Tech Today w/ Ken May

While the Society for Information Display’s “Display Week 2011” doesn’t sound like the sexiest event, it was at that conference in Los Angeles that a company called Polymer Vision showed off their latest technology: A rollable flatscreen.

Polymer’s 6-inch SVGA display is 800×600 pixels and (thus far) just black-and-white, but it can be rolled into a radius of just six millimeters–meaning it would fit around a tube less than a half-inch in diameter. While integration into actual products is presumably a ways off, it’s not hard to imagine, say, scroll-shaped iPads in the future.

Europe will presumably get a look at the technology when Polymer Vision travels to LOPE-C, the upcoming Large-area Organic & Printed Electronics Conference, to be held in Frankfurt at the end of June.
via crunchgear

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Polymer Vision’s Rollable Flatscreen

Freggy writes “In Belgium, a group of activists calling themselves the Field Liberation Movement has destroyed a field which was being used for a scientific experiment with genetically modified potatoes. In spite of the presence of 60 police officers protecting the field, activists succeeded pulling out the plants and sprayed insecticides over them, ruining the experiment. The goal of the experiment was to test potato plants which are genetically modified to be resistant to potato blight. It’s a sad day for the freedom of scientific research.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Activists Destroy Scientific GMO Experiment

With Guitar Hero on extended leave and no new Rock Band title coming out this year, now is the perfect time to trade in our toy guitars for something a bit more substantial. Going from five colorful plastic buttons for six strings with 22 frets each is a daunting task however, especially when music games have trained you to respond to visual cues to guide your playing; you see a green circle, you hold down the corresponding button and strum. A regular guitar won’t flash little circles in front your eyes to help you hit the right notes. More

Despite a litany of missed launch dates, bankruptcy filings, and corporate buyouts, Polymer Vision continues to trudge forward, and we’re more than happy to ogle its latest flexible screen. This time, the new hotness is a six-inch SVGA display repeatedly rolled-up 25,000 times at a radius of only six millimeters. The resulting scroll is apparently slightly smaller than a dime. With that kind of repetitive endurance, this tech seems well suited for building that Readius-like eReader Wistron promised a while back; not that we’re holding our breath, or anything.

Polymer Vision’s latest display rolls up, still doesn’t ship out (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 30 May 2011 03:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The ViewPad 10 era is over, here comes the epoch of the ViewPad 10Pro. Beyond the introduction of Intel’s Oak Trail Z670 1.5GHz processor, the new Windows 7 Pro / Android 2.2 dual-boot tablet throws in a 3G radio, 32GB of onboard storage (expandable via MicroSD or USB), and a 3500mAh battery that’s rated to last for 4.5 hours of 1080p video playback. It’s one of Intel’s promised 10+ Android tablets coming at this year’s Computex, though it has the appreciable advantage of being able to switch over to Windows 7 pretty much instantaneously. Check it out in the gallery below and you can expect a more in-depth look from us later on during the currently ongoing Computex 2011 trade show.

Update: Calling this a dual-boot tablet may have been a little ambitious, as it’s running the Bluestacks virtualization software, which turns Android into a Windows app, rather than allowing true dual-booting capabilities.

Continue reading ViewSonic ViewPad 10Pro boots an Intel Oak Trail CPU into Windows 7 Pro, virtualizes Android

ViewSonic ViewPad 10Pro boots an Intel Oak Trail CPU into Windows 7 Pro, virtualizes Android originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 30 May 2011 02:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Thanks to ten years of painstaking work by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, budding astronomers and astronauts now have a much clearer map of what lies in the cosmos beyond our pale blue dot.

If you’ve enjoyed NVIDIA’s fine tradition of merely bumping along its GPUs time and again and affixing a new badge, you’ll like the GeForce GTX 560M — it’s much like last year’s GTX 460M, but with more bang for the buck than ever. ASUS, MSI, Alienware, Toshiba and Clevo have all committed to new notebooks bearing the graphics processor in light of the potent performance NVIDIA claims it will bring: Namely, those same 192 CUDA cores (now clocked at 1550MHz) and up to 3GB of GDDR5 memory (now clocked at 1250MHz, with a 192-bit bus) should enable the latest games to run at playable framerates on a 1080p screen with maximum detail — save antialiasing. Of course, that assumes you’ve also got a recent quad-core Sandy Bridge processor and gobs upon gobs of RAM, but NVIDIA also says that with the built-in Optimus switchable graphics, those same potent laptops should be able to manage five hours of battery life while idling.

If you’re looking for some inexpensive discrete graphics, however, NVIDIA’s also got a refresh there, as the new GeForce GT 520MX bumps up all the clock speeds of the GT 520M. When can you expect a mobile GPU to knock the GTX 485M off its silicon throne, though? Glad you asked: a chart shows a “Next-gen GTX” coming late this year. Meanwhile, see what NVIDIA says the GTX 560M’s capable of in the gallery below and a video after the break.

Continue reading NVIDIA refreshes notebook graphics with GeForce GTX 560M, attracts ASUS, MSI, Toshiba and Alienware

NVIDIA refreshes notebook graphics with GeForce GTX 560M, attracts ASUS, MSI, Toshiba and Alienware originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 29 May 2011 20:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It looks like a piece of Photoshop trickery, but that bit of fairlyand fungus is Entoloma hochstetteri, the Sky Blue Mushroom. In its native New Zealand the mushroom is well known, appearing on a postage stamp and on the back of the country’s $50 note, but it is virtually unheard of outside the Land of the Long White Cloud. The Sky Blue Mushroom is probably poisonous, but no daring forager has offered to find out.

Fresh mushrooms can add delicious, savory flavor to all sorts of dishes. Sadly, they don’t keep very well in the fridge if you buy them from the grocery store. With these mushroom growing kits, you can raise your own fresh mushrooms. Then cut, clean, and cook them when you’re ready to eat. More

In 1809, the Ottoman Empire wanted to warn the Serbian people not to attempt any more foolish rebellion*, so it created this macabre monument:

Serbian forces dug new trenches under the local command of the Duke, Stevan Sindjelic. Since there was such a great defensive strategy
between the Serbian leaders, Sinjelic found himself unprepared. He realized the situation was hopeless, so he blew up the ammunition store with his own pistol.

Afterwards, Turkish commander, Hurshid Pasha, ordered the decapitation of all the Serbian bodies, even erecting a monument using the heads as building material. The tower itself was 10 feet high, contained 952 skulls, and was topped with the head of Sindjalic himself.

During the later part of the 19th century, the skulls were removed, both as macabre souvenirs of battle and proper burials. In 1892, there were only 50 left on the tower and a chapel was built over top to preserve what little remained.

Link | More at Atlas Obscura and Wikipedia (Photo: Wikimedia/Freerspska.org)

*note: the warning didn’t exactly work. A few years later in 1815, Serbia rebelled again and that time, achieved semi- and then full-independence.

Link:
The Skull Tower