Micromirror technology for smartphones

With consumers using smartphones as a mobile entertainment centre, the ability to project photos and videos on any surface may soon become the norm.

Gaia: the cosmic camera that will chart a billion stars

Humanity has been looking at the stars since its earliest days, and some of the greatest leaps in science have come as a result of stargazing. Indeed, astronomy was at the heart of the origin of what we now know as the scientific method, with such names as Flamsteed, Newton, Halley, Wren and Boyle involved in producing what was then the most comprehensive star catalogue, listing the positions of 3,000 stars.

Unmanned combat aircraft makes first landing at sea

A drone designed for aircraft carrier operations has successfully landed on the deck of the USS George H.W. Bush, an event that marks a new milestone for unmanned combat air systems (UCAS).

Joining technique could improve design optimisation

A new method of creating an extremely strong bond between lightweight aluminium and ultra-high-strength steel could help car manufacturers optimise vehicle design.

Brainwave reader could improve safer driving system

New technology for reading brainwaves while monitoring eye movement could lead to improved systems for stopping drivers falling asleep at the wheel.

Metallic bubble wrap offers 'better protection for products'

Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a new metallic bubble wrap that is lighter, stronger and more flexible than sheet metal and more heat- and chemical-resistant than plastic or other polymer-based bubble wraps.

Turning a router into an Arduino shield

[Dirk] had a problem: while he already had an Arduino with an Ethernet shield, he needed WiFi for an upcoming project. Running a Cat5 cable was out of the question, and a true Arduino WiFi shield is outrageously expensive. He did, however, have a WiFi router lying around, and decided it would make a perfect WiFi shield with just a little bit of cutting.

The router [Dirk] used was a TL-WR702N, a common router found in the parts bins of makers the world over. Inspiringly, the size of the router’s PCB was just larger than the space between the Arduino’s pin headers. Turning the router into a shield is simply a matter of scoring the edge of the board and gluing on a few pins for mechanical strength.

British teardrop shaped car to enter World Solar Challenge

An unusual new design for a solar-powered car has been unveiled by a group of Cambridge University students.

Most solar cars have a relatively flat, wide shape to maximise the surface area for solar panels, but the Cambridge team hoping to become the first British winners of the World Solar Challenge have instead opted for a more aerodynamic teardrop design fitted with panels that move to follow the sun.

LegoDuino for kid-friendly microcontrollers

[J. Benschop] is teaching his nine-year-old son electronics by giving him a few wires, LEDs, and batteries. Eventually, the son looked over at his dad’s workbench and wondered what the little bug-shaped rectangles did. Microcontrollers and embedded programming are just a bit too advanced for someone who hasn’t hit a double-digit age, but [J] figured he could still have his son experience the awesomeness of programming electronics by building a custom electronic Lego microcontroller system.

Architect imagines BT Tower as pollutant-scrubbing haven

File under Big Idea. Use a city building to trap pollutants, clean the air, and convert car emissions into biofuel? An architect has such a concept. The idea is to attach a special carbon fiber and steel structure to London's BT Tower, one of the city's tallest buildings. The structure could suck up pollutant particles like a vacuum cleaner. The process would involve "harnessing advancements of various particle-capturing technologies," according to a report in Dezeen, and this process would also involve extracting the carbon from fumes and using it to produce a sustainable biofuel.

"The project aims to show how hybridized new infrastructure can gather pollutants, store, digest, and harvest them to dilute minerals and biofuels, celebrating clean air process on the ground level," according to the architect, Chang-Yeob Lee. He is a Royal College of Art graduate. He calls his concept the Synth[e]tech[e]cology design. Lee created the concept as his diploma project. He was one of two winners of the Sheppard Robson Student Prize for Architecture.

The structure he has in mind is made out of carbon fiber filled with nanotubes. These tubes capture carbon dioxide and mix it with a catalyst. Steel rigging would be used to fix the structure to the tower. While the exterior of the tower would behave as a catalytic converter, a research facility in the interior would be at work exploring ways to increase air movement and maximize the structure's efficiency.

The artist impressions of the carbon fiber and steel rigging structure makes the building look like a special-effects stage prop in an action movie. Nonetheless, he is quite serious about the problem of air pollution, and how the idea might contribute toward alleviating the problem. It could be a marker for a way of thinking about how buildings can better serve the environment. Air pollution is a public health risk, and the BT Tower, he suggests, could be repurposed. It could be an eco-skyscraper that cuts the level of dirt particles and helps to reduce the level of respiratory illness in London. (The BT Tower, a communications tower in London, was previously known as the Post Office Tower.)

"Harnessing advancements of various particle-capturing technologies, this project envisions that air pollution as a valuable commodity in an age of depleting resources," said Lee. Commenting on his choice of the BT Tower as the project focus, he said it could serve "as a hybrid between a vertical oil field and laboratory for future resources scrubbed from the atmosphere."

World's largest wind farm officially opened

The world’s largest offshore wind farm, the London Array,  has been officially opened by the Prime Minister David Cameron.

The huge 100km2 installation - which is located in the outer Thames Estuary - features 175 Siemens 3.6MW turbines with a combined generating capacity of 630MW.  The facility is expected to produce enough electricity to power over half a million UK homes each year.


The site has been developed by a consortium made up of DONG Energy, Denmark’s biggest energy company, which has a 50 per cent share; E.On Renewables, which owns 30 per cent; and Masdar,  the Abu Dhabi state-owned renewable energy company, which owns 20 per cent of the facility.

Originally, Shell had a large share in the venture, but the Anglo-Dutch oil giant pulled out in 2008 throwing the future of the project into doubt until Masdar came on the scene.

Construction began in July 2009 when work started to build a new onshore substation on the north Kent coast. The first offshore foundation was installed in March 2011, and the final turbine was installed in December 2012. The facility began generating power for the grid in October 2012

Yahoo Buys Inbox Management Service Xobni

What will Yahoo buy next? The answer: inbox management tool Xobni.
For now, many of Xobni's products will remain available until at least July 2014, though the company is no longer accepting new purchases of premium products.
Xobni did not elaborate on how it will integrate with Yahoo, except to say that Yahoo "want[s] us to use our platform to make many Yahoo services better for you." The Xobni team (left) is currently moving from San Francisco to Yahoo's Sunnyvale headquarters.

"Did you ever meet someone who truly 'gets' you? That's how we feel about Yahoo," Xobni said in its statement. "The power within every Xobni product is that it responds to how you communicate. Every day you demonstrate who and what is important to you. That can benefit not just your inbox or smartphone, but the many services you use. Yahoo gets that."

Perfect wall-mounted tablet integration

There’s a building downtown built about ten years ago that has tablet-sized LCD screens next to the entrance of each large meeting room. They’re never on and we always wonder why they didn’t just use one of those things that holds a sheet of printer paper to label what’s happening in the meeting space? Now this is a similar idea but with much better execution. Instead of just displaying data the in-wall tablet mount makes your room interactive.

Building blocks to safer buildings

Precast or ready-made building structures offer a number of advantages when compared to more traditional construction techniques, in terms of time and cost savings. However, the vulnerability of joints and connections between assembled precast elements is widely recognised as a potential safety issue, especially in earthquake-prone areas.

Students capture the flight of birds on very high-speed video

Graduate student Eirik Ravnan works with a parrotlet that he is training to fly from perch to perch in order to be filmed by a high-speed camera. Credit: L.A. Cicero

Stanford mechanical engineering professor David Lentink and his students capture slow-motion video from the fastest wings in the bird world, with an eye toward building flying robots that take design cues from Mother Nature.

"The best way to prevent a small drone from spying on you in your office is to turn on the air-conditioning," said David Lentink, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford. That little blast of air, he explained, creates enough turbulence to knock a hand-size UAV off balance, and possibly send it crashing to the floor.

A pigeon, on the other hand, can swoop down busy city streets, navigate around pedestrians, sign posts and other birds, keep its path in all sorts of windy conditions, and deftly land on the tiniest of hard-to-reach perches.

"Wouldn't it be remarkable if a robot could do that?" Lentink wondered.

If robots are to become a bigger presence in urban environments, they will need to.

In order to build a robot that can fly as nimbly as a bird, Lentink began looking to nature. Using an ultra-high-speed Phantom camera that can shoot upwards of 3,300 frames per second at full resolution, and an amazing 650,000 at a tiny resolution, Lentink can visualize the biomechanical wonders of bird flight on an incredibly fine scale.

Anna's hummingbirds, often spotted darting from flower to flower on the Stanford campus, beat their wings about 50 times per second, nothing but a green blur to human eyes.

"Our camera shoots 100 times faster than humans' vision refresh rate," Lentink said. "We can spread a single wing beat across 40 frames, and see incredible things."

First flight

Every time Lentink's students take the camera into the field, they have the potential to make a groundbreaking discovery. Thousands of birds have never been filmed with a high-speed camera, their secret flight mechanics never exposed.

Students Andreas Peña Doll and Rivers Ingersoll filmed hummingbirds performing a never-before-seen "shaking" behavior: As the bird dived off a branch, it wiggled and twisted its body along its spine, the same way a wet dog would try to dry off. At 55 times per second, hummingbirds have the fastest body shake among vertebrates on the planet – almost twice as fast as a mouse.

The shake lasted only a fraction of a second, and would never have been seen without the aid of the high-speed video.

"We're actually in a position where we can quantitatively analyze this video, and some of the results are the first results of their kind," said Ingersoll, an engineering graduate student who specializes in hummingbird flight. "It is kind of cool to know that potentially other researchers in the future will look at the data we've got in this class and [it will] help them with their research."

Though Lentink's lab has amassed hours of short clips of bird flight, it's difficult to frame up a perfect shot in the wild, so his students supplement this footage with carefully orchestrated laboratory-based experiments.

"In the field, you can observe social interactions near other birds, how they fly through the wind or through clutter," Lentink said. "This is very valuable. But the conditions aren't always ideal for examining discrete motions."

Eirik Ravnan, a mechanical engineering graduate student, trains small birds called parrotlets to fly from perch to perch, or to fly through narrow passageways. In exchange for their flight displays, the birds receive their favorite seeds as a reward.

Repeating and videotaping these actions in controlled conditions, he said, makes it possible to look more carefully at, for example, exactly how a bird tilts its wings to slow itself when landing, or how birds corner. The lab just acquired an advanced flow measurement system that can help elucidate how the birds manipulate the airflow with their wings during such maneuvers.

"I've never even had a pet," Ravnan said. "But working with birds and investigating their flight mechanics and thinking about how to apply those abilities to robots has been a really interesting way to apply my studies in fluid dynamics."

A better bird 'bot

Search-and-rescue is one of the more attractive applications for robotic planes, particularly scanning a wide urban area for survivors after a natural disaster. The unpredictable environment will demand robots that can better deal with changing conditions.

Mini-copters and planes often stall at steep angles, or when they get caught in a gust of wind. They have difficulty avoiding other airborne objects, and fly clumsily near buildings.

Lentink and his students have already begun applying the lessons they've learned from birds to various robotic designs.

"Hummingbirds are amazing at hovering, but it's not a very efficient form of flight," said Waylon Chen, a graduate student in Lentink's lab. "A swift flies a lot, so it has a very efficient wing platform, but its legs are too short to land. As we lay out the goal of our robotic design, we can pick and choose which natural mechanisms will be useful, and incorporate only those."

This summer Lentink is making his camera and students available to local birders. (To apply, fill out this questionnaire. Email questions to birderquestionnaire@gmail.com)

"We'd like to pair the camera with some bird enthusiasts who might know the natural history of these birds better than us," Lentink said. "We want to give people outside of Stanford the magical experience of using this camera, and hopefully learn something more about birds in the process."

DIP switch adjusted voltage regulator

It couldn’t be simpler but you have to admit that a small adjustable portable power supply like this one will be really handy.

The main part of the PSU is an LM317 linear voltage regulator which we’re already familiar with. The output voltage is adjustable based on a voltage divider between two of the pins. The set of eight DIP switches allows you to tweak that voltage divider. Switch number one connects the 9-volt battery connector to the regulator, serving as a power switch. Each of the other seven switches adjusts the output voltage by 1.5 volts. The output of the regulator connects to your target device using alligator clips which are not in frame above.

[Jason] says he takes this with him when thrift store hunting for cheap electronics. It can mimic most combinations of Alkaline cells letting you power up electronic toys to ensure they work. But we would find it equally useful for getting that early prototype away from the bench supply for testing before finalizing a dedicated portable supply.

Doped diamond coating could enhance electronics

A new method for creating thin films of diamonds may allow manufacturers to enhance future electronics.

In industrial settings, diamonds are particularly valued for their hardness, optical clarity, smoothness, and resistance to chemicals, radiation and electrical fields.

Research team proposes mathematical model that examines multiple walking patterns and movements in adults older than 65

A Pitt research team is working toward building a better tracking device to make earlier predictions regarding diseases like Parkinson's. They tested their approach on older adults using a motion-analysis system that studied 39 joint regions.

Designing a cleaner future

A slum on the outskirts of Accra, Ghana, received major media attention in 2010 and 2011 when the outside world realized where computers go to die. In an area called Agbogbloshie, impoverished residents were burning broken electronic parts, discarded and dumped by wealthier nations, to extract the metal components. Crouched around bonfires, they inhaled toxic smoke and unwittingly leached heavy metals into a nearby river, just to eke out a living.

Neutrons help create colour-changing fingerprint technique

Researchers developing a way to identify fingerprints that would be otherwise unusable have made a breakthrough using neutron scattering.

Tread carefully around the green shoots of recovery

Talk of “green shoots” never fails to remind me of the wonderful Hal Ashby movie “Being There”, in which an illiterate gardener played by Peter Sellers ends up advising the US president on economic policy.  

This week’s news that the UK’s economy may be experiencing the first signs of spring brought Ashby’s forgotten classic to mind once again. Although one would hope that our economic policy isn’t being formed by a vagrant knocked down during one of George Osborne’s late night  “burger runs”.


According to one of the key measures of business and economic conditions - Markit’s Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) - the UK’s manufacturing sector enjoyed something of a surge in June,  growing at its fastest rate in more than two years.

Anything above 50 indicates growth, and the PMI rose to 52.5 from an upwardly revised 51.5 in May. Analysts have put the growth down to a surge in orders both home and abroad, and in particular healthy exports to economies beyond the Eurozone. PMI data also suggests that the construction and service sectors are enjoying a period of accelerated growth.

These positive indicators are reinforced by the results of the British Chamber of Commerce’s (BCC) quarterly economic survey, which points to strong export balances and growing business confidence.

The EEF’s chief economist Lee Hopley welcomed the latest indicators as a cause for “cautious optimism”, and called on the UK to continue to look to build on its exports outside the non-EU markets.  Meanwhile, BCC director general John Longworth described it as a “crucial moment”  but warned that government needs to keep its “feet on the gas” to avoid choking off any burgeoning recovery.

This call was reiterated by CBI director general John Cridland who in a speech to business leaders in London this week said that economic growth depends upon the UK’s medium sized businesses having access to finance.

Cridland called on the government to make sure it treads carefully in its efforts to regulate and stabilise the banking system. ‘Choking off supply to shore up recovery will only hold back the very firms that should be driving growth’ he said.

Economists have also sounded a note of caution over weakening activity in the Chinese economy, which they fear could impact the UK’s recovery.

‘While good news is always welcome, manufacturers should not get carried away as we have seen short-lived recoveries before, said Carl Williamson, manufacturing sector lead at Lloyds Bank Commercial Banking. ‘The sector’s future health will be determined by continued global economic performance, notably in the Far East, as well as with our primary trading partners on the Continent.’

Is it too early to talk about green shoots? Certainly not. But as we’ve seen before green shoots are fragile, they’re easy to starve or trample. Government and business must now work hard to ensure the optimum conditions for growth and give these green shoots space to grow. In the words of Peter Sellers’ illiterate gardener, ‘as long as the roots are not severed, all is well. And all will be well in the garden.’

Eye in the sky monitors pollution levels

Leicester scientists have installed pollution-detecting technology in a plane to map air quality around the city.

Leicester University physicists used their air quality measuring spectrometer to produce “heatmap” style images of pollution levels in Leicester as part of the Airborne Air Quality Mapper (AAQM) project.

Windows 8 Tops 5 Percent

Microsoft ended last week's Build developer conference on a high note — increased Windows 8 market share.

The operating system topped 5 percent market share in June, according to stats from Net Applications, finally eclipsing Microsoft's Vista OS. Still, Windows 7 and Windows XP still rule, with 44.37 percent and 37.17 percent of the market, respectively.

Skype Overhauls Android App, Hits 100M Installs

Skype today celebrated a milestone 100 million Android app installations with the launch of a revamped app for Google's mobile OS.

With Android 4.0, Skype wanted an app "that makes your interactions easier and puts conversations first," the company said in a blog post.

Raspberry Pi automates your tomato farm

Check out the tomato plants [Devon] grew using a monitoring system he built himself. It’s based around a Raspberry Pi. As far as grow controllers go it falls a bit short of full automation. That’s because the only thing it can actuate is the black water line seen hovering above the plants. But [Devon's] work on monitoring and collecting sensor data should make it easy to add features in the future.

Briefcase mill

Take the machine shop with you; that’s the mantra which drove [Ryan] to build this CNC mill in a briefcase. That album will give you a taste of the final product. But you’ll want to dig through two pages of his forum thread starting with this post in order to behold the build process.

Robots inspect cables

The bearer cables and tethers of bridges, elevators, and cable cars are exposed to high levels of stress. For this reason, their functional reliability must be monitored on a regular basis. A new robot recognizes fissures before they pose a danger.

Using RFID for fiber composites

Antennas that are capable of transmitting radio waves turn components into intelligent objects. Researchers have now found a way to embed these antennas in fiber composites. As a result, the technology also works with carbon and glass fibers.

To embed RFID tags in fiber composites, ultra-thin antennas are needed (right: UHF, left: HF transponder). Credit: Fraunhofer IIS


It is barely visible to the naked eye: the work pieces in the production hall look normal. But the first impression is deceiving. The airplane components are "intelligent" and can communicate with the skilled workers in their vicinity. Not only can they tell them what they are, they can also provide information on who has worked on them as well as on the next work step. A radio frequency identification chip (RFID) transmits the information. It measures just a few square millimeters and transmits details about the component quickly, efficiently, and consistently to a receiver via radio waves. Until now, only a handful of companies use the technology for documentation purposes in production processes. Most often, RFID is used for access control purposes, or to record time, for instance on employee smart cards.

How well an RFID transponder works depends mainly on the material that surrounds it. The material can have a negative influence on the transponder antenna's range, as well as on the quality of data transmission. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS in Nuremburg have now developed an RFID transponder whose antenna works reliably on fiber composites as well. Components such as glass or carbon fibers are both lightweight and robust, and are thus used increasingly in airplane and vehicle production. However, these fibers have a particularly strong influence on frequencies. Until now, their exact behavior with regard to RFID has not been well known on the wireless system, and this is why production steps are still documented with a pencil and paper.

Carbon fibers compromise the performance of RFID chips

"We took a close look at the frequencies relevant to RFID technology: 125 kHz (LF: low frequency), 13.56 MHz (HF: high frequency), and 868 MHz (UHF: ultra high frequency). We measured the extent to which glass and carbon fibers affect the reliability of the trans- ponder," says Tobias Dräger, an engineer, in describing the work of the IIS team. The result: while LF, HF, and UHF work well with glass fibers, they showed weaknesses with carbon fibers. The high frequencies in particular compromised the performance of the RFID chip significantly. "Carbon fibers are, similarly to metal, conductive. As a result, they dampen radio signals considerably– especially at 868 MHz," says Dräger's colleague Dr. Iker Mayordomo.

But thanks to their relatively large range of up to 15 meters, UHF frequencies are very well suited to applications in logistics and production. In the past, if RFID was used with incompatible materials such as metals, a very expensive transponder was required to reach this level of performance. "The antennas and transponders required make these customized systems very large. At the same time, integrating them into fiber composites is difficult," says Dräger in discussing the initial situation. Together with partners from the aviation industry and research, his team has successfully developed a trans-ponder that can operate reliably within conducting components, which are also subject to physical stress. The scientists have designed an ultra-thin antenna that can be embedded in materials underneath a protective glass fiber layer. Together with Schreiner LogiData, a manufacturer of RFID transponders, IIS has already developed the first test series.

According to Eurostat, the statistics office of the European Union, about six percent of German companies were using RFID in 2011. In Europe, the figure was four percent. Maximilian Roth, an engineer and RFID expert at the Center for Intelligent Objects ZIO of the IIS in Nuremberg, is convinced that this is about to change. "New applications in the area of fiber composites, which is booming, will further increase the relevance of RFID for industry. There are currently a number of other pilot projects underway in the market that are conducting major tests for the use of RFID in logistics, traffic, and production." Fraunhofer IIS is already working on its next project in parallel, the EU-sponsored "SmartFiber" initiative. Researchers working on the project are using RFID technology to transmit energy and data to sensors that are embedded in fiber materials. This makes it possible, for instance, to monitor the entire structure of wind turbines.

New technology means improved safety for radiation workers

The University of Reading has played a leading role in the development of new technology that will reduce health risks for those working in jobs where there is a danger of radiation exposure.

How Much Is Your Gmail Account Worth?

Many people don't realize just how valuable their email account is. Now, thanks to researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a nifty tool called Cloudsweeper calculates how much your account would be worth, if cyber-criminals ever managed to get control.

Whenever someone's email gets hacked, whether through a phishing attack, malware, guessing passwords, or plain brute-force, a common complaint goes something like this: "Why did I get hacked? There is nothing interesting in my account." The thing is, the criminals aren't looking for exciting gossip buried within your correspondence or looking at the pictures you've emailed people. They are looking for valuable data, such as passwords to other accounts.

Your email account is quite frequently used for password resets. If someone gets control of your account, that person can search through the saved messages and figure out what other sites use the email address for account recovery. Access to your online banking account, login credentials for Facebook and Twitter, and details for iTunes and Amazon accounts are all accessible via your email account. I know many people who treat their email accounts as secret storage, frequently emailing private keys and password reminders to themselves.

My Gmail Is Worth $15Enter Cloudsweeper, a project from researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The tool scans all the messages in your account to figure out what other services use the address to send password reset emails, or to login to the service. The tool also tracks services that sent the actual password when the user clicked on the "forgot password" link. The tool assigns a dollar figure to the data pieces found to determine how much the account is worth in the underground market.

I ran one of my Gmail accounts through Cloudsweeper, and it determined my account would be worth approximately $15.30 to bad guys. I was surprised, because I use this account purely for accessing Google services and don't use it to sign up for third-party services (I keep a separate account for that) or for regular correspondence (a different account for that). I'd forgotten that I did use this account for one of Twitter accounts, as well as my Kindle account on Amazon. According to the tool, my Amazon.com account was worth approximately $15 to the criminals and Twitter was worth $0.30.

There were some false positives, as a result of the fact that I long ago used this account for my PayPal account. I've since then changed the email address associated with PayPal, but since I still had some of their emails archived, CloudSweeper flagged the service as a potential risk. I asked a friend to scan his account, and Facebook popped up (worth $5) on his list of risks, except he doesn't have an account on that social network. The alert seems to have been fooled by various Facebook friend requests he received in the past that he never deleted.

How Much Are You At Risk?Cloudsweeper uses prices for account types and data collected from various sellers across multiple underground forums to calculate how much the information in the user's email account is worth, said Chris Kanich, assistant professor at UIC's computer science department and principal organizer of the project. It uses OAuth, so you just have to be logged in to the account when you run the "audit" from the project's page. No passwords are stored, and you can just revoke permissions at the end so the tool no longer has any visibility into your account.

If nothing else, this tool is great for spring cleaning, to wipe out some of the old emails that you don't need to keep anymore. Close accounts you aren't using, or at least make sure your information has been removed. And once you realize just how valuable your account is, perhaps you will consider setting up two-factor authentication to protect yourself?

Reverse engineering a wireless protocol

Like all good tinkerers, [Andrew] decided to figure out how his wireless security system worked. Yes, it’s an exercise in reverse engineering, and one of the best we’ve seen to date.

Rapid-readout bacteria test can detect antibiotic resistance

Researchers at EPFL have built a matchbox-sized device claimed to test for the presence of bacteria in minutes instead of up to several weeks.