In Future, The Internet Could Come Through Your Lightbulb

The tungsten lightbulb has served well over the century or so since it was introduced, but its days are numbered now with the arrival of LED lighting, which consume a tenth of the power of incandescent bulbs and have a lifespan 30 times longer. Potential uses of LEDs are not limited to illumination: smart lighting products are emerging that can offer various additional features, including linking your laptop or smartphone to the internet. Move over Wi-Fi, Li-Fi is here.
Wireless communication with visible light is, in fact, not a new idea. Everyone knows about using smoke signals on a desert island to try to capture attention. Perhaps less well known is that in the time of Napoleon much of Europe was covered with optical telegraphs, otherwise known as the semaphore..



Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, actually regarded the photophone as his most important invention, a device that used a mirror to relay the vibrations caused by speech over a beam of light.
In the same way that interrupting (modulating) a plume of smoke can break it into parts that form an SOS message in Morse code, so visible light communications – Li-Fi – rapidly modulates the intensity of a light to encode data as binary zeros and ones. But this doesn’t mean that Li-Fi transceivers will flicker; the modulation will be too fast for the eye to see.
Wi-Fi vs Li-Fi
The enormous and growing user demand for wireless data is placing huge pressure on existing Wi-Fi technology, which uses the radio and microwave frequency spectrum. With exponential growth of mobile devices, by 2019 more than ten billion devices are expected to exchange around 35 quintillion (10¹⁸) bytes of information each month. This won’t be possible using existing wireless technology due to frequency congestion and electromagnetic interference. The problem is most acutely felt in public spaces in urban areas, where many users try to share the limited capacity available from Wi-Fi transmitters or mobile phone network cell towers.
A fundamental communications principle is that the maximum data transfer possible scales with the electromagnetic frequency bandwidth available. The radio frequency spectrum is heavily used and regulated, and there just isn’t enough additional space to satisfy the growth in demand. So Li-Fi has the potential to replace radio and microwave frequency Wi-Fi.
 


Visible light spectrum has huge, unused and unregulated capacity for communications. The light from LEDs can be modulated very quickly: data rates as high as 3.5Gb/s using a single blue LED or 1.7Gb/s with white light have been demonstrated by researchers in our EPSRC-funded Ultra-Parallel Visible Light Communications programme.
Unlike Wi-Fi transmitters, optical communications are well-confined inside the walls of a room. This confinement might seem to be a limitation for Li-Fi, but it offers the key advantage that it is very secure: if the curtains are drawn then nobody outside the room can eavesdrop. An array of light sources in the ceiling could send different signals to different users. The transmitter power can be localised, more efficiently used and won’t interfere with adjacent Li-Fi sources. Indeed the lack of radio frequency interference is another advantage over Wi-Fi. Visible light communications is intrinsically safe, and could end the need for travellers to switch devices to flight mode.
A further advantage of Li-Fi is that it can use existing power lines as LED lighting so no new infrastructure is needed.



Lightening The Burden Of The Internet Of Things
The internet of things is an ambitious vision of a hyper-connected world of objects autonomously communicating with each other. For example, your fridge might inform your smartphone that you have run out of milk, and even order it for you. Sensors in your car will directly alert you though your smartphone that your tyres are too worn or have low pressure.
Given the number of “things” that can be fitted with sensors and controllers then network-enabled and connected, the bandwidth needed for all these devices to communicate is vast. Industry monitor Gartner predicts that 25 billion such devices will be connected by 2020, but given that most of this information needs only to be transferred a short distance, Li-Fi is an attractive – and perhaps the only – solution to making this a reality.
Several companies are already offering products for visible light communications. The Li-1st from PureLiFi, based in Edinburgh, offers a simple plug-and-play solution for secure wireless point-to-point internet access with a capacity of 11.5 Mbps – comparable to first generation Wi-Fi. Another is Oledcomm from France, which exploits the safe, non-radio frequency nature of Li-Fi with installations in hospitals.
There are still many technological challenges to tackle but already the first steps have been taken to make Li-Fi a reality. In the future your light switch will turn on much more than just illumination.

Pavlos Manousiadis, Research Fellow, University of St Andrews; Graham Turnbull, Professor, Head of the School of Physics and Astronomy, ...


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Lightening The Burden Of The Internet Of ThingsThe internet of things is an ambitious vision of a hyper-connected world of objects autonomously communicating with each other. For example, your fridge might inform your smartphone that you have run out of milk, and even order it for you. Sensors in your car will directly alert you though your smartphone that your tyres are too worn or have low pressure.Given the number of “things” that can be fitted with sensors and controllers then network-enabled and connected, the bandwidth needed for all these devices to communicate is vast. Industry monitor Gartner predicts that 25 billion such devices will be connected by 2020, but given that most of this information needs only to be transferred a short distance, Li-Fi is an attractive – and perhaps the only – solution to making this a reality.Several companies are already offering products for visible light communications. The Li-1st from PureLiFi, based in Edinburgh, offers a simple plug-and-play solution for secure wireless point-to-point internet access with a capacity of 11.5 Mbps – comparable to first generation Wi-Fi. Another is Oledcomm from France, which exploits the safe, non-radio frequency nature of Li-Fi with installations in hospitals.There are still many technological challenges to tackle but already the first steps have been taken to make Li-Fi a reality. In the future your light switch will turn on much more than just illumination.The ConversationPavlos Manousiadis, Research Fellow, University of St Andrews; Graham Turnbull, Professor, Head of the School of Physics and Astronomy, University of St Andrews, and Ifor Samuel, Professor of Polymer Optoelectronics,  

Question of the day .

Are antibiotics to blame for allergies?

Science Says Love Doesn't Exist

If you're one of those depressed single people posting "Fuck Valentine's Day" statuses on Facebook, I've got great news for you: According to science, love doesn't exist, so there's nothing to get worked up about.
Scientific study into mating and pair bonding behaviors leaves little alternative. Granted, science isn't one monolithic entity that collectively agrees on things. Plus you supposedly can't prove a negative, but Bill Nye in particular seems to be into debating that things don't exist lately. So while there's not an open debate about love, I'd love to moderate one. Bill Nye would be on one side, vivisecting love. On the other side would be Zach Braff and Oprah.
Right now there's a meme going around in interviews with psychologists about this animal called the prairie vole that engages in perfect monogamy, almost without exception. Prairie voles are so totally monogamous that they pair bond instantly after mating. As Abby Marsh, psychology professor at Georgetown University, said to a documentary crew, "Compared to a lot of other mammals, the male doesn’t just disappear. He sticks around." When she says "other mammals," she probably means us.
So scientists cut open the vole's brain and found, according to Marsh, "really dense oxytocin receptors in regions like the nucleus accumbens." The nucleus accumbens is the reward center. "When they mate, it triggers a flood of oxytocin to be released. That triggers a flood of dopamine to be released to the nucleus accumbens which causes the female to find that particular male really rewarding to be around." This is an animal that, if its mate dies, won't choose another mate. Instead it'll just die alone. Imagine how this vole thinks about its little partner vole. Imagine that love feeling. Are you imagining it?






Next, because scientists are assholes like that, they gave the voles a drug that cut off their oxytocin receptors. Sure enough, Marsh says the vole is now, "uninterested in forming pair bonds," and its behavior will be essentially the same as its cousin, the polygynous Montane vole, which fucks everything in sight because it favors quantity of litters over its offspring's having the protection of two parents, a perfectly valid position for a vole to take.
It's the same with humans, Marsh says. "Humans are probably built similarly. People who excite romantic feelings in us probably also trigger increases in oxytocin, which results in this increase in dopamine when we find that person." We're just not as good at it as the vole, even without a scientist fucking with our oxytocin receptors.
No one should be surprised that pair bonding has been linked to biology, but think of it this way: We knew a long time ago how chemistry was involved in the reproductive component of what we interpreted to be love, in our narrow definition, and we figured how to turn that off via castration or oophorectomy. But there was still the pair bonding. Now we can shut that off too.
Which capacity would you rather have permanently turned off, mating or pair bonding? You have to say mating, not bonding, or you're a monster, right? Someone who can mate but can't bond doesn't love, do they? Besides, bonding and mating can't be all there is to love, can they?
For the past few decades, scientists and philosophers armed with pop sensibilities and book deals have done a lot of work compiling arguments in layman's terms that each explain away some socially toxic aspect of love: heteronormativity (you have to be a man and a woman to be in love), gender binary (you have to be either a man or a woman to be in love), along with patriarchy, monogamy, and exclusivity—all the tattered legacy of our superstitious ancestors.
There's enough mainstream science literature that you can cherry-pick until the explanation gels with your worldview. Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate explains much of human behavior as part of our biological programming, but he arguably gets too infatuated with 1950s gender roles, and in some circles he has become a symbol of sexism in science. For a while, it was tough to find intelligent discourse about this, what with the term "evolutionary psychology" being hijacked by fedora-wearing men's rights activists who used it to justify their "biological imperative" to "spread their seed."
Sex at Dawn, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, who were rightly critical of Pinker, came out in 2011 and became the go-to explanation for humans as a non-monogamous species. It's now used by people in poly marriages to explain how weird they aren't, or brought to the table when people have the "I want to open up this relationship" talk. The book very successfully rips apart the idea of monogamy as a set-in-stone human instinct, but it also tends to be a little saccharine about our species' supposed preference for peace over war, and a suppressed instinct for conflict resolution through blowjobs.
Christopher Ryan is now America's leading anti-monogamy pundit. He told this to CNN: 

"The human body tells the same story. Men's testicles are far larger than those of any monogamous or polygynous primate, hanging vulnerably outside the body where cooler temperatures help preserve standby sperm cells for multiple ejaculations. Men sport the longest, thickest primate penis, as well as an embarrassing tendency to reach orgasm when the woman is just getting warmed up. These are all strong indications of so-called sperm competition in our species' past."

But science doesn't just hold that we're a non-monogamous species. We're also fickle. Rutgers University psychology professor Helen Fisher, who spends most of her public speaking time talking about the science of attraction, theorizes that there's a four-year cycle on passion for couples. She ties it to the idea that you meet someone, mate, and raise a child until it can at least run from predators, and then one partner gets bored and leaves. Here's Fisher in a much less controversial mode:



That's not to say, by the way, that men leave. Any member of any couple could well want to take off, male or female, gay or straight. Sarah Hrdy's Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species is a brutal, unsentimental take on female sexual and maternal instincts. Totally intuitive statements from Hrdy like "Wherever women have both control over their reproductive opportunities and a chance to better themselves, women opt for well-being and economic security over having more children," shouldn't blow anyone's mind, but they often do.

But even while we keep redefining it, love remains this enduring literary concept that consoles us when we try to tackle the cosmic void. Carl Sagan pulled readers out of the darkest, most despairing chapters of his books about the infinite abyss with famous quotes like, "For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love," but what's really left of love after some time in the cold hard light of science?

While writers of bestsellers usually won't explain away love completely, the philosopher Judith Butler seems willing to go there but stops just shy. In a letter that was published in 2007 she wrote about grappling with the concept of love. She frames it as a series of transactions: "One finds that love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision."
At the end of my aforementioned hypothetical debate, Bill Nye would force Zach and Oprah to agree to something like the conclusion Judith Butler came to. Love is just a behavior acted out by choice, because of forces within society. It means something to us not because it's a tangible thing that exists but because we've agreed to pretend it exists, like money, or Christmas.

But i can say " Love is part of nature.People who usually dont accept it and trying to convince us that its an "illusion", then they are the ones who are hallucinating unatural madness and trying to destroy happiness and mother nature by any force. People like those,are just only losers and insanes (and thats why psychiatrists exist today). And thats the true realism,realism needs optimism,because nature want us to evolve naturally and we have to accept it,if its that so,then love,which this feeling makes us happy and increases our consciousness,is a gift from nature and those who hate it are those who are currently destroying our world. First rule,before you be a politician or generally a citizen or enter generally in life" LOVE the world.
Ps:Dont respond here if you have different opinion,cause this is my first and last statement here,only like if you like it.END OF MESSAGE!
Pss:I love my friends,my family,I know my feelings and I do respect them! We arent robots,we are living beings.Stop calculating us as numbers or computers.We arent!"....

Have a good day :)

How to make your own kickass homemade projector

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You won’t get the level of satisfaction and self-content that you can get from doing things on your own. One can buy stuff at stores or on internet, but if you can build something on your own, no matter how big or how small; it will always be a pride moment of accomplishment.

Here is a way to build a projector out of some cereal box and things that you can find in your house.

1 Things required building this projector

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One requires a large cardboard box, a Fresnel lens and a regular magnifier glass. You also need a bright light such as a LED or LCD, whichever you find cheaper. A round cylinder of some kind as same size as the magnifier glass (pringles box will do).

Other things required are aluminium foil, tape and scissors. The LCD light can be found on eBay for $20 or so.

2 Step 1: The base work

Cut the top of the cardboard box and put a piece of cardboard about halfway in the box along with the Fresnel lens in it and firmly secure it with tape (See pic 1). Cut out another piece of card board which is the same size and width as the main box and cut a hole in it for your light to be fixed in.




Cover the cardboard around the hole with tin foil. This will reflect the most light, which is needed. Then insert the said piece into the main box, making sure that it is in line with the Fresnel lens and it is at least 3 inches away from it.

 

You can also put a cone and a condenser lens or a strong magnifying glass on the light to make it a lot brighter.
 

visit this page
http://deveev.com/creative/how-to-make-your-own-kickass-homemade-projector/2/

Pirate Bay Founder Finally Free After Three Years

Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm is a free man again after serving three years in prison for hacking and copyright offenses. His release marks the end of a turbulent and tough period characterized by successive trials, appeals and convictions in both Sweden and Denmark
 Gottfrid Svartholm, also known as Anakata, was a founding member of The Pirate Bay and played a key role during the site’s early years.
He has spent the last three years in prisons in Sweden and Denmark, for a variety of offenses. Last month his prison time in Denmark ended and after serving a final month in Sweden he is now a free man.
At this time Gottfrid and his family prefer not to make any public statements, which is understandable considering all that’s happened, but his mother just confirmed the good news.
His release marks the end of a tough time with several consecutive setbacks.
It all started in 2011 when Gottfrid received a one-year prison sentence for his involvement with the notorious site, which he initially avoided.

Liquid water flows on present-day Mars! Researchers using our Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter detected signatures of hydrated minerals on slopes where mysterious dark streaks are seen on the Red Planet. Scientists say it’s likely a shallow subsurface flow, with enough water wicking to the surface to explain the darkening.

New findings from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) provide the strongest evidence yet that liquid water flows intermittently on present-day Mars.
Using an imaging spectrometer on MRO, researchers detected signatures of hydrated minerals on slopes where mysterious streaks are seen on the Red Planet. These darkish streaks appear to ebb and flow over time. They darken and appear to flow down steep slopes during warm seasons, and then fade in cooler seasons. They appear in several locations on Mars when temperatures are above minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 23 Celsius), and disappear at colder times.
“Our quest on Mars has been to ‘follow the water,’ in our search for life in the universe, and now we have convincing science that validates what we’ve long suspected,” said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “This is a significant development, as it appears to confirm that water -- albeit briny -- is flowing today on the surface of Mars.”
These downhill flows, known as recurring slope lineae (RSL), often have been described as possibly related to liquid water. The new findings of hydrated salts on the slopes point to what that relationship may be to these dark features. The hydrated salts would lower the freezing point of a liquid brine, just as salt on roads here on Earth causes ice and snow to melt more rapidly. Scientists say it’s likely a shallow subsurface flow, with enough water wicking to the surface to explain the darkening.
 We found the hydrated salts only when the seasonal features were widest, which suggests that either the dark streaks themselves or a process that forms them is the source of the hydration. In either case, the detection of hydrated salts on these slopes means that water plays a vital role in the formation of these streaks," said Lujendra Ojha of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in Atlanta, lead author of a report on these findings published Sept. 28 by Nature Geoscience.

Ojha first noticed these puzzling features as a University of Arizona undergraduate student in 2010, using images from the MRO's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE). HiRISE observations now have documented RSL at dozens of sites on Mars. The new study pairs HiRISE observations with mineral mapping by MRO’s Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM).
The spectrometer observations show signatures of hydrated salts at multiple RSL locations, but only when the dark features were relatively wide. When the researchers looked at the same locations and RSL weren't as extensive, they detected no hydrated salt.
Ojha and his co-authors interpret the spectral signatures as caused by hydrated minerals called perchlorates. The hydrated salts most consistent with the chemical signatures are likely a mixture of magnesium perchlorate, magnesium chlorate and sodium perchlorate. Some perchlorates have been shown to keep liquids from freezing even when conditions are as cold as minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 70 Celsius). On Earth, naturally produced perchlorates are concentrated in deserts, and some types of perchlorates can be used as rocket propellant.

Perchlorates have previously been seen on Mars. NASA's Phoenix lander and Curiosity rover both found them in the planet's soil, and some scientists believe that the Viking missions in the 1970s measured signatures of these salts. However, this study of RSL detected perchlorates, now in hydrated form, in different areas than those explored by the landers. This also is the first time perchlorates have been identified from orbit.
MRO has been examining Mars since 2006 with its six science instruments.
"The ability of MRO to observe for multiple Mars years with a payload able to see the fine detail of these features has enabled findings such as these: first identifying the puzzling seasonal streaks and now making a big step towards explaining what they are," said Rich Zurek, MRO project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
For Ojha, the new findings are more proof that the mysterious lines he first saw darkening Martian slopes five years ago are, indeed, present-day water.
"When most people talk about water on Mars, they're usually talking about ancient water or frozen water," he said. "Now we know there’s more to the story. This is the first spectral detection that unambiguously supports our liquid water-formation hypotheses for RSL."
The discovery is the latest of many breakthroughs by NASA’s Mars missions.
“It took multiple spacecraft over several years to solve this mystery, and now we know there is liquid water on the surface of this cold, desert planet,” said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. “It seems that the more we study Mars, the more we learn how life could be supported and where there are resources to support life in the future.


There are eight co-authors of the Nature Geoscience paper, including Mary Beth Wilhelm at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California and Georgia Tech; CRISM Principal Investigator Scott Murchie of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland; and HiRISE Principal Investigator Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson, Arizona. Others are at Georgia Tech, the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and Laboratoire de Planétologie et Géodynamique in Nantes, France.
The agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin built the orbiter and collaborates with JPL to operate it.
More information about NASA's journey to Mars is available online at:

https://www.nasa.gov/topics/journeytomars

For more information about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/mro

BlackBerry confirms ‘Priv’ Android device, formally ‘Venice’

BlackBerry has finally officially confirmed that their upcoming Android slider is real and it’s production ergo launch name is the BlackBerry Priv. There has been many leaked images of the device and a hands on video recently but now thanks to the release of the 2nd Qtr Fiscal results the devices is official.
In the press release Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer John Chen said:

“At the same time, we are focused on making faster progress to achieve profitability in our handset business. Today, I am confirming our plans to launch Priv, an Android device named after BlackBerry’s heritage and core mission of protecting our customers’ privacy. Priv combines the best of BlackBerry security and productivity with the expansive mobile application ecosystem available on the Android platform,”

Great news for BlackBerry lovers, what’s left of them anyway and a new device to consider for Android heads

Enjoy this iPhone 6S being heavily damaged

A great YouTube account called JerryRigEverything set about testing how durable the iPhone 6S is now that it has hit the US market. The new iPhone 6S is stronger than the previous versions and now that it has a new 3D touchscreen they set about basically destroying it.

 

Along with knives, keys and coins, fire was also used to see how strong the screen is and as expected it doesn’t fair too well in some of the tests.
Check it out and let us know what you think, ohh and yes…you can still bend it.

John Chen demo’s the BlackBerry Priv in disastrous video

September 28, 2015 by +Ali Khan 

John Chen is the CEO of BlackBerry and he was showing off the new Android powered BlackBerry Priv in what surely must be one of the worst, most awkward videos I have ever seen. The interviewer first asks about the name ‘Priv’ and he says it stands for ‘Privacy’. She says ‘not privilege’ to which Mr Chen also say yes ‘Privacy & Privilege’ as if to try and add something extra to the phone. In fact this is something terrible to say, you should feel privileged if you use the new Priv, come on, please.
Next John Chen tries, badly, to take us through some features, first trying to open Chrome which takes an age and multiple attempts, finally he gives up.
 Clearly Mr Chen has no idea what he is doing and if BlackBerry want to actually shift these things then they better start upping their game and get someone who can actually show off its features.

Samsung Pay declared a Hit

Samsung Pay has proven both popular and profitable during its first month of use in South Korea, according to the company. On Wednesday, Samsung announced that its mobile payments system took in more than $30 million in transactions in South Korea between August 20, when it launched, and September 20. The service has been successful with merchants and users, Samsung touted, generating more than 1.5 million transactions and recording around 36 percent of its users as active during the first month, with 10 percent of them using it every day.  Samsung Pay is the company's own mobile payments system, which lets users pay for items on the go at supported merchants using their smartphones. Following its launch in South Korea, Samsung Pay will sail to the United States on September 28. And that's where the real challenge begins. Once in the US, the service will go head-to-head against Apple Pay and Google's Android Pay. 

But Samsung Pay carries one distinct advantage. Apple Pay and Android Pay require NFC (near-field communications) support from merchants. Samsung Pay can work with non-NFC technology, so retailers don't have to upgrade their equipment. However, Apple Pay has a huge head start, having launched almost a year ago in the US and now available in the UK. This has given Apple the necessary time to sign up major banks, credit card companies and merchants. Samsung will have to go through the same lengthy process in order to gain a foothold in the US. Both services are also trying to make a dent in overseas markets. Samsung Pay is scheduled to expand to the UK, Spain and China soon, Samsung said. Apple has run into roadblocks launching Apple Pay in regions such as Australia and China due to concerns from banks over the high cut of transaction fees that the iPhone maker demands.

 

Ten Years On, Invisibility Cloaks Are Close To Becoming A Manufacturable Reality

Photo credit: A new invisibility cloak can hide objects using an ultrathin layer of nanoantennas that reflect off light. Are humans next? Courtesy of Xiang Zhang group, Berkeley Lab/UC Berkeley, CC BY 




 Invisibility has long been one of the marvels in science fiction and fantasy – and more recently in physics. But while physicists have figured out the concept for how to make invisibility cloaks, they are yet to build a practical device that can hide human-sized objects in the way that Harry Potter’s cloak can.
Objects are visible to the human eye because they distort light waves according to their shape. We see the objects by registering these distortions when the light from the objects hit our eyes. In a similar way an object can also be visible to a radar, which transmits radio waves or microwaves that bounce off objects in their path.
So far, most invisibility cloaks are made from engineered materials that can bend light in a way that manipulates the eye – or another device such as a radar. However, these typically only work for tiny objects. But that may be about to change. A new experiment has created a cloak that, for the first time, can hide small objects of any shape completely from visible light. The cloak, which is thinner and more flexible than any of its predecessors, can also be scaled up to hide bigger objects – potentially transforming the science into something that can be manufactured and sold.

Messy Metamaterials

The first invisibility cloak was created in 2006 by British scientist John Pendry. It consisted of a material that could bend microwaves, but not visible light, around a tiny, 2D object measuring just a couple of micrometers – making it look like they had travelled straight and never touched the object. Since then, better versions that work for other wavelengths in both two and three dimensions have been created
Nearly all of these cloaks rely on the use of metamaterials, which are a class of material engineered to produce properties that don’t occur naturally. They typically have small internal structures built out of glass, metal or plastics or dielectrics, electrical insulators loaded with nano-particles. In this way they can be made to interact with light in unusual ways. However, these are generally bulky and can be hard to scale up.
Another problem is that it is difficult to make invisibility cloaks conceal light completely. If there’s just a little bit leaking out the hidden object can’t be completely invisible.

Promising Technique

The new cloak is more sophisticated than past devices. It is ultra thin and able to conceal a small three-dimensional object measuring 36 by 36 micrometers by completely reflecting a wavelength of visible light, which has not been done before. And perhaps the most important feature is that the technology could be scaled up to hide bigger objects.
The downside? It only works for light at 730-nanometer wavelength, which is visible light near the infrared part of the spectrum. While this could be useful to hide things from for specific devices, such as radar, it would have to be improved to scatter lights from all wavelengths on the visible spectrum to be able to hide from the human eye. While we are still some way away from doing this, we are getting closer.
The cloak hides objects by wrapping them in layer of gold nanoantennas — only 80 nanometers thick. The antennas in the cloak manipulate the light as it hits the object in a way that makes it look like it’s bouncing off a flat surface instead – making it impossible to see the geometry of the object.
The technology of invisibility cloaking has many potential uses, ranging from military applications to bio medicine, computing and even energy harvesting.
For example, it could be used to render an aircraft invisible from radar. Stealth aircraft, which have been built to avoid detection by radar, are thought to have first been produced in Germany during World War II and use a number of technologies that reduce reflection and emission of light. The cloak can be also used to isolate closely placed antennas, which eventually reduces the footprint of antenna arrays and makes future communication systems extra compact.
Meanwhile, the UK QUEST project, led by Queen Mary, University of London to come up with new ways to manipulate electromagnetic fields, has challenged the fundamental physics of thin absorbers, which can dissipate unwanted incoming waves, by combining graphene with metamaterials to develop “stealthy” wallpapers to create wireless-secure environments, reduce the interference of handheld devices and reuse the radio to increase mobile communication capacity.
With so many important applications, it is surely just a matter of time before the cloaks get better and more practical. With the help of ever-emerging advanced manufacturing tools, ten years on, the future of invisibility is coming into view.

Light-Based Data Breakthrough Could Lead To Much Faster Computers

Researchers say they have developed a method to store data permanently in a memory chip using light. The breakthrough, published in the journal Nature Photonics, could lead to significantly faster computers in the future.
To store data, it is essential a device must be able to work when power is both on and off – think of a CD, DVD or hard drive. But computers are limited in their speed by the transmission of electric data between a processor and the memory stored in these devices – called the von Neumann bottleneck. This means that faster processors don't necessarily mean better computing power, when it is the transmission speed of the data that is the limiting factor.
Using light, or photons, to transfer data could therefore allow for much greater speeds. But until now, scientists had struggled to find a way to create a light-based device that can store data for a significant period of time.
“There’s no point using faster processors if the limiting factor is the shuttling of information to-and-from the memory,” said University of Oxford's Professor Harish Bhaskaran, who led the research, in a statement. “But we think using light can significantly speed this up.”
In this research, which also included the University of Münster, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the University of Exeter, the team created the world’s first all-photonic non-volatile memory chip. It uses a material called Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST), which is also used in rewritable CDs and DVDs, to store data.
Pulses of light can change the material's state from an ordered to a random state, or crystalline to amorphous. This change can be used to store information, in the form of 1s and 0s, for decades. And using a technique known as multiplexing – which involves sending and directing different wavelengths of light down a silicon nitrate waveguide – a single pulse can write and read data simultaneously, providing “virtually unlimited bandwidth,” Professor Wolfram Pernice of the University of Münster said in the statement.
“This is a completely new kind of functionality using proven existing materials,” added Professor Bhaskaran. “These optical bits can be written with frequencies of up to one gigahertz and could provide huge bandwidths. This is the kind of ultra-fast data storage that modern computing needs.”
The team will now work to develop the technology, including finding ways to perform more tasks using light instead of electrical signals.

Technology : Here Is the World's First Engine Driven by Nothing...

Technology : Here Is the World's First Engine Driven by Nothing...: Bioengineers invent a way to harvest energy from water evaporating at room temperature. It's an engine with living parts.      ...

Here Is the World's First Engine Driven by Nothing But Evaporation

Bioengineers invent a way to harvest energy from water evaporating at room temperature. It's an engine with living parts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It might not look like much, but this plastic box is a fully functioning engine—and one that does something no other engine has ever done before. Pulling energy seemingly out of thin air, it harvests power from the ambient evaporation of room-temperature water. No kidding.
A team of bioengineers led by Ozgur Sahin at Columbia University have just created the world's first evaporation-driven engine, which they report today in the journal Nature Communications. Using nothing more than a puddle of resting water, the engine, which measures less than four inches on each side, can power LED lights and even drive a miniature car. Better yet, Sahin says, the engine costs less than $5 to build.


"This is a very, very impressive breakthrough," says Peter Fratzl, a biomaterial researcher at the Max-Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam, Germany who was not involved in the research. "The engine is essentially harvesting useful amounts of energy from the infinitely small and naturally occurring gradients [in temperature] near the surface of water. These tiny temperature gradients exist everywhere, even in some of the most remote places on Earth."

An engine with living parts

To understand how the engine works, it helps to understand unique material behind it.
The key to Sahin's astonishing new invention is a new material that Sahin calls HYDRAs (short for hygroscopy-driven artificial muscles). HYDRAs are essentially thin, muscle-like plastic bands that contract and expand with tiny changes in humidity. A pinky finger-length HYDRA band can cycle through contraction and expansion more than a million times with only a slight, and almost negligible, degradation of the material. "And HYDRAs change shape in really quite a dramatic way: they can almost quadruple in length," Sahin says

The idea for the HYDRA material came to Sahin more than half a decade ago, when he came across an unusual find in nature. While studying the physical properties of micro-organisms with advanced imaging techniques, he discovered that the spore of the very common grass bacillus bacteria responds in a strange way to tiny amounts of moisture. Although the dormant spore has almost no metabolic activity and does no physical work, its outer shell can soak up and exude ambient levels of evaporated water—expanding and shrinking while doing so.
"The spores stay very rigid as they expand and contract in response to humidity," Sahin says. "That rigidity means their movements come with a whole lot of energy."

 After many experiments, Sahin found a way he could mimic the spore's unique response. To make HYDRAs, he actually paints the spores onto plastic strips using a laboratory glue. By painting dormant spores in altering patches on both sides of a single strip, the pulsating spores cause the plastic to flex and release in a single direction in response to moisture—just like a spring expanding and contracting.
While a material made of living creatures may sound like it should have a short lifespan, Fratzl says that, in fact, HYDRAs are "likely to last for a very, very long time," he says. "In nature, it's absolutely critical that these spores survive from decades to even hundreds of years in dormancy, all while responding to outside humidity in this dramatic way without breaking down."

The inner workings

How do you go from spores on strips to a working engine? The engine is placed over a puddle of room-temperature water, creating a small enclosure. As the water on the surface naturally evaporates, the inside of the engine becomes slightly more humid. This triggers strips of HYDRAs to expand as they soak up some of the new-found humidity. Collectively, these HYDRAs pull on a cord which is attached to a small electromagnetic generator, transforming the cord's movement into energy. The HYDRAs also pull open a set of four shutters on top of the engine, releasing the humid air. With the shutters open, humidity inside the engine drops. This causes the HYDRAs to shed their water-vapor and contract, which pulls the shutters back closed. And the process repeats, just like an engine's cycle.
Sahin has found that the engine works at room temperature (around 70 degrees Fahrenheit) with water that's at a wide range of temperatures—from 60 to 90 degrees F. Because water naturally evaporates faster at higher temperatures, hotter water works best. With 60-degree water, the engine will open and close its shutters once every 40 seconds. At 70 degrees, it does so every 20 seconds. At 90 degrees, it's every 10.
Sahin also created a second engine with his HYDRAs—this one a turbine-style creation that uses the motion of bending HYDRAs to spin a wheel. Placed on top of a miniature car, the entire device slowly ekes forward—again, powered by nothing but evaporating water.

More than a toy

On average, each pull of the engine creates roughly 50 microwatts. That's a tiny amount of energy, but it's enough to generate light with an LED by harvesting the energy of a puddle of water that's doing nothing but existing at room temperature. Sahin also says that the materials used to make the engine are extremely cheap. Even including the HYRDAs, he says it should cost less than $5 to put together.
There is plenty of room for improvement, too. For one thing, he says, each HYDRA band uses just 1 percent of energy potential of the bacteria spores. A HYDRA-like material that could make better use of the spores would radically increase usefulness of the device. In fact, Sahin says he already developed another material that could tap into one-third of the spores' energy potential, but it proved an absolute nightmare to finagle that material into a long-lasting engine.
For now, the evaporation engine is just a proof of concept meant to show that this unique type of energy generation really can be accomplished. Whether future devices will ever be able to compete with other renewable energy sources, such as wind or solar energy collection, may be a question that won't even be answerable for decades. But the promise is there, he says. Just consider the way the planet works: "The power in wind on a global scale primarily comes from evaporation," he says, "so there's more power to be had here than there is in the wind."

Facebook suffers widespread outage

Facebook suffered a widespread outage Thursday.
“Sorry, something went wrong,” explained an error message on the social networking site at 12:40 p.m. ET. “We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can,” it added.  The site was up again at 12:49 pm ET.

Users quickly took to other social media to discuss the outage.

“Everyone floods onto Twitter soon as Facebook goes down to tweet that Facebook is down,” tweeted @JoeMurfin
“But how is everyone’s one aunt going to post those inspirational memes?” quipped @SimonOstler
Earlier this month, Twitter.com also suffered a brief outage.

CERN Physicists Produce ‘Littlest’ Quark-Gluon Plasma

Physicists from the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have produced a quark-gluon plasma – a state of matter thought to have existed right at the birth of the Universe – with fewer particles than previously thought possible. The material, dubbed ‘littlest liquid,’ was discovered by colliding protons with lead nuclei at high energy inside the CMS detector.
According to CMS physicists, quark-gluon plasma is a very hot and dense state of matter of unbound quarks and gluons.
“It’s believed to correspond to the state of the Universe shortly after the Big Bang. The interaction between partons – quarks and gluons – within quark-gluon plasma is strong, which distinguishes the quark-gluon plasma from a gaseous state where one expects little interaction among the constituent particles,” said team member Dr Quan Wang of the University of Kansas.
“Before the CMS experimental results, it had been thought the medium created in a proton on lead collisions would be too small to create quark-gluon plasma.”
“Indeed, these collisions were being studied as a reference for collisions of two lead nuclei to explore the non-quark-gluon-plasma aspects of the collisions,” said Dr Wang, who is a co-author on the study published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
“The analysis presented in this paper indicates, contrary to expectations, a quark-gluon plasma can be created in very asymmetric proton on lead collisions.”
According to the team, this unexpected discovery sheds new light on high-energy physics.
“This is the first paper that clearly shows multiple particles are correlated to each other in proton-lead collisions, similar to what is observed in lead-lead collisions where quark-gluon plasma is produced. This is probably the first evidence that the smallest droplet of quark-gluon plasma is produced in proton-lead collisions,” said co-author Prof Yen-Jie Lee of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“While we believe the state of the Universe about a microsecond after the Big Bang consisted of a quark-gluon plasma, there is still much that we don’t fully understand about the properties of this plasma,” Dr Wang said.

Chemistry, MATERIALS The structural memory of water persists on a picosecond timescale

A team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P) in Main z, Germany and FOM Institute AMOLF in the Netherlands has characterized the local structural dynamics of liquid water, i.e. how quickly water molecules change their binding state. Using innovative ultra fast vibrational spectroscopes, the researchers show why liquid water is unique when compared to most other molecular liquids. This study has recently been published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.

With the help of a novel combination of ultrafast laser experiments, the scientists found that local structures persist in water for longer than a picosecond, a picosecond (ps) being one thousandth of one billionth of a second (10-12 s). This observation changes the general perception of water as a solvent. “71% of Earth’s surface is covered with water. As most chemical and biological reactions on earth occur in water or at the air water interface in oceans or in clouds, the details of how water behaves at the molecular level are crucial. Our results show that water cannot be treated as a continuum, but that specific local structures exist and are likely very important” says Mischa Bonn, director at the MPI-P.

1. 

 Water is a very special liquid with extremely fast dynamics. Water molecules wiggle and jiggle on sub-picosecond timescales, which make them distinguishable on this timescale. While the existence of very short-lived local structures — e.g. two water molecules that are very close to one another, or are very far apart from each other — is known to occur, it was commonly believed that they lose the memory of their local structure within less than 0.1 picoseconds.

 The proof for relatively long-lived local structures in liquid water was obtained by measuring the vibrations of the Oxygen-Hydrogen (O-H) bonds in water. For this purpose the team of scientists used ultrafast infrared spectroscopy, particularly focusing on water molecules that are weakly (or strongly) hydrogen-bonded to their neighboring water molecules. The scientists found that the vibrations live much longer (up to about 1 ps) for water molecules with a large separation, than for those that are very close (down to 0.2 ps). In other words, the weakly bound water molecules remain weakly bound for a remarkably long time.

Evolving With Technology

A comprehensive introduction to cybercrime with links to resources


In today's world, people must keep up with technology in order to conduct their daily routines. They are required to adapt daily to new knowledge and exciting discoveries that are constantly changing the way they live and do business. Today, everything from saying hello to a friend down the street to videoconferencing with someone around the world can be done electronically, from home.
Technological advances now allow people to carry out the most mundane of tasks, such as ordering groceries from the store, to the most complex activities, such as performing complicated surgery, all from a separate, remote location: a computer connected to the Internet.
Since its beginnings in the 1990s, the Internet has grown into a vast electronic network that now spans the entire globe, and it will only continue to grow. Because people use the Internet in their everyday lives, they rely on it for a safe and accurate exchange of information.
Constantly, personal data such as Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, and passwords are traveling through wires, and also through the air, from one computer to another. With security measures in place to protect this sort of information online, most people feel safe on the Internet and trust that their personal information will remain confidential. But, unfortunately, criminals have also adapted to advancements in technology and, these days, people are becoming victims of crimes committed over the Internet.

The Evolution of Crime on the Internet

For years, criminals have been using discarded credit card receipts, bank statements, tax notices, and other bills (often found in the trash) to gain the personal information necessary to assume another person's identity. However, on today's electronic playing field, these criminals have used technology to devise cunning new methods of theft in the form of cyber crimes. Now, computer hacking and email scams known as phishing are included among the risks of sharing information online.
Computer hackers are able to enter areas of the Internet where they are prohibited and hack in to another computer network. Once they are inside a computer's network, they are able to view documents, files, and confidential data and use it for their own personal gain. Phishing, on the other hand, is a method in which people are duped into providing their own personal data to a thief who is posing as a legitimate business or agency. Both of these cyber crimes have been steadily on the rise in recent years. In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal, there were more than 9.9 million cases of identity theft last year in the United States.

Hacking Into Your Life

One example of the growing computer hacking problem in which personal information was stolen emerged in February, 2005 when an information broker, ChoicePoint Inc., announced that an identity theft ring had hacked into its database and gained access to hundreds of thousands of personal documents. Some of the information that was stolen included full names, Social Security numbers, home addresses, and credit reports.
Many other large corporations such as T-Mobile USA were also recently hacked, and had their clients' information stolen. Even superstar Paris Hilton could not escape the threat of identity theft as her personal photos, text messages, and phone numbers in her personal directory were stolen by a hacker and spread across the Internet. The U.S. Senate will soon hold hearings to determine whether these corporations and information brokers require more extensive regulation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Phishing - Don't Get Hooked! 

Phishing is currently on the rise around the world as well. Phising works because scammers are able to construct bogus emails, pop-up ads, and even websites that appear to be from legitimate businesses or agencies. They inspire a false sense of trust, then send out emails asking for personal and financial data so they can steal identities.

Some phishing emails may even install software on your computer that could be used to redirect your computer to bogus websites. Be extremely cautious of whom you trust with personal information on the Internet. You should know that legitimate businesses will never ask you to provide nor confirm any personal information through an email or pop-up message.

Tips to Protect Yourself and the Internet

The Internet can be a powerful tool, and the convenience it offers to manage business and recreation is invaluable. But theft and fraud are damaging the positive reputation of the Internet as a medium for business. Consumers are losing confidence in their own safety on the Internet, and fewer people are making purchases online these days.
However, there are steps that you can take to decrease your chances of becoming a victim, and to help catch cyber-criminals at work:

• Be aware that there are people online who would like to gain access to your personal information. Do not share this information unless you have initiated the exchange or are absolutely sure of who is receiving it.
• Install security and scanning software onto your computer to protect it from online hacking.
• Do not use your name, date of birth, address, or any other personal information for passwords. These passwords are easily cracked by hackers. In fact, it is suggested that for any password, you should not use a word that is found in the dictionary, as there are hacking programs that will attempt every word in the dictionary.
• Never disclose personal information in response to an email. Legitimate businesses would never ask you to do this. If an email or pop-up ad requests you to confirm personal information, even if it looks genuine, it is an example of phishing and should be reported to reportphishing@antiphishing.org, the attorneys at the Securities and Exchange Commission at enforcement@sec.gov, and to the Federal Trade Commission at uce@ftc.gov.
• If you are concerned about an email you receive from a company, contact that company by phone to verify the information. If there is a web link provided in the email, type it directly into your browser instead of using the link or copying and pasting it, as some links can be redirected to other sites.
• When giving personal information over a website, check to make sure that site is secure. Look at the first part of the web address in your browser. It should read https:// and not http://
• Regularly check your credit card and bank statements and keep track of your transactions. Also, log into your online accounts frequently. This way, you will be able to notice any changes to your account soon after it happens.

By taking these steps, you can greatly reduce your chance of having your identity stolen, and help to combat this growing problem. If you are careful not to reveal personal information online, and help to make others aware of the risks, you will be playing a part in making the Internet a safer place for all of us to communicate and conduct business.

Sixth Sence Technology

What is sixth sense?
Sixth Sense is a wearable gestural interface that enhances the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information. It is based on the concepts of augmented reality and has well implemented the perceptions of it. Sixth sense technology has integrated the real world objects with digital world. The fabulous 6th sense technology is a blend of many exquisite technologies. The thing which makes it magnificent is the marvelous integration of all those technologies and presents it into a single portable and economical product. It associates technologies like hand gesture recognition, image capturing, processing, and manipulation, etc. It superimposes the digital world on the real world.

 

Sixth sense technology is a perception of augmented reality concept. Like senses enable us to perceive information about the environment in different ways it also aims at perceiving information. Sixth sense is in fact, about comprehending information more than our available senses. And today there is not just this physical world from where we get information but also the digital world which has become a part of our life. This digital world is now as important to us as this physical world. And with the internet the digital world can be expanded many times the physical world. God hasn’t given us sense to interact with the digital world so we have created them like smart phones, tablets, computers, laptops, net books, PDAs, music players, and others gadgets. These gadgets enable us to communicate with the digital world around us. 

But we’re humans and our physical body isn’t meant for digital world so we can’t interact directly to the digital world. For instance we press keys to dial a number; we type text to search it and so on. This means for an individual to communicate with the digital world he/she must learn it. We don’t communicate directly and efficiently to the digital world as we do with the real world. The sixth sense technology is all about interacting to the digital world in most efficient and direct way. Hence, it wouldn’t be wrong to conclude sixth sense technology as gateway between digital and real world.  Before Wear Ur World (WuW) came there were other methods like speech recognition software, touch recognition etc., which empowered us with direct interfacing.

 

This WuW or sixth sense device invented by Pranav Mistry is a prototype of next level of digital to real world interfacing. It comprises of a camera, a projector, a mobile cum computing device and colored sensors which are put on the fingers of a human being. The device efficiently senses the motion of the colored markers. Using them it provides us the freedom of directly interacting with the digital world. This technology enables people to interact in the digital world as if they are interacting in the real world.

Why choose sixth sense technology?

Humans take decisions after acquiring inputs from the senses. But the information we collect aren’t enough to result in the right decisions. But the information which could help making a good decision is largely available on internet. Although the information can be gathered by connecting devices like computers and mobiles but they are restricted to the screen and there is no direct interaction between the tangible physical world and intangible digital world. This sixth sense technology provides us with the freedom of interacting with the digital world with hand gestures. This technology has a wide application in the field of artificial intelligence. This methodology can aid in synthesis of bots that will be able to interact with humans.

 

 

NASA

NASA

NASA stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA was started in 1958 as a part of the United States government. NASA is in charge of U.S. science and technology that has to do with airplanes or space

 What Does NASA Do?
NASA does a lot of different things. NASA makes satellites. The satellites help scientists learn more about Earth. NASA sends probes out into space. NASA scientists study things in the solar system, and even farther away. A new program will send humans to explore asteroids, Mars and beyond. People at NASA work on ways to make air travel better for everyone on Earth, too. People at NASA also share the things they learn with others. This can help make life on Earth better.
Do you like science, math and learning new things? Would you like to be an adventurer? Would you like to plan future missions to other planets and outer space? People in NASA's Education Office work hard to share news about NASA's missions to learn about Earth and space with teachers. Then teachers work with students to get them ready to be engineers, scientists and astronauts. Learn more about what NASA has for students in grades K-4 on NASA's education Web pages.

NASA tested two SR-71 aircraft. They are still the world's fastest and highest-flying aircraft. 

• Where Is NASA?

NASA Headquarters is in Washington, D.C. There are 10 NASA centers located across the United States. There are also seven test and research facilities. More than 18,000 people work for NASA! Being an astronaut is probably the best-known job at NASA, but astronauts make up just a small part of the workforce. A lot of engineers and scientists work at NASA. People are doing other jobs, too,such as secretaries, writers, lawyers and even teachers. 

NASA Headquarters is in Washington, D.C 

Astronaut Ed White was the first American to walk in space.

•  What Has NASA Done?
  From its start, NASA began to plan for human spaceflight. The Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs helped NASA learn about flying in space. This led to the first human landing on the moon in 1969. NASA has astronauts living and working on the International Space Station. Space probes have visited every planet in the solar system. Scientists have looked far into space using telescopes. NASA satellites help people better understand weather patterns on Earth. NASA also helps develop and test new aircraft. Some of the airplanes have set new records. NASA works to make air travel faster and safer. 
•   http://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/stories/nasa-knows/index.html