The Black Hornet Is A $195,000 Spy Plane That Fits In Your Hand

Microtechnology is very interesting, especially in military technology. Smaller the things, harder they are for people to notice.

The British have been using this little drone for about a year. It’s called the Black Hornet Nano Unmanned Aircraft System, costs $195,000 and can fly for a total of 25 minutes. It is equipped with a small camera that can send back full video or still images to the soldiers screen, with range of up to 1000 meters. The device is 10 cm long and weighing 16 grams, with a 4 inch rotor span – think a little longer than your middle finger.

The Black Hornet is powered by a small battery pack that enables it to fly at up to 10 m/s. What is really awesome about it is that it can be controlled via an ‘autopilot’ type mode where it goes to its destination via a GPS chip.

British troops have been using the device since August of 2012, and seem to find the device very useful. They’ve been so well received in fact, that the British Ministry of Defense has ordered 160 more units for a total cost of £20 million ($31.3 million).

Overall, the use of micro and nanotechnology for military use will increase over the next decade, since not only is it getting ‘cheaper’, but there are more and more breakthroughs in that area all the time. What it means is that eventually this kind of technology will make its way down to the consumer market. Obviously not drones, but the same sort of high-tech miniaturization technology that the military likes. Technology like this often times starts out being used in the military, and then some ingenious business finds a way of utilizing parts or all of the tech in a consumer application.

Source: Gizmocrazed.com

The Black Hornet Is A $195,000 Spy Plane That Fits In Your Hand

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Bluetooth Stickers Light and Beep with 100ft Range and Radar App

 

Did you hear that? It’s the sound of your keys beeping from the nether regions of your couch.

Did you see that? It’s the flashing light coming from your TV remote which is in the bathroom for some reason…

Don’t know where you cat went? Pull out your phone, load up the app and you’ll see he’s in the kitchen, sleeping on top of your cabinets. That’s the power of ultra-small bluetooth location stickers by Stick-n-Find, and their first production run should be complete in March.

 

 

Each sticker has a diameter of 0.98 Inches x Thickness 0.16 Inches (24mm x 4mm) and a weight of 0.15 ounces (4.5 grams). They have a range of about 100-ft (30 meters) and use a replaceable CR2016 watch battery with about a 1-year battery life (based on 30 minutes a day usage). The Bluetooth location stickers use Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity.

 

The Stick-N-Find app works iOS devices with Bluetooth 4.0 (iPhone 4s, iPhone 5, new iPad, New Touch, mini iPad) and Android devices supporting Bluetooth Low Energy, running Android 4.1 and newer.

 

 

Virtual Leash: This feature allows you to create a virtual Leash on a sticker. If that sticker moves away more than the approximate selected distance from your phone, the app will alarm you. You can select different types of alarms for different Stickers.

 

 

“Find It” Alerts: If you are looking for a missing sticker that your phone cannot find, or is not in range use a ‘find it’ alert. Once that sticker is in range, your phone will alert you. For example, waiting for your luggage at an airport carousel: have a seat and wait until your alarm goes off.

 

The maximum recommended number of stickers per smartphone is 20. You can pair the stickers to multiple phones, and even see all the stickers in range on the radar screen from multiple phones, but only one device can connect to a sticker to make it buzz, light up or create a virtual leash.

 

 

The Stick-N-Find Bluetooth location stickers use 3M VHB adhesive. It adheres to most surfaces and creates a achieves full strength in about 1 hour. Batteries can be replaced by twisting off the top, so you do not need to remove the sticker to replace the battery.

 

 

The app does not show direction. The radar screen is used to show distance of the Stick-N-Find to your phone, but not direction. Once you have located a sticker on the radar screen you start walking in a specific direction and see if the sticker gets closer or farther away.

 

On their website the MSRP is $49.95 for 2 stickers and $89.95 for 4 stickers. There’s a crowdfunding page on indiegogo.com where they have already raised $680,000. There you can pre-order 2 stickers for $35 or 4 stickers for $65.

 

 

For those wanting a device with greater range than 100-ft, there is the Bluetracker with a range of 2,500 ft. (800m). The device is larger and the battery will only last about 2 months though. Engadget also reports that the designers will be offering an SDK so developers can create their own apps and uses for the stickers. This is where some new and unexpected uses will emerge.

 

 

 

Sources

- Official website

- indiegogo crowdfunding page

- Engadget: StickNFind Bluetooth stickers let you tag and locate your goods with a smartphone

Bluetooth Stickers Light and Beep with 100ft Range and Radar App

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Technologies of the Future We Want Now

#14 Flying Cars

From watching shows like The Jetsons and Futurama, if you’re an 90′s kid, you’d think the post Y2K era would bring about huge changes to mundane life. It wouldn’t be a car anymore if you never drove it and just flew it. How many times have you been stuck in traffic and just wish your car could vertical take off? It’d only be cool if you had one.

 

 

#13 Holograms

It’s not like they don’t have holograms, but you’d think it’d be an everyday utilized technology by now. Hatsune Miku and Tupac singing at concerts are about the closest thing they have now. Imagine just having a hologram of you lining up in a long line while you shopped at the store. Come check out time you’re paged by the hologram and you come up to pay!

 

#12 Robot servants

You hear of these in Japan but do they really have them? Get them out already! Again another “The Jetsons” reminder that we’re not in the future just yet. Almost…? Roomba

#11 Teleportation device

We dream that one day we can travel great distances within a blink. Thanks to “Star Trek” and “Star Gate”we wish we could be “beamed up”. Imagine internet shopping teleporting your products instantly! Gotta eat the nasty cooking of a friend or family, teleport that into your stomach! Too lazy to chew? Teleport that food!

#10 Space Colonies

We all thought from the many expeditions by NASA to space that outer space living or at least tourist ventures there would be possible. We imagine lunar colonies and the International Space Station is giving us hope for that. Thanks “Total Recall”. Why aren’t we out there yet?

#9 Mechanized battle suits

Countless tv shows draw upon this as fantasy material and who could disagree that the future of war shouldn’t be badass? Just to name a few shows and movies that bring this up….”Gundam”, “Power Rangers”, “Voltron”, “Mech Warrior” and countless other iterations

 

#8 Food replicator

What’s a future without food? Imagine being rid of our human need for food. We’d eat, but we’d never eat for sustainable. Every meal we’d eat for pleasure. Food tailored to our every whim, health traits, palette, and culture wherever, whenever. The lack of struggle for food will make us post-human and leave us with more time for intellectual development.

#7 Nanobots

What would a future be without nanobots? Nanites that would act according to our desires manipulating everything down to the molecular make up of any structure. Self-replicating machines that repair, destroy, combine, construct, and remove anything and everything at a molecular level. It could remove our species of disease, filth, biological functions (waste management) and much more. Imagine never having to cut your hair again because nanites could chew off the tips of your hair when they reached a certain length. Have nanites assist your body in repairing your wounds and removing scar tissue, tumors, bacterial infections, and parasites. Technologically we could construct any piece of material from the molecular structure up. The human condition could be a thing of the past, with material wealth and bodily health we would be post-human in our existences.

 

#6 Robitic limb enhancements

Remember “Mortal Kombat’s” Jax? That guy that got robot arms because his name implied he jacked it too much? Or Robocop, that guy that had his whole body repaired by machines? We have prosthetic but why not ones that increase our killing power or at least utility?

#5 Jetpacks, hover shoes, hover board

Tired of walking? Fly! Ever since that “Back to the Future” movie with the “Mattel” hover board I’ve been wanting one. I’d imagine that I’d never walk again. Of course that’s not a thing to consider anymore. The closest thing we come to flying off the ground is with a couple hundred dollars and a trip to the airport. Flying is a possibility today but we wish we could do it alone and with the wind in our hair. Maybe then we could try some quidditch or many other variations of the boring grounded sports we have today. Imagine hover board basketball, baseball…

 

#4 Underwater colonies

We have all heard the craze of underwater hotels. Why not start marketing parts of the sea as real estate by now. Space cannot be the final frontier if we have not even explored the depths of this planet.

#3 Robot toys

We thought the future was here when Sony released the robotic companion Aibo. Honda followed with ASIMO. But none of that ever became more than a fad. Though toys like Furby and Aibo were consumer products, this category of robotic companions did not create a market. We could’ve all had an Aibo for Aibo dog fights.

 

#2 Laser tools

Why are laser tools only for precision surgery. Imagine laser can openers or laser scissors. Never have the wipe the blades off again when you can cut food with a laser knife.

Source: dailypix.me

#1 …

 

Technologies of the Future We Want Now

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How do you make a transparent smartphone?

If you need to ask why you would need a transparent smartphone, you probably don’t really need one. After all, not only would it be hard to find, particularly if transparent when powered down, but others could easily see exactly what you are working on. It is only when you take a step back that you realize that the state of being non-transparent, or opaque, is the weaker condition. If by nature you possess transparency, opacity can be just another option under a menu, while the converse is clearly not true. The real power once you have it, is not just that you get opacity for free, it is that you get everything else in between. A prototype device being developed by Polytron Technologies from Taiwan, pictured above, shows some of the challenges to making the transparent smartphone a reality.

Butterflies and jellyfish (pictured right) have the unique ability to extract pigment-free color directly from the quantum, so to speak, through precisely configured scales or undulating cilia — tiny “hairs” that protrude from a larger cell. They use these bio-antennea to blink out a measured photon whenever the distance between these hairs matches the wavelength of the illumination that strikes them. Other organisms, particularly the smaller and thinner ones, have more direct means to utilize or deal with incoming radiation as the case may be. Often they must spend significant energy just to shield their DNA from the mutagenic rays which penetrate their cells. They also may need to work hard just to be able to be seen by their peers. When creatures are trapped in caves, they quickly turn down their pigment production and lose all ability to express it within a couple of generations. This is for good reason, as light-absorbing melanins and carotenoids are metabolically costly to produce and actuate into position.

For larger creatures, like smartphones, there are a host of effects that arise to oppose transparency. The lens of the eye for example, needs to ⋆ a non-trivial amount of energy just to maintain transparency. To make a large scale device transparent, the first thing you need is transparency of the smaller parts that comprise them. While this appears rather obvious, it is not enough just to put transparent parts together. The more difficult requirement you need is to have a smooth variation in the refractive indexes across the subcomponents. Fireflies, which we have discussed before, can efficiently emit light through their bodies only by optimizing each interphase in the light path as the different tissues are traversed.

Their are many kinds of transparent display options available today, and new methods are being developed all the time. One way to do this is to coat two pieces of glass with transparent but conductive material like indium tin oxide (ITO), and sandwich a gel of polarizable molecules between them. When an electric field is applied, the liquid crystal changes its alignment and becomes transparent or nontransparent, depending on the materials used. The display is not the problem for the Polytron phone which sports an OLED-based liquid crystal device. The problem is several of the smaller components, like the battery and the memory. Transparent lithium-ion batteries have previously been developed based on PDMS. PDMS is a favorite polymer material often used in the life sciences to build transparent microfluidic sensors and Polytron plans to incorporate these kinds of batteries in future versions of the phone. They will also start using transparent speakers and touchscreens on both sides of the final product. (See: MIT startup makes transparent solar panel that will allow your smartphone to power itself.)

What can you do with a transparent phone?

Part of the power of having control over transparency is that, not only can you block light, but you can control the properties of the light that you might let pass through it. In addition to simple point pixel effects like color or polarization, more complex phenomena like refraction and diffraction might be controlled if the resolution of the device is high enough. Spatial light modulators (SLMs) used in optics can be switched at speeds of several thousand hertz, to create virtually any kind of wavefront that is desired.

Apps that feed the front camera image to the display have been available for some time but are only a crude and artificial attempt at transparency. True transparency would turn a phone into virtual cuttlefish. The video above shows how the cuttlefish is able to mirror its local environment by directly controlling the pigments in its skin which are under control of its nervous system. While the cuttlefish can’t become anything it might choose, as it apparently requires the appropriate visual input from the environment to drive the pigment alterations, a phone, at least in principle, could.

Via: Extremetech

How do you make a transparent smartphone?

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This lamp absorbs 150 times more CO2 than a tree

Lately, it seems like you can’t click on a handful of links on the internet without running into some kind of prototype invisibility cloak. Though this device can now be added to that list, it’s more like a cube than a cloak, and something out of the ordinary — even for a notion that is as abnormal as becoming invisibile.

Invisibility cloaks seem to run rampant nowadays, but even though they’re “common,” none of them are like what you see in the movies. There isn’t a thin sheet of fabric that you can toss over your head and then completely disappear, with your arm becoming visible when you reach out from under the cloak to grab something. Recently, at TED2013 in Long Beach, California, assistant professor of physics at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, Baile Zhang, showed off a little device that has the same outcome of an invisibility cloak, but isn’t a cloak in the least. The device is a little cube, only a few inches in height, but ably performs its function. Zhang seems to be using the term “cloak” not to refer to the garb, but the action. This is fine by us, because look at it go:

Via: extremetech.com

This lamp absorbs 150 times more CO2 than a tree

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Are you ready for the iWatch? Apple"s next big thing?

Earlier this month, rumors surfaced that Apple was toying with concepts for a “smart watch.” While reports remain mostly unconfirmed, a patent application from Apple earlier this week did outline a device with a flexible screen that could be worn on wrists.

The rumors sparked a frenzy of questions that Apple has yet to provide any concrete answers to, but that hasn’t stopped an Apple fan from developing an entire commercial around the mysterious product.

Are you ready for the iWatch? Apple"s next big thing?

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