Fidget Cube: A Vinyl Desk Toy

Fidget Cube – Pocket Sized Desk Toy

Very often most of us tend to fidget mindlessly while we tend to be in deep thoughts, like clicking pens or squeezing stress balls or flipping paper clips. A new system has been developed by two brothers, wherein it enables the person to fidget discretely at the desk while at the same time tends to increase the focus as well as productivity.

Known as Fidget Cube, this pocket sized desk toy has been created with six tangible surfaces which enable the person to flip, roll, click, spin, rub and glide over till it suits the person. Fidget Cube the brainchild of Matthew and Mark McLachlan had designed the Apple Watch accessory Duet and are fidgeters themselves.

They have designed this toy in order to change the way society tends to view these small movements. The Fidget Cube is said to be a new crowdfunded product which is mainly a small vinyl box having instruments designed for fidgeting on each side of the cube.

It is a type of no use since the buttons do not really do anything but is a kind of creative since the point is not to switch on or off the TV but to provide your fingers with something to do.

Each Side – Various Mechanisms

The researchers had discovered a link between working with the hands while increasing the memory together with creativity which the McLachlan’s invention tends to do just that. The so called Fidget Cube is said to weight around 4.1 ounces while the complete toy tends to measure 1.3 inches.

The products is offered in eight various colour schemes, die, graphite, aqua, midnight, sunset berry, fresh and retro. Each side of the toy tends to have various mechanisms which could fit anyone’s needs of fidgeting and have clickable buttons which bear a resemblance to the action of clicking pen.

On one surface here are three clicker buttons together with two silenced buttons that enables the person to fidget with causing disturbances to anyone around them. Another surface resembles a worry stone which enables the user to rub away the stress and a moveable joystick which fulfils the needs with a sliding action.

The cube has also been created with a switch which can be clicked rolling gears with a ball and spinning dial. In a video explained by the team it states that while designing Fidget Cube they wanted to ensure two things.

Utilised – Classroom to Boardroom

First the functionality requires to satisfy the fidgeting needs, and needs to be a complete tool box of fidgeting choices while staying small as well as compact. They wanted Fidget Cube to be a premium desk toy which could be utilised separately in any setting, from the classroom to the boardroom.

The McLachlan brothers had opened a Kickstarter campaign recently with a target of $15,000 which they had exceeded it greatly. Presently the campaign had raised over 1.4 million from 37,651 supporters with 41 days still until it ends.

The cube can be purchased by the consumers for $19 and the deliveries are expected to be scheduled in December to any destination in the world.

Naked 3D Mirror Scans Your Body for Fitness Progress

Naked 3D Fitness Tracker – Body Scanning Mirror

Health conscious individuals while sticking to a diet or fitness routine rely on scales which only tell them on the pounds gained or lost. A usual mirror could let them know how one tends to look though not how that look would compare to when they start working out. The Naked 3D Fitness Tracker fills up this gap and the mirror tends to create a 3D scan of the body for tracking your fitness.

 It is said to be available for a pre-order price of $699. The Naked 3D Fitness Tracker is said to be a full-length mirror which takes a scan of the body to record precise measurements, fat percentages together with weight. The data is then sent to a smartphone or a tablet app where the person can view the development via heat maps as well as a time-lapse model.

It utilises its built-in RealSense cameras in performing a complete body scan in order that individual can have a visual record on how the body tends to alter to diet and exercise over a period of time. Naked Labs is expecting to ship its body scanning mirror somewhere in early 2017.The device with this premium price tag would be for people who seem to be serious in tracking their fitness progress.

3 RealSense Cameras Implanted in Mirror Captures 3D Images

However CEO and co-founder of Naked Labs, Farhad Farahbakhshian states that the fitness tracker could be perfect for those keen in making a change in their standard of living. He added that very often, sticking to a new diet together with exercise plan does not seem to show the desired results.

 He had explained at a demo during the week’s Intel Developer Forum, the issue that the Naked 3D Fitness Tracker could address. He commented that `people want to understand how their bodies change depending on diet and exercise’.

In order to obtain a 3D scan, the individual needs to take their place on a turntable scale before a mirror with only the inner garment so that the camera can obtain a good view of the body. While the individual have a tendency to rotate, three RealSense cameras implanted in the mirror tends to capture 3D images of the body which the quad-core Atom X5 process of the mirror closes together in a scan of the body.

 The mirror not only captures a scan on how one looks at a given point of time but also said to calculate measurements for various areas of the body like the neck, shoulders, biceps, chest, forearms, waist, hips, quads as well as the calf muscles.

Data Can Be Observed on Friend Mobile App

On recording the data one can observe it on a friend mobile app and get an understanding on how one’s diet and exercises option tend to be paying off. It could be that the exercises have not been giving the desired results which you envisaged to do so. But with Naked’s scan, Farahbakhshian points out that it portrays how flatter the tummy has been.

The Naked 3D Fitness Tracker may not be solely intended for fitness obsessiveness or qualified athletes but would need someone who is much more enthusiastic than a casual dieter especially considering the price tag which is likely to reach $999 after the pre-order time. The 3D body scanner, if nothing else, seems to show off other possibilities for RealSense technology of Intel further than drones, games and movement tracking.

Engineered Bacterium Turns Carbon Dioxide into Methane Fuel

Bacterium Turns Carbon Dioxide into Fuel with Enzymatic Step

Scientists have brought about a bacterium which tends to take carbon dioxide from the air, turning it into fuel with a single enzymatic step. The process is said to draw on sunlight in producing methane and hydrogen within the bacterium Rhodopseudomonas palustris, in essence withdrawing combustion. The said engineered bacteria tend to guide scientists to an improved carbon-neutral biofuels.

Their results had been published recently by the researchers in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. According to co-author Caroline Harwood, professor of microbiology at the University of Washington, the report flourished from her work studying an enzyme known as nitrogenase. She commented that they were interested in the enzyme nitrogenase since it does a remarkably difficult reaction.

 The enzyme, in nature tends to serve as a catalyst to assist certain bacteria turn inert atmospheric nitrogen gas into reactive ammonia through a process known as nitrogen reduction or nitrogen fixation. The enzyme tends to utilise adenosine triphosphate –ATP which is a compound that assists as an energy exchange in cells.

Enzyme Type of Promiscuous

The nitrogen reduction reaction tends to have a big energy barrier and seldom occurs on its own without the enzyme. Researchers have been speculating if they could tweak nitrogenase to operate with other stable as well as inert molecules.

Harwood has commented that it has been somewhat appreciated recently that this enzyme is a type of promiscuous and tends to do other reactions, efficiently.Some of her co-workers succeeded in isolating and changing nitrogenase to use the most oxidized type of carbon, carbon dioxide as the initial material in producing the most reduced kind of carbon, methane.

However, this altered enzyme was dully produced in test tube at tiny scales that was not adequately good for a process which could someday produce industrial quantities of biofuels. Harwood had stated that they want to see if they could get a real living organism for this conversion. A form of the R palustris bacterium which had been modified to crank out the engineered nitrogenase at full blast had been prepared by the team.

Modified Nitrogenase Unable to Fix Nitrogen

The bacterium in its natural state tends to absorb sunlight in order to produce ATP so that light can assist in generating the energy to power the enzyme in the modified cells. The researchers discovered that the modified nitrogenase could not fix nitrogen though it could produce methane and hydrogen when the bacteria were illuminated.

But the latest nitrogenase is not anywhere as efficient in producing methane from carbon dioxide since it makes ammonia from nitrogen gas. Harwood has remarked that the normal enzyme tends to make about a couple of hydrogen from each molecule of ammonia and the changed enzyme tends to make a thousand of hydrogen for every molecule of methane.

An associate lecturer from the department of biological sciences at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Daniel Lessner, not involved in the research had stated that the findings draw out a clear pathway in producing methane, the foremost constituent of natural gas from the living organisms. He had studied a class of bacteria known as methanogens which tend to produce methane, naturally.

But they tend to use various starting materials such as acetate. He commented saying that the methanogens need other microbes in providing them with the other electron donors and what is needed then is not just one microorganism but multiple microorganisms.

Smallest Hard Disk to Date Writes Information Atom by Atom

Accomplished In Reduction to Final Limit

Present society tends to create over a billion gigabytes of new data daily and to store them, it has been progressively important for every individual to occupy the minimum space as possible. A group of scientist at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft University accomplished in bringing about this reduction to the final limit by building a memory of 1 kilobyte wherein each of the bit is said to be represented by the position of a single chlorine atom. Sander Otte, lead-scientist had commented that in theory, this storage density would enable all books created by humans to be written on an individual post stamp.

 They had reached a storage density of 500 Terabits per square inch, which was 500 times superior to the best commercial hard disk available presently. Reports on this memory in Nature Nanotechnology had been done by his team on July 18. Physicist Richard Feynman had challenged his colleagues to engineer the world at the smallest possible scale.

 In his well-known lecture – There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom, he had speculated that if they had a platform enabling them to arrange single atoms in a precise orderly pattern, there would be a possibility of storing a piece of information for each atom.

Scanning Tunnelling Microscope

To respect the visionary Feynman, Otte together with his team had coded a section of Feynman’s lecture on an area of 100 nanometers wide. A scanning tunnelling microscope – STM had been utilised by the team where a sharp needle tends to search the surface of the atoms one after the other. With the aid of these probes, scientist not only can see the atoms but can also utilise them in pushing the atoms around.

Otte had explained that one could compare it to a sliding puzzle. Every piece comprises of two positions on a surface of copper atoms and one chlorine atom which tends to slide back and forth between these two positions. If the chlorine atom tends to be in the top position, there will be a hole below it which is called a 1. If the hole is said to be in the top position and the chlorine atom is on the bottom, the bit is then considered as 0.

New Approach Offers Tremendous Prospects

Since the chlorine atoms are surrounded by other chlorine atoms, apart from being near the holes, they seem to keep each other in place. This is the reason why this system with holes is said to be much more stable than the systems with movable atoms and are more suitable for data storage. The new approach tends to offer tremendous prospects with regards to stability and scalability.

Yet this kind of memory need not be anticipated in data centres soon. Otte had stated that in its present condition the memory tends to operate only in clean vacuum situations and at liquid nitrogen temperature in order that the actual storage of data on an atomic scale tends to be some way off. However through this accomplishment we seem to have advanced a big step nearer.

The research had been made conceivable with the support from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research NOW/FOM. The scientists of the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory – INL in Portugal had done calculations on the performance of the chlorine atoms.

Self Shading Windows Can Rapidly Switch from Transparent to Dark

New System – Windows Switch from Translucent to Opaque

The researcher team at MIT have discovered a new system of making windows which tend to switch from translucent to opaque which have a tendency to save energy by the blocking of sunlight on hot day thereby reducing the air-conditioning costs. Though other means of causing the glass to darken prevails, this new system tends to provide substantial benefit with the combination of speedy response times together with low power requirements.

When the glass is said to be switched from clear to dark or vice versa, the new system is said to need only little to no power for the maintenance of its new state unlike the other substances and only requires energy when the need to switch back again, arises. Reports of the results had been reported recently in a paper on Chem, the online journal, by the MIT professor of chemistry, Mircea Dinca, doctoral student Khalid Al-Kaabi as well as the former postdoc Casey Wade, presently an assistant professor at Brandeis University. Dinca explains that the latest discovery tends to utilise electrochromic materials that incline to alter their colour as well as transparency in reaction to applied voltage

Turning Voltage – Windows Darken

These tend to vary from the photochromic materials like those that are found in some eyeglasses which are inclined to get darker while the light gets brighter. These types of materials have the tendency of much slower response time and to experience a smaller change in their levels of opaqueness.

The prevailing electrochromic materials face similar limitation and have only role applications. For instance, the aircraft Boeing 787 has electrochromic windows that get darker to avert the bright sunlight from coming into the cabin. Dinca informed that by turning on the voltage, the windows could be darkened though when the switch is flipped it tends to take some time for the windows to turn dark and surely one would prefer it to be quicker.

The delay is due to the changes in the material which depend on the movement of electron, an electric current which provides the whole window with a negative charge.

MOFs – Conducts Electrons/Ions At High Speeds

Positive ions thereafter seem to move through the material restoring the electrical balance thus creating the colour change effect. However, while the electrons seem to flow quickly through the materials, the ions tend to move much more slowly which limits the general reaction speed.

By utilising the sponge-like material known as metal-organic frameworks-MOFs that tends to conduct both electrons and ions at very high speeds, the MIT team overpowered that issue. These materials are said to have been utilised for around 20 years for their capacity of storing gases in their structure. However, it was the MIT team who were the first to connect them for their electrical as well as optical properties.

Dinca remarks that the other issue with the prevailing versions of self-shading materials is that it is difficult to obtain a material which alters from totally transparent to, for instance, completely black. Even the windows in the 787 tend to change only to a dark shade of green instead of being opaque.