Apple's Homekit Devices Are Available For Sale

Apple's revealed smart home technology known as Homekit which is a certified devices that allow to control lights with voice command and turn them off and on and adjust room temperature as well as other appliances from the iPads, iPhones and iPods.

These five devices are: Elgato is a device that controls temperature, humidity, air pressure water and energy consumption as well.Ecobee costs $ 250 which controls thermostate via WiFi connectivity.Lutron is available at $ 230 which is a smart bridge device allows users to control lighting system.iHome is a Wi-Fi connected plug that allows users to turn on and off home appliances.Insteon hub lets users control various home gadgets like door lock, switches and other light systems.

Apple announced Homekit software a year ago at Apple's developers conference.Google also announced that it is developing such software that controls gadgets in the home and in commercial settings, called Brillo.

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Cow Manure powered Bus Sets World Speed Record

UK based Reading Buses powered by cow manure broke previous land speed record of the bus.In UK normally buses run with speed limits of 56 mph.The bus is known as the "Bus Hound" that runs on biomethane compressed natural gas (CNG) reached a lap speed of 76.785 mph (123.57 km/h) around the test track at Bedford's Millbrook proving Ground.

The bus has potential to run on biomethane, a gas which is produced by a process called anaerobic digestion.In this process waste of animal breaks down to produced compressed biogas and then liquified to be used as the bus fuel.The liquified gas is stored in a various tanks that are fixed inside of the bus roof.

The Bus was painted with a white and black paint to look like a Friesian cow, which is common dairy cow in the UK.Chief engineer John Bickerton said, "It was an impressive sight as it swept by on the track.It sounded like a Vulcan bomber - the aerodynamics aren't designed for going 80mph."

The Bus gets its name by the British Bloodhound super-sonic car which targets to reach around 1,000 mph in 2016.

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Wind Power Ecocapsule Allows Live Off-The-Grid Anywhere On Earth

Bratislava, Slovakia based group Nice Architects unveiled a tiny egg shaped portable house which is powered by wind and solar energy and contains rain drops collection as well as filtration.This is a micro-home that is designed as energy efficient, called "Ecocapsule".

It contains 2.6 sq metre array of high efficiency solar cells on the roof and a built in 750W wind turbine, both provide power the house.The dual power system and a high-capacity battery approx 9,744Wh capacity, ensures the house will have enough power to operate during periods of reduced solar or wind activity.The spherical shape is optimized for rainwater collection.Ecocapsule can fit inside a standard shipping container.

The Ecocapsule lengths about 4.5 meters (14.6 feet), width is 2.4 meters (7.9 feet) and heights 2.5 meters (8.2 feet).The total usable area is 8 square meters (86 sq feet).The micro shelter is enough for two persons.It includes a folding bed, entrance, a dinning and working place, two openable windows, toilet and shower, Kitchennette and storage space.

The team plans to display a micro-home at the Pioneers festival in Vienna on May 28.It is expected to be available for sale later this year and delivery of first units will take place in the first half of 2016.

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Input Device Phree Tracks Notes, Sketching On Any Surface

Tel Aviv, Isreal based OTM Technologies company revealed a prototype smartpen called "Phree" which is a high resolution input device allows users write down notes, sketch or anything on any surface and see the sketch or notes appear on your device screen.

Phree connects to a various devices such as smartphone, tablet and computers.It is also capable to work with TV and laptops via Bluetooth connection.The phree is designed to work with several apps such as Office, EverNote, OneNote, Google Handwriting Keyboard and Acrobat.It supports many operating system like iOS, Linux, Windows, OSX and Android.

Chief engineer Opher Kinrot and Uri Kinrot has developed a patented technology known as Optical Translates Measurement (OTM) which can track hand movements through 3D laser interferometer sensor that detect relative motion of any surface.They also fit optical sensor at the tip of the pen that is able to capture handwriting patterns.

Elisha Tal is the cheif designer of Phree.It has a screen which allows users to read messages as well as receive calls and give respond via pen.It is available in different colours that are black, silver, graphite and gold."An open API allows developers to make use of the screen for specific interaction with their applications. The API provides access to additional sensor information such as vertical (Z) motion data, as well as access to the accelerometer," they said.

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Vortex Stick Like Turbine Generates More Power At Low Cost

A Spanish radical company called Vortex Bladeless changes the way we capture energy from the wind.The ompany targets to generate wind power through Vortex, which is a stick like bladeless wind turbine.When wind flows over stick like turbine the flow changes and generates a cyclical pattern of vertices which is called vortex shedding effect that creates vorticity.Through vorticity Vortex Bladeless generate energy.

Co-founder of Vortex Bladeless David Yanez explains the example of vorticity; the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940.The bridge started vibrating in heavy winds, wind conditions was 40 mile per hour.As a result of this incident scientists and engineers changed their way they built and designed bridges.

Yanez and his team take advantage of vorticity which is a aeroelactic effect that make vibration instead of turning, and capture the energy.The mast designed to vibrate in the wind.Actually it is a Vortex wind generator which has a fixed mast and it has no spinning parts like blades.It is a magnetic induction system turbine which has no contact between moving parts so there is no lubricant needed.

According to the company site, the Vortex manufacturing costs and operating costs are 53 % and 51% respectively that are lower than conventional wind turbines.Co-founder of Vortex Bladeless Raul Martin added, "compare our invention to a conventional wind turbine with similar energy generation—ours would cost significantly less," around 50 percent or 47 percent less."

This turbine has potential to generate more energy in less space.Martin said the next step will be to lunch a 4-kilowatt wind turbine for small businesses.

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World's First Bike Path That Generates 3,000 kWh Of Energy

Six months age in November 2014, SolaRoad opened a world's first solar path which is 230 feet long that generates energy, in Krommenie, a village northwest of the Dutch city of Amsterdam.It generated 3,000 kWh of electricity or enough to power a single person home for a year.It is three year project which costs 3.5-million Euros. 

A spokeman of SolaRoad, Sten de Wit said, "We did not expect a yield as high as this so quickly.The bike road opened half a year ago and already generated over 3,000 kWh. "If we translate this to an annual yield, we expect more than the 70 kWh per square meter per year, which we predicted as an upper limit in the laboratory stage."

The solar panels are fitted underneath a path which is made up of 2.5 by 3.5 meters concrete modules.The solar panels are protected by a centimetre thick layer of safety glass.The transparent, skid-resistant glass that can support bicycles and vehicles.Since the solar path opened, it has been crossed by 150,000 cyclists just in six months.The test run project will remain open for another two and a half years.

Looking to the future, TNO project manager Wim ven der Poel said, "Using this energy to charge electric cars while they are driving over the road is a beautiful dream, which might become reality. SolaRoad acts as a step towards a closed ecosystem.From mobility through energy back to mobility – which makes the circle complete."

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The $9 CHIP Computer Runs Linux, Crushing Kickstarter

The Next Thing Co. a Oakland, California based company lunched a CHIP which is a microcomputer, on Kickstarter.It is a tiny computer that can support a full version of Linux.CHIP is smaller than a credit card which costs about $9.It allows user to check your email over wifi, surf the Web and play games with a Bluethooth option.

It comes with a 1 GHz processor, 512MB RAM and 4 GB storage capacity.It has a WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity.The presenter said, "the camera shifts to a mannequin's pocket.This is PocketCHIP. It makes CHIP portable. Take CHIP, put it into PocketCHIP and you can use CHIP anywhere."PocketCHIP has 4.3'' touchscreen, five hour battery and QWERTY keyboard.It also has LibreOffice that allows users save the documents to onboard storage.It comes with many preinstalled tools and applications.

A mouse or keyboard can be connected with CHIP wirelessly.CHIP ables to work with any VGA and HDMI monitors via built in composite output and add an adapter for monitor screen.CHIP has included many pre-installed apps such as scratch which is a language teaching programming that teaches basics of programming by games, stories and animations.

CHIP shipment will take place in May 2016.

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Fixstars Announced World's First 6-Terabyte SSD

Japanese software company Fixstars has introduced the world's first 6TD 2.5 inch SATA Solid State Drive.The Fixstars drive is known as SSD-6000M that has a 6TD of storage capacity and uses 15nm flash memory.It supports SATA 6Gbps, offers read speeds up to 540 MB/s and write speeds of 520 MB/s which is higher speed 6Gbps of serial vise access.Fixstars is taking orders; sending will take place in the end of July.

Fixstars's SSD-1000M and 3000M will utilize 19nm flash memory and offer 1TB and 3TB of storage capacity.With the Fixstars SSD-3000M, the owner of SSD controller ables a stable, high I/O performance for sequential access throughout the lifetime of the drive.This factor has shown to be very effective in various field of life such as medical imaging, network infrastructure, video recording, industrial applications and big data analysis.

Satoshi Miki, the CEO of Fixstars Corporation said that the unparalleled performance of our previous model's (The SSD-3000M) sequential I/O helped propel our SSDs and garner lots of attention.Since many of our customers desire even greater capacity, I am excited to offer a new solution and grow the product line with the inclusion of the larger SSD-6000M." He continues, "Since our SSD's capacity is now able to compete with high-end hard drives, we feel our product can draw the attention of data centers as well."

The Fixstars does not announce the price of 6TD SSD.A senior editor for Greek.com, Matthew Humphries said, "SSDs still carry a much higher price than hard drives, "but the benefits in terms of speed and power use are clear, and in a lot of cases worth the added cost."

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iPhone Case Downloads Power From Air To Extend Mobile's Battery Life

Nikola Labs has developed an iPhone case which has potential to download power from air.A company has presented their product at a TechCrunch event, an iPhone case which can convert radio frequencies into electricity that can be utilized to recharge the battery of a mobile devices.It is a case that is designed for iPhone 6.

The iPhone case can convert 90 percent of the energy wasted by the mobile phone to gain a signal and put it back into the smartphone, therefore the bettery life of phones extend up to 30%.

The company wrote on its web page, "Nikola Technology efficiently converts RF signals like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and LTE into DC power using its proprietary energy harvesting circuit. The result is usable energy that can provide power to mobile devices wirelessly."

Co-founder at Nikola Labs Will Zell said, "we allow you to download power from the air.We are using 19th-century technology to power 21st-century mobile devices."The latest technology that converts radio frequency energy carried by phones into surplus bettery power for that device.Will Zell explained that the case that we developed is available with a planted antenna that captures the wasted energy and convert it into electricity and then dumps it back into the phone.

The company will launch their iPhone case on Kickstarter in a month.The case will be available for pre-order via Kickstarter for $99.

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Microsoft App Judges Your Age From A Photo

Microsoft has launched a new website known as How Old.net that utilizes facial recognition software to determine your age based on a image.It is a website where users can upload a photo and API has to estimate how old is and also guess about gender.

Microsoft's demo app was released during build conference in San Francisco, a few days ago.Microsoft's Machine Learning APIs is a really fun tool which can detect faces in a picture and then guess the age of that person and their gender.

Two Microsoft engineers Corom Thompson and Santosh Balasubramanian said, "we sent e-mail to a group of several hundred people asking them to try the app demo for a moment and give us feedback.Estimating that at least 50 people would want to it a shot."We monitored our real time analytics dashboard to track usage and, within a few minutes, the number of people using the site vastly exceeded the number of people we had sent our email to.Within a few hours, more than 35,000 users had visited the web page from all over the world."

Age and gender recognition features are focal points for Microsoft and we want to improve this technology, a senior program manager at Microsoft Ryan Galgon said."Any usage of the app, even if it results in inaccurate renderings, is good usage, because Microsoft gets more data to improve its systems," VentureBeat's Jordan Novet said.

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This High Speed Camera Could Visualize Atoms

Japanese researchers have developed a high speed camera that can record events at a rate of more than 1-trillion-frames-per-second.A new high speed camera ables to capture images a thousand times faster than formal high speed cameras.By this camera researchers can watch or capture waves of atoms travelling through crystal structures at one sixth of the speed of light, or about 28,000 miles per second.

The new technology was created by Keiichi Nakagawa from the University of Tokyo called Sequentially Timed All-optical Mapping Photography (STAMP).According to the team of researcher the new device, "holds great promise for studying a diverse range of previously unexplored complex ultrafast phenomena."

The speed of conventional high-speed cameras are limited because of their mechanical and electrical components.The new camera solve this issue by using only fast, optical components.

The pump-probe method is another optical technique, can create movies and take images at even higher speed than STAMP, but at this time, it can capture one frame at a time.

Nakagawa said, ""Many physical and biological phenomena are difficult to reproduce.This inspired me to work on an ultrafast camera that could take multiple frames in a single shot."

The camera splits an ultra-short pulse of light into different colours such as rainbow that hit the imaged object in quick succession.Then each flash is analysed to see how the object looked like over the period of time of the flash.The first version of STAMP could take six frames in a single shot.But now latest version of STAMP can take 25 images and they have aim to increase the number of frames up to 100 with this technology.

Nakagawa and his team utilized this camera with image electronic motion and lattice vibrations on a crystal of lithium niobate to watch how a laser focused onto a glass plate creates a hot, rapidly expanding plume of plasma."I think it is important to note that there might be many potential applications of STAMP that I have not imagined," Nakagawa said. "I hope more researchers will become interested in STAMP."

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Remote Technology That Detects Human Life With Cameras

Two Iraqi students Laith Al-Shimaysawee and Ali Al-Dabbagh are studing at Adelaide's Flinder University have developed a technology which can be utilized for detecting human life using remote cameras, which could be used for rescue operations.These two students are from Najaf, south of Baghdad and studying their masters on Iraqi Government scholarships.

These two have created a new algorithm for detecting people through thermal and colour cameras which is much faster than any other available technology that needs several samples to be processed before a person can be detected.

Al-Dabbagh said,"the technology that we developed used less samples than any other present technology that sometime use 500 or may use up to 1000 samples.The latest technology that we developed uses only eight samples.Due to fewer samples this system works much faster as well as made human detection much faster.

"You could put it on a robot, or rescue team workers can put it on a helmet to detect people in difficult scenarios, unstable structures or collapsed buildings and report back to the rescue team," Dr Nasser Asgari said.

This system has potential to detect people up to 50 metres with thermal cameras and up to 30 metres with colour cameras.Its detecting range can be increased by adding lenses to the camera.Their work will be published at an international robotics conference in Dubai next month.

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Clever Shoes That Grow 5 Sizes In 5 Year To Help Poor Children

The shoes invented by Kenton Lee that grow and can adjust its size as the foot grows.The shoes come with only two sizes, small and large.Each size can grow five sizes and last at least five years.

Kenton Lee was in Nairobi, Kenya in 2007.One day he saw a girl wearing shoes that were very small for her feet.Then he thinked about a shoe that could adjust and expand.He said, "there are over 300 million children who do not have shoes. And countless more with shoes that do not fit.Some children receive shoes donations but within a year their feet grow and they outgrow donated shoes."

The shoes are made with high quality materials such as compressed rubber, leather, buckles, a few buttons and snaps.No mechanical parts of gears to break and it is easy to use as well as easy to clean.The shoe can grow from the front which is adjustable toe, from the sides through snaps to expand shoe size and the back which has expandable heel strap.

The Shoe That Grows team said, "footwear for poor rural populations around the world is an extremely important resource to help ward off parasitic diseases transmitted from the soil and in environments with inadequate sanitation resources. In addition to infections from the soil, mere cuts and scrapes can also make the skin vulnerable to infections. "And being sick = struggling. Kids miss school, can't help their families, suffer with pain. Many of these diseases and parasites get into the body because people don't have shoes."

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Gamers Feel Virtual Objects with Omni Gloves

Engineering students are making a glove that allows a gamer to feel objects in a virtual space.The glove introduced by engineers at Rice University is called Omni glove which allows a user to interact with virtual objects in the world.The glove revealed during the George R. Brown School of Engineering Design Showcase and built up with a Houton gaming company (Virtuix), is purposed to leave force feedback to the fingertips as players touch, press or grip objects in the virtual world.

The glove utilized air to expand bladders under your fingers, so user can hook this up to a video game and when user touch out and take hold of a practical object, it feels as you are grabbing that object," mechanical engineering Thor Walker said.

The right handed only glove is designed to be unnoticeable as possible and is without wire to let the user a full range of movement.The glove is light sufficient to prevent the user from noting it, even after a while and it weighs about 350 grams."We had a constraints based on testing to decide the quantity of detectable weight that could be strapped to your legs, fingers, arms and limbs, the utmost weight that is obvious to users and we went up with 660 grams on the forearm and often less than that on the back of a palm or on the fingers," Koch said.

"We needed as much mass as far back on a palm as possible, and that's precisely what we are doing," he said."The user will just know it's there."

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Mammals Can Tell The Time Of Day Via Colour

Scientists from the University of Manchester have unveiled that the colour of light has a big impacts on brain clock.The colour of light has play a big role in how animals measure what time of day it is and the physiology and behaviour change according to light's colour.

The Study was published in the Open Access journal PLOS Biology which explains that the mammal's internal clock could be affected by the change in light at dawn and dusk.Light intensity changes with the sun sets and rises, the scientists discovered that light is bluer in the twilight than during the day time.Then the scientists got electrical activity of mice's brain clock, as the mice were shown several visual stimuli.They found that their neurons were more sensitive to changes in colour between blue to yellow than respond to changes in brightness.

The researchers utilized an artificial sky that changes colour and brightness.When the mice were placed in the artificial sky for several days, their body temperatures were high, when it turned dark blue.It the brightness was changed, the mice were more active before dusk, without changing the colour.This experiment shows that the mice's body clock do not have right sync with the day and night cycle.

Dr Timothy Brown from the Faculty of Life Sciences, who led the research said, "this is the first time that we've been able to test the theory that colour affects our body clock in any mammal. It has always been very hard to separate the change in colour to the change in brightness but using new experimental tools and a psychophysics approach we were successful. What's exciting about our research is that the same findings can be applied to humans. So, in theory, colour could be used to manipulate our clock, which could be useful for shift workers or travellers wanting to minimise jet lag."

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Researchers Invent A Camera That Powers Itself

At Columbia a researcher Shree K. Nayar and T.C. Chang, Professor of Computer Science with his team has introduced a video camera that powers itself.In the prototype video camera reseacher designed a pixel that is able to measure incident light and convert incident light into electric power.

The camera is expected to make its way to wearable devices, sensor networks, smartphones and the internet of things.In the camera, the major component is the photodiode which produces an electric current when exposed to light.They utilized image sensor, a chip that houses the pixels of millions.They used photoconductive mode to measure the intensity of light falling on a pixel.

Nayar and his team utilized off-the-shelf components to fabricate a 30x40 pixels image sensor.It has two transistors.The camera first record and read the image and then to collect light to charge the sensor's power supply.When the camera is not in use, it can be utilized to produce power for other devices like a watch or a smartphone.Nayar said, the image sensor ables to use a rechargeable battery and charge it through harvesting capability.They used capacitor to store power energy.

Nayar explained, "even though we've used off-the-shelf components to demonstrate our design, our sensor architecture easily lends itself to a compact solid-state imaging chip. We believe our results are a significant step forward in developing an entirely new generation of cameras that can function for a very long duration—ideally, forever—without being externally powered."

The group of researcher is going to display its prototype self-powered camera at the the International Conference on Computational Photography at Rice University in Houston.

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Love me like you do

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Researchers Launch Coating That Protects Cotton From Flame And Water

In china a team of researchers have introduced a triple layer coating that makes cotton waterproof and fire resistant as well as self cleaning.The researchers Shanshan Chen , Xiang Li, Yang Li and Junqi Sun from Jilin University found a way to extend the life of fire retardants and hit on an idea to formed water resistant materials.

They dipped a strip of cotton into different chemicals such as a binding agent "polyethylenimine" to stuck the chemicals into the strip of cotton, then dipped into a fire retardants known as ammonium polyphosphate and at the end they dipped it into ethanol and silsesquioxane solution which work as a seal against water.

Then they exposed both strips, treated as well as untreated, to flame.The treated cotton released a gas that cut off the oxygen supply and blasts out fires in a few seconds.While the other strip burns up quickly.The first layer allows waterproofing that remain on cotton strip after 1000 times rubbing.The second layer of hydrophobic molecules act as a self-healing, fills the gaps where the first layer is damaged.

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