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Bridge Power!

When you ask someone what they think of when someone mentions renewable energy the most common answer is solar power or wind power. The problem with these two sources is that they are annoyingly unpredictable. Solar power only works for half the day when the sun is out and even during the day, certain conditions such as clouds and rain can restrict the amount of energy collected. Wind turbines obviously use the wind to generate electricity but as everyone knows, the wind is arguably one of the most unpredictable things created by Mother Nature. People have started to realize this and its resulted in wind power efforts to be the lowest they have been in the last four years. Tidal power on the other hand, is relatively predictable and since...

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Helping the World with One Tab at a Time

Google has now come out with this new extension that records every tab you open and they donate to charity. They have charities such as: The nature conservation, for planting trees, Charity water for building wells to bring people safe drinking water, doctors without borders to provide vaccinations, Un Techo para mi País to provide shelter for those that don’t have, and finally, Room to read to bring books to children in developing countries to learn more. Not every tab provides one of each it more like a fraction of one. For example if I open a new tab it will give me .1 vaccinations. I myself am up to 57 tabs and 2.2 vaccinations, 5.7 books, 0.3 person's clean water provided, .6 square feet of shelter built, and 5.7 trees built....

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Nexus S Review

As Google released their newest and best phone they have updated it to the new gingerbread 2.3. So before I begin talking about the phone it isn’t really comparable to other phone yet because nearly none of them have the same software yet, gingerbread 2.3. Let’s start with the hardware, showing off its 1GHz Hummingbird CPU, 512MB of RAM, a 4-inch, 800 x 480 curved Super AMOLED display, 16GB of storage, a 5 megapixel rears and VGA front-facing camera, and near field communication capabilities. This is just part of the phone because some of the most astonishing stuff is inside the new software that has debuted with the Nexus S. The screen is something that is a little weird....because it is curved. As seen here in this...

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How to Cloak a Crime in a Beam of Light

The 14th member of Danny Ocean's team of thieves might just be a physicist, making use of an "event cloak" dreamed up by Martin McCall's team at Imperial College London. Unlike invisibility cloaks, which bend light around an object, an event cloak would open up a time gap in the light by controlling its speed through optical fibres, and then seal it again to hide all traces of activity within the gap. A modified version could, in principle, allow a safe-cracker to work while the security camera appears to record an empty room. McCall's colleague Alberto Favaro compares the way it works to the way a road packed with speeding cars can still allow a pedestrian to cross. Some cars slow down, creating a jaywalker-friendly, vehicle-free gap, before...

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Holographic Maps for the Battlefield

It’s one of those grandiose ideas that gets bandied about by Pentagon scientists and pops up in the press every few years. The “Face of Allah” weapon would beam a massive, lifelike hologram over a battlefield, projecting the image of some deity “to incite fear in soldiers on a battlefield,” according to one researcher. We last checked in on holographic weapons research two years ago, when the University of New Hampshire was working on some Pentagon-funded projects. Since then, another university team has turned holograms into a reality — but not as tools of war. Not yet, at least. Optical scientist Nasser Peyghambarian and his teammates at the University of Arizona have demonstrated what The New York Times calls “actual moving holograms that are filmed in one spot and then projected and...

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BMW Uses Subliminal Messages To Sell Motorcycles

The BMW S1000R is fast enough and sexy enough (other than that one lazy eye) to sell itself, and you'd think a commercial showing World Superbike rider Ruben Xaus flogging one around the track would be quite enough to get people inclined to buy the things. Not enough for BMW. The company used the optical illusion of afterimage to temporarily imprint "BMW" onto the retinas of theater-goers. Behind the screen was a giant cut-out backed by an even bigger light (a Profoto Pro-7B, we're told). It flashed for an instant during the commercial and, while all the spectators noticed was a quick pop, when they were asked to close their eyes they saw the logo hovering in their vision. Subliminal? Possibly. Illegal? Maybe. Ingenious? Absolutely. [Via Endgadg...

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Dragon Spacecraft Success Opens a New Era In Space Exploration

The Dragon spacecraft is now the first private spaceship to reach orbit and return safely to Earth. It just splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, after a perfect mission. This is a huge milestone in the history of space exploration. After aborting the first launch attempt because of a false telemetry reading, the Falcon 9 rocket zoomed up flawlessly from Cape Canaveral (">watch video here), flying over the Atlantic Ocean and reaching orbit in under ten minutes. Seconds after shutting down its second stage, the Dragon spacecraft separated from the Falcon 9 rocket. Dragon orbited the planet gathering crucial data for future missions. Then it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, opening its parachute and splashing gracefully in the Pacific Ocean,...

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HAPPY THOUSAND VIEWS!!!

Thank you, the readers, for 1000 page views! Heres to another thousan...

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3D TVs without glasses?!

First it was DLP then LCD then Plasma then LED. The new thing is 3D TVs and even though they have barely been out for 6 months, they are already being upgraded. The biggest complaints that people have with 3D TVs is that you have to wear special glasses to view 3D media. Now a few companies like Samsung and Intel have created special TVs that do not require glasses to watch 3D media. Of course this technology is still almost in the concept form. Intel gave a demonstration on their glassless 3D TVs and the Engadget reporter said that the experience was phenomenal if you stood at one of the eight postions where it worked. Otherwise the experience was sub-par and also, even if you were standing from one of the 8 “optimal” viewing angles, the...

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New file format and grass roofs?!

There are millions of people out there who are trying to make us greener to save the planet. Many ingenious ideas have arisen through this “green movement” but the new .WWF file format is not one of them. The people over at the World Wildlife Fund decided that it would be a good idea to create a new file format that was pretty much the exact same thing as .pdf except it doesn’t allow you to print the document. The idea is that if you can’t print then you will be saving trees because you won’t be wasting paper but wow…what a dumb idea. The only thing this will succeed in is thoroughly pissing everyone off. I can’t really remember the last time I printed of something from a pdf document that I didn’t absolutely have to (probably because I NEVER...

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Netflix News

Everyone’s favorite streaming media service, Netflix, has decided that they don’t have enough TV shows (which I completely agree with) so what do they do? Announce that they are willing to pay $75,000 to $100,000 per episode!! Yes you read correctly. Per EPISODE not per season. One would think that when they are offering so much money they will get what they want immediately but of course that's not how it works. Let’s say that a show has 24 episodes (can you guess what show I’m talking about) per season and if Netflix is willing to pay $100,000 per episode, that amounts to $24,000,000! To help put this in perspective, as of December 2nd Netflix has spent a total of $350 million dollars on media rights for the movies and TV shows they stream....

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Navy Railgun Breaks World Record At Mach 7

There wasn’t much left of the 23-pound bullet, just a scalded piece of squat metal. That’s what happens when an enormous electromagnetic gun sends its ammo rocketing 5,500 feet in a single second. The gun that fired the bullet is the Navy’s experimental railgun. The gun has no moving parts or propellants — just a king-sized burst of energy that sends a projectile flying. And today its parents at the Office of Naval Research sent 33 megajoules through it, setting a new world record and making it the most powerful railgun ever developed. Reporters were invited to watch the test at the Dalghren Naval Surface Warfare Center. A tangle of two-inch thick coaxial cables hooked up to stacks of refrigerator-sized capacitors took five minutes to...

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The XM-25, A Computerized Grenade Launcher

Words like "futuristic," "computerized," "explosive," and "grenade launcher" really tickle our sensibilities, so perhaps it was no surprise that we honored the XM-25 grenade launcher - that futuristic-looking, computerized-targeting infantry weapon that hurls smart explosive rounds downrange - with a Best of What's New award last year. But with so much defense tech falling victim due to cost overruns, impracticality of deployment, or simple bureaucratic indecision, we're always pleasantly surprised to see new systems hit the battlefield. And that's exactly where the XM-25 is headed next month. The shoulder-fired XM-25 supposedly deployed with Special Forces in Afghanistan this summer, though we couldn't tell you anything about that. The...

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China Telecom Reroutes 15% of The Internet

For about 18 minutes in April, a Chinese telecommunications company hijacked 15 percent of the Internet, redirecting U.S. government and military traffic through Chinese servers. The misdirection affected NASA, all four branches of the military, the office of the Secretary of Defense and the U.S. Senate. We don’t yet know what this means — the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which released report on the incident today, says it is unclear whether it was intentional or just an accident — but at the very least, it’s one more piece of disturbing evidence showing the U.S. is vulnerable to cyberattack. The hijacking was reported when it first happened, but this is the first acknowledgement that American government sites were...

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Upgrading=Downgrading?

Usually when you hear that a new car model is coming out you would expect some small aesthetic differences, new technology and maybe a better engine. Unfortunately, because of this issue called global warming everyone wants fuel efficient cars, changing what we would usually expect from a new car. So in order to get people to buy their cars, car manufacturers are devising ways to make their cars more and more fuel efficient. The most common ways to do this is to make cars lighter, able to use E85 gas and make hybrid models. Apparently this isn’t enough so automakers including Volkswagen, Audi, Volvo and Fiat (a European company) have decided that in their newer models they will be putting downsized engines that are fuel efficient due to the...

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High Speed Trains

Almost everywhere in the world except for the US use trains as a means of transportation across long distances. Some countries even have high speed train networks such as France, China and Japan. China has decided that just being a part of this list wasn’t good enough but they needed to be better than everyone else. During their last test run, the Chinese hit a top speed of 302 miles per hour (486 kilometers per hour) between Beijing and Shanghai. This is a world record speed for an unmodified commercial train. When the line opens in 2012, the 824 mile (1318 kilometers) journey will be cut by five hours because of the ridiculously high speed of the trains. China already has the world's longest high-speed rail network, and it plans to cover...

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Robotic Camera Mimics Speed Of Human Eye

Some researchers at the Technical University of Munich have built an unassuming but no-less-remarkable mechanism for tilting and panning a small camera robotically. Designed to keep up with the eye movements of a human in gaze-tracking studies, the camera mount features three degrees of movement, and can flick around at a rapid 2500 degrees per second -- our flesh-composed eyeballs max out at a mere 1000. The setup uses ultrasonic piezo-actuators, which move prismatic joints, which drive spherically-jointed rods attached to the camera, keeping the weight under 100 grams and still acting gently enough to avoid rattling on top of the wearer's head. [Via Engadg...

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NASA Find New Life

Biologists have isolated a bacterium that can use a deadly chemical in place of one of life’s key building blocks, in a finding NASA says could have major implications for astrobiology and our understanding of life on Earth. In the study, researchers examined a bacteria living in a very salty and arsenic-heavy lake in northeastern California, not far from Yosemite National Park. It is not a space alien, nor is it “new life” — it’s an existing bacteria that lives in a difficult environment and was deliberately manipulated in a lab. But the results are interesting because nothing like this has ever been done before. All life as we know it depends on six key ingredients — carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus. This bacteria...

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Hydrogen, Solar and Wind powered Ferry

Plan on visiting the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island via ferry next year? If so, pay close attention to the vessel you board, as it just might be the world's first to rely on hydrogen, solar and wind power for motorization. Currently, the New York Hornblower Hybrid (not to be confused with the San Francisco Hornblower Hybrid) is under construction in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and if all goes well, it'll reach completion in April. The 600-passenger boat be equipped with Tier 2 diesel engines, hydrogen fuel cells, solar panels and wind turbines, with power coming from a proton exchange membrane fuel cell that turns hydrogen into electricity. We're told that the diesel rigs will only kick in to cover "additional energy needs," but it's hard...

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We're Baaaccckk

Yes its true, new articles will be posted starting this wee...

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