“YU55 poses no threat of an Earth collision over, at the very least, the next 100 years,” says Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at JPL.
Let our great grandkids worry about it.
Huge asteroid to fly by Earth in November
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Huge asteroid to fly by Earth in November
We all know people who look like they can nod off with their eyes open. These exceptions aside, we generally think of sleep as a switch with two settings – you’re either asleep or awake. But Vladyslav Vyazovskiy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison has found that sleep is more complicated than that.
By studying the brains of sleep-deprived rats, Vyazovskiy found that individual neurons can effectively fall asleep, going “offline” while those around them carrying on firing. Even if the rats are awake, parts of their brain can be taking a nap. What we know as “sleep” is the global version of something that happens throughout the brain at a local level.
Our neurons exist in two states. When they’re “on”, they have an electric charge across their membranes and they fire erratically and often. When they’re “off”, the charge disappears and they stop firing altogether. When we’re awake, our neurons are mostly on. When we’re asleep, they cycle between the two states, in time with one another. Scientists can detect these flips as “slow waves” on an electroencephalogram (EEG).
To find out what happens in a sleep-deprived brain, Vyazovskiy kept rats …
We’ve already seen plenty of glasses-free 3D HDTVs and portable devices, but a promising new technology called HR3D (High-Rank 3D) has hit the prototype phase. Engineers from MIT’s Media Lab, who developed the new solution, say that it avoids compromising on screen brightness, resolution, viewing angle, and battery life, and doesn’t require those pesky (and pricey) 3D glasses. HR3D uses a pair of layered LCDs to give the illusion of depth, with the top layer (or mask) displaying a variable pattern based on the image below it, so each eye sees a slightly different picture. Nintendo’s 3DS uses a similar technique, but with a parallax barrier instead of a second display. The designers constructed the prototype from two Viewsonic VX2265wm displays, removing the LCDs from their housings and pulling off polarizing filters and films. We’ve yet to go eyes-on with HR3D, so we’re a mite skeptical, but tech this promising is worth watching closely, and from every angle.
Continue reading MIT Media Lab develops glasses-free HR3D, supports broad viewing angles (video)
MIT Media Lab develops glasses-free HR3D, supports broad viewing angles (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 04 May 2011 21:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
At an event today in San Francisco, Intel announced one of the most important pieces of semiconductor news in many years: the company’s upcoming 22nm processors will feature a fundamental change to the design of the most basic building block of every computer chip, the transistor.
Intel has been exploring the new transistor for over a decade, and the company first announced a significant breakthrough with the design in 2002. A trickle of announcements followed over the years, as the new transistor progressed from being one possible direction among many to its newly crowned status as the official future of Intel’s entire product line.
In this short article, I'll give my best stab at explaining what Intel has announced—the so-called tri-gate transistor. Semiconductor physics are not my strong suit, so corrections/clarifications/comments are welcome. Also, this explanation focuses solely on the “3D” part of today's announcements. Other features of the 22nm process, like high-K dielectrics and such, are ignored. (So if you see a funny term on a slide and you don't know what it means, either ignore it or hit one of the Related Links for more info.)
But we dive into what’s new about Intel’s transistor design, we first have to review how traditional transistors work.
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Feature: Transistors go 3D as Intel re-invents the microchip
Convicted murderer Joseph Paul Jernigan was executed in Texas on August 5, 1993, at 12:31. Jernigan donated his body to science, and it was sliced into 1,871 milimeter-thick segments. Now a new photo project puts him back together. More
It seems like everybody and their dog is trying to get a flexible display out there. TDK, Sony, LG, HP, and most recently Bridgestone are all going nuts trying to make this happen. E Ink is no exception, and although they’re not planning on putting out a successor to their Pearl screen this year, they aren’t standing still, either.
The Digital Reader managed to wangle a few demo videos of cutting-edge E Ink tech at an event a couple weeks ago. Here’s E Ink displays using cloth and Tyvek material as bases:
Although E Ink is the market leader, it’s wide open to disruption. The companies mentioned above have their own projects, and academics are getting into the game, too.
[via Engadget]
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E Ink Shows Off More Flexible, Crunchable Screens
On June 8th (the World IPv6 Day) you’ll see Facebook, Google and a number of other web sites reachable over IPv4 and IPv6 (more accurately: the DNS records for their web sites will have both A and AAAA records). No problem … unless your users have misconfigured workstations and you haven’t deployed IPv6 throughout your network yet (not many have).
Users with broken IPv6 connectivity will experience long delays connecting to major public web sites. Their workstations will try to reach the content over IPv6 first and will have to experience a TCP-level timeout before retrying to get the same content over IPv4. Guess whose phone will ring … and what the problem description will be 😉
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June 8th: the day your phone won’t stop ringing
Photos courtesy of Phil Seaton, Living Photo
MIT Professor Sheila Kennedy and her team at Kennedy and Violich Architecture recently debuted “SOFT Rockers” as part of MIT’s 150th-anniversary Festival of Art+Science+Technology (FAST) celebration. The team arrived at a sleek, solar-powered energy recharging station, disguised as a comely piece of public furniture, as a response to “‘hard’ urban infrastructure.”
Full specs after the jump…
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Recharge Yourself and Your Electronics with KVA’s Solar-Powered “SOFT Rockers”
When we heard that Brammo was hitting the dirt in a Las Vegas motorcross race we had horrific visions of a bright green Enertia with knobby tires struggling in the dirt, pitching its rider over the bars on the first yump it encountered. Thank goodness we can now say with confidence that is not the case. The company has announced it has not one but two new models coming, both specifically designed to handle questionable terrain. The Engage is a full-sized dirtbike, available in both motorcross (offroad) and supermoto (onroad, mostly) variants, and is just a few letters short of a beautiful marketing tie-in. It starts at $9,995 for the on or off road racing versions and then steps up to $11,995 for the street-legal SMS Super Moto, which you can see above wearing some pre-production bodywork. There’s also the Encite MMX Pro, a more hardcore racing version that lacks a price. More details and a video after the break.
Gallery: Brammo Engage and Encite
Brammo announces Engage and Encite electric motorcycles, taking it to the dirt with six speeds originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 04 May 2011 07:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
The planet’s population, now almost 7 billion, is expected to reach the 9 billion mark before 2050, according to a revised United Nations projection announced Tuesday.