1 million UK students will receive a free Micro:bit

The idea of a small and easy to program microcomputer is old by now. Raspberry Pi was the first to introduce a true low-cost PC for kids to start programming, and soon more followed. Following the same idea, BBC introduces the Micro:bit. A tiny programmable computer that will get distribute to schools around UK that applied for it.

1 million lucky students and their teachers will receive a Micro:bit. The Micro:bit was codeveloped by more than 20 companies and organisations. Some of which are Microsoft, that provided the programming languages (Touch develop and block editor), Samsung with an Android App, the Lancaster university which created the runtime kernel, and many more.

The Micro:bit box will include a USB cable and a battery holder. Teachers will also get a small manual with starter project to get students going in programming the devices.

1.8 gigapixel surveillance camera.

Amazing and frightening at the same time. The Argus array is made up of several imaging sensors that are used to create a large 1.8GPixel mosaic of images and video.

Japan to start 4K TV broadcast in July 2014

The Japanese government is set to launch the world's first 4K TV broadcast in July 2014, roughly two years ahead of schedule, to help stir demand for ultra high-definition televisions, the Asahi newspaper reported on Sunday without citing

Supercomputer Build Time-lapse

Volunteer students, professors and friends of the university of Zurich have built a supercomputer for the department of physics. This cluster has a theoretical compute capacity of 1% of the human brain.

Link to the Zbox4 page: link
Enjoy the video!

Japanese Tech ftw!

Those Japanese engineers are crazy! Look at some really cool tech that's coming out in the near future! Crazy thin displays and low-power consumption!

High Speed Camera Captures Moving Photons

MIT Media Lab researchers have created a new imaging system that can acquire visual data at a rate of one trillion frames per second. That's fast enough to produce a slow-motion video of light traveling through objects. 

Read more: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/trillion-fps-camera-1213.html

Project website: http://www.media.mit.edu/~raskar/trillionfps/

Video: Melanie Gonick

Life On Mars? Curiosity Is Sent To Find Out

The rover named Curiosity is on it's way to Mars. It's mission, to find whether life could have ever arisen on Mars, prepare for human exploration of Mars and to study the geology and climate of Mars.

The nuclear powered rover was launched on Saturday the 26th of November at 10:02 EST (15:00 GMT for European readers) by an Atlas V rocket and is scheduled to arrive and land on Mars early August 2012, after covering a distance of 350 million miles (~560 million km). The total cost of the project a mere US$2.5 billion.

Continue on for some interesting videos.

Could Our Online Selves Continue For Ever After We Die?

We'll all die eventually and that is a fact! But what if our digital selves continue online, tweeting and posting stuff on facebook and youtube? Technology could enable a service like that in the future to create a digital persona of ourselves, after analyzing all the content we have ever created online. People would be able to interact with your digital copy online as if it were you and find out about your history on this planet.

Sony Dream House - Geek Paradise

Tour of Intel's Data Center in Russia

e-Paper From The Future

Check this new invention by Polymer Vision.

It's a rollable 6" display. Polymer Vision made Science Fiction into Science Fact!

Cray XK6: The most powerful supercomputer to date

Cray unveiled their new powerful supercomputer, this Petaflop beast is a compination of AMD Opteron 6200 CPUs and NVidia's Tesla-20 GPUs, making it a hybrid 50 petaflop, multi-purpose supercomputer. Already the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS), will the first customer of Cray XK6. The CSCS is supporting scientist working in diverse fields such us weather forecasting, climatology, chemistry, physics, material sciences, geology, biology, genetics, experimental medicine, astronomy, mathematics and computer sciences.

26 TeraBits per Second

Found an interesting article on BBC Science & Technology. They report that TeraBits per second speeds of data communication have been achieved in lab. Not just 1 Tbps, but 26 Tbps. You can read about it here.

What can you do with those speeds? What would you do if you had an internet connection with that kind of data rate? That's 2.95TBytes per second!

In one second you could transfer:
4427 Audio CDs (700mb)
659 Single Layer DVDs
362 Dual Layer DVDs
129 Single Layer BluRays
65 Dual Layer BlueRays
3 1TB Hard Disk Drives

Of course all the above figures are just comparisons to the data rates achieved in the lab. There is no computer that fast to transfer those kinds of data. A typical motherboard with a x16 PCI express slot can deliver up to 16GBytes per second. A DDR3 memory running @1333Mhz transfers data with a rate of 10.4GB/s.

So those kind of transfer speeds can be utilized only by large telecommunications companies, to deliver more data to their networks.

Sharp's new 85-inch LCD Super Hi-Vision TV.

Sharp developed with NHK (Japan Broadcastin Corporation), the next generation of television format. The Super Hi-Vision. With 16x the resolution of HDTV (720p) this panel is a 33megapixel monster!

World Ipv6 Day

Google is paving the way to the future of Internet connectivity by enabling the IPv6 protocol in their services for 24hours in an effort to root out problems that might occur. The IPv6 Day date is 8 June 2011 and along with major web companies such as Facebook and Yahoo!, they will enable IPv6 for a 24hour test run on their main websites.

What is all the fuss about? Well a little story about the old brother of IPv6, the IPv4 internet protocol. Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) is the fourth revision in the development of the Internet Protocol (IP) and it is the first version of the protocol to be widely deployed. IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses, which limits the address space to 4,294,967,296 (2³²) possible unique addresses. However, some are reserved for special purposes such as private networks (~18 million addresses) or multicast addresses (~270 million addresses). This reduces the number of addresses that can potentially be allocated for routing on the public Internet. As addresses are being incrementally delegated to end users, an IPv4 address shortage has been developing. This limitation has stimulated the development of IPv6, which is currently in the early stages of deployment, and is the only long-term solution.

IPv6 uses a 128-bit address. The new address space supports 2¹²⁸ (about 3.4×1038
) addresses. That's about 3.400.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000 addresses. This expansion provides considerable flexibility in allocating addresses and routing traffic.

Google Blog