Tag Archives: electron

Pebble Smartstraps Paint the Future of Wearable Tech

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Pebble Time Smartstraps 2

Modular wearables aren’t for everyone, so Pebble has decided to offer its smartwatches in two strikingly different flavors: with and without smartstraps.

The manufacturer of some of the best smartwatches on Earth (or at least that’s what I think, along with the 78,471 backers that pledged money for Pebble’s latest crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter) has recently announced that it would launch smartstraps for Pebble Time, in an attempt to satisfy as many needs as possible.

Modular wearables don’t represent an entirely new concept (as Phoneblocks has toyed with this idea, too, last year, and announced that it would launch the BLOCKS modular smartwatch in 2015), but we have yet to see a mainstream solution. The fact that these smartstraps are coming from Pebble and not from a newcomer should boost the overall confidence of the potential customers. As if Pebble didn’t already have plenty of backers!

“It’s only been a few short weeks since we announced smartstraps, but we’re pretty pumped with how it’s going,” explained Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky in an e-mail to Brian P. Rubin of ReadWrite. “Pebble is working on a few projects internally, but we haven’t made any of them public yet.”

Migicovsky also hinted at some of the possibilities: “Imagine GPS, so you could track your runs and rides without taking your phone along, or a battery strap, increasing Pebble Time’s battery from seven days to…maybe a month? Then there is always the opportunity for hackers and makers to create straps that bring a special, unique sensor or functionality for a particular use case, like a certain health situation.”

Xadow, Seeed’s modular hardware platform, will soon be compatible with Pebble’s smartstrap port, and considering that the platform includes such modules as barometric sensors, NFC chips, and accelerometers, among many others, there’s a lot to be excited about. Spark, a San Francisco Internet-of-Things startup, demonstrated their skills by creating a cellular connectivity smartstrap in an afternoon.

“When Pebble was announcing Time, they talked about their smartstraps, and we were building the Electron at the same time,” stated Zach Supalla, Sparks’ CEO, in an interview with ReadWrite. “We thought, oh, this would be a really cool use case. Let’s hack together a prototype and show how a Pebble could theoretically be not tethered to a phone and connect directly to a cellular network. [...] Really for us, it’s about inspiring people to think about creating products like that themselves. We’d love to see somebody take the Electron, which is our development kit, and use it to create something like that as a commercial product.”

In conclusion, Pebble seems to agree with the “different strokes for different folks” expression, and realizes that the perfect smartwatch is the one you build yourself, with only the modules you need and nothing more. In the future, modularity will (or should) be applied to smartwatches and smartphones, but I’d like to see more devices, and especially wearables, following this trend. After all, some functions available in the smartwatches we can buy now are utterly useless to some, while others think that they could use some more functions besides the basic ones.

Be social! Follow Walyou on Facebook and Twitter, and read more related stories about the BLOCKS modular smartwatch, or the Pebble Time color e-paper smartwatch.

New Research Discovers Secret of Frustrated Magnets

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An experiment conducted by Princeton researchers has revealed an unlikely behavior in a class of materials called frustrated magnets, addressing a long-debated question about the nature of these...

‘Star Trek’ style teleportation might be possible

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The advancement in technology in today’s world is surely quite overwhelming and with every new step towards more advancement we get a little surprised each time. Did you ever think that a seemingly ‘...

Researchers create working quantum bit in silicon, pave way for PCs of the future

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Researchers create working quantum bit in silicon, pave way for PCs of the future

If you've been paying attention, you know the quantum computing revolution is coming -- and so far the world has a mini quantum network, not to mention the $10,000 D-Wave One, to show for it. Researchers from the University of Melbourne and University College, London, have now developed the "first working quantum bit based on a single atom of silicon." By measuring and manipulating the magnetic orientation, or spin, of an electron bound to a phosphorus atom embedded in a silicon chip, the scientists were able to both read and write information, forming a qubit, the basic unit of data for quantum computing.

The team used a silicon transistor, which detects the electron's spin and captures its energy when the spin's direction is "up." Once the electron is in the transistor, scientists can change its spin state any way they choose, effectively "writing" information and giving them control of the quantum bit. The next step will be combing two qubits into a logic step, with the ultimate goal being a full-fledged quantum computer capable of crunching numbers, cracking encryption codes and modeling molecules that would put even supercomputers to shame. But, you know, baby steps.

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Researchers create working quantum bit in silicon, pave way for PCs of the future originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 Sep 2012 00:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink The Register  |  sourceUNSW Australia  | Email this | Comments

IBM creates consistent electron spin inside semiconductors, takes spintronics one twirl closer

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IBM creates consistent electron spin inside of a chip, takes spintronics one twirl closer

A fundamental challenge of developing spintronics, or computing where the rotation of electrons carries instructions and other data rather than the charge, has been getting the electrons to spin for long enough to shuttle data to its destination in the first place. IBM and ETH Zurich claim to be the first achieving that feat by getting the electrons to dance to the same tune. Basing a semiconductor material on gallium arsenide and bringing the temperature to an extremely low -387F, the research duo have created a persistent spin helix that keeps the spin going for the 1.1 nanoseconds it would take a normal 1GHz processor to run through its full cycle, or 30 times longer than before. As impressive as it can be to stretch atomic physics that far, just remember that the theory is some distance from practice: unless you're really keen on running a computer at temperatures just a few hops away from absolute zero, there's work to be done on producing transistors (let alone processors) that safely run in the climate of the family den. Assuming that's within the realm of possibility, though, we could eventually see computers that wring much more performance per watt out of one of the most basic elements of nature.

Continue reading IBM creates consistent electron spin inside semiconductors, takes spintronics one twirl closer

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IBM creates consistent electron spin inside semiconductors, takes spintronics one twirl closer originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Aug 2012 14:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Scientists generate 281-gigapixel cell map using electron microscope

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Scientists generate 281gigapixel cell map using electron microscope

Electron microscopes can produce incredibly detailed and even 3D views of sub-cellular structures, but often at the cost of losing the bigger picture. Researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands, however, have leveraged a technique called virtual nanoscopy that enables researchers to observe the whole of a cell and its intricate details in a single image. With the method, the team stitches together nanometer resolution photographs of what's gone under the scope to create a map with adjustable zoom a la Google Maps. Their study created a 281-gigapixel image (packed with 16 million pixels per inch) of a 1.5-millimeter-long zebrafish embryo. If you'd like to take a gander at the ultra-high resolution fish or read up on the group's findings for yourself, check out the source links below.

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Scientists generate 281-gigapixel cell map using electron microscope originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Aug 2012 04:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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  • Source:The Journal of Cell Biology, (2)
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    Scientists generate 281-gigapixel cell map using electron microscope

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    Scientists generate 281gigapixel cell map using electron microscope

    Electron microscopes can produce incredibly detailed and even 3D views of sub-cellular structures, but often at the cost of losing the bigger picture. Researchers at Liedel University in the Netherlands, however, have leveraged a technique called virtual nanoscopy that enables researchers to observe the whole of a cell and its intricate details in a single image. With the method, the team stitches together nanometer resolution photographs of what's gone under the scope to create a map with adjustable zoom a la Google Maps. Their study created a 281-gigapixel image (packed with 16 million pixels per inch) of a 1.5-millimeter-long zebrafish embryo. If you'd like to take a gander at the ultra-high resolution fish or read up on the group's findings for yourself, check out the source links below.

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    Scientists generate 281-gigapixel cell map using electron microscope originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Aug 2012 04:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

    Permalink PhysOrg  |  sourceThe Journal of Cell Biology, (2)  | Email this | Comments

    Beam-switching endows electron microscopes with 3D, added gross-out

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    3D-scanning-electron-microscope-Japanese-research

    Having haunted our curtailed childhoods with tiny, disgusting horrors, the scanning electron microscope is about to get a new lease of life in 3D. Researchers in Japan have figured out how to deflect the electron beam rapidly to give two slightly shifted views, so real-time 3D images can now been scoped on a monitor without even the need for eye-wear. Current gear can only muster flat images, so it's always been painfully slow for scientists to extract convexity and other details from objects. Though the 3D-version is lower-res than the old way, at least now all those slimy mandibles and egg sacs will be right there in your face. Nice.

    Beam-switching endows electron microscopes with 3D, added gross-out originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 May 2012 17:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

    Permalink The Verge  |  sourceTechOn!  | Email this | Comments

    Flawed diamonds are perfect ingredients for quantum computing, just add time travel

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    Flawed diamonds are perfect ingredients for quantum computing, just add time travel
    Ready to suspend your brain cells in a superposition of disbelief? Good, because the latest news published in Nature is that diamonds are a quantum computer's best friend -- particularly if they're flawed. An international team of scientists sought out sub-atomic impurities in a 1mm-thick fragment of over-priced carbon and used these as qubits to perform successful calculations. A "rogue" nitrogen nucleus provided one qubit, while a free electron became a second. Unlike previous attempts at solid-state quantum computing, this new effort used an extra technique to protect the system from decoherence errors: microwave pulses were fired at the electron qubit to "time-reverse" inconsistencies in its spinning motion. Don't fully get it? Us neither. In any case, it probably won't stop jewellers tut-tutting to themselves.

    Flawed diamonds are perfect ingredients for quantum computing, just add time travel originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 07 Apr 2012 06:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

    Permalink DVice  |  sourceUSC  | Email this | Comments