Fresh Electronics News

Have you ever thought what is your laptop made of? At least, I think I know everything inside it, and how it basically works. But I didn’t think of something: my laptop has an accelerometer inside, it’s a tiny chip containing lots of  thin and parallel pieces of metal that move when acceleration is present, and change the capacity between them. That is how they detect the acceleration (almost the same as you do in your car with your ears).

Some computer geeks put their brains to the work and hacked this feature of modern laptops, learned how to use the accelerometer function, and linked about 1500 laptops, in a network between them, to control… guess what… earthquake activity!

Their network has already detected several quakes, including a magnitude 4.5 quake in LA in July. Led by Elizabeth Cochran at the University of California, Riverside, and Jesse Lawrence at Stanford University, QCN uses the same BOINC platform for volunteer computing that projects like SETI@home rely on.

There is a catch with the QCN sensors, though: getting accurate coordinates for their position. At present, since most laptops do not have GPS, the project relies on coordinates that the users type in. Fortunately, rough coordinates can also be automatically retrieved from network routers that the laptop is connected to, as a backup.

Cool invention, isn’t it? If used properly, it could one day save lives…

Scientists at Clemson University for the first time have been able to make a practical optical fiber with a silicon core, according to a new paper published in the current issue of the Optical Society’s open-access journal, Optics Express. Led by Professor John Ballato and including fiber pioneer Roger Stolen, the team of scientists was able to create this new fiber by employing the same commercial methods that are used to develop all-glass fibers, making silicon fibers viable alternatives to glass fibers for selected specialty applications. This advance ultimately should help increase efficiency and decrease power consumption in computers and other systems that integrate photonic and electronic devices. Continue reading »

Sonos Controller is an iPhone application that can manage the same audio hardware and music libraries as the CR100 unit. For example, it can control your music library, switch/link zones on the fly, adjust the volume, and many others. It is practically a software emulation of its relative CR100. You can easily search a title or artist, or listen to your MP3 library in another room helped by the already-known intuitive interface of the iPhone.

In addition to your music library on your computer, NAS or Time Capsule, Sonos brings Pandora, Sirius, Rhapsody and Napster control right to the iPhone, plus support for 15,000 new radio stations and Last.fm.

via Gizmodo

Gizmodo has presented a video material made by the iPhone Dev Team, showing how to access the Apple processor in the case of iPhone 3G.

The baseband processor controls the connection between the phone and the mobile network, meaning that downloading a software should soon allow an iPhone 3G user to use his device in another network than the one set by Apple.

You surely remember the buzz around the first iPhone model and those who managed to hack it, for being used outside the four networks supported by Apple. iPhone 3G proved itself harder to hack, because it seems Apple has changed the technology to make it harder to use in other networks. You can unlock the iPhone 3G and use it in another network by modifying the SIM card, but what the iPhone Dev team is trying to prove is a software unlocking method, that you only have to download and install.

There haven’t been many requests for unlocking the iPhone 3G, because the model was distributed on a much larger scale worldwide. Anyway, there still are countries like China, that don’t have access to this gadget and there also are users that want to use their iPhones in other network than the one Apple set for their home country.

It proves out Epson is not only good at making printers, but also LCD displays. So, recently, Epson Imaging Devices Corporation came up with a Photo Fine High-Reflect (HR). That is a TFT LCD made for high visibility and energy efficiency.

In dark environments, the Epson LCD uses classic illumination techniques. When there’s light outside, though, the monitor relies on the ambient light and turns off the backlight. This causes a reduction in the monitor’s energy consumption.

The new LCD monitor has a brightness of 200cd/m² and a reflection ratio of over six percent. The release date will be this October, and the models will feature a 3 inch and a 3.5 inch.

Just two weeks after a Nobel Prize was given to a theoretical work on subatomic particles, scientists are announcing a discovery about a much more familiar form of matter: Scotch tape. It turns out that if you peel the popular adhesive tape off its roll in a vacuum chamber, it emits X-rays. The researchers even made an X-ray image of one of their fingers.

Who knew? Actually, more than 50 years ago, some Russian scientists reported evidence of X-rays from peeling sticky tape off glass. But the new work demonstrates that you can get a lot of X-rays, a study co-author says.

“We were very surprised,” said Juan Escobar. “The power you could get from just peeling tape was enormous.”

Escobar is a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles.

He suggests that with some tune-ups, the process might be harnessed for making inexpensive X-ray machines for paramedics or for places where electricity is expensive or hard to get. After all, you could peel tape or do something similar in such machines with just human power, like cranking.

In the new work, a machine is peeling a standard Scotch tape off a roll in a vacuum chamber at about 1.2 inches per second. Rapid pulses of X-rays, each about a billionth of a second long, emerged from very close to where the tape was coming off the roll.

This seems an interesting idea for generating X-Rays, especially in low cost instrumentation. Imagine third-world countries having cheap X-Rays machines in their hospitals…
via AP

Researchers from McGill University in the US, from the Ultra-Low Temperature Condensed Matter Experiment Lab, led by Dr. Guillaume Gervais discovered a new state of matter, a quasi-three- dimensional electron crystal, in a material very much like those used in the fabrication of modern transistors. This discovery could have huge implications for the development of new electronic devices.

Two-dimensional electron crystals were discovered in the laboratory in the 1990s, and were predicted as far back as 1934 by renowned Hungarian physicist Eugene Wigner. Until an accidental discovery during one of Gervais’s earliest ultra-low temperature experiments in 2005, however, no one predicted the existence of quasi-three-dimensional electron crystals. “Picture a sandwich, and the ham in the middle is your electrons,” explained Dr. Guillaume Gervais, director of McGill’s Ultra-Low Temperature Condensed Matter Experiment Lab. “In a 2D electron crystal, the electrons are squeezed between two materials and they’re very two dimensional. They can move on a plane, like billiard balls on a pool table, but there’s no up and down motion. There’s a thickness, but they’re stuck.”

Working with one of the purest semiconductor materials ever made, they discovered the quasi-three-dimensional electron crystal in a device cooled at ultra-low temperatures roughly 100 times colder than intergalactic space. The material was then exposed to the most powerful continuous magnetic fields generated on Earth.

When you go to lower scales with the electronic circuits currently being used, other laws of physics apply. Once in two years, the circuits density gets higher, and there will be a time not too far away when it will be impossible to make electronics any smaller. Being so small, the electrons cannot be treated by the classic laws of physics, they respect other weird laws, the quantum physics. For example, at those scales they’re not to be treated as individual units, because they may even split up.

“This issue is academic, but it’s not just academic.”, says Gervais. “The same semiconductor materials we’re working with are currently used in cellphones and other electronic devices. We need to understand quantum effects so we can use them to our own advantage and perhaps reinvent the transistor altogether. That way, progress in electronics will keep happening .”

Skype has announced that TOM Online, owning the majority of shares of the Chinese society TOM-Skype, has monitored and stored part of the text messages sent by Skype users, without letting Skype know that.

Skype appologized after a report brought to the surface that the service is monitoring chat messages that contain political interest keywords, and stores them among millions of personal records of computer users. They could be accessed by anyone, including chinese authorities.

Jennifer Caukin, s Skype representant, who owns the minoritary share package of TOM-Skype, recognized the existence of this breach on TOM’s servers and said that this issue has been resolved. Continue reading »

Sony and Max Planck Institute demonstrate the possibility of bendable optically assessed organic light emitting displays for the first time, based on red or IR-A light upconversion. So, rigid television screens, heavy laptops and still image posters are to be a thing of the past as new research, published today, Thursday, 2 October, in the New Journal of Physics, heralds the beginning of a technological revolution for screen displays.

All organic, upconversion multicolour displays have significant advantages when they are compared to the classic technology used for projection displays and televisions nowadays. Continue reading »