Tech-savvy artist pushes for gadgets that everyone can use [Popular Science. Read Original]
Twenty-two-time Grammy winner Stevie Wonder has created new sounds, even genres, by absorbing and reshaping every musical and audio technology he’s encountered.… Read the rest
A new competition aims to inspire the 100mpg personal plane
[Popular Science. Read Original] Imagine a ’57 Chevy cruising through the air, and you get an idea of what single-engine, propeller-driven airplanes do to the environment. The average private plane, such as the popular two-seat Cessna 172, is 30 years old.… Read the rest
A radical new power plant aims to convert our dirtiest fossil fuel into clean-burning hydrogen
[Popular Science. Read Original] Big lumps of sooty coal hardly seem like the future of energy, but that’s exactly what the U.S. Department of Energy predicts.… Read the rest
[New York Times] Brawn beat brains in the old days of automobiles. To make cars faster, people bolted bigger air intakes, carburetors and exhaust pipes onto giant muscle car engines. Tuning adjustments were simple, requiring only screwdrivers and wrenches.
In the mid-1980’s, control of the engine slipped out of the average mechanic’s hands and into the so-called black boxes housing onboard computers.… Read the rest
The new Healthmap website digests information from a variety of sources ranging from the World Health Organization to Google News and plots the spread of about 50 diseases on a continually updated global map. It was developed as a side project by two staffers at the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program in Boston — physician John Brownstein and software developer Clark Freifeld.… Read the rest
[New York Times] In the old days of digital television, a year or two ago, choices were simple. If the screen measured under 37 inches diagonally, it would be a liquid-crystal-display panel. From about 37 to 43 inches, it would probably be a plasma panel.… Read the rest
Researchers in Switzerland are developing a new nano technology they claim will double the range of colors that future TVs can produce — displaying every hue the human eye can see. By comparison, most of today’s TVs — be they plasmas, LCDs or projectors — display only about half the visible colors.… Read the rest
A new line of 3-D televisions by Philips uses the familiar trick of sending slightly different images to the left and right eyes — mimicking our stereoscopic view of the real world. But where old-fashioned 3-D movies rely on the special glasses to block images meant for the other eye, Philips’ WOWvx technology places tiny lenses over each of the millions of red, green and blue sub pixels that make up an LCD or plasma screen.… Read the rest
Tiny, laser-based projectors could transform these pocket-size devices into full-blown entertainment systems by shining images onto walls, tabletops or the backs of airplane seats. In a bright room, the handheld projectors would produce images about as bright and big as a 10-inch laptop screen, said Greg Niven, the vice president of marketing at laser maker Novalux.… Read the rest
[Slate] Before last month, Dell had made only one attempt to look cool in its 22-year history. I don’t need to tell you that the “Dell dude” wasn’t the coolest guy on the planet. Dell’s second attempt to win street cred, its recent acquisition of the hip, gamer-friendly computer manufacturer Alienware, will probably prove more successful.… Read the rest
