NEW LAUNCHES OF APPLE

          Apple launched a new version of its iMac desktop computer in California, with a 27inch retina display. It will go on sale today, starting at $2,499.

          The new iMac brings the high resolution retina display – first introduced on the iPhone and iPad, then the MacBook Pro in 2012 – to the desktop.

        The main feature of desktop is that the “retina 5K” display will have a native resolution of 5120x2880 pixels, leading to a 14.7 megapixel display.That boosts the resolution and pixel density, but in keeping with Apple’s approach to mobile devices, it uses it to make text, icons and pictures sharper and easier to read, rather than simply making everything much smaller and adding more screen real estate.

              The new iMac maintains the slim all-aluminiumdesign, introduced in 2011 along with Apple’s Thunderbolt port for fast external connections, while the internals are upgraded with a 3.5Ghz quad-core Intel i7 and an AMD Radeon R9 M290X graphics card.

        Since 1998 the iMac has seen several revisions, moving to an articulated flat screen in 2002 and then to the basis for the current aluminium bodies in 2004. Apple continued to update the iMac internally, switching to Intel processors from IBM Power PCs.

          The iMac has steadily replaced the Mac Pro as the machine used by most desktop Mac users, including publishers and artists, with only video producers clinging to the more expensive, but more powerful Mac Pro.        

                 

         

         On December 27, 2012, the US Patent & Trademark Office published two display related patent applications from Apple. The first patent generally relates to liquid crystal displays (LCDs), and, more specifically, to a coated chassis for an LCD. According to Apple, the chassis could be made from a non-conductive material and be operable to support displays found on the iPhone, iPad, MacBook and even the touchpad on MacBooks. The coating could advantageously prevent or reduce noise in the device's antenna usually caused by the LCD. Because the conductive material adds little or no bulk to the device, it's able to maintain a compact size. 

     The second patent relates to LCDs that include a panel having an array of metal oxide TFTs, which may be configured to reduce visual artifacts by providing reduced RC loading and parasitic capacitance, thus improving overall image quality. In one embodiment, the display may be a high-resolution LCD display having more pixels per inch, such as a Retina Display.

                   

THE SECRET BEHIND THE GOOGLE CAR

    After attending the1964 World’s Fair, the science-fiction author Isaac Asimov wrote an essay in The New York Times imagining a visit to the World’s Fair 50 years in the future, in 2014. Among his predictions: “Much effort will be put into the designing of vehicles with ‘robot-brains’—vehicles that can be set for particular destinations and that will then proceed there without interference by the slow reflexes of a human driver.”

        Asimov got some of the details wrong (he thought the cars would ride suspended on compressed air), but most of his prediction proved accurate: much effort is, indeed, now being put into the design of robot cars, thanks largely to Google. Earlier this year, the company revealed a prototype of a fully driverless car, an adorable machine without a steering wheel or pedals that tooled around its campus in Mountain View, California.

       Google’s achievement draws on the ideas of computer scientists, roboticists, and automotive engineers who have been working on autonomous vehicles for decades. And the goal is not just to realize our science-fiction dreams: driverless cars might alleviate congestion, ease demand for parking, and reduce crashes, one of the leading causes of death .

       

    Still, the Google car offers lessons about how science fiction can become fact. In a sense, Google’s self-driving car is more of a parts-assembly project than it is a dramatic new vision for human transport. The company’s real breakthrough was bringing together researchers and the existing technologies that underlie their effort—computer vision, digital mapping, and more. Perhaps this is what Asimov overlooked in his vision of 2014: the future is less about technologies themselves than it is about the organizations with the means and the will to put them into practice.

A TINY TELESCOPE

         Wearable smart-devices represent the next stage in mobile computing and Google Glass is the most hotly-anticipated gadget in that space. It is not an extension of your Android smartphone or tablet, but is a whole new gadget in itself that can perform various day to day tasks, without you ever moving your hands. The computing headgear unveiled at a Google launch event in 2012 has created lot of excitement.

                       Look,....now instead of google glass..A tiny telescope  is used. For a group of researchers from Nokia and several universities, it would be a cylinder about the size of a tube of lipstick that you hold up to one eye only when you want to check your Twitter feed or Instagram. When you didn’t want to use it, you might wear it as a pendant or tuck it away in a pocket.

           That’s the look of a prototype they built called Loupe, so named because it bears a resemblance to the little magnifying glass that jewelers use to inspect stones. A paper on the device was presented this month at the ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium in Honolulu, Hawaii.

          

          While it’s still just a research project, the Loupe presents an intriguing look at how wearable gadgets could be reimagined to make people feel comfortable trotting them out in public. It’s a challenge facing makers of wearable devices, especially head-up displays like Google Glass, which has failed to achieve mainstream appeal and is still not available as a regular consumer product.

           With the Loupe, researchers suggest, the obvious act of holding it up to your eye, rather than gazing into the distance as you would with a head-up display, makes it easier to signal to someone that you’re using it. This could make people around you more comfortable, since they know whether or not you’re paying attention to them—a common concern with devices like Google Glass.

          The Loupe prototype is three centimeters wide and eight long, with a circular hole at one end that you look into to see a small, circular floating display. Four rings of copper-colored touch electrodes encircle the device, and an actual jeweler’s loupe is included near one end for manually focusing the image.

          The device includes a proximity sensor to tell when it’s being held in front of your eye, and a magnetometer, gyroscope, and accelerometer help determine its orientation and measure changes so the display can always appear upright to the user. The current version of the Loupe is also tethered to a computer running Android and an Arduino microcontroller.

MAVEN captures first images of Mars atmosphere.

             

            NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft, which arrived at Mars last month, has sent back its first images of the Red Planet’s atmosphere as it was battered by a large solar storm. These images are the first of their kind, providing us with information about Mars’ ozone layer, and the tenuous oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen coronas at the edge of Mars’ atmosphere. These coronas can tell us what the conditions on Mars might’ve been like over the last four billion years, detailing how the planet went from being warm and wet  to the cold, dry, dusty sphere that it is today.

           MAVEN, which stands for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, only inserted itself into Martian orbit three weeks ago. NASA hasn’t even finished checking out all of the orbiter’s various instruments and sensors, to see if they survived the 442-million-mile journey from Earth. But when the Sun produces a solar flare and coronal mass ejection (CME) that’s headed straight for Mars — as it did on September 26, just five days after MAVEN’s orbital insertion — you boot up your cameras and take lots of pics first, and ask questions later.

           

              These first images, seen above, show the planet’s coronas of atomic carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen as they escape the Martian atmosphere. I believe the brighter right edge is the edge that’s currently facing the Sun — and presumably, when Mars is bombarded by solar energetic particles (SEPs), more carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen leak out into space. Once upon a time, these atoms would’ve been molecules of water (H2O) or carbon dioxide (CO2), but without an atmosphere they’re free to just bubble out into space.

           Following all of this initial excitement, MAVEN will then go through a couple of weeks of instrument calibration — and then begin its primary science mission in earnest. With MAVEN, NASA hopes to finally determine how Mars — which was probably once warm and wet — lost both its atmosphere and surface water. The most popular hypothesis is that, as Mars’s iron core cooled, its protective magnetic field decayed, allowing energetic solar particles — like those that bombarded the planet last month — to burn away the atmosphere.

Robotics

          walking is an extraordinary feat of biomechanical engineering. Every step requires balance and the ability to adapt to instability in a split second. It requires quickly adjusting where your foot will land and calculating how much force to apply to change direction suddenly. No wonder, then, that until now robots have not been very good at it.

         

        Robots that walk properly could eventually find far greater use in emergency rescue operations. They could also play a role in routine jobs such as helping elderly or physically disabled people with chores and daily tasks in the home.

                   A robot is an automatic mechanical device often resembling a human or animal. Modern robots are usually an electro-mechanical machine guided by a computer program or electronic circuitry. Robots can be autonomous or semi-autonomous and range from humanoids such as Honda's Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility (ASIMO) and TOSY's TOSY Ping Pong Playing Robot (TOPIO) to industrial robots, collectively programmed swarm robots, and even microscopic nano robots. By mimicking a lifelike appearance or automating movements, a robot may convey a sense of intelligence or thought of its own.

         

            The branch of technology that deals with the design, construction, operation, and application of robots, as well as computer systems for their control, sensory feedback, and information processing is robotics. These technologies deal with automated machines that can take the place of humans in dangerous environments or manufacturing processes, or resemble humans in appearance, behavior, and/or cognition. Many of today's robots are inspired by nature contributing to the field of bio-inspired robotics.

           Some robots are used for entertainment and as a demonstration of the newest technology. This nimble automoton is a perfect example of this process. 

COPYRIGHT PROTECTION OF IMAGES

A novel idea developed by " IMAGE PROCESSORS " of KITES Embedded Solution. 

MAKING IMAGES MORE AUTHENTIC BY USING MULTIPLEWATERMARKING AND DATA HIDING.

Here, we made our "Lena" more authentic by hidding more images inside her without any serious degradation.We had also made a provision to keep your secret message too.

      

         " Such Type of Copyright Protection Ensures Your Safety in Internet Multimedia ".

                                            

                   Copyright protection of image is revolutionized in these days, where internet multimedia used in high rate. So, protection of image with proper authentication to find dishonest holder and damage or corruption of image is essential requirement. We proposed multiple watermarking scheme instead of classical watermarking combined with data hiding for proper authentication of image without much affect the quality of image.

                   Our proposed watermarking method preserve imperceptibility and robustness of image by embedding watermark on the elements of singular values of the cover image’s DWT sub-bands and achieve multiple watermarking by series of such operation. Data hiding is worked out in least correlated DWT sub-band by simple algorithm whose computation complexity is so low and execution time is very short. Our algorithm utilize the peak point of histogram of the sub-band and slightly modify the pixel value to embed the data.          

                        

THE UNMANNED PLANE..

Hey...friends ...Does anybody know about DRONES??? Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVS), also known as drones, are aircraft either controlled by ‘pilots’ from the ground or increasingly, autonomously following a pre-programmed mission. 

Basically they  fall into two categories: those that are used for reconnaissance and surveillance purposes and those that are armed with missiles and bombs.

The use of drones has grown quickly in recent years because unlike manned aircraft they can stay aloft for many hours (Zephyr a British drone under development has just broken the world record by flying for over 82 hours nonstop); they are much cheaper than military aircraft and they are flown remotely so there is no danger to the flight crew.

 Military drone manufacturers are looking for civilian uses for remote sensing drones to expand their markets and this includes the use of drones for domestic surveillance. Drones will no doubt make possible the dramatic expansion of the surveillance state. With the convergence of other technologies it may even make possible machine recognition of faces, behaviours, and the monitoring of individual conversations.

                                                    

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