Gizmodo: experimental

Plastic Motor Powered Directly By Light, No Solar Middleman Necessary

Sean Fallon — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:20:00 EDT

Professor Tomiki Ikeda, along with his research team at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed a plastic motor that runs on direct light. Unlike solar power, there is no need for storing energy before conversion. The motor can achieve this feat thanks to a plastic compound containing azobenzene which contracts when exposed to ultraviolet light and returns to its original shape when exposed to visible light. By making this material into a belt and wrapping it around two wheels of different sizes, movement can be generated when the larger wheel is exposed to ultraviolet light and the smaller one to visible light.

According to Ikeda, the material is not very efficient at converting light into energy, but he is confident that it will improve in time. He also noted that the material is about 4 times more elastic than human muscle, and it maintained its strength during a test despite contracting and expanding every 7 seconds for 30 hours. He hopes that one day the technology will come of age to the point that we will all be driving around in light-powered plastic automobiles. Maybe—if by "we" he means our grandchildren and great grandchildren. [Pink Tentacle via DVICE]

Hands-On Video With Microsoft's Deepfish Windows Mobile Browser

Jason Chen — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 19:35:10 EDT

To say that Windows Mobile web browsers are hard to use would be tantamount to saying babies are fairly easy to beat up. Microsoft's trying to remedy this with their experimental Deepfish web browser, which tries to give you desktop-class rendering on your WM smartphone. Does it work? Well, sorta.

Watch the video and hit the jump for our impressions.

It's true that the whole setup look quite nice. By taking a snapshot of a webpage on the server side and sending the image to your phone, you get proper rendering without a lot of CPU use. The downside to this is that dynamic pages, javascript, flash, and other web advances since Netscape 1.0 aren't supported.

Other quirks are that it's quite bandwidth heavy and slow if you're on a skinny pipe. Whenever you zoom in, the zoomed-in high quality has to be downloaded from the server. Not too bad, but it does slow down the web browsing experience.

Scrolling isn't bad on my Cingular 8525, but it's nothing to brag about. There are noticeable delays and the page actually cuts off a certain distance down the page. We're not sure what's going on here.

So all in all, it's a nice start for an experimental browser. Sure, there are kinks to be worked out, but in the meantime you can actually get desktop-quality HTML rendering on your WM smartphone. Other phones like the iPhone and certain Series 60 phones support similar browsing features as well. We'll have to put the three together and see who wins. – Jason Chen

Project Page [Deepfish]

Stem Cells Key to Bigger Boobies

blongo3 — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 20:45:13 EST

Who here is a girl/knows a girl who wants implants, but gets spooked by the whole silicone aspect? Well it looks like a couple of Japanese scientists have got your back. Their plan is to combine fat from your thigh with some stem cells. Then they take the "soup" and inject it into each of your mammaries. And presto chango you've got yourself a new rack that looks like pretty damn natural, since it's all you. Leave it Japan to take cutting edge medical tech, and turn it into a way to get bigger boobs.– Ben Longo

Stem cells used to boost breasts [BBC]