Beyond “always on”

Current technology encourages us to be continuously connected. This blog post predicts that that will change.

What temperature has the same degrees in Celsius and Fahrenheit?

Idle question of the day: What temperature has the same degrees in Celsius and Fahrenheit?

A shirt that cools better than sweat

It is difficult to cool the body better than sweat (without involving a machine). Quoting “The First Shirt That Lowers Your Body Temperature” (by Berne Broudy for Popular Science):

Mars Science Laboratory – interesting links

“Curiosity” is the name of the Mars rover that landed successfully today. “Mars Science Laboratory” (MSL) is the mission name and describes what the rover is: A car-sized mobile lab. NASA launched the MSL spacecraft from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Nov. 26, 2011. That is, it took Curiosity over 8 months to land on Mars. Here are a few links with more information on Curiosity:

Watching the Earth breathe

The Earth breathes: When vegetation grows, carbon dioxide is consumed and oxygen is produced. That is, carbon dioxide breathed in (obviously, we breathe oxygen in). That process is reversed when plants lose leaves and they decompose or are eaten by animals. The NASA Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio has created an animation that visualizes the breathing by showing both the cycle of vegetation and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere:

Why we wear pants and don’t wear hats

For a long time, pants were only worn in a few corners of the world. And as recently as 100 years ago, most men in the USA wore hats. This blog posts explains why those customs have changed.

The third culture

The Third Culture is a movement that tries to bring two cultures together. Quoting “The Third Culture” by John Brockman:

Learn before going to sleep, remember better

Quoting “Ability to Learn Is Affected by the Timing of Sleep” by Christie Nicholson for Scientific American:

SpeechJammer – a gun that makes it difficult to talk

You can impede someone’s speech by playing back to them what they are saying with a slight delay. SpeechJammer is a gun-like apparatus that uses this idea to prevent someone from speaking – at a distance.

Reinventing the tire – without air

It’s a dream come true: drive a vehicle without worrying about a flat tire or insufficient air pressure. Bridgestone has presented a concept for “airless tires”.

Water reservoir in space: 140 trillion times our oceans

NASA’s article “Astronomers Find Largest, Most Distant Reservoir of Water” reports on some truly staggering numbers:

Visually comparing the sizes of Earth, other planets, and stars (video)

The video “Star Size Comparison” (duration: 2:34) nicely visualizes how tiny Earth (diameter 12756 km) is compared to the Sun (diameter 1,392,000 km, 109.1 times Earth’s). And how tiny the Sun is compared to other stars. Factoid from the video:

VY Canis Majoris (a red hypergiant) is the largest known star. It has a diameter of 2,800,000,000 km. It would take an airplane 1100 years to circle it, if it was flying at 900 km/h.

Video embedded after the break.

Storing hydrogen fuel in micro-beads

Quoting the press release (via Engadget): “In some senses hydrogen is the perfect fuel; it has three times more energy than petrol per unit of weight, and when it burns it produces nothing but water. But the only way to pack it into a vehicle is to use very high pressures or very low temperatures, both of which are expensive to do.” Thus, a company called Cella Energy Limited is working on a new way to store hydrogen.

New research: the brain forgets almost as quickly as it receives

From the press release (via Engadget):

It appears that information is lost in the brain as quickly as it can be “delivered” from the senses. [...] These new findings therefore indicate that the dynamics of the cerebral cortex are specifically tailored to the processing of brief snapshots of the outside world.

In other words, abstraction sets in quickly. That would explain why eyewitness reports are so unreliable: Everyone abstracts differently. I wonder how photographic memory works, then.

New device moves your eyelids for 3D without glasses

I am not sure that this is an improvement over glasses, but it is certainly intriguing: You attach a pair of patches to your temples and they move your eyelids so that you see pictures on a monitor in 3D. Picture and video after the break.

Computers beat humans at Jeopardy

The supercomputer “Watson” plays jeopardy. The box at the bottom shows three possible answers Watson came up with and its confidence (in percent) in each one of them.

Quite an impressive feat: An IBM-built supercomputer won against two humans playing Jeopardy. Note that the questions were not typed into the computer, it had to understand them when spoken. This shows that much progress has been made in natural language processing, but it still has to be a limited domain, where, I assume, questions follow certain patterns. Engadget has details and a video.
There is a HAL-like animation on the screen of the computer (which is even mentioned in the Wikipedia article on HAL). As an aside, what acronym do you get if you advance each letter of HAL one position in the alphabet? This has been rumored to be the source of the name, which has since been denied by the author.

Measure your body temperature from 30cm away

The above mirror is able to measure your body temperature from 30cm (ca. 1ft) away, via infrared sensors. This should solve many hygiene hassles. [Source: Engadget]

Future-proofing surround sound

Home theater surround sound is currently transitioning from 7.1 to 9.1 which has the drawback of needing to re-encode all 7.1 content. The following idea would make audio content independent of the number of speakers:

[...] record where the audio is supposed to come from, instead of which speaker it should be played on. This way a movie would never need its audio remastered again, because the fact that the plane coming in at 2 O'Clock wouldn't change no matter how many speakers you had, it wouldn't even matter if you had a speaker placed precisely at 2 O'Clock. So basically your AVR [audio/video receiver] would render the audio on the fly based on the number of speakers, and where you placed those speakers by using the recorded sounds and the data about those sounds.

First steps towards recycling plastic

There are already huge islands of plastic floating around in the Pacific Ocean (at least the size of Texas), the Atlantic Ocean (hundreds of kilometers across), and the Indian Ocean, in addition possibly other places. Thus figuring out how to recycle plastic is more important than ever. Recently, researchers have made advances in this regard.

Related post:

• Decomposing plastic

An analog world time clock

The idea is similar to an analog clock that adapts to daylight savings time: An analog clock being round, you can add or subtract hours from the hour hand by turning it the right amount. The only drawback: This won’t work for the minute hand and it looks like this clock does not have one, only a hand for seconds.