So what’s the big deal? The inventor, post-doc student Tian Li, notes in a press release that “this can insulate better than most other current thermal insulators, including Styrofoam. It is extremely promising to be used as energy efficient building materials.”
Insulations are mostly air, and so is Nanowood. According to the research article, they take American Basswood and remove the lignin by boiling it in Sodium Hydroxide and Sodium Sulfite, then treat it with Hydrogen Peroxide and freeze-dry the pure cellulose that is left.
It still has the tubular structure of the wood so it has low thermal conductivity across the grain and higher conductivity parallel to it. With a thermal conductivity of 0.03 W/m·K it is not going to save the planet; it is about the same as plastic foams and slightly better than the cellulose insulations from Steico that we showed recently. (Thermal conductivity is a measure of the capacity of a material to conduct heat through its mass; the lower the better.) The tubular structure apparently also helps distribute the heat that does get through the stuff over a larger area, resulting in a cooler surface.
It is really strong compared to other insulations. Although only a third as strong as the wood it is made from, it might be strong enough that one could build walls out of it.
They say it is cheap ($7.44 per square meter, but they don’t say how thick it is). It can be made of any kind of wood; they suggest fast-growing species like balsa, which is a pretty good insulation all on its own.
It’s a shame that these developments get pitched as “saving the planet” (really!). It’s just insulation. But it is neat stuff that is as effective as extruded polystyrene (Styrofoam is a trade name, not a generic) without the carbon footprint.
Tian Li reports to Liangbing Hu, an associate professor in the department of materials science and engineering at the University of Maryland, who says “we are reinventing ways to use wood that could be useful in constructing energy efficient and environmentally friendly homes.” He has a startup called Inventwood which also markets Transparent Wood, another interesting idea. Imagine solid walls of Nanowood with transparent wood windows. We might soon see buildings that are truly TreeHugger approved.
Raspberry Pi 3 B+ has faster CPU, Wi-Fi, and easier compliance testing
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The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced a new version of its modular compute platform: the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+.
The B+ has the same form factor and dimensions as the Pi 2 B and Pi 3 B, making it a drop-in replacement but with a better processor and connectivity. Compared to the Pi 3 B, the B+ adds many hundreds of MHz—it runs its quad core 64-bit Cortex-A53 processor at 1.4GHz, up from 1.2GHz—along with dual band 2.4/5GHz 802.11b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2, up from 2.4GHz and Bluetooth 4.1.
Other connections are unchanged, with Ethernet, four USB 2 ports, a 40-pin GPIO connector, an HDMI video output, camera and touchscreen ports, stereo/composite video, and a microSD slot for its software and operating system. It uses the same 5V/2.5A power as before and will also support power-over-Ethernet with an accessory (coming soon) sold separately.
The faster processor and better networking don’t change the price: it’s still a $35 piece of hardware.
Already popular among the maker crowd, the new Pi version should be easier to integrate into products, as it ships with modular compliance certification for the new dual-band Wi-Fi. This certification should reduce the testing time and expense for any products built around the model B+, as they should no longer need to obtain a full Wi-Fi certification. With this certification and 5GHz Wi-Fi, we should expect to see 5GHz becoming more common in Internet-of-Things devices, and for many of us, 2.4GHz networks will increasingly become legacy relics.
New Walking Dead AR Game Uses Google Maps On Your Phone
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AMC’s next Walking Dead game will use location-based data and Google Maps to infest your real neighborhood with zombies. The Walking Dead: Our World is coming this spring/summer from Finnish developer Next Games.
The AR-based gameplay has you battling walkers wherever you happen to be, alongside characters from the AMC series like Rick, Daryl, and Michonne. The trailer shows off the first-person gameplay, like firing or swinging your weapon at approaching hordes. It will be playable at GDC next week, so we can expect more details soon.
“With Google Maps, we can count on providing the most up-to-date location data, meaning that when new buildings or roads are built, we’ll have them in our game,” said Next Games CEO Teemu Huuhtanen in the announcement. “This enables us to create an immersive experience, tied to the players’ location. Google Maps’ unrivaled amount of location data, covering world-famous landmarks, businesses and buildings, such as the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, the London Eye, Burj Khalifa and India Gate, makes exploring your surroundings a breathtaking experience.”
Pokemon Go demonstrated the potential for AR-based games, and some of the maps in Walking Dead: Our World certainly bear a resemblance. Harry Potter: Wizards Unite looks to be similarly riffing on Pokemon’s success, and will be coming later this year.
Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com
AMD Ryzen and Epyc Processors Said To Have 13 Critical Security Vulnerabilities
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Posted by
Nathan Kirsch|
Tue, Mar 13, 2018 – 1:40 PM
A recent CTS Labs security audit has revealed multiple critical security vulnerabilities and manufacturer backdoors in AMD’s latest EPYC, Ryzen, Ryzen Pro, and Ryzen Mobile processors. In total, there are 13 critical security vulnerabilities found that are said to significantly increase risk of cyber-attacks. CTS Labs, today published a press release about the ‘Severe Security Advisory’ as well as a dedicated site called amdflaws.com, a full whitepaper, and a video overview.
According to CTS-Labs, there are four primary platform exploits that have been discovered and each of which have their own variants. The four primary vulnerabilities are Ryzenfall, Fallout, Chimera, and Masterkey. Some of the backdoors have existed for six years as some of the exploits are through the ASMedia chipsets. AMD uses ASMedia as its third-party chipset supplier, so it is now facing the same backdoor issues on its own chipsets.
The good news is that three of the four vulnerabilities require local admin access. We are still digesting all the information and have reached out to AMD for a statement.
Tech
via Legit Reviews Hardware Articles http://ift.tt/Ihhl0h
Audeze Wants to Change How You Think About Gaming Headphones and 3D Audio
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3D audio in headphones that envelops you like a surround sound home theater is an elusive thing. The market is dominated by products for gamers, who play content that’s mixed for surround sound, and who want to hear the crunch of opponents in the bushes behind them as it’s a matter of life and death (in a game at least). Also they don’t want to wake the neighbors at 3AM.
There are plenty of 3D-ready “surround sound” headphones out there, but the new Mobius headphones from Audeze are probably the most sophisticated to date, incorporating not only 3D audio processing but also head-tracking to create an experience you just can’t get from any competitor products.
Until now, if you’d heard of Audeze, it was probably in the the context of some absurd audiophile product. The company got its start a decade ago producing very expensive, very large headphones with planar magnetic drivers. The headphones that sit on your desk probably use dynamic drivers. This technology involves transferring audio voltage to a magnet attached to a voice coil which is attached to a speaker diaphragm that vibrates to blast tunes into your ear. Planar headphones are similar in concept but use much larger magnets placed on either side of a very thin diaphragm with a conductor attached. Without getting into it too much, these theoretically produce much better sound. In the beginning, Audeze headphones were very accurate, incredibly large and cumbersome—they even required a separate amplifier for the best results—and cost thousands of dollars. In the years since, the company has expanded its line to produce similarly uncompromising products in better designed packages at more affordable price tags. Yes, most still cost north of $500, but not all of them did.
A few years ago, when the iPhone broke up with its headphone jack, Audeze saw an opening and released a set of its midrange headphones (~$800, lol) with a specially designed lightning cable, and suddenly, it found itself a new audience of fans who weren’t self-identified audiophiles but rather tech enthusiasts. Now, the new Mobius headphones represent an attempt to carve out yet another niche of people who like to spend top dollar on hardware: gamers.
Gamers are a notoriously fussy lot who, for reasons of gameplay and general comfort, often splurge on graphics cards, fancy mice, plush desk chairs, and of course, headphones. But in the eyes of Audeze CEO Sankar Thiagasamudram, most of the headphones people are using for gaming are just trash.
“If I look the gaming headphone companies, with the exception of one or two companies, there is almost no audio pedigree,” he told Gizmodo. “Most of them are keyboard and mouse makers making a headset because they can put 13 million LED colors on it.” He said that in one of the competitor headphones that the company tore down, the LED lights cost more than the audio components.
While some products like the Game One from Sennheiser are quite good, others are stuffed with gimmicks. Who can forget the Razer Tamiat with its 10 discreet drivers that pummel you with sound? We all know Audeze can make a great-sounding headphone, the real question is whether the novel technology that it’s introducing is more gimmick or breakthrough.
To brave the new market, Thiagasamudram said the company has produced “our most advanced headphone yet.” As with the company’s other products, the Mobius headphones still use planar magnetic tech, but now, in addition to working with a standard aux connection, the headphones will support USB-C connection and, for the first time, Bluetooth
When you sit down to play a game or listen to music or watch a movie, the headphones perform sophisticated processing to create a surround sound effect that not only takes into account the source material (be it stereo or 5.1) but also your anatomy, an understanding for how sound reflects off walls in a room, and data from head-tracking sensors. To get truly surround sound audio, you’ll need to use the USB-C connection on a computer, but the 3D processing and head-tracking will work with Bluetooth and aux.
When you hear sound in the real world—that is, not from a set of headphones—you hear it inside each of your ears as reflected off several parts of your body and especially different parts of your head. Your brain processes differences in loudness and timing as perceived by the anatomy of your ear to create a 3D picture of the world. Audio engineers can do a rough calculation of how this works and process audio to take this into account. The Mobius headphones, however, take this a step further by allowing you to define the size of your head in a desktop settings app. The audio processing is tweaked accordingly. Similarly, since you perceive space not just from the sound you hear from the source but also from how sound reflects off other objects and the walls in a room, Audeze also has a “room ambiance” setting to account for these reflections.
But the real kicker is in the built-in head-tracking technology, which consists of a 3-axis accelerometer and a 3-axis gimbal. Once you put on the headphones, you press a little button on one of the ear cups to “center” the headphones. From there, the headphones track the movement of your head and adjust the audio so that what’s in front of you stays there. That means if you turn your head to the left, the audio will stay in the same place, with the volume and timing precisely adjusted in each ear cup to create the effect.
In my experience in a controlled demo listening to mobile audio, movie soundtracks, and even a brief gaming session, the effect felt very realistic. It’s weird, at first, but after a few minutes of violently jerking your head around to feel out how extreme the effect can be, you settle into a more natural and stationary mode of watching and hearing something, where the head-tracking is barely perceptible. The audio sucks you in, for sure, but in large measure, I’m convinced that’s because—new tech aside—those planar drivers are reproducing the audio very accurately, so the headphones sound like a dream.
I’m convinced Audeze’s sophisticated 3D audio reproduction could really be a boon, especially to PC gamers and people who like to watch movies on planes. As for the head-tracking, I’m not so sure the casual user will have much use for it. Thiagasamudram told me it could help reduce listening fatigue, basically because sound reproduction is never as perfect as the real world so your brain has to do some lifting to make you perceive recorded audio as real. So to the degree that you can make things sounds even marginally more real (by adjusting audio as you move your head, for example) you reduce the rate at which your ears get tired.
One area in which head-tracking definitely has a use is virtual reality. Of course, most VR headsets already do head-tracking, but Audeze will offer a “Creator Package” that comes bundled with plugins to help people develop VR content.
For its part, even Audeze isn’t totally sure how much of a market there will be for these headphones, so it’s doing a first run of sales on Indiegogo, with the units shipping in early May. Introductory pricing will start at $199, and the final retail pricing will be $399. The Creators Package bundled with plugins for VR will cost $599.
Has Audeze leveraged its considerable audio expertise to create something that’s not only new but worth it? We’ll believe it when we spend more time with the new Mobius headphones this spring.
Guy Builds Giant Version Of A Pocket Lighter That Can Shoot Flames Eight Feet
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This is a video of Youtuber BrainfooTV discussing the build of, then testing (by burning a bunch of stuff, heck yeah!) the giant version of a pocket lighter he built from a propane torch and various pipes and valves and fittings. The result is pretty sweet, although that’s certainly not something I want laying around the apartment when the police come by asking about last night’s fire. “What fire?” I don’t know of any fire, I was at home all night Netflixing with my girlfriend. She made him watch ‘How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days.’ Back me up honey. ‘I totally did that.’ See? You believe me, right? “That was definitely you throwing your voice. Besides, everyone knows you’re a pyromaniac.” I’m not a pyromaniac, I’m a pyromancer, there’s a difference. “What’s the difference?” Mostly just the spelling.
Keep going for the video, but skip to 4:30 for the testing to begin.
Thanks to K Diddie, who’s going to have to start counting his own Geekologie gold star tipping awards and tell me how many I owe him at the end of the week.
Google opens Maps to bring the real world into games
http://ift.tt/2DuRWze
Pokémon Go and other games that use real-world maps are all the rage, but there’s a catch: they typically depend on semi-closed map frameworks that weren’t intended for gaming, forcing developers to jump through hoops to use that mapping info. Google doesn’t want that to be an issue going forward. The search firm is both opening its Maps platform’s real-time data and offering new software toolkits that will help developers build games based on that data.
The software includes both a kit to translate map info to the Unity game engine as well as another to help make games using that location data. The combination turns buildings and other landmarks into customizable 3D objects, and lets you manipulate those objects to fit your game world. It can replace every real hotel into an adventurer’s inn, for instance, or add arbitrary points of interest for the sake of checkpoints.
It’s going to be a while before you see games based on these frameworks. As with augmented reality kits like ARKit and ARCore, however, they could lead to a surge of titles from developers who previously would have had to write a lot of this code themselves. Now, they can focus less on the nuts-and-bolts aspects and more on the actual gameplay.
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