Ever notice how you feel more productive while listening to a great song? It’s not just you. Researchers just discovered that a certain type of solar panel works most efficiently when exposed to the acoustic vibrations of pop music . Crank it up! Read more…
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Pop Music Makes Experimental Solar Panels Work 50% Harder
Bruce66423 writes “Milton Keynes is the most successful new town in the U.K., being built on a green field site from the ’60s onward. Initially famous for concrete cows, it is the home of the Open University, which offers college-level courses at home. Now, the U.K. Business Secretary has announced plans to have small driverless cars shuttle people around parts of the town starting in 2015. There will be about 20 of the pod-like vehicles to start, each capable of holding two people. They will have their own pathways and move at about 12mph. The plan is to continue developing and testing the vehicles, and by 2017, 100 of them will share walkways with pedestrians.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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UK Town To Get Driverless ‘Pods’ Mixing With Pedestrians
Star Wars: Episode VII will be released December 18, 2015. “We’re very excited to share the official 2015 release date for Star Wars: Episode VII, where it will not only anchor the popular holiday filmgoing season but also ensure our extraordinary filmmaking team has the time needed to deliver a sensational picture,” announced Walt Disney Studios chairman Alan Horn over at StarWars.com . JJ Abrams is of course directing and also writing the script with Lawrence Kasdan (Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi.) Importantly, John Williams will score the new film!
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Star Wars: Episode VII coming December 18, 2015
Researchers from the University of Iowa have developed a remarkable new procedure for regenerating missing or damaged bone. It’s called a “bio patch” — and it works by sending bone-producing instructions directly into cells using microscopic particles embedded with DNA. Read more…
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A bioengineered patch that regrows damaged bones inside the body
We got our first peek at Panasonic’s 4K Toughpad tablet last January at CES, and now the company says it will go on sale in the US about a year later, for $5, 999. Panasonic announced two devices for Europe , but here in the US there’s only the higher end UT-MB5 that packs Windows 8.1, 8GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD, Intel Core i5 CPU and, oh yeah — that super high res 3, 840 x 2, 560 LCD. With a projected two hour battery life you probably won’t be using this on the go very often (there’s an optional desktop cradle and carrying case), but even with its incredible 20-inch size, it’s about .49-inches thick and weighs 5.27 lbs. If you’re a professional in the “video production, architecture, design, photography and healthcare” fields who can expense this six thousand dollar slate, you’re probably already sold — all others can check after the break for a demo video and more specs. Filed under: Desktops , Tablets Comments Source: Panasonic
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Panasonic’s 20-inch 4K ‘tablet’ comes to the US in January for $6,000
“Game changer” isn’t a term that ought be thrown around loosely. It’s the kind of thing that loses value each time it’s uttered — sort of how everyone’s a “genius” of some kind or other these days. Every so often, though, we get to spend some time with a product that seems to wear the moniker well. We’re going to hold off here, of course — wait until we’ve spent some more time 3D Systems’ Sense scanner and more or less dance around the phrase in the meantime. But man, we’ve been pretty ecstatic about the Sense since we saw it in action a day or two ago. You see, ever since desktop 3D printers became a realistic possibility for consumers, we’ve been waiting for a missing link — something that would fill in the gap between concept and creation, without the formal training required to learn CAD. It’s clear, of course, that a solution is on its way, given the massive sums of money currently being pumped into the space. After all, whoever becomes the first to unlock such a thing would have a considerable advantage among the dozens of companies vying for the top prize. MakerBot swung for the fences with the Digitizer , an attempt to do for 3D scanning what its Replicator line has done for 3D printing. And indeed, we were largely impressed with the product during our hands-on earlier this week. The $1, 400 lazy Susan-esque device will no doubt find success among the maker community the company has successfully courted. Common wisdom, after all, is that 3D printing and its ilk are seeding the enthusiast community first, with casual users somewhere on the distant horizon. Surely such cost and size limitations will ensure they remain the realm of enthusiasts through the first few iterations. With the Sense, measuring roughly the same as a staple gun and boasting a price falling somewhere around that of a premium tablet, 3D Systems looks positioned to leapfrog such expectations. Filed under: Peripherals Comments
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3D Systems’ Sense scanner is compact, $400 and ready to transform 3D printing as we know it
dcblogs writes “U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has released 175 pages of “War Room” notes — a collection of notes by federal officials dealing with the problems at Healthcare.gov. They start Oct. 1, the launch day. The War Room notes catalog IT problems — dashboards weren’t showing data, servers didn’t have the right production data, third party systems weren’t connecting to verify data, a key contractor had trouble logging on, and there wasn’t enough server capacity to handle the traffic, or enough people on the help desks to answer calls. To top it off, some personnel needed for the effort were furloughed because of the shutdown. Volunteers were needed to work weekends, but there were bureaucratic complications.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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"War Room" Notes Describe IT Chaos At Healthcare.gov
Mail in OS X 10.9. Apple Apple has just issued a patch specifically for Gmail users running Mail.app in OS X 10.9 . The 32.46MB Mail Update for Mavericks is said to bring “improvements to general stability and compatibility with Gmail,” specifically a bug that causes unread message counts to be inaccurate, and another bug that “prevents deleting, moving, and archiving messages for users with custom Gmail settings.” The support page for the fix recommends backing up your data via Time Machine or some other mechanism before installing. You can get the update either through Software Update or by grabbing it manually . The rumor mill says that Apple is also testing some other new features and fixes for Mavericks, most notably in an OS X 10.9.1 update designed to fix minor-but-pressing problems and a larger 10.9.2 update later on. Neither of these has appeared in Apple’s standard developer portal as of this writing, but given that Apple has followed this pattern for every single version of OS X to date, it’s not exactly a stretch of the imagination. Apple also released version 1.0.1 of iBooks for OS X today, which includes some non-specific “bug fixes and improvements to performance and stability.” Read on Ars Technica | Comments
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New update from Apple gets Mavericks and Gmail to play nice
An anonymous reader writes “After all the revelations about NSA’s spying efforts, and especially after the disclosure of details about its Bullrun program aimed at subverting encryption standards and efforts around the world, the question has been raised of whether any encryption software can be trusted. Security experts have repeatedly said that it you want to trust this type of software, your best bet is to choose software that is open source. But, in order to be entirely sure, a security audit of the code by independent experts sounds like a definitive answer to that issue. And that it exactly what Matthew Green, cryptographer and research professor at Johns Hopkins University, and Kenneth White, co-founder of hosted healthcare services provider BAO Systems, have set out to do. The software that will be audited is the famous file and disk encryption software package TrueCrypt. Green and White have started fundraising at FundFill and IndieGoGo, and have so far raised over $50, 000 in total.” (Mentioned earlier on Slashdot; the now-funded endeavor is also covered at Slash DataCenter.) Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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TrueCrypt To Go Through a Crowdfunded, Public Security Audit
Outside of a few smartphones , 4K video capture has largely been limited to pro-level hardware ; the SD cards in regular cameras frequently can’t handle so many pixels at once That won’t be a problem in the near future, as the SD Association has just unveiled an Ultra High Speed Class 3 (U3) card format that’s up to the job. The spec guarantees write performance of at least 30 MB/s, or enough bandwidth to record 4K clips without hiccups. You’ll have to wait for U3-capable devices and cards to begin shooting, but it shouldn’t be long before you can produce footage worthy of your Ultra HD TV . Filed under: Cameras , Storage Comments Source: SD Association (PDF)