A Luxury Hotel In China Is Being Built Almost Completely Underground

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/underground-hotel-china-2012-4

AN EXTRAORDINARY hotel is being built in a disused quarry near Shanghai. At the foot of the Tianmashan mountain, the InterContinental Shimao Wonderland will rise two floors above the top of the 100-metre rock face and another 16 storeys below ground level. The lowest of these levels, housing a restaurant, will actually be under water at the bottom of the quarry.

The architectural plans are futuristic, yet the 380-room hotel is expected to open by late 2014 or early 2015. Given how much work there is to do—CNN has an image of what the site currently looks like—those projections do seem rather bullish. But weve already seen how much hotel the Chinese can build in 15 days, so 2.5 years for this fantastical construction might suffice.

The design was the award-winning work of Atkins, a British firm of architects. Martin Jochman, the leader, has described the thinking behind it: 

We drew our inspiration from the quarry setting itself, adopting the image of a green hill cascading down the natural rock face as a series of terraced landscaped hanging gardens. In the centre, we have created a transparent glass 'waterfall' from a central vertical circulation atrium connecting the quarry base with the ground level. This replicates the natural waterfalls on the existing quarry face.

No word there on what winds are supposed to fill the boats (see image), but I wouldn't be surprised to find provision for a warm southerly breeze included in the engineering specifications.

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Canon shows off prototype 30-inch 4K reference display, won't put a price tag on love

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/17/canon-shows-off-prototype-30-inch-4k-reference-display-wont-pu/

With 4K cameras suddenly popping up everywhere we look at NAB 2012, it's little surprise that Canon is showing off this matching 30-inch prototype intended for the very professionals tasked with mastering video shot by its latest hardware. Like the retina display, it produces an effect where no matter how close you're standing it's still impossible to pick out the individual pixels, and easily matched what we'd seen from a prototype 20-inch 4K LCD from Panasonic at CES. The people we spoke to who handled some of the work on Canon's demo footage preferred it to their 2K projectors for the clarity and ability to get pixel accurate representations of the source material, plus it probably fits more easily into a production suite. The big question from all who see this in person is when will it be available and for how much, and while Canon says it's due to ship this year, we're on our own to speculate about the (surely astronomical) price.

Continue reading Canon shows off prototype 30-inch 4K reference display, won't put a price tag on love

Canon shows off prototype 30-inch 4K reference display, won't put a price tag on love originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Apr 2012 13:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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New material brings semiconducting to the graphene party

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/17/new-material-brings-semiconducting-to-the-graphene-party/

Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee have cooked up a new graphene-based material that could provide a speed boost for all electronics. We've seen the carbon allotrope turn up in circuitry and transistors before, but the new chemical modification -- graphene monoxide -- is said to be easier to scale up, and most importantly is semiconducting, unlike the insulating or conducting forms that have preceded it. This also means graphene can now provide the triad of electrical conductivity characteristics. The scientists were honest enough to admit the discovery was as much by chance as design, with it coming to light while investigating another material containing carbon nanotubes and tin oxide. We're sure they're not the first to make a discovery this way, we just haven't had time to check the notes to be sure of it.

New material brings semiconducting to the graphene party originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Ap! r 2012 1 5:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sharp readying 1/2.3-inch, 20.2-megapixel CCD destined for noisy point-and-shoots

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/17/sharp-readying-1-2-3-inch-20-2-megapixel-ccd/

As you probably know, megapixels aren't everything. In fact, the more of them you cram into a smaller space, the noisier your images will be. So, you'll forgive us if we don't exactly shout from the mountain tops that Sharp has managed to stick a whopping 20.2 megapixels into a CCD only 1/2.3 inches in size. That does, however, give the RJ23G3BA0LT the highest pixel count in that size range. That's gotta count for something, right?

Sharp readying 1/2.3-inch, 20.2-megapixel CCD destined for noisy point-and-shoots originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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ARM announces new quad-core Cortex-A15 Hard Macro variant

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/17/arm-announces-new-quad-core-cortex-a15-hard-macro-variant/

It's pretty much a year to the day that we reported the possibility of a quad-core Cortex-A15 from ARM, and look what just came across the wire! It's the Cortex-A15 Hard Macro -- the first design from ARM we're aware of that packs four A15 cores. The Hard Macro edition is of particular interest as it aims to help manufacturers bring products to market more quickly and at a lower cost. The chip variant runs at 2GHz, with performance of over 20,000 DMIPS if you were wondering. Notably, it operates with the same power usage of the A9 hard macro, which should mean it's got good efficiency credentials, and it's the first in the family to be based on 28nm process. There's no indication where we might see this turning up, but with the firm spilling the full details at the IEEE Symposium later this week, we're sure we'll find out soon enough.

Continue reading ARM announces new quad-core Cortex-A15 Hard Macro variant

ARM announces new quad-core Cortex-A15 Hard Macro variant originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Apr 2012 12:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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