Hasta La Gadget!

NEPTUNE Canada, the world’s largest undersea cabled network, has powered up and will begin streaming data from hundreds of undersea instruments and sensors on the Pacific Ocean floor to the Internet, Scientific American reports.

The network will run around the clock and is expected to produce 50 terabytes of data each year. The data will include information about earthquake dynamics, deep-sea ecosystems, salmon migration, and the effects of climate change on the water column, the report said.

“It’s revolutionary in that it brings two new components into the ocean environment, which are power and high-bandwidth Internet,” says Project Director Chris Barnes, from the project’s offices at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, in the article. “We’re really on the verge of wiring the oceans.”

Shown in the photo is a rat-tail fish checking out the installation of a seismometer at “node ODP 1027” of the new network–buried at a depth of 2,660 meters underneath the surface. (Image credit: NEPTUNE Canada/CSSF)

On the heels of awarding $3.4 billion in broadband grants earlier this week, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on Wednesday awarded an additional $12.9 million intended to improve education and graduation rates at community colleges. This latest round of grants is part of the Gates Foundation’s Postsecondary Success initiative, which aims to double the number of low-income students who earn a degree or credential by age 26.

Wednesday’s grants are intended to advance the role of technology at community colleges, improve virtual learning improvements, incorporate Web 2.0 tools and social media, and create learning tools that are open and available to all students. Among the four organizations that received funding was Global Skills for College Completion (GSCC), which got $3.6 million. GSCC strives to come up with ways to teach math and writing skill using social media and technology in order to improve the pass rate for students in basic skills courses.

The Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE), meanwhile, was awarded $5 million to produce developmental math course material that will be available as an open educational resource (OER). The MITE project aims to increase the number of students that meet math standards so they can move into post-secondary educational programs. Individual students and teachers get free access to materials at hippocampus.org while institutions can get subscription-based access for a nominal fee.

Jing Li, a scientist in California’s NASA Ames Research Center, has designed a smartphone plug-in device that could sense chemicals from the environment. Current prototype of the device works with the iPhone, and plugs into the handset’s bottom connector. The device can detect chemicals in ambient air such as methane, ammonia and chlorine gas. It’s designed to connect to a network through WiFi or a regular phone connection in order to send alerts to other phones also equipped with the device. According to Li, a previous prototype of the device was the size of a soda can – this iteration, however, is touted as one of the smallest complete sensing-device in the world.

The device contains a silicon-based sensing chip with 64 nanosensors. Li and colleagues had to work on making a chip that can contain all those nanosensors and yet is compact, high-speed, low-power and low-cost. The chip consumes 5 milliwatts, and can last for 100 hours when ran continuously. Although connected to a bottom connector and draws power through it, data communication is routed through the audio input jack due to restrictions imposed by Apple upon third-party developers. There might be a chance that the second phase of the device’s development could be made for a smartphone other than an iPhone. Whether this happens or not, Li envisions future prototypes to be used by fire fighters and other kinds of emergency responders.

Diabetes is a major cause of disability in the aging Chinese population, and many of them located in rural areas don’t have immediate access to health care. A team of researchers in China have developed a smartphone technology that they believe could help diabetics.

Called the Chinese Aged Diabetic Assistant or CADA, the technology aims to provide assistance to patients and doctors alike. The program can monitor the patient’s blood pressure, weight, diet, exercise routine, mood and blood glucose levels. It is also designed to be interactive so that the patients will learn self-management that’s right for their condition. When the project started, the developers were not aiming for program that’s centered on gaming. But further studies on the target population revealed that gaming “was a persuasive way to engage patients in managing their personal health.” According to ScienceDaily, one of the games in the program is a food pyramid game that’s designed to encourage patients to eat healthy. There’s also a trivia game and a tile-matching game that aims to educate the patients on what’s needed to live a healthy lifestyle.

The program was designed for the smartphone since the researchers found that many of the patients are already in possession of mobile phones and smartphones, making the devices a logic choice for the patients to be interested in the technology. Moreover, smartphones are mobile, giving the developers more options for the technology’s improvement. In the future, developers aim to improve the technology so that patients will be able to send their information to health care providers.

If it isn’t bad enough that we’re being bombarded with advertisements in every form possible, some Japanese companies devised another way to directly send ads to cell phones. Using nothing but light as a form of data transmission, the process works through the use of blinking LED lights.

The new system allows advertisers to place LED-containing ad stations around an area to interact with the LED lights on the phones. A user as far as five meters or more (depending on the size of the ad station) can receive advertisements instantly. As with other legitimate types of ads though, users can choose which ads to download by pointing the cell phones towards the ad station – advertisers only have to change sending frequencies to alter the ad sent to the user. Aside from the ads, users can get coupons from advertisers for freebies and discounts.

According to MobileCrunch, two of the companies from the roster of those involved in the development of the new system are huge corporations, Toshiba and NEC. It will take a few more years before the system makes its way into the market though, because cell phones equipped with LED light receivers are needed to make it work. Target year of commercial release is 2013.