Lifeboat Foundation

An experiment that created a 3.5 Mbps broadband internet connection won’t sound very impressive to most of us, especially since the average download speed in the US is about 75 megabits per second. But the surprising part is that it was established using a 6ft 7in piece of wet string.

While broadband connections tend to rely on wires made of materials such as copper, engineers at a small British internet service provider called Andrews and Arnold wanted to see if it was possible to send data through something less conventional.

They soaked the long piece of twine in a salt water as it’s a good conductor of electricity, though it had to be re-soaked every half an hour, and used a pair of alligator clips to establish the connection. “The upkeep of these wet string connections is very hard; in our tests, we had to continually re-wet the string approximately every 30 minutes to avoid a complete loss of sync, and this process was always disruptive to the signals,” wrote Adrian Kennard, the ISP’s director, in a blog post.

Continue reading “UK ISP creates 3.5 Mbps broadband internet connection using wet string” »

A new technique for recording image information onto a surface creates the ability for one space to contain multiple holographic snapshots, depending on how you look at it.

With this new research, cramming numerous holograms without loss of resolution on the same material could open the way to some fascinating new applications.

Holograms have been around for over half a century, serving as art, entertainment, and foils to counterfeiting. It’s been a hard and fast rule that no matter which way you view a hologram, the same object would appear in three dimensions. Until now.

Continue reading “Engineers Just Figured Out How to Put Several Holograms Into a Single Surface” »

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Even as autonomous robots get better at doing things on their own, there will still be plenty of circumstances where humans might need to step in and take control. New software developed by Brown University computer scientists enables users to control robots remotely using virtual reality, which helps users to become immersed in a robot’s surroundings despite being miles away physically.

The software connects a robot’s arms and grippers as well as its onboard cameras and sensors to off-the-shelf virtual reality hardware via the internet. Using handheld controllers, users can control the position of the robot’s arms to perform intricate manipulation tasks just by moving their own arms. Users can step into the robot’s metal skin and get a first-person view of the environment, or can walk around the robot to survey the scene in the third person—whichever is easier for accomplishing the task at hand. The data transferred between the robot and the virtual reality unit is compact enough to be sent over the internet with minimal lag, making it possible for users to guide robots from great distances.

Continue reading “Software enables robots to be controlled in virtual reality” »

Freshly discovered malware called Triton can compromise safety systems that control many kinds of industrial processes.

For years, security experts have been warning that hackers can disable systems that control critical infrastructure we all rely on, such as dams and power plants. Now researchers at Mandiant, which is part of the security firm FireEye, have revealed that a new form of malware, dubbed Triton, closed down the operations of a business in the Middle East belonging to Schneider Electric, a French company. The researchers say that they haven’t attributed the hack to a particular attacker, but they do say it bore hallmarks of threats from a nation-state.

Triton appears to have targeted a so-called safety instrumented system, or SIS, which monitors the operation of a physical process using sensors and acoustics. By taking control of it, hackers can destroy or damage the process the SIS is monitoring by tricking it into thinking everything’s normal, when in fact the process is operating at unsafe levels.

Continue reading “A New Industrial Hack Highlights the Cyber Holes in Our Infrastructure” »

GE researchers are using cold spray to repair and build new parts for aviation, energy, and other applications. http://invent.ge/2iqaKra