Tag: modeling

ICYMI: Amazon made its first drone-powered delivery

Today on In Case You Missed It: Amazon has been testing drone deliveries for three years now, even having to move to the UK to keep it going once the FAA changed its UAV guidelines. The company released a video of its first fully autonomous drone delivery, which happened on December 7. Meanwhile a team of researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory dug into what would happen if a sizable meteorite hit the ocean and the modeling shows a substantial amount of water vapor would get thrown into the stratosphere, which would not do great things for climate change. Finally, the Danish Neighborhood Watch came out with a robbery-preventing Christmas light and app combination to deter robbers– and provide laughs for the rest of us. If you’re looking for the dash cam video of an Uber car going through a red light, that’s here . As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.

See more here:
ICYMI: Amazon made its first drone-powered delivery

Reducing the Heat In Computing

Graphene + Copper (not to scale, obviously) About a year ago, I traveled to Cornell University to interview a bunch of materials scientists who work at the nanoscale level. This means they work with stuff that is very, very tiny. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. One of the challenges nearly all of the scientists kept mentioning is the issue of overheating in electronics. Most of us are directly familiar with the heat released from our computers when we balance them on our lap for a period of time, for example. And this becomes a big deal as devices get smaller and smaller. The smaller the copper wires—which connect chips, among other things—the more heat they emit. This is important for future devices and wearables. Scientists are exploring all kinds of solutions but a proven one has recently been announced in the journal Nano Letters. We’ve mentioned the magic material graphene before and it continues to be the superhero material, coming to the rescue over and over again. This time, it shows up as a possible damper for heated copper wires. Graphene is a one-atom thick material that can move electrons and heat. And it is able to cling to copper. Apparently by sandwiching copper between layers of graphene, the heat created by the metal is decreased by 25 percent. When attached to copper, the graphene actually changes its structure in such a way that allows the heat to move more freely through the metal, instead of being trapped in it. From left: (1) copper before any processing, (2) copper after thermal processing; (3) copper after adding graphene. Image via UCR Today (more…)

Originally posted here:
Reducing the Heat In Computing

Joris Laarman’s Latest ‘Anti-Gravity’ 3D Printer Basically Conjures Metal Out of Thin Air

About nine months ago, we got a first look at a freely articulating 3D printer , developed by Joris Laarman Lab in collaboration with the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC). By extruding a special fast-curing resin with a multi-jointed robotic arm, MATAERIAL proposed a “radically new 3D printing method, ” suitable for “irregular or non-horizontal surfaces.” Now, the Dutch designer has unveiled his latest breakthrough in liberating digital fabrication from a build platform: As its name suggests, MX3D-Metal can print lines of steel, stainless steel, aluminum, bronze or copper “in mid-air.” The MX3D-Metal reportedly debuted at last week’s Fabricate2014 conference and will make its way to New York City’s Friedman Benda gallery come May . Laarman shared some more information on his approach and what’s next for the team. Our Amsterdam-based lab is an experimental playground that tinkers with engineers and craftsmen on the many new possibilities of emerging technology in the field of art and design. We usually start working on projects based on the concept “what if…?” after which we start figuring out how we could hack or combine certain technologies to make something new. Usually, this results in a new series of design pieces with a form language; and this arises out of the new possibilities of the new technology. We believe we tackle technological challenges very differently than others by using a hands-on approach to create such design objects. Over the years, our lab has worked this way together with many inspiring people in the field of digital fabrication and computational design. We’ve worked with professionals and students from institutes like MIT, IAAC, ETH and the Architectural Association to develop new concepts for the digital fabrication revolution. For some time now, we’ve held two research positions at our lab. The purpose of this role is pure experimentation with digital fabrication under our supervision—and with the help of craftsmen and software and robotic engineers. Recently, the technical side of our work at the lab is supported by Autodesk. The reason for this is so we don’t just end up with a new series of design objects; it’s so we can bring technology to a higher level. (more…)

See more here:
Joris Laarman’s Latest ‘Anti-Gravity’ 3D Printer Basically Conjures Metal Out of Thin Air

A Simple Trick for Getting 3D-Looking Results from Moving 2D Images

Watching movies in 3D is fun, if you can stand the splitting headache those headsets give you. For now they’re the moviemakers’ way of tricking your eyes into feeding your brain a false sense of depth perception, but a bunch of GIF-happy blogosphere denizens have discovered a more low-tech way to do that: By adding two vertical white stripes to your moving image. Presumably they needn’t be two perfectly vertical stripes, nor is it important that they be precisely white so much as in sharp contrast to the predominant tone of the image. But by adding a visually static element that interrupts, and becomes interrupted by, a moving object, our brains are fooled into perceiving depth. (more…)

Continue reading here:
A Simple Trick for Getting 3D-Looking Results from Moving 2D Images

Scientists Detect Two Dozen Computers Trying To Sabotage Tor Privacy Network

New submitter fynbar writes “Computer scientists have identified almost two dozen computers that were actively working to sabotage the Tor privacy network by carrying out attacks that can degrade encrypted connections between end users and the websites or servers they visit (PDF). ‘Two of the 25 servers appeared to redirect traffic when end users attempted to visit pornography sites, leading the researchers to suspect they were carrying out censorship regimes required by the countries in which they operated. A third server suffered from what researchers said was a configuration error in the OpenDNS server. The remainder carried out so-called man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks designed to degrade encrypted Web or SSH traffic to plaintext traffic. The servers did this by using the well-known sslstrip attack designed by researcher Moxie Marlinspike or another common MitM technique that converts unreadable HTTPS traffic into plaintext HTTP.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read the original:
Scientists Detect Two Dozen Computers Trying To Sabotage Tor Privacy Network

More Digitally Fabricated Records: Listen to the Velvet Underground on Laser Cut Maple

We were pretty impressed with Amanda Ghassaei’s 3D-printed records , but apparently the Tech Editor at Instructables isn’t content to blow our minds with her digital fabrication prowess just once. As of this weekend, she’s back with a veritable encore: a Laser Cut Record . Although all the documentation for that project is available here, and the 3D models can be printed through an online fabrication service, I felt like the barrier to entry was still way too high. With this project I wanted to try to extend the idea of digitally fabricated records to use relatively common and affordable machines and materials so that (hopefully) more people can participate and actually find some value in all this documentation I’ve been writing. As with the 3D-printed vinyl, the laser cut record is hardly high-fidelity… but that’s not the point. The point is, it’s really f’in cool. (more…)        

Taken from:
More Digitally Fabricated Records: Listen to the Velvet Underground on Laser Cut Maple

With MS Research Help, UN Attempts To Model All of Earth’s Ecosystems

An anonymous reader writes “Microsoft Research and UN scientists have teamed up to build the first general-purpose computer model of whole ecosystems across the entire world. The project was detailed in a recent Nature article [note: yet another expensively paywalled original article] titled ‘Ecosystems: Time to model all life on Earth.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View post:
With MS Research Help, UN Attempts To Model All of Earth’s Ecosystems