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Holographic television sets may be only a few years off thanks to a new breakthrough in 3D technology. Researchers at the University of Arizona said they had made the first updatable 3D displays with memory, a prerequisite for getting any holographic image to move. With the new technology, displays can now be erased and rewritten in a matter of minutes.
Posted by Nick Broughall at 11:30 AM on October 7, 2008
Did you know that there were over 200 different aboriginal languages in Australia? Of those, there are now only about 20 that are still in use today - the rest have essentially been wiped out. What's more, the Asia Pacific region is home to about a third of the world's indigenous languages, many which are now facing the possibility of being lost forever.
But, thankfully, a group of Australian scientists are in the process of digitising and cataloging these languages so that they will never be completely lost. The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) is a collaboration between ANU and the universities of Melbourne, Sydney and New England. Already in its data banks are thousands of pages of notes, plus hours and hours of audio recordings as part of their research.
The archive has just won a Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative (VeRSI) Award in humanities and social sciences, which gave them a $26,000 PowerEdge 2950 rack mountable Dell server as their prize.
In the future, it's efforts like this that will form the basis of cultural and historical studies throughout a large part of the world. Sadly, it's probably inevitable that these smaller cultures get absorbed into the global machine, but at least we'll have some record of the past. And probably on a Dell server, no less.
[Science in Public - Thanks Niall!]
Well, the LHC may be out of commission until April, but the LHC Computing Grid, otherwise known as the world's largest computing grid, was just switched on. The system is comprised of combined computing power from 33 countries. That's 140 computer centres crunching 15 million gigabytes of LHC data per year (or roughly six CDs/second at its peak).
Get ready to fight to the death for this one, Disney, Pixar, and Dreamworks: More than a thousand penguins have suddenly appeared on the beaches of Brazil. The scientists can't explain why this is happening. Some say they are somehow confused. Knowing the views in Brazil's beaches, I personally think they are not confused at all. Brazilian National Institute for Space Research climatologist Jose Marengo thinks the penguins--who are being airlifted back to its origin by the air force--got lost because of changes in the ocean circulation in the South Atlantic:
The 2008 Paralympics wrapped up over the summer, but we're only just today learning about some of the awesome stories to come out of this amazing tech-assisted sporting event. We've covered these bionic athletes before, with some help from the Big Picture, but today's story out of Germany shows just how much goes into helping these young men and women compete. A previous sporting injury left Wojtek Czyz without a left leg and the ability to long jump. The ESA, using materials developed for space, helped him get to the Olympics and vault into the record books.
The $US1.7-billion HiPER facility--High Power laser Energy Research--will kick off with a party this monday. Yes, the project that will hopefully give us a way to produce limitless clean energy and save humanity from self-destruction (or pull out an LHC and destroy half the planet), starts up with a hydrogen pellet and alcoholic cocktails, which, if you ask me, is the perfect way to begin saving the planet. Here is how it works:
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is "a proposed ground-based 6.7 meter effective diameter (8.4 meter primary mirror), 10 square-degree-field telescope that will provide digital imaging of faint astronomical objects across the entire sky, night after night." What's that mean? Well, it means, if it's built, we'll have a telescope attempting to catalog the entire night sky into an absolutely massive 150 petabyte database. Awesome!
A new robot called ExoFly could be exploring the surface of Mars, guiding rovers through the surface of the Red Planet. Developed by scientists at the Technical University Delft, Wageningen University, and TNO in Netherlands, the ExoFly is designed to imitate the flight patterns of dragonflies. Dragonflies from 300 million years ago, because these things are huge.
The Large Hadron Collider, which has been delayed due to some problems with a helium link, now has a date for when it'll go back online: early April. It's going to be so long not just because of the problem, but because there was already a scheduled maintenance from November 15th through April anyways, as there will be every year. This reduces the strain on the French power grid during the winter months and gives them a chance to make sure the collider is always running in top shape. [CNET]
As we move towards battery and hydrogen cell breakthroughs that could wean us off our addiction to oil, here's at least one engine design from yesteryear that ought to be examined a bit more. The free-piston engine, first invented in 1920, are cheap to build and roughly twice as efficient as current gas engines.
