Innovation&Society

Via SlashGear

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Touchscreen laptops appear to be rising in popularity as the newest data from market research firm DisplayBank says that touchscreen notebook shipments have jumped 51.8% during Q1 2013 compared to the previous quarter. A total of 4.57 million touchscreen laptops were shipped during the quarter, making up 10% of all notebook shipments during Q1 2013.

Throughout the entire Q1 2013 quarter, a total of 46 million laptops were shipped, so 4.57 million touchscreen variants certainly isn’t a lot, but with a healthy increase from the previous quarter, touchscreens in laptops are becoming more popular than ever. Most likely, the number of these kinds of laptops will only increase in the future.

Specifically, manufacturers like Lenovo, Acer and ASUS have set higher targets for themselves to achieve over 20% of touchscreen market share, which could be quite achievable, but it’s really only up to consumers who want to adopt touchscreens in their laptops. We already know Apple thinks that people don’t want them, but a 51.8% increase says otherwise.

Much of the adoption of touchscreen technology in laptops is thanks to Windows 8, which includes a touchscreen-friendly start screen that you can swipe and navigate around using your fingers. Of course, the new operating system hasn’t received a lot of compliments lately, and its adoption rate is slightly slower than what Microsoft or PC makers were expecting, but most OEMs have added touchscreen laptops to their repertoire due in part to Windows 8.

Plus, as laptop prices get lower and lower, touchscreen laptops will become more affordable. Right now they’re quite on the pricey side, with a decent machine running over $1,000, but former Intel CEO Paul Otellini says that touchscreen laptops will break the $200 barrier in the near future, so the technology could eventually become the norm.

Via gizmag

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Millions of years of evolution has resulted in plants being the most efficient harvesters of solar energy on the planet. Much research is underway into ways to artificially mimic photosynthesis in devices like artificial leaves, but researchers at the University of Georgia (UGA) are working on a different approach that gives new meaning to the term “power plant.” Their technology harvests energy generated through photosynthesis before the plants can make use of it, allowing the energy to instead be used to run low-powered electrical devices.

Photosynthesis turns light energy into chemical energy by splitting water atoms into hydrogen and oxygen. This process produces electrons that help create sugars that the plant uses to fuel growth and reproduction. A team led by Ramaraja Ramasamy, assistant professor in the UGA College of Engineering, is developing technology that would interrupt the photosynthesis process and capture the electrons before the plant puts them to use creating sugars.

The technology involves interrupting the pathways along which the electrons flow by manipulating the proteins contained in thylakoids. Thylakoids are membrane-bound compartments at the site of the light reactions of photosynthesis that are responsible for capturing and storing energy from sunlight.

The modified thylakoids are immobilized on a specially designed backing of carbon nanotubes that acts as an electrical conductor to capture the electrons and send them along a wire. The researchers say that small-scale experiments of this system have yielded a maximum current density that is two orders of magnitude larger than previously reported for similar systems.

While you won’t be running your HDTV off the nearest tree anytime soon, Ramasamy says the technology has the potential to find its way into less power-intensive applications in the not too distant future.

"In the near term, this technology might best be used for remote sensors or other portable electronic equipment that requires less power to run," he said. "If we are able to leverage technologies like genetic engineering to enhance stability of the plant photosynthetic machineries, I'm very hopeful that this technology will be competitive to traditional solar panels in the future."

Ramasamy and his team are already working to improve the stability and output of the technology to get it to a stage suitable for commercialization.

"We have discovered something very promising here, and it is certainly worth exploring further," he said. "The electrical output we see now is modest, but only about 30 years ago, hydrogen fuel cells were in their infancy, and now they can power cars, buses and even buildings."

The team’s study appears in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.

Source: University of Georgia

Via Quartz

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Anjan Contractor’s 3D food printer might evoke visions of the “replicator” popularized in Star Trek, from which Captain Picard was constantly interrupting himself to order tea. And indeed Contractor’s company, Systems & Materials Research Corporation, just got a six month, $125,000 grant from NASA to create a prototype of his universal food synthesizer.

But Contractor, a mechanical engineer with a background in 3D printing, envisions a much more mundane—and ultimately more important—use for the technology. He sees a day when every kitchen has a 3D printer, and the earth’s 12 billion people feed themselves customized, nutritionally-appropriate meals synthesized one layer at a time, from cartridges of powder and oils they buy at the corner grocery store. Contractor’s vision would mean the end of food waste, because the powder his system will use is shelf-stable for up to 30 years, so that each cartridge, whether it contains sugars, complex carbohydrates, protein or some other basic building block, would be fully exhausted before being returned to the store.

Ubiquitous food synthesizers would also create new ways of producing the basic calories on which we all rely. Since a powder is a powder, the inputs could be anything that contain the right organic molecules. We already know that eating meat is environmentally unsustainable, so why not get all our protein from insects?

If eating something spat out by the same kind of 3D printers that are currently being used to make everything from jet engine parts to fine art doesn’t sound too appetizing, that’s only because you can currently afford the good stuff, says Contractor. That might not be the case once the world’s population reaches its peak size, probably sometime near the end of this century.

“I think, and many economists think, that current food systems can’t supply 12 billion people sufficiently,” says Contractor. “So we eventually have to change our perception of what we see as food.”

There will be pizza on Mars

If Contractor’s utopian-dystopian vision of the future of food ever comes to pass, it will be an argument for why space research isn’t a complete waste of money. His initial grant from NASA, under its Small Business Innovation Research program, is for a system that can print food for astronauts on very long space missions. For example, all the way to Mars.

“Long distance space travel requires 15-plus years of shelf life,” says Contractor. “The way we are working on it is, all the carbs, proteins and macro and micro nutrients are in powder form. We take moisture out, and in that form it will last maybe 30 years.”

Pizza is an obvious candidate for 3D printing because it can be printed in distinct layers, so it only requires the print head to extrude one substance at a time. Contractor’s “pizza printer” is still at the conceptual stage, and he will begin building it within two weeks. It works by first “printing” a layer of dough, which is baked at the same time it’s printed, by a heated plate at the bottom of the printer. Then it lays down a tomato base, “which is also stored in a powdered form, and then mixed with water and oil,” says Contractor.

Finally, the pizza is topped with the delicious-sounding “protein layer,” which could come from any source, including animals, milk or plants.

The prototype for Contractor’s pizza printer (captured in a video, above) which helped him earn a grant from NASA, was a simple chocolate printer. It’s not much to look at, nor is it the first of its kind, but at least it’s a proof of concept.

Replacing cookbooks with open-source recipes

Remember grandma’s treasure box of recipes written in pencil on yellowing note cards? In the future, we’ll all be able to trade recipes directly, as software. Each recipe will be a set of instructions that tells the printer which cartridge of powder to mix with which liquids, and at what rate and how it should be sprayed, one layer at time.

This will be possible because Contractor plans to keep the software portion of his 3D printer entirely open-source, so that anyone can look at its code, take it apart, understand it, and tweak recipes to fit. It would of course be possible for people to trade recipes even if this printer were proprietary—imagine something like an app store, but for recipes—but Contractor believes that by keeping his software open source, it will be even more likely that people will find creative uses for his hardware. His prototype 3D food printer also happens to be based on a piece of open-source hardware, the second-generation RepRap 3D printer.

“One of the major advantage of a 3D printer is that it provides personalized nutrition,” says Contractor. “If you’re male, female, someone is sick—they all have different dietary needs. If you can program your needs into a 3D printer, it can print exactly the nutrients that person requires.”

Replacing farms with sources of environmentally-appropriate calories

Contractor is agnostic about the source of the food-based powders his system uses. One vision of how 3D printing could make it possible to turn just about any food-like starting material into an edible meal was outlined by TNO Research, the think tank of TNO, a Dutch holding company that owns a number of technology firms.

In TNO’s vision of a future of 3D printed meals, “alternative ingredients” for food include:

• algae

• duckweed

• grass

• lupine seeds

• beet leafs

• insects

From astronauts to emerging markets

While Contractor and his team are initially focusing on applications for long-distance space travel, his eventual goal is to turn his system for 3D printing food into a design that can be licensed to someone who wants to turn it into a business. His company has been “quite successful in doing that in the past,” and has created both a gadget that uses microwaves to evaluate the structural integrity of aircraft panels and a kind of metal screw that coats itself with protective sealant once it’s drilled into a sheet of metal.

Since Contractor’s 3D food printer doesn’t even exist in prototype form, it’s too early to address questions of cost or the healthiness (or not) of the food it produces. But let’s hope the algae and cricket pizza turns out to be tastier than it sounds.

Via hatnote

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Via SlashGear

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Researchers with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory have undertaken a large project that will allow them to measure the carbon footprint of megacities – those with millions of residents, such as Los Angeles and Paris. Such an endevour is achieved using sensors mounted in high locations above the cities, such as a peak in the San Gabriel Mountains and a high-up level on the Eiffel Tower that is closed to tourist traffic.

The sensors are designed to detect a variety of greenhouse gases, including methane and carbon dioxide, augmenting other stations that are already located in various places globally that measure greenhouse gases. These particular sensors are designed to achieve two purposes: monitor the specific carbon footprint effects of large cities, and as a by-product of that information to show whether such large cities are meeting – or are even capable of meeting – their green initiative goals.

Such measuring efforts will be intensified this year. In Los Angeles, for example, scientists working on the project will add a dozen gas analyzers to various rooftop locations throughout the city, as well as to a Prius, which will be driven throughout the city and a research aircraft to be navigated to “methane hotspots.” The data gathered from all these sensors, both present and slated for installation, is then analyzed using software that looks at whether levels have increased, decreased, or are stable, as well as determining where the gases originated from.

One of the examples given is vehicle emissions, with scientists being able to determine (using this data) the effects of switching to green vehicles over more traditional ones and whether its results indicate that it is something worth pursuing or whether it needs to be further analyzed for potential effectiveness. Reported the Associated Press, three years ago California saw 58-percent of its carbon dioxide come from gasoline-powered cars.

California is looking to reducing its emissions levels to a sub-35-percent level over 1990 by the year 2030, a rather ambitious goal. In 2010, it was responsible for producing 408 million tons of carbon dioxide, which outranks just about every country on the planet, putting it about on par with all of Spain. Thus far into the project, both the United States and France have individually spent approximately $3 million the project.

 

Via The Telegraph

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Photo: The University of Manchester

 

Via InventorSpot

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How serious is the threat of killer robots? Well, it depends on whom you ask.  Some people will tell you that the threat is very real, and I don’t mean the guy with the tinfoil hat standing on the street corner. A new draft of a report coming out of the U.N. Human Rights Commission looks to negate the possible threat of the use of unmanned vehicles with the ability to end human life without the intervention of another human being. As you can guess the UN is anti-killer robots.

In the 22-page report, which was released online as a PDF, the Human Rights Commission explained the mission of the document in the following terms:

“Lethal autonomous robotics (LARs) are weapon systems that, once activated, can select and engage targets without further human intervention. They raise far-reaching concerns about the protection of life during war and peace. This includes the question of the extent to which they can be programmed to comply with the requirements of international  humanitarian law and the standards protecting life under international human rights law. Beyond this, their deployment may be unacceptable because no adequate system of legal accountability can be devised, and because robots should not have the power of life and death over human beings. The Special Rapporteur recommends that States establish  national moratoria on aspects of LARs, and calls for the establishment of a high level panel on LARs to articulate a policy for the international community on the issue.”

So it looks like you may just have to watch the sky’s after all.

 

Via Big Think

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The new Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare, which lays out 95 core rules on how to conduct a cyber war, may end up being one of the most dangerous books ever written. Reading through the Tallinn Manual, it's possible to come to the conclusion that - under certain circumstances - nations have the right to use “kinetic force” (real-world weapons like bombs or armed drones) to strike back against enemy hackers. Of course, this doesn’t mean that a bunch of hackers in Shanghai are going to be taken out by a Predator Drone strike anytime soon – but it does mean that a nation abiding by international law conventions – such as the United States – would now have the legal cover to deal with enemy hackers in a considerably more muscular way that goes well beyond just jawboning a foreign government.

Welcome to the brave new world of cyber warfare.

The nearly 300-page Tallinn Manual, which was created by an independent group of twenty international law experts at the request of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence, works through a number of different cyber war scenarios, being careful to base its legal logic on international conventions of war that already exist. As a result, there's a clear distinction between civilians and military combatants and a lot of clever thinking about everything -- from what constitutes a "Cyber Attack" (Rule #30) to what comprises a "Cyber Booby Trap" (Rule #44).

So what, exactly, would justify the killing of an enemy hacker by a sovereign state?

First, you’d have to determine if the cyber attack violated a state’s sovereignty. Most cyber attacks directed against the critical infrastructure or the command-and-control systems of another state would meet that standard. Then, you’d have to determine whether the cyber attack was of sufficient scope and intensity so as to constitute a “use of force” against that sovereign state. Shutting down the power grid for a few hours just for the lulz probably would not be a “use of force,” but if that attack happened to cause death, destruction, and mayhem, then it would presumably meet that threshold and would escalate the legal situation to one of "armed conflict." In such cases, warns the Tallinn Manual, sovereign states should first attempt diplomacy and all other measures before engaging in a retaliatory cyber-strike of proportional scale and scope.

But here's where it gets tricky - once we're in an "armed conflict," hackers could be re-classified as military targets rather than civilian targets, opening them up to military reprisals. They could then be targeted by whatever "kinetic force" we have available.

For now, enemy hackers in places like China can breathe easy. Most of what passes for a cyber attack today – “acts of cyber intelligence gathering and cyber theft” or “cyber operations that involve brief or periodic interruption of non-essential cyber services” would not fall into the “armed attack” category. Even cyber attacks on, say, a power grid, would have to have catastrophic consequences before it justifies a military lethal response. As Nick Kolakowski of Slashdot points out:

"In theory, that means a nation under cyber-attack that reaches a certain level—the “people are dying and infrastructure is destroyed” level—can retaliate with very real-world weapons, although the emphasis is still on using cyber-countermeasures to block the incoming attack."

That actually opens up a big legal loophole, and that's what makes the Tallinn Manual potentially so dangerous. Even the lead author of the Tallinn Manual (Michael Schmitt, chairman of the international law department at the U.S. Naval War College) admits that there's actually very little in the manual that specifically references the word "hacker" (and a quick check of the manual's glossary didn't turn up a single entry for "hacker").

Theoretically, a Stuxnet-like hacker attack on a nuclear reactor that spun out of control and resulted in a Fukushima-type scenario could immediately be classified as an act of war, putting the U.S. into "armed conflict." Once we reach that point, anything is fair game. We're already at the point where the U.S. Air Force is re-classifying some of its cyber tools as weapons and preparing its own rules of engagement for dealing with the growing cyber threat from China. It's unclear which, if any, of these "cyber-weapons" would meet the Tallinn Manual's definitional requirement of a cyber counter-attack.

The Tallinn Manual’s recommendations (i.e. the 95 rules) are not binding, but they will likely be considered by the Obama Administration as it orchestrates its responses against escalating hacker threats from China. Rational voices would seem to tell us that the "kinetic force" scenario could never occur, that a state like China would never let things escalate beyond a certain point, and that the U.S. would never begin targeting hackers around the world. Yet, the odds of a catastrophic cyber attack are no longer microscopically small. As a result, will the day ever come when sovereign states take out enemy hackers the same way the U.S. takes out foreign terrorists abroad, and then hide behind the rules of international law embodied within the Tallinn Manual?

Via Slash Gear

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We’ve already heard plenty about the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, and while we youngsters are pretty amazed by the technology, nobody has their mind blown more than the elderly, who could only dream about such technology back in their younger days. Recently, a 90-year-old grandmother ended up trying out the Oculus Rift for herself, and she was quite amazed.

Imagimind Studio developer Paul Rivot ended up grabbing an Oculus Rift in order to play around with it and develop some games, but he took a break from that and decided to give his grandmother a little treat, by strapping the Oculus Rift to her head in order to experience a bit of virtual reality herself.

The video is quite entertaining to watch, and we can’t imagine what’s going on inside of her head, knowing that she never grew up with such technology as the Oculus Rift, let alone 3D video games. She even gets to the point where she thought the images being displayed were actual images taken on-location, when in fact it’s all 3D-rendered on a computer.

Currently, the Oculus Rift is out in the wild for developers only at this point, and there’s no announced release date for the device, although the company has noted that it should arrive to the general public before the 2014 holiday season. In the meantime, it’s videos like this that only excite us even more.

Via Mashable

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Remembering the passwords for all your sites can get frustrating. There are only so many punctuation, number substitutes and uppercase variations you can recall, and writing them down for all to find is hardly an option.

Thanks to researchers at the UC Berkeley School of Information, you may not need to type those pesky passwords in the future. Instead, you'll only need to think them.

By measuring brainwaves with biosensor technology, researchers are able to replace passwords with "passthoughts" for computer authentication. A $100 headset wirelessly connects to a computer via Bluetooth, and the device's sensor rests against the user’s forehead, providing a electroencephalogram (EEG) signal from the brain.

Other biometric authentication systems use fingerprint or retina scans for security, but they're often expensive and require extensive equipment. The NeuroSky Mindset looks just like any other Bluetooth set and is more user-friendly, researchers say. Brainwaves are also unique to each individual, so even if someone knew your passthought, their emitted EEG signals would be different.

In a series of tests, participants completed seven different mental tasks with the device, including imagining their finger moving up and down and choosing a personalized secret. Simple actions like focusing on breathing or on a thought for ten seconds resulted in successful authentication.

The key to passthoughts, researchers found, is finding a mental task that users won’t mind repeating on a daily basis. Most participants found it difficult to imagine performing an action from their favorite sport because it was unnatural to imagine movement without using their muscles. More preferable passthoughts were those where subjects had to count objects of a specific color or imagine singing a song.

The idea of mind-reading is pretty convenient, but if the devices aren't accessible people will refuse to use it no matter how accurate the system, researchers explain.