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IT 

AMD’s new Radeon RX 480 GPU aims to make VR affordable

admin

Getting VR-ready requires a pretty beefy rig, and there’s usually an equally-beefy price tag attached. AMD is looking to lower that barrier with the US$199Radeon RX 480 graphics card. That $199 will net you the 4GB edition of the Radeon RX 480, which AMD says packs the punch of a $500 GPU in terms of VR performance. With this price point the company hopes to drive up adoption rates of VR, encourage developers to create more content for the platform and drive down the costs of VR-ready computers and equipment.…

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Medical Tech 

Nanotechnology sunscreen filters out dangers

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Current commercial sunscreens use compounds to filter out damaging ultraviolet (UV) light, but these agents can have adverse effects as they penetrate past the surface skin into the bloodstream. The agents have been found in human breast tissue and urine and are known to disrupt the normal function of some hormones. Also, the exposure of the UV filters to light can produce toxic reactive oxygen species that can damage cells, tissues and DNA, potentially causing cancerous tumors. A team of bioengineers and dermatologists at Yale University in New Haven, CT,…

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IT 

New detector overcomes key challenge in using light for wireless communications

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Today’s high-speed wired communication networks use lasers to carry information through optical fibers, but wireless networks are currently based on radio frequencies or microwaves. In an advance that could one day make light-based wireless communications ubiquitous, researchers from Facebook Inc.’s Connectivity Lab have demonstrated a conceptually new approach for detecting optical communication signals traveling through the air. The team described the new technology, which could pave the way for fast optical wireless networks capable of delivering internet service to far-flung places, in Optica, The Optical Society’s journal for high impact research.…

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Medical Tech 

Novel 3-D “Smart” Sutures for Wireless Collection of Biological Data

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The field of smart wearable systems has just gotten a boost thanks to researchers from Tufts University.  A team of engineers has developed a novel 3-dimensional thread-based diagnostic platform that, when sutured into tissue, collects a range of real-time diagnostic data wirelessly, including pH, glucose levels, temperature, stress, strain, and pressure.  Physical and chemical nanosensors, microfluidics, and electronics integrated into various types of conductive threads, including cotton and synthetic fibers, are connected to a wireless electronic circuit.  The result is a suture that can penetrate tissue, sense various factors in…

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Other Tech 

This Drone Would Swim Through Lava—if Someone Could Build It

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Which part of earth haven’t we explored yet? One hint: It’s by far one of the biggest places on the planet. It is, of course, the earth’s mantle, sitting just beneath a relatively thin crust of rocks. To develop a vehicle capable of clawing into the heart of our planet, start by designing and testing such a vehicle in lakes of lava near volcanoes. That’s what the Vulcan concept is about. Lava can range in temperature from 1,500 to 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit, so the Vulcan would need an outer shell…

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Transport Tech 

The Transit Elevated Bus

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The Transit Elevated Bus Ever spotting a frustrating problem in your daily life? While you are still silently enduring the inconvenience it brings, some sagacious minds have been trying to solve it. As trafic problems haunt cities all over the world, a novel bus design recently presented in front of the public sheds a beam of refreshing light on the problem. Early this year in May, on the 19th China Beijing International High-tech Expo, inventor Youzhou Song published a intriguing design of a “tunnel-shaped” bus. The design is named “Transit…

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Transport Tech 

SoftBank and Honda aim to build a car that can read your emotions

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Japanese telecom SoftBank and automaker Honda have announced a unique partnership to develop technology that would allow future Honda vehicles to both talk to its drivers and read their emotions. At an event in Tokyo on Thursday, SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son invited attendees to imagine robots, with super intelligence, devoting themselves to humans. Taking it a step further, Son asked people to imagine a future in which cars themselves become supercomputers before vowing that Honda would be the first to adopt such technology. As The Verge notes, the two will do…

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Transport Tech 

The Brilliant Sorcery of England’s 7-Circle Magic Roundabout

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I am from a different land—a different time, maybe—where the car people resist the circling. No circles at all costs, they say. Straight ahead is the way forward. But in this place, across the sea, the cars circle in all directions, within and without each other, a tango of mystery. This place is Swindon, they tell me. It is in south England, a land recently torn asunder. They call this swirl of movement the “magic roundabout”. But how does such sorcery work? The roundabout in its common form is already…

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IT 

Applications of Nanoparticles in Biology and Medicine

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Nanotechnology [1] is enabling technology that deals with nano-meter sized objects. It is expected that nanotechnology will be developed at several levels: materials, devices and systems. The nanomaterials level is the most advanced at present, both in scientific knowledge and in commercial applications. A decade ago, nanoparticles were studied because of their size-dependent physical and chemical properties [2]. Now they have entered a commercial exploration period [3,4]. Living organisms are built of cells that are typically 10 μm across. However, the cell parts are much smaller and are in the…

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Transport Tech 

Riversimple launches Rasa, a hydrogen-powered city car for the masses

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A new hydrogen fuel-cell electric vehicle prototype has been launched with a claimed fuel economy equivalent to 250 mpg (0.9 L/100km). Dubbed “Rasa,” the new car has a lightweight carbon-fiber monocoque shell, in-wheel electric motors, a bank of supercapacitors charged by braking-regeneration, and a host of other features that enable it to travel up to a claimed 300 miles (483 km) on just a 3.3 lb (1.5 kg) tank of hydrogen. A road-legal two-seater engineering prototype, the Rasa by Riversimple Movement Ltd UK has been designed from scratch to meet the company’s brief of…

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