Wireless Power Transmission

Cota system transmits power wirelessly at up to 30 feet

By Brian Dodson
 

Hatem Zeine, the CEO of Ossia Incorporated and inventor of the Cota wireless charging system, demonstrated charging of his smartphone during a presentation at Tech Crunch Disrupt 2013 (Photo: Ossia, Inc.)
    

 

In 2008, Gartner Research released a report in which it identified the number one IT grand challenge as "Never having to manually recharge devices." Physicist Hatem Zeine has invented what he believes to be the answer to this challenge. The Cota wireless power transmission system uses intelligently steered phased array antennas to focus a beam of microwaves on a receiver module – and only on that module. The inherently safe technology can deliver electrical power up to 30 feet from a central transmitter without any line-of-sight requirement and without interfering with other devices. The system is projected to hit the market in 2015.

 

At Tech Crunch Disrupt 2013, Hatem Zeine pulled the curtain on the Ossia, Inc. development company by introducing the Cota wireless power transmission system. The Cota technology uses steered phased array microwave antennas and the time-reversal properties of electromagnetic radiation to focus several watts of power on a wireless receiver while preventing any of the radiation to hit obstacles, resulting in an inherently safe charging system.
Cota uses a single microwave transmitter, operating in the 2.4 or 5.8 GHz industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) bands that are also used by Wi-Fi routers. Unlike most wireless charging systems we've seen that require the close proximity between the transmitter and the device being charged, the Ossis transmitter will provide effective charging to distances of about 30 feet (9 m). This means that a single unit would suffice for most households and offices. The microwave power from the transmitter is directed onto charging receivers that convert the received power into a form that can be used to charge device batteries, or even to directly run portable devices.

The charger is housed in an 18" cube while the receiver resides on a chip and uses a chip antenna for operation. The commercial version of the receiver will be small enough to fit inside a phone or even a AAA battery according to Zeine. The amount of electrical power that will initially be made available by a single receiver is expected to around 1 W (about a third the power transmitted via a USB socket), which is sufficient for charging multiple portable devices. However, the use of unmodulated RF power to transfer power does not seem to fall under any specific FCC regulation in the US. As Cota is not being used for telecommunication, the power which could be made available will be controlled by the general ISM regulations, which allow much larger power than the maximum one watt of a Wi-Fi router. Worldwide, of course, the limits will depend on local regulations.

The Cota system works by a clever combination of phased-array steering antennas on the transmitter and locator beacons on the receivers. In a room without obstacles, the RF radiation from the locator beacon (pulsed at 100 times/sec) travels directly from the receiver to the walls of the room. A portion of that radiation will strike the transmitter unit, whose electrically-steerable phased-array antennas (20,000 individually controlled antennas are being planned for the first commercial system) will not only detect the radiation, but also the direction from which it is arriving. This is similar in principle to the Lytro camera, which records the complete light field of a scene, rather than just the intensity of light at a particular surface.

The transmitter then uses this information to fabricate a beam of microwave power that is focused only onto the receiver. This is accomplished by using a physical property of RF fields called time-reversal symmetry. If you reverse the beacon wave detected by the transmitter, it will follow the same path back to the receiver as it took on its way to the transmitter. As seen above, this means that the transmitter does not waste power heating the walls of the room, but rather makes nearly all of its output available at the charging receiver. Because of the rapid pulsing rate of the locator beacon, the transmitter is easily able to track the motion of the charging receiver (it is, after all, charging a portable device) as it moves around the room, and into adjoining rooms. The Cota system will charge your smartphone in your pocket as you wander around your house.
What happens if a person is standing in the room between the charging receiver and the Cota transmitter? An attempt to generate a direct microwave beam between the transmitter and the receiver would result in very little power transmission to the receiver, and quite a bit of microwave exposure for the person – not a good or safe situation. Fortunately, the property of time reversal symmetry saves the day.

As shown above, the locator beacon signal from the charging receiver again bounces around the room, but the portions that hit the person are absorbed and do not reach the Cota transmitter. (The power level of the beacon signal is too small to cause any biological damage, even with long exposures.) What does reach the transmitter's antennas are reflections of the beacon signal from the walls.

When the time-reversed microwave transmission is generated, the radiation reverses course, bouncing off the walls in just the right manner to once again focus on the charging receiver, while missing the person in the room. (The person is subjected to a very small microwave exposure from diffuse scattering at the walls, but again this is at a very safe level.) Extensions of the same principle work for rooms containing multiple obstacles as well as multiple charging receivers (see photo gallery for examples). Owing to the way the Cota system harnesses the time-reversal symmetry of electromagnetic radiation, it is extremely flexible and intrinsically safe in use.
Ossia plans to license the technology to consumer electronics OEMs and ODMs for integration into consumer electronics products and the system could also be retrofitted to existing devices via an add-on dongle arrangement.
The potential of the Cota system for recharging and directly powering portable devices seems nearly unlimited. If these systems become a common feature of our everyday environment, in stores, offices, restaurants, cars, trains, and planes, the reliability and convenience of our portable connectivity will leap far beyond the current state of affairs. At a price point expected to be not terribly in excess of that of a Wi-Fi router, this could well be a dream that comes true.
Zeine demonstrates and discusses the prototype system in the video below.
Source: Ossia, Inc.

10 Most Powerful Pieces Of Technology Of Their Kind

10 Most Powerful Pieces Of Technology Of Their Kind
By Alan Boyle, Listverse, 29 September 2013.

Technology is an awesome thing. Without it, you’d not be reading this list right now, and your life would be much worse because of that. But, while we have some pretty powerful gadgets available to us compared to just a few decades ago, science has produced machines whose power dwarfs anything you’re likely to come close to in your life. Here are the 10 most powerful items of their type in the world.

10. Camera

The awesomely named Dark Energy Camera is the most powerful camera in the world. It’s being built at Fermilab in Illinois as part of a project to figure out why the expansion of the universe is getting faster. The 570-megapixel device is 70 times more powerful than a phone camera, which is handy since it’s going to be viewing things 8 billion light-years farther away. The lenses alone cost US$1.6 million each, and there are five of them. Over the next five years, it will take pictures of 300 million galaxies from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, hopefully offering some answers to the mystery that has stumped astronomers for a decade and a half.

9. Loudspeaker

The most powerful speaker ever constructed is the HS-60, an acoustic hailing device produced by the Wattre Corporation in the US. From one meter (3.3 ft) away, it produces a noise level of 182 decibels (dB), slightly above the volume that kills hearing tissue. For comparison, the loudest recommended level of noise for someone wearing hearing protection is 140 dB. The HS-60 created 140.2 dB at a distance of 128 meters (over 400 ft). It’s loud enough that if it was producing a voice transmission, you’d be able to hear it clearly over three kilometres (two miles) away.

Unfortunately, it’s not currently available for purchase, so you’ll have to make do with its slightly less-powerful cousin, the HS-40. The HS-40 is able to transmit a voice clearly over half that distance and is used for hailing ships and making security announcements over large distances.

8. Laser

The most powerful laser in the world is housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The laser is part of the National Ignition Facility and was designed to research methods of achieving fusion power. They use 192 lasers, which converge onto one point and produce 60 times more energy than any previous laser system.

At its peak, it produces 500 trillion watts of power, which is 1,000 times more than the entire US uses at any time. It looks as sci-fi as it sounds, so much so that scenes from the latest Star Trek movie were shot there.

7. Magnet

The most powerful magnet in the world was finished in 2012 by scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. It was capable of producing 100 Teslas, long seen as the Holy Grail of magnet engineers. The director of the lab where it was built described it as “our Moon shot,” and it took 15 years of work to complete.

So how powerful is 100 Teslas? It’s 2 million times the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field and over six times more than is needed to levitate a frog. The magnet is expected to help with a large number of physics experiments, and if you were hoping to play with it, we’re afraid it’s already fully booked. It’s only able to produce the field for a short pulse, as the force it produces could be enough to tear itself apart.

There is even a way to produce magnetic fields up to 1,000 Teslas - scientists take a pulse magnet, surround it with explosives, and set both off at the same time. The magnetic field inside the implosion is condensed, and massive fields can be produced. Of course, these can only be used once.

6. Diesel Engine

The most powerful diesel engine in the world can be found on the Emma Maersk cargo ship. It’s four stories high - the engine, not the ship - and over 26 meters (about 85 ft) in length. This diesel engine produces over 100,000 brake horsepower and over 5.5 million foot-pounds of torque, around 2,500 times more than a tractor. Most impressively, it’s extremely efficient, losing only around 50 percent of its energy to heat. (That may sound like a lot, but it’s actually pretty good for a diesel engine.)

5. Supercomputers

The TOP500 project keeps records of the most powerful computers in the world. The current leader is Tianhe-2, a Chinese supercomputer run by their National University of Defense Technology. The system operates at 33.86 petaflops per second. That’s 33,000 times faster than a Playstation 4, by comparison. It runs on a custom operating system named Kylin, meaning “Chinese unicorn.”

Though America’s next-closest contender is half as fast as Tianhe-2, the US still dominates the top 500, accounting for over half of the world’s fastest supercomputers.

4. X-Ray Generators

The Z-Machine is officially the world’s most powerful X-ray generator. Located at the Sandia National Laboratories facility in New Mexico, the Z-Machine is so powerful (and just generally huge) that it’s submerged in an enormous tank of water and oil, so adjustments need to be made by divers in scuba gear.

How powerful is it? At its peak, it produces power 80 times more than the electrical generation capacity of every single power plant. On Earth. Combined. It discharges in less than 100 billionths of a second, but for that time, it’s literally the most powerful man-made thing ever. It can also propel a small piece of metal from 0 to 122,000 kph (76,000 mph) in under one second, which is faster than the Earth moves through space.

3. Robots

The strongest robot in the world is an industrial robot named Titan, produced by German manufacturer KUKA robotics. It’s able to lift a full-sized car to a height of three meters (about 10 ft), which you will notice greatly exceeds both the strength and reach of the human masters it will one day help to overthrow.

There is, of course, no need to worry about that because it’s safely bolted to the floor of the fac– oh, holy crap. They’ve given it wheels. It was nice knowing you, fellow lumps of feeble meat.

2. Solar Furnace

The largest and most powerful solar furnace on the planet is located in the Pyrenees Mountains on the border between France and Spain. It consists of a massive curved array of 10,000 mirrors, which concentrate sunlight from hundreds of flat mirrors on the opposite hillside. “Furnace” is the correct choice of word, as it is able to focus beams to create a temperature of 6,000 °C (5,430 °F), about half the surface temperature of the Sun.

The high temperatures produced by the furnace are used for everything from generating electricity to the creation of carbon nanotubes. It’s also handy for testing materials designed for coating spaceships to protect them from the heat produced during re-entry.

1. Gun

The most powerful gunshot on the planet was created by scientists from the US Navy in 2010 without the use of any explosives. They used a prototype rail gun, effectively a cannon that accelerates an aluminium shell to enormous velocities, using electromagnetic fields. The rail gun is heralded as the weapon of the future in naval warfare, with predictions that the weapons will be able to fire at a range of 320 kilometres (200 mi), compared to the 20 kilometres (12 mi) of contemporary artillery.

Current prototypes can only last for a few shots, since they produce a lot of heat during operation. The US has given US$34.5 million to BAE Systems to develop a more durable version of the weapon, capable of firing up to 10 shots a minute without blowing itself apart.

[Source: Listverse. Edited.]

Smart LED Bulb

A multi-tasking LED bulb that stays bright when the lights go out

Available exclusively at the MoMA store, Lin Guohui's Bulb Flashlight is just that: A screw-in 40W LED replacement bulb with a rechargeable battery that can be removed and used as a handheld torch during emergencies.

Thu, Sep 26 2013 at 1:23 PM

Photo: MoMA Store

 

With the high season of ghost stories, creepy shadow puppetry, and the after dark door-to-door solicitation of King Size Snickers upon us, it’s always a fine idea to check in on your stockpile of flashlights as they get plenty of use 'round this time of year (particularly to go investigate those strange bumps, thuds, and scratching noises originating from the darkest corners of your unfinished basement).

During a quick stop in at the SoHo branch of the MoMA Store earlier this week, I spotted an intriguing LED torch fashioned in the shape of an oversized screw-in LED light bulb (Gizmodo seems to be a fan as well). Aptly called Bulb Flashlight, the Lin Guohui-designed product is actually a completely functional screw-in LED bulb — a 40W incandescent replacement bulb that consumes 6W and boasts a 60,000 hour lifespan — that thanks to a telescoping handle and rechargeable built-in battery pulls double-duty as a handheld flashlight.

Simply unscrew the clever bulb/torch from the fitting/fixture that it normally calls “home” and, if fully charged, use it up to three hours while participating in the aforementioned seasonal activities. Of course, the low-heat Bulb Flashlight really comes in handy not during Halloween/haunted home invasions but in emergency situations/power outages where there’s no time to scramble for fresh batteries or scrounge for mini Maglites hidden away in the bottom of the kitchen junk drawer — you’ll know exactly where to find Bulb Flashlight and can count on it being fully charged and ready to go when you need it most.

The Bulb Flashlight costs $45 and is availably exclusively at the MoMA Store (MoMA members receive a 10 percent discount). Sure, this is more moola than most non-smart LED bulbs and more than most utilitarian household flashlights but keep in mind you’re essentially paying for two separate devices that you’ll get a ton of use out of throughout the year.

And if you're looking for other forms of multipurpose emergency lighting, MoMA Store has got you covered with solar/crank-powered AM/FM radios/flashlights and vesatile flashlight/worklights.

Source: Mother Nature Network

 

 

What happens to our body after drinking Coca-Cola?

Have you ever wondered what exactly Coca Cola is?

After 10 minutes: Ten tea spoons of sugar contained in a glass of Cola, cause devastating “strike” on the organism and the only cause, by reason of not vomiting, is the phosphoric acid which inhibits the action of sugar.

After 20 minutes: A leap of insulin levels in bloodstream occurs. The liver converts all the sugar into fat.

After 40 minutes: Ingestion of caffeine is finally completed. The eye pupils are expanding. Blood pressure rises, because the liver disposes more sugar into bloodstream. The adenosine receptors get blocked, thereby preventing drowsiness.

After 45 minutes: Body raises production of dopamine hormone, which stimulates the brain pleasure center. Heroin has the same principle of operation.

After 1 hour: Phosphoric acid binds calcium, magnesium and zinc in the gastrointestinal tract, which supercharges metabolism. Releasing of calcium through urine also rises.

After more than 1 hour: Diuretic effect of the drink enters in “the game”. The calcium, magnesium and zinc are removed out of the organism, which are a part of our bones, as well as sodium. At this time we have already become irritable or subdued. The whole quantity of water, contained in a coca cola, is removed by the urine.

Actually, when having a cold bottle of Coke and enjoying its undeniable freshness, do we know what chemical “cocktail” we pour into our throats?

The active ingredient of Coca-Cola is orthophosphoric acid. Due to its high acidity, cisterns used for transporting of the concentrate have to be equipped with special reservoirs designed for highly corrosive materials.

Let's have a look at “the anatomy” of one of the most advertised products of “Coca-Cola Co.” – Coca-Cola Light without caffeine. This drink contains Aqua Carbonated, E150D, E952, E951, E338, E330, Aromas, E211.

Aqua Carbonated – this is sparkling water. It stirs gastric secretion, increases the acidity of the gastric juice and provokes flatulency – plenty evolution of gases. Furthermore, spring water is not used, but is used regular filtered water.

E150D – food coloring, obtained through the processing of sugar at specified temperatures, with or without addition of chemical reagents. In the case with coca-cola, ammonium sulfate is added.

E952 – Sodium Cyclamate is a sugar substitute. Cyclamate is a synthetic chemical, has sweet taste, which is 200 times sweeter than sugar, and is used as an artificial sweetener. In 1969 it was banned by FDA, since it as well as saccharin and aspartame, caused cancer in rats' urinary bladder. In 1975, prohibition seized also Japan, South Korea and Singapore. In 1979, WHO (World Health Organization), “who knows why?” rehabilitated cyclamates and recognizing them as safe.

E950 – Acesulfame Potassium. 200 times sweeter than sugar, containing methyl ether, where it aggravates the operation of the cardiovascular system. Likewise, it contains asparaginic acid which can also cause excitant effect on our nervous system and in time it can lead to addiction. Acesulfame is badly dissolved and is not recommended for use by children and pregnant women.

E951 – Aspartame. A sugar substitute for diabetics and is chemically unstable: at elevated temperature it breaks down into methanol and phenylalanine. Methanol is very dangerous: 5-10ml can cause destruction of the optic nerve and irreversible blindness. In warm soft drinks, aspartame transforms into formaldehyde which is very strong carcinogen. Some number of cases with aspartame poisoning include: unconsciousness, headaches, fatigue, dizziness, nausea, palpitation, weight gain, irritability, anxiety, memory loss, blurry vision, fainting, joint pains, depression, fertility, hearing loss and etc. Aspartame can also provoke the following diseases: brain tumors, MS (Multiple Sclerosis), epilepsy, Graves' disease, chronic fatigue, Alzheimer's, diabetes, mental deficiency and tuberculosis.

E338 – Orthophosphoric Acid. This can cause irritation of skin and eyes. It is used for production of phosphoric acid salts of ammonia, sodium, calcium, aluminum and also in organic synthesis for production of charcoal and film tapes, for production of refractory materials, ceramics, glass, fertilizers, synthetic detergents, medicine, metalworking, and textile and oil industries. Food orthophosphoric acid is used in the production of carbonated water and for preparation of ingredients in pastry. It is known that orthophosphoric acid interfere with the absorption of calcium and iron from the body, which can cause weakening of bones and osteoporosis. Other side effects are thirst and skin rashes.

E330 – Citric Acid. It is widely spread in nature and is used in pharmaceutical and food industries. Salts of citric acid (citrates) are used in food industry as acids, preservatives, stabilizers, and in medical fields – for preserving blood.

Aromas – unknown aromatic additives

E211 – Sodium Benzoate. It is used in production of some food products, as an anti-bacterial and anti-fungal agent. These products refer to jams, fruit juices and fruit yoghurts. It's not recommended for use by asthmatics and people who are sensitive to aspirin. A study conducted by Peter Piper at the Sheffield University in Britain, found that this compound causes significant damage to DNA. According to his words, sodium benzoate which is an active component in preservatives doesn't destroy DNA, but deactivating it. This can lead to cirrhosis and degenerative diseases like Parkinson's disease.

So, what turns out? Well, it turns out that “the secret recipe” of coca-cola is just one advertising play. What kind of secret may be there, when it's well known to us that this is a weak solution of cocaine with preservatives, colorants, stabilizers and etc. I.e., this is legalized cocaine addiction plus pure poison. Diet Coke is even worse, because the aspartame in it, replaces sugar, becoming pure neurotoxic poison.

So, if you can't imagine a life without coca-cola, take advantage of the following recommendations:
- Many distributors of coca-cola in U.S use this drink for cleaning their truck engines.
- Many police officers in U.S have bottles of coca-cola in their cars and when a car accident happens, they wash the blood out of the road with it.
- Coca-Cola is a great tool for removing rusty stains on chrome surfaces of cars. To remove corrosion from car battery, pour it with Coke and the corrosion will disappear.
- To unscrew a rusty screw, dip a cloth in coca-cola and wrap around it for several minutes.
- To clean stains from clothes – pour coca-cola on dirty clothes, add washing powder and run the washing machine as usual. You will be surprised of the results.
- In India, some farmers use coca-cola instead of pesticides for pest extermination, because it's cheaper and the effect is completely satisfying.

So, coca-cola undeniably is a very useful product. The key is to be used for intended purposes, but not for drinking!

Here is a video about Coca-Cola!

Source: Get Holistic Health

4K TV

Most new 4K TVs cost as much as a car, but the price of this tech may come tumbling down faster than just about anyone expected.

By Glenn Derene

Source: Popular Mechanics

Seiki's $1500, 50-inch 4k display.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, the tech press oohed and ahhed at the beautiful 4K displays (those with about four times the resolution of a 1080p HDTV) from Sony, LG, and Samsung, then gulped when we saw the $20,000-plus prices. It's a familiar story in the world of technology—an interesting product category gets introduced in the pricing stratosphere, but if you give it a few years, costs come down to where mere mortals live. So imagine my surprise when the relatively unknown Chinese brand Seiki announced a 50-inch 4K set at one-tenth the proposed costs of the big-brand sets, available today, and invited me to come see it for myself.

It looks pretty darned good. Seiki representatives showed me 3840 x 2160–resolution footage piped from a media server through an HDMI 1.4 cable (which is necessary for resolutions over 1080p, and included with the set). I saw overhead footage of Tokyo with tiny cars and pedestrians clearly identifiable, an animated short film with remarkable detail ("shows you what high-resolution gaming could look like," said Frank Kendzora, Seiki's executive vice president for the U.S. market). I also saw a clip from a 1080p Blu-ray copy of The Dark Knight Rises upscaled to 4K. All of them looked remarkable, though the color saturation of skin tones in the Batman flick was a little on the rosy side.

I had to ask the obvious question: Why is it you can sell a 4K set so cheaply so soon? The answer I got was twofold. First, Seiki keeps its sets simple to keep costs down. That means no Wi-Fi, smart TV, 3D, elegant industrial design, or crazy-fast refresh rates—just three HDMI ports and a simple remote. The second answer was "That's how much it costs to produce these sets profitably," representative Sung Choi said. "You should be asking the other manufacturers why their sets are so expensive."
Now that I've seen what you can get for $1500, I'm guessing those other manufacturers won't be able to keep their prices so high for long; 4K is tumbling down the price chain in a hurry. That said, I'm not sure you should break out your credit card just yet. Seiki's demo was remarkable, and its price point is compelling, but I saw only a few minutes of footage and in controlled circumstances. Plus, today there's still pretty much zero 4K content available and nothing to play it on.
That may change before the year is out. Sony has already announced that the PlayStation 4 it plans to launch this year will support a 4K movie service—although, mysteriously, not 4K games. And, at least in Japan, broadcasters are planning to start limited over-the-air 4K transmission as soon as 2014. None of this makes a compelling case for buying into 4K right now, but Seiki has definitely changed my mind about how quickly the technology is coming.

4D Printing

3D Printing or Additive Manufacturing technology are in craze amid issues which still yet to be resolve such as intellectual property, guns control and etc.
If you are new to 3D Printing, Popular Mechanics is a very informative site.
If you are into 3D printing hobby, this site will be your playground then.

So, what is latest technology in 3D Printing? In color, of course.




Heard of 4D printing? Well it's in the pipeline.

Periodic Table

When did you last check on periodic table? The day you left school... I bet.
Did you know how many are there now?

Periodic table welcomes mysterious element 115 to the fold

Scientists hope that by creating heavier and heavier elements, they will find stable super-heavy elements with as yet unimagined practical uses.           

Megan Gannon, LiveScience

 

Image: concept w/Shutterstock

 

Scientists say they've created a handful of atoms of the elusive element 115, which occupies a mysterious corner of the periodic table.

The super-heavy element has yet to be officially named, but it is temporarily called ununpentium, roughly based on the Latin and Greek words for the digits in its atomic number, 115.

The atomic number is the number of protons an element contains. The heaviest element commonly found in nature is uranium, which has 92 protons, but scientists can load even more protons into an atomic nucleus and make heavier elements through nuclear fusion reactions. [Wacky Physics: The Coolest Little Particles in Nature]

Scientists hope that by creating heavier and heavier elements, they will find a theoretical "island of stability," an undiscovered region in the periodic table where stable super-heavy elements with as yet unimagined practical uses might exist.

In experiments in Dubna, Russia about 10 years ago, researchers reported that they created atoms with 115 protons. Their measurements have now been confirmed in experiments at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Germany.

To make ununpentium in the new study, a group of researchers shot a super-fast beam of calcium (which has 20 protons) at a thin film of americium, the element with 95 protons. When these atomic nuclei collided, some fused together to create short-lived atoms with 115 protons.

"We observed 30 in our three-week-long experiment," study researcher Dirk Rudolph, a professor of atomic physics at Lund University in Sweden, said in an email. Rudolph added that the Russian team had detected 37 atoms of element 115 in their earlier experiments.

"The results are by and large compatible," Rudolph said.

Super-heavy elements are generally unstable and most last only a fraction of a second before they start to decay. The scientists had to use special detectors to look for the energy signatures for the X-ray radiation predicted to be given off by element 115 as it quickly degrades.

A committee from the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), which governs chemical nomenclature, will review the new findings to decide whether more experiments are necessary before element 115 gets an official name.

Some of element 115's neighbors have already been christened. Last year, the man-made elements 114 and 116 were named flerovium (Fl) and livermorium (Lv).

The new experiments will be detailed in The Physical Review Letters.

 

 

Apparently 115 is not the last list. Quick check on wikipedia Periodic table

 

Standard form of the periodic table. The colors represent different categories of elements listed below, under the larger table in the Layout section.

Space Exploration

Want to navigate the solar system without having to leave your home?
Explore the planets, moons, asteroids and spacecraft that rotate around our sun in real-time.
Listen to TED talk tour the solar system prior log on to eyes nasa
Bon Voyage!

SMART Tunnel

Another engineering feat in Malaysia.


SMART Tunnel in Kuala Lumpur: A Storm Water Tunnel With Built-in Motorway

By Kaushik

Malaysia’s capital of Kuala Lumpur is regularly subjected to flash floods after heavy rains that remain for three to six hours, flooding the city center. After a series of devastating flash floods washed the heart of Kuala Lumpur city center and accumulated losses rose to billions of ringgit, the government approved a never-before-attempted concept to tackle the crippling floods and snarling traffic jams that plaque the Southern Gateway of the city – a SMART tunnel.
SMART stands for Stormwater Management and Road Tunnel. The 13.2m diameter tunnel consists of a 9.7km storm water bypass tunnel, with a 4km dual-deck motorway within the storm water tunnel. The main purpose of SMART is to solve the problem of flash flooding in Kuala Lumpur from the Sungai Klang and Kerayong rivers and also to reduce traffic jams during the daily rush hour.


The dual-purpose SMART tunnel begins at Kampung Berembang lake and ends at Taman Desa lake, diverting floodwaters away from the confluence of the two major rivers that run through the center of Kuala Lumpur. The 4km motorway tunnel incorporated into SMART acts as an efficient alternative route from the Southern Gateway of KL-Seremban Highway, Federal Highway, Besraya and East-West Link from entering and exiting the city centre. For motorists, the tunnel greatly reduces the travel time between the Jalan Istana Interchange and Kampung Pandan – from around 15 minutes down to just four minutes.
The SMART tunnel consist of three sections. The upper two sections are roadways that cater to traffic. Each section allows traffic to travel in one direction only. The third section at the bottom is a storm water tunnel. Under normal condition, when there is low rainfall and no storm, the motorway section is open to motorists and the storm water tunnel is closed. During moderate storm, the SMART system is activated and floodwater is diverted into the bypass tunnel in the lower channel of the motorway tunnel. The upper channel is still open to motorists. During an impending flood, the upper two roadways are closed to traffic and evacuated. Then the entire three sections of the SMART tunnel is ready to carry flood waters.
SMART opened to traffic on 14 May 2007, after four years of construction. The cost of the project was around MYR1,887m (approximately $514m). The tunnel handles 30,000 cars per day and has been used 44 times to divert floodwater.

Langkawi Sky Bridge, Malayasia

An article on Langkawi's Sky Bridge. Click on link Langkawi sky bridge 
My last visit was in 2006. Fond memories.


The Langkawi Sky Bridge in Malaysia

By Kaushik

Langkawi Sky Bridge is a 125 meters curved pedestrian cable-stayed bridge, located at the peak of Gunung Mat Chinchang mountain, on Pulau Langkawi, an island in the Langkawi archipelago in Kedah, Malaysia. Completed in 2004, this suspended bridge is located at the ‘end’ of a cable car ride which begins at the Oriental Village at the foot hill of the Machincang mountain range. The bridge is suspended from a 82 meter high single pylon and hangs at about 100 meter above ground. It swings out over the landscape to give visitors a unique spatial experience and spectacular views. The 1.8 meters wide bridge has two triangular platforms that act as ‘stops’ where you can admire the view and rest your feet.
Langkawi Sky Bridge ranks among the world’s strangest suspension bridge and constructing it was not an easy feat. The entire bridge, in all its elements had to be lifted to the top of the mountain by helicopter and was later assembled to its current position.

























 

The Message Voyager 1 Carries for Alien Civilizations

A quick search on what's on board Voyager 1 yield some interesting find.


Source: The Atlantic

The Message Voyager 1 Carries for Alien Civilizations
 The "Golden Record" aboard the interstellar spacecraft is a time capsule of humanity, sent from 1977 to the distant future.
Megan Garber


Wikimedia Commons
The year was 1977. Jimmy Carter was president. Rod Stewart topped the Billboard chart with "Tonight's the Night (Gonna Be Alright)." The economy was recovering from recession. Oil was scarce. Ties may have been wide, but patience, among many, was thin. Into that turbulent and indolent and somewhat cynical world -- and on behalf of it -- NASA launched two little probes, tiny even by spaceship standards, from Cape Canaveral. Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, were initially meant to explore Jupiter, Saturn, and their moons. They did that. But then they kept going. And going. And going. At a rate of 35,000 miles per hour. One of them, almost 35 years to the day after it left Earth behind, finally ventured beyond the influence of the body that has defined so much of life on Earth: the sun.
The Voyager probes are technically unmanned; in another sense, however, they carry all of humanity with them as they speed through space. Each craft bears an object that is, in every way, a record -- of Earth, of humanity, of humanity's drive to reach and strive and dream and connect. The two epic mementos, given the sunny hue of their aluminum coverings, have been dubbed the Golden Records. They were the product of Carl Sagan and a team that, in January 1977, realized the far-traveling probes would stand a better chance than most human spacecraft would of encountering extraterrestrial life. So they decided to undertake a task that was both uniquely human and uniquely of its moment: They would make a record that would, if discovered by aliens, represent humanity. They would make a time capsule of human civilization. One that would, as NASA puts it, "communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials." An artifact that would be epic and Quixotic in equal measure.

Telling humanity's story was, as team member Ann Druyan puts it in the phenomenal "Space" episode of Radiolab, "a sacred undertaking." She and Sagan and their group of, as she calls them, "half a dozen very flawed human beings" had taken it upon themselves to represent humanity as a culture and also as an aesthetic -- to explain to anything that might be out there who, and what, we're all about. They arrived at the idea during a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in January 1977; the Voyager probes would launch in late August and early September. Representing the entirety of human achievement in a single recording would have to be done quickly.
So the group, as humans are wont to do, divided the labor. Jon Lomberg was in charge of assembling pictures of Earth. Timothy Ferris selected the music. Druyan, the project's creative director (and later the co-writer, with Sagan, of Cosmos, and, as of 1981, Sagan's wife) oversaw the record's "Sounds of Earth" essay. Linda Salzman collected greetings from people around the world. Sagan served as the liaison with NASA. The team set about researching -- talking to historians and artists and ethnomusicologists. They reached out to political groups and documentarians. They recorded humans speaking -- among them, in perhaps the record's most iconic track, Sagan's young son saying, "Greetings from the children of planet Earth."

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The result was a time capsule that was (and still is, somewhere out there in space) much more suggestive than summative. Humanity's cosmic mix tape for, and about, itself. Included on the pair of Golden Records that blasted from Earth in 1977 are sounds of the planet, including surf and wind and thunder. The record shares the tweetings of birds, and the calls of humpback whales, and the hootings of chimpanzees. It includes, via Salzman's work, spoken greetings from earthlings rendered in 55 languages -- starting with Akkadian, spoken in Sumer about 6,000 years ago, and culminating with Wu, a modern Chinese dialect. There's music, 90 minutes' worth of it -- music that includes classic tunes from cultures around the globe, including the first two bars of Beethoven's String Quartet No. 13 in B Flat. Jimmy Carter sent a message of greeting on the record. So did U.N. Secretary General Waldheim.

And though the Golden Record does, indeed, adopt the form and the logic of a standard, late-'70s-era record, it's more accurately thought of as a kind of early CD: Its archive contains images from Earth (118 of them) as well as sound.

So how would a notional extraterrestrial, encountering this sweeping record of human existence, actually play it? Like you'd play any record. (NASA apparently assumed that alien civilizations, should they be sufficiently advanced, would be familiar with vinyl. Which is fair.) Each Golden Record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, along with a cartridge and, yep, a needle. And both include instructions -- in the symbolic language you can see etched in the image above -- that both explain the origin of the Voyager crafts and indicate how the record is meant to be played. (Ideally, NASA explains, the record is played at 16-2/3 revolutions per minute.) The logic of all this is simple: It will be tens of thousands of years (if ever) before either Voyager can make a close approach to any planetary system that lies beyond our own. "The spacecraft," Carl Sagan put it, "will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space."

He added: "But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet."

The two Voyager craft, of course, aren't the first to contain messages for beings that are foreign to us by virtue of either place of origin or stretch of time. The moon still bears the plaque left on its surface by the astronauts of Apollo: "We came in peace for all mankind." And Pioneers 10 and 11, which preceded Voyagers 1 and 2, both carried small, metal plaques that identified both their time and place of origin -- "for the benefit," NASA has it, "of any other spacefarers that might find them in the distant future."
But the Golden Records carry more than (English) words. They carry our culture. They carry the transcendent aspects of human existence: the art, the beauty, the ache, the joy. They offer what we have, and what we are, up to the cosmos -- and to anyone who might call the same space home. As Jimmy Carter, president when Earth's two Voyagers launched, put it: "This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours."

Sounds of interstellar space

Source: Yahoo! News

by Miriam Kramer, Staff Writer                                                      

Click on the link below.

           

Video of voyager-1 probe enters interstellar

 

       

Thanks to NASA's far-flung Voyager 1 spacecraft, now exploring the final frontier beyond our solar system, humanity can tune into the sounds of interstellar space.
Scientists announced today (Sept. 12) that Voyager 1 left the solar system in August 2012 after 35 years of spaceflight, making it the first craft ever to reach interstellar space. No other manmade object has ever travelled so far away from its home planet.
To mark the occasion, NASA unveiled the first Voyager 1 recording of the sound of interstellar space, offering the probe's strange, otherwordly take on its new frontier. The sounds are produced by the vibration of dense plasma, or ionized gas; they were captured by the probe's plasma wave instrument, NASA officials wrote in a video description. [Voyager 1's Journey to Interstellar Space: A Photo Tour]
"When you hear this recording, please recognize that this is an historic event. It's the first time that we've ever made a recording of sounds in interstellar space," Don Gurnett, principle investigator for the Voyager plasma wave investigation, said in a press conference today.

View gallery."

This artist's concept depicts NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft entering interstellar space, or the space  …

Researchers used the plasma data to infer that Voyager 1 first came into contact with the interstellar medium, effectively taking humanity between the stars, on or around Aug. 25, 2012.
"There were two times the instrument heard these vibrations: October to November 2012 and April to May 2013," NASA officials wrote. "Scientists noticed that each occurrence involved a rising tone. The dashed line indicates that the rising tones follow the same slope. This means a continuously increasing density."
Voyager 1's plasma sensor broke in 1980, so scientists had to get creative, and a little lucky, to figure this out. A massive solar eruption in March 2012 arrived at the location of Voyager 1 about 13 months later, making the plasma around the probe vibrate, NASA officials said.
That vibration helped researchers understand the density of the plasma, determining that it was 40 times more dense than measurements taken in the outer layer of the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles and magnetic fields that the sun puffs out around itself.
The observed density matched up very well with what researchers expected to find in interstellar space.

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This artist's concept shows the general locations of NASA's two Voyager spacecraft. Voyager 1 (top)  …

"Now that we have new, key data, we believe this is mankind's historic leap into interstellar space," Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement. "The Voyager team needed time to analyze those observations and make sense of them. But we can now answer the question we've all been asking — 'Are we there yet?' Yes, we are."

Voyager 1 launched on Sept. 5, 1977, about two weeks after its twin Voyager 2. The two spacecraft made it through their "grand tour" of the solar system, taking close-up looks at the Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune systems. Their original mission ended in 1989, but the probes soldiered on, streaking through the unexplored regions at the outer reaches of the solar system.
The Voyager team still communicates with the two spacecraft every day, but the probes' extreme distances pose a challenge. At the speed of light, it takes about 17 hours for a message to reach Earth from Voyager 1, which is currently about 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) from the sun.

London to Brighton train journey 1953-1983-2013

In 1953, the BBC filmed a train trip from London to Brighton. Thirty years later in 1983, they filmed it again and then again 30 years after that, in 2013. Here are all three films synced up and played side-by-side: You can compare the rail tracks, scenery and people.

2D photographs into 3D image

This is a bit of a mindblower...this software presented at SIGGRAPH Asia lets you pluck objects out of photos and start manipulating them as if they were in 3D.

Touchable holograms

Wow! This is cool. Gaming industry will hit high note. Your X-box or Playstation will be obsolete.


Researchers at Tokyo University have come up with a technology that is a first and significant step away from the mouse and keyboard touchable holograms.



“Up until now, holography has been for the eyes only, and if you’d try to touch it, your hand would go right through. But now we have a technology that also adds the sensation of touch to holograms.” -Hiroyuki Shinoda, Professor, Tokyo University

The technology consists of software that uses ultrasonic waves to create pressure on the hand of a user touching the projected hologram. Researchers are using two Wiimotes from Nintendos Wii gaming system to track a users hand.

The technology was introduced at SIGGRAPH, an annual computer graphics conference, and has so far only been tested with relatively simple objects. But its inventors have big plans for touchable holograms in the future.

“For example, it’s been shown that in hospitals, there can be contamination between people due to objects that are touched communally. But if you can change the switches and such into a virtual switch, then you no longer have worry about touch contamination. This is one application that’s quite easy to see.” -Hiroyuki Shinoda, Professor, Tokyo University

Touchable holograms could be used for a wide variety of things… everything from light switches to books with each appearing when needed, and then disappearing when not. And holograms could replace the need for making new interfaces for technology, since they could be changed without having to make a new physical product.