FT Chronicle

Skype has made an update to its Mac application to 2.8 that adds a number of new features which have recently been added to the Windows editions.

The update brings Skype Access functionality, allowing you to connect to public Wi-Fi hotspots on a pay-as-you-go system. It has Screen Sharing capabilities, letting you show the person you’re calling exactly what’s going on on your monitor in those “it’s gone funny” situations. Lastly, there’s the usual round of call quality upgrades and bug fixes.

Newly introduced, and at the exact same price as Olympus’  E-600 Four Thirds digital SLR with 14-42mm kit lens, is the manufacturer’s latest Micro Four Thirds system hybrid in the E-PL1 Digital Pen.

Like that DSLR “proper” it also comes in kit form with a zoom of the exact same focal range, equivalent to 28-84mm in 35mm film terms. The E-PL1 is however the baby of its particular family that includes its predecessors in the E-P1 and E-P2, the former reportedly due to be phased out by the middle of this year. The close price match with the E-600 is of interest as what you’re getting in the E-PL1 is, as with its forebears, basically a foreshortened E-series DSLR with the mirror mechanism removed to bring lens and sensor closer together.

This wild new motorcycle, invented by 19-year-old Ben J. Poss Gulak, is among the latest inventions to capture attention.

Debuting at the National Motorcycle Show in Toronto, the “Uno” uses gyro technology for balance and acceleration.

It is a battery charged machine that accelerates by leaning forward and slowing down by leaning backwards. It weighs approximately 129 pounds (58 kg.) and has a top speed of 25 mph (40 klms).

One of the most exciting products from CES 2010 last month was Notion Ink’s Adam tablet, the Android-based slate using the latest-gen NVIDIA Tegra chipset and Pixel Qi’s innovative low-power display.

The company had brought along a prototype they could exclusively show, and now they’ve sent over renders of what’s likely to be the final Adam design complete with some mockups of a SlashGear digital magazine.

The Notion Ink Tablet will feature the Pixel Qi transflective display, and it will have a 10.1 inch screen with a resolution of 1024 x 600, and it measures 6.3 inches by 9.8 inches by 0.6 inches thick and weighs in at 1.7lbs.

It has HDMI-out and 3 USB ports, and can output video at 1080p resolution. There’s a 3-megapixel autofocusing camera and Notion Ink reckons it’ll squeeze 16 hours of juice out of its battery. In direct sunlight, with the backlight off, it should shoot up to 160 hours. There’s Wi-Fi, 3G, Bluetooth, a pile of sensors and accelerometers, GPS and an SD Card slot.

Australian engineers from Invetech, a company with headquarters in Melbourne, and Organovo, a firm based in San Diego, California, developed a 3D bio-printer that can prove to be very useful in creating organs for those who need them.

At this time, one of their most useful inventions can grow blood vessels. It is expected that in 5 years the arteries printed by the device could be used by surgeons when they perform open heart surgeries. The companies believe that more sophisticated organs could be developed by 2020.

To be able to print organs researchers need to place specific cells into a preferred 3D shape. There are two print heads in the bio-printer. One pin heads is where human cells are placed, while the other is used for placing a hydrogel, scaffold or support matrix.

from infoniac.com

Mexico’s NAICA MINE- One of the world’s most spectacular geographical discoveries was the cave of giant crystals with its selenite crystals of a size never seen before. Most of them measure six meters in length, with some of them reaching eleven meters.

In the year 2000 at 300 m below, the Crystals’ cave was discovered. This cave is a true wonder of the underground world. It is one of the most spectacular geological and mineralogical discoveries ever made. It contains selenite mega crystals, some 11m in length and one meter thick. These are much larger than any crystals of this type ever found. The walls and particularly the floor of the cave are sprinkled with blocky single crystals that in some cases cluster to form a parallel aggregate.

Giant elongate selenite mega crystals, the biggest ever found on the planet, grow from some of these groups of blocky crystals or directly from the floor, and some criss-cross the cave from side to side. Most of the crystals are 6 meters long but several reach 11 m creating a natural scenario of unparalleled beauty, beyond imagination, an unreal dream world discovered by chance.

The temperature at this depth varies from 45°C to 50°C, while the percentage of humidity ranges from 90 to 100%, meaning that human beings cannot survive there for longer than two hours.

Exploring teams, film teams and scientists continue to risk their lives at these hellish temperatures, in order to document this gorgeous underground fantasy-land for future generations.

for more info: click here

Apple is offering one lucky shopper $10,000 dollars in the form of an iTunes gift card if they happen to be the buyer of the 10 billionth song from the iTunes store.

In what the company is calling “One huge milestone for music” the Cupertino based company is hoping the chance to win a vast chunk of cash to buy music, videos, and apps will be enough to lure thousands of customers into the iTunes store.

All you have to do is buy a song, and if it’s the 10 billionth download, you could win a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card!

Canon announces the arrival of the latest and most advanced touch screen IXUS – the new IXUS 210. Available in black, gold, silver and pink, the Canon IXUS 210 offers a sculpted metal exterior, a 14.1 Megapixel image sensor and 24mm genuine Canon lens for premium imaging performance to match its iconic IXUS styling.

The new Canon IXUS 210 will focus on bringing an array of interesting picture features and enhancements above and beyond making sure you can just point and shoot.

All controlled via a capacitive touchscreen on the back, the display was responsive and easy to zip through the menus. Icon’s are simply pressed to access things like ISO and even after a quick play we forgot that the camera lacked all the traditional buttons.

Picture modes of worth are the “miniature” mode that is a basic tilt shift effect – making everything look like you’re shooting a model image – and a fisheye lens option that you can adjust the strength of (low, medium and high).

Denon has announced the launch of a new Blu-ray beast, informally dropping the S-5BD model number for a more manageable name – the Cara.

On the technical side, the device incorporates technology from its big brother models. Cara Blu-ray beast, offers 5.1 channel surround sound, two-source, two-room distribution capabilities which allows you to listen to music from two different sources. Besides, it supports BD-Live and HDMI 1.4.

Almost all the popular formats are supported by this device. Facilities like SD card slots as well as iPod/iPhone digital direct playback via the USB port needs special mentioning.

The name might be the only manageable thing about the device – its 7.8 kilogram heft certainly isn’t and it comes with a spec sheet (and no doubt manual) that will give you a headache, while its £1999 price tag will certainly make your wallet hurt.

Once upon a time, Acer gussied up some of its mid-range workhorse computers with hot-red paint jobs and affixed them with the vibrant equine sporting logo from Ferrari.

Now the name has been slapped on to a $600 notebook.

The Acer Ferrari One is essentially a tarted-up notbook*, an 11.6-inch model (with a 1366 x 768-pixel screen) that subs in a 1.2-GHz Athlon X2 for the usual Intel Atom and juices the specs with 4 gigs of RAM and a real (if low-end) video card (ATI’s Radeon 3200).

Main specs:

Processor and chipset AMD Athlon™ X2 dual-core processor L310, supporting AMD HyperTransport™ 3.0 technology, AMD M780G Chipset

Operating system Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium

Genuine Windows® 7 Home Basic

Memory Up to 4GB of DDR2 667/800 MHZ memory

HDD    160 GB or larger hard disk drive

Storage Multi-in-1 card reader: supporting Secure Digital™ (SD) Card, MultiMediaCard (MMC), Reduced-Size Multimedia Card (RS-MMC), Memory Stick™ (MS), Memory Stick PRO™ (MS PRO), xD-Picture Card™ (xD); supporting storage cards with adapter: miniSD™, microSD™, Memory Stick Duo™, Memory Stick PRO Duo™

Display 11.6” HD 1366 x 768 (WXGA) pixel resolution, high-brightness (200-nit) Acer CineCrystal™ LED-backlit TFT LCD

Graphics ATI Radeon™ HD 3200 Graphics with up to 2047 MB of HyperMemory™ (256+128 MB of dedicated system memory, up to 1663 MB of shared system memory), supporting Unified Video Decoder (UVD), OpenEXR High Dynamic-Range (HDR) technology, Shader Model 4.0, Microsoft® DirectX® 10, Dual independent display support, 16.7 million colors, MPEG-2/DVD decoding, WMV9 (VC-1)1 and H.264 (AVC) decoding

Audio ptimized 3rd Generation Dolby Home Theater® audio enhancement, featuring Dolby® Digital Live, Dolby® Pro Logic® IIx, Dolby® Headphone, Dolby® Natural Bass and Dolby® Sound Space Expander, Dolby® Inverse Filtering, Dolby® High Frequency Enhancer technologies, High-definition audio support, Two Built-in stereo speakers, S/PDIF support for digital speakers, MS-Sound compatible

The touchpad, flush with the palm rest, is curious. Its trapezoidal shape makes it a bit awkward in a world of rectangles, and it’s tricky to intuit where the pad ends and the palm rest begins — causing you to drag your fingertip off the edge a bit too often — but the multitouch implementation works well here. We wish we could say the same for the keyboard, which is a typically cheap affair (with Page Up/Down keys foolishly sandwiched in with the arrow buttons).