Science and Technology’s Latest News

• The key caps are now practically all screen, whereas on the Maximus, a border frame cut down on the size of the visible portion.
• An overall much sleeker design, and a neat display bar that is home to several nicely designed widget readouts.

Hulu Plus

Hulu announced that their subscription service is finally happening.
Called Hulu Plus, it offers a “season pass” to current shows on ABC, NBC and Fox, as well as an extensive episode backlog, all streamable to a multitude of devices including your game console, mobile phone, iPad or web-connected TV. It costs $10 a month.

• Patrolling Life Guard Robot Swims at 28 MPH

  • The ocean’s riptide, a four-foot-long talking buoy. It’s EMILY, the robot lifeguard. Grab on, and it can bring you safely back to shore.

  

  
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

  IP Phone Armed with Facial Recognition APP Lets Cops ID Perps On The Street

  • Law officers in Brockton, Mass., have a new tool for fighting crime: the iPhone.
  • Using a new app armed with facial recognition software linked to a statewide database, cops can snap a picture of a suspect in the field and within seconds pull up that person’s identity on the device.

  Sea Lions & Dolphins trained to carry out surveillance and detect undersea threats

  Sea Lions and Dolphins trained to locate undersea mines earned their jobs back, jobs that were supposed to be turned over to undersea mine-sweeping robots.

  • And why were these seafaring mammals brought back into service?
  • To find the very robots that were supposed to replace them, four of which have gone AWOL somewhere off the coast of Virginia.

  • The Navy has employed sea lions and dolphins to seek out underwater mines for decades, but as unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) rose in prominence over the past two decades the Navy has replaced it’s flesh-and-blood employees with robots, namely the REMUS 100 UUV, a historically reliable little bot ideal for shallow water mine sweeping operations.

  • But earlier this week, four of the Navy’s mine bots went missing during a training exercise, dropping off the radar and vanishing into the ocean after becoming unresponsive to commands.

  • Naturally, the Navy wants its bots back, so it called back in the veterans to track them down.

    Wax-Powered Heat Storage Is Key to General Atomics’ Next-Gen Directed Energy Weapons

  • Directed energy weapons,the laser weapons of the futurehave shown promise in both their power and their precision.
  • But there are some serious technological challenges involved in weaponizing devices like powerful chemical lasers, not least of which is dealing with the vast amounts of waste heat they generate.
  • General Atomics recently tested a wax-fueled storage device that might just overcome that hurdle, opening the door to the next generation of energy weapons.

  DARPA Wants To Look into the Future to Prevent Outbreaks Before They Happen

• The fight against pathogens is usually reactionary.
• A pathogen evolves or mutates, developing a drug resistance or finding a more efficient path toward infection, and researchers scramble to shift tactics for fighting off said pathogen.
• That’s not good enough for DARPA, which wants a means to look into the future so researchers can stop an outbreak of a potentially dangerous pandemic before it ever begins.

Synthetic Nano-Platelets Added to Blood Cut Healing Time in Half

• When a wounded patient begins bleeding, the most commonly employed solution is decidedly low-tech: apply pressure.
• But a group of medical researchers have developed injectible synthetic nanoparticles that could cut bleeding time in half.