3Frames Turns Your iPhone Into the Animated Gif Making Machine You Always Wanted It To Be [Apps]
Saturday, April 09, 2011
The white light technology that could finally make 3D awesome - without glasses [Optics]
Source: http://io9.com/#!5790289/the-white-light-technology-that-could-make-holograms-awesome
They work with normal light and can produce full-colored 3D images — where the color stays the same no matter how you look at it.
This new technology works by hitting a thin metal film with three beams of white light, each from a different angle. Each beam excites a different color of light, which then passes through an RGB hologram, combining to form a full-color 3D image. The technique promises to more efficient, simpler, and more scalable than current color holograms.
Who's up for a nice game of dejarik?
You Owe MIT More Thanks than You Think You Do [Mit]
Source: http://gizmodo.com/#!5790309/you-owe-mit-more-thanks-than-you-think-you-do/gallery/
Photo via PSD
Ethernet
Yeah, right, Wi-Fi isn't even the new hotness anymore. Our computers have it, our phones have it—wireless is old hat, and the most super-convenient way to network. But ethernet remains a big, snaky part of the internet. And one of the men behind the ubiquitous cord? Robert Metcalf, class of '69.
Intel & The Microchip
Robert Noyce, who picked up his doctorate from MIT, and went on to both co-invent the microchip and found Intel. Not too shabby! So, the odds are fairly high that you've either used or are using something that (indirectly) sprang from this guy's cranium. His alleged earliest childhood memory is the agony of beating his father in ping pong, and having his mother comment, "Wasn't that nice of Daddy to let you win?" I guess that explains a lot about microchips, if you really think about it.
Photo via P - A - S
Texas Instruments
Ol' TI, founded by MIT grad Cecil Howard Green, has had its fingers on almost every piece of electronic gut there is—lasers in missiles, digital signal processors in audio gear, processors in phones—but at the very least, you've probably held dear a TI-83+ at some point in your educational career. Unless you were one of those supernerds with a more advanced graphing calculator, in which case I hate you. But the things are still everywhere, synonymous with exam anxiety and covert in-class gaming.
Image via Brothers Le
Campbell Soup
Yeah. Soup. Soup. Probably not what you associate with tech wizardry, but John Thompson Dorrance absorbed the chemical knowhow to turn mass-produced soup into an empire at MIT.
Image via Navin75
Zipcar
Live in a city? Don't feel like owning a car? Maybe you use Zipcar! It's a neat convenience, and was co-spawned by MIT grad Robin Chase.
Image via Dylan Passmore
McDonnell Douglas
It's not all as peaceful as graphing calculators and tomato soup, however—some MIT grads go on to make stuff that blows up other stuff, such as James Smith McDonnell. His firm is responsible for linchpins of American air power such as the F-15, the F-18, and the ever-popular Tomahawk missile. Kablooey!
Image via US Navy
I.M. Pei
Okay, so he's not a thing or a company, but he's designed some of the most incredible and significant structures in history—the Louvre's pyramid, the East Wing of the National Gallery, and, controversially, the Hancock Tower in Boston. Where did I.M. Pei pick up his architectural prowess?—Hancock tower aside—you guessed it.
Image via linz_ellina
DARPA Video Game Lets You Teach Military Software How to Hunt Submarines [War Games]
Fancy yourself a suave military gaming tactician? Is prestige level 24 starting to bore you on Black Ops? DARPA wants to put your strategic savviness to real military use by integrating its Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) configurations into the sub-hunting simulator game Dangerous Waters. Download and play the game, and your tactical prowess may just be implemented into ACTUV's prototype software.
DARPA's ACTUV program aims to develop new tools for anti-submarine warfare that include unmanned autonomous ocean-going vessels that can track quiet submarines hiding in the depths. But in order to figure out what tactics work (and don't work) for their ACTUV software, they need to test a variety of maneuvers and sub-hunting configurations in naval scenarios.
That's where the crowdsourcing comes in. At the end of each round, the software will ask if you want to send your game data to DARPA for analysis—and for possible use in the crafting of ACTUV's software brain, once it is developed. Corner the crafty AI sub commander, and your data could inform a future line of defense against threats from the deep.
Download the game from ACTUV here. [Armed with Science]
Here's Proof That People Have Been Trying to Go Green for Over a Century [Green]
Madrigal recounts the adventures of Terrence Duffy, Alva Reynolds, and Fred Starr, three men who sought to use the motion of ocean waves to generate power via motion or air compression. Starr, in particular, played up the environmental perks of such technology all the way back in 1907:
Starr went on to declare that by December 1908, "Los Angeles will be a smokeless and sootless city, clean pure. It will be made so by all the power and heating plants being supplied with power and heat from the ocean waves by the Starr Wave Motor."
Obviously this didn't pan out so well, but it's kind of cool (or possibly demoralizing) that clean energy was a consideration even before global warming entered the international lexicon. For the full excerpt from Madrigal's book, be sure to check out [Wired].
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