Amputee Gamer Gets Bionic Arm That Has Its Own Drone. When biological scientist James Young was pulled under a train in London in 2012, he feared the worst. His left foot was severed, and his left arm later had to be amputated to save his life. But now, four years later, he’s been given a new lease of life thanks to a futuristic-looking prosthetic arm. The $90,000 device is a gadget-lover's dream, being packed full of technology and, of course, sporting a rather enticing look. It was designed especially for James by Sophie de Oliveira Barata from the Alternative Limb Project and, if you’re a gamer, it might look familiar. James, himself an avid gamer, had the design loosely based on Solid Snake’s bionic limb in Metal Gear Solid V. Together with a group of engineers, roboticists and designers, Barata put the arm together for James last year. James Young, appearing on BBC News this morning In the wrist of the arm is a smartwatch, something James was unable to use previously when it was on his other arm.
Creation of first practical silicon-based laser: Researchers take giant step towards 'holy grail' of silicon photonics. A group of researchers from the UK, including academics from Cardiff University, has demonstrated the first practical laser that has been grown directly on a silicon substrate. It is believed the breakthrough could lead to ultra-fast communication between computer chips and electronic systems and therefore transform a wide variety of sectors, from communications and healthcare to energy generation.
The EPSRC-funded UK group, led by Cardiff University and including researchers from UCL and the University of Sheffield, have presented their findings in the journal Nature Photonics. Silicon is the most widely used material for the fabrication of electronic devices and is used to fabricate semiconductors, which are embedded into nearly every device and piece of technology that we use in our everyday lives, from smartphones and computers to satellite communications and GPS. Explore further: First telecommunications wavelength quantum dot laser on a silicon substrate. Google's new robot is now even more human - Feb. 24, 2016. Atlas, the humanoid robot created by Alphabet (GOOGL, Tech30) company Boston Dynamics, can open doors, balance while walking through the snow, place objects on a shelf and pick itself up after being knocked down.
The new version of Atlas is smaller and more nimble than its predecessor. At 5-feet, 9-inches tall and 180 pounds it's about 7 inches shorter and 120 pounds lighter than the first version. It's fully mobile too -- the previous version had to be tethered to a computer. Atlas was created to perform disaster recovery in places unsafe for humans, such as damaged nuclear power plants. The robot made its debut in 2013 during a competition held by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Atlas uses sensors embedded in its body and legs to keep its balance. With hydraulically-operated joints, Atlas can scan its surroundings and maneuver through complex environments: walking, climbing stairs and dodging debris. Librarian of Congress grants limited DRM-breaking rights for cars, games, phones, tablets, and remixers. Every three years, the Librarian of Congress allows the public to request exemptions to a law that makes it a felony to break a digital lock, even on on a device that you own, and which you are breaking for a lawful purpose.
For the past year, public interest groups have been spending their scarce money and resources writing petitions to the Copyright Office, arguing that people who own devices with computers in them should have the same property rights as they do in their non-computerized devices: the right to open, change, and improve the things they own in lawful ways. Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits tampering with, weakening or removing digital locks, even when you're doing so for a lawful purpose. But every three years, the Copyright Office lets individuals and nonprofits square off against some of the best-funded companies in the world in order to argue that you should be able to do lawful things with your lawful property. It gets worse. Scientists Create Holograms that you can Touch. A scientist flicks on a switch. Like magic, a small, delicate image of a fairy appears, suspended in the air. The scientist then reaches out to touch the floating figure: it feels rough, like sandpaper.
This might sound like it's been taken straight out of science fiction, but think again, because this is the reality for Yoichi Ochiai and his fellow researchers at Digital Nature Group. The team has been using a host of lasers, lenses and mirrors to create holograms suspended in the air that humans can touch. This technology means that holograms can now move away from two-dimensional surfaces and enter the limitless three-dimensional world. And since the holograms are touchable, they become interactive: when you touch a holo-heart it breaks in two, or when you touch a checkbox a tick appears in it.
These holograms are created using a laser that fires ultra-short bursts of light, the length of femtoseconds, or a quadrillionth of a second (it's very short). [Via Arxiv] [H/T: Popsci] Meet the e-voting machine so easy to hack, it will take your breath away. Virginia election officials have decertified an electronic voting system after determining that it was possible for even unskilled people to surreptitiously hack into it and tamper with vote counts. The AVS WINVote, made by Advanced Voting Solutions, passed necessary voting systems standards and has been used in Virginia and, until recently, in Pennsylvania and Mississippi.
It used the easy-to-crack passwords of "admin," "abcde," and "shoup" to lock down its Windows administrator account, Wi-Fi network, and voting results database respectively, according to a scathing security review published Tuesday by the Virginia Information Technologies Agency. The agency conducted the audit after one Virginia precinct reported that some of the devices displayed errors that interfered with vote counting during last November's elections. The weak passwords—which are hard-coded and can't be changed—were only one item on a long list of critical defects uncovered by the review. He went on to write: Review: Anonabox or InvizBox, which Tor router better anonymizes online life? A while back, we covered the controversy over a few Kickstarter projects aiming to provide something in increasing demand as of late: a foolproof way to connect any Wi-Fi capable device to the Tor anonymized network.
Two such Tor "travel router" projects have since become actual product: InvizBox, from a team in Ireland, and the resurrected Anonabox, which was acquired by the tech holding company Sochule. A third, the open source PORTAL project, originally coded by "opsec" champion the grugq, is being turned into a consumer product by Ryan Lackey and Marc Rogers of CloudFlare and will be getting its bow at the RSA Conference later this month. These devices are, to varying degrees, effective ways to hide from unwanted attention of all sorts. We don't have PORTAL in hand yet, but we did receive test units of Anonabox and InvizBox. The bottom line is that these two devices do work.
Tor them a new one There are many reasons why anyone might want to use Tor. There are some trade-offs. Of Course a Training Montage of Our Best Robots is Hilariously Creepy | Nerdist. Humans aren’t the only ones who can push it to the limit and pull off a sweet training montage. Below, set to “Scarface (Push It to the Limit)”, the best humanoid robots we’ve come up with are being tested with all the intensity of Tony Montana’s rise to power. It’s part hilarious, part fascinating, and part creepy: With cuts of videos from DARPA and Boston Dynamics, the video features some of the major players that will be competing at the DARPA Robotics challenge later this year. The GIF at the top of the post features PETMAN, a humanoid robot that is used to test chemical protection clothing and confident strutting (probably).
We also see Atlas near the middle of the video, showing off incredible balance and stability. The fact that the montage music works almost perfectly with the efforts of these robots shows how far robotics has come. In other words, our best robots will be pushing it to the limit to make sure we’re stayin’ alive. Researchers create glasses-free 3D display with tiny spherical lenses. Several industries have tried and failed to get consumers excited about 3D, but it simply hasn’t taken hold yet. The most successful foray into the realm of 3D technology is probably the Nintendo 3DS, which has sold quite well by the standards of handheld game consoles. Part of that is effective use of 3D in games, but more importantly, you don’t need glasses to experience a 3D effect. Glasses-free 3D comes with drawbacks, but a team of researchers from Chengdu, China might have figured out how to make this type of 3D viable using spherical lenses in the display. The screen on the 3DS can produce a 3D image without glasses, making it an “autostereoscopic” screen.
This works on the concept of parallax — each eye sees a slightly different image, which is beamed from the screen using a parallax barrier. This method does away with the need for glasses to split up the image with shutters or polarized light. You just look at the screen and see a 3D effect. Google’s quantum computer just flunked its first big test. When the D-Wave 2 was first released last year, it was accompanied by a tidal wave of hype. The machine was a self-proclaimed quantum computer, commercially available to anyone with $15 million to spend, and attracting the attention of everyone from NASA to the NSA. One of the computer’s buyers was Google, which launched a new lab to test the device's powers more rigorously than they’d ever been tested before.
This October, the lab announced a major discovery, providing stronger evidence for quantum effects within the D-Wave 2 than anyone had previously found. As D-Wave had claimed, its device really was quantum-powered — and Google’s big research bet seemed to be paying off. The team found no clear advantage to the quantum computer But today, the D-Wave 2 is facing its first big stumble. "We haven't seen any fundamental limits to performance. " "Most scientists would not set out to build a machine without knowing what it can do. " And then there's Google's lab.
IBM researchers just built the best graphene-based circuit yet: it sends text messages. IBM researchers have created a graphene-based circuit that they say performs 10,000 times better than existing options; It was reliable enough that they used it to send and receive a text message. They plan to publish their work in Nature Communications today. Graphene is an atom-thick sheet of carbon atoms renowned for its strength and conductivity. It is heralded as a possible alternative to silicon, which currently dominates electronics production. One of the major potential applications for graphene is transistors, which control the flow of electricity in circuits.
The more transistors you can fit onto a chip, the more powerful it can be. A completed graphene integrated circuit chip. The IBM team integrated graphene into a radio frequency receiver; a device that translates radio waves into understandable information that can be sent back and forth. IBM created the first graphene-based integrated circuit back in 2011. Researchers crack the world’s toughest encryption by listening to the tiny sounds made by your computer’s CPU.
Security researchers have successfully broken one of the most secure encryption algorithms, 4096-bit RSA, by listening — yes, with a microphone — to a computer as it decrypts some encrypted data. The attack is fairly simple and can be carried out with rudimentary hardware. The repercussions for the average computer user are minimal, but if you’re a secret agent, power user, or some other kind of encryption-using miscreant, you may want to reach for the Rammstein when decrypting your data. This acoustic cryptanalysis, carried out by Daniel Genkin, Adi Shamir (who co-invented RSA), and Eran Tromer, uses what’s known as a side channel attack. A side channel is an attack vector that is non-direct and unconventional, and thus hasn’t been properly secured. For example, your pass code prevents me from directly attacking your phone — but if I could work out your pass code by looking at the greasy smudges on your screen, that would be a side channel attack. Tech giants form AllSeen Alliance to standardize the Internet of Things.
Home appliances, cars and computers could soon be talking to one another thanks to an open source framework that has the backing of consumer electronics manufacturers in a new industry alliance. The AllSeen Alliance is supported by the Linux Foundation. Its members include Cisco, D-Link, Haier, LG Electronics, Qualcomm, Panasonic and Sharp. The software framework, originally developed by Qualcomm as a project called AllJoyn, is intended to allow systems to seamlessly discover, connect and interact with each other regardless of their manufacturer or the operating system they are using, the Linux Foundation said.
The alliance members will contribute engineering resources and software to the framework, allowing software developers, manufacturers and service providers to make interoperable services and devices. The framework runs on software platforms such as Linux, Android, iOS, and Windows, including embedded variants. New qubit control bodes well for future of quantum computing. The fanless spinning heatsink: more efficient and immune to dust. There’s a fundamental flaw with fan-and-heatsink cooling systems: no matter how hard the fan blows, a boundary layer of motionless, highly-insulating air remains on the heatsink. You can increase the size of the heatsink and you can blow more air, but ultimately the boundary layer prevents the system from being efficient; it’s simply a physical limitation of fan-and-heatsink cooling systems in specific, and every kind of air-cooled heat exchanger in general, including air conditioning and refrigeration units.
But what if you did away with the fan? What if the heatsink itself rotated? Well, believe it or not, rotating the heat exchanger obliterates the boundary layer, removes the need for a fan, and it’s so efficient that it can operate at low and very quiet speeds. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Air Bearing Heat Exchanger [PDF]. So when can you get your hands on one? Read more at New Scientist or read the research paper. Russian scientists find a way to analyze substances in a matter of seconds. Russian scientists have developed a device that can analyze the composition of a substance through its container.
The portable device can determine the properties of any substance, as long as the substance is in a transparent container. The phenomenon around which the technology is built was discovered in the mid-20th century by Indian researcher Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics for his findings. Aleksei Steblyov, vice president of the developer Enhanced Spectrometry, explains that the device’s technology is based on Raman’s observation that every substance reflects light in a unique way. The device emits a laser beam to the substance, analyzes how the beam is reflected and determines the exact composition of the substance. The entire process takes one to three seconds.
“By collecting scatter information – that is, the difference between the way light went in and the way it returned – we can observe a certain spectrum for the substance. Analysis: Friend and foe; Samsung, Apple won't want to damage parts deal. Lilliputian Fuel Cell Gadget Charger Ready to Grow Up. Scientists Build Incredible Supercapacitor Using... Pen Ink? LED converts heat into light. Heat-based laser recording improves speed of hard drives. Scientists build the world's first anti-laser. Biological computers come closer to reality. Nokero Updates Solar Powered Light Bulb. Android (The real thing, not the phone) P-III autopsy « Sciency stuff.