The First Laser ever made

The First Laser ever made 

50th Anniversary of the first laser. The first laser ever created is in Vancouver. Its late inventor, Ted Maiman, moved here in 1999. His wife Kathleen Maiman shows us how it works.

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The Negative Impact of RFID

The Negative Impact of RFID

     By Milton Kazmeyer, eHow Contributor 

Radio frequency identification, or RFID, is a technology that uses tiny electronic tags to store and broadcast information. When exposed to a radio wave of the correct frequency, the tag broadcasts its information to the scanner, allowing users to collect large amounts of information quickly. The use of these tags to track and store information about individuals, however, has led to some concerns about their widespread use.

           RFID Tags

1. • RFID tags are small devices that contain a circuit designed to store information and an antenna for receiving and broadcasting radio signals. Passive tags are unpowered, relying on the energy from the incoming radio wave to power the broadcast, and have a range measured in feet. Active tags contain an integral power source of some kind, and can broadcast over larger distances. Common uses of RFID tags include encoding them with product information for inventory purposes and encoding personal data on identification or financial documents to speed verification.

   Tracking

   • RFID tags allow companies to track items in inventory, but if the tags remain active after the point of purchase, they can also serve to track consumers. For instance, if you buy a shirt and the clerk neglects to deactivate the tag, the unique identifier in that tag will show up every time you return to the store to shop, or go anywhere else that uses RFID scanners for inventory purposes. Collating a scan of a worn RFID tag with a purchase can give a retailer your identity information, and from there allow them to build up a profile of your shopping and spending habits.

   Privacy

   • Privacy concerns do not end at the retail level. If RFID becomes widespread, the ability to track someone via passive tags in clothing or carried items could become important in criminal investigations or civil disputes. RFID tags associated with big-ticket purchases could provide criminals with information about suitable households to target simply by scanning trash at the curb. Active RFID tags could even provide information to third parties about the contents of your home and your activities, all without your knowledge.

   Identity Theft

   • Another downside of RFID’s widespread use is the possibility outsiders to gain access to identity data. Encoding personal data to RFID tags in passports and other important documents can speed customs checkpoints and other areas where citizens must show their papers, but third parties can also read these chips by using a scanner tuned to the right frequency. Government agencies and financial institutions that use RFID encode this information, but if a commonly used cipher is broken or compromised, it could lead to widespread identity theft.

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The Three Ways to Cloud Computer

The Three Ways to Cloud Computer

This cloud computing video explains SaaS, PaaS and Iaas -- otherwise known as "software as a service", "platform as a service" and "infrastructure as a service". It is produced and presented by Christopher Barnatt, author of ExplainingComputers.com and "A Brief Guide to Cloud Computing" .

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How CDs made

How CDs made ?

This is a simple video clarified some step of making a CD

The Compact Disc, or CD for short, is an optical disc used to store digital data. It was originally developed to store and play back sound recordings only, but the format was later adapted for storage of data (CD-ROM), write-once audio and data storage (CD-R), rewritable media (CD-RW), Video Compact Discs (VCD), Super Video Compact Discs (SVCD), PhotoCD, PictureCD, CD-i, and Enhanced CD. Audio CDs and audio CD players have been commercially available since October 1982.

Standard CDs have a diameter of 120 millimetres (4.7 in) and can hold up to 80 minutes of uncompressed audio or 700 MB (700 × 10⁶ bytes) of data. The Mini CD has various diameters ranging from 60 to 80 millimetres (2.4 to 3.1 in); they are sometimes used for CD singles, storing up to 24 minutes of audio or delivering device drivers.

CD-ROMs and CD-Rs remain widely used technologies in the computer industry. The CD and its extensions are successful: in 2004, worldwide sales of CD audio, CD-ROM, and CD-R reached about 30 billion discs. By 2007, 200 billion CDs had been sold worldwide.^[1] Compact Discs are increasingly being replaced or supplemented by other forms of digital distribution and storage, such as downloading and flash drives, with audio CD sales dropping nearly 50% from their peak in 2000

Source : WekiPedia 

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How the first transistor worked ?

Maybe we need to know How the first transistor worked !

Bill uses a replica of the point contact transistor built by Walter Brattain and John Bardeen at Bell Labs. On December 23, 1947 they used this device to amplify the output of a microphone and thus started the microelectronics revolution that changed the world. He describes in detail why a transistor works by highlighting the uniqueness of semiconductors in being able to transfer charge by positive and negative carriers.

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Wireless Homopolar Motor strange phenomenon

Most amazing strange phenomenon - simple wireless homopolar motor! Homopolar motor with no battery wire. Build your own fastest. Are you tired of stupid experiments? 

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MIT engineers develop new glucose-powered implantable medical device

MIT engineers have developed a fuel cell that runs on the same sugar that powers human cells: glucose. This glucose fuel cell could be used to drive highly efficient brainimplants of the future, which could help paralyzed patients move their arms and legs again.

The fuel cell, described in the June 12 edition of the journal PLoS ONE, strips electrons from glucose molecules to create a small electric current. The researchers, led by Rahul Sarpeshkar, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, fabricated the fuel cell on a silicon chip, allowing it to be integrated with other circuits that would be needed for a brain implant.

The idea of a glucose fuel cell is not new: In the 1970s, scientists showed they could power a pacemaker with a glucose fuel cell, but the idea was abandoned in favor of lithium-ion batteries, which could provide significantly more power per unit area than glucose fuel cells. These glucose fuel cells also utilized enzymes that proved to be impractical for long-term implantation in the body, since they eventually ceased to function efficiently.

The new twist to the MIT fuel cell described in PLoS ONE is that it is fabricated from silicon, using the same technology used to make semiconductor electronic chips. The fuel cell has no biological components: It consists of a platinum catalyst that strips electrons from glucose, mimicking the activity of cellular enzymes that break down glucose to generate ATP, the cell's energy currency. (Platinum has a proven record of long-term biocompatibility within the body.) So far, the fuel cell can generate up to hundreds of microwatts - enough to power an ultra-low-power and clinically useful neural implant.

"It will be a few more years into the future before you see people with spinal-cord injuries receive such implantable systems in the context of standard medical care, but those are the sorts of devices you could envision powering from a glucose-based fuel cell," says Benjamin Rapoport, a former graduate student in the Sarpeshkar lab and the first author on the new MIT study.

Rapoport calculated that in theory, the glucose fuel cell could get all the sugar it needs from the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) that bathes the brain and protects it from banging into the skull. There are very few cells in the CSF, so it's highly unlikely that an implant located there would provoke an immune response. There is also significant glucose in the CSF, which does not generally get used by the body. Since only a small fraction of the available power is utilized by the glucose fuel cell, the impact on the brain's function would likely be small.

A team of researchers at Brown University, Massachusetts General Hospital and other institutions recently demonstrated that paralyzed patients could use a brain-machine interface to move a robotic arm; those implants have to be plugged into a wall outlet.

Mimicking biology with microelectronics

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What next after the Higgs?

What next after the Higgs? Scientists use huge telescope buried 8000ft under South Pole to hunt for ANOTHER mystery particle

• World's biggest telescope to hunt for mysterious 'neutrinos'
• Particles could help explain origin of universe
• Mega-detector built 8,000ft under ice near South Pole
• Machine took 10 years to build

Scientists are using the world's biggest telescope, buried deep under the South Pole, to try to unravel the mysteries of tiny particles known as neutrinos
The discovery could shed light on how the universe was made.
The mega-detector, called IceCube, took 10 years to build 8,000ft below the Antarctic ice.
At one cubic km, it is bigger than the Empire State building, the Chicago Sears Tower - now known as Willis Tower - and Shanghai's World Financial Center combined.

The final Digital Optical Module (DOM) descends down a bore hole in the ice as it is deployed in the IceCube array, the world's largest neutrino observatory, built under the Antarctic tundra near the US Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station

The IceCube array uses strings of sensors taht are lowered down deep boreholes in the ice. The IceTop has two layers of detectors just below the surface. The Eiffel Tower is depicted, bottom right, to show the detector's size

WHAT ARE NEUTRINOS - AND WHY ARE WE LOOKING FOR THEM?

Very little is known about neutrinos, but they are believed to carry information about the birth of our galaxy and the mystery of black holes.

Physicists think that they are born when violent cosmic events, such as colliding galaxies or distant black holes, occur at the very edges of the universe.
Able to travel billions of light years through space without being absorbed or deflected either by magnetic fields or by atoms, these mysterious high-energy particles could provide answers to some of the most fundamental questions about the universe.

Designed to observe neutrinos, which are emitted by exploding stars and move close to the speed of light, the telescope is attracting new attention in the wake of last week's discovery of a particle that appears to be the Higgs boson - a basic building block of the universe.
‘You hold up your finger and a hundred billion neutrinos pass through it every second from the sun,’ said Jenni Adams, a physicist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, who works on IceCube.
IceCube is essentially a string of light detectors buried in the ice through hot water drilling. When neutrinos, which are everywhere, interact in the ice, they produce charged particles that then create light, which can be detected.
The ice acts as a net that isolates the neutrinos, making them easier to observe. It also protects the telescope from potentially damaging radiation.
‘If a supernova goes off in our galaxy now, we can detect hundreds of neutrinos with IceCube,’ Adams told reporters at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Melbourne.
‘We won't be able to see them individually, but the whole detector will just light up like a massive fireworks display.’

Artist's impression of a 'Cerenkov light cone' passing through the IceCube telescope, left. IceCube will encompass AMANDA (yellow cylinder), right, a smaller neutrino detector. The coloured dots show where the passage of a neutrino has been detected by the modules as it passes through the array

Scientists are attempting to track the particles to discover their points of origin, in the hope that will give clues on what happens in space, particularly in unseen parts of the universe known as dark matter.
Before IceCube was completed in 2010, scientists had observed just 14 neutrinos. With the huge new instrument, paired with another telescope in the Mediterranean, hundreds of neutrinos have been detected.
So far, all of those have been created in the earth's atmosphere, but IceCube scientists hope to eventually detect those from space.
‘Neutrinos ... will point back to where they came from,’ Adams said.

Read more: DAILY MAIL

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