Tag: try-it-now-rarr

easyJet’s new cabin crew uniforms are covered in LEDs

Whether it’s recon drones , VR training or 3D-printed plane parts , easyJet is quick to embrace new technologies. The company’s latest experiment is a little more garish — to mark its 20th birthday, cabin crew and engineers are getting brand-new uniforms littered with colourful LEDs. With the cabin crew, you’ll notice tiny lights on their jacket lapels that illuminate to reveal flight numbers, destinations and other useful tidbits. Extra LEDs have been sewn onto the shoulders which, along with some illuminated hems, are designed to help staff and travellers in the event of an emergency. Finally, there are built-in microphones so the crew can communicate with one another and the passengers.

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easyJet’s new cabin crew uniforms are covered in LEDs

Expedia to pay $3.9 billion for Airbnb competitor HomeAway

The short-term rental market is growing, and Expedia understandably wants a piece of it. After snapping up Orbitz and Travelocity earlier this year, it has now decided to purchase HomeAway. It’s an online service that focuses on renting out vacation homes, further intensifying Expedia’s rivalry with Airbnb. The travel empire has been displaying HA properties alongside hotels for a couple of years, but it will now completely own the company and all its brands. In its press release , Expedia admits that it has agreed to pay a hefty $3.9 billion for HomeAway, because it has “long had [its] eyes on the fast growing ~$100 billion alternative accommodations space.” Both companies are expecting to close the deal in 2016, and if they obtain regulatory approval, Expedia will pay in cash and stock worth $38.31 per share. Source: Expedia , Bloomberg , The New York Times , HomeAway , Reuters , USA Today

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Expedia to pay $3.9 billion for Airbnb competitor HomeAway

Scientists stretch metal to make it stronger

You’d think that stretching metal would make it weaker, but just the opposite is true… on a very small scale. Researchers have developed a technique that pulls nanoscopic metal crystals to eliminate defects. By gently and repeatedly stretching the crystal, scientists move “dislocations” (rows of atom-level defects) to free surfaces, where they’re ultimately forced out. The result is a metal that is considerably less likely to crack or otherwise fail over time. You may not see this technique used to improve larger (that is, visible) metal, like what you see in buildings or vehicles. The same trick that improves nanoscale metal tends to make things worse at the macro level. However, it could be very helpful for processors and any other device where even the tiniest breaks could cause big problems. Don’t be surprised if you’re one day using electronics that last for years longer than you’re used to. Source: Carnegie Mellon University , PNAS

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Scientists stretch metal to make it stronger

Scientists make a transistor from a single molecule

You’re looking at what could be not just one of the smallest semiconductor parts ever, but one of the smallest semiconductor parts possible . A worldwide research team has built a transistor that consists of a single copper phthalocyanine molecule, a dozen indium atoms and an indium arsenide backing material. The trick was to abandon the usual mechanics of a transistor, which normally controls current by modulating the gate voltage, in favor of a field effect. Here, you only need to vary the distance of the gate (in this case, the atoms) to modulate electricity. Don’t start preparing for a world full of tiny-but-complex gadgets just yet. The scientists created their transistor in a near-total vacuum, at a temperature barely above absolute zero. That’s a far cry from real-world conditions, and it’ll take much more research before transistors this small are in devices you can actually buy. Nonetheless, the breakthrough is promising — it shows that there’s still a long, long way to go before we hit the physical limits of electronics . [Image credit: US Naval Research Laboratory] Filed under: Science Comments Via: IEEE Spectrum Source: NRL , Nature

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Scientists make a transistor from a single molecule

Google Voice transcriptions will soon actually make sense

One of the most prevalent qualms users have of Google Voice is its occasionally accurate (but usually absurd) interpretations of what’s being said. However, with the upcoming public debut of the Project Fi cellular service , Google has reportedly greatly improved its transcription service. According to a post on the company’s blog , Google’s managed to reduce its transcription error rates by nearly 50 percent by leveraging a “long short-term memory deep recurrent neural network.” Users don’t even have to change their routine to take advantage of the new system, just keep using Voice and Fi as they always have. [Image Credit: shutterstock] Filed under: Internet , Mobile , Google Comments Source: Google Blog

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Google Voice transcriptions will soon actually make sense

XBMC’s Kodi media player officially hits the Play Store

Kodi’s media player got a name change last year and now it has something even better — official Android status. The app formerly known as XBMC is now available on the Google Play store for all takers. It actually arrived to the store last month in beta form , but prior to that could only be sideloaded on Android. Version 15 (codenamed Isengard) now supports Android 5-specific features like 4K and variable refresh rates on certain Android TV devices, like NVIDIA’s Shield . Another new trick on all platforms is “adaptive seeking” that lets you search material faster by tapping a key several times. There’s also new audio and subtitle lists, an updated add-on manager, improved video queuing and better live TV closed-captioning. It has other minor tweaks and fixes (check the source), and the XBMC foundation said that the next release would support DirectX 11. You can grab the app now on Google Play, but just remember that Kodi is a deep app, so leave yourself some time (and possibly some help ) to get it working. Filed under: Cellphones , Home Entertainment Comments Source: Kodi

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XBMC’s Kodi media player officially hits the Play Store

Forever 21’s ‘Thread Screen’ displays Instagram pics using fabric

Most companies seek out the latest displays for high-tech billboards, but Forever 21 has decided to take a different route for this particular Instagram project. For the past year-and-a-half, the folks at connected hardware maker Breakfast New York have been building a “Thread Screen” for the company. It’s called that, because well, it’s literally a screen made of 6, 400 mechanical spools of multicolored threaded fabric. Those spools have five-and-a-half feet of fabric each, divided into 36 colors that transition every inch-and-a-half. They move like a conveyor belt, stopping at the right hue based on what picture they’re displaying — an infrared even scans the finished product to make sure each spool is displaying the correct color. According to Breakfast NY, which also created a smart street sign among other installations in the past, the machine weighs 2, 000 pounds and has over 200, 000 components. It’s a gargantuan display, and you’ll get the chance to control it from today, July 22nd, up until July 28th. When you post a photo on Instagram and use #F21ThreadScreen as a hashtag, the device’s accompanying software will take your image and optimize it for the screen’s 80×80 resolution. You’ll then get an edited video of your picture as the Thread Screen transformed to display it — check out this editor’s profile photo being ran through the system below to see an example of what you’re getting. If you’re curious about other people’s photos, though, you can also visit the project’s official website . F21 and Breakfast are live streaming the machine as it displays photo after photo for 24 hours from now until the project ends. Filed under: Misc Comments Source: Breakfast New York , F21 Thread Screen

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Forever 21’s ‘Thread Screen’ displays Instagram pics using fabric

Mario and Sonic look absolutely stunning in Unreal Engine 4

Unreal Engine 4 has shown us what the next generation of video games can look like: large, realistic and mind-bogglingly gorgeous. Frankly, its tech demos are breathtaking — technical marvels that show off photo-realistic apartments and stunningly beautiful landscapes ; but what happens when you cram cartoonish mascots like Mario and Sonic The Hedgehog into these technical marvels? Mind-blowingly awesome YouTube videos, that’s what. It was bound to happen eventually. Back in March, Unreal made its incredibly popular game engine free to anybody who wants to use it, leaving amateur game developers with immediate access to professional game creation tools. Search around YouTube, and you’ll find more than a few folks using it to put our favorite game characters into hauntingly realistic worlds. Check it out: See that vast landscape? That’s the setting for Unreal Engine 4’s Kite demo, which shows off the engine’s ability to handle large worlds and procedural asset placement. YouTube user CryZenx decided it was the perfect place to drop in Sonic The Hedgehog. The resulting demo isn’t much of a game (though it does show off just how fast a blue hedgehog can run), but it binds the potential of Unreal Engine 4 to a familiar face — letting us imagine what the coming generation of games could really look like. CryZenX made a Mario demo, too — but the plumber looks a little out of place in the Unreal’s endless prairie. YouTuber Aryoksini put Mario in a more familiar environment, a series of castles and caverns more suited to his adventures in the Mushroom Kingdom. The canned environments (taken directly from the Unreal marketplace) look a little too polished for the off-beat world Nintendo’s mascot normally inhabits, but it’s still a stunning look at where console gaming could be in a few short years. Want to see more? Hit up the YouTube search bar with “Unreal Engine 4” and your favorite video-game mascot. Let us know if you find anything good. Filed under: Gaming Comments Source: YouTube (1) , (2)

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Mario and Sonic look absolutely stunning in Unreal Engine 4

UW-Madison researchers invent a metal-free fuel cell

The development of fuel cell technology has been hamstrung by the need for expensive and difficult-to-manufacture catalysts like platinum , rhodium or palladium. But a team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison believe they’ve found an ingenious alternative that employs a molecular, rather than solid, catalyst . A fuel cell generates electricity from chemicals by reacting hydrogen and oxygen at its anode and cathode , respectively. Specifically, a catalyst at the anode oxidizes the hydrogen fuel to create free electrons and charged ions. The ions pass through the electrolyte while the electrons pass through a separate wire (to drive an electronic device) and the two recombine in the cathode with oxygen to create water or CO2. The team, led by Professor Shannon Stahl and lab scientist James Gerken, noticed that the aerobic oxidation reactions they had studied in their previous work closely mimicked the oxygen reaction in fuel cells. To see if this aerobic reaction could work as a fuel cell, they built one using a catalyst composed of nitroxyl and nitrogen oxide molecules to react with its electrode and oxygen. “While this catalyst combination has been used previously in aerobic oxidations, we didn’t know if it would be a good fuel cell catalyst, ” Stahl said in a statement. “It turns out that it is the most effective molecular catalyst system ever reported.” The results are more than impressive. “This work shows for the first time that molecular catalysts can approach the efficiency of platinum, ” Gerken continued. “And the advantage of molecules is that you can continue to modify their structure to climb further up the mountain to achieve even better efficiency.” [Image Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto] Filed under: Science Comments Source: University of Wisconsin-Madison

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UW-Madison researchers invent a metal-free fuel cell