My students and I equipped street trees with sensors in and around the trunk in Los angeles to monitor growth
to demonstrate how batteries work. To make a battery from organic material all you need is two metals oe an anode,
which is the negative electrode, such as zinc, and a cathode, the positively charged electrode, such as copper.
Others have made"earth batteries  using two metal plates and a pile of dirt, or a bucket of water.
"but enough to construct a battery that could charge mobile phones or laptops in places where there is no grid, no power connection.
 Their cost analyses suggested that a single boiled potato battery with zinc and copper electrodes generates portable energy at an estimated $9 per kilowatt hour,
which is 50-fold cheaper than a typical 1. 5 volt AA alkaline cell or D cell battery,
Which raises an important question oe why isn't the potato battery already a roaring success?
companies or organisations embraced potato batteries?""The simple answer is they don't even know about it, Â reasons Rabinowitch.
The potatoes that don't make it to the market could easily be turned into batteries. Pithy answeryet in Sri lanka
and the best battery performance was obtained by chopping the plantain pith after boiling. With the boiled piths, they found they could power a single LED for more than 500 hours,
"In reality, the potato battery is essentially like a regular battery you'd buy at the store,
Basically, some people might not want to show off their potato battery to impress a neighbor. Still, it cannot be denied that the potato battery idea works,
and it appears cheap. Advocates of potato power will no doubt continue to keep chipping away.
Perfume companies, with total global revenues of around $31. 6bn last year, are of course always on the look out for novel fragrance combinations.
Given enough time, Kampachi Farms will replace stagnant ponds with GPS-tracked cages stitched out of copper wire to enable a constant inflow of fresh ocean water without flushing out the precious fish.
He hopes that it could become the basis of self-cleaning robot oe a potentially useful design for Mars rovers
and sensors covered in Martian dust. So, perhaps in the not too distant future, Mars rovers will shake their circuits in a similar way to a dog emerging from a pond.
Predictive policing Mark Johnson The Economist 19 july 2013 On the use of big data in policing.
I'm looking at how we might change the agricultural landscape by hacking plants. Our human population is increasing beyond anything Earth has experienced before.
and unless I commandeer a supercomputer or a global botnet to do the legwork, I'd be better off mining loose change from the backs of old sofas.
The worst video game ever madedesert Bus Simon Parkin New yorker 9 july 2013 Magicians Penn and Teller set out in 1995 to create the worst video game ever.
making a Desert Bus high score perhaps the most costly in gaming. Â But it's found a semi-ironic second life as a fund-raising instrument for charities.
The wastefulness of automation Frances Coppola Pieria 8 july 2013 If robots put more and more workers out of jobs,
but even for the rich, heavy taxation may be preferable to an economy in which there is little or no demand for the goods which they and their robots produce.
Then again, maybe it would be better just to stop building robots, and keep people working.
Government builds free cloud-based backup for ungrateful nation Totient Medium 8 july 2013"The cloud backup program, called Prism, safely stores all American's phone
and documents, for years in a completely secure, state of the art data centre located in Utah. Â The joy of old age (no kidding) Oliver Sacks New york times 6 july 2013 On turning 80."
Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft oe are turning against interoperability.""They want to lock you in, shut out competitors,
British and Danish artificial life researchers such as Rachel Armstrong and Martin Hanczyc are designing protocells oe a mix of chemicals
which has a lattice exoskeleton. These solutions are realised currently through industrial processes. But we have reached a point at the start of the 21st Century where we do not have to copy nature
By rigging the LED bulbs to the motorcycle indicator box, powered by the battery and solar panel,
 Richard's invention may not be a remarkable technological breakthrough oe flashing motion sensor lights could probably do the trick-but the fact that it costs hardly anything
Crowdsourced conservationwith increasing pressures on land and resources, as well as a rising demand for ivory, Kenya has witnessed a stunning decline of its large wildlife oe nearly two-thirds oe over the past few decades.
Another service called Elephant 911 crowdsources information on incidents involving elephants oe such as suspected poacher activity
owners plan to start test-flying a $75, 000 drone to live-stream information on the rhinos to rangers on the ground.
Nature's hidden patternsone of the unforeseen boons of research on artificial intelligence is that it has revealed much about our own intelligence.
But a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters stands the problem of image analysis on its head by asking not how we solve the problem of interpreting the world but
For example, any processing of information oe changing a bit in a computer's binary memory from a 1 to a 0,
A team at Princeton university led by William Bialek now integrates these ideas with concepts from image processing and neuroscience.
the country has become known for drone strikes against Al Qaeda suspects and for the 2011 protests-inspired by the Arab spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt oe that led to the overthrow of its leader.
His solution is a website that could provide a unique 10-digit address-or Natural Area code-to everyone in Yemen based on GPS coordinates.
including hi-tech medical sensors that could, it was claimed, help extend the lives of the 97%of the Yemeni population who never make it past the age of 65.
Drone musictedx events like the one in Sanaa are affiliated with TED, but locally organized. They are an offshoot of the two,
and there is also growing criticism over US drone strikes, which are embraced openly by the current government.
Yemen's interim President Abd Rabu Mansur Hadi, in his first visit to Washington in September, marveled at drone technology,
a reported US drone strike targeted suspected Al Qaeda militants in central Yemen, one of a series of attacks that has escalated only in recent months.
titled,"How Drones Help Al Qaeda Â. But, on stage, Mothana decided to avoid the topic, focusing instead on local communities and leadership.
and talking about drones is rather depressing, Â he said. That doesn't mean that TEDXSANAA was droneless.
One of the more popular moments at the event was a replay of a videotaped TED 2012 talk by University of Pennsylvania Professor Vijay Kumar on swarming drones, titled"Robots that fly...
 Though Kumar's talk focused on small civilian drones that could be used in situations such as earthquake recovery,
divorcing drones from the reality of their political and military applications is hard, even at TED.
The video's closing scene pictured a tiny band of the flying robots performing the James bond spy theme.
Monsters, wimps and rockstarsmoral machines Gary Marcus New yorker 27 november 2012google's driverless cars are already legal in three US states, California, Florida and Nevada.
is did what Auernheimer criminal hacking or simply exposing a security failure? Forest Giant David Quammen National geographic 30 november 2012on a gentle slope above a trail junction in Sequoia National park, around 7, 000 feet above sea level in the Sierra nevada, lies a very big tree.
"We've often said the perfect search engine will provide you with exactly what you need to know at exactly the right moment,
or memory cards that have lost data. From India to Ethiopia, I have had no trouble in finding someone who can sort the problem out,
and memory cards will stop uploading after a preset number of photo uploads. The user is forced then to buy a replacement.
or replace the hard drive and battery. As a result, users can find themselves buying a new computer every couple of years.
not only do need consumers to buy a different memory card or battery or charger for each device or brand of electronic equipment they buy, from phones to laptops to toothbrushes,
but they must also buy a new charger or adaptor when they upgrade from an iphone 4 to the iphone 5, for example.
or overwrite the memory card software. But this is technically challenging and time-consuming, and most people aren't even aware of the reason for their device no longer working.
Motorola and Nokia, both of which were known for their durable phones with easily replaced long-lasting batteries
have released now both thin phones with glued-in batteries. But some companies have been bucking the trend.
The same arguments apply to e-cigarettes oe battery-powered devices that look like cigarettes, and release a nicotine vapour without any of the accompanying carcinogens.
Google throws open doors to its top-secret data center Steven Levy Wired 17 october 2012 A visit to the beating heart of the digital age.
For years, he had been using airborne laser sensors known as Lidar (Light Detection And Ranging) to map
In less than a week, the team collected more data than they had in a quarter of century of hacking their way through the jungle.
Radar has even been used, famously uncovering vast new areas of the vast Cambodian temple complex Angkor Wat.
All shoot thousands of pulses of laser light and then use sensors to detect any reflections.
 Using it in combination with GPS and other location technologies, it allows very accurate 3d maps to be built.
equipped with handheld GPS units his team spent three months on foot mapping the area in search of other treats.
and store it in a battery. Â But this battery doesn't store electricity. Instead, it is a thermal battery that can"store cold Â. White won't go into great detail about the battery's design,
except to say that it features a phase-change material that can supercool quickly in a compact space.
The company recently field tested a 750 litre device with India's largest private dairy.
how charged the thermal battery is, and even about maintenance issues. Â The company is in the process of moving from Boston to India in the coming months
he's clearly a major inspiration for the character of the-resolutely heterosexual-cryptographer Tom Jericho in the film of Robert Harris'Enigma (the two are more distinct in the book),
Or artificial intelligence. Sometimes all three. As the only name most of us are familiar with among the code-breakers at Bletchley Park,
because it was itself based on an earlier device to crack the Enigma ciphers called the Bomba developed by Polish cryptologists.
and artificial intelligence are even more questionable: both have many fathers (and a few mothers) and even without his considerable input does anyone really think we would not have computers very similar to the ones we now use?
but having enough research-grade sensors that cover hundreds of miles of fault lines would cost them millions and millions of dollars.
But the computing power to run it is too expensive. Whilst in the deep, lush forests of the Congo Basin having enough well-trained people to monitor illegal tree felling
I think crowdsourcing could almost be more important than the development of the Web, Â says Ben Segal,
desktops or laptops from people scattered worldwide can band together to mimic the number-crunching power of a supercomputer.
several projects were using volunteer computing power for solving complex problems, ranging from cataloguing stars in the distant corners of the universe with Galaxy Zoo to predicting the complex three dimensional structures of protein structures with Foldit.
and sensors were sent to New zealand following the earthquake in September 2010 to learn more about the occurrence of"aftershocks  oe which are almost as dangerous as the main event itself.
The sensors were developed by Elizabeth Cochran of the US Geological Survey and Jesse Lawrence of Stanford university an currently cost between $60 and $200 per sensor, a fraction of the cost of professional seismometers
"With many more cheap sensors, instead of guessing where strong motions were felt by interpolating between research sensors,
because we have (QCN) sensors there. Â And soon there could be an army of mobile"quake-catchers Â, according to QCN's Carl Christensen.
and GPS signaling. By summer 2012 QCN expects to release an app that turns your Android smartphone into a pocket-sized earthquake sensor.
Soon after they hope to send 1, 000 sensor-equipped phones to places where a fault-line has slipped just.
Some of the hardware being adopted in other citizen science projects also hail from unexpected origins.
A major advance in scientific computing came from the development of superfast 3d Graphics Processing Units (GPUS) to run video games on Sony's Playstation 3 console.
Consequently, Dave Anderson, founder of the open-source software platform BOINC, foresees volunteer computing at an"exascale  level oe about 1, 000,000, 000,
000,000, 000 calculations per second oe 100 times more powerful than today's top supercomputers.
Gaming for gainthe scientific benefits of volunteer computing can be enormous, and consequently there are a host of efforts looking to capitalise on people's unused processing power.
they now have the computing power of up to 15,000 desktops working simultaneously. Nicolas Maire, a researcher for the organization, estimates that this figure is the equivalent of a single desktop computer operating between 800 and 1, 000 years."
Some of the most successful volunteer computing approaches have their roots in the world of gaming.
In January this year, gamers produced the first crowdsourced protein redesign oe revving up the performance of an enzyme for one of the most important reactions organic chemists use to build compounds ranging from drugs to pesticides.
"There are certain problems you can crack with a supercomputer that would be hopeless with volunteer computing,
Supercomputers are suited best for problems where thousands of processors must communicate with each other and swap data frequently during a calculation, according to Grey.
and the open-source community gather at hackfests to find volunteer programming and computing solutions to science problems.
and tag with GPS coordinates.""What is good is that these maps will do the talking for communities,
GPS provides accurate time and good location; phone pictures provide location and timestamps (which are unlikely to be tampered by nonliterate
and when they communicate with air pollution sensors or a microphone about noise level, for instance, you have stamped a time observation from an instrument.
with the support of IBM's World Community Grid, set up Computing for Clean Water to use computing power from more than 50,000 volunteers to virtually design better low-cost, low-pressure water filters,
That heart-thudding glimpse of copper fur"burning bright"will stain my memory forever; it will be truly devastating
the machinery sowing this new revolution includes supercomputers, molecular biology and arrays of sensors. Here, BBC Future profiles four areas of research to discover how close they are to feeding the coming nine billion.
supercomputers. Long's team broke photosynthesis down into a long series of mathematical equations and fed them to the National Center for Supercomputer Applications in Illinois. The supercomputer whirred through the numbers and spat out a list of"best-bet
 interventions. For example, one potentially easy win they identified was to dial up production of just a single protein known as sedoheptulose bisphosphatase, or SBPASE.
They do it by bringing electronic tools into their crop rows-global positioning systems, infrared devices that measure soil's electrical conductivity and light and sound sensors.
#15 Most Bizarre Brain Experiments If the brain is a supercomputer these would be its hacks.
That strange, mysterious and awesome mass of gray matter is more powerful and creative than any supercomputer.
citing issue with the resulting creature being oetoo human. http://www. msnbc. msn. com/id/10441350/ns/health-cloning and stem cells 8. Robot powered by rats brain in bizarre British experiment
On the other hand, robots controlled by rat brains now thats an abomination if Ive ever heard of one.
which consist of attaching a chunk of rat brain to a robot to see if it moves The creepy part is that it does move.
The scientists are in the process of oeteaching the robot, as if it was an animal being trained. http://www. dailymail. co. uk/sciencetech/article-1044909/Robot-powered-rats-brain-bizarre-British-experiment. html#ixzz16mpvastz 9. Brain
Experiments of CIA to Create the Perfect Soldier The Perfect Soldier (almost) existed, and he wouldve been American.
Whats interesting is the Coke label activated parts of the brain (memory, self-image and cultural knowledge) that the Pepsi label didnt. http://www. hnl. bcm. tmc. edu
And unlike many of the best-known console video games like the classic Super Mario Bros. from Nintendo or the latest in the Call of Duty series, from Activision cellphone games like Angry Birds
a ringtone, a video game, book. It has shot a at the big time. On cellphones, he added, oeanyone with coding skills,
and is working on versions of Angry Birds for gaming consoles and PCS, along with a line of stuffed birds and pigs.
an effort to punish companiesand individuals attempting to fight internet piracy. The current attacks related to Wikileaks are performed under the same banner.
12, said she learned. oethey lose their memory and go back to childhood. It is part of a remarkable South korean campaign to cope with an exploding problem:
and oehow is Your Memory? Free diagnosis center in Mapo. The Mapo Center for Dementia perches at a busy crossroads of old and new, near a university and a shop selling naturopathic goat extracts.
I dont know. oeyou have a lot of loss of memory, Dr. Yang said. oethis is the very beginning stages of Alzheimers disease.
researchers will be intent on harnessing knowledge of host sensors to advance plant and animal health, said Ronald,
Everyone runs around with GPS chips in their sneakers nowadays to track their runs and share them online this is like that for cyclists oeicase:
That heartbeat sensor is just one example of the wild smart phone casings Apple is working on oeicharge:
Records your progress playing a video game, then creates a custom comic book of your experience oeidim:
An ambient light sensor that adjusts the brightness of your screen to fit your surroundings oeifluxcapacitor:
is that the viral-fungal combination disrupts memory or navigating skills and the bees simply get lost.
the resulting social intelligence and data-mining could exceed anything that Foursquare could design at this point in time.
if they are posting from a location-enabled deviceo provide a business directory infrastructure for the forthcoming geolocation product.
The fake iphones special features include a removable battery and a place for two SIM cards, meaning the user can have two phone numbers ring for the same phone. oeyou almost cant tell the difference between this and the real thing,
Multimedia could be a catalyst for spawning more reading. Vook does not disclose information about its finances or its payments to authors.
when Freeman and his colleagues used the UK Science Research Councils supercomputer called HECTOR (High End Computing Terascale Resource),
42. 5g per 100g=2, 482g sugar per year Calories: 454 per 100g 26,514 calories per year Buns, cakes and pastries:
19. 5g per 100g=854g per year Sugars: 5. 3g per 100g=232g per year Calories: 240 per 100g 10,512 calories per year Ice cream:
5g per 100ml=4, 050g per year Calories: 48 per 100ml=38,880 cals per year Skimmed: Fat:
5g per 100ml=4, 050g per year Calories: 34 per 100ml 27,540 calories per year Sausages: The average child eats 5, 840g a year Equal to:
19. 5g per 100g=1, 139g per year Sugars: 1. 2g per 100g=70g per year Calories:
2. 5g per 100g=91. 25g per year Sugars: 35g per 100g=1, 278g per year Calories:
Over the holidays, for example, it bundled a new Sony TV, Playstation gaming system, game and Blu-ray movie for $900 less than it would cost to buy the items separately. oewe sold out of all the units in that promotion, notes Redsun.
and in Germany beekeepers have started fitting GPS tracking devices to their hives. Via Telegraph Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati m
with the manure from their cows possibly powering the vast data centers of companies like Google and Microsoft.
10,000 cows could fuel a 1mw data center, the equivalent of a computing center used by a bank.
1. A critical approach to these bunkers as symbols of xenophobia in order to invert their meaning and change then into symbols of hospitality. 2. The preservation of the bunkers in terms of their link to the memory of an important period of the Albanian history
The battery 5. 25 WHR at 3. 7v compared to the 3gs battery, which is 4. 51 WHR at 3. 7v.
On the back of the phone, it said it was XX GB, but Gizmodo were unable to see how large the memory was as they believe Apple had killed the phones 4. 0 operating system after it went missing.
The iphone 4g is expected to hit stores worldwide in June, according to the latest blog speculation and will be on the Verizon network in the US.
uses heat sensors to detect a fire, then automatically relays the information to a forest station through mobile phone technology. oethe heat sensors are programmed to detect temperatures which are over 45 degrees Celsius,
said the soft-spoken inventor. oetemperature from the sun does not go beyond this level in terms of heating
Katana altered sensor levels to detect body temperate and then touched the sensor with his finger.
That immediately triggered a call to his mobile phone. oethis is how the system is expected to work,
One of the more interesting features of Apples e-ticket patent is that it includes the possibility of an NFC (near field communication) interface that would allow the iphone to communicate with other NFC enabled devices or RFID tags.
turnstiles, or RFID tickets. There are a number of potential benefits to using this system. The most obvious benefit is you would no longer have to worry about losing
Computers, cellular networks and data centers are connected to the destruction of over 600 square miles of forest in the U s. because of their ravenous consumption of electricity.
Greenpeace estimates that by 2020 data centers will demand more electricity than is demanded currently by France
According to the U s. Department of energy, the electricity consumed by data centers in the United states doubled from 2000 to 2006, reaching more than 60 billion kilowatt hours per year,
Science will create real-time reactive sensors in our bodies that can read everything from the fluctuation of brainwaves, to micro changes in heartbeats, to gastro-digestive processes, to variations of skin perspiration rates.
The sensors will need to interface with an equally nuanced supply chain to meet the needs of this next generation, hyper-individualized consumer.
The entire production area in these silos will be managed with a robotic arm that travels up and down a central shaft performing all necessary tasks of planting,
which sunlight will be channeled to provide natural illumination for optimal plant growth as well as the primary rail for the robotic arm.
The laptop marks a sharp contrast to the supercomputers at the disposal of Phil Jones and the other prophets of global warming,
Ultimately, the lack of information centers around the fact that terra preta is old and biochar, well,
while simultaneously letting Microsoft experiment with new business models that dont threaten its traditional licensing-based model (as cloud computing does for its server and oedesktop businesses).
A form of money used in an online virtual world, such as oelinden Dollars in Linden Labs Second life or oegold pieces in Blizzard Entertainments World of Warcraft.
the ergonomic and bionic arm that grips greasy chips & brings them to your lips.
and memory, is considered a strong aphrodisiac. It impacts the central nervous system gonadic tissues and the endocrine system,
He helped shape not only Nevada but its gaming industry, the entire American Southwest and even major league baseball.
He helped shape not only Nevada but its gaming industry, the entire American Southwest and even major league baseball.
and the purchase marked the first entry of a respected public stock corporation into Las vegas gaming.
In those days Wall street was afraid of gaming and Nevada gaming authorities were afraid of Wall street. After a series of scandals involving mob investments in casinos,
In 1978 the company was the largest gaming employer in Nevada with some 7, 000 workers.
It isnt clear whether Webbs entry into Nevada gaming inspired Howard Hughes entry. They shared interests in flying and played golf together in the 1940s.
and the purchase marked the first entry of a respected public stock corporation into Las vegas gaming.
In those days Wall street was afraid of gaming and Nevada gaming authorities were afraid of Wall street. After a series of scandals involving mob investments in casinos,
In 1978 the company was the largest gaming employer in Nevada with some 7, 000 workers.
It isnt clear whether Webbs entry into Nevada gaming inspired Howard Hughes entry. They shared interests in flying and played golf together in the 1940s.
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