In the USA schools chalkboards are being replaced to interactive, giant, touch-sensitive computer screen, that allow students and teachers to share assignments, surf the web and edit video using their fingers as pens, says Wired News. Dust and painful sound of fingernails scratching on a chalkboard are in the past.

Students used the board to demonstrate solutions to math problems, they children draw on the board with their fingertips and explain to the class how they came up with their answers.

“It really helps with motivation,” said Eliza Bang, the class teacher. “As a platform for encouraging group work, it’s amazing.”

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Now I’ll tell You about what we touch everyday — door locks and handles. I don’t like doors with electricity connected, but I liked these products:

Swedish designers offer the new version of door handle with the indicator “vacant/occupied”. As you see, indicator is a handle itself — it shines by green/red light respectively. There are versions with the connection to the electricity and with the small batteries.

BrightHandle.com. Found here.

Now I’ll show You another interesting thing. Now You can secure your home with the latest in technology and at the same time eliminate the headache of shared or lost keys. BioCert Guardian is a fingerprint biometric door lock.

You can read more at biometricdoorlock.com.

Here is the new portion of the curious devices, intended to tell the current time . Now You decide how good they are.

Hour Glass Clock

Mechanical clocks in the form of hourglasses – two revolving cones with the numbers. Lower one is for hours, upper – for minutes. Read the rest of this entry »

This is not an illusion and not a fake. The Tango is a carbon fibre, two seater electric commuter vehicle that will reach 60mph in four seconds and 150 mph in a few seconds more – a radical, pollution-free solution to the problem of transport in congested urban environments. Price for the car will be about $20,000. Tango batteries can be quick-chargered to 80% capacity in around 10 minutes that gives approximately 50 additional miles of range. Standard charge time is about 3 hours.

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A new type of battery based on the radioactive decay of nuclear material is 10 times more powerful than similar prototypes and should last 10-12 years without a charge, scientists announced rewcently.

The longevity would make the battery ideal for use in pacemakers or other surgically implanted devices, developers say, or it might power spacecraft or deep-sea probes.

The technology is called betavoltaics. It uses a silicon wafer to capture electrons emitted by a radioactive gas, such as tritium. It is similar to the mechanics of converting sunlight into electricity in a solar panel.

Until now, betavoltaics has been unable to match solar-cell efficiency. The reason is simple: When the gas decays, its electrons shoot out in all directions. Many of them are lost.

Now the flat silicon surface, where the electrons are captured and converted to a current, was turned it into a three-dimensional surface by adding deep pits. Each pit is about one micron wide. That’s four ten-thousandths of an inch. They’re more than 40 microns deep.

Tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen. It is safe and can be implanted in the body. Tritium emits only low energy particles that can be shielded by very thin materials, such as a sheet of paper, so hermetically-sealed, metallic battery case will encapsulate the entire radioactive energy source.

Don’t expect anything on the store shelves for at least 2-5 years, this is a period for technology to be adopted.

Based on LiveScience article.

Konarka Technologies will supply the US Army with flexible plastic sheeting that converts light into energy — technology that could someday find its way into the casing of laptops or even clothing to power portable devices. The US Army signed a $1.6 million contract to buy flexible solar cells for mobile troops.

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Motorola Labs unveiled a working 5-inch color video display prototype based on proprietary Carbon Nanotube (CNT) technology – a breakthrough technique that could create large, flat panel displays with superior quality, longer lifetimes and lower costs than current offerings. Optimized for a large screen High Definition Television ( HDTV ) that is less than 1-inch thick, this first-of-its kind NED 5-inch prototype harnesses the power of CNTs to fundamentally change the design and fabrication of flat panel displays.

“Motorola’s NED technology is demonstrating full color video with good response time,” said Barry Young, VP and CFO of DisplaySearch, a leading flat panel display market research and consulting company. “And according to a detailed cost model analysis conducted by our firm, we estimate the manufactured cost for a 40-inch NED panel could be under $400.”

Motorola’s industry-first working prototype demonstrates:

• Operational full color 5″ video section of a 1280 x 720, 16:9, 42-inch HDTV
• High quality brightness
• Bright, vivid colors using standard Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) TV phosphors
• Display panel thickness of 3.3 millimeters (about 1/8th of an inch)
• Low cost display drive electronics (similar to LCD, much lower than Plasma)
• Display characteristics meet or exceed CRTs, such as fast response time, wide viewing angle, wide operation temperature

Read Motorola’s press release

India will launch the world’s first stereographic mapping satellite into orbit. The most innovative feature of the 1.6-tonne Cartosat-1 is its pair of cameras, which will give stereo images of the earth’s surface that can distinguish features down to 2.5 metres across. They will directly generate three-dimensional maps that have until now been achievable only indirectly, by combining data from a large number of satellite passes over the same place. “Such a stereographic imaging system does not exist in the civil sector anywhere else,” says Mr Nair, chairman of the Bangalore-based Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro).

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