Lifeboat Foundation

Walls and floors can seriously limit the range of your wireless network, but the WiFi Alliance thinks they’ve come up with a fix. Their new 802.11ah standard aims to deliver superior penetration and power savings to boot.

How will 802.11ah do that? By operating in the unlicensed 900MHz spectrum. Today’s WiFi gear operates at either 2.4GHz or 5GHz. Their higher frequencies make it harder for the signals to maintain their strength as they pass through obstructions. That’s one reason Google wants you to pretty up your OnHub router: so that you stick it somewhere out in the open where walls won’t get in the way.

Way down at 900MHz, though, things like walls, floors, and doors won’t be as much of a problem. According to the WiFi Alliance, 802.11ah will also achieve nearly double the range of current standards. There’s another bonus, too. Because the signal doesn’t degrade as much when it passes through objects, devices don’t consume as much power while sending and receiving data.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9dImgyFsVY

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3D printed ceramics are still something of a rarity, compared to other materials. The material has several limitations; it’s generally printed by sintering powder materials that result in porous, relatively weak end products with low heat resistance. This greatly limits the size and shape of objects that can be printed; 3D printed ceramic objects have thus far been pretty much limited to relatively small decorative items or tableware. But that’s all about to change, thanks to a new material developed by research and development company HRL Laboratories, LLC.

HRL, which is owned by Boeing and General Motors, has developed a ceramic resin that can be printed through stereolithography. The company actually calls it a “pre-ceramic” resin that prints like a typical plastic resin, and is then fired in a high temperature kiln, which turns it into a dense ceramic. The resulting objects are about ten times stronger than other 3D printed ceramics, have virtually no porosity, and can withstand temperatures higher than 1700°C.

Continue reading “Groundbreaking Ceramic Resin Developed” »

According to zSpace, your future web browser won’t be on a monitor, but in virtual holographic space before your very eyes! — B.J. Murphy for Serious Wonder.

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Intel’s collaboration with eyewear maker Luxottica will launch its first product later this year, with the release of special smart glasses designed for athletes.

Intel showed off the technology, which it called Radar Pace, on stage at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Tuesday night. The wearable tech will apparently be available in sunglasses made by the Luxottica-owned Oakley brand.

During a video and on-stage demo, Intel showed how the Oakley glasses, equipped with special earpieces on either side, allowed an athlete to quickly track workout information like the speed and distance travelled while running. The tech is entirely voice-activated. Unlike Google Glass, which requires that users swipe the side of the headset to do certain things, the Radar Pace technology lets the wearer do everything just by talking.

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Moximed, a firm with offices in Hayward, California and Zurich, Switzerland, recently won the European CE Mark to introduce its Atlas Knee System. We just got hold of photos of the Atlas and more information on how it works. The device is a knee joint unloader designed to reduce the pressure applied to the joint and to push off the eventual need for a knee replacement. The device works like the shock absorbers in your car, but instead for the knee. It results in less damage to the cartilage within the knee, letting it last longer than it would naturally without the support of the Atlas.

The company hopes the device will allow patients to maintain an active lifestyle they’re used to while improving satisfaction, reducing repeat surgeries, and lowering pain.

From the announcement:

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Here’s a brief video explaining how our researchers are using single-cell gene expression to classify cell types in the brain. The research was published online today in Nature Neuroscience.

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The Osterhout Design Group, which has been making high-end night-vision goggles for years, has begun shipping its R-7 augmented reality glasses for enterprise applications. The $2,750 smartglasses are a sign of things to come, as the company eventually hopes to bring the technology to the masses at consumer prices.

Augmented reality is expected to become a $150 billion market by 2020, according to tech advisor Digi-Capital. But first, it has to become cheaper, lighter, and otherwise more practical. The R-7 represents ODG’s best trade-off between capability and cost. The company is showing the R-7 at the 2016 International CES, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas this week.

The ODG R-7 shows heads-up display images on the inside of the lenses, so you can see stereoscopic 3D or other animated imagery on top of objects in the real world. The company is targeting applications in health care, energy, transportation, warehouse, logistics, and government.

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Remember when a cheap $60 wireless router was all your home needed? We were so naive back then. When everything from your phone to your fridge is on your home network, you need a little more wi-fi horsepower. So TP-Link is introducing the first wireless router with blazing 802.11ad.

For the uninitiated, the 802.11ad protocol adds yet another band of spectrum in the 57-66GHz range (depending on what part of the world you live in) in addition to the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands that 802.11ac routers use now.

There’s quite a few technical reasons as to why the jump to 60GHz is a good thing, but the most important for the average consumer is speed. The 5GHz band maxes out at 1,733Mbps, but the new 60GHz band can achieve wireless transfer speeds of up to 4,600Mbps. So streaming 4K video without a network cable? Not a problem.

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