Category: Sci/Tech

Yesterday, HP shone the ol’ passive memory chip reader onto its forthcoming Memory Spot chip, its answer to the RFID tag. The Memory Spot is pretty amazing. It’s very tiny, having an antenna built right into its wee package. It can hold 4 megabits of data and has a 10 Mbps data transfer rate. HP sees a future in which these slivery chips are in and on everything, from products that will come with catalogs of other products built into them to medicine bottles that’ll lecture you about contraindications, to greeting and business cards that will have audio and video built into them. HP sees PDAs and phones eventually being turned into Memory Spot readers.

It’ll be interesting to see how this technology shakes out and if we’ll end up in a drawn out standards battle between this tech and conventional RFID.

As we reported earlier this week, Robert Bigelow was planning to launch a test inflatable structure in space as the first stage of his planned hotel in space. The launch happened on Wednesday and the flight and inflation was a success. The Genesis flew aboard a Cold War-era ballistic missile launched from a pad in Russia’s Ural Mountains.

In a mission update released yesterday by Blowfeld…er… I mean Bigelow himself, he said:

“All Systems are operating within expected parameters. Temperature, avionics, solar arrays and battery power all remain positive. All of our initial orbits have had direct sunlight, which has helped in charging the main battery to maximum capacity.

“Pressure onboard the spacecraft has remained constant at 7.5 pounds per square inch (PSI). We have had multiple contacts with the ship, and received several data streams. While most of these current communication streams are dedicated to command and control of the spacecraft, we have downloaded several small images from the onboard cameras and hope to get more as more bandwidth in the data stream becomes available.”

Is it just me or does this look like something that should have stayed on the drawing board? And as Matt Groening once pointed out about such Gernsbackian bubble cars o’ the future: you’d fry like a freakin’ egg in there on a hot sunny day!

The amazing thing about this electric goofmobile is that it can go up to 112 mph, which, as the Sci-Fi Tech blog point outs, is so you won’t have to hear the derisive laughter of those you pass by on the street.

The not-so-good news for Sony and its Playstation 3 machine just keeps on coming. The latest is found via an interview with Tom Reeves, VP of semiconductor and technology services at IBM, conducted by Electronic News. In it, he reveals that the initial yields for the Cell chip, used in Sony’s forthcoming game machine, are currently between 10 to 20 percent. They’re hoping to improve that to 40% But in high-volume chip fabrication, that’s still an unsettlingly low number. The lower the yield (i.e. usuable chips on a silicon wafer), the more expensive the processor. Not good news for a consumer electronics device that already looks in danger of being priced out of a competitive range.

[Via CNet News]

We held our collective breath last week as that aging relic of ’70s technology, the Space Shuttle, limped its way into space. (You know your spaceship is old when, after you’ve climbed out of Earth’s gravity well, you have to inspect the entire craft to make sure it arrived with all of its parts.) But the real action in space is taking place later on this week, and later on this fall, as a number of private space efforts take to the sky.

First off the pad is Vegas hotelier Robert Biglow’s test flight of the first component for his proposed space hotel. On July 14, a subscale model of his planned inflatable space modules will be launched from a pad in Russia. If successful, he plans on starting to launch the actual inflatable modules which will eventually go together to create the first hotel in space. Biglow thinks big, hoping to start turning down the upright sleeping bags in your sub-luxury space birth by 2012 (that’s right, less than SIX years from now). The next next-gen space event will take place in the fall, at the X Prize Cup Expo in Las Cruces, Mexico. Fifty teams have signed up to participate in making attempts at suborbital flights (unmanned, of course) and two teams will show off vertical take off and landing vehicles.

But wait, there’s more! SpaceX, founded by PayPal’s Elon Musk, will make another attempt with their Falcon rockets, the only serious contender in the field to possibly sending humans or sats into space via private rocketry in the next few years. That flight is scheduled for October as well. And, if all stays on schedule, we might see another Virgin Galactic flight by year’s end too.

So, all and all, an exciting year for private space flight. Let’s just hope that the Mr. Magoo of Low Earth Orbit, the Shuttle, doesn’t drive up onto the median strip or otherwise wreck the ol’ pile o’ heat tiles on the way home.

I’ve been intrigued by the idea of visual representations of data and actions in Cyberspace since the late ’80s when I heard William Gibson describe an idea for rendering the stock market as field crops, where you could gauge the health of the market and individual funds by the visual health of the plants, harvesting to sell, planting to invest, etc.; Wall Street brokers becoming croppers of a different kind of share.

So I like the idea, in theory anyway, of real-world avatars that physically indicate online presence. That’s the concept behind the Availabot, a USB-powered action figure that goes limp when you’re not on IM and ah… stands erect when you are. Each Availabot represents a specific user, so you need one (and an available USB port) for each user you wish to represent. This makes it impractical. Woulda been smart if they’d been designed so you could daisychain ’em, not that you’d likely want all of your Buddies loitering around on your desktop. This is really nothing more than a proof of concept (dreamt up by a UK design firm), and maybe a cool gift for a paramour you want to give a little something visual to remember you by. They can even be customized so that they look like you. No word yet on cost or when Availabot will be availaBLE.

According to a piece in Science magazine, resechers have discovered that cellulose is piezoelectric:

Researchers have discovered that cellulose, the ubiquitous building block of the plant kingdom, will flap when exposed to an electric field. Delicate sheets of cellulose with electrodes attached could be used to make microrobots, biodegradable sensors, and paper airplanes that flap like birds.

Read the piece here.

[Via /.]

Citibank has begun sending out MasterCard PayPass RFID keyfobs to their customers in some markets. Dan Costa at GearLog got one. Took him a while to find someplace where he could take it for a test debit, but he finally found one — in a long concession link at Yankee Stadium.

Like online shopping before it, there are a lot of irrational fears about this technology, not that it can’t be exploited — like bricks and mortar use of credit and online payments — it ceratinly will be, but just as with ANY credit card transactions, YOU are not liable, the credit card company is, and as Dan points out, you still have to sign receipts on purchases over US$25, as he discovered with his $42.25 payment for three beers, three dogs, and a bag of nuts. Yoiks!

Here’s a Top Ten list you don’t want to find yourself on: Business 2.0’s Ten People Who Don’t Matter.

“And the Wet Rasberry goes to….”

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft (pictured)
Jeff Citron, Vonage
Reed Hastings, Netflix
Ken Kutaragi, Sony
Warren Lieberfarb, HD-DVD Promo Group
Rob Malda, Slashdot.org
Arun Sarin, Vodafone
Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems
Linus Torvalds, Linux
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook

So what sorts of Sins of the Suits got these guys on the list of people it’s “okay to snub at conferences” (as News.com put it)? Here’s what the piece says about two of the worst sinners (as far as we’re concerned, anyway):

Ken Kutaragi
President, Sony Computer Entertainment
Remember the Betamax debacle? Sony seems to have forgotten all about it. Under Kutaragi, who is the power behind Sony’s PlayStation videogame consoles, the company is launching another format war with its Blu-Ray high-definition videodisc, the successor to the venerable DVD. Unfortunately, the PlayStation 3, which was supposed to put Blu-Ray into millions of living rooms, is months late and hundreds of dollars more expensive than competing consoles from Microsoft and Nintendo – largely because it includes one-of-a-kind technologies like Blu-Ray. The delays and cost overruns are likely to make both the PS3 and Blu-Ray nonstarters. But there’s also another problem, which leads us to Warren Lieberfarb …

Warren Lieberfarb
Senior Consultant, HD-DVD Promotion Group
Lieberfarb, known in Hollywood as the father of the DVD, has been around long enough to recall the Betamax/VHS wars. But rather than broker a peace settlement between Sony and the rest of the industry – as he did with the DVD – he’s working with Microsoft, Toshiba, and other backers of the competing HD-DVD format on how to beat Blu-Ray. Ironically, the whole debate may well be pointless. There’s little evidence that consumers are eager to upgrade their existing DVD collections, and by the time the latest format war is settled, most of us will simply download movies in our living rooms instead of hoarding them on little plastic discs.

PopSci has a decent piece detailing ten steps to ending our “fossil fuel addiction.” Many of these you’ve heard before (like using more wind power), but this piece provides a nice up-to-date summary of the various technologies concerned. The real tragedy in all of this is how relatively easy many of these steps would be to implement, if we had the collective will to do so.

Step 1: Harness the Wind
Turbines are getting stronger, lighter, bigger
Step 2: End Gridlock
Make power where we use it
Step 3: Rev Up Our Hybrid Rides
Ultralight parts and a plug could double America’s mileage
Step 4: Brew Better Ethanol’
Step 5: Switch on the Sun Lamp
Step 6: Go H2
Step 7: Ride the Waves for Watts
A sea change, indeed, with tidal turbines and generators
Step 8: Dig Deeper
We can now mine hotspots in more places
Step 9: Make Gas from Trash
Heat + waste = power
Step 10: Use “Negawatts”
Nice: saving money. Nicer: saving the planet

[Via Boing Boing]