All this week, we're showing off the coolest, most futuristic, and strangest gadgets from the Consumer Electronics Show. Here we have The Parrot MiniDrone a personal drone that can climb freakin' walls. Check it out in this video, and be sure to see the rest of our CES coverage here.
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All this week, we're showing off the coolest, most futuristic, and strangest gadgets from the Consumer Electronics Show. Audi's latest concept car uses laser high beams to keep drivers safe on the road. Learn how they work in this video, and be sure to see the rest of our CES coverage here.
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All this week, we're showing off the coolest, most futuristic, and strangest gadgets from the Consumer Electronics Show. This robot basketball uses sensors to detect how well you're shooting and dribbling, then gives you feedback until you're doing it flawlessly. Check it out in this video, and be sure to see the rest of our CES coverage here.
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The problem with wearables is that you have to always wear them, even to bed. SleepNumber, this year at the Consumer Electronics Show, introduced a way around that. The x12 bed uses pressure sensors underneath its air-based mattress to see how well -- or badly -- you sleep. It's a little out there, we admit, but how could we possibly ignore a smart bed? Check out the video to see how it works.
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All this week, we're showing off the coolest, most futuristic, and strangest gadgets from the Consumer Electronics Show. The WowWee MiP is a charming, two-wheeled Segway 'bot that has some impressive balance. See it in action in this video, and be sure to see the rest of our CES coverage here.
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Synaptics makes touchpads for the likes of Lenovo, Dell, and HP, and their touch technology lives inside smartphones made by Samsung and Nokia. So they know a thing or two about touch. But rather than resting on their success, they’re here at CES showing off a keyboard technology, called ThinTouch, which replaces the switches under the keys with magnets that pop the keys back up.
This means the keyboard can be much thinner, while still feeling surprisingly clicky. It also leaves room for adding other components. So Synaptics added touch sensitivity to the entire keyboard area, which lets you perform Windows 8 gestures by swiping across the keys. Slide your thumb across the spacebar and you can scroll through menus or page through documents.
But does that mean traditional laptop touchpads are headed for extinction? Synaptics would rather see them evolve, so they’re teaching them how to take to the air. Their Proximity Touchpad prototype can accurately detect your finger movements as they hover up to three centimeters above the laptop.
There’s certainly a lot of potential here for cool next-generation devices. But in the meantime, we hope the company is also working hard on improving the touchpads in current laptops. We still encounter enough touchpad freak-outs to make us miss our mice while we’re away from the office covering massive conventions.
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There was a great article from The Onion recently called "Study: People Far Away From You Not Actually Smaller."
... But what if they were???
A new game, created by a team of students from Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center now at a development company called Pillow Castle Games, plays with the idea of forced perspective: stuff looks smaller when it's farther away, so what if it actually was smaller, and you could manipulate those objects to solve puzzles? Pick up a giant Statue of Liberty that's far away, then carefully place the miniature version on a table; grab a small painting, then place it far away to make it gigantic. Using that, you can make your way through levels, solving puzzles to progress.
The game's still in early development; it's not clear when we'll have a final, downloadable version of it. But there have been some great games built on simple, novel ideas--"mechanics," in videogame parlance--so we'll be eager to see how this one turns out.
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Over in the startup section of CES, we found Onewheel, the world’s first self-balancing electric skateboard. All you need to do is step on the board and it will adjust itself automatically to your movements. Leaning forward accelerates the motor and leaning backward slows it down. The motor knows what to do because it receives info about your leaning angle from a processor inside the wheel’s hub, which in turn receives data from gyro and accelerometer sensors.
Top cruising speed is about 12 miles per hour and the battery lasts for 4 to 6 miles on one charge (it takes 2 hours to recharge with a standard charger and 20 minutes with a fast charger). The Onewheel teams says newbies can learn in a couple minutes since the hard part--balancing--is done for you.. At 25 pounds, the skateboard seems a little too heavy to carry around casually, but we like that there’s only one moving part--the wheel--so there aren’t any gears or chains to mess with.
Onewheel is currently seeking funding on Kickstarter with an asking price of $1,299. Set to ship in September.
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From Razer's Nabu smartband to the Pebble Steel smartwatch, there are wrist-worn devices aplenty debuting at the Consumer Electronics Show this year. But UK-based CSR is betting on a different kind of wearable tech: bling. They brought two smart jewelry prototypes to CES. And while they're a bit bulky in their current form, there could be a little more substance than meets the eye.
When you pair the device with your smartphone, it can vibrate, flash, blink, or change color to indicate a text message, email, or other notification.
But CSR also thinks their platform is a good fit for wearable medical devices, especially when paired with other sensors. Imagine, say, a wearable necklace or bracelet that lets you know when your heart rate gets too high, or your blood sugar gets too low. Pair that with a smartphone, and a text could be automatically sent to a family member or care provider as well.
CSR's current prototypes could certainly stand to be a bit smaller, but battery size is the biggest limitation at the moment. But for people with conditions that require constant or frequent monitoring, these prototypes are certainly more attractive than bulky medical equipment designed for function, rather than form.
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That finding launched a study to see how widespread biofluorescence is in fish. The researchers were astonished to find that it is quite common in both bony and cartilaginous fishes: They identified 180 species of fluorescent fish, from 50 different families. Many of these fish live in reefs and are well camouflaged, according to the study, published Jan. 8 in the journal PLOS ONE.
"We’ve long known about biofluorescence underwater in organisms like corals, jellyfish, and even in land animals like butterflies and parrots, but fish biofluorescence has been reported in only a few research publications," said Sparks, a study co-author and researcher at the American Museum of Natural History, in a statement.
Scientists think that the fluorescence may allow individuals of the same species to recognize one other, like a kind of glowing uniform that may not be detectable by certain predators. They found fish that emit neon red, green and orange light.
The study could guide the search for fluorescent proteins, which could be used for a variety of scientific studies. The scientists who discovered and adapted the green fluorescent protein, which can make animals glow in the dark and was isolated from jellyfish, won the 2008 Nobel Prize for chemistry.
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Watson, IBM's Ken Jennings-smirk-obliterating robot riddle-solver, is getting $1 billion and some new digs in the hopes that it can be brought to the masses.
The company announced that they'll be fueling the supercomputer with the cash, forming a new business division around it, and building office space in New York City's East Village. A new team--eventually, 2,000 people, hundreds of which will work at the new headquarters, according to the company--will work on developing and commercializing the computer. About $100 million of the investment will go toward funding apps built by third-party developers.
This isn't a complete shock; we've known for a while that IBM had plans for Watson beyond game-show novelty. First, the company announced it wanted Watson in smartphones, Siri-style; then it opened up the system to developers. Now it has the funding to make it all happen.
[AP]
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When it comes to shipping, humans crews are inconvenient. They need places to sleep and to take care care of bodily functions, they probably require food and a place to prepare that food, and they can only work so many hours a day. Also, crewmembers and their accommodations have weight, which means increased fuel costs for ocean-going vessels. All told, it's expensive. If it were possible to move ships to and from ports without humans, shipping could get a lot cheaper, says Rolls-Royce's head of marine innovation Oskar Levander. The future of shipping, much like that of flying vehicles and land-based ones, may well be unmanned.
Removing the crew wouldn't just save on the costs of keeping the crew alive. It might even reduce human-caused accidents. Humans, clever as we are, are not fantastic at doing repetitive tasks for long hours, and fatigue can set in. Robots, on the other hand, have no problems with tasks that are dull. Robots love dull!
So the real challenge for unmanned shipping, much like for commercial drones, will come from two places: the development of technology for safe remote operation, and the modernization of laws governing transportation. Complicating the latter challenge is that the body of law governing international waters, territorial waters, and how they interact is vast and complex. Another snag is the U.S. reluctance to ratify the United Nations Convention On The Law Of The Sea, which is the main framework under which the rest of the world operates.
To overcome the technical challenges of making ships that sail without sailors, a multi-country group under the European Union is working on a project called Maritime Unmanned Navigation through Intelligence in Networks (MUNIN), which aims to develop autonomous ships that can, when needed, be controlled from shore.
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Ever wondered how a lens focuses? Our friends over at Popular Photography, on the ground now at the Consumer Electronics Show, grabbed a video showing how Canon cameras use an electromagnetic mechanism to smoothly focus a shot. It's a more intricate process than you might think. Check it out here. [PopPhoto]
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Using aerial surveys and satellite images, an international research team has discovered four breeding colonies of emperor penguins that have re-located from sea ice floating on the ocean's surface to the tops of ice shelves: thick glaciers that extend from Antarctica's interior to the coast.
It's an amazing finding because ice shelves can tower over 300 feet above the ocean's surface, and emperor penguins are fairly clumsy creatures on land. How did they do it? The study found that two of the bird colonies traveled some miles to ascend their ice shelves via more gently-sloping gullies before reaching their ultimate breeding sites. This suggests that the other two colonies also sought out penguin-friendly creeks or ramps onto the higher ice.
Over observations go back five years—the largest data set in the study—a penguin group dubbed the “Shackleton Ice shelf colony" demonstrates the adaptive behavior that has so surprised the researchers. The breeding colony of around 6,470 pairs found stable sea ice in March of 2008, 2009, and 2010, when they returned to lay eggs and raise chicks. But the sea ice formed late, in early- to mid-April, in 2011 and 2012. Rather than look for different sea ice, the penguins walked about 3 additional miles eastward, finding gently sloping ice creeks that provided routes to the top of the 110-foot ice shelf.
“The birds show remarkable fidelity to the site,” write the researchers, “changing their breeding platform in preference to changing the breeding location when April sea-ice conditions become unsuitable.” The Shackleton Ice shelf extends roughly 248 miles along Antarctica's eastern coast; it is in the northernmost range of Emperor penguins.
Emperor penguins, the hardy and devoted bird parents featured in “March of the Penguins,” have long been known as a “sea-ice obligate” species: an animal that habitually breeds on the layer of frozen seawater on the ocean's surface. Scientists and conservationists fear that by mid-century, climate change will destabilize Antarctic coastal sea ice patterns enough to slash the Emperor population by half. So this newly-observed ability to surmount and nest on tall ice cliffs—or “change their breeding platform,” in the words of the scientists—is encouraging for anyone hoping that cold-loving animals can survive global warming in the wild .
But even this won't solve all the challenges that loom before Emperor penguins. The ice shelves are harsher environments for raising young than sea ice, less sheltered and more exposed to Antarctica's katabatic winds. Getting on and off the ice shelves may be using up energy the birds need for long-term survival, even as changes in sea ice affect the food web the emperor depends upon. And even massive ice shelves are vulnerable to human-propelled climate warming: Witness the speedy collapse of the Wilkins Ice shelf in 2008.
All great reasons to do more science, according to the researchers, by continuing to study these and additional penguin colonies. “Emperors are often portrayed as a barometer for the ecosystem,” they write,
that is, a “canary in the coalmine” for species more difficult to study. This previously unknown and surprising behavior recorded in such an iconic animal suggests that other species may also be capable of unpredicted or unknown behavioral adaptations that may also increase their survival in a future warming world.
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All this week, we'll be showing off the coolest, most futuristic, and strangest gadgets from the Consumer Electronics Show. Here's a closer look at Induct Technology's Navia driverless shuttle. Check it out in this video taking a test-drive outside the Las Vegas Convention Center, and be sure to see the rest of our CES coverage here.
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All this week, we'll be showing off the coolest, most futuristic, and strangest gadgets from the Consumer Electronics Show. Here we have the Scanadu Scout. Check it out in this video to see how it is able to read your vital signs -- without ever having to touch you! Also: be sure to see the rest of our CES coverage here.
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All this week, we're showing off the coolest, most futuristic, and strangest gadgets from the Consumer Electronics Show. This is Intel's RealSense 3-D Camera, a tiny cam that could improve everything from Skype conferences to interactive gaming. Check it out in this video, and be sure to see the rest of our CES coverage here.
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The Consumer Electronics Show is home to the technology of the future, the stuff we'll be using tomorrow, here today. But with so many companies all vying for precious attention, it's also home to acid-fueled techno-horrors out of some terrible, warped, tragicomic sci-fi novel.
We've gathered those here! Enjoy.
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The phrase "seeing stars" has a whole new connotation: Research suggests that sea stars, a type of five-legged starfish that usually appears blue in color, can see images with the tiny compound eyes at the ends of their legs. The eyes aren't very powerful, however, and unlikely to see things beyond 4 meters (13 feet). But the sea stars can use their vision to navigate toward reef corals, which hadn't previously been shown, according to a study published January 8 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The stars' eyes lack a lens like the compound eyes of insects, cannot process quick movements, and cannot sense colors, so they are unlikely to be used for finding food or avoiding predators. To find out if they could sense large objects like reef corals, the scientists placed sea stars at a distance of 1, 2 and 4 meters (3.24, 6.5 and 13 feet) from the corals. Those closer than 4 meters quickly returned to the reef, whereas those at 4 meters moved in random directions. They also preformed the experiment with blinded sea stars, the eyes of which had been poked out. (Ouch. Sorry, sea stars.) All of these animals moved at random, suggesting they couldn't see where they were going.
To sense large objects, the researchers write, the eyes' must be able to form an image, rather than just sensing light, and thus are capable of rudimentary "sight." This sets sea star eyes apart from eye spots, more primitive structures found in animals like flatworms that sense light but cannot form images, they added.
The sea stars, Linckia laevigata, can sever their own arms if they are snared by a predator, and then re-grow them, meaning they also have the ability to regenerate their eyes. Think about that next time you find yourself pondering that ways that you're superior to a sea star.
[Via Discover Magazine]
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