GLIMPSES OF THE
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Move Data With Your Fingertips Ever dreamt that you can touch an image or text on one screen and transfer it to another with your fingertips? Soon you may be able to. A new program called Sparsh lets you transfer files from one device to another simply by touching the screen – and you don't have to become a cyborg first. Transferring files from one computer to another is a major pain. Even cloud-based storage like Dropbox is still somewhat complicated. Now Pranav Mistry of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has the solution. He understands that what we really want is to just pick up stuff from one machine and put it in the other, as we do with a physical object. Mistry has designed a system to make this as simple as it could possibly be. 'The user touches a data item they wish to copy from a device, conceptually saving it in the user's body,' he says. 'Next, the user touches the other device to which they want to paste the saved content.' For example, say you look up the phone number for the local pizza place on your laptop. Normally you then have to type all those numbers into your phone; but if both devices are running Sparsh, you simply touch the phone number on your laptop's screen, then touch your smartphone's keypad. The system knows that what you have transferred is the phone number and automatically dials it. The trick is the data is actually transferred via the cloud, but your finger becomes the 'cursor'. First Plastic Computer Processor Created Computer processor and memory chips have now been made out of plastic rather than silicon suggesting that, someday, nowhere will be out of bounds for computer power. Researchers in Europe used 4,000 plastic, or organic, transistors to create the plastic microprocessor, which measures roughly two centimetres square and is built on top of flexible plastic foil. 'Compared to using silicon, this has the advantage of lower price and that it can be flexible,' says Jan Genoe at the IMEC nanotechnology centre in Leuven, Belgium. Genoe and IMEC colleagues worked with researchers at the TNO research organization and display company Polymer Vision, both in the Netherlands. The processor can so far run only one simple program of 16 instructions. The commands are hardcoded into a second foil etched with plastic circuits that can be connected to the processor to 'load' the program. This allows the processor to calculate a running average of an incoming signal, something that a chip involved in processing the signal from a sensor might do. The chip runs at a speed of six hertz - on the order of a million times slower than a modern desktop machine-and can only process information in eight-bit chunks at most, compared to 128 bits for modern computer processors. EU Plans To Phase Out All Fossil-Fuel Vehicles By 2050 The European Commission has released a white paper detailing ambitious plans to transform Europe's transport infrastructure by 2050. The roadmap for a Single European Transport Area includes forty initiatives for road, rail and air travel that aim to increase mobility, reduce reliance on oil imports, cut emissions by 60% and combat congestion by halving the use of 'conventionally fuelled' cars in urban transport by 2030 with a view to phasing them out in cities by 2050. The overall goal is to create a unified transport system capable of meeting the needs of the 500 million EU citizens Plastic Packaging That Changes Colour When Food Is off Researchers from the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Modular Solid State Technologies in Munich, Germany have developed an inexpensive plastic film that will change colour in the presence of rotten foods. The film would be applied to the inside of food packaging, where it would respond to the biogenic amines produced by decaying meat or fish. If a sufficient amount of amines were present in the air within the sealed packaging, they would cause dye in the film to turn from yellow to an obvious blue. A gas-permeable layer in the film would allow the amines to reach the indicator chemicals, while not allowing those chemicals to come into contact with the food.
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Computers That Can Anticipate The Future An artificial intelligence algorithm that gives computers 'hindsight' to anticipate the future has been developed by computer scientists and economists at Tel Aviv University. Funded by Google, the researchers have developed an algorithm that uses academic game theory to measure the distance between a desired outcome and an actual outcome. The algorithm can adapt to the situation at hand by analysing the behaviour of users as it is running. The results, a form of hindsight, may prove useful in more accurately predicting future outcomes — such as a bidding war on an online auction site, a sudden spike of traffic to a media website, or demand for an online product. Why Older People Can't Multi-Task As Well As Youngsters Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have pinpointed one reason older adults have a harder time multitasking than younger adults: they have more difficulty switching between brain networks. UCSF scientists compared the working memory of healthy young men and women (mean age 24.5) and older men and women (mean age 69.1) in a visual memory test involving multitasking. Using fMRI, the researchers tracked blood flow in the participants’ brains to identify the activity of neural circuits and networks. Participants were asked to view a natural scene and maintain it in mind for 14.4 seconds. Then, in the middle of the maintenance period, an interruption occurred: an image of a face popped up and participants were asked to determine its sex and age. They were then asked to recall the original scene. Older adults had more difficulty maintaining the memory of the original image. The fMRI analysis showed that when both the young and older adults were interrupted, their brains disengaged from a memory maintenance network and reallocated neural resources toward processing the interruption. The younger adults re-established connection with the memory maintenance network following the interruption and disengaged from the interrupting image. The older adults failed both to disengage from the interruption and to reestablish the neural network associated with the disrupted memory. American Express Launches Mobile Payments System American Express and mobile payments processor, Payfone have announced an alliance to create a new mobile checkout service. As part of the agreement, Payfone will combine its advanced mobile authorization and payment services with American Express' recently launched digital payments platform, Serve. Working together, Serve and Payfone will provide consumers with the ability to make purchases from online merchants using their mobile phone number at checkout. Consumers will be able to link their mobile numbers to a variety of payment methods including their pre-or-postpaid mobile operator account, as well as via a customer's Serve account. IBM Demonstrates Smallest, Fastest Graphene Processor IBM has demonstrated its fastest graphene transistor, which can execute 155 billion cycles per second, which is about 50% faster than previous experimental transistors shown by the company's researchers. The transistor has a cut-off frequency of 155GHz, making it faster and more capable than the 100GHz graphene transistor shown by IBM in February last year. The research also shows that high-performance, graphene-based transistors can be produced at low cost using standard semiconductor manufacturing processes, IBM claimed. That could pave the way for commercial production of graphene chips. Commercialised graphene transistors will provide a performance boost in applications related to wireless communications, networking, radar and imaging, adds IBM. Graphene is a single-atom-thick layer of carbon atoms structured in a hexagonal honeycomb form. Back issues of 'Glimpses' are archived here. |