Engadget

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon have developed a prototype smart headlight which blots out individual drops of rain or snow -- improving vision by up to 90 percent. Made with an off-the-shelf Viewsonic DLP projector, a quad-core Intel Core-i7 PC and a GigE Point Grey Flea3 camera, the Rube Goldberg-esque process starts by first imaging raindrops arriving at the top of its view. After this, the signal goes to a processing unit, which uses a predictive theory developed by the team to guess the drops' path to the road. Finally, the projector -- found in the same place as the camera -- uses a beamsplitter like modern digital 3D rigs. Used in tandem with calculations, it transmits a beam with light voids matching the predicted path. The result? It all stops light from hitting the falling particles, with the cumulative process resulting in the illusion of a nearly precipitation-free road view -- at least in the lab. So far, the whole process takes about a hundredth of a second (13 ms) but scientists said that in an actual car and with many more drops, the speed would have to be about ten times quicker. That would allow 90 percent of the light located 13 feet in front of the headlights to pass through, but even at just triple the speed, it would give drivers a 70 percent better view. To see if this tech might have a snowflake's chance of making it out of the lab, go past the break for all the videos.

Looks like playing games and watching sci-fi flicks didn't do the University of Iowa's Jack Scudder any harm. The NASA-funded researcher has been studying elusive magnetic portals connecting the Earth and Sun, and now he's figured out how to find them. The portals, also known as X-points in Scudder-speak, are born from the mingling of Earth's magnetic field with incoming solar winds. These astral connections create flux transfer events (we've got Doc Brown's attention) -- high-energy particle flows responsible for, among other things, the eerie twinkling of the polar auroras. Off the back of Scudder's data wizardry, NASA's planning the 2014 Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMS), sending four craft into the void to observe the portals. Each spacebot is capable of locating them, and when one is found, inviting the others 'round for a study date. Taking a leaf from Scudder's book, Engadget researchers have tracked down a NASA video detailing the mission, located beyond the fold for your convenience.

Spain might be on Cloud Nine after clinching victory in UEFA's Euro 2012, but a team at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid isn't resting easy. To help referees know when they should blow the whistle, researchers have recorded 500 simulated offside soccer (yes, football) plays in stereoscopic 3D to give refs a more immersive sense of what it's like to make the call on the pitch. The hope is to have FIFA more quickly and accurately stopping play without having to spend too much actual time on the grass. We don't yet know how many referees if any will be trained on the system by the 2014 World Cup, or if it will spread to other leagues -- what we do know is that no amount of extra immersion is needed to catch a theatrically fake injury.

Twitter dispatched its first biannual Transparency Report -- revealing government requests for user info and content holdback along with DMCA takedown notices -- which spotlights the US as the most active by far. The company claimed it was aroused to action by Google, which has been doing it for the last two years and recently added copyright takedowns to its own reports. So far, Twitter says that while most nations requested user data 10 times or fewer, the US government made 679 such appeals, more than the entire rest of the world combined. It also showed how often it obeyed -- 75 percent of the time in the US; much less elsewhere -- and said that affected users are always notified unless the company is prohibited from doing so. As we also noted with Google's reports, DMCA takedowns were by far the most numerous requests, with 3,378 total affecting 5,874 users, and 599 offending items actually pulled (38 percent). Those appeals aren't broken down by company like Mountain View's, but if you think that Usher photo mashup you're using as an avatar might be a problem, check the source to see all the data.

Printing a chocolate heart is easy enough, but how about an actual organ? There are folks working on it, but it turns out those veins of yours aren't exactly a breeze to replicate. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and MIT may have found a semi-sweet solution -- dissolving a sugar lattice in a batch of living Jell-O. The research team uses a RepRap 3D printer and a custom extruder head to print a filament network composed of sucrose, glucose and dextran which is later encased in a bio-gel containing living cells. Once the confectionery paths are dissolved, they leave a network of artery-like channels in their void. Tissue living in the gel can then receive oxygen and nutrients through the hollow pipes.

The research has been promising so far, and has increased the number of functional liver cells the team has been able to maintain in artificial tissues. These results suggest the technique could have future research possibilities in developing lab-grown organs. MIT Professor Sangeeta Bhatia, who helped conduct the effort, hopes to push the group's work further. "More work will be needed to learn how to directly connect these types of vascular networks to natural blood vessels while at the same time investigating fundamental interactions between the liver cells and the patterned vasculature. It's an exciting future ahead." Scientists at other labs could also get their mitts on the sweet templates since they're stable enough to endure shipping. Head past the break for a video of the innard infrastructure.

With x86 and a few high-powered RISC chips dominating the list of the most powerful computers on Earth, you might be wondering what's the big deal with ARM and it's push into the server space. Well, this is the big deal. The image above is of Jon Masters powering a Calxeda-server from HP with nothing more than a bicycle. OK, so there's a bit more to the setup -- including a 400 watt inverter, a 35 Ah battery, a UPS and a Pedal-a-Watt -- but the gist of it is that Masters was able keep 32 ARM cores humming along just by pedaling his road bike at the Red Hat Summit. The demo was mostly meant as a proof of concept, but we can easily imagine our future robot overlords putting us to work keeping their network of servers running. On the plus side, pedaling to power the Internet might help solve our global obesity epidemic. For a quick tour of the rig, check out the video after the break.

Welcome to Growing Up Geek, an ongoing feature where we take a look back at our youth and tell stories of growing up to be the nerds that we are. Today, we have CNBC technology contributor, Natali Morris.

These days I spend more of my time raising geeks than growing up as one. I gave birth to my daughter just seven weeks ago, so there is little time to geek out, but the force is still there. Temporarily dormant. I am a TV journalist who specializes in geek, as a technology contributor to CNBC. I got an early start in television. I was Miss Fremont 1984. Maybe you recognize me from the parade float with Sylvester and Tweety Bird? No? Odd.

That's me on the left with my younger sister on the children's show Romper Room in 1984. Question: When we talk about my geeky childhood, do we mean that I had special geeky talents? Because I'm not sure I was a geek as much as I was a nerd. I was a rule follower. An overachiever. I always got the best grades in my science classes, had my term papers written weeks in advance, and always kept my textbooks covered with brown bag paper the way school policy required. I also had braces and headgear. And bangs. So what do you think? Geek or nerd? Or idiot?

Actually no, I didn't always follow the rules. I used to cheat on the Nintendo Power Pad by pounding on the pressure sensors with my hands instead of my feet when I was feeling lazy. I used the code to get 30 extra lives on Contra. Although is it really cheating if it is built into the game? But I digress.

Vanadium oxide seems to be the go-to guy in power storage right now. A new solid-oxide fuel cell -- developed at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences -- that can also store energy like a battery, also uses the stuff. In the new cell, by adding a VOx layer it allows the SOFC to both generate and store power. Example applications would be situations where a lightweight power source is required, with the potential to provide reserve juice should the main fuel source run out. The team who developed the cell usually work with platinum-based SOFCs, but they can't store a charge for much more than 15 seconds. By adding the VOx, this proof of concept extended that by 14 times, with the potential for more lifespan with further development. Especially handy if you're always running out of sugar.

Fed up with wandering through supermarket aisles in an effort to cross that last item off your shopping list? Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Intel Science and Technology Center in Embedded Computing have developed a robot that could ease your pain and help store owners keep items in stock. Dubbed AndyVision, the bot is equipped with a Kinect sensor, image processing and machine learning algorithms, 2D and 3D images of products and a floor plan of the shop in question. As the mechanized worker roams around, it determines if items are low or out of stock and if they've been incorrectly shelved. Employees then receive the data on iPads and a public display updates an interactive map with product information for shoppers to peruse. The automaton is currently meandering through CMU's campus store, but it's expected to wheel out to a few local retailers for testing sometime next year. Head past the break to catch a video of the automated inventory clerk at work.

It was Bret Easton Ellis who coined the phrase, "The better you look, the more you see," and it appears the folks down at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab agree. In what's considered a "first," the agency's latest space-scouring probe, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, has turned on its X-ray vision to capture focused images of a black hole, dubbed Cygnus X-1, feeding on a nearby giant star. By tuning into these high-energy frequencies, scientists are getting a peek into a previously unseen side of the heavens at 100 times the sensitivity and 10 times the resolution of any preceding tech. The space agency plans to use the observatory's powerful sight to suss out other known areas of mass X-ray activity like 3C273, an active quasar located two billion light years away and even explore G21.5-0.9, the fallout from a supernova within the Milky Way galaxy. NuSTAR's first tour of galactic duty will span two year's time, during which it'll attempt to record imagery from "the most energetic objects in the universe, " as well as track the existence of black holes throughout the cosmos. Impressed? Yeah, us too.

You, sir or ma'am, should probably not get too excited. Chances are, this trans-Pacific 10 Gigabit link won't do you any good, personally. On the other hand, researchers working together across the oceanic divide have tons to cheer about. The China Education and Research Network, the National Science Foundation and Indiana University worked together with BGI, one of the largest genomics organizations in the world, to christen the connection by transferring 24 Gigabytes of genomic data from Beijing to UC Davis in under 30 seconds. As a benchmark, the same file was sent between the same locations over the regular ol' Internet and it took over 26 hours. The high-speed link should prove to be a major boon for genetic research and DNA sequencing.

Scientists from Singapore's Nanyang Technological University aren't keen on being wasteful -- that's why they've developed a toilet that uses 90% less water than other commodes and is capable of generating energy. Aptly named the No-Mix Vacuum Toilet, the porcelain pedestal's pot divides waste between two partitions -- one side for liquids, the other for solids -- and uses vacuum tech reminiscent of airline lavatories. Flushing solid and fluid wastes with 1 and 0.2 liters of H2O, respectively, the can will be able to route refuse to external processing facilities. Fertilizer ingredients such as nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous would then be harvested from liquids. Similarly, methane can be coaxed from solids for conversion to electricity or as a replacement for other natural gasses. Two of the university's restrooms are slated to have the toilets installed in the near future, and the team expects the thrones to roll out worldwide within three years.

[Thanks, Yuka]

Just when you're numbing to robot, zombie and nuclear apocalypse scenarios, some old-fashioned asteroid paranoia pops up to surprise you. The B612 Foundation, which gets funding from, well, anyone, has just announced plans to launch Sentinel, a space telescope which will wander the vacuum cataloging asteroids in our inner solar system. Their goal is to track asteroid orbits and predict large impacts up to 100 years in advance, giving us plenty of time to find a solution (or enjoy our final days). Construction doesn't start til late fall, with the launch expected in around five years, so it won't be any use in disproving the 2012 doomsday believers out there. You can find out more about the project and donate to the foundation at the source link, or jump past the break for a video explanation, Aerosmith not included.

Astronomers in Chile using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope are now able to analyze the atmosphere on faraway planet Tau Bootis b. Using CRIRES, a supercooled infrared spectrograph bolted to the 'scope, the team was able to judge the size of the exoplanet -- and for the first time, take a reading of the atmosphere while not in transit. Historically, the only time researchers have been able to conduct atmospheric analysis is during the transit of its nearby star, which imprints the qualities of the atmosphere onto the light. The team found that Tau Bootis b is around six times the size of Jupiter, but its air is so thick with Carbon Monoxide that we'll have to look elsewhere to plan that expedition to the stars.

Dr. Paolo Macchiarini is no stranger to world firsts, and less than a year after performing a synthetic windpipe transplant, the Karolinska Institute Professor has coordinated no less than two successful transplants of synthetic sections of larynx. Amazingly, both patients were able to breathe and talk normally straight after surgery, the basic functions we take for granted that they either struggled with or were simply unable to do before. The implants consisted of personally designed synthetic scaffolds coated with the candidates' own stem cells, so there's neither the chance of rejection nor the burden of life-long immunosuppressant therapy. Despite the amazing feat, Dr. Macchiarini ain't done yet, claiming this is the first of many steps towards building a synthetic, complete larynx -- voice box and all. Jump past the break for the official PR issued by Harvard Bioscience, the company responsible for growing what's in that tub.

Back in the 1920s, Thomas Edison's dream of an electric automobile was ultimately foiled by those meddling petroleum engines. But thanks to nanotube research from Stanford University, one legacy from that era may regain some glory: nickel-iron batteries. It turns out that carbon nanotubes doped with nickel and iron crystals can top up the normally slow-charging cells in a matter of minutes -- according to the scientists, that's almost 1,000 times faster than in the past. Although the batteries couldn't power your Volt or Prius due to a lack of energy density, they could give an extra jolt to their lithium-ion siblings for quicker starts and regenerative braking. The researchers are working on improving stability to allow more charging cycles, but it might be an extra in-your-face for Edison if it pans out.

Japan got itself in the good graces of many a Futurama fan after creating Bender's ancestor. Then again, another Japanese robotic creation -- one that specializes in rock, paper, scissors -- may actually have more in common with the morally questionable, beer-guzzling bot. That's because this sneaky little future overlord wins 100 percent of its matches by using an oh-so human trait known as cheating. See, the researchers at the University of Tokyo's 4chan, er, Ishikawa Oku Laboratory programmed the "Janken" robot to recognize its human opponent's hand shape and counter it within a millisecond. Adding to the troll factor is the fact that it was unwittingly named the "Human-Machine Cooperation System" because, well, it needs the cooperation of some poor human sap to work its magic. The achievement joins other man-versus-machine milestones, including losses by humans in chess and shogi. Of course, the question now is, what happens if you pit two "Janken" machines against each other?

We've watched our potential quad-mech overlords from KMel Robotics evolve from agile solo acrobats to worker bees to deft synchronized performers. It seemed only a matter of time before they would hunt down Sarah Connor en masse -- or take the show-biz world by storm. Fortunately for us, the tricky flyers chose to embrace their flamboyant side at a tour-de-force 16-quad lightshow in Cannes, where they opened the Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors' Showcase. The soaring automatons pulled all their past tricks out of the bag, flying precisely with mirrors to bounce lights from below, all timed to dramatic music --which they also had a hand in controlling. The sparkly treat awaits right after the break.

If you're game for learning some new search tricks, they may as well come from the hive mind itself. Mountain View is currently accepting registrations for "Power Searching with Google," a free-of-charge virtual course which will start on July 10th and involve six 50-minute interactive classes spread over two weeks. In addition to plugging Google+ at every opportunity, it promises to explain how to "solve real, everyday problems" using advanced search features -- and there's even a certificate at the end of it. Sign up at the course homepage linked below.

At a size of just 100 nanometers, it may not be much to look at, but a new type of microwave oscillator developed by researchers at UCLA could open the door to mobile communication devices that are smaller, cheaper and more efficient. As PhysOrg reports, unlike traditional silicon-based oscillators (the bit of a device that produces radio-frequency signals), these new oscillators rely on the spin of an electron rather than its charge to create microwaves -- a change that apparently bring with it a host of benefits. That includes a boost in signal quality, and a dramatic reduction in size. The new nanoscale system is fully 10,000 times smaller than current silicon-based oscillators, and can even be incorporated into existing chips without a big change in manufacturing processes. As with most such developments, however, it remains to be seen when we'll actually see it put into practice.