Engineer Builds 'Working' Thor's Hammer only He can lift

Thor’s Legendary Hammer - Imitated by Engineer Allen Pan

Thor’s legendary hammer Mjolnir, in marvel comics is popular for being used only by the worthy. Mjolnir cannot be lifted off the ground and it is this property which electrical engineer Allen Pan, decided to imitate on a `working’ Mjolnir.

To make the hammer immoveable he thought that strong magnets seemed to be the best option and inside the Mjolnir he filled a microwave oven transformer electromagnet that utilised electricity to produce a magnetic field. This produced a strong magnetic pull which was strong enough for the hammer that when placed on a metal surfacecannot be lifted like the locked manhole cover and felt too heavy to be lifted.

The handle is linked to a capacitive touch sensor which is in turn attached to an Arduino Pro Mini and a solid state relay that acts as a switching device. When someone tends to grasp the handle, the electromagnets get switched on attaching the hammer to the metal surface. But the hammer could be turned off through a fingerprint sensor keyed to Pan’s thumbprint and when he grasps the hammer, the magnets switches on. When he tends to move his thumb across the sensor, it switches off again enabling Pan to lift the hammer.

Challenged Unsuspecting Passer-By

Taking his invention to the streets of Venice Beach California, Pan challenged unsuspecting passer-by to lift it and it seems to be a brilliant prank like the ones in comics and in films. A video of Pan urging people to try and lift the hammer, in California, has been shared millions of times.

Pan seemed to come up with this idea after observing a trailer for the latest Avengers movie, the series which promoted the Norse god of thunder. In a certain scene there are all superheroes who seem to be hanging out and are trying to lift Thor’s hammer which traditionally can be lifted only by someone who is worthy – that being Thor.
Pan tells that `Tony Stark, who is sort of the engineer genius of the group, throws a theory that it’s printed and you need your thumbprint’. Hence he decided that there could be a technological solution to this magical object.

The Hoax - Thumbprint Sensor

Pan purchased a Halloween costume version of Thor’s hammer online and filled it with the electronic guts. Towards the bottom of the hammer, was a large electromagnet which gets activated when anyone tries a hand on the handle. For the hammer to operate, it needs to be on a metal surface.

The hoax is the thumbprint sensor which only recognizes Pan’s prints and when he puts his hand on the handle, the electromagnet tends to get deactivated. After developing it, he took the hammer to Venice Beach in order to test it and his innovative plan was to locate monstrous, gigantic mutant men at Muscle Beach, which was the infamous public workout space.

However being the middle of a weekday, he was unable to find anyone. He finally ended in employing people on the boardwalk to test it. Initially, there seemed to be some hesitation since people were apprehensive that the hammer would shock them.

He mentioned that when they were capable of getting few people to try the same, they were able to gather a small crowd with lot of great attempts. Ultimately, some people reckoned out how the hammer worked.

Trick That Doubles Wireless Data Capacity Stands Up in Cell Network Tests

Doubling Capacity of Wireless Data Connection

Start-up Kumu Networks, in 2012, rolled out of Stanford University to profit from a clever trick with the capabilities of doubling the capacity of any type of wireless data connection. Tests have been carried out recently by one of America’s biggest wireless carriers as well as by Deutsche Telekom, the German telecom colossal owning a major stake in U.S. carrier T-Mobile.

 It has been indicated that doubling is achievable in real cellular networks. The effects showed the products of Kumu Networks, for cellular operators could aid in expanding the capacity of mobile data networks. The company in the longer term anticipates in delivering further capacity boosts by developing its technology adequately compact to accommodate in mobile devices.

Kumu had invented in research which had disapproved the long held supposition that radios could not transmit and receive at the same time and that belief was established on the fact that if radios made attempts to do both at the same time, its outgoing signal tends to drown out incoming one. This is due to it being billions of times stronger and for this reason, the radios in our phone and computers tend to use separate channels to send as well as to received or switch in the midst of sending and receiving on a single channel.

Full Duplex Connection

The founders of Kumu had designed hardware and software which permits the receiver of a radio to filter out interference from outgoing signals. The device is said to then transmit and receive simultaneously what according to Kumu is known as `full duplex’ connection.

This tends to double the effective capacity of an individual radio channel. It could also make it possible to use one where two were needed initially. Kumu had worked with main wireless carriers this summer, on the first test of its technology in real cellular network situations.

An associate professor at Columbia University, Harish Krishnaswamy states that Kumu’s trialsrecommend the idea of full duplex wireless connection could bepractical though the company may have not made public, the detailed results. He mentioned that the work coming out of Kumu seems to be the first clue of realistic demonstration of the technology and there are still more challenges though they are seeing the possibility.

Wireless Carriers – Small Mobile Base Station

The first products of Kumu would be focused on wireless carriers which would be a version of the small mobile base station called small cells utilised to improve coverage in busy areas like stadium. Small cells tend to link back to carrier’s network utilising cable.

 Its version would be cable-free and would utilise the full duplex technology and at the same time serve the nearby devices making a high powered LTE link back to the central network.Creating small cells totally wireless could be helpful for carriers in deploying them in wider range of locations, improving on data coverage and capacity, according to Steven Hong, director of product and cofounder of Kumu.

He anticipates that next year, the carriers would test that product in the field attending live traffic. Kumu also seems to be working on a chip making it possible to reduce the package containing the company’s technology from the size of a hardback book to something similar to a credit card. Earlier in the year, Krishnaswamy’s group had demonstrated a full duplex chip smaller than a fingertip at Columbia and was confident that the technology would ultimately land in phones.

This Car Knows Your Next Misstep before You Make It

Experimental New Dashboard Computer – Keep Track of Behaviour Behind Wheel

With the increase in road accidents that are often occurring on the roads due to the driver’s negligence or failure on control of the vehicle, a new development has come up. This is in the form of experimental new dashboard computer which can keep track of the behaviour behind the wheel as well as predict what one is about to do next. Volvo, GM together with the others is on their way of testing systems which would be monitoring head and the eye position in order to identify signs of distraction.

Study by researchers at Cornell University and Stanford portray a more advanced method which could be educated in recognizing body language as well as behaviour which precedes a certain movement. This could activate early alerts like a blind spot vigilant, in advance thereby helping in avoiding serious accidents as per the academics involved.

Saxena Ashutosh, director of a project known as Robo Brain, at Cornell University and Stanford who oversaw the driving project, comments saying that `one could imagine yourself driving on a highway and you look to the right for a second since you intend making a right turn and as you are starting to make a right turn, some other driver pulls into the space which you probably thought was empty’.

Cutting Edge Machine Learning Algorithms

A car could in this instance issue an alert or prevent the driver form pulling into the lane. This method has been trained utilising cutting edge machine learning algorithms which predicts with over 90% precision whenever a driver is about to change lanes in the next few seconds. This lane change is generally signalled with a glance over the shoulder together with indicative head movement and changes in the steering, braking as well as acceleration.

 Ashutosh states that the accuracy achieved is quite excellent to be utilised in a production system. The researchers are exploring various ways for a vehicle to monitor and expect the driver’s behaviour through the project – Brain4Cars. The process involves utilising a machine learning approach known as deep learning in order to distinguish the actions that led the effort of lane changing.

 The systems were trained using data gathered as 10 different individuals drove around 1,180 miles around various locations of California. The researchers propose to make the ensuing data set easily available in order that the other academics and auto researchers could utilise the same.

Luxury Cars Equipped with Sensors

In recent years deep learning is said to be particularly beneficial in recognizing complex or elusive patterns like video and audio. The same has already been used allowing vehicle computers to identify various kinds of obstacles on the road. The team in their recent work had combined data from a video camera with GPS data and information from a computer system of a car.

Several luxury cars are now equipped with sensors which enable safety warnings and automatic breaking and steering. A student of Saxena’s and project lead on Brain4Cars, Ashesh Jain has commented that monitoring activity within a car and outside tends to make such safety systems intelligent.

He says that if the driver is distracted for a moment, if there is nothing in front, the car could be smart enough and not alert the drive. It is about how one utilises the info from all these sensors.

iPhone 6S Plus Review

iPhone 6S Plus offers better screen, robust performance, longer battery life and an awesome camera but it does have its own shortcomings.

No new improvements in looks and designs

It is very difficult for the users to spot the difference between the two models i.e. 2014 iPhone 6 Plus and latest iPhone 6S Plus. Apple has introduced a new color scheme for the iPhones this year which is ‘Rose Gold’ and it is not available for the last year’s model. If any user possesses this color then he will be able to make the difference otherwise both the phones are undistinguishable from each other. However latest iPhone 6S has a small ‘S’ stamped right at the back cover, happens to be just 0.2 mm thicker and 20 g heavier than last year’s variant.

iPhone 6S Plus is a phablet device which comes with 5.5 inch display at a resolution 1080p along with pressure sensitive touch feature. It has a pixel density of 401 pixels but seems almost similar to the last year’s model.

iPhone 6S Plus offers a splendid performance

iPhone 6S Plus is christened with new Apple’s dual core A9 processor which offers splendid performance. It is loaded with a GB RAM which makes it faster than other iPhone models as they run on A8 processor. Moving from one app to another, multitasking and playing or running system intensive apps is quite great but not as smooth as found on the Android devices with similar specifications.

One thing worth mentioning is that this iPhone remains throughout the software and hardware intensive usage which is a delight for the iPhone users. Battery life as expected is pathetic on this device which fails to offer a full day usage without the need of pluging in the charger. Phone’s battery happens to drain quite steeply when browsing the web but the stand by time has been improved considerably.

Apple’s new iOS 9

Apple has unveiled its new iOS 9 along with bundling with iPhone 6S Plus and updates has been released to bring it on the all the iPhones. This OS is more responsive on the iPhone 6S Plus and comes loaded with a number of iOS 9 features like ever on Siri and minor changes in the user interface. It is quite tricky to make Siri understand your voice pattern and it will require a really quite place to do so.

More features makes iPhone 6S Plus more adorable

3D touch will take a little time to get accustomed to and this feature offers an opportunity to perform various tasks without really opening a number of apps. Touch ID sensor will allow you to add another layer of security to the phone wherein you can lock and unlock your device by simply pressing your thumb on the home button.

Apple has just provided users with a 12 megapixel but it is as good as any other camera even better in some instance. iPhone 6S Plus boasts of the 4k video recording capability but it is extremely memory consuming as a one minute video can take up-to 300 mb of space.

Watch a Floating Green Ball of Water Effervesce in Space in Glorious 4K

NASA Astronauts aboard ISS Assessing 4 K Cameras

The astronauts of NASA, aboard the International Space Station- ISS, have been presently assessing a 4K camera for filming science experiments which means that the recording would be at higher frame rate, higher resolution than the usual HD camera and would be offering more information to researcher studying the recordings. Moreover, it would also add more fun together with interesting videos.

Most recent is the video starring astronaut Scott Kelly and the ball of changing colours is unique because of the first space videos which NASA shot in 4K ultra-high definitions HD. Kelly who is part of NASA’s crew, had spent a year in space instead of the standard six months, in order to scale the effects on the body of long term Mars mission, toying with water.

 Subsequent to the 8K UHD, 4K UHD is said to provide the highest resolution viewing experience one can get and is four times the definition which the standard 1080p HD television could offer. NASA has explained in a description of the video that astronaut Scott Kelly had taken on board the ISS, that the higher resolution images and higher frame rate videos seems to disclose more information when utilised on science investigations providing the researchers with valuable new tool aboard the space station.

Video Beautiful Highlighting Various Colours/Texture/Movements

His video is just not beautiful but tends to highlight various colours, textures as well as movements which show the high resolution camera’s tremendous potentials. Kelly has a globule of water in which is added things and is filming the effects.

Water floats in the air as quivering blobs, in microgravity, which tends to make for some experiments which the astronauts finds it fun, like the popping water balloons, or injecting air bubbles and watching how the water tends to move.

In July, Terry Virts, NASA astronaut had inserted an effervescent tablet in a ball of water to observe it dissolve and release gases in the water and in the air. In Kelly’s experiment, he tends to switch it a little wherein he creates the water globule first and then adds what seems like blue and yellow edible dye to colour the water into an algae green.

Camera – Huge Sensors/Potential of High Resolution Imaging

Thereafter he adds effervescent tablets that cause the green globule to bubble and distort as tablet tends to quickly break down producing carbon dioxide. One can observe individual pockets of water explode off the surface after the effervescent tablet has dissolved which is because as the tablet liquefies it generates bubbles of carbon dioxide gas in the water which would generally rise to the surface of a glass on Earth.

However in space it moves to the outer edge of the sphere increasing in size till the bubbles pop flinging bits of water everywhere.The camera – the Red Epic Dragon 4K has also been utilised in the production of films like Peter Jackson’s – the Hobbit, series. Rodney Grubbs, program manager for NASA’s Imagery Experts Program of the camera in July, informs that this is a big leap in camera technology for spaceflight.

These cameras tend to have huge sensors with the potential of very high resolution imaging at high frame rates. It seems like having a high speed 35MM motion picture film camera though it is compact and can use lenses which are already up there besides being digital.