Fifty Years after Telstar: Why the first commercial satellite was so important

Today, July 12, marks the 50th anniversary of the first broadcast from the Telstar satellite, the first commercial satellite in orbit. These broadcasts heralded a sea change in the way we communicated, and laid the groundwork for many of the services we take for granted today. Telstar was one of the first satellites with a usable purpose. Up until its launch, the world’s two superpowers at the time — the US and the USSR — were more interested in one-upping each other by just proving they could put something in orbit. The Soviets were first, launching Sputnik in October 1957, which included a radio transmitter that emitted a short beep every few seconds. The US responded in January 1958, launching Explorer 1, which sent back...

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Android 4.1 Jelly Bean on the Version Galaxy Nexus

Google did a lot to make Android 4.1 Jelly Bean a desirable evolution of Ice Cream Sandwich. There is all the attention paid to responsiveness and colors that improve the visual experience. Then we have the more substantial improvements like Google Now predictive search and all those widget and notification enhancements. Jelly Bean is solid software, but you’re probably not going to get your paws on it officially for a good long time. If that bums you out, there is alwaysrooting and custom ROM. You’re going to be taking a risk doing it, but you can probably get the newest Android 4.1.1 software on your phone right now. Stability and support have improved now that Google has added the new build to the Android Open Source Project...

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The camera that can see through around corners

Scientists in Israel have created a camera that can see around corners, or through solid objects such as frosted glass, and skin. The most exciting facet of this innovation is that the camera uses natural light to perform the imaging — such as a lamp, or the Sun — and not lasers or X-rays. Ori Katz, Eran Small, and Yaron Silberberg of the Weizmann Institute have shown that they can accurately resolve an object that’s hiding behind nearly opaque obstacles, or around a corner (or in another room, as long as the door’s open. In both cases, the light is scattered by the obstacle (the frosted glass, the corner wall), creating what appears to be white noise — but their camera can take these speckles of noise and enhance them “1000-fold”...

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MIT creates intelligent car co-pilot

Mechanical engineers and roboticists working at MIT have developed an intelligent automobile co-pilot that sits in the background and only interferes if you’re about to have an accident. If you fall asleep, for example, the co-pilot activates and keeps you on the road until you wake up again. Like other autonomous and semi-autonomous solutions, the MIT co-pilot uses an on-board camera and laser rangefinder to identify obstacles. These obstacles are then combined with various data points — such as the driver’s performance, and the car’s speed, stability, and physical characteristics — to create constraints. The co-pilot stays completely silent unless you come close to breaking one of these constraints — which might be as simple...

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BMW adds Siri-like voice dictation

Match and raise: BMW adds Siri-like voice dictation, then builds a touchpad into iDrive Buy a 2013 BMW and you’ll be able to dictate text messages or email while you drive, and not just the canned Yes, No, Running Late responses that pass for replies. It’s part of BMW’s newest ConnectedDrive technology and includes a touchpad with smartphone-like gestures built into the iDrive control knob, a 4G LTE WiFi hotspot, and a new 3D navigation system. BMW’s free-form voice recognition is the first application of Nuance Dragon Drive. Voice recognition happens in the cloud, so it should be just as good as Apple’s Siri (another Nuance-backed product that uses the cloud). But because of Apple’s current non-support of key Bluetooth...

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A mysterious lightning sprite in the sky ! What is it ?

What you see here is a red sprite, captured by an astronaut aboard the International Space Station, which happened to be passing over Myanmar during a large thunderstorm. Sprites — named after Puck, a nature sprite in English folklore — are huge electrical discharges that occur in the mesosphere (50-100km above Earth), which are triggered by positive lightning strikes on the ground below. Beyond that, we don’t know a whole lot about sprites. Because they’re so high up in the sky, often obscured by huge clouds, and only exist for a few milliseconds, the existence of sprites was only confirmed in 1989 when the University of Minnesota accidentally caught one on tape. Since then, they’ve been captured on film and tape hundreds...

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The 10-million-year sapphire hard disk

A multidisciplinary team of scientists, anthropologists, archeologists, artists, archivists, and linguists have put pen to paper and come up with the ultimate long-term storage solution: two 20cm (8in) sapphire disks, molecularly fused together, with a thin layer of inscribed platinum in between. The disk is expected to have a lifetime of 10 million years. As you have probably assumed, this 10-million-year hard disk (well, it isvery hard, and it is a disk) has nothing to do with computers — rather, this is all about passing important messages to future archeologists. Complex storage devices such as flash drives are no good: There’s just no way of guaranteeing that a future human (or alien?) race will be able to decode the...

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