Very clever work by Byung-Gon Chun, a research scientist at Intel Research Berkeley, which shares processing between your Android mobile and a cloned version in the cloud. This will happen and become the norm.
CloneCloud, invented by Chun and his colleague Petros Maniatis, uses a smart phone’s high-speed connection to the Internet to communicate with a copy of itself that lives in a cloud-computing environment on remote servers. The prototype runs on Google’s Android mobile operating system and seamlessly offloads processor-intensive tasks to its cloud-based double… because CloneCloud creates a perfect copy of the phone’s software, it can take on literally any processor-intensive task that it calculates it can do faster than the phone itself, after weighing the amount of time and battery life required to transfer the required data…
UCLA scientists have developed a digital camera that takes 6 million shots per second.
By using a laser that emits different infrared frequencies to illuminate the subject, each pixel picks up individual signals that are amplified to be visible. According to the scientists–who detail their research in the current issue of Nature–this technology is called serial time-encoded amplified microscopy, or STEAM for short… Right now, STEAM can capture an image of only 3,000 pixels, but the team is planning to develop a multi-megapixel shooter that can record 100 million snaps a second.
Scientists have decided that the Northern Lights are “electrical tornados” striking the ionosphere.
The lights, also known as Aurora Borealis, are generated when electrical tornadoes hurtle towards Earth and come into contact with the ionosphere, one of the upper layers of the atmosphere. These tornadoes, spinning at more than a million miles an hour, are produced by vast clouds of solar particles. They gather 40,000 miles above the planet’s surface, releasing whirlwinds when they become destabilised by the strength of their own electrical charge.
A GE lab in Albany says it has achieved a readable holographic storage medium.
In G.E.’s approach, the holograms are scattered across a disc in a way that is similar to the formats used in today’s CDs, conventional DVDs and Blu-ray discs. So a player that could read microholographic storage discs could also read CD, DVD and Blu-ray discs. But holographic discs, with the technology G.E. has attained, could hold 500 gigabytes of data… The holographic research was originally related to G.E.’s plastics business, which it sold two years ago to the Saudi Basic Industries Corporation for $11.6 billion…
First we had flourescent fish; now the same genetic marker is in a flourescent dog.
A cloned beagle named Ruppy – short for Ruby Puppy – is the world’s first transgenic dog. She and four other beagles all produce a fluorescent protein that glows red under ultraviolet light… A team led by Byeong-Chun Lee of Seoul National University in South Korea created the dogs by cloning fibroblast cells that express a red fluorescent gene produced by sea anemones… This new proof-of-principle experiment should open the door for transgenic dog models of human disease… Starting with 344 embryos implanted into 20 dogs, Lee’s team ended up with seven pregnancies. Five dogs are alive, healthy and starting to spawn their own fluorescent puppies…
Prox Dynamics (http://www.proxdynamics.com) of Asker, Norway, has developed what it says may be one of the world’s smallest unmanned helicopters… Although even smaller than a typical cheapo toy-copter, the Hornet is fully controllable, with the ability sprint from a dead hover to almost 20 mph… The sound from the helicopter was inaudible at three yards over ambient noise … Delivery to select customers is expected later this year.
Another battery-powered sports car in the USA, this one from Fisker Automotive.
The Karma, a luxury four-passenger sedan, can be recharged by plugging it in; it can then be driven on power from a battery alone for 50 miles. After that, an onboard gasoline generator kicks on to recharge the battery, extending the range by 250 miles between fill-ups… The car will run on a lithium manganese oxide battery made by Advanced Lithium Power, based in Vancouver… Two 150-kilowatt electric motors together deliver 403 horsepower–enough to accelerate to 60 miles per hour in 5.8 seconds… the car carries a hefty price tag of $87,000.
Asians are getting into the race for the Google Lunar X prize… many teams are drawing heavily on Asian engineering and manufacturing but several new teams are based there.
A US$20 million first prize goes to the team which is the first to build, launch and land a privately-funded lunar rover on the moon by the end of 2012. In this case, “privately funded” means that at least 90% of a team’s support or funding must come from the private sector… After making a successful soft landing, the lunar rover needs to go at least 500 meters across the lunar surface while simultaneously transmitting video, images and data back to Earth in order to win… There are only 3 GLXP teams now based in Asia, including two in Malaysia – Independence-X Aerospace (IDXA) which is based in Shah Alam and Kuala Lumpur, and Team Advaeros in Perak…