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Category: internet – Page 318

University of Washington engineers have developed a novel technology that uses a Wi-Fi router—a source of ubiquitous but untapped energy in indoor environments—to power devices.

The Power Over Wi-Fi (PoWiFi) system is one of the most innovative and game-changing technologies of the year, according to Popular Science, which included it in the magazine’s annual “Best of What’s New” awards announced Wednesday.

The technology attracted attention earlier this year when researchers published an online paper showing how they harvested energy from Wi-Fi signals to power a simple temperature sensor, a low-resolution grayscale camera and a charger for a Jawbone activity tracking bracelet.

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Transparent walls and customized cabins may be ahead, according to Airbus.

If you think in-flight Wi-Fi and lie-flat seats are cutting edge, just wait until 2050. That’s when aircraft cabins will feature holographic pop-up gaming displays and seats that adjust to each passenger’s size and shape, according to Airbus. In its vision for the future, Airbus predicts that the cabin walls of planes will be transparent, providing amazing views of the earth. Those with vertigo could block the view with an opaque hologram around their seat. Themed zones will replace first, business and economy classes, so individuals could choose areas in which to relax, play games, interact with other passengers or hold business meetings with people on the ground. This could even top the flying car.

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NASA’s announcement in late September that it found evidence of flowing water on Mars was only the beginning of the revelations that will be the result of its current Mars mission. The organization’s exploratory mission carried out by the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft began with the intention of examining Mars’ atmosphere to an extent that had never before been possible, and now NASA is about to reveal what it is calling key science findings on the “fate Mars’ atmosphere.”

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NASA is being very tight-lipped about its upcoming announcements, which are scheduled to be made beginning at 2:00 p.m. EST / 11:00 a.m. PST on Thursday, November 5th. If you’re interested in NASA’s current mission though — and you certainly should be — you’ll be able to find out what NASA has in store for us the very same moment that the rest of the world does, because NASA will broadcast its special news conference live on the web.

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The local delivery market is worth approximately £150bn in the UK alone. This includes parcel and delivery companies (20 pc) and personal shopping trips by people (80 pc). Starship said that robot deliveries are potentially five to fifteen times cheaper than current “human-powered” delivery services.

“It does not take the whole delivery chain from an Amazon warehouse to your doorstep, it only takes the last few miles. But right now the last few miles are the most difficult part for the delivery vans. They need to find parking spaces and so forth, so our robot is taking care of that,” said Mr Heinla.

“For the large e-commerce companies it helps to reduce the costs. For the local businesses it opens up new possibilities, allowing people to order deliveries over the internet rather than coming to the store physically.”

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Google’s Project Loon is a massively ambitious plan to provide Internet connectivity to areas of the planet that don’t already enjoy good access to the web. How? Via a huge fleet of helium balloons that hang in the stratosphere 20 kilometres above the surface, assembling to form a high-tech communication network that beams the web to the surface.

And the undertaking is only getting more ambitious, with the company announcing this week that it plans to circle the planet with a ring of Project Loon balloons that will provide a perpetual data service for those living underneath its path.

It sounds like science fiction, but this isn’t some faraway ethereal concept we’re talking about. Google says it will do this next year, provided current tests work out as planned.

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Who needs a peep hole when a wifi network will do? Researchers from MIT have developed technology that uses wireless signals to see your silhouette through a wall—and it can even tell you apart from other people, too.

The team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab are no strangers to using wireless signals to see what’s happening on the other side of a wall. In 2013, they showed off software that could use variations in wifi signal to detect the presence of human motion from the other side of a wall. But in the last two years they’ve been busy developing the technique, and now they’ve unveiled the obvious — if slightly alarming — natural progression: they can use the wireless reflections bouncing off a human body to see the silhouette of a person standing behind a wall.

Not only that, the team’s technique, known is RF-Capture, is accurate enough to track the hand of a human and, with some repeated measurements, the system can even be trained to recognise different people based just on their wifi silhouette. The research, which is to be presented at SIGGRAPH Asia next month, was published this morning on the research group’s website.

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