ZNAK SAGITE — više od fantastike — edicija, časopis, knjižara...

A ja ću tebi da poklonim fotografiju najstarije igrice na svetu. Desno su ganz novi, a levi je star najmanje 2000 g. (vide se otvori za ojačanje žicom). Inače, igra je stara najmanje 5000 g. Kako joj je grčko ime, a kako naše domaće?

Grčko - jebemliga. Srpsko - piljci!!!!!!!!!!!

To je poenta. Ja mogu da objasnim zašto je raket majstor projektovao šerpu, a ti ne znaš prelepo ime piljaka - astragal. Raket majstor sigurno radi na oblogama raketnih mlaznica, a odatle do šerpe čas posla. Isto tako, mi smo u institutu radili na samozagrevanju binarnih smeša, pa smo došli do smeše za samopodgrevanje pakovanja gotovih jela. U tome je i srž vojnog finansiranja istraživanja svega i svačega. Kasnije je pitanje imaginacije kako od naivnog načiniti opasno i obratno.

THE END OF "GENIUS"


Ovo je naslov, a sadržina je:


http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-genius.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region&region=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region&_r=0


Još pre tirdesetak godina rasprava "ideja pojedinca" ili "naučni tim" imala je neki balans. Slagali smo se oko toga da timski rad ostvaruje ideju kreatinog pojedinca, ali je bilo teško zamisliti da tim kreira ideju. Kako stoje stvari, uskoro ni timski rad neće biti u centru događanje već oni koji prihvate projekat i u njega ulože pare.

Quote from: Meho Krljic on 15-07-2014, 10:03:50
Izvori su užasni (Indipendent i Dejli Mejl), ali evo, naučnici napravili materijal koji je toliko taman da se skoro uopšte ne vidi - samo 0,035 posto vidljivog spektra se reflektuje sa njega. Plus provodi toplotu sedam i po puta brže nego bakar a jači je deset puta od čelika. Baciti pogled:

http://www.surreynanosystems.com/news/19/

Ovo sam video još jučer, ali surovi tempo života mi nije dao vremena da okačim. Ali evo, NASA ima prototip novog motora za kosmička plovila, koji je opisan kao "nemoguć" a ipak za sad - radi. Baza su mikrotalasi:

NASA tested an impossible space engine and it somehow worked

Quote

NASA has been testing new space travel technologies throughout its entire history, but the results of its latest experiment may be the most exciting yet — if they hold up. Earlier this week at a conference in Cleveland, Ohio, scientists with NASA's Eagleworks Laboratories in Houston, Texas, presented a paper indicating they had achieved a small amount of thrust from a container that had no traditional fuels, only microwaves, bouncing around inside it. If the results can be replicated reliably and scaled up — and that's a big "if," since NASA only produced them on a very small scale over a two-day period — they could ultimately result in ultra-light weight, ultra fast spacecraft that could carry humans to Mars in weeks instead of months, and to the nearest star system outside our own (Proxima Centurai) in just about 30 years.

The type of container NASA tested was based on a model for a new space engine that doesn't use weighty liquid propellant or nuclear reactors, called a Cannae Drive. The idea is that microwaves bouncing from end-to-end of a specially designed, unevenly-shaped container can create a difference in radiation pressure, causing thrust to be exerted toward the larger end of the container. A similar type of technology called an EmDrive has been demonstrated to work in small scale trials by Chinese and Argentine scientists.





While the amount of thrust generated in these NASA's tests was lower than previous trials — between 30 and 50 micronewtons, way less than even the weight of an iPhone, as Nova points out — the fact that any thrust whatsoever is generated without an onboard source of fuel seems to violate the conservation of momentum, a bedrock in the laws of physics.



Most impressively, the NASA team specifically built two Cannae Drives, including one that was designed to fail, and instead it worked. As the scientists write in their paper abstract: "thrust was observed on both test articles, even though one of the test articles was designed with the expectation that it would not produce thrust." That suggests the drive is "producing a force that is not attributable to any classical electromagnetic phenomenon," the scientists write. It may instead be interacting with the quantum vacuum — the lowest energetic state possible — but the scientists don't have much evidence to support this idea yet.

There are many reasons to be skeptical: the inventor of the Cannae Drive, Guido Fetta, has only a Bachelor's Degree in Chemical Engineering and is operating his company Cannae as a for-profit venture. Still, the fact that such results were produced by NASA scientists is promising and should warrant further investigation.

 

Eh, kad Gvido doktorat nije vid'o.

U ovoj postmegatrendovskoj atmosferi, to mu je plus.

medium.com podseća, a vezano za gorenavedeni "nemogući" kosmički pogon, da nauka generalno funkcioniše tako da ako eksperiment daje izvanredne rezultate, onda morate biti jako pažljivi da za njih date i izvanredna objašnjenja. A da u ovom slučaju to nemamo. Sve to, služeći se primerom N-zraka, starim čitav vek:

https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/how-to-fool-the-world-with-bad-science-7a9318dd1ae6

Soft Robotic Exosuit

Svi naši energetski problemi će uskoro biti kao rukom odneseni 


Lockheed says makes breakthrough on fusion energy project

Quote(Reuters) - Lockheed Martin Corp said on Wednesday it had made a technological breakthrough in developing a power source based on nuclear fusion, and the first reactors, small enough to fit on the back of a truck, could be ready for use in a decade.
Tom McGuire, who heads the project, said he and a small team had been working on fusion energy at Lockheed's secretive Skunk Works for about four years, but were now going public to find potential partners in industry and government for their work.  Initial work demonstrated the feasibility of building a 100-megawatt reactor measuring seven feet by 10 feet, which could fit on the back of a large truck, and is about 10 times smaller than current reactors, McGuire told reporters.In a statement, the company, the Pentagon's largest supplier, said it would build and test a compact fusion reactor in less than a year, and build a prototype in five years.     In recent years, Lockheed has gotten increasingly involved in a variety of alternate energy projects, including several ocean energy projects, as it looks to offset a decline in U.S. and European military spending.Lockheed's work on fusion energy could help in developing new power sources amid increasing global conflicts over energy, and as projections show there will be a 40 percent to 50 percent increase in energy use over the next generation, McGuire said.If it proves feasible, Lockheed's work would mark a key breakthrough in a field that scientists have long eyed as promising, but which has not yet yielded viable power systems. The effort seeks to harness the energy released during nuclear fusion, when atoms combine into more stable forms. "We can make a big difference on the energy front," McGuire said, noting Lockheed's 60 years of research on nuclear fusion as a potential energy source that is safer and more efficient than current reactors based on nuclear fission.Lockheed sees the project as part of a comprehensive approach to solving global energy and climate change problems.Compact nuclear fusion would produce far less waste than coal-powered plants since it would use deuterium-tritium fuel, which can generate nearly 10 million times more energy than the same amount of fossil fuels, the company said.Ultra-dense deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen, is found in the earth's oceans, and tritium is made from natural lithium deposits.It said future reactors could use a different fuel and eliminate radioactive waste completely.McGuire said the company had several patents pending for the work and was looking for partners in academia, industry and among government laboratories to advance the work.Lockheed said it had shown it could complete a design, build and test it in as little as a year, which should produce an operational reactor in 10 years, McGuire said. A small reactor could power a U.S. Navy warship, and eliminate the need for other fuel sources that pose logistical challenges. U.S. submarines and aircraft carriers run on nuclear power, but they have large fission reactors on board that have to be replaced on a regular cycle."What makes our project really interesting and feasible is that timeline as a potential solution," McGuire said.Lockheed shares fell 0.6 percent to $175.02 amid a broad market selloff. (Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe)

Sve će to da posluži za neku novu bombu.

Pa, dobro, sasvim je uobičajeno da mnoga istraživanja za vojne namene daju rezultate koji se koriste u civilne i sasvim mirnodopske svrhe. Tako to ide.

Jel' ti Mića reče da kupiš šlauf? Pa, kupi šlauf. Dok energija fuzije stigne do nas treba dugo plivati.

Ne plašim se ja toliko potopa koliko najezde Crnogoraca kad im zemlja ode pod vodu 

Pročitati moju jako kratku priču "More dolazi".

Napravili su novu vrstu mikroskopa, posle kog ništa više neće biti isto...

http://io9.com/this-powerful-new-microscope-will-transform-the-way-we-1650225317

Mouse-Box kompjuter




1.4GHz ARM Cortex CPU
128GB flash storage (cloud storage optional)
Micro HDMI port
Wi-Fi connectivity
2 x USB 3.0 ports... 


Your entire PC in a mouse

Ako se skrolne malo gore po ovom topiku videće se vesti iz prošlog Avgusta o tome kako NASA ima na testiranju naoko "nemoguć" motor koji bi mogao da revolucioniše kosmička putovanja, kao i reakcije koje kažu da malko iskuliramo i da ništa od ovoga nije još dovoljno dokazano & obrazloženo.

Desetak meseci kasnije, situacija se i dalje podgreva. Iz NASA javljaju da naoko "nemoguć" motor izgleda "više moguć" posle novih testova:



NASA's seemingly impossible space engine looks more possible after latest test



Ali isti kritičar koji je na mediumu prošle godine polivao ladnom vodom ovu priču, sada u ulozi Forbsovog kontributora veli da i dalje ne treba da se uzbuđujemo preko neke razumne mere:



No, NASA Did Not Accidentally Invent Warp Drive

Konačno ćemo moći da ljude na internetu uvredimo bez napora potrebnog da se uvrede fizički i otkucaju na prokletom premalom na dodir osetljivom ekranu telefona...


This Device Reads Your Mind and Types Your Thoughts

Quote
When Stephen Hawking talks, a laser pointed at his face detects whether he's moving one of the only muscles he still has control over as a computer cycles through individual letters of the alphabet, determining what he's trying to say. It's an excruciatingly slow process, and it can take several minutes for him to say anything at all. What if, instead, a computer could simply read his mind?
Scientists in Albany, New York have just demonstrated for the first time that it's possible to turn a person's thoughts into a legible phrase using what they're calling a "brain-to-text" interface.
To be clear, these are the very early days of mind reading, if you want to call it that. The Albany study, carried out by researchers at the National Center for Adaptive Neurotechnologies and the State University of New York at Albany, took place in a very controlled environment and had to employ a couple tricks to get the job done.



Here's the good news: Researchers' computers were able to decipher seven patients' "silent speech"—their unspoken thoughts—and translate the output as text.
And here's why you can't go grab a brain-to-text device and hook it up to the internet just yet: For one, the patients' skulls were split open and electrode sheets were attached directly to their brains. They were also asked to read aloud from various texts (the Gettysburg Address, JFK's inaugural address, Charmed fan fiction, and a children's story) to get a baseline of what their brains were doing while they were speaking. Finally, the "dictionary" of the brainwave recognition device was limited—it wasn't selecting words from everything in the English language.
Nonetheless, Peter Brunner and his colleagues have accomplished something pretty amazing, and he does say that internet-connected brains could be coming someday. For now, brainwaves are regularly read by machines, but interpreting their meaning is always difficult.
"I liken it to having a helicopter over a crowd of cheering people. If you're near them, you can hear them cheering, but you can't hear individual people. If you put a microphone on one or two people, you're able to hear them, but you can't hear the overall picture," Brunner told me. "But if you put electrodes all over the surface of the brain—giving microphones to groups of people cheering—you can figure out what those groups are cheering for."
Of course, it's not terribly easy to find people willing to have their skulls split open to try out a mind reading device. But it turns out that there's already a clinical use for such technology. People with severe epilepsy will often wear a sheet of electrodes on their brain to determine which part of it is being overloaded during a seizure, so further treatment can take place. They wear these electrodes while they're in the hospital, waiting for a seizure to occur.
But in the meantime, there's no reason why other experiments can't take place (with their consent). Brunner said that his team "piggybacked" on their treatment.
"We were wondering if you could infer what someone was saying based on the signals sent from the surface of their brain—whether those signals are sent when they're speaking out loud or silently," Brunner, who published his research in Frontiers in Neuroscience, said. "It turns out you can to a degree that's much better than chance."
Brunner says the research was limited by his time with the patients and was also limited by their conditions: Each patient had the electrodes placed on different regions of their brain, depending on the part expected to be causing seizures. With more time to "train" the interface and more targeted electrode placement (he believes that the superior temporal gyrus, in the temporal lobe of the brain, would be ideal), brain-to-text interfaces could become much better. He also hopes to make interfaces that don't need to be placed directly on the brain.
"This could be relevant for people who suffer from ALS—their muscles don't work but there's no effect on the brain," he said. "You would probably want to have a person train the interface before they're fully locked in."
Brunner's device wasn't connected to the internet, but he said there's no reason why it couldn't be, which would allow real-time brain-connected communication. Maybe that whole internet of brains isn't actually so far off.

Airplane Coatings Help Recoup Fuel Efficiency Lost To Bug Splatter

QuoteWhen bugs explode against the wings of oncoming airplanes, they create a sticky problem for aerospace engineers.
   "A bug doesn't know that it's been catastrophically destroyed," says Emilie J. (Mia) Siochi, a materials scientist with the National Aeronautics & Space Administration. "Its blood starts to thicken as if it's healing any other injury."
   This bug blood, or hemolymph, clings to an airplane's wings, disrupting the smooth airflow over them and sapping the aircraft's fuel efficiency.

NASA scientists are now developing coatings that help aircraft shed or repel bug guts during flight. After screening nearly 200 different coating formulations, the NASA researchers recently flight-tested a handful of promising candidates on a Boeing ecoDemonstrator 757 aircraft in Shreveport, La. The team explored different combinations of polymer chemistry and surface structure and reports that it has created a coating that could reduce the amount of insect insides stuck to the wings by up to 40%.
   With further optimization, such coatings could allow planes to use 5% less fuel, Siochi says. Although that may not sound like much, it adds up. "That could be millions of dollars in fuel savings," Siochi explains. The bump in fuel efficiency would also curb the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by planes, she says.
   These coating studies are part of NASA's Environmentally Responsible Aviation Project, which launched in 2009 to study new technologies to make flying more eco-friendly. But researchers have been trying to reliably debug planes in flight since the middle of the 20th century, Siochi says. Her own interest in the problem goes back to her master's degree work on splatter-resistant coatings in the 1980s.
   NASA's more recent studies started with an examination of commercially available products covering a range of chemistries, including polyvinyl alcohol, polysiloxanes, and fluorinated polymers.
   To test these materials in the lab, researchers developed a pneumatic launcher to fire living bugs at a sample coating. They first used crickets as ammunition, but a physicist colleague urged them to switch to fruit flies, which would be more representative of what planes hit during takeoff and landing.
   Of the off-the-shelf coatings, Siochi says, the most promising was a commercial fluorocarbon that's usually used to prevent printed electronic circuits from getting gunked up—though presumably not by eviscerating insects at 150 mph. Despite its promise, the fluorocarbon simply couldn't slough off enough bug juice to maintain optimum airflow over plane wings.

So the NASA team crafted its own coatings to solve the problem, which is a rather daunting one considering the diversity of bug gut chemistry. When insects collide with an aluminum plane wing, a bug's exoskeleton cracks open and bounces off. "You're basically left with sugars, fats, and proteins" on the wing, says Lynn S. Kimsey, an entomologist at the University of California, Davis, who helped support NASA's flight tests this spring. "Sugars are easy to get off. Fats and proteins are a different story."
   Once a bug's hemolymph is "activated" by an impact, its lipid-encased hemocyte cells and phenoloxidase enzymes become tacky and adhere to plane wings. But wing coatings also have to contend with other hangers-on: pigments from red-eyed hoverflies, clear goop from honeybee stomachs, and yellow yolks from the eggs of female insects.
   Developing a coating that can deal with all of that and more is a challenge, but NASA has the polymer chemists who can do it, Siochi says. Right now, the agency isn't disclosing the precise composition of the coatings it tested in Shreveport, but a 2013 publication gives some ideas as to what researchers have investigated previously (Prog. Org. Coat. 2013, DOI: 10.1016/j.porgcoat.2012.08.009).
   For example, the team looked at glycol-modified surfaces to try and minimize protein adhesion, as well as a hydroxyl-functionalized methacrylate that frustrates hemocyte accumulation. NASA is patenting its newly tested coatings and has announced that more information is forthcoming.
   But polymer chemistry isn't the only factor that contributes to a coating's nonstickiness. By incorporating structures such as silica nanoparticles into the coatings, the NASA researchers worked to give the wings rough surfaces like those found on many superhydrophobic materials. The trick is to make a surface with protrusions large enough to block bugs' guts from sticking but small enough that they themselves don't disrupt airflow, Siochi says.
   The team appears to have found a balance, but it is still unclear whether the coatings will be a viable solution to the bug problem. The leading edge of an airplane wing is a harsh environment. Dust and rain can erode the surface coatings during flight, Siochi says. It remains to be seen how much a coating's upkeep offsets the fuel savings it affords.
   Still, the ramifications of this work are broad: Bug guts stick to a lot of things other than plane wings, points out Kimsey of UC Davis. "Think about all the people who whine about cleaning bugs off their radiator grilles." 
      Chemical & Engineering NewsISSN 0009-2347Copyright © 2015 American Chemical Society 

  How virtual reality porn could bring about world peace

OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

http://youtu.be/A54CBfRBTYU

Research Scientists to Use Network Much Faster Than Internet

Quote
SAN FRANCISCO —  A series of ultra-high-speed fiber-optic cables will weave a cluster of West Coast university laboratories and supercomputer centers into a network called the Pacific Research Platform as part of a five-year $5 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation.
The network is meant to keep pace with the vast acceleration of data collection in fields such as physics, astronomy and genetics. It will not be directly connected to the Internet, but will make it possible to move data at speeds of 10 gigabits to 100 gigabits among 10 University of California campuses and 10 other universities and research institutions in several states, tens or hundreds of times faster than is typical now.
The challenge in moving large amounts of scientific data is that the open Internet is designed for transferring small amounts of data, like web pages, said Thomas A. DeFanti, a specialist in scientific visualization at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, or Calit2, at the University of California, San Diego. While a conventional network connection might be rated at 10 gigabits per second, in practice scientists trying to transfer large amounts of data often find that the real rate is only a fraction of that capacity.
The new network will also serve as a model for future computer networks in the same way the original NSFnet, created in 1985 to link research institutions, eventually became part of the backbone for the Internet, said Larry Smarr, an astrophysicist who is director of Calit2 and the principal investigator for the new project.
NSFnet connected five supercomputer centers with 56-kilobit modems. In the three decades since, network speeds have increased dramatically, but not nearly enough to handle a coming generation of computers capable of a quintillion operations per second. This week the Obama administration announced that the United States is committed to creating what is known as the "exascale" supercomputing era, with machines roughly 30 times faster than today's fastest computer, on what is called the "petascale."
"I believe that this infrastructure will be for decades to come the kind of architecture by which you use petascale and exascale computers," Dr. Smarr said. Increasingly digital science is generating torrents of data. For example, an astronomy effort called the Intermediate Palomar Transient Factory, at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California, continuously scans the dark sky looking for new phenomena. Over all, the Palomar observational system captures roughly 30 terabytes of data per night. By contrast, a Library of Congress project that archives the entire World Wide Web collects about 5 terabytes per month.
In addition to moving data between laboratories, the high-speed network will make new kinds of distributed computing for scientific applications possible. For example, physicists working with data collected by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland initially kept duplicate copies of files at many different computer clusters around the world, said Frank Wuerthwein, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego. More recently, he said, as high-speed links have become more widely available, experimental data is often kept in a single location and used for experiments by scientists running programs from remote locations, at a significant cost savings.
Further, the new network has been designed with hardware security features to protect it from the attacks that routinely bedevil computers connected to the Internet. Recently, one server at the University of California, San Diego, that was connected to the open Internet counted 35,000 false login attempts in one day, said Dr. Smarr.
The new network is an extension of an existing intra-campus effort by the National Science Foundation to create islands of high-speed connectivity for campus researchers. In recent years the agency has invested more than $500,000 dollars on each of roughly 100 campuses nationwide.

Vanity Fair ima dobar članak o Oculus Riftu, predvodniku najnovijeg talasa VR tehnologije:



Why Facebook's $2 Billion Bet on Oculus Rift Might One Day Connect Everyone on Earth

IBM Scientists Find New Way to Shrink Transistors

Quote

In the semiconductor business, it is called the "red brick wall" — the limit of the industry's ability to shrink transistors beyond a certain size.
On Thursday, however, IBM scientists reported that they now believe they see a path around the wall. Writing in the journal Science, a team at the company's Thomas J. Watson Research Center said it has found a new way to make transistors from parallel rows of carbon nanotubes.
The advance is based on a new way to connect ultrathin metal wires to the nanotubes that will make it possible to continue shrinking the width of the wires without increasing electrical resistance.
One of the principal challenges facing chip makers is that resistance and heat increase as wires become smaller, and that limits the speed of chips, which contain transistors.
The advance would make it possible, probably sometime after the beginning of the next decade, to shrink the contact point between the two materials to just 40 atoms in width, the researchers said. Three years later, the number will shrink to just 28 atoms, they predicted.

The ability to reduce electrical resistance will not only make it possible to extend the process of shrinking transistors beyond long-held beliefs about physical limits. It may also be the key to once again increasing the speed of computer processors, which has been stalled for the last decade.
The report represents a big advance for an exotic semiconductor material that has long held great promise but has also proved maddeningly difficult for scientists to work with. Single-wall carbon nanotubes are strawlike structures that are a composed of a one-atom thick matrix of carbon atoms rolled into an infinitesimally small tube.
The challenge of carbon nanotubes in their typical state is that they form what scientists call a giant "hairball" of interwoven molecules.
However, researchers have found ways to align them closely and in regularly spaced rows and deposit them on silicon wafers with great precision. They then serve the crucial role of a semiconductor, allowing electrical current to be switched on and off in a computer circuit.
Until now, however, they have been just one of a range of new materials that have been seen as candidates to replace silicon, which has for more than half a century been the material of choice for chip makers.
"Of all the possible materials, this one is at the top of the list by a long shot," said Dario Gil, vice president for science and technology at IBM Research.
At the same time, he acknowledged that challenges remained in perfecting carbon nanotube transistors, but he said that IBM was increasingly confident that they could be overcome.
"By way of analogy, in the past we have had to carve in marble to create a statue," Dr. Gil said, referring to the photolithographic etching process that is the standard industry manufacturing technique today. In the future, researchers are looking to materials that will "self-assemble."
"With carbon nanotubes, you begin with dust and you have to find a way to assemble it into a statue," he said. Advertisement
  Continue reading the main story   Advertisement
  Continue reading the main story Computer chips such as microprocessors are made up of vast interconnected arrays of transistors — tiny switches that can turn electrical flows on and off. Computer processors have become vastly more powerful because it has been possible to double the number of silicon transistors etched into silicon chips at two-year intervals for many decades. Today, modern microprocessors are composed of billions of switches capable of switching on and off in just billionths of a second.
However, during the last decade, the pace and power of semiconductor technology has begun to slow. The switching speed of computer chips stopped increasing because heat created by ultrafast processors was rising to the point where the chips would break.
More recently, for most of the industry, the cost of transistors has ceased to decline with each new generation. This has undercut the tremendous power of the technology to create new markets. And this year, Intel announced that the challenges and costs of bringing a new generation of technology to market had forced it to slow the every-two-year pace it had been on for more than a decade.
Now the industry has a new reason for optimism.
"Carbon nanotube field-effect transistors are excellent candidates for improving the performance and energy efficiency of future computing systems," said Subhasish Mitra, a Stanford University electrical engineer.
The IBM researchers said that, in simulations, they had been able to design versions of microprocessors that were optimized either for high performance or for low power consumption.
By simply swapping carbon nanotube transistors for conventional ones in a simulated IBM microprocessor, they were able to increase speeds by a factor of seven, or, alternatively, achieve power savings almost as significant, said Wilfried Haensch, an IBM physicist who is a member of the research group.
    Correction: October 1, 2015
An earlier version of this article misidentified the IBM employee who spoke of challenges and potential of perfecting carbon nanotube transistors. He is Dario Gil, not Shu-Jen Han. An earlier version also misstated the speed increase achieved by IBM researchers by swapping carbon nanotube transistors for conventional ones in a simulated microprocessor. They increased speeds by a factor of seven, not seven orders of magnitude.
   

Ovo nije o nekoj konkretnoj tehnologiji, ali Forbes ima zanimljiv članak koji pokazuje da ne treba tek tako otpisati Japan:

Japan ili SAD?

A new form of real gold, almost as light as air

15,000 'unsafe' hoverboards seized in Britain

Quote
LONDON — If you're hoping for a hoverboard this Christmas you may be left disappointed. Thousands of the in-demand motorised self-balancing devices were seized by British authorities at ports and borders because they didn't pass basic safety checks.

More than 17,000 hoverboards imported from outside the European Union have been examined over the past seven weeks, and 15,000 of them didn't make the cut, according to a statement from the National Trading Standards on Thursday.

Many of the seized devices were at risk of exploding or catching fire.

Officers at ports have reported a "huge spike" in the number of hoverboards arriving into the country and large numbers of the items are being sent for testing.

"We suspect that most of these products are being imported for onward sale domestically as Christmas approaches," Chair of the National Trading Standards Toby Harris said.
"We urge consumers to be on their guard when purchasing these products."

The national body has released a tip sheet for people who buying hoverboards — telling them to never leave them unattended while charging. 

The warning comes weeks after firefighters rushed to a blaze in a bedroom London after a charging hoverboard caught fire. The occupant of the property heard a massive bang and fled after their electric uni-cycle sparked a blaze.

This week in the United States, a man in Alabama posted a video of his hoverboard in flames three days after buying it.

This New Non-Lethal Gun Could Be More Effective Than Police Tasers

A šta kad bismo mogli da tekst unosimo samo korišćenjem zenica?


How to write with your mind? (or: Decoding attention through pupillometry)

Evo ga i akademski članak (čitav dostupan za čitanje):
The Mind-Writing Pupil: A Human-Computer Interface Based on Decoding of Covert Attention through Pupillometry
A evo i video za najlenjije među nama:

http://youtu.be/RHOyZFMI4l8

da, da, ovo je ultra stvar. jedino mi je žao što neću doživeti da vidim usavršenu verziju.

   Dotle je došlo? Pa šta onda mi stariji treba da kažemo?

Quote from: Meho Krljic on 15-09-2014, 11:00:53

Soft Robotic Exosuit

Типично америчко рекламно просеравање и не би ми сметало да није у питању Харвард... СВА истраживања и иновације и алгоритми у вези људског егзоскелета и роботике (ходајуће и хуманоидне) заснивају се на радовима Миомира Вукобратовића од прије 50 година и суштина се није промијенила.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miomir_Vukobratović

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_moment_point

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cga/legs/vukobratovic.pdf

http://geek-mag.com/posts/248270/

Ево руска компанија која продаје егзоскелете за инвалиде поштено пише -http://www.exoatlet.com/#!ourstory/cwi0

Quote from: Meho Krljic on 06-05-2015, 10:20:54
Ako se skrolne malo gore po ovom topiku videće se vesti iz prošlog Avgusta o tome kako NASA ima na testiranju naoko "nemoguć" motor koji bi mogao da revolucioniše kosmička putovanja, kao i reakcije koje kažu da malko iskuliramo i da ništa od ovoga nije još dovoljno dokazano & obrazloženo.

Desetak meseci kasnije, situacija se i dalje podgreva. Iz NASA javljaju da naoko "nemoguć" motor izgleda "više moguć" posle novih testova:



NASA's seemingly impossible space engine looks more possible after latest test



Ali isti kritičar koji je na mediumu prošle godine polivao ladnom vodom ovu priču, sada u ulozi Forbsovog kontributora veli da i dalje ne treba da se uzbuđujemo preko neke razumne mere:



No, NASA Did Not Accidentally Invent Warp Drive

То она наса која увози руске моторе за своје ракете и која не умије да ископира технологију стару преко 50 година у тим моторима? 
Нек се играју ђеца  има се пара. Умјесто да развијају нуклеарни погон што би стварно било напредак...

Ma znaš da oni stalno kukaju kako ih krajcaju za pare, kako nemaju od čega i sa čim... dobro je da i ovoliko rade. 

Quote from: Meho Krljic on 08-02-2016, 16:52:39
Ma znaš da oni stalno kukaju kako ih krajcaju za pare, kako nemaju od čega i sa čim... dobro je da i ovoliko rade. 

Ma vijesti iz nase je kao spanska serija 

само да додам детаљнији вики унос за м.вукобратoвића
мој добар друг је имао част да ради са вукобратовићем током 80тих...ствари које смо ми правили седамдесетих и осамдесетих су биле испред тадашњег јапана, САДа и СССРа

Da, to je jedna od stvari koju je sasvim upropastio raspad Jugoslavije i sve što je uz to išlo. I ja se sećam koliko se na tadašnjoj našoj televiziji sa ponosom pričalo o robotici iz domaće radinosti.

Quote from: Meho Krljic on 29-07-2015, 08:23:21
OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

http://youtu.be/A54CBfRBTYU

А виђи Фјодора што чини -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EI4qh8NNzw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPuhNi_TblA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-37jQwgHaLA
А ево га и његов рођак Аватар -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBaY35FwA68

Иде Аватар на руску космичку станицу за коју годину, а овај његов старији безноги рођак САР-401 је требао да иде на међународну космичку станицу али одустали, можда због санкција...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9Bve_qd1Ng
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSE6dYCv07U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obu3pG1CCCs

Ako nešto zvuči kao suviše dobro da bi bilo istinito... obično i jeste suviše dobro da bi bilo istinito. Tako da ove priče o superbrzom internetu koji bi bio prenošen svetlošću treba konzumirati solidno posoljene. Ali dobro zvuče.



Internet by light promises to leave Wi-Fi eating dust

Quote
Barcelona (AFP) - Connecting your smartphone to the web with just a lamp -- that is the promise of Li-Fi, featuring  Internet access 100 times faster than Wi-Fi with revolutionary wireless technology.
French start-up Oledcomm demonstrated the technology at the Mobile World Congress, the world's biggest mobile fair, in Barcelona. As soon as a smartphone was placed under an office lamp, it started playing a video.
The big advantage of Li-Fi, short for "light fidelity", is its lightning speed.
Laboratory tests have shown theoretical speeds of over 200 Gbps -- fast enough to "download the equivalent of 23 DVDs in one second", the founder and head of Oledcomm, Suat Topsu, told AFP.
"Li-Fi allows speeds that are 100 times faster than Wi-Fi" which uses radio waves to transmit data, he added.
The technology uses the frequencies generated by LED bulbs -- which flicker on and off imperceptibly thousands of times a second -- to beam information through the air, leading it to be dubbed the "digital equivalent of Morse Code".


A delegate checks his smartphone at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, on February 22, 2016 (AF ...
It started making its way out of laboratories in 2015 to be tested in everyday settings in France, a Li-Fi pioneer, such as a museums and shopping malls. It has also seen test runs in Belgium, Estonia and India.
Dutch medical equipment and lighting group Philips is reportedly interested in the technology and Apple may integrate it in its next smartphone, the iPhone7, due out at the end of the year, according to tech media.
With analysts predicting the number of objects that are connected to the Internet soaring to 50 million by 2020 and the spectrum for radio waves used by Wi-Fi in short supply, Li-Fi offers a viable alternative, according to its promoters.
"We are going to connect our coffee machine, our washing machine, our tooth brush. But you can't have more than ten objects connected in Bluetooth or Wi-Fi without interference," said Topsu.
Deepak Solanki, the founder and chief executive of Estonian firm Velmenni which tested Li-fi in an industrial space last year, told AFP he expected that "two years down the line the technology can be commercialised and people can see its use at different levels."


Li-Fi has been tested in France, Belgium, Estonia and India (AFP Photo/Sam Yeh)
- 'Still laboratory technology' -
Analysts said it was still hard to say if Li-Fi will become the new Wi-Fi.
"It is still a laboratory technology," said Frederic Sarrat, an analyst and consultancy firm PwC.
Much will depend on how Wi-Fi evolves in the coming years, said Gartner chief analyst Jim Tully.
"Wi-Fi has shown a capability to continuously increase its communication speed with each successive generation of the technology," he told AFP.


Li-Fi (Light-Fidelity) has reached speeds of over 200 Gbps (AFP Photo/Jung Yeon-Je)
Li-fi has its drawbacks -- it only works if a smartphone or other device is placed directly in the light and it cannot travel through walls.
This restricts its use to smaller spaces, but Tully said this could limit the risk of data theft.
"Unlike Wi-Fi, Li-Fi can potentially be directed and beamed at a particular user in order to enhance the privacy of transmissions," he said.
Backers of Li-Fi say it would also be ideal in places where Wi-Fi is restricted to some areas such as schools and hospitals.
"Li-fi has a place in hospitals because it does not create interference with medical materials," said Joel Denimal, head of French lighting manufacturer Coolight.
In supermarkets it could be used to give information about a product, or in museums about a painting, by using lamps placed nearby.
It could also be useful on aircraft, in underground garages and any place where lack of Internet connection is an issue.
But Li-Fi also requires that devices be equipped with additional technology such as a card reader, or dongle, to function. This gives it a "cost disadvantage", said Tully.

Solar cells as light as a soap bubble

QuoteImagine solar cells so thin, flexible, and lightweight that they could be placed on almost any material or surface, including your hat, shirt, or smartphone, or even on a sheet of paper or a helium balloon.
Researchers at MIT have now demonstrated just such a technology: the thinnest, lightest solar cells ever produced. Though it may take years to develop into a commercial product, the laboratory proof-of-concept shows a new approach to making solar cells that could help power the next generation of portable electronic devices.
The new process is described in a paper by MIT professor Vladimir Bulović, research scientist Annie Wang, and doctoral student Joel Jean, in the journal Organic Electronics.
Bulović, MIT's associate dean for innovation and the Fariborz Maseeh (1990) Professor of Emerging Technology, says the key to the new approach is to make the solar cell, the substrate that supports it, and a protective overcoating to shield it from the environment, all in one process. The substrate is made in place and never needs to be handled, cleaned, or removed from the vacuum during fabrication, thus minimizing exposure to dust or other contaminants that could degrade the cell's performance.
"The innovative step is the realization that you can grow the substrate at the same time as you grow the device," Bulović says.
In this initial proof-of-concept experiment, the team used a common flexible polymer called parylene as both the substrate and the overcoating, and an organic material called DBP as the primary light-absorbing layer. Parylene is a commercially available plastic coating used widely to protect implanted biomedical devices and printed circuit boards from environmental damage. The entire process takes place in a vacuum chamber at room temperature and without the use of any solvents, unlike conventional solar-cell manufacturing, which requires high temperatures and harsh chemicals. In this case, both the substrate and the solar cell are "grown" using established vapor deposition techniques.
One process, many materials
The team emphasizes that these particular choices of materials were just examples, and that it is the in-line substrate manufacturing process that is the key innovation. Different materials could be used for the substrate and encapsulation layers, and different types of thin-film solar cell materials, including quantum dots or perovskites, could be substituted for the organic layers used in initial tests.
But already, the team has achieved the thinnest and lightest complete solar cells ever made, they say. To demonstrate just how thin and lightweight the cells are, the researchers draped a working cell on top of a soap bubble, without popping the bubble. The researchers acknowledge that this cell may be too thin to be practical — "If you breathe too hard, you might blow it away," says Jean — but parylene films of thicknesses of up to 80 microns can be deposited easily using commercial equipment, without losing the other benefits of in-line substrate formation.
A flexible parylene film, similar to kitchen cling-wrap but only one-tenth as thick, is first deposited on a sturdier carrier material – in this case, glass. Figuring out how to cleanly separate the thin material from the glass was a key challenge, explains Wang, who has spent many years working with parylene.
The researchers lift the entire parylene/solar cell/parylene stack off the carrier after the  fabrication process is complete, using a frame made of flexible film. The final ultra-thin, flexible solar cells, including substrate and overcoating, are just one-fiftieth of the thickness of a human hair and one-thousandth of the thickness of equivalent cells on glass substrates — about two micrometers thick — yet they convert sunlight into electricity just as efficiently as their glass-based counterparts.
No miracles needed
"We put our carrier in a vacuum system, then we deposit everything else on top of it, and then peel the whole thing off," explains Wang. Bulović says that like most new inventions, it all sounds very simple — once it's been done. But actually developing the techniques to make the process work required years of effort.
While they used a glass carrier for their solar cells, Jean says "it could be something else. You could use almost any material," since the processing takes place under such benign conditions. The substrate and solar cell could be deposited directly on fabric or paper, for example.
While the solar cell in this demonstration device is not especially efficient, because of its low weight, its power-to-weight ratio is among the highest ever achieved. That's important for applications where weight is important, such as on spacecraft or on high-altitude helium balloons used for research. Whereas a typical silicon-based solar module, whose weight is dominated by a glass cover, may produce about 15 watts of power per kilogram of weight, the new cells have already demonstrated an output of 6 watts per gram — about 400 times higher.
"It could be so light that you don't even know it's there, on your shirt or on your notebook," Bulović says. "These cells could simply be an add-on to existing structures."
Still, this is early, laboratory-scale work, and developing it into a manufacturable product will take time, the team says. Yet while commercial success in the short term may be uncertain, this work could open up new applications for solar power in the long term. "We have a proof-of-concept that works," Bulović says. The next question is, "How many miracles does it take to make it scalable? We think it's a lot of hard work ahead, but likely no miracles needed."
"This demonstration by the MIT team is almost an order of magnitude thinner and lighter" than the previous record holder, says Max Shtein, an associate professor of materials science and engineering, chemical engineering, and applied physics, at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in this work. As a result, he says, it "has tremendous implications for maximizing power-to-weight (important for aerospace applications, for example), and for the ability to simply laminate photovoltaic cells onto existing structures."
"This is very high quality work," Shtein adds, with a "creative concept, careful experimental set-up, very well written paper, and lots of good contextual information." And, he says, "The overall recipe is simple enough that I could see scale-up as possible."
The work was supported by Eni S.p.A. via the Eni-MIT Solar Frontiers Center, and by the National Science Foundation.

Is old tech putting banks under threat of extinction?

Quote
You put your card in the cash machine but nothing comes out. The bank's IT systems have crashed again.
But you need money fast, so what do you do?
It's an unsettling scenario that is likely to become more common over the next few years as the big banks try to upgrade their IT systems, experts are warning.
Global banking giant HSBC is just one of several major banks that have had intermittent problems with their technology, leaving customers unable to access online bank accounts and other services. Bank of America, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, ANZ Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest have all suffered similar issues.
And these system failures - or outages in the jargon - undermine confidence in traditional banking and encourage more competition from nimbler start-ups.


"For the next five years - and we're talking globally - every incumbent banking player who's been around for a while will have an increased risk of outages," says Julian Skan, managing director of financial services at consultancy Accenture.Legacy issueThe problem is that the old mainframe computers - the workhorses of the global banking industry - have been chugging away keeping tabs on all our transactions for decades now. They're slow and reliable.
But the world has changed.
We've gone mobile and online. We expect real-time transactions and access to financial services around the clock.


The new computer systems and programming languages designed to cope with this fundamental shift in our behaviour don't interact well with the old, slower back-office systems.
Layers and layers of IT have built up over the years, gradually hobbling banks' ability to innovate and respond to this new world.
"Very often banking groups that have grown by acquisition have never fully integrated their systems," says Mr Skan.
"When a bank reaches a certain size it becomes too risky to change the core technology, so you build layers on top, and that adds complexity."'The plane would crash'There can be hundreds of applications needing management just on the retail side of banking, says Sameet Gupte, global head of banking and finance for tech consultancy Virtusa, which names nine of the top 10 biggest banks as clients.
"Now expand that globally and include all the applications serving the investment banking side and the number of applications can run into the thousands," he says.
Mr Gupte likens the IT challenge big banks face to refitting an aeroplane while it's in the air.


"If you tried to change the crew, the engine, the navigation system, the wings, and everything else, all at once while in the sky, the plane would crash," he tells the BBC.
"This is the same with banking systems: if you try and change everything all at once then you will end up having to run two banks at once, in case anything went wrong, doubling your cost and increasing your risk."
This is why banks take a cautious approach to upgrades, changing things gradually, he says. But this takes time and leaves the field open to nimbler rivals. Media captionThe rise of the banking app? "It's a challenge for banks, no question," says Ann Cairns, president of international markets at payments processing giant, MasterCard, which numbers 27,000 banks as clients around the world.
"If a bank needs to change out its core accounting platform it can take years to upgrade."
Not to mention the hundreds of millions of dollars it can cost.Threats Alistair Newton, research vice-president at tech consultancy Gartner, says: "These legacy systems brought scale and stability to big banks, but now they need flexibility and speed.
"We're reaching a tipping point where the benefits of upgrading will soon outweigh the costs."
This is because app-only banks like Atom Bank and fledgling start-up Mondo are unencumbered by old tech and building responsive, agile systems for the smartphone generation, with modish features like "authentication by selfie" and video chat customer service.


"Kids now want a cool experience on the phone. Banks are no longer the monoliths to be feared and respected," says Mr Gupte.
Another financial start-up with technology at its core is Future Finance, a Dublin-based firm specialising in making loans to students in the UK and Germany.
Brian Norton, founder and chief executive, says: "We built our systems from scratch so we get real-time database visibility and we look at a substantial amount of data to help us make our decisions.
"Everything is stored securely in the Microsoft Azure cloud and even our loan agreements are signed electronically, handled by Docusign."


The start-up has lent £25m to 3,500 customers so far but already sees the potential to expand into other financial products for students and graduates, Mr Norton says.
Money transfer services like WorldRemit, Azimo and TransferWise are using the latest technology to reduce the costs of sending money abroad, nibbling away at a traditionally lucrative business that banks used to subsidise less profitable parts, such as retail banking.
And peer-to-peer lenders, such as Zopa and RateSetter, are offering alternatives to personal loans sold by banks, albeit on a modest scale.
Another huge threat on the horizon for banks comes in the form of tech giants such as Google, Amazon, Facebook . In-app payments within social media environments are already becoming the norm, for example.TrustSo are banks' days numbered?
While they may sometimes resemble lumbering dinosaurs under threat of extinction because of their inability to adapt to a rapidly changing environment, their size and age could also be their strength.


"People might not like banks in the same way that they like their social media providers, but they do trust them more," says Accenture's Mr Skan.
MasterCard's Ms Cairns agrees, asking: "Would you feel happy putting your money with a tech company? Banks are heavily regulated - they're just safer."
But "they need to start thinking and behaving like start-ups," says Chris O'Malley, chief executive of Compuware, a tech company trying to bridge the gap between mainframes and the fast-paced world of app development.
Technology of Business will explore this question later in our current financial technology series.

Majkrosoft reklamira svoju "holoport" tehnologiju. Da juče nisam gledao epizodu Silicon Valley u kojoj se ovaj koncept parodira dve godine ranije, još bih se i uzbudio 



You'll soon be able to 'holoport' anywhere in the world with Microsoft

QuoteMicrosoft research manager Shahram Izadi is showing off the company's latest innovation using HoloLens: 'holoportation,' enabling him to appear as if he's there in real-time, anywhere in the world.
His image is captured in 3D by cameras placed around the room. This is then stitched together, compressed and transmitted so someone else can see, hear and interact with him as though he's right there with them.


You can even playback previous interactions, as though "walking into a living memory," and miniaturize the content to make it easier to consume.
"Imagine being able to virtually teleport from one place to another," he says. Well, if you're the owner of a HoloLens, you soon could do.
He posits that this might well be the next generation of Skype-style interactions with distant family members.
But so far, the technology isn't in the wild and HoloLens is still $3,000 to buy today.


  Microsoft demos 'holoportation' 3D presence tech with HoloLens on Gamasutra 

Volvo smišlja da u nove modele njihovih automobila ulazite bez fizičkog ključa, a pomoću digitalnog ključa koji je zapravo aplikacija instalirana na vašem telefonu i kojom možete drugmi ljudima privremeno ili stalno davati pristup istim kolima itd. Udobno!!!!!!!!! Naravno, ono što digitalizacija daje, to ona i uzima, od pražnjenja baterije do hakovanja telefona, nebrojene su hipotetičke situacije u kojima ćete psovati kroz zube što nemate normalan, mehanički ključ umesto ove glupave novotarije.


Volvo wants you to ditch car keys for its new smartphone app

QuoteLending your car to a friend could be as easy as sending a text. That's the future Volvo is imaging with its smartphone app that enables keyless entry for the driver—and anyone with permission to enter.
Announced earlier this year and now prominently on display at the New York International Auto Show, the app does away with key fobs and puts the key right on the user's phone.
Using the device's Bluetooth capability, the app can do just about everything that a standard key could do—from unlocking the doors to popping open the trunk to even starting the engine of the vehicle without turning the ignition.



Beyond just convenience for the primary holder, the Volvo app also allows others to take the wheel without requiring a physical key. Users are able to grant digital keys to others, allowing them temporary or ongoing access to the car.
The process requires just a few taps, and the recipient of the digital key is provided with all the relevant information they'd need to know about the car: the make and model, where it's located, and how long they will be able to use the vehicle.
It's a relatively simple innovation—keyless entry isn't new, and a smartphone app seems like the logical evolution of the feature—but it does present some interesting usage cases in the future. For the average person, it just makes it easier to share possession of a car, but community cars and ride-hailing services could conceivably spring out from this development.
It also comes with a potentially increased risk. Researchers in Germany recently highlighted just how susceptible wireless key fobs are to attack; the group successfully gained access to 24 vehicles using a makeshift remote hijacking device.
Ideally, the phone and Bluetooth connection would provide a more secure means of communication between device and vehicle and may be able to avoid those concerns, but the risk of hacking is always present once you go digital.
That's all a little down the road, though; Volvo is testing the app at the Gothenburg airport in Sweden with car-sharing firm Sunfleet. Commercial versions of the service won't be available into 2017, and only with limited availability—and of course, physical keys will still be available for those who want a new car but fear change.

Da se zabeleži da je gauda na Amazon uspešan u prvim koracima u svemir:

Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin launches and successfully lands rocket

Quote
"Launch. Land. Repeat."
That's the approach Jeff Bezos' space company, Blue Origin, is taking to test its New Shepard, which launched and landed safely on Saturday.
   
The launch in West Texas is the third for the New Shepard rocket, which is named after Alan Shepard, the first American to go to space.

Both the rocket and the capsule, which will eventually carry paying customers, landed successfully. During this test, the capsule was carrying two microgravity experiments from the Southwest Research Institute and the University of Central Florida.

The SRI contributed its "Box of Rocks Experiment" (BORE) -- a box of loose rocks that "mimic the surface conditions on asteroids." The second experiment, "Collisions Into Dust Experiment" (COLLIDE), involved a box of dust and a marble that "mimic impacts between objects in microgravity."

Unlike other capsules, Blue Origin's is completely automated so no pilots are inside to control it -- this reduces risk of casualties and human error.

Related: Jeff Bezos says he'll put people in space in two years

Related: SpaceX tries, tries again -- and successfully launches satellite

The rocket will continue to be relaunched and landed in order to test and improve upon it.

New Shepard had its first successful launch in April 2015 but because of issues with the hydraulic system, it wasn't recovered.

It was launched again in November and January and successfully landed both times. The tests are part of an effort to reuse rockets instead of disposing of them after they've been used to launch space craft. This new approach would greatly lower the cost of space flight.

"Now safely tucked away at our launch site in West Texas is the rarest of beasts -- a used rocket," Bezos said after the first successful landing. "Full reuse is a game changer, and we can't wait to fuel up and fly again."

Saturday's event was unique in that Blue Origin announced the test beforehand -- usually they're revealed after they've been completed.

The launch and landing were captured by drone cameras, according to tweets from Bezos. The founder of Amazon (AMZN, Tech30) tweeted the event and noted that the landing was "perfect."

Jebemu, gore piše "gauda" umesto "gazda". Prokleti prsti, zašto ne kucate ono što hoću a ne ono što vam kažem!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!



Dobro, druga tema: svi znamo da nema ništa lepše od slane hrane ali onda posle pritisak oće dubije. U Japanu razvijaju viljušku koja simulura slanoću time što vam pošalje blagi elektrošok u jezik. Nadam se da ne simulira ljutinu time što se ugreje na 3500 stepeni Kelvina ili ugođaj jedenja škampa tako što vas u odsudnim trenucima krvnički ubode u desni...


New electric fork simulates a salty flavor by shocking your tongue

QuoteDousing every meal in salt might make food tastier, but all that extra sodium is eventually going to raise your blood pressure—giving you bigger problems than bland food. So researchers in Japan have built a prototype electric fork that uses electrical stimulation to simulate the taste of salt.
Designed and engineered using the research on electric flavoring at the University of Tokyo's Rekimoto Lab, the battery-powered fork features a conductive handle that completes a circuit when the tines make contact with a diner's tongue, electrically stimulating their taste buds.
The prototype fork, which was built from just $18 worth of electronics, creates the sensation of both salty and sour, and has adjustable levels of stimulation, given that everyone has unique taste buds. When pushed too far, though, the fork can produce an unpleasant metallic taste in the mouth. So if it's ever commercialized, there will need to be an initial calibration procedure to ensure a pleasant and tasty dining experience, without going so far as to cause physical discomfort.

Metal Foam Armor Disintegrates Bullets

Quote
Bad news for bullets this week: Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a super strong armor material that literally turns bullets to dust upon impact.
In a rather dramatic video recently posted online, an armor-piercing bullet is shown essentially disintegrating as it impacts the armor. Check it out:




http://youtu.be/lWmFu-_54fI




The armor plating shown in the video is made in part from composite metal foams, or CMFs, which are both lighter and stronger than traditional metal plating used in body and vehicle armor.
Jacket Acts Like Adventure Armor
Afsaneh Rabiei, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at N.C. State, has spent several years developing CMFs and investigating their unique properties.
The bullet used in the demonstration video is a 7.62 x 63 millimeter M2 armor-piercing projectile, and was fired using standard testing procedures established by the Department of Justice for evaluating armor types.
Body Armor Based On Snake, Fish And Butterfly Scales
The armor — only an inch thick — features a ceramic strike face, Kevlar backing, and CMFs in the energy-absorbing middle layer.
"We could stop the bullet at a total thickness of less than an inch, while the indentation on the back was less than 8 millimeters," Rabiei writes in press materials issued with the video.
Apart from body and vehicle armor, the CMF plating has potential applications for space travel or even transporting nuclear waste, according to the research team. Earlier testing has demonstrated that CMFs can withstand extremely high temperatures and effectively block x-ray, gamma ray and neutron radiation.
That's some serious armor.
via Phys.org

O ovome sam već čitao u, hm, Svetu Kompjutera (?) ali evo sad konkretnije, zašto je pravljenje čipa čija aritmetika nije sasvim tačna dobro za kompjutere:


Why a Chip That's Bad at Math Can Help Computers Tackle Harder Problems

Quote
  Your math teacher lied to you. Sometimes getting your sums wrong is a good thing.
  So says Joseph Bates, cofounder and CEO of Singular Computing, a company whose computer chips are hardwired to be incapable of performing mathematical calculations correctly. Ask it to add 1 and 1 and you will get answers like 2.01 or 1.98.
The Pentagon research agency DARPA funded the creation of Singular's chip because that fuzziness can be an asset when it comes to some of the hardest problems for computers, such as making sense of video or other messy real-world data. "Just because the hardware is sucky doesn't mean the software's result has to be," says Bates.
A chip that can't guarantee that every calculation is perfect can still get good results on many problems but needs fewer circuits and burns less energy, he says.
Bates has worked with Sandia National Lab, Carnegie Mellon University, the Office of Naval Research, and MIT on tests that used simulations to show how the S1 chip's inexact operations might make certain tricky computing tasks more efficient. Problems with data that comes with built-in noise from the real world, or where some approximation is needed, are the best fits. Bates reports promising results for applications such as high-resolution radar imaging, extracting 3-D information from stereo photos, and deep learning, a technique that has delivered a recent burst of progress in artificial intelligence. Your math teacher lied to you. Sometimes getting your sums wrong is a good thing.
So says Joseph Bates, cofounder and CEO of Singular Computing, a company whose computer chips are hardwired to be incapable of performing mathematical calculations correctly. Ask it to add 1 and 1 and you will get answers like 2.01 or 1.98.
The Pentagon research agency DARPA funded the creation of Singular's chip because that fuzziness can be an asset when it comes to some of the hardest problems for computers, such as making sense of video or other messy real-world data. "Just because the hardware is sucky doesn't mean the software's result has to be," says Bates.
A chip that can't guarantee that every calculation is perfect can still get good results on many problems but needs fewer circuits and burns less energy, he says.
Bates has worked with Sandia National Lab, Carnegie Mellon University, the Office of Naval Research, and MIT on tests that used simulations to show how the S1 chip's inexact operations might make certain tricky computing tasks more efficient. Problems with data that comes with built-in noise from the real world, or where some approximation is needed, are the best fits. Bates reports promising results for applications such as high-resolution radar imaging, extracting 3-D information from stereo photos, and deep learning, a technique that has delivered a recent burst of progress in artificial intelligence.
In a simulated test using software that tracks objects such as cars in video, Singular's approach was  capable of processing frames almost 100 times faster than a conventional processor restricted to doing correct math—while using less than 2 percent as much power.
Bates is not the first to pursue the idea of using hand-wavy hardware to crunch data more efficiently, a notion known as approximate computing (see "10 Breakthrough Technologies 2008: Probabilistic Chips"). But DARPA's investment in his chip could give the fuzzy math dream its biggest tryout yet.
Bates is building a batch of error-prone computers that each combine 16 of his chips with a single conventional processor. DARPA will get five such machines sometime this summer and plans to put them online for government and academic researchers to play with. The hope is that they can prove the technology's potential and lure interest from the chip industry.
DARPA funded Singular's chip as part of a program called Upside, which is aimed at inventing new, more efficient ways to process video footage. Military drones can collect vast quantities of video, but it can't always be downloaded during flight, and the computer power needed to process it in the air would be too bulky.
It will take notable feats of software and even cultural engineering for imprecise hardware to take off. It's not easy for programmers used to the idea that chips are always super-precise to adapt to ones that aren't, says Christian Enz, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne who has built his own approximate computing chips. New tools will be needed to help them do that, he says.
But Deb Roy, a professor at the MIT Media Lab and Twitter's chief media scientist, says that recent trends in computing suggest approximate computing may find a readier audience than ever. "There's a natural resonance if you are processing any kind of data that is noisy by nature," he says. That's become more and more common as programmers look to extract information from photos and video or have machines make sense of the world and human behavior, he adds.

Čudesni/"nemogući" EmDrive, o kojem je ovde već bilo reči u više navrata, je možda dobio teorijsku potporu.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601299/the-curious-link-between-the-fly-by-anomaly-and-the-impossible-emdrive-thruster/