An artificial 'super skin' for androids

Summary: Stanford researchers have developed a stretchable, transparent skin-like sensor that could have applications in prosthetic limbs, robotics, and touch displays.

Credit: Steve Fyffe, Stanford News Service

The wrinkle-smoothing wonder of Botox could some day be a thing of the past.
Stanford researchers have built a new transparent skin-like sensor that can stretch out to more than twice its normal length in any direction and bounce back to its original shape.
The sensor uses a transparent film of single-walled carbon nanotubes that are bent to act as tiny springs. The springs help the sensor to accurately measure almost any force applied on it–from a firm pinch to thousands of pounds.
“This sensor can register pressure ranging from a firm pinch between your thumb and forefinger to twice the pressure exerted by an elephant standing on one foot,” said Darren Lipomi, a postdoctoral researcher in Bao’s lab, who is part of the research team. “None of it causes any permanent deformation,” he added.
According to Lipomi and his team, the sensor could be used in making touch-sensitive prosthetic limbs or robots, for various medical applications such as pressure-sensitive bandages or in touch screens on computers.

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A Jam-Packed, Reality-Augmenting Key to the Sky

SkyView uses the iPhone's compass and gyroscope, along with the camera, to reveal on an "augmented reality" screen that shows and identifies what's in the sky in the direction the camera is pointing. While SkyView works best at night when the stars are visible, the app will reveal what's above no matter what time of day, light or dark.

Even if you don't care about stars, planets, satellites and other celestial objects in the night sky, this point alone may sway you to take a look anyway: SkyView -- Explore the Universe, an app by Terminal Eleven LLC, has a solid five-star rating by users in the Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) App Store. Not 4 or 4.5. All those little stars are filled in with color. Nearly everyone who bought it (and bothered to rate it) gave it a five-star rating.


I don't see that very often at all, certainly not when there are over a 1,000 ratings.

And the five stars? They're well-deserved.

This augmented reality app, which lets you point your iPhone at the sky to see what's up there, is pretty freaking cool.

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Android ICS Will Require 16GB RAM To Compile 114

"New smartphones may be lightweight, compact objects, but their OSs are anything but. Ice Cream Sandwich will need workstations with no less than 16 GB RAM to build the source code, twice the amount Gingerbread needed. It will take 5 hours to compile on a dual quad-core 2+GHz workstation, and need 80GB disk space for all AOSP configs. Android developers are also being warned to be cautious of undocumented APIs: 'In almost every case, there's only one reason for leaving APIs undocumented: We're not sure that what we have now is the best solution, and we think we might have to improve it, and we're not prepared to make those commitments to testing and preservation. We're not claiming that they're "Private" or "Secret" — How could they be, when anyone in the world can discover them? We're also not claiming they're forbidden: If you use them, your code will compile and probably run.'"

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Android super smartphones: Too much of a good thing?

If I'm a Droid Bionic owner, I have to be pretty peeved.
The Bionic was supposed to be positioned as Verizon Wireless' flagship 4G LTE smartphone--the first with a dual-core processor--when it launched in early September. But its reign barely lasted a month, and following several recent announcements, it may not even rank as the third-best Android phone in Verizon's lineup by November.
The speed in which new Android devices are hitting the market speaks to the strength of Google's mobile platform. But it also leads to a lot of headaches for consumers who can be overwhelmed by the sheer number of options emerging every day. It's like the Best Buy commercial parodying the next great device coming out moments after you buy it, only it's playing out in real life.
Handset manufacturers can't like the pace either. They spend millions of dollar of research and development on the hot new device, only to lose the spotlight after a few days (or, in the case of the Droid Razr, a few hours).

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