Using your smartphone or tablet while driving is not only illegal in most sane states, it’s also just a dangerously stupid thing to do behind the wheel. But since access to your device can make your travels easier, the dashboard-mounted Navdy provides a heads-up display that shares info from your devices, and lets you interact with them through voice and gesture commands. Read more…
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This Heads-Up Display Puts the App Info You Need On Your Windshield
vinces99 (2792707) writes “Imagine a world in which your wristwatch or other wearable device communicates directly with your online profiles, storing information about your daily activities where you can best access it – all without requiring batteries. Or, battery-free sensors embedded around your home that could track minute-by-minute temperature changes and send that information to your thermostat to help conserve energy. This not-so-distant ‘Internet of Things’ reality would extend connectivity to perhaps billions of devices. Sensors could be embedded in everyday objects to help monitor and track everything from the structural safety of bridges to the health of your heart. But having a way to cheaply power and connect these devices to the Internet has kept this from taking off. Now, University of Washington engineers have designed a new communication system that uses radio frequency signals as a power source and reuses existing Wi-Fi infrastructure to provide Internet connectivity to these devices. Called Wi-Fi backscatter, this technology is the first that can connect battery-free devices to Wi-Fi infrastructure. The researchers will publish their results at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Data Communication’s annual conference this month in Chicago. The team also plans to start a company based on the technology. The Pre-print research paper. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Harvesting Wi-Fi Backscatter To Power Internet of Things Sensors
Exhaustive analysis into the price of Lego bricks has revealed that parents of children who like both Lego and trains are getting the metaphorical brick in the sole of the foot treatment—with train sets bucking the trend and costing more than their less thrilling equivalents. Read more…
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Lego Trains are the Worst Value Sets in Per-Brick Pricing
Professional-networking site LinkedIn is agreeing to pay nearly $3.35 million in unpaid overtime to 359 workers, in addition to $2.5 million in damages under a deal announced Monday with the US Department of Labor. The accord covers current and former employees at LinkedIn offices in California, Illinois, Nebraska, and New York. “This company has shown a great deal of integrity by fully cooperating with investigators and stepping up to the plate without hesitation to help make workers whole,” David Weil, administrator of the Wage and Hour Division, said in a statement. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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LinkedIn paying shorted employees $6 million in unpaid wages, damages
You may want to be careful about the conversations you hold in the future; if you’re near a window, someone might be listening in. A team of researchers from Adobe, Microsoft and MIT have developed a visual microphone algorithm that picks up audio by looking for microscopic vibrations in video footage. The technique exploits the rolling shutter effect in digital cameras (where the sensor reads pixels one row at a time) to detect sound-related movements that might otherwise be invisible; the only gear you need is a camera that can record at high frame rates. It’s good enough to capture singing from a bag of potato chips, and musical tones from a potted plant. Don’t worry about optical eavesdropping just yet. The experiment only got accurate reproduction with specialized cameras that shoot at up to 6, 000 frames per second; an off-the-shelf device with 60fps recording can identify people’s voices, but it’s hard to make out words. Provided the technology reaches fruition, it would most likely be used by investigators that want to hear what suspects say when they’re not on the phone. It would be useful for more than surveillance, too, as team member Abe Davis believes the visual mic could identify a material’s properties without making contact. It’s definitely clever tech — let’s just hope that it’s used more for science than snooping. Filed under: Cameras , Science , Microsoft Comments Source: MIT (1) , (2)
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Visual microphone can pick up speech from a bag of potato chips
Airplane tickets are one of the biggest costs of traveling, so cutting down the price on those can expand your travel budget in a huge way. If you’re planning to visit Europe, Business Insider has determined the nine cheapest airlines to fly to Europe. Read more…
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The Cheapest Airlines for Flying to Europe
Marie Curie made some of the most significant contributions to science in the 20th century. And as most people already know, she did so at a great cost to her own health. What most people probably don’t know, however, is that the radiation levels she was exposed to were so powerful that her notebooks must now be kept in lead-lined boxes . Read more…
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Marie Curie’s 100-year-old notebook is still too radioactive to touch
The Ebola virus consists of small but lethal filament of RNA containing only seven genes. CDC Today, CNN is reporting that the two US citizens who were flown back to the states after contracting Ebola virus were given an extremely experimental treatment, one that’s still undergoing animal testing. While the treatment involves antibodies, it’s not a vaccine and can work effectively even after an infection has started. The process that produced it is a testament to the impressive capabilities developed in the field of biotechnology. The Ebola virus, known for its horrific symptoms and high fatality rate, currently has no established treatment. Which means that health care workers who are fighting the disease, and thus at high risk for becoming infected themselves, can do little more than put themselves in isolation and try to compensate for the damage the virus causes. That was apparently the case for two Americans who contracted the virus while working in Liberia. In this case, however, both were apparently given an experimental treatment developed in part by a company called Mapp Biopharmaceutical. Complicating matters, Mapp licenses its developments to a company called LeafBio for production and distribution. But LeafBio has also licensed an Ebola treatment from a second company, called Defyrus, and plans on combining the two. It’s unclear whether the Americans received the original or combined therapy. In either case, both therapies were based on the same developmental process outlined below. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Bio-high-tech treatment for Ebola may have saved two US citizens
If you saw the Teague X/Sizemore “Denny” e-bike last week and voted for it in the Oregon Manifest design contest, pat yourself on the back — it just won. As a result, what was merely a design experiment will now become an actual retail product built by Fuji Bikes , available to buy in 2015. To bring you up to speed, the Seattle-inspired cycle grabbed our attention with its removable handlebar locking system and electric drive pedal assist. Other techie features include an automatic gear shifter, removable battery, minimalistic “fenders, ” integrated storage and a full set of lights. Along with the clean lines, that helped it best four other formidable entries and launch it as a product. There’s no word on pricing yet, but Fuji said it has “exactly the kind of innovations we hoped would come from (the contest)” and expects it to sell well. Filed under: Transportation Comments
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You’ll soon get the chance to buy Teague’s e-bike of the future
A weird place for an SSD. Apacer PC makers do all kinds of things to save space inside their cases, but this is a new one to us: Apacer is apparently sampling sticks of DDR3 desktop RAM that include slots for M.2 SSD add-in boards and CFast CompactFlash cards, allowing you to mount storage devices directly to your RAM rather than using slots on the motherboard. The slots will still use the SATA III interface to transfer data—they’re just mounted to the RAM and they draw power through the RAM slot. These sticks will support all three lengths of M.2 SSD boards (2242, 2260, and 2280). That’s especially useful because, as AnandTech points out , only one mini-ITX desktop motherboard can directly support full-length M.2 boards. Full-length M.2 boards are necessary to accommodate higher storage capacities—currently available drives top out at 512GB, but 1TB drives are on the horizon . Connectors visible on top of the DIMMs would likely need to be connected to the SATA connectors on your motherboard; unfortunately it doesn’t look like these can take advantage of the faster PCI-Express flavor of M.2. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Mount your hard drive… on your RAM?