We’re not sure if we should always cheer figures that reflect sedentary behavior. Still, chalk one up for greater (if superficial) gender equality. Nielsen finds that, as of this past March, men who owned a modern game console like the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 or Wii were using their TVs almost as much as women: while males in the broader population typically spend 37 fewer minutes in front of the big screen every day than females, that gap shrank to a negligible 11 minutes when console use came into play. Unfortunately, the agency doesn’t say just what’s getting men to tune in for that much longer. Gaming is the most likely culprit, but a raft of streaming video options could have some of those refined couch potatoes watching Hulu or Netflix instead of playing one more round of Gears of War. If consoles have people of all genders spending more time together, we’re in favor of it; given that men still spend over twice as much time on consoles as women, though, it’s clear there’s still a bridge to cross if we want more of a balance in the kinds of TV activity we enjoy.
If you thought cloud writing was cool, then how about a message from space burnt into the night sky? A group of unassuming cubesats recently left the comfort of the ISS and joined Earth’s orbit — among them was FITSAT-1 (aka Niwaka), a four-inch-cubed Japanese satellite covered in high-powered LEDs. Its mission is to broadcast the message “Hi this is Niwaka Japan” in Morse code, using bursts of intense light to draw dots and dashes across the heavens. FITSAT-1 was originally planned to appear only over Japan, but a flurry of interest means it’ll be touring the globe, starting next month. It’ll also find time for its studies, beaming VGA images snapped with an onboard camera back to Earth, to test a high-speed data transmitter.
While its creator, Professor Takushi Tanaka, has said the Morse broadcast has “no practical aim,” we think it would make a good emergency beacon for natural disasters (or, more worryingly, alien invasions). FITSAT-1 will try and fulfill all requests for appearances, but it can’t control the weather, so you’d better hope for a clear night if it visits your part of the world. If you’re as excited as we are to see it in action, bookmark the source links below, which should be updated with its orbit schedule in the near future. And, even if you don’t speak Japanese, the video after the break will give you an idea of what to expect.
Australia’s Shire of Murchison is quickly becoming a hotbed for radio telescopes. As of of Friday, the territory is operating the world’s fastest radio telescope in the form of the Australia Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP). The 36-antenna grid’s eventual use of six phased array feeds, each with 188 receivers, will let it scan a field of view 150 times larger than the moon’s visible area while processing that information much faster than a typical single-pixel radio telescope feed — CSIRO estimates that an image of the Centaurus A galaxy that would take 10,000 hours to process with rivals should take five minutes with ASKAP. Ultimately, the array should grow to 60 antennas as part of the Square Kilometer Array, which includes South Africa in its hunt for pulsars, quasars and other unique parts of the universe. Just don’t get your hopes up for booking alien listening sessions anytime soon. Commissioning started virtually as soon as the ribbon was cut, and scientists have already scheduled their usage slots for the next five years. We’re sure we’ll get over any frustration when we see the first ASKAP results published within the next year.
For the longest time, battery manufacturers have mostly only been focusing on how to make lithium-ion batteries smaller and thinner, while still offering as much capacity as possible. However, researchers are now coming up with ways to make lithium-ion batteries charge up quicker — more specifically, twice as fast than the average charge time.
The new algorithms that researchers have discovered simply track exactly where lithium ions are within the battery cells to allow for a more accurate battery reading. The way that batteries charge now is less efficient, meaning that it takes no time at all to charge your phone to 80%, but the last 20% usually takes forever. Once the battery hits an 80% charge, it will start to slowly allow small sips of electricity into the battery until it thinks that it’s completely full, based upon software calculations.
However, these new algorithms with completely get rid of the slowness that occurs during that last 20%, and then some. By simply knowing exactly how full a battery is at all times in its charging process, it will no longer have to slow down and guess how full it is. It sounds like a simple idea that makes us wonder why this wasn’t the plan in the first place.
This new technology actually isn’t so advanced and so expensive that it would be a long way off, and the researchers say that the new charging technology will easily be in devices like smartphones, tablets, and laptops. In other words, you won’t be hard-pressed to find it in most consumer electronics in a few years.
Mars explorer Curiosity is about to grab itself a scoopful of soil, the first time the sample gathering system has been used while the robotic rover has been on the red planet, but just what is the NASA ‘bot hoping to find? According to NASA, the mission – which will see Curiosity flex its incredibly slow claw – is both a test of the rover’s hardware and of the Martian surface itself, an important double-hit to help show whether Curiosity is made out for exploration, and whether Mars was once hospitable to life.
“We now have reached an important phase that will get the first solid samples into the analytical instruments in about two weeks,” Mission Manager Michael Watkins of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California said of the new trials. In the meantime, Curiosity will do some cleaning of its sample collecting kit: the first two scoopfuls of dirt, exposed by scuffing the surface of the planet with one of its wheels, will be shaken up and then discarded, so as to remove any particulates that have been brought with the rover from Earth.
“It is standard to run a split of your sample through first and dump it out, to clean out any residue from a previous sample. We want to be sure the first sample we analyze is unambiguously Martian, so we take these steps to remove any residual material from Earth that might be on the walls of our sample handling system” Joel Hurowitz, JPL team
The scoop itself has a small capacity – it can dig down to 1.4-inches, and is just 1.8-inches wide and 2.8-inches long – and moves particularly slowly; in the video below, filmed during tests pre-launch back on Earth, the footage is in fact being played at four-times normal speed.
Scooping process:
The third sample collected will be put under the microscope, of sorts, with Curiosity’s mast cameras, though a small amount will be loaded into the Chemistry and Mineralogy X-ray powder diffraction and fluorescence instrument (CheMin). This instrument, designed and developed by NASA scientists, uses X-rays to identify different crystalline structures, using the fact that they refract such rays at predictable angles to figure out the composition.
A fourth scoopful will repeat that CheMin testing, but also be provided to the Sample analysis at Mars (SAM) system. This instrument – a combination of multiple tests and the collaborative work of NASA scientists and counterparts from around the world – includes a Quadrupole Mass Spectrometer, a gas chromatograph and a tunable laser spectrometer, and will primarily be used to identify oxygen and carbon isotope ratios in carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4).
Such testing will help Curiosity to figure out whether those atmospheric gases were created geochemically or biologically, and an important step in understanding what the atmosphere of the planet was like in the past.
Curiosity’s appetite for filth won’t be sated by a couple of scoopfuls in the next few weeks, however. Assuming all goes to plan, the rover will travel roughly 100 yards to the east, and then pick out a rock which will be the first subject for its drill. That can carve a hole 1.6cm wide and up to 5cm deep, and then collect more samples for further testing.
You don’t find sharp and pointy teeth on most modern herbivores, sharp and pointy teeth for killing prey are generally associated with meat-eating animals. A new study of a dinosaur dubbed the Pegomastax africanus found the dinosaur had tiny self-sharpening fangs. Scientists believe that the two-foot-long heterodontosaur lived about 200 million years ago.
Scientists believe that the tiny dinosaur exclusively ate plants and used its sharp and pointy fangs for self-defense. That would make the little dinosaur similar to modern plant eating mammals that use teeth for self-defense and foraging. The new dinosaur species is believed to have lived along the forested rivers in southern Africa.
The first fossils of this tiny dinosaur discovered in South Africa in the 1960s. In an attempt to discover what the little dinosaur did with it sharp fangs, study author Paul Sereno reassembled available teeth and jaw bones for the little dinosaur and compared them to reconstructed jaws and teeth of meat eating and modern plant eating mammals.
Sereno found evidence that teeth the P. africanus was equipped with were similar to those of fanged deer and peccaries that use fangs for self-defense and in competition for mates. The scientists also suggests that P africanus’ upper and lower jaws worked like self sharpening scissors for sharing plants for the dinosaur to eat.
Astronomers at UCLA have discovered something said to be crucial to revealing the fabric of space and time around a black hole. The astronomers have reported the discovery of a star that orbits an enormous black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The star orbits the black hole in 11 1/2 years.
The scientists say that the orbit time of 11 1/2 years makes the star’s orbit the shortest known of any star near the black hole. The star in question is called S0-102, and scientists hope that it could help them determine whether Einstein was correct in the fundamental predictions of how black holes are able to warp space and time. Before discovering the star, astronomers knew of only one other start with a very short orbit near the black hole.
That other star is called S0-2 and has an orbit that takes 16 years to go all the way around the black hole. Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicts that mass distorts space and time and slows down the flow of time and stretchers or shrinks distances. According to the scientists as the stars approach their closest distance to the black hole; their motion will be affected by the curvature of space-time.
The light traveling from the stars to us will be distorted due to the effect on their motion. Star S0-2 is said to be 15 times brighter than the newly discovered S0-102. S0-2 will make its closest approach to the black hole in 2018.
Our 1997-era selves would die with envy right about now. Fraunhofer has developed a new generation of infrared transceiver that can transfer data at 1Gbps, or well above anything that our vintage PDAs could manage. While the speed is nothing new by itself — we saw such rates in 2010 Penn State experiments — it’s the size that makes the difference. The laser diode and processing are efficient enough to fit into a small module whose transceiver is as large as a “child’s fingernail.” In theory, the advancement makes infrared once more viable for mobile device syncing, with room to grow: even the current technology can scale to 3Gbps, lead researcher Frank Deicke says, and it might jump to 10Gbps with enough work. Along with the usual refinements, most of the challenge in getting production hardware rests in persuading the Infrared Data Association to adopt Deicke’s work as a standard. If that ever comes to pass, we may just break out our PalmPilot’s infrared adapter to try it for old time’s sake.
When you think about it, pushing a mouse across a table or poking a flat screen with your finger is a pretty limited way to interact with a computer. After all, our hands are capable of far more intricate motions, which a company called 3Gear Systems hopes to translate into complex gestures that could revolutionize how we use our devices. More »
The last time Keio University was in the news it was for a prototype wearable cloaking device developed by a team of researchers at the school. A decade later you still can’t go out and buy one, but the research has inspired another brilliant use for the technology—invisible car interiors that let you see everything outside when backing up. More »
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
Nielsen | Email this | Comments
