From Autoblog: Official: Aspid unveils menacing new GT-21 Invictus hammerhead

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Aspid GT-21 Invictus

Aspid has finally gotten around to revealing the production version of the GT-21 Invictus. This funky-looking sports car delivers 450 horsepower to the rear wheels thanks to a BMW-sourced 4.4-liter V8 engine paired with a seven-speed dual-clutch gearbox or six-speed manual. That’s a far cry from the supercharged 2.0-liter four-cylinder found in the Spanish company’s first offering. Aspid says the GT-21 Invictus can lay waste to 60 mph from a standstill in under three seconds on its way to a top speed of 189 mph. Even better, the creation’s suspension can serve up 1.6 g on the skidpad.

The company has managed to keep weight to a mere 2,182 pounds thanks to composite body panels and a spaceframe chassis. Interestingly enough, the GT-21 Invictus is also available with a slew of on-road safety equipment, including adaptive airbags, stability control and anti-lock brakes.

Inside, there’s a 2+2 seating configuration, which suggests there’s actually room for two adults and their luggage for a weekend trip. Aspid is currently aiming to start building its newest model in 2014, but there’s no word on pricing yet. Scroll downto watch a dramatic – dare we say Batman-esque – official video below.

 

from Autoblog

From Engadget: Researchers use off-the-shelf parts to let you write emails with your eyes

Researchers use offtheshelf parts to let you write emails with your eye movements, play Pong

There’s a lot of research to help the spinal cord or stroke-injured become more self-sufficient, but it often takes some exotic paraphernalia. To buck that trend, scientists from Imperial College London showed that subjects could perform relatively hard tasks like writing messages and playing Pong using eye movement — with a mere $35-worth of parts. They even showed how well the system worked, with subjects scoring within 20 percent of an able-bodied person after a scant 10 minutes of practice. The tracker works with two video console cameras and a pair of eyeglasses that, after calibration, can precisely track the pupils — allowing them to control a cursor or move a paddle. The researchers also figured out how to “click” the eye-mouse by winking, and can even use more precise adjustments to calculate gaze depth — meaning subjects will be able to perform more complex tasks in the future, like guide a motorized wheelchair. While by no means the first eye-tracking system we’ve seen, it’s by far the most economical. Check the video after the break to see how it works.

 

from Engadget

From Ars Technica: Korean company’s tiny quad-core ARM Linux computer packs a punch at $129

Hardkernel’s little Linux computer, with a quad-core Samsung Exynos CPU

Little Linux computers have attracted a lot of interest from hobbyists this year. The $35 Raspberry Pi ARM board, which met with huge demand when it launched in February, is a compelling solution for affordable embedded projects. But what if you need more power than the 700MHz ARM11 board can offer?

A Korean hardware manufacturer called Hardkernel is launching a high-end alternative. The company’s new ODROID-X board comes with a Samsung Exynos 4 processor, a quad-core CPU clocked at 1.4GHz. The board also has a quad-core Mali 400 GPU, 1GB of RAM, six USB host ports, an ethernet adapter, headphone and microphone jacks, and an SDHC card slot for storage.

With four times as much RAM as the Raspberry Pi and a much more powerful processor, the Hardkernel board seems like a nice option for more computationally-intensive usage scenarios. The system is still highly compact, measuring at about 3.5 x 3.7 inches.

 

from Ars Technica

From Engadget: Nielsen has Android near 52 percent of US smartphone share in Q2, iPhone ekes out gains

Nielsen has Android near 52 percent of US smartphone share in Q2, iPhone ekes out its own gains

If there was doubt as to whether or not Android would soon become the majority smartphone platform in the US, that’s just been erased by Nielsen. Google crossed the tipping point in the second quarter after getting close in the winter, with 51.8 percent of current smartphone users running some variant on the green robot’s OS. As we’ve seen in the past, though, the increase is coming mostly at the expenses of platforms already being squeezed to within an inch of their lives, such as the BlackBerry (8.1 percent) and Windows (4.3 percent combined). Apple still isn’t in a position to fret: it kept climbing to 34.3 percent and swung the attention of recent buyers just slightly back in its direction. The real question for many of us might center on what happens in a summer where Samsung has thrown a Galaxy S III-sized curveball at Americans and any new iPhone is likely still a few months away.

 

from Engadget

From Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now: Strategies for a Changing Planet: If All Else Fails…

Desperate Measures Bombarding the stratosphere with aerosol-packed artillery shells could either lower the temperature of the planet-or destroy it. Graham Murdoch
When it’s 115 degrees in March, it might take a Hail Mary of a solution to help usClimate change is already happening, and it’s time to get ready. Here’s how we could adjust our most basic needs–food, water, shelter–to survive.

It’s impossible to predict the exact speed and severity with which climate change will unfold, but one thing is clear: if we take no preventive action, eventually we’ll be tempted to take desperate action. And over the decades, as the effects of climate change grow increasingly severe, the amount of risk humankind is willing to bear will increase.

In the next decade, as Dust Bowl-like conditions afflict the American West and it becomes ever more difficult to dismiss the drought as a temporary glitch, low-risk methods for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will start to look attractive. The most benign scheme would be to plant more trees. In 1976, physicist Freeman Dyson proposed planting a tree farm the size of Australia to offset the fossil-fuel emissions of the day. By 2009, NASA climate modelers and biologist Leonard Ornstein estimated that both the Australian outback and the Sahara would have to be transformed into forest to remove meaningful quantities of carbon dioxide. They proposed irrigating both deserts with desalinated seawater and planting them with eucalyptus forests, which could remove as much as 12 billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere every year-about a third of the total global emissions in 2010. Nuclear power plants could generate carbon-free electricity for the network of reverse-osmosis desalination plants. This world-historical landscaping project would carry risks. An afforested Sahara could provide a breeding ground for swarms of crop-destroying locusts and flocks of disease-carrying birds. Because Saharan dust may help suppress Atlantic cyclone formation, the scheme could strengthen hurricanes. The biggest problem, however, may be the $1-trillion-plus annual cost.

A cheaper method would be ocean fertilization-dumping iron dust into the sea to stimulate the growth of CO2-breathing phytoplankton. Over the past two decades, scientists have conducted more than a dozen small-scale trials to confirm that iron seeding does indeed stimulate the growth of phytoplankton. Yet ocean fertilization could devastate aquatic life; iron seeding could unintentionally stimulate the growth of algal varieties that are toxic to fish, or create oxygen-depleted dead zones. And it might not even remove all that much CO2. Researchers with Britain’s Royal Society estimated that even a massive global ocean-fertilization program might reduce atmospheric carbon concentrations by only 10 parts per million, which would have no impact on global temperatures.

When things get worse-when rising seas and worsening storms conspire to flood energy facilities, subway systems and millions of homes in the U.S. alone, and when the Arctic experiences an ice-free season that grows longer every year-schemes for reflecting the sun’s radiation away from Earth may start to look appealing. Some of these plans call for preserving our existing sun-reflecting assets. In 2008, for example, the Dutch science writer Rolf Schuttenhelm proposed building a 180-mile dam across the Bering Sea to prevent warmer, saltier Pacific Ocean water from flowing toward the North Pole, thereby allowing the Arctic ice cap to refreeze. The restored ice would reflect solar energy back into space and help cool the planet.

Other plans involve shielding the Earth from above. In 1989, James Early, a researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, suggested parking a 1,200-mile-wide space shade at the first Lagrangian point (L1, a gravitationally fixed point between the Earth and the sun), where it would block 2 percent of the sun’s radiation. Since then, scientists have updated Early’s plan. In 2006, for example, University of Arizona astronomer Robert Angel proposed sending 16 trillion two-foot-wide mirrors (via 20 million rocket launches) to L1, where they would collectively form a 62,000-mile-long shade.

Even if implemented perfectly, sun-blocking schemes could cause persistent drought for billions of people.If humanity holds off even longer, until millions of people are short of food and water-­or if it turns out that all previous efforts to stop the warming have been too feeble-the most attractive contingency plan will be the only one that nature has proven to work. In 1991, when Mount Pinatubo, a volcano in the Philippines, spewed some 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, the average global temperature dropped by 1°F over the next year. Hence the term “Pinatubo option,” which refers to the process of enshrouding the planet in aerosol particles that reflect sunlight and thus cool the Earth.

Even if it were possible to activate an actual volcano, the cooling effect from a single eruption would be short-lived and impossible to control. Instead, most advocates favor mechanical aerosol-delivery methods. Researchers on a British government-funded project called SPICE (Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering) have proposed using stadium-size balloons, tethered to oceangoing ships using 12-mile-long hoses, to deliver sulfate particles into the stratosphere. More-dramatic plans call for dispatching flotillas of Navy warships to fire particle-packed artillery shells into the sky. In 1992, a U.S. government-funded committee calculated that firing five million metric tons of aluminum oxide into the atmosphere every year would require 35 10-barrel gun batteries operating 250 days a year at a cost of $100 billion. Particles tend to fall from the stratosphere after two or three years, so the scheme would have to be conducted continuously, in perpetuity. It would also require unprecedented cooperation among China, the European Union and the U.S.

Even if the project were administered perfectly, the side effects of the Pinatubo option-or, for that matter, of any other solar-radiation-management scheme-could be severe. The sudden drop in temperatures could result in less evaporating water entering the hydrological cycle, which could disrupt the monsoon seasons in India, China and the African Sahel, triggering a drought affecting billions of people. But humankind would have little choice but to endure the side effects. If the sun-blocking machine were to stop, temperatures would quickly rebound. At that stage, the side effects of solar-radiation management would seem manageable compared with the alternative-temperatures rising high enough that melting permafrost releases billions of tons of methane, a greenhouse gas 30 times as strong as carbon dioxide, pushing the climate into a state of no return.

Damon Tabor is a writer in Brooklyn.

 

from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now