Technology

Affordable emission-free cars come closer to reality

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Researchers are reportedly trying to find the best possible way to develop an affordable emissions-free car.

A University of Delaware research team has been considering the important question of what it will take to create an affordable emissions-free car.

Hydrogen fuel cells may be the best option for powering zero-emission vehicles: Toyota has just introduced a hydrogen-powered car in Japan and will make them available in the United States in 2015.

Microsoft to give Lumia 830, 930 ‘lustrous’ makeover in upcoming special edition productline

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Microsoft has reportedly announced two new special editions of its Lumia 830 and 930 smartphones which offer the same specifications as its predecessor but comes with the traditional bold colours replaced with black and white backs and an “anodized gold” finish.

Although Microsoft has been quite late in joining the gold trend, yet it has pulled off an impressive trick by providing the two devices a lustrous makeover without making them look tacky, reported The Verge.

Lab grown intestines come closer to reality

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Researchers were recently able to grow a functional tissue-engineered intestine from human cells, it has been reported.

Researchers at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles have shown that tissue-engineered small intestine grown from human cells replicates key aspects of a functioning human intestine.

The tissue-engineered small intestine they developed contains important elements of the mucosal lining and support structures, including the ability to absorb sugars, and even tiny or ultra-structural components like cellular connections.

Chat with your future self on this website to know what lies ahead for you!

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If you want to know what your might be then a new website lets you do exactly the same by letting you talk to your future self.

The site called Future Self uses complicated combination of motion capture software, speech recognition, and 3-D rendering and creates a semi-realistic simulation of what the user might look like in 2034, before letting the user ask questions, fastcoexist.com reported.

The site was created as an ad campaign for Orange, a European telecom company to celebrate its 20th anniversary.

Parting with iPhone can cause grave psychological and physiological effects

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A new study has suggested that separation from iPhone can have serious psychological and physiological effects on their users.

University of Missouri researchers say these findings suggest that iPhone users should avoid parting with their phones during daily situations that involve a great deal of attention, such as taking tests, sitting in conferences or meetings, or completing important work assignments, as it could result in poorer cognitive performance on those tasks.

Monkeys can be trained to recognize themselves in mirrors

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A new study has demonstrated that monkeys can learn to see themselves in the mirrors.

The study that experimented with rhesus monkeys suggested that rhesus monkeys don’t realize when they look in a mirror that it is their own face looking back at them but it doesn’t mean they can’t learn.

Neng Gong of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that their findings suggest that the monkey brain has the basic “hardware” for mirror self-recognition, but they need appropriate training to acquire the “software” to achieve self-recognition.

Google Capital invests in CommonFloor.com

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Buoyed by the real estate growth in India, Google Capital has invested in online real estate platform CommonFloor.com, a statement said Thursday.

“CommonFloor.com makes it easy for people in India to research, buy, sell and rent real estate. The online real estate market in India is poised for tremendous growth, which is why we’re excited to work closely with CommonFloor’s excellent team in the months and years ahead,” said David Lawee, partner at Google Capital.

This is Google Capital’s third investment in Asia.

Chinese city spends $24,000 on phone hacking software

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A Chinese city will spend $24,000 on Trojan horse computer software for monitoring mobile phones, state media reported Thursday, after a notice announcing the move inexplicably appeared on a local website.

According to the Global Times newspaper, police in the eastern city of Wenzhou plan to spend a total of 149,000 yuan ($24,000) on the software, which is “designed for unlocked iPhones and Android smart phones to monitor the saved call logs, messages, photos and other information”.

How human brain ignores distractions to concentrate revealed

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Scientists have convincingly identified a network of neurons in a particular area of the brain, the lateral prefrontal cortex, that interact with one another to promptly filter visual information while at the same time ignoring distractions.

The researchers recorded brain activity in macaques as they moved their eyes to look at objects being displayed on a computer screen while ignoring visual distractions. These recorded signals were then input into a decoder running on a personal computer which mimicked the kinds of computations performed by the brain as it focuses.

Now, cycle helmets that can warn about an ‘imminent crash’

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A new helmet has been developed for cyclists that can warn them about an “imminent crash.”

The prototype helmet has been developed by Volvo to warn a vehicle when it has got too close to a cyclist and also let them know if they are in a vehicle’s blind spot so they can take action to avoid a collision, the BBC reported.

Now, nanowire clothes that keep you warm without heating everything else

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Scientists have recently developed a new nanowire coating, which can be used on clothes, that has the capability to keep human body warm without heating everything else

It can both generate heat and trap the heat from our bodies better than regular clothes. Yi Cui and colleagues note that nearly half of global energy consumption goes toward heating buildings and homes. But this comfort comes with a considerable environmental cost; it’s responsible for up to a third of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions.

Nanowire clothes to soon keep you warm

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A team of US scientists has developed a novel nanowire coating for clothes that can both generate heat and trap the heat from our bodies better than regular clothes.

“The technology can help us reduce our reliance on conventional energy sources,” said lead researcher Yi Cui from Stanford University in California.

Cui and team developed lightweight, breathable mesh materials that are flexible enough to coat normal clothes.

When compared to regular clothing material, the special nanowire cloth trapped body heat far more effectively.

LG’s webOS smartwatch set to release in early 2016: Report

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A report has said that LG’s much awaited webOS smartwatch is set to release in early 2016.

A source “familiar with the plans” said that the company is trying to build a software ecosystem around areas “we can have more control over,” reported The Verge.

LG already makes two smartwatches, the G Watch and G Watch R, which run on an Android platform. The company teased a third model at CES, developed in partnership with Audi .

These neurons help to better understand ‘sense of touch’

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A new study has recently provided a deeper insight into the human’s sense of touch, which generally been taken for granted in neuroscience.

An international group of researchers, including Carnegie Mellon University’s Alison Barth have linked a group of neurons to a specific type of somatosensation, a finding that can open the door for a heightened understanding about our sense of touch.

Privacy could be ‘a priced luxury’ in 10 years, says Pew report

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A report by Pew Research Center suggests that privacy in the next ten years will be more of a luxury.

According to the Washington Times, Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, there is broad agreement that the world will become much more “transparent” or “public”-but there’s little or no consensus about what will happen to privacy policies.

The issue of privacy crops up from numerous incidences where photos and personal data of celebrities and other prominent people have been leaked online.

German government websites under hacking attack

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The internet pages of the German government and Chancellor Angela Merkel were attacked by hackers Wednesday, said a government spokesman.

Websites including bundeskanzlerin.de and bundesregierung.de were temporarily paralysed by the hacker attack, confirmed German government spokesman Steffen Seibert, calling it “a quite severe attack”, Xinhua reported.

The spokesman did not give further details, but added the government has made counter-measures and informed the German Federal Office for Information Security to conduct analysis of the attack.

Google received more than 345 mn requests to remove pirated content in 2014

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Google has reportedly received requests to take down more than 345 links to pirated content by copyright holders in the year 2014, a report said.

With more and more people leaning on the search engine giant to use brute force to fight privacy, the figures have seen a 75 percent jump from the previous year, reported The Verge.

Google now gets more than one million takedown requests each day and honours most of them.

The company got merely 177 takedown requests in 2007, a number that dipped to 62 in 2008, just before beginning its rapid ascent to current heights.

Recipe for Earth-like planets found

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The same basic ingredients and mixing process that went to make Earth could go in to building exoplanets around distant stars, astronomers have found.

The “test kitchen” of Earth has given us a detailed recipe, but it was not clear whether other planetary systems would follow the same formula, researchers said.

“Our solar system is not as unique as we might have thought,” said lead author Courtney Dressing of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics (CfA).

“It looks like rocky exoplanets use the same basic ingredients,” said Dressing.

NASA’s ‘Disk Detectives’ find a million potential space habitats

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In less than a year, citizen scientists using NASA-sponsored website DiskDetective.org have logged one million classifications of potential debris disks and disks surrounding young stellar objects (YSO).

A YSO disk is less than five million years old, contains large quantities of gas and is often found in or near young star clusters.

This data will help provide a crucial set of targets for future planet-hunting missions.

How iron in Sun is key to energy transmission

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A new study has recently revealed that the iron in Earth’s Sun is a key to how stars transmit energy.

Working at temperatures matching the interior of the sun, researchers at Sandia National Laboratories’ Z machine have been able to determine experimentally, for the first time in history, iron’s role in inhibiting energy transmission from the center of the sun to near the edge of its radiative band, the section of the solar interior between the sun’s core and outer convection zone.

New ‘reversible’ USB connects laptops, phones, even charges them

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A new Type-C connector has made its appearance at the International CES this week that is reversible with identical ends.

In this cable connector, there is no small end for the phone and big one for the PC as in the case with Micro USB, reported PCWorld.

Type-C connector works with the USB 3.1 standard, operates at up to 10 Gbps and works faster.

The connector is twice the speed of the USB 3.0 standard that is supported current USB connectors.

It can be used to charge even a laptop as it uses up to 100 watts of power.

—ANI

2015 to be ‘one second longer’ due to Earth’s slow rotation

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Scientists have revealed that the year 2015 will have one extra second to compensate for the Earth’s slowing rotation.

However, it is feared the ‘leap second’ added at midday on June 30 by scientists at the International Earth Rotation Service in Paris could spark internet crashes, the Mirror reported.

According to scientists, Earth’s rotation is gradually slowing by around two thousandths of a second per day and when the last leap second was added in 2012, Mozilla, Reddit, LinkedIn and scores of other sites crashed.

How iron in Sun is key to energy transmission

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A new study has recently revealed that the iron in Earth’s Sun is a key to how stars transmit energy.

Working at temperatures matching the interior of the sun, researchers at Sandia National Laboratories’ Z machine have been able to determine experimentally, for the first time in history, iron’s role in inhibiting energy transmission from the center of the sun to near the edge of its radiative band, the section of the solar interior between the sun’s core and outer convection zone.

Now, convertible backpack that vibrates when you get phone calls

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A new HiSmart convertible messenger bag / Backpack has been recently developed that will vibrate if the phone starts ringing.

The HiSmart Pack, which was a combination backpack and messenger bag, with a waterproof canvas body and a leather strap, has the metal wheel embedded in the strap, which acts as a simple control system for your phone, the Verge reported.

If it is connected via Bluetooth and plug a microphone into the connected jack, the bag will vibrate when people will get a phone call, and they can answer it by pressing a button.