Category: Better Technology

The roadways currently have a single use: traffic. But what if we could someday make our streets with solar cells that serve to collect and distribute energy constantly? This is exactly what solar roadways do. Watch this video, it is really cool.

Solar Roadways hexagonal panels are designed to withstand traffic and to generate power for your city.The presented system is a modular solar panels that can be placed on the streets, avenues and roads. Besides the potential to feed power to the nearby homes, businesses and electric vehicles, the panels also have heating elements for snow and ice removal, as well as LEDs that can evolve static road signs. Regarding the strength, the panels are tested for tensile strength, load tests and impact resistance. It’s supposed to support a load of 50000Kgs, the  typical weight of trucks with freight.

According to calculations by the Brusaw, if the ” Solar Roadways Panels “could be installed on all roads of  U.S, it could generate more than three times the electricity currently used in U.S. You can support their campaigning at IndieGoGo. Several state agencies and even other countries have shown interest in this project.

It is becoming easier and cheaper to increase the resolution on still cameras. The only thing to be done in it is to increase the number of sensors, and combine them into a gigantic image. This has resulted in panoramic photos . But what about the video?  Cameras with sufficient technical capacity are often limited to professional users , and there are great issues of portability too. However, both stories are expected to end with the new camera CENTR . The company was created by five ex-Apple engineers who were part of the team responsible for the cameras for the iPhone.

The device contains four HD cameras.Its resolution for 360 degrees in  the 1080p mode is 6,900 x 1,080, while 720p is 4,600 x 720.It has built in WiFi (802.11b/g/n)and Bluettoth 4.0, two USB 3.0 connectors and a class 10 MicroSD card slot along with 8GB of internal memory.To add more to it,the camera is splash-proof.

The price rumored for the CENTR camera is $ 399 . The Kickstarter campaign is about to be launched, and is hoped to call attention among general consumers. The idea is creative, and CENTR have already carried out projects for high-profile names as FOX Sports, National Geographic, and the Army of the United States, so the technology is proven.But the only thing we can do for this camera now is to WAIT.

For more information,you can visit the official site here.

The Pocket Printer of Zuta Labs Ltd. is a small device that works like a little robot printer. It moves along sheets of paper printing the information you send it.

The current fashion is 3D printers , but that does not mean that traditional printers will become obsolete. The Pocket Printer of Zuta Labs Ltd. is a machine that has the shape of a guitar pick, but ten inches high, which functions as a portable printer. The Pocket Printer have four omni-directional wheels similar to those of an old mouse and crawls along sheets of paper and print whatever you send from a PC,Android app or iPhone app.

For now it is a prototype , but the videos showing it in action is astounding. While it takes about a minute to print a full A4 size page, the good thing is that you do not have size restrictions and you can take it anywhere. It uses HP cartridges and it claims that one cartridge can print thousand pages. The only problem is perhaps the battery which takes three hours to charge but it only works for only an hour and can not permanently plug and use. But, printing 60 pages on the go is more than enough I suppose.

This Pocket Printer  is easy to use for the users, plus it can be used anywhere and from any device (tablets, smartphones, etc..). The current version of the pocket printer can print black and white text only.The future version may be able to print in colour. It is almost miraculous to see this little machine roll over a page and print everything in detail, but perhaps the current price of one hundred and eighty U.S. dollars is too high for a device that is just a nice curiosity.

You can fund it here in their kickstarter campaign if you intend to buy it. The mentioned delivery date is “January 2015”.

The blood banks across the world struggle daily to hold their reserves, and the artificial blood could definitely solve the problem of scarcity. A new development based on stem cells have entered a phase of clinical trials to be completed in 2017, but it is still far from mass production.

The blood donation is a diffrent process in various parts of the globe. Some countries rely on paying money to keep their blood banks at acceptable levels, while in others it is illegal to receive any compensation, and develop broad appeal campaigns seeking volunteer donors. Generally, the volume of blood available tends to be insufficient. We should not  forget that blood can only stored for only a small period of time (less than a month in the case of whole blood) , and after that the “stock” needs to be renewed accordingly. On the other hand, the concept of artificial blood has been with us for several years. For example. Fluosol and PolyHeme were two so-called “blood substitutes” which received approval and reached an advanced stage of testing, but for different reasons have been abandoned.

Other developments were inclined in favor of stem cells as a basis for artificial blood . In January 2013, it was reported that the IIT-Madras was ready to start mass production of artificial blood , and now come Similar developments through research funded by the Wellcome Trust , a foundation dedicated to raising funds for biomedicine projects. According to Professor Marc Turner , principal investigator, his team created red blood cells (RBCs) from induced pluripotent stem cells.  Professor Turner acknowledges all previous investigations, but said it is the first time that it was possible to manufacture blood obeying every parameter of quality and safety required for transfusion in humans .

Now this artificial blood must enter a prolonged phase of testing. Chances are that these tests are focused on the treatment of patients with thalassemia, a complex type of anemia that requires frequent transfusions. The next step will closely monitor the behavior of artificial cells, and if all goes well, the process should be completed in the last months of 2016, or early 2017. Unfortunately, Professor Turner admits that mass production will be a challenge apart. A single unit of blood (about 450 milliliters) contains one trillion red blood cells, therefore, we cannot think of “blood factory” yet, but if the proof of the concept is successful, then this could change within some years.