Hasta La Gadget!

In cases of real emergencies, most emergency lights are pretty much useless if you don’t have the required number of and type batteries to power them up. You can consider yourself lucky if you come across sealed packs of double As and triple As as you stumble around in the dark, but if what you’ve got is a set of batteries in mixed sizes, then you’re pretty much doomed.

Panasonic was well aware of this problem, which is probably why they came up with the BF-BM10 flashlight which is also known as the ‘Any Battery Light.’

I think the name pretty much says it all. You can use any size of 1.5 volt battery that you can find lying around in your house, from the tiny AAAs to the huge D-sized battery. The flashlight uses one battery at a time, and you can expect up to 86 hours of operation if you insert four brand-new batteries into the slots.

Panasonic was inspired to invent the flashlight after demand for portable torches soared after the devastating earthquakes in Japan last 2011.

At this point, the Any Battery Light will only be made available to the Japanese market, and will go on sale later this month for 2,000 yen (~$24 USD).

[via Japan Today via Bit Rebels]

About a month ago, a project launched on Kickstarter called the Light by Moore’s Cloud. Unfortunately, the project failed to meet its funding goal, despite gathering about 2,000 supporters. With the company’s Kickstarter funding plans foiled, it has decided to run its own homegrown crowdfunding project.

The Light is an open-source, computer-controlled cube that has 52 individual LEDs inside that can change to any of 2 million different colors. The light can be configured to produce static colors, or cool animation effects. The Light is also Wi-Fi connected allow you to control it from an application running on the iPad or iPhone. And since it’s running an embedded Linux computer with the LAMP stack on it, you can write your own custom applications for it as well.

Moore’s Cloud is now seeking funding from its own website allowing people to pre-order the Light for $149(USD). That is about $50 more expensive than the device was on Kickstarter. Not only is the device more expensive, but it now has a $10 shipping fee as well. The increased prices will allow them to go into production with about 3,000 of the lights being pre-sold, which is significantly lower than the nearly 7,000 they had to sell to hit their Kickstarter goal. The increased price could be a turn-off to the people who had previously committed on Kickstarter, so only time will tell if they will hit their goal.

Assuming they can make it this time, they’re estimating a ship date of July 2013.

Unfortunately for those in the enemy tracking game, sophisticated aircraft-equipped anti-detection systems can outfox radar by intercepting the signal and sending back a false image, as shown above. However, researchers from the University of Rochester have figured out a technique to defeat such a jamming system that harnesses the quantum properties of light. By polarizing photons before sending them toward objects to be scanned, any attempt at modifying the returning photons caused quantum interference that was easy to detect, in the form of the very high polarization errors shown in the second false image. According to the team, such a a system could “easily be realized and integrated into modern optical ranging and imaging systems,” with a little work, making it infinitely more difficult to defeat radar systems. Check the source for more “light” reading, provided that quantum mechanics doesn’t break your brain.

Filed under: Science, Alt

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Via: MIT Technology Review

Source: Arxiv (PDF)

Light. What is it? What isn’t it? Such are the questions left to the experts at Caltech, which have just concocted a new device that can focus light to a point just a few nanometers wide. That kind of precision has never been done at scale, and the university is hoping that the invention could help “pave the way for the next-generation of communication, computing, and even imaging technology.”

In lay terms, it could allow increased bandwidth for fiber optics, and since it’s built on-chip, integration with existing doodads shouldn’t be too much of a hassle. Previous on-chip nanofocusing devices were only able to focus light into a narrow line, making them inefficient, whereas Caltech’s contraption can be focused in three dimensions, producing a point a few nanometers across, and using half of the light that’s sent through. Hyuck Choo seems to think that it can be put to use in short order in the medical field, but it remains to be seen if we’ll see this in the next wave of Google Fiber rollouts. But hey, a lowly DSL user can hope, right?

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Source: Caltech

A couple of months ago, the LIFX LED lightbulb debuted on Kickstarter, and it was only a couple of weeks ago when electronics giant Philips unveiled its Hue color changing LED light bulb. These light bulbs not only allow you to choose whatever color you want using a smartphone application, they also allow you to turn the light on or off at pre-set times, making for built-in home automation. These bulbs require an in-home Wi-Fi connection and come with a special bridge you have to connect to your network. Now, a competing product has turned up on Indiegogo called the Lumen Bluetooth LED bulb.

Like the LIFX and the Hue, the Lumen bulb will use an app that controls the light brightness, color, and can turn the lights on or off. Inside the bulb, its RGBW LED array lets you create any color you desire, including pure white. However, the Lumen operates on Bluetooth instead of Wi-Fi. This lets you use the bulbs without an existing wireless network, but limits its range to 30 feet. This might be okay for apartment-dwellers, but it’s not so great if you live in a larger dwelling.

The bulb also has four special operating modes. The modes include Party Mode that flashes the light bulb and changes color to the music. Sleep Mode is designed to simulate moonlight. Lake mode helps you get out of bed in the mornings by waking you to gradually brightening light rather than the alarm. The Ambient Mode creates romantic soft and dim lighting.

An early-bird special will get you one Lumen bulb for $49(USD). Two bulbs will cost $99, 10 sell for $450, 25 cost $1000, and 100 of the bulbs will cost $3500. The project still has 30 days to raise the funding needed, and is seeking $110,000 in funding, and has so far scored only about $1300. If you prefer Bluetooth to Wi-Fi, head on over to Indiegogo and reserve yours now.