University library starts ‘drone loan’ program for students

There’s good news if you’re a broke University of South Florida student who’d like to take an $1,195 DJI Phantom 2 Vision UAV for a spin: you can now sign one out from the library. Before you start preparing some kind of water balloon-dropping scheme, however, there are a few caveats. First off, all use will be supervised by library staff and you’ll have to take a course in drone operation before you can borrow one of the two available. Secondly, you’ll need a good reason to use it — one approved usage cited by a library supervisor was aerial surveying by architecture students to learn about building layouts. Educational projects aside, however, with the Phantom 2 Vision’s stabilized footage we imagine there’ll also be a lot of sweet aerial mixer videos.

Filed under: Robots

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Via: The Verge

Source: University of South Florida

Nestle’s working on a kitchen appliance that creates custom vitamin cocktails

If Nestlé’s new “Iron Man” project ends up a success, your morning routine could go like this: 1.) Take a shower. 2.) Eat breakfast. 3.) Brew your very own vitamin supplements. According to Bloomberg, the Nestlé Institute of Health Sciences is developing a device (possibly like its Nespresso coffee-making machines) that can make supplements on the spot based on your body’s needs. Since each dose — which might come in powder or capsule form — is tailored for you, NIHS director Ed Baetge says it’s going to be more effective than anything on the market. Then again, it’s worth remembering that there are many scientists who question the health benefits of vitamin supplements in the first place. Plus, there could be some very high costs involved in Nestlé’s vision: For the vitamin-mixing machine to work properly you’ll have to input your nutrient profile and, according to University of Minnesota researchers, knowing that profile won’t be cheap. It’ll cost at least $50 to analyze the level of each nutrient, and it could cost more than $1,000 for a complete analysis.

We’re in the dark when it comes to how Nestlé plans to analyze user’s bodies since the project’s still in its very early stages, but the company’s just begun talking to a Massachusetts-based scientific equipment manufacturer. As you can imagine, developing a personal supplement maker won’t be as easy as making a coffee maker, so it’ll take Nestlé many years to conjure up a final product. Baetge believes that if he and his colleagues do it right, the machine could be “the next microwave in your kitchen.”

Filed under: Misc

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Via: The Verge, Quartz

Source: Bloomberg

High-tech gloves can teach you Braille even if you’re distracted

It looks like a team of Georgia Tech researchers is in the business of making wondrous, high-tech gloves — their most recent one, for instance, can teach you Braille even if you’re doing something else. Similar to the piano-teaching glove they designed years ago, this new pair has vibrating motors on each knuckle that buzz in different patterns to correspond with preset Braille phrases. To test how well the gloves work, they asked volunteers during an experiment to play a game for 30 minutes while the motors buzz along with audio cues. When the subjects typed the phrases after half an hour, the researchers found their answers to be mostly accurate, with some even getting perfect scores.

Even better, the subjects, who’ve supposedly never studied Braille before, could not only type random phrases after the test, but also read and recognize some Braille letters. As with any new technology, the researchers are still conducting more tests, but the gloves have a huge potential to help with teaching more blind people the language. The wearable might also make it easier to learn Braille (something that’ll take years to master) for those who lose their sight later in life.

Filed under: Wearables

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Via: Medgadget

Source: Georgia Tech

Scientists simulate time travel using light particles

We may never see practical time travel in our lifetimes, if it’s possible at all. However, a team at the University of Queensland has given the Doc Browns of the world a faint glimmer of hope by simulating time travel on a very, very small scale. Their study used individual photons to replicate a quantum particle traveling through a space-time loop (like the one you see above) to arrive where and when it began. Since these particles are inherently uncertain, there wasn’t room for the paradoxes that normally thwart this sort of research. The particle couldn’t destroy itself before it went on its journey, for example.

As you might have gathered from the “simulation” term, sci-fi isn’t about to become reality just yet. The scientists haven’t actually warped through time — they’ve only shown how it can work. It could take a long time before there’s proof that whole atoms and objects can make the leap, let alone a real-world demonstration. Should you ever step into a time machine, though, you’ll know where it all started… and ended.

Filed under: Science

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Via: Phys.org, IFLScience

Source: Nature Communications