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Random Thoughts Archive

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Liquid Cooled Racing Shirt - Keeps Racers Cool

Cool Shirt is a really cool shirt to wear under your racing suit. I decided to write about this hardly known gadget from my years of racing experience.

When I had started racing porches back in 99 in sunny south Florida , The heat was so intense on Sebring, Homestead raceways that I felt I was in a convection oven soon as I got in the car.

My crew worked out a solution from Cool Shirt, This shirt has two plugs attached to it, One for input of cold water and one for output of the water warmed by your body - that would then be recirculated to a water tank in the car that would be cooled by dry ice or a more modern version refrigeration tank.

I would just plug it in and it felt like I had a nice cold running shower all over my upper torso. What a relief, I was now able to concentrate on racing - get less fatigued and push harder than ever.

On a random thought, I will mention the main unit is even capable of pushing cold air though a wide hose that will attach to a racing helmet keeping the air icy cold around your head!

Sunday, April 27, 2008

New Monowheel Bike Gets Rolling

This design has been around since 1885 however, there has been much improvement to the original monowheel bike.

Ben Wilson is now meddling with the classic design. Wilson says that he does not suggest getting one for the moment, Since the normal bicycles of today are more efficient.

So whats the reason you ask, why he is working on a monowheel? Wilson says that its value comes from the discourse and ideas that have been generated as a result of the research.

Random Thoughts: Honestly, I don't think I would like to riding that low on the street. I rather be able to see and avoid a possible collision.

Friday, April 25, 2008

Transformer Like Fire Prevention Robot

I would just love to have one of these robots around the house for a lot of reasons. This is a Forest fire prevention robot by Jordan Guelde is an advanced robot designed to clear large areas of trees, Bush and other foliage from around a forest fire to stop the flames from spreading.

Back Burning thats traditional would certainly be less expensive and less lethal to surrounding wildlife but complete with and array of hubless motors, and integrated fuel system - My thoughts are that this robot is a a marvel of technology.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Make Your Walls Shine With OLED Light Up Wallpaper

If your wallpaper can use a cool face lift never fear as Ingo Maurer has created an wallpaper using OLED technology. You can now see organic LED’s being printed on to wallpaper or this clear film as shown in the picture.

Traditionally wallpaper is for old people who live in houses that smell musty and dank but lighting designer Ingo Maurer feels differently. while this wallpaper is surely expensive, we know its only a matter of time before its mass produced thats just my thoughts.

Check out the Picture below of the clear wallpaper he created hanging from the center of a room with Ingo standing behind it.

Sunday, April 20, 2008

EEStor Putting An End To Batteries As We Know Them

For Years, battery storage technology has been a much relied on way to power up your gadgets, keep a pacemaker running and far out in space to keep systems running, cell phones to electric vehicles, our technological capabilities always seem to be several steps ahead of our ability to power them. Several promising new technologies are currently under development to help power your needs, but one small start-up looks especially promising to transform the way we think about energy storage.

EEStor is not exactly creating a new battery, since no chemicals are used. The storage technology is based on the idea of a solid state ultracapacitor, but cannot be really described in these terms either. Ultracapacitors have an advantage over electrochemical batteries for example lithium-ion technology - in that they can absorb and release a charge virtually instantaneously with virtually no deterioration. Batteries low away ultracapacitors in their ability to store much larger amounts of energy at any given time.

EEStor's revamp of the ultracapacitor is called the Electrical Energy Storage Unit, or EESU it combines the best of both worlds. The advance is based on a barium-titanate insulator claimed to increase the energy far beyond whats achievable with today's ultracapacitor technology. It is claimed that this new advance allows for a specific energy of about 280 watts per kilogram, more than double that lithium-ion technology and ten times that of lead-acid batteries. This could make an electric vehicle capable of traveling up to 500 miles on a five minute charge, compared with current battery technology which offers an average 50-100 range on an overnight charge. EEStor claims they will be able to mass-produce the units at a fraction of the cost.

EEStor claims the technology can be scaled up or down for virtually any application, from pacemakers to use in the renewable energy sector (think solar panels). If it comes to fruition, the technology could revolutionize virtually every aspect of energy storage. Further, because it is based on a solid state design and not dependent on chemicals, the technology would be extremely safe, environmentally friendly, and benefit from an unparalleled lifespan.

EEStor plans to roll out the first production units later this year, and Zenn hopes to have cars utilizing the technology on the road by Fall 2009.

How To Make Free Calls From Hotel When Traveling

MagicJack is a phone jack for your computer that lets you plug in a standard phone and make basically free calls. This is great if you like to travel or are in sales on the road and you have an laptop and wish to make cheap calls from the road.

I would say it works great to get rid of pricey penalties for exceeding mobile phone minutes to expensive hotel telephone charges, calling from the road costs too much. Travelers with laptops and broadband can make Internet calls, but those pay-per-minute rates sure can add up.

MagicJack changes the game with a flat-rate price so low it looks like a misprint: $20 per year - not per month, per year - for unlimited calls to the United States and Canada from anywhere in the world.

This gadget plugs into a USB port. The device has a telephone jack that lets you use a standard phone, including cordless ones - you also use a headphone.

We tested magicJack with a variety of Internet broadband connections and PCs. The quality did not suffer, and the device did not slow down other programs, even on an older, slower PC.

This little gadget will run $20 for the jack, plus $20 a year for service. The phone service comes with a free local phone number, voice mail, call waiting, call forwarding, three-way calling and free (commercial-supported) directory assistance. International calls are extra, though competitively priced: Calls to France, for example, are 2 cents a minute (18 cents a minute for French mobile phones).

Its about time these communication companies got smart and stopped charging by the minute!

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Stupid Crook Accidentally Puts Loot Back In Owners Hands

Here we go, First nomination this year for stupid crimes.

Three days after taking a rare collection of coins, a crook in Germany took them to the bank for safe keeping - and delivered them into the hands of the person he had taken them from.
"I really don't think the crook was expecting this," said a spokesman for police in the western city of Dortmund on Tuesday.
Soon after the crook made the deposit, a bank vault keeper handling the coins recognized them as the set worth some $80,000 that had been taken from his home.
Police tracked down the 36-year-old suspect and arrested him, finding a swag of other stolen goods in the process.
Ha, talk about losers!!

Source 

BlowFish SEO

True Human Cyborgs - Closer To Reality

True Human Cyborgs now becoming a reality in the near future.

Researchers at Osaka University Medical School neurosurgery in Japan are now coming closer to creating mind controlled robotic limbs and other attachments. The researchers are doing this amazing feat by actually placing sensors directly on the brain tissue of the subject to read the thoughts and create the movement of the limbs.

The research marks Japan’s first foray into invasive (requiring open-skull surgery) brain-machine interface research on human test subjects. The aim of the research is to develop real-time mind-controlled robotic limbs.

To date, the researchers have worked with four test subjects to record brain wave activity generated as they move their arms, elbows and fingers. Working with Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International, the researchers have developed a method for analyzing the brain waves to determine the subject’s intended activity to an accuracy of greater than 80%. The next step is to use the data to control robot arms developed by the University of Tokyo.

From my Random Thoughts:
Could we possibly be on target to create real remote controlled humans much like Darpa's Cyborg moths?

Sanyo Xacti DMX-CA8 - Video Cam Waterproof Out Of Box

Sanyo Xacti DMX-CA8 -

The Sanyo DMX-CA8 video camera now has a 8Mpix CMOS sensor as well as as “face chaser” technology which works with both photos and video, and up to four different people even under water! the Sanyo DMX-CA8 is waterproof and can stay at a maximum of 1.5m depth under water for one hour.

As for codec, the Sanyo Sanyo DMX-CA8 uses the MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 at 60fps in VGA, a 5x optical zoom.

I thinks its possible Sanyo is using the technology from the article I wrote on this gadget, to make it waterproof.

Friday, April 18, 2008

Growing Flowers On The Moon - 1st step To Habitation

Scientists at the European Space Agency say the day when flowers bloom on the Moon has come closer.

An Esa-linked team has shown that marigolds can grow in crushed rock very like the lunar surface, with no need for plant food.

Some see growing plants on the Moon as a step towards human habitation.

Bernard Foing, a senior scientist with the European Space Research and Technology Centre (Estec) in the Netherlands, believes growing plants on the Moon would be a useful tool to learn how life adapts to lunar conditions, and as a practical aid to establishing manned bases.

"We would bring a system of water circulation and recovery, which is also the type of system that in any case you want to develop when you are going to manufacture a primitive sort of life support system.

In principle, putting self-contained pieces of kit with seeds and nutrients on the Moon and giving them a supply of water and an artificial atmosphere would be little different from growing them on space stations, which has been done several times; although outside Earth's protective magnetic field they would be subject to higher levels of radiation.

Lunar rover (Esa)
Esa has made no firm plans yet to explore the lunar surface

The new step, taken in the experiments reported at the EGU, is to remove the need for bringing nutrients and soil from Earth.

A team led by Natasha Kozyrovska and Iryna Zaetz planted marigolds in crushed anorthosite, a type of rock found on Earth which is very similar to much of the lunar surface. In neat anorthosite, the plants fared very badly. But adding different types of bacteria made them thrive; the bacteria appeared to draw elements from the rock that the plants needed, such as potassium.

Dr Foing, who presented the study at the EGU meeting, said there was no reason in principle why the same idea could not bear fruit on the Moon itself. Tools could crush lunar rock and add bacteria and seeds.

But, he added, scientists could look to go further, by selecting plants or bacteria that are especially well adapted to lunar conditions, or even by genetically engineering new strains.

This looks to me as the first Step's to creating a habitable atmosphere, in an extreme enviroment.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Now Talk Over Iphone Free - Forget Your Carrier

Get ready for free VoIP calls on your iPhone. An Israeli company called Fring announced today that it started publicly testing an application for the iPhone called Fring, which allows users to make and receive calls using voice over IP technology. In case there’s any sort of misconception here, Fring bypasses any cellphone carrier and relies solely on an Internet connection to make a call.

But here’s the surprise. Fring allows users to make VoIP calls over 3G or EDGE connections, which is a huge deal. With Fring, all customers need would be a data subscription with their carrier (in case of the U.S., AT&T) and begin making those free calls. According to Fring, the application will dynamically adjust audio quality depending on the type of connection it detects.

This is a big deal for iPhone users, and even Apple itself. The partnership between Apple and AT&T as well as other carriers becomes almost meaningless. Most of the time, with available WiFi access points, you can connect and start making calls. Bypass those pesky long distance. According to Fring:

Make cheap local and international calls to landlines and regular mobile contacts using your SkypeOut account or hundreds of SIP-based providers such as Eutelia, GizmoProject, VoipCheap, VoipStunt, Free World & SIPNET over fring, even from non-SIP enabled handsets.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Sony Unveils The PMW-EX3 - A Cinematographers Dream

Sony announced the PMW-EX3 the latest camera in the XDCAM EX line, the PMW-EX3 sports three 1/2 inch CCDs with full HD resolution (1920 x 1080) for maximum image quality.

The lens that comes with the EX3 can be detached and different lenses can be used. Interchangeable lens features are a must for many cinematographers.

The camera rests easily on the shoulder for ENG, live production or event use. With native 24p (23.98 fps), this is also an affordable digital cinema camera for filmmakers looking to shoot high quality movies without spending too much money.

On the high end of the spectrum, Sony will soon be introducing the F35, which is more advanced than the current F23.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

52LG50 Hot LCD Flat Panel TV Brings It In Clear

52LG50 Hot LCD Flat Panel TV Brings It In Clear.

When it comes to a clear picture and great sound the LG 52LG50 delivers with its invisible speakers and 1080p full HD resolution.

The LG 52LG50 AV MODE
The AV Mode optimizes the picture into Cinema, Sports, and game Mode according to the video and audio content. The viewer has the ability to quickly choose the correct mode for the picture they are viewing.


The LG 52LG50 includes a inteligent sensor system, unlike other sensors which can only sense brightness of ambient light, LG’s “Intelligent Sensor” uses 4,096 sensing steps to evaluate its surroundings. Using a sophisticated algorithm, the LG processes picture quality elements including brightness, contrast, color, sharpness and white balance. The result is a picture optimized for it’s surroundings, more pleasing to watch and which can also save up to 50% in power consumption.

CLEAR VOICE TECHNOLOGY
Automatically enhances and amplifies the sound of human voice frequency range to help keep dialogs audible when background noise swells.

This television was amazing to watch and listen to, you wont be disappointed.

Total Recall Brain Chip Implant

What would you do to have a memory chip implanted in your brain if that chip will double the capacity of your short-term memory? Or guarantee that you would never again forget a face or a name?

All this becomes even more poignant when you compare our memories to those of the average laptop. Whereas it takes the average human child weeks or even months or years to memorize something as simple as a multiplication table, any modern computer can memorize any table in an instant — and never forget it. Why can’t we do the same?

In the best-case situation, this process works well: the particular memory we need just “pops” into our minds, automatically and effortlessly. The catch, however, is that our memories can easily get confused, especially when a given set of cues points to more than one memory. What we remember at any given moment depends heavily on the accidents of which bits of mental flotsam and jetsam happen to be active at that instant. Our mood, our environment, even our posture can all influence our delicate memories. To take but one example, studies suggest that if you learn a word while you happen to be slouching, you’ll be better able to remember that word at a later time if you are slouching than if you happen to be standing upright.

However difficult the practicalities, there’s no reason in principle why a future generation of neural prostheticists couldn’t pick up where nature left off, incorporating Google-like master maps into neural implants. This in turn would allow us to search our own memories — not just those on the Web — with something like the efficiency and reliability of a computer search engine.

Would this turn us into computers? Not at all. A neural implant equipped with a master memory map wouldn’t impair our capacity to think, or to feel, to love or to laugh; it wouldn’t change the nature of what we chose to remember; and it wouldn’t necessarily even expand the sheer size of our memory banks. But then again our problem has never been how much information we could store in our memories; it’s always been in getting that information back out — which is precisely where taking a clue from computer memory could help.

The Bed That Makes Itself

ITALIAN engineer Enrico Berruti admits that it was simply his personal laziness that first prompted him to come up with the idea for a gadget to have a bed that makes itself.

Three years later, his first prototype is on show at an International Exhibition of Inventions in Geneva.

The bed has a contraption at the sides that you wrap bedsheets or duvet over.

The sheet is rolled out when the two fasteners it is attached to move along metal bars on both sides of the bed.

Once the sheet is spread over the bed, the two bars are automatically lowered - when you press a button - smoothing out the sheet and tightening it over the bed.

He said the bed could be useful to people with back problems who cannot bend.

Saturday, April 12, 2008

Government Attaching Laser Beams To Sharks - Remote Controlled

IMAGINE getting inside the mind of a shark: swimming silently through the ocean, sensing faint electrical fields, homing in on the trace of a scent, and navigating through the featureless depths for hour after hour.
We may soon be able to do just that via electrical probes in the shark's brain. Engineers funded by the US military have created a neural implant designed to enable a shark's brain signals to be manipulated remotely, controlling the animal's movements, and perhaps even decoding what it is feeling.
That team is among a number of groups around the world that have gained ethical approval to develop implants that can monitor and influence the behavior of animals, from sharks and tuna to rats and monkeys. These researchers hope such implants will improve our understanding of how the animals interact with their environment, as well as boosting research into tackling human paralysis.
More controversially, the Pentagon hopes to exploit sharks' natural ability to glide quietly through the water, sense delicate electrical gradients and follow chemical trails. By remotely guiding the sharks' movements, they hope to transform the animals into stealth spies, perhaps capable of following vessels without being spotted. The project, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), based in Arlington, Virginia, was presented at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii, last week.
Neural implants consist of a series of electrodes that are embedded into the animal's brain, which can then be used to stimulate various functional areas. Biologist Jelle Atema of Boston University and his students are using them to "steer" spiny dogfish in a tank via a phantom odour. As the dogfish swims about, the researchers beam a radio signal from a laptop to an antenna attached to the fish at one end and sticking up out of the water at the other. The electrodes then stimulate either the right or left of the olfactory centre, the area of the brain dedicated to smell. The fish flicks round to the corresponding side in response to the signal, as if it has caught a whiff of an interesting smell: the stronger the signal, the more sharply it turns.
The team is not the first to attempt to control animals in this way. John Chapin of the State University of New York Health Science Center in Brooklyn has used a similar tactic to guide rats through rubble piles (New Scientist, 25 September 2004, p 21). Chapin's implant stimulates a part of the brain that is wired to their whiskers, so the rats instinctively turn toward the tickled side to see what has brushed by. Chapin rewards that response by stimulating a pleasure centre in the rats' brains. Using this reward process, he has trained the rodents to pause for 10 seconds when they smell a target chemical such as RDX, a component of plastic explosives.
The New York Police Department is considering recruiting Chapin's rats to its disaster response team, where they could be used to detect bombs or even trapped people, and Chapin met them to discuss the possibility last month.
However, Chapin's "mind patch" only works in one direction: he can stimulate movement or reward an action, but he cannot directly measure what the rat smells, which is why he has to train them to reveal what they are sensing. DARPA's shark researchers, in contrast, want to use their implant to detect and decipher the different patterns of neural activity that indicate the animal has detected an ocean current, a scent or an electrical field. The implant sports a small pincushion of wires that sink into the brain to record activity from many neurons at once. The team plans to program a microprocessor to recognise which patterns of brain activity correlate with which scents.
Atema plans to use the implants to study how sharks track chemical trails. We know that sharks have an extremely acute sense of smell, but exactly how the animals deploy that sense in the wild has so far been a matter of conjecture. Neural implants could change all that. "You get much better information from a swimming shark than from an anaesthetised animal that is strapped down," says Atema. "It could open up a whole new window into how these animals interact with their world."
At the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, Tim Tricas is using the implant to investigate what information scalloped hammerhead sharks glean from their electric field sensors. Gel-filled pores, scattered across a shark's head connect to nerve endings that make them sensitive to voltage gradients. Sharks can use these electroreceptors to spot the weak bioelectric fields around hidden prey, such as a flounder buried in sand.
For decades, marine biologists have suspected that sharks might also use these electroreceptors for navigation. Tiger and blue sharks can swim mile after mile in a straight line with no view of the ocean floor and only scattered, changing light coming from above. Some researchers suspect they maintain their heading by using the Earth's magnetic field.
When a conductor - in this case the shark - passes through a magnetic field, the interaction sets up a voltage across the conductor. The strength and orientation of that voltage depends on the conductor's angle to the magnetic field. If a shark could detect those changes, it could use its electrical receptors like a compass. The only way to test this, Tricas says, is to monitor electroreception in a freely swimming shark.
Other animal behaviour researchers are setting their subjects loose too. Jaideep Mavoori at the University of Washington in Seattle has developed a neural implant for monkeys that can monitor brain activity while the primates play. "We believe we are the first to record neural activity from a monkey doing a somersault," Mavoori says.
Mavoori's implant can also stimulate one part of the brain in response to activity in another, and has a microchip that can interpret the neural signals and send a message to another part of the brain or a muscle accordingly. He and his colleagues believe such an implant might ultimately help humans compensate for lost nerve function caused by injury or disease.
They have found that when a monkey is free to move around, sets of neurons controlling opposing muscle groups - those that extend and flex a joint - are both active throughout many movements. However, when a monkey is restrained in a chair and taught to extend its hand for a food reward, say, only the neurons that control the extensor muscles tend to be active.
"Remote controlled sharks glide silently though the water without being spotted"
Understanding this difference may be vital in creating a muscle-stimulating prosthesis to restore movement to a limb paralysed by nerve damage. For some loose movements, such as gently extending your arm in and out, sending signals to opposing muscles in turn works quite well. However, for movements that require some rigidity in the joint, such as inserting a book into a bookcase, you need to engage opposing muscles simultaneously. A successful neural prosthesis will need to mimic both patterns.
Meanwhile DARPA too plans to take its shark implants out of the laboratory. Project engineer Walter Gomes of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, Rhode Island, says the team's next step will be to implant the device into blue sharks and release them into the ocean off the coast of Florida.
However, the radio signals used to direct the dogfish in the tank will not penetrate water, so the engineers plan to communicate with the sharks using sonar. According to Gomes, the navy already has acoustic signalling towers in the area that are suitable for relaying messages from a ship to a shark up to 300 kilometres away. The team has designed a sonar receiver shaped like a remora fish to minimise drag when attached to the animal.
The scientists will be particularly interested in the sharks' health during the tests. As wild predators, it is very easy to exhaust them, and this will place strict limits on how long the researchers can control their movements in any one session without harming them. Despite this limitation, though, remote controlled sharks do have advantages that robotic underwater surveillance vehicles just cannot match: they are silent, and they power themselves. Newbury Street Source

Miami Gets Its Own Spy In The Sky Drone

Miami police could soon be the first in the United States to use cutting-edge, spy-in-the-sky technology to beef up their fight against crime.

A small pilotless drone manufactured by Honeywell International, capable of hovering and "viewing" using electro-optic or infrared sensors, is expected to be flying soon in the skies.

If use of the drone wins Federal Aviation Administration approval after tests, the Miami-Dade Police Department will start flying the 14-pound (6.3 kg) drone over urban areas with an eye toward full-fledged employment in crime fighting.

"We intend to use this to benefit us in carrying out our mission," he added, saying the wingless Honeywell aircraft, which fits into a backpack and is capable of vertical takeoff and landing, seems ideally suited for use by SWAT teams in hostage situations or dealing with "barricaded persons."

Miami-Dade police are not alone, however.

Taking their lead from the U.S. military, which has used drones in Iraq and Afghanistan for years, law enforcement agencies across the country have voiced a growing interest in using drones for domestic crime-fighting missions.

I for one am fed up with all this surveillance on common citizens. There has to be some type of control here. Hillery states she wants to put 100,000 more cops on the job, Are we in a police state? There needs to be an checks and balances system in place as well as laws - if this system can be like the eyes of 3000 police in the area. If you decide to launch this gadget lay-off 3,000 human police officers for every one you put up. We all know this little machine will be used to abuse the privacy rights of citizens much like the patriot act has in the past.

Spy Plane Based On Flying Bats

Scientists at the University of Michigan College of Engineering are developing a tiny six-inch robot spy plane, designed like a bat. Its whole reason for creation is gathering data such as sights, sounds, and smells in combat zones and transmitting the information back to the troops behind lines in real time.

The bat is to perform short-term surveillance missions supporting advancing troops in the battlefield. It could perch at a street corner and send data regarding its immediate surroundings, or could land on a building for longer surveillance assignments. Real-time reports of its activity will constantly be sent to the commanding unit.

The University of Michigan researchers are focusing on the microelectronics. They will develop sensors, communication tools, and batteries for the new "Bat" micro-aerial vehicle. Engineers envision tiny cameras for stereo vision, an array of mini microphones that could home in on sounds from different directions, and small detectors for nuclear radiation and poisonous gases. The robotic bat will also have the ability to navigate at night, using low-power miniaturized radar and a very sensitive navigation system. Its lithium battery will recharge using solar energy, wind, and vibrations, and the bat will communicate with the troops using radio signals.

"Bats have a highly-attuned echolocation sense providing high-resolution navigation and sensing ability even in the dark, just as our sensor must be able to do," Sarabandi said. Echolocation allows bats to navigate by emitting sounds and detecting the echoes. By basing the robotic bat on an audio navigation system, the scientists can avoid the difficulties encountered when using vision-based systems. The robot's body is designed to be about six inches long and to weigh about a quarter of a pound. Its expected energy consumption will be 1W.

University of Michigan researchers intend to improve the technologies currently in use. They will work to develop quantum dot solar cells that double the efficiency of current solar cells. Furthermore, they expect their autonomous navigation system, which would allow the robot to direct its own movements, to be 1,000 times smaller and more energy efficient than systems in use today. If the planned improvements will indeed be successful, the researchers believe they will provide the bat with a communication system ten times smaller, lighter and more energy efficient than currently available systems. "Throughout this research, we expect to make technological breakthroughs and have a much wider range of applications for other types of engineering problems, from medical to industrial," Sarabandi said.

While all this technology and assorted gadgets might seem pretty cool, I am getting a bit concerned here. To just spy on anyone at anytime you know this will be abused by law enforcement. They already are putting up airborne surveillance in Miami, Florida

PNY Quadro FX 5600 SDI Card - 1.5 GB Of Memory

PNY has a new super graphics card in the SDI series the Quadro FX 5600 , which, is seen all over the NAB 2008.

NAB 2008 has opened in Las Vegas it is the key conference for the broadcasting industry. Nvidia, AMD and Intel are there as well, I would have to say that AMD and Intel take the second and the third spot in visualization technologies for the broadcasting industry. Quadro SDI is the facto a standard in the world of HD - if you watch any of US sports channels, there is 99% chance that all those fancy effects have been created in real-time using Quadro SDI cards like the Quadro FX 5600.

PNY's new Quadro FX 5600 HD-SDI card includes 1.5 GB of memory and memory bandwidth of up to 76.8 GB/sec. A single dual link DVI-I output supports resolutions of up to 3840 x 2400 at 24Hz. The power consumption of the card tops out at 171 watts.

Friday, April 11, 2008

Saitek PK17U Cyborg Gaming Keyboard-Rules

Saitek PK17U Cyborg Gaming Keyboard, has the same great touch response and attractive, helpful illumination. Now Saitek has outdone itself with the Saitek PK17U Cyborg Gaming Keyboard. This keyboard reaches to a new height of back lighting coolness, giving you control of not only the intensity of its three colors, but the ability to mix them together into hues no sane designer would dare choose.

You can also set the Saitek PK17U Cyborg Gaming Keyboard up to independently light up commonly-used gaming keys, and if you tend to bang away at Eve Online or WOW all night long, there are metal-plated keycaps on those gaming keys that can withstand even the most spirited pounding. You can also program the system for multiple rapid key presses, letting you shoot faster than any human ever could.

The keyboard's fully-programmable custom preferences are saved for your next re-boot. Thats a lot of keyboard for a super low price.

Programmable Tattoos For Your Body

I just knew this was coming, Scientists at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have come out with the programmable tattoo concept. Human hair-sized nanotubes were embedded in the skin the display the image of your choice. The tattoo will still be visible even the power is off. You can change the tattoo to anything you like in an instant or make it go away. Wouldn't it be cool to flash a message or design across your body in an instant.



Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Scientists Close to Finding "God Particle"

Finding the Higgs Boson Particle - In February, the last piece of the ATLAS detector, the world’s largest general-purpose particle detector, has been lowered down a 300 feet shaft at the European Organization for Nuclear Research's (CERN) underground facility along the Swiss-French border. This concluded the construction of the high-tech device which started in 2003.

The ATLAS detector, measuring 46 meters long, 25 meters high and 25 metres wide, will detect and trace particles called muons expected to be produced in particle collisions in the CERN accelerator, known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Meanwhile, British physicist Peter Higgs said yesterday that he is certain the new device will find a particle named the "Higgs boson," which is named after him. Also dubbed the "God particle," its existence was claimed by Higgs as far back as 1964, but using only scientific calculations.

European experiments are slated to begin later this year. The project will look for signs of the Higgs particle, which is believed by some scientists to be responsible for giving other particles their mass. CERN said in its statement that its entire muon spectrometer system contains an area equal to three football fields, including 1.2 million independent electronic channels.

Nokia Tube - Will It Crush Iphone

Nokia has given its touchscreen phone an early name of the Tube and full demo, Nokia Tube was revealed at the Evans Data Developer Relations Conference.

Nokia at the Redwood City-based event said its first touch device is internally known as the Tube and is said to be visually similar to the iPhone. However, the Finnish handset is already known to add features that its Apple competitor lacks, including the ability to directly upload videos as well as support for Java-based apps.

Neither additional features or a release date have been released, though Nokia has demonstrated the Tube playing Disney films the Third and last year showcased a likely related concept that includes iPhone-like photo navigation and an accelerometer that auto-rotates the image depending on the phone's relative position to the user.

Nokia VP Tom Libretto directly compared the Tube to the iPhone and explained that both features as well as sheer market influence would help Nokia outmuscle Apple. The latter has shipped 4 million iPhones as of January but is dwarfed by Nokia's sales, which saw 133.4 million phones shipped just in the fourth quarter alone. Apple is simply can not match that production scale, according to Tom Libretto

"We've done that [iPhone level of volume] since we've left the office on Friday," Libretto says.

Monday, April 07, 2008

Face Recognition Gone Terribly Wrong

Face Recognition Software obviously not what its cracked up to be. Yeah so, I am embarrassing myself here. However here are the splendid results of my celebrity lookalikes.

Who do you think I look Like? Most of the time when I'm out, people say I look like Robert Downey JR. I had to take this in stride with a grain of salt and some humor. These are the honest results. Click on the picture to get one for yourself with this gadget.


Ranger Robot Runs 45 Laps At Cornell - Sets Record

We're not sure what kind of batteries it was using, but the Cornell Ranger robot just kept going and going April 3 when it set an unofficial world record by walking nonstop for 45 laps - a little over 9 kilometers or 5.6 miles - around the Barton Hall running track.

Developed by a group students working with Andy Ruina, Cornell professor of theoretical and applied mechanics, the robot walked (and walked) until it finally stopped and fell backward, perhaps because its battery ran down. "We need to do some careful analysis to find out for sure," said Greg Stiesberg, a graduate student on the team.

An earlier version of the robot had already set a record by free-walking a bit over 1 kilometer, about .62 miles. (Another robot has walked 2.5 kilometers [1.55 miles] on a treadmill, Ruina noted. A six-legged robot has walked a bit more than 2 kilometers, and there's some debate over whether or not that counts.)

There are no rules for such records, Ruina admits, and the Guinness people were not involved. "There's a lot of rigmarole with that," he explained. The event, he said, was to show off the machine's energy efficiency. Unlike other walking robots that use motors to control every movement, the Ranger emulates human walking, using gravity to help swing its legs forward.

Source

Sunday, April 06, 2008

Nanobots finally Get A Central Brain To Control Them

Recently, scientists have built the first ultra-tiny, ultra-powerful "brains" for nanobots.

The brain, just two billionths of a meter across - work as tiny computer transistors. But instead of carrying out just one operation at a time, like a normal transistor, the new controller can simultaneously perform 16 operations at once. In other words, the devices use parallel processing, like a real human brain - rather than serial processing - like a normal computer. The researchers call this ability "one-to-many" communication.

The tiny machines (see Picture Top Right) are composed of 17 duroquinone molecules that act as logic gates. The researchers arranged 16 of these molecules in a wheel, and placed the last molecule in the middle, which acts as the control center. The entire wheel was constructed on a gold substrate.

Each duroquinone molecule has four side chains that can be individually rotated to represent four separate logic states. Conventional transistors, on the other, have just two logic states: on and off.

The scientists also created the "world´s tiniest elevator," a 2-nanometer-tall device that can move up and down by 1 nanometer. They also plan to hook up the brain to a variety of nano-sized motors, propellers, switches, and sensors for different applications.

In the future, the researchers hope that they can control the central duroquinone molecule using proteins or other molecules, rather than the scanning electron microscope tip. For one thing, this ability might enable the brains to serve as tiny transistors packed onto a microchip for future powerful computers.

More futuristically, the brains could accompany nanobots for medical missions, such as bloodless surgery. As the scientists explain, specialized molecular machines could travel through veins to a tumor or damaged tissue, and perform surgery according to the instructions given by the new brains.

Nokia 5000 Cell Phone

Nokia 5000 Cell Phone is shaped like its 5310 XpressMusic with green on the sides. This gadget comes with a a 2-inch high resolution QVGA display,FM radio with recording ability, 1.3-megapixel camera, MP3 ringtones and support for email,Bluetooth and GPRS connectivity, Nokia Xpress Audio Messaging. Other basic features include advanced calculator, Bluetooth, screensavers and Image caller ID. The Nokia 5000 will be available in Cyber Green, Neon Blue and Perfect Purple. The Nokia 5000 is expected to hit the shelves in Q2.

Thursday, April 03, 2008

Sony HDR-TG1 Super Small HDR

The Sony HDR-TG1 is the worlds smallest HDR 1080i camcorder. The HDR-TG1, measures at just 1.3- x 4.7- x 2.5-inches and weighs ten ounces. HDR-TG1 has a 4.0-megapixel sensor, 10x Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar optical zoom lens, 2.7-inch touch display, MS Pro Duo / Pro Duo Mark2 card slots and a BIONZ processing engine. The HDR-TG1 has so many features its well worth taking a look at.

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Kabu Keitai 920SH YK Phone Allows Real Time Stock Trading

The Kabu Keitai 920SH YK, cell phone enables online trading and real time portfolio checking. The other is a Citizen iVIRT-M watch that pairs to the 920SH via Bluetooth, incoming calls, mail, and news are available without pulling out the 920SH phone from your pocket. You can take, reject or divert calls from the watch, use it as a remote camera shutter, with 1000 address book entries, the contact details of your caller probably will be posted on the screen.

The Kabu Keitai 920SH will no doubt be snapped up by stock brokers / traders as it frees them from a PC for the first time. The W-CDMA + GSM phone is available from Softbank Mobile and trading is done via SBI E-Trade Securities, though even without the trading function, this gadget has a ton of features.

Blackberry Curve 8330 - Very Sexy

Blackberry Curve 8330 will be released at the end of the month. The Blackberry Curve 8330 with 320 x 240 pixel display, stereo bluetooth audio, 2-megapixel camera, media player, GPS, microSD / SDHC expansion, and provides 260 minutes talk / 11 days standby. The Blackverry Curve 8330 is available $270 after a $50 mail-in rebate and it’s a 2-year contract for this gadget.

Thats a lot of phone for the money.