In this Discovery Channel documentary, we get a prediction of what life could be like in the year 2025, thanks to technological advancements that are happening today. This 5 part docu-drama delves into wearable computers, immersive telecom, intelligent homes, emotive AI, robots, genetics, clean energy, entertainment, and education.
South Korea’s LG Philips LCD has developed the world’s first A4-sized colour electronic-paper – a paper-thin and bendable viewing panel.
The e-paper – which measures 35.9cm across its diagonal and is just 300 micrometres (0.3 millimetres) thin – can display up to 4096 colours, the world’s second largest liquid crystal display maker said in a statement.
It is designed to be energy-efficient, only using power when the image changes on the display, it said.
“This represents the next generation in display technology,” Chung In-Jae, chief technology officer and executive vice-president, said in the statement.
One day last month, I paid a visit to Michael Wright, in his book-and-clock-cluttered home, in West London. Wright was reading Xenophon, the Greek historian, in ancient Greek. He put the book down and brought out his model of the Mechanism from a cabinet underneath the stairs. In size, it is startlingly similar to a laptop computer, though a bit thicker. On the front dial, in addition to the pointers for the sun and the moon that Price posited, Wright added pointers for the planets and a separate pointer for the day of the year. On the back dial were two hundred and twenty-three divisions, marking months in the saros cycle; a similar dial above that showed months in the Metonic cycle. The gears were hidden inside a wooden casing, which had a large wooden knob on one side.
Wright took his model apart to showed me how all the gears fitted together. Then Wright put the machine back together and turned the hand knob that drives the solar gear. It engaged with the smaller gears, through the various gear trains, and the pointers began to spin around the dials. The day-of-the-year pointer moved forward at a regular pace, but the lunar and planetary pointers traced eccentric orbits, sometimes reversing course and going backward, just as the planets occasionally appear to do in the night sky. Meanwhile, the pointers on the back dials crept through the months in the saros and Metonic cycles; eclipses came and went. I noticed that as long as he kept turning the knob Wright himself seemed, for once, perfectly unmuddled.
Until this moment, I had, like many others, continued to puzzle over why, if the Greeks were capable of building such a technically sophisticated device, they used that capacity to construct what is essentially a toy—an intellectual amusement. But as I beheld this whirring, whirling symphony of metal, a perfect simulation of a mechanistic and logical universe, I realized that my notions of practicality were foolish and shortsighted. This machine was much more than a toy; it embodied a whole world view, and it must have been, for the ancients, wonderfully reassuring to behold.
A convincing twin of Darth Vader stalks the beige cubicles of a Silicon Valley office, complete with ominous black mask, cape and light saber.
But this is no chintzy Halloween costume. It’s a prototype, years in the making, of a toy that incorporates brain wave-reading technology.
Behind the mask is a sensor that touches the user’s forehead and reads the brain’s electrical signals, then sends them to a wireless receiver inside the saber, which lights up when the user is concentrating.
The player maintains focus by channeling thoughts on any fixed mental image, or thinking specifically about keeping the light sword on. When the mind wanders, the wand goes dark.
Engineers at NeuroSky Inc. have big plans for brain wave-reading toys and video games. They say the simple Darth Vader game—a relatively crude biofeedback device cloaked in gimmicky garb—portends the coming of more sophisticated devices that could revolutionize the way people play.
In work that has implications for those with severe burns, researchers have demonstrated in mice a new way to encourage skin regeneration.
Artificial skin that slowly releases a stem-cell-attracting protein could improve the healing process for patients with severe burns and for diabetics with foot ulcers. Preliminary studies combining a commonly used skin substitute with a growth factor have demonstrated faster healing in mice. The animals even appear to have regenerated new tissue, rather than scar tissue.
Ontario will ban the sale of inefficient incandescent light bulbs by 2012, a move that follows in the footsteps of Australia, the province said Wednesday.
The government estimates that replacing the 87 million incandescent bulbs in use across Ontario with more efficient bulbs would save six million megawatt hours every year — enough to power 600,000 homes.
Changing to more efficient bulbs is also the equivalent — in terms of greenhouse-gas emissions — of taking 250,000 cars off the road, said Ontario Environment Minister Laurel Broten, who announced the move along with Energy Minister Dwight Duncan on Wednesday morning.
“It’s lights out for old, inefficient bulbs in Ontario,” Duncan said in a statement.
Scientists worldwide are struggling to make motor fuel from waste, but Richard Gross has taken an unusual approach: making a “fuel-latent plastic,†designed for conversion. It can be used like ordinary plastic, for packaging or other purposes, but when it is waste, can easily be turned into a substitute diesel fuel.
The process does not yet work well enough to be commercial, but the Pentagon was impressed enough to give $2.34 million for more research. The technique could reduce the amount of material that the military has to ship to soldiers at remote bases, because the plastic would do double duty, first as packaging and then as fuel. It would also reduce trash disposal problems, according to the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, known as Darpa.
It is made of wax, is barely three inches across and comes in any colour you like, as long as it’s black. And it could save more greenhouse gas emissions than taxes on gas guzzling cars, low energy light bulbs and wind turbines on houses combined. It is the e-cube, and it is coming soon to a fridge near you.
Invented by British engineers, the £25 gadget significantly reduces the amount of energy used by fridges and freezers, which are estimated to consume about a fifth of all domestic electricity in the UK. If one was fitted to each of the 87 million refrigeration units in Britain, carbon dioxide emissions would fall by more than 2 million tonnes a year.
The patented cube mimics food and is designed to fit around a fridge’s temperature sensor, which usually measures the temperature of the circulating air.
Because air heats up much more quickly than yoghurt, milk or whatever else is stored inside, this makes the fridge work harder than necessary. With the cube fitted, the fridge responds only to the temperature of the food, which means it clicks on and off less often as the door is open and closed.
Trials are under way with supermarkets, breweries and hotels. One of the largest, the Riverbank Park Plaza hotel in London, fitted the device to each of the hotel’s 140 major fridges and freezers. David Bell, chief engineer, says energy use decreased by about 30% on average – enough to slash the hotel’s annual electricity bill by £17,000. The Park Plaza group plans to fit them throughout its UK hotels, and to recommend them overseas.
University of Delaware researchers have developed an inexpensive, nonchlorine-based technology that can remove harmful microorganisms, including viruses, from drinking water.
UD’s patented technology, developed jointly by researchers in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources and the College of Engineering, incorporates highly reactive iron in the filtering process to deliver a chemical “knock-out punch†to a host of notorious pathogens, from E. coli to rotavirus.
The new technology could dramatically improve the safety of drinking water around the globe, particularly in developing countries. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over a billion people—one-sixth of the world’s population—lack access to safe water supplies.
Chimpanzees in Senegal have been observed making and using wooden spears to hunt other primates, according to a study in the journal Current Biology.
Researchers documented 22 cases of chimps fashioning tools to jab at smaller primates sheltering in cavities of hollow branches or tree trunks.
The report’s authors, Jill Pruetz and Paco Bertolani, said the finding could have implications for human evolution.
Chimps had not been previously observed hunting other animals with tools.
Pruetz and Bertolani made the discovery at their research site in Fongoli, Senegal, between March 2005 and July 2006.
“There were hints that this behaviour might occur, but it was one time at a different site,” said Jill Pruetz, assistant professor of anthropology at Iowa State University, US.
“While in Senegal for the spring semester, I saw about 13 different hunting bouts. So it really is habitual.”
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Deep in the most remote jungles of South America, Amazon Indians (Amerindians) are using Google Earth, Global Positioning System (GPS) mapping, and other technologies to protect their fast-dwindling home. Tribes in Suriname, Brazil, and Colombia are combining their traditional knowledge of the rainforest with Western technology to conserve forests and maintain ties to their history and cultural traditions, which include profound knowledge of the forest ecosystem and medicinal plants. Helping them is the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT), a nonprofit organization working with indigenous people to conserve biodiversity, health, and culture in South American rainforests.
Think carbon nanotubes are new-fangled? Think again. The Crusaders felt the might of the tube when they fought against the Muslims and their distinctive, patterned Damascus blades.
Sabres from Damascus, now in Syria, date back as far as 900 AD. Strong and sharp, they are made from a type of steel called wootz.
Their blades bear a banded pattern thought to have been created as the sword was annealed and forged. But the secret of the swords’ manufacture was lost in the eighteenth century.
Materials researcher Peter Paufler and his colleagues at Dresden University, Germany, have taken electron-microscope pictures of the swords and found that wootz has a microstructure of nano-metre-sized tubes, just like carbon nanotubes used in modern technologies for their lightweight strength.
The tubes were only revealed after a piece of sword was dissolved in hydrochloric acid to remove another microstructure in the swords: nanowires of the mineral cementite.
NASA’s EO-1 is a new breed of satellite with AI programming to notice things that change (like the plume of a volcano) and take appropriate action, such as monitoring that specific location.
EO-1 can re-organize its own priorities to study volcanic eruptions, flash floods, forest fires, disintegrating sea-ice, and other unexpected events. It can also use sensors on other satellites or on the ground as a “sensorweb.”
A St. Louis-area teenage boy and a computer game have gone hands-off, thanks to a unique experiment conducted by a team of neurosurgeons, neurologists, and engineers at Washington University in St. Louis. The boy, a 14-year-old who suffers from epilepsy, is the first teenager to play a two-dimensional video game, Space Invaders, using only the signals from his brain to make movements.
Getting subjects to move objects using only their brains has implications toward someday building biomedical devices that can control artificial limbs, for instance, enabling the disabled to move a prosthetic arm or leg by thinking about it.
Beaming people in “Star Trek” fashion is still in the realms of science fiction, but physicists in Denmark have teleported information from light to matter bringing quantum communication and computing closer to reality.Until now scientists have teleported similar objects such as light or single atoms over short distances from one spot to another in a split second.
But Professor Eugene Polzik and his team at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University in Denmark have made a breakthrough by using both light and matter.
“It is one step further because for the first time it involves teleportation between light and matter, two different objects. One is the carrier of information and the other one is the storage medium,” Polzik explained in an interview on Wednesday.
The experiment involved for the first time a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms. They also teleported the information a distance of half a meter but believe it can be extended further.