Daily Tech News

LifeStraw Personal Water Filter LifeStraw is the award-winning personal water filter, designed to provide you with safe, clean drinking water in any situation. The ideal water filter for hiking & camping, travel, emergency preparedness & survival, LifeStraw makes contaminated or suspect water safe to drink. LifeStraw Buy One, Give One:  for every LifeStraw water filter sold, a child in Africa receives clean water for an entire school year The LifeStraw personal water filter, a "Best Invention of the Year" (Time magazine) winner, enables users to drink water safely from contaminated water sources. LifeStraw is ideal for homeowners during emergencies such as local flooding which can contaminate drinking water supplies. LifeStraw is also ideal for campers and hikers who may be drinking from rivers or lakes and are unsure of the water safety. Because LifeStraw is lightweight and compact, it is also great for travelers who do not want to rely on the quality of local w

Just strap a projector to your ceiling and you're good to go. Augmented reality tech like Microsoft's Hololens and  the upcoming Magic Leap  are undeniably cool, but they do have a downside. You have to wear some chunky thing on your face to use them. That's a problem it looks like Amazon might be out to solve. The web-commerce giant just patented two different technologies that could help bring holograms to the living room with out the cumbersome specs. The first, a patent for " object tracking in a 3-dimensional environment ," is all about being able to track movement in a room. Unlike Microsoft's Kinect, which sits atop a TV and just looks forward, the system Amazon outlines would be able to track the movement of a user's hands throughout an entire room with as little as one ceiling mounted node. Meanwhile, a patent for a " reflector-based depth mapping of a scene ," pairs a single ceiling-mounted projector with a depth-sensi

Mid-air holograms that respond to human touch Researchers from Tsukuba University in Japan have created holograms that respond to human touch. Involving femtosecond lasers, which can stimulate physical matter to emit light in 3D form, the research could eventually lead to the creation of holograms that humans are able to interact with. The computer-generated holograms, called Fairy Lights (some are shaped like multicolored pixies), are quite small, occupying a maximum volume of 1 cm 3 , but could be scaled up using larger optical devices. By touching the mid-air light displays with a finger, a holographic heart breaks in half and returns to whole when the finger is removed, the word "Love" turns to "Hate" with a touch, and a floating box can be "checked" with a finger. Through a series of lenses and mirrors, the researchers followed two methods of rendering their mid-air graphics made up of plasma voxels: through spatial light modulation, and by the

It’s not Black Friday yet, but if you’re in the market for a dirt-cheap smartphone you don’t have to wait. Walmart’s got a contract-free, dual-core Android that will only set you back $9.82. For ten bucks , you get a phone with a 3.8-inch touchscreen, a dual-core processor clocked at 1.2GHz, WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0 support, and a 3-megapixel rear camera. The same phone would cost you $60 over at Best Buy right now, so it’s a pretty impressive deal. That probably accounts for why it is currently out of stock. Vice, however, thinks that it’s “perhaps even more impressive” that the $10 LG phone has better specs that the original iPhone, but let’s think about that for a moment. The reality is that they’re cramming hardware that’s  vastly superior  to the iPhone’s (single-core 411Mhz chip, 128MB of RAM) into  smartwatches  these days. The fact that even a humble $10 phone is superior to a device that went on sale the year President Obama was elected really shouldn’t come as a surprise

Lazy eye, or amblyopia, is a reasonably common disorder affecting around  two or three percent of children  that can lead to serious loss of vision in the long term. The two most common methods of early treatment are eye patches and eye drops, but both require a disciplined approach and are uncomfortable in their own ways. Researchers have now developed electronic glasses that can be programmed to automatically build the brain's reliance on the weaker eye, with the initial trials suggesting they might be as effective as traditional methods of treatment. Amblyopia comes about when the nerve pathways between the brain and eye don't develop as normal in early childhood, leading the sufferer to favor one eye over the other. Over time, the weaker eye will start to wander and the brain can even eventually come to ignore its signals completely. It is important to treat the condition early while the eyes and brain are still developing, so as to limit the risk of blindness la

New desalination technique pushes salt to one side with shock waves As access to clean water continues to be an issue throughout the developing world, there's an increased demand for easier ways to turn contaminated and salty water into something you can drink. Researchers at MIT may have found a solution using a method they are calling shock electrodialysis. It uses electric shock waves to separate contaminated or salty water into two separate streams, with a natural barrier between each one. The method developed at MIT is unlike most traditional desalination systems that either use some type of membrane less filter that can become clogged over time, or boiling methods that require extensive amounts of energy to produce clean water. The MIT process sends water through an inexpensive porous material made of tiny glass particles, and across membranes or electrodes sandwiched on each side. As electricity is applied to the system, the salty water divides into zones of d

Fans of  The Simpsons  may recall Lisa using genetic engineering to create a super tomato that she hoped would cure world hunger. Now researchers at Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) have come close to the real thing, not through genetic engineering, but with the use of nanoparticles. Although the individual fruit aren't as large as Lisa's creation, the team's approach has resulted in tomato plants that produced almost 82 percent more fruit by weight, with the fruit also boasting higher antioxidant content. The new technique developed by Ramesh Raliya, PhD and Pratim Biswas, PhD, both at WUSTL's School of Engineering & Applied Science, involves the use of zinc oxide and titanium dioxide nanoparticles to boost the tomato plant's ability to absorb light and minerals. The titanium oxide increases chlorophyll content in the plant's leaves to improve photosynthesis, while zinc is an essential nutrient that also helps the function of enzymes within th

An interactive swarm of flying 3D pixels (voxels) developed at Queen's University's Human Media Lab is set to revolutionize the way people interact with virtual reality. The system, called BitDrones, allows users to explore virtual 3D information by interacting with physical self-levit Queen's professor Roel Vertegaal and his students are unveiling the BitDrones system on Monday, Nov. 9 at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Charlotte, North Carolina. BitDrones is the first step towards creating interactive self-levitating programmable matter -- materials capable of changing their 3D shape in a programmable fashion -- using swarms of nano quadcopters. The work highlights many possible applications for the new technology, including real-reality 3D modeling, gaming, molecular modeling, medical imaging, robotics and online information visualization. "BitDrones brings flying programmable matter, such as featured in the futuristic Disn

Researchers from the  University of Alexandria  have developed a cheaper, simpler and potentially cleaner way to turn seawater into drinking water than conventional methods. This could have a huge impact on rural areas of the Middle East and North Africa, where access to clean water is a pressing issue if social stability and economic development is to improve. Right now, desalinating seawater is the only viable way to provide water to growing populations, and large desalination plants are now a fact of life in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries. Most of these plants rely on a multi-step process based on reverse osmosis, which requires expensive infrastructure and large amounts of electricity. These plants release large quantities of highly concentrated salt water and other pollutants back into the seas and oceans as part of the desalination process, creating problems for marine environments. That’s why the race is on to find a cheaper, cleaner and more energy-efficient way o

Researchers in Norway have succeeded in getting bacteria to power a fuel cell. The "fuel" used is wastewater, and the products of the process are purified water droplets and electricity. This is an environmentally-friendly process for the purification of water derived from industrial processes and suchlike. It also generates small amounts of electricity -- in practice enough to drive a small fan, a sensor or a light-emitting diode. In the future, the researchers hope to scale up this energy generation to enable the same energy to be used to power the water purification process , which commonly consists of many stages, often involving mechanical and energy-demanding decontamination steps at its outset. Nature's own generator The biological fuel cell is powered by entirely natural processes -- with the help of living microorganisms. "In simple terms, this type of fuel cell works because the bacteria consume the waste materials found in the water," explains SINTEF

Water is an essential to any human being on this planet, while having clean water is unfortunately not something we all have access to. But a new invention developed by a team of researchers at Alexandria University in Egypt could change that. The technology uses a desalination technique called pervaporation. Salt is removed from sea water using specifically designed synthetic membranes which filter out large salt particles and impurities so they can be evaporated away. The remaining salt is heated, vapourised, and condensed back into clean water.  In developing countries, spending time and money on water filtration is important, but there aren’t always enough resources to properly explore the field. So when it comes to water cleaning in those countries, it’s important for technology to be affordable and easily replicable. Thankfully, the membranes involved in this new invention can be made in any lab using cheap materials that are available locally. More importantly, the vaporisation

It's the kind of simple yet brilliant invention that would have the tycoons of Dragons' Den salivating with excitement. Not only is the fridge solar powered, it can also be built from household materials  -  making it ideal for the Third World. Emily Cummins, 21, came up with the idea while working on a school project in her grandfather's potting shed. The fridge is now improving the lives of thousands of poverty-stricken Africans. Emily Cummins holds the portable eco-fridge. It can keep perishable goods, such as milk or meat, cool for days at a temperature of around 6C And Miss Cummins hopes to patent a more sophisticated portable model for use in transporting medical supplies around hot countries. From the age of four, when she was given a hammer as a gift, Miss Cummins has spent much of her spare time making things out of ordinary materials. She has won awards for a toothpaste squeezer for arthritis sufferers and for a water-carrying device, again for Third World

The U.S. Air Force is offering $2 million to whoever can design a new and improved engine to power its airplanes. The competition, known as the Air Force Prize, is open to American citizens and permanent U.S. residents age 18 and older, as well as corporations and research institutions in the United States. The goal of the contest is to speed up the development of a lightweight, fuel-efficient turbine engine, or jet engine, to power the aircraft of the future. This is the first time the Air Force, or any other branch of the U.S. military, is offering a prize to stir up technological innovation among the general public, said Lt. Col. Aaron Tucker, deputy chief of the turbine engine division at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). [Supersonic! The 10 Fastest Military Airplanes] "The secretary of the Air Force is really looking for innovative ways to acquire systems and technology," Tucker told Live Science. Even though the AFRL is chock-full of "really smart p