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Scientists stumble upon bomb-sniffing laser with a boomerang effect

You might think of a laser as light forced into a single, directed beam, but scientists have recently discovered that if you fire a laser in one direction, the air itself can fire another right back. Using a 226nm UV laser, researchers at Princeton University managed to excite oxygen atoms to the point that they emit infrared light along the same channel as the original beam, except this time pointed back where it came from. Since the return beam’s chemistry depends on the particles in the air to generate the return beam, the “backward laser” could potentially carry the signature of those particles back to the source and help identify them there. That seems to be the entire goal, in fact — the project, funded by an Office of Naval Research program on “Sciences Addressing Asymmetric Explosive Threats,” hopes that such a laser can ID bombs from a distance by hunting for trace chemicals in the air. Sounds like the perfect addition to our terahertz specs, and one step closer to the tricorder of our dreams.

Scientists stumble upon bomb-sniffing laser with a boomerang effect originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 31 Jan 2011 07:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How to Take Control and Customize Google Calendar Reminders

Google calendar has great flexibility with reminders, but the defaults are often useless without tweaking the settings. Here are some common notification settings you may want to change to suit your needs better

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This Week's Best YouTube Videos: Shaolin Monks, Lazy Teenage Superheroes, and the Indian Terminator

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One of the best things about Indian films is the way they manage to be hilarious, campy, epic, and awe-inspiring all at the same time. Enthiran, which apparently translates to "Robot," is a three-hour master work featuring a number of Indian movie stars about a robot who falls in love with a girl but finds himself reprogrammed to kill everything in sight. How can you not possibly want to watch that? 
Also making waves on YouTube this week is a slow-motion video of a Shaolin monk throwing a needle – an ordinary needle – through a pane of glass. If you ever wondered whether there was something to all of the movies and lore, watch this and know that yes, in fact, there is. But those two videos just scratch the surface. Hit the jump to see all five. 

Robot (TeztigoMix_Part 02)
You don’t have to know what’s being said here to appreciate how incredibly awesome it is. This 10 minute stretch of film picks up right after the robot, Chitti, has been reprogrammed and goes on a destructive rampage, complete with exploding vehicles, machine guns, and, of course, musical numbers. Want to see the first part? It’s right here.
Shaolin Monk Throwing Needle through a Piece of Glass 2
When I first heard about this video, I didn’t think it could possibly be true, but sure enough, the proof is in the video. A Shaolin monk, with an ordinary sewing needle in his right hand, manages to throw the needle such that it pieces a pane of glass perfectly. It doesn’t shatter or break the glass into pieces; it simply pierces it and passes through in one piece, leaving a pretty big hole behind it. The video is shot at 1000 frames per second and played back in slow-motion…as if that will help you figure out how he managed to do it.
 

Lazy Teenage Superheroes – Short Film
If you've ever wondered what a bunch of super-powered young adults would do with their time, this is probably a much more accurate representation of how they would behave than any new animated television series could possibly describe. The special effects are pretty good, too. 
The story goes like this: a bunch of super-powered teenagers are hanging out in their dorm/apartment that looks remarkably like a set of abandoned warehouses when they’re confronted by some of their old nemeses. The story is told by one of their friends who doesn’t have superpowers at all, but that doesn’t stop him from making himself useful.

Old Spice | I’m Back
The Old Spice Guy has made his triumphant return to YouTube. In a new video, the Old Spice Guy, also known as Isaiah Mustafa, announces he’ll be seen again soon with a whole new line of Old Spice ads in a brand new campaign. The spot is just over a minute long, but it has all of the flare and humor of the original ads. Welcome back, Old Spice Guy. The Internet missed you.
I Wanna Be An Engineer – (Billionaire Geeked Out Mix) Only Won the Lyrical Engineer
We mentioned this one a little earlier in the week, but it bears repeating, partially because of Only Won’s sweet rhymes, and partially because he gives PC Mag a good solid shout out. It doesn’t hurt that since he uploaded the video, Only Won’s racked up close to 300,000 views of his music video. Seriously, someone get that guy a job as a Systems Engineer. I know a couple of companies that are hiring.

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Google announces Android event for February 2nd

Had enough Honeycomb this week? Perhaps — but next week is a whole new week, and Google’s got your back. Mountain View has selected Wednesday, February 2nd for an event that’ll include “an in-depth look at Honeycomb, Android ecosystem news and hands-on demos,” so by all accounts this seems to be more than a mere wrap-up of everything they’ve announced in the past few weeks. New tablets? Honeycomb for smartphones? Android 2.4? Something else entirely? We’ll be there to find out, of course.

Google announces Android event for February 2nd originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 Jan 2011 18:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Wireless electricity enables next generation of annoying packaging

Yep, these cereal boxes light up. They’re using a new branded-technology called eCoupling that provides electricity via induction, which means the shelves have a coil with AC power running through it. The “printed coils” on the boxes allow inventory control and data exchange presumably thanks to a low-power microcontroller. But in the video after the break you can see that the printed lighting on the boxes lets them flash parts of the box art as a way to attract customers’ attention. We’d bet that they’re using electroluminescent materials but we weren’t able to get find specifics on how this is done. We just hope advertisers don’t start rolling noise-makers into their packaging.

[Crave via Laughing Squid]

Filed under: wireless hacks

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Android 3.0 Honeycomb emulator has traces of smartphone support

Thought Honeycomb was just for tablets? Well, it’s not! Sure, tablets might be Google’s main thrust with the release, but we’ve been able to dig up enough evidence in the preview SDK’s emulator released yesterday to suggest that these guys are still keeping their eyes on the smartphone prize.

Here’s how it works: the emulator can be set to load at an arbitrary screen resolution. By default, that’s WXGA, 1280 x 768 — perfect for tablets, but obviously a wee bit large for even the biggest smartphones. Well, it turns out that setting the emulator to WVGA (like you might find on a modern mid- to high-end smartphone) triggers a moderately different shell UI that lacks most of the whiz-bang home screen stuff Google’s shown on the Honeycomb tablets. In fact, the default launcher crashes out entirely, which means you need to install a replacement (Launcher Pro works nicely) just to play around.

Once you get in, it’s pretty raw, but you immediately notice that the emulator’s got some traces of smartphone support. Notably, the status bar reverts to a more smartphone-friendly form, albeit one with pre-Gingerbread background coloration and incorrectly-inverted font colors. The lock screen (pictured above) is back to its old form, not the webOS-esque circular lock in the Honeycomb tablet UI. The browser — which has been completely revamped in Honeycomb — works, though without visible tabs; Google might be thinking that they’d take up too much real estate on a screen this small.

Again, you can’t glean much here, but it’s interesting primarily because the emulator knows to revert to a smartphone UI layout at the lower resolution — a possible sign that Honeycomb will be a true dual-mode, dual-purpose platform from day one. And even if it isn’t, it looks like they’re setting themselves up for a two-UI strategy down the road.

[Thanks, Andrew]

Android 3.0 Honeycomb emulator has traces of smartphone support originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 Jan 2011 16:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Internet Blows Lid Off of KFC Secret

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Is nothing sacred, the Internet? Colonel Sanders’s long-protect military-style secret of 11 herbs and spices has apparently been revealed for all the world to see. Oregano, chili powder, basil–honestly, most of these things are readily found on in the average garden, save for one super-secret element (hint: it’s pretty much MSG).
This is the iPhone 4, Wikileaks cables, and Santa Claus's social security all rolled up in one. No clue as to the source of the alleged leak, but if this is true, it could shake up the Kentucky-style chicken deep-frying industry forever. 

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Visualized: Google’s periodic table of APIs

The world of Google APIs and developer tools can be a confusing one, but the company has now at least brought a bit of order to the chaos with its own take on the periodic table of the elements. As you can see above, Android occupies the top spot normally reserved for hydrogen in the actual periodic table, and the remaining APIs and developer products are all grouped into their appropriate categories — and, of course, linked to their respective websites. Hit up the link below to check out the table in its interactive form.

Visualized: Google’s periodic table of APIs originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 Jan 2011 14:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Kinect Projects A New Hope In Holographic Tech

Microsoft’s Kinect has already brought us invisibility, motion-tracked underwear and giant animated Minecraft cats. Now, it’s taking us to a galaxy far far away, thanks to researchers from the MIT Media Lab. Using Kinect and a PC equipped with three off-the-shelf graphics cards, the researchers were able to create a three-inch holographic Princess Leia running at around 15 frames per second, according to the university’s news office. 

One of the students in the group dressed as Leia and re-enacted the famous scene from Star Wars in real-time at a conference in San Francisco last weekend. It might not have quite the resolution as R2’s projector in A New Hope, but its one of the fastest methods of projecting a hologram around today. According to an article on ScienceNews.org, a team at the University of Arizona was able to create a large hologram with much higher resolution using 16 cameras and a series of lasers. Unfortunately, this method was 30 times slower than MIT's Kinect hack, refreshing the image once every two seconds. 

Maybe the most impressive thing about this hack was that the MIT researchers only got their hands on a Kinect around the end of December, giving them about a month to not only create the hologram, but double the frame rate from 7.5 frames per second to 15. 
Before you run out and wire up your own droids with appeals to Ben Kenobi, keep in mind that there is still one component of the setup that can't be bought in stores. The holographic display used in the project has been developed by MIT since the late-1980s by two groups of professors and their students. The current display, called the Mark-II, is the successor to the original. Professor Michael Bove said his group is developing a larger and cheaper display using the same technology. 

Here’s a video of the hologram, projected in real-time over the Internet: