For everything from family to computers…
Google may be a little late to the tablet party, but its Nexus 7 should make plenty of friends.
After the iPad came out in 2010, many electronics companies attempted to cash in on the craze by rushing out their own tablet devices, many of them running Google’s Android software.
The U.S. government, understandably, doesn’t want its drone technology to fall out of the sky and into other peoples’ laps. But being able to hijack a drone and control it? That’s even worse. And a team of researchers has done it for 1,000 bucks.
The University of Texas at Austin team successfully nabbed the drone on a dare from the Department of Homeland Security. They managed to do it through spoofing, a technique where a signal from hackers pretends to be the same as one sent to the drone’s GPS.
We’ve seen spoofing before; it was reportedly used to bring down the drone that crashed in Iran last year. As the researchers point out, we’ll be seeing (or maybe not seeing) more and more drones in the skies as the technology becomes more widely used, so making this technique ineffective will be high on Homeland Security’s priority list.
[RT]
from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now
The vaccine works by using the liver to churn out a steady flow of antibodies that destroy nicotine as it enters the bloodstream, before it can make the circulatory loop to the brain and the heart. Previous therapies have proven effective at doing this, but they have to be administered on a regular basis. In mice, one dose of the vaccine activated the antibody-producing function in the liver for life.
That raises the possibility of a single vaccination, introduced to a person once in his or her lifetime, that would free that person from nicotine’s addictive qualities for life. That person could still choose to enjoy a cigarette for the sheer pleasure of sucking sweet, sweet tarred tobacco smoke into his or her lungs, but the capacity for addiction would be muted. It could also be used to treat smokers who have exhausted other quitting aids.
[C-Health]
from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now
There will come a time when our homes are completely automated, just like in several horror movies in which a house slowly murders its unsuspecting occupant. The Insteon is a pretty good step towards that inevitable murder–it’s the first LED lightbulb that you can control with a smartphone app.
Lots of LED bulbs have some kind of remote triggering–I’ve been using the GiiNii speaker-in-a-bulb lately, which can be controlled with a little remote–but this is the first we’ve seen to have a smartphone app. It assigns each bulb in your house a unique IP address, so you can trigger each one independently with an app (compatible with iOS and Android). And for the system to really be worth the cost, you’ll want to outfit your whole house in these things. The bulbs cost $30 each (which is not too bad; LED bulbs last for decades and even the current best LED bulb on the market runs $25), but the real cost is the $100 Insteon SmartLinc Controller you’ll need to buy if you want to hook up devices like smartphones.
[Insteon via SmartPlanet]
from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now
An LCD screen can bring a whole new level of interactivity to your Arduino projects. They can provide instant data without using your computer and give visual feedback about your project. Normally, you would use a separate breadboard to hook up an LCD but using a MakerShield and this tutorial from Make: Projects, you can make your own LCD shield!
LCD screens look complicated but using an Arduino it’s not too bad at all. This tutorial will teach you how to hook up an LCD display to an Arduino using a MakerShield. All the components you need for this build are included in the Ultimate Microcontroller Pack.
You can pick up an Ultimate Microcontoller Pack from the Maker Shed, Micro Center, and select RadioShack locations. Call me crazy but I love the look of all those jumper wires!
More:
Using the MakerShield – Button
Using the MakerShield – Servo Control
from MAKE
