in the online retailer's interior furniture best sellers. It's also Amazon Japan's best selling garbage can.
There are also the inevitable funny Amazon reviews, with people "warning" that this was in fact a garbage can and pointing out that it could not run Thunderbolt 2. There was even a wry worry about how the black cylinder could show dust.
But as one Amazon Japan reviewer noted, "It does have the innovative ability to hide the plastic bag by a concealing cover." Shame it can't run Thunderbolt, though! More here.
You may have spent a small fortune on the impressive home theater setup in your living room, but when you're watching TV in bed, are you really going to settle for the crappy sound coming from its tiny speakers? Of course not. But skip the redundant bedroom surround sound setup and go with these SoftSound pillows which feature a wireless set of stereo speakers built right in.
Instead of opting for Bluetooth, which most TVs don't have built-in anyways, the pillow gets a wireless audio feed from an included RF transmitter that connects to and sits atop your TV. Because the audio out connection on your TV isn't controlled by its remote, the $130pillow comes with its own soft remote that won't hurt if you accidentally roll over onto it, plus a sleep timer to ensure you don't wake up at four in the morning with it blaring in your ears.
Now all we need is someone to develop a sub-woofer mattress for the experience to be complete. More here.
OK, so none of us probably have any use for a flying bike, but it's alright to want one. It's perfectly natural. So just let the wild envy wash over you as this Frankenstein machine takes flight.
Developed by three Czech companies working in unison, the bike was demoed for the first time in Prague today, where it underwent a remote-controlled five-minute flight. The 209-pound rig with its four battery-powered propeller pods isn't quite capable of carrying around a real human being yet, so instead a dummy got the inaugural ride. Hope he enjoyed it.
It's all but guaranteed that the most hair-raising drives you'll have will be immediately after you fill the trunk with groceries, plants, and anything else you don't want to topple. But with these $13 Stayhold trunk dividers, you can hand your keys to a Hollywood stuntman and not have to worry about the bread being crushed by a jug of milk.
The solid plastic shields grips your trunks carpeting to keep whatever it's butt-up against securely in place. It can handle cargo as heavy as a toolbox or a suitcase, and unless you're putting air between the tires and the road, everything will be exactly as you organized it when you get to your destination. Now if only they made a version for kids. More here.
Opportunity, aka The Little Rover That Could, is still making important discoveries 10 years into its Martian jaunt. After the devastating loss of twin rover Spirit in 2011, Opportunity rallied and kept trekking, only to recently discover a fascinating rock near Endurance Crater.
One of the oldest rocks ever analyzed, the specimen shows that drinkable water once existed on Mars. Opportunity identified a type of clay mineral on the rock that is only formed in neutral water, like the water found on Earth. Steve Squyres, the principle Opportunity researcher, noted that Opportunity has found other liquids that could chemically be described as water in the past, but these samples were all closer to sulphuric acid. Curiosity recently found similar evidence of neutral water at Gale Crater. Squyres said:
It is really striking to me, how similar the stories are for the rocks at Gale and Endeavour crater.
Though the desert conditions on Mars have made other Martian water acidic, the findings contribute to theories that Mars may once have been habitable. Nice hustle, Opportunity. Way to be. More here.
As expected and widely reported ahead of today's keynote, Apple introduced a completely revamped iOS at WWDC. Not only did they ditch the skeuomorphic design scheme in favor of something a little more colorful and fun, the company added a handful of neat new features—some old, some new. But as with any major update to the mobile OS, there are a handful of features that won't be coming to older generation iOS devices. (Hint: It's because Apple wants you to upgrade.)
Now, according to Apple "features are subject to change" and "not all features are available on all devices." Here's what you're getting and not getting based on each device. (And in some instances some services will be limited to 10 devices.)
Summertime is upon us, and that means it's grilling season. You could go down to the store to pick up everything you need for a tasty BBQ, or you could just make do with what you can find on your desk. That second option is remarkably nice-lookin' but probably not the most delicious.
This drool-worthy yet stylized piece of art was put together by the French creative team zim & zou, and inspired by some illustrations that lept off the page but not quite into anyone's mouths. They wouldn't do too well on the grill either. Now if you'll excuse me I REALLY have to go get dinner. More here.
It's quite simple really, the car gets completely destroyed, screwed and mangled in every which way possible. The TR-150 construction drill completely eats the car alive to the point where it can no longer drill it anymore, it has to smash and pulverize it. Using construction tools for destruction is a beautiful thing.
Windows Phone 8 is pretty, and there's a lot of things to like about it. But for every one of those there's also a glaring absence. Hopefully one of those is soon to disappear, leaked screenshots of an internal build of the OS shows that there's finally a notification center, presumably coming soon.
The screenshots were shared by a Redditor who bought a 920 off Ebay and found that it was running a peculiar OS: an internal beta. In addition to the notification center, there seem to be some improvements to multitasking as well, including the ability to close applications in that view.
As with any leak, there's always the possibility it's just a big fake, but there's nothing about this set of screenshots to make it wildly suspicious. On top of that, we know Microsoft's pushing out a Windows 8.1 update soon, and when an update comes to Windows Phone 8, you'd hope it would include something so basic as a notification center. Here's to hoping. More here.
3D printers just got a little more mainstream. Amazon has now opened its own 3D Printer page for the sale of printers and filaments so you can get all that jazz shipped right to your door with the greatest of ease.
Amazon is peddling the MakerBot Replicator 2, Afinia 3D Printer H-Series, 3D Systems' Cubify (not available), fabbster 3D Printer, Airwolf3D, and a couple of Chinese models as well as well as filament—both ABS and PLA varieties. You can also pick up books, CAD software, and other assorted parts there too.
It's just one small step to bigger 3d printer adoption; this doesn't make them any cheaper. But it's never been easier to pick one up if you're in the market. More here.
Lego whisperer Simon Burfield has a knack for taking the plastic building toy well past the limits of what it was intended for. His specialty is building rideable creations including a full-sized wheelchair, and now a rather brilliant Segway clone.
It can easily support his weight, and even turns with a pivoting handle. The current version doesn't self-balance—yet—but that's totally within his grasp since the 'Legway' already has four Mindstorm NXT control modules on board. And Burfield claims he's already started construction on a larger version that promises to be even more amazing. Can you imagine the size of the box these sets would come in? The building instructions would be as thick as a phone book.
A tapering mummy-style sleeping bag is easier to travel with since they can be compressed extremely compact. But if you suffer from even a smidgen of claustrophobia, spending a night in one can be like sleeping in a straitjacket. To make them more comfortable and compatible with those of us who toss and turn, Nemo has created a spoon-shaped sleeping bag which provides extra space where it's needed, without sacrificing portability.
The $230 Rhythm 40 bulges at the knees and elbows to allow the occupant to easily roll over during the night, or strike a more comfortable sleeping pose that doesn't have them just lying on their back. The sleeping bag's also waterproof, for unanticipated leaks and floods in the night, and has a pocket in the hood for stashing a pillow. Suddenly, camping seems a bit less like roughing it. More here.
You can officially stop bragging about how fast your fancy new USB 3.0 flash drive is. At the Computex show in Taipei Intel was showing off this hacked together prototype of adedicated Thunderbolt 128GB flash drive boasting data transfer speeds of 10 Gbit/s, or about twice as fast as USB 3.0's max. And now that Thunderbolt 2 has been introduced, waiting around for large files to copy to your flash drive could be a thing of the past.
Of course Intel had no word on when consumers could get their hands on the Thunderbolt flash drive, if ever. But there was plenty of interest in it, and as the protocol becomes more popular, it's safe to assume at some point these will move past the prototype stage—hopefully with that adorably compact form factor still intact. More here.
Sonar. Subs use it. Dolphins use it. And someday your own body might use it to detect and treat what ails you. Echolocation unlocking the quantified self.
Given that the human body is mostly water—about 60 percent—researchers at the University of Buffalo are currently developing miniaturized sensors that use ultrasounds to communicate with other embedded devices, like pacemakers, in the body to figure out what's going on under all that flesh.
What's different about this type of "body area network" is that it isn't relying on a series of sensors that use electromagnetic radio frequency waves but instead uses ultrasound, which Tommaso Melodia, PhD, UB associate professor of electrical engineering, says is far more efficient given the body's mostly liquid composition. Radio waves, you see, have a hard time penetrating through the human body, much less water. A cluster of devices sending radio waves back and forth to each other also generates a significant amount of heat, which isn't really something you want happening inside your body. Melodia's theory has garnered a five year, $449,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to further investigate this idea.
So, for example, if you're a diabetic and have embedded insulin pumps that are connected to a blood glucose monitor, the two could communicate via ultrasound to regulate insulin levels in real time.
We're obviously still years away from Melodia's ultrasound network becoming a reality but it's this type of wearable technology that will one day make the quantified self a reality. the NSF grant will allow Melodia and his team to begin modeling and experiment with an array of ultrasonic, wireless body sensors. More here.
Do you remember the dream you had last night? Last week? Last month? Probably not. Our sleepy imagination just vanishes without a trace. But... what if we could record our dreams? Like invent some sort of dream DVR. Then we would never forget.
AsapSCIENCE delves into the mysterious world of dreaming to answer the question of whether or not we can invent technology and software to translate our dreaming brain into actual recordings. It's sort of mind blowing how close we already are.
A very patient soul spent hours and hours of his life installing each version of Windows from 1.0 to 8.0 Pro, then sped up the footage. The result? The entire history of the operating system condensed into just over an hour. Bonus points: Daft Punk's Random Access Memories as the soundtrack.
It's fun to see how antiquated Windows 1.0 looks against Windows 8's clean, Metro design, and the hour-long ride gives you a nice, big picture look at how far Windows has come (with a quick break for Doom and Reversi). More here.
If you're in the market for slimline storage, Western Digital has just the hard drive for you: it's latest offering, WD Blue, crams 1TB into a case that's just 7mm thick.
Small enough, in fact, to make it the world's thinnest 1TB hard drive right now. The small frame doesn't mean it skimps on features, though: it has motor shafts at each end to reduce vibration and improve tracking, secure parking to keep the heads away from the plates during shocks, and both electromagnetic and piezo actuators for more precise movement.
For $140 with a two year warranty, it seems like a pretty sweet deal—and should help all those exciting new Haswell ultrabooks stay as slim and slinky as possible. It's available as of today, for both OEMs and consumer alike. More here.
Vine, the very popular way to splice together six-second video vignettes, is now available for Android. Here's the Google Play link, which is live for your video-sharing enjoyment right now—after some initial delays, it looks like the download link is finally operational.
Twitter purchased Vine when it was still just a nothing startup late last year, and launched . Despite some early controversy, and questions about how fun/useful Vine actually is, the service has really blossomed over the last half-year into something both fun and useful, dragging millions upon millions of regular users into it's whirlpool of erratic filmstrips. (Vine claims it's got some 13 million users in tow.)
The minds behind "Planet: Under Construction" (PUC), on the other hand, put some 200 cones to a use that's awesome.
Made from a big, spherical metal frame work with a high-powered lamp in the middle and the 200 cones bungie corded on around the outside, PUC was created by the international architecture firm Woods Bagot for Vivid Sydney. It'll mark the entrance point to the festival at large until June 10th, suspended in the air by cables like some construction-working sun. Beats a shirtless dude waving an orange flag any day. More here.
I think it's safe to say that we all want Wolverine claws. Sure, working out some of the logistics would be tough at first, but come on. You would feel invincible! And you could open plastic packaging really easily. To this end, Master James made a set of great looking claws at a machine shop. But they weren't awesome enough. So he electrified them.
Inspired by "Thor's Hammer," a Hack A Day project, James hooked his claws to the transformer from a salvaged oil furnace and let the sparks fly. He notes that he has no sense of how high the voltage is, which just makes the whole thing stupid amazing. Safety and the internet have never really mixed and this makes it all worth it. More here.
One of the things that always shocks me when I go to the Kennedy Space Center is the tiny size of the Mercury (left) and Gemini (right) capsules—the missions that jumpstarted the American space exploration program. This unique photo clearly shows how ridiculous these tin cans are.
It also shows how big the astronauts' gonads were. Look at them! These guys were actually strapping themselves to oversized photo booths attached to metal cylinders full of a few tons of explosive fuel. Even Gemini—designed to carry two humans and rendezvous in orbit—looks stupidly small. More here.
Very, very big. Like way bigger than the new World Trade Center big. Like almost double the world's tallest tower big. If you combined all the iPhones ever sold into a single gigantic monolith of a phone, it'd be 5,059 feet tall and 2,846 feet across. Ridiculous!
In Animal's very silly series Stupid Calculations, Josh Orter figured out the size of a ginormous iPhone by doing simple math with a lot of numbers. It's delicious arithmetic, to be honest. Here's a tasty sampling:
305,160,600 older models x 5.65 square inches=1,724,157,390² inches 51,131,400 iPhone 5’s x 6.83 square inches= 349,227,462² inches TOTAL 2,073,384,852 square inches (14,398,506 sq ft or 330.54 acres or 0.516 square miles)
That was the calculations to figure out the area of the beastphone but to calculate the dimensions, he needed to jump through more hoops. Comparatively speaking, the giant iPhone would be wider than Central Park (2,846 feet vs 2,640 feet) and its surface area would dwarf the new World Trade Center (330.54 acres vs 23 acres).
Hell, if you wanted to pave a standard highway with all the iPhones ever sold, you could do so for 227 straight miles. Read the rest of the fascinatingly (but admittedly useless) report here.
Though Curiosity the rover can explore and see Mars up close, curious men and women of Earth will have to wait a bit longer. NASA reports that a manned trip to Mars is likely impossible with current technology because of radiation.
Curiosity's Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) was able to measure the radiation of Mars from inside the spacecraft and found data that makes NASA reconsider the effectiveness of current radiation shielding. Specifically:
The findings, which are published in the May 31 edition of the journal Science, indicate radiation exposure for human explorers could exceed NASA's career limit for astronauts if current propulsion systems are used.
Two forms of radiation pose potential health risks to astronauts in deep space. One is galactic cosmic rays (GCRs), particles caused by supernova explosions and other high-energy events outside the solar system. The other is solar energetic particles (SEPs) associated with solar flares and coronal mass ejections from the sun.
Right now, spacecrafts do a better job at shielding against SEPs than they do GCRs. GCRs are highly energetic and penetrate the shielding on current spacecrafts. In order to protect astronauts from being exposed to radiation, NASA might have to invent better shielding. Or invent better something.
Exposure to radiation, which is measured in units of Sievert (Sv), increases the risk of cancer. We know that. Exposure to 1 Sv over time is associated with a five percent increase in risk of developing cancer. NASA's acceptable limit for its astronauts is a three percent increase in risk. Curiosity's RAD instruments measured an average of 1.8milliSv per day on its trip to Mars. The accumulated dose of the trip, according to Cary Zeitlin, lead paper in the findings and a principal scientist at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio, would be equivalent to "getting a whole-body CT scan once every five or six days". Yeah, that's too much.
But knowing this doesn't prevent a manned trip to Mars from ever happening. Knowing this helps protect the men and women who will take that manned trip to Mars. More here.
Multifunctional tools can help in reducing the amount of dirty dishes in your house, checkout this Loop Tea Strainer. This tool allows you to have smart tea preparation, no spoon is required and this stick-shaped tea strainer can be used as a scoop. Open the sliding mesh lid and fill with tea leaves, close it, and place it in the hot water in your tea cup.
Nowadays, we’ve been trying to reduce dirty dishes in any way, from eating directly from the container to using paper plate. This product is a smart way to serve a cup of tea. More here.
Harnessing the complex hydrodynamic properties of surface tension, this brilliantly re-engineered mug features a strategically engineered reservoir running around the circumference of the vessel's outer wall. Or, in other words, designer Kim Keun Ae added a groove that cleverly catches drips before they hit the table.
Cleaning the mug takes a little extra effort to get that groove sparkling, but otherwise it's a simple innovation that goes a long way to improving the coffee experience, particularly if you hate coasters. And while you can't buy one just yet, it won't be terribly difficult for someone to implement this simple improvement. More here.
Over on the Windows SuperSite, Thurott has dumped a few, choice screenshots from the upcoming, free update to the operating system. And chief among them is that one featuring everybody's favorite Start Button. It should go without saying that this button launches you to the Metro Modern UI Start Screen, and not into some sort of Start Menu, but the button's back. Interestingly, there seems to be no way to turn it off either. Not that you'd really want to.
Along with the start button, Thurrott's reporting that 8.1 also comes with a Boot To Desktop option (disabled by default) and the ability to use the desktop wallpaper of your choice as the background on the Start Screen.
And, of course, while this seems like a pretty credible leak, it's still a leak. But it's seeming more than ever like the real deal. More here.
If they're good enough to keep temperatures under control inside your electronics, it only makes sense that a simple aluminum heatsink would be just as effective at taming a piping hot cup of coffee. Not to mention providing plenty of tiny channels for condensation to collect instead of dripping onto your furniture and leaving unsightly rings.
These Fin Coasters feature a thin cork underlay further protecting the surface of your tables from scratches and excess heat. And since this is a highly engineered way to deal with hot beverages, it only makes sense that a set of two—available in silver or black finishes—will set you back $65. A tad bit pricey, but your furniture will thank you for splurging. More here.
Our superficial, beauty-obsessed culture is pretty scary. People starve themselves or have serious surgeries so they can look a certain way. But for better or worse (definitely worse) we're all pretty used to hearing about those beauty interventions. Which is why it's unusual to see a new wrinkle-reducer and immediately want to shit your pants or run away. Or both. But behold.
The Facewaver Exercise Mask uses stretching and tightening action for "kneading out wrinkles, lines and sag." The site recommends you use it for five minutes a day to get younger-looking skin. The problem is that during those five minutes you will send anyone you encounter into cardiac arrest as a result of their general shock and terror. Or you yourself will be killed because people will assume that you are a zombie. And frankly, if you choose to wear this they won't be totally wrong.
Some products from the Japan Trend Shop can be very soothing, but this just isn't one of them. It's scary enough to see someone wearing one of those green face masks before bed or even just using a Shake Weight. When will the madness end? More here.
Counter clutter can be even worse in a bathroom which is typically a lot smaller than a kitchen. And if you find yourself constantly battling to find room to store things around the sink, you'll immediately see the genius behind this flippable cup that doubles as a way to rinse your mouth and a convenient spot to store a toothbrush.
Available in a small selection of decor-friendly colors, the $11 Flip Cup also features a contoured rim that allows air to get in when flipped upside-down so it dries quickly preventing germs and bacteria from finding a home. So say goodbye to halitosis and goodbye to awkwardly trying to rinse your mouth directly from the faucet. More here.
It's hard to listen to music while you're swimming because even waterproof earbuds that actually stay on try to conduct sound through air to reach your eardrums, and there's not a lot of air underwater. The FINIS Neptune works on this issue by sending sound waves straight into your face. Total bombardment. In a good way.
The Neptune speakers rest on your cheek and make the bone vibrate so that the vibrations can be relayed to your cochlea, allowing you to hear music. The process is called "bone conduction," and is also used by some marine mammals. Since the music is going straight into your head, you don't have to deal with anything in your ears while you're trying to swim.
The Neptune is an updated version of FINIS's years-old SwiMP3, which had 128MB of memory and sold for $180. Now at 4GB, the Neptune costs $160. A quick PSA, though: Just because you feel the music in your bones, does not mean you should engage in any type of swim-singing or swim-dancing unless you are totally sure no one is watching. More here.
The Apple 1 is a little piece of history, the first in a lineage that's taken the world by storm since its birth in 1976. And that piece of history is worth a lot. An anonymous collector just picked up a still functioning(!) one of the suckers at auction for a cool $671,400. And you thought gaming PCs were expensive.
The recent sale—which just closed today—beats out a record of $640,000 that was set in the same Cologne, Germany auction house just last year, and a record of $374,500 just a few months before that; these have got to be some of the few electronics that are going up in value as they age.
Not much is known about the purchaser except that he/she is "a wealthy entrepreneur from the Far East" according to the New York Times. I'll bet you wish you had that much cash to throw down on a seriously antiquated piece of hardware. And though it might be a bit of an increase over the machines initial $666.66 launch-price (some $2,700 in current-day dollars), it's priceless in its own way. But most of us would probably just be better off with an iPad. More here.
There's no denying the global connectivity literally changed the world, and most of us are lucky enough to have been alive and conscious when that paradigm shift was rolling out. You might not remember your first real interaction with the digital behemoth, but you have to have a first recollection. What is it?
It's worth noting that the Internet and the World Wide Web are technically different things, and depending on what kind of person you are, you might have some distinctly different first memories of both. Either way, it's story time. Who's got a good one?
Space is so ludicrously vast that keeping a precise fix on our spacecraft—even within the solar system—is really tough. So rather than track them from afar, a team of researchers want spacecraft to govern themselves—using pulsars.
For every astronomical unit (AU) between the Earth and the craft, ground control loses 4km of tracking accuracy. That means we can only guess a satellite's location orbiting around Pluto, about 50 AU, within a radius of 200km. You're not going to catch an asteroid with that level of inaccuracy.
Instead, Werner Becker and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy have devised a method for spacecraft to triangulate their own positioning in space based on the relative locations of known pulsars—rapidly spinning neutron stars that emit blasts of high energy radiation in precise intervals. By measuring how long it takes for the emissions of at least three pulsars to reach the craft, compared against their predicted values, the spacecraft should be able to determine its location to within 5 km. This is essentially the same method used by cell towers and the global positioning system, but over massive distances.
There are many technical hurdles that must be overcome before this concept is actually feasible. For one, different pulsars emit radiation at different wavelengths, which can only be received by collecting dishes of a specific size. The 21cm waves that Becker's team is investigating would require an array measuring 150 square meters. This of course leads to the problem of designing and packing a sufficiently large—and, more importantly, sufficiently light—dish into the craft and successfully launching it into space. More here.
Florists around the country, pay attention. If you're looking for a value-added reason for people to buy a dozen roses from your shop, then find a way to get this brilliant Crown Vaseput into production and include one with every bouquet.
Designed by Lambert Rainville, a student at the Royal College of Art, the Crown Vase works as a support allowing flowers to stand via their own stems, like a simple shelter crafted by an experienced outdoors person. A shallow dish or bowl full of water is still needed to keep the flowers alive for more than a day, but when they eventually die everything can be composted and recycled, making cleanup an eco-friendly affair. More here.
According to technical reasons, the version of the HTC One sold in the US lacks an SD card slot due to internal space restrictions. Because of something to do with mobile radio frequencies. That’s what HTC says and we're powerless to argue.
The explanation comes from HTC’s Jeff Gordon, the company’s Senior Global Online Communications Manager. Jeff told Techradar: “Because the Chinese version of the One is designed specifically for the smaller Chinese radio bands, we do have additional space inside the device we were able to use for the microSD slot. That space isn’t available in the global version.” They could, of course, just made it a bit bigger, though. So we’re not entirely sure we believe them. More here.
Microsoft has a couple new mice coming out today with some simple features that make using Windows 8 a little bit easier.
First up on the the fancier end is the Sculpt Comfort Mouse, which will be on sale in June. It's $40, connects to your computer or tablet via Bluetooth, and is the first Microsoft mouse with a blue, touch-sensitive Windows button that gives you a couple of shortcuts. Press it and it'll take you directly to the start screen, or use this button to swipe through all the apps you have open.
The more basic model is the Sculpt Mobile Mouse. Available later this month, it costs $30 and features four-way scrolling, meaning you can tilt the scroll wheel up down, left, or right. We played with both of the new mice and found that they were comfy and responsive, giving you that little extra something you want out of an accessory. Plus, they're a nice match to multitasking on Windows 8. More here.
While SSDs are blisteringly fast, they still can't offer the capacities that the humble hard disk provides. Especially this one, because with 1.5 TB squeezed into its tiny little frame, it's the most memory-dense drive you can buy right now.
The 2.5-inch Travelstar 5K1500 is just 9.5mm deep. Packing 1.5TB, that means the drive offers 694Gb per square inch—comfortably making it the densest HDD on the market. It draws just 1.8W, but there is one downside: it only spins at 5,400 rpm, so it's not the fastest drive you'll ever use.
Still, if your laptop's heaving under the weight of video, music and whatever else you choose to fill it up with, then this little guy could provide just the shot in the arm it needs. There's currently no pricing information, but it will be available in June. More here.
This is China's stealth combat drone, an airplane that seems very similar to the American Northrop Grumman X-47B. The unmanned combat air vehicle was photographed while performing taxiing tests. Given the development speed of China's other military airplanes, it wouldn't be surprising to see this in flight in the next few weeks.
According to China Defense Blog, it was initially labeled to be a project by "college students" for the 601 Aircraft Design Institute/Shenyang Aircraft Corporation. Clearly, it's much more than that.
It seems obvious that China's military complex is advancing at a higher pace than many in the West would like to believe. It is not comparable to the United States yet, but the technology matching may be a matter of years and not decades. And it has already happened in the cyber war front. More here.
Isn't this an ingenious design? This bowl has a moveable colander piece that folds in and out so you can wash and serve your fruit in the same piece.
The combination strainer/bowl is $15 from Umbra. It rolls two steps of meal prep into one smart kitchen gadget, while solving one of life's most grating—albeit boring—problems. Ever been rinsing off some fresh fruit and dropped a plump strawberry into the nasty depths of your sink's drain? It's the small things, really. More here.
Microsoft claims that the new Kinect is so sensitive that it can see the slightest movement of your wrists and fingers, the tension of your muscles and, amazingly enough, even your heartbeat.
So next time you exercise in front of the TV, it will be able to tell how much you are really working out. But I bet there will be a lot more to this feature, like a first-person shooter reading your heart beat and muscle tension to spook you at the right moment. And kill you for real. More here.
If you're going to have a glass of orange juice and brush your teeth (a good idea), there's only one order in which to do them. It makes sense that your minty toothpaste-mouth would make OJ taste weird, but why so down-right heinous?
As Bytesize Science explains, it's because your tongue gets coated with a particularly troublesome foamy oral detergent.
The youtube.com domain name was activated on February 14, 2005, and the first public preview of the site went live eight years ago today. So...birthday!
More than 100 hours or about four days-worth of video is uploaded to the site every minute now. Which is pretty staggering. On average, 1 billion people, almost half of worldwide internet users, visit YouTube every month. And yes, fine, we get it, there are adorable animal videos on YouTube. They are great. But at this point it's kind of gone beyond that.
The Iocane Powder trick really does work! As this slick educational short from the SciShowexplains, you've got two choices when it comes to treating deadly, deadly snake bites: you can either hopefully make it to a hospital in time to counter the toxins with dozens of expensive vials of delicate anti-venom, or you can slowly inoculate yourself against their effects—effectively turning yourself into a poison-immune mobile anti-venom factory. Where do I sign up?
Take a deep breath. You're lucky to be able to. Without a handy blanket of atmosphere gases to swaddle us all, we'd be no more than a twinkle in evolution's eye. But that wonderful blanket of gas is slowly escaping, molecule by molecule, and there's not much we can do about it.
As MinuteEarth explains, the process is very slow, and chances are we'll be long gone before its ever complete. But someday, our blue-green wonderland will probably be just another barren rock like its neighbor, Mars. So enjoy this whole life thing while it lasts. Happy Friday!
They're light, they're cheap, they're marginally comfortable, but ironically, folding chairs are rarely easy to stack and store. They're supposed to be, but their random curves and bulges make it a task that's frankly just not worth it—especially knowing that Folditure's ultra-flat hanging Tilt chairs are about to hit the market.
The hinges and supports on the Tilt that allow it to fold are designed so that when collapsed, the chair ends up being as flat as a pancake. So when stacked, the risk of avalanche is slim to nil. But stacking isn't your only option. The tilt also features an integrated hanger so a whole mess of them can be easily hung up like a closet full of clothes. There's no word on pricing or availability just yet, but Folditure has put crazier designs into production, so there's a good chance these will be too. More here.
If you ever stared at a chrysalis as a kid, patiently waiting for a beautiful new butterfly to emerge, you were probably left wondering just what was going on inside there. Was the caterpillar reconfiguring itself like a Transformer? Was it morphing like a Terminator? Nobody knows—except now everyone does thanks to these fascinating micro-CT 3D x-ray scans of the process.
Two research teams used the cutting edge imaging technique to routinely scan a chrysalis during its metamorphosis and generate 3D models of its organs and other internal structures changing over time. Smaller details—like details of the brain—are unfortunately still left out with the limitations of the technology. But as they improve, so will our understanding of this unique process. Not to mention, kids won't have to wait weeks to see a butterfly finally emerge—they can just hit fast forward.
You might think 30 seconds is pretty short. Your body doesn't though. In order to keep everything running, there's a lot of things going on in those 30 seconds. Like you'll make 72 million red blood cells! And shed 174,000 skin cells! And have 25 thoughts. The human body, what a wonderful thing.
Microsoft just announced on a call with shareholders that the Windows Blue update will officially be called Windows 8.1, which will be a free update. It'll be available for both Windows 8 and Windows RT.
A preview will be available to the public after the Microsoft Build conference. Windows 8.1 is expected to fix a lot of the biggest concerns users had with the Metro interface, without completely abandoning the concept. More here.
