Easy ways to keep your phone going longer – a light-hearted look at options to ensure the battery lasts longer while out and about. 1. Turn down the screen brightness Okay, so you might struggle to see your phone screen on a bright day – but you could try shielding it with your hand. And it could help your phone battery last that crucial little bit longer. You could also try making your screen timeout – when the display goes dark…
Eat your heart out Captain Kirk – tractor beam that uses SOUND can hold, move and even rotate objects without physical contact. We’ve all seen tractor beams in science fiction films from Star Trek to Star Wars to pull in smaller ships, but now a UK based team has developed an actual tractor beam that works. A sonic tractor beam Researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Sussex, in collaboration with Ultrahaptics, put together 64 miniature loudspeakers to create high-pitch…
Seriously good news! Scientists develop method that could lead to computers guaranteed never to lose your data. Picture the scene, you’ve spent hours working on an important project – and then boom, crash the whole lot’s gone. Well, researchers at the world famous MIT research centre in the US have found a way for this to never happen again. It’s all to do with something called ‘formal verification’. It’s complicated Nickolai Zeldovich, a principal investigator at MIT’s Computer Science and…
Speculation is rife that the top Apple Watch Edition could sell for more than £10,000. One online commentator has suggested the most expensive Edition models could reach into the $20,000 (around £13,000) bracket, while others have suggested the starting price for an Apple Watch made with gold will start at around $5,000 (more than £3,000). There have also been reports that Apple is installing safes inside its shops to keep its most expensive products under lock and key. Entry model cost For those with…
Stratospheric demand for storage risks capacity gap, says leading provider of hard drives. Mark Whitby, senior vice president of branded products at Seagate, says a storage capacity gap could emerge by 2020 when the world will be producing something like 44 zettabytes of data annually. The zettabyte era – how much data is that? To get just one zettabyte of data you would have to fill the storage capacity of 34,359,738,368 smartphones with 32GB (gigabytes) of memory each. So, 44 zettabytes requires…
Drivers in the US could soon be using a mobile app as their official driver’s licence, it has been reported. Transport officials in the American state of Iowa have revealed that the app will be available in 2015 at no extra cost. The digital licence will be accepted by Iowa law enforcement officials during traffic stops and by security officers screening travellers at the state’s airports, reported the Des Moines Reporter newspaper website. Motorists will be able to stick with…
Scientists have reportedly found a way to create a DVD-sized disc that can hold 1,000 terabytes of data – enough to store 40,000 HD movies. It’s all to do with using lasers in a way akin to a fine tipped pen rather than a felt-tip pen – the old way – to write information to the disc, apparently. Two lasers have been used to massively increase the storage capacity of a DVD from 4.7 gigabytes. One beam partially blocks the light…
The lead singer of Irish rock band U2 has apologised after offering the band’s new album for free to iTunes customers worldwide – following a backlash, with people complaining they never asked for it. Bono said he was sorry in a video, which featured the band answering questions from fans on Facebook, after being asked to never release an album on iTunes that automatically downloads to people’s playlists ever again because “it’s really rude”. “Oops,” said Bono. “I’m sorry about that. “I…
Microsoft has developed the RoomAlive prototype that creates an augmented reality in a room – and has been compared to Star Trek’s famous holodeck. Imagine if you could turn your front room into something else or another place – and that you could interact with its inhabitants and immerse yourself in that environment? Microsoft has unveiled a system that could just be a step towards turning that into a reality. The RoomAlive project uses projectors, depth cameras and a computer to create an…
How’s this for an idea? The city of Chongqing in China has created separate pedestrian lanes for mobile phone users – handy given people’s adherence to their devices. We’ve all seen people looking at their mobile phones or texting, heads down as they walk along – risking the potential of bumping into other people. The photo above was tweeted by CCTVNews, the English news channel of China Central Television (CCTV) and shows a lane in operation. And as our mobile devices become more and…
