LEDs have come a long ways. From the early 70s when a bulky LED watch cost thousands of dollars to LG’s announcement last month that it had created an OLED TV as thin as a magazine , these glowing little bits of magic have become wonderfully cheap and impossibly small. But guess what: they’re about to get much smaller. Read more…
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The World’s Thinnest LED Is Only 3 Atoms Thick
In a surprising breakthrough for the world of materials science, researchers have created some of the world’s most powerful artificial muscles we’ve ever seen. And they did it with simple fishing line. These freakishly strong and cheap muscles could revolutionize robotics, and perhaps one day our own bodies. Read more…
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Scientists just created some of the most powerful muscles in existence
Archaeologists from the University of Michigan believe they have found what is perhaps the oldest Roman temple still in existence. Built around the 7th century BC—probably for the goddess Fortuna—the temple tells us a lot about how the Romans built their city, thousands of years ago. Read more…
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Archaeologists May Have Uncovered the Oldest Roman Temple Ever Found
A team of physicists has proposed a way of teleporting energy over long distances. The technique, which is purely theoretical at this point, takes advantage of the strange quantum phenomenon of entanglement where two particles share the same existence. Read more…
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Physicists say energy can be teleported ‘without a limit of distance’
When we last saw metamaterials, they were helping us create real-life invisibility cloaks . But, in even more exciting news for true nerds, light-bending metamaterial can also do math. Not just simple math, but calculus. Read more…
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This Amazing, Light-Bending Metamaterial Can Do Calculus
AmiMoJo writes “According to security company Sophos, around 55% of home users and 18% of enterprise users have updated to Mavericks, the latest version of Mac OS (10.9). Unfortunately Apple appears to have stopped providing security updates for older versions. Indeed, they list Mavericks itself as a security update. This means that the majority of users are no longer getting critical security patches. Sophos recommends taking similar precautions to those recommended for people who cannot upgrade from Windows XP.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
mikejuk writes “A recent paper by Dr Rob Jenkins of the Department of Psychology at York University (UK) has managed to prove that you can get useful images of faces from the reflections in eyes. It really is as simple as zooming in. The catch is that the experiments were done with a 39 mega pixel camera — even so the actual final images were low resolution. In the experiment a number of people were photographed with a ‘bystander’ in a position so that a reflection of their face would be captured in the eye. The resulting extracted image of the reflection in the eye was only 27×36 and then rescaled using bicubic interpolation to 400×240 or bigger and enhanced using standard PhotoShop operations to normalize the contrast and brightness. Test subjects were able to match faces using the low resolution images but the important result was that if the subject knew the person in the photo then recognition went up to 90% with false positives down at 10%. So the next time you appear in a photo consider the fact that a simple procedure might reveal who you are with.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
We’re all outraged by the NSA’s invasions of privacy, sure—but we don’t perhaps understand exactly how it managed it. This video explains the maths behind the agency’s surveillance. Read more…
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The Math Behind the NSA’s Email Hacks
Cubli is a clever little cube that uses reaction wheels to jump, balance and “walk” across stationary and dynamic surfaces alike. It reminds us a lot of MIT’s M-Blocks, only bigger , and… well… more balance-y. Read more…
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Meet Cubli, a motorized box that balances perfectly on ONE CORNER
iONiUM writes “Today BlackBerry announced a $4.4 billion loss, and a deal with Foxconn to outsource hardware manufacturing. One interesting stat is that 75% of sales were actually older BB7 devices. That said, CEO John Chen says, ‘We are very much alive, thank you.’ He adds, ‘Our “for sale” sign has been taken down and we are here to stay. BlackBerry recently announced it has entered into an agreement to receive a strategic investment from Fairfax Financial and other institutional investors, which represents a vote of confidence in the future of BlackBerry.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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BlackBerry Posts $4.4 Billion Loss, Will Outsource To Foxconn