14 | U.S. Air Force investigates using laser light to heal war injuries Andrew Nusca May 10, 2010 | The U.S. Air Force may soon use light to treat battlefield wounds. The process is called "photochemical tissue bonding," and it can replace the stitches, staples and glues normally used to repair skin wounds. It can reconnect nerves, tendons, blood vessels and even corneal incisions. Led by Harvard Medical School professors Irene Kochevar and Robert Redmond, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital recently completed a pilot clinical study of the technology, which was first announced in 2009, to determine how effective laser sutures were compared to traditional stitches. | 15 | Duke University Shutting Down Usenet Server Kevin Parrish May 19, 2010 | Monday Duke University announced that it will be shutting down a piece of Internet history by switching off the home of the first electronic newsgroups. Thursday, May 20 will mark the day Duke's Usenet server The Users Network, or Usenet as we know it today, quickly grew to become an international electronic discussion forum consisting of more than 120,000 newsgroups. Dietolf Ramm, professor emeritus of computer science, said that the Usenet played a large role in the growth and popularity of the Internet. However, not every parent, student, or general consumer could jump "online." Connections were expensive and required a research contract with the federal Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Ramm, who worked with the students responsible for developing and launching Usenet, said that the ARPA had funded a few schools to begin the early stages of the Internet. "But most schools didn't have that," he said in an interview. "Usenet was a pioneering effort because it allowed anybody to connect and participate communications." | 16 | Shape-Shifting Battery Smooshes To Fit Sizes AA-D Jaymi Heimbuch 05.19.10 | Rechargeable batteries are a solution for keeping batteries out of the landfill, but you still have to have the right size for your device, which means buying more batteries. What if you could buy just a small handful of batteries that fit all of your devices? That's the solution presented by The A to D Battery, a single nickel hydroxide battery core wrapped in memory foam that you can simply squish right into that remote control. The battery is a AA size core with a memory foam wrap that expands to Gadjitz writes, "Given the small capacity of the battery, it's hard to imagine that it would provide much life for any gizmo. But when you really need something to work right now, being able to grab a one-size-fits-all battery would be the very definition of convenience." | 17 | Flash 10.1 for Android beta unveiled: Hulu a no-show, Froyo now a minimum requirement Ross Miller May 20th 2010 | What was once just one echelon above a myth is now finally coming to fruition. Adobe is pushing out a beta of its Flash 10.1 player alongside Google's own beta for Android 2.2 "Froyo." The general release for Flash is still on track for June, according to Anup Murarka of the Mobile and Devices team. The announcement doesn't come without caveats, however, and the bad news is that Froyo is now a minimum requirement -- according to Murarka, the APIs needed for its software only now exist in 2.2. Also not on the docket? Hulu -- it's being blocked due to content licensing issues, and our inquiries with that company turned up nil. Flash 10.1 will be available as a Marketplace download, but Adobe intends to work with as many OEMs as possible to preload it on devices so it's there at purchase. Speaking of OEMs, Murarka teased that we should expect announcements later this month and the next regarding Flash integration in TVs. Be sure to head on after the break as we talk a little more in-depth with Murarka about 10.1. As for all there is to see, hear, and do with Froyo, Google's big keynote is going on now -- stay tuned, and in the meantime, why not check out our hands-on impressions of Android 2.2! Oh, and did we mention Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch is gonna be on this week's Engadget Show? | 18 | Next generation hard drives may store 10 terabits per sq inch: research Lin Edwards May 10, 2010 | Bit addressing during TAR writing on bit patterned media. a, Schematic of the head path and write waveforms during experiment. Both up and down orientations were written. The head path is purposefully misaligned to the track direction by a fraction of a degree. Initial phase is random with each track. Write frequency was incremented by 1% between tracks. b, Large area HR-MFM image of resulting tracks. Scale bar, 1um. Single tone tracks at the highest data frequency are written properly with no adjacent track writing when the head is centered on the track and in phase with the island positions. Nebulous light regions are due to reversal of the soft magnetic material in the trenches between islands. c, Close-up HR-MFM image of a single track. 60 islands are written correctly before the write phase and track centering drift too far. Scale bar, 500nm. Image credit Nature Photonics, The research, published in this week’s Nature Photonics, has found a method that combines two writing procedures to store data on hard drives. Each procedure writes tightly packed data without affecting data on the bits surrounding it and avoiding the usual challenge with tightly packing data, which is that the heat generated in the write head can create superparamagnetisim that can interfere with surrounding bits and jumble the data on them (by flipping a 0 state to 1 or vice versa). One of the procedures used is bit-patterned recording (BPR), which writes to "magnetic islands" lithographed into the surface, which isolate the write events and prevent superparamagnetic effects occurring. The other is thermally-assisted magnetic recording (TAR), in which a tiny region of the surface is heated when data are being written and then cooled. The heat allows the surface to magnetize quickly, and this, the small-grained design of the surface, and the distance between bits all help to prevent superparamagnetisim. | 19 | Exclusive: Seagate confirms 3TB
17 May 2010 | The ancient foundations of the PC’s three-decade legacy has once again reared its DOS-era head, revealing that many of today’s PCs are simply incapable of coping with hard drives that have a larger capacity than 2.1TB. The root of the problem is the original LBA (logical block addressing) standard, which can’t assign addresses to capacities in excess of 2.1TB. Originally set out by Microsoft and IBM as a part of the original DOS standard, the original LBA standard assigns an address to each 512-byte sector – the smallest physical block of data on a hard drive. Unfortunately, though, the range of addresses is limited to capacities of 2.1TB. It’s a limit that until now has seemed so far off in the future that hardly anyone’s considered it a problem. "I think that’s what everyone thought," says Craig. "Nobody expected back in 1980 when they set the standard that we’d ever address over 2.1TB." | 20 | Report: Only Escape From Hellish Apple iPhone Factory Was Suicide Jason Mick May 19, 2010 | Last time a reporter tried to penetrate Apple's veil of secrecy, security guards employed by their parts supplier, Foxconn, beat up the reporters involved. But questions had to be answered in the wake of the suicide/potential murder of a Foxconn employee which occurred after the employee lost an iPhone prototype. Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly was determined to find out the true story, and sent a reporter in undercover, posing as a new employee. Given the fact that Foxconn's Shenzen plant that builds Apple's iPads, iPods, and iPhones has 400,000 employees, that part wasn't too hard. What was hard, was for the reporter to endure the plant's reportedly hellish working conditions for 28 days. | 21 | How to calibrate your HD TV Hunter Skipworth 16 May 2010 | Shopping for televisions at the moment is a minefield: walk into any electronics shop and you will be confronted by an assistant reeling off a swathe of acronyms about the latest must-have TV. Everything seems to be 'HD ready' and decorated with stickers listing the deluge of image processors and black levels the TV can put out. But even if you spend everything you have got on the television of your dreams, chances are you wont be getting the most out of it. The problem is, manufacturers' default picture settings tend to pump the colour and contrast on displays in order to make them stand out in the shop window. It means that when you get your TV home, the picture won't look right for domestic use. A good television should be highly customisable, allowing the viewer to change its picture to suit movies, gaming and sports. | 22 | HTC EVO 4G review Chris Ziegler May 19th 2010 |
As a mobile platform, the EVO 4G's Android foundation is still an infant -- well, okay, perhaps it's a tweener -- but in its two-odd years in the public spotlight, the list of truly revolutionary devices to use it has been a significant one: the G1 for being the first to market; the Nexus One for ushering in a new (and subsequently killed) retail model; perhaps the CLIQ for introducing Motorola to the platform or the Droid for bringing the company some desperately needed, long overdue success. For the moment, anyway, a whopping fraction of the world's most important phones are running Google's little experiment. Needless to say, Sprint, HTC, and quite frankly, many of us have come to expect the EVO 4G to join that short list for some obvious reasons. Put simply, its magnificent list of specs reads as though it was scribbled on a napkin after a merry band of gadget nerds got tipsy at the watering hole and started riffing about their idea of the ultimate mobile device: a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, 4.3-inch WVGA display, 8 megapixel camera with 720p video recording, HDMI-out, and WiMAX compatibility. Of course, the list of potential deal-breakers for a phone is as long as the EVO 4G's display is wide; to put it another way, there are countless ways HTC, Sprint, or even Google could've screwed this thing up. So does this moderately intimidating black slab of pure engineering and marketing -- this high-profile bet on Sprint's future -- deliver the goods? Read on. | 23 | Google TV Is Official: The Web And Pay-TV Have Finally Clashed Ray Willington May 20, 2010 | Google's own I/O conference in California is wrapping up today, but not before the company goes out with a serious bang. To our knowledge, Google is about the only technology company out there today that is big enough to throw their own party and get people to come, aside from Apple of course. One of the major announcements from today's keynote speech was something that had been rumored for awhile: Google TV. Unlike what we had heard earlier, there's not going to be a special Google TV set-top box, at least not yet. Basically, Google is taking the Apple TV concept, but going way overboard by introducing apps, screen customization and channel searching. Google is really, really good at two main things: advertising, and search. TV is a huge business, far larger than smartphones or even the Internet. Far more people (four billion, according to Google's own research) have access to a television screen than a broadband signal, and Google is hoping to take advantage of that fact. | |