FAKE ROCKS TRACK FLASH FLOODS
Dry stream beds in Arizona are being seeded with fake rocks to reveal what happens to the river bed after flash floods. The 200 tangerine-sized concrete stones contain transponders that squawk a unique ID signal when a radio device 鈥渋nterrogates鈥� them.
After torrential rain from summer thunderstorms has sent the rocks rolling and tumbling downstream, scientists from the US Agricultural Research Service in Tucson will scan the rivers for the ID signals. They will record the rocks鈥� progress to get a better understanding of erosion patterns and sediment deposition in the parched south-west.
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TEXTING WITHIN TENT
How do you find your tent when you stumble back to your campsite after dark? Simple 鈥� you send it tent a text message that makes it light up.
That鈥檚 how UK mobile phone firm Orange will be demonstrating machine-to-machine (M2M) communications at this year鈥檚 Glastonbury rock festival, which it is sponsoring.
When the cellphone-based device in one of Orange鈥檚 10 tents receives a message, it will switch on electro-luminescent wires that snake around the tent poles, making the whole tent glow orange. The company is not planning to commercialise the device in the short term but future offerings could include a device that makes lost keys light up or bleep when you text them.
THE DO-IT-ALl GADGET
What do you call a hand-held karaoke machine that lets you play 3D games, send email, take high quality digital photos, watch TV, listen to the radio and edit video clips? A cellphone, of course.
These are just some of the features that Vodafone KK is offering in the latest handset it plans to make available to its GPRS network subscribers in June.
Unlike most camera phones, the Sharp V602SH has an optical zoom lens rather than digital zoom, which merely enlarges pixels, making blurry images. The device also comes with software called Movie Mask that lets users paste animated images, such as a flood of tears, onto a moving image in a video clip: the tears follow the face of a moving person.
Karaoke video and lyrics can also be downloaded and run on the mobile. Users, it is said, will also be able to make quaint things called 鈥減hone calls鈥�.
