Apple’s shrunk down Apple TV

The “one more thing” at Apple’s September 1 event was an updated Apple TV. Apple has certainly cranked up the ol’ shrink ray for a form factor that is 80 percent smaller than the previous generation. The rumored addition of apps didn’t eventuate nor did the rebranding to “iTV” but, as predicted, the update sees the device sporting an A4 chip and it will only be able to handle a maximum resolution of 720p. Because the new Apple TV does away with local storage altogether in favor of cloud-based storage and streaming of content, Apple says the choice of 720p was more a balance between quality and bandwidth than any rumored difficulties the A4 chip may have with Full HD content.

The device also gets a paint job and now comes in black. It has built-in HDMI, Wi-Fi, Ethernet and optical audio out and, while a lot of devices slim down thanks to an external power supply, the new Apple TV achieves its size reduction with its power supply crammed inside its miniaturized frame. Apple says it’s also extremely energy efficient and doesn’t require a fan to keep cool so is never noisy.

There’s also a Micro-USB port on the back, but don’t go thinking you’ll be able to plug in an external HDD to access content because it’s apparently only for service and support. In short, if you want to watch anything using the device you’ll need to stream it – be it TV shows and movies from the iTunes Store, content from Netflix, YouTube, Flickr and MobileMe, or media stored on your Mac or PC. In bad news for existing Apple TV owners, their devices won’t be getting an upgrade to the new cloud-based software.

The move away from local storage shouldn’t be a huge surprise. Apple has been pushing the cloud for some years now with its MobileMe service and a media streamer fits in nicely with that philosophy. Unfortunately for Apple, it isn’t the only company that sees media streamers as the future of home entertainment. Aside from facing stiff competition from dedicated streamers with more impressive specs, like the Roku XR and Pop Box, nowadays streaming capability is included in everything from gaming consoles to Blu-Ray players.

But Apple’s strength has always been the ease of use of its products and their integration with iTunes so maybe this latest update will be enough to attract consumers to a device that hasn’t been able to scale the heights of Apple’s other device in recent times. We’ll see.

Apple TV comes with the aluminum Apple Remote but can also be controlled with an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch using the free Remote app.

The device measures 0.9 x 3.9 x 3.9 inches –H x W x D – (23 x 98 x 98mm) and weighs 0.6 lbs (272g). Apple TV’s dimensions aren’t the only thing to be hit by the shrink ray. The device is now priced at a much more reasonable US$99. It will ship in four weeks.

Cheyenne Crow from Exmovere Holdings with child wearing Exmobaby pajamas

Seems not even babies are safe from the advances in wearable technology. Nowadays, unborn children can tweet or listen to music and fully-fledged infants can wear a suit that changes color when they have a fever. The latest wearable concept is the Exmobaby sleep suit – a baby garment designed to monitor a baby’s heart rate, emotional state and activity level and to wirelessly relay the information to a cell phone or PC.

The Exmobaby onesie or pajama will be made from a patented washable conductive biosensor textile that will come with a rechargeable wireless transceiver. The transceiver will snap into a pouch in the suit. Parents will be able to see icons indicating their baby’s heartbeat, emotional state and behavior on their cell phone or PC. The transceiver will use the Zigbee wireless standard which reportedly requires lower data rate, longer battery life and network security and is compatible with a wide range of USB and mini SD-slot dongle devices, such as cell phones.

The Exmobaby is being produced by Exmovere Holdings, a biomedical engineering company. A limited edition marketing campaign will begin in early 2011 when 1,000 Exmobaby pajama kits, available in blue or pink, will be released to select buyers from a waiting list. The kits will include an Exmobaby garment set, a Zigbee transceiver, PC and cell phone monitoring software and six months of online service.

For parents who need some reassurance that all’s well with their little one, the Exmobaby may one day provide a solution … but will it really be able to analyze a baby’s emotional state?

Thorium One ton of thorium can produce as much energy as 200 tons of uranium and 3.5 million tons of coal, according to the former director of CERN.

An abundant metal with vast energy potential could quickly wean the world off oil, if only Western political leaders would muster the will to do it, a UK newspaper says today. The Telegraph makes the case for thorium reactors as the key to a fossil-fuel-free world within five years, and puts the ball firmly in President Barack Obama’s court.

Thorium, named for the Norse god of thunder, is much more abundant than uranium and has 200 times that metal’s energy potential. Thorium is also a more efficient fuel source — unlike natural uranium, which must be highly refined before it can be used in nuclear reactors, all thorium is potentially usable as fuel.

The Telegraph says thorium could be used as an energy amplifier in next-generation nuclear power plants, an idea conceived by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia, former director of CERN.

Known as an accelerator-driven system, it would use a particle accelerator to produce a proton beam and aim it at lump of heavy metal, producing excess neutrons. Thorium is a good choice because it has a high neutron yield per neutron absorbed.

Thorium nuclei would absorb the excess neutrons, resulting in uranium-233, a fissile isotope that is not found in nature. Moderated neutrons would produce fissioned U-233, which releases enough energy to power the particle accelerator, plus an excess that can drive a power plant. Rubbia says a fistful of thorium could light up London for a week.

The idea needs refining, but is so promising that at least one private firm is getting involved. The Norwegian firm Aker Solutions bought Rubbia’s patent for this thorium fuel cycle, and is working on his design for a proton accelerator.

The Telegraph says this $1.8 billion (£1.2 billion) project could lead to a network of tiny underground nuclear reactors, producing about 600 MW each. Their wee size would negate the enormous security apparatus required of full-size nuclear power plants.

After a three-decade lull, nuclear power is enjoying a slow renaissance in the U.S. The 2005 energy bill included $2 billion for six new nuclear power plants, and this past February, Obama announced $8.3 billion in loan guarantees for new nuclear plants.

But nuclear plants need fuel, which means building controversial uranium mines. Thorium, on the other hand, is so abundant that it’s almost an annoyance. It’s considered a waste product when mining for rare-earth metals.

Thorium also solves the non-proliferation problem. Nuclear non-proliferation treaties (NPT) prohibit processes that can yield atomic bomb ingredients, making it difficult to refine highly radioactive isotopes. But thorium-based accelerator-driven plants only produce a small amount of plutonium, which could allow the U.S. and other nations to skirt NPT.

The Telegraph says Obama needs a Roosevelt moment, recalling the famous breakfast meeting when Albert Einstein convinced the president to start the Manhattan Project. A thorium stimulus could be just what the lagging economy needs.

Carl Zeiss has been making their Cinemizer video glasses for a few years, but now they added 3D capability for home theater and gaming applications.

The Cinemizer Plus video glasses have a tiny 16:9 format OLED screen in each eyepiece, with a native resolution of 640 x 480 pixels. The resulting field of view is the same as watching a 45-inch screen from a distance of about 6.5 feet, so it should be a pretty cinematic experience. A small external box connects to a variety of playback sources including recent iPods and iPhones, along with many other phones and video players, various game consoles, laptops, and Blu-ray players.

One nice touch is that eyeglass wearers have a separate diopter adjustment for each eyepiece, so you won’t be trying to wear them on top of your regular glasses as with some of those shutter glasses for 3D TV sets.

Battery life is about 4 hours which covers most movies, and the battery is charged through its USB connection. Still, this sounds like the perfect entertainment companion for any longish airline trip.

It’s Only Blurry Because It’s Magnified The world’s smallest University of Michigan logo, magnified thousands of times.

Apple is justifiably proud of their so called "retina display", but a new display technology promises to make it look like about as sharp as a worn out 1977 Sylvania Superset.

This picture might look fuzzy, but that’s because it’s a super magnified image of an incredibly tiny area. About six of these University of Michigan logos would fit in the width of a single human hair. This makes the pixels about eight times smaller than the iPhone’s, and would allow for a full HD 1920 x 1080 display that was smaller than a postage stamp.

The technology is called a nanoresonator, and uses nano-thin sheets of metal with a precisely spaced grid of slits that can trap or release light depending on its wavelength. An added benefit is that no color filters are needed, making the nanoresonator display much more efficient than current LCDs.

The developers from the University of Michigan (no surprise) say the displays can be made to be flexible, and would be useful for projection displays in addition to very small high-rez applications.

No word on when nanoresonator displays might show up in actual products you can buy.

500,000 Asteroids Discovered From 1980 to 2010

In this amazing video of the solar system, the asteroids that were discovered from 1980 to 2010 appear in the sequence as they were discovered. It’s very cool to watch the process of discovery. You can observe patterns, as technological innovations come online and spur new batches of findings; and as groups of astronomers all look in the same direction at once — for instance, when Voyager passed Jupiter, a lot of asteroids suddenly started to be discovered around that region of space.

How’s this for spooky action at a distance? The sun, at 93 million miles away, appears to be influencing the decay of radioactive elements inside the Earth, researchers say.

Given what we know about radioactivity and solar neutrinos, this should not happen. It’s so bizarre that a couple scientists at Stanford and Purdue universities believe there’s a chance that a previously unknown solar particle is behind it all.

The big news, according to Stanford’s news service, is that the core of the sun — where nuclear reactions produce neutrinos — spins more slowly than the surface. This phenomenon might explain changing rates of radioactive decay scientists observed at two separate labs. But it does not explain why the decay-change happens. That violates the laws of physics as we know them.

While examining data on radioactive isotopes, Purdue researchers found disagreement in measured decay rates, which goes against the long-accepted belief that these rates are constant. While searching for an explanation, the scientists came across other research that noted seasonal variation in these decay rates. Apparently radioactivity is stronger in winter than in summer.

A 2006 solar flare suggested the sun was involved somehow. Purdue University nuclear engineer Jere Jenkins noticed the decay rate of a medical isotope dropped during the solar flare, and what’s more, the decline started before the flare did. The latter finding could be useful for protecting satellites and astronauts — if there is a correlation between decay rates and solar activity, changed decay rates could provide early warning of an impending solar storm.

But while that’s good news for astronauts, it’s bad news for physics.

Peter Sturrock, Stanford emeritus professor of applied physics and an expert on the inner workings of the sun, told the researchers to look for evidence that the changes in radioactive decay vary with the rotation of the sun. The answer was yes, suggesting that neutrinos are responsible.

But how could the nebulous neutrino, which does not interact with normal matter, be affecting decay rates? No one knows. It might be a previously unknown particle instead.

As Jenkins puts it, "What we’re suggesting is that something that doesn’t really interact with anything is changing something that can’t be changed."

Though disaster movies would have you believe otherwise, we should not yet worry about solar neutrinos warming the core of the Earth. But perhaps we should worry that our understanding of the sun — and perhaps our understanding of nuclear physics in general — is a lot weaker than we thought.

‘Hygroelectric’ collectors could someday harness atmospheric electricity

Nikola Tesla once dreamed of being able to harness electricity from the air. Now, research being conducted at Brazil’s University of Campinas (UC) is indicating that such a scenario may indeed become a reality. Professor Fernando Galembeck, a UC chemist, is leading the study into the ways in which electricity builds up and spreads in the atmosphere, and how it could be collected. “Our research could pave the way for turning electricity from the atmosphere into an alternative energy source for the future," he stated. "Just as solar energy could free some households from paying electric bills, this promising new energy source could have a similar effect.”

Scientists once believed that water droplets in the atmosphere were electrically neutral, even after having come into contact with charged dust particles. Galembeck and his UC team, however, have shown that this isn’t the case. In a lab experiment, they noted that tiny particles of silica and aluminum phosphate became negatively and positively charged (respectively) when circulated in highly-humid air. “This was clear evidence that water in the atmosphere can accumulate electrical charges and transfer them to other materials it comes into contact with,” Galembeck explained. “We are calling this ‘hygroelectricity,’ meaning ‘humidity electricity’.”

He now pictures collectors, not unlike solar cells, that could someday collect and distribute hygroelectricity from the air. Just as solar cells work best in sunny places, his collectors would do best in humid parts of the world. He even believes it’s possible that by diminishing the electrical charge in the air, his collectors could prevent lightning, especially if mounted on top of tall buildings. His team is currently experimenting with different metals, to find out which would work best for capturing atmospheric electricity and preventing lightning strikes.

"These are fascinating ideas that new studies by ourselves and by other scientific teams suggest are now possible," he said. "We certainly have a long way to go. But the benefits in the long range of harnessing hygroelectricity could be substantial."

A report on Galembeck’s research was presented this week at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society.

The Hubble Space Telescope image of the inner region of Abell 1689, an immense cluster of galaxies located 2.2 billion light-years away

Dark energy has been described as the greatest puzzle of our universe. This mysterious force, discovered in 1998, is pushing the universe apart at ever-increasing speeds and astronomers have now devised a new method of measuring it. Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers were able to take advantage of a giant magnifying lens in space – a massive cluster of galaxies – to narrow in on the nature of dark energy. Their calculations, when combined with data from other methods, significantly increase the accuracy of dark energy measurements and may eventually lead to an explanation of what the elusive phenomenon really is.

Although scientists aren’t clear about what dark energy is, they do know that it makes up a large chunk of our universe – about 72 percent. Another chunk, about 24 percent, is thought to be dark matter, also mysterious in nature but easier to study than dark energy because of its gravitational influence on matter that we can see. The rest of the universe, a mere four percent, is the stuff that makes up people, planets, stars and everything made up of atoms.

Cosmic lens

In their new study, the science team used images from Hubble to examine a massive cluster of galaxies, named Abell 1689, which acts as a magnifying, or gravitational, lens. The gravity of the cluster causes galaxies behind it to be imaged multiple times into distorted shapes, sort of like a fun house mirror reflection that warps your face.

Using these distorted images, the scientists were able to figure out how light from the more distant, background galaxies had been bent by the cluster — a characteristic that depends on the nature of dark energy. Their method also depends on precise ground-based measurements of the distance and speed at which the background galaxies are traveling away from us. The team used these data to quantify the strength of the dark energy that is causing our universe to accelerate.

"What I like about our new method is that it’s very visual," said Eric Jullo, an astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "You can literally see gravitation and dark energy bend the images of the background galaxies into arcs."

According to the scientists, their method required multiple, meticulous steps. They spent the last several years developing specialized mathematical models and precise maps of the matter – both dark and "normal" – constituting the Abell 1689 cluster.

"We can now apply our technique to other gravitational lenses," said co-author Priya Natarajan, a cosmologist at Yale University, New Haven, Conn. "We’re exploiting a beautiful phenomenon in nature to learn more about the role that dark energy plays in our universe."

"We have to tackle the dark energy problem from all sides," said Jullo. "It’s important to have several methods, and now we’ve got a new, very powerful one." Jullo is lead author of a paper on the findings appearing in the Aug. 20 issue of the journal Science.

Spotting Sunspots Big Bear Solar Observatory/NJIT

Researchers at Big Bear Solar Observatory have tuned their adaptive optics array and achieved first light, capturing this image of a sunspot that is now the most detailed ever captured in visible light. The image was captured with Big Bear’s New Solar Telescope (NST), a brand new instrument (as the name implies) with a resolution of just 50 miles on the sun’s surface.

The NST is the precursor to an even-larger telescope, the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST), which will be constructed over the next decade, allowing Big Bear researchers to build a new kind of adaptive optics system known as multi-conjugate adaptive optics, that should provide them with a clear, distortion-free means of observing the sun from Earth in unrivaled detail.

In the meantime, NST will collect incredibly detailed images of solar phenomena like this that should help researchers understand the complexities of solar weather and its impact on the space climate in our neighborhood of the solar system.