Thursday, October 11, 2012

Mathematicians Extend Einstein's Special Relativity Beyond Speed of Light

Mathematicians Extend Einstein's Special Relativity Beyond Speed of Light:



Hugh Pickens writes writes "The Christian Science Monitor reports that despite an apparent prohibition on faster-than-light travel by Einstein's theory of special relativity, applied mathematician James Hill and his colleague Barry Cox say the theory actually lends itself easily to a description of velocities that exceed the speed of light. 'The actual business of going through the speed of light is not defined,' says Hill whose research has been published in the prestigious Proceedings of the Royal Society A. 'The theory we've come up with is simply for velocities greater than the speed of light.' In effect, the singularity at the speed of light divides the universe into two: a world where everything moves slower than the speed of light, and a world where everything moves faster. The laws of physics in these two realms could turn out to be quite different. In some ways, the hidden world beyond the speed of light looks to be a strange one. Hill and Cox's equations suggest, for example, that as a spaceship traveling at super-light speeds accelerated faster and faster, it would lose more and more mass, until at infinite velocity, its mass became zero. 'We are mathematicians, not physicists, so we've approached this problem from a theoretical mathematical perspective,' says Dr Cox. 'Should it, however, be proven that motion faster than light is possible, then that would be game changing. Our paper doesn't try and explain how this could be achieved, just how equations of motion might operate in such regimes.'"




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Thursday, October 4, 2012

Delta Six controller brings fragging to life, worries your friends

Delta Six controller brings fragging to life, worries your friends:
Delta Six controller brings fragging to life, worries your friends
Chances are you know someone who takes their CoD a little too seriously -- well, this peripheral is for them. The Delta Six controller is the latest brainchild of Avenger inventor David Kotkin, made to please hardcore FPS gamers with immersive and responsive input. A built-in accelerometer is used for aiming, while the faux recoil and acting out a reload will put you closer to real combat than an appearance on Stars Earn Stripes. The hardware also features a scattering of pressure sensors -- allowing you, for example, to bring up the sights by meeting cheek with gun body, or if you're feeling lazy, squeezing the side of it instead. Depending on your class bias, you can add and retract plastic from the main frame for an SMG, assault or sniper rifle form factor (see below for the gist). There's no word on availability, or if it will actually improve your game, but the price is slated as $89 at launch. After the break is a short product demo in video form, although we suggest you skip straight to 1:30 to avoid the awkward live-action CTF scene.
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Delta Six controller brings fragging to life, worries your friends originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Oct 2012 04:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Add an Automatic Cooling System to Your Entertainment Center [Video]

Add an Automatic Cooling System to Your Entertainment Center [Video]:
Heat is one of the worst enemies of electronics. That's a big issue if you've got a game system, audio equipment, TV set top box, and other gear tucked away in an enclosed cabinet where there's little airflow. The solution? Build an automatic cooling system into your entertainment center. More »

Nippon Electric Glass demos liquid crystal lens and 'invisible glass' at CEATEC (video)

Nippon Electric Glass demos liquid crystal lens and 'invisible glass' at CEATEC (video):
Nippon Electric Glass demos liquid crystal lens and 'invisible glass' at CEATEC video
How about some glass from CEATEC, eh? The folks at Nippon Electric Glass were showing off its still-in-development liquid lens technology, as well as its already-available "invisible glass." The latter, as pictured above, is very much what it says on the tin albeit with some exaggeration, obviously, but we were still very impressed by how little reflection we saw on it. While it's already being used in art galleries and inside cameras (as sensor covers), Nippon Electric Glass is pushing hard to get its invisible glass featured on mobile devices -- the selling point here is simply to achieve the effect of somewhere in between glossy glass and matte glass, so that you'd get the best color vibrancy with minimal reflection. Do check out the video after the break.
As for the liquid lens, Nippon Electric Glass' version uses low-power electric field to control its liquid crystal molecular orientation, thus changing the focal point. You'll also see that the lens is also small enough to be integrated into phones and webcams. While the demo response was pretty quick, we were told that it'll be at least another year before the technology becomes available for us mere mortals. For now, you can see our hands-on demo after the break.


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The weird, black, spidery things of Mars

The weird, black, spidery things of Mars:


See those weird, black, spidery things dotting the dunes in this colorized photo taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2010? Yeah. Nobody knows what the hell those things are.

What we do know about them just underlines how incredibly unfamiliar Mars really is to us. First spotted by humans in 1998, these splotches pop up every Martian spring, and disappear in winter. Usually, they appear in the same places as the previous year, and they tend to congregate on the sunny sides of sand dunes — all but shunning flat ground. There's nothing on Earth that looks like this that we can compare them to. It's a for real-real mystery, writes Robert Krulwich at NPR. But there are theories:

Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, from Hungary, from the European Space Agency have all proposed explanations; the leading one is so weird, it's transformed my idea of what it's like to be on Mars. For 20 years, I've thought the planet to be magnificently desolate, a dead zone, painted rouge. But imagine this: Every spring, the sun beats down on a southern region of Mars, morning light melts the surface, warms up the ground below, and a thin, underground layer of frozen CO2 turns suddenly into a roaring gas, expands, and carrying rock and ice, rushes up through breaks in the rock, exploding into the Martian air. Geysers shoot up in odd places. It feels random, like being surprise attacked by an monstrous, underground fountain.

"If you were there," says Phil Christensen of Arizona State University, "you'd be standing on a slab of carbon dioxide ice. All around you, roaring jets of carbon dioxide gas are throwing sand and dust a couple hundred feet into the air." The ground below would be rumbling. You'd feel it in your spaceboots.

Read the rest of Robert Krulwich's post — and check out some spectacular photos of the things — at NPR





Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Solar-powered dowel-sawing machine is a perfect desktop distraction

Solar-powered dowel-sawing machine is a perfect desktop distraction:


Alex's Almost Useless Machine is a solar-powered desktop amusement that slowly saws through dowels whenever the light is bright enough to power its motor. It's mesmerizing.


This little machine uses a so called solar engine to drive the motor. This solar engine is able to collect tiny amounts of energy over time and stores it in large capacitors. When the voltage reaches a certain level, it opens up and uses all the stored energy at once to drive a motor. These engines were used to drive tiny BEAM-bots and were quite popular a while ago. A lot of information can be found at beam-wiki.org on how to build them and how they work.

The Almost Useless Machine

(via Wired)








Hexaflexagons! The miracle of the inside-out hexagon with many, many sides

Hexaflexagons! The miracle of the inside-out hexagon with many, many sides:




The incomparably great Vihart continues her Doodling in Math Class video series with a history and demonstration of the miraculous Hexaflexagon, a simple-to-fold paper hexagon that contains several iterations of itself, which can be found by turning it inside-out over and over again. Sure to delight, inform, entertain, and mystify!



Historical Note: This video is based on a true story. Arthur H. Stone really did invent the hexaflexagon after playing with the paper strips he'd cut off his too-wide British paper, and really did start a flexagon committee (which we'll hear more about in the next video). The details and dialogue, however, are my own invention.


Hexaflexagons

(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)








Super Bacteria Create Gold

Super Bacteria Create Gold:



SchrodingerZ writes "With the price of gold skyrocketing in today's market, Michigan State University researchers have discovered a bacterium that can withstand high toxicity levels that are necessary to create natural gold. '"Microbial alchemy is what we're doing — transforming gold from something that has no value into a solid, precious metal that's valuable," said Kazem Kashefi, assistant professor of microbiology and molecular genetics.' The bacteria is Cupriavidus metallidurans, which is conditioned to be tolerant to heavy, toxic metals and to be 25 times stronger than most bacteria. When put into gold-chloride (a natural forming toxic liquid), the bacteria reproduces and converts the liquid into a gold nugget. The complete process takes about a week to perform. This experiment is currently on tour as an art exhibit called 'The Great Work of the Metal Lover.'"




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Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Smartphones for audiophiles: is the iPhone 5 more musical than its rivals?

Smartphones for audiophiles: is the iPhone 5 more musical than its rivals?:
Smartphones for audiophiles the iPhone 5 vs rival flagships
The love of audio. It's a dangerous condition, because every minute spent obsessing over headphones or specs or conflicting opinions is a minute not spent enjoying your favorite tracks or discovering new ones. That's why a review like this, which compares the iPhone 5 with rival phones based largely on acoustic qualities, runs a high risk of time-wastage -- no one really needs a cacophony of flowery words with no concrete conclusions.
How to steer clear of the technological equivalent of a wine-tasting? By trying our damnedest to focus only on the more practical pros and cons of these top handsets, specifically from the POV of someone who listens to a lot of music on their phone. We're talking about someone who likely prefers high-bitrate recordings and who is ready to spend money on something better than the earbuds (or EarPods) that come in the box.
In addition to testing Apple's new flagship we'll also look at the iPhone 4S, which is now a ton cheaper than it was a few weeks ago, as well as the Galaxy S III (both the global and the Sprint US version) plus the HTC One X (global and AT&T), and run them all through an audiophile obstacle course that goes right from purely subjective observations through to slightly more scientific tests as well as storage, OS and battery comparisons. There'll also be some consideration of the iPhone 4, Nokia Lumia 800 and PureView 808, although it'll be more condensed.
And yes, we'll end up with an overall winner, but the research here is about more than that. Different phones may suit different people, depending on their priorities. Moreover, new handsets are just around the corner -- the Lumia 920, the Note II, the LG Optimus G and whatever other goodies the future undoubtedly holds -- and so it makes sense to have a bed of knowledge against which new entrants can be judged. Interested? Then let's get started.
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Smartphones for audiophiles: is the iPhone 5 more musical than its rivals? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Oct 2012 11:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Monday, October 1, 2012

Ten One ships $80 Pogo Connect, a pressure-sensitive Bluetooth 4.0 stylus for iPad

Ten One ships $80 Pogo Connect, a pressure-sensitive Bluetooth 4.0 stylus for iPad:
DNP Ten One introduces Pogo Connect, a pressuresensitive Bluetooth 40 stylus for new iPad
While there are many third-party capacitive pens for the iPad on the market, none are as precise as pressure-sensitive models like the ones Samsung Galaxy Note aficionados have enjoyed for some time. Enter the Pogo Connect, which is described as the world's first pressure-sensitive Bluetooth 4.0 iPad stylus. Brought to you by Ten One Design, the Pogo Connect was originally codenamed "Project Blue Tiger" back in March. The benefits of Bluetooth seem to be key here, as it offers full pressure sensitivity thanks to a "Crescendo Sensor" technology that works at multiple angles and without calibration. You also get palm rejection capabilities so the page doesn't get smudged from your hand resting on the surface. The pen has a removable magnetic tip, leaving room for interchangeable tips in the future.
There's also an LED status light, an integrated radio transmitter to let you know its location in case you lose it, and it runs on a single AAA battery. Be aware that the Connect is only compatible with around 16 apps for now -- they include Brushes, SketchBook Pro, Paper by FiftyThree, and PDFPen -- but Ten One hopes to add to the list over time. You can pre-order one now for $79.95, and if you're one of the first 2,000 to do so, you'll get a special edition pen with a laser-engraved tiger. Those intrigued can get a peek at the company's promo video as well as the PR after the break.
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Ten One ships $80 Pogo Connect, a pressure-sensitive Bluetooth 4.0 stylus for iPad originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Oct 2012 18:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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