Cheap, clean power for 50,000 UK homes could be just 5 years away as "anacondas" take to British shores.

A company, called Checkmate, is testing 200m long rubber devices which would be tethered to the sea bed and are designed to swim against the current to produce up to 1MW of power each. The waves cause a bulge to ripple down the length of the anacondas and power turbines at the tails.

Fifty-strong shoals of the tubes could sit together just below the surface and scare all sorts of children in the sea. Checkmate hopes the devices, as designed by Professor Rod Rainey, would be in commercial production by 2014.

An enterprising techy in the Computer Science department at Rochester University, NY, has undertaken an investigation to find out exactly how much you have to mangle audio tracks before YouTube's content identification system can't recognise them any more. The findings are quite interesting.

For starters, he learnt that despite YouTube still easily recognising when a song's volume is massively increased or decreased, it can't cope with any pitch scaling beyond 5% or so. Also, interestingly, it only seems to recognise the first 30 seconds or so of a track.

The full analysis is right here, and there's some fantastic comments on the white noise test video, here. Also interesting is that despite infringing copyright on the website 35 times and, at once point, 15 times in an hour, the account hasn't been banned or removed.

Parallax

Research from US and Israeli scientists indicates that playing violent video games might be good for your eyes. The researchers asked two groups of non-gamers to play Call of Duty and The Sims, and then tested their vision.

Turns out that contrast sensitivity increased 43% in the group playing Call of Duty, whereas it only increased 11% in the people playing The Sims. The researchers think this may be because Call of Duty is a little more fast-moving than Maxis' hit game.

As an avid gamer who had his first eye test over the weekend, I'm not convinced. As a gamer who gets occasionally nagged to play less 'shooty-loud' games, I've now got an excuse. Guess science is good for something.

(via Metro)

OLED technology may be about to take a massive leap forwards, which is good news for anyone looking to the screens becoming more widely used. The blue OLED has always been the weak link in the screens, offering significantly shorter lifespans than its red and green brethren. Well, a team from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is one step closer to cracking the problem by improving blue efficiency by an impressive 25%.

The breakthrough was made via new host materials for a blue phosphorescent OLED. Other than the alleged 25% improvement in efficiency, there's not a lot more to tell at this point however, and we'll have to play the waiting game. The PNNL scientists are rumoured to be discussing their findings ahead of meeting the American Chemical society later this spring, so hopefully we'll have more to tell then.

To the casual observer this may be a fish caught somewhere off the uncanny valley, but most fishes' limited eyesight will mean that it slips by completely unnoticed as it goes about its business. And its business is detecting hazardous pollutants in the water off the coast of Spain.

They've been designed by a group of UK scientists with the intention of collecting data while not scaring the local aquatic life. They look like carp and move around realistically with a top speed of around 2.25mph. They cost £20,000 a-piece, but fortunately the designers from the University of Essex have found the European Commission happy to foot the bill.

Mathematician Andrew Hicks is clever. So clever, in fact, that he's managed to work out how to get a mirror to display text that displays the correct way around, as in the picture above. Mightily impressive, no?

He's also done some other faintly magical stuff with mirrors, including a wing mirror that can display a 45 degree field-of-view, undistorted, and a mirror that reflects 360 degrees around you, again with no distortion.

Check out the full gallery of mirror fun at New Scientist.

A team of scientists at Purdue University have mapped carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels across the USA. The mega-high-res map will show you CO2 emissions in metric tons per state, county or capita.

The project, which took three years to complete, also breaks down emissions by their source - offering the option of viewing only emissions from electricity production, travel, or residential homes, for example.

To check out the map you'll need the Google Earth browser plugin, and a bit of patience because it takes a while to load.

Meanwhile, an erstwhile group of Google Earth explorers that thought that they'd found Atlantis have been disappointed. Metro is claiming that the vast city that observers had spotted on the floor of the Atlantic to the west of the Canary Islands is actually just an artifact of the sonar scanning process on the ocean floor. Pity.

(via AFP and Metro)