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Submission + - The Actual Reason Behind Facebook Supporting Digital India (youtube.com)

Submitted by rtoz
rtoz writes: Today Many people are changing their Facebook profile picture using a Tool provided by Facebook, for supporting Digital India initiative. We can use this tool from https://www.facebook.com/suppo...

But it seems Facebook is actually trying to promote its internet.org in the name of the digital India.

Based on the past business approach of Mark Zuckerberg, any one can easily understand this fact.

Now we can see the proof for this fact, by seeing the source code of the digital India profile setting page. We can see the Internet.org related stuff there. So, we can safely assume that Facebook is treating Internet.org and digital India as one thing. Facebook is facing difficulty in implementing internet.org in India because of the heavy opposition from Net Neutrality supporters. So, it seems Facebook is trying to use Modi's Digital India as shortcut or workaround to forcefully implement its internet.org in India.

Submission + - Ultrathin Invisibility Skin Cloak makes 3D Objects Disappear (rtoz.org)

Submitted by rtoz
rtoz writes: Scientists have devised an ultra-thin invisibility “skin” cloak that can conform to the shape of an object and hide it from detection with visible light.
Although this cloak is only microscopic in size, the principles behind the technology should enable it to be scaled-up to conceal macroscopic items as well.
Working with brick-like blocks of gold nanoantennas, the Berkeley researchers fashioned a “skin cloak” barely 80 nanometers in thickness, that was wrapped around a three-dimensional object about the size of a few biological cells and arbitrarily shaped with multiple bumps and dents. The surface of the skin cloak was meta-engineered to reroute reflected light waves so that the object was rendered invisible to optical detection when the cloak is activated.
This is the first time a 3D object of arbitrary shape has been cloaked from visible light.
This short video clip shows how the activation of a metasurface cloak made from an ultrathin layer of nanoantennas can render a 3D object invisible. When the cloak is turned “on,” the bump-shaped object being illuminated in the center white spot disappears from view. The object reappears when the cloak is turned “off.”

Submission + - 'Siri' interrupts White House Press Briefing

Submitted by rtoz
rtoz writes: Apple’s Siri interrupts a question about Barack Obama’s Iran policy on Thursday (10th September 2015) during a White House press briefing.

The Apple iPhone's virtual Personal Assistant Siri was saying "Sorry, I'm not sure what you want me to change", when a journalist asked White House spokesman Josh Earnest if Obama is disappointed at not getting Republican backing for the Iran nuclear agreement.

As the assembled journalists burst into laughter, Mr Earnest even cracked a smile on the podium.

Watch this at https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Submission + - Acer Unveils Revo Build, a Modular Computer that can be built like Lego bricks. (youtube.com)

Submitted by rtoz
rtoz writes: The Taiwanese company Acer has unveiled Revo Build, a modular computer at IFA 2015 Technology show in Berlin, Germany

The new Revo Build Series (M1-601) Mini PC takes a modular approach to allow consumers to customize their computer without opening up the chassis. “Blocks” with different features can be easily stacked on top of the base unit, which makes adding functionality as easy as playing with toy blocks. The “Blocks” are connected through pogo pins with magnetic alignment so that there’s no hassle with wires when swapping out modules. The Blocks can also work independently or with other PCs. The Revo Build M1-601 desktop is packaged in a tiny 1 liter chassis with a 125 x 125 mm footprint that takes up minimal space and can be placed almost anywhere.

“Blocks” such as the 500GB/1TB hot-swappable Portable Hard Drive will be available at launch, while a Wireless Power Bank for wireless charging, an Audio Block with speakers and microphones, and other expansion “Blocks” will be rolled out gradually.

The Acer Revo Build runs Windows 10 and is expected to retail at $300.

Submission + - Carphone Warehouse says up to 2.4 Million customer accounts Hacked (youtube.com)

Submitted by rtoz
rtoz writes: British cell phone retailer Carphone Warehouse says personal details of up to 2.4 million customers may have been accessed after the company was hit by a cyber-attack.
This security breach could have included names, addresses, dates of birth and bank details.
Up to 90,000 customers may also have had their encrypted credit card information accessed.
The affected division operates the OneStopPhoneShop.com, e2save.com and Mobiles.co.uk websites.
It also provides services to iD Mobile, TalkTalk Mobile, Talk Mobile and some Carphone Warehouse customers.

Dixons Carphone was formed last year by the merger of Carphone Warehouse and Dixons Retail.
Dixons Carphone operates in many European countries including Britain, Ireland and Germany.
Carphone Warehouse said it was informing all customers who may have been affected of the breach.
It will also advise affected individuals on how to reduce the risk of further consequences arising from the data leak.

Submission + - Japanese engineer develops "WalkCar", world's first 'car in a bag'

Submitted by rtoz
rtoz writes: A Japanese engineer has developed a portable transporter small enough to be carried in a backpack that he says is the world's first 'car in a bag'.

Twenty-six-year-old Kuniako Saito and his team at Cocoa Motors recently unveiled the lithium battery-powered "WalkCar" transporter, which is the size of a laptop and resembles a skateboard more than a car.

According to the Reuters report, the slender WalkCar is made from aluminum and weighs between two and three kilograms , depending on whether it is an indoor or outdoor version.

The developer Saito expects to see many other uses for his transporter, as he says it has enough power to help people push wheelchairs with ease. The lightweight aluminum board is stronger than it looks, and can take loads of up to 120kg .

It reaches top speeds of 10 kilometers per hour, for distances of up to 12 kilometers after three hours of charging.
Its developer says it's also extremely simple to ride. Once the rider stands on it the WalkCar starts automatically, while simply stepping off stops the vehicle. To change direction, the user just shifts their weight.
Best of all, there is no need to find a parking space, because it fits into a small bag when not in use.
Saito says customers will be able to reserve their own WalkCars from autumn 2015 on the crowd-funding website Kickstarter. The futuristic skateboard will have a price-tag of around $800. Shipping is expected to begin by spring 2016.

Submission + - Hackers Show They Can Take Control of Moving Jeep Cherokee (wired.com)

Submitted by rtoz
rtoz writes: Two computer-security researchers demonstrated they could take control of a moving Jeep Cherokee using the vehicle’s wireless communications system, raising new questions about the safety of Internet-connected cars.

Former National Security Agency hacker Charlie Miller, now at Twitter, and IOActive researcher Chris Valasek used a feature in the Fiat Chrysler telematics system Uconnect to break into a car being driven on the highway by a reporter for technology news site Wired.com.

The Hackers were able to get control of air-conditioning, radio, windshield wipers and transmission of the jeep remotely by sitting many miles away from the jeep.

Even they were able to disable the Brake of the jeep remotely.

Fiat Chrysler said it had issued a fix for the most serious vulnerability involved. The software patch is available for free on the company’s website and at dealerships.

Miller and Valasek have been probing car safety for years and have been among those warning that remote hacking was inevitable.

Submission + - High-Performance Supercapacitors from Niobium Nanowire Yarns for Wearables.

Submitted by rtoz
rtoz writes: Wearable electronic devices for health and fitness monitoring are a rapidly growing area of consumer electronics; one of their biggest limitations is the capacity of their tiny batteries to deliver enough power to transmit data. Now, researchers at MIT have found a promising new approach to delivering the short but intense bursts of power needed by such small devices.

The key is a new approach to making supercapacitors — devices that can store and release electrical power in such bursts, which are needed for brief transmissions of data from wearable devices such as heart-rate monitors, computers, or smartphones. They may also be useful for other applications where high power is needed in small volumes, such as autonomous microrobots.

The new approach uses yarns, made from nanowires of the element niobium, as the electrodes in tiny supercapacitors

Nanotechnology researchers have been working to increase the performance of supercapacitors for the past decade. Among nanomaterials, carbon-based nanoparticles — such as carbon nanotubes and graphene — have shown promising results, but they suffer from relatively low electrical conductivity

In this new work, the researchers have shown that desirable characteristics for such devices, such as high power density, are not unique to carbon-based nanoparticles, and that niobium nanowire yarn is a promising alternative.

The new nanowire-based supercapacitor exceeds the performance of existing batteries, while occupying a very small volume.

The innovation is especially significant for small devices, as this technology can deliver big bursts of power from a very small device.

Niobium is a fairly abundant and widely used material. so the whole system should be inexpensive and easy to produce

The niobium-based supercapacitors can store up to five times as much power in a given volume as carbon nanotube versions.

Niobium also has a very high melting point — nearly 2,500 degrees Celsius — so devices made from these nanowires could potentially be suitable for use in high-temperature applications.

In addition, the material is highly flexible, so this innovation is very significant in the development of smart fabrics and future wearable technologies

Submission + - MX3D to 3D print a steel bridge on-site in Amsterdam using Robots.

Submitted by rtoz
rtoz writes: The 3D printing R&D company MX3D is planning to print a bridge across a canal in Amsterdam, Netherlands. It is hoped that the robots used will print their own supports and gradually move across the water, creating the bridge as they go. MX3D teams up with AutoDesk and few other companies to do this amazing work.

MX3D says the project is made feasible by its robotic 3D printing technology that effectively makes it possible to draw in mid-air. The multi-axis industrial robots to be used can print metals, plastics and combinations of materials.

For the bridge project, the robots will be printing in steel. They will use specially-designed arms that heat up the metal to 1,500 C before welding the structure. This approach means structures can be created that are strong, durable and complex. It will be as strong and as any other bridge. People will be able to walk back and forth over it for decades.

It is hoped that the entire process will take place on-site. And, it will be built over the course of two months in fall of 2017.

Submission + - Now we can stop and store light traveling in an Optical Fiber

Submitted by rtoz
rtoz writes: Researchers at the Kastler Brossel Laboratory in Paris have managed to store light that propagates in an optical fiber and to release it later on demand. By causing interaction between the traveling light and a few thousand atoms in the vicinity, they demonstrated an all-fibered memory.

The researchers report that they have devised optical memory integrated into an optical fiber. The team created a way to stop and store the light that usually propagates in a fiber at a speed as fast as 200,000 km/sec. This capability represents an important advance in optical communications, as fibers are at the heart of our worldwide telecommunication system, but also for a future quantum Internet, in which quantum information can be transported and synchronized between interconnected nodes.

This work provides a demonstration of an all-fibered memory for light. The researchers have been able to store the light and release it later into the fiber

At the core of the device is a commercial fiber with a short section elongated to 400 nm in diameter where the light can efficiently interact with a cloud of laser-cooled atoms. Using the so-called electromagnetically induced transparency technique, which is well-known in free space but combined here for the first time with a fiber, the researchers slowed down the light pulse by 3,000-fold and then halted it completely.The information conveyed by the laser light is transferred to the atoms in the form of a collective excitation, a large quantum superposition. Around 2,000 cesium atoms very close to the fiber were involved in the process. Later, after a programmable period, the light was released into the fiber, reconstituting the initial encoded information that can once again travel. Storage times of up to 5 micro seconds were demonstrated, corresponding to a traveling distance of 1 km if the light had not been halted.

The experiment by the Paris team also showed that even light pulses containing only one photon can be stored, with a very large signal-to-noise ratio. This feature will enable the use of this device as a quantum memory, an essential ingredient for the creation of future quantum networks.

Submission + - A Wind Turbine without Blades

Submitted by rtoz
rtoz writes: Vortex Bladeless is a Spanish tech start-up. It wants to completely change the way we get energy from the wind. Think wind stick instead of a massive tower with blades that capture blowing winds.

The Vortex is a new kind of Wind Turbine being developed without any blades.
The conical shape harnesses the oscillating motion caused by the wind and converts that to kinetic energy.

When wind hits a structure and flows over its surfaces the flow changes and generates a cyclical pattern of vortices at the tail end of the flow. This is known as the vortex shedding effect which creates something known as vorticity and that is what Vortex Bladeless uses to generate energy.

Vorticity has long been considered the enemy of architects and engineers, who actively try to design their way around these whirlpools of wind.

Where designers see danger, Vortex Bladeless’s founders sees opportunity. The team started Vortex Bladeless in 2010 as a way to turn this vibrating energy into something productive.

This is not your usual wind turbine. It consists of a fixed mast, a power generator that has no moving parts which come into contact with each other and a semi-rigid fiberglass cylinder. The power generator is a system of magnetic coupling devices which means there are no gears needing lubrication and an overall system needing less maintenance.

The Vortex team says there are some clear advantages to their model It’s less expensive to manufacture, totally silent, and safer for birds since there are no blades to fly into.

According to conservative estimates: Vortex saves 53% in manufacturing costs and 51% in operating costs compared to conventional wind turbines.

Vortex is much smaller than traditional wind turbines, allowing you to use your space more efficiently.

Initially, the co-founders were looking at large generating devices. That remains a longer-term goal but a much shorter range goal is a device of 4kW Vortex that would be about 13 meters tall. The company sees this generator being used in conjunction with solar generation for homes that are either off the grid or want to be off the grid.

This spanish company has already raised $1 million from private capital and government funding in Spain.

In February of this year, Vortex Bladeless relocated to Boston. There it is working with Harvard University, SunEdison, and is working with venture capitalists for its next round of Series A funding. Due to public interest in investing in the company, they will launch a crowdfunding campaign on June 1.

Submission + - MIT algorithm removes reflections from Photos taken through Windows (youtube.com)

Submitted by rtoz
rtoz writes: It’s hard to take a photo through a window without picking up reflections of the objects behind you. To solve that problem, professional photographers sometimes wrap their camera lenses in dark cloths affixed to windows by tape or suction cups. But that’s not a terribly attractive option for a traveler using a point-and-shoot camera to capture the view from a hotel room or a seat in a train.

To solve this problem, Now MIT researchers have developed a new algorithm.
This new image processing algorithm can automatically remove reflections from digital photos. The algorithm exploits the fact that photos taken through windows often feature two nearly identical reflections, slightly offset from each other.

i-e this algorithm will work only with the window producing double reflection. Normally the double-paned windows and very thick windows produce double reflection.

With double-paned windows, there’s one reflection coming from the inner pane and another reflection from the outer pane.
Thick windows also usually produce a double reflection, one reflection from the inner side and the other reflection from outer side.

This new image processing software can be used to allow digital cameras to automatically eliminate a reflection from a photo taken through a window as it’s being snapped, or to give image-processing apps like Photoshop another powerful tool for improving shots.
Apart from that, it may help robot vision in the presence of confusing glass reflection.

Submission + - Authenticating user by their ear using touchscreen of phone

Submitted by rtoz
rtoz writes: A team of researchers from Yahoo Labs have created a new technology called ‘Bodyprint’ that turns your smartphone’s touchscreen display into a biometric scanner.

Recent mobile phones integrate fingerprint scanners to authenticate users biometrically and replace passwords, making authentication more convenient for users. However, due to their cost, capacitive fingerprint scanners have been limited to top-of-the-line phones, a result of the required resolution and quality of the sensor.

This new biometric authentication system "Bodyprint" detects users' biometric features using the same type of capacitive sensing, but uses the touchscreen as the image sensor instead. While the input resolution of a touchscreen is ~6 dpi, the surface area is larger, allowing the touch sensor to scan users’ body parts, such as ears, fingers, fists, and palms by pressing them against the display.

Submission + - "Acoustruments" could add physical controls to Smartphones just by using plastic (youtube.com)

Submitted by rtoz
rtoz writes: Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and Disney Research have invented a unique type of accessory called “Acoustruments” for smartphones and other gadgets. They’ve come up with a way of utilizing ultrasonic waves to make smartphones even smarter.

The researchers got the inspiration for their invention from the wind instruments

The idea is to use pluggable plastic tubes and other structures to connect the smartphone’s speaker with its microphone. The device can then be controlled by acoustically altering sounds as they pass through this system. i-e they can control phones with sounds from their own speakers

Using smartphones as computers to control toys, appliances and robots is already a growing trend. Acoustruments can make the interactivity of these new ‘pluggable’ applications even richer

The researchers have used Acoustruments to build an interactive doll, which responds when its tummy is poked; a smartphone case that can sense when it has been placed on a table or is being hand carried; and an alarm clock that provides physical on/off and snooze buttons.

Acoustruments can be made with 3-D printers, with injection molds, or even by hand in some cases

The plastic tubing is designed to limit external noise interference, and the emitted ultrasonic frequencies are inaudible to the human ear. Experiments carried out by the researchers showed the control method to be impressively precise – achieving an accuracy of 99 percent when controlling a smartphone.

And, the researchers highlight smartphone-powered virtual reality headsets as a product category that could benefit from this technology, where users are physically unable to interact with a touchscreen interface.

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