Thursday, November 29, 2007

Incredible Optical Illusion : Motion Induced Blindness

Michael Bach has presented on his site a very interesting illusion. You fixate your eyes in the center of some rotating square and 3 yellow dots inside begin to disappear.

It is very easy to do. You will be amazed how our eyes can be confused easily.

Go to try yourself

Thursday, November 22, 2007

A Shocking Experiment Video for Heavy Smokers

This video clip shows what you will get after smoking 400 cigarettes on your lungs.

Seeing is believing! 7200 mgr of black toxic chemical called tar. It contains many deadly elements assuring to make you lung cancer in the long run.

Forward this article to the people you love and care !



Monday, November 12, 2007

New Discovery : 4,000 years old temple in Peru

4,000-year-old temple filled with murals on the northern coast of Peru was discovered. It became one of the oldest finds in the Americas.

The temple, inside a larger ruin, includes a staircase that leads up to an altar used for fire worship at a site scientists have called Ventarron, said Peruvian archaeologist Walter Alva, who led the dig.

It sits in the Lambayeque valley, near the ancient Sipan complex that Alva unearthed in the 1980s. Ventarron was built long before Sipan, about 2,000 years before Christ, he said.

"It's a temple that is about 4,000 years old," Alva, director of the Museum Tumbas Reales (Royal Tombs) of Sipan, told Reuters by telephone after announcing the results of carbon dating at a ceremony north of Lima sponsored by Peru's government.

"What's surprising are the construction methods, the architectural design and most of all the existence of murals that could be the oldest in the Americas," he said.

Lambayeque is 472 miles from Lima, Peru's capital.

Discoveries at Sipan, an administrative and religious center of the Moche culture, have included a gold-filled tomb built 1,700 years ago for a pre-Incan king.

Peru is rich in archaeological treasures, including the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu in the Andes.

Thursday, November 1, 2007

How to Make Your Own Wi-Fi Antenna

It is not a complicated process at all. You can change your regular antenna into a high gain antenna just like the $30 range extender antennas very cheaply.

Here is a nice how-to video

Blind to 'see' and 'touch' the images soon

A recently completed licensing agreement for two new technologies may help bring affordable graphic reading systems for the blind and visually impaired to market. The two systems bring electronic images to life in the same way that Braille makes words readable.

The Braille system, based on a method of communication originally developed by Charles Barbier for Napoleon's soldiers, was devised by Frenchman Louis Braille in 1821. Braille allows vision impaired people to read and write using characters made up of raised dots. The system has been used for almost two centuries but these new developments in technology could mark a significant change in the way the blind are able to “see” in that they incorporate images, rather than words and numbers.

The two new systems, a tactile graphic display device and fingertip graphic reader, were developed by researchers at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) in the US. The tactile graphic display for localized sensory stimulation, was created using an array of about 100 small, very closely spaced (1/10 of a millimeter apart) actuator points set against a user’s fingertip. To “see” a computer graphic with this technology, a blind or visually impaired person moves the device-tipped finger across a surface like a computer mouse to scan an image in computer memory. The computer sends a signal to the display device and moves the actuators against the skin to “translate” the pattern, replicating the sensation of the finger moving over the pattern being displayed. With further development, the technology could possibly be used to make fingertip tactile graphics practical for virtual reality systems or give a detailed sense of touch to robotic control (teleoperation) and space suit gloves.

The second technology, introduced as a prototype in 2002, conveys scanned illustrations, map outlines or other graphical images to the fingertips, and can translate images displayed on Internet Web pages or in electronic books. It uses refreshable tactile graphic display technology, allowing a person to feel a succession of images on a reusable surface. The machine uses about 3,600 small pins that can be raised in any pattern, and then locked into place to hold the pattern for reading. The actuator points then can be withdrawn and reset in a new pattern, allowing the tactile reading to continue through a variety of images.

If you think the devices look familiar it’s because inspiration came from a “bed of nails” toy found in a novelty store. The toy allows the user to press their hand or face or an object onto the back of the nails and they raise up to create a picture of that object. Watching the pins in the toy depress under fingers and then return to their original state started the researchers thinking about how the principle could be applied to electronic signals. NIST recently signed a non-exclusive license for commercialization of its two tactile graphic display technologies with ELIA Life Technology which may soon see the two products become commercially available.

Source : Gizmag