That fancy high-speed Phantom camera is pretty much a child’s toy when compared to MIT’s new hardware which can record at 1,000,000,000,000 frames per second. Fast enough to capture slow motion footage of light waves. More »
CERN is pouring cold water on the rumor it’s gonna announce the discovery of the Higgs at today’s seminar in Zurich. For the uninitiated: the Higgs-Boson is the particle that is believed to give all things mass: it surrounds us, penetrates us and binds the galaxy together. The scuttlebutt is that the ATLAS sensor picked up a Higgs with a mass of 125GeV (gigaelectronvolts) and rated at three-point-five-sigma — a one sigma barely warrants a mention, a five-sigma is a bona-fide scientific discovery. CERN hasn’t confirmed or denied anything, claiming it’s still got five inverse femtobarns worth of data (roughly 5 x 70 x 10^12 of individual collisions) to examine before it can be sure, so just chuck the one bottle of champagne into the refrigerator — better to be safe, eh?
Update: Looks like we don’t need to bust out the bubbly, after all. The conclusion from the two-hour presentation is that the ATLAS detector has been able to narrow down the region it believes the Higgs is in to 115.5GeV to 131GeV and that any discovery so-far only has a rating of two point three sigma. The CMS is similarly inconclusive, with results bobbing around the two sigma region. In short, whilst they know where they should look, they haven’t been able to find one — yet.
CERN: ‘Don’t believe the Higgs-Boson hype’ (update: not yet) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Dec 2011 09:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Google’s new Street View feature provides eerie glimpse of post-tsunami Japan originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Dec 2011 09:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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This article was written on August 30, 2006 by CyberNet.
Microsoft has finally depleted their supply of 100,000 downloads that they were giving out of Vista 5536. That build is considered to be Pre-RC1 but you shouldn’t be too disappointed if you didn’t get an opportunity to download it. If RC1 remains on schedule it should be available sometime next week.
The site for the download now says:
The Customer Preview Program is now closed.
We have reached our goal of 100,000 downloads for the pre-RC1 release and the program is now closed. Windows Vista RC1 will be available in the coming weeks. Please refer to the Customer Preview Program website for information, including DVD-burning instructions.
I am extremely happy that Microsoft did this because it is a really stable release for everything that I have been running on it. This is now my primary operating system on two computers and the only thing I lack is a widespread AntiVirus compatibility. AVG seems to be doing well for me but I was hoping to use Avast. For more details on the compatibility issue please refer to my previous article.
Remember that your Beta 2 keys do work with this build and can be activated on up to 10 different machines (I think that is what the number was). Happy testing!
Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com
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We’ve handled the PlayStation Vita often enough to know our way around its lightweight chassis and petite thumbsticks, but whenever we’ve tried to explore the handheld’s underlying user interface, event staff played interference. Developers at a recent Vita Hill Social Club event were much less shy, however, and let us poke and swipe through the Vita’s menu with hardly a shrug.
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Continue reading PlayStation Vita plays it smart with phone-like UI, we go hands-on
PlayStation Vita plays it smart with phone-like UI, we go hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Dec 2011 09:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Do you like the appearance of this home theater system?
(Credit:
In2Technologies)
At first glance, the Unity Home Theater is a T-shaped speaker system that looks like a Jenga tower of home theater equipment.
The setup aims to give consumers a Swiss Army Knife of entertainment with the inclusion of a 5.1 surround sound bar, subwoofer, Blu-ray/DVD player, HDMI pass-through, surge protector, and TV stand (up to 60 inches) in a single package. A power cord to Unity and a HDMI connection to the HDTV would be the only wires you would need to get started.
A home theater system without a jungle of cords that uses only one remote is enticing, but is Unity the end-all accessory for someone buying a first HDTV? I recently had a chance to speak with the co-founders of the company behind the product, In2Technologies.
Todd Beauchamp, a former head of audio labs for Apple, has extensive acoustical engineer experience. Mike Fidler, a major marketing player with Sony and Pioneer, met Todd through mutual friends. The two told me how their first brainstorming session turned into a torrential downpour of inspiration that created Unity.
Their goal was to create a fusion product that contains the best aspects of a sound bar, home theate… [Read more]
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Sony Walkman Z gets FCC approval, reveals no 64GB model forthcoming originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Dec 2011 08:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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How fast can your camera shoot photos? 60 frames per second? Pah. 1,000 fps? Puh-lease. What’s that? You have a Phantom camera that’ll shoot one million fps? Whatever. MIT’s new camera will shoot one trillion frames per second.
Let’s put that in some perspective. One trillion seconds is over 31,688 years. So if you shot one second of footage on this camera, and played it back at 30fps, it’d still take you over 1,000 years to watch it. That’s one boring-ass home movie.
Of course, the “camera” can’t be taken on vacation, and even if it could, there wouldn’t be enough light on even the sunniest beach to support shooting so fast. What MIT’s device (designed by Professor Ramesh Raskar and team) does is to use “femtosecond laser illumination, picosecond-accurate detectors and mathematical reconstruction techniques” to illuminate a scene and then capture the pulses of laser light. And like all good magic, the kit also uses mirrors: in this case to move the view of the camera.
Nor does the camera run for a full second. The movies are 480 frames long, and show a slice in time of just 1.71 picoseconds.
The result is a movie of an advancing wave of light. The individual frames can also be colorized to show a rainbow of wavefronts:
If your jaw isn’t on the ground right now, then shame on you. If you want to see more, you should head the team’s project page at MIT where you can see such wonders as a single pulse of light traveling the length of a soda bottle in one billionth of a second, and wavefronts rippling over still-life setups as if they were waves of water lapping at a beach.
Visualizing Photons in Motion at a Trillion Frames Per Second [MIT Camera Culture]
If you’ve freshly fallen off the Android bandwagon to fill your cup with Mango’s nectar, chances are you’re still coming to terms with a lack of customization. No longer, as Windows Phone Hacker has just released its Themes for Windows Phone 7 application that puts the power of the live tile into your very willing hands. The program, PC-only for now, applies user-selected images, icons, colors and transparencies to a preferred list of apps, nullifying the need for those pre-set accents. But before you rush to download the file, bear in mind this requires an unlocked handset. So, unless you’ve cozied up to ChevronWP7 with that $9, you’ll just have to watch from the sidelines. Check out the tutorial after the break.
Mango’s live tiles get footloose and fancy free with Themes for Windows Phone 7 (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Dec 2011 08:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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