A joint research with the Nature Nanotechnology team at Stanford University in the USA claim to have created a tiny device that uses the sun’s power to purify water, in just 20 minutes! That is ground breaking technology!
The Tiny Miracle (Jin Xie/Stanford University)
When in water, this device absorbs sunlight in the way most solar devices do not, efficiently, and uses this to cause a reaction that kills bacteria. The test killed off 99.9% of the bacteria in 20 minutes! If you want to read more, please click here!
Boy is this good news for many parts of this blue globe we live in. 1.9 billion people, that is almost a third of the world, are said to drink water that is faecally contaminated according to WHO! Needless to say this technology will be seeing the light of day soon!
Do you remember the polygraph? I am sure you have seen it in movies. You know the machine they hook the accused to test if they are lying or not? Yes, that one! It is a not fiction, it is a real machine, and it works most times. Now. have you ever wondered how it worked? So with all the connections to skin, chest and fingertips, it detects your pulse, breathing, e.t.c. Apparently if you lie, these readings change and the polygraph knows you are lying!
Now a research team at the prestigious MIT in the USA have created another machine that can read your vitals without the need for wires. How does the machine do this? It bounces wireless radio signals off your body and reads them many times and continuously. It is claimed it can then use this information to accurately deduce your mood. It can do this because as humans, our vitals often translate to how we feel. E.g When you are aroused or scared your heartbeat increases rapidly. You can read the technical babble here.
Much like the polygraph though, it can be easily fooled. If you are very good at keeping your body calm when scared or aroused, then the machine won’t be able to tell! But like any great innovation, we at The Computer Potato think this technology has a lot of potential application and we wish to see more of its use in the nearest future! Think robots!
Unless you are disconnected from the entire earth due to some natural disaster that placed you on the moon itself, you would have heard cars are becoming autonomous, slowly but surely! Autonomous? That just means they can drive themselves in everyday language, nothing sinister.
How do they do this? They use cameras as eyes, sensors as skin to know if an object is near, GPS as direction, and a computer (processor) – that ties all these parts together – as brain. Now this is the tricky part. A car like that needs a computer fast enough to handle all the data it gets from all these different components in realtime, in other to be able to drive safely to its destination: a super computer with artificial intelligence!
As always with new technology nowadays, tech giants are vying doggedly to get a piece of the action, and who is to blame them? Autonomous cars are looking, everyday, more like they are the future even if they don’t stick around for long. So when Nvidia – a computer graphics processor giant- showcased their latest endeavour in Jan 2016, it sent a shock round the information technology world. Meet the Nvidia Drive PX 2!
Courtesy of www.engadget.com
Why is it news worthy you might say, it’s because of its speed. It can deal with 24 trillion computer instructions in a second. In everyday language, it is 150 times faster than your MACbook Pro or I7 Windows computer! So yeah, it is fast, for now! Not only is it a supercomputer in speed, it also runs on artificial intelligence, meaning it learns!
Even though the Drive PX 2 is not the fastest processor in the world, it is one of those that are solely made for self driving cars, and within a year, we are sure to see faster processors for this very purpose. Another glimpse into our futures!
