Tag: credit

Ultimate VR simulator throws you around in mid-air

Virtual reality headsets can trick our eyes and ears into believing we’re someplace else. Fooling the rest of the body is a little trickier though. Companies have tried spinning chairs and omnidirectional treadmills , but nothing comes close to the ” Cable Robot Simulator ” developed at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. The player wears a wireless VR headset inside a carbon fibre cage, which is then suspended in mid-air and thrown around the room using eight steel cables. The exposed pod is able to tilt, bank and move with an acceleration of up to 1.5g in response to the VR experience. Researchers have shown off some basic flight and racing simulations, but we’re already imagining how it could be used in our favorite video games. A dogfight in Star Wars: Battlefront ? Tearing around corners in F-Zero GX ? The possibilities are endless. It’s still very much a prototype, and hardly suitable for home use, but we’re desperate to have a go ourselves. [Image Credit: Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen] Via: Eurogamer Source: Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics

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Ultimate VR simulator throws you around in mid-air

Physicists successfully map individual atoms in 3D

Technology can evolve at such a rapid rate that many scientific discoveries are not just pushing boundaries, they’re practically barging them. Example, Physicists at UCLA have managed to 3D-map the position of individual atoms to a precision of 19 trillionths of a meter (that’s several times smaller than a hydrogen atom, for those of you playing at home) using a creative scanning technique. The method will help scientists and engineers build things — such as aircraft components — that lack point defects (i.e. missing atoms) that can have detrimental effects on structural integrity. The new procedure is called “scanning transmission electron microscopy” and works by passing an electron beam over a sample and measuring how many electrons interact with the atoms in said sample. Different arrangements of atoms react with the electrons in different ways so the outcome is unique to a particular atomic structure. The team conducts the initial scan which produces a 2D image, and in order to get to the final 3D product, they combine several scans from different angles. The downside of this technique is that multiple scans can potentiality damage the sample. The research is led by Jianwei (John) Miao, a UCLA professor of physics. Currently, a method known as X-Ray crystallography is used to map the layout of billions of atoms at a time, but has never been able to pinpoint an atom’s exact coordinates. This all encompassing procedure makes identifying a missing atom impossible. “Our measurements are so precise, and any vibrations — like a person walking by — can affect what we measure, ” said Peter Ercius, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The team of UCLA scientists who happened across this discovery now plan to use it in order to study magnetic properties. [Image Credit: Mary Scott and Jianwei (John) Miao/UCLA] Source: UCLA Newsroom

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Physicists successfully map individual atoms in 3D

Politiwoops uploads its 1.1 million-tweet collection to the Internet Archive

Twitter may have revoked Politiwoop’s API access but that isn’t stopping the political watchdog from preserving its already-sizeable collection of online gaffs and retractions from elected officials . Politiwoops, which archived the deleted tweets of politicians in 35 countries worldwide, announced on Wednesday that it will upload its collection of 1.1 million formerly-deleted tweets to the Internet Archive for perpetual preservation. This move follows the publication earlier this month of an open letter penned by 17 international rights groups — including the EFF, Sunlight Foundation and Human Rights Watch — urging Twitter to reverse its decision. That letter has since been endorsed by more than 50 more rights groups from across the globe. “Social networks should take into account international norms about transparency and the right to information, ” Arjan El Fassed, director of Open State Foundation, said in a statement. “When politicians turn to social networks to amplify their views, they are inviting greater scrutiny of their expression.” However, to date, Twitter has refused to review the decision. [Image Credit: AFP/Getty Images] Filed under: Internet Comments Source: Open State , Internet Archive Tags: Human Rights Watch, Internet Archive, politics, politiwoops, Social networks, Sunlight Foundation, twitter

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Politiwoops uploads its 1.1 million-tweet collection to the Internet Archive

Nine of World’s Biggest Banks Create Blockchain Partnership

An anonymous reader writes: Nine major banks, including Barclays, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, and JP Morgan have teamed up to bring Bitcoin’s blockchain technology to financial markets. “Over the past year, interest in blockchain technology has grown rapidly. It has already attracted significant investment from many major banks, which reckon it could save them money by making their operations faster, more efficient and more transparent.” Leaving aside the question of whether banks actually want to become more transparent, they’re funding a firm dedicated to running tests on how data can be shared and collected through the blockchain. “The blockchain works as a huge, decentralized ledger of every bitcoin transaction ever made that is verified and shared by a global network of computers and therefore is virtually tamper-proof. … The data that can be secured using the technology is not restricted to bitcoin transactions. Two parties could use it to exchange any other information, within minutes and with no need for a third party to verify it.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Nine of World’s Biggest Banks Create Blockchain Partnership

Researchers create a near-perfect sound absorbing system

We’ve come a long way since the days of pouring wax into our ears to block out siren songs . A team of researchers at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have developed a sound-cancelling system that eliminates 99.7 percent of noise, no matter how quiet. Typically, passive sound deadening technologies have relied on materials that simple absorb sound waves (and usually only along a narrow band of frequencies). But even the most absorbent material tends to scatter some of the sound incoming sound waves. As such, this new system absorbs incoming sounds not once but twice. It uses a pair of ” impedance-matched ” resonators. These are devices that naturally vibrate at a specific frequency and, in the case of “impedance-matching”, that frequency is equal to that of the the background medium (whatever the resonator is mounted to). The first resonator eliminates a majority of the incoming sound waves. However at very low energy levels (ie very quiet sounds), even the best resonator tends to scatter a little bit of the sound at its own frequency. That’s where the second resonator comes in — it’s tuned precisely to the first resonator’s frequency, allowing it create destructive interference for any sound the first resonator scatters. This single-layer system builds and improves upon the team’s earlier work, published last year in Nature . That study fit a soft absorbent layer atop a hard reflective one and separated them with a thin layer of air. The idea was that any sound that got through the soft layer would bounce off the reflective layer and cancel out any incoming sound waves . [Image Credit: AFP/Getty Images] Filed under: Science Comments Via: Motherboard Source: Applied Physics Letters Tags: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, HongKong, NoiseCancelling, resonator, sounddampening

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Researchers create a near-perfect sound absorbing system

Perform Quick Calculations and Conversions in Windows 10’s Taskbar

Quick: How many grams are in an ounce? How many Euros is $1 worth? What’s the square root of 65? Windows 10’s search in the taskbar can answer these and similar questions. Read more…

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Perform Quick Calculations and Conversions in Windows 10’s Taskbar

Coin Unveils The Next Generation Of Its All-In-One Credit Card

 Coin, the device that wanted to replace all of your credit cards with a… card, is prepped and ready to dig into the future with Coin 2.0. Coin 2.0 uses NFC and is EMV-compatible so that users can not only tap to pay, the way you would with Apple Pay on an iPhone, but can integrate their chip-and-pin cards to the device. The original Coin, debuted in November 2013 on Kickstarter, … Read More

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Coin Unveils The Next Generation Of Its All-In-One Credit Card

Researchers may have found a cancer cell’s ‘off’ switch

Aside from their abnormal growth rates, cancerous cells aren’t that much different from normal healthy tissue. That’s why radiation and chemo treatments can’t effectively target just tumors. However, a team of researchers from the Mayo Clinic believe they’ve discovered a mechanism that can rein in cancer’s uninhibited growth by retraining these wayward cells to die like they’re supposed to . See, when cells get old and prepare to die, they’re supposed to stop dividing. This process is controlled by “biological processors” called microRNAs which feed the cell just enough of the PLEKHA7 protein to inhibit division. But in the case of cancer, the microRNAs don’t deliver enough of the protein and the cells begin to divide out of control, resulting in a tumor. In a recently published study in the journal Nature Cell Biology , the Mayo Clinic team found that by injecting microRNA directly into a tumor, PLEKHA7 levels returned to normal and the cancerous cells stop reproducing. “This is an unexpected finding, ” Chris Bakal, a specialist at the Institute for Cancer Research in London, told The Telegraph . “Normal cells touch each other and form junctions, then they shut down proliferation. If there is a way to turn that [process] back on, it would be a way to stop tumors from growing.” What’s more, the method has shown to be surprisingly effective against some especially aggressive forms of cancer, at least in initial lab tests. However, the researchers don’t believe this will be some magic bullet that cures cancer outright. “This important study solves a long-standing biological mystery, but we mustn’t get ahead of ourselves, ” Henry Scowcroft, Cancer Research UK’s senior science information manager, told The Telegraph . “There’s a long way to go before we know whether these findings, in cells grown in a laboratory, will help treat people with cancer. But it’s a significant step forward in understanding how certain cells in our body know when to grow, and when to stop. Understanding these key concepts is crucial to help continue the encouraging progress against cancer we’ve seen in recent years.” Still, any step forward in the fight against this disease will be a welcome one. [Image Credit: Scott Tysick / Getty Creative] Filed under: Science Comments Via: Telegraph , Quartz Source: Nature Tags: cancer, chemo, MayoClinic, medicine, microRNA, PLEKHA7, protein, radiation, tumor

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Researchers may have found a cancer cell’s ‘off’ switch

PSA: Apple will replace your iPhone 6 Plus’ wonky camera

Did you buy an iPhone 6 Plus sometime between last September and this January? Do you notice that your shots taken with its back camera come out all blurry? Yeah, it’s not just you . Turns out, a limited number of these phones shipped with a manufacturing defect. However, Apple is aware of the issue and has already begun issuing replacements for the iSight camera. If you think that you have one of these borked units, go to this website and type in your phone’s serial number. If your unit is part of that bad batch, Apple will replace the camera (not the entire phone) at no charge. Also, if you’re rocking one of the 4.7-inch iPhone 6’s , don’t worry; none of those units suffered from the defect. [Image Credit: Getty Images] Filed under: Cellphones , Cameras , Wireless , Mobile , Apple Comments Via: 9to5Mac Source: Apple Support Tags: apple, iphone, iphone6, iphone6plus, isight, mobilepostcross, PSA

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PSA: Apple will replace your iPhone 6 Plus’ wonky camera

UK research finds vaping is 95 percent safer than smoking

Vaping just took a huge step forward in its quest for public acceptance. A report published today by Public Health England (PHE), an agency sponsored by the UK’s Department for Health, has concluded that e-cigarettes are 95 percent less harmful than traditional smokes. In addition, it’s recognised their potential to help people quit smoking altogether, and says it looks forward to the day when the NHS can prescribe medicinally regulated devices. “E-cigarettes could be a game changer in public health, in particular by reducing the enormous health inequalities caused by smoking, ” Professor Ann McNeill from King’s College London, and one of the review’s independent authors said. The problem, the research found, is that close to half of the UK population (44.8 percent) isn’t aware that vaping is less harmful than tobacco. In fact, a growing number of people think e-cigarettes are just as dangerous, if not more so than the regular kind — 22.1 percent hold this view in 2015, up from 8.1 percent in 2013. PHE hasn’t suggested that vaping is a healthy pursuit — it’s likely not risk free — but it believes public perception could be stopping smokers from trying e-cigarettes and, eventually, dropping the habit entirely. “Local stop smoking services should look to support e-cigarette users in their journey to quitting completely, ” Professor Kevin Fenton, Director of Health and Wellbeing at PHE said. Legislation due in October will ban under-18s from buying e-cigarettes in the UK, in part because their long-term health effects are still unknown. Today’s report isn’t an all-clear for lifelong vaping, but it could help the technology slowly shake its troubled image . [Image Credit: Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images] Filed under: Misc Comments Source: Public Health England Tags: departmentforhealth, ecigarette, ECigarettes, publichealthengland, vape, vapers, vaping

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UK research finds vaping is 95 percent safer than smoking