Hasta La Gadget!

Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days.

We see a lot of crazy stories here at Engadget, especially when we spend our week poking around in dark and scary corners of the internet specifically in search of them, just so you don’t have to. We consider it a service almost. One that we’re delighted to provide, we must add. When else would we be able to share such delights as an astronaut triathlete, soft, color-changing robots and a recent response to a thirty-year-old alien broadcast? Exactly. This is alt-week.

Continue reading Alt-week 8.18.12: Graphene sponges, zero-g athletics and tweets in space

Filed under: Science

Alt-week 8.18.12: Graphene sponges, zero-g athletics and tweets in space originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 18 Aug 2012 17:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’re the sort geek who really likes robots, you may remember last November when I talked a little bit about a soft robot that was designed to move like a starfish. The robot was made from a soft and flexible rubber material and used compressed air pump inside the structure to move. One of the key attributes of the soft robot was its ability to move underneath a pane of glass that was only 2 cm off the ground.

An updated version of that robot has now surfaced from researchers at Harvard University that is designed exactly like the robot from last year with one notable addition. The new version of the robot now has camouflage skills that allow it to either stand out or blend into its surroundings. The robots camouflage system is likened to that used by certain sea creatures such as cuttlefish, squid, and octopus.

The new camouflage enabled robot comes from the same team that released the plain robot last year. The robot is made from silicon-based polymers and is still driven by air that is pumped into tiny cylinders in the robot’s legs. In the camouflage version, the robot is covered in a network of tiny channels filled that various dyes can be pumped into.

By quickly pumping dye into the channels, the robot can be made to blend into its surroundings. According to the scientists, the bot can also be made to thermally camouflage itself by pumping in hot or cold fluids. The bot can also be pumped full of fluorescent fluids to allow it to glow-in-the-dark. In the current design, the fluid for camouflaging the robot comes from an external reservoir, but the researchers say in the future it could be incorporated directly into the body of the robot.

[via BBC]

Flexible robot gets color changing capability is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Masers, or microwave lasers, have rarely been as viable as their regular counterparts; they need temperatures near absolute zero, exotic vacuum chambers or strong magnets just to run at all, which safely rules out carrying a maser as a pocket pointer. The National Physical Laboratory and Imperial College London might put that gap in practicality to bed after developing a maser that can run at room temperatures. Instead of using ruby to boost the microwave strength, the scientists rely on a less pronounceable p-terphenyl crystal treated with pentacene that can handle ordinary amounts of heat. There’s still much work left in refining the technology: it has yet to stay active for sustained periods, only works in a narrow bandwidth and chews through an ample amount of power. Once it’s given the appropriate polish, however, the extra sensitivity of the improved maser could be a boon for medical scanning, bomb disposal or even future space communication that could punch through the atmosphere.

Filed under: Science

NPL, Imperial College create room-temperature maser, promise more sensitive beams originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Aug 2012 23:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Many people in Japan are still recovering from the tragic earthquake and tsunami that killed so many and left a nuclear power plant in Fukushima leaking radiation into the environment. It’s hard to look past the human toll that this tragedy took on families in affected areas of Japan, but the leaking radiation from the nuclear power plant has profound implications for the environment. Scientists have announced that they have found an increase in mutations among butterflies collected around Fukushima.

According to the scientists, there has been an increase in leg, antennae, and wing shape mutations among butterflies collected after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. The scientists also report that they have linked the mutations in the butterflies to radioactive material from the nuclear disaster. In March of 2011, two months after the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident, Japanese researchers collected 144 adult pale grass blue butterflies from 10 locations around Japan including Fukushima.

According to the researchers when the nuclear disaster occurred these adult butterflies would’ve been larvae. Comparing mutations in the same species of butterflies collected around Japan the team was able to determine that increased radiation was present in environments where the butterflies had smaller wings and irregularly developed eyes. The researchers also found after breeding the genetically mutated butterflies, a whole host of abnormalities not seen in the previous generation were produced in their offspring.

The mutation in the offspring of butterflies collected around Fukushima included malformed antennae, which are critical to exploring the environment for butterflies and to seek out mates. Six months after the original butterfly collection, the researchers collected more adult butterflies from the same 10 sites and found that those around Fukushima had a mutation rate more than double of those found in Fukushima previously. The high mutation rate was linked to eating contaminated food and mutations passed down from parents.

[via BBC]

Severe mutations discovered in butterflies around Fukushima is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Gartner is the latest of the big analyst houses to release its numbers for smartphone and overall mobile sales in Q2. The picture it paints is one of a market that has, effectively, one winner at the moment: Android — and more specifically Samsung — with growth for Apple’s iPhone “paused” as users hold out for the next iPhone and ride out the tough economy.

Worldwide, there were 419 million phones sold to end users, is down 2.3% compared to a year ago, Gartner says. Just over one-third (36.7%) of all devices sold were smartphones, which continued to grow well even as the wider market (which includes feature phones) declined. Sales of smartphones were up by 42.7% to 154 million units, with Apple and Samsung together accounting for 83% of all smartphone sales.

Within the smartphone category, Android, led by Samsung, is reaping the most benefits from that growth at the moment. With nearly 99 million units sold, Android devices captured 64% of the smartphone market for the quarter (compared to 43.4% a year ago). Samsung’s Galaxy line of devices accounted for more than half of all Android sales, reaching 45.6 million devices sold.

And as a testament to the power of a good, new product launch, the new S3 sold 10 million units in its first two months of its release. “The Galaxy S3 was the best-selling Android product in the quarter and could have been higher but for product shortages,” Gartner notes.

Apple’s iOS-based iPhone devices, meanwhile, also saw growth, selling nearly 29 million units, but this was only in line with overall smartphone market expansion, so its share remained largely the same: it captured 18.8% of the smartphone market (versus 18.2% the year before). Gartner notes that sales of the iPhone fell by 12.6% compared to Q1.

Both Symbian and RIM saw big drops and are both hovering between 5% and 6% market share for sales last quarter, while Samsung’s bada and Microsoft saw modest, single-percentage gains to be level at 2.7% shares (equivalent to around 4 million devices).

Incidentally, do you remember when Nokia said it sold 4 million Lumia devices in Q2? That paints a particularly bad picture for how well the other OEMs are doing with WP7: between the rest of them they sold only about 87,000 devices, according to Gartner’s numbers. Ouch.

Apple’s Tim Cook told us in its Q2 earnings last month that the company was seeing lower iPhone sales in the quarter because of economic presssures, particularly in Europe, as well as a general lag due to people waiting for the new iPhone to hit the market (which by many reports it will do come September). Gartner essentially agrees with this assessment:

“The challenging economic environment and users postponing upgrades to take advantage of high-profile device launches and promotions available later in the year slowed demand across markets,” wrote Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner, in a statement.

But he added that there is a converse to this, too, if the iPhone does in fact launch: “The anticipated Apple iPhone 5, along with Chinese manufacturers pushing 3G and preparing for major device launches in the second half of 2012, will drive the smartphone market upward,” he noted.

That growth, he says, will be primarily in smartphones. Lower-end devices will “continue to see pressure”, even if they continue to sell well in emerging markets.

Indeed, at the moment, it is feature phones that seem to be keeping Nokia alive in terms of phone sales (yes, the platform is burning, but it’s still standing up). While Nokia saw big declines in its smartphone stature — Symbian market share dropped by nearly 17 percentage points, and Windows Phone 7 saw only modest gains — the impact of that was only saw a small decline in overall world rankings, where Nokia now stands at just under 20% market share compared to 23% a year ago. It has feature phones to thank for that.

The picture is different for the world leader: buoyed by its strong sales in smartphones (over half of all devices sold by Samsung) and feature phones, Samsung is playing the game perfectly. It improved its market by nearly five percentage points to 21.6% marketshare, working out to over 90 million units sold. The distance between Samsung/Nokia and the rest of the pack is big at the moment. Apple comes in third but a ways behind with 29 million units. That shows how challenging the mobile market, which needs to operate at scale to be profitable, is at the moment for the majority of the industry.

Google’s Motorola is among the challenged ones. Yesterday the company set out a long-term plan to move away from feature phones to smartphones; it will be worth watching to see how that impacts the company’s standing in the wider rankings — perhaps very little since Motorla has been relying less on feature phone sales than companies like Nokia and Samsung. It took 2.2 percent share of sales in Q2, down 0.2 percentage points from last year.