LED 'Li-Fi' 100 Times Faster than Wi-Fi

Connecting your smartphone to the Web with just a lamp -- that is the promise of Li-Fi, featuring Internet access 100 times faster than Wi-Fi with revolutionary wireless technology.
French start-up Oledcomm demonstrated the technology at the Mobile World Congress, the world's biggest mobile fair, in Barcelona. As soon as a smartphone was placed under an office lamp, it started playing a video.

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The big advantage of Li-Fi, short for "light fidelity," is its lightning speed. Laboratory tests have shown theoretical speeds of over 200 Gbps -- fast enough to "download the equivalent of 23 DVDs in one second," the founder and head of Oledcomm, Suat Topsu, told AFP.
"Li-Fi allows speeds that are 100 times faster than Wi-Fi" which uses radio waves to transmit data, he added.
The technology uses the frequencies generated by LED bulbs -- which flicker on and off imperceptibly thousands of times a second -- to beam information through the air, leading it to be dubbed the "digital equivalent of Morse Code."

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It started making its way out of laboratories in 2015 to be tested in everyday settings in France, a Li-Fi pioneer, such as a museums and shopping malls. It has also seen test runs in Belgium, Estonia and India.
Dutch medical equipment and lighting group Philips is reportedly interested in the technology and Apple may integrate it in its next smartphone, the iPhone7, due out at the end of the year, according to tech media.
With analysts predicting the number of objects that are connected to the Internet soaring to 50 million by 2020 and the spectrum for radio waves used by Wi-Fi in short supply, Li-Fi offers a viable alternative, according to its promoters.

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"We are going to connect our coffee machine, our washing machine, our tooth brush. But you can't have more than ten objects connected in Bluetooth or Wi-Fi without interference," said Topsu.
Deepak Solanki, the founder and chief executive of Estonian firm Velmenni which tested Li-fi in an industrial space last year, told AFP he expected that "two years down the line the technology can be commercialized and people can see its use at different levels."
Analysts said it was still hard to say if Li-Fi will become the new Wi-Fi.

Source:-http://news.discovery.com/

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Meteorite Did NOT Kill Man in India: Experts

Meteorite Did NOT Kill Man in India: Experts 

It would have been a first — but it probably wasn’t.
A report earlier this week suggested that a falling meteorite killed a bus driver and injured three others in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. However, scientific experts have since looked into the matter and cast serious doubt on the initial report from Indian government authorities.
“Considering that there was no prediction of a meteorite shower and there was no meteorite shower observed, this certainly is a rare phenomena if it is a meteorite,” G.C. Anupama, the dean of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, told the New York Times.
Meteorite Kills Man in India, Authorities Say
NASA scientists, meanwhile, were more definitive in disclaiming the meteorite report. They said in a statement that photographs of the 5-foot-deep, 2-foot-wide impact crater indicated a “land-based explosion” may have caused the damage.
In fact, according to the International Comet Quarterly, no meteorite-caused death has ever been confirmed. The closest report yet, according to the New York Times, was a 1908 incident in Tunguska, Siberia when a “blast” was reported entering Earth’s atmosphere. The blast flattened hundreds of square miles of forest and killed two men and hundreds of reindeer. But no meteorite was recovered.
As for the supposed meteorite recovered from the scene in India, reports are hardly definitive that it is, in fact, a meteorite. According to the BBC, some reports said police recovered “small stone weighing about 10g,” while others refer to a “hard, jagged object in dark blue and small enough to be held in a close hand.”
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Derek Sears, a meteorite and asteroid expert at Nasa’s Space Science Division, saw a photograph of the rock. He told the BBC that “the image of the stone is too poor to tell anything, but I would have thought if the object killed someone we would have a large stone?”
If the falling object was not a meteorite, then what was it? Sears suggested to the BBC it could have been an object falling from an aircraft passing overhead. Others have said it could have been a bit of space junk that didn’t burn up completely after passing through Earth’s atmosphere.
Needless to say, the definitive explanation remains a mystery.

http://news.discovery.com

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Apple's latest patent could let you type without a keyboard

It appears 3D touch and multi-touch functionalities weren't enough for Apple. In fact, it was revealed today that Apple has been granted a patent for touch-free gesture input. The patent abstract suggests that the technology could theoretically allow you to control your Apple devices by hovering your hands over their displays, keyboards, and trackpads.
While that feature seems like the sort of gimmick most users would abandon after calibration, the patent also suggests the use of similar sensors designed to prevent accidental touch input on your iPhone screen. This could be useful in the case of talking on the phone, or perhaps even listening to music on YouTube while it's in your pocket. The iPhone already attempts to reject touch input when it thinks you're speaking, based on input from its internal sensors, but the new patent suggests a more refined system could be in the works.
Seeing the term "gesture controls" may instinctively lead you to draw connections to Microsoft's Kinect, which has all but bit the dust at this point. This patent, however, appears to suggest more close-range "hover event" detection rather than living room party game banter.
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Moreover, the patent explains that although some functions could be initiated by gestures alone, others will require both touch and gesture input at the same time. In turn, this could indicate an evolution of multi-touch as we currently know it.
Apple also makes it seem as though the proximity sensors responsible for the repeatedly aforementioned gesture controls will exhibit the same amount of pixel-level coverage as the touch sensors before them, though it's also possible the displays themselves could intersperse between touch sensor rows and rows which detect input proximity. Otherwise, it's also possible we could see proximity detection only occupying a carefully selected portion of the screen.
Oddly enough, the patent goes in some detail on more than just iPhones and iPads. In fact, it specifically mentions the use of proximity detectors for virtual keyboard emulation from the surface of a trackpad. It also mentions such technology could be used to supersede current iPhone proximity detectors.
Nonetheless, everything mentioned here should be taken with several spoonfuls of salt. Most patents from companies of Apple's stature don't make their way into manufacturing. Still, Apple did demonstrate an extensive interest in gesture inputs as far back as 2013, when it purchased the company behind the original Kinect.

Source:-FOX News

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The Moon's Gravity Alters Rainfall on Earth

When the moon is high overhead at night, its gravity actually can reduce the amount of rainfall very slightly, new research reveals.
In an article for Geophysical Research Letters, University of Washington scientists Tsubasa Kohyama and John M. Wallace report that the moon causes the Earth’s atmosphere to bulge toward it. That causes the pressure, or weight of the atmosphere, on that side of the planet to go up, which in turn increases the temperature of air below.
Since warmer air can hold more moisture, the same parcels of air are now farther from their maximum moisture capacity, resulting in a slight dip in rainfall.
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The researchers studied 15 years of data collected by NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite from 1998 to 2012. It proved that the rain is reduced by an amount that is measurable, though imperceptible to humans — a change of about 1 percent in the total rainfall variation.

“As far as I know, this is the first study to convincingly connect the tidal force of the moon with rainfall,” said Tsubasa Kohyama, a doctoral student in atmospheric sciences.

While the effect isn’t going to affect agriculture or alter weather forecasts, the knowledge is potentially beneficial to climate researchers, who can use it to test the physics behind their climate models.
The effect of the moon’s position on air pressure on Earth was first detected back in 1847, and researchers showed in 1932 that the moon could affect air temperature as well. A 2014 study by the same University of Washington researchers confirmed that air pressure on Earth varies with the position of the moon.

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Wallace plans to conduct future studies to see whether certain types of rain storms, such as heavy downpours, are more susceptible to the moon’s position, and whether the moon has any effect on the frequency of storms.

Source:Dnews

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World Record: 100 Drones Swarm in Formation

In the Guinness World Records category of Most Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Airborne Simultaneously, the award goes to…Intel.

The record-breaking feat involved 100 drones flying along pre-programmed paths, all to the music of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

It happened back in November (although we’re just getting a press notice now) in Linz, Austria, where Intel teamed up with Austria’s Ars Electronica Futurelab for the occasion.
The LED-equipped quadcopters, weighing just 1.5 pounds each, were manufactured by the German company Ascending Technologies, which Intel just acquired on January 4, 2016.
Ascending Technologies made headlines on DNEWS this past December when they showed off precision software that gave drones the capability of painting holiday-based “light images” in the sky.

In this latest show, dubbed Drone 100, the swarm of drones climbed to an altitude of about 328 feet and then danced a choreographed routine that ended in a large Intel logo painted in the night sky.
You can watch th

“Drone 100 was a crazy idea that came out of a hallway conversation inside Intel, and now it has become a reality,” said Intel's Anil Nanduri, GM of New Markets, Perceptual Computing.
Although precision drone swarms perform beautiful displays, they actually have a practical purpose. The software the coordinates their movements is used to program drones to inspect bridges and tunnels, to potential build structures, and to also carry out military operations.
via Gizmag and Ars Electronica

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