Installing a set of solar panels on the roof of your home can lead to significant savings when your monthly power bill arrives. But how do you know how well they’re performing in between without watching the meter like a hawk? With this innocuous looking piece of art that doubles as a home energy monitor.
We’ve already got machines that give ophthalmologists a close-up view of the inside and outside of the human eye. The problem is they’re big and heavy, expensive, and rarely accessible to those in third world nations. So researchers at Stanford University have created a simple iPhone add-on that lets almost anyone, anywhere, perform eye exams.
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Just getting a particle up to near the speed of light isn’t good enough for today’s physics. To properly unravel the fundamentals of the universe, particles have to be smashed together with enormous force. And two Stanford researchers have just devised a laser-based method that imparts ten times the power of traditional methods at a fraction of the cost.
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Your chances of being split open sternum to sphincter for a medical procedure are quickly declining (whew) thanks to the advent of endoscopic surgery and robotic surgical platforms like the DaVinci, though even these revolutionary procedures have their limitations. But thanks to a team of Stanford researchers, size is no longer one of them. More »
Stanford University’s got itself a fancy new concert hall opening tomorrow. And to give the world a sneak peak at the building—without having to open the doors to the public and interrupt the last minute work going on—the school sent a camera-equipped quadcopter soaring through the space. More »
Harnessing the awesome power of the Sun isn’t just dependent on the efficiency of solar cells, but also on making them affordable. Current techniques aren’t exactly cheap, but researchers from
The carbon amalgam can be applied from solution using simple methods, meaning the flexible cells could be used to coat surfaces, although you won’t be seeing it smeared over anything too soon. The prototype only touts a “laboratory efficiency of less than 1 percent,” so it can’t compete with traditional solar cells just yet. Also, it only absorbs a sliver of the light spectrum, but the researchers are looking to other forms of the wonder element which could increase that range. They are hoping that improving the structure of the cells will help to boost their efficiency, too. They might never generate the most energy, but the all-carbon cells can remain stable under extreme conditions, meaning they could find their calling in harsh environments where brawn is a little more important than status, or looks.
Stanford researchers create ‘world’s first’ all-carbon solar cell, do it on the cheap originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 01 Nov 2012 19:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Squared away in the PlayStation 3‘s latest software update post, Sony announced that the Folding@Home service will be retired starting next month, alongside the console’s 4.30 update. The project, which tied into Stanford University’s work on protein folding and research into the causes of a diseases like Alzheimer’s, pulled in over 15 million PlayStation owners since it started in 2007. In fact, according to Stanford’s client statistics, PS3 users offered the second greatest contribution after Windows devices, adding more than 100 million computation hours to the research project — and well, we did our bit.
Filed under: Gaming, Science, Sony
Folding@Home packs up on PlayStation 3: over 100 million computation hours added to research originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Oct 2012 05:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Google is well-known for projects with unexpected origins. It’s almost natural, then, that the code Google used to build a web course has led to a full-fledged tool for online education. The open-source Course Builder project lets anyone make their own learning resources, complete with scheduled activities and lessons, if they’ve got some skill with HTML and JavaScript. There’s also an avenue for live teaching or office hours: the obligatory Google+ tie-in lets educators announce Hangouts on Air sessions. Code is available immediately, although you won’t need to be grading virtual papers to see the benefit. A handful of schools that include Stanford, UC San Diego and Indiana University are at least exploring the use of Course Builder in their own initiatives, which could lead to more elegant internet learning — if also fewer excuses for slacking.
Filed under: Internet
Google releases Course Builder, takes online learning down an open-source road originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 11 Sep 2012 20:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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When they’re not breaking world records, fuel-hating Wave Glider seabots like to indulge in other hobbies, like shark tracking. One of the vessels has just been launched off the coast near San Francisco (vid after the break), adding a mobile worker to the existing local network of buoy-mounted receivers. They monitor the movements of electronically tagged sea life, including the fearsome Great White, picking up signals within a 1,000-foot range while researchers from Stanford University analyze the data from the safety of the shore. Better still, the free Shark Net iOS app gives anyone the chance to track these things, and activity should increase as the monitoring network (hopefully) expands along the west coast and more bots are introduced. You didn’t think the world’s fascination sharks was limited to only a single single week, did you?
Filed under: Robots, Science, Software
Autonomous Wave Glider bot launched to track sharks, beam real-time data to your iPhone and iPad originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 19 Aug 2012 19:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The US Department of Energy’s SLAC accelerator lab already has a pretty useful X-ray laser — the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS). But, recent modifications to the device have scientists drooling over its new found potential. Using a thin wafer of diamond, the Stanford-run lab filtered the beam to a lone frequency, then amplified it in a process called “self-seeding.” That’s given the world’s most powerful X-ray laser even more punch by tossing out unneeded wavelengths which were reducing its intensity. The tweaks allow scientists across many fields to finesse and image matter at the atomic level, giving them more power to study and change it. According to the lab, researchers who came to observe the experiment from other X-ray laser facilities “were grinning from ear to ear” at the possibility of integrating the tech into their own labs. The SLAC team claims they could still add 10 times more punch to the LCLS with further optimization, putting the laser in a class by itself — X-ray-wise, anyway.
Continue reading Diamond hones DOE X-ray laser howitzer to razor-sharp precision
Filed under: Science
Diamond hones DOE X-ray laser howitzer to razor-sharp precision originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 12 Aug 2012 13:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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