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Network

Submission + - What is 4G LTE? (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "When it gets right down to it, do you actually know what LTE is? As far as acronyms go — long term evolution — it's not exactly self-explanatory. LTE, in short, is an ongoing, living (evolving!) standard that will hopefully form the foundation for cellular networks over the next decade or more. For a complete dissection of the standard, its deployment, and even an explanation for why LTE chews through batteries, check out ExtremeTech's LTE guide."
Idle

Submission + - Orangutans to Skype between zoos with iPads (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "For the last six months, orangutans — those great, hairy, orange apes that go “ook” a lot — at Milwaukee zoo have been playing games and watching videos on Apple’s (seemingly ubiquitous) iPad, but now their keepers and the charity Orangutan Outreach want to go one step further and enable ape-to-ape video chat via Skype or FaceTime. "The orangutans loved seeing videos of themselves — so there is a little vanity going on — and they like seeing videos of the orangutans who are in the other end of the enclosure," Richard Zimmerman of Orangutan Outreach said. "So if we incorporate cameras, they can watch each other." And thus the idea of WiFi video chat between orangutans — and eventually between zoos — was born. It might seem like folly, but putting (ruggedized!) iPads into the hands of apes could really revolutionize our understanding of great ape behavior — and thus our own behavior, too."
Hardware

Submission + - Transistor made from cotton yarn, t-shirt computer (extremetech.com) 1

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "Altering the very fabric of technophilic society, a multinational team of material scientists have created electric circuits and transistors out of cotton fibers. Two kinds of transistor were created: a field-effect transistor (FET), much like the transistors found in your computer’s CPU; and an electrochemical transistor, which is similar but capable of switching at lower voltages, and thus better suited for wearable computers. Cotton itself is an insulator, but by using various coatings the team from Italy, France, and the United States were able to make conductor and semiconductor cotton "wires" that retained most of their flexibility. The immediate use-cases are clothes with built-in sensors (think radiation or heart beat monitors), but ultimately, think of how many thousands of interconnections are in every piece of cotton clothing — you could make a fairly powerful computer!"
Network

Submission + - IP over Lego model train (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "In one of the finest examples of what overly-entitled, First World westerners get up to during cold, winter months, a Frenchman called Maximilien has raised the useless-applications-of-technology stakes and turned a model railway into one of the world’s slowest computer networks. A Lego train carries a USB key around a model railway, stopping at three Arduino-powered "stations." The USB key is mounted and checked to see if the drive contains a packet for the Linux computer attached to the Arduino. The latency is pretty high (about 5-10 seconds), but just like bulk data transfer by loading a truck full of tapes or hard drives, throughput is probably quite good."
Hardware

Submission + - Intel Medfield SoC specs leak (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "Specifications and benchmarks of Intel’s 32nm Medfield platform — Chipzilla’s latest iteration of Atom and first real smartphone- and tablet-oriented SoC — have leaked, and if I held stock in an ARM-based company like Qualcomm, Nvidia, or Samsung, I’d be a little jittery right now. The tablet reference platform is reported to be a 1.6GHz x86 CPU coupled with 1GB of DDR2 RAM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and FM radios, and an as yet unknown GPU. The smartphone version will probably be clocked a bit slower, but otherwise the same. Benchmark-wise, Medfield seems to beat the ARM competition from Samsung, Qualcomm, and Nvidia — and, perhaps most importantly, it's also in line with ARM power consumption, with an idle TDP of around 2 watts and load around 3W."
NASA

Submission + - A Christmas gift from Cassini (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "Just in time for Christmas (or Hanukkah, or Festivus, or...), NASA’s Cassini probe has sent back some amazing photos of Titan, Dione, Tethys, and of Saturn herself. Cassini has now been orbiting Saturn for seven years, and is scheduled to continue operating until 2017, by which point — because it takes almost 30 Earth years for Saturn to orbit the Sun — it will still only have experienced Saturnian spring and summer."
Sci-Fi

Submission + - MIT discovers memory gene, breeds fearless mammals (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "Neuroscientists at MIT have discovered what appears to be the master gene that controls the forming of new memories in your brain. Called Npas4, the gene triggers a complex reaction that results in memories (events) being encoded into your brain’s neurons — and by knocking out Npas4 from test subjects, the neuroscientists were able to stop new memories from forming. Before you scrunch up your face in disgust, MIT carried out this research on mice, not humans — but the same gene does exist in humans, and it almost certainly plays the same role in the formation of memories. The next step is finding out whether Npas4 also affects the recollection of memories, and ultimately find out where exactly memories are stored in the brain. Eventually, it might be possible to find the exact neuron that stores a specific memory — and then delete or change that memory."
The Internet

Submission + - Average web page is now almost 1MB (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "According to new research from HTTP Archive, which regularly scans the internet’s most popular destinations, the average size of a single web page is now 965 kilobytes (KB), up more than 30% from last year’s average of 702KB. This rapid growth is fairly normal for the internet — the average web page was 14KB in 1995, 93KB by 2003, and 300KB in 2008 — but by burrowing a little deeper into HTTP Archive’s recent data, we can discern some interesting trends. Between 2010 and 2011, the average amount of Flash content downloaded stayed exactly the same — 90KB — but JavaScript experienced massive growth from 113KB to 172KB. The amount of HTML, CSS, and images on websites also showed a significant increase year over year. There is absolutely no doubt that these trends are attributable to the death throes of Flash and emergence of HTML5 and its open web cohorts."
Android

Submission + - EFF reverse engineers Carrier IQ config (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "At this point we have a fairly good idea of what Carrier IQ is, and which manufacturers and carriers see fit to install it on their phones, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation — the preeminent protector of your digital rights — has taken it one step further and reverse engineered some of the program’s code to work out what’s actually going on. There are three parts to a Carrier IQ installation on your phone: The program itself, which captures your keystrokes and other “metrics”; a configuration file, which varies from handset to handset and carrier to carrier; and a database that stores your actions until it can be transmitted to the carrier. It turns out that that the config profiles are completely unencrypted, and thus very easy to crack."
Science

Submission + - A bionic eye that can speak to your brain (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "On the grand scale of things, we know so very little about the brain. We know that stimuli goes in, usually through one of our senses, and motor neurons come out, but that’s about it. One thing you can do with a black box, however, is derive some semblance of a working model through brute force testing. We've done it with prosthetic arms and brain-computer interfaces, but those merely read the rather simple output of your brain. Now, Sheila Nirenberg of Cornell University has done the opposite and fed data into the brain via a bionic, silicon chip retina that's wired directly into the optic nerve. To do this, she had to attach electrodes to the optic nerve of an animal eye, and record the electric impulses that were transmitted when images hit the retina. She reverse engineered the mathematical equations that linked the viewed image to the electric impulses, and then built those equations into a bionic retina. For now she has only restored the sight of animals, but the next step is surely humans."
Hardware

Submission + - Is overclocking over? (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "Earlier this week, an ExtremeTech writer received a press release from a Romanian overclocking team that smashed a few overclocking records, including pushing Kingston's HyperX DDR3 memory to an incredible 3600MHz (at CL10). The Lab501 team did this, and their other record breakers, with the aid of liquid nitrogen which cooled the RAM down to a frosty -196C. That certainly qualifies as extreme, but is it news? Ten years ago, overclocking memory involved a certain amount of investigation, research, and risk, but in these days of super-fast RAM and manufacturer’s warranties it seems a less intoxicating prospect. As it becomes increasingly difficult to justify what a person should overclock for, has the enthusiast passion for overclocking cooled off? ET's Matthew Murray investigates."
Hardware

Submission + - Liquid metal capsules used to make self-healing el (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "A crack team of engineers at the University of Illinois has developed an electronic circuit that autonomously self-heals when its metal wires are broken. This self-healing system restores conductivity within “mere microseconds,” which is apparently fast enough that operation can continue without interruption. The self-healing mechanism is delightfully simple: The engineers place a bunch of 10-micron (0.01mm) microcapsules along the length of a circuit. The microcapsules are full of liquid metal, a gallium-indium alloy, and if the circuit underneath cracks, so do the microcapsules (90% of the time, anyway — the tech isn’t perfect yet!). The liquid metal oozes into the circuit board, restoring up to 99% conductivity, and everything continues as normal. This even works with multi-layer printed circuit boards (PCBs), such the motherboard in your computer, too. There’s no word on whether this same technology could one day be used by Terminators to self-heal shotgun blasts to the face, but it certainly sounds quite similar. The immediate use-cases are in extreme environments (aerospace), and batteries (which can't be taken apart to fix), but long term we might one day buy motherboards with these self-healing microcapsules built in."

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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