"Glimpse"
My scrap book of what was, is, might and should be.
![realcleverscience:
One day soon we will truly become a wireless technological civilization. This doesn’t just mean not having to charge your laptop all the time, or even ridding ourselves of the infamous ‘black spaghetti’. I’m talking about being connected to the emerging “hive mind” and “smart-everything”. We will all be one step closer to fully hybridizing ourselves with eachother, our environment, and the collected knowledge of mankind through our own technological inventions.
So, yeah, in other words we’re just talking about a revolutionary step in the history of our planet that we’re rapidly approaching.
(*ugh* This much awesomeness gives me butterflies that hurt! Toooo awesome! oh!)
RCS Highlights:
…Even though improvements have brought [wireless sensors’] energy consumption down, wireless sensors’ batteries still need changing periodically. Especially for networks in remote locales, replacing batteries in thousands of sensors is a staggering task.
To get around the power constraint, researchers are harnessing electricity from low-power sources in the environment, such as vibrations from swaying bridges, humming machinery and rumbling foot traffic. Such natural energy sources could do away with the need for batteries, powering wireless sensors indefinitely.
Now researchers at MIT have designed a device the size of a U.S. quarter that harvests energy from low-frequency vibrations, such as those that might be felt along a pipeline or bridge. The tiny energy harvester — known technically as a microelectromechanical system, or MEMS — picks up a wider range of vibrations than current designs, and is able to generate 100 times the power of devices of similar size…
To harvest electricity from environmental vibrations, researchers have typically looked to piezoelectric materials such as quartz and other crystals. Such materials naturally accumulate electric charge in response to mechanical stress (piezo, in Greek, means to squeeze or press). In the past few years, researchers have exploited piezoelectric material, or PZT, at the microscale, engineering MEMS devices that generate small amounts of power…
The researchers calculated that [their new] device was able to generate 45 microwatts of power with just a single layer of PZT — an improvement of two orders of magnitude compared to current designs…
“Our target is at least 100 microwatts, and that’s what all the electronics guys are asking us to get to… For monitoring a pipeline, if you generate 100 microwatts, you can power a network of smart sensors that can talk forever with each other, using this system.”](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lrmuywoWOv1qzaxqwo1_250.jpg)
"The Google Internet Bus has traversed ten states in India and arrived in Patna, the capital of Bihar, on Tuesday. Speaking at the launch event, Peeyush Ranjan, Google India’s managing director of R&D, said that more than 1.5 million people had gone online for the first time after visiting the bus, according to a report by The Times of India. The bus has so far made stops at over 2000 locations in 120 cities and towns all over the country."
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Paul Higgins : Amazing numbers
Google’s Internet Bus enables 1.5m people discover Internet in India (via thenextweb)
(via emergentfutures)
"It is by now an old idea in futurology, originating with Alvin Toffler, that modern man exists in a state of constant shock at the changing landscape of the technological world — akin to “culture shock,” but as ceaseless as the progress of technology. But we quickly become accustomed to, and adjust ourselves to, the technologies that increasingly form the fabric of our interaction with the world — and so their novelty rapidly fades. And then we find our experience of moving through the world is not one of perpetual awe and wonderment, but of boredom and restlessness."
– GPS and the End of the Road, fantastic long read from The New Atlantis (via curiositycounts)
(via futuramb)
