Ten of the Best Football Apps and Games

This upcoming new season of football can be enjoyed in a much better on the tablet and smartphone by using some smart football apps. Here are some smart football apps which offer more than just checking scores and reading recent news.

Flick Click Football Free on iOS & Android

This football game is all centered on scoring goals by just flicking the fingers on the screen and avoiding the alert defenders and goalkeepers. The response for touches is highly improvised and offers highly tuned flicking mechanics for perfect gaming experience. This game brings a variety of modes from just hitting the bulls-eye targets to scoring as much as you can within a set time limit. This game is loaded with in-app purchases, which offer to increase the intensity of the game and improve the skills of the users.

Stats Zone by FourFourTwo Free on iOS & Android

This game is seen as a spin-off from FourFourTwo magazine, which in the past has brought some smart statistics in its pages, which offered new insight in the football dynamics. This football app is great at bringing smart statistics ion form of graphs and numbers on the screen carefully managing different leagues and teams. It taps the Opta database in order to retrieve match statistics therefore its able to provide intense and in-depth data related to player performance and gaming attributes rather just checking scores.

Corner Available Free on iOS & Android

Corner is a football app, which offers an incredible help in locating the nearby pub in UK, which showcases the football matches on the TV. It offers fast and easy way of choosing the match and sees which nearby pubs are showing it in their premises along with other details like the kind of foods being served, WiFi connectivity as well as beer gardens.

Ultimate Fan Live Free on iOS & Android

Most of the people use a wide number of fantasy football tournament ranging from the Telegraph fantasy tournament to official Premier League game. Ultimate Fan Live brings an interesting spin on this format by bringing the best experiences by just signing up and creating a new league with your friends. It is a live form of fantasy tournament wherein users can choose just two players before the match and points are earned later on by performing all the action s in the game, which helps in boosting up the total.

OneFootball Free on iOS, Android and Windows

It is a highly popular football app, which offers a great avenue to look out for news, statistics and scores for the fans. It offers some popular features like push notifications, minute-by-minute commentaries, one-to-one and group messaging service and others. The app design is neat and carefully organized to display results in a friendly manner. It is available for free on three popular mobile based OS namely iOS, Android and Windows and is filled with in app purchases to enhance its usability and utility.

Metamaterial wormhole Teleports Magnetic Fields across Space

Metamaterials are the stuff futurists dream of: painstakingly engineered materials of conventional origin (plastics, metal, etc.) that display properties not found in nature, enabling things like invisibility (also sometimes called ‘cloaking’), imaging beyond the diffraction limit of light and dissipating seismic waves.

Metamaterials differ with conventional materials

In that they display significant interaction with the magnetic component of electromagnetic waves. It is this property that has been exploited by Alvaro Sanchez et al. at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Autonomous University of Barcelona), in Spain, who claim to have built the world’s first magnetic wormhole. Unlike the wormhole of the popular lexicon however, this is no portal in space-time that allows travelling over great distances almost instantaneously; it is simply a device that allows a magnetic field originating in one region to emerge elsewhere, the device itself remaining magnetically undetectable. Simply put: an invisible (so to speak) device that absorbs a magnetic field at one end and emits the field, unchanged, at the other, much like an invisible garden hose that apparently causes water to vanish at the tap and spontaneously rematerialize at the other end.

This “pipe of magnetism” seems fairly insignificant at first glance, until you consider that when a magnetic field disappears at a point, it effectively is a magnetic monopole.

More about the idea

The idea was first put forth in a 2008 paper “Electromagnetic wormholes and virtual magnetic monopoles” by Allan Greenleaf et al. According to Matti Lassas at the Helsinki University of Technology in Finland, co-author of the 2008 paper, some clever manipulations of the mathematical constructs in that paper, by the scientists at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, have enabled the “wormhole device” to finally fall within the scope of present engineering techniques.

The device has at its core a magnetised nickel-iron tube, coated with “metasurfaces” that actually transmits the magnetic field. It is surrounded by a spherical mesh of superconducting alloy (made of yttrium barium copper oxide) that helps with both repelling the field inside the tube as well as protecting it from distortion due to incoming external fields. Now to completely make the arrangement magnetically undetectable, the sphere is further enclosed in a ferromagnetic metal array that disguises the superconductor’s magnetic signature. The entire arrangement is dipped in liquid nitrogen to bring the temperature down to where the yttrium barium alloy becomes superconducting.

The result is simply that a magnetic field disappears into one end of the apparatus and appears out the other end. No field is detected between the two ends. This is effectively a pair of monopoles, one at each end of the device.

This ‘cloaking’ of magnetic fields as they travel has significant advantages, the most obvious of which, at least at the present, is in the field of medicine. The MRI machine has revolutionised medical care by providing doctors the ability to fully image the entire human body, a very tedious and slow process with x-rays, which also posed the risk of radiation overexposure, in very little time. With this device multiple imagers could work simultaneously without mutual distortion. The ‘cloaking’ effect could also be implemented in that it would be possible to use metal implements, viz. surgical equipment, in the vicinity of an MRI machine. Presently, the strong fields emanated by an MRI machine can cause unsecured metal to fly across the room. Metal also interferes with the imaging.

Another scenario is one in which the patient does not have to lie inside a loud claustrophobic machine for a scan; the fields generated by the actual machine could simply be “teleported” around the patient.

Most of all though, this device actually presents us with a functional magnetic monopole, the likes of which have eluded us, despite theoretical evidence, for decades. New research will definitely open avenues to as-of-yet unknown applications for the magnetic wormhole.

Assuming this holds up to third-party confirmation and is peer reviewed for accuracy, it really might be a real game changer.

Next stop, real matter?

MIT Unveils 3D Printing Method Using Glass Instead of Plastic

They’re calling it 3DGP for Glass 3D Printing.

Borne out of collaboration between the Mediated Matter group at the MIT Media Lab, the Mechanical Engineering Department at MIT, the MIT Glass Lab and the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, 3DGP is the first time transparent glass has been used as precursor, the “ink” in common printing parlance, in 3D printing, also known as additive manufacturing. The paper titled “Additive Manufacturing of Optically Transparent Glass” by Neri Oxman, John Klein et al. will be published in the September 2015 issue of 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing (3DP+).

• Using optical glass as precursor in the printing process is a first

The machine works like a conventional 3D printer, where layer upon layer of the precursor is deposited on a work surface, thereby literally building a product from the ground up. In 3DGP, the upper part of the machine is the kiln containing molten glass at up to 1100°C, which is then piped through an alumina-zircon-silica nozzle, which traces the shape to be printed in all three dimensions. The lower chamber anneals the constructed structures.

The process is laser precise and could pave the way for fundamentally changing how glass and related objects are manufactured, the most obvious example being fibre optics, made with higher accuracy and lesser expense, which might be integrated into other surfaces or fabricated materials. This will enable them, for instance, to be incorporated in building construction, such as in precast walls or glass façades, the latter of which can now be created in unimaginable shapes. Also under consideration are printable optoelectronics and photonics.

•  Printed architectural structures incorporated with fibre optics and optoelectronics a possibility

The accuracy with which the thickness and shape of the glass can be controlled is significant: geometrical variations can be used to generate desired forms of transparency, reflectivity, refractivity and various other properties.

With cutting edge research and indigenous processes and methodology at stake, people are understandably unwilling to reveal the nitty-gritties of the process. Extruder manufacturer Micron3DP, with a similar glass 3D printer in development, has been equally reluctant to share information, except that their printhead can reach temperatures up to 1640°C.

• Details about the printing process and glass composition are closely guarded

Although the products of 3DGP have only been novelties until now, the group at MIT will soon begin to print various other geometrically complex structures, chiefly those with architectural applications. And like with any case of 3D printing, the bespoke nature of the work means maximum compatibility with each and every application.

Intricate glass work has always remained outside the domain of mechanisation; manual work by master glassblowers has been the way to go. How this new technology might clash with the age-old practice remains unknown. 3D printing might breach new frontiers of adhesion between layers, lack of light distortion, clarity, and most importantly, indistinguishability. Complex patterns created by hand will never be identical to the previous case. 3DGP and its competition do not suffer from this drawback; they can create identical products over and over.

• Glass-blowing: an art on the way out?

3D printing might also enable creation of new shapes and structures that might have been impossible to fashion by hand, whether due to weight or other restrictions.

New Internet Routing Method Allows Users to Avoid Sending Data through Undesired Countries

Censorship of information has become quite commonplace all across the world. The developing countries and developed countries- both are using censorship in similar fashion to thwart the flow of information on the online medium. Censorship is even a greatest threat to the open channel communication on the internet. If data travels from the route, which passes by countries, which had placed censorship, then it is a cause of worry for data integrity.

A new system offers sublime internet routing features

Some computer scientists at the University Of Maryland have come up with a commendable solution of advanced internet routing method. A method has been developed which provides a concrete proof to the internet users so that their information does not cross through certain geographical areas, which possess censorship. The advantage of using of this new system is that it can be deployed immediately without wasting any time and it happens to be extremely easier to use and doesn’t require any special or extensive knowledge.

How this new internet routing method works?

This new system of internet routing has been named Alibi Routing and is expected to be presented in the upcoming event of Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group On Data Communications (ACM SIGCOMM) in London.

Information when transmitted over the internet in form of website requests or email content then it is broken into different packets and later on it is sent through a series of routers until it reaches its destination. Through the censoring of content, some parts of the world are known to actively engage in modifying the data, which is returned to the users. Alibi Routing uses an extensive peer-to-peer network in order to locate peers- who are running alibi routing software- and relay the user’s packets to the final destination through avoiding the forbidden regions. In this system a peer is termed as “alibi” whose work is to provide proof through calculations whether the information can relay fast at a particular time over a particular geographical location or not. Successful rates show that the information has reached successfully to its desired destination without traversing through the forbidden regions.

Users can use safety parameter in the Alibi Routing in order to get much better control over their data. If a safety parameter is set at larger then it will be hard to find an alibi but at smaller safety parameter alibi can be found easier. The safety parameter shows the user’s desired level confidence whether their data packets are safeguarded from travelling the forbidden regions or not.

Alibi Routing gives better control to users over their data
 
In the recent times, censorship of the internet traffic and information has resulted in the creation of suspicious boomerang routing. This routing makes it easier to monitor the data, which leaves a region to come back again, which is not at good for the end users. Computer scientists have developed the Alibi Routing system in a bid to empower the users to have better control over what happens with their data on the internet.

Charge Your Phone the Lo-Fi Way

Charging Phone – Lo-Fi Way - Nipper

From pocket solar panels and kinetic energy converting armbands to wireless inductive charging docks, portable phone charger market seems to be more like science fiction with each passing day. For those interested in updated lo-fi option or has a backlog of AA batteries around the place, could utilise a gadget known as Nipper which could be of some help.

The Nipper tends to hold in place, two AA batteries with magnets and plugs in the smartphone’s micro USB port in order to deliver extra jolt of power around 10% with 30 minute charge and 20% with one hour charging. It has been developed for the purpose of quick spurts and emergencies instead of full fuel ups and is appropriate for those moments of time when one tends to be trapped in a subway station and to avoid the risk of arrest by plugging into an outlet.

The Nipper is hyper portable measuring around 17mm cubes and fits on a keychain. Presently it only works on phones with micro-USB connectors with models of Samsung, HTC, Nokia and other Android devices. However, the designers are of the opinion that an iPhone compatible option is in the pipeline and the first Nipper would be shipped in April 2016.

Small Phone Charger – Emergency Use

The Nipper is a small phone charger, small enough to be carried around wherever you go and is readily available everywhere – household AA batteries and is primarily designed for emergency use. It is the phone’s smallest phone charger and can be carried anywhere.

When one is in desperate need in using the phone, but is unable to access to the laptops, electrical sockets, wind turbine or solar panels, the Nipper comes to your aid in these situations. When it is not being used, it can be attached to a keychain, pocket or bag and when needed, you can open the Nipper and place two AA batteries between the magnets and connect the same to the phone.

 The Nipper tends to give an extra 10% battery capacity in 30 minutes and 20% in over an hour for a modern smartphone which was tested by utilising a HTC one M7 with Duracell Ultra AA batteries. The power output differs based on the batteries used, in the case of new Duracell batteries; it was found that it gave 500mAh.

Circuit – Boost Converter

The Nipper comprises of 3 neodynium magnets and have the double function of holding the batteries in place while simultaneously makes an electrical connection to the Nipper circuit board. This circuit is known as a boost converter which turns the power from the batteries into a 5v power supply in order to charge the phone.
If the volume of Nipper is small, 3D print of the cases out of high quality nylon will be done but if the demand is high and the need to make a full Nipper army is needed, mold will be injected in the cases out of polypropylene. The two halves of the Nipper can be connected by fabric or genuine leather straps. The neodymium is the nickel plated on the classic Nippers while gold plated on premium Nippers.

The AA batteries are generally recognized and the most widely sold battery and though it does not seems to be sensible relying on AA batteries for daily charging of the phone, it could prove to be handy in times of emergency.