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Plants come in at about 2% energy conversion efficiency. The best solar cells are over 35% conversion efficiency.

I think it depends on how you're counting. The 2% probably includes all photons hitting the leaf, which seems reasonable enough when comparing to a solar cell where nearly the entire surface is supposed to be converting photons to electricity. However, the individual proteins in plants that capture photons are indeed extraordinarily efficient. Nothing we can synthesize is as efficient on the nano-scale as Photosystems I and II - but of course since the plant is not made entirely of photosystems, the relative efficiency rate appears to be less.

This statement "Millions of years have evolution has resulted in plants being the most efficient harvesters of solar energy on the planet" is flat out incorrect.

Plants come in at about 2% energy conversion efficiency. The best solar cells are over 35% conversion efficiency.

Now, to be fair, plants aren't optimimized for energy conversion efficiency-- they are basically solar-powered engineering units that synthesize complex organic molecules and make self-replicating macromolecular structures out of little more than carbon dioxide and water, plus a few trace minerals... they are harvesting, mining, concentrating, and structural machines of amazing complexity. But "efficient energy conversion engines"-- no, not even close.

When the very first sentence of an article is factually incorrect, I have no interest in reading any more of it.

Plus you have to stand on it all day. Won't your legs get tired. Those small, one-wheeled things with the little seat that folds up small enough to put into your backpack would be much more useful. Like this one, and I remember another one that might have folded up smaller and was lighter weight.

The working prototype is a helicopter with an added prop on the front.

This is not a new concept. Autogyros are very old tech.

No, it's not. First, it's not an autogyro, although it apparently can operate in autogyro mode. But, more important, once it has forward motion, the rotor stops rotating and becomes a wing.

check some of the images here http://www.gizmag.com/hybrid-rotorwing-stop-rotor/27092/pictures

The headline is focusing on the wrong thingThere was already a process to make brains look like glass. It was really cheap and easy too: it's just urea basically.

True, but the level of transparency wasn't that impressive with that method, it only worked up to 1-3mm of depth. BABB based protocols were a lot better in that regards.

The real story is the second part. You can stain for proteins and see where the localize. With SCALE, the previous method, you couldn't do that easily. Probably anyway, I never tried. You had to have fluorescent proteins expressing in the tissue, which isn't possible in human tissue samples from deceased patients unless you're trying some weird shit. Alternatively, you could stain sections, but that doesn't give you as good a 3D image of the 3D structure. It's really interesting work. If it doesn't cost too much, I may have to try it in my lab (though I don't work on brains.)

Hell yes, that's the big one here. Plus, expressed fluorescent proteins in the tissue don't get degraded as much as with BABB et al. Definitely give it a shot, you probably have all the ingredients around the lab anyway. The clearing is done with PFA, acrylamide, bis-acrylamide, VA044 and PBS. The slices should then be immersed in glycerol, so nothing special there as far as I can see it. You only need to build a custom electrophoresis chamber to stain the brain, but even that shouldn't be too hard.

The headline is focusing on the wrong thingThere was already a process to make brains look like glass. It was really cheap and easy too: it's just urea basically.

The real story is the second part. You can stain for proteins and see where the localize. With SCALE, the previous method, you couldn't do that easily. Probably anyway, I never tried. You had to have fluorescent proteins expressing in the tissue, which isn't possible in human tissue samples from deceased patients unless you're trying some weird shit. Alternatively, you could stain sections, but that doesn't give you as good a 3D image of the 3D structure.

It's really interesting work. If it doesn't cost too much, I may have to try it in my lab (though I don't work on brains.)

This is (almost certainly) probably wrong, but...

As I understood it, a message travelling at FTL will experience exotic negative time, since it is travelling faster than light. (At exactly c, it experiences 0 time) the sender and reciever do not experience this exotic time. However, the message itself acheives its apparent FTL by going backward in time as measured by the conversationalists respectively.

Combining normal time reference frames with imaginary negative time reference frames results in strange voodoo though. I would conjecture that because we don't see oddball neutrinos with antimass traveling at ftl velocities in particle collisions, that this kind of communication is not really possible. The closest thing the time reversed data transmission I can think of is the "charlie sends photons to alice and bob, they later compre notes" experiment:

http://www.gizmag.com/quantum-entanglement-speed-10000-faster-light/26587/

And the "charlie predicts if alice and bob entangled their photons" experiment:

http://www.livescience.com/19975-spooky-quantum-entanglement.html

I am not sufficiently educated to sanely discuss these findings, but others here are.

There is a solution to this;
Use solar derived electricity to crack water, then use this combined with CO2 derived from whatever source you like to make jet fuel. Or just make biodiesel and refine that into jetfuel. If you can get away without having to meet the JetA specs it should not be that hard. Turbines are pretty flexible.

An article about this tech:
http://www.gizmag.com/air-fuel-synthesis-gasoline-from-air/24739/

Yes, it is a very lossy process, but the energy density of liquid hydrocarbons is hard to match.

Don't forget solar. Solar-powered race cars are averaging over 60 mph.
It's not unthinkable to tow a solar trailer behind an EV to give it a boost while driving during the day.
These cells would be perfect for that application.

"AI" has always been that which AI can't do. Here are several activities that once were considered sci-fi-level AI but are no longer considered AI in a broad sense because we know how to do them more-or-less:
* Looking stuff up for us (Google);
http://www.google.com/
* Inferring questions from examples and answering questions posed in natural language (IBM's Watson);
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer)
* Generating hypotheses and doing hands/grippers-on scientific experiments (Adam);
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Scientist
* Reading text in multiple fonts reliably and quickly and cheaply;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition
* translating one human language to another on the fly;
http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/research.nsf/pages/r.uit.innovation.html/
http://www.gizmag.com/go/1833/
* reading and translating signs;
http://questvisual.com/us/
* Making portraits;
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/11/tresset_robot_artist_artist_engineers_robots_to_make_art_and_save_his_own.single.html
* Playing the piano including from sheet music;
http://www.synthgear.com/2009/music-misc/synth-playing-robot/
http://gizmodo.com/5963137/watch-this-adorable-horde-of-intelligent-swarm-robots-play-piano
* Driving a car in busy traffic (Google, Stanford, CMU, others);
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge#2007_Urban_Challenge
* Winning chess games (IBM's Deep Blue and pretty much any PC now against a mid-level player);
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_chess
* Image recognition for quality control in factories;
http://www.general-vision.com/products/mtvs.php
* Recognizing faces;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_recognition_system
* Figuring out the name of a musical composition from a few notes as well as making new compositions and dynamic accompaniments;
http://www.wikihow.com/Identify-Songs-Using-Melody
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_and_artificial_intelligence
* The diagnostic aspect of being a doctor (Watson again);
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/11/ibm-watson-medical-doctor
* Investing in volatile financial markets;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_trading
* Serving as a sentry with a machine gun;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5YftEAbmMQ
* Twirling a cell phone;
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
* Identifying things by smell;

Tell that to NASA.

4 – Placing a group of skilled snipers to hunt the drone, especially the reconnaissance ones because they fly low, about six kilometers or less.

That would be a really neat trick, since the acknowledged World's longest sniper kill is only about 2 and a half kilometers.

I hope for their sake the rest of these ideas of theirs work better.

"It defines public airspace as anything above your shoelaces"

Great, now we're going to have nano drones buzzing around below the level of our shoe laces. Nice one Oregon.

And another one, found by searching for military and blimps, also found in gizmag and wired, is a dedicated blimp site article about the army preparing and training for using a huge/mammoth spy blimp, an LEMV = US Army's massive Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle:

also http://www.gizmag.com/lemv-first-flight/22675/
and http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/05/massive-spy-blimp : Army Readies Its Mammoth Spy Blimp for First Flight ...
There wass also an auxilliary naval air field north of La Jolla in Del Mar that also was used for blimps: http://www.militarymuseum.org/NAAFDelMar.html

Name two.

1. Martinovich I., Perito, D., et al.
2. House, P., Greger, B.

Notes:
- these are only two papers that made it into the public media in recent times
- it is a very conservative estimation to assume that each one of them involved the work of tens of peoples
- it is also safe to assume that there are many others that are still "pushing the boundaries of Knowledge" on the matter but are not enough "media-chewable" so they never reach the notoriously sloppy AC's attention

Looks like the concept of "Dark Energy" that many physicists have been so fond of, is dead. bit.ly/S7dwQv [Lonny Eachus]

No, Lonny. The gizmag article you linked just shows that one type of dark energy (the cosmological constant) is more consistent with long-term observations showing that the proton to electron mass ratio (PEMR) has remained roughly constant over billions of years. Even wikipedia makes it clear that the cosmological constant is a type of dark energy:

In the standard model of cosmology, dark energy currently accounts for 73% of the total mass–energy of the universe.[2] Two proposed forms for dark energy are the cosmological constant, a constant energy density filling space homogeneously,[3] and scalar fields such as quintessence or moduli, dynamic quantities whose energy density can vary in time and space.

Because dynamic types of dark energy like quintessence tend to imply changes in the PEMR over billions of years, these observations suggest that physicists now have enough evidence to prefer a static type of dark energy- the cosmological constant. So why is Lonny once again wrongly claiming that dark energy is dead?

One reason might be these curious sentences in that gizmag article:

The concept of "dark energy" with a negative pressure was introduced to describe this acceleration. ... Dark energy must have a negative pressure to produce the observed acceleration in the standard cosmological model, a rather bizarre notion meaning that space repels itself.

A casual reader might conclude that dark energy's negative pressure distinguishes it from a cosmological constant, but both types of dark energy have negative pressure. In fact, I've explained to Jane Q. Public that "vacuum energy has pressure equal and opposite to its energy density" which is why its equation of state is w = -1. I continued, explaining why the universe's expansion accelerates for any w < -1/3.

Because -1 < -1/3, the cosmological constant's negative pressure accelerates the expansion of the universe. It is a type of dark energy, which accounts for roughly 3/4 of all the mass-energy in the universe.

I swear some of their prototypes look like the Geth:

http://images.gizmag.com/gallery_lrg/roboy-34.jpg

http://www.gizmag.com/avatar-project-2045/23454/

>It would make the US troops seem more human

>That is a good point, but it's the only thing better about using animals.

I disagree. I believe in most situations it's best to make US soldiers seem, to the extent possible, like technodemons summoned from the cauldrons of American science wizards.

The less known and the more presumed about a US soldier's abilities the easier it will be to fight. Give them night vision and guns that can shoot around corners. Give them air conditioned self supporting strength enhancing armor. Give them networks that let every soldier know where every other soldier in his squad is. Give them flying death robots and laser guns. Emulate every desired superpower you can from ESP to precognizance to golems and X-ray vision. Make every US soldier a nightmare for his enemies, inflating his capabilities beyond any enemy simulation and in the end we'll save money by not having to actually use these abilities.

Poke around on this website: www.gizmag.com. It's mostly short articles announcing new or future products, but maybe you can find something you think he'd like that's been released and get it for him.

They have sections, and some of these might be helpful:

http://www.gizmag.com/aroundthehome/
http://www.gizmag.com/electronics/
http://www.gizmag.com/wearableelectronics/

Poke around on this website: www.gizmag.com. It's mostly short articles announcing new or future products, but maybe you can find something you think he'd like that's been released and get it for him.

They have sections, and some of these might be helpful:

http://www.gizmag.com/aroundthehome/
http://www.gizmag.com/electronics/
http://www.gizmag.com/wearableelectronics/

Poke around on this website: www.gizmag.com. It's mostly short articles announcing new or future products, but maybe you can find something you think he'd like that's been released and get it for him.

They have sections, and some of these might be helpful:

http://www.gizmag.com/aroundthehome/
http://www.gizmag.com/electronics/
http://www.gizmag.com/wearableelectronics/

Perhaps you should compare high-end professional equipment with high-end professional equipment instead of with stuff consumers can afford. 3D-printing in titanium is used for making medical implants, for instance. A Belgian woman whose lower jaw was being eaten away by an infection received a replacement printed in 3D. That part isn't cute and the equipment used is not a toy. I don't know the history of the development of that 3D printer, but I would't be surprised if hobbyists playing with producing cute plastic parts gave them ideas.

Whether or not they have a legitimate beef against FormLabs, the act of dragging Kickstarter into their little patent war was absolutely inexcusable. This is a company that sees itself as threatened not only by competition, but by the existence of the marketplace itself.

If you are considering purchasing a 3D printer you could do well to pick a company that won't use your money to suppress competition through enforcement of bullshit patents on abstract ideas like photolithography. Or one whose business model is so insecure that it relies on barratry against unrelated parties.

FormLabs has a clearly valid patent. This is the patent system doing exactly what it is supposed to do, protecting an innovation for a period of ~20 years. Just because somebody wanted to make a cheap knockoff of their product, and FormLabs sued both the people who were selling that, and the people enabling that, doesn't make them a patent "troll."

Whether or not they have a legitimate beef against FormLabs, the act of dragging Kickstarter into their little patent war was absolutely inexcusable. This is a company that sees itself as threatened not only by competition, but by the existence of the marketplace itself.

If you are considering purchasing a 3D printer you could do well to pick a company that won't use your money to suppress competition through enforcement of bullshit patents on abstract ideas like photolithography. Or one whose business model is so insecure that it relies on barratry against unrelated parties.

Well, then, flipping burgers is out:
http://www.gizmag.com/hamburger-machine/25159/

That is changing rapidly. Cargo ships in North American waters are now required to burn low-sulfur diesel instead of bunker fuel. And there are several different attempts to harness wind power to lower fuel consumption. The link above wouldn't work on big container vessels but could be used in conjunction with biodiesel to drop net carbon emissions to near zero.

There was the Beluga Skysail for container ships that demonstrated a 20% reduction in fuel usage but they appear to have gone out of business.

Plus I've heard something like current cargo ships have a much larger carbon footprint than most of the world's cars combined.

Shipping is by far the biggest transport polluter in the world. There are 760 million cars in the world today emitting approx 78,599 tons of Sulphur Oxides (SOx) annually. The world's 90,000 vessels burn approx 370 million tons of fuel per year emitting 20 million tons of Sulphur Oxides. That equates to 260 times more Sulphur Oxides being emitted by ships than the worlds entire car fleet. One large ship alone can generate approx 5,200 tonnes of sulphur oxide pollution in a year, meaning that 15 of the largest ships now emit as much SOx as the worlds 760 million cars.

citation

For some other reason, it reminds me of something else.

For some reason, it reminds me of something

Cast aluminum dashboard cladding was well-known for its cushioning ability in the 1960's

Full of apologising for crack-brained-isms of Windows8.

I for one cannot imagine using a touch-the-screen solution on the desktop or laptop.

On the other hand (er, so to speak) I am seriously looking forward to non-contact gesture technologies like Leap Motion.

Reaching forward and touching an exact spot with your finger (eg an Icon, a screen-control widget) fundamentally DOES NOT MAKE SENSE for anything other than a tablet solution.

On the flipside, reaching out towards your screen for a broad-scale gesture (swipe to move an app the the other screen, maximise an app, finger-zoom or select an area, control 3D space {google earth, etc}, shuffling a bunch of images onscreen, etc) seem completely natural. Touch-screen-ing an 82 inch display makes sense, but at desktop scales that's like sitting 3 inches from your monitor - and even then it really only makes sense because you're now using that display as an advanced information kiosk not as your personal computer (different interaction rates, different interaction precision for common usage).

Having said that, there's no sane reason why in the future we will not see our displays using BOTH interaction methods (ie fully capable of direct-touch as well as Gestures in 3D Space). But I'm also sure they (er, the main computer/OS) will include some kind of basic voice control as well.

"Without programming?"

Bullshit. Look in the article, in the picture in the article.

Program's right there, on the right side.

"Test subjects were provided instructions on how to teach the robot similar to what you'd expect when buying a sophisticated appliance."

"Tutorial: Programming PR2 by Demonstration."

"Step 1... Say: 'TEST MICROPHONE'."

"Step 2... Say: 'RELEASE RIGHT ARM.' ... Move the arm to a neutral pose and say HOLD RIGHT ARM."

If this isn't programming, then I'm not a programmer. Instead, I'm just someone who manipulates a text editor.

Really.

If guys want to wet-dream over some car they will never get to own, anyways? Grow some balls!

FIA allows KERS that store braking energy in a battery (which needs a generator), or a flywheel. Mechanical energy is bled off the rear axel during deceleration, a secondary braking mechanism. You're correct that it's not hub motors/generators.

http://www.gizmag.com/formula-one-kers/11324/

9 of the 10 teams use the electrical variety.

However, about 15.5 seconds into the flight the upper right-hand fin unlocked and deployed while the booster was still firing. ... Indications are that the fin deployed because a random vibration issue caused the assembly to vibrate harmonically while in boost phase, so that the actuator responded and sprang open. ... Brink says that the simplest fix will be to deploy the fins on the cruiser about one or two seconds after being dropped from the B-52 instead of later when the vibration problem occurred so that the fins are powered up and protected from damage.

You're assertion is that the problem is the same as tightening the lug nuts on a car tire. The only lug nuts I see are the ones rattling around in your empty skull.

This aircraft needs to achieve almost Mach 5 before the engine even starts, so it requires an air drop and a rocket booster even to start working. It operates in a test domain that cannot be completely simulated or created in a ground test. This is exactly the kind of failure that can only be encountered by a live lest. You have to build it, fly it, and see if it breaks. There is no other way.

Given you complete lack of technical understanding, I would suggest that you stop wasting people's time on Slashdot and go somewhere more suited to your mental level. I hear that Disney has a lot of nice stuff for children. I think you would fit right in.

The U.S. Navy is doing similar research creating jet fuel from sea water. This would allow aircraft carriers to stay on location longer because they wouldn't have to worry about running out of fuel for aircraft. Basically the only things that would need to be delivered would be supplies for the crew (food, toilet paper, etc.).

I guess you're the center of the universe, then. It didn't happen if you didn't read it. So I'll provide some tech news/blog posts about the similarity. FYI, Diaspora first released the aspects ("circles") feature and the alpha UI in September 2010. Google+ launched in June 2011.

http://www.gizmag.com/diaspora-google-plus-resemblance/20638/

http://www.launch.co/blog/did-google-copy-diaspora-or-vice-versa.html

http://babyfruit.typepad.com/mediagirl/2011/09/google-meet-diaspora-or-maybe-you-know-them-already.html

http://www.launch.co/blog/diaspora-finally-unveiled-feels-like-google.html

Windows transmit percussive noise quite well even if they are insulated. The best solution I have come up with was to use translucent corrugated roofing panels (such as http://www.wolfleader.com/products/brand/sequentia/ ) on the outsides of the windows. The currugation serves to both deflect noise away and to redirect the percussive waves so that they aren't in sync when they hit the glass (and thus don't transmit as well). Add some black-out curtains (the kind with the rubberized backing) for when the noise outweighs your need for sunlight or use some more expensive translucent sound absorbing curtains (such as http://www.gizmag.com/empa-translucent-sound-absorbing-curtain/18556/ ). There are commercial/industrial solutions that use similar techniques, but nothing I found was translucent and all of it was extremely expensive compared to the commodity items available at your local hardware store.

The bike on inflates itself simply by rolling. I would love to have these, but they're not exactly mass production yet and I've got a lot of goofy tire sizes on my bikes.

Well IBM are making a big push in Lithium air, there was an article about that here on /. a while back, but even they were only predicting products on the street between 2020-2030 (link), and probably a while more before they are price-competitive with existing tech. That's a couple of generations of cars at least, so yeah, hardly "around the corner".

Right now storage is electrical to chemical batteries. Maybe TATA's air powered engine is a better idea, at least in the interim.

This sort of thing already has medical applications. Hope the article is of interest.

I don't know why that URL disappeared. http://www.gizmag.com/apple-cost-iphone4/15583/

They said Space elevator. Space elevator "orbiting the moon" are your words. This link shows exactly what they are attempting to do: http://www.gizmag.com/lunar-elevator/23884/pictures#2

By definition a space elevator orbits whatever you attach it to. Otherwise, it falls.

Having read TFA, this seems to be precisely what they're doing; it looks like they deploy at the L1 point and extend the tether in both directions. Of course, this does mean the tether needs to be an extraordinary 250000km long.

Despite being totally awesome (which is reason enough to do it!) and also good practice for Earth (ditto) I am slightly at a loss as to how useful this would be. Space elevators are slow, and a lunar elevator would be really long and therefore really slow. And it's not as if the moon's hard to land or take off from.

I'm wondering if there's something useful to do with the other end. The high end of the tether is only 135000km from Earth. Is that far enough into the ionosphere to use for power generation?

They said Space elevator. Space elevator "orbiting the moon" are your words. This link shows exactly what they are attempting to do: http://www.gizmag.com/lunar-elevator/23884/pictures#2

"We all know that home 3d printers are just a matter of time"

No, we don't.

They've been available for home use for years now. Now, however, they're starting to get cheap.

"They are not at all ideal for self-sustainability since you need a lot of other resources to build and operate them."

Nonsense. They are available pre-assembled for under $500, are made from readily-available commercial parts if they break, and the raw plastic is pretty cheap if you know where to look.

Less than 3x the cost of a Gulfstream G-650, for comparison. http://www.gizmag.com/business-travel-at-800-mph--the-gulfstream-g650/9000/