When it looks like your phone is about to run out of battery, you actually have plenty of juice to spare. The Voltmaker is a device that allows you to make use of that reserve energy in order to charge your phone — all with the flick of a wrist.

A hidden rod that is normally secured to the body using a magnet can be released using a spring-loaded mechanism. Once you release it, you can spin the rod by shaking the device like a rattle — a movement that allows your smartphone to harvest kinetic energy.

By keeping up your enthusiastic rattling for a few minutes, it’s possible to generate enough power to make a quick phone call, play a couple of songs or light the way using an LED torch attachment that fits into the USB port at the opposite end. Read more…

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We've seen terahertz cameras that can look through walls and X-ray scanners that fit in the palm of your hand. Now, scientists at MIT have developed a way to track movement through walls using Wi-Fi signals.

The idea is pretty simple: take two transmitters and one receiver. Each transmitter sends out a signal that is precisely 180 degrees out of phase with the other, so the two cancel each other out, and the receiving antenna “hears” nothing.

But put any moving object in the area, and it reflects the signals. The signals don’t cancel out, and where once there was no radio “noise” at all, now radio energy is emanating off the moving object or person. A still object also reflects radio waves, but the time it takes for a wave to bounce back to the receiver stays the same, and the reflections will still cancel out.

The invention — which Dina Katabi, an electrical engineering professor, and her graduate student Fadel Adib are developing — is called Wi-Vi. The two will present it at the Sigcomm conference in Hong Kong this August.

There are several uses for this technology. A small handheld detector could find people buried under tons of rubble, showing rescue workers where to look, or police could use it to see if there is someone inside a room.

Wi-Vi differs from traditional X-ray or terahertz wave systems. In that case a beam of radio waves is sent to an object that reflects them back. This kind of detection is just like what your eyes do – seeing reflected light. (Radio waves just happen to be in a different part of the spectrum).

It’s also a twist on a previous attempt at using Wi-Fi routers to see through walls by taking advantage of the signals they emit. Wi-Vi doesn’t require that a router be in place.

The advantage here is that this works with radio frequencies that penetrate walls relatively easily, at least for short distances. The wavelengths are also short, so the antenna doesn’t need to be very large. It also needs just one receiving antenna, so it can be fit onto a hand-held device.

And the reason it uses Wi-Fi type signals is that they aren’t reserved for the military, and are open to use by any device with less need to get approvals from regulators.

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Space shuttle Atlantis, the final orbiter among NASA's winged fleet to fly in space, launched on its new mission Saturday (June 29) as the centerpiece of a $100 million tourist attraction in Florida.

Astronauts from each of Atlantis' 33 flights joined officials at NASA's Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex for a morning ceremony marking the opening of "Space Shuttle Atlantis," a 90,000-square foot (8360 square meters) exhibit dedicated to the retired spacecraft.

"There are not a lot of places where you are going to be able to get as a close to an orbiter as you are going to be able to get when you get inside the Atlantis exhibit here," said Charles Bolden, NASA Administrator and commander of Atlantis' 11th mission, STS-45, in 1992. Read more…

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A couple of days ago, Flipboard received an update that brought a couple of minor improvements along with the usual bug fixes and performance optimizations. As it turned out, though, that same update also brought a notable change involving Instagram‘s recently launched video feature.

As noted by The Next Web, Flipboard has been updated with support for videos shared from Instagram. Now, the popular social-magazine app is able to display videos from the popular photo-sharing and video-sharing social networking app.

For some reason, the addition of this enhancement was not included in the changelog of Flipboard’s latest update. What did get included are the following:

Reminder: Log in to Google Reader on Flipboard on or before June 30th to save your feeds and folders.

Now you can share to Twitter and Facebook when sharing to your magazines.

Flipboard is available in the App Store for free. The app also received an update earlier this month that gave users the ability to co-curate magazines.

Instagram’s video feature was launched by Facebook just last week, obviously in response to Twitter’s Vine. Not unexpectedly, Instagram’s video shares to Twitter, and presumably across the web in general, have increased at the expense of Vine’s.

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Google is killing Reader tomorrow, and as a sort of consolation prize, they’ve added some new features to Google News. There’s now a box that features a four-day forecast of local weather, editor’s picks of stories, and sports scores. This is clearly not going to be replacing Reader for anyone, but it’s always pretty nice to get weather updates.

The weather defaults to the local forecast for your location, but you can also set it for a specific place. It also features links to other weather services such as the Weather Channel and the Weather Underground for more detailed information.

Editor’s Picks are limited to the categories of “Technology” and “Business” with more on the way, according to Google News product manager Anand Paka. It’s easy to click over to different news sources for more picks, but it’s a far cry from something like an RSS reader.

Right now, the sports scores are limited to U.S. football, basketball, baseball and hockey (more countries and sports are set to arrive in the near future). Google might be rolling out the features over time, but right now I can’t see the sports-scores box — which I don’t actually mind.

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Apple has been on something of a world tour securing trademarks for its anticipated “iWatch.” After first seeking trademarks in Russia and Jamaica back in June, and more recently filing for the “iWatch” name in Japan, Apple has applied for the same trademark in Mexico, Taiwan and Turkey.

Mexico’s “Institute of Industrial Property” received the application on June 3 — the same day Apple submitted its Japan application — although the filing only became public recently, according to 9to5Mac. Apple has reportedly filed for the “iWatch” trademark under both hardware and software categories, the website explains, and the document in question is tied to the company’s present Infinite Loop address in Cupertino, Calif., as you can see: Read more…

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In what's good news for Microsoft, Windows 8 has become a more popular operating system than its much criticized Vista platform.

Although Windows 8 has taken awhile to gain traction, new data conducted by NetMarketShare.com has revealed the operating system was on about 5.1% of computers in June, compared to Vista's 4.6% share. The analytics firm used the desktop systems it tracks, which includes more than 40,000 business websites and 2 million personal ones such as blogs and profiles, as the basis of the report.

Windows 7 — the predecessor of Windows 8 — dominates the space with 44.8%, followed by Windows XP with 37.2%. The data also revealed Windows occupies 91.5% of the market and Mac takes up 7.2%. Linux trails with its 1.28% share.

Microsoft's web browser Internet Explorer 10 also experienced growth, thanks to automatic updates released by the company. Internet Explorer now makes up about 56.2% of the market share, followed by Firefox (19.2%), Chrome (17.2%) and Safari (5.6%).

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FitBit has long been doing fitness wearables a lot longer than others, but now it's taking its heath-tracking technology to the next level with a fitness wristband — and it's one of the most impressive options we've seen so far.

The water-resistant FitBit Flex wristband tracks just about everything you do — from the steps you take to how well you sleep — and can even handle laps in the pool. Although the FitBit Flex was first announced at the 2013 International Consumer Electronics conference in January, it's been generating significant buzz since it's May debut. Read more…

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Every year in the United States, about 3,500 Americans die in fires, according to the U.S. Fire Administration. Household smoke alarms can help save lives, and a new iPhone dock design could work as a secondary detector in your bedroom.

Seattle-based Tonic Product Design created an iPhone dock and accompanying app that can warn you while you're sleeping when smoke or carbon monoxide is detected. It's still a prototype design right now, but the Sense+ dock includes a built-in photoelectric smoke detector and carbon monoxide gas detector. Carbon monoxide is an odorless gas that can be deadly. Read more…

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Ubisoft, best known for creating the popular Assassin's Creed video-game series, has announced that its user-account database was hacked, and is urging all users to change their passwords immediately.

"We recently discovered that one of our Web sites was exploited to gain unauthorized access to some of our online systems ... During this process, we learned that data had been illegally accessed from our account database, including user names, email addresses and encrypted passwords," Ubisoft said in a statement.

Ubisoft added that no personal payment information is stored in its database — meaning that no credit- or debit-card info was stolen.

Still, those who have a Ubisoft account should change their passwords right away; this also goes for any other web services where they use the same or a similar password.

Without going into details about the attack, Ubisoft claimed it took steps to "begin a thorough investigation with the relevant authorities, internal and external security experts" about the data breach. The company also said it is exploring "all available means to expand and strengthen" its security measures.

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Free airport Wi-Fi sounds too good to be true, but a select group of 20 U.S. airports will soon be offering the service as part of a partnership with the digital advertising company MediaShift.

It's called the Premier Airport Network and the deal will place ads throughout a user's surfing session.

MediaShift, which has more than 23 million users, is known for monetizing private Wi-Fi networks for travel companies and hotels, and providing detailed info on information that could help boost vendors' bottom lines, such as click-through rates, conversions and behavioral data. It has not yet revealed which airports are participating in the network.

“MediaShift provides the technology at no cost to the airports," Brendon Kensel, MediasShift's president, told Mashable. "For the first time, airports can participate in ad revenues that have traditionally eluded last mile online access providers. Airports receive incremental revenue with no start-up costs, investment or capital expenditure for airports.”

The average traveler's airport browsing session is already at 57 minutes, and MediaShift is betting those numbers shoot up if travelers don't have to pay to surf. And it gives merchants a new way to monetize those users with the addition of targeted ads.

MediaShift expands its reach, airport economies get a shot in the arm, and users get a new tool to improve their journey.

"This would make a world of a difference for travelers, especially international visitors, who don't have data plans in the U.S. and rely solely on Wi-Fi access to connect to the world," says Aigerim Shorman, the cofounder and CEO of Triptrotting, a social network linking travelers with authentic in-country experiences.

Shorman says this addition gives travelers the flexibility to plan and make decisions on the fly. And it allows travel companies to better target potential customers.

"Imagine being able to land in any airport and make a decision on where you want to stay based on what mood you are in, the weather, cool event or anything else that affects you," she says. "Limited access to data and Wi-Fi has been one of the major issues for travel companies' ability to provide deeply personalized experience. I think what MediaShift is doing is the first step into the future where Wi-Fi will be just available everywhere."

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An Iowa businessman says 3D-printed human organs can help doctors practice surgeries before actually opening up a real body.

Mark Ginsberg — an Iowa City jewelry store owner, who also has a manufacturing facility with a couple of 3D-printers — has partnered with physicians to help 3D print organ models or whatever they might need, the Iowa City Press-Citizen reported.

A surgeon can provide a CT scan of a patient's organ and that can be translated into information for 3D printing. Recently, Ginsberg 3D-printed a photopolymer heart model for a University of Iowa surgeon, who had a young patient with a hole in the heart, the Press-Citizen reported.

“This way, they can hold the actual heart in their hand, the physiology of that heart, the rendering of that heart, and pregame the direction of the tools, the angle of the tools and how they’re going to attack different vessels,” Ginsberg told the newspaper. Read more…

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Smartphones may comprise a majority of mobile-phone shipments worldwide, but a sizeable number of handset users still prefer basic feature phones.

Nokia catered to the latter market on Wednesday by debuting two 3G-capable feature phones — the 207 and 208 — that are specifically designed to provide users with quick Internet access.

Available in red, cyan, yellow, white and black, the handsets have Nokia's traditional "candybar" design. They offer Internet-connection sharing, and come pre-installed with Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp.

"The Nokia 207 and Nokia 208 are designed for people who like a classic phone and traditional keypad, but don't want to miss out on smartphone experiences, like staying connecting to social media and accessing the Internet," Timo Toikkanen, executive vice-president of the Finnish company's Mobile Phones division, said in a release. Read more…

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Vine released its biggest update to date for iOS Wednesday, bringing a number of new features to the video service.

Included in the update are 15 new channels ranging from comedy to cats where you can submit your videos, a new “On the Rise” section that highlights Vine videos going viral on the service, and new capture tools — such as grid and ghost tools — to add flavor to your videos.

In addition to the app enhancements, Vine’s update also adds the ability to “revine” Vine posts to your followers, much like you might retweet a tweet on Twitter, as well as the ability to create a protected account on Vine that can be seen only by specified users.

Finally, users can now set focus and exposure for their videos.

You can download the Vine update now for iOS devices from the App Store.

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Microsoft regularly introduces new features to its Bing search engine — such as the coming 3D maps — but often those features can't be used outside of Bing. That changes as of today with the launch of the Bing Platform for developers.

Announced today at Microsoft's Build 2013 conference, the Bing Platform will let app developers create experiences in their apps around Bing's services. For example, if an app wants to perform real-time translation of text, it could tie into the Bing Translator Control API for that capability, so the developer won't have to create the service from scratch.

Or, more pointedly, developers can use Microsoft's services instead of Google's.

The Bing Platform offers developers three kinds of services: First is "Entities," which bring Bing's "deep knowledge" about various subjects to apps. In a demo at the Build 2013 keynote, Microsoft Vice President Gurdeep Singh Pall showed how the Bing Entities API could be used to show information about an architect of a particular building in a maps app.

The second Bing Platform service helps developers introduce "natural and intuitive" user experiences. A major component of this is integrating voice interaction with apps, but it also includes things like optical-character recognition, so an app can interpret the text on a sign or document as information and not just an image.

Finally, Bing Platform has the "awareness of the physical world," which extends beyond simple interpretation of location, letting apps "put the user at the center of the action." That implies augmented-reality experiences with real-time response to the location of the user's device and the ways he is interacting with it.

The Bing Platform will let developers more easily create apps with features such as text-to-speech, real-time traffic and translation. It also gives them motivation to integrate Microsoft services into their apps instead of those of a third party.

Although Bing has a small market share compared to Google, Microsoft is investing hundreds of millions of dollars into the service, and it powers search on many devices beyond PCs and Windows Phones, including BlackBerry phones, Kindle tablets and Apple's Siri.

Will developers favor the Bing Platform over other services? And will it rival Google's offerings? You tell us. Give us your thoughts on Microsoft's new developer tools in the comments.

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I am in a full-on state of denial about the approaching deadline to move my news-reading off Google Reader, Google’s industry-leading RSS reader. I don’t want it to happen, although I know I am powerless to stop it.

Google Reader is how I begin my workday. It is the first web application I open, and one I turn to multiple times throughout the day. My list of feeds is longer than the Amazon. It traverses breaking news, tech updates, press releases, cultural phenomena, science and space updates and even byzantine patents. It’s a perfect reflection of my interests and world view.

Now, every time I open it, Google reminds me of its impending fate.

On July 1, Google will put a bullet in the brain of Google Reader. Not because it’s old, addled, hurt, redundant, superfluous or incongruous with modern times. No, Google is killing Reader because, as Google explained in a March 13 blog post, "usage had declined." Although the search giant characterizes Google Reader’s fate as “retirement,” I’m pretty certain I won’t find Reader wearing bad golf pants and sipping a Mai Tai while lounging beside a Boca Raton pool.

Google said it created Reader to help people keep tabs on their favorite websites. It did that and so much more. Every update, press release, minor post and more that I cared about made its way through Google Reader. A website is typically a percolating cauldron of content: multiple posts, headlines, images, ads. Google Reader broke everything down into its primary parts. In the compressed feed, I could scan much more than a few posts from one site. “All Items” gives me a never-ending list of sources, headlines, times, dates and the briefest portions of content. Even that brief bit of information was still usually enough for me to decide if I wanted to expand any post and read it fully within Reader or move on.

And read inside Reader I did. As a result, I grew accustomed to its largely unadorned, yet endearing face. Honestly, Google Reader is the ugly step sister of all Google apps. Visually, there’s nothing to recommend it. Google rarely updated Reader but always made sure it simply worked.

Its Parent

Without RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simply Syndication), Google Reader is nothing. Over the years, pundits have predicted the demise of RSS.

In 2004, I professed my love for RSS push technology and a couple of young RSS Readers: Feed Demon and the eponymous RSSReader. It would be a few years before I adopted Reader, but I soon fell in love with its far simpler interface. I also lived in constant fear that sites would, one-by-one, turn off the RSS feed spigot, and one day I would open an empty Google Reader.

RSS, however, has outlived its most popular platform. It’s also about to witness the rise of a whole new collection of readers, including ones from AOL and Digg. In an interview with Mashable's senior tech analyst Christina Warren, the Digg Reader developers said Google Reader and its success blotted out the sun for other RSS reader developers, most of whom had given up.

The Google Reader vacuum, however, is marking the rebirth of a little cottage industry for RSS readers, which seems to contradict Google’s Reader shutdown reasoning. The company said usage numbers were declining. So why would anyone else want to build a similar tool?

Tastemakers

Google Reader was never intended for consumers. Google seems to think it was, but I’ve never met an average consumer who uses a single RSS reader. Not Google Reader, not FeedDemon, not the suddenly super-popular Feedly.

For the average consumer, a reader is Flipboard. It's an attractive, highly visual mobile app that sucks in all your favorite content from sites and people you follow, and presents it in something most consumers instantly recognize: a digital magazine format.

List-style presentations favored by most readers, including my beloved Google Reader, are not for average consumers. They’re for nerds, geeks, tech enthusiasts, digital tastemakers and reporters. Those are the people who have been using Google Reader for years and the ones who, like me, are crying the loudest about its demise.

That’s also why the death of Google Reader seems like a bigger deal than it really is. People like me are writing about it not to inform the larger world of what’s happening, but to lick our wounds. If we all do this enough, perhaps Google will get confused and think the rest of the world cares about readers.

No, nobody fooled Google. But, as I mentioned, AOL and Digg are certainly caught up in it. Digg, I guess, can be excused, because its roots are in nerd culture. AOL? I’m not sure for whom they’re building a reader.

Things got downright loony last week when everyone predicted Facebook was about to introduce a reader of its own: Facebook, a service with more than 1 billion users, many of whom have no interest in technology or managing a news feed. They like content, visual stuff, funny stuff, emotional stuff, and the most they can deal with is the News Feed Facebook already provides. When Facebook changes it, they cry out in horror, not glee.

People soon came to their senses and started to realize that a Flipboard-like “reader” from Facebook was most likely in the offing. That makes sense and no one will confuse it with a successor to Google Reader.

Dealing With It

Google does not have to kill Google Reader. It could simply acknowledge, as Twitter has with TweetDeck, that there are pro-level users. People who, by dint of their roles in the Internet universe, consume content differently — maybe even at a higher level. Twitter maintains TweetDeck for people like me. Google, which seems to treat virtually all products like experiments, looks upon things like Google Reader dispassionately. When it’s done with something, it’s simply done. I can cry in my digital milk all I want. Google will not do anything about it.

I know there is nothing, short of presidential order, that will stop Google from killing Reader. I will mourn its loss and curse Google for taking away my favorite news reader and then, like everyone else I know, move on.

Share your best memories of Google Reader in the comments below.

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If you love LEGOs, you might have imagined building a real house from them. And with the surging popularity of 3D printers, such a dream seems well within reach. Nick Johnson, a spokesman for real estate blog Movoto, decided to find out what it would take to build a 3D-printed house.

"Given that we're due to get our own 3D printer here in the Movoto office soon, I pretty much couldn't be more excited by the possibilities the technology introduces," Johnson wrote in a company blog post. "So, with that, I thought I'd look into exactly how realistic it would be to print the components needed to build a house using one of these devices."

As it turns out, if you were to use today's 3D printing technology, you would be long dead by the time your pieces were printed. In fact, it would take 220 years, four months and 11 days for a single machine to print the 27,735 bricks required to construct a 2,500-square-foot (232 square meters), two-story house. And if you think the endeavor sounds time-costly, you should read the price tag: $332,820 in plastic alone.

 Read more…

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All three of China's mobile telcos have just released their May figures, and the huge mobile market has hit another significant milestone: It has surpassed 300 million 3G users.

China Mobile now has 129.40 million on its TD-SCDMA network despite it not supporting Apple's iPhone or iPad for full 3G functionality, China Unicom is now up to 95.9 million on its 3G data plans and China Telecom has convinced 88 million to sign up for 3G. That's a total of 309.5 million on 3G in China.

That's well up from 175 million nearly a year ago at Q2 2012 (see graph below).

Here's a summary of its growth from 2010 to these latest figures:

It's little wonder that 3G is growing so well, with an estimated 160 million active users of Android, and 80 million on iOS, at the end of last year. It's anticipated that there will be 300 million active Android users in mainland China by the end of this year. Of course, many content themselves with just 2G connectivity.

I know what you're thinking: When's 4G coming to China? Leading network China Mobile could well be ready for a nationwide roll-out in October this year after performing many ongoing citywide trials for over a year.

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A dragonfly snatching a meal in midair is nothing short of an aerial dogfight. First, it must predict the trajectory of its prey, maneuver a course of intersection and make split-second adaptations to outwit evasive mosquitoes or fruit flies.

All this rapid-fire multitasking takes some serious neurological circuitry — the kind scientists are so interested in, they've designed a tiny dragonfly backpack to measure its brain activity.

Created by Anthony Leonardo, a neuroscientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the backpack weighs about as much as a couple grains of salt — around 40 milligrams — and compromises just 10% of the dragonfly's body weight.

Neurological electric activity is captured by electrodes inserted into the dragonfly's brain and body, on which a small computer chip amplifies and wirelessly transmits signals to a nearby computer.

Powering the computer chip without adding too much weight to the payload proved to be a difficult task. However, in collaboration with colleagues at Duke University and Intan Technologies, Leonardo came up with an ingenious solution. You know those RFID key card systems on office or apartment buildings — the ones you swipe near small pads that emit radio waves, which in turn induce a current into the card's chip and transmit a code to unlock a door? Well, Leonardo applied similar technology. He put two long, lightweight antennae on the dragonfly backpack that pick up radio waves to power the chip.

Researchers released fruit flies inside a lab, while 18 high-speed cameras were on hand to record every second as the dragonflies took off from a perch and nabbed their prey. The backpack documented the firing of neurons, which Leonard says play a crucial roll in predators capturing their prey.

SEE ALSO: App Lets You Map Room Like A Bat

However, hunting inside a plain white lab room wasn't so appetizing for the dragonflies. Many of the insects exhausted themselves because they where more interested in escaping than hunting. To create a more natural habitat, researchers draped the walls with imagery of a spring meadow, carpeted the floor with turf and installed a small pond.

The scenic backdrop was successful and Leonardo continued his own hunt, after the questions that fascinate him most: how neurons translate a visual scene into a plan of action and how a dragonfly continuously updates that plan during its midair dogfight.

"We know a lot about their anatomy. They gather input from visual parts of the brain and send axons down to the motor neurons that move the wings," Leonardo said, according to Wired. "The dragonfly is a convenient and beautiful and elegant means to an end.

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Tesla Motors has designed its Model S to be capable of fast battery swapping, which can ultimately prove to be a better solution than charging the car battery.

According to Tesla, swapping a battery in the Model S takes about 90 seconds, and the driver never has to get out of the car. The process is as simple as driving the car onto a designated spot, where a platform rises up from the ground, removes the depleted battery and installs a new one.  Read more…

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