There are plenty of robot arms out there, but what about robot skin to cover them in? A new kind of piezotronic transistor mesh could make for robotic skin that's as soft supple sensitive as your own is, covered in thousands of tiny mechanical hairs...
Researchers at the University of Wyoming have discovered a new lithium reserve that could radically alter where the US sources a key component of the li-ion batteries used in consumer electronics, electric vehicles, and other technology. Currently the United States imports a vast majority of its lithium, but the newly-unearthed reserve — located at Rock Springs, Wyoming — could transform the US from "a significant lithium importer to an independent lithium producer" according to experts at the university's Carbon Management Institute...
Microsoft is working on some cool telepresence projects which was revealed by their latest job listings. Microsoft was always criticized for not utilizing their R&D well enough to make them into marketable products. Microsoft is trying to change this scenario with the new startup labs which will be productizing ideas and code from Microsoft Research...
It's going to look silly! But more seriously, it seems like we're all going to have to accept that wearing technology is going to be the real future and not just the imagined future of science fiction movies. We won't know we're in the future until we're wearing technology like Google Glass or Apple's supposed iWatch. PBS Off Book decided to take a look at what that future of wearable technology would look like.
We previously looked at the logic behind and general impediments to the use of energy weapons on the battlefield. Beam weapons have developed slowly, as much due to understandable public skepticism as technological limitations. We’ve seen that range is a continuing issue for beam weapons (as is traveling through a gas) and that satellites that kill other satellites are quite possible, while satellites that fire through ozone and several kilometers of air to kill tanks on the Earth’s surface are less likely. Similarly, while the technology needed to create killer energy weapons — like particle beams — exists and seems feasible, it’s just as impractical as lasers for miniaturization and personal deployment.
Cornell's new graduate school of applied sciences is expected to fuel major growth in the New York City tech sector.
To help fuel that growth, Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs and his wife just donated $133 million to the school, Ariel Kaminer of The New York Times reports.
The new school, Cornell NYC Tech, is the result of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's contest to a create a new science school. It beat out top-notch schools like Columbia, NYU, Carnegie Mellon, and Stanford to open up a new graduate school focused on computer science.
Robot Combat League, Syfy's new reality series pitting 12 expensive, 8-feet-tall humanoid machines against each other in tournament-style face-offs, ends Tuesday night with the final two robots. And while this season lasted only three months, it has been years in the making.
"I really couldn't believe how technologically advacnced they were," Chris Jericho, the show's host and popular WWE wrestler, told Mashable. "It's like being attacked by a Terminator. If you got hit by one of these things it would literally cave your head in."...
Google Glass won't be coming to the market this year after all.
We first saw the news on DVICE.
Even though Google has previously said it expects to release a fully-polished version of its computerized glasses by the end of the year, that no longer seems to be the case.
In an interview with BBC Radio 4, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said Glass will not be made available to the general public until sometime next year.
Last week, at the meeting of the American Chemical Society, researcher Joesph Wang and his lab presented some new concepts for microrockets that can operate inside the body. These self-propelled devices are able to fuel themselves using the products of the natural surroundings. In the stomach, for example, a micromotor would make use of the acid environment to generate hydrogen bubbles for thrust. By using hollow tubules made from polyanaline and coated on the inside with zinc catalyst, these bio-rockets could cruise at speeds up to 100 body lengths per second. At a length of 10um, that translates to around 0.3 meters per hour. The real power of the device is brought to bear after it is coated with additional layers of nickel and titanium — at that point, it becomes responsive to external control by magnetic fields.
As complex ecosystems, cities are confronting tremendous pressures to seek optimum efficiency with minimal impact in a resource-constrained world. While architecture, urban planning, and sustainability attempt to address the massive resource requirements and outflow of cities, there are signs that a deeper current of biology is working its way into the urban framework.
Innovations emerging across the disciplines of additive manufacturing, synthetic biology, swarm robotics, and architecture suggest a future scenario when buildings may be designed using libraries of biological templates and constructed with biosynthetic materials able to sense and adapt to their conditions. Construction itself may be handled by bacterial printers and swarms of mechanical assemblers.
It's no secret that late Apple CEO Steve Jobs was keen on bringing the company's technology to the automotive world. In fact, according to longtime Apple board member Mickey Drexler, "Steve's dream before he died was to design an iCar." Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Phil Shiller, echoed those sentiments during the company's copyright infringement trial against Samsung, saying there had been discussion of Apple making a vehicle.
Immediately following Jobs' death, it seemed like his dream might never come true. But since then, Apple has made a big push to integrate its Siri technology into vehicles. Meanwhile, automakers are finding ways to get iOS apps to work on the dashboard. These and other moves have set Apple on a collision course with Microsoft and Google in a market that's still very much up for grabs...
As you may or may not know, cars these days are getting fancier and fancier with technology by the year. Remember when automatic windows and a CD player were considered amazing car technologies?
Now you can talk to your car, have GPS built in, and see exactly where you are when backing up, without having to turn around! I compiled 5 more features we will see in the future of cars...
As you may or may not know, cars these days are getting fancier and fancier with technology by the year. Remember when automatic windows and a CD player were considered amazing car technologies?
Now you can talk to your car, have GPS built in, and see exactly where you are when backing up, without having to turn around! I compiled 5 more features we will see in the future of cars...
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a new lithium-ion battery technology that is 2,000 times more powerful than comparable batteries. According to the researchers, this is not simply an evolutionary step in battery tech, “It’s a new enabling technology… it breaks the normal paradigms of energy sources. It’s allowing us to do different, new things.”
Currently, energy storage is all about trade-offs. You can have lots of power (watts), or lots of energy (watt-hours), but you can’t generally have both. Supercapacitors can release a massive amount of power, but only for a few seconds; fuel cells can store a vast amount of energy, but are limited in their peak power output. This a problem because most modern applications of bleeding-edge tech — smartphones, wearable computers, electric vehicles — require large amounts of power and energy. Lithium-ion batteries are currently the best solution for high-power-and-energy applications, but even the best li-ion battery designs demand that industrial designers and electronic engineers make serious trade-offs when creating a new device.
Additive manufacturing or 3D printing is a process of making a three-dimensional solid object of virtually any shape from a digital model. 3D printing is achieved using an additive process, where successive layers of material are laid down in different shapes. 3D printing is considered distinct from traditional machining techniques, which mostly rely on the removal of material by methods such as cutting or drilling (subtractive processes).
A materials printer usually performs 3D printing processes using digital technology. Since the start of the twenty-first century there has been a large growth in the sales of these machines, and their price has dropped substantially.
The technology is used for both prototyping and distributed manufacturing in jewelry, footwear, industrial design, architecture, engineering and construction (AEC), automotive, aerospace, dental and medical industries, education, geographic information systems, civil engineering, and many other fields.
During the writing of this post, Google Glass is being shipped out to Glass Explorers. But alas it is only to early adapters and developers who had forked out the hefty price tag and only a portion of those who signed for it is actually getting a unit.
For the rest of us, we will just have to wait until Glass is more commercially available but if you’re like me, you probably wondered how this wearable gadget actually works. Well this simple inforgraphic by Martin Missfeldt explains the technology behind Google Glass. How images are projected onto the ‘visual layer’, what does a view behind Glass look like and how bespectacled enthusiasts can also join in on the fun.
Microsoft is prototyping its own wrist-worn device. A reliable source familiar with Microsoft's Xbox plans has revealed to The Verge that the company has been developing a wrist-worn device for just over a year. We understand that Microsoft had originally planned to release a "Joule" heart rate monitor accessory for the Xbox, but the company has since decided to focus on a smartwatch instead. The Wall Street Journal first reported on Microsoft's plans earlier this week, citing unnamed supply chain sources who claim Microsoft has requested 1.5-inch displays from component manufacturers.
Those betting big on wearable computing believe an assorted new crop of gadgets — mostly worn on the wrist or as eyewear — will transform the way in which we interact with the rest of our devices.
But wearables won't just complement smartphones. What is perhaps most intriguing about them is that they will serve new purposes too. Because they are designed to be worn close to the body, they're ideal for monitoring our vital signs and health. They'll track how active we are, our sleep quality, how many steps we take during the day. Consumers of all sorts — fitness buffs, dieters, and the elderly — will come to rely on them.
The first Explorer Editions of Google Glass, which eager developers had to shell out $1500 for during Google I/O last year, have started shipping and to coincide with this, Google has provided an official specification sheet for the high-tech glasses. Anyone expecting Glass’ features to rival top-end smartphones is going to be disappointed, as the camera has 5-megapixels and the video camera shoots at 720p. Wi-Fi and an unknown version of Bluetooth are both installed, along with a total of 16GB of memory, 12GB of which will be usable. This will also sync with Google cloud storage.
Google just released the official specs for Google Glass (after releasing the API too) and the futuristic frames come with 16GB (only 12GB will be usable) Flash memory, 5 megapixel camera for stills, 720p video recording, Wi-Fi b/g, Bluetooth and a battery that can handle "one full day of typical use".
Of course with a product like Google Glass, its specs won't tell us how much we'll actually use the, um, specs. Here are the nuts and bolts of Google Glass...
