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OCAU News |
Saturday Afternoon
(5 Comments)
(link) Saturday, 26-August-2006 17:44:25 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Dell aren't alone with their battery woes - Apple are recalling 1.8M batteries also manufactured by Sony. Meanwhile, here's an article about reviving and maximising batteries.
I don't have a flying car yet, but maybe I could get a personal helicopter. It comes with a seat and landing gear so all you have to do is strap on and you are ready to go.
Lego has a cool new version of their mindstorms product - BusinessWeek have a slideshow. The combination of a computerized controller, sensors, servo motors, and hundreds of Lego Technic pieces lets kids of all ages design and build sophisticated robotics.
Popular Science have an article about the future of robots. The word "robot" originated almost a century ago. Czech dramatist Karel Capek first used the term in his 1921 play R.U.R. (for "Rossum’s Universal Robots"), creating it from the Czech word "robota," meaning obligatory work.
The future of hard drives is interesting too, with perpendicular recording perhaps only being a stop-gap measure. Reducing the grains further in size could cause them to flip at room temperature and so corrupt the data--an aspect of the "superparamagnetic effect," first identified in the mid-1990s by Stan Charap of Carnegie Mellon University.
There's interesting news on the cooling front too, with tiny ion pumps being used for cooling hot chips. The device, which uses an electrical charge to create a cooling air jet right at the surface of the chip, could be critical to advancing computer technology because future chips will be smaller, more tightly packed and are likely to run hotter than today's chips.
HowStuffWorks meanwhile explain how liquid-cooled PC's work. It might seem a little counterintuitive to put liquids near delicate electronic equipment, but cooling with water is far more efficient than cooling with air. Good intro for newbies.
DPReview have a detailed first look at Canon's EOS 400D / Digital Rebel XTi, their new affordable 10-megapixel digital SLR. Headline new features / specifications include the ten megapixel CMOS sensor (up to ISO 1600), a new dust reduction system, nine area auto focus, Picture Styles, a large 2.5" LCD monitor which now also provides shooting information (the second control panel LCD is gone) and better continuous shooting buffering.
If you think of diesel cars as slow, think again - a British team has run a diesel-powered car at 328 miles per hour on the Bonneville salt flats recently. The JCB Dieselmax he drove was designed by a British team and is powered by a version of the same engine that is used in ordinary JCB vehicles.
In space news, NASA are planning to launch Atlantis tomorrow. The 11-day mission will kick off a final round of construction at the international space station, where work was delayed for nearly three years by the 2003 Columbia accident.
Finally, Pluto is apparently not a planet anymore. "Pluto is not a planet," Brown said. "There are finally, officially, eight planets in the solar system." I have to say, and I've said this before about this issue: bah! Surely if we can have A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y, we can have Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto because of its historical significance. Any future objects that don't meet the new critera won't be declared planets. But leave Pluto alone! It seems others agree. Discussion here.
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All original content copyright James Rolfe.
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