A Bulb That Can Turn Any Surface Into Touchscreen

Natan Linder has created an adavnced light system based on Augmented Reality named LuminAR that transforms any surface into interactive touch screen.

We all use table lamps at our study, but what if that lamp was able to transform your table into an interactive touch screen? Natan Linder, a PhD student in the Fluid Interfaces group at the MIT Media Lab has exactly done that. Linder has created an advanced light system named LuminAR that transforms any surface into interactive touch screen. LuminAR is an Augmented Reality system that projects images on any surface and can detect when anyone touches the projected image. Describing his project at the official site of MIT Media Lab, Linder said, “LuminAR reinvents the traditional incandescent bulb and desk lamp, evolving them into a new category of robotic, digital information devices. The LuminAR Bulb combines a Pico-projector, camera, and wireless computer in a compact form factor. This self-contained system enables users with just-in-time projected information and a gestural user interface, and it can be screwed into standard light fixtures everywhere. The LuminAR Lamp is an articulated robotic arm, designed to interface with the LuminAR Bulb.” Linder is a ten-year industry veteran and has worked for Sun Microsystems, and was the co-founder of Samsung Electronics Israel R&D Center and served as its Mobile R&D general manager. He was also an entrepreneur in Residence at Jerusalem Venture Partners, a leading VC in Israel. To know more about LuminAR click here.

Meet The World's Most Powerful 570MP Camera

Handsets with the Nokia Lumia PureView cameras may boast of an astounding count of 41 MP but a newly erected DEC (Dark Energy Camera) has somewhat shaken its reputation. To make things clear, this is not a camera phone that anybody can keep in his pocket but reportedly the most powerful sky-mapping machine. The DEC has captured and recorded light from 8 billion years ago.

The newest achievement may well hold within the answers to one of biggest unsolved mysteries of Astrophysics, such as why the expansion of the universe is speeding up, as reported by NDTV.

At the international Dark Energy Survey collaboration, scientists briefed about the Dark Energy Camera, a product that took eight years of planning and construction by a joint team of engineers, scientists and technicians working across three continents. The first pictures of the Southern sky were shot by the 570MP camera on 12 September.

The Dark Energy Camera was developed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. The gigantic camera is mounted on the Victor M. Blanco telescope at the National Science Foundation’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, which is the southern branch of the U.S. National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO). “The achievement of first light through the Dark Energy Camera begins a significant new era in our exploration of the Cosmic Frontier,” James Siegrist, DOE associate director of science for high-energy physics was quoted as saying.

The Dark Energy Camera is claimed to be the most powerful survey instrument of its kind, able to see light from over 1,00,000 galaxies up to 8 billion light-years away in each snapshot. The camera’s series of 62 charge-coupled devices has an unprecedented sensitivity to very red light.It also allows scientists from around the world to pursue investigations ranging from studies of asteroids in our own solar system to the understanding of the origins and the fate of the universe.

Scientists in the Dark Energy Survey collaboration will use the new camera to carry out the largest galaxy survey ever undertaken. The collected data will then be used to carry out probes on dark energy, studying galaxy clusters, supernovae, the large-scale clumping of galaxies and weak gravitational lensing. This will be the first time all four of these methods will be possible in a single experiment
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The past, present, and future of bionic eyes

Next-generation bionic eyes are practically here today. Imagine a blind person’s real-world conundrum trying to shop for one — they could schedule surgery for Nano Retina’s implant today and see their daughter’s wedding in 576-pixel clarity, but it would cost them their life’s savings. The Nano Retina 5000-pixel device could be ready tomorrow, or in another six months… and would be much more affordable. When the procedure involves assimilation of an electrode pincushion into the ganglionic tentacles of your retina, hardware upgrades are not as simple as popping in more RAM. What kind of decision matrix could be offered under such critical circumstances?

Cochlear implants, used to restore hearing, work phenomenally well when properly tuned and fitted. Most are refinements of the basic piece of hardware one might have sitting on their bookshelf — the graphic equalizer. The implant processes a single audio stream into bins of various sizes according to frequency, and then applies current to the corresponding frequency location in the cochlea, typically with a 16-spot linear electrode. The main function of these devices is to capture speech formants — the peaks in the frequency spectrum of the voice. The toughest challenge for the cochlear implant is to provide sound localization and source separation in noisy environments like a cocktail party.

Vision implants are much more complex. As any practiced photographer knows, the eye is more than a camera. The optic nerve does not feed the brain pixels. If you imagine your camera responding to auto-selected targets several times a second, gathering the full spectrum of light through its entire range of settings at each pause, and compressing the data onto a bandwidth- and energy-limited channel ideally matched to its receiver, you have some idea of what the retina accomplishes routinely.

The reason cochlear implants work so well is that the brain is just that good at making sense out of virtually any kind of signal it is given. If presented only with noise, or with nothing at all, the brain will eventually begin to manufacture hallucinations. If the implant signal contains even some distorted fragment of the original signal, it can be made to work convincingly. This is also the reason why retina implants can work without incorporating any knowledge of what the retina actually does in the healthy state.

These days researchers are trying to do a little better than the grainy images provided through our current implants. Signal processing techniques were developed in the Cold War era to track and target incoming missiles by extracting signals from noisy radar data. These same techniques are now used to convert the activity of groups of neurons in the motor cortex into a set of commands for moving a cursor, prosthetic device, or de-enervated limb in brain machine interfaces (BCIs). These methods and derivations of them can also be applied to incoming sensory data and can approximate what the retina actually does, without doing it in the same way.

Unfortunately, videos and TED talks are not the places where this kind of knowledge is typically transmitted in much depth. For that, one needs to look back to the work of the founding father of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, and his eminently practical inspiration, Vito Volterra. After suggesting that helium be used instead of hydrogen in airships, to great success, Volterra shifted gears and came up with some methods to characterize complex systems. Wiener simplified Volterra’s equations and they are now widely used today in statistical techniques like linear regression analysis, and analysis of spike trains from neurons.

The 3D display that tracks your head for a true holographic effect

When you go to a movie projected in 3D, you’ll often see grown men and women swiping in the air as if they could touch the images floating in front of them. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could actually interact with the objects in 3D space? Even better, what if the object in 3D space was viewable from multiple angles like a hologram? That’s what a company called Infinite Z is doing with its display and input device that goes by the name zSpace. This technology combines stereoscopic images with infrared cameras that actually track head and hand movements to construct a more realistic holographic effect.

For the zSpace illusion to work, you need to wear a pair of special glasses. Not only do the glasses perform the required image separation for stereoscopy, but they also have embedded infrared reflectors to help the system track your head. This allows you to move your head so that you can view a hovering object from different perspectives. The screen actually changes what is being displayed based on where you’re looking at it. This innovation allows the illusion of three dimensions to work much more effectively. When you add the ability to manipulate objects in 3D space with its special stylus, this stops being a gimmick. This actually has real-world uses now.

The zSpace is designed for professionals working in fields like 3D modeling, so it is priced accordingly. It’s available for $3,995, but the MIT Technology Review notes that people enrolled in Infinite Z’s developer program can buy a device for only $1,500. For those of you interested in developing software that takes advantage of this technology, an SDK is available for download alongside documentation and webinars covering relevant information.

This technology isn’t just useful for professionals, though. Browsing through a white paper written by Robert Earl Patterson [PDF], with help from Infinite Z, it’s obvious that the potential for interactive 3D displays is endless. The 3D technology in video game systems like the Sony PlayStation 3 or Nintendo 3DS is child’s play compared to the capabilities of this system. When these interactive 3D displays work their way downmarket, 3D gaming will actually make sense. When you can interact with a digital object as if it was real, that experience can lead to interesting and unique gameplay instead of the tacked-on 3D we have now.

Alternate reality and 3D immersion have been promised for a long time, and this is a big step forward. With traditional 3D technologies, the illusion is broken the second you start moving your head around. If this technology can get enough momentum in the high-end market, consumers will reap the benefits only a few years down the road. Now we wait for the price of this technology to drop low enough for the consumer market.

Sodium-air batteries could replace lithium-air as the battery of the future

The world of hardware reshapes itself as fast as it ever has nowadays. Pocket computers exponentially increase in power seemingly every few months, while our laptops can now fold completely in half and masquerade as a tablet. However, as far as hardware ever reaches, batteries always seem so stagnant. Now, though, promising research into sodium-air batteries could lead toward the battery revolution we’ve all been waiting for.

Aside from, for example, standard AA or AAA batteries, lithium-ion batteries are the go-to power source for our most prized mobile devices. They are rechargeable, and last an acceptable amount of time before cutting out right in the middle of an important phone call. Though our smatphones and tablets have an acceptable lifetime, sometimes you accept what you’re given rather than what you actually want. An iPhone 5 can last around 8 hours of 3G, LTE data use or talk time, or for 10 hours of video playback, or 40 hours of audio playback.

When you’re using some combination of all those features — as anyone with a smartphone and a long commute is fully aware — the phone’s battery life is woefully short. Because of the way a lithium-ion battery generates power — through chemical reactions — the amount of power generated has a ceiling. This means that at some point, a lithium-ion battery will be giving literally the maximum amount of power it can. A ceiling means that, eventually, our devices will require more power than the battery can give.

In order for a battery to work, it needs to exchange an electron, because that usually generates a form of energy that is harvestable. However, the weight of a material is an important factor when designing a battery, as, obviously, a heavier battery means a heavier, less desirable device. So, in order to generate energy from a light material, you turn to oxidation. Considering oxygen abounds, you don’t need to include something that will be the oxidation catalyst, which makes the battery lighter. This type of battery, rather than the usual suffix of -ion, carries the self-explanatory suffix of -air. Scientists theorize that, in part due to not requiring a catalyst in the battery, a higher yield of energy can be generated. Whereas a lithium-ion battery has a capacity of around 200Wh/kg, a lithium-air battery could reach all the way up to 3460Wh/kg.

Unfortunately, the chemistry behind lithium-air batteries is so complicated that researchers have begun shifting their focus to sodium-air batteries. Though the capacity of the sodium-air is much lower than the lithium-air, sitting around 1600Wh/kg, it’s at least significantly higher than a lithium-ion, and much easier to make than the lithium-air. One end of the battery has a sodium electrode, on which an electrolyte is sandwiched underneath a carbon electrode that oxygen can travel through. The electron travels around the battery, the ionic metal dissolves into the electrolyte which in turn travels to the carbon electrode and hits the oxygen.

Though this is still in an experimental form, researchers found that not only does the sodium-air hold more charge than a lithium-air battery, but is easier to charge as well. It was mentioned above that lithium-air has a theoretical density of more than double the sodium-air, but as it turns out, the sodium-air has a higher density in practice (that isn’t to say that, one day, lithium-air won’t reach its enormous density destiny).

At the moment, though, a sodium-air can only be charged around eight times before it dies for good. Hopefully, scientists will be able to figure out why that is, and bring us a battery that can power our mobile devices for long periods of time without us having to conserve the power after a long night out

German student creates electromagnetic harvester that gathers free electricity from thin air

A German student has built an electromagnetic harvester that recharges an AA battery by soaking up ambient, environmental radiation. These harvesters can gather free electricity from just about anything, including overhead power lines, coffee machines, refrigerators, or even the emissions from your WiFi router or smartphone.

This might sound a bit like hocus-pocus pseudoscience, but the underlying science is actually surprisingly sound. We are, after all, just talking about wireless power transfer — just like the smartphones that are starting to ship with wireless charging tech, and the accompanying charging pads.

Dennis Siegel, of the University of Arts Bremen, does away with the charging pad, but the underlying tech is fundamentally the same. We don’t have the exact details — either because he doesn’t know (he may have worked with an electrical engineer), or because he wants to patent the idea first — but his basic description of “coils and high frequency diodes” tallies with how wireless power transfer works. In essence, every electrical device gives off electromagnetic radiation — and if that radiation passes across a coil of wire, an electrical current is produced. Siegel says he has produced two versions of the harvester: One for very low frequencies, such as the 50/60Hz signals from mains power — and another for megahertz (radio, GSM) and gigahertz (Bluetooth/WiFi) radiation.

The efficiency of wireless charging, however, strongly depends on the range and orientation of the transmitter, and how well the coil is tuned to the transmitter’s frequency. In Siegel’s case, “depending on the strength of the electromagnetic field,” his electromagnetic harvester can recharge one AA battery per day. He doesn’t specify, but presumably one-AA-per-day is when he’s sitting next to a huge power substation. It makes you wonder how long it would take to charge an AA battery via your coffee machine, or by leeching from your friend’s mobile phone call.

As a concept, though, Siegel’s electromagnetic harvester is very interesting. On its own, a single harvester might not be all that interesting — but what if you stuck a bunch of them, magnetically, to various devices all around your house? Or, perhaps more importantly, why not use these harvesters to power tiny devices that don’t require a lot of energy? Sensors, hearing aids (cochlear implants), smart devices around your home — they could all be powered by harvesting small amounts of energy from the environment.

NASA’s cold fusion tech could put a nuclear reactor in every home, car, and plane

The cold fusion dream lives on: NASA is developing cheap, clean, low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR) technology that could eventually see cars, planes, and homes powered by small, safe nuclear reactors.

When we think of nuclear power, there are usually just two options: fission and fusion. Fission, which creates huge amounts of heat by splitting larger atoms into smaller atoms, is what currently powers every nuclear reactor on Earth. Fusion is the opposite, creating vast amounts of energy by fusing atoms of hydrogen together, but we’re still many years away from large-scale, commercial fusion reactors. 

LENR is absolutely nothing like either fission or fusion. Where fission and fusion are underpinned by strong nuclear force, LENR harnesses power from weak nuclear force — but capturing this energy is difficult. So far, NASA’s best effort involves a nickel lattice and hydrogen ions. The hydrogen ions are sucked into the nickel lattice, and then the lattice is oscillated at a very high frequency (between 5 and 30 terahertz). This oscillation excites the nickel’s electrons, which are forced into the hydrogen ions (protons), forming slow-moving neutrons. The nickel immediately absorbs these neutrons, making it unstable. To regain its stability, the nickel strips a neutron of its electron so that it becomes a proton — a reaction that turns the nickel into copper and creates a lot of energy in the process.

The key to LENR’s cleanliness and safety seems to be the slow-moving neutrons. Whereas fission creates fast neutrons (neutrons with energies over 1 megaelectron volt), LENR utilizes neutrons with an energy below 1eV — less than a millionth of the energy of a fast neutron. Whereas fast neutrons create one hell of a mess when they collide with the nuclei of other atoms, LENR’s slow neutrons don’t generate ionizing radiation or radioactive waste. It is because of this sedate gentility that LENR lends itself very well to vehicular and at-home nuclear reactors that provide both heat and electricity.

According to NASA, 1% of the world’s nickel production could meet the world’s energy needs, at a quarter of the cost of coal. NASA also mentions, almost as an aside, that the lattice could be formed of carbon instead of nickel, with the nuclear reaction turning carbon into nitrogen. “You’re not sequestering carbon, you’re totally removing carbon from the system,” says Joseph Zawodny, a NASA scientist involved with the work on LENR.

So why don’t we have LENR reactors yet? Just like fusion, it is proving hard to build a LENR system that produces more energy than the energy required to begin the reaction. In this case, NASA says that the 5-30THz frequency required to oscillate the nickel lattice is hard to efficiently produce. As we’ve reported over the last couple of years, though, strong advances are being made in the generation and control of terahertz radiation. Other labs outside of NASA are working on cold fusion and LENR, too: “Several labs have blown up studying LENR and windows have melted,” says NASA scientist Dennis Bushnell, proving that “when the conditions are ‘right’ prodigious amounts of energy can be produced and released.”

I think it’s still fairly safe to say that the immediate future of power generation, and meeting humanity’s burgeoning energy needs, lies in fission and fusion  But who knows: With LENR, maybe there’s hope for cold fusion yet.