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.

Bright Future Expected for Bionic Eye Developments

A new report from the research and consulting firm GlobalData predicts a promising future for the ocular medical device market.

The report’s author, GlobalData’s medical device analyst Shashank Settipalli, writes that the successful implantation of the Alpha IMS device made by Retina Implant AG could kick start the growth of the “burgeoning retinal prosthesis market.”

Scientists from the University of Oxford recently installedthe implant in Rhian Lewis, a woman in the U.K. who suffered from retinitis pigmentosa, a rare disease that has no cure.

Photoreceptor cells in the eye die at the onset of the disease. Lewis has no vision in her left eye and was rendered completely blind in her right eye.

The wafer-thin electronic chip powered by a tiny battery housed behind the ear restored vision in Lewis’s right eye helping her to see again.

The Alpha IMS device has distinct advantages over Second Sight’s Argus II system, its closest competitor in the retinitis pigmentosa space, says Settipalli. This rival product can help an individual suffering from this disease view light and shapes, but does not restore someone’s vision,reports the Los Angeles Times.

Hubble sees the force awakening in a newborn star

Just in time for the release of the movie "Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens," NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has photographed what looks like a cosmic, double-bladed lightsaber.

In the center of the image, partially obscured by a dark, Jedi-like cloak of dust, a newborn star shoots twin jets out into space as a sort of birth announcement to the universe.

"Science fiction has been an inspiration to generations of scientists and engineers, and the film series Star Wars is no exception," said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator for the NASA Science Mission directorate. "There is no stronger case for the motivational power of real science than the discoveries that come from the Hubble Space Telescope as it unravels the mysteries of the universe."

NASA Orders Second Commercial Crew Launch from Boeing

After ordering a commercial crew launch from SpaceX in November, NASA ordered an additional launch last week from Boeing Space Exploration in Houston, marking the company’s second order from the space agency.

The launch order is the third of four guaranteed orders NASA will make under the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contracts.

“Once certified by NASA, the Boeing CST-100 Starliner and SpaceX Crew Dragon each will be capable of two crew launches to the station per year,” said Kathy Lueders, the Commercial Crew Program manager. “Placing orders for those missions now really sets us up for the sustainable future aboard the International Space Station (ISS).”  

SpaceX Launches Satellites and Achieves Historic Landing

Almost a month after private space firm Blue Origin successfully landed their rocket at a site in west Texas, Elon Musk’s SpaceX successfully landed their Falcon 9 rocket last night after delivering a satellite payload into low-Earth orbit.

A view from the landing pad showed the rocket—all but a bright, circular glow—lowering itself back down to the earth last night. The emanating dot grows into a horizontal, fiery plume, leaving the tubular Falcon standing in its wake on solid ground.

Cheers break out from onlookers. “The Falcon has landed,” a commentator said.

“(Eleven) satellites deployed to target orbit and Falcon has landed back at Cape Canaveral. Headed to LZ-1. Welcome back, baby,” Musk tweeted.    

Jade Rabbit on Moon Reveals 'Ground Truth'

The Chinese lunar rover Yutu—which means “jade rabbit”—is unveiling the first new “ground truth” from the Earth’s celestial neighbor in close to 40 years.

Since the American Apollo (1969-1972) missions, American observation of the moon is primarily achieved from orbit. However, such distance poses problems when attempting to interpret the moon’s regolith layer.

In 2013, China’s Chang’e-3 mission touched down on the moon, landing in the northern part of the Mare Imbrium, an impact basin filled by lava flows. The regolith layer was thin and unmixed with debris, which meant it resembled the composition of underlying bedrock.  

Analyzation of the surrounding area has revealed the area’s basalts differ from the basalts returned to Earth from the Apollo and Russia’s Luna (1970-1976) missions.

U.S. Christmas Lights Consume More Energy than Some Developing Countries

The decorative lights seen around U.S. neighborhoods during the holiday season consume about 6.6 billion kWh of energy every year, according to the U.S. Dept. of Energy.

A recent post from the Center for Global Development said that usage exceeds the national electricity consumption of developing countries, such as El Salvador, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Nepal, and Cambodia.

While the U.S. number only amounts to 0.2% of U.S. energy consumption, it’s enough to power 14 million refrigerators.

El Salvador, which uses the highest amount of energy of the listed countries, topped its yearly use at 5.35 kWh. Cambodia, the lowest, was at 3.06 billion kWh.