compumike writes "Just in time to add a bit of geeky holiday cheer to your office, this video demonstrates how to build a robotic xylophone featuring handmade solenoids and aluminum bars, and shows it playing several classic holiday tunes. New songs can be programmed in with C macros, and this project could even be extended to perhaps play a melody when a new e-mail arrived or a software build has finished compiling!"

kkleiner writes "The Institute of Agricultural Machinery at Japan's National Agriculture and Food Research Organization, along with SI Seiko, has developed a robot that can select and harvest strawberries based on their color. Ripened berries are detected using the robot's stereoscopic cameras, and analyzed to measure how red they appear. When the fruit is ready to come off the vine, the robot quickly locates it in 3D space and cuts it free. From observation to collection, the harvesting process takes about 9 seconds per berry. Creators estimate that it will be able to cut down harvesting time by 40%."

Khyber writes "Hackers: 2 Sony: 0 — that's the current standing score now that the X3 team have successfully performed a jailbreak on the official 3.50 PS3 firmware, allowing homebrew applications and more to be enabled. Here's a video of the jailbreak in action."

Kemeno writes "The International Atomic Energy Agency voted on Friday to form a nuclear fuel bank to help developing countries acquire nuclear fuel without having to enrich uranium themselves. Warren Buffet contributed 50 million dollars to a pool of 150 million with contributions from many different countries. The goal of the program is to provide countries with a source of low-grade enriched uranium suitable for fueling reactors but not for creating nuclear weapons."

Csiko writes "Researchers at Boston University's department of cognitive and neural systems are working on an artificial brain implemented with memristors. 'A memristor is a two-terminal device whose resistance changes depending on the amount, direction, and duration of voltage that's applied to it. But here's the really interesting thing about a memristor: Whatever its past state, or resistance, it freezes that state until another voltage is applied to change it. Maintaining that state requires no power.' Also theoretically described, solid state versions of memristors have not been implemented until recently. Now researchers in Boston claim that memristors are the new key technology to implement highly integrated, powerful artificial brains on cheap and widely available hardware within five years."

UgLyPuNk writes "Takayuki Fukatsu, a Japanese coder who works under the name Art & Mobile, has done a bit of trickery with Kinect and openFrameworks. The peripheral will still track your movement and position, but turns your image nearly transparent. Take a look (it's particularly obvious at about 1:30):"

CWmike writes "'Wintel' is the term that for years defined Windows-based computers running Intel chips. Now a similar expression is emerging for smartphones: 'Quadroid,' a term that refers to the Qualcomm chips used inside smartphones running the Android mobile operating system. The term, recently coined in a report by the PRTM consultancy, could catch on, largely because Qualcomm provides 77% of the chips in phones running Google's Android, which is expected to take the No. 2 slot in 2010. And the Quadroid alliance is expected to grow. Like Wintel has for PCs, Quadroid could push down profit margins for smartphone manufacturers, some analysts say. That might seem like a good thing to consumers, but may not be so good for many phone makers."

A Japanese aquarium is using the greenest energy possible to power the lights on its Christmas tree, an electric eel. From the article: "Each time the eel moves, two aluminum panels gather enough electricity to light up the 2-meter (6 ft 6 in) tall tree, decked out in white, in glowing intermittent flashes."

eldavojohn writes "A Japanese/Algerian effort called The Sahara Solar Breeder Project employs a simple concept revolving around the pure silica in the sand of the Sahara Desert. The silica can be used to build vast solar arrays which will then provide the power and means to build more solar arrays in a classic breeder model. They would then use DC powerlines utilizing high temperature superconductors. The lead of the project points out that silica is the second most abundant resource in the Earth's crust. The project's lofty goals to harness the Sahara's energy has a few requirements — including 100 million yen annually — but also the worldwide cooperation of many nations and the training of the scientists and engineers to create and man these desert plants. The once deadly wasteland of the Sahara now looks like a land rich in an important resource: sunlight."

angry tapir writes "Apple has been awarded a US patent for a display system that would allow multiple viewers to see a high-quality 3D image projected on a screen without the need for special glasses, regardless of where they are sitting. Entertainment is far from the only field in which 3D can enhance the viewing experience: others include medical diagnostics, flight simulation, air traffic control, battlefield simulation, weather diagnostics, advertising and education, according to Apple's US patent 7,843,449 for a 3D display system."

snydeq writes "Security professionals are tapping Trojan horse access points cloaked in printers and other office equipment to infiltrate clients who want their defenses tested, InfoWorld reports. Attackers dressed in IT supplier uniforms drop off printers to a company for a test-drive. Once the device is connected to the network, the penetration testers have a platform behind any perimeter defenses from which to attack. 'You can put your box inside a printer tray and glue it shut, and who will notice if there are one or two or three power cables coming out?' one security researcher says of the method. A variant of the attack, presented by Errata Security at the Defcon hacking convention, uses an attack-tool-laden iPhone mailed to a target company to get inside the firm's network defenses."

cylonlover writes "Researchers from Aachen University's Media Computing Group have created a computer workstation called the BendDesk where the desk and screen are transformed into one multi-touch display. The display is curved at the middle and uses infrared emitters and cameras to track user movement over the whole of the surface, which has its graphical user interface beamed onto it by a couple of short throw projectors hidden within its wooden frame."

Lucas123 writes "SanDisk, Nikon and Sony are jointly developing a new Compact Flash card specification for the professional photography and video markets that boosts data transfer rates from 167MB/sec with today's 6.0 specification to 500MB/sec. The newly proposed specification would also offer up cards with a theoretical maximum capacity of 2TB, which would be conducive to recording high-definition video."

MojoKid writes "IBM is one of a number of companies working on a next-generation storage memory project and a recent discovery at Texas A&M University is a step forward for the company's racetrack memory. Racetrack memory relies on a nanowire arranged perpendicular to the chip. Current pulses across the nanowires allow data to be shifted as necessary. In theory, racetrack memory could be the Holy Grail of storage, capable of replacing both traditional hard drives and SSDs simultaneously. Racetrack memory could solve multiple problems and commercial implementations could offer hard drive-level density. Performance and reliability would both be far superior to today's SSDs. To date, IBM has demo'd a three-bit racetrack configuration. It's a start, but it's far from a shippable product at this juncture." What the A&M researchers have come up with is "a way to pulse the current much more efficiently and quickly."

suraj.sun sends this quote from Engadget about improving the Kinect 3D video recordings we discussed recently: "[Oliver Kreylos is] blowing minds and demonstrating that two Kinects can be paired and their output meshed — one basically filling in the gaps of the other. He found that the two do create some interference, the dotted IR pattern of one causing some holes and blotches in the other, but when the two are combined they basically help each other out and the results are quite impressive."

itwbennett writes "According to Electronista, a series of patents filed 13 months ago and published late last week by Sony Computer Entertainment America may confirm rumors of a PSP2 with back touchpad. Of course, they could also confirm the rumored PlayStation phone. 'In either case,' says Peter Smith, 'exactly what interactions will be performed via the rear touch pad remain to be seen. Without adding a cursor to the display it couldn't be anything very precise (in other words, you wouldn't want to have to tap on a specific spot on the UI), but scrolling through menus, swiping to select items in inventory or panning around a map all seem like viable touch-enabled gaming UI interactions that you can do 'blind.' In shooter games you'll often have a gun reticle (essentially a cursor) anyway so aiming could be done via a rear pad.'"

eldavojohn writes "Have you ever wanted to catch the perfect photo with your SLR camera but couldn't time the shot just right? Photography enthusiast Matt Richardson brings us an instructional video over at Make Magazine that shows how to use some very basic breadboarding and an Arduino Nano to do some high-speed flash photography that is timed by sound instead of your finger hitting the button on the camera. He pops a balloon and smashes a wine glass to show some results. His code is available on Github, and you can find more of this sly hardware hacker on his YouTube channel."

Stoobalou writes "In layman's terms, Microsoft's patent is for a special type of touch-screen display which includes a 'shape-memory' layer at its base. When activated by a special frequency of ultraviolet light, individual blocks — not-coincidentally the same size as a pixel on the display part — can be raised or lowered, lending the displayed image physical texture."

Hugh Pickens writes "Jonathan Fahey writes for AP that as the first mass-market electric cars go on sale next month, the power industry faces a huge growth opportunity, with SoCal Edison expecting to be charging 100,000 cars by 2015 and California setting a goal of 1 million electric vehicles by 2020. But utility executives are worried that the difficulty of keeping the lights on for the first crop of buyers — and their neighbors — could slow the growth of this industry because it's inevitable that electric utilities will suffer some difficulties early on. 'We are all going to be a lot smarter two years from now,' says Mark Perry, director of product planning for Nissan North America. When plugged into a home charging station the first Leafs and Volts will draw 3,300 Watts and take about 8 hours to deliver a full charge, but both carmakers may soon boost that to 6,600 Watts. The Tesla Roadster, an electric sports car with a huge battery, can draw 16,800 Watts. That means that adding an electric vehicle or two to a neighborhood can be like adding another house, and it can stress the equipment that services those houses. The problem is that transformers that distribute power from the electrical grid to homes are often designed to handle less than about 12,000 watts so the extra stress on a transformer from one or two electric vehicles could cause it to overheat and fail, knocking out power to the block."

iONiUM sends in news of an early glimpse at Acer's upcoming Iconia laptop, on which they've replaced the keyboard area with a second 14" display that accepts multi-touch input. "The upright display acts as the primary display, while the display that remains parallel with the surface generally serves as a navigation panel, alternatively displaying a roomy on-screen keyboard, a touch-wheel and other on-screen touch controls, or even an extension of what's displayed on the primary display. The latter option effectively provides a dual-monitor mobile device for presentations or studying complex spreadsheets across both monitors, or viewing one document in one monitor, and another on the second monitor. The two monitors make the Iconia a hefty device — at 6.1 pounds it's unlikely to be the device you throw in your bag for your commute." Engadget has some pictures and a video of the device.