Hasta La Gadget!

The Mindstorms line already makes it possible to create robots, machines and other moving and highly interactive toys out of LEGO. But the company isn’t resting on its laurels. Recently LEGO teamed up with Sony to make what they’re calling Toy Alive – prototype LEGO bricks that have motors, LEDs and even cameras.

Toy Alive was one of the prototypes shown off by Sony Computer Science Laboratories Tokyo at its 25th Anniversary open house. As you’ll see in the video below, the embedded gadgets can be controlled wirelessly. There are motors that let you race LEGO, actuators that can be used to destroy LEGO structures on cue and a LEGO toy with a built-in camera that sends footage to an iPad app.

Sony researcher Alexis Andre explained that the collaboration aims to look at ways to combine the strengths of videogames and LEGO. The Toy Alive prototypes provide kids with a wider array of interactivity compared to normal LEGO toys without restricting their imaginations, as most videogames do. You can listen to Andre talk about Toy Alive at around 0:58 in the video below:

It’s like a real world Little Big Planet.

[via Network World & The Japan Times via Topless Robot]

I guess you could say that most old arcade machines were made from wood, but it was mostly laminated pressboard, covered with shiny vinyl decals. Designer Love Hultén’s latest arcade build offers a much more timeless wooden styling.

The R-Kaid-42 is a complete arcade console built into an elegant handcrafted walnut wood box. Inside, you’ll find a pair of high quality arcade joysticks and buttons, at the bottom of the stack is a compact PC with an SSD drive for emulating games. The joysticks themselves are wireless, and have solid brass handles and ball tops.

To play, simply detach the magnetic sections of the R-Kaid-42, screw in the joystick handles, and connect it to a VGA monitor and power. The system comes with a clean and minimal front-end for a variety of emulators which can play over 20,000 different games. All of this can be operated entirely using the arcade controls.

Best of all, you can actually buy the R-Kaid-42 for yourself over on Etsy. It’s selling for $970(USD), and while that might seem like a lot of money, I think it’s a steal for all of the work that went into this thing.

Are you in the market for a new television? Then you’ll definitely want to check out these new sets just released by Vizio. The new M-Series refines the style of past Vizio displays, with a clean new look that virtually does away with the border around the screen.

The M-Series Razor LED Smart TV series is available in nine screen sizes, ranging from 32″ all the way up to an eyeball-popping 80″. All of the displays offer full 1080p HD resolution. The screens also have local dimming for improved contrast. All sets  50″ or greater offer passive-lens 3D support, and a 240Hz refresh rate for smooth action.

Each display packs Ethernet and Wi-Fi connectivity, and Vizio’s suite of Internet apps, including Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, Hulu Plus, Pandora, Vudu, YouTube and more. Vizio also says the apps run faster than in previous-gen displays.

Here’s the full list of models and retail prices for the displays:

VIZIO M-Series Razor LEDTM Smart TVs
32” Razor LED Smart TV (M321i) – $399.99 MSRP
40” Razor LED Smart TV (M401i) – $529.99 MSRP
47” Razor LED Smart TV (M471i) – $729.99 MSRP

VIZIO M-Series Razor LEDTM Smart TVs w/Theater 3D
50” Razor LED Smart TV w/Theater 3D (M501d) – $799.99 MSRP
55” Razor LED Smart TV w/Theater 3D (M551d) – $1,199.99 MSRP
60” Razor LED Smart TV w/Theater 3D (M601d) – $1,599.99 MSRP
65” Razor LED Smart TV w/Theater 3D (M651d) – $1,999.99 MSRP
70” Razor LED Smart TV w/Theater 3D (M701d) – $2,499.99 MSRP
80” Razor LED Smart TV w/Theater 3D (M801d) – $3,999.99 MSRP

You can check out the full specs for the M-Series displays here.

After the horrific tsunami hit Japan in 2011, officials have been attempting to think up ways to protect areas from flooding. It’s obviously really expensive to implement an entire new infrastructure, but researchers at Kyoto University and Hitachi Zosen Corp. have made a cheaper option that looks promising. It’s a new floodgate that raises and lowers based on the water level, and it does it automatically without sensors or any electricity — it’s powered by mother nature.

The new floodgate uses a water reservoir underneath the gate, along with a highly-buoyant material that acts as the sensor of sorts. When the floodgate detects water, the gate begins to raise as the reservoir fills up. Obviously, it won’t stop a full-blown tsunami attack, since the flood gate only goes up a little over 16 feet high, but it should protect buildings from water seeping in through doorways and such.

Because the floodgate raises and lowers automatically, there’s no human interaction needed at all, and since there’s no complex electrical system to power the gate, maintenance is left to a minimal. You might be thinking why they couldn’t just make a permanent wall, but this particular floodgate is meant for walkways, roads, and doorways where regular foot and car traffic can get through, as the floodgate can be up to 33 feet across.

It’s not said if larger floodgates like these will be made, but for the time being, we could see these things start to get implemented into doorways and such, with the possibility of larger models coming in the future that could replace entire flood walls, but we’ll have to wait and see what happens with these smaller gates.

There’s no word on when these new floodgates will begin to pop up, but we’re guessing it shouldn’t be too long, as we’re sure Japan officials, as well as other flood-prone areas around the world, are wanting in on this new technology as soon as possible.

VIA: Gizmodo

SOURCE: Asahi

New floodgate uses mother nature to automatically power itself is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Many researchers over the years have worked towards increasing data speeds, something that has had breakthroughs in various ways over the years. The latest one involves a method the creators say is a simple concept, but one that – for whatever reason – was never done. By creating mirrored beams of light that cancel out noise, the researchers sent a 400GB/s signal down nearly 8,000 miles of fiber optic cables.

According to the researchers, fast data transfers over long distances is best achieved using two beams of light rather than a single one ran down a fiber optic cable. These twin beams, as they’re called, are mirrored images of each other, something that has the added benefit of cancelling out the noise resulting from traveling down the cable. As such, data can be send across long distances.

The merging of the signals is done at the end of the cable, with the noise-cancelling effect being the result of something call phase conjugation. When light beams are sent down the fiber optic, they produce a pattern full of essentially “ups” and “downs” referred to as peaks and troughs. The way phase conjugation works is by forming an inverse of one light beam so that a peak becomes a trough and vice versa. As a result, the noise effects are cancelled out.

While conventional methods would require phase conjugation to be performed using devices located a various places along a cable length regardless of where the cable is located – even the ocean floor – the researchers’ method removes that necessity by using the twin-beams method instead, and simply merging them together so that the noise is automatically cancelled out, resulting in a perfect signal.

Such a concept has the prospect of both increasing data speeds and increasing the distances a signal can travel without suffering from the effects of signal noise. Said lead author Dr. Xiang Liu: “Nowadays everybody is consuming more and more bandwidth – demanding more and more communication. We need to solve some of the fundamental problems to sustain the capacity growth.”

SOURCE: BBC News

Image via Ozan Uzel

Twin-beam signals send data 4x faster than conventional speeds is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.