Helicam Combines Toy Helicopter and Camera for HD Videos

In a quest to get the perfect shot, Eric Austin, a Texas-based videographer, found a neat way to fuse a remote controlled helicopter and a Canon DSLR camera so he could shoot aerial videos easily and get the kind of footage that would otherwise be difficult to pull off.

“I took a hobbyshop helicopter and modified it to hold a camera, so I can get low altitude, close and tight aerial shots,” Austin told Wired.com.

An amateur videographer turned pro, Austin got interested in remote-controlled photography just four months ago.

“As I did more photos and videos, I realized I could develop a niche where I could use the advancements in technology to provide the kind of photos most people can’t get easily,” he says.

Austin is one of the many hobbyist photographers who are finding ways to use drones and remote-controlled helicopter toys to get a more attractive camera angle. Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson helms a site called DIY Drones where users have found a way to use unmanned aerial vehicles to do aerial photography. Last year, New York City photographer Anthony Jacobs showed a helicam built using a German helicopter rig called MikroKopter. Jacobs used his helicam rig to shoot videos of neighborhooods in the city.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/04/helicam-combines-toy-helicopter-and-camera-for-hd-videos

More helicopter forum : http://www.helifreak.com/

New Software Uses Probability Algorithm to Assemble Jigsaw Puzzles at Record Speed

Published on Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 at 6:48 am

When it comes to complex games like chess, computers can compete with the world’s best humans. But complicated jigsaw puzzles have largely had computers stumped — until now.

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US, team has set a new world record for a jigsaw-puzzle-solving computer algorithm. The software solved a 400-piece puzzle in three minutes, New Scientist reports.

The software can handle any image, even photographs of outdoor scenes. The previous record was 320 pieces, set by a Danish team in 2008, but that software could only solve simple puzzles with clear shapes and limited colours.

The new software is adept at finding image pieces that blend well, so its inventor, MIT grad student Taeg Sang Cho, hopes it could improve photo-editing programs like Photoshop. It could make Photoshopped images look more realistic, for instance.

To train the software, Cho and his colleagues chopped 5-megabyte pictures into 400 squares. The computer analysed the predominant colours and referenced a database of existing images to roughly arrange the pieces. It uses the same common-sense approach a person would — lots of blue pieces could indicate sky, for instance, and a mixture of blue, grey and green could indicate a landscape with sky, buildings and grass.

From there, the computer’s work gets more complex. It examines the pixel colour values along the boundaries of each piece, and uses a probabilistic approach to find similar values on pieces that look alike, stitching the images back together.

It’s much harder to do this with squares than with traditional jigsaw pieces, but as Cho and his colleagues write in a paper about the findings, that’s a good thing.

“This is a good framework for analysing structural regularities in natural images since it requires us to focus on the image content to solve the puzzle,” the paper says.

Cho and his team will present their work at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in San Francisco next month.

[New Scientist]

New iPhone to land in US on 7 June

Posted in Mobile, 25th May 2010 12:25 GMT

June 7 is now a near-certainty to be the launch date for the latest iPhone, with Apple CEO Steve Jobs kicking off the firm's Worldwide Developers' Conference on that day (and with US retailer Wal-Mart halving the prices of the current iPhone 3GS in readiness). That would suggest that the new handset would hit the shelves in early July.

The pattern is a familiar one, since the original iPhone launch in June 2007, but the big difference is that Google is now Apple's avowed enemy, not close ally. Google executives used the firm's own developer conference last week to attack Apple at every turn, and Jobs is likely to respond during his own keynote. In a weekend open email, he said there was "not a chance" that Android could surpass Apple on the technology front, says Gizmodo.

Amid speculation over whether Verizon would get an iPhone this time around (and even some rumors that Sprint would gain a CDMA version instead), research by Morgan Stanley found that an Apple handset would benefit Verizon, with 17 per cent of its subscribers "very likely" to purchase the device if offered. That compares with 14.6 per cent of AT&T customers who express interest in the product.

Wal-Mart is to cut the price on the entry level iPhone 3GS, with 16Gb of memory, by $100 to $97 with a two-year AT&T contract. When Apple introduced the iPhone 3GS last June, it cut the price of the older iPhone 3G to $99.

Copyright © 2010, Wireless Watch
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/25/iphone_date/

WikiLeaks

http://wikileaks.org/

WikiLeaks is a multi-jurisdictional public service designed to protect whistleblowers, journalists and activists who have sensitive materials to communicate to the public. Since July 2007, we have worked across the globe to obtain, publish and defend such materials, and, also, to fight in the legal and political spheres for the broader principles on which our work is based: the integrity of our common historical record and the rights of all peoples to create new history

White iPhone 4G Images Leak Online, Next-gen iPhone to Look Slick

Images of a white-coloured iPhone 4G have been leaked on the internet. The images, first released by Apple.pro, a Chinese site, show the white iPhone 4G along with the black iPhone 4G. Parts of the phone, such as the front-facing camera, can be clearly seen on the white iPhone. Still, the phone in the pictures doesn’t seem to be assembled very well as there is a large gap near the home button which is yet to be snapped in properly.

Rumours of the existence of a white iPhone 4G model have already been floating on the internet. They were supported further by pictures of a white front panel for the phone as well as white home buttons being leaked online.

However, even the most recent leak does not officially confirm that a white iPhone 4G model will surely be launched by Apple or whether the device will look exactly as seen in the pictures. The company started selling white coloured iPhones with the iPhone 3G model and continued the trend into the iPhone 3GS model. The white iPhone 3GS also gained a lot of popularity.

No other iPhone till date has been leaked as much as the iPhone 4G. The leaks have certainly lessened the element of surprise that was expected before Apple officially launches the device at the WWDC event to be held in two weeks.

Bear Grylls Blog

Bear's Profile

Bear spent three years with the British Special Forces.

During this time he had a horrendous parachuting accident whilst in southern Africa and broke his back in three places.

Yet two years later, after severe rehabilitation, he overcame the odds to become the youngest British climber ever to reach the summit of Mount Everest and return alive.

Man vs wild season 5 and worst case scenario update...

http://beargrylls.blogspot.com/

WR 104 gramma ray that my hit the Earth?

WR 104 is a Wolf-Rayet star discovered in 1998, located 8000 light years from Earth. It is a binary star with a class OB companion. The stars have an orbital period of 220 days and the interaction between their stellar winds produce a spiral "pinwheel" outflow pattern over 200 AU long.^[2] The spiral is composed of dust that would normally be prevented from forming by WR 104's intense radiation were it not for the star's companion. The region where the stellar wind from the two massive stars interacts compresses the material enough for the dust to form, and the rotation of the system causes the spiral-shaped pattern.^[3]

Some optical measurements indicate that WR 104's rotational axis is aligned within 16° of Earth.^[4] This could have potential implications to the effects of WR 104's eventual supernova, since these explosions often produce jets from their rotational poles. It is possible that WR 104 may even produce a gamma-ray burst, though it is not possible to predict with certainty at this time.^[3] Newer spectroscopic data suggest that WR 104's rotational axis is angled more like 30-40° from Earth^[5]

^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WR_104}

A planet like Earth

Discovery

A team of astronomers led by Stéphane Udry of the Geneva Observatory used the HARPS instrument on the European Southern Observatory 3.6 meter telescope in La Silla, Chile to discover the planet in 2007. Udry's team employed the radial velocity technique, in which the size and mass of a planet are determined based on the small perturbations it induces in its parent star’s orbit via gravity.^[3]

The motion of the parent star indicates a minimum mass for Gliese 581 d of 7.09 Earth masses. Dynamical simulations of the Gliese 581 system assuming that the orbits of the three planets are coplanar show that the system becomes unstable if the masses of the planets exceed 1.6 – 2 times the minimum values. This implies an upper mass limit for Gliese 581 d of 13.8 Earth masses.^[2]

Climate and habitability

It was originally thought that Gliese 581 d orbits outside the habitable zone of its star. However, in 2009 the original discovery team revised its original estimate of the planet's orbital parameters, finding that it orbits closer to its star than originally believed. They concluded that the planet is within the habitable zone where liquid water could exist. ^[2][4] According to Stéphane Udry, "It could be covered by a 'large and deep ocean'; it is the first serious ocean planet candidate."^{[5][dead link]}

Gliese 581 d's orbit compared to Mercury's orbit (0.38AU) in our Solar System.

On average, the light that Gliese 581 d receives from its star has about 30% of the intensity of sunlight on Earth. By comparison, sunlight on Mars has about 40% of the intensity of that on Earth. That might seem to suggest that Gliese 581 d is too cold to support liquid water and hence is inhospitable to life. However, an atmospheric greenhouse effect can significantly raise planetary temperatures. For example, Earth's own temperature would be about -18°C^[6] without any greenhouse gases. If the atmosphere of Gliese 581 d produces a sufficiently large greenhouse effect, then the surface temperature might well permit liquid water and the planet might conceivably support life.^[7][8][9]

Gliese 581 d is probably too massive to be made only of rocky material, but it is speculated that it is an icy planet that has migrated closer to the star.^[10][11] Calculations by Barnes et al. suggest, however, that tidal heating is too low to keep plate tectonics active on the planet, unless radiogenic heating is somewhat higher than expected.^[12]

[edit] Messages from Earth

Another artist impression of Gliese 581 d as a Super-Earth.

In October 2008, members of the networking website Bebo beamed A Message From Earth, a high-power transmission at Gliese 581, using the RT-70 radio telescope belonging to the National Space Agency of Ukraine. This transmission is due to arrive in the Gliese 581 system's vicinity by the year 2029; the earliest possible arrival for a response, should there be one, would be in 2049.^[13]

As part of the 2009 National Science Week celebrations in Australia, Cosmos Magazine launched a website called Hello From Earth to collect messages for transmission to Gliese 581d. The maximum length of the messages was 160 characters, and they were restricted to the English language. In total, 25,880 messages were collected from 195 countries around the world. The messages were transmitted from the DSS-43 70 m radio telescope at the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex at Tidbinbilla, Australia on the 28th of August, 2009.^[14]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_581_d

Quantum teleportation achieved over 16 km

May 20, 2010 by Lin Edwards

Enlarge

a, A birds-eye view of the 16-km free-space quantum teleportation experiment. Charlie sends photon 1 to Alice for BSM. Classical information, including the results of the BSM and the signal for time synchronization, is sent through the free-space channel with photon 2, to Bob, before decoding and triggering of the corresponding unitary transformation. b, Sketch of the experimental system. See the original paper for more details. Image copyright: Nature Photonics, doi:10.1038/nphoton.2010.87

Scientists in China have succeeded in teleporting information between photons further than ever before. They transported quantum information over a free space distance of 16 km (10 miles), much further than the few hundred meters previously achieved, which brings us closer to transmitting information over long distances without the need for a traditional signal.

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Quantum teleportation is not the same as the teleportation most of us know from science fiction, where an object (or person) in one place is “beamed up” to another place where a perfect copy is replicated. In quantum teleportation two photons or ions (for example) are entangled in such a way that when the quantum state of one is changed the state of the other also changes, as if the two were still connected. This enables quantum information to be teleported if one of the photons/ions is sent some distance away.

In previous experiments the photons were confined to fiber channels a few hundred meters long to ensure their state remained unchanged, but in the new experiments pairs of photons were entangled and then the higher-energy photon of the pair was sent through a free space channel 16 km long. The researchers, from the University of Science and Technology of China and Tsinghua University in Beijing, found that even at this distance the photon at the receiving end still responded to changes in state of the photon remaining behind. The average fidelity of the teleportation achieved was 89 percent.

The distance of 16 km is greater than the effective aerosphere thickness of 5-10 km, so the group's success could pave the way for experiments between a ground station and a satellite, or two ground stations with a satellite acting as a relay. This means quantum communication applications could be possible on a global scale in the near future.

The public free space channel was at ground level and spanned the 16 km distance between Badaling in Beijing (the teleportation site) and the receiver site at Huailai in Hebei province. Entangled photon pairs were generated at the teleportation site using a semiconductor, a blue laser beam, and a crystal of beta-barium borate (BBO). The pairs of photons were entangled in the spatial modes of photon 1 and polarization modes of photon 2. The research team designed two types of telescopes to serve as optical transmitting and receiving antennas.

The experiments confirm the feasibility of space-based quantum teleportation, and represent a giant leap forward in the development of quantum communication applications.

The paper is available in full online at Nature Photonics.

More information: Xian-Min Jin, Experimental free-space quantum teleportation, Nature Photonics, Published online: 16 May 2010. doi:10.1038/nphoton.2010.87

http://www.physorg.com/news193551675.html

Experimental Security Analysis of a Modern Automobile

Experimental Security Analysis of a Modern Automobile

http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-oakland2010.pdf

Micro-Supercapacitors Could Boost Lifetime of Portable Devices

Clay Dillow, Jeremy Hsu
Published on Friday, April 30th, 2010 at 6:45 am

Micro-supercapacitors could enable future geeks to go longer without recharging their smartphones or computers. Researchers have developed a way to build the energy-storing supercapacitors by using microfabrication methods similar to those which create microchips for electronic devices, according to ScienceDaily.

Batteries can store electrical energy in chemical reactants and typically have higher energy storage densities than supercapacitors. But supercapacitors simply store energy as electrical charge and can endure a charge-discharge cycle millions of times, compared to just several thousand cycles for batteries.

“We have known for some time that supercapacitors are faster and longer-lasting alternatives to conventional batteries, so we decided to see if it would be possible to incorporate them into microelectronic devices and if there would be any advantage to doing so,” said Yury Gogotsi, a materials engineer at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

Gogotsi worked with John Chmiola, a chemist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. They etched electrodes made of monolithic carbon film into a conducting substrate of titanium carbide, and created micro-supercapacitors with an energy storage density at least twice as much as existing supercapacitors.

That suggests micro-supercapacitors can more efficiently store energy within ever-smaller physical spaces. By directly integrating the supercapacitors with the devices they power, researchers can boost the density of microelectronic devices and allow for more functionality, less complexity and enhanced redundancy.

The almost infinite cycle life of micro-supercapacitors would make them ideal for capturing and storing energy from renewable resources, and for on-chip operations to make electronic devices longer lasting, according to Chmiola.

More short-term applications would likely combine micro-supercapacitors with micro-batteries for the most possible energy storage. But the researchers eventually hope to boost super-capacitor storage to levels closer to batteries, and hold onto the supercapacitor edge regarding charge-discharge cycles. The future of micromachines looks bright indeed — and we can think of a micro drone or two which could use more juice while doing recon. — Jeremy Hsu

http://www.popsci.com.au/2010/04/micro-supercapacitors-could-boost-lifetime-of-portable-devices/