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Category: mobile phones – Page 240

If you’ve got an iPhone, there is a good chance you also have a MacBook. The MagSafe charger on Apple’s laptop offerings is easy to use, leading some to want an iPhone with the same functionality. A recently funded Kickstarter is attempting to bring it to us, and even slaps in a battery pack for good measure.

The draw for Cabin is twofold: the magnetic charging, and the battery pack. The battery pack slips onto the rear of the device, much like we see with the Case+ lineup from Logitech. Aluminum, Cabin is relying on your sensitivity to style for the battery pack. At 2200mAh, it’ll charge you up more than once, too.

The magnetic charging is a bit more adapter than anything else. By taking a lightning connector and working a pinned magnetic charger on the end, we get simple, easy, and (hopefully) effective charging. What you won’t be able to do is use your MacBook charger. Cabin includes a Lightning adapter and dock (if you spend a touch more), though.

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Researchers at the University of California, Riverside in the US have developed lithium-ion batteries that substitute graphite with silicon extracted from sand and last three times longer than current products.

The negative side of lithium-ion batteries, or anode, is made with graphite, and scientists have been trying to find a substitute material that could make batteries last longer. One of the options is silicon, which can store up to 10 times more energy than current materials, but it’s expensive and hard to produce in large quantities.

But then a very simple but brilliant option revealed itself to graduate student Zachary Favors. As Gizmag reports, Favors was relaxing after surfing when he noticed something quite special: sand. Sand is made of quartz, or silicon dioxide, and other materials, so Favors thought he could extract the silicon and use it to make batteries.

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“The current benchtop cell sorters are too expensive, too un-safe, and too high-maintenance. More importantly, they have very low biocompatibility. The cell-sorting process can reduce cell viability and functions by 30–99 percent for many fragile or sensitive cells such as neurons, stem cells, liver cells and sperm cells. We are developing an acoustic cell sorter that has the potential to address all these problems.”

Researchers describe an acoustic cell sorter capable of the kind of high sorting throughput necessary to compete with commercial fluorescence activated cell sorters.

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Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are a cornerstone of consumer tech. They make thin-and-light TVs and smartphones possible, provide efficient household, handheld, and automobile illumination, and, of course, without LEDs your router would not have blinkenlights. Thanks to some engineers from MIT, though, a new diode looks set to steal the humble LED’s thunder. Dubbed a diode for light, and crafted using standard silicon chip fabrication techniques, this is a key discovery that will pave the path to photonic (as opposed to electronic) pathways on computer chips and circuit boards.

In electronics, a diode is a gate that only allows electrons to pass in one direction (and with an LED, it also emits light at the same time). In this case, the diode for light — which is made from a thin layer of garnet — is transparent in one direction, but opaque in the other. Garnet is usually hard to deposit on a silicon wafer, but the MIT researchers found a way to do it — and that’s really the meat of this discovery.

Diode for light diagramBasically, it’s now possible, with regular chip-fab tools, to create an integrated silicon circuit with optical, rather than electronic, interconnects — both internally, and between other chips. Photons, moving through the kind of transparent metamaterials that would be required to make such a circuit, move a lot faster than electrons. Furthermore, optical channels, through wavelength-division multiplexing, can carry a lot more data than electric signals. At the moment, hundreds of copper wires connect the CPU, northbridge, and memory — with on-chip photonic controllers, a motherboard might only have 10 or 20 channels.

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At Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco August 18th – 20th, two Intel executives discuss how 5G network capabilities will transform the way we live.

Imagine taking a trip to a cabin in the woods to get some work done and have a mini-vacation. Today, given our need for wireless connection, that’s a sketchy proposition.

You’ve got GPS in your rental car, plus your laptop, your smartphone, maybe a tablet or a smartwatch. But what if there’s no cable? What if there’s no Wi-Fi connection? What if the cellular connection is weak?

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Remember Iron Man’s transparent smartphones They might become reality sooner than you think thanks to an unusual new type of battery that’s not only transparent, but it can also charge via solar power. The technology could also be used for other products in the future, such as smart office and home windows that would be able to let the sun’s light pass through them, but also recharge and store energy.

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Developed by a team of researchers at the Kogakuin Univeristy, the lithium ion battery is not entirely transparent, as it contains the same chemical compounds that make any battery work. Furthermore, when exposed to sunlight, the battery becomes slightly tinted, transmitting 30% less light – but it’s still transparent. When fully discharged, the light transmittance rises to approximately 60 percent, TechXplore reports.

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