BioDigital Human
Google Glasses (Project Glass) : The Future of Human Computer Interaction?
Google made waves on the Internet last month when it unveiled what it is calling Project Glass. The company released some press shots of what the product, Google Glasses, might eventually look like. Resembling a normal pair of glasses in terms of how the user wears them, Google Glasses does not have any lenses. Instead, it has a small tranparent device just over the right eye which serves as a means of displaying information in an overlay manner. Now that the dust generated by the initial furor last month has settled, we sit down and analyze whether Google Glasses is indeed the future of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Augmented Reality or just hype. Project Glass – The YouTube Video On April 4th 2012, a teaser video was also released to give the world an idea of what using the glasses on a daily basis might be like. Of course, none of this is particularly noteworthy on its own. The features shown off in the video include: Project Glass – The Facts Project Glass – My View
Poor man's MSOP soldering
MSOP stands for Mini Small Outline Package, that means that width of 4 leads is just 2mm, exactly the width of a row in a stripboard... Let see how can we solder that though. On a piece of wood we tape carefully 4 thin wires. We start my taping one wire and then taping again a second one at a distance of 2mm, take as much time as you need, this step is crucial, place on top the MSOP to make sure they have the right separation. If you need to make any adjustments use the blade of a cutter to move the wire. We place the MSOP on top and we tape it, then make the necessary adjustments in the separations of the wires. Time to solder, use flux and apply the iron firmly as with any other SMD Once we have one side done we do the other side, this time it will be easier since the other half is firmly fixed, time to correct the separation of the wires too. Once we remove the tape we check the back of the IC to make sure all looks good and clean. And voila, the breakout board :)
Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram
A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data — around 700 terabytes — in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times. The work, carried out by George Church and Sri Kosuri, basically treats DNA as just another digital storage device. Instead of binary data being encoded as magnetic regions on a hard drive platter, strands of DNA that store 96 bits are synthesized, with each of the bases (TGAC) representing a binary value (T and G = 1, A and C = 0). To read the data stored in DNA, you simply sequence it — just as if you were sequencing the human genome — and convert each of the TGAC bases back into binary. It is only with recent advances in microfluidics and labs-on-a-chip that synthesizing and sequencing DNA has become an everyday task, though. Just think about it for a moment: One gram of DNA can store 700 terabytes of data.
German student creates electromagnetic harvester that gathers free electricity from thin air
A German student has built an electromagnetic harvester that recharges an AA battery by soaking up ambient, environmental radiation. These harvesters can gather free electricity from just about anything, including overhead power lines, coffee machines, refrigerators, or even the emissions from your WiFi router or smartphone. This might sound a bit like hocus-pocus pseudoscience, but the underlying science is actually surprisingly sound. We are, after all, just talking about wireless power transfer — just like the smartphones that are starting to ship with wireless charging tech, and the accompanying charging pads. Dennis Siegel, of the University of Arts Bremen, does away with the charging pad, but the underlying tech is fundamentally the same. The efficiency of wireless charging, however, strongly depends on the range and orientation of the transmitter, and how well the coil is tuned to the transmitter’s frequency. (See: How wireless charging works.)
Prometheus Fusion Perfection | Developing Clean, Cheap, Open Source Energy with the Bussard Reactor.
Electromagnetic Harvester - Dennis Siegel - Dennis Siegel
The omnipresence of electromagnetic fields is implied just by simple current flow. We are surrounded by electromagnetic fields which we are producing for information transfer or as a byproduct. Many of those fields are very capacitive and can be harvested with coils and high frequency diodes. Depending on the strength of the electromagnetic field it is possible to charge a small battery within one day. There are two types of harvester for different electromagnetic fields: a smaller harvester that is suitable for lower frequencies below 100Hz which you can find in the general mains (50/60Hz, 16,7Hz) and a bigger one that is suitable for lower and higher frequencies like radio broadcast (~100MHz), GSM (900/1800MHz) up to Bluetooth and WLAN (2,4GHz). Press:» Rauchwolken & Luftschlösser» Designboom» Co.Design» Phys.org
Daniel Sauter
