Qualcomm's wireless charging tech now works on metal phones

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2015/07/28/qualcomms-wireless-charging-tech-now-works-on-metal-phones/

Until now, you've had a choice: a smartphone with a sleek metal chassis, or one that played nice with wireless charging standards. Those days may be over. Qualcomm just announced that its WiPower charging technology can now power smartphones, tablets and other devices with metal cases. The updated standard is already available to device manufactures and licensees, the company says. Everything else about WiPower seems to be the same: it still charges at the same rate and still meets Rezence standards -- it's just doing the same job better now. Good enough.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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Source: Qualcomm

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Nanowires help produce hydrogen fuel using sunlight

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2015/07/20/nanowires-help-produce-hydrogen-fuel-using-sunlight/

You ideally want to produce clean hydrogen fuel using clean sources, and Dutch researchers have taken a big step toward making that a practical reality. They've built a solar cell that uses a grid of gallium phosphide nanowires to make hydrogen gas from water. The approach gets a useful yield of about 2.9 percent in lab tests. That may not sound like much, but it's about 10 times more effective than previous techniques and uses 10,000 times less exotic material.

It's still going to take more refinements before this kind of technology is practical. Even hooking up silicon cells to a battery nets a 15 percent yield, for example. If scientists improve their methods, though, you could be driving hydrogen cars whose fuel is eco-friendly at every step, not just when it's in your vehicle.

[Image credit: AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi]

Filed under: Transportation, Science

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Source: TUE, Nature

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This Sea Sapphire Can Become Transparent in the Blink of an Eye

Source: http://gizmodo.com/this-sea-sapphire-can-become-transparent-in-the-blink-o-1718968498

Now you see it, now you don’t. But the disappearing act performed by this small sea sapphire isn’t magic: it manage to flex its body to reflect frequencies of light that the human eye simply can’t see.

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ASUS' slim and sharp ZenPad S tablet arrives in the US

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2015/07/12/asus-zenpad-s-8-reaches-us/

Looks like you didn't have to wait long for ASUS' ZenPad S 8.0 to show up in the US -- Best Buy is now selling the 8-inch Android 5.1 slate for an easy-to-swallow $200. While this isn't the highest-end version (it's carrying 'just' 2GB of RAM and a slower 1.33GHz Atom chip) it's far from a slouch. You're still getting an iPad mini-rivaling 2,048 x 1,536 display, 5-megapixel rear camera, 2-megapixel front cam and 32GB of storage in a frame that's just 0.27 inches thick. You'll have to like ASUS' custom software for the ZenPad S to float your boat, but it's otherwise a solid deal.

Filed under: Tablets, ASUS

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Via: Android Central

Source: Best Buy

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Ditching RAM may lead to low-cost supercomputers

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2015/07/12/mit-flash-only-supercomputers/

Many servers, supercomputers and other monster systems thrive on high-speed RAM to keep things running smoothly, but this memory is wildly expensive -- and that limits not just the number of nodes in these clusters, but who can use them. MIT researchers may have a much more affordable approach in the future, though. They've built a server network (not shown here) that drops RAM in favor of cheaper and slower flash storage, yet performs just about as well. The key was to get the flash drives themselves (or specifically, their controllers) to pre-process some of the data, instead of making the CPUs do all the hard work. That doesn't completely close the speed gap, but the differences are virtually negligible. In one test, 20 servers with 20TB of flash were about as fast as 40 servers with 10TB of RAM.

This doesn't mean that flash-centric computing will be useful absolutely everywhere. MIT has only demonstrated its technique helping out with database-heavy tasks like ranking web pages. This wouldn't necessarily help much with tasks that depend more on calculations, and the networked design means it this RAM-less approach wouldn't do much to help your home PC. All the same, this could help a lot if it lets your favorite cloud service run faster, or helps cost-conscious scientists devote money toward other projects.

[Image credit: AP Photo/Jens Meyer]

Filed under: Storage, Science

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Source: MIT News

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