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New indoor positioning system lets you do Batman-like echolocation on your phone July 31, 2014 at 1:27 pm
Echolocation has worked helped bats navigate for millions of years, and now Berkeley researchers think your laptop could do it too.
Massive, undetectable security flaw found in USB: It’s time to get your PS/2 keyboard out of the cupboard July 31, 2014 at 11:38 am
Security researchers have found a fundamental flaw that affects almost every USB device. This flaw is so serious that, now that it has been revealed, you probably shouldn’t plug a USB device into your computer ever again. There are no known effective defenses against this variety of USB attack. The USB IF itself notes that your only defense against this new attack vector is to only use USB devices that you 100% trust — but even then, as we’ll outline below, this won’t always protect you.
The secret world of power generation, and the arrival of Earth-spanning super grids July 30, 2014 at 12:37 pm
A long, long time ago — well, the middle of the 1800s to be exact — electricity was an intriguing but mostly useless thing. Some factories and residences toyed with early electric lights and motors powered by on-site generators, but most of the world used piped steam and natural gas to heat their homes and drive their machines for decades after electrification began. That would all change, however, with Nikola Tesla’s invention of three-phase high-voltage power distribution at the end of the 1800s and the creation of the world’s first synchronized national electricity grid in Great Britain in 1938.
Microsoft announces Sharks Cove mini PC, a powerful, expensive rival to Raspberry Pi July 30, 2014 at 11:11 am
Though it takes Microsoft a while to jump in on an emerging trend, the company does tend to throw its hat into the ring eventually. Despite releasing satisfactory hardware, the company was late to both the modern-day smartphone and tablet scene, hindering its success. This time around — likely thanks to the success of the Raspberry Pi — Microsoft is targeting the mini PC market with the announcement of Sharks Cove.
This robot needs just a few seconds to learn to walk again after you break its legs July 30, 2014 at 10:14 am
Some foolhardy roboticists in France, who clearly haven’t read enough sci-fi books, have created a robot that can recover from a broken leg. More accurately, if the robot is immobilized by a broken leg, it only takes a few seconds for it to learn how to walk again, using a new gait that minimizes the impact of the broken leg. If robots are to become truly useful, they’ll have to be able to autonomously recover from damaged circuits and broken limbs.
Sewing an invisibility cloak with a needle made of light July 29, 2014 at 11:32 am
Needles made of lasers are being used at the University of Cambridge to assemble nanoparticles into larger segments that could one day be used to make an honest-to-goodness cloaking device.
What happens if you get hit by the main beam of a particle accelerator like the LHC? July 28, 2014 at 2:04 pm
I don’t know about you, but ever since I started covering the Large Hadron Collider and other large-scale particle accelerators for ExtremeTech, I’ve always morbidly wondered: What would happen if a scientist was accidentally hit by the main particle beam? Would the scientist explode in the style of beam weapons in Star Trek? Would the beam bore a hole clean through the scientist’s chest? Or maybe the beam would do nothing at all and pass through the scientist harmlessly? Well, fortunately (unfortunately?) we don’t have to guess, as this exact scenario actually happened to Anatoli Bugorski, a Russian scientist, way back in 1978.
Nvidia quadruples display resolution by stacking two cheap LCD panels on top of each other July 28, 2014 at 10:58 am
Nvidia researchers have used a fantastically straightforward approach to quadruple the effective resolution and double the refresh rate of cheap, off-the-shelf LCD panels: Stacking them on top of each other. This technique, which Nvidia calls cascaded displays, could be key to developing cheap, ultra-high-resolution screens that are needed for consumer-oriented head-mounted displays like the Oculus Rift. Nvidia has already built a prototype cascaded display device — using a 3D printer no less — that closely resembles the Oculus Rift, and the results are surprisingly good.
Stanford creates ‘Holy Grail’ lithium battery, could triple smartphone and EV battery life July 28, 2014 at 8:43 am
They’ve done it again: The battery barons of Stanford, led by Yi Cui, have created what those in the industry call the ‘Holy Grail’ of lithium-ion battery design. In specific, they’ve finally worked out how to create a rugged lithium electrode that can increase the capacity of a lithium-ion battery by three to four times — as in, this lithium electrode, on its own, could increase the battery life of your smartphone by three times, or significantly reduce the size and cost of an electric car’s battery pack.
A implant that trains your brain to stop tinnitus July 25, 2014 at 1:29 pm
Is that ringing ears bad enough that you would implant a simulator in your neck just to be free of it? For thousands of Americans, the answer seems to be yes. A series of clinical trials for an implant made by company called Microtransponder has demonstrated that their new nerve cuff electrode device is up to the job. The question that remains is how does it work, exactly?
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