Anaconda – Giant offshore sea snakes to provide power for 50,000 homes

anaconda.jpg

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.

YouTube's content ID system – copes with volume, but not pitch changes

youtube-logo.jpg

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 claims violent video games are good for you

big-glasses.jpg

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)

Blue OLED efficiency up 25%

blue-oled-material.jpg

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%.

Robo-fish would be the coolest bath toy ever

robo-fish2.jpg

To the casual eye, 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 not scaring the local water 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.

New mirrors reflect text the right way round

non-reversing-mirror.jpg

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.