Scientists have been able to use metal to do tricks with light. Now they can differentiate that light into a spectrum, and store each colour in separate little grooves on the metal. With the power of plasmonics, you may one day have a rainbow on your keychain. More »
Baltimore citizens aren’t just dealing drugs and installing wiretaps, some of them are busy using convex lenses to trap rainbows, which could be put to good use with optical computing—making hardware faster! Stronger! More powerful! More »
We first showed you the rainbow-illuminated Luxeed LED keyboard a year and a half ago, but then it was in Korean letter-style versions. Now it’s got plain old Western characters and is on sale in the US. It’s not quite in the same league as the legendary Optimus Maximus, sure, but with 430 LEDs embedded inside—each fully controllable with some custom software—it actually sounds pretty impressive. Check out the video: it’s psychedelic, man. Or, at least, vaguely sci-fi looking anyway.
The Department of Defense office of Research Engineering is putting up $1,000,000 for the team that can come up with the best battery suit for “dismounted warfighters.” These days, in order to complete a four-day mission, soldiers need to pack 20 lbs of batteries to power up all their assorted electronics (which also add weight). What the DoD wants, badly, is a wearable system that weighs 4kg (just under 9lbs) and puts out 20W average electric power for 96 hours, with peaks up to 200W. And in case you Tony Starks out there were thinking it, “No radioisotope or nuclear power sources are permitted.” More »
