Scientific data in various fields of human endeavor. Interesting user friendly presentation of articles in sciences both recent and in the distant past
IBM’s annual list of five innovations about to change our lives in the following five years
IBM has announced its fifth annual Next Five in Five – a valued list of five technologies that the company believes “have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the ensueing five years.” While there is an absense of flying cars or robot servants on the list, there are however holographic friends, air-powered batteries, personal environmental sensors, customized commutes and building-heating computers.
Reuters Small Business presents expansion pitches from upstarts across the country. Robotic gaming startup Orbotix has developed technology that lets people control a ball with their smartphone. Here’s the pitch:
Dec 7 – Robotic hummingbird wings may hold secrets to a new family of aircraft, capable of hovering steadily even in high winds. Scientists from New Mexico State University say experiments reveal promising results.
BAE Systems has presented the fruits of its Future Protected Vehicle program (FPV) to the U.K. Ministry of Defence, and it’s an intiguing glimpse of the what we can expect to see in tomorrow’s high-tech battlefield. With input from over 35 organizations, the FPV study is aimed at identifying “innovative technologies and concepts for short, medium and long term exploitation into future lightweight land platforms.” Hundreds of new technologies were canvassed in the study and seven platform concept vehicles have been floated to showcase the most significant of these, including the use of electronic ink camouflage systems, microwave weapons, floating electro-magnetic armor and a type of mechanical “sweat” that reduces thermal signature. Read More
Henn Tan, chairman of Trek 2000 International posing in front of the company’s signage in Singapore. Photo: AFP
Henn Tan could have ruled the global market in what became the ubiquitous USB flash drive that helped consign the floppy disk to the dustbin of technological history.
But his grip on the ThumbDrive slipped and the market was flooded with a myriad of brands for the handy memory device which could be small enough to dangle on a key ring.
Now the Singaporean entrepreneur hopes to prove he was no one-hit wonder.
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This photo shows various thumb drives displayed at the office of Trek 2000 International in Singapore. Photo: AFP
Tan, who holds the patent for the compact data storage device in over 30 markets and the global trademark for the ThumbDrive brand, now has a firmer hold on another invention with a rather unusual name.
The FluCard – a postage stamp-size storage device that can also transmit data wirelessly – is Tan’s new baby, and he hopes to see it used by millions of people; just like the USB drive.
Tan said many thought the ThumbDrive was a one-hit wonder.
“I told them no, but many refused to believe me,” the 54-year-old said.
“We are more than just about ThumbDrives and the power of this FluCard is going to be immense,” insisted the chairman and chief executive of Trek 2000 International, which is listed on the Singapore Exchange.
Tan laments that he made a mistake with the ThumbDrive by going it alone instead of partnering with an established player in 2000, an admittedly “naive” move that allowed rivals to get big slices of the USB-based data storage pie.
This time around, he has teamed up with Japan’s Toshiba Corp to promote the FluCard and ensure its patent is protected globally.
Why the name?
“It’s contagious and easy to recall,” says Tan, a marketing man who employs technical experts to flesh out his ideas.
“You go to Afghanistan, you say flu, and they understand.”
Marc Einstein, regional manager at technology consultancy Frost and Sullivan, said the FluCard is a sign of the convergence underway in consumer electronics and computer technology.
“I do think that this is where the future lies for technologies and consumer devices,” he said, adding that securing Toshiba’s support “is a good first step” for the Singapore firm.
Tan said his company and Toshiba, now the second largest shareholder in Trek 2000 International after him, formed a consortium of camera makers to adopt the FluCard as the industry standard.
Terence Wong, co-head of research at Singapore brokerage DMG and Partners, sees good commercial prospects for the FluCard and also feels partnering Toshiba is a right move for Tan.
“This FluCard can potentially kill off the dummy SD card if they get it right,” Wong said.
Shaped exactly like the Secure Digital (SD) memory cards now used widely in compact digital cameras, the FluCard comes embedded with Wi-Fi to transmit data to other wireless-enabled devices such as mobile phones, laptops and tablet computers.
“It can do more than what an ordinary dumb, dumb SD card can do which is just to store data,” Tan said.
“As long as you have a hardware embedded with Wi-Fi, you can download anything from the FluCard.”
Launched earlier this year, the FluCard works in any device that has an SD slot and the camera market is the most obvious target for Tan.
SD cards are predominantly used in compact digital cameras, 100 million of which were sold in 2009 alone, according to industry estimates.
Using a FluCard in the digital camera the user has the option of uploading new photos directly to the internet for sharing with friends on Facebook and other social networks.
It also functions as a data storage back-up since the content inside the FluCard can be instantly transferred to a private user account on a portal set up by Trek 2000 International.
Tan’s idea for the FluCard came about after a holiday with his family in China five years ago was ruined when they lost their camera.
“You can’t be going back to the places to retake the photos, and I felt lousy there wasn’t any data backup,” said Tan.
“The power of this FluCard is going to be immense if I get it right,” he said, adding it could catapult his company from a fringe player into the major leagues of the data storage industry with Toshiba’s support.
Tan’s anguish was clear as he recalled how his company lost out to the “big boys” of data storage who came out with their own USB-based devices – and to pirates who simply made ThumbDrive knockoffs.
“Right now we are still generating income [from royalties] but not much,” said Tan.
“Size counts, and I learnt my lesson real hard.”
In retrospect, Tan said it would have been better if he had partnered one of the big brands when the ThumbDrive was launched in March 2000, but his eagerness got the better of him at the time.
“I was naive, I was gullible and I decided to take this product all alone, believing that we can do it.”
“Now I have Toshiba, I am riding on the coat-tails of Toshiba.”
It’s unlikely that John Pistole, the Transportation Security Agency’s dour chief who once warned that terrorism must “always be considered imminent,” expected such public vilification over his agency’s new airport screening procedures.
The surprise is that, beyond exempting flight attendants and pilots, the TSA has remained unyielding and impenitent. All Pistole would tell CBS News this week is that he’ll continue asking: “How can we be better informed if we modify our screening? Then, what are the risks that we deal with?” That’s Washington-ese for “I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More Baby.”
The Q2 puts a new twist on Internet radioThe Internet has opened up a brave new radio world to listeners who otherwise suffer airwave restrictions. With tens of thousands of stations now pumping out just about every kind of music imaginable around the clock, tuning in can be overwhelming and complicated. The Q2 Internet Radio from Armour Home Electronics offers to make the process a whole lot easier and a lot more fun. Read More
Zebra finches, beware! That tweeting noise you’re responding to might not be coming from another finch at all, but from a rubber tube-based bird-call-imitating device. The gizmo was devised by a team of physicists at Harvard University in an effort to understand the physics of bird song. Read More
Modern technology has advanced so quickly, so why shouldn’t it also advance our cake decorating skills. The Cricut Cake printer will do just that … and it might inspire a new wave of neighborhood cake competitions and children’s parties. The printer is designed to make cake decorating as simple as printing a piece of paper, but instead of using paper and ink, it cuts shapes, words, motifs and decorations into frosting sheets, cookie dough, modeling chocolate and soft candies. Read More
These articles sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha
Dentsu Facility Management Inc will start taking orders for the “Chef’s Farm,” a small vegetable plant that can be installed in, for example, a restaurant, in June 2010.
The vegetable plant, which will be released in the summer of 2010 in Japan, was exhibited at International Food Machinery & Technology Exhibition 2010 (FOOMA JAPAN 2010), which took place from June 8 to 11, 2010, in Tokyo. It is priced at about ¥8.3 million (approx US$90,552). Dentsu Facility Management claims that it is possible to harvest 60 heads of lettuce per day (20,000 per year) and recoup the investment in about five years.
The Chef’s Farm comes with five nutriculture beds, each of which is 2,750mm in width and 1,270mm in depth. Each bed is installed with long and thin metal frames on which lettuce seeds can be planted in sponges (one piece of sponge for a seed).
The metal frames are moved from right to left by inches as the vegetables grow. Seeds are planted in the rightmost frame, and grown vegetables are harvested from the leftmost frame.
Though the metal frames have to be manually moved, they can be moved at the same time by using a chained mechanism. It takes about an hour to harvest 60 heads of lettuce, move the frames and plant seeds, Dentsu Facility Management said.
As lighting equipment, 12 40W fluorescent lamps are installed for each nutriculture bed. The lighting equipment, culture solution and temperature can be controlled for each bed. Therefore, five different vegetables can be cultivated by using the five beds.
The size of the Chef’s Farm is 3,940 (W) x 1,460 (D) x 2,330mm (H) including the air shower unit. The cultivation space can be slid forward to make a space behind the nutriculture beds.
Science (Oct. 8, 2010) — University of Illinois chemistry professor Alexander Scheeline wants to see high school students using their cell phones in class. Not for texting or surfing the Web, but as an analytical chemistry instrument.
Scheeline developed a method using a few basic, inexpensive supplies and a digital camera to build a spectrometer, an important basic chemistry instrument. Spectrophotometry is one of the most widely used means for identifying and quantifying materials in both physical and biological sciences.
“If we want to measure the amount of protein in meat, or water in grain, or iron in blood, it’s done by spectrophotometry,” Scheeline said.
Many schools have a very limited budget for instruments and supplies, making spectrometers cost-prohibitive for science classrooms. Even when a device is available, students fail to learn the analytical chemistry principles inherent in the instrument because most commercially available devices are enclosed boxes. Students simply insert samples and record the numbers the box outputs without learning the context or thinking critically about the process.
“Science is basically about using your senses to see things — it’s just that we’ve got so much technology that now it’s all hidden,” Scheeline said.
“The student gets the impression that a measurement is something that goes on inside a box and it’s completely inaccessible, not understandable — the purview of expert engineers,” he said. “That’s not what you want them to learn. In order to get across the idea, ‘I can do it, and I can see it, and I can understand it,’ they’ve go to build the instrument themselves. ”
So Scheeline set out to build a basic spectrometer that was not only simple and inexpensive but also open so that students could see its workings and play with its components, encouraging critical-thinking and problem-solving skills. It wouldn’t have to be the most sensitive or accurate instrument — in fact, he hoped that obvious shortcomings of the device would reinforce students’ understanding of its workings.
“If you’re trying to teach someone an instrument’s limitations, it’s a lot easier to teach them when they’re blatant than when they’re subtle. Everything goes wrong out in the open,” he said.
In a spectrometer, white light shines through a sample solution. The solution absorbs certain wavelengths of light. A diffraction grating then spreads the light into its color spectrum like a prism. Analyzing that spectrum can tell chemists about the properties of the sample.
For a light source, Scheeline used a single light-emitting diode (LED) powered by a 3-volt battery, the kind used in key fobs to remotely unlock a car. Diffraction gratings and cuvettes, the small, clear repositories to hold sample solutions, are readily available from scientific supply companies for a few cents each. The entire setup cost less than $3. The limiting factor seemed to be in the light sensor, or photodetector, to capture the spectrum for analysis.
“All of a sudden this light bulb went off in my head: a photodetector that everybody already has! Almost everybody has a cell phone, and almost all phones have a camera,” Scheeline said. “I realized, if you can get the picture into the computer, it’s only software that keeps you from building a cheap spectrophotometer.”
To remove that obstacle, he wrote a software program to analyze spectra captured in JPEG photo files and made it freely accessible online, along with its source code and instructions to students and teachers for assembling and using the cell-phone spectrometer. It can be accessed through the Analytical Sciences Digital Library.
Scheeline has used his cell-phone spectrometers in several classroom settings. His first classroom trial was with students in Hanoi, Vietnam, as part of a 2009 exchange teaching program Scheeline and several other U. of I. chemistry professors participated in. Although the students had no prior instrumentation experience, they greeted the cell-phone spectrometers with enthusiasm.
In the United States, Scheeline used cell-phone spectrometers in an Atlanta high school science program in the summers of 2009 and 2010. By the end of the 45-minute class, Scheeline was delighted to find students grasping chemistry concepts that seemed to elude students in similar programs using only textbooks. For example, one student inquired about the camera’s sensitivity to light in the room and how that might affect its ability to read the spectrum.
“And I said, ‘You’ve discovered a problem inherent in all spectrometers: stray light.’ I have been struggling ever since I started teaching to get across to university students the concept of stray light and what a problem it is, and here was a high school kid who picked it right up because it was in front of her face!” Scheeline said.
Scheeline has also shared his low-cost instrument with those most likely to benefit: high school teachers. Teachers participating in the U. of I. EnLiST program, a two-week summer workshop for high school chemistry and physics teachers in Illinois, built and played with cell-phone spectrometers during the 2009 and 2010 sessions. Those teachers now bring their experience — and assembly instructions — to their classrooms.
Scheeline wrote a detailed account of the cell-phone spectrometer and its potential for chemistry education in an article published in the journal Applied Spectroscopy. He hopes that the free availability of the educational modules and software source code will inspire programmers to develop smart-phone applications so that the analyses can be performed in-phone, eliminating the need to transfer photo files to a computer and turning cell phones into invaluable classroom tools.
“The potential is here to make analytical chemistry a subject for the masses rather than something that is only done by specialists,” Scheeline said. “There’s no doubt that getting the cost of equipment down to the point where more people can afford them in the education system is a boon for everybody.”
IBM’s annual list of five innovations about to change our lives in the following five years 
Henn Tan, chairman of Trek 2000 International posing in front of the company’s signage in Singapore. Photo: AFP
This photo shows various thumb drives displayed at the office of Trek 2000 International in Singapore. Photo: AFP
