Like something out of Fantastic Voyage, the torpedo is just 10 microns in length and designed to travel within the human body
From Lifehacker: Turn a Magazine Holder into a Corner Shelf
A simple change in perspective turns a magazine holder into a useful and decorative catch-all shelf for your keys, change, gadgets, receipts, and whatever else you like. More »
from Lifehacker
From MAKE: Instructables Giving Away $50,000 3D Printer
Our pals over at Instructables are always having one cool contest or another, and have given away some fabulous maker dream-prizes in the past including four Epilog laser cutters, now, in a series of annual contests. But with their new Make It Real Challenge, they have truly outdone themselves: The grand prize is an Objet30 from Israel’s Objet Geometries, which manufactures some of the highest-performing and most sought-after 3D printing equipment in the world. It’s described as a “desktop†model, but it’s priced like a luxury car at $51,995. Here are the juicy technical deets straight from Objet’s website:
- Layer Thickness: 0.0011 inch (28µ)
- Accuracy: 0.0039 in (0.1 mm)
- Material: VeroWhitePlus, VeroBlue, VeroBlack, VeroGray, DurusWhite
- Net Build Size: 11.57 x 7.58 x 5.85 in (294 x 192.6 x 148.6 mm)
- Tray Size: 11.81 x 7.87 x 5.9 in (300 x 200 x 150 mm)
- Resolution: 600 x 600 x 900 dpi
- No. of Print Heads: 1 modeling head, 1 support head
- Weight: 205 lbs (93 kg)
- Size: 32.28 x 24.4 x 23.22 in (82.5 x 62 x 59 cm)
As if that weren’t enough, each of ten first prize winners gets a $4,000 Up! 3D printer, and each of twenty runners up gets a coupon for a single 3D printed object costing up to $1,000. The challenge is to “post an Instructable that shows how to turn a virtual item into a tangible object,†and the deadline is April 30. Details here. [Thanks, Randy!]
from MAKE
From Gizmodo: Lytro Teardown Reveals Its Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Capabilities
The focus-free Lytro camera is so good that Steve Jobs reportedly wanted to roll the technology into the iPhone. Though it’s not quite ready for sale yet, a teardown has revealed that the camera is capable of communicating via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. More »
from Gizmodo
From Gizmodo: The Miraculous NASA Breakthrough That Could Save Millions of Lives
From Gizmodo: How a Laser Could Make Your Hard Drive 1,000 Times Faster
The reason people are so pumped about solid-state hard drives right now is because they’re super-speedy. But if you think your SSD is fast, just wait until a new breed of laser-based hard drives comes to market. More »
from Gizmodo
From Engadget: Researchers get CPUs and GPUs talking, boost PC performance by 20 percent
How do you fancy a 20 percent boost to your processor’s performance? Research from the North Carolina State University claims to offer just that. Despite the emergence of fused architecture SoCs, the CPU and GPU cores typically still work independently. The University hoped that by assigning tasks based on each processor’s abilities, performance efficiency would be increased. As the CPU and GPU can fetch data at comparable speeds, the researchers set the GPUs to execute the computational functions, while the CPUs did the prefetching. With that data ready in advance, the graphics processor unit has more resources free, yielding an average performance boost of 21.4 percent though it’s unclear what metrics the researchers were using. Incidentally, the research was funded by AMD, so no prizes for guessing which chips we might see using the technique first.
from Engadget