Hasta La Gadget!

Panasonic’s plasma TVs have always earned high marks, and they were one of the first companies to embrace 3D television. Now, Panasonic has unveiled the new Viera GT25 series of 1080p HD 3D sets designed to bring 3D HD sets to more people, at a lower price point and slightly smaller screen size than the company’s higher-end VT25 series of high-end premium 3D TVs. The G525 series will come in two models, a 42-inch and a 50-inch, priced at $1699.95 and $2099.95 respectively. Active-shutter 3D glasses required to watch 3D content on the TV are sold separately.

Both new TVs bring some of the features that made the VT25 series popular at CES in January, including Panasonic’s use of Web-enabled widgets and VIERA CAST, both of which bring content like Netflix, YouTube, Pandora, and even Twitter to your television. The new displays were unveiled today, but should make it to store shelves later this month. 

Can technology make wrong calls a thing of the past? The NFL is hoping so.

A football field is 100 yards long, but games often come down to small battles over inches of gridiron real estate. The outcomes of these small battles often hinge on observations which, as all fans eventually learn, are prone to mistakes. Reuters is reporting that the NFL is investigating at least one technology that would remove some elements of human judgment from the game. According to the report, the league is in discussions with German location-mapping firm Cairos Technologies to implement their “chip-in-ball” technology to take the guesswork out of accurate ball placement.

Cairos has been pushing for the go-ahead to use their Goal Line Technology (GLT) in professional soccer (“fútbol” in European-speak) matches. The technology has been in development for over a decade and been utilized in several test runs. Around the soccer blogosphere, GLT has been the subject of vigorous debate among technophile soccer hooligans, but still has not given the official go-ahead from the soccer higher-ups. Now Cairos is setting their sites on other sporty avenues.

If the NFL deal works out, Cairos’ reported next deal is with Professional Figure Skating to develop a technology that will use digital cameras that have the ability to measure both sparkle and spunk (that last part’s not true!)

After the jump, find a video describing the tech.

When the Space Shuttle Discovery lifts off to rendezvous with the International Space Station (ISS) on its final scheduled mission (STS-133), currently slated for November 1, it will be carrying an unusual assistant: a humanoid robot known as Robonaut 2, R2 for short. Last week, NASA launched R2’s Twitter feed, over which the robot will provide updates from its new home aboard the ISS (presumably tweeted by a human surrogate, despite NASA’s whimsical PR photo).

Robonaut 2 has already been busy fielding questions it’s received from the Twitterverse, revealing for the record: “Robots are non-gender by design. I’m an it.” It would seem that R2 won’t be in the running for cyber-chess champion of the universe anytime soon, as it tweeted: “Like many humans, I’d be great at moving chess pieces around, but I’d need help deciding where to move them.” R2 has taken pains to reassure the public of its benevolent nature: “Nah. We’re not taking over – I’m here to help!” In another tweet, Robonaut 2 has disavowed any relation to HAL, though it wouldn’t be inclined to admit it if there were one.

Robonaut 2, jointly developed by NASA and GM, will be a permanent fixture aboard the ISS, whose mission Congress seems poised to extend until 2020. Although R2 will initially  participate only in operational tests, upgrades could eventually allow the robot to realize its full potential–helping spacewalking astronauts with tasks outside the space station.

Noémie Chocat, a graduate student in the materials science department, says: “If you connected them to a power supply and applied a sinusoidal current” (an alternating current whose period is very regular) “then it would vibrate. And if you make it vibrate at audible frequencies and put it close to your ear, you could actually hear different notes or sounds coming out of it.”

The team is announcing the achievement with much more detail in the August issue of Nature Materials.

Photo credit: Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT/Greg Hren Photograph

Coming up with a significantly new approach for generating colors in a projector isn’t easy. Neither is coming up with a new approach for generating the light itself. That makes it a big deal that Casio’s managed to do both at once in its Green Slim projectors, with its new Green Slim hybrid light source.

Projector manufacturers all know the harmony to “It’s not easy being green,” because projectors generally are pretty much the opposite of green. The central problem is the standard projector lamp, which eats up lots of power, wastes lots of energy as heat, and includes mercury as one of its components. A few projectors today use LEDs or lasers instead of a standard lamp, but most of those are either pico or palm-top projectors that offer a relatively dim 100 lumens or less. I’ve yet to see any that offer more than 1000 lumens.

Casio’s innovation is to combine LEDs, lasers, and phosphor. The combination lets its Green Slim projectors reach 2000 to 2500 lumens depending on the model, a brightness level that puts them in the same category as traditional projectors aimed at small conference rooms and portable use.