The sprawling Hermitage Museum has long reigned as the world’s largest museum—but China has plans to come close to it with a huge new building for the National Art Museum of China , the design plans for which were recently released by French architect Jean Nouvel. Read more…
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China’s National Gallery Will Be One of the Largest Museums on Earth
Your gadgets contain tiny specks of precious and rare earth metals—we rely on these dust-sized particles, which are so small they’re often not recycled because the cost of recycling outweighs the value of the metals. But according to the American Chemical Society, the overall value of these minute materials is massive. Read more…
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There’s $2.5 Billion Worth of Silver and Gold in Phones Sold This Year
Growing nerve tissue and organs is a sci-fi dream. Moheb Costandi met the pioneering researcher who grew eyes and brain cells. Read more…
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The Man Who Grew Eyes From Scracth
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
Google opened up applications today for the Little Box Challenge, announced in May, with plans to give away $1, 000, 000 to the group that can create a smaller and cheaper power inverter. Inverters take direct current from power sources such as solar panels and turn it into alternate current so that it can be used in homes, cars and businesses. Making the inverter smaller allows for more cost… Read More
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Google Opens $1M Contest To Shrink A Power Inverter
This morning at the annual Research Faculty Summit, Microsoft showed off a pretty impressive advancement in its AI tech. An app, entitled Project Adam , is poised to identify all of its surroundings just like a Fire Phone without the merch hooks. The app is still in development but shows promising results. Read more…
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Microsoft’s AI Is On Its Way to Identifying the Whole World
Ever try measuring the straight-line distance between two points on Google Maps? You had to hold some object or appendage up to the little scale, then eyeball-measure the distance on your screen. What a mess. No more—a new update puts the task a right-click away . Also, you can doodle with it. Read more…
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Google Maps Update Lets You Measure Distances (or Aimlessly Doodle)
An anonymous reader writes We’ve been calling it for years — connect everything in your house to the internet, and people will find a way to attack it. This post provides a technical walkthrough of how internet-connected lighting systems are vulnerable to outside attacks. Quoting: “With the Contiki installed Raven network interface we were in a position to monitor and inject network traffic into the LIFX mesh network. The protocol observed appeared to be, in the most part, unencrypted. This allowed us to easily dissect the protocol, craft messages to control the light bulbs and replay arbitrary packet payloads. … Monitoring packets captured from the mesh network whilst adding new bulbs, we were able to identify the specific packets in which the WiFi network credentials were shared among the bulbs. The on-boarding process consists of the master bulb broadcasting for new bulbs on the network. A new bulb responds to the master and then requests the WiFi details to be transferred. The master bulb then broadcasts the WiFi details, encrypted, across the mesh network. The new bulb is then added to the list of available bulbs in the LIFX smart phone application.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Hacking Internet Connected Light Bulbs
The most popular brands in America are not always the largest companies making the most revenue. Brands that you know, stores that you go to and places that you associate with some states get replaced by faceless monoliths who basically repurpose oil, energy, technology, other people’s money, etc. into more money. Read more…
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What the biggest companies are from each state in the US
Jeddah’s Kingdom Tower will be taller than any other structure ever built. At more than one kilometer high, this supertall will require feats of engineering that, until now, have been the stuff of science fiction. Like the world’s tallest, longest, and fastest elevators—which are being developed in a mine shaft in Finland. Read more…
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The Tallest Elevators On Earth Are Being Tested In an Old Mineshaft