Bendable Bridgestone e-Book Reader

Bendable Bridgestone e-Book Reader » My Digital Life

Bridgestone, the name synonymous with tires and Formula 1, has got the e-book market into a frenzy lately through its new invention. It claims that it has pioneered the design of the world’s first flexible e-book reader. The e-book reader has a 10.7-inch-screen and measures 5.8mm thick, half the thickness of Kindle. It can display color pages and be bent to a certain extent. Both the circuit board and electronic board are flexible. While Bridgestone has announced that it has no plans to commercialize the product yet, the technology is set to make e-book readers more appealing and versatile for users.

Enermax Aurora Micro Wireless Keyboard Review

Enermax Aurora Micro Wireless Keyboard Review | Hardware Secrets

Conclusions

* Top-notch looks.
* High-quality trackball.
* Scroll wheel is an excellent addition.
* Works out of the box with video game consoles like Playstation 3.
* No extra software is needed to operate the multimedia and function keys.
* You can feel and hear the keys being pressed.
* Low battery indicator.

Weak Points

* Price
* It could be based on Bluetooth technology.

OLED Prices to be Lower than LCD in 2016

DailyTech – OLED Prices to be Lower than LCD in 2016

Consumers will have to wait until 2016 to see the price of OLED panels drop below the price of LCD panels. The reason is that a stable supply of large OLED panels at a low cost is unavailable today. Big challenges for OLED panels today include driver elements, organic EL materials, and the sealing process.

Kim said, “We will be able to use a low-temperature polycrystal silicon with the sixth-generation size glass substrate.” He continued, “However, for 40-inch and larger panels, we have to use the eighth-generation size glass substrate. Therefore, we have to develop equipment that can deal with an SPC process at a temperature of more than 700°C.”

According to LG, its OLED panels will use florescent materials until 2011 and then move to phosphorescent materials after 2012. When 2016 rolls around OLED panels will be 20-30% lower in material cost and have an equivalent yield to LCD panels today. In 2012, the OLED panel will have a 50% higher material cost and 30% lower yield than LCD panels.

12 Must-Know Windows 7 Shortcuts – How To

12 Must-Know Windows 7 Shortcuts – How To by ExtremeTech

If you’ve been using computers a long time, you can remember the days when you needed the keyboard for everything. Some of us have never given up the habit, and still use keyboard shortcuts in Windows with great regularity. Depending on what you’re doing, they can really speed you up. So if you’ve either bought a new system using Windows 7, or if you’ve bought the OS and installed it yourself on a computer you already have, you may be wondering what new keyboard and mouse shortcuts on it can make your life easier. Here’s a look at 12 of them.

Ultracapacitor Startup Gets a Big Boost

Technology Review: Ultracapacitor Startup Gets a Big Boost

Riccardo Signorelli, first a graduate student and later a postdoc in Schindall’s lab, developed a way to replace the activated carbon with vertically oriented nanotubes. This significantly increases the surface area and voltage of an ultracapacitor electrode, which in turn boosts the amount of energy that an ultracapacitor can store. Schindall’s group hopes to develop ultracapacitors that can store five times more energy than those on the market now, bringing their capacity up to one-quarter of the amount stored by lithium-ion batteries. Because ultracapacitors can be charged and discharged thousands of times more than a rechargeable battery, however, Schindall and Signorelli believe that reaching that goal would make ultracapacitors a viable and cost-effective solution for hybrid vehicles. In fact, hybrid buses and heavy-duty vehicles are the first market FastCAP plans to target.

Signorelli cofounded FastCAP to commercialize the nanotube-enhanced ultracapacitors, and he is the company’s president. While working at MIT, he has demonstrated electrodes that deliver the power density that the company pitched in its ARPA-E grant application. The ARPA-E grant, he says, will enable FastCAP to complete the process of putting the electrode into a packaged device that operates as predicted. Additionally, by the end of the grant term he plans to have determined the process that will be used for manufacture, built a pilot-scale production plant, and tested the devices in vehicles. Signorelli calls the ARPA-E grant “instrumental” to achieving these plans.

High-Energy Batteries Coming to Market

Technology Review: High-Energy Batteries Coming to Market

A Swiss company says it has developed rechargeable zinc-air batteries that can store three times the energy of lithium ion batteries, by volume, while costing only half as much. ReVolt, of Staefa, Switzerland, plans to sell small “button cell” batteries for hearing aids starting next year and to incorporate its technology into ever larger batteries, introducing cell-phone and electric bicycle batteries in the next few years. It is also starting to develop large-format batteries for electric vehicles.

The battery design is based on technology developed at SINTEF, a research institute in Trondheim, Norway. ReVolt was founded to bring it to market and so far has raised 24 million euros in investment. James McDougall, the company’s CEO, says that the technology overcomes the main problem with zinc-air rechargeable batteries–that they typically stop working after relatively few charges. If the technology can be scaled up, zinc-air batteries could make electric vehicles more practical by lowering their costs and increasing their range.

The unromantic truth about why we kiss – to spread germs

The unromantic truth about why we kiss – to spread germs | Mail Online

It is an international symbol of love and romance. But the kiss may have evolved for reasons that are far more practical – and less alluring.

British scientists believe it developed to spread germs.

They say that the uniquely human habit allows a bug that is dangerous in pregnancy to be passed from man to woman to give her time to build up immunity.

Mecanismele evoluţiei vieţii pe Terra

Mecanismele evoluţiei vieţii pe Terra

În cadrul seriei dedicate evoluţiei vieţii pe Terra am prezentat dovezi în favoarea teoriei evoluţionismului. În continuare vom explora mecanismele care fac posibilă evoluţia formelor de viaţă. Pentru a realiza acest lucru, este nevoie să găsim răspunsurile la doar două întrebări:

1. Cum apare diversitatea în cazul genomului indivizilor care fac parte din acelaşi grup (aceeaşi specie)?

2. Care este modul prin care această diversitate conduce la apariţia unor noi specii?

Special relativity passes key test

Special relativity passes key test – physicsworld.com

Scientists studying radiation from a distant gamma-ray burst have found that the speed of light does not vary with wavelength down to distance scales below that of the Planck length. They say that this disfavours certain theories of quantum gravity that postulate the violation of Lorentz invariance.

Declaratii dupa accident

Declaratii dupa accident

MSI Unveils Big Bang Trinergy P55

MSI Unveils Big Bang Trinergy P55

MSI, a leading high-performance mainboard company, unveil its first gaming series mainboards in Intel P55 platform featuring awe-inspiring graphics and audio functionality to offer serious gamers immersive gaming experience.

The state-of-the-art gaming line is inspired by the mighty Big Bang. Unique and innovative, the all-new Big Bang series will deliver the shock and awe of unprecedented experiences and expand into its own collection of galaxies.

The first Big Bang branded mainboard, Trinergy is designed with eye-catching features such as NVIDIA SLI technology and QuantumWave audio processing with the latest THX TruStudio PC and Creative EAX ADVANCED HD 5.0 plus exclusive performance boost design from MSI.

No men OR women needed: artificial sperm and eggs created for first time

No men OR women needed: artificial sperm and eggs created for first time | Mail Online

Human eggs and sperm have been grown in the laboratory in research which could change the face of parenthood.

It paves the way for a cure for infertility and could help those left sterile by cancer treatment to have children who are biologically their own.

But it raises a number of moral and ethical concerns. These include the possibility of children being born through entirely artificial means, and men and women being sidelined from the process of making babies.

„Kiwi de România” şi „apă încălzită cu lupa”-din noul val de inovaţii româneşti

„Kiwi de România” şi „apă încălzită cu lupa”-din noul val de inovaţii româneşti – Gandul

Un profesor de filosofie a inventat împreună cu rectorul Politehnicii Timişoara un dispozitiv de producere a apei calde menajere de 20 de ori mai ieftin decât sistemele solare existente pe piaţă, altul a introdus în construcţia de case materialul folosit ca umplutură la fabricarea aripilor de Boeinguri, un timişorean a creat “îngrăşământul cu magnet pisat”, care creşte producţia de legume-fructe cu 300%, şi agronomii au constatat că, de când clima a luat-o razna, kiwii şi curmalii se simt deja ca acasă în Bucureşti.

Intel, Numonyx announce phase-change memory breakthrough

Intel, Numonyx announce phase-change memory breakthrough – The Tech Report

With this breakthrough, Intel and Numonyx expect to make PCM considerably cheaper to produce than before—there was talk in the conference call of a cost structure much like that of NAND flash memory, which powers today’s solid-state drives, with similar density increases over time and without compromised performance. The two firms see the potential for “collapsing” existing memory types (such as NAND and DRAM) into PCM in future devices.

ASUS Unveils Motherboards to Feature True USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gb/s Performance

ASUS Unveils Motherboards to Feature True USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gb/s Performance

ASUS today announced a range of enhanced motherboard solutions that deliver true USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gb/s data throughput performance. The ASUS Xtreme Design P7P55D-E Series motherboard has onboard support while the ASUS Xtreme Design P7P55D Series utilises the ASUS U3S6 PCIe x4 expansion card to deliver the latest USB and SATA data transfer capabilities.

GIGABYTE Introduces Full Range of Motherboards Featuring Onboard USB 3.0, SATA 3

GIGABYTE Introduces Full Range of Motherboards Featuring Onboard USB 3.0, SATA 3

GIGABYTE Technology CO., LTD., a leading manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards, today announced seven new P55A-series motherboards that feature GIGABYTE 333 onboard acceleration. This thrilling trio of technologies includes USB 3.0, Serial-ATA Revision 3.0 (6Gbps) and a 3x boost in USB power, and redefines the highly successful P55 platform.

World’s first commercial application of DSSC solar technology is in the bag

World’s first commercial application of DSSC solar technology is in the bag

The first commercial shipment of low-light, ultra thin, solar cell technology called DSSC (dye-sensitized solar cells), created by G24 Innovations, has been sent to Hong Kong-based consumer electronics bag manufacturer, Mascotte Industrial Associates for use in backpacks and bags. Ideal for clothing and portable applications, DSSCs are less than 1mm thick, inexpensive, don’t contain silicon or cadmium and can even operate indoors, making them ideal for powering cell telephones, cameras and portable electronics. The company says DSSCs also can be embedded into tent material to power LED lighting systems for camping.

Next-generation TMOS displays closer to mass production – means cheaper better LCD displays

Next-generation TMOS displays closer to mass production

Uni-Pixel, a company based in Woodlands, Texas, has announced it is about to start mass production of a thin-film to be used in time-multiplexed optical shutter (TMOS) displays, a next-generation display technology that exploits retinal persistence in the human eye and promises significantly better performance than CRT, LCD and OLED displays with, among other things, great durability and dramatically improved energy efficiency.

The vast majority of displays available today use spatial superimposition of a synchronized red, green and blue light, each shining with a specific intensity, to create millions of color combinations. For instance, in LCD displays each pixel is made up of three RGB-colored dots that can take up discrete values over a 6- or 8-bit range: when watching the pixels from a distance, the human eye blends these three components together and perceives a single color over a total 18- or 24-bit range respectively.

TMOS displays harness a different principle in human vision: rather than superimposing the three components spatially, they do it temporally, exploiting the retinal persistence by intermittently sending just one of the three components at a time at very short intervals, and letting our brains “do the math” by adding the colors.
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This simple but seemingly very powerful architecture also has other advantages: for instance, because of its small pixel size, it will be possible to reach densities as high as 300dpi. But the figure that might well be the most impressive is the projected display’s life. The first component expected to fail in a TMOS display is one of the three LEDs, each of which have a life of 100,000 hours under continuous operation. However, TMOS displays use the three LEDs intermittently, which puts display life to approximately 300,000 hours, much more than LCDs or OLEDs.

This approach greatly simplifies the manufacturing process, basically subtracting components from existing LCD lines and reducing others — such as the thin-film transistors for the RGB dots — by a factor of three, resulting in monitors that are 60 percent cheaper to manufacture than LCDs.

Official Tool from MS Enables USB Install for Windows 7

Official Tool from MS Enables USB Install for Windows 7

Microsoft has finally owned up to the exciting new tool it’s releasing with Windows 7, a bootable USB Installer creator. Aimed squarely at netbook owners, which have eschewed the venerable optical drive for weight and battery life. Microsoft’s tool will let you take your downloaded install files and turn a sufficiently sized USB drive into a bootable installer. Be prepared, if you’ve never tried to put a few gigabytes of files onto an average flash drive in one sitting, you’re probably in for a bit of a wait. A USB hard drive is probably a better bet but not as cool. The program may also be called Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool (WUDT).

YouTube – Borderlands Review – new game

YouTube – Borderlands Review