There’s a flood of new smartwatches and other wearable devices coming just around the corner, and every one of them will require a connection to your smartphone. Wireless NFC technology has already made things a little easier when it comes to pairing, but researchers at Disney want to make things even easier by just having you shake a couple of devices in unison.
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It will be years before Amazon’s dream of same day package deliveries via drone will ever become a reality. But you can forget about trying to shoot one down for some free electronics thanks to new software that allows a quadcopter to stay aloft—and on course—even after losing one or more of its propellers.
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Mankind’s attempts to create robotic humans that move exactly like us have so far been far from perfect. They usually stumble around, desperately trying to keep their balance like a toddler taking its first steps. But recreating the natural motions of underwater creatures like sea turtles? We’ve damn near perfected that. More »
Sure you could have a robot assist you around the home, or even one that’ll make factories friendlier, but we’ll opt for a robot sea turtle any day of the week. The Swiss folks over at ETH Zurich are working on making that a reality with the Naro-Tartaruga, a turtle-inspired machine that would swim efficiently while carrying cargo in its shell. It’s currently a cylindrical aluminum vessel with a couple of flippers, but concept designs include that totally bad-ass bot in the image above. The turtle-bot has a top speed of over 7 knots, so it’ll handily beat any real sea turtle in a race, and the big torso has enough space for battery and sensors that are necessary for autonomous function. The fins on the turtle have a fully three-dimensional mechanism — there are three actuators per fin, and each actuate the fin axle independently. The end goal is for the development of underwater autonomous vehicles, which will hopefully bring us one step closer to SeaQuest DSV. In the meantime, we’d like one just so we can freak the hell out of our cats.
Heroes in a half shell: autonomous robot sea turtles in development originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 05 Oct 2012 00:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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A fundamental challenge of developing spintronics, or computing where the rotation of electrons carries instructions and other data rather than the charge, has been getting the electrons to spin for long enough to shuttle data to its destination in the first place. IBM and ETH Zurich claim to be the first achieving that feat by getting the electrons to dance to the same tune. Basing a semiconductor material on gallium arsenide and bringing the temperature to an extremely low -387F, the research duo have created a persistent spin helix that keeps the spin going for the 1.1 nanoseconds it would take a normal 1GHz processor to run through its full cycle, or 30 times longer than before. As impressive as it can be to stretch atomic physics that far, just remember that the theory is some distance from practice: unless you’re really keen on running a computer at temperatures just a few hops away from absolute zero, there’s work to be done on producing transistors (let alone processors) that safely run in the climate of the family den. Assuming that’s within the realm of possibility, though, we could eventually see computers that wring much more performance per watt out of one of the most basic elements of nature.
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IBM creates consistent electron spin inside semiconductors, takes spintronics one twirl closer originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Aug 2012 14:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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