Jaguar Land Rover Introduces Holographic Head-up Display

In 1988, General Motors brought the first head-up display (HUD) to market. Designed with the intent to keep driver attention on the road, these systems display vital information, such as vehicle speed and warning messages, in the driver’s field of vision.

Today, this technology is widely available, but the Univ. of Cambridge and Jaguar have teamed up to offer the first HUD to use laser holographic techniques to project information.

“We’re moving towards a fully immersive driver experience in cars, and we think holographic technology could be a big part of that, by providing important information, or even by encouraging good driver behavior,” said Prof. Daping Chu, of the university’s Dept. of Engineering and the Chairman of the Centre for Advanced Photonics and Electronics (CAPE).

The new technology was recently implemented in all Jaguar Land Rover vehicles, but was first offered as an option in September 2014.

Tech Tats: The Future of Wearables?

A forlorn girl sits at the bottom of a staircase in her household. An adult comes by with a small plastic case, opening it to reveal a rectangle sheet. The adult applies the sheet to the girl’s arm and holds a cloth over it. The cloth is pulled away and a small circuit board-like array with glowing green dots is stuck to the girl’s deltoid. The adult pulls out her smartphone, where the girl’s vitals are displayed.  

“Rather than going to the doctor once a year to get your physical, this Tech Tattoo can be something that you just put on your body once a year and it monitors everything that they would do in a physical and sends that to your doctor, and if there’s an issue, they could call you,” said Eric Schneider, a creative technologist with Chaotic Moon, the developer of Tech Tats, in a video. 

“It can look at early signs of fever, your vital signs, heartrate, everything that it needs to look at to notify you that you’re getting sick, or your child is getting sick.”

According to Vice’s Motherboard, the tattoo uses electroconductive paint to transfer data from temperature sensors to an ATiny85 microcontroller.

New Microscope Creates Near-real-time Videos of Nanoscale Processes

State-of-the-art atomic force microscopes (AFMs) are designed to capture images of structures as small as a fraction of a nanometer — a million times smaller than the width of a human hair. In recent years, AFMs have produced desktop-worthy close-ups of atom-sized structures, from single strands of DNA to individual hydrogen bonds between molecules.

But scanning these images is a meticulous, time-consuming process. AFMs therefore have been used mostly to image static samples, as they are too slow to capture active, changing environments.

Now engineers at MIT have designed an atomic force microscope that scans images 2,000 times faster than existing commercial models. With this new high-speed instrument, the team produced images of chemical processes taking place at the nanoscale, at a rate that is close to real-time video.

Wireless sensors could make diesel engines greener

Advances in wireless technology continue to pave the way for better consumer devices. In the future, however, wireless devices could also benefit the automotive industry, by helping diesel engines use less fuel while curbing soot and ash emissions.

Years ago, MIT spinout Filter Sensing Technologies (FST) invented sensors that use radio frequency signals — commonly used to transmit and receive data from wireless devices — to measure in real-time exactly how much soot and ash builds up in engine exhaust filters. These data help automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) — which build engines and vehicles — to program engines to burn fuel more efficiently to clean the filters. 

Now, with an acquisition in October by CTS Corporation, a major manufacturer of vehicle electronics and sensors, FTS is poised to scale up manufacturing of its sensors for diesel engines, which must meet increasingly strict emissions limits.

A Mysterious Radio Wave Coil Passing through Space

In 2001, West Virginia Univ. undergraduate student David Narkevic was poring through stellar data collected by the Parkes radio dish in Australia. What Narkevic stumbled upon would leave astronomers scratching their heads for years following. A powerful radio burst, estimated at originating some 1.6 billion light-years away, was picked up. According to New Scientist, the burst released energy akin to what the sun produces in a month in a manner of milliseconds.

Since then, scientists have detected 16 Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs).

Now, an international team of scientists have linked FRBs with a highly magnetized, gas-filled region of space.

“We now know that the energy from this particular burst passed through a dense magnetized field shortly after it formed,” said Univ. of British Columbia astronomer Kiyoshi Masui, the lead author of the study published in Nature.

Training Driverless Cars to “See”

Side-by-side, the images only resemble one another in terms of geometrics.

In the left photograph, a lone rural road stretches out, edged by fields of grass. A stop sign stands on the road’s right side and a utility pole with electrical wires is center.

The right image is a splash of colors, the road represented by purple, the road markings in orange, the stop sign in pink. Each of the 12 colors represents a category of object one might encounter on the road. 

One day, this may be how driverless cars see.

“Vision is our most powerful sense and driverless cars will also need to see,” said Prof. Robert Cipolla, of the Univ. of Cambridge. “But teaching a machine to see is far more difficult than it sounds.”

Cipolla and colleagues have designed two new systems that can recognize objects in the road and orient a user’s location with merely cameras, including smartphone cameras.

Home Broadband Usage Reach Plateaus

A new poll from the Pew Research Center indicates the number of Americans using home broadband service has plateaued at 67%, sinking below 2013’s 70%.

“This downtick in home high-speed adoption has taken place at the same time there has been an increase in ‘smartphone-only’ adults—those who own a smartphone that they can use to access the internet, but do not have traditional broadband service at home,” according to Pew Research Center. “Today smartphone adoption has reached parity with home broadband adoption (68% of Americans now report that they own a smartphone), and 13% of Americans are ‘smartphone-only’—up from 8% in 2013.”

The smartphone’s proliferation, according to respondents, is due to its ability to let users do whatever they need to on the internet.

But those utilizing smartphones solely for internet access do face challenges.