Lifeboat Foundation

Much ado has been made of Dell’s new maglev keyboard, currently exclusive to the XPS 15 9575 2-in-1. Utilizing rare-earth magnets to repulse the keys back up once depressed, the keyboard still provides a decent amount of feedback despite its meager 0.7mm of travel.

In a late March webcast for Dell’s new products, the company’s Vice President & General Manager Alienware, Gaming and XPS, Frank Azor, mentioned that the keyboard could be adopted in more of Dell’s laptops — if it proves popular.

The major advantage of design is that it allows the laptop to be thinner, but not everyone is a fan. Though it provides more travel and feedback than Apple’s much-maligned “butterfly” keyboard, initial reviews suggest that the keyboard is basically tolerable, but it isn’t going to replace a ThinkPad’s keyboard anytime soon.

Continue reading “XPS 15 2-in-1’s maglev keyboard may find its way into other Dell laptops — Frank Azor” »

Latvian company Aerones created the machine, which — according to the company — can fly up to 984 feet, compared to 100-foot-height that firefighter ladders can reach. The drone is fitted with a water hose from a fire truck, and is controlled by a pilot on the ground remotely. However, the drone does suffer from low battery life, providing only 30 minutes flight time from a 90-minute charge. It’s still in development, but Aerones hopes to use the machine for real-life operations soon.

See more from Aerones: https://www.aerones.com/eng/

Continue reading “Drone Could Help Firefighters” »

The Nickelodeon films for Invader Zim and Rocko’s Modern Life are both coming to Netflix this summer.

Modders are taking advantage of AI tools to update old graphics.

Circa 2016

U.Scientists are working on next-generation combat wear for soldiers inspired by the nano suit worn in the Iron Man films — and say it could be just two years away.

Continue reading “US Army to test radical ‘Iron Man’ bullet-proof liquid armour” »

Scientists want to capture your dreams like a movie — and human trials of the technology will start next year…

Recording and watching people’s dreams has been the subject of mind-bending films like ‘Until the End of the World,’ ‘Total Recall,’ ‘Strange Days’, ‘Minority Report’ and more recent hits like ‘Inception’ and ‘Captain Marvel’.

Continue reading “Dream-recording tech is set to begin human test trials next year” »

The world’s first virtual reality gym just opened in San Francisco, offering a next-generation workout via a computer games-based distraction technique that aims to put the fun back into exercising.

Black Box VR promises a gym experience like no other by giving users a full-body workout while virtually immersed in another world that requires them to fight battles and beat their opponent.

Continue reading “Get your head in the game: World’s 1st VR gym opens in San Francisco (VIDEO)” »

Circa 2014

Where did Groot come from? In reality, he came from the imaginations of Jack Kirby, Dick Ayers, and Stan Lee. In the Guardians of the Galaxy movie, he came from another planet. In this essay, he came from the stuff in your yard. We’ll see which plants might have evolved, over time, to become the world’s most beloved tree-man. Warning: Major spoilers for the movie after this point!

Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) have succeeded in developing a key constituent of a novel unconventional computing concept. This constituent employs the same magnetic structures that are being researched in connection with storing electronic data on shift registers known as racetracks. In this, researchers investigate so-called skyrmions, which are magnetic vortex-like structures, as potential bit units for data storage. However, the recently announced new approach has a particular relevance to probabilistic computing. This is an alternative concept for electronic data processing where information is transferred in the form of probabilities rather than in the conventional binary form of 1 and 0. The number 2/3, for instance, could be expressed as a long sequence of 1 and 0 digits, with 2/3 being ones and 1/3 being zeros. The key element lacking in this approach was a functioning bit reshuffler, i.e., a device that randomly rearranges a sequence of digits without changing the total number of 1s and 0s in the sequence. That is exactly what the skyrmions are intended to achieve. The results of this research have been published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

The researchers used thin magnetic metallic films for their investigations. These were examined in Mainz under a special microscope that made the magnetic alignments in the metallic films visible. The films have the special characteristic of being magnetized in vertical alignment to the film plane, which makes stabilization of the magnetic skyrmions possible in the first place. Skyrmions can basically be imagined as small magnetic vortices, similar to hair whorls. These structures exhibit a so-called topological stabilization that protects them from collapsing too easily – as a hair whorl resists being easily straightened. It is precisely this characteristic that makes skyrmions very promising when it comes to use in technical applications such as, in this particular case, information storage. The advantage is that the increased stability reduces the probability of unintentional data loss and ensures the overall quantity of bits is maintained.