Haynes.tv

Last year Toshiba developed a new lithium-ion battery that can incredibly be recharged to 80% capacity in one minute. That is right one minute and it is recharged to 80% capacity. That is extremely fast especially when we consider that current lithium-ion batteries take about an hour to be recharge to that amount; that is a 60 fold improvement. Not even considering the increased energy capacity and other improvements of this new battery, the rapid charging ability is already enough to make this battery worth while, it is just an unbleiveable improvement! Unfourtantly even though it has increased capacity it does not seem that it has increased capacity in any vast amounts when comparing it to the recharge time improvement; however it does boast a 600mAh energy capacity. This battery real benefits can be found in its life span and usable in almost any temperature. This battery can operate in very high extremes of temperature; it can discharge 80% of its capacity at minus 40 degrees which happens to interestingly be the same in the Fahrenheit and Centigrade scale. Sufficient to say it is very cold and as anyone like myself; who has left rechargeable batteries out in the cold knows this will be a very helpfully feature. In addition, they say it losses only 5% of capacity at temperatures as high as 113 degrees Fahrenheit after 1,000 cycles; meaning that the battery is very high life. Unfortunately we may not see this battery in laptops right away Toshiba seems to be trying to market it more towards cars and locomotives at this point, however this technology should eventually be incorporated into laptops I would imagine, we will see it in them in the not to far future.

Metal Storm guns
Wow Metal Storm guns are crazy is crazy. It can fire thousands of rounds a second, hence the name metal storm. They even have a pistol type gun that can fire 3 rounds before it even recoils, making it extremly acurate atlhough I do not think it can fire many more rounds that a conventional gun it can fire rounds much faster and no jam.

40mm Redback picture from metal storm dot com

The secret to these metal storm weapons is that they do not use conventional firing mechanism, and therefore have very few moving parts. Metal storm guns use an electronic ignition system so bullets in the guns are just lined up right behind one another, so even if a gun does jam the next bullet behind it will push the jammed bullet out. The metal storm gun can also fire 250,000 grenades a minute.

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Which will it be, Blu Ray or HD DVD? Blu Ray is coming out here soon in the next month I believe and will run around $1,000 for a player. For those of you who do not know Blu Ray and HD DVD are the next generation of DVDs they will hold much more on a disc. Blu Ray promises to hold 25 GB on a disc and 50 GB for a two sided disc, as where HD DVD is suppose to hold about 15 GBs a side, so only 30 GB on the two sided. The current DVDs can only hold about 4.7 GBs on a side. So that is obviously a substantial improvement. How they do this you ask? They use a blue laser instead of the standard red laser. See if you remeber since class there are all these colors in the rainbow which and if you remeber what a rainbow looks like blue or violet, to be more specific, is on the bottom as where red is on the top. This can be seen in the picture below.

Unfortunately the bend of the rainbow can not be seen in that picture, but as any one who has seen a rainbow know the blue is shorter and on the inside of the bow. Consequently the laser on these new DVDs players will have a short wave length and therefore be narrower and able to read more lines of information on the DVDs. Eventually they want to increase the layer on the DVDs, which will allow virtually unlimited storage they are working on a 100GB one for next year and who knows maybe a 1TB one in the next several years. Anyhow the only problem is there are these two different designs the Blu Ray by Sony, which will also be used in the new PS3s coming out in November. Then there is the HD DVD which I believe is by Toshiba. I imagine there will be more brands using these technologies as time goes on I know companies like Dell will have the Blu in their computers this summer, but I do not recall what other companies are planning to use which. Anyhow this will be interesting to see which one wins, right now my money is on the Blu Ray, but that might change. Because it looks like the HD DVD is going for cheaper. In fact half the price on Amazon $500 where you can preorder either one now.

OLEDs hold great promise for the future of computer screens, TV and displays on portable devices. OLED stands for organic light emitting diode, which is actually similar to the LED used in many modern flash lights today, except the process of putting these light emitting diodes into TV displays is obviously radically different than that of putting them into flash light. They need to be grouped in large amounts, hence they use what is called luminophore which is basically an atom or atomic grouping in an organic compound. In is obviously much more complicated than just that, but that is the basic idea. With these organic compounds and LEDs that produce light without back lighting the display, see LCDs must have a backlight to see anything, but an LED, as it’s name implies, emits it’s own light. Therefore OLEDs use much less power and can even be viewed in direct sunlight and better from different angles becase they of the fact emit thier own light, and do not need a backlight. Just Imagine, taking your laptop outside on a bright sunny day and being able to see the display no problem! OLEDs get better still; they can be printed on essentially any ink-jet printer, so they will be cheaper to make, will be much more flexible, and may even be employed on clothing and could be used to produce roll up monitors. This technology is however not without it’s downsides, such as short life of around a 1,000 hours and the high potential for water damage unless the screen is sealed. I believe with continued research and development these downsides will be easily overcome, and OLEDs will be the future of electronic displays.

This is a Samsung TV using their latest OLED screen of 40″, a resolution of 1280×800 (WXGA), a contrast ratio of 5000:1 and a very limited thickness, and was unveiled last year.

Taken from http://www.akihabaranews.com/en/news_9619.html