Like many other leading tech firms, Intel regularly ventures outside its comfort zone in pursuit of new revenue opportunities. The chip maker maintains a dedicated investment fund for backing startups in promising markets, while its engineering division usually runs at least several projects that fall under Google’s definition of a moonshot. One such initiative appears…
Category: Sci-tech
The HoloLens could receive a major cloud-powered boost
To achieve mass-market appeal, an augmented reality headset must be compact and light enough for regular use, which limits the amount of hardware that can fit inside. It’s a restriction that often makes it difficult to perform the complex rendering involved in generating 3D content. Microsoft, however, isn’t about to let that get in the…
Samsung has a new vision for bendable touch devices
In 2011, Samsung captured consumers’ imagination with an experimental screen that could be bent at will without hurting the display quality. Six years and hundreds of patent applications later, the South Korean mobile giant has reportedly reached a point where it’s all but ready to bring the technology to market. The question that now occupies…
Next on Google's agenda: Industrial robots
The robotics industry has emerged as a key focus area for Google in recent years. The company’s Boston Dynamics subsidiary recently unveiled a four-legged walker that can independently navigate around a house, while its artificial intelligence researchers are working to improve the finesse of mechanical limbs. And now a new patent application indicates that yet…
Samsung is working on a biometric earpiece
While the wearable industry has its attention turned towards Apple’s recently unveiled AirPods, rival Samsung is quietly developing a wireless earpiece of its own. The new patent application in which the device is detailed indicates that it will not only be able to play music and take calls but also monitor the user’s vital signs in…
IBM is developing an ultra-durable battery for electric cars
The lithium-ion battery in the average smartphone is capable of lasting a good number of years if it’s not exposed to overheating or some other form of permanent damage, but the same working assumption can’t always be made elsewhere. When it comes to electric vehicles, for instance, the risk of catastrophic power failure must be…
Samsung is developing a fabric-like display for smart clothing
Now that the first curved and bendable displays are starting to enter mass production, Samsung is moving on to the next adjective with a new elastic diode arrangement capable of stretching like a fabric. The technology, which was revealed in a recently published patent application from the company’s monitor-making business, bears a close resemblance to…
IBM is using analytics to encourage recycling
It appears that Big Blue’s interest in connected devices is much broader than what has officially been acknowledged. A new patent filing from the company published this week reveals the specifications for a smart recycling bin that harnesses the image recognition capabilities of its cloud-based analytics platform to try and encourage consumers to become more conscious about how…
Solar concentrators are finally becoming a viable energy source
Manufacturing follows a very basic economic principle. The easier a product is to make, the faster it can be assembled, which means that the production line is able to churn out more units and exploit the resulting operational gains to cut overhead. With luck, the savings are passed onto the consumer. But the axiom is…
Hong Kong university will use drones to fight bad Wi-Fi
The next time you visit Hong Kong, don’t be too surprised if you find miniature drones roaming about your hotel lobby. That’s part of a plan by researchers from the local public research university to combat one of the biggest impediments to tourism in the modern era and urban life as a whole: Poor Wi-Fi. You’ve…
IBM is bringing the corporate world’s unbreakable encryption to your phone
As any first-year computer science undergraduate could tell you, the rigid programming of current software prevents applications from taking any truly random actions. That requires important corporate systems like the mainframes processing your payments to tap physical parameters such as light and background radiation to generate cryptographic sequences that hackers can’t theoretically predict. The technology has been around…
NASA and GM’s joint space robot is halfway to human-level flexibility
Three years after the last official update about its collaboration with NASA to develop a humanoid robot capable of performing maintenance work in orbit, a new patent filing reveals that GM has upgraded the most recent prototype shown to the public almost unrecognizably. The enhanced iteration shares little external resemblance with the astronauts that it may…
IBM is developing a nanoscale GPS
It is an irony of modern life that GPS has made finding your location during a trip to a remote mountain range easier than positioning a microscope in an air-conditioned lab, where the level of precision required below a certain scale makes moving the probe to the desired location a major undertaking. That’s the latest…
IBM has invented a cloaking device to conceal military vehicles
With an annual research budget of several billion dollars, IBM has plenty to spare for moonshot experiments such as its recently revealed effort to bring DRAM technology to production, but the latest addition to the roster is in a league all of its own. Engineers at its optics group have developed a cloaking device that promises…