The Great Geek Manual News

The first plug-in hybrid to be sold in the United States will likely be the Fisker Karma, which is due out in November. Fisker Automotive, which unveiled the concept version of the Karma in January, recently raised $87 million to help put it into production. A number of other plug-in hybrids, including models from GM, Chrysler, and Toyota, are scheduled to come out in the next few years.

The Karma, a luxury four-passenger sedan, can be recharged by plugging it in; it can then be driven on power from a battery alone for 50 miles. After that, an onboard gasoline generator kicks on to recharge the battery, extending the range by 250 miles between fill-ups. Power from optional solar cells on the roof will be used primarily to cool the car when it’s parked, but they could also partially recharge the battery. The car will run on a lithium manganese oxide battery made by Advanced Lithium Power, based in Vancouver, BC. The battery is similar to the one selected for the Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid due out in November of 2010.

Henrik Fisker, a car designer and cofounder of the company, said at the New York Auto Show last week that the car is part of his effort to show that environmentally friendly cars need not be small and underpowered. To go with its performance, the car carries a hefty price tag of $87,000.

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Source: Technology Review

A second generation of Microsoft’s Surface computing device is two to three years away, the South by SouthWest Festival has heard.

Developer Joe Olsen, whose company Phenomblue writes applications for the Surface, said he had been told the device was still in the development stage.

“They haven’t even got to point where they are going to commercialise,” he said.

Chris Bernard, user experience evangelist for Microsoft, said he could not confirm a release date.

Surface is a multi-touch computer in the shape of a table, with a flat screen that can “read” multi-touch gestures, as well as content from printed material placed onto the device, thanks to five cameras inside the machine.

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Source: The BBC

A security research team led by the well-known computer science professor Ed Felten has just finished a study into whether future anticounterfeiting measures might have more luck if they focused on the print medium itself. Is it possible to fingerprint a single sheet of paper?

According to the study’s abstract, the answer is yes—and it can be done with commodity hardware. “This paper presents a novel technique for authenticating physical documents based on random, naturally occurring imperfections in paper texture,” says the document. “We introduce a new method for measuring the three-dimensional surface of a page using only a commodity scanner and without modifying the document in any way. From this physical feature, we generate a concise fingerprint that uniquely identifies the document. Our technique is secure against counterfeiting and robust to harsh handling; it can be used even before any content is printed on a page.”

The fact that Felten’s method takes advantage of a commodity scanner is important. Other security techniques can check the base material of a suspected document, but options to date have been expensive, laborious, or both. Felten’s primary contention is that this commodity-driven scanning method is both low-cost and robust.

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Source: Ars Technica

Engineers claim to have developed lithium-ion batteries that could lead to smaller, lighter batteries that charge in seconds.

Due to the amount of energy they can store lithium-ion batteries are typically found in consumer devices such as MP3 players and laptops, however they are slow to recharge.

Scientists have traditionally blamed this on slow-moving lithium ions which carry charge across the battery. However, five years ago, Gerbrand Ceder and a team at MIT discovered that lithium ions in traditional lithium iron phosphate battery material actually move quite quickly.

Ceder and colleagues discovered the problem was to do with the way ions pass through the material. Lithium ions travel through tunnels accessed from the surface of the material. If a lithium ion at the surface is directly in front of a tunnel entrance, it can quickly deliver a charge. But if the ion is not at the entrance, it cannot easily move there, making it less efficient at delivering a charge.

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Source: PC Pro

Officers: Are you sick and tired of excessive force lawsuits? Well cheer up. Taser has a plan to give your police department its own CYA reality TV show.

The less-lethal weapons company has launched a wearable computer, called Axon, that will let cops record every minute of their day and upload it to a secure website. From there, they can share their favorite memories with friends, family, and jurors.

“Our Axon and Evidence.com technology will be a lifeline to protect truth,” says Steve Tuttle, the vice president of communications for Taser.

For years, cops around the world have been accused of being a little too eager to reach out and stun someone. For example, a Denver Post report found that 90 percent of the subjects tased by the police department there were unarmed. Most times, the weapon was used to “force people to obey orders, to shortcut physical confrontations and, in several cases, to avoid having to run after a suspect.” In Sarasota, officers recently tased a naked senior. In Wales, cops even zapped a bunch of sheep.

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Source: Wired’s Blog

Ever wish you could you power your home’s electrical appliances with the energy you generate on your exercise bike? A new concept called an “inlet outlet” could allow homeowners to put power from kinetic household activities - such as exercise equipment - back into the grid through a wall socket, helping to lower electricity bills. Basically, the inlet outlet would be the opposite of a typical wall outlet.

The concept was one of 50 finalists at this year’s Greener Gadgets Design Competition, which was held last Friday, February 27, in New York City, and is sponsored by the Consumer Electronics Association. Designed by Carla Diana and Jeff Hoefs of Smart Design, the inlet outlet concept includes adapter kits that convert common household products into energy-generating devices compatible with the inlet outlets.

Besides exercise equipment, sources of reusable energy could include things like a refrigerator or gas oven/range, which generate heat that could be captured by a panel and converted into electricity. In addition, motion is everywhere: a welcome mat that is constantly stepped on, an outdoor trampoline, and a flag in the wind all generate kinetic energy that could be converted into electricity and fed back into the grid through the inlet outlet. No matter how small, inlet energy could counteract some of the energy consumed.

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Source: PhysOrg

The idea is to replace the printer with a secure e-mail server operated by the postal service that can then deliver a digital equivalent of your paper phone bill or investment statement to a personal, secure online mailbox. The approach has been embraced by Swiss Post, Switzerland’s national carrier which operates in 16 countries.

Calls for an overhaul of the U.S. Postal Service are getting louder. They’ll only increase in volume in the runup to a 2 percent increase in the price of a first-class stamp, scheduled for May 11.

The extra postage is needed to cover the rising costs of a sprawling operation that employs 685,000 people, operates 37,000 retail locations, and in fiscal 2008 delivered 202 billion pieces of mail in every state, city, town, and village in the U.S. and its territories. The U.S. Postal Service [USPS], which relies on postage-stamp sales and not Uncle Sam for revenue, is operating at a large loss. Last year’s $2.6 billion shortfall, on $75 billion in revenue, is expected to widen to $8 billion this year.

In an effort to rein in costs, Postmaster General John E. Potter last month floated before a Senate subcommittee the idea of cutting back on mail delivery to five days a week from six.

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Source: News Factor

We’ve still got a long way to go before human beings can be beamed from one place to another “Star Trek”-style, but a team of scientists at the University of Maryland has achieved, nonetheless, a milestone in teleportation.

According to the Web site LiveScience, the university’s Joint Quantum Institute for the first time was able to teleport information between two separate atoms across a distance of a meter — about one step for an adult.

Generally, teleportation works thanks to a remarkable quantum phenomenon called entanglement, which occurs only on the atomic and subatomic scale. Once two objects are put in an entangled state, their properties are inextricably entwined. In layman’s terms, if they are in entangled mode, what you “see” on one is what you get on the other.

The JQI team set out to entangle the quantum states of two individual ytterbium ions so information embodied in one could be teleported to the other. Each ion was isolated in a separate high-vacuum trap, suspended in an invisible cage of electromagnetic fields and surrounded by metal electrodes.

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Source: MSN

With their immersive 3D capabilities, virtual-reality environments (VEs) provide the kind of intense visual experience that two-dimensional digital televisions could never to live up to. But digital TVs outperform VEs in one important way: They can play high-resolution video in real-time without a hitch, while VEs have trouble rendering the data-heavy video clips at a constant frame rate.

University of California at San Diego grad student Han Suk Kim is trying to narrow that performance gap so that VEs can one day be used for high-resolution video conferencing, video surveillance or even in virtual movie theaters. Kim, a computer science and engineering Ph.D. student at the Jacobs School of Engineering, has developed an efficient “mipmap” algorithm that “shrinks” high-resolution video content so that it can be played interactively in VEs. He has also created several optimization solutions for sustaining a stable video playback frame rate, even when the video is projected onto non-rectangular VE screens.

Kim will showcase his work during the student poster session at the Jacobs School of Engineering’s Research Expo on Thursday, Feb. 19. Kim’s research will be one of 240 grad student projects presented at Research Expo. For a sneak peak of hot student posters, click here . Research Expo also includes technical breakout sessions by Jacobs School faculty, as well as a luncheon featuring keynote speaker Christopher Scolese, NASA’s acting administrator.

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Source: Phys Org

It’s a modern medical twist on an ancient art. Scientists at Draper Laboratory, in Cambridge, MA, are developing a nanosensor that could be injected into the skin, much like tattoo dye, to monitor an individual’s blood-sugar level. As the glucose level increases, the “tattoo” would fluoresce under an infrared light, telling a diabetic whether or not she needs an insulin shot following a meal. The researchers have already tested a sodium-sensing version of the device in mice, and will soon begin animal tests of the glucose-specific sensor.

The most reliable way to measure blood sugar is by pricking the finger for a tiny blood sample and using enzyme-laden test strips to detect glucose. In an attempt to free diabetics from this time-consuming and expensive regime, a number of novel glucose-sensing technologies are under development, from implanted devices that continually monitor blood sugar and dispense insulin, to noninvasive sensors that detect glucose through the skin via infrared light.

Heather Clark and her colleagues are developing something designed to operate in between these two extremes. The material consists of 120-nanometer polymer beads coated with a biocompatible material. Within each bead is a fluorescent dye and specialized sensor molecules, designed to detect specific chemicals, such as sodium or glucose.

When injected into the skin, the sensor molecule pulls the target chemical–say, sodium–into the polymer from the interstitial fluid, which surrounds cells. To compensate for the newly acquired positive charge of a sodium ion, a dye molecule releases a positive ion, making the molecule fluoresce. The level of fluorescence increases with the concentration of the chemical target. Scientists can swap in different recognition molecules to measure different targets, including chloride, calcium, and glucose. The range of concentrations that the sensor can detect can be varied by altering the ratio of the components, depending on whether it is important to measure precise concentrations or more broad variability.

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Source: Technology Review

The craze for touch-screen gadgets, sparked by Apple Inc’s popular iPhone, is raising worries that a whole generation of consumer electronics will be out of the reach of the blind.

Motown icon Stevie Wonder and other advocates came to the world’s biggest gadget fest, the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, to convince vendors to consider the needs of the blind.

Wonder told a CES event that his wishlist included a car he could drive — which he acknowledged was probably “a ways away” — and a Sirius XM satellite radio he could operate.

“If you can take those few steps further, you can give us the excitement, the pleasure and the freedom of being a part of it,” said the famed musician.

Wonder said some companies had managed to make their products more accessible to the blind, sometimes without even meaning to. He cited an iPod music player and Research in Motion’s BlackBerry as gadgets he likes to use.

Advocates argue that if product designers take into account blind needs, they would make electronics that are easier to use for the sighted as well.

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Source: Yahoo! Tech

The Internet has proven it can handle television, but is TV prepared to handle the Internet?

For years, technology companies have tried in vain to bring the Internet onto the screen at the centre of North American living rooms. Although TV shows have made the migration to the Web, to date, it has been a one-way road.

Now, a new breed of Internet-connected televisions is threatening to shake up both the technology and broadcasting industries while making millions of recently purchased high-definition TVs yesterday’s news.

Although the migration of the Internet to television could prove a boon for online video services, chip makers and television manufacturers, the new reality, if successful, could also bring about tough new challenges for cable companies and purveyors of set-top boxes.

Yesterday, LG Electronics Inc. unveiled a new line of high-definition TVs at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that will include software from Netflix Inc. – the largest U.S. mail-order movie service – to allow users to download movies and television programs directly to their TVs over an Internet connection.

Sony Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. have been selling Internet-enabled televisions for a few years now, but users have been reluctant to adopt the technology simply because there wasn’t much worth watching.

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Source: Canada’s Globe and Mail

A consortium of 14 U.S. technology companies is seeking $1 billion in federal aid to build a factory to manufacture advanced electric car batteries, according to a report Wednesday night by The Wall Street Journal.

Aiming to catch up to Asian battery producers that already dominate the market, the National Alliance for Advanced Transportation Battery Cell Manufacture is described as the most ambitious effort to date to meet automakers’ increasing demand for lithium-ion batteries. The report noted that U.S. automakers such as GM and Ford plan to roll out plug-in electric cars by 2010, but that the U.S. lacks sufficient facilities to produce the lithium-ion batteries those cars require.

Batteries are the most expensive component in plug-in electric vehicles, a market being pursued by a few U.S. companies. But battery makers and analysts say that U.S. manufacturers lack the financial means to meet the anticipated demand of electric cars.

Last week, former Intel CEO Andy Grove joined other Silicon Valley elites in advocating for an industry shift into energy technology. Grove told the Journal that he is urging Intel to invest in battery manufacturing as a way to diversify from its core chip business.

Grove said Intel’s “strategic objective is tackling big problems and turning them into big businesses.” He said Intel, with its cash resources, can invest in battery technology and manufacturing to bring down the cost of car batteries, which would drive adoption of plug-in electric cars.

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Source: CNet

Fuel cells are, in principle, the most efficient way to convert hydrogen fuel into electricity. But they require expensive catalysts such as platinum to split hydrogen into ions and electrical current. Cheaper metals simply can’t withstand the harsh acidic environment of the fuel cell. Now researchers in China have developed a fuel cell that uses a new membrane material to operate in alkaline conditions, eliminating the need for an expensive catalyst. The power output of the new prototype, which uses nickel as a catalyst, is still relatively low, but it provides a first demonstration of a potentially much less expensive fuel cell.

Conventional fuel cells consist of two electrodes coated with a platinum catalyst that splits hydrogen fuel into acidic hydrogen ions and electrons. The electrodes are separated by a polymer membrane that conducts acidic hydrogen ions from one side to the other, creating an external electrical current. The new fuel cell, developed by researchers led by Lin Zhuang, a professor of chemistry at Wuhan University, in Wuhan, China, uses a new membrane that conducts alkaline ions called hydroxyl groups. Alkaline fuel cells work by reacting hydrogen and oxygen to create hydroxyl ions and water, a reaction catalyzed in the Wuhan University fuel cell by the nickel anode. The hydroxyl ions are conducted across the polymer membrane, generating an external electrical current.

Most researchers have been focused on acidic fuel cells because membranes that work well under such conditions have already been developed. A stable hydroxyl-conducting membrane has been “the holy grail of electrochemistry,” says Robert Savinell, a professor of chemical engineering at Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland. Such a membrane would allow researchers to build fuel cells and batteries that don’t require precious-metal catalysts but can use cheaper ones like nickel.

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Source: Technology Review