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June |
Newsletter |
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Issue
55 |
Included in this months issue:
Apple iPad Review
The Apple iPad, that is all we have been hearing about for the last couple of months, but does it live up to all the hype? The Geeky Gadgets team have been testing out the iPad since we got our hands on a couple when they went on sale in the UK on the 28th of May.
We have put the iPad through its paces, to give you guys a good idea of what it can and cant do, and whether it is the ‘magical’ gadget that Apple says it is, in this review we will look at everything the iPad has to offer.
By Roland Hutchinson
Extreme DIY: Building a home made nuclear reactor in NYC
Many might be alarmed to learn of a homemade nuclear reactor being built next door. But what if this form of extreme DIY could help solve the world's energy crisis?
By day, Mark Suppes is a web developer for fashion giant Gucci. By night, he cycles to a New York warehouse and tinkers with his own nuclear fusion reactor.
The warehouse is a non-descript building on a tree-lined Brooklyn street, across the road from blocks of apartments, with a grocery store on one corner. But in reality, it is a lab.
In a hired workshop on the third floor, a high-pitched buzz emanates from a corner dotted with metal scraps and ominous-looking machinery, as Mr Suppes fires up his device and searches for the answer to a question that has eluded some of the finest scientific minds on the planet.
By Matthew Danzico
Prisoner of iTunes - the iPad file transfer horror
First the good news - it's light, compact, reasonably capable for typing, and it has enough battery life for you not to be forever worrying about where your next power socket's coming from. These advantages alone are sufficient for me to take the iPad seriously for note-taking and for document viewing and manipulation, and to stop using the MacBook Air as the thing I carry around all the time.
But the bad news is that - in this iteration at least - the iPad is a conflicted machine. It's a media consumption device, and if it's just that it's an expensive one. Not that Steve Jobs is likely to go broke by selling expensive toys, as the sales figures remind us. But alongside this it has a capability as a productivity tool, and it's here that the problems start to tumble out. That doesn't mean it doesn't have a value there, but it does mean that it has considerable potential to become an infuriating device to use.
By John Lettice
Insane Crystal Bathtub Costs $790,000
If I were a billionaire, I would squander untold sums of money on all manner of things that many people would find stupid. I would buy anything that tickled my fancy, mostly cars though. I agree with some types of money squandering, but to drop nearly $800k on a bathtub is crazy.
An Italian company called Baldi has carved a three-person tub out of a solid piece of crystal rock. The tub was made for a window display at Harrods and can be yours for only $790,000. Scoff as I might, Baldi has already sold a similar tub.
By Shane McGlaun
Teachers lose thousands in bank fraud
An alert has been issues to teachers after staff at 16 schools had their bank accounts targeted by fraudsters.
Bogus standing orders were set up to divert money from the accounts of more than 70 people in the borough of Lewisham.
The council has launched an investigation into whether a security breach in the borough's payroll system could be to blame. Teachers have been urged to check their bank statements carefully and inform police if they see any unexpected standing orders.
In a letter to borough headteachers, Alan Docksey, Lewisham's head of resources wrote: "we are aware of 72 staff across 16 schools that have been affected in some way."
"Whilst we have not identified a link to the London Borough of Lewisham, staff are requested to inform the council's corporate anti-fraud and corruption team."
By Tim Ross
LHC Smashes beam collision record
Scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) say they have moved a step closer to their aim of unlocking the mysteries of the Universe.
The world's highest-energy particle accelerator has produced a record-breaking particle collision rate - about double the previous rate.
The collider is now generating around 10,000 particle collisions per second, according to physicist Andrei Golutvin.
The LHC is housed in a 27km circular tunnel under the French-Swiss border.
By Katia Moskvitch
Touchscreen made from biggest graphene sheet
A new method to produce graphene sheets with a diagonal dimension of 76 centimetres – an order of magnitude larger than previously managed – could result in cheap, transparent electrodes that can be used in flexible displays or photovoltaic cells. The graphene has already been used to construct a touchscreen that is twice as flexible as one made using the current favoured material, indium titanium oxide.
Graphene is made up of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice. It is a promising material for the production of next-generation displays or solar cells because it is flexible, transparent and conductive.
Until last year, though, graphene sheets no larger than 1000 square micrometres had been produced. Then Rodney Ruoff of the University of Texas at Austin and colleagues discovered a way to grow graphene sheets several centimetres wide.
Using a technique called chemical vapour deposition, they heated methane and hydrogen gas to 1000 °C above a flexible copper substrate, causing a reaction that left a layer of graphene deposited on the copper. Once the graphene cooled, they transferred it onto a piece of flexible plastic.
By Kurt Kleiner
Pulses of darkness let digital data travel farther
Optical fibres can carry digital data for much longer distances without distortion if it is encoded in pulses of darkness, rather than pulses of light. To exploit this, Steven Cundiff, a physicist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and colleagues have developed a device that has been dubbed the dark laser.
A standard laser can send out millions of picosecond-long light pulses each second, separated by longer dark intervals. The dark laser operates in reverse: it generates short pulses of darkness separated by relatively long intervals of brightness.
At the heart of Cundiff's dark laser is a chunk of material that emits light when an electric current is passed through it. This light bounces back and forth inside a mirrored chamber, in a similar manner to the way light is reflected back and forth in the resonance cavity of an ordinary laser to generate concentrated pulses of light.
The difference in the dark laser is that one of the mirrors has a light-absorbing coating. In this arrangement, with light of the right frequency, the chamber emits short pulses characterised by an absence rather than presence of light. The pulses, produced at a rate of up to 400 million per second, are 70 per cent less intense than the background light.
By Colin Barras
iPhone 4 Review
The iPhone 4 is no small thing to review. As most readers of Engadget are well aware, in the gadget world a new piece of Apple hardware is a major event, preceded by rumors, speculation, an over-the-top announcement, and finally days, weeks, or months of anticipation from an ever-widening fan base. The iPhone 4 is certainly no exception -- in fact, it may be Apple's most successful launch yet, despite some bumps on the road. We've already seen Apple and AT&T's servers overloaded on the first day of pre-orders, the ship date for the next set of phones pushed back due to high demand, and die-hard fans in lineoutside of Apple locations a week before the phone is actually available. It's a lot to live up to, and the iPhone 4 is doing its best -- with features like a super-fast A4 CPU, a new front-facing camera and five megapixel shooter on the back, a completely new industrial design, and that outrageous Retina Display, no one would argue that Apple has been asleep at the wheel. So the question turns to whether or not the iPhone 4 can live up to the intense hype. Can it deliver on the promises Steve Jobs made at WWDC, and can it cement Apple's position in the marketplace in the face of mounting competition from the likes of Google and Microsoft? We have the answers to those questions -- and many more -- in our full review, so read on to find out!
By Joshua Topolski
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