Digital Art (31 pics)
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Mobile phones powered by??¦speech?
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This modern age of cell phones has certainly made communication easier, and the only downside is the necessity of charging our cell phones. This need always keeps us going back to the AC outlet, often at inconvenient times.
Devices like the solar-powered Solio or other AA-battery powered chargers might give a cellular phone a tiny bit of juice that it needs, but what if there was a simpler way? What if charging our phone was as simple as talking to it?
This is what some University of Houston scientists are suggesting is possible with piezoelectricity, when a mechanical force is converted to electricity. For example, a barbeque grill lighter uses piezoelectric forces when you push a button. The button puts pressure on a crystal, the crystal produces a voltage, and the result is a spark that lights your coals.
A specific size of crystal or ceramic material could become a power cell for a mobile device, and the sound waves for our own voice could be the spark that powers it. Some of the power generating crystals would have to be very small, only 23 nanometers wide. To put this into scale, a human hair is about 100,000 nanometers thick.
Something that miniscule would be hard to perfect, and scientists are saying that it could be years before this technology gets going. However, phones that run on speech alone would save a lot of energy. After all, most teenagers are chatting on their phones constantly, so you might as well put this chatter to good use.
Amazing Photoshop! People.. (14 pics)
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The Hanging Alarm Clock jerks out of your reach
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This new alarm hangs on a 30cm cable and when it??™s time to wake up it will creep up that cable and hide out on your ceiling. The only way to shut it off is to grab it off the ceiling and hit the stop button. Which means you??™ll end up having to stand to reach the thing. Hopefully you don??™t have a cat though, because it would end up attempting to rip it down from the ceiling. Which doesn??™t look good for either your alarm clock or the cat.
Nokia N97: The next cool smartphone (+video)
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Our friends from Finland recently unveiled the Nokia N97 at the Nokia World 2008 conference in Barcelona this week. This quad-band world phone is HSDPA compatible, with integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
The N97 is designed for the social networking generation with Web 2.0 compatibility, which can support streaming flash videos. One of the most prominent features is what the company calls ???social location??? which can enable integrated A-GPS sensors with an electric compass to automatically update users??™ social networks, or let them share their location via photos or videos with friends.
Ycam Wi-Fi Baby Monitor
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Even though I have children of my own, I haven??™t really invested in a baby monitor. I really ought to, because they have some fancy ones with video cameras now for a low price. When I was a baby, the only baby monitors with video cameras were several hundred dollars each.
The Ycam Wi-Fi Baby monitor is certainly a whole lot cheaper, as it uses the inexpensive video technology that is common on webcams everywhere. The Ycam is designed to hook up with the user??™s own Wi-Fi network, and it is able to take high quality video with sound. It can shoot in 30fps with 640 x 480 pixel resolution.
Walking Shopping Cart Robot
(No Ratings Yet)1993 kinetic robotic art project using remote control, car batteries, aluminum parts, and cables ??” intentionally set on fire.
