Self cleaning roads which clean the air too

Pollution is a serious problem all across the world, wouldn't it be great if the streets clean themselves and also the air around them. A new kind of concrete mixture researched by the University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands  has shown some significant figures resulting in decrease in the concentration of nitrogen oxides (NOx) by 25 to 45% , NOx is what results in acid rain which is very dangerous for the fertility of soil and human skin.

Mr Jos Brouwers a professor of building materials at the Eindhoven University of Technology reveled this in his inaugural speech, he sees numerous potential applications for this technology. The concrete stones used in the tests are made by paving stone manufacturer Struyk Verwo Infra, and are already available for real world applications. 

Pranav Mistry's new innovation the invisible computer mouse.(Mouseless)

After coming up with the popular invention of Sixth sense technology Pranav Mistry, Pattie Maes and Liyan Chang from MIT's Media Lab have come up with a new innovation the Invisible computer mouse. No Doubt mouse is a very important peripheral of the computer, over all these years it has steadily gone through changes from  losing the tracker ball to getting laser tracker for improved precision, becoming wireless to turning in to a touch sensitive pad found in a laptop and there are a ton of other mouse design concept that people have come up with, but no one had every thought of turning it invisible.

How Invisible Mouse works

The invisible mouse is no alien technology! There have been a lot of advancement in multi-touch,  gesture interface technologies but all these technologies have not been explored to their full potential. The mouse still has the same kind of buttons since it was first made. When it comes to Pranav Mistry's mouseless interface it consists of  two major components, an Infrared (IR) laser beam and an Infrared camera. Now the laser beam is modified by fitting it with a line cap which creates a plane of infrared laser just above the surface where the computer is placed. Now the user has to place their hand like they are holding a real mouse, the IR beam covers the hand. Now the IR (infrared) camera detects  the hand movements and creates what is called blob (interpreted by computer) the change in the IR created by the hand movements is thus detected by the computer and the cursor thus move the way you move your hand on the surface just like a real mouse. When you tap your index finger it is able to detect a click.

Hardware trojans another way to steal data

Ever wondered if your mouse keyboard or other USB peripherals could transmit sensitive data. Yes this is possible with what is called "Hardware Trojan". Hardware Trojans are compromised hardware devices which can send data to a remote thief. Until now Hardware Trojan was considered as modified electronic circuitry like if it has been fabricated in the factory to do so but, a recent finding by engineers at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario suggests that a flaw in the USB could be used to sack into data from the hard disk.

The USB's plug and play functionality allows any device being plugged in to report its identity correctly. If the swapped device belongs to the same manufacturer and model the computer will not even notice a change in the device. Any USB device like a keyboard or a mouses could be swapped to a hacked one without  the user knowing it. The engineers at Royal Military college successful designed a USB keyboard that successfully transmitted  binary data from the Hard Drive via led flashing which could be encoded using Morse Code and by encoding data as a subtle warbling output from the sound card.

Toshiba and Intel to commercialize an educational-use tablet PC for school kids

Toshiba and Intel recently announced the launch of a tablet PC  in Japan for elementary and junior high schools kids named CM1. The tablet is focused to foster ICT (Information and communication technologies) skill among kids. The CM1 came up due to The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications of Japan which set out a policy of providing digital textbooks for all elementary and junior high school students by 2015.

Microsoft Instaload technology lets you put batteries the way you want.

You might have come across times when you insert batteries in the wrong way and the device wont start. It happens with a lot of people but no one came up with a solution, but the IT giant Microsoft with its new technology called InstaLoad.

How Instaload works

You might wonder it works on complex electronics but the fact is its a purely mechanical design that makes it work. It has a set of positive and negative contacts at both ends, unlike only positive at one end and only negative at the other end. So always the battery either interfaces with a positive contact or a negative contact. Check out the contact design diagram.

How to trace the location of a host server

Whenever you visit a website you are routed through various servers and locations before ending up to the final host server here's a method to trace the location of a host server through a really simple command and a website which can be used on any Windows PC.

Step 1
Click on Start and go to command prompt by typing cmd in the run box. OR Simply go to Accessories and click on Command Prompt.

Step 2
In the Command Prompt Type tracert followed by the address of the website you want to trace. For example if you want to trace the routes for my website-- 

tracert www.mytechcenter.co.cc
OR  tracert www.yahoo.com  

(Remember only type address beginning with www don't type the url with http://)

Now my website is hosted on blogger so it is hosted on google servers. It takes almost 18 routes before reaching my website from my internet connection.

Step 3

Now that we have traced the host server IP ie. the last line before trace complete, in my case as you can see it is 74.125.95.121 we can easily trace the server location and other details. Now you can't use copy in Command Prompt so just write down the IP address  on a piece of paper or type it on notepad and then put in the Lookup IP Information box on the website  

http://ip-address-lookup-v4.com  and hit enter.

It will show you all the details of the website like its location on google maps ,the hosting service, company name and a ton of other stuff.

You can also trace the location of the routes you went through by putting in the route IP addresses. 

Have fun tinkering and finding server locations of your favorite websites! If you have a problem doing it, put it in the comments and i can help you out.