Lifeboat Foundation

A British tech company has come up with a new way of powering wearables and smart home devices: a device called the Freevolt, which can harvest the ambient energy from radio waves and turn it into a small amount of electricity for low-energy gadgets to tap into.

As CNET reports, this level of energy can’t keep a smartphone running, but it could be enough to power that remote sensor on your garden gate. If sensors and beacons have a wireless energy source plus wireless connectivity, it opens up more possibilities for kitting out our homes and gardens with these kind of devices.

“Companies have been researching how to harvest energy from Wi-Fi, cellular, and broadcast networks for many years,” Drayton Technologies CEO and chairman, Lord Drayson, said in a press statement. “But it is difficult, because there is only a small amount of energy to harvest and achieving the right level of rectifying efficiency has been the issue — up until now. For the first time, we have solved the problem of harvesting usable energy from a small radio frequency signal.”

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“A living being, but not alive.” The Dutchman artist Theo Jansen creates these structures which move through the strength of the winds. He uses wood, PET bottles and rags to transform wind energy in a synchronized motion that looks like their creations have a life of its own! Sensational!

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Advance could make flow batteries cheaper and easier to build.

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Calculations show that if the wormhole’s throat is orders of magnitude longer then the width of its mouth, it does indeed create Casimir energy at its centre.

Cambridge Physicists Find Wormhole Proof:-Physicists at the University of Cambridge have established a theoretical groundwork for the reality of wormholes, which are pipes that join two different points in space-time. If a part of information or physical object could pass through the wormhole, it might open the door to time travel or immediate communication through huge distances. “But there’s a problem: Einstein’s wormholes are extremely unsteady, and they don’t stay open long enough for something to pass over.” In 1988, physicists reached the deduction that a type of negative energy called Casimir energy might keep wormholes open.

The hypothetical solution established at Cambridge has to do with the properties of quantum energy, which conveys that even vacuums are teaming by means of waves of energy. If you visualize two metal plates in a vacuum, some waves of energy would be excessively big enogh to fit between the plates, meaning that the space-time among the plates would have negative energy. “Under the right circumstances, could the tube-like shape of the wormhole itself generate Casimir energy? Calculations show that if the wormhole’s throat is orders of magnitude longer then the width of its mouth, it does indeed create Casimir energy at its centre.”

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Sick of waiting an hour for your phone to charge before you leave the house? Researchers at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have come up with the best solution yet — a lithium ion battery that charges to 70 percent in just two minutes.

Even better, it also lasts for 20 years, and will reportedly be available to the public within two years.

Rechargeable lithium ion batteries are already common in our mobile phones, tablets and laptops — but most only last around 500 recharge cycles, which is around two to three years of typical use. And at the moment batteries take around two hours to fully charge.

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While many companies are tinkering with lasers, ultrasound and even arm muscles for touchless gesture control on portable devices and desktop PCs, Japan’s 16Lab just wants to put a pretty ring on you. The yet-to-be-named titanium wearable is designed by the award-winning Manabu Tago, and it features ALPS Electric’s tiny module (5.05 × 5.65 × 2.5 mm) that somehow manages to pack Bluetooth Smart radio, movement sensor, environment sensor plus antennas — there’s a video demo after the break. Despite its custom-made 10mAh lithium polymer cell, 16Lab is aiming for at least 20 hours of battery life. This is possible mainly because you have to place your thumb on the top pad (with the ring’s wedge pointing away from the user) to enable the sensors — upon which point the ring vibrates to confirm that it’s active. It’s then just a matter of waving and tilting your hand until you’re done.

Gallery | 13 Photos.

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Touchless gestures powered by ultrasound has become a mark of distinction for Elliptic Labs. The company has new “Multi Layer Interaction” technology designed to bring users intuitive device interactions.

Without touching the device, the person’s hand moves towards the smartphone, the screen lights up and information is displayed. As the person continues moving the hand closer, different information is revealed. With users constantly, frequently, eagerly reaching for their devices throughout the day, Elliptic Labs aims to make a difference in its easy and fast way to get information, from playing games to navigating maps, to using social media, to watching videos. A promotional video says the user can interact above, in front, underneath, double-tapping anywhere around the device, easily turning the device on and off as well. There is an SDK kit for applications. How it works: Ultrasound signals sent through the air from speakers integrated in smartphones and tablets bounce against the hand and are recorded by microphones integrated in the devices. As such, the technology recognizes hand gestures and uses them to move objects on the screen, similar to how bats use echolocation to navigate.

Continue reading “Elliptic Labs powers up ultrasound for touchless gesturing” »

German scientists have developed technology that makes lithium-ion batteries last for 10,000 charging and discharging cycles while still retaining 85% of their original capacity.

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When vendors send out announcements of long battery life and juicing strategies for electronic gadgets, interest is assured; the bad news is that interest is assured because consumers are still eagerly looking for less bother and less time needed to keep their smartphones and other mobile gadgets up and running. Intel is aware of the challenge, what with wearables on tap in an assortment of form factors. To be sure, Intel would like to be in the frontlines of technology giants providing the buying public with finer solutions.

“What’s New with Wireless Charging?” Intel asked in July. Intel’s answer, “If you’ve been keeping up with trade shows and tech blogs, you might think that some new breakthrough in wireless energy transfer has taken place in the past year. It hasn’t.” Nikola Tesla worked on wireless power transmission before the turn of the 20th century; his inductive charging techniques would see a renaissance some five decades after his death in 1943, said Intel. That has not stopped technologists, however, from asking what comes next. Today, said Intel, the idea and the technology is gaining momentum.

This week’s news headlines of Intel saying its charging bowl will be available by the end of this year will no doubt interest readers and will please those who saw the bowl earlier this year at the Consumer Electronics show, and kept sending e-mails to Intel asking when it will be ready. Earlier this year, it was clear that Intel was working on a day not too distant in the future when people in PC environments could enjoy docking and charging activities as a wire-free experience. Intel revealed at the Computex trade show in Taipei, via an Intel demonstration by Kirk Skaugen, Intel’s senior vice president and general manager of the PC Client Group, that the chipmaker was in fact working on wireless technologies to help deliver a new normal. Skaugen demonstrated how wireless technology could be integrated into a table that could simultaneously charge a laptop, phone, headset and tablet. In January, the company had really whetted appetites for changes in showing a wireless charging bowl at CES. The bowl looks like the standard bowl one might place on a table at home to hold keys, loose coins, or other items.

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