Jun 10
Jun 09
Why Inventors are Awesome….
Posted in: Today's Chili
I think we all know that inventors are awesome. Even when their inventions don’t work, they still show an incredible amount of creativity that many people don’t possess. I’m one of those people that can’t think that far out of the box to create something (other than art and fiction, that is). This video is a salute to inventors–and it’s pretty funny as well.
Jun 09
Inhabitat’s Week in Green: 310MPH Maglev train, full-color 3D printer and a car that boasts an astounding 1,300MPG
Posted in: Today's ChiliEach week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week’s most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us — it’s the Week in Green.
Lego just made an announcement that will have geeks around the world salivating: Beginning in September, the company will release a 1-foot-tall Star Wars Ewok Village, complete with tree houses, rope ladders and of course, our favorite furry friends. That’s not all — this week the toy maker also unveiled plans for a new Lego museum in Denmark that looks like a big pile of toy bricks. In other blocky building news, the world’s first carbon-negative building brick was just unveiled in the UK, and Studio Liu Lubin created an awesome set of stackable Tetris-style micro houses in China. And in green transportation news, Tesla announced that it will add a fourth car — a compact SUV — to its electric vehicle lineup, and Japan just unveiled a new prototype of its ridiculously fast 310MPH maglev train.
Filed under: Misc, Transportation, Science
Jun 08
Alt-week takes a look at the best science and alternative tech stories from the last seven days.
Printing can take many forms these days, it seems. It’s a term we see pulled in another direction this week, but one we think you’ll enjoy. Want something a little more tangible? How about advanced Antarctic topology, or gas-detecting microscale vacuum pumps? Yep, this is alt-week.
Jun 08
Create App To Show Driver’s MPG & Win $25,000 In Ford Personalized Fuel-Efficiency App Challenge!
Posted in: Today's Chili
Honestly, I have no idea how many miles my car gets to the gallon.
Hopefully one of you software geniuses can collaborate with Ford to
build a simple app to show me just how efficient my Taurus is.
Jun 08
“We’re not scanning every object in the collection,” Adam Metallo tells me, offering up the information almost as soon as we set foot in the Smithsonian’s Digitization office. It’s an important piece of information he wants to make sure I have, right off the bat. It seems that, when the story of the department’s 3D-scanning plans first hit the wire, a number of organizations blew the scope of the project out of proportion a bit. And while the team’s project is certainly ambitious, it’s not, you know, crazy. It’s the work of a three-person team, still in its nascent stages, attempting to prove the value of new technologies to a 167-year-old museum affectionately known as “the nation’s attic.”
In the fall of 2011, Metallo and fellow Smithsonian 3D scanner Vince Rossi (a duo the institute has lovingly deemed its “laser cowboys”) unpacked their equipment in Chile’s Atacama Desert. “They were widening the Pan-American Highway, and in doing so, they uncovered about 40 complete whale specimens,” Rossi explains. “But it might take decades for them to remove the fossils from the rock, so we were able to capture this snapshot of what that looked like in 3D.” The tool of choice for the expedition was a laser arm scanner, which utilizes a process the duo compares to painting an object, moving back and forth across its surface as the device records the relative position of its axes.
Filed under: Science
Jun 08
Many suspect that China’s Tianhe-2 could win the supercomputer speed wars, but there haven’t been real numbers to back up that hunch. We now have some of those figures courtesy of Top 500’s Jack Dongarra, and Tianhe-2 could well be the new leader — by a gigantic margin. The cluster of Ivy Bridge and Xeon Phi chips has benchmarked at 30.65 petaflops when using 90 percent of its nodes, giving it a 74 percent edge (!) over the 17.6-petaflop Titan. There’s no guarantee that Tianhe-2 will hold the crown when the official Top 500 rankings appear on June 17th, but we don’t see any upstart rivals on the horizon. It could be lonely at the top… for a while.
Via: Ars Technica
Source: Netlib.org (PDF)
Jun 07
The hunt for evidence of water on Mars that could support life has been a long and exciting one (depending on your definition of exciting). While there is evidence abound of water that used to be on the Martian planet, it has been of the highly acidic variety, which is not conducive to life. Now,
Jun 07
Scientists build soft, transparent contact lens displays with nanomaterials
Posted in: Today's Chili
Of the contact lens display prototypes that we’ve seen so far, few if any are focused on comfort — a slight problem when they’re meant to sit on our eyeballs. A collaboration between Samsung and multiple universities may solve this with display tech that’s meant to be cozy from the start. By putting silver nanowires between graphene layers, researchers have created transparent conductors that can drive LEDs while remaining flexible enough to sit on a contact lens. Current test lenses only have one pixel, but they’re so soft that rabbits can wear them for five hours without strain. Scientists also see the seemingly inevitable, Glass-like wearable display as just one development path — they’re working on biosensors and active vision correction. While there’s still a long way to go before we reach a cyberpunk future of near-invisible displays, we may finally have some of the groundwork in place.
Filed under: Displays, Wearables, Science, Samsung
Source: ACS Publications
Jun 07
Cheap Fire Finding Robots
Posted in: Today's Chili
A new robot the FFR, which is short for Fire Fighting Robot, is desgned to help the fire fighters who are battling the blaze to not only find the fires, but also the people inside of them as well. When it comes to fires, there is always a chance of destruction. So the bots are less expensive then you may think.
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