Tag: science
Nintendo lessons, anyone? Teach videogaming in school to keep Britain up to speed in booming industry, report suggests
9AM – Playstation. 10AM – Xbox. 11AM – Wii. How's that for a Monday morning at school? The call to bring videogaming into schools comes from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA), whose report warns…
Science cures the hangover! With coffee and aspirin…
Eureka! The most important scientific discovery of all time has been reached; no more headaches, no more puking, the hangover has been cured! Michael Oshinsky of Thomas Jefferson Universtiy in Philadelphia made the discovery after, well, getting a load of…
Wii-like motion tech may help rehabilitate stroke survivors
Patients suffering from the after-effects of surviving a stroke may soon find help in the most unlikely of places. A study conducted by a team at City University London seems to suggest that motion technologies found in the likes of…
Twitter is just a passing fad, claims research
Research from Nielsen Online suggests that Twitter might have problems with ‘stickiness’ – with retaining users that give it a try. Its statistics suggest that more than 60% of Twitter users fail to return a month of using it.
In fact for most of the past twelve months, Twitter has had difficulty keeping more than 30% of its users after a month, though the entry of Oprah Winfrey has helped. Facebook and MySpace, before their explosive growth periods, had nearly double the retention rates that Twitter currently faces.
What would be interesting to see would be how many people come back later on. It’s been my experience of the site that people sign up and bag their name, then ignore it until lots of their friends are using it, at which time they return.
Still, it’s worrying news for the site which needs to start crossing over sooner, rather than later. Intense media coverage in the UK has helped, but it’s still not obvious to many new Tweeters how the site works, or its Twittiquette.
(via Nielsen Wire)
YouTube's content ID system – copes with volume, but not pitch changes
An enterprising techy in the Computer Science department at Rochester University, NY, has undertaken an investigation to find out exactly how much you have to mangle audio tracks before YouTube’s content identification system can’t recognise them any more. The findings are quite interesting.
For starters, he learnt that despite YouTube still easily recognising when a song’s volume is massively increased or decreased, it can’t cope with any pitch scaling beyond 5% or so. Also, interestingly, it only seems to recognise the first 30 seconds or so of a track.
The full analysis is right here, and there’s some fantastic comments on the white noise test video, here. Also interesting is that despite infringing copyright on the website 35 times and, at once point, 15 times in an hour, the account hasn’t been banned or removed.
Blue OLED efficiency up 25%
OLED technology may be about to take a massive leap forwards, which is good news for anyone looking to the screens becoming more widely used. The blue OLED has always been the weak link in the screens, offering significantly shorter lifespans than its red and green brethren. Well, a team from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is one step closer to cracking the problem by improving blue efficiency by an impressive 25%.
Robo-fish would be the coolest bath toy ever
To the casual eye, this may be a fish caught somewhere off the uncanny valley, but most fishes’ limited eyesight will mean that it slips by completely unnoticed as it goes about its business. And its business is detecting hazardous pollutants in the water off the coast of Spain.
They’ve been designed by a group of UK scientists with the intention of not scaring the local water life. They look like carp, and move around realistically with a top speed of around 2.25mph. They cost £20,000 a-piece, but fortunately the designers from the University of Essex have found the European Commission happy to foot the bill.
New mirrors reflect text the right way round
Mathematician Andrew Hicks is clever. So clever, in fact, that he’s managed to work out how to get a mirror to display text that displays the correct way around, as in the picture above. Mightily impressive, no?
He’s also done some other faintly magical stuff with mirrors, including a wing mirror that can display a 45 degree field-of-view, undistorted, and a mirror that reflects 360 degrees around you, again with no distortion.
Check out the full gallery of mirror fun at New Scientist.
Super-efficient LED lighting now a real possibility within five years
The quest for cheaper, more environmentally-friendly lighting has taken another leap forward with scientists’ new-found ability to produce much cheaper LEDs.
The New Scientist article goes into quite significant detail about how the process was achieved in order to avoid the LEDs cracking during the manufacturing process (due to the high heat required to grow them) so I won’t attempt to look clever here by regurgitating it.
Suffice it to say, the “new” LEDs can be produced for around a tenner per 150,000 units…
YouTube Video of the Week: Insane Japanese Water Jetpack
Whoa – this is awesome. Supersize a simple bottle rocket, and strap it to a terrified-looking Japanese bloke. The most impressive thing? The science involved, neatly summarised by PopSci. In short, this bloke leaves the launchpad at over 200MPH, experiencing acceleration of approx 10gs! Don’t try this at home, kids.
PopSci (via Digg)
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