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Category: mobile phones – Page 241

Scientists in the UK have invented a new type of touchscreen material that requires very little power to illuminate, offering up a cheap alternative to today’s smartphone and tablet screens, with vivid colours and high visibility in direct sunlight.

The team is already in talks with some of the world’s largest consumer electronics corporations to see if their new material can replace current LCD touchscreens in the next couple of years, which could spell the end for daily smartphone charging. “We can create an entire new market,” one of the researchers, Peiman Hosseini, told The Telegraph. “You have to charge smartwatches every night, which is slowing adoption. But if you had a smartwatch or smart glass that didn’t need much power, you could recharge it just once a week.”

Developed by Bodie Technologies, a University of Oxford spin-off company, the new display is reportedly made from a type of phase-change material called germanium-antimony-tellurium, or GST. The researchers are being understandably cagey about exactly how it’s made as they shop the technology around, but it’s based on a paper they published last year describing how a rigid or flexible display can be formed from microscopic ‘stacks’ of GST and electrode layers.

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Chinese technology company Huawei has announced that its latest prototype battery fills up with power 10 times quicker than the ones in current smartphones. Huawei has been showing off the technology at the 56th Battery Symposium in Japan this week, where a 3,000mAh pack reached a 48 percent charge in just 5 minutes.

The lithium-ion batteries inside smartphones, tablets, and other similar gadgets have two main sections: an anode and a cathode. Electrons move from one section to the other while our devices are in use, and then back in the opposite direction as they are recharged.

Huawei says it has managed to bond special heteroatoms to the graphite molecules in the anode section of the battery to get this process moving faster, without decreasing energy density or battery life.

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Today’s particle accelerators are massive machines, but physicists have been working on shrinking them down to tabletop scales for years. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation just awarded a $13.5 million grant to Stanford University to develop a working “accelerator on a chip” the size of a shoebox over the next five years.

The international collaboration will build on prior experiments by physicists at SLAC/Stanford and Germany’s Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen-Nuremberg. If successful, the prototype could usher in a new generation of compact particle accelerators that could fit on a laboratory bench, with potential applications in medical therapies, x-ray imaging, and even security scanner technologies.

The idea is to “do for particle accelerators what the microchip industry did for computers,” SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory physicist Joel England told Gizmodo. Computers used to fill entire rooms back when they relied on bulky vacuum tube technology. The invention of the transistor and subsequent development of the microchip made it possible to shrink computers down to laptop and cell phone scales. England envisions a day when we might be able to build a handheld particle accelerator, although “there’d be radiation issues, so you probably wouldn’t want to hold one in your hand.”

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It has been hailed as a wonder material set to revolutionise everyday life, but graphene has always been considered too expensive for mass production – until now.

Scientists at Glasgow University have made a breakthrough discovery, allowing graphene to be produced one hundred times more cheaply than before, opening it up to an array of new applications.

First isolated in 2004, the miracle material can be used in almost anything from bendable mobile phone screens to prosthetic skin able to provide sensation.

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With a glass and metal design reminiscent of the Galaxy S6, it could prove pretty popular.

It’s actually quite difficult to buy a phone these days that isn’t a buttonless smartphone — leaving people who prefer a physical keyboard (they still exist, as the Blackberry Priv shows) without many options.

The market for this phone might be fairly niche, but if it satisfies users’ nostalgia and actually works it could be a success.

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Welcome to #24 Avatar Technology Digest! We provide you with the latest news on Technology, Medical Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence the best way we can. Here are the top stories of the last week!

1) Did you know that Disney does more than shoot box office hits and sell toys to your kids? They also have a very active Research Department that specializes in a variety of applications that can be used throughout the Disney empire. And now another interesting innovation has come out of the Research Department, as they have developed a method for generating those 3D printable robots without the need for time and energy-consuming work at all.

2) Being able to identify problems with a person’s body without subjecting them to invasive procedures is the fantasy of all Star Trek doctors. There’s even a prize offering a fortune to anyone who can effectively recreate the tricorder technology out in the real world. Now, Stanford scientists think that they’ve developed a system that, in time, could be used to spot cancerous tumors from a foot away.

3) Technology is all around us, but what happened to the robots we dreamed of as kids? The ones who could be our friends and members of our family. The robots who were as smart as our smart phone, but could walk and talk and learn and engage with us, in a way no smart phone ever could. We think the Human-like household robot Alpha 2 by Ubtech Robotics could finally be that robot, and with your support, we can make Alpha 2 a reality.

4) Imagine playing a virtual-reality boxing game, complete with a menacing opponent aiming a haymaker at your head. You get your gloves up in time to block the punch, but you feel no impact when it hits, breaking the otherwise immersive experience.
Researchers in Germany have developed Visual reality technology for an armband that lets you feel impact from virtual interactions.

TV Anchor: Olesya Yermakova @olesyayermakova
Video: Vladimir Shlykov www.GetYourMedia.ru
Hair&Make-up: Nataliya Starovoytova

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Because of its unique chemical and physical properties, graphene has helped scientists design new gadgets from tiny computer chips to salt water filters. Now a team of researchers from MIT has found a new use for the 2D wonder material: in infrared sensors that could replace bulky night-vision goggles, or even add night vision capabilities to high-tech windshields or smartphone cameras. The study was published last week in Nano Letters.

Night vision technology picks up on infrared wavelengths, energy usually emitted in the form of heat that humans can’t see with the naked eye. Researchers have known for years that because of how it conducts electricity, graphene is an excellent infrared detector, and they wanted to see if they could create something less bulky than current night-vision goggles. These goggles rely on cryogenic cooling to reduce the amount of excess heat that might muddle the image. To create the sensor, the researchers integrated graphene with tiny silicon-based devices called MEMS. Then, they suspended this chip over an air pocket so that it picks up on incoming heat and eliminates the need for the cooling mechanisms found in other infrared-sensing devices. That signal is then transmitted to another part of the device that creates a visible image. When the researchers tested their sensor, they found that it clearly and successfully picked up the image of a human hand.

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Taiwanese PC manufacturer Asus says it’s building an augmented reality device and aims to release it next year. According to a report from CNET, Asus CEO Jerry Shen confirmed the plans during an earnings call on Wednesday, arguing that augmented reality or AR will be more useful than virtual reality. “You can make a real setting meld together with yourself and the AR portion,” said Shen. “Internally, we are talking about how to prepare.”

Unlike VR, augmented reality doesn’t show you a completely fabricated view, but instead overlays digital elements onto the real world. The current frontrunner in this nascent field is Microsoft’s HoloLens, which the company has shown off in a range of impressive demos. However, the HoloLens is hampered by a number of problems, including bulkiness, constrained viewing angles, and a high price tag, with Microsoft releasing a $3,000 HoloLens developer kit in the first quarter of 2016. (By comparison, Samsung’s Gear VR, a virtual reality headset powered by the company’s smartphones, became available for preorder this week for just $99.) Asus has previously hinted that it might build its own version of the HoloLens, but as a company best known for its budget laptops, tablets, and smartphones, we wouldn’t expect it to match Microsoft’s price.

Despite the lack of unknowns surrounding Asus’s announcement, it’s still interesting to see a company align itself with augmented, rather than virtual, reality. The Verge’s Adi Robertson has argued that the complete immersion of VR makes it difficult for multitasking, and that augmented reality, by comparison, is more practical. Asus apparently agrees. “We think AR will be very important for people’s lives,” said Shen according to CNET. “It should be next year when we come out with a product.”

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