Tag: Science & Technology

SAN FRANCISCO (TIP): Google’s updated Android mobile software seeks to make the smartphone smarter, while keeping the search titan relevant in a world where people rely on apps on the go. At its annual Google developers conference, Google offered a preview of Android M, due for release later this year, with an upgraded version of ‘Google Now,’ the voice-activated assistant which competes with rivals like Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana. Google will take the software a step further by allowing users to activate the assistant software, even if they are using another application, to find relevant information on their phones. “Your smartphone ought to be smarter,” Google Now director Aparna Chennapragada said while demonstrating the new feature on-stage at the developers conference in San Francisco.”Why can’t it tell you to pick up the milk that your spouse text messaged you about?”

Google Now cards on smartphones already tap into calendars, emails and other information, with user permission, to do things such as remind people when to leave to catch flights or where they parked their cars.

“Now on Tap” would build on that capability, and allow it to be layered over third-party applications on Android smartphones.

WASHINGTON (TIP): Scientists have developed the first form of real-time communication that allows screens of electronic devices, such as TVs and laptops, and cameras to ‘talk’ to each other without the user knowing it.

Using off-the-shelf smart devices, the new system supports an unobtrusive, flexible and lightweight communication channel between screens and cameras.

The system, called HiLight, will enable new context-aware applications for smart devices, researchers said.

Such applications include smart glasses communicating with screens to realise augmented reality or acquire personalised information without affecting the content that users are currently viewing.

The system also provides far-reaching implications for new security and graphics applications.

The idea is simple: information is encoded into a visual frame shown on a screen, and any camera-equipped device can turn to the screen and immediately fetch the information, researchers said.

Operating on the visible light spectrum band, screen-camera communication is free of electromagnetic interference, offering a promising alternative for acquiring short-range information.

But these efforts commonly require displaying visible coded images, which interfere with the content the screen is playing and create unpleasant viewing experiences.

The team at Dartmouth College studied how to enable screens and cameras to communicate without the need to show any coded images like QR code, a mobile phone readable barcode.

In the HiLight system, screens display content as they normally do and the content can change as users interact with the screens.

At the same time, screens transmit dynamic data instantaneously to any devices equipped with cameras behind the scene, unobtrusively, in real time.

HiLight supports communication atop any screen content, such as an image, movie, video clip, game, web page or any other application window, so that camera-equipped devices can fetch the data by turning their cameras to the screen.

HiLight leverages the alpha channel, a well-known concept in computer graphics, to encode bits into the pixel translucency change.

HiLight overcomes the key bottleneck of existing designs by removing the need to directly modify pixel colour values. It decouples communication and screen content image layers.

“Our work provides an additional way for devices to communicate with one another without sacrificing their original functionality,” said senior author Xia Zhou, an assistant professor of computer science and co-director of the DartNets (Dartmouth Networking and Ubiquitous Systems) Lab.

“It works on off-the-shelf smart devices. Existing screen-camera work either requires showing coded images obtrusively or cannot support arbitrary screen content that can be generated on the fly. Our work advances the state-of-the-art by pushing screen-camera communication to the maximal flexibility,” said Zhou.

WASHINGTON (TIP): These bladeless wind turbines can revolutionize the way wind energy is produced.

A startup out of Spain called Vortex Bladeless, whose turbines look like stalks of asparagus poking out of the ground, is using pillars that shake back and forth from the vortices created by the movement of air around the structure to generate power, the Verge reported.

Typically, a structure can only be optimized to oscillate at the specific frequencies caused by a certain wind speed, but Vortex says it is using magnets to adjust the turbine on the fly to get the most from whatever the wind speeds happen to be. Once the structure starts vibrating, an alternator in the base of the device then converts the mechanical movement into electricity.

Vortex claims that energy produced by its turbines will cost around 40 percent less than energy made from today’s wind turbines and a large part of that cost reduction comes from maintenance as the Vortex doesn’t have moving parts or gears, it should last longer and won’t require periodic lubrication.

The simpler design also means that manufacturing costs are about half that of a traditional wind turbine (those massive blades are expensive).

As per Vortex, its bladeless design captures around 30 percent less energy than a regular turbine, but it’s possible to fit more of the “silent” Vortex models in the same area.

Vortex is working on its “Mini,” a 41-foot model that should be ready for commercialization in 2016, while a larger, industrial model is in the works for 2018.

NEW YORK (TIP): Boats of the future may not sink despite damage to their structure, thanks to a new light weight composite material developed by researchers from Deep Springs Technology (DST) and the New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering, including one of Indian-origin.

Researchers said a boat made of such material, so light that it can float on water, will not sink despite damage to its structure. The new material also promises to improve automotive fuel economy because it combines light weight with heat resistance. Although syntactic foams have been around for many years, this is the first development of a light weight metal matrix syntactic foam.

Their magnesium alloy matrix composite is reinforced with silicon carbide hollow particles and has a density of only 0.92 grams per cubic centimetre compared to 1.0 gcc of water. Besides having density lower than water, it is strong enough to withstand the rigorous conditions faced in the marine environment. The new technology could be put into test within three years.

Amphibious vehicles such as the Ultra Heavy-lift Amphibious Connector (UHAC), being developed by the US Marine Corps, can especially benefit from the light weight and high buoyancy offered by the new syntactic foams. “The ability of metals to withstand higher temperatures can be a huge advantage for these composites in engine and exhaust components, quite apart from structural parts,” said Nikhil Gupta, an NYU School of Engineering professor in the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the study’s co-author.

The secret of this syntactic foam starts with a matrix made of a magnesium alloy , which is then turned into foam by adding strong, lightweight silicon carbide hollow spheres. A single sphere’s shell can withstand pressure of over 25,000 pounds per square inch (PSI) one hundred times the maximum pressure in a fire hose. The hollow particles also offer impact protection to the syntactic foam because each shell acts like an energy absorber during its fracture. The composite can be customized by adding more or fewer shells into the matrix to fit the requirements of the application.

WASHINGTON (TIP): Researchers have created a miniature, fibre-optic microscope designed to peer deeply inside a living brain, allowing high-resolution 3-D imaging of inaccessible brain regions.

“Microscopes today penetrate only about one millimetre into the brain but almost everything we want to see is deeper than that,” said Professor Diego Restrepo, one of the paper’s authors and director of the Center for NeuroScience at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.

“You can manipulate this lens while most others are fixed. That means you can see neurons firing inside a living brain,” Restrepo said.

The laser-scanning microscope, a prototype which will be further refined, uses fibre-optics and a tiny electrowetting lens. Compared to other small, focusing lenses, it’s fast and not sensitive to motion. This allows it to reliably focus on living tissue.

At the same time, the lens allows a rapid shifting of focus by applying electricity across two different liquids, which actually changes the curvature of lens.

The microscope, about half an inch in diameter, can be directly mounted onto the head of a mouse. A thin, fibre optic cord will allow the animal to freely roam while scientists look inside its brain and monitor reactions to certain stimuli.

That means parts of the living brain like the amygdala, which had been virtually off-limits to microscopes, will soon be seen in real-time, high-resolution, 3-D images.

“Using optical methods to stimulate and record from neurons is the future of neuroscience research,” said Baris Ozbay, a doctoral student in bioengineering at CU Anschutz and lead author of the paper.

“But most researchers are adapting existing large microscopes to fit mice for head-fixed imaging which limits movement, is difficult to set up and has issues with motion. The solution is to put the microscope on the mouse, rather than putting the mouse on the microscope,” Ozbay said.

Emily Gibson, assistant professor of bioengineering at CU Anschutz and senior author of the study, said the microscope opens a new world for scientists.

“We can now measure a large region and sample more neurons. For example, we can image up to 100 neurons at the same time, as opposed to perhaps the 10 or so we could do in the past,” she said.

One in seven Britons have contemplated divorce because their partners spend too much time on various social media platforms, a top British legal firm has revealed.

The study by Slater and Gordon Lawyers found that social networking site Facebook was considered the
“most dangerous” place for ruining relationships.

“Five years ago, Facebook was rarely mentioned in the context of a marriage ending but now it has become commonplace for clients to cite social media use or something they discovered on social media, as a reason for divorce,” Andrew Newbury, head of family law at Slater and Gordon, said in an online statement.

“We are finding that social media is the new marriage minefield,” he added.

According to the findings, while almost half of people secretly check their partner’s Facebook account, one in five also indulge in brawls related to Facebook with their partner.

Nearly 25 percent of married couples said they “had at least one argument a week” because of social media use. Nearly 17 percent said they fight daily over something they find online about their partner, GeekWire.com reported.

Over 58 percent of the people know their partner’s log-in details. The most common reasons for checking their partner’s social media accounts was to find out who their partner was talking to and find out if they were telling the truth about their social life.

According to Newbury, pictures and posts on Facebook are now being routinely raised in the course of divorce proceedings.

WASHINGTON (TIP): Researchers have found a geochemical process on Saturn’s sixth largest moon that suggests life could exist on it, or could have previously existed.

The team, including Christopher Glein from the Carnegie Mellon University, has revealed the pH of water spewing from a geyser-like plume on Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

The pH tells us how acidic or basic the water is.

Enceladus is geologically active and thought to have a liquid water ocean beneath its icy surface.

“Knowledge of the pH improves our understanding of geochemical processes in Enceladus’ ‘soda ocean,’” Glein explained.

The hidden ocean is the presumed source of the plume of water vapour and ice that the Cassini spacecraft has observed venting from the moon’s south polar region.

Whenever there’s the possibility of liquid water on another planetary body, scientists begin to ask whether or not it could support life.

The present team, including lead author Glein and John Baross of the University of Washington, developed a new chemical model based on mass spectrometry data of ice grains and gases in Enceladus’ plume gathered by Cassini, in order to determine the pH of Enceladus’ ocean.

The team’s model shows that the plume, and by inference the ocean, is salty with an alkaline pH of about 11 or 12, which is similar to that of glass-cleaning solutions of ammonia.

It contains the same sodium chloride salt as our oceans here on the Earth.

Its additional substantial sodium carbonate makes the ocean more similar to our planet’s soda lakes such as Mono Lake in California or Lake Magadi in Kenya.

The scientists refer to it as a “soda ocean.”

The model suggests that the ocean’s high pH is caused by a metamorphic, underwater geochemical process called serpentinisation.

On the Earth, serpentinisation occurs when certain kinds of rocks (low in silica and high in magnesium and iron) are brought up to the ocean floor from the upper mantle and chemically interact with the surrounding water molecules.

This process is central to the emerging science of astrobiology.

“Serpentinisation provides a link between geological processes and biological processes. The discovery of serpentinisation makes Enceladus an even more promising candidate for a separate genesis of life,” the authors wrote.

The work demonstrates that it is possible to determine the pH of an extraterrestrial ocean based on chemical data from a spacecraft flying through a plume.

This may be a useful approach to searching for habitable conditions in other icy worlds, such as Jupiter’s moon Europa.

“The results open the door to an exciting new era of chemical oceanography in the solar system and beyond,” Glein concluded.

SEOUL (TIP): A simple, thermometer-like device that could make diagnosing heart attacks easier in remote or low-income locations has been developed.

Diagnosing a heart attack can require multiple tests using expensive equipment. But not everyone has access to such techniques, especially in remote or low-income areas.

Now scientists have developed a simple, thermometer-like device that could help doctors diagnose heart attacks with minimal materials and cost.

Sangmin Jeon from the Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea and colleagues note that one way to tell whether someone has had a heart attack involves measuring the level of a protein called troponin in the person’s blood.

The protein’s concentration rises when blood is cut off from the heart, and the muscle is damaged.

Today, detecting troponin requires bulky, expensive instruments and is often not practical for point-of-care use or in low-income areas.

Yet three-quarters of the deaths related to cardiovascular disease occur in low- and middle-income countries, researchers said.

Early diagnosis could help curb these numbers, so Jeon’s team set out to make a sensitive, more accessible test.

Inspired by the simplicity of alcohol and mercury thermometers, the researchers created a similarly straightforward way to detect troponin.

It involves a few easy steps, a glass vial, specialised nanoparticles, a drop of ink and a skinny tube.

When human serum with troponin – even at a minute concentration – is mixed with the nanoparticles and put in the vial, the ink climbs up a protruding tube and can be read with the naked eye, just like a thermometer.