“Danger! High Voltage. Do Not Touch. Death or Serious Injury May Occur,” reads the yellow sticker on the side of this 1.25 Kilojoule DIY coilgun. Watching this video of it in action, that sounds about right: More »
Not so long ago, you might have walked out of a restaurant that served you ludicrous-sounding creations like cream of mushroom foam, or spheres of olive oil that explode in your mouth like salmon roe. Not anymore. More »
Silicon carbide sensors developed for transmitting inside volcanos originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Sep 2010 05:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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It’s probably advisable to not mention this to T-Pain or anyone even closely related to him, but it looks as if auto-tune may have finally found a legitimate use. You know — aside from crafting one of the most hilarious Bud Light commercials in the history of Bud Light commercials. An EU-funded team has crafted a prototype device that uses a technology similar to auto-tune in order to nix cross-talk on signals that travel down fiber optic cabling. Currently, the clean up process on phase noise ends up decimating the total capacity available to travel, so far less information actually gets through the end than what you started with. Now, this here device is claiming to spit shine the noisy signals and “re-transmit them with fuller capacity.” Periklis Petropoulos, a researcher on the project from the University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Centre, summed it up as such: “With this demonstration we’ve shown that it is possible to use the capabilities of the optical fiber to the full without being restricted by the capabilities of the electronics; you could say that in its final functionality, it is like auto-tune.” Obligatory video demonstration is after the break.
Auto-tune nabs new lease on life, kills phase noise in long-haul fiber transmissions originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 14 Sep 2010 09:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Researchers and engineers have been toiling on synthetic skins for years now, but most of ’em have run into one major problem: the fact that organic materials are poor semiconductors. In other words, older skins have required high levels of power to operate, and those using inorganic materials have traditionally been too fragile for use on prosthetics. Thanks to a team of researchers at UC Berkeley, though, we’re looking at a new “pressure-sensitive electronic material from semiconductor nanowires.” The new ‘e-skin’ is supposedly the first material made out of inorganic single crystalline semiconductors, and at least in theory, it could be widely used in at least two applications. First off, robots could use this skin to accurately determine how much force should be applied (or not applied, as the case may be) to hold a given object. Secondly, this skin could give touch back to those with artificial hands and limbs, though that would first require “significant advances in the integration of electronic sensors with the human nervous system. Dollars to donuts this gets tested on the gridiron when UCLA and / or Stanford comes to town.
UC Berkeley researchers craft ultra-sensitive artificial skin, robots dream of holding eggs originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Sep 2010 12:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Ready to get swept away into the wild, wild abyss known as quantum computing? If not, we’re certain there’s a less mentally taxing post above or below, but for those who answered the call, researchers at the University of California Santa Cruz have a doozie to share. A team of whiz kids at the institution have developed a minuscule optical device that’s built into a silicon chip, and it’s capable of reducing the speed of light by a factor of 1,200. If you’re wondering why on Earth humans would be interested in doing such a thing, here’s the long and short of it: the ability to control light pulses on an integrated chip-based platform “is a major step toward the realization of all-optical quantum communication networks, with potentially vast improvements in ultra-low-power performance.” Today, data transmitted along optical fibers must still eventually be converted to electronic signals before they’re finally understood, but the promise of an all-optical data processing system could obviously reduce inefficiencies and create communication networks that are far quicker and more robust. There’s still no telling how far we are from this becoming a reality — after all, we’ve been hearing similar since at least 2006 — but at least these folks seem to be onto something good… even if it’s all too familiar.
All-optical quantum communication networks nearly realized, ‘Answers to Life’ airing at 9PM originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Sep 2010 23:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The Western World keeps cutting its science research budget because of the economic crisis. As China rises—funneling tons of money into science—our obtuse politicians don’t realize that, without pure research, they are sentencing us to irrelevance and oblivion. More »
You live your life at 2.4GHz. Your router, your cordless phone, your Bluetooth earpiece, your baby monitor and your garage opener all love and live on this radio frequency, and no others. Why? The answer is in your kitchen. More »
Solar farms are swell and all, but they aren’t exactly fit for laboratories or studio apartments. Thanks to new discoveries by gurus at the University of Birmingham, though, we could be on our way to a far more diminutive method of creating clean energy. As the story goes, we could soon be using microbes to transform wastes in metals into energy. The team managed to pinpoint Hydrogenase enzymes and BioPd in their research, which they believe can be used as catalysts for the treatment of persistent pollutants. The overriding goal, however, is to “develop a one-step technology that allows for the conversion of metallic wastes into high value catalysts for green chemistry and clean energy generation,” but it’s difficult to say at this point how close they are to realizing it. The best news? This is bound to start a new rash of Cash 4 Gold commercials.
Scientists using metallic wastes to generate clean energy originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Sep 2010 09:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Intel’s mind reading computer could bring thought controlled interfaces to a whole new, frightening level originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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