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- Miracle Battery Gets from 0 to 70 Percent in 2 Minutes, Lasts Up to 20 Years
- Xbox One to Run Windows 10 Apps in 2015
- Frozen as an classic retro video game
- TinyScreen Brings Games to Tiny Gadgets
- Malleable Robots to Lead the Way in Space Exploration
| Miracle Battery Gets from 0 to 70 Percent in 2 Minutes, Lasts Up to 20 Years Posted: 13 Oct 2014 11:46 AM PDT  Researchers at Nanyang Technological University have developed a battery that charges ultra-fast and is able to store energy for up to 20 years. The increased popularity and use of smartphones determined scientists to look for ways of improving the way batteries charge and store energy. The good news about the battery developed by the NTU researchers is that it’s not an absolute novelty, so the research didn’t really start from the ground up. Instead, it represents an improvement over existing Lithium-Ion batteries. What’s really revolutionary here is that the battery can be charged to 70 percent in 2 minutes, and that it can store the charge for up to 20 years. Mind you, this doesn’t mean that a smartphone equipped with such a battery would need to be recharged every two decades, but that the battery will still be usable after 20 years if it’s charged and then forgotten in a cave. Not the Batcave, as I doubt the Caped Crusader would misplace his gadgets for so long. Associate Professor Chen Xiaodong from the School of Materials Science and Engineering at NTU Singapore, who invented these ultra-fast charging batteries, pointed out that “With our nanotechnology, electric cars would be able to increase their range dramatically with just five minutes of charging, which is on par with the time needed to pump petrol for current cars. Equally important, we can now drastically cut down the waste generated by disposed batteries, since our batteries last ten times longer than the current generation of lithium-ion batteries.” NTU professor Rachid Yazami, who co-invented 34 years ago the lithium-graphite anode, a precursor of modern Li-Ion batteries, stated that “While the cost of lithium-ion batteries has been significantly reduced and its performance improved since Sony commercialised it in 1991, the market is fast expanding towards new applications in electric mobility and energy storage. There is still room for improvement and one such key area is the power density — how much power can be stored in a certain amount of space — which directly relates to the fast charge ability. Ideally, the charge time for batteries in electric vehicles should be less than 15 minutes, which Prof Chen’s nanostructured anode has proven to do.” Professor Chen also mentioned that these batteries are easy to manufacture: “Manufacturing this new nanotube gel is very easy. Titanium dioxide and sodium hydroxide are mixed together and stirred under a certain temperature. Battery manufacturers will find it easy to integrate our new gel into their current production processes.” In this context, we can only hope that the batteries will be available in a commercially viable form in the near future. As a matter of fact, you know what? I want a few right now! Be social! Follow Walyou on Facebook and Twitter, and read more related stories about the StoreDot fast-charging smartphone battery, and the molten metal batteries that store renewable energy.         |
| Xbox One to Run Windows 10 Apps in 2015 Posted: 13 Oct 2014 07:00 AM PDT  As Microsoft reveals their plans for an Xbox One update, it seems that the console will be able to work with Windows 10 apps from next year.
Windows 8 was an ungodly beast of an operating system. We’ve spoken time and time again about its uncomfortable features, a layout that made it useless to everybody who hadn’t forked out for a pricey touchscreen monitor and it carelessly robbed us of the Start menu. The horror. Microsoft is looking to replace that with Windows 10 though, and the company has promised that along with giving us back the Start menu and ditching that god awful Metro tiled layout, it will also make it far easier for developers to make apps that work across all of Microsoft’s devices. And, it seems, that includes the Xbox One. In their Windows 10 announcement post, Microsoft specifically explained the following,
While PCs can use an Xbox controller as a control input, given that mouse/keyboard is the standard control combo, it seems that they were referring to Xbox consoles. Not only this but next year the Xbox One is set to get a whopping great update. While the entire list of features hasn’t been announced, it will allow the console to work with "universal Windows apps" i.e apps developed for Windows 10. It will even give the console a shiny new dashboard that switches out the usual green and black colour scheme for a lovely blue one (as seen above). A console that has got off to a relatively staggered start, the reveal could potentially buff up the Xbox One’s sales and Microsoft is no doubt looking for a way to keep the Xbox brand in line with the Windows side of things. That’s especially clear after current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella dismissed suggestions that he sell off the Xbox brand and make a tidy profit. We’ll keep you posted once we know more. Source: IBTimes Be social! Follow Walyou on Facebook and Twitter, and read more related stories, Here's Why Microsoft Skipped Windows 9, Microsoft Announces Windows 10    |
| Frozen as an classic retro video game Posted: 13 Oct 2014 06:00 AM PDT  Frozen gets the pixel art treatment as it’s depicted as a classic 8 (more like 16, maybe even 32) bit video game. The result, just like the movie, is incredibly charming. The team at CineFix have created this version of Frozen, retold as if it was an old school, 8 bit classic from the NES days… or maybe SNES, as the sprites are too pretty for the NES to handle! Now, the web gets to relive Elsa and Anna’s story with retro-gaming visuals..Check the video below these lines. Via Nerdgasmo Be social! Follow Walyou on Facebook and Twitter, and read more related stories at 8-Bit Is Coming – Game of Thrones The 8-Bit Game and 8-Bit Cinema Presents Blade Runner – A Retro Gaming Replicant.    |
| TinyScreen Brings Games to Tiny Gadgets Posted: 13 Oct 2014 05:00 AM PDT  Using miniature OLED screens, one team wants to let us make our own tiny, mobile gadgets.
The wearable gadgets on the market today are incredulously expensive. A pair of Google Glass will set you back by $1000 despite Google’s pair of hi-tech spectacles still being in beta. The Apple Watch is yet to be released and has yet to really prove itself bar a nifty dial on the side that lets us zoom in and out of the display but the cheapest version is expected to retail for hundreds of dollars when it’s made available next year. So what if you were able to recreate the brilliant features of these wearables but much cheaper? And you could even customise them yourself? Well that’s what one Akron, Ohio based team is aiming to bring us, having launched a Kickstarter project for TinyScreen. A colour OLED display, each TinyScreen can be fixed and customised at your will. Whether you want to make a giant wall of miniature blinking displays, or attach them to an existing device (or even make your very own wearable out of them) TinyScreens lets us do that whether we have programming knowledge or not. Working with their TinyDuino platform (a smaller version of Arduino – a microcontroller that helps make things more interactive) users can customise the TinyScreens to display whatever information you’d like. Some suggestions include attaching them to a pair of normal glasses so that you can check information on the fly, to a smartwatch that communicates with your smartphone and notifies you of incoming messages and phone calls. TinyScreens support joysticks too via Joystick Tinyshield or you can use the buttons on the side of the screen to play games. So far a Flappy Bird clone has been made for it while the team behind it explains that that are “many more games to come” through their own efforts and through their open source software library. And, as if that weren’t enough, each TinyScreen has video support too. The team says any video of any length can be played on them when a microSD card is inserted (keep in mind TinyScreens do use batteries though so it’s probably best not to watch a 3 hour epic on them) though you’ll have to convert the videos into the proper file type. They’ve got computer software available that lets you do that though, so that’s definitely a feature to keep an eye on. As it stands, the TinyScreen Kickstarter campaign is at $79,000 which is way above their $15,000 goal. It’s definitely happening then, but check the source link below if you want to back the project. Source: TinyScreen Kickstarter Be social! Follow Walyou on Facebook and Twitter, and read more related stories, Transparent Solar Cell Turns Screens and Windows Into Power Sources, 4chan post gets screencapped, sold for $90,900 USD    |
| Malleable Robots to Lead the Way in Space Exploration Posted: 12 Oct 2014 01:17 PM PDT  Long before mankind sets foot on anything but the Moon, it will have already sent plenty of robots into space to explore the great unknown. Flexible tentacle robots seem to be ahead of the other mechanical device of their kind, though. Sure, Curiosity, Opportunity and the other rovers are not only good-looking, but also highly-functional. And still, researchers have found a way of making planet exploring robots even better: equip them with tentacle-like arms. Bioinspired robotics is definitely not something new, but it’s the first time it will be applied on NASA’s rovers. More precisely, the arms of this new generation of robots look a lot like elephant trunks, octopus arms and giraffe tongues. Grasping things and inspecting Mars crevices in a similar way a space-octopus would do weren’t exactly on NASA rovers’ to-do list. In fact, “those are all things that would be difficult for a conventional robot to do,” claimed roboticist Ian Walker of Clemson University in April at a presentation for NASA’s Future In-Space Operations group. Until now, conventional robots have been designed to function much like humans, and their arms resembled ours, with joints and everything else. In space, that design might not be as useful, though. “What we want to do is something rather different than that,” stated Walker. Their ultimate purpose is to create “something that can adapt its shape more completely down its structure, and to be able to adapt to environments you haven’t seen before. So it’s the non-factory scenario, in many ways.” Walker has explained that the design of the flexible NASA robots goes beyond elephant trunks and octopus tentacles: “You could reach it out into the environment and grab things, and basically use it as a tunable hook for stability. In some ways, this is inspired by various monkeys.” An alternative to making their arms highly flexible would be to equip them with different tools with similar functionality: “They would basically have a robot lasso, or a robot rope, that would be part of their toolkit that they could deploy in situations that called for it.” “Mechanically, these things are cheap and very versatile in what they can do,” added Walker. However, the challenge is “to extract that performance from it. So there are questions of, How much do you need to model it? How much does it need to know?” The community of tentacle robot researchers have gone a long way in the past few years, and there will be even more progress in this field in the years to come: “The learning curve has been significantly attacked, and I would say that we know an incredible amount more now than we did five years ago. At the progress we’re making right now, I would be surprised if there aren’t things that look intelligent and [are] intelligent in, say, a decade.” Be social! Follow Walyou on Facebook and Twitter, and read more related stories about the Harvard’s wearable robot that got $3M in funding from DARPA, and the bio-inspired Robugtix 3D-printed T8 octopod robot.    |
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