Next Gen Cargo Ships could use high sails to be fuel efficient

Cargo Ships are like the arteries of human civilization on this planet, they move tons of cargo of all sorts which keeps the international economy running. That being said, there are over 40,000 cargo ships on this planet which burn poor quality Diesel fuel for propulsion. This adds up to a lot of Carbon emissions every year and not much is being done to make these ships more fuel efficient and eco-friendly.

This past week at the 10th International Maritime Exhibition held in Tokyo in Japan a new cargo ship concept was unveiled, named the 'Wind Challenger Project'. The Project is lead by a group which involves members from the University of Tokyo. 

The aim of the Wind Challenger Project is to significantly reduce fuel consumption of large merchant/cargo vessels. The idea is to utilize giant retractable sails, 20m wide and 50m high, to make maximum use of wind energy. The idea is not really new though, sails have been used in the past. The essence of the technology lies in the fact that it will utilized modern day weather forecasting, navigation, networking and communication  technology to automatically control the sails and find the best possible path to safely reach the destination with minimum fuel consumption.

Simulations have already shown an annual average of 30% reduction in fuel consumption on shipping routes such as Yokohama-Seattle.

Google+ gets a makeover

When Google plus first came out everyone thought it would take social networking to a new level and yes Google Plus does have the potential. But unfortunately the novelty died pretty quick and then a lot of people stopped using Google plus. Although Google Plus now has over 170 million users, I really wonder how many are really active though. So now Google is using it's big programming Guns to make Google Plus the best place for Social networking.

I just logged into my Google+ account today to find out Google plus looks all different than ever before. I must say the new interface looks amazing. It's made things a lot simpler to find. Everything looks a lot clearer. I really appreciate the new interface. The free conference video chat feature called 'Hangout' has become much easier to use. Being an avid Facebook user, I must say the new G+ interface has won my heart. If only all my friends on Facebook are willing to be on Google plus. I m ready to stop using my Facebook account.

Micromax fires up the cheap tablet market with ' Funbook'

The cheap tablet market is really getting fired up with companies jumping into this lucrative market with these amazingly cheap portable tablet devices. After the announcement of the Akash 2 tablet a lot of companies have come up with tablet devices like Zync's Z-990, WishTel's Ira, Beetel's Magiq and just announced yesterday, the HCL's ME Tab U1.

To give a brief look in the specifications, The Tablet runs on the latest Android 4.0 Ice cream sandwich OS its powered by an ultra powerful 1.2GHz Cortex A8 Processor,features 512MB of RAM with 4GB of internal memory expandable up-to 32GB via microSD card. 

It has a 7 inch Capacitive touch screen with a native resolution of 800 x 400. 

Most importantly it features a Dual Mali 2D/3D Graphics processor, making it capable of playing 1080 HD playback with Adobe Flash support. It also has mini HDMI out. The form factor of the device is pretty slim too. The tablet supports 3G connectivity via USB dongle and comes bundled with a Tata Photon EVDO datacard with 1GB of data for 2 months.

Indian Television shows on YouTube!

Well it seems like YouTube has struck a major deal with various television media houses in India.

I just logged into my YouTube account to find out a new link tab called "TV shows" . What I ended up discovering is a whole archive of Indian TV shows right there infornt of my eyes, any episode from the shows available at the click of a mouse. 

The 7th All Japan Robot American Football Tournament (Video)

I came across this really cool and unique robotic sport that's becoming popular in Japan, 'The All Japan Robotic American Football'. 

In this game 5 robots from each team compete with one another to get the ball across the opponents line. These robots are Radio controlled with limited autonomous abilities. Just like in an American Football (Rugby) match the robots dash and wrestle against each other to get to the ball. These robots have dimension and size limitations. Dimensions should not exceed 20cm width, 20cm depth, and it should fit within a rectangular framework of 20cm in height.

Play Angry birds with a real slingshot!

By now most of the people across the planet who have access to the internet have tried their hands on Angry birds, if not you should try it out, its pretty engaging.

But if you are among the ones bored of the same old thing and like something thats closer to the real world then here is something really interesting you can try your hands on.

A guy named 'Simon Ford' who leads an online tools group at ARM, particularly mbed and http://mbed.org, a community website which works on enabling rapid prototyping with microcontrollers and taking DIY technology to the next level, developed a really cool device that's  a sling shot that can be actually used to play angry bird on a computer.

The idea for the project started off to show how easy it is to build USB devices using the new mbed NXP LPC11U24, specially designed to built USB devices.