Technology

Ecosystems in the Antarctic and sub-Antarctic islands are being irreversibly changed by alien plant and animal species introduced through human contact, a leading Antarctic researcher warned Tuesday.

British Antarctic Survey researcher professor Pete Convey, a visiting academic at New Zealand’s University of Canterbury, said the frozen continent had been protected from human contact until about 100 years ago, when humans deliberately and accidentally began introducing new organisms, Xinhua reported.

Rich Chinese tourists will be able to go on a journey into space as China may send its spacecraft into space before the end of 2014.

A Netherlands-based space tourism firm Space Expedition Corporation (SXC), has signed an agreement with Dexo Travel, a domestic travel agency, to take rich Chinese to space for 95,000 dollars, the China Daily reported.

Zhang Yong, chief executive officer of Dexo Travel , said that more than 100 people have expressed an intention to book space trip tickets since registrations for the Lynx Mark I spacecraft began on the Chinese mainland.

Google has announced that it is buying smart thermostat start-up Nest in a deal valued at USD 3.2 billion.

“They’re already delivering amazing products you can buy right now — thermostats that save energy and smoke/CO alarms that can help keep your family safe,” Google chief executive Larry Page said in a press release.

“We are excited to bring great experiences to more homes in more countries and fulfill their dreams.”

A new iPhone cover reportedly allows users to see heat in their surroundings, which could include checking home insulation for leaks. FLIR Systems has rolled out its FLIR One cover for Apple”s smartphone that contains a heat camera and shows temperature differences in varied colours on the screen. According to News24, users can choose the accessory to show up colours as per choice, for example, hotter things can be shown in yellow, while medium-hot could be set for red and cold in purple.

In what appears to be poetry inspired take on modern-day technology, Apple”s commercial for latest iPad Air reportedly wants people to think that the device isn”t a gadget but a tool to a dream.

Researchers have developed tiny “micro-windmills” that they have claimed can potentially revive the dead batteries of your cellphone in just a few minutes.

The windmills created by the researchers at the University of Texas Arlington (UTA) are so tiny that ten of them can fit on one grain of rice, the Verge reported.

According to researcher J.C. Chiao, if a hundred of them were glued onto a cell phone case and held out of the window they could charge the phone in just a few minutes.

Samsung is reportedly following up on Samsung S4’s eye tracking technology with new features that could be introduced in Galaxy S5, along with a head movement tracker. Samsung Galaxy has filed a European patent detailing its new innovation that could track head movements such as nodding. The patent application filed by Samsung revealed an invention capable of controlling a smart phone via head tracking using a front-face camera. However, the patent does not indicate as to when or where the technology will be put to use, Cnet reported.

A small French startup company has created a shirt that would know when you’re tired, excited or unwell.

France-based Cityzen Sciences unveiled shirts made of “Smart Sensing” material, which read body heat, heart rate, motion and location, News.com.au reported.

Gilbert Reveillon, international managing director at Cityzen, the lead company in a consortium that created the material, said that the gloves, shirts, pants, and any other clothing can be made out of the fabric.

Encouraged by its success in reaching out to people through social networking site Facebook, ISRO has decided to use social networking site Youtube.

“We received tremendous response to our Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) project through Facebook. We have now decided to use Youtube to reach out to people in a better way,” Department of Space secretary K Radhakrishnan told reporters here.

He said the younger generation was a major chunk that follows the space agency on social networking sites.

Google has reportedly introduced a controversial feature to its email service, Gmail, which allows anyone to send email to an unknown Google+ user simply by typing their name in the ‘send to’ field.

Google representatives have said that by default, anyone on its social network will be able to send messages to a user’s Gmail inbox.

According to The Verge, once the service goes live over the next few days, a new setting will appear in Gmail called ‘Email via Google+’, which would allow users to opt out of the ‘default’ settings by selecting ‘no one’ or alternative options from the menu.

Researchers at ETH University in Zurich are reportedly working on electronic components that are thinner and more flexible that paves way for new possibilities for ultra-thin, transparent sensors that are literally easy on the eye.

Researcher Niko Munzenrieder demonstrated special characteristics of an electronic component in the form of an ultra-thin membrane that he picked from a submerged ficus leaf in water and said that the new thin-film transistors adhere to a wide range of surfaces and adapt perfectly.

A commercial spacecraft operated by US space company Orbital Sciences Corp. blasted off Thursday, flying its first cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS), NASA TV showed.

The unmanned Cygnus spacecraft was launched atop the Antares rocket, also built by Orbital Sciences, at 1:07 p.m. EDT (1707 GMT) from the US space agency’s Wallops Flight Facility in eastern Virginia.

“Liftoff!” Orbital Sciences said in a tweet. “Love feeling the roar of a launch.”

A latest eyewear system made with a combination of glasses and contact lenses could reportedly allow the wearer to have superhuman vision by focusing on finer details of objects that are otherwise not visible to natural eye .

The iOptik lenses, developed by Innovega, has two parts, including contact lenses, which give the wearer enhanced focusing abilities, beyond normal eye’s capacity.

T-Mobile CEO John Legere has said the company is positioning itself for a long life as an independent brand.

The comments from Legere sent signal that the company is not interested in teaming up with competitor Sprint.

According to CNET, Legere said that his company is not interested in being gobbled up by another competitor.

At the end of last year, there were rumors that Sprint, the third largest carrier in the US, was putting together a proposal to buy T-Mobile, the fourth largest carrier, the report said.

In a ground-breaking research for the fast-growing global electronic industry, researchers have invented world’s fastest, and cheapest thin-film organic transistors.

This new technology has the potential to achieve the high performance needed for high-resolution TV screens and similar electronic devices in an inexpensive way, said the researchers.

Engineers from University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) and Stanford University created thin-film organic transistors that could operate more than five times faster than previous examples of this experimental technology.