Windows, our source of life-giving sunlight indoors, are a menace to your electrical bill. In the summer, windows bleed cold and in the winter they ooze heat. To save energy, researchers want to give window panes a circulatory system that could pump in cool, liquid relief when they get too hot.
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Bioluminescence is awesome. Essentially the production of light by a living organism, e.g. fireflies, certain types of jellyfish, etc—but it doesn’t just occur in animals. There’s even some plant life that has the potential to give off that lovely, ethereal glow. And as Mark Rober shows us in the video above, you can even harness that power to become your very own natural, eerie, and totally beautiful light source.
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Plants are beautiful. But up close, they’re inspiring, terrifying, and, well, just quite large.
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Sometimes, good oral hygiene
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Color temperature is critical component of how we perceive a photograph or a slice of film. (It’s that whole "white balance" thing we nerds are always blabbing about.) As this video explains, we often don’t even notice the ways in which an image’s color temperature affects us. When directors are playing with color, they’re playing with your emotions.
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We know, we know, Google has the whole hot air balloon thing covered. But this idea is a bit different. It consists of a group of “helikites,” or small load-bearing balloon-kite hybrids, which can quickly be launched to form a network of LTE or WLAN masts up to an altitude of 2.5 miles, providing data coverage following an earthquake or tsunami. A standalone rugged suitcase, or “Portable Land Rapid Deployment Unit,” contains everything needed for activation in tough conditions. Researchers behind the project, including German R&D firm TriaGnoSys, have even found a way to integrate the temporary network with existing cell towers that remain in tact on the ground — a feature that makes the system suitable not only for emergencies, but also for expanding mobile coverage during planned events in remote locations. Of course, the helikites would eventually drift apart and lose connectivity, probably after around four days depending on the wind, but these things never travel quite as far as you’d expect.
Filed under: Cellphones, Science, Internet, Alt
Via: Technology Review
Source: EAI PSATS (PDF download)
Microscopes are a dime a dozen in universities, so there’s plenty of fun to be had hacking ’em any way you can—like a team of researchers from Caltech, who have developed a cheap and easy way to increase their resolution by a factor of 100.
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We’re all painfully aware that there isn’t a cure for Alzheimer’s. There isn’t even a reliable way to diagnose it. But a new blood test, the first of its kind, indicates that we can hold out hope for a surefire diagnosis, one that might catch the disease earlier than the current battery of brain scans and cognitive tests.
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A paper has been published by Flavio Garcia of the University of Birmingham which includes access codes for a number of luxury car brands, this resulting in the Professor being served an injunction from a UK court. The paper is being called dangerous as it would, according to the brands on the other side of this court case, allow criminals to drive away with the cars in question. The paper itself, on the other hand, warns against what Professor Garcia calls “weaknesses in security” which he suggests, in so many words, that criminals are already aware of.
The paper in question was set to be published by Usenix Security Symposium in Washington DC in August, but due to this court order, it’ll be held until a court session on the matter can be held. The injunction itself is being filed against Garcia as well as two colleagues of his, Baris Ege and Roel Verdul of Stichting Katholieke Universiteit, both of them cryptology experts that contributed to the paper.
Porsches, Audis, Bentleys and Lamborghinis are included in the paper, each of them with security codes set to be published if the paper ever does see the light of day. It’s Volkswagen’s parent that’s launched this case against the scientists, that one entity owning the four luxury lines affected by the paper.
Those filing for the injunction made a specific request for the paper to be published without the codes themselves, but the paper’s authors have declined. The paper itself, Dismantling Megamos Crypto: Wirelessly Lockpicking a Vehicle Immobiliser, shines light on the system that protects the whole lot of these luxury vehicles: Megamos Crypto.
The software behind the code has been available on the internet since 2009, the team reminded The Guardian this week through their court case filings. The paper suggests that the code had been leaked to the web after the system had (likely) been broken using what the team describes as “chip slicing.”
This chip slicing technique takes a computer chip from the security system and analyzes it under a microscope. The process, which the paper asserts likely cost the perpetrator around 50 thousand British pounds, analyzed the arrangement of the physical bits of the chip, inferring their abilities.
Now we’ve only to see what the difference is between this paper being published and the same information being available on the internet – other than the courts’ control over one and not the other, of course.
Scientists’ luxury car hack warning faces injunction via Volkswagen is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
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A team of researchers at the California Institute of Technology, led by Professor Changhuei Yang, have figured out a way to crank their microscopy up to 11. Usually, scientists are forced between a rock and a hard place: they can have high res images of small areas or low resolution pictures of larger fields. Using a strategy known as Fourier ptychographic microscopy, Yang’s team was able to computationally correct a standard microscope’s low res imagery, producing a billion-pixel picture. By adding an LED array to an existing microscope — the only hardware tweak their $200 system calls for — the researchers were able to stitch together a 20X quality image from a 2X optical lens. The information gleaned from the LED lights was corrected entirely on a computer, making it an exceptionally cost effective way to create high res microscopic images. The team’s report, published by the journal Nature Phototonics, can be read in full at the source link below.
Via: California Institute of Technology
Source: Nature Phototonics
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