Day: August 15, 2016

Posted on

Learn How to Escape a Rip Current With This Handy Illustrated Guide

If you’re planning on hitting the beach, take a look at this handy guide before you dive into the water so you know how to escape a deadly rip current. It might just save your life.

Rip currents are strong jets of water that flow away from the shore, despite the fact waves still crash against the shore. If you get caught in one, you can get pulled away from shore at speeds of up to ten feet per second—so there’s no swimming against it. This illustrated guide from Ted Slampyak at The Art of Manliness shows what you should do instead. First thing’s first, don’t panic and exhaust yourself. Keep yourself afloat with eggbeater kicks, call for a lifeguard if there’s one nearby, then sim parallel to the beach until you get out of the rip current. Most rip currents are somewhere between 20 and 100 feet wide, so keep going until you feel the waves pushing back toward the shore. If you start to get tired while you swim, stop and float on your back until you regain some energy. Swimmers will usually be warned of rip currents in the area—in that case, head to the pool—but you won’t always get a warning, so it’s good to know how to escape one just in case.

http://ift.tt/2b2cmoA

How to Escape a Rip Current | The Art of Manliness

Illustration by Ted Slampyak.

from Lifehacker http://ift.tt/2b6HuQS
via IFTTT

Posted on

Infiniti’s latest engine is a last hurrah for gas-powered cars

Hybrid and pure electric cars may be the future of transportation, but Nissan’s Infiniti badge has found a way to make the most out of gas engines while they’re still relevant. When the next-generation QX50 crossover arrives in 2017, it’ll carry the first-ever production variable compression turbo (VC-T) engine — a technology that promises to dramatically improve fuel efficiency without compromising on performance. By automatically adjusting the height the engine’s pistons reach, the VC-T motor can optimize its compression ratio for the task at hand. It’ll lower the ratio if you’re mashing the throttle (to prevent premature detonation and make the most of the turbo), but raise it when you’re putting around town and need to wring out better mileage.

If you ask Infiniti, the result is the best of both worlds. The future QX50 will kick out 268HP and 288lb/ft of torque, but gets up to 27 percent better fuel economy than Nissan’s widely used 3.5-liter V6. It’s lighter and smaller than similar conventional engines, too, and doesn’t need treatment to pass modern emissions standards. The big drawback is that it’s limited to four-cylinder engines, but this inaugural VC-T is powerful enough that it can go toe-to-toe with (and will likely replace) that previously mentioned V6. Nissan is also contemplating the possibility of pairing it with a hybrid system.

You should learn more about the engine at the Paris Auto Show on September 29th. Even at this early stage, though, it’s apparent that VC-T could be one of the last gasps for purely gas-powered cars in the mainstream. As the company explained to Reuters, it sees variable compression technology as an eventual replacement for diesel. It could be the go-to option for drivers who can’t (or won’t) switch to electric vehicles and are leery about diesel pollution, but still care about efficiency and running costs.

Via: Autoblog

Source: Infiniti

from Engadget http://ift.tt/2aTja4b
via IFTTT

Posted on

Samsung plugs IBM’s brain-imitating chip into an advanced sensor

IBM’s TrueNorth, a so-called "cognitive chip," remarkably resembles the human brain: its 4,096 cores combine to create about a million digital neurons and 256 million synapse connections. In short, like everyone’s favorite complex organ, it operates extremely quickly and consumes far less energy than typical processors. Samsung has taken the chip and plugged it into its Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS) to process digital imagery at a blindingly fast rate.

Typical digital cameras max out 120 frames per second, but a DVS-equipped gadget can capture an incredible 2,000 fps. Unlike a conventional sensor, each pixel on Samsung’s only reacts if it needs to report a change in what it’s seeing, according to CNET. That high speed could be useful for creating 3D maps or gesture controls. At a press event on Thursday in San Jose, the company demonstrated its ability to control a TV as it recognized hand waves and finger pinches from ten feet away.

DVS is efficient like its TrueNorth chip base, and only consumes about 300 milliwatts of power. That’s about a hundredth the drain of a laptop’s processor and a tenth of a phone’s, a Samsung VP said at the event. But we still have a ways to go before we approach the minimal power requirements of the human brain, he said, which can process some tasks at 100 million times less power than a computer.

Source: CNET

from Engadget http://ift.tt/2b85uoW
via IFTTT

Posted on

Ultrasound can levitate large objects

Scientists have long dreamed of using acoustic levitation to float objects, but there has been one big catch: you couldn’t lift an object larger than the wavelength without being picky about what you’re lifting. However, it might not be a problem going forward. Researchers in Brazil and the UK have successfully levitated a polystyrene ball 3.6 times larger than the ultrasonic waves holding it up. The trick was to create a standing wave in the gap between the transducers and the object, instead of the usual pressure node between the transducer and a reflector. You can change the angle and number of transducers without messing with the effect, and it finally creates both horizontal and vertical lift — you don’t need physical support to prevent the object from drifting sideways.

The technology only works with stationary objects at the moment. Sorry, folks, you won’t see ultrasonic hovercars any time soon. Levitation that can manipulate large objects is on the cards, though, and it shouldn’t be limited to specific shapes or sizes. You could eventually see this used to hold on to liquid in space, or to study very hot objects (say, molten metal) that you wouldn’t dare touch.

Via: Phys.org

Source: Applied Physics Letters

from Engadget http://ift.tt/2bt5Gku
via IFTTT