SABC 17 June 2013 Samsung Electronics Co plans to sell a variation of its flagship Galaxy S4 smartphone that will transmit data at nearly twice the normal speed, the head of its mobile business said on Monday. J.K. Shin, also co-chief executive of the world's biggest technology firm by revenue, said the phone would be sold in South Korea as early as this month. Samsung was in talks with several overseas carriers to take the phone, Shin told Reuters in an interview at Samsung's … [Read more...]

SABC 11 June 2013 Apple Inc unveiled a music streaming service called iTunes Radio and new mobile software on Monday, in the biggest redesign of its operating system since the original iPhone was introduced in 2007. The new software, designated iOS 7 and announced at Apple's annual developers' conference in San Francisco, sports a streamlined design, employs translucency and a fresh palette of colours, and features animation in apps. Apple's iTunes Radio, one of the more highly … [Read more...]

NASA Lying just above the sun’s surface is an enigmatic region of the solar atmosphere called the interface region. A relatively thin region, just 3,000 to 6,000 miles thick, it pulses with movement: Zones of different temperature and density are scattered throughout, while energy and heat course through the solar material. Understanding how the energy travels through this region – energy that helps heat the upper layer of the atmosphere, the corona, to temperatures of 1 million … [Read more...]

Astronomers at NASA and Pennsylvania State University have used NASA's Swift satellite to create the most detailed ultraviolet light surveys ever of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, the two closest major galaxies. "We took thousands of images and assembled them into seamless portraits of the main body of each galaxy, resulting in the highest-resolution surveys of the Magellanic Clouds at ultraviolet wavelengths," said Stefan Immler, who proposed the program and led NASA's contribution … [Read more...]

POPSCI 26 May 2013 With smartphone interaction mostly relying on sight, since there's no tactile difference to what's on the screen, some blind people have turned to apps to make up the difference. These apps can do some pretty impressive things, like determine the denomination of currency or read text out loud, rendering braille unnecessary for some tasks. But those were workarounds, to make up for the inability to create an actual braille interface. For about three years, a team of … [Read more...]

By Klaus Schmidt Space Fellowship 16 May 2013 An international team of astronomers have reported the first scientific results from the Karoo Array Telescope (KAT-7) in South Africa, the pathfinder radio telescope for the $3 billion global Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project. The results appear in the latest issue of the prestigious international astronomical journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS). Using the seven-dish KAT-7 telescope and the 26 m radio … [Read more...]

The Financial Express 12 May 2013 Samsung Electronics said today it had successfully tested super-fast fifth-generation (5G) wireless technology that would eventually allow users to download an entire movie in one second. The South Korean giant said the test had witnessed data transmission of more than one gigabyte per second over a distance of two kilometres. The new technology, which will not be ready for the commercial market before 2020 at the earliest, would offer transmitting … [Read more...]

By Eko Armunanto, Digital Journal 11 May 2013 Citing its most favorite source: “people familiar with the company's plans”, Wall Street Journal says Amazon has recently been developing a wide-ranging lineup of gadgets, including two smartphones and an audio streaming device. Greg Bensinger wrote the report on WSJ saying that one of the devices is a high-end smartphone featuring a screen that allows for three-dimensional images without glasses. The new smartphone uses … [Read more...]

SABC 4 May 2013 The first-ever manned airplane that can fly by day or night on the sun's power alone took off on Friday on the first leg of a trip across the United States.  Solar Impulse, piloted by Swiss adventurer Bertrand Piccard, left the runway in northern California against the backdrop of a golden morning sunrise, in what a mission control operator called a "perfect takeoff." Flying quietly and slowly at an average speed of about 49 kilometres per hour, the plane is scheduled … [Read more...]

BBC News 30 April 2013 Richard Branson's dreams of sending tourists up to space are a step closer after SpaceShipTwo (SS2) made its first powered flight.  The vehicle was dropped from a carrier aircraft high above the Mojave Desert in California before its rocket engines were lit. The engines only burned for 15 seconds, but this is the first time the SS2 has flown solo. After shutting down its motor, the vehicle then glided back to the Mojave runway. On Twitter, Virgin Galactic … [Read more...]