PopSci.com on The Colbert Report The Colbert Report
Earlier this week, Stephen Colbert gave us a nice shout-out for Rebecca Boyle's post on the first robots to jump into the fray at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Seems like Colbert may have wanted to see some of Japan's own robotic earthquake helpers, or at least a contribution from somewhere other than perpetual Report punching bag France.
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Turmeric Yellowcake Wikimedia Commons
Curry powder can already reduce cow burps, kill cancer cells and fight the epidemic of unflavorful food. Now it can help detect bombs.
Specifically, the curry ingredient turmeric, and its molecule curcumin, can be used with fluorescence spectroscopy to sniff out explosive chemicals. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts said turmeric-based sensors could detect small amounts of explosives in a room, down to 80 parts per billion.
It?s another nice marriage of spices and science. Last year, scientists said cinnamon could be used to build gold nanoparticles.The researchers mixed turmeric with a viscous polymer and spread it onto glass plates. Then they shone an LED onto the glass plate, and measured the light waves emitted from the plate. In the presence of explosives, the emitted light was dimmer. An array of turmeric-based sensors could detect a wide range of materials, the BBC reports.
Such sensors would be cheap and easy to deploy in areas where authorities would want to look for explosives, from airports to fields full of land mines.
[BBC]
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PopSci.com on The Colbert Report The Colbert Report
Earlier this week, Stephen Colbert gave us a nice shout-out for Rebecca Boyle's post on the first robots to jump into the fray at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Seems like Colbert may have wanted to see some of Japan's own robotic earthquake helpers, or at least a contribution from somewhere other than perpetual Report punching bag France.
health news kids science national geographic popular mechanics popular science
Pretty soon now
Standing This Close Won't Get You Better Resolution Douglas Fraser
Television manufacturers are already starting to produce equipment with an image resolution that far exceeds today?s HDTV standards. In part, that?s because passive 3-D glasses cost you picture resolution, so LG, Vizio and others plan to compensate by doubling the resolution of 1080p screens by next year?and double it again by 2013. Those sets will be able to display an amazing picture.
Content is another issue, though. Don?t look to traditional over-the-air broadcasters for revolutionary improvement in video quality. Broadcast-TV standards in the U.S. improve incredibly slowly; the transition from analog to digital TV took 13 years. And even today?s seemingly rich HD video spectrum doesn?t display even close to the full range of colors discernible to our eyes.
Consumer video evolves faster. Blu-ray is the current gold standard, with six times the detail of standard DVDs and a much higher bit rate than cable HDTV broadcasts. Some movies, meanwhile, are now being shot or scanned digitally at four times 1080p resolution or greater. To keep up with this ever improving quality (and to bypass stagnant broadcast standards), cable, satellite and Internet video distributors have turned to direct-streaming technologies. Services such as Vudu?s HDX 1080p tech (no subscription fee; vudu.com) now come close to matching Blu-ray quality and could be the first step toward delivering even higher-resolution formats to your living room.
health news kids science national geographic popular mechanics popular science
A New Phase of Matter? One type of high-temperature superconductor may exhibit a new phase of matter. SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
While studying the weird behavior of high-temperature superconductors, scientists may have found a new phase of matter, separate from solid, liquid, gas and plasma. Electrons in a pre-superconducting state apparently form a strange, distinct order, lining up in a way that has never been seen before.
Superconductors are 100-percent-efficient materials that waste no energy. In them, electrons break off into pairs, conducting electricity with no resistance. This usually requires operating at extremely cold temperatures, however, so superconductors are not quite practical for a wide range of uses. Scientists have been trying to make warm superconductors that can operate at room temperature, but warm superconductors experience a "pseudogap" while the electrons change their energy levels, preparing to team up and enter their superconducting states.
During this ?pseudogap,? the electrons are doing something other than superconducting. For 20 years, no one has been able to figure out what they?re doing instead, and scientists are not sure if it is part of the whole superconducting process, or if it?s detrimental, and if they should try to close the pseudogap so warm superconductors can work better. Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University set out to uncover what the electrons were up to.They combined three types of measurement techniques to study electronic behavior at the surface, thermodynamic behavior in the interior, and changes to their dynamic properties over time, as a news release from SLAC explains.
They learned that in the pseudogap phase, electrons are not pairing up; instead, they're reorganizing into a distinct order. What?s more, this electron formation remains even when the material is superconducting, but no one noticed it before.
Scientists are still not sure what the new electron order means, and they still have to figure out what this new arrangement is all about. But it?s an interesting finding: Though brief, a new phase of matter opens up all kinds of questions about electronic properties and how superconductors work.
science current events science definition science games science illustrated science journal
Fly like a seagull into the future
SmartBird Festo
A new lifelike seagull ?bot is one of the most realistic bio-inspired flight machines we?ve seen. SmartBird takes off, flies and lands on its own, flapping its wings and turning its head and tail to steer. It is modeled on the herring gull and its appearance and movements are uncannily similar to the real thing.
Designed by the German firm Festo, which also brought us the elephant-trunk-inspired robotic arm and the autonomous robotic jellyfish, SmartBird is Festo?s newest entry in its Bionic Learning Network program, which involves several universities in the U.S. and Europe and aims to use nature as a model for mechatronic systems.
The bird has a 6.5-foot wingspan, so it?s much larger than a real gull, but it looks pretty much like the real thing, as you can see in the video below.
SmartBird flies like a seagull thanks to an active torsion system combined with a complex control system. Its wings each consist of a two-part arm wing spar with an axle bearing on the torso. The wings and tail are the only mechanisms creating lift, and Festo engineers had to figure out bird flight in order to do it.
The company explains: ?First, the wings beat up and down, whereby a lever mechanism causes the degree of deflection to increase from the torso to the wing tip. Second, the wing twists in such a way that its leading edge is directed upwards during the upward stroke, so that the wing adopts a positive angle of attack.?
The tail acts as an elevator and rudder, stabilizing the bird in straight-line flight and helping it change direction. Here's how it works:
Perhaps not as unobtrusive as the teeny hummingbird spy drone, but impressive nonetheless.
[via IEEE]
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PopSci.com on The Colbert Report The Colbert Report
Earlier this week, Stephen Colbert gave us a nice shout-out for Rebecca Boyle's post on the first robots to jump into the fray at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Seems like Colbert may have wanted to see some of Japan's own robotic earthquake helpers, or at least a contribution from somewhere other than perpetual Report punching bag France.
space news web of science science science news astronomy news
Fly like a seagull into the future
SmartBird Festo
A new lifelike seagull ?bot is one of the most realistic bio-inspired flight machines we?ve seen. SmartBird takes off, flies and lands on its own, flapping its wings and turning its head and tail to steer. It is modeled on the herring gull and its appearance and movements are uncannily similar to the real thing.
Designed by the German firm Festo, which also brought us the elephant-trunk-inspired robotic arm and the autonomous robotic jellyfish, SmartBird is Festo?s newest entry in its Bionic Learning Network program, which involves several universities in the U.S. and Europe and aims to use nature as a model for mechatronic systems.
The bird has a 6.5-foot wingspan, so it?s much larger than a real gull, but it looks pretty much like the real thing, as you can see in the video below.
SmartBird flies like a seagull thanks to an active torsion system combined with a complex control system. Its wings each consist of a two-part arm wing spar with an axle bearing on the torso. The wings and tail are the only mechanisms creating lift, and Festo engineers had to figure out bird flight in order to do it.
The company explains: ?First, the wings beat up and down, whereby a lever mechanism causes the degree of deflection to increase from the torso to the wing tip. Second, the wing twists in such a way that its leading edge is directed upwards during the upward stroke, so that the wing adopts a positive angle of attack.?
The tail acts as an elevator and rudder, stabilizing the bird in straight-line flight and helping it change direction. Here's how it works:
Perhaps not as unobtrusive as the teeny hummingbird spy drone, but impressive nonetheless.
[via IEEE]
health news kids science national geographic popular mechanics popular science
Pretty soon now
Standing This Close Won't Get You Better Resolution Douglas Fraser
Television manufacturers are already starting to produce equipment with an image resolution that far exceeds today?s HDTV standards. In part, that?s because passive 3-D glasses cost you picture resolution, so LG, Vizio and others plan to compensate by doubling the resolution of 1080p screens by next year?and double it again by 2013. Those sets will be able to display an amazing picture.
Content is another issue, though. Don?t look to traditional over-the-air broadcasters for revolutionary improvement in video quality. Broadcast-TV standards in the U.S. improve incredibly slowly; the transition from analog to digital TV took 13 years. And even today?s seemingly rich HD video spectrum doesn?t display even close to the full range of colors discernible to our eyes.
Consumer video evolves faster. Blu-ray is the current gold standard, with six times the detail of standard DVDs and a much higher bit rate than cable HDTV broadcasts. Some movies, meanwhile, are now being shot or scanned digitally at four times 1080p resolution or greater. To keep up with this ever improving quality (and to bypass stagnant broadcast standards), cable, satellite and Internet video distributors have turned to direct-streaming technologies. Services such as Vudu?s HDX 1080p tech (no subscription fee; vudu.com) now come close to matching Blu-ray quality and could be the first step toward delivering even higher-resolution formats to your living room.
science current events science definition science games science illustrated science journal
A New Phase of Matter? One type of high-temperature superconductor may exhibit a new phase of matter. SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
While studying the weird behavior of high-temperature superconductors, scientists may have found a new phase of matter, separate from solid, liquid, gas and plasma. Electrons in a pre-superconducting state apparently form a strange, distinct order, lining up in a way that has never been seen before.
Superconductors are 100-percent-efficient materials that waste no energy. In them, electrons break off into pairs, conducting electricity with no resistance. This usually requires operating at extremely cold temperatures, however, so superconductors are not quite practical for a wide range of uses. Scientists have been trying to make warm superconductors that can operate at room temperature, but warm superconductors experience a "pseudogap" while the electrons change their energy levels, preparing to team up and enter their superconducting states.
During this ?pseudogap,? the electrons are doing something other than superconducting. For 20 years, no one has been able to figure out what they?re doing instead, and scientists are not sure if it is part of the whole superconducting process, or if it?s detrimental, and if they should try to close the pseudogap so warm superconductors can work better. Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University set out to uncover what the electrons were up to.They combined three types of measurement techniques to study electronic behavior at the surface, thermodynamic behavior in the interior, and changes to their dynamic properties over time, as a news release from SLAC explains.
They learned that in the pseudogap phase, electrons are not pairing up; instead, they're reorganizing into a distinct order. What?s more, this electron formation remains even when the material is superconducting, but no one noticed it before.
Scientists are still not sure what the new electron order means, and they still have to figure out what this new arrangement is all about. But it?s an interesting finding: Though brief, a new phase of matter opens up all kinds of questions about electronic properties and how superconductors work.
kids science national geographic popular mechanics popular science popular science articles
Fly like a seagull into the future
SmartBird Festo
A new lifelike seagull ?bot is one of the most realistic bio-inspired flight machines we?ve seen. SmartBird takes off, flies and lands on its own, flapping its wings and turning its head and tail to steer. It is modeled on the herring gull and its appearance and movements are uncannily similar to the real thing.
Designed by the German firm Festo, which also brought us the elephant-trunk-inspired robotic arm and the autonomous robotic jellyfish, SmartBird is Festo?s newest entry in its Bionic Learning Network program, which involves several universities in the U.S. and Europe and aims to use nature as a model for mechatronic systems.
The bird has a 6.5-foot wingspan, so it?s much larger than a real gull, but it looks pretty much like the real thing, as you can see in the video below.
SmartBird flies like a seagull thanks to an active torsion system combined with a complex control system. Its wings each consist of a two-part arm wing spar with an axle bearing on the torso. The wings and tail are the only mechanisms creating lift, and Festo engineers had to figure out bird flight in order to do it.
The company explains: ?First, the wings beat up and down, whereby a lever mechanism causes the degree of deflection to increase from the torso to the wing tip. Second, the wing twists in such a way that its leading edge is directed upwards during the upward stroke, so that the wing adopts a positive angle of attack.?
The tail acts as an elevator and rudder, stabilizing the bird in straight-line flight and helping it change direction. Here's how it works:
Perhaps not as unobtrusive as the teeny hummingbird spy drone, but impressive nonetheless.
[via IEEE]
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Theremin Fork DigInfo
We've covered theremins before, from DIY pocket theremins to hacks using the Microsoft Kinect and Nintendo Wii. But we've never covered a utensil-based theremin, or a theremin with tines, or even a theremin that uniquely reacts to the texture of chicken skin. Until now.
This fork, demonstrated at Interaction 2011 and profiled by DigInfo, has an embedded theremin that begins making its unique and oddly unpleasant screeching noises once it touches a person, completing a circuit. But the pitch of the theremin changes based on the feedback from the fork's tines: The more resistance it encounters, as when you're gnawing on something particularly tough or chewy, the lower the tone. Oh, and it has a cute name: the EaTheremin.
According to the video's narrator, "Flexible items like chicken skin can generate vibrato effects as they stretch," so theoretically you could put together a dish that produces a melody, based on the textures you choose. The video above is worth watching if only for the uncomfortably close shots of the spokesperson gnawing sausages and fried chicken. We just hope she made it through the day without feeling too ill.
[DigInfo via The Hairpin]
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PopSci.com on The Colbert Report The Colbert Report
Earlier this week, Stephen Colbert gave us a nice shout-out for Rebecca Boyle's post on the first robots to jump into the fray at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Seems like Colbert may have wanted to see some of Japan's own robotic earthquake helpers, or at least a contribution from somewhere other than perpetual Report punching bag France.
science science news astronomy news health news kids science
Nintendo ditches glasses in the first major gadget with a glasses-free 3-D display. Find out how it plays in our test
Nintendo 3DS on the New York subway Awaiting Street Pass friends! John Mahoney
The latest version of Nintendo's wildly, globally popular DS handheld gaming system (which goes on sale this weekend in the US) is an exciting gadget. It's the first major mainstream launch of a glasses-free 3-D display, something that bodes well for the future of the extra-dimensional entertainment world currently being pursued at full throttle by multiple industries. Is glasses-free 3-D gaming for real? I've been playing for the last week to find out.
You may already have seen our initial impressions and my general thoughts on 3-D gaming here, and after a week with the 3DS, I'm still sold. Gaming in 3-D is great fun, when it works. Which it does very consistently on the 3DS.
The aforementioned glasses-free display is the big one: it employs a parallax-barrier LCD (which we tore open to show you How It Works here). What's neat about the LCD parallax barrier is that the affect can be fine-tuned with a slider, ranging from a crystal-clear 2-D image all the way to full 3-D.
When side by side with the previous generation DSi, there are several other changes: aside from being in 3-D, the screen is also larger at 3.5 inches and has a higher resolution at 400 x 240 pixels (800 x 240 if you count the discrete images for each eye, up from the DSi's 3-inch, 256 x 192 pixel display); a slightly beefier case (just over two millimeters thicker and 16 grams heavier); and 2 GB of internal storage in addition to an SD card slot (it comes with a 2GB card in the box, for 4GB total). There's a 3-D camera on the back plus an additional front-facing single-lens camera for self-portraits; on the outside, an analog thumbstick joins the traditional D-pad on the left side of the controls; and, rounding out the insides, a gyroscope for orientation sensing has been added, as well as a more powerful processor and increased RAM.
Gaming in 3-D: I will say it again: video games are the most natural use for 3-D screens (my thoughts on why are here). On the 3DS the 3-D effect is, for me, very well implemented. There is a definite sweet spot, which lives around 14-16 inches from your eyeballs when held straight-on, and if you venture too far out of it, the screen can be blurred (interestingly, there are sweetspots to the left and right as well, for friends looking over your shoulder). But after a very brief adjustment, I found it easy to stay in the zone and keep the 3-D view consistent.
That said, some friends who played had a harder time adjusting initially. It's probably smart to get some playtime before purchasing just to make sure your eyes and the 3DS get along.
The basics: The 3DS's system software, like most everything else Nintendo, is beautifully designed, interface wise. Lots of big rounded corners, sans-serif fonts, pleasing color schemes and cute icons--I love it. It also multitasks rather elegantly, allowing you to drop out of any game you're running to quickly change the display brightness, take a photo with the camera, jot a note, check notifications or friend status, etc, all while keeping your game's state preserved.Plenty to do: In addition to games, there's lots of fun to be had with the pre-loaded software. The Wii's customizable Mii avatars are here, complete with a new feature to auto-create Miis based on a photograph of your own face. A built-in pedometer tracks your steps and doles out "Play Coins" for every ten you take, which you can use to unlock additional features like more minigames in the AR Games section, etc. I've taken 1,160 steps today with my 3DS.
A passive networking mode called StreetPass also exchanges Miis and other data with any other 3DS-toters who may come within range, even when the system is asleep in your pocket or bag. There haven't been too many 3DS players on the streets of NYC this week, but I'm excited to see how this feature takes shape in the big city once it goes on sale here.
Faces are also applied to Face Raiders, a fun built-in mini game for shooting cartoon balloons of your friends' faces out of the sky (as viewed by your 3-D camera). And then there are...
AR Games: The easiest way to wow someone with your new 3DS is to plunk one of the included AR Game cards down on a table and play AR Games, a pre-loaded suite of augmented-reality mini games that turn your tabletop (again as viewed by the 3-D camera on the back) into the stage for a dragon hunt, an archery range, a fishing pond and more. It's pretty magical, and while the replay value is not high, it's a great way to immediately show off all the capabilities of the machine at once.
Super Street Fighter 4: 3D Edition: The best launch game by far. I'm a Street Fighter fan already, and on the 3DS, this feels like full-blown Street Fighter 4 as it runs on my Xbox 360. The graphics are great, the 3-D effect perfectly implemented (including a new over-the-shoulder fight perspective), and online battles are possible. This is the game I've played most.
Battery Life: So bad I'll say it a few more times: battery life, battery life, battery bife. It's a terrible sign when even the often-inflated ratings provided by the manufacturer are embarrassingly low. Here, it's just 3-5 hours of 3-D play (compared to 9-14 on the DSi and 15-19 on the DS Lite). In the real world, you can expect to get even less than that sometimes. Having Wi-Fi on is the biggest battery suck--battling online with Street Fighter sapped a 75-percent full battery down to nearly a quarter in just under an hour. You can easily disable Wi-Fi with a dedicated switch on the side, but it's a shame the Wi-Fi is so inefficient, as it's necessary to enable cool features like StreetPass.
You can tell Nintendo is painfully aware of this deficiency. A new charging cradle is included in the box (meant to say "look how convenient it is to charge!") and instead of the 30-40 minutes of low-battery warning via an unblinking LED found on previous DS systems, the 3DS employs two red LEDs that blink angrily when juice is running out. It's best to heed their warning and save your game, because the time from low-battery indication to auto-shut-down can be just a minute or two.
So if your DS is a particularly friendly companion on long trips, expect to spend a lot of time playing at the lowest display brightness and with Wi-Fi disabled. Or be stuck reading a book after your battery dies.
Varying qualities of 3-D: How effective and tolerable the 3-D effects are seems to vary largely from game to game. Where Super Street Fighter IV almost never makes my eyes uncomfortable, and employs a great sense of depth rather than a constant barrage of objects flying out from the screen, Madden Football is full of jarring perspective changes and graphic elements. Thankfully you can dial back the 3-D effect for these games, but what's the fun in that? It will be interesting to see how developers maintain quality control in this new variable of game design.
Hardware design: To me, the DS Lite/DSi are some of the more pleasingly designed gadgets I've owned. Holding and using one, you get the sense that every superfluous element has been eliminated, and every necessary element has been honed down to its most precise form. And while the 3DS shares a very similar chassis, the details don't seem quite as locked down to me. The hinge jiggles when open a bit more than my DSi, and the whole thing feels a tad more cheap and plastic-y. A minor quibble.
No Mario! Nintendo hasn't launched many major consoles without Mario. And even more surprising, beyond our favorite plumber, very few recognizable Nintendo franchises are here at the start (the exception is Pilotwings Resort, which I found to be one of the more eye-straining games when I played it at the system's U.S. debut event earlier this year, interestingly enough). Games like Lego Star Wars III: Clone Wars show that your typical platform action is a blast in 3-D, so I can't wait for whatever Nintendo has cooked up for Mario, who is usually saved for its genre- and platform-defining titles.
$250, which is too much, considering the battery limitations (and that the DSi was $80 cheaper at $170).
Overall, the 3DS is a joy to play. For the most part, the glasses-free 3-D "just works" and is a thrilling experience that adds significantly to most games, even when it's not employed as a major gameplay element. I can't wait to see what developers (especially Nintendo's own) do with its capabilities.
That said, the battery life is a huge bummer. If you're like me, you grow almost afraid to use any gadget with such poor battery longevity; there's a nagging anxiety in the back of your mind that what you're doing won't last, especially if you feel like cranking up the display brightness (where it's at its prettiest) and using Wi-Fi to get the most out of your gadget. This is an unpleasant feeling.
Nintendo loves to release physically enhanced versions of its portable consoles pretty regularly, so it's safe to bet that a slimmer 3DS with better battery capacity (plus more efficient components) is on the horizon. That almost certainly won't happen any earlier than 12 months from now, though, so for the time being, the battery life (and price) will be the price to pay for what is otherwise top-notch portable 3-D gaming.
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Nintendo ditches glasses in the first major gadget with a glasses-free 3-D display. Find out how it plays in our test
Nintendo 3DS on the New York subway Awaiting Street Pass friends! John Mahoney
The latest version of Nintendo's wildly, globally popular DS handheld gaming system (which goes on sale this weekend in the US) is an exciting gadget. It's the first major mainstream launch of a glasses-free 3-D display, something that bodes well for the future of the extra-dimensional entertainment world currently being pursued at full throttle by multiple industries. Is glasses-free 3-D gaming for real? I've been playing for the last week to find out.
You may already have seen our initial impressions and my general thoughts on 3-D gaming here, and after a week with the 3DS, I'm still sold. Gaming in 3-D is great fun, when it works. Which it does very consistently on the 3DS.
The aforementioned glasses-free display is the big one: it employs a parallax-barrier LCD (which we tore open to show you How It Works here). What's neat about the LCD parallax barrier is that the affect can be fine-tuned with a slider, ranging from a crystal-clear 2-D image all the way to full 3-D.
When side by side with the previous generation DSi, there are several other changes: aside from being in 3-D, the screen is also larger at 3.5 inches and has a higher resolution at 400 x 240 pixels (800 x 240 if you count the discrete images for each eye, up from the DSi's 3-inch, 256 x 192 pixel display); a slightly beefier case (just over two millimeters thicker and 16 grams heavier); and 2 GB of internal storage in addition to an SD card slot (it comes with a 2GB card in the box, for 4GB total). There's a 3-D camera on the back plus an additional front-facing single-lens camera for self-portraits; on the outside, an analog thumbstick joins the traditional D-pad on the left side of the controls; and, rounding out the insides, a gyroscope for orientation sensing has been added, as well as a more powerful processor and increased RAM.
Gaming in 3-D: I will say it again: video games are the most natural use for 3-D screens (my thoughts on why are here). On the 3DS the 3-D effect is, for me, very well implemented. There is a definite sweet spot, which lives around 14-16 inches from your eyeballs when held straight-on, and if you venture too far out of it, the screen can be blurred (interestingly, there are sweetspots to the left and right as well, for friends looking over your shoulder). But after a very brief adjustment, I found it easy to stay in the zone and keep the 3-D view consistent.
That said, some friends who played had a harder time adjusting initially. It's probably smart to get some playtime before purchasing just to make sure your eyes and the 3DS get along.
The basics: The 3DS's system software, like most everything else Nintendo, is beautifully designed, interface wise. Lots of big rounded corners, sans-serif fonts, pleasing color schemes and cute icons--I love it. It also multitasks rather elegantly, allowing you to drop out of any game you're running to quickly change the display brightness, take a photo with the camera, jot a note, check notifications or friend status, etc, all while keeping your game's state preserved.Plenty to do: In addition to games, there's lots of fun to be had with the pre-loaded software. The Wii's customizable Mii avatars are here, complete with a new feature to auto-create Miis based on a photograph of your own face. A built-in pedometer tracks your steps and doles out "Play Coins" for every ten you take, which you can use to unlock additional features like more minigames in the AR Games section, etc. I've taken 1,160 steps today with my 3DS.
A passive networking mode called StreetPass also exchanges Miis and other data with any other 3DS-toters who may come within range, even when the system is asleep in your pocket or bag. There haven't been too many 3DS players on the streets of NYC this week, but I'm excited to see how this feature takes shape in the big city once it goes on sale here.
Faces are also applied to Face Raiders, a fun built-in mini game for shooting cartoon balloons of your friends' faces out of the sky (as viewed by your 3-D camera). And then there are...
AR Games: The easiest way to wow someone with your new 3DS is to plunk one of the included AR Game cards down on a table and play AR Games, a pre-loaded suite of augmented-reality mini games that turn your tabletop (again as viewed by the 3-D camera on the back) into the stage for a dragon hunt, an archery range, a fishing pond and more. It's pretty magical, and while the replay value is not high, it's a great way to immediately show off all the capabilities of the machine at once.
Super Street Fighter 4: 3D Edition: The best launch game by far. I'm a Street Fighter fan already, and on the 3DS, this feels like full-blown Street Fighter 4 as it runs on my Xbox 360. The graphics are great, the 3-D effect perfectly implemented (including a new over-the-shoulder fight perspective), and online battles are possible. This is the game I've played most.
Battery Life: So bad I'll say it a few more times: battery life, battery life, battery bife. It's a terrible sign when even the often-inflated ratings provided by the manufacturer are embarrassingly low. Here, it's just 3-5 hours of 3-D play (compared to 9-14 on the DSi and 15-19 on the DS Lite). In the real world, you can expect to get even less than that sometimes. Having Wi-Fi on is the biggest battery suck--battling online with Street Fighter sapped a 75-percent full battery down to nearly a quarter in just under an hour. You can easily disable Wi-Fi with a dedicated switch on the side, but it's a shame the Wi-Fi is so inefficient, as it's necessary to enable cool features like StreetPass.
You can tell Nintendo is painfully aware of this deficiency. A new charging cradle is included in the box (meant to say "look how convenient it is to charge!") and instead of the 30-40 minutes of low-battery warning via an unblinking LED found on previous DS systems, the 3DS employs two red LEDs that blink angrily when juice is running out. It's best to heed their warning and save your game, because the time from low-battery indication to auto-shut-down can be just a minute or two.
So if your DS is a particularly friendly companion on long trips, expect to spend a lot of time playing at the lowest display brightness and with Wi-Fi disabled. Or be stuck reading a book after your battery dies.
Varying qualities of 3-D: How effective and tolerable the 3-D effects are seems to vary largely from game to game. Where Super Street Fighter IV almost never makes my eyes uncomfortable, and employs a great sense of depth rather than a constant barrage of objects flying out from the screen, Madden Football is full of jarring perspective changes and graphic elements. Thankfully you can dial back the 3-D effect for these games, but what's the fun in that? It will be interesting to see how developers maintain quality control in this new variable of game design.
Hardware design: To me, the DS Lite/DSi are some of the more pleasingly designed gadgets I've owned. Holding and using one, you get the sense that every superfluous element has been eliminated, and every necessary element has been honed down to its most precise form. And while the 3DS shares a very similar chassis, the details don't seem quite as locked down to me. The hinge jiggles when open a bit more than my DSi, and the whole thing feels a tad more cheap and plastic-y. A minor quibble.
No Mario! Nintendo hasn't launched many major consoles without Mario. And even more surprising, beyond our favorite plumber, very few recognizable Nintendo franchises are here at the start (the exception is Pilotwings Resort, which I found to be one of the more eye-straining games when I played it at the system's U.S. debut event earlier this year, interestingly enough). Games like Lego Star Wars III: Clone Wars show that your typical platform action is a blast in 3-D, so I can't wait for whatever Nintendo has cooked up for Mario, who is usually saved for its genre- and platform-defining titles.
$250, which is too much, considering the battery limitations (and that the DSi was $80 cheaper at $170).
Overall, the 3DS is a joy to play. For the most part, the glasses-free 3-D "just works" and is a thrilling experience that adds significantly to most games, even when it's not employed as a major gameplay element. I can't wait to see what developers (especially Nintendo's own) do with its capabilities.
That said, the battery life is a huge bummer. If you're like me, you grow almost afraid to use any gadget with such poor battery longevity; there's a nagging anxiety in the back of your mind that what you're doing won't last, especially if you feel like cranking up the display brightness (where it's at its prettiest) and using Wi-Fi to get the most out of your gadget. This is an unpleasant feeling.
Nintendo loves to release physically enhanced versions of its portable consoles pretty regularly, so it's safe to bet that a slimmer 3DS with better battery capacity (plus more efficient components) is on the horizon. That almost certainly won't happen any earlier than 12 months from now, though, so for the time being, the battery life (and price) will be the price to pay for what is otherwise top-notch portable 3-D gaming.
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PopSci.com on The Colbert Report The Colbert Report
Earlier this week, Stephen Colbert gave us a nice shout-out for Rebecca Boyle's post on the first robots to jump into the fray at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Seems like Colbert may have wanted to see some of Japan's own robotic earthquake helpers, or at least a contribution from somewhere other than perpetual Report punching bag France.
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This week, if you've been watching television, you may have seen Dr. Nathan Myhrvold dipping his hand in liquid nitrogen on the Colbert Report or making a striped omelet on the Today show. We also saw the Modernist team at the New York Academy of Sciences, where everyone in the standing-room audience got a bowl of modernist pistachio gelato, which is made of nothing but pure pistachios ultra-homogenized into a cream.
Back in January, as you recall, I went to Seattle to visit the Modernist Cuisine kitchen laboratory, talk to Myhrvold and his team, and eat striped omelet and pistachio gelato long before TV stars got their famous paws on it.
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Magnetic Gels on the Move
Mikl�s Zr�nyi of Semmelweiss University in Budapest, Hungary, has created some gels that are anything but gellin?. In fact, these gels are moving, shaking, and otherwise getting around with a little help from magnetism. The gel ?snakes?--made from a mix of polymer and metal particles--bend to match the shape of any magnetic field exerted upon them.
That means with a little ingenuity, these gels can be manipulated in a variety of ways using either permanent magnets or electromagnets, depending on the shape and strength of the fields. As you can see in the video below, that means you can make them do all kinds of quirky things. But as New Scientist notes, a magnetic material that?s also soft and flexible could find an array of applications, like in artificial robot muscles or to replace machine parts that are usually rigid with softer alternatives.
[New Scientist]
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Pre-Clovis Toolkit A sample of pre-Clovis tools found in central Texas, dating to 15,500 years ago. Scientists say the trove of tools and toolmaking supplies could finally prove the Clovis people were not the first Americans. Courtesy Michael R. Waters
A prehistoric mobile toolkit buried in milky creek sediments in central Texas shows humans first settled North America 2,500 years earlier than previously thought. The finding could shatter the prevailing theory of paleo-American settlement, which holds that people left northeast Asia via a land bridge through the Bering Strait and settled the continent 13,000 years ago.
Archaeologists excavating the Debra L. Friedkin site at Buttermilk Creek, about 40 miles northwest of Austin, found ancient human artifacts spanning 15,500 years, according to a paper published today in the journal Science. The artifacts were buried in neatly stacked cake-like layers of sediment, with little or no mixing between the layers, scientists said.
?People were over almost the entire continent, from Oregon to Wisconsin to Pennsylvania to Florida to Texas, by 15,000 years ago,? said Michael Waters, director of Texas A&M's Center for the Study of First Americans and lead author of the study. ?It?s time to abandon once and for all the ?Clovis-First? model, and develop a new model for the peopling of the Americas.?
Waters said the team found 16,000 artifacts, mostly pieces of rock left over from the tool-making process. The site yielded 56 tools, including 12 knives; several rocks on their way to becoming spear points; 20 blades and small ?blade-lets,? choppers and more.
?This is a mobile tool kit, something which is easily transported. It?s lightweight,? Waters said. ?These are the types of tools you would have if you were a mobile hunter and gatherer.?
The Clovis culture has long been the benchmark for the earliest human habitation of the Americas. Its name comes from 11,200-year-old stone spear points first discovered in the 1930s near Clovis, N.M. Several other archaeological sites from Pennsylvania to Chile harbor evidence of much older settlements, but the ?Clovis first? model prevails among many archaeologists.The Buttermilk Creek artifacts were found directly below a layer of Clovis relics, and sediment tests and a unique dating method show that in this case, Clovis was not there first. The artifacts are similar to Clovis relics, suggesting they are precursors to Clovis technology and were later adopted and modified by Clovis cultures, Waters said.
?These people ... grew in population size and eventually experimented with the lithic material that was available to them, and then would eventually develop into the technology that we recognize as Clovis,? he said.
Dennis Jenkins, senior archaeologist for the Museum of Natural and Cultural History at the University of Oregon, and who was not involved in the research, said he was skeptical at first. Jenkins has supervised more than 100 excavations, including extensive work at Oregon?s Paisley Caves, where he found fossilized pre-Clovis-era human excrement in 2002. Almost every time, sediment layers are mixed up by burrowing animals, plant roots or other phenomena, making it difficult to prove which tools come from which layers. But the Buttermilk Creek site is different, he said.
?(Waters) is arguing the site is nicely stacked together like a cake, and basically each layer of the cake is separate from the layers above it and below it,? he said.
As Buttermilk Creek flooded over the millennia, it saturated the ground and deposited sediments over the surrounding meadows. The clay settled and compacted over thousands of years, Jenkins said. Waters was able to reconstruct the layers and connect various artifacts to each layer.
??He meticulously addressed each question about the movement of artifacts. It is just an incredible piece of scientific work,? Jenkins said. ?We can be skeptical, but the evidence supports what he says.?
Buttermilk Creek Sediments: �Courtesy Michael R. Waters
Though rich in tools and tool fragments, the site was short on organic material, making it impossible to measure the tools? age using radiocarbon dating. Instead, researchers turned to a relatively new technique called optically stimulated luminescence, which measures doses of ionizing radiation to determine when a mineral like quartz or feldspar was last exposed to sunlight. Scientists have to account for environmental radiation dosage, by measuring sediment exposure to radioactive elements like uranium, thorium and potassium-40. Then they can measure how the quartz changes in response to a light source, in this case blue light.
?A time-dependent signal accumulates after the grain is shielded from light exposure,? said Steven Forman, earth and environmental sciences professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
Jenkins said the OSL technique has a much greater margin of error than radiocarbon dating ? in some cases, the error range is as wide as 800 years, compared to about 25 years for radiocarbon dating.
?Archaeologists are going to look at this and go, whoa, gee whiz, why are they so broad?? he said.
After consulting with radiocarbon dating experts, he said he was convinced of the technique?s veracity, however. He believes the finding will help settle the debate about Clovis First: ?This is exactly the ind of meticulous work that the Clovis First people have been asking for,? he said.
Waters said archaeologists can now start looking for relationships between pre-Clovis artifacts and the Old World, and how the first humans came to the Americas.
?If you are at 15,000 years ago and you?re in central Texas, that tells us that somebody was here even earlier, because you have to get to central Texas and that would take a while. At 15,500 years ago, the ice-free corridor (in Canada) was closed. The two ice sheets were merged. So this lends indirect credence to the idea that people came along the coast and entered the Americas,? he said. ?It opens up and creates all sorts of new possibilities and new thinking about the first people to enter the continent.?
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The Multitouch Microscope
Mashing web-based virtual microscopy and a massive multi-touch display surface, Finnish researchers have created a new interface for laboratory science that allows researchers to pan and zoom around a microscope sample via a tabletop or wall-mounted touchscreen, zooming in so close that sub-cellular details can be seen.
Given the fact that the minimum size for the screen is 46 inches--and it can be much larger, like the size of a conference table or even an entire wall--the device is capable of making the very small very large. The multitouch surface can recognize the touches of several different people at the same time, adding a whole new dimension to collaborative science and lab instruction.
This isn?t just an overblown iPad app--files can be up to 200 gigabytes, so there?s some real computing power backing the multitouch microscope. But from a technology standpoint, it?s not so very complex. Samples are digitized using a microscopy scanner and put onto a server from which the touchscreen device continuously receives them over the Web.From there, an entire group can stand around a massive visualization of a sample, swiping, zooming, and otherwise manipulating it intuitively and without any kind of serious training. We?ll always be a bit nostalgic for the old days when we stained our own slides in chem lab, but it?s hard to argue that a wall-sized, multitouch microscope isn?t extremely cool.
[Eurekalert]
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The Multitouch Microscope
Mashing web-based virtual microscopy and a massive multi-touch display surface, Finnish researchers have created a new interface for laboratory science that allows researchers to pan and zoom around a microscope sample via a tabletop or wall-mounted touchscreen, zooming in so close that sub-cellular details can be seen.
Given the fact that the minimum size for the screen is 46 inches--and it can be much larger, like the size of a conference table or even an entire wall--the device is capable of making the very small very large. The multitouch surface can recognize the touches of several different people at the same time, adding a whole new dimension to collaborative science and lab instruction.
This isn?t just an overblown iPad app--files can be up to 200 gigabytes, so there?s some real computing power backing the multitouch microscope. But from a technology standpoint, it?s not so very complex. Samples are digitized using a microscopy scanner and put onto a server from which the touchscreen device continuously receives them over the Web.From there, an entire group can stand around a massive visualization of a sample, swiping, zooming, and otherwise manipulating it intuitively and without any kind of serious training. We?ll always be a bit nostalgic for the old days when we stained our own slides in chem lab, but it?s hard to argue that a wall-sized, multitouch microscope isn?t extremely cool.
[Eurekalert]
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3D 360-Degree Fog Bunny DigInfoNews
A new, truly 360-degree 3-D display has been developed by researchers at Osaka University. The fog display is created by three projectors each beaming a different image into a column of thin fog, making the resulting image appear 3-dimensional from all angles. This technique means that viewers can physically walk around the display to see it from different vantage points without losing the 3-D effect.
As we see in the video, the image quality is still a little shaky, but researchers say their next step is to make the technology ?more stable.? Applications for the 360-Degree Observable Fog Display are not exactly clear, but researcher Asuka Yagi says in the video that they hope to apply it in ?healthcare and entertainment.? The project was inspired by amusement park fog displays, so we can only hope that means one day your children will be taking pictures with 3-D fog princesses at theme parks.
[CrunchGear]
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3D 360-Degree Fog Bunny DigInfoNews
A new, truly 360-degree 3-D display has been developed by researchers at Osaka University. The fog display is created by three projectors each beaming a different image into a column of thin fog, making the resulting image appear 3-dimensional from all angles. This technique means that viewers can physically walk around the display to see it from different vantage points without losing the 3-D effect.
As we see in the video, the image quality is still a little shaky, but researchers say their next step is to make the technology ?more stable.? Applications for the 360-Degree Observable Fog Display are not exactly clear, but researcher Asuka Yagi says in the video that they hope to apply it in ?healthcare and entertainment.? The project was inspired by amusement park fog displays, so we can only hope that means one day your children will be taking pictures with 3-D fog princesses at theme parks.
[CrunchGear]
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Earth at Night NASA
During the next two weeks, you can help build a map of global light pollution, assisting scientists and astronomers as they monitor the loss of virgin night skies. You just have to look at the stars and write down what you see ? or, more likely, what you don?t see.
The GLOBE At Night program is encouraging the public to look at certain constellations and compare observations with brightness maps on its site. You can enter your data in a new web app, accessible via tablets and mobile phones. The program, in its sixth year, hopes crowd-sourced night-sky observations will yield the most accurate Earth-at-night maps.
Satellite views like the one above can tell the story only so well; ground-based observations are a better gauge of how light from buildings and other infrastructure illuminates most people?s night skies.
By the turn of the millennium, two-thirds of the world no longer saw a virgin night sky, and in some places this may never be reversed. More than half the world?s population lives in cities, the most light-polluted of which prevent even the Big Dipper from being seen. Along with robbing us of our natural heritage, light pollution can be detrimental to human health, and it can also harm birds, sea turtles and bats, among many other creatures who are confused by artificial lighting.
The GLOBE At Night project runs through April 6.
[via Wired]
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TEROOS TEROOS
Most telepresence robots are geared toward providing the user with a remote presence in the workplace or home. TEROOS, a shoulder-mounted telepresence robot developed by researchers at Keio University and elsewhere in Japan, is making telepresence more of a social experience.
Video chat, the robots creators say, is great for stationary exchanges between two people, but what if you want to do some long-distance antiquing or go on a long-distance date? ?With this system, the person who's going out carries an avatar on their shoulder, so the other person can operate the avatar to look around freely,? the demonstrator explains in the video below. ?This can provide an experience just like going shopping or having a date with the other person.?
See, you carry TEROOS around on your shoulder but someone else controls it, using its built-in camera, microphone, and speaker to look around and communicate with the wearer. Communications and commands are relayed via a smartphone, which is passed to TEROOS via Bluetooth. Skype handles the audio/video exchange between TEROOS and its remote operator.We?re not exactly sold on the dating aspect, even if some effort has been taken to make the eyes lifelike (the operator can change the ?facial expression? by clicking on a variety of expressions in the control software). Besides, what couple wants to feel like they are attached at the shoulder? Still, it?s a neat little robot and could provide a nice social outlet for those with limited mobility.
[DigInfo via io9
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Space Tracking and Surveillance System (STSS) Northrop Grumman
When it comes to space-based missile defense, history tells us it?s a good idea to be skeptical of any given development. Nonetheless, it appears Northrop Grumman has gone and done something pretty cool, tracking a ballistic missile through all phases of flight, a feat one Grumman VP called ?the Holy Grail for missile defense.?
Such a birth-to-death tracking has never been achieved before from space, but two unclassified low Earth orbiting satellites launched in 2009--known as Space Tracking and Surveillance System (STSS) spacecraft--managed the feat back on March 16 (the test results weren?t made public until March 22).
The birth-to-death test is but a milestone on the way to loftier goals Northrop Grumman and the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (the body that commissioned the STSSs) have in mind for their missile tracking satellites. After launching in 2009, both STSS spacecraft were put through a series of on-orbit maneuvers and calibrations, a process that ended in November. Since then, they?ve tracked several missile launches through various phases of rocket flight, demonstrating the ability to relay information to each other.On March 16, the Pacific Missile Range Facility in Hawaii fired off an ARAV-B target missile to see if the satellites could follow it start to finish. Sure enough one of the STSS spacecraft detected the heat signature of a launch event and locked onto its position through boost. Then--and this is the critical part--it passed the tracking data off to the second satellite, which followed it through space, re-entry, and splashdown.
That?s significant for two reasons. For one, they demonstrated the ability to pass tracking data along from one spacecraft to another effectively, a key capability for any future missile tracking constellation. But more critically, the test bodes well for upcoming test in which the satellites won?t just pass tracking data among themselves but also share it with Navy Aegis ships cruising on the waves below.
Later this year the MDA will test the STSS spacecraft to see if their tracking data is good enough to cue the launch of ship-based interceptor missiles. As it stands, those Navy Aegis ships can only launch interceptors if the ship?s own radar is locked onto the missile. If it turns out the satellite data is good enough target a SM-3 interceptor, it would drastically increase the effective range of each ship. It would also show, in demo at least, that a space-based missile defense system actually might be effective.
[Space News]
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3-D Photo Stitching via Technology Review
A new mobile app turns your cell phone into a 3-D scanner, stitching together overlapping snapshots to render a 3-D model of any object. A smooth 3-D model of a car, which can be turned and spun in any direction, would take about 40 snapshots; a model of a guitar took only eight.
Microsoft researchers used PhotoSynth technology to build the app, but it goes beyond that photo-stitching program and also calculates the depth of an object. The model determines the camera?s location in space and determines the depth. You don?t have to worry about capturing perfectly overlapping panoramas ? the software can smooth it all out, as Microsoft researcher Johannes Kopf explains to Technology Review.
The software preserves straight lines and eliminates holes and weird triangular gaps, a common problem in 3-D stitching.To make a model, you would walk around an object, snapping overlapping pictures from different angles. Upload them to a server for processing, and the app downloads a 3-D model that you can grab and spin on your phone?s touchscreen. It recreates your view as you walked around, allowing you to see the object from every angle. Technology Review explains in further detail.
This could be useful for selling items online, among a myriad other uses. The app uses much less bandwidth than a 3-D video would, because it only needs a few images.
The project was developed at Microsoft's Interactive Visual Media group.
[Technology Review]
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Music Through the Mind Eduardo Miranda
Paralysis patients could play music with their minds, using a new brain-control interface that senses brain impulses and translates them into musical notes.
Users must teach themselves how to associate brain signals with specific tasks, causing neuronal activity that the brain scanners can pick up. Then they can make music.
It?s a pretty unique use of brain-computer interfaces, which are already being used to do things like drive cars, control robots and play video games. The device was developed by Eduardo Miranda, a composer and computer-music specialist at the University of Plymouth, UK. A composer by trade, Miranda said he was captivated by the idea of using a musical brain-controlled interface for therapeutic purposes. ?Now I can't separate this work from my activities as a composer,? he told Nature News.
Patients with neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson?s or Alzheimer?s can use music to walk to a rhythm or even to trigger memories or emotions. But stroke patients or those with locked-in syndrome can?t interact with music beyond just listening to it. With this system, patients with physical limitations might be able to use music for therapy, too ? truly making music the medicine of the mind.Like other brain-computer interfaces, a user calibrates the system ? and his or her brain ? by learning to associate certain brain signals with a stimulus. While wearing an EEG cap, patients focus their attention on four small buttons on a computer screen, each of which triggers a series of musical notes. The user must direct his or her gaze at the target corresponding to the action he or she would like to perform, Miranda and colleagues explain.
Miranda and computer scientists at the University of Essex tested the system on a patient with locked-in syndrome, who learned the system in about two hours and was soon playing notes along with a backup track.
By varying levels of concentration, she learned to vary the amplitude of the EEG, which allowed her to choose among the different notes, like striking piano keys.
A future version of the system would not require calibration, relying on advanced algorithms to sense a user?s neuronal response to each button, the researchers say.
The work is reported in the journal Music and Medicine.
[Nature News]
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HTC Evo 3D Sprint/HTC
Today at the CTIA conference in Orlando, HTC and Sprint announced the new HTC Evo 3D, which will be one of the first 3-D-capable smartphones in the country, just following the LG Thrill 4G on AT&T. These phones are both big, powerful Android phones, with an interesting twist of glasses-free 3-D displays.
The Evo 3D, in some ways the follow-up to the Evo 4G, boasts a dual-core 1.2GHz processor, WiMax (4G) compatibility, and 1GB of memory, as well as Android 2.3 "Gingerbread," the newest and surprisingly rare version of Android. But what we're really interested in is the screen, an impressive 4.3-inch "QHD" screen with a 960 x 540 resolution, a much-needed and substantial bump from HTC's previous phones of the same size. The screen is an auto-stereoscopic display with a parallax barrier--similar to the Nintendo 3DS, it relies on the viewer being at a particular distance from the screen, but does seem to work fairly well at creating a mild illusion of depth. You can read more about how this kind of 3-D works in our explainer.
Both the Evo 3D and the Thrill 4G boast dual cameras so you can shoot photos and videos in 3-D. HTC claims that the Evo will be able to shoot 720p video in 2-D, and 1080p in 3-D, which is pretty impressive, supposing the image quality is good.
The LG Thrill 4G is a rebadged LG Optimus 3D, which I got a chance to play with at CES this past January. It is, we should add, an HSPA+ device and not a true 4G device--HSPA+ is AT&T's boondoggly, theoretically bumped-up 3G network, but in our tests we found it actually slower than 3G. That makes the Evo 3D much more exciting; after all, WiMax legitimately is far faster than traditional 3G. That being said, the Thrill seems like a pretty nice phone, fairly similar to the Evo with its 4.3-inch screen and dual-core processor.
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HTC Evo 3D Sprint/HTC
Today at the CTIA conference in Orlando, HTC and Sprint announced the new HTC Evo 3D, which will be one of the first 3-D-capable smartphones in the country, just following the LG Thrill 4G on AT&T. These phones are both big, powerful Android phones, with an interesting twist of glasses-free 3-D displays.
The Evo 3D, in some ways the follow-up to the Evo 4G, boasts a dual-core 1.2GHz processor, WiMax (4G) compatibility, and 1GB of memory, as well as Android 2.3 "Gingerbread," the newest and surprisingly rare version of Android. But what we're really interested in is the screen, an impressive 4.3-inch "QHD" screen with a 960 x 540 resolution, a much-needed and substantial bump from HTC's previous phones of the same size. The screen is an auto-stereoscopic display with a parallax barrier--similar to the Nintendo 3DS, it relies on the viewer being at a particular distance from the screen, but does seem to work fairly well at creating a mild illusion of depth. You can read more about how this kind of 3-D works in our explainer.
Both the Evo 3D and the Thrill 4G boast dual cameras so you can shoot photos and videos in 3-D. HTC claims that the Evo will be able to shoot 720p video in 2-D, and 1080p in 3-D, which is pretty impressive, supposing the image quality is good.
The LG Thrill 4G is a rebadged LG Optimus 3D, which I got a chance to play with at CES this past January. It is, we should add, an HSPA+ device and not a true 4G device--HSPA+ is AT&T's boondoggly, theoretically bumped-up 3G network, but in our tests we found it actually slower than 3G. That makes the Evo 3D much more exciting; after all, WiMax legitimately is far faster than traditional 3G. That being said, the Thrill seems like a pretty nice phone, fairly similar to the Evo with its 4.3-inch screen and dual-core processor.
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It?s reminiscent of Cartman?s runaway Trapper Keeper notebook in that long-ago episode of South Park, but researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison may be scratching the surface of a new kind of brain/machine interface by creating computer chips that are wired together with living nerve cells.
A team there has found that mouse nerve cells will connect with each other across a network of tiny tubes threaded through a semiconductor material. It?s not exactly clear at this point how the nerve cells are functioning, but what is clear is that the cells seem to have an affinity for the tiny tubes, and that alone has some interesting implications.
To create the nerve-chip hybrid, the researchers created tubes of layered silicon and germanium that are large enough for the nerve cells? tendrils to navigate but too small for the actual body of the cell to pass through. They then introduced nerve cells to the tubes and found that the cells will readily thread their tendrils through them--even through complex geometries like helical curves--to connect with each other physically.What isn?t clear is whether or not the cells are actually communicating with each other they way they would naturally. Going forward, the team aims to get sensors into the chips to see exactly how they are interacting. But the fact that nerve cells will follow the tubes along a preset path designed by researchers belies thrilling prospects.
For instance, nerve-electronic hybrid chips would make great places to test neurological drugs or to study the way nerve cells afflicted with disorders like Parkinson?s communicate. But even more tantalizing is the idea of a nerve-computer interface that would enable the kind of Skywalker-esque control of artificial limbs that is the holy grail prosthetics research.
[Discovery News]
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About 20 years ago, the static split-and-tilt ergonomic keyboard became the wrist-friendly standard. Today, Smartfish Technologies, a company founded by a former chiropractor, has a better approach: the Engage, a keyboard that periodically shifts its position. The goal is to constantly change your typing angle, thereby reducing the chance of repetitive-stress injuries. A motor inside the keyboard tweaks the separation (up to 1.4 inches) and tilt (up to 6 degrees) of each side in small increments every 2,500 keystrokes. You can also alter the frequency of changes.
We used an early model for several days, typing articles on a Windows 7 PC as the Engage adjusted itself automatically. We paid close attention to key feel and wrist comfort and maintained an upright sitting position (we didn?t want to sabotage any benefits by slouching).
The ever-changing keyboard was startling at first, but we had no problem acclimating to it. Each shift takes only about two seconds, so using the Engage for long periods is comfortable. The downsides: the motor is noisy, the keyboard a tad high (which can itself cause stress), and the keys a bit stiff. But the company is already working on a model that fixes these problems, along with an additional nonsplitting option that tweaks just your wrist angle.
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About 20 years ago, the static split-and-tilt ergonomic keyboard became the wrist-friendly standard. Today, Smartfish Technologies, a company founded by a former chiropractor, has a better approach: the Engage, a keyboard that periodically shifts its position. The goal is to constantly change your typing angle, thereby reducing the chance of repetitive-stress injuries. A motor inside the keyboard tweaks the separation (up to 1.4 inches) and tilt (up to 6 degrees) of each side in small increments every 2,500 keystrokes. You can also alter the frequency of changes.
We used an early model for several days, typing articles on a Windows 7 PC as the Engage adjusted itself automatically. We paid close attention to key feel and wrist comfort and maintained an upright sitting position (we didn?t want to sabotage any benefits by slouching).
The ever-changing keyboard was startling at first, but we had no problem acclimating to it. Each shift takes only about two seconds, so using the Engage for long periods is comfortable. The downsides: the motor is noisy, the keyboard a tad high (which can itself cause stress), and the keys a bit stiff. But the company is already working on a model that fixes these problems, along with an additional nonsplitting option that tweaks just your wrist angle.
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Today in clever science tricks: a new kind of microscopy that can see down to resolutions smaller than the wavelength of the imaging light itself. On its face, this shouldn?t be possible; the smallest resolution you should be able to get in the visible spectrum is about 200 nanometers because of the lower limits of visible light?s wavelengths. But with a special lens, Dutch researchers have used 561-nanometer laser light to image gold nanoparticles just 97 nanometers across. It?s the first lens to provide a sub-100 nanometer resolution with visible light.
So how do you cross that wavelength limit and image something smaller than the wavelength of the light itself? Their new lens is basically a frosted piece of glass--a transparent slab that?s etched on one side to scatter the light going through. Picture it with the etched side facing the light source; the light hits the etching and scatters, bending the wave front and producing distorted light from the other side.
The Dutch team (they?re from the University of Twente) measures this light distortion using a CCD chip, which gives them a reading of the distorted light?s shape. Using that data, they then send the light through the lens again, but this time they run it through a modulator that lets them distort the light to their liking. In this way they can actually inject light through the lens that?s already distorted in such a way that it cancels out the lens distortion.But that?s not the trick. The real trick is tweaking the light just right so that it comes into a focal point that is much tighter than what can be achieved using a regular lens relying on only refraction to focus the light. The team?s setup is so spot-on accurate that they can actually move the focal point around, allowing them to scan back and forth over a nanoscale object and build an image.
Ninety-seven nanometers sets a new record for microscopy with visible light, but the team says with a bit more work they can get the resolution down to 72 nanometers. That more than doubles the resolution of conventional lenses, and could make microscopy in the visible range capable of resolving things like nanoelectric circuits or organelles that were previously too small to image with visible-light tools.
For the entire paper on the imaging method, check out arXiv.
[Technology Review]
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