Colleges are learning that small cost-cutting and money-making measures, like charging for printing, getting rid of dining hall trays or selling naming rights for campus bathrooms, can really add up.
From Business and financial news – CNNMoney.com: Phone customers ditch carriers faster than ever
Verizon… are you reading this?! My loyalty to you is now on a timer!! Better treat us better… I have been very unhappy with them recently… I’m just waiting for that one mistake from them that will make me move…
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The average cell phone customer now switches carriers as soon as his or her second two-year contract is up. That startling decline in loyalty is causing wireless companies to rethink the way they do business, according to a new study released Monday.
From Engadget: AT&T Labs, Carnegie Mellon research haptic-feedback steering wheel for turn-by-turn directions
A force-feedback steering wheel. It’s quite literally the stuff of racing games, and AT&T labs, along with Carnegie Mellon, is researching the possibly of throwing similar tech into your real-world whip. MIT’s Technology Review recently highlighted the project, which uses 20 vibrating actuators shoved inside of a steering wheel to create a variety of patterns — a counter-clockwise sequence could indicate a left turn, for example. As you might have guessed, one of the goals is to keep drivers less distracted by the likes of visual turn-by-turn GPS navigators and more focused on the road. While it’s currently being tested with driving simulators, the results are positive so far, if a bit modest. When supplemented with typical audio / visual navigation, folks near the age of 25 kept their eyes planted on the asphalt for 3.1 percent more time than without it. Notably, the improvement wasn’t found with those over 65 in the aforementioned instance, however, supplemented with just the audio, the vibrating wheel had them focusing on the road by an increase of four percent.
According to Technology Review, this isn’t the first time haptic feedback has been tested as a driving aid, although past tests have, notably, resulted in “fewer turn errors” by those behind the wheel. Best of all, the tech is capable of sending more than just navigation cues — it could certainly be useful in a Telsa. So when can you expect to find a force-feedback steering wheel in your ride? Technology Review cites Kevin Li, an AT&T Labs researcher on the project, who says the main hurdle is making something that people will just “get,” and that it’s still “years” away from becoming a possibility. While there’s no photos of the setup just yet, a full report on the research will get release in June. Hey, there’s always Forza and Gran Turismo, at least for now — right?
from Engadget
From The UberReview: Adam Savage Describes How Credit Card Companies Shot Down RFID Episode
Uh oh… man, I don’t wanna carry around my credit cards anymore! Â At least not the ones with RFID!
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Here is something that you might not know. Mythbusters had planned to air an episode on how “hackable and trackable†RFID chips are – it never saw the light of day. What happened was this: calls were made to arrange a meeting with someone at Texas Instruments and when the meeting was scheduled to happen a bunch of legal heavies from Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover explained that showing the episode would be a really, really bad idea.
So the episode never happened and Mythbusters won’t be examining any RFID-related myths anytime soon.
I’ve got to admit that I am finding myself curious. It isn’t like the Mythbusters episode was going to show people how to defraud their credit card company – so the card companies’ objections more likely stemmed from other aspects of RFID that they might be uncomfortable with customers finding out about.
Click here to view the embedded video.
[Source]
from The UberReview
From The UberReview: FAA gives OK to space tourism from the USA for 2014
If you grew up like me, watching the Jetsons jet around in their aircrafts, commuting to work in their flying hovercars, flying them on air highways, and spend a holiday on the Moon, or Mars, or Saturn then this might jerk a tear from your eyes.
Starting in 2014, space tourism will begin to spread its wings in the United States, rocket planes and spaceships to carry passengers beyond the atmosphere, similar to the suborbital hops taken by Mercury astronauts Alan Shepard and Virgil “Gus†Grissom in 1961, are being built and tested, with commercial flight services targeted to begin in 2013 or 2014.
Another perk will be commercial flights that will take passengers from one location to another on Earth, but that will be flying at an altitude of 62 miles, allowing the passengers to experience weightlessness and giving them a view of the Earth’s curvature and of black space.
Will I go to space? Tragically not. I don’t have the physical fortitude for that kind of trip (read I’m a wimp, I can barely stand on a chair because I’m afraid of heights…) but I’m sure they’ll have plenty of customers. George Nield, associate administrator for the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation also testified that they expect commercial space tourism to take up to a 1 billion $ marked within 10 years.
from The UberReview
From Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now: Catalyst Helps Store Hydrogen In Liquid Form for Simple, Safe Future Fuel Use
Hydrogen Storage System This diagram shows the new catalyst in its protonated and deprotonated states. It converts hydrogen and CO2 gas to and from liquid formate or formic acid at ambient temperature and pressure. The gases can thereby be stored and transported as a liquid, and used later as a carbon-neutral energy source, simply by adjusting the pH. Brookhaven National Laboratory
A future powered by hydrogen fuel, whose only byproduct is water, has long been an eco-friendly dream too difficult to realize. Storing and transporting hydrogen can be difficult and dangerous, and hydrogen production methods can also produce unwanted carbon dioxide. A new catalyst promises to solve these problems, using CO2 and hydrogen to store energy in liquid form. The only thing you need to worry about is pH.
It’s the first catalyst to combine hydrogen and CO2 at room temperature and pressure, using water as the liquefying solution. As such, it could use existing fuel infrastructure built for the liquid hydrocarbons we have been using since the dawn of the combustion engine.
In basic (as in alkaline) conditions, the catalyst converts hydrogen and CO2 into formic acid, a promising hydrogen-storage fluid that is safer to handle and transport than cryogenically stored dihydrogen. If you flip the pH switch to acidic, the resulting redox reaction frees the hydrogen from its carbon bonds, allowing you to grab and use the hydrogen for use in a fuel cell.
Scientists from Brookhaven National Laboratory and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan worked with iridium-based catalysts with specific types of ligands, which are clusters of atoms surrounding the central metal atom. These ligands improve the catalyst’s ability to release protons. The researchers say they drew inspiration from nature’s catalysts – enzymes – and the way they move protons and electrons around inside biological molecules.
Under the right conditions, the iridium catalyst helps hydrogen react with CO2. The research team figured out the atomic structure of the catalyst to see exactly how it promotes this reaction. It worked extremely well, they say – they converted a 1:1 mixture of dihydrogen (the form you would want to use in a hydrogen fuel cell) and CO2 to formate, a form of formic acid, at room temperature. Then they increased the pH of the solution, and were able to regenerate the H2 at high pressure. There were no unwanted byproducts like carbon monoxide, the researchers say.
The paper was published online Sunday in Nature Chemistry.
from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now
From Discover Magazine: Scientists Identify Molecule That Makes Men Go Bald | 80beats
Although male pattern baldness affects some 80% of Caucasian men by age 70, it’s remained a puzzle to scientists. Existing treatments were discovered by chance: Rogaine was originally a drug for high-blood pressure and Propecia was for prostate enlargement. In a new study, however, researchers have identified a molecule called Prostaglandin D2 (PGD2) that inhibits hair growth in men, which could provide a target for future drugs designed to treat baldness.
The first thing researchers did was find a good use for the scalp fragments, usually discarded, from men undergoing hair transplant surgery. (Well, where else do you find volunteers to get scalped?) Comparing bald and non-bald tissue from these scalp parts, they discovered that the bald scalp had ten times as much PGD2 and elevated levels of PTGDS, the enzyme that makes PGD2, compared to normal scalp. The gene for PTGDS is also expressed more when there’s lots of testosterone floating around, which may explain why baldness is so endemic to men.
Once scientists identified PGD2 as a potential culprit in baldness, trials in mice were the next step. They found that mutant mice with unusually high levels of PGD2 also had the atrophied hair follicles …
from Discover Magazine