Li-on batteries gradually deteriorate as they’re repeatedly drained and recharged. But now researchers from University of California, Irvine have developed a new nano-wire battery that can survive hundreds of thousands of charging cycles. Read more…
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New Nanowire Batteries Can Be Charged More Than 100,000 Times
A team of researchers has managed to boost the amount of light an LED emits by 60 percent simply by etching its outer surface to resemble the outside of a firefly’s lantern. Read more…
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Scientists Made LEDs 60 Percent Brighter By Copying Firefly Lanterns
Forget Inbox Zero. Yesterday, the British telecomm company BT managed to forward outgoing email from its customers’ accounts to single email address. Read more…
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An ISP Forwarded Its Users’ Sent Email to a Single Inbox
Hold on to your hats: The US Air Force has accelerated a sled down a magnetic levitation track at an incredible 633 mph, setting a new world record in the process. Read more…
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The Air Force Smashed the MagLev Speed Record at 633MPH
Whether you’re a fan of Keurig coffee machines or not, the product delivery method known as the ‘pod’ is here to stay. In the case of Miracle-Gro’s Gro-ables, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. The pods make planting a garden almost completely idiot-proof. Unless you find using a hose a challenge. Read more…
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Keurig-Like Miracle-Gro Seed Pods Make Gardening Idiot-Proof
It sounds like something out of Star Trek: a patch thinner than a band-aid that you slap on your arm and, within moments, it lights up with heart rate, blood sugar, and so on — then peels off a few days later. That’s the goal of work by researchers at the University of Tokyo. Read More
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This tattoo-like display is made possible by a new ultra-thin protective ‘E-skin’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Mitel announced that it would acquire Polycom in a cash-and-stock deal with a total value of $1.96 billion, creating a company with combined sales of $2.5 billion and 7, 700 employees. Polycom’s acquisition by Mitel comes at a key time in the world of enterprise communications and collaboration. On one hand, it is a time of massive change and evolution. For years a lot of the services that companies used were based on legacy networking, but in the last decade there has been a big shift to IP-based networks for many of these services. However, at the same time the whole space has been massively disrupted by startups that are upsetting by tapping into the next phase of digital services — the internet. Companies like Microsoft by way of services like Skype and Yammer, and smaller startups like Slack, are overturning the whole idea of how people who are not in the same office floor can communicate and collaborate for work. These solutions are way cheaper than a lot of the legacy offerings; they tap into the cloud-based services that are now ubiquitous to share and work on files; and they are also built in very user-friendly ways, based around tech that ordinary consumers are using. Both companies compete against the likes of Cisco and Avaya. Mitel is perhaps best known for its IP telephony solutions, including PBX systems, while Polycom is a leader in conferencing services. They also cover SIP technology, and customers span 82% of Fortune 500 companies. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Mitel Buys Polycom For $1.96B In Enterprise Communications Consolidation Play
William Herkewitz, writing for Popular Mechanics: Physicists have just built the smallest working engine ever created. It’s a heat-powered motor barely larger than the single atom it runs on. Designed and build by a team of experimental physicists led by Johannes at the University of Mainz in Germany, the single atom engine is about as efficient as your car at transforming the changing temperature into mechanical energy. While scientists have previously created several micro-engines consisting of a mere 10, 000 particles, Johannes’s new engine blows these out of the water by paring down the machine to a singular atom housed in a nano-sized cone of electromagnetic radiation. The project is outlined today in the journal Science. “The engine has the same working principles as the well-known [combustion] car engine, ” Johannes says. It follows the same four strokes; expanding then cooling, contracting then heating.There’s some confusion here. The article says it’s a “four-stroke” engine. But as we know, a four-stroke engine consists of an intake stroke, a compression stroke, a power stroke, and an exhaust stroke — things that the engine in the article doesn’t seem to have. The article doesn’t mention how a single atom is able to mimic all the effects of a combustion engine. Update: 04/15 18:24 GMT by M :The article appears to have been updated for clarification. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Scientists Build Smallest, Single Atom, Working Heat Engine
Justin Ling and Jordan Pearson, reporting for Vice News: A high-level surveillance probe of Montreal’s criminal underworld shows that Canada’s federal policing agency has had a global encryption key for BlackBerry devices since 2010. The revelations are contained in a stack of court documents that were made public after members of a Montreal crime syndicate pleaded guilty to their role in a 2011 gangland murder. The documents shed light on the extent to which the smartphone manufacturer, as well as telecommunications giant Rogers, cooperated with investigators. According to technical reports by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that were filed in court, law enforcement intercepted and decrypted roughly one million PIN-to-PIN BlackBerry messages in connection with the probe. The report doesn’t disclose exactly where the key — effectively a piece of code that could break the encryption on virtually any BlackBerry message sent from one device to another — came from. But, as one police officer put it, it was a key that could unlock millions of doors. Government lawyers spent almost two years fighting in a Montreal courtroom to keep this information out of the public record. Motherboard has published another article in which it details how Canadian police intercept and read encrypted BlackBerry messages. “BlackBerry to Canadian court: Please don’t reveal the fact that we backdoored our encryption, ” privacy and security activist Christopher Soghoian wittily summarizes the report. “Canadian gov: If you use Blackberry consumer encryption, you’re a “dead chicken”. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Canadian Police Have Had BlackBerry’s Global Decryption Key Since 2010
Last week, a local Denver journalist named Stan Bush reported that Hillary Clinton’s campaign appeared to be using a hidden static noise machine to prevent reporters and other passerby from hearing the candidate’s stump speech at an outdoor fundraiser held at the private residence of Colorado’s governor, John Hickenlooper. The general allegation hung in odd kind of limbo, however, since Bush managed to record the machine’s ( inherently indiscriminate ) sound but was unable to photograph the actual device, while Clinton’s press shop ignored reporters’ attempts to confirm the machine’s existence. Meanwhile, the underlying question went unanswered: Why was Clinton using a static noise machine in the first place? Read more…
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Clinton Donor Confirms Presence of Static Noise Machine at Secretive Colorado Fundraiser