Tech giant Samsung is looking to ditch not only the keyboard but the touch screen in favor of mind control.
The
technology, which Samsung stresses is in its infancy, would allow users to
control a computing device with their thoughts alone.
A
project at the company's Emerging Technology Lab in partnership with Roozbeh
Jafari, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of
Texas, the research has already enabled test subjects to launch apps on a
tablet, pick a song on a playlist or a contact from an address book and power
up or power down the device. However, according to the MIT Technology Review,
which first reported on the project, don't expect to see these features rolling
out as part of Samsung's 2014 product line-up.
In
order to control the tablet with their minds alone, users needs to wear a cap
full of EEG monitoring electrodes which only work when wet, meaning that a gel
needs to be applied to the head. As Jafari says: "Depending on how many
electrodes you have, this can take up to 45 minutes to set up, and the system
is uncomfortable."
The ultimate goals of the project are to
recognize and isolate the right brainwaves, to develop better sensors that can
work without liquid and, ultimately, to offer another form of device
interaction, something that could be a true breakthrough for those who, due to
disabilities, are unable to operate technology via voice, swipe, touch or
gesture
Wrist Brazilian designer Dinard da Mata has developed a wearable gadget that becomes a fashion accessory to complement the style of next-gen users. Known as MP3 Player Creative, the portable music player sports a flexible OLED screen that other than displaying the playlist also lets the user select the song or control volume with just a touch of a finger. Worn around the wrist like a bracelet, the MP3 concept gives easy access of the functions to the user. Along with that the sleek music player includes wireless headphones to offer excellent music on the go.
Meet Rex, the world's first complete "bionic man."
Rex has the face of a man. prosthetic limbs. a functional artificial blood-circulatory system and artificial organs including a pancreas, kidney, spleen, and trachea. At 6.5-feet tall, Rex is valued at a whopping $1 million.Created for the TV documentary series "How to Build a Bionic Man," Rex was constructed by a team of roboticists. The researchers say they wanted to test scientific boundaries and demonstrate how modern science is beginning to catch up with sci-fi in the race to replace body parts with man-made alternatives.
In the future, people may be able to fix a failing organ without having a transplant. The agonizing wait for a matching donor could be a thing of the past.
Bertolt Meyer, a social psychologist at the University of Zurich, was in London with other researchers to demonstrate how the bionic man works.
After being exhibited at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2013) lat month, Sony's Vaio T Series Touch Ultrabooks are now ready for purchase. The Led-lit display with HD 4000 graphics provides the user with an attractive interface, and the touch-enabled device comes as a 13-inch, 14-inch, or 15-inch model. Other features include a webcam, HDMI and USB ports, as well as SD readers. Weighing just over 5 pounds, the new Ultrabook is already available online on Sony, J&R Electronics, and the Best Buy websites.
After being exhibited at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2013) lat month, Sony's Vaio T Series Touch Ultrabooks are now ready for purchase. The Led-lit display with HD 4000 graphics provides the user with an attractive interface, and the touch-enabled device comes as a 13-inch, 14-inch, or 15-inch model. Other features include a webcam, HDMI and USB ports, as well as SD readers. Weighing just over 5 pounds, the new Ultrabook is already available online on Sony, J&R Electronics, and the Best Buy websites.
This will operate at temperatures of 3200 and 7200 degrees, respectively. That's hot enough to pretty well burn through anything, but rather than mounting them on the front of a spike-treaded tank and driving it into the UN to deliver his list of demands, Potter has instead opted to turn the fury of his psycho-drills on the very planet itself. At such high temperatures, the drills are capable of boring through the Earth's crust without ever actually touching the rock itself, thus eliminating the need for replacement drill bits, equipment maintenance and rock cooties.
How This Will Change the world?
If we're able to cheaply and efficiently burrow deeper into the Earth's crust than ever before, we can tap past the earth's crust to the chewy center, where a sea of molten rock lies waiting to power the flying cars of the future. The chief downside to using all that glowing hot earth juice as an energy source has always been location: If you don't live in a Dr. Evil style volcano base, it just doesn't do you much good. But with these new flame drills, geothermal shafts can be dug anywhere, just like tapping a well. A spurting well of unceasing Hellfire, sure, but a well nonetheless. This could cleanly solve all the world's energy needs and, what's better, we could look better Refered by www.cracked.com
Warp drive is a hypothetical faster-than-light (FTL) propulsion system
A few months ago, physicist Harold White stunned the aeronautics world when he announced that he and his team at NASA had begun work on the development of a faster-than-light warp drive. His proposed design, an ingenious re-imagining of an Alcubierre Drive, may eventually result in an engine that can transport a spacecraft to the nearest star in a matter of weeks — and all without violating Einstein's law of relativity. We contacted White at NASA and asked him to explain how this real life warp drive could actually work.
The Alcubierre Drive
The idea came to White while he was considering a rather remarkable equation formulated by physicist Miguel Alcubierre. In his 1994 paper titled, "The Warp Drive: Hyper-Fast Travel Within General Relativity," Alcubierre suggested a mechanism by which space-time could be "warped" both in front of and behind a spacecraft.
Hitting the lab
Theoretical plausibility is all fine and well, of course. What White needs now is a real-world proof-of-concept. So he's hit the lab and begun work on actual experiments.
"We're utilizing a modified Michelson-Morley interferometer — that allows us to measure microscopic perturbations in space time," he said. "In our case, we're attempting to make one of the legs of the interferometer appear to be a different length when we energize our test devices." White and his colleagues are trying to simulate the tweaked Alcubierre drive in miniature by using lasers to perturb space-time by one part in 10 million.
Of course, the interferometer isn't something that NASA would bolt onto a spaceship. Rather, it's part of a larger scientific pursuit.
Hitting the lab
Theoretical plausibility is all fine and well, of course. What White needs now is a real-world proof-of-concept. So he's hit the lab and begun work on actual experiments. "We're utilizing a modified Michelson-Morley interferometer — that allows us to measure microscopic perturbations in space time," he said. "In our case, we're attempting to make one of the legs of the interferometer appear to be a different length when we energize our test devices." White and his colleagues are trying to simulate the tweaked Alcubierre drive in miniature by using lasers to perturb space-time by one part in 10 million. Of course, the interferometer isn't something that NASA would bolt onto a spaceship. Rather, it's part of a larger scientific pursuit.
Waiting for that "Chicago Pile" moment
Given just how fantastic this all appears, we asked White if he truly thinks a warp-generating spacecraft might someday be constructed. "Mathematically, the field equations predict that this is possible, but it remains to be seen if we could ever reduce this to practice." What White is waiting for is existence of proof — what he's calling a "Chicago Pile" moment — a reference to a great practical example.
Slingshot Effect
A curious extension of warp travel which has been shown throughout Star Trek is the "Slingshot Effect". First discovered accidentally in "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" (1967), one of the earlier episodes of the original Star Trek series, it is a method of time travel. Whereas the actual procedure is intentionally obscure, it involved traveling at a high warp velocity (depicted in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home to be over warp 9.8) in the direction of a star, on a precisely calculated "slingshot" path; if successful, the ship is caused to travel to a desired point, past or future. The same technique was used later in the episode "Assignment: Earth" (1968) for historic research — in this episode, the warp factor required for "time warp" is given the name "light speed breakaway factor." The term "time warp" was first used in "The Naked Time" (1966) when a previously untried cold-start intermix of matter and antimatter threw the Enterprise back three days in time. The term was later used in Star Trek IV in describing the slingshot effect. The technique was mentioned as a viable method of time travel in the TNG episode "Time Squared" (1989).
