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In 2010, a lake of caustic, poison mud from an aluminum manufacturing operation spilled out and destroyed a nearby town, along with much of the native life. Humans were killed and burned, property destroyed. And it still looks like Mars. More »
from Gizmodo
We’re quite familiar with the fun you can have when you’ve got a high speed camera in your possession. But, even Phantom’s pricey and impressive 2,800 FPS cameras have nothing on the latest project out of UCLA. Engineers at the school have rigged up a microscope cam that uses serial time-encoded amplified microscopy (STEAM) to capture clips of individual cells at 36.7 million FPS. Let that sink in for a moment — that’s a “shutter” speed of 27 picoseconds. The school actually pioneered the method years ago, which uses ultra-fast laser pulses to generate images of cells as they speed by. The camera is capable of processing 100,000 cells a second, allowing doctors to spot cancerous anomalies that might have otherwise gone undetected. Now we just hope they can supersize the tech and sell it to HBO… boxing KOs can never be played back slow enough.
from Engadget
The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) just deflated the size of a bit down to a solitary nanometer — the length of an organic molecule. The international research team managed it by first embedding a magnetized iron atom into a molecule made up of 51 atoms, then taking advantage of so-called memristive and spintronic properties. By applying a current, they flipped the atom’s magnetic charge, altering the resistance of the molecule as well — which they subsequently measured, storing a bit. Compared to a typical magnetic drive which needs 3 million atoms per bit, a device made this way could theoretically store 50 thousand times as much data in the same size — and would be an all-electric device, to boot. If the research ever pans out, a terabyte magnetic drive could turn into a 50 petabyte solid state unit — hopefully ready in time for all those 4K home movies you’ll need to store one day soon.
from Engadget
The graphene filled in the smaller hole with fresh
carbon atoms
Due to their extraordinary abilities, graphene and other one-atom-thick molecules like carbon nanotubes have enormous potential for use in fields from electronics to medicine. For example, graphene is physically strong, transparent, flexible, and a great conductor of both electricity and heat—and now the two-dimensional carbon molecule can add another power to its roster: self-healing. When researchers made holes in a graphene sheet, the molecule rebuilt its own structure using new carbon atoms. This ability might help researchers grow graphene in large quantities and specific shapes.
Physicists led by Konstantin Novoselov, who along with Andre Geim discovered graphene and won the physics Nobel Prize, trained an electron microscope at a sheet of graphene. They deposited palladium or nickel, which damage graphene by encouraging carbon bonds to break, onto a section of the sheet. When the researchers shot an electron beam at the damaged area, the beam mobilized the metal atoms to eat away at the graphene, etching nanometer-scale holes. But the holes didn’t last long: Provided with a reservoir of spare carbon atoms, the graphene incorporated the fresh carbon to patch the holes, as can be seen in the …
from Discover Magazine
My two biggest gripes with mobile Android gaming are as follows: I don’t have a reliable controller for most of the games, and the screens are too small to really get immersed in. Kickstarter is hosting a very promising looking project called OUYA (pronounced ooh-yah) that looks to take mobile gaming back to the living room, and rival the big console makers. This Android powered console is calling on the powers of Android’s open development platform and the free-to-play model of gaming that has been all the rage recently. Can this grassroots program rattle the cages of Sony and Microsoft?
The OUYA team has created a prototype console that is based off our favorite OS and even uses parts that you might find in your phones today:
All the games that work for Android now will work on OUYA and the developers of the console are hoping to entice game developers to make games just for their console, that are made to play on the big screen in your living room. Games like Shadowgun and Dead Trigger will look and play great on your TV and even Minecraft will be included in all this fun.
One interesting note from the developer states “We’re handing the reins over to the developer with only one condition: at least some gameplay has to be free.†F2P has taken off in PC gaming recently with most games going free and then allowing you to buy upgrades to the game for real money. Microtransactions are now funding Team Fortress 2 and League of Legends, even though some players never pay a cent to play them. It’s an interesting demand but in the long run it could be beneficial for any owners of the OUYA.
OUYA is looking to raise money through Kickstarter and their goal is $950,000 to get the project up and running fully. At the time of this post they are near half that already, with 29 days to go. You can reserve a username for as little as $10 but if you want to get a console for yourself, $99 will get you an OUYA before they hit stores. This little console definitely has a lot of potential and could redefine gaming on the Android platform, we’ll just have to see how we eventually get there.
Via:Â Kickstarter
from Droid Life
Using both the military and software sides of their education, a team of Polish military students studying computer engineering at Wojskowa Akademia Techniczna (Military University of Technology) presented at the Imagine Cup here in Sydney an app that uses the built-in magnetometer in a Windows phone to detect the magnetic signature of land mines buried in the ground.
SAPER (Sensor Amplified Perception for Explosives Recognition) is Poland’s entry in the software design category of the 2012 Imagine Cup.
It’s like a high-stakes Minesweeper with real-world results. The corresponding web application shows the locations of mines users have already detected, or whose known locations were input by military professionals. Then, if you enter a dangerous area, the app sends you a notification on your phone.
SAPER has 75 percent accuracy in detecting land mines, and works from 30 centimeters away. However, both of these stats can be improved by purchasing their external, more powerful magnetometer/metal detector, for “premium users,” which the team says makes the app comparable in accuracy to current military tools. Being from a military academy, Team ARMED had access to a field test site, where they buried mines in the ground and tested their app on them.
The team hopes to first deploy their app in the most affected areas, such as Afghanistan, Cambodia, Vietnam and Croatia, where, team mentor Mariusz Chmielewski tells me, there are regularly “bombs on the side of the road you are driving on. It is a big, big problem.”
from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now