PREFAB Unlock Tool:- Master key for all software

 Imagine a  computer program that would help anyone to edit inaccessible software like Microsoft Word and Apple iTunes, and even add customized features to them.

It is made possible by Researchers at the University of Washington.
The software would also help the user to move program from computer screens to mobile devices, which do not have a standard operating system.
It modifies pixels on a computer screen to change the behaviour of a program, such as Microsoft Word or Apple iTunes. The display is overridden and users are able to customize how they interact with the program.


This tool is called 'Prefab' .
This will allow users to customize their desktop in the same way people have been able to customize web pages. The research is outlined in the paper "Prefab: Implementing Advanced Behaviours Using Pixel-Based Reverse Engineering of Interface Structure.


Prefab, allows people to personalise programs based on their needs, according to the report that appeared online in Physorg.com. Prefab takes advantage of the fact that almost all displays are made from prefabricated blocks of code such as buttons, sliders, check boxes and drop-down menus. The tool looks for those blocks as many as 20 times per second and alters their behaviour. It unlocks previously inaccessible interfaces and allows people to add the same usability tool to all the applications they run on their desktop.

It can also produce more advanced effects like creating multiple previews of a single image in Photoshop. For this, Prefab moves the sliders to different points, captures the output and then displays all of them on a single screen.
This could save time by showing a range of effects the user frequently adjusts.

The software would be demonstrated in Atlanta at the Association for Computing Machinery's Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 

Finger powered mobile phone battery charger

A mobile battery that could be charged by spinning it around your fingers .
The concept design promises quick charging in places where a wall socket is not available to charge your mobile phone. Based on the specs presented, it requires you to rotate the device approximately 130 times to get enough power to make a call for about 2 minutes.
At standby, the juice generated from revolving the battery could last for around 25 minutes.

Although there's a little flaw in the calculations of power generated, this finger powered

mobile phone battery charger is a possible green solution to minimize usage of electricity and could revolutionize mobile phones and other similar gadgets that requires battery for power.

Lenovo unveils G455, G555 notebooks

Bangalore: Lenovo has launched the G455 and G555 notebooks based on the AMD platform. Designed for mainstream consumers, they support up to the latest AMD Turion and Athlon processors and ATI graphics. These notebooks come with Lenovo applications such as OneKey Rescue System and Energy Management.

The Lenovo G445 and G555 notebooks include 16:9 widescreen High-Definition displays. Users can enjoy rich digital content with High Definition video and DirectX 10 for running Windows 7 as advanced graphics features such as Aero Peek and Aero Flip. These notebooks boast an ergonomic keyboard designed for rigidity and support to improve typing accuracy and key responsiveness.

Both the G455 and G555 come with Lenovo Energy Management 5.0 which lets users select from several energy-saving modes to help decrease energy consumption and extend battery life. Energy Management 5.0 also protects the long-term durability of the battery by preventing unnecessary recharges. These notebooks also feature OneKey Rescue System, a one-touch backup, repair and recovery tool, as well as VeriFace facial recognition, which give users a fun and interactive way to log on to the PC. The Lenovo G455 and G555 notebooks start at $449 and will be available in the U.S. beginning in March.

3-D television expected to come to homes in 2010

Three-dimensional images are expected jump out of movie theaters and into living rooms by next year.
Sony and Panasonic say they will release home 3-D television systems in 2010; Mitsubishi and JVC are reported to be working on similar products.

TV finally becomes real in three dimensions,You're in it. It's the next frontier.
  ESPN is test-recording some sporting events in 3-D, using cameras with two sets of lenses, which would make football players appear to jump out of home television screens during live 3-D broadcasts.

And, although television makers haven't released specifics, the price of 3-D TV -- which requires a new television, broadcasting content and 3-D glasses -- is not expected to be substantially higher than some high-definition televisions on the market now.
Still, there are skeptics who say that 3-D is not ready for prime-time home viewing.

There are concerns that 3-D broadcasts, which require twice the data, will gobble up an unworkable amount of television bandwidth. And some worry that 3-D glasses and graphics won't make a smooth transition to American living rooms.
All 3-D technology relies on the idea that if separate images are presented to the left and right eyes, the human brain will combine them and create the illusion of a third dimension.
TV makers go about this in different ways, though.
Panasonic and Sony, which demonstrated their products for CNN at a recent tech expo in Atlanta, Georgia, use "active glasses" and TVs with high refresh rates to achieve the effect.
Two images, one for the right eye and one for the left eye, alternate quickly on the TV. Shutters on the 3-D glasses swap the viewer's vision from right eye to left eye at the same rate: 120 hertz, or 240 hertz for the images together. The TV connects with the glasses through a sensor that's placed between the lenses on the glasses.
The effect moves so quickly that it tricks the brain into merging the images and creates the perspective needed to see images in 3-D, he said.
Glance away from the TV, though, and you can see the lenses opening and closing, which irritates some people.
Those who saw the technology at the recent Custom Electronic Design and Installation Association Expo seemed wowed by Panasonic's 3-D footage of Olympic events and skiers who appeared to send snow flying into the laps of the audience.
These next-generation televisions would be able to play shows in 2-D or 3-D. They also would be able to show video games in 3-D, which Sony demonstrated at the expo in Atlanta.
JVC's version uses polarized glasses to separate the right-eye image from the left-eye image and is more pleasing to the eye, he said.
Aside from the kooky glasses, people who want to watch television that jumps off the screen will need something to watch. The process of making live television work in 3-D probably would involve a major conversion of broadcast equipment.
Also, Blu-ray is said to be working on a product that would play three-dimensional movies at home.
Panasonic and Sony said they're still working out some kinks in their 3-D entertainment systems. The TV makers hope to ride the wave of popularity of improved stereoscopic 3-D movies, such as recent hit "Up," that are being shown in theaters.

India developing e-dog to sniff out explosives

Robots will soon find a place at homes, according to robotics engineer Prahlad Vadakeppat.Vadakeppat who, along with his students,is building these robots says that a host of robots would soon be available at home, to care for the elderly, and to assist doctors in hospitals and clinics
Read on:-
http://www.indiaedunews.net/IIT/India_developing_e-dog_to_sniff_out_explosives_10145/

Copy your brain on computers!! Wondering how??

Thiruvananthapuram: Now, Swiss scientists and PIT Solution, a little-heard of IT startup in Technopark in Kerala will be working on the Blue Brain Project, the world's first comprehensive attempt to reverse-engineer the mammalian brain, reports Financial Express.
The $3 billion project is expected to be completed by 2018, said Brain Mind Institute of Swiss Federal Institute Director Henry Markram to Financial Express. The project is billed as an attempt to build a computerized copy of a brain - starting with a rat's brain, and then progressing to a human brain-inside one of the world's most powerful computers. It is an international project, propelled by Swiss Federal Institute, and involves several countries and ethics monitoring by UN bodies. India is yet to be part of the project

The immediate purpose is to understand brain function and dysfunction through detailed simulations. "The study of rhodent brain has given us a template to build on. This would help in unraveling human brain," says Markram. "The whole idea is that mental illness, memory and perception triggered by neurons and electric signals could be soon treated with a supercomputer that models all the 1,000,000 million synapses of brain."

The key finding is that irrespective of gender and race, human brains are basically identical. "We will be able to map the differentiations by nuancing the patterns later. The exciting part is not how different we are but how same we all are," says Markram.

Intel and Micron to launch 25nm flash memory chips

angalore: To give the companies a significant cost advantage over rivals, Intel and Micron are all set to launch a new 25-nanometer chips today via their IM Flash Technologies joint venture. This is likely to be the first commercial chip products made using advanced 25nm manufacturing technology, reports IDG News Service.

An Intel official said that the new chips are aimed at smartphones, solid-state drives (SSDs), and portable media players such as iPods. "We are currently sampling it with production expected in the second quarter," said Intel said via e-mail.
Samsung Electronics, one of the world's largest producer of flash memory, is starting work on 30nm technology this year and plans to use it in most production lines by the end of 2010.

The demand for smaller cheap increased as developing smaller chip manufacturing technology is crucial to meeting user demand for small devices that can perform many functions, such as smartphones with built-in music players, cameras and computers. Smaller etching technologies also enable companies to increase chip speed and reduce power consumption. Advances in chip manufacturing technology also lower costs over time, a major benefit to consumers.

The analysts have predicted that the manufacturing cost of the new 25nm flash chips will be about $0.50 per gigabyte (GB), compared to $1.75 per gigabyte for mainstream 45nm flash. The market price of flash chips has been hovering around $2.00 per gigabyte, Objective Analysis said, and will likely remain there throughout 2010. Currently, both Intel and Micron are offering chip samples to customers so that they can start to plan them into gadget designs.

Clothes as a wearable battery?

Researchers at Stanford University have developed clothing dyed with carbon nanotubes that can store electricity. The BBC reports:

Yi Cui and his team at Stanford University in the US has shown that their "ink" made of carbon nanotubes - cylinders of carbon just billionths of a metre across - can serve as a dye that can simply and cheaply turn a t-shirt into an "e-shirt".

The idea is the same as that outlined in their work with plain paper; the interwoven fibres of fabrics, like those of paper, are particularly suited to absorbing the nanotube ink, maintaining an electrical connection across the whole area of a garment.

Cloth is simply dipped into a batch of nanotube dye, and is then pressed, to thin and even out the coating.

The fabric maintains its properties even as it is stretched or folded. Even rinsing the samples in water and wringing them out does not change their electronic properties.

"Our approach is easy and low-cost while producing great performance," Professor Cui told BBC News.

"Fabrics and paper represent two technologies with a thousand-year-old history. We combined 'high-tech' - nanotechnology - with traditional 'low-tech' to produce new applications."

The next step is to integrate the approach with materials that store more energy, in order to create more useful batteries. By combining the approach with other electronic materials in the ink, the team believes even wearable solar cells are possible.

Puffin: the one-person electric aircraft

NASA engineers have designed an extremely quiet one-person electrically powered aircraft that can hover like a helicopter and fly like a plane. The “Puffin” launches from an upright position with the tail split into four legs that serve as stable landing/take-off gear.




The 3.7-meter-long craft has two wings with a combined wingspan of 4.1 meters. Each wing is has a 2.3 meter wide propeller. Flaps on the wings direct the air from the rotors upward while the aircraft is on the ground, and then direct it downwards allowing the Puffin to rise, and then hover as it leans over to begin its flight with the craft (and pilot) horizontal.

The aircraft was designed by NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, in collaboration with the National Institute of Aerospace, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and M-DOT Aerospace. It is designed to be manufactured from carbon fiber composites and would weigh only around 135 kg, plus 45 kg of rechargeable lithium phosphate batteries.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Watch Jupiter Rotate
Credit: NASA, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Southwest Research Institute

Explanation: What would it be like to coast by Jupiter and watch it rotate? This was just the experience of the New Horizons spacecraft as it approached and flew by Jupiter in 2007. Clicking on the image will bring up a movie of what the robotic spacecraft saw. Visible above in the extensive atmosphere of the Solar System's largest planet are bands and belts of light and dark clouds, as well as giant rotating storm systems seen as ovals. Other movies compiled by New Horizons and other passing spacecraft have captured the clouds swirling and moving relative to themselves. Jupiter has a diameter of about eleven times that of our Earth, and rotates once in about 10 hours. The robotic New Horizons spacecraft, launched four years ago last week, continues to speed toward the outer Solar System and has recently passed the halfway point between Earth and Pluto. New Horizons will reach Pluto in 2015.

The DISGUSTOSCOPE

Amazingly repulsive, yet 3 simple mirrors just create symmetrical optical geometry. A shining jewel ...made of hairy damp pulsing FLESH.