10 Upcoming Technology That May Change The World : Part 1

1. Google Glass

Augmented Reality has already gotten into our life in the forms of simulated experiment and education app, but Google is taking it several steps higher with Google Glass. Theoretically, with Google Glass, you are able to view social media feeds, text, Google Maps, as well as navigate with GPS and take photos. You will also get the latest updates while you are on the ground.

(Image Source: YouTube)

It’s truly what we called vision, and it’s absolutely possible given the fact that the Google’s co-founder, Sergey Brin has demo’ed the glass with skydivers and creatives. Currently the device is only available to some developers with the price tag of $1500, but expect other tech companies trying it out and building an affordable consumer version.

2. Form 1

Just as the term suggests, 3D printing is the technology that could forge your digital design into a solid real-life product. It’s nothing new for the advanced mechanical industry, but a personal 3D printer is definitely a revolutionary idea.

Everybody can create their own physical product based on their custom design, and no approval needed from any giant manufacturer! Even the James Bond’s Aston Martin which was crashed in the movie was a 3D printed product!

(Image Source: Kickstarter)

Form 1 is one such personal 3D printer which can be yours at just $2799. It may sound like a high price but to have the luxury of getting producing your own prototypes, that’s a reaonable price.

Imagine a future where every individual professional has the capability to mass produce their own creative physical products without limitation. This is the future where personal productivity and creativity are maximized.

3. Oculus Rift

Virtual Reality gaming is here in the form of Oculus Rift. This history-defining 3D headset lets you mentally feel that you are actually inside a video game. In the Rift’s virtual world, you could turn your head around with ultra-low latency to view the world in high resolution display.

There are premium products in the market that can do the same, but Rift wants you to enjoy the experience at only $300, and the package even comes as a development kit. This is the beginning of the revolution for next-generation gaming.

(Image Source: Kickstarter)

The timing is perfect as the world is currently bombarded with the virtual reality topic that could also be attributed to Sword Art Online, the anime series featuring the characters playing games in an entirely virtual world. While we’re getting there, it could take a few more years to reach that level of realism. Oculus Rift is our first step.

4. Leap Motion

Multi-touch desktop is a (miserably) failed product due to the fact that hands could get very tired with prolonged use, but Leap Motion wants to challenge this dark area again with a more advanced idea. It lets you control the desktop with fingers, but without touching the screen.

(Image Source: Leap Motion)

It’s not your typical motion sensor, as Leap Motion allows you to scroll the web page, zoom in the map and photos, sign documentss and even play a first person shooter game with only hand and finger movements. The smooth reaction is the most crucial key point here. More importantly, you can own this future with just $70, a price of a premium PS3 game title!

If this device could completely work with Oculus Rift to simulate a real-time gaming experience, gaming is going to get a major make-over.

5. Eye Tribe

Eye tracking has been actively discussed by technology enthusiasts throughout these years, but it’s really challenging to implement. But Eye Tribe actually did this. They successfully created the technology to allow you to control your tablet, play flight simulator, and even slice fruits in Fruit Ninja only with your eye movements.

(Image Source: Eye Tribe)

It’s basically taking the common eye-tracking technology and combining it with a front-facing camera plus some serious computer-vision algorithm, and voila, fruit slicing done with the eyes! A live demo was done in LeWeb this year and we may actually be able to see it in in action in mobile devices in 2013.

Currently the company is still seeking partnership to bring this sci-fi tech into the consumer market but you and I know that this product is simply too awesome to fail.

6. SmartThings

The current problem that most devices have is that they function as a standalone being, and it require effort for tech competitors to actually partner with each other and build products that can truly connect with each other. SmartThings is here to make your every device, digital or non-digital, connect together and benefit you.

(Image Source: Kickstarter)

With SmartThings you can get your smoke alarms, humidity, pressure and vibration sensors to detect changes in your house and alert you through your smartphone! Imagine the possibilities with this.

You could track who’s been inside your house, turn on the lights while you’re entering a room, shut windows and doors when you leave the house, all with the help of something that only costs $500! Feel like a tech lord in your castle with this marvel.

7. Firefox OS

iOS and Android are great, but they each have their own rules and policies that certainly inhibit the creative efforts of developers. Mozilla has since decided to build a new mobile operating system from scratch, one that will focus on true openness, freedom and user choice. It’s Firefox OS.

Firefox OS is built on Gonk, Gecko and Gaia software layers – for the rest of us, it means it is built on open source, and it carries web technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3.

(Image Source: Mozilla)

Developers can create and debut web apps without the blockade of requirements set by app stores, and users could even customize the OS based on their needs. Currently the OS has made its debut on Android-compatible phones, and the impression so far, is great.

You can use the OS to do essential tasks you do on iOS or Android: calling friends, browsing web, taking photos, playing games, they are all possible on Firefox OS, set to rock the smartphone market.

8. Project Fiona

Meet the first generation of the gaming tablet. Razer’s Project Fiona is a serious gaming tablet built for hardcore gaming. Once it’s out, it will be the frontier for the future tablets, as tech companies might want to build their own tablets, dedicated towards gaming, but for now Fiona is the only possible one that will debut in 2013.

(Image Source: Razer™)

This beast features next generation Intel® Core i7 processor geared to render all your favorite PC games, all at the palm of your hands. Crowned as the best gaming accessories manufacturer, Razer clearly knows how to build user experience straight into the tablet, and that means 3-axis gyro, magnetometer, accelerometer and full-screen user interface supporting multi-touch. My body and soul are ready.

9. Parallella

Parallella is going to change the way that computers are made, and Adapteva offers you chance to join in on this revolution. Simply put, it’s a supercomputer for everyone. Basically, an energy-efficient computer built for processing complex software simultaneously and effectively. Real-time object tracking, holographic heads-up display, speech recognition will become even stronger and smarter with Parallella.

(Image Source: YouTube)

The project has been successfully funded so far, with an estimated delivery date of February 2013. For a mini supercomputer, the price seems really promising since it’s magically $99! It’s not recommended for the non-programmer and non-Linux user, but the kit is loaded with development software to create your personal projects.

I never thought the future of computing could be kick-started with just $99, which is made possible using crowdfunding platforms.

10. Google Driverless Car

I could still remember the day I watch the iRobot as a teen, and being skeptical about my brother’s statement that one day, the driverless car will become reality. And it’s now a reality, made possible by… a search engine company, Google.

While the data source is still a secret recipe, the Google driverless car is powered by artificial intelligence that utilizes the input from the video cameras inside the car, a sensor on the vehicle’s top, and some radar and position sensors attached to different positions of the car. Sounds like a lot of effort to mimic the human intelligence in a car, but so far the system has successfully driven 1609 kilometres without human commands!

(Image Source: Wikipedia)

“You can count on one hand the number of years it will take before ordinary people can experience this.” Google co-founder, Sergey Brin said. However, innovation is an achievement, consumerization is the headache, as Google currently face the challenge to forge the system into an affordable gem that every worker with an average salary could benefit from.

Source : hongkiat.com

Source of Boy's Mysterious Lead Poisoning Was in an Unlikely Place

An 8-year-old boy in Australia had high levels of lead, a toxic metal, in his blood for more than two years for unexplained reasons, until doctors found lead pellets in his body, trapped in an unlikely place, according to a new report of his case.

Doctors had tested the boy for toxins in looking for the cause of his unusually hyperactive behavior. They found levels of lead in his blood ranging from 17.4 to 27.4 microgram per deciliter, much higher than the level of 5 micrograms considered normal. But the source remained mysterious -- doctors couldn't find what the boy might have been touching, inhaling or eating, to have such high lead levels for months.

When the boy started to have a stomachache and was admitted to the hospital, the doctors did an x-ray, which revealed large numbers of small round objects in the boy's abdomen, according to the researchers, who published a case report in Aug. 8 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

The metallic-looking objects were in the lower right side of the boy’s abdomen, appearing to be inside the digestive tract. The doctors immediately gave the boy a bowel washout, which should have cleared any object within his digestive tract, but a second x-ray showed the objects had not moved.

The doctors suspected the unlikely scenario – the objects had to be in the boy's appendix.

In surgery, the doctors removed the boy’s appendix and cut it open, revealing 57 lead pellets trapped inside.

"It's one of those things you only see once in a life time," said Dr. Ibrahim Zardawi, the pathologist who examined the appendix. "I've been in medicine for almost 40 years now, and had never seen anything like this."

The boy’s appendix weighed 5 times heavier than normal when containing the pellets, but other than few tissue scars, it was normal and wasn’t inflamed.

It is highly unlikely for external objects to end up in the appendix, Zardawi said. Sometimes small fruit seeds such as tomato seeds may find a way through, but it’s a puzzle as to how so many pellets entered and became stuck in the boy's appendix, he said.

The pellets likely came from the geese the boy’s family regularly hunted and ate, they later told the doctors. The boy and his siblings said they had been eating the pellets as part of a game the played, to make the pellets disappear.

Lead is a heavy metal used in manufacturing batteries and plastics. It is strongly poisonous to humans when ingested or inhaled. Once in the body, lead circulates in the blood and small amounts can be excreted through urine or feces, but some can remain in the tissues, organs and bones. Symptoms of severe lead poisoning include confusion, seizures, coma and death.

"One important question to ask is, why not use copper pellets?" Zardawi said. The pellets used to kill the birds usually stay inside the animal, and the lead can be dangerous to other animals and to whoever eats the meat. The whole family had high levels of lead, he said.

Consuming just one lead pellet could have been enough to make the child seriously ill, Zardawi said.

In another case of lead poisoning from a mysterious source, a 4-year-old boy was brought to a hospital in Knoxville, Tenn., with symptoms of lead poisoning. As detailed in the report of his case, published in 1994 in the Journal Pediatric Surgery, it took the doctors several rounds of x-rays and bowel washouts to finally find a lead pellet trapped in his appendix.

Source : livescience.com

Why Some Remember Dreams, Others Don't

People who tend to remember their dreams also respond more strongly than others to hearing their name when they're awake, new research suggests.
Everyone dreams during sleep, but not everyone recalls the mental escapade the next day, and scientists aren't sure why some people remember more than others.
To find out, researchers used electroencephalography to record the electrical activity in the brains of 36 people while the participants listened to background tunes, and occasionally heard their own first name. The brain measurements were taken during wakefulness and sleep. Half of the participants were called high recallers, because they reported remembering their dreams almost every day, whereas the other half, low recallers, said they only remembered their dreams once or twice a month.


When asleep, both groups showed similar changes in brain activity in response to hearing their names, which were played quietly enough not to wake them.
However, when awake, high recallers showed a more sustained decrease in a brain wave called the alpha wave when they heard their names, compared with the low recallers.
"It was quite surprising to see a difference between the groups during wakefulness," said study researcher Perrine Ruby, neuroscientist at Lyon Neuroscience Research Center in France.
The difference could reflect variations in the brains of high and low recallers that could have a role in how they dream, too, Ruby said. [7 Mind-Bending Facts About Dreams]
Who remembers their dreams
A well-established theory suggests that a decrease in the alpha wave is a sign that brain regions are being inhibited from responding to outside stimuli. Studies show that when people hear a sudden sound or open their eyes, and more brain regions become active, the alpha wave is reduced.
In the study, as predicted, both groups showed a decrease in the alpha wave when they heard their names while awake. But high recallers showed a more prolonged decrease, which may be a sign their brains became more widely activated when they heard their names.
In other words, high recallers may engage more brain regions whenprocessing sounds while awake, compared with low recallers, the researchers said.

While people are asleep, the alpha wave behaves in the opposite way —it increases when a sudden sound is heard. Scientists aren't certain why this happens, but one idea is that it protects the brain from being interrupted by sounds during sleep, Ruby said.
Indeed, the study participants showed an increase in the alpha wave in response to sounds during sleep, and there was no difference between the groups.
One possibility to explain the lack of difference, the researchers said, could be that perhaps high recallers had a larger increase in alpha waves, but it was so high that they woke up.
Time spent awake, during the night
The researchers saw that high recallers awoke more frequently during the night. They were awake, on average, for 30 minutes during the night, whereas low recallers were awake for 14 minutes. However, Ruby said "both figures are in the normal range, it’s not that there’s something wrong with either group."
Altogether, the results suggest the brain of high recallers may be more reactive to stimuli such as sounds, which could make them wake up more easily. It is more likely a person would remember their dreams if they are awakened immediately after one, Ruby said.
However, waking up at night can account for only a part of the differences people show in remembering dreams. "There's still much more to understand," she said.

Source : livescience.com

Area 51 Secrets Revealed in Unclassified Documents

Newly declassified CIA documents reveal the history of Nevada's Area 51. The area was never home to aliens or UFOs, but was instead a super secret site for testing spy planes such as the U-2.

The document, "The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance: the U-2 and Oxcart Programs," was released recently in response to a Freedom of Information Act Request made by George Washington University in 2005.

Area 51, a desert tract near Groom Lake, about 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas, was first chosen by officials searching for a place to test planes and train pilots flying the U-2 in 1955.  The airstrip by a salt flat was used for the U-2 plane, as well as its successors, the Lockheed A-12 Oxcart, the D-21 Tagboard and the F-117 Stealth Fighter. The document doesn't reveal what's been done at the base since 1974.

Area 51 buffs are unlikely to be surprised by the new disclosure: Many of these facts had been suspected for years and government officials have even mentioned the area offhandedly on occasion. However, this is the first time Area 51 is explicitly mentioned in a publicly available government document.

Source : livescience.com

Drones Monitor Crops, Study Ancient Ruins

Drones are most often associated with assassinations in remote regions of Pakistan and Yemen but in Peru, unmanned aircraft are being used to monitor crops and study ancient ruins.

Forget Reapers and Predators -- the drones used here are hand-held contraptions that look like they were assembled in a garage with gear from a hardware store. They are equipped with a microcomputer, a GPS tracker, a compass, cameras and an altimeter, and can be easily programmed by using Google Maps to fly autonomously and return to base with vital data.

Disposable Drones Take Flight

Flores heads a multidisciplinary team brainstorming the best ways to use drones for civilian purposes. "Up to now we have managed to use them for agricultural purposes, where they gather information on the health of the plants, and in archeology, to better understand the characteristics of each site and their extensions," Flores said.

A UAV model built by Catholic University engineers is made with light balsa wood and carbon fiber. At a glance the devices look like souped-up hand-held gliders. One limitation is that these drones must fly below the clouds. If not their instruments, especially the cameras, could fail, said Aurelio Rodriguez, who is both an aerial model-maker and archeologist. Some of the earliest human settlements in the Americas are found in Peru.

There are thousands of archeological sites, many unexplored, dotting the Peruvian landscape, most of them pre-dating the Incas, a major civilization which was defeated by Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century. Along the dry coastline, where the main construction material was adobe brick, whole societies flourished. After centuries of abandon some of these ancient cities have deteriorated to the point that they are hard to distinguish in the sandy, hilly region.

Source : news.discovery.com

Suicide Drones Blow Up With Their Target

Killer drones are getting lighter, smaller and cheaper in order to keep their place on the battlefield as defense budgets are cut and as the U.S. military pulls out of Afghanistan. The latest twist: “kamikaze” drones that blow up along with their intended target.

Two devices were on display at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) trade show in Washington, DC, this week: Textron System’s Battlehawk and Aerovironment’s Switchblade. Both are hand-launched devices that can be carried in a small backpack.

Photos: Anything You Can Do, Robots Can Do Better

The Battlehawk is made of carbon-fiber wings that curl up into a 22-inch tube launcher. The 5.5-pound device is then flown via an Android-based software app on a smartphone or tablet device to its intended target. The soldier can turn on a video camera, arm the grenade in the nose of the drone and watch as the truck, tank or unfortunate bad guy is terminated.

“It’s a squad-level loitering munition,” said Cathy Loughman, Textron senior program manager. “The soldier is given a target, punches it into the tablet, within a minute and a half, they peel the top off and press a couple buttons on the tablet and off it goes.”

The Battlehawk runs on a small battery-powered propeller. It also has a geo-location device that allows it to follow a target for 30 minutes before the soldier can chose between Abort or Attack modes.

“If there is a sniper three kilometers away,” Loughman said. “This can hit it without calling in air support.”

Once the Afghan war winds down, Textron hopes to convert the Battlehawk into domestic law enforcement device that could carry a bigger battery to fly longer, or even something like smoke grenades for crowd dispersal. The device is going into more testing this fall before a tryout with troops.

Drones Could Rescue Drowning Vehicles

Aerovironment has developed a similar grenade-carrying device already being used by the Army called the Switchblade, which also weighs 5.5 pounds, but only has a 10-minute flight time.

Like many other drone firms at this week’s show, Aerovironment trying to determine when drones will allowed by the Federal Aviation Administration be flying over U.S. airspace. The agency has been given a 2015 deadline by President Obama and Congress to figure out how integrate them with human-piloted aircraft.

Many firms are also looking overseas for new markets. This week Aerovironment signed an agreement to build U.S. drones in India for the Indian defense forces. Representatives for other firms at the show say they are preparing to sell drones to U.S. rivals China and Russia.

“We are preparing for that time (2015) and looking for new opportunities,” said Aerovironment’s Dave Heidel.

Source : news.discovery.com

Acrobatic Robot Jumps, Rolls, Flips

Some robots jump and some run. Why not both, with a few acrobatics as well? That’s what Jianguo Zhao, a PhD student in engineering at Michigan State University wanted to know. So he built a robot that does just that.

‘Flipperbot’ Crawls Like A Turtle To Save Them

The robot is called TailBot and it looks like a three-inch version of a Transformer, but it’s no toy. The robot has legs to jump with, wheels that let it roll along and a tail that lets it do a perfect flip, so it always lands on its feet.

Zhao was inspired by a 2012 study of reptiles and how they use their tails to balance. In that study lizards showed they used their tails as counterweights when leaping, to ensure that they landed on their feet. Zhao asked himself why that couldn’t be applied to robots.

So be built Tailbot. When the robot trundles along t uses wheels. If it runs into an obstacle like a staircase, the robot’s rail — a stiff rod — extends and pushes it up onto its legs. The legs flex, the robot jumps, the tail swings around to keep the robot upright and helps it land on its wheels. The robot can jump up to 32 inches.

Zhao plans to present his work at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in Tokyo this November.

Credit: Jianguo Zhao