Wednesday, February 10. 2010Haier's wireless HDTV lacks wires (WiTricity)If you're at CES and just can't stand wires, be sure to drop by the Haier booth where the company is showing off its completely wireless HDTV. Employing both Wireless Electricity technology developed at MIT, as well as Wireless Home Digital Interface (WHDI) this tube can supposedly stream video over 100 feet, but there's no telling if that WiTricity signal will be as far reaching. All this technology does add a good bit of heft to the panel's profile, so even though you might be avoiding that mess of tangled cables, don't think you're getting off that easy. Video of the wire-free panel is after the break. Related Links:Friday, February 05. 2010"Melting" Drywall Keeps Rooms CoolDevelopers think these phase-change materials could reduce the need for air-conditioning.
By Katherine Bourzac
The "phase-change" materials inside the BASF capsules keep a room cool in much the same way that ice cubes chill a drink: by absorbing heat as they melt. Each polymer capsule contains paraffin waxes that melt at around room temperature, enabling them to keep the temperature of a room constant throughout the day. The waxes work best in climates that cool down at night, allowing the materials inside the capsules to solidify and release the heat they've stored during the day. In some southern European climates, for example, the materials absorb enough heat during the day to save 20 percent of the electricity needed for air-conditioning. In The work is part of a push in the construction industry toward greener building materials that help maintain comfortable temperatures without using electricity. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, buildings consume more than 70 percent of the electricity generated in Phase-change materials offer a way to add thermal mass to lightweight building materials, says Leon Glicksman, professor of building technology and mechanical engineering at MIT. Since the 1950s, several companies have tried to develop passive cooling systems that take advantage of phase-change materials. But they had limited success because it's difficult to incorporate these new materials into existing building substances. BASF makes the microcapsules by rapidly beating melted wax into hot water. Since wax and water repel one another, the wax forms small droplets. When the researchers add acrylic precursors to the mix, the repulsion between wax and water drives them to coat the droplets' surface. Finally, they add a catalyst to form an acrylic polymer shell around the wax. The resulting wet mixture can then be added to the powder that's used to make drywall or dried out and incorporated into other construction materials, including concrete and plasters. Chemical giant DuPont also makes encapsulated phase-change materials and has incorporated them into heat-absorbing panels that it markets in Europe. BASF's strategy is a little different: the company sells the capsules to other companies to incorporate into a range of building materials, including ceiling panels, aerated concrete blocks, and drywall. Based on German electricity prices and climate conditions, a study conducted by BASF estimated that a family home made with plaster that incorporated 360 grams of the phase-change material (at a cost of $4,883) would save enough electricity to recoup the cost within five years. National Gypsum is working with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and California's Emerging Technologies Coordinating Council to field-test its heat-absorbing panels, which will be marketed under the name Thermalcore. The panels are made by mixing the BASF microcapsule-water solution with gypsum, the mineral used to make drywall. The paraffins used by BASF can be tailored to melt at different temperatures; those in National Gypsum's panels liquefy at 22.8 ºC (about 73 ºF). According to the company, the panels can store 22 British thermal units per square foot. National Gypsum will take at least a year to test the panels' performance through all four seasons before bringing them to market. A spokesperson says the company may reformulate the panels to include more or less of the capsules, depending on how they perform in the climate of the western United States. Data from the field trials will also be used to model how much the panels help reduce energy consumption. So far, the heat-absorbing capsules have only been tested in passive systems. But they could also be used in active systems in warmer climates, says MIT's Glicksman. "In commercial buildings, you could run the air conditioner at night when electricity is cheaper and use the phase-change materials to maintain lower temperatures during the day," he says. Schossig says his research group and BASF are gathering data from experimental active systems. Copyright -----
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Science & technology
at
16:42
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, conditioning, materials, ressources, science & technology
Potentially Amazing Technology: Is Spray-On Liquid Glass About to Make Everything Greener?
If it Works and is Safe, It Could Change the World How Does it Work? An Almost Unbelievable List of Applications The flexible and breathable glass coating is approximately 100 nanometres thick (500 times thinner than a human hair), and so it is completely undetectable. It is food safe, environmentally friendly (winner of the Green Apple Award) and it can be applied to almost any surface within seconds . When coated, all surfaces become easy to clean and anti- microbially protected (Winner of the NHS Smart Solutions Award ). Houses, cars, ovens, wedding dress or any other protected surface become stain resistant and can be easily cleaned with water ; no cleaning chemicals are required. Amazingly a 30 second DIY application to a sink unit will last for a year or years, depending on how often it is used. But it does not stop there - the coatings are now also recognised as being suitable for agricultural and in-vivo application. Vines coated with SiO2 don't suffer from mildew, and coated seeds grow more rapidly without the need for anti-fungal chemicals. This will result in farmers in enjoying massively increased yields . Trials for in-vivo applications are subject to a degree of secrecy, but Neil McClelland, the UK Project Manager for Nanopool GmbH, describes the results as "stunning". "Items such as stents can be coated, and this will create anti sticking features - catheters , and sutures which are a source of infection, will also cease to be problematic." Physorg has a few more details: "Food processing companies in Germany have already carried out trials of the spray, and found sterile surfaces that usually needed to be cleaned with strong bleach to keep them sterile needed only a hot water rinse if they were coated with liquid glass. The levels of sterility were higher for the glass-coated surfaces, and the surfaces remained sterile for months. [...] A year-long trial of the spray in a Lancashire hospital also produced "very promising" results for a range of applications including coatings for equipment, medical implants, catheters, sutures and bandages. The war graves association in the UK is investigating using the spray to treat stone monuments and grave stones, since trials have shown the coating protects against weathering and graffiti. Trials in Turkey are testing the product on monuments such as the Ataturk Mausoleum in Ankara. " Promising, but Let's Wait and See More Green Science & Technology ----- Via TreeHugger Hairpin bends, no lights, no problemTo test the night vision technology in the Mercedes E-Class, Guy Bird took on the hairpins of the Stelvio Pass in the Italian Alps, in the dark. With no lights. He also made a short film of his unusual road trip... Night vision technology has come a long way since the first heat-sensing systems used in WWII by the US Army to spot enemy targets writes Guy Bird. Today, the latest systems are now so effective and affordable they're being offered as road safety devices on civilian cars.
Car manufacturer research found that many accidents were occurring on poorly-lit country roads due to cars only using dipped beams to avoid blinding on-coming traffic. They then worked out that night vision systems in tandem with dipped beams greatly enhance drivers' ability to see further down the road and spot hazards earlier. To see how good night vision technology has become three plucky British journalists drove up the infamous 60-hairpin Stelvio Pass in the Italian Alps in a night vision-equipped Mercedes E-Class at midnight, and then taped up the exterior lights to see if the night vision system alone might be enough to navigate by. The car uses ‘near infrared' technology (also known as ‘active infrared') to allow the driver to ‘see' just beyond the visible light spectrum of the human eye. It works by illuminating the road with invisible, and therefore non-reflective, infrared light from the car's two inner front headlamps. A tiny infrared light-sensitive camera mounted in the windscreen then records what it sees and beams the greyscale images to a small LCD display on the dashboard. The system in the new E-Class not only detects pedestrians, cyclists or obstacles up to 90 metres ahead, but also highlights them via a graphic on-screen framing device to help avoid them. Luckily, halfway up the Stelvio Pass at midnight pedestrians and cyclists are thin on the ground – but the technology's still useful for displaying the odd car, plus obstacles like stone walls and boulders, behind which lie huge drops down the mountainside. Mercedes' system is not the first to be plumbed into a passenger car but most of the others major on ‘far' or ‘passive' infrared technology that processes infrared radiation and displays the images on the car's front windscreen. While they can work up to greater distances than ‘near infrared' the images tend to be much grainier and lower resolution, and Mercedes says such heat-reliant systems don't always work as well if the object to be detected is of a similar temperature to the atmosphere around it, ie rocks or boulders warmed up by hot weather may fail to be picked up by the sensor. To test the theory that our night vision really could substitute for headlights, the car's main and side headlamps were taped over, leaving only the tiny but crucial infrared light elements exposed. Even so, you'd be hard pressed to read a book by the light left remaining outside, let alone drive anywhere. A safety car drove several hairpins in front (to alert any cars coming the other way) and then it was the turn of our night vision car to set off. Mercedes' system only kicks in at about 14mph, so once the night vision system has been activated by a small button in the dash it takes a real leap of faith to accelerate into the darkness and just wait for the satnav screen to start beaming back images. But put your foot down properly and the critical speed is quickly reached – a second later the camera is feeding back crystal clear, virtually real-time images to the driver's cabin. It's a particularly unnerving experience driving a car up a narrow, unlit mountain pass navigating almost completely on the basis of images that resemble a black and white videogame on a screen normally reserved for consulting the satnav.ght vision But after some mental and physical adjustment, traversing the straighter sections gets easier and we go above 25mph. The hairpins are trickier. The night vision images that feed back as each corner is taken are no more than a fast-moving blur of impending wall. The only way to tackle them is to pick a line hugging the outside wall before you enter the corner and make the turn into the middle of the darkness as smoothly as possible. Without being able to see inside the curve, memories of turns taken in daylight practice runs help, but as soon as the road straightens up again the night vision tech shows the path forward remarkably clearly. After ten minutes more concentration, and dozens more hairpins, the summit is reached. Of course, ours was a slightly daft test that should ‘not to be tried at home' – or halfway up a mountain – but it nonetheless shows how sharp an image ‘near infrared' night vision can project and how effective a tool it could be for road safety. It's also quite affordable at £1,100 and could well filter down to cheaper and smaller models in time, just like so many other devices from airbags to ABS. Guy Bird is a freelance journalist, specialising in cars and car design. This article appears in the CR February issue. ----- Via Creative Review Personal comment: Just interested by the strange, unlikely (and a bit nerdly stupid) experience.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Design, Science & technology
at
15:07
Defined tags for this entry: artificial reality, design, mediated, science & technology, visualization
Thursday, February 04. 2010Symbian OS goes open sourceThe smartphone market is very hot right now with smartphones selling very well and many different companies competing in the market. The open source Android OS is doing very well in the market against the proprietary iPhone OS and Windows Mobile. The most widely used smartphone OS in the world is Symbian and the Symbian Foundation announced today that its open source migration is complete. The Symbian OS has been developed for more than ten years and has shipped on more than 330 million dives. The entire source code for the OS is now open source and available to anyone who wants to download it at no charge. The code can now be used and modified by anyone for any purpose from mobile phones to other types of gear. The move was made to put Symbian in a position for growth and faster time to market. I wonder if we will see the Symbian OS start to pop up on consumer electronic devices like tablets like Android is doing. The use of the software is governed by the Eclipse Public License and other open source licenses.
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fabric | rblgThis blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research. We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings. Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations. This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
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