Some beautiful, efficient solar spheres we'll never use. The idea of a beautiful solar panel probably seems like a bit of a stretch, unless you dig rectangular, mirrored panels. But German architect André Broessel saw a way to make solar collectors beautiful while also making them more efficient. He made them into enormous spheres. Unfortunately, we probably won't be using them any time soon, as they can weigh several tons. Most basic solar panels that you'll see on your energy-efficient neighbor's house are laid facing south. These are the cheapest way to go, and they work well enough. The solar spheres, as I've dubbed them, are enormous spherical lenses that are solid glass or filled with water. But, as aforementioned, these babies weigh anywhere from a few hundred pounds to a couple tons. Via Co.Exist. Li-Fi: 10 ways visible-spectrum wireless will make your life better | DVICE#2. Li-Fi — that just-over-the-horizon wireless technology which could transform your everyday LED lighting fixtures into 10 Gbps wireless modems — has a lot of people talking these days.
With a commercial product promised later this year and the tech already in beta, we might all be trippin' the lamplight fantastic real soon. But other than really, really awesome movie streaming speeds, what do we care? According to its inventor Harald Haas, Li-Fi offers a bundle of niche applications that regular Wi-Fi just doesn't measure up to. Here are a few of those unique benefits.
How Li-Fi Works The basic principle of Li-Fi is this: visible light has 10,000 times as broad a spectrum as the radio frequencies which Wi-Fi uses, allowing for much more bandwidth, once tapped. A side effect of Li-Fi is that your power cord immediately becomes your data stream, so if you have power, you have Internet. Meet the tiny little pod car that runs on air. The Airpod is a new entry into the alternative car market.
It's small and futuristic looking like many other models, but with one key difference: it runs on air. Sound too good to be true? Well it's no joke. India's Tata Motors is developing the concept car that contains a pneumatic motor that uses pressurized air to drive the pistons. Aside from the "free" fuel, emissions are virtually non existent. It's a tiny little three-seater designed for urban driving. When you need to fuel up, you will either head to specialized charging stations or activate an onboard electric motor to suck more air in. Tata has been working on bringing this kind of car to the market for some time (the video below, for instance, is from a CNN report in 2010).
It's not clear what the next stage means by Tata's definition, though it could be how the car is configured. From the exterior, the Airpod looks much like many of the other "nano" cars out there. The Atlantic Cities, via io9. Star Wars hover bike rides into reality from the Mojave Desert. 'Hyperloop,' Elon Musk's radical, speedy transportation system. SpaceX's Elon Musk wants to take astronauts to the International Space Station. He wants to take humanity to Mars. You'd think he would forget all about Earth by now, but here's one for us terrestrials: Musk calls it the Hyperloop, and it's a system that never crashes, ignores the weather and is twice as fast as your average plane. Musk considers the Hyperloop to be the fifth mode of transportation, following "planes, trains, automobiles and boats," and it would take commuters "from downtown LA to downtown San Francisco in under 30 minutes.
" Right now that trip takes six hours by car, nearly twice that by train as there's no direct connection and just over an hour by air. A flight, of course, means a time buffer on either end as you work through an airport, so it'd be more than an hour, even. Sounds pretty great, right? Maybe even a little too great. He elaborates: PandoDaily, via Business Insider and The Atlantic. Now you can safely sword fight by smartphone. Though it looks easy on TV, fighting with a broadsword is an activity knights and other medieval types probably practiced a lot. So how do modern knights get some practice in without cutting their hands off?
Microsoft Research is tackling this problem with a new game called SwordFight that enables multi-player dueling with smartphones using hardware localization technology. As part of their work to enable phones to be able to sense or localize with each other, a team at Microsoft Research Asia have created FAR. It's a system where one smartphone can locate another smartphone and measure its distance via chirps.
To play SwordFight, two players aim their phones at each other and move aiming for each other's handset. With these features, the gameplay is mimics real sword fighting, though the size of your virtual sword is smaller and magically non-lethal. Team member David Chu explained the dramatic differences between traditional measuring and the FAR system in an interview with Wired: Eighteen-rotor personal helicopter coming to a driveway near you.