We’ve all heard that it’s not safe to put metal in the microwave. But the fact of the matter is, we often put metals in the microwave—like when we heat up a Hot Pocket, for example. Its pouch has a thin layer of aluminum lining that is designed to absorb the microwaves and heat up a bit to brown the outside of the Hot Pocket.
Where are our mass-produced robot butlers already, the Rosies of our Jetsons families? Still a ways off, unfortunately, but here’s the next best thing: ‘Roboy,’ a child-like service bot that researchers are billing as “one of the most advanced humanoid robots.”
Roboy, which the inventors are trying to create in nine months, is tendon-based, and it’s modeled on people. Young ones, in this case. The idea is for it to help out with duties usually reserved for humans, depending on what the user needs. The robot, or at least similar robots, could help … Read More → "Robot boy to be ‘born’ in 9 months, and programmed to do all his chores"
Cars and cities don’t mix together very well. Most cities were built without the horseless carriage in mind and even the ones that tend to become overwhelmed by cars after a certain point. BMW Group and Local Motors’ “BMW Urban Driving Experience Challenge” hopes to redress the balance with car concepts that “do good” based on technology predicted to be available in 2025. The winners of the … Read More → "Second phase winners announced in BMW Urban Driving Experience Challenge"
If you’ve used location services on a phone for any length of time, you know they can quickly drain the battery. A Microsoft Research project suggests that there’s a way for location chips inside smartphones to use far less power.
Reducing the power consumption of GPS chips could not only extend the battery life of smartphones and tablets, it could also make it practical to add GPS functionality to more devices, including low-power remote sensors.
The biggest power hog inside a smartphone is the GPS chip. This component can … Read More → "Cloud-powered GPS chip slashes smartphone power consumption"
The amount of time and money needed to sequence genomes continued to fall this year, perhaps to no one’s surprise. But while the field seemed to be finally approaching the heralded $1,000 human genome, the implications of reaching that milestone are not clear. Without expert analysis, the result of sequencing a human genome is just a large file of letters. You still need to manipulate … Read More → "It’s all about the genes and the brain machines"
… Read More → "Newsweek’s last print cover features a hashtag"After announcing that it would be going all-digital in October, Newsweek has tweeted an early version of what will be the last print cover—and it features a hashtag.
via Design Taxi
Building up your beat lab’s equipment arsenal to finish up production on that 80s-themed mix-tape that you’ve been working on? Then you might want to check out Animoog 2.0 for iPad. Loaded with a smorgasbord of abilities, the updated synthesizer app adds features like scale lock and a note hold button that allows you to maintain tones between presets. Users also gain accelerometer-controlled sound modulation and … Read More → "Animoog 2.0 for iPad helps you crank out hits with accelerometer-controlled modulation"
First of all, how can non-invasive surgery even be possible? After all, even in the case of minimally-invasive laparoscopic surgery, small incisions are still made in the skin. Nonetheless, that’s just what scientists from the University of Michigan are proposing. They believe that it could be achieved by using a beam of sound, which would be emitted through the skin to a highly-focused point within the body – and they’ve already created such a beam and used it.
Focused sound waves are already used in the field of medicine, for doing … Read More → "Sonic “invisible scalpel” could be used for non-invasive surgery"
The silver lining of being a developing continent is that you can skip entire stages of technological progress, like going directly from no phones to cellphones without suffering through land lines in between. Africa, for example, now has more mobile subscribers than the United States or Europe, and that means big things for African economies.
via DVICE
Continue reading</ … Read More → "Africa boasts more cellphone users than all of North America"
