When Indonesian President Widodo played zero-gravity VR ping pong with Mark Zuckerberg!

 

Zuckerberg took to social network site to express his happiness over his meeting with the President.

Interestingly, this time the President also played zero-gravity ping pong in virtual reality with Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg said they had a good conversation about continuing to work together to increase connectivity and extend the opportunities of the internet to everyone in Indonesia.

World's first flexible smartphone that bends it like Beckham!

 

Researchers at Queen's University's Human Media Lab developed ReFlex - a full-colour and high-resolution smartphone that combines multi-touch with bend input allowing users to experience physical tactile feedback when interacting with their apps through bend gestures.

"This represents a completely new way of physical interaction with flexible smartphones," Roel Vertegaal, director of the Human Media Lab at Queen's University, said.

"When this smartphone is bent down on the right, pages flip through the fingers from right to left, just like they would in a book. More extreme bends speed up the page flips," Vertegaal explained, adding: "Users can feel the sensation of the page moving through their fingertips through a detailed vibration of the phone."

Published on EurekAlert.com, the report said the bend sensors are placed on the back of the display to sense the force with which a user bends the screen. The amount of bend is read by the sensors and is made available to apps for use as input.

ReFlex has a high definition LG Display Flexible OLED touch screen and is powered by an Android 4.4 (KitKat) with boards mounted to the sides of the display.

The smartphone also features a voice coil that allows the phone to simulate forces and friction through highly detailed vibrations of the display.

"This allows for the most accurate physical simulation of interacting with virtual data possible on a smartphone today," Vertegaal noted.

Google pays a “doodle” tribute to stethoscope inventor René Laennec on his 235th birth anniversary!

Internet giant Google has, in its trademark doodle style, paid a 'stethoscopic' tribute to Laennec. The doodle shows Laennec in black and white holding his prized invention to his ear, while a doctor stands next to him holding a modern-day version of the stethoscope.

Born on this day in 1781 in Quimper (Brittany), Laennec invented the medical tool in 1816, while working at the Hôpital Necker and pioneered its use in diagnosing various chest conditions.

Apart from the stethoscope being his biggest invention, other contributions, according to Wikipedia, included the development of the understanding of peritonitis and cirrhosis. Although the disease of cirrhosis was known, Laennec gave cirrhosis its name, using the Greek word (kirrhos, tawny) that referred to the tawny, yellow nodules characteristic of the disease.

He coined the term melanoma and described metastases of melanoma to the lungs. In 1804, while still a medical student, he was the first person to lecture on melanoma.

Laennec died at a young age of 45 in 1826, 10 years after his invention, due to tubercolosis. 

New app turns smartphones into earthquake detectors

The android app, which can be downloaded from Google Play Store, runs in the background with little power, so that a phone's onboard accelerometers can record local shaking any time of the day or night.

For now, the app only collects information from the accelerometers, analyses it and, if it fits the vibrational profile of a quake, relays it and the phone's GPS coordinates to the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, for analysis.

However, once enough people are using it, the seismologists plan to use the data to warn people miles from ground zero that shaking is rumbling their way.

"MyShake cannot replace traditional seismic networks like those run by the US Geological Survey, UC Berkeley, the University of Washington and Caltech, but we think MyShake can make earthquake early warning faster and more accurate in areas that have a traditional seismic network, and can provide life-saving early warning in countries that have no seismic network," said the leader of the app project Richard Allen from the University of California, Berkeley.

A crowd-sourced seismic network may be the only option today for many earthquake-prone developing countries, such as Nepal or Peru, that have a sparse or no ground-based seismic network or early warning system, but do have millions of smartphone users.

"In my opinion, this is cutting-edge research that will transform seismology," UC Berkeley graduate student Qingkai Kong, who developed the algorithm at the heart of the app, said.

Smartphones can easily measure movement caused by a quake because they have three built-in accelerometers designed to sense the orientation of the phone for display or gaming.

While constantly improving in sensitivity for the benefit of gamers, however, smartphone accelerometers are far less sensitive than in-ground seismometers.

But they are sensitive enough to record earthquakes above a magnitude 5 -- the ones that do damage -- within 10 kilometres.

And what these accelerometers lack in sensitivity, they make up for in ubiquity. There are an estimated one billion smartphones worldwide, the researchers said.

In a paper published in the journal Science Advances, the researchers described the algorithm in the mobile app that analyses a phone's accelerometer data and distinguishes earthquake shaking from normal vibrations, such as walking, dancing or dropping the phone.

In simulated tests, the algorithm that the researchers developed successfully distinguished quakes from non-quakes 93 percent of the time. 

100-million-year-old amber preserved oldest animal societies

This proves that advanced sociality in ants and termites was present tens of millions of years earlier than indicated by the previous fossil record, according to researchers.

Advanced sociality, or eusociality, a hallmark of which is reproductive specialisation into worker and queen castes, is essentially a phenomenon of the group of invertebrates known as arthropods.

Queens and reproductive males take the roles as the sole reproducers while the soldiers and workers defend and care for the colony.

Eusociality occurs in a range of arthropods, from some shrimp, beetles, and aphids, to various wasps, though the phenomenon is nowhere more pronounced than in honey bees, ants, and termites.

Among vertebrates, eusociality is found in just two species of African mole rats.

"Ecologically, advanced sociality is one of the most important adaptive features for animals," said Dave Grimaldi from the American Museum of Natural History.

"All ants and termites are social, and they are ubiquitous across terrestrial landscapes, with thousands of described species and probably even more that we have not yet found," said Grimaldi.

Eusociality is thought to have appeared first in termites in the Late Jurassic, about 150-160 million years ago.

However, before the new work, the earliest termites ever found that could definitively be tied to a caste system were from the Miocene, a mere 20 to 17 million years ago.

A similar story held true for ants, whose evolutionary history with eusociality was also thought to be long, but only weakly supported by the fossil record. 

New filter may enhance lowlight smartphone photography

Mumbai: A new type of color filter has been developed that might soon allow smartphones to take good quality low-light images.

Developed by Rajesh Menon, an Indian origin computer engineer at the University of Utah, the filter is speculated to let in more light than conventional filters, resulting in brighter and sharper images with better color reproduction.

Menon has created a transparent diffractive-filter array, which lets in three times more light than its Bayer alternatives. The transparent filer is just about a micron thick and is made of a wafer of glass with accurately designed minute ridges fixed on one side.

This design helps in bending light in certain directions as it passes, creating a series of at least 25 new color patterns. Consequently, abundant light enters the sensor, allowing the filter to determine more color information. This process helps in gaining brighter images with correct color illustration and no grains.

Even though smartphones are capable of offering brilliant image detailing during the daytime, lowlight photography continues to be the biggest predicament. 

Menon has developed this filter specifically for smartphones to enhance low light image quality and is currently negotiating with several large electronics and camera companies to incorporate this technology.He believes that the first commercial product to use this filter could be out in less than three years.