Microsoft”s new Surface Pro tablet PC is a version upgrade with drastic enhancements of its Surface RT, but it is gonna be extremely hard to repair, ifixit. The repair pros at ifixit had the Surface Pro opened and examined. The … Continue reading
Horologists around the world on Saturday will carry out one of the weirdest operations of their profession: they will hold back time.
The last minute of June 30, 2012 is destined to be 61 seconds long, for timekeepers are to add a “leap second” to compensate for the wobbly movements of our world.
The ever-so-brief halting of the second hand will compensate for a creeping divergence from solar time, meaning the period required for Earth to complete a day. The planet takes just over 86,400 seconds for a 360-degree revolution. But it wobbles on its axis and is affected by the gravitational pull of the Sun and Moon and the ocean tides, all of which brake the rotation by a tiny sliver of a second.
As a result, Earth gets out of step with International Atomic Time (TAI), which uses the pulsation of atoms to measure time to an accuracy of several billionths of a second.
To avoid solar time and TAI moving too far apart, the widely used indicator of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is adjusted every so often to give us the odd 86,401-second day.
The adjustments began in 1972. Before then, time was measured exclusively by the position of the Sun or stars in relation to Earth, expressed in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) or its successor UT1. This will be the 25th intervention to add a “leap second” to UTC.
TAI is kept by several hundred atomic clocks around the world, measuring fluctuations in the atom of the chemical element caesium that allows them to divide a single second into 10 billion smaller bits. Every time the discrepancy between TAI and UT1 becomes too big, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service jumps into action and announces a “leap second”. The extra second is added to UTC, also known as Zulu time, only ever at midnight, either on a December 31 or a June 30.
Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.
Repairing cracks in roadways is a costly and time-consuming job. So researchers have come up with an automated system to fill cracks in asphalt, which covers more ground in less time and could save money by extending the life of a road.
The new method is an automated pavement crack detection and refilling system developed by Jonathan Holmes and colleagues at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). The device, which attaches to a vehicle like a trailer, uses a stereo camera and light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to detect cracks in the road. Once a crack is identified, it is sealed while the vehicle moves at a mere five kilometers per hour.
GTRI research engineer Jonathan Holmes said that the system works like a dot matrix printer, which dispenses dots of ink onto a piece of paper that moves through a reel. In the case of the crack sealing system, the road is the moving sheet of paper and nozzles attached to the device fire sealant into the cracks.
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The device is able to identify more than 83 per cent of the cracks in the road with a vision system that uses red and green LED lights that spots cracks smaller than three millimeters wide. The cracks are photographed and detected within 100 milliseconds of being spotted by the cameras and are then sealed.
The system has already been tested on a roadway in Georgia and in parking lots with cracked asphalt. Researchers are now fine-tuning the image processing software used to identify cracks and they plan on scaling up the device for use in a four meter wide section of road.
Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.
Got a credit card equipped with a contactless payment chip? Then watch out next time someone bumps into you in the street – they may have just mugged you with an app.
Contactless cards use near field communications (NFC) chips to exchange your payment details with a merchant’s till, and some smartphones also come equipped with NFC chips to let you use them as a wallet. Now security researcher Thomas Skora has written an app that turns any NFC phone into a reader and successfully read card numbers, expiry dates, transactions and merchant IDs from German credit cards.
The app, called paycardreader, was removed from the Google Play store yesterday, but Skora has also placed the source code on GitHub, a code-sharing website, and says the app doesn’t actually save the swiped data, it just displays it.
It is possible that more malicious app developers could use similar methods to actively steal data though – an investigation by Channel 4 television in the UK earlier this year revealed it was possible to swipe details via a phone and use them to make purchases on Amazon.
Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.
