Source: http://gizmodo.com/this-4k-new-zealand-timelapse-transports-you-to-lord-of-1574442179
Super-sharp 4k video, in the right hands, is powerful technology
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Solar panels have become cheaper and more efficient in recent years, but you can't say the same for the big, costly inverters turning their energy into usable electricity. Google isn't happy with this lack of progress, so it's about to launch the Little Box Challenge, an open competition to build a tiny (and consequently cheaper) solar power inverter. The search giant is promising $1 million to whoever cracks the problem, although it warns that this won't be easy; don't expect to reach a breakthrough in your basement. If someone does produce this miniscule power box, though, it could lead to eco-friendly energy in places where it's currently unaffordable or otherwise impractical -- whether it's a remote village or your own rooftop.
Source: http://gizmodo.com/chinas-maglev-train-prototype-could-reach-speeds-of-1-8-1574030943
A research team in China just successfully tested a blisteringly fast transportation concept: super-maglev, a high speed train that could theoretically hit speeds of up to 1,800 miles per hour. That's three times the speed of a passenger jet.
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Source: http://gigaom.com/2014/05/09/cablevision-starts-crowdsourcing-wi-fi-hotspots/
Cablevision revealed on its earnings call Thursday that it has been rolling out new smart wireless gateways, which create the equivalent of two wireless networks at the end of every cable modem, LightReading reported. The first is the customer’s private home network. The second is a public network, which any Cablevision broadband customer can connect to.
It’s the crowdsourced Wi-Fi model that Comcast has been pursuing aggressively since last year to grow its Wi-Fi hotspot network into neighborhoods, and it appears Cablevision has similar ambitions. According to LightReading, Cablevision plans to have 1 million hotspot nodes in the New York City tri-state area by the end of the year.
Cablevision has always been hot on Wi-Fi. It was the first to start installing outdoor public hotspots in a commercial corridors and high-trafficked public areas throughout its cable territory. But the addition of these new neighborhoods will give its customers access in areas beyond those so-called “hot zones.”
Though you can’t use Wi-Fi to build a cellular-network replacement, the cable operators have been toying with the concept of Wi-Fi First. In such a model networks using unlicensed airwaves could provide an underlying layer of cheap data access, complementing and in some case supplanting 3G and 4G networks. The more Wi-Fi is available in more places, the less we’re dependent on cellular data and ultimately that will make the costs of mobile networking go down.
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Philips has taken the concept of lighting far beyond the traditional options as it has embraced LEDs. From connected hue bulbs for the consumer to giant sheets of lighting for architects, the company is taking the flexibility and programability offered by LEDs and changing how lighting is used. Much like the internet took the concept of phone calls and augmented that experience until it was so much more, Philips is doing the same with LEDs.
The latest example comes from the Green Sense Farms near Chicago. This indoor farm has outfitted a one-million-cubic-foot growing space with fourteen 25-foot-tall growing towers in two climate-controlled rooms for growing crops. Green Sense has been working with Philips to develop specific lighting recipes for different crops to help increase yields. The Philips LEDs emit the most appropriate wavelength of light for each plant so they can be grown indoors in racks without ever having to go outside. Because LEDs don’t get hot, they can sit close to the plants, and because they can be programmed to produce many variations of wavelengths (some we can’t see but plants can use), one can program the lights for the needs of a particular crop.
This is literally factory farming. Green Sense Farms grows the crops using machines to plant the seeds and then shunts them into racks in containers six stacks high. There’s no sunlight. The seeds germinate and seedlings are moved from the germination pod to the propagation pod. It is organic, uses the LEDs and can be produced inside urban areas, but it’s kinda creepy. This is how we will farm on spaceships as we leave our depleted earth and travel to other worlds.
Jokes about grow lamps and hydroponics aside, the problem Philips and Green Sense are hoping to help solve is of growing interest in Silicon Valley as companies try to apply technology to feeding the world’s growing population. From big purchases like Monsanto’s buy of Climate Corp. to startups using robotics, data algorithms or even manufactured nutrients, investors and entrepreneurs are looking at the future of food and seeing a chance to innovate.
Philips is no exception. What is cool about the company’s approach here is that it’s developing partnerships across an array of industries to try to take advantage of the opportunities that LED lighting offers to change design, provide ambient information and now, change our food production. It’s a lot of fun to watch.
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Taxi companies aren't pleased with Uber and Lyft, but they could be making way better use of ride-sharing technology themselves, according to researchers. A study by MIT and Fujitsu examined why cabs are usually underutilized, but never available during surge periods when you need them. To combat that, they developed on-demand tech that automatically assigns vehicles three possible operating states: taxi, ride-sharing and fixed-route modes. Customers could choose one of those when they order a ride, and immediately receive the boarding times and fares, which would vary by mode. That could save passengers a lot of money, and a test on Tokyo roads resulted in operators making 80 percent more profits too. Fujitsu's goal is to see it operating in Tokyo by 2016, but it might take some convincing to get it adopted more widely. Still, why not beat the upstarts at their own game?
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/05/09/solar-highway-indiegogo/
At some point, you've probably sat back and said "Couldn't we solve climate change and the broader energy crisis just by sticking solar panels to everything?" It's not a bad idea, mind, but the cost and resistance to such a scheme would make it a nightmare to implement. But what about if we turned the nation's highways into solar farms that we could drive along? Scott and Julie Brusaw have been working on that idea, and after a decade of partially-successful flirting with the US Government, they're taking to Indiegogo to ask us to fund the next phase of their solar roadway.
Each interlocking hexagonal segment is covered with toughened and textured glass that's capable of withstanding 250,000 pounds. Beneath that, you've got a solar panel, a series of LED lights and a heating element that'll keep the ice and snow off the hardware in winter. The lights are used to replace conventional traffic lights, offering constantly updating safety warnings and guide lines that can adapt to traffic conditions on the fly.
The system would require a trench running down one side, which would hold the power cables, but could also be used as the backbone for a potential new high-speed data network. As each panel would also be connected, it'd instantly report a fault back to a maintenance engineer, and also track its location, should someone decide to steal one for their own nefarious uses.
Naturally, a nationwide, decentralized power grid could potentially guarantee energy independence and provide near-limitless power for our EVs and homes. That's why the couple is asking for a whopping $1 million required to hire the materials scientists, civil and structural engineers necessary to turn the panels from neat idea to workable project. There are plenty of pitfalls, and we're wondering if heating the ground to keep the roadway clear wouldn't in itself cause more climate change, but hopefully that's another issue that your cash could fix.
Filed under: Transportation, Science
Via: Fast Company
Source: Indiegogo
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Sometimes breaking news happens right before your eyes while you're out and about. If you happen to be wearing Google Glass when those events take place, CNN now has a way for you to share photos and videos of the action directly from the headset. The news outfit announced the addition to its iReport citizen journalism effort earlier this week, and it's claiming to be "the first major news network" to allow contributing via the wearable. If you're interested in joining up, you'll have to authorize CNN to send notifications to Glass and link up an iReport profile in the settings. When you've completed those steps, the appropriate avenue for beaming captured media to the newsroom will appear as a sharing option for photos and videos. Folks have already opted in, as the first mobile coverage (relating to gas prices in Miami) can be seen here.
Source: http://sploid.gizmodo.com/this-is-a-grain-of-interstellar-stardust-1573047996/+caseychan
This is a grain of interstellar dust. To get one of these, your best bet is to get into a spaceship for a couple hundred years and get close enough to a red giant star, near its atmosphere. That's where they're formed and ejected into space. Or, like NASA, you can create a machine to make one from scratch—for the first time ever.
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The Pale Blue Dot—a book that should be mandatory for every single student in the world—is a vision of the cosmos that will inspire you to be a better human being. It's full of memorable passages but this is the best—the one that gives its title to the book.
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Source: http://gizmodo.com/adobe-voice-a-free-ipad-app-for-pitching-brilliant-ide-1572443425
Everyone with a cool new idea or vision wants a concise and beautiful video to illustrate their story and broadcast it to the world. But oh, right—you suck at all things visual and just learned how to make something move in After Effects. Adobe's new iPad app, Voice, is there to hold your hand in the making of presentation videos.
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Source: http://gizmodo.com/experimental-color-changing-fabric-could-turn-you-into-1573373997
Animals do it
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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/05/07/solar-wind-energy-tower/
Many green energy sources only generate power in a narrow range of conditions. Solar panels won't work when it's dark, for instance, and wind turbines are useless when everything is still. If Solar Wind Energy Tower has its way, though, we'll soon get clean electricity around the clock. It recently received permission to build a tower in San Luis, Arizona that produces power through hot air downdrafts; water injected at the top of the tower cools the desert winds, dragging them toward turbines at the bottom. Since it's almost always hot in the area, the plant should run all day and night for much of the year. An ideal summer day could have it churning out a healthy 1,250 megawatts per hour.
The downdraft tower should be ready for action in 2018, and Solar Wind Energy Tower hopes to license the technology to others. As you might imagine, the need for a hot climate is going to narrow the customer list -- you won't see this system in more temperate regions. However, it could be a boon to both the southern US as well as Africa, the Middle East and other places where heat is far more abundant than eco-friendly energy.
Via: Phys.org
Source: Solar Wind Energy Tower, Accesswire (MarketWatch)
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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/05/08/adobe-voice/
Whether you're doing a book report or trying to show someone how to boil an egg: video can make it a heck of a lot easier for you to get your point across. Adobe's new iPad app, Voice, hopes to make the often time-consuming experience of creating your own such videos a lot faster and easier. The app guides you through making a sharable vid, from the conception of your idea to the finished product. We've had a chance to try it out for the past week. We found that the app makes it easy to create some pretty professional looking stuff without having any special skills or a lot of time, but there's just one thing missing.
To kick things off with Voice, you'll need to pick a topic and a story type. Once you do, the app will launch a project for your video -- complete with instructional cards that give you an idea of how to tell your tale. The app is broken into several types of stories, which you may not realize are formulaic, but they are. For instance, a "Hero's Journey" will start with a Setup Card, followed by a Call to Adventure, Challenge, Climax and finally, a Resolution. Each card provides a bit of detail on what you should be saying (and showing) on each card. It seems a bit elementary at first, but it's surprising how that little bit of direction can help you stay on track and create a video someone is actually going to be able to follow and want to watch.
Simple is the name of the game with Voice. The app's instructions are really easy to follow, as is adding desired elements to your story. Tapping on a card opens it up for editing. For each part of your story you can add a still photo, text or an icon from the app's built-in library. Voice doesn't support video elements (yet), which keeps things simple, but is a huge downer for someone who wants to include, you know, some actual moving pictures in their project. That said, the built-in photos and the icons are really great looking -- we considered them an asset rather than something we had to settle for. All of the (over 100,000!) images you can access from within the app are available under a Creative Commons license, so you're free to add them as you please. Even better, Adobe keeps track of everything you use, and includes proper attribution in the credits at the end of your video.
Rather than recording audio for the full video at once, Voice does it one card at at a time. Once you're done, Adobe enhances your voiceover to make it sound like it was recorded in a studio rather than on your iPad. It also adds a soundtrack to your monologue from its library. Track options are organized by the type of emotion they're intended to evoke -- i.e. playful, relaxed -- and are mixed in like the score to a good movie, so you barely notice them. Each video also gets the benefit of one of 32 different themes. Built by graphic artists, the themes take a page from Adobe's professional motion graphics program After Effects, and handle things like timing and transitions for your vid. The end result is a polished, professional-looking job (seriously) suitable for your business, or just making all the others kids in class look like rank amateurs.
Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile
Source: iTunes
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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/05/08/lg-just-released-its-first-quadhd-phone-but-its-not-the-g3/
KDDI has just launched the first QuadHD (QHD) phone solely for the Japanese market, the Isai FL model built by LG. That gives us a preview of LG's G3's 5.5-inch 2,560 x 1,440 display and its record 538ppi resolution. As it happens, LG just announced that the panel has now been certified, and re-confirmed that it'll be installed in it's "forthcoming flagship smartphone," ie the G3. KDDI's model may may give us an idea of what LG's eagerly-awaited G2 successor will be like spec-wise, too. The Isai FL has the narrow bezels we saw in leaked images of the G3, but sports a different design lacking the LG's rear buttons and rumored metal back. It also has some of LG's Knock functions and will come in three colors with a 13-megapixel camera, 3,000mAh battery, 2GB of RAM and a quad-core Snapdragon 2.5GHz CPU. That lines up with some of the G3's rumored specs, but we won't have to wait long to know them -- it's set to arrive on May 27th.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, LG
Via: Engadget Japan
Source: KDDI
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