For everything from family to computers…
This is insane. I keep watching this video again and again, and my stupid grin doesn’t go away: a live demonstration of a real flying bike! Now we just need light sabers, golden robots with English accent, and hyperspace engines. More »
from Gizmodo
The challenge to reduce carbon emissions rages on (despite those who “don’t believe†in global warming). According to Manuel Jiménez Aguilar, an answer may lie in our urine.
In a study he published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials, Aguilar explains that urea results in the production of ammonium bicarbonate and also ammonia, which can absorb atmospheric CO2. So why the olive waste? Well urine decays and it seems that the liquid waste that results from the olive paste-making process is a basic preservative that will keep urine fresh.
This mixture of urine and olive waste, according to the study, could reduce CO2 emissions by one percent. Sure, it’s not really doing anything for the carbon monoxide or host of other gases, but CO2 is a big problem in global warming and that would make quite a significant difference. He’s proposing that such a mixture would be placed in places such as chimneys so that gas is sort of filtered past it before heading out into our atmosphere. There would obviously also need to be a system to refresh the paste once it was saturated with carbon dioxide.
It would be a pretty cool environmental development: recycling of olive waste water and our own personal body waste, while also reducing CO2 emissions. Win-win, if you ask me.
What do you think? Viable option for reducing carbon emissions or waste (oooh see what I did there?) of time?
[Via Geekosystem | Photo Credit]
Premiership footballers will be weeping in envy at the way Samsung’s been spending its cash this month. After splashing $822 million on a Korean R&D center, it’s now chucking $4 billion to renovate its semiconductor factory in Austin, Texas. The cash will be used to increase production on system-on-chip products used in a wide variety of smartphones and tablets, presumably to cope with future demand. It’s not clear if this investment is in addition to the $1 billion it was raising in January to add a new SOC and OLED line to the same facility, but it’s certainly a good time to be living in Texas, right now.
from Engadget
Microsoft’s Xbox Live already accomplishes much of what the rumored Apple TV overhaul sets out to do with cable content.
Spin is one of the intrinsic quantum properties of particles. The spin of electrons orbiting an atom has significant consequences, such as determining the magnetic properties of materials. Atomic nuclei also have spin, but that is harder to manipulate: it interacts less with other spins and nuclei are much more massive, so they aren’t as easily moved. However, those very properties could make nuclear spin a good option for for quantum computing, since the spin state of a nucleus is less subject to environmental influences that might alter its state. But reading out the nuclear spin state is notoriously difficult.
A new proof-of-principle experiment by Romain Vincent, Svetlana Klyatskaya, Mario Ruben, Wolfgang Werndorfer, and Franck Balestro measured the nuclear spin of a single atom. The nucleus belonged to a terbium (Tb) ion inside a larger molecule, which the researchers linked to a gold nanowire to construct a transistor-like device. They measured the four possible nuclear spin states, and observed them to be stable for tens of seconds—long enough to perform entanglement and other quantum-information processes.
Spin is integral to particles: all electrons (for example) have the same amount of spin. The spin quantum state is the relative orientation of the spin with respect to some other spin, or to an external magnetic field. Electrons are low mass particles and relatively lightly bound to atoms, so their spins are fairly easy to manipulate. As a result, the spins of atoms are typically determined by their electrons—including the magnetic properties. However, because electrons’ spins are subject to strong environmental influences, they are somewhat unreliable from a quantum information perspective. If you write information to an electron’s spin, it won’t stay written for long.
from Ars Technica
Modern diesel engines are more fuel efficient than gasoline engines. Cleaning up their exhaust is a bit more challenging, though, due to the large amount of oxygen involved in the combustion. In particular, removing the nitrogen oxides (NOx) formed as oxygen and nitrogen in the air reacting at high temperatures requires specialized systems and expensive catalysts like platinum. While everyone would like to get rid of the platinum, no materials have been found that match its catalytic performance in diesel engine exhaust.
Until now, apparently. Research published recently in Science describes a new catalyst, a complex mixture of metal oxides including manganese, mullite, and the rare earth metals samarium and gadolinium (Mn-mullite (Sm, Gd)Mn2O5, to be precise), that actually performs better than platinum. And it’s cheaper.
The work was performed by scientists at the nanotechnology startup Nanostellar, with collaborators at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology, University of Kentucky, and the University of Texas at Dallas.
from Ars Technica
On Friday evening, Motorola Mobility, a Google subsidiary since May of this year, filed a patent infringement suit against Apple with the International Trade Commission. It said Apple had infringed on 7 of its patents in creating the iPhone, the iPad, and the iPod Touch, and Motorola is seeking an import ban on those products to the US.
While the paperwork filed by Motorola with the ITC was not immediately available, WSJ is reporting that none of the patents Motorola is asserting are currently considered standards-essential, meaning Motorola may have a fair chance at getting its requested import ban if the ITC decides Apple has in fact infringed. Patents that are not standards-essential may be licensed or not licensed at the holding company’s will, whereas patents that qualify as standards-essential require holding companies to license them at fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) prices. While judicial authorities have been called upon to decide what constitutes a FRAND patent, there is no legal precedent that defines what fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory means in every case.
“We would like to settle these patent matters, but Apple’s unwillingness to work out a license leaves us little choice but to defend ourselves and our engineers’ innovations,†Motorola Mobility said in an e-mailed statement to Bloomberg. The publication also noted that in a previous patent battle with Apple, the Cupertino company said that Motorola’s demands for licensing fees are unreasonable.
from Ars Technica
