HOLIDAY SNAPS GO MOBILE
Do you nod off when friends pulls out their pile of holiday snaps? Then things are about to get far worse. Mobile Operandi of Vancouver, Canada, is using the internet to turn an ordinary picture cellphone into a mobile slide viewer. Around 拢25 a year buys a private store page on its Mophone website.
A user can stock the store with a library of pictures and edit them into an automated slide show. A call to the site will allow the user to see an index of stored pictures and then download them. It is designed to work with most phones and, according to Mophone boss Patrick Payne, the company鈥檚 next step is to do the same with video clips.
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WAR ON WASTE
The Pentagon says it wants to go green on the battlefield by converting waste food and equipment packaging into energy without polluting the environment. But the real goal of the research project launched by its research arm, DARPA, is to reduce the amount of fuel it has to ship to the front.
Armies can get bogged down waiting for their supplies to reach them. So DARPA鈥檚 planners hope packaging from computers and ready-to-eat meals can do double duty: protect their contents and act as fuel. Since plastics give off nearly as much heat as diesel fuel when they are burned, DARPA reckons it could save on fuel shipments as well as reducing the volume of rubbish. But burning conventional plastics produces dioxins, so DARPA鈥檚 aim is to develop plastics that don鈥檛 pollute when combusted.
WHITER THAN WHITE LAPTOPS
If the colours on your laptop or flat-screen TV seem a little dull or unrealistic, that鈥檚 probably because they are illuminated by fluorescent backlights. These appear white, but actually produce more blue and green light than red.
Agilent Technology, based in Palo Alto, California, says it can solve this problem by generating a whiter white using a mix of red, green and blue light-emitting diodes.
Although this has been proposed in the past, it was never implemented because LEDs of different colours degrade at different rates, so the picture eventually acquires an odd hue. Agilent鈥檚 solution is to use a controller that measures the spectral composition of the light and automatically adjusts the LEDs to compensate for any change in intensity.
