Just some cool Friday stuff
I haven’t posted in a while, so I thought I’d share some cool stuff I’ve found the past week or so.
I’ve been sharing this through my twitter profile as I find them, but I thought I needed place more emphasis on them.
The worlds first battery fuelled by air – Developed at the Chemistry Department at the University of St Andrews the STAIR’ (St Andrews Air) battery could pave the way for a new generation of electric cars, laptops and mobile phones. The battery uses a porous carbon component instead of the traditional lithium cobalt oxide. This carbon component then reacts with oxygen in the surrounding air to general additional energy allowing it to last up to 10 times longer. It’ll also be much lighter.
How to fit 300 DVDs on one disc – Forget Holographic Disks, Researchers have found a way to record 1.6 terabytes of information on a DVD-sized disc. 5-D optical recording adds three “dimensions” to the two spatial dimensions that DVD and CD discs already have. A spectral – or colour – dimension, a polarisation dimension, as well as a third spatial dimension of recording information in 10 layers of the nano-rod films.
Mozilla Labs announces Jetpack – develop your own Firefox plugins with only HTML, CSS and Javascript. I imagine we’ll start seeing a whole lot more completely useless and rubbish plugins, but hopefully also more amazingly innovative firefox addons. I’ll sure try and create some stuff with it.
Nokia Makes Unused Patents Available to All – “In an effort to boost the local Finnish economy, they’re throwing open their thousands of unused patents so that any company in Finland can pursue ideas that Nokia has abandoned.” An precedented move, but a great move nonetheless I think. I think these are probably patents produced by their R&D department that compliment their existing products, not compete, so allowing other people to develop that IP and benefit helps them also in the long run.
Wind Turbine Towers Win Metropolis Next Generation Prize -I thought this was pretty clever. The project aims to give an existing energy grid a much needed boost by installing wind turbines in broken electrical transmission towers. It was designed for France, but can be used anywhere. In general, I really like the idea developing energy producing or storing capabilities on top of existing infrastructure. This means lower implementation times and costs.
And lastly some pictures 😛
Pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope repair mission
And Some amazing pictures of Cape Town.
That’s all. Have a great weekend.