Xbox One? More like Xbox None: MS blew the Xbox 720 reveal on every conceivable level

After watching Microsoft’s Xbox One unveil this afternoon, I came away with one overwhelming impression: Redmond doesn’t understand its audience anymore.  If the company is going to fix this mess it’s just made for itself, it’s going to need the best damned E3 in the history of video gaming. The problem with the Xbox One launch isn’t that the features Microsoft announced are bad, it’s with the ocean of things Microsoft didn’t say.

Microsoft showed us some nifty capabilities (voice commands, fast task switching), and some tidbits on how the Windows kernel and Xbox operating system have been cross-leveraged to create a different product. That’s all well and good. What the company utterly failed to demonstrate, however, was any compelling narrative as to why I should want to put one of these systems in my living room next year. Yes, the Xbox One can seamlessly switch between content, but why would I shove the TV content over by 33% when I can pick my smartphone up and surf to IMDB or Wikipedia if I have a question? Try doing that with a significant other (or at least with my significant other). It won’t end well. Skyping on the TV is nice, but it’s not a feature I’ll ever, ever use.

Why didn’t Microsoft demonstrate how fast switching can be used to open walkthroughs or YouTube videos when you get stuck playing a game? That’s a legitimately awesome feature. Even on a PC, not every game responds well to an Alt-Tab — there are times I’ve used my phone to look up game data because the game engine crashes if it loses focus. Why didn’t Microsoft link this feature back to gaming?

Developer ecosystem, OS capabilities

When Microsoft was bringing the Xbox 360′s ecosystem online, its XNA development studio was a critical piece of the puzzle. XNA was built and marketed to allow individuals to build games for Xbox Live Arcade and other Windows devices. Now XNA is gone, and with the Xbox One launching “sometime this year,” its replacement took center stage at the launch event today. Just kidding! Actually, it’s just gone,  and MS hasn’t said a word about what replaces it.

If you think this doesn’t matter, it’s because you haven’t thought through the implications of the hybrid OS model the Xbox One uses. The Xbox One isn’t just a console with the capabilities of a PC, it’s an x86 device running a customized operating system based on Windows. Can it run apps? Can it actually install Virtual Studio and self-compile/test its own code? Will Microsoft integrate Windows Explorer-level network sharing, such that you can see your Xbox as a device on the home network and copy files to and from it as you would another system?

These aren’t make-or-break capabilities, but being able to use the Xbox One as a computer for the purposes of viewing email, PDFs, or even power point presentations could be a really nice bonus to the usage proposition. No need to keep the laptop handy if you’re expecting an email. If Kinect 2.0 is as powerful as Microsoft implies, it might be able to handle speech-to-text conversion — and that opens up new possibilities for the Xbox One as an access device for the legally blind.

You’d think Microsoft would take at least a little time to talk about how it intends to leverage its enormous Windows ecosystem to enhance offerings on the Xbox One and vice versa. And you’d be wrong. But the company did confirm that Kinect is mandatory in all games, and since the system never turns off, Kinect is actually on — and potentially spying on you — all the time. This is a malware risk, for obvious reasons, but it’s also a new profit center for the company, which filed a patent last year on a method of using Kinect to monitor an entire room to confirm that everyone watching a movie or other content has purchased an individual license for watching that content.

Instead of Gears of War, we got Big Brother. But wait — there’s more.

The hardware & gaming unveil that wasn’t

See if you can spot the difference. Here’s Microsoft’s press release for the original Xbox 360 announcement on May 12, 2005:

With more than one teraflop of system-floating point performance, a three-core PowerPC-based CPU for the most-advanced artificial intelligence and physics processing, a custom ATI graphics processor, and more than 512 MB of memory for the ultimate in visual fidelity, the Xbox 360 hardware is a perfect blend of power, elegance and balance. Fabled game studios such as BioWare Corp., Bizarre Creations Ltd., Bungie Studios and Rare Ltd., as well as legendary Japanese game creators Hironobu Sakaguchi, Tetsuya Mizuguchi, and Yoshiki Okamoto, are harnessing the powerful Xbox 360 platform to create exclusive games for Microsoft Game Studios. Equally commanding, game-changing publishers such as 2K Games, Activision Publishing Inc., Capcom Co. Ltd., Electronic Arts, Tecmo Inc., Namco Hometek Inc., Rockstar Games, SEGA of America Inc., THQ and Ubisoft Entertainment — just to name a few — are flocking to Xbox 360.

It took less than two weeks for the first in-depth articles to go up detailing every aspect of the CPU and GPU. Compare that to what Microsoft’s PR department released today:

An eight-core, x86 processor and more than 5 billion transistors helps make lag and load times a thing of the past so you can instantly jump between a game and your entertainment at lightning speed or run a host of apps right alongside your game with no loss in performance.

Measuring system performance based on transistor counts is so bass-ackwards, they ought to have scored the unveil with Kriss Kross. Adding insult to injury, the company is playing coy with facts we already know. As of this writing, Wired’s story still claims the Xbox One is based on a 5 billion-transistor SoC built on 40nm technology. Engadget says 28nm. GCN and Kabini were both native 28nm designs, which means AMD would’ve had to do entirely different products for both CPU and GPU to make a 40nm product. It’s not a trivial mistake. Someone’s wrong here, but MS can’t be bothered to tell us who it is or give out the information publicly.

Tech specs, in and of themselves, aren’t the best way to build user engagement, but they’re a set of figures that people pay attention to. Talking about hardware is a natural way to talk about software, and talking about software is the best way to start talking about games. And games are what we’re here to talk about. Sure, instant-on, fast-switching, and communications software are interesting, but no one buys an Xbox so they can Skype grandma. Instead of major game unveils, we got nothing but pre-rendered footage.

This pre-rendered footage of a random ship hitting a random bridge, sans gameplay, was really inspiring.

Yes, the big game unveils are coming at E3, but just how rough is the current console if Microsoft can’t debut more than 1-2 trailers using nothing but pre-rendered footage just weeks before the E3 date? More to the point, what does that say about the likely quality of the games in question? EA is guaranteed to vomit up a sports title for every platform in existence (sans Nintendo) and anything with “Call of Duty” stamped on it is so derivative, you already beat it in 2004.

The two games worth mentioning? One, Quantum Break, was demoed for roughly 30 seconds and consisted almost entirely of FMV with a single scene of a ship hitting a bridge.Forza 5 was legitimately gorgeous (pictured below), if you like racing. That’s it. Steven Spielberg showed up to talk about how excited he is to be working on a Halo TV show, as if this had anything to do with the Xbox One. But hey, at least the NFL made a vague promise of content and a fantasy football app.

Again, the problem here isn’t that there’s something wrong with racing games or Call of Duty. These games sell millions of copies. The problem is, when it came time to show off the depth and breadth of the new console, Microsoft dropped the ball, tripped on it, and broke its own arm.

Glimmers of hope

The good news is that journalists who were able to go backstage and get hands-on time with the console came back with a lot of positive feedback. Clearly the console has some strong points. The panel Q&A sessions that took place after the main event were another place to get details on the Kinect sensor and controller. Feedback on both of these items was quite good. Clearly Microsoft has put a lot of work into creating better peripherals that drive better gaming.

But that doesn’t change the fact that the functions and capabilities of the Xbox One that needed to be front-and-center today were pushed off into after-event panels or doled out as exclusives, while the actual event was a flaccid illustration of a few cool concepts and next to nothing in the way of a unifying experience.

The Xbox One is technologically impressive, but I expected that. It integrates capabilities that the Xbox 360 could only dream of and it’s clearly designed for a more flexible software base. Well and good. Yesterday, I was waiting for Microsoft to articulate a reason why I should buy this console. Not “Buy it instead of a PS4 or a Wii U.” Buy it, period.

I’m still waiting.

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Cold fusion reactor independently verified, has 10,000 times the energy density of gas

Against all probability, a device that purports to use cold fusion to generate vast amounts of power has been verified by a panel of independent scientists. The research paper, which hasn’t yet undergone peer review, seems to confirm both the existence of cold fusion, and its potency: The cold fusion device being tested has roughly 10,000 times the energy density and 1,000 times the power density of gasoline. Even allowing for a massively conservative margin of error, the scientists say that the cold fusion device they tested is 10 times more powerful than gasoline — which is currently the best fuel readily available to mankind.

The device being tested, called by Energy Catalyzer (E-Cat for short), was created by Andrea Rossi. Rossi has been claiming for the past two years that he had finally cracked cold fusion, but much to the chagrin of the scientific community he hasn’t allowed anyone to independently analyze the device — until now. While it sounds like the scientists had a fairly free rein while testing the E-Cat, we should stress that they still don’t know exactly what’s going on inside the sealed steel cylinder reactor. Still, the seven scientists, all from good European universities, obviously felt confident enough with their findings to publish the research paper.

As for what’s happening inside the cold fusion reactor, Andrea Rossi and his colleague Sergio Focardi have previously said their device works by infusing hydrogen into nickel, transmuting the nickel into copper and releasing a large amount of heat. While Rossi hasn’t provided much in the way of details — he’s a very secretive man, it seems — we can infer some knowledge from NASA’s own research into cold fusion. Basically, hydrogen ions (single protons) are sucked into a nickel lattice (pictured right); the nickel’s electrons are forced into the hydrogen to produce neutrons; the nickel nuclei absorb these neutrons; the neutrons are stripped of their electrons to become protons; and thus the nickel goes up in atomic number from 28 to 29, becoming copper.

This process, like the “conventional” fusion of hydrogen atoms into helium, produces a lot of heat. (See: 500MW from half a gram of hydrogen: The hunt for fusion power heats up.) The main difference, though, is that the cold fusion process (also known as LENR, or low energy nuclear reaction) produces very slow moving neutrons which don’t create ionizing radiation or radioactive waste. Real fusion, on the other hand, produces fast neutrons that decimate everything in their path. In short, LENR is fairly safe — safe enough that NASA dreams of one day putting a cold fusion reactor in every home, car, and plane. Nickel and hydrogen, incidentally, are much cheaper fuels than gasoline.

As far as we can tell, the main barrier to cold fusion — as with normal fusion — is producing more energy than you put in. In NASA’s tests, it takes a lot more energy to fuse the nickel and hydrogen than is produced by the reaction. Rossi, it would seem, has discovered a secret sauce that significantly reduces the amount of energy required to start the reaction. As for what the secret sauce is, no one knows — in the research paper, the independent scientists simply refer to it as “unknown additives.” All told, the E-Cat seems to have a power density of 4.4×10⁵ W/kg, and an energy density of 5.1×10⁷ Wh/kg.

Still, if Rossi and Focardi’s cold fusion technology turns out to be real — if the E-Cat really has 10,000 times the energy density and 1,000 times the power density of gasoline — then the world will change, very, very quickly. Stay tuned; we’ll let you know when — or if — the E-Cat passes peer review.

Research paper: arXiv:1305.3913 - “Indication of anomalous heat energy production in a reactor device”

NASA funds 3D food printer, to combat hunger in space and on Earth

Many astronauts have PhDs, perhaps a military honor or two, maybe even a history in combat — but cooking? This is apparently a bridge too far, and while astronauts don’t have nearly as much free time in space as we might assume (probably a good thing, for mental health reasons), time is the least of the reasons NASA is looking to change our relationship with food. The space agency recently awarded a $125,000 grant to a project aimed at 3D printing food for astronauts, and while the space agency’s main concern is efficient food storage for long-haul space flights, creator Anjan Contractor hopes his technology could help people here on Earth get access to the volume and variety of food they need.

Thinking about mechanized food creation in space, comparisons to Star Trek‘s replicator immediately spring to mind, but it’s worth noting that in this case both the printer and the software are relatively old hat (by the standards of the spanking-new 3D printing industry). Contractor is planning to use the RepRap 3D printer, an open-source design that was originally intended to build its own parts from scratch — a replicator in the Darwinian sense, if not the Roddenberrian. In the plan, a NASA-modified RepRap printer will be fitted with several culinary building blocks, from oil to protein powder, then mixed and deposited. (See: What is 3D printing?)

Amazingly, the new research kitchen’s first order is for pizza. For a first project, it’s certainly ambitious, involving not just many ingredients, but ingredients that must be mixed and cooked differently, at different times. This makes sense, since printing lends itself most easily to layer-based foods like pizza, but it’s still an ambitious project; they’re not starting with 3D-printed Jell-o, by any means. The printer will mix and deposit a layer of dough and cook this layer before putting down the next. Tomato sauce will be made from powder, water, and oil. Follow this with a slightly less appetizing “protein layer” and you’ve got pizza. It has no real cheese, nor meat, but for astronauts who are used to freeze-dried rations and non-perishable snacks, it could be a mouthwatering change of pace.

Embedded below is the simple chocolate printer that won Contractor this NASA small business award.

Doing it this way lets NASA keep foodstuffs under pressure, and unlike traditional canning the 3D printer can extrude only the amount needed for a single meal while keeping the rest safely sequestered. The ISS has already categorized many dozen types of bacteria brought up to space, but food decay is a slightly smaller issue in an environment that can be scrubbed once, sent to space, and assumed to be under perfect quarantine. The third world, however, has no such luxuries, and Contractor claims that by dehydrating foods to powders we can increase their shelf-life to as much as 30 years — perfect for trips to Mars, or preservation in quick-rotting environments like Africa, South America, and Asia.

Turning recipes into open-source code could allow for dynamic recipe creation; input your sex, age, weight, etc. and watch as the software not only creates a pizza balanced just for your nutritional needs, but prints it for you. Protein sources could be anything form all-American corn to all-African insects to all-Asian algae — and that’s the point.

Contractor thinks a 3D printer should be a fixture of every kitchen, though, not just those in space or in rural Zimbabwe. After all, 3D printing is a versatile enough system that it could just as easily be incorporated into cooking as replace it entirely, perhaps laying a thin coat of nutrient gel onto a half-finished dish. If that doesn’t sound too appetizing, just wait until the current projections for food availability start coming of age — we might be eating 3D-printed insect protein faster than you think.

Teenage girl creates tiny device that could charge a smartphone in 20 seconds

When you’re out all day, it’s a huge pain to charge your mobile devices. Even if you remember to bring a charger and get lucky enough to find a free electrical outlet at a coffee shop, you still have to sit there for around an hour or so to get a full charge. 18-year-old high school student Eesha Khare invented a tiny device that could potentially charge a phone in around 20 to 30 seconds.

At this year’s Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Phoenix, Arizona, Khare displayed her tiny device. Referred to as a supercapacitor, the item is small enough to fit inside a standard smartphone battery. To demonstrate the device, she had it power a small LED — certainly not a power-hungry smartphone battery that dies before your train gets to your stop. Along with lasting around 10,000 charge cycles (as opposed to a standard battery’s 1,000), the capacitor is also flexible, so it can be maneuvered into oddly shaped spaces.

Khare’s capacitor (which we hope she’ll call the Khare Kapacitor if it ever hits the market) incorporates nanostructures to help store more energy per volume than a standard battery, hold a charge longer, and deliver a charge more quickly. After charging it for just 20 seconds, she was able to power that small LED. She hasn’t applied the battery to mobile devices just yet, but the theory has been tested, and that is the supercapacitor’s eventual goal.

The capacitor is also a solid-state device, making it more environmentally friendly than a regular battery, which could spill its liquid innards should the casing experience a rupture. The flexible nature of the capacitor should also help prevent it from taking severe damage. The device is also more temperature-stable than standard batteries, as well as more affordable. Along with powering your tasteful front yard LEDs, and hopefully mobile devices one day, the capacitor can also potentially be used in car batteries. This could be a boon for electric vehicles, making their power usage much more time efficient.

Khare won the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award, which came with a $50,000 prize, which she plans on using to help pay for college and other scientific endeavors.

Like most revolutionary battery technology — such as increasing standard lithium-ion battery storage with the help of graphene-based nanosheets — there isn’t a definite timeframe for when (if ever) Khare’s capacitor will hit the market, or even if it can be successfully incorporated into consumer electronics. However, it certainly is promising that there’s a veritable deluge of battery advancements seemingly every month. The more frequently they occur, the more likely one will be applicable to devices we use.

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Kinect for the Xbox One: Sensor revolution or marketing hype?

For all the buzz about the new Kinect that will ship with the Xbox One, there are remarkably few facts to go around. Sources trumpet its infrared-enabled ability to detect motion in a dark room, for example, but so could the original Kinect. Taking a look at what we know about the Kinect 2.0, it isn’t at all clear whether it is an exciting breakthrough or just a group of incremental updates.

Improved camera and personalized voice recognition

One clear step up in the new Kinect is the 1080p camera, with better resolution and a 60% wider field of view. This will allow the camera to cover a wider range of simultaneous player positions. The new Kinect also helps the Xbox One quickly and (at least in the demo) accurately respond to voice commands. If it works as well in real living rooms, it’ll be a huge improvement over existing user interfaces. A big piece of making that possible is the recognition of individual voices, which should make an unprecedented degree of personalization possible.

Time of flight replaces structured light

Rather than the coded-light patterns used by the original Kinect, the new version is reported to use direct time of flight (TOF) measurement. TOF sensors are essentially small infrared “radars” that instantly create a depth map. However, TOF sensor sites normally take up room that could otherwise be used for traditional visible-light sensing — also crucial for gaming. Samsung’s integrated Visible+TOF sensor, for example, has a fill factor under 50%, and that’s with a relatively low VGA resolution for its depth map. If Microsoft is truly offering high accuracy depth sensing in its new Kinect, it is either using a completely separate sensor, sacrificing quite a bit of the camera’s potential, or has truly made a breakthrough in fundamental CMOS sensor technology.

Microsoft hasn’t revealed much about the specifics of its proprietary TOF solution, but does say that the sensor (possibly including the visible light camera) gathers about two gigabits of data — not the same as the 2GB that some other tech sites have reported. Assuming the TOF sensor captures data at 30fps (matching the camera), that’s about 60 million bits per frame. If it records depth in the same 11-bits per sample precision as the original Kinect, that would more than match the throughput needed for a 1080p resolution TOF sensor. If so, it is indeed much higher resolution than the 640×480 depth map of the current Kinect. I suspect the depth precision has also been improved, perhaps to 12-bits or even 16-bits per sample — to help allow the detection of subtle motions in the Xbox One.

Has Microsoft caught up on motion accuracy?

When Kinect was first introduced, it was the benchmark by which other motion sensitive peripherals were measured. Then tiny LEAP Motion made headlines last year by claiming200 times the accuracy of the Kinect. A year later, Leap is finally about to ship its product, so it would be natural for Microsoft to leapfrog, or at least match, Leap’s claimed 0.01mm accuracy. However, Microsoft has been completely silent on the technical specs achieved through its switch to TOF technology — other than saying it can now track small movements like those made with the wrist.

Some tech sites are reporting the new Kinect’s ability to measure player heartbeats as some type of breakthrough, but numerous research projects have shown it isn’t hard to do that with a standard 1080p video camera. Similarly, Microsoft’s comment that TOF measures the return time of individual photons has been taken out of context and reported as if the Kinect can measure single photons. In reality, physics makes it impossible to reliably predict the course of a single photon, so any system that tried to measure at that level would be dominated by noise. In fairness, the gestures demonstrated by Microsoft on stage to control the Xbox One were pretty impressive. However, it wasn’t clear how much of that was made possible by the new Kinect and how much was simply improvements in the gesture-recognition software in the new Xbox.

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Xbox 720 vs. PS4 vs. PC: How the hardware specs compare

Updated: Microsoft has now confirmed the Xbox 720′s specs (aka, the Xbox One). They seem to be exactly the same as the rumored specs. In addition to the specs listed below, Microsoft has confirmed that the Xbox 720 has 8GB of RAM, HDMI in/out, USB 3.0, and a 500GB hard drive. The Xbox 720 (Xbox One) seems to have virtually identical hardware to the PS4.

Microsoft has finally unveiled the Xbox 720. Not only have we found out its real name (the Xbox One), but more importantly we’ve found out how the Xbox 720′s hardware stacks up against the PS4 and gaming PCs. While we don’t know the exact hardware spec — console makers never give away all their secrets — all signs point to the Xbox 720 having very, very similar hardware to the PS4, and about on-par with a mid-range gaming PC. This is in stark contrast to the current generation of consoles, which were beastly, noisy, massively expensive machines that blew away all but the highest-end PCs. Merely comparing hardware specs is incredibly naive, though — to find out why, read on.

For the most accurate Xbox 720 hardware specs, we look towards the games development sector, which has been programming Xbox 720 games since last year. The latest leaks suggest that the Xbox 720 will have an 8-core 64-bit x86 Jaguar AMD CPU @ 1.6GHz, coupled with a GPU that’s very close to the Radeon HD 7790. The PS4, in comparison, has an 8-core Jaguar AMD CPU, with a GPU that’s around the Radeon 7870. In both consoles, the CPU and GPU will be on the same die (an AMD APU). Just as the PS4 has 8GB of high-speed memory that is shared by the CPU and GPU, the Xbox 720 — by virtue of being based on the same APU heterogeneous system architecture (HSA) — will probably be the same. In short, while there will undoubtedly be small hardware differences between the consoles, they will ultimately have very similar performance characteristics.

In comparison to a modern PC, you can probably guess how the Xbox 720 compares. There’s no direct comparison for the 8-core Jaguar CPU — AMD’s own parts based on the Jaguar core, Kabini and Temash, are quad-core parts destined for ultrathins and tablets. From leaked benchmarks, the Jaguar core is around 10% faster than its predecessor (Bobcat). A dual-core Brazos (Bobcat core) about 10 times slower than the latest Ivy Bridge parts, in a very naive comparison. So, all in all, an 8-core Jaguar might manage about half the performance of a current-gen Core i7. The GPU comparison is easier: The Radeon 7790 is a $150 card.

In short, then, today’s PCs will stomp all over the Xbox 720 (and PS4) in terms of raw computation power.

It’s now how big it is; it’s what you do with it

Another way of looking at the Xbox 720 and PS4, though, is their power relative to their predecessors. In terms of raw, synthetic performance, the Xbox 360 could churn out around 300 gigaflops; the PS3 was around 400 gigaflops. The Xbox 720 and PS4, however, should both be above two teraflops — about six times more powerful than their predecessors. Remember, the output resolution (1920×1080) is unlikely to change — so, with six times more power, we’re looking at a significant improvement to image quality.

Using teraflops as a stand-in for real-world performance, though, to quote our hardware analyst Joel Hruska, is like “giving the fuel efficiency of a car going downhill with an 80 mph tailwind on helium-inflated tires.” What it ultimately comes down to is how efficiently developers use the hardware — and in that regard, we have high hopes. With the shift to x86, and a GPU architecture (AMD’s GCN) that’s well known, developers will be able to hit the ground running. Compare this to the Cell CPUs at the heart of the Xbox 360 and PS3, which took years for developers to fully understand.

It’s also important to remember that, in recent years, there has been a fundamental shift away from games that do the bulk of their computation on the CPU, to programs that use the CPU to offload computation to the (much more powerful) GPU. With the Xbox 360 and PS3, both consoles had a monstrous Cell-based CPU and an equally large GPU — the PS4 and Xbox 720, on the other hand, have wimpy, many-core CPUs and much larger GPUs. With both consoles expected to fill more of a media center/set-top box role, rather than focusing on gaming, we can foresee those cores being dedicated to background tasks, such as downloading updates or listening for voice commands.

Ultimately, with both the Xbox 720 and PS4 having such similar hardware, real-world performance differences will probably come down to how well the consoles make use of those eight CPU cores and GPU offloading. It’s also important to bear in mind that a huge speed-up is available when developing games for a fixed platform, with known performance/latency characteristics. Realistically, we wouldn’t be surprised if games on the Xbox 720 and PS4, just like the current generation, look very similar. Likewise, games will probably look better on consoles for a few years, and then PCs will probably pull back ahead.

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High-quality inkjet-printed graphene circuits: One step closer to foldable computers

Researchers at Northwestern University have devised a new method of creating large volumes of high-quality graphene, and then printing flexible graphene patterns with an inkjet printer that are 250 times more conductive than previous attempts.

When it comes to the next generation of electronics and computing, graphene has a unique combination of properties that make it an almost ideal material. Not only is it extremely conductive, but it’s very strong, chemically stable, and flexible. There are just two problems: It’s very hard to produce pure graphene in large quantities, and it’s proving quite hard to use graphene as a semiconductor (it doesn’t contain the all-important bandgap). Today, it seems like Northwestern may have solved the first problem — but the bandgap issue still remains at large.

Historically, graphene is produced through mechanical exfoliation — a fancy term that essentially means “peeling off layers of graphite using sticky tape.” This produces high-quality graphene, but it’s impossible to scale up to commercial production. Researchers have recently grown pure graphene on a copper substrate, using chemical vapor deposition (CVD), but it’s still a very slow process, and it’s unlikely to produce graphene in the quantities that we require. The better option for mass production is solution-phase exfoliation — flaking off graphene from graphite using a liquid solvent — but previous attempts have only produced very low quality flakes that don’t possess many of graphene’s “wonder material” properties. Now Northwestern has devised a new method, using ethanol and ethyl cellulose, that can be used to mass produce flakes of fairly high quality graphene.

These flakes are then mixed into an ink, which is then printed using a conventional inkjet printer. The resulting circuits, as you can see on the right, are highly flexible — and even under such stress, their conductivity (which is 250 times higher than previous inkjet-printed graphene circuits) remains virtually unchanged. In theory, these inkjet-printed graphene circuits could form the basis of flexible, foldable devices. Imagine a display that is made up of individual panels, which can be unfolded to make a giant display — much like a folded tourist map. The other obvious application is wearable computing, where various components might be stored in fairly static locations (against your chest, your inside leg), but the connections between the components would be fashioned from flexible graphene.

Research paper: DOI: 10.1021/jz400644c – “Inkjet Printing of High Conductivity, Flexible Graphene Patterns”

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Honeybees trained to sniff out land mines, might replace sniffer dogs in airports

Possibly explaining the recent dramatic decline in their population, Croatian scientists have successfully used honeybees to sniff out land mines. A swarm of bees will be released, and then a heat-sensing camera will be used to track their movements to any mines that might be hidden below the soil.

During the Yugoslav Wars, which mired the Balkan peninsula during the 1990s and saw the dissolution of Yugoslavia into Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Montenegro, and Macedonia, 90,000 land mines were placed across what is now Croatia. Since 1991, about 2,500 people have died from land mine explosions. An extensive cleanup has occurred, but there’s still more than 450 square miles that are suspected to filled with mines. More importantly, though, there are areas that have been swept — but they still have mines that were missed by the sweepers, and people are still dying. Dijana Plestina, head of the Croatian de-mining bureau, suspects these mines are a large obstacle for the country’s continued growth. ”While this exists, we are living in a kind of terror…  And of course, that is unacceptable,” she says.

We have known for a long time that bees have a very acute sense of smell — rivaling, and sometimes bettering sniffer dogs. In the past, bees have been used to sniff out explosives, drugs, uranium, pregnant women, and diseases such as cancer. Training, as with most creatures, is easy: Classical (Pavlovian) conditioning is used, to associate the smell of a substance with their food source. The Croatian scientists mixed a sugar solution with a small amount of TNT — and after about five minutes of hunting for this doped sugar solution, the honeybees are trained to flock to the smell of TNT.

A rat on a string, looking for a land mine

Once the bees have been trained, the Croatians will release the bees into areas that have already been de-mined by humans, and then track their movements with a heat-sensing camera. It is these regions where the most deaths occur, as people move freely and there aren’t any warning signs. The Croatians hope that the bees will help them discover mines that the humans may have missed. Unlike the unfortunate dogs and rats that came before them (pictured above), bees have the obvious advantage that they’re light enough to sniff out the mines without setting them off, too.

Moving forward, it sounds like the Croatians are still trying to prove that the honeybees are scientifically reliable before deploying them in the field. Other studies, though, have already confirmed that bees are accurate and reliable. The only real drawback of using bees (or wasps) over sniffer dogs is that they can only detect a single scent.

In the UK, there’s a firm called Inscentinel (!) that’s trying to commercialize the training and use of honeybees for sniffing substances. The video below details their technology — but be warned, it’s quite different from the Croatian technique, and altogether rather weird. For Inscentinel, sniffing out explosives is just the beginning: They see their bee-based sensor technology as a bona fide replacement for mass spectrometry, gas chromatography, and sniffer dogs in a wide range of applications.

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The $25 Lulz Liberator: The first 3D-printed gun with a rifled barrel

Proving that the open source movement is something that ought to be feared and revered, an engineer in Wisconsin has taken the world’s first 3D printed gun — and refined it, so that it can be produced for just $25, with a cheap 3D printer.

When Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed (DefDist) produced the first all-plastic, 3D-printed gun, he did so with a commercial-grade ($8,000+) Stratasys 3D printer. Obviously, this put the 3D-printed gun out of most people’s reach. This was good in one sense — yay, no one can afford to print a gun! — but, when DefDist’s goal is to ensure that every American always has access to guns, you can see how this was a bad thing. Well, Wilson need not have worried: Now an engineer in Wisconsin, identified as only “Joe” by Forbes, has used Wilson’s design to produce a better gun, using a cheaper printer.

The new gun, dubbed the Lulz Liberator, is based on Wilson’s Liberator. As the name suggests, it was printed on a fairly humdrum LulzBot AO-101 3D printer ($1,725), with about $25 of conventional ABS plastic. Unlike the Liberator, the Lulz Liberator uses metal screws to hold the hammer in place, rather than plastic pins. The screws (and the nail which acts a firing pin) are available from any hardware store, though. Even though it isn’t entirely plastic, it’s still very easy to make.

Surprisingly, despite the cheaper printer, the Lulz Liberator seems to be even stronger than Wilson’s original Liberator. According to Joe, the Polylac PA-747 ABS plastic he uses is stronger than the ABS plastic used by the Stratasys. In fact, he actually printed a barrel using his friend’s Stratasys printer (Michael Guslick), and it exploded on firing. The LulzBot-printed barrel, on the other hand, survived eight consecutive shots

Perhaps more importantly, though, Joe actually went one step further and added rifling to his barrel. Without rifling, Wilson’s Liberator isn’t accurate beyond a few feet, making it rather useless as a weapon — with rifling, the Lulz Liberator might be one step closer to being a functional, dangerous firearm. We say “might,” because Joe hasn’t provided any details that confirm that the plastic rifling is actually working as intended — and for now, with the US Department of State breathing down DefDist’s neck for releasing the Liberator’s CAD files, and lawmakers scrambling to plug the 3D-printed hole, Joe doesn’t have any immediate plans to share the Lulz Liberator CAD files, so no one can replicate his work.

Still, there you have it: The first rifled, plastic 3D gun has been produced — and it costs just $25. Rather than fearing that your life might be ended by someone busting a plastic cap in your ass, though, the much larger concern is that we’re now much closer to governments mandating that 3D printers contain DRM that prevents you from printing guns in the first place.

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Xbox 720 vs. PS4 vs. PC: How the hardware specs compare

Tomorrow, Microsoft will finally unveil the Xbox 720. Not only will we find out its real name (the money seems to be on Xbox Infinity), but more importantly we will find out how the Xbox 720′s hardware stacks up against the PS4 and gaming PCs. While we can’t be certain until the event, all signs point to the Xbox 720 having very, very similar hardware to the PS4 — and about on-par with a mid-range gaming PC. This is in stark contrast to the current generation of consoles, which were beastly, noisy, massively expensive machines that blew away all but the highest-end PCs. Merely comparing hardware specs is incredibly naive, though — to find out why, read on.

For the most accurate Xbox 720 hardware specs, we look towards the games development sector, which has been programming Xbox 720 games since last year. The latest leaks suggest that the Xbox 720 will have an 8-core 64-bit x86 Jaguar AMD CPU @ 1.6GHz, coupled with a GPU that’s very close to the Radeon HD 7790. The PS4, in comparison, has an 8-core Jaguar AMD CPU, with a GPU that’s around the Radeon 7870. In both consoles, the CPU and GPU will be on the same die (an AMD APU). Just as the PS4 has 8GB of high-speed memory that is shared by the CPU and GPU, the Xbox 720 — by virtue of being based on the same APU heterogeneous system architecture (HSA) — will probably be the same. In short, while there will undoubtedly be small hardware differences between the consoles, they will ultimately have very similar performance characteristics.

In comparison to a modern PC, you can probably guess how the Xbox 720 compares. There’s no direct comparison for the 8-core Jaguar CPU — AMD’s own parts based on the Jaguar core, Kabini and Temash, are quad-core parts destined for ultrathins and tablets. From leaked benchmarks, the Jaguar core is around 10% faster than its predecessor (Bobcat). A dual-core Brazos (Bobcat core) about 10 times slower than the latest Ivy Bridge parts, in a very naive comparison. So, all in all, an 8-core Jaguar might manage about half the performance of a current-gen Core i7. The GPU comparison is easier: The Radeon 7790 is a $150 card.

In short, then, today’s PCs will stomp all over the Xbox 720 (and PS4) in terms of raw computation power.

It’s now how big it is; it’s what you do with it

Another way of looking at the Xbox 720 and PS4, though, is their power relative to their predecessors. In terms of raw, synthetic performance, the Xbox 360 could churn out around 300 gigaflops; the PS3 was around 400 gigaflops. The Xbox 720 and PS4, however, should both be above two teraflops — about six times more powerful than their predecessors. Remember, the output resolution (1920×1080) is unlikely to change — so, with six times more power, we’re looking at a significant improvement to image quality.

Using teraflops as a stand-in for real-world performance, though, to quote our hardware analyst Joel Hruska, is like “giving the fuel efficiency of a car going downhill with an 80 mph tailwind on helium-inflated tires.” What it ultimately comes down to is how efficiently developers use the hardware — and in that regard, we have high hopes. With the shift to x86, and a GPU architecture (AMD’s GCN) that’s well known, developers will be able to hit the ground running. Compare this to the Cell CPUs at the heart of the Xbox 360 and PS3, which took years for developers to fully understand.

It’s also important to remember that, in recent years, there has been a fundamental shift away from games that do the bulk of their computation on the CPU, to programs that use the CPU to offload computation to the (much more powerful) GPU. With the Xbox 360 and PS3, both consoles had a monstrous Cell-based CPU and an equally large GPU — the PS4 and Xbox 720, on the other hand, have wimpy, many-core CPUs and much larger GPUs. With both consoles expected to fill more of a media center/set-top box role, rather than focusing on gaming, we can foresee those cores being dedicated to background tasks, such as downloading updates or listening for voice commands.

Ultimately, with both the Xbox 720 and PS4 having such similar hardware, real-world performance differences will probably come down to how well the consoles make use of those eight CPU cores and GPU offloading. It’s also important to bear in mind that a huge speed-up is available when developing games for a fixed platform, with known performance/latency characteristics. Realistically, we wouldn’t be surprised if games on the Xbox 720 and PS4, just like the current generation, look very similar. Likewise, games will probably look better on consoles for a few years, and then PCs will probably pull back ahead.

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