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New Kinect ready 250GB Xbox 360 Comes to India [Rs. 21,990]

If you have been waiting to buy the Microsoft gaming console Xbox 360 now is the right time as Microsoft has launched their new Xbox 360 with 250GB of hard disk space in India. This new console is slimmer than it’s original counterpart and sports black glossy finish.

The best thing about this new Xbox 360 is that it is compatible with Kinect, which is set to release at the end of 2010. Wi-Fi, 5 USB ports, touch sensitive button, and Kinect port, ensures that you get the most connectivity options, and the best interactive experience. Also thanks to its carefully crafted design this new Xbox 360 runs quieter and cooler than the previous version.

 

250GB Xbox 360 is expected to hit shelves with a price tag of around Rs 21,990.

hacking PlayStation 3: Jailbreak PS3 Using Android Mobiles

New method of jailbreaking/hacking PlayStation 3 has been surfaced through which you can use your Android Mobiles like HTC Desire, Nexus One with root access to jailbreak your PS3. Using this you will also be able to backup your precious Blu-ray games on PS3 (requires download manager patch).

 

How to Jailbreak PS3 Using Android Mobiles (HTC Desire, Nexus One)

• Download PSFreedom and extract the file
• Now place file named N1-CM6-PSFreedom.tar.gz to the phone’s memory card
• Download this flashable boot.img
• Enter Recovery mode and flash the file named PS3-signed.zip
• Reboot the device
• Now Using the Terminal Emulator type this

#cd sdcard
#su
#insmod psfreedom.ko

• Now Turn off your PS3 Slim by killing power at the power socket and connect your Android mobile via USB.
• Turn on PS3 by pressing power and eject button respectively in quick succession.
• Now you should be able see “Install Package files” in the PS3 XMB menu
• Congrats your PS3 has now been jailbreaked.

How to get the phone back to previous state.

Download this file named PS3-no-more-signed.zip and flash into this file by going to recovery mode.

PSFreedom ports for Samsung Galaxy S and PSP are also under development and would be available soon.

HTC Desire HD and Desire Z Unveiled

credit: HTC

HTC has finally revealed the next generation of Android Smartphones, named as HTC Desire HD and HTC Desire Z, both of them will be featuring Android 2.2 OS with HTC Sense UI running on top of it. HTC Desire HD is basically the HTC EVO 4G minus front facing camera and 4G, it has got the same 4.3 inch capacitive touchscreen, 1 GHz Snapdragon processor, 8 megapixel camera, dual-flash and sports impressive unibody design.


HTC Desire Z on the other hand features 3.7 inch capacitive touchscreen, 800MHz processor and 5 megapixel camera, it also has a slide out QWERTY keypad for easier typing.

Both of the HTC Android Smartphones support 720p video recording and playback capability along with HTC Fast Boot that reduces the time needed to make a call or for checking email.

 

 HTC Desire HD and Desire Z Release Date

October 2010, exact date to be announced later.

HTC Desire HD and Desire Z Price

To be announced later.

Tesla to supply batteries for Daimler E-Cell EV

Boosting its activity in electric vehicles, Daimler plans to start producing an all-electric sedan for Europe this fall that uses batteries from Tesla Motors.

Daimler is expected to launch an electric version of its entry-level line called the A-Class E-Cell at the Paris Auto Show next month, according to reports.

Daimler will start manufacturing 500 units of the A-Class E-Cell this fall in Germany for the European market, according to a company representative. The company has not yet decided whether it will be offered in the U.S., she said.

Daimler's planned EV line-up includes the Smart ForTwo Electric Drive, A-Class E-Cell, and the F-Cell fuel cell vehicle.

(Credit: Daimler AG)

The car will have a range of over 124 miles. Tesla will supply the lithium-ion battery and charger for the car, according to Daimler.

Tesla engineers purchased an A-Class in Europe and built an electric-version prototype, which helped speed up introduction of the E-Class, Tesla told The New York Times last month. Daimler invested in Tesla in 2009 and is a corporate partner.

Tesla's batteries will also appear in an electric version of the RAV-4 which Toyota plans to debut at the 2010 Los Angeles Auto Show, Toyota said on Monday. It plans to have an electric vehicle for the U.S. market in 2012.

Daimler's push into electric vehicles is being accelerated by European targets to reduce CO2 emissions from vehicles. "We won't be able to meet the target of 95 grams CO2 in 2020 without electric vehicles with batteries and fuel cells," Daimler head of research Thomas Weber told Reuters.

In the U.S., Daimler plans to offer an electric version of its mini car, the ForTwo Electric Drive, for lease starting next month. Like other automakers, Daimler is primarily targeting its electric vehicles at fleet buyers because of the higher upfront cost.

Turning everyday garbage into gasoline

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Among a hotel ballroom full of enterprise, cloud, and mobile apps, one product stood out at Demo Fall 2010: The gas pump at the E-Fuel stand.

An upgrade from the EFuel100 Microfueler we covered in 2008, which converted sugars and discarded alcohols into ethanol fuel, the new MicroFusion Reactor can process nearly any "cellulosic waste" into ethanol. Said waste is pretty much anything that'd otherwise go into a compost bin.

CEO Thomas Quinn explained the fuel pump part of the Reactor in the video in this post, as well as a companion product, an electricity generator that harvests the heat from the chemical process.

Quinn says Reactor-produced ethanol is less than a dollar a gallon if you provide your own waste to process, or you can pay an E-Fuel service company to deliver you ready-to-react waste to make fuel from--still saving money compared to buying ethanol the usual way.

Quinn sees businesses ("like this hotel," he says) using E-Fuel systems to turn their garbage into fuel. He even sees the products in homes. The ethanol pump system, which requires the installation of a waste storage tank as well as the pump/reactor itself, is $10,000. The generator is $6,000. Quinn says there are government subsidy and incentive programs available that lower the cost to consumers and businesses.

Nokia vows to take on iOS, Android

Niklas Savender, Nokia's executive vice president in charge of sales

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

LONDON--It is hard to ignore the paradox at Nokia's global partner and developer conference: the company sells more smartphones than anyone else in the industry but is fighting for its life.

Nokia executives speaking here Tuesday at Nokia World 2010 didn't try to dismiss the years of trouble that culminated last week in the hiring of Microsoft's Stephen Elop as its new chief executive. Nokia's management is facing Apple's and Google's economic might, brand power, and sudden relevance in the mobile phone market that Nokia once dominated.

With words that were at times defiant, defensive, and strident, though, three Nokia leaders tried to show a new assertiveness to the programmers and mobile phone service providers that the company needs as allies.

"We haven't been as competitive as we want to be in smartphones. That's about to change," said Niklas Savender, Nokia's executive vice president of sales. "Today, we shift into high gear in Nokia's fight back in smartphone leadership."

It's a time of turmoil for Nokia. Chairman Jorma Ollila plans to leave in 2012, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. That's on top of last week's announcement of Elop replacing CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo and Monday's announcement that mobile solutions chief Anssi Vanjoki is stepping down.

To recover its position, Nokia is trying to capitalize on the large number of Nokia phones in circulation today--not just smartphones but the more modest and widespread "feature phones," which fit midway between smartphones and basic cell phones. The company is pitching its wares to ordinary people, the folks far from Silicon Valley's technophilic bubble.

Nokia not only wants to sell its phones to this vast yet growing market, but also to turn those people into customers for software sold through Nokia's Ovi store.

Nokia has its work cut out for it, though: Apple's iPhone is spreading well beyond the upper crust, and developers writing software for it can extend to millions of iPod Touch and iPad devices as well. Google's Android OS is a newer arrival, but new Android phones from several top-tier phone makers arrive almost weekly, and its applications market is maturing.

Nokia has a lot of clout yet, though. Gartner predicts Symbian and Android will roughly tie for smartphone operating system market share in 2014--30.2 percent for Symbian and 29.6 percent for Android. The analyst firm also predicts Research In Motion's BlackBerry OS will slip to 11.7 percent that year, and Apple's iOS to 14.9 percent.

Naturally, Vodafone, one of the world's largest carriers, is a willing partner in Nokia's efforts to upsell the world's masses to new phones with new network abilities, not just cater to higher-end customers.

"Everybody--north to south, rich to poor--must be thought of as a data customer," Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao said.

New smartphones
Both hardware and software figure in Nokia's attempt to rally against the polished user interfaces, advanced Internet connectivity, and thriving developer communities of Android and iOS.

To that end, Nokia has introduced three new-generation smartphones joining its current flagship N8 smartphone in using the Symbian operating system: the smaller C6, the thinner and more expensive C7, and the big and business-oriented E7.

The C6 is the smallest of the bunch and comes with the new ClearBlack Display, which provides deeper black colors, Vanjoki said.

Nokia's new Symbian lineup has three new phones. From left to right are the new C6, the new C7, the previously announced flagship N8, and the new E7.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Next up the line is the C7, which features a larger screen and a thinner body. "The C7 is the sleekest, smoothest device in the world. No doubt about that," Vanjoki said.

Last is the E7, the successor to the Nokia 9000 Communicator throne for devices that offer more features without worrying overmuch about a svelte design.

"It's big," Vanjoki said. "For those of us in business and on the move, nothing beats a real keyboard...It's really an office on the go."

Software push
Phones are nice, but one of the chief disruptions from iOS and Android is in extra software--the huge range of games and productivity tools that let a person easily customize a phone. Nokia's phone dominance dates from an era where phone apps came with the phone for the most part, but it's trying to get with the times.

There are 175 million Symbian phones in customers' hands today, with 260,000 being sold each day, so that could be a powerful draw for programmers trying to find a market. Nokia is trying to woo them with better developer tools, lower development costs, and improvements to its Ovi store, said Purnima Kochikar, Nokia's vice president of Forum Nokia and developer community.

On the software side, the company announced changes for developers geared to make it easier to write software for a variety of Nokia phones, including the lower-end Series 40 and Series 60 models.

Purnima Kochikar, vice president of Forum Nokia and developer community

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Specifically, Nokia touted its Qt Software Development Kit (SDK), whose use lets developers more easily write software not just for Nokia's prevailing phone operating systems today but also the Linux-based MeeGo operating system that it's developing with Intel and using on its next-generation N9 flagship phone.

And Nokia also announced the ability for developers to build in-app purchasing into their programs, meaning that people who download free versions of programs can upgrade to premium ones without leaving the application.

It also means that Rovio Mobile, developer of the popular Angry Birds game for mobile devices, can enable a new feature announced Tuesday: the new Mighty Eagle character that can bulldoze opponents--once the player purchases the right to use it in the game.

"In-app [purchasing] capabilities provide a remarkable opportunity to provide extraordinary content to our most engaged customers," said Rovio CEO Mikael Hed.

Nokia also hopes to spur more purchases with lower-end devices; Nokia sold 364 million Series 40 devices last year, all potential new customers. One mechanism Nokia is pushing is operator-driven purchases, in which customers buy applications or content through their mobile phone service provider rather than with a credit card.

And to improve lower-end phone use, Nokia's SDK now supports touch screens on such phones. Kochikar also touted a new WebKit-based browser.

Silicon Valley remains the epicenter of application development, but it's spreading, Kochikar said. On a recent tour she took, developer events were packed, she said.

"Nokia is much loved in most parts of our planet. So I felt like a rock star in a lot of the places I visited. Then when I get back to Silicon Valley--well, not so much," she said. "The good news is we have made a lot of progress this year toward creating a Nokia ecosystem that developers everywhere will love and embrace."

Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao speaking at Nokia's conference.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

IPv6 reality starts dawning on ISPs

The transition to IPv6 hasn't been easy, mostly because of a compatibility barrier that has pushed back the change until absolutely necessary. Those with an IPv4 connection to the Internet can't see IPv6 Web sites and vice versa, unless some gateway device is specifically set up to handle the chore.
For companies with Web sites or other Internet services, they must obtain new IPv6-based addresses for their servers and network connections to the outside world so they can handle IPv6 traffic. "If you've got a Web site, you should be looking at how to get it on IPv6 now," Curran said.




Some big companies have begun the transition; Google, a particularly fervent IPv6 advocate, has made YouTube and other services available on IPv6. Facebook also began its IPv6 transition, as has Comcast.
For ordinary consumers, they'll eventually have to upgrade DSL and cable modems, though because the IPv4 network will still work, they'll only miss out on Internet services available only over IPv6.



IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) catalogs Internet servers with 32-bit numbers, offering of 4.3 billion numeric addresses. That may sound like a lot until you realize only 6 percent are left unused today.
By comparison, IPv6's 128-bit address space offers a gargantuan number: 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 if you're keeping track.



That's enough to render unnecessary today's IPv4 stopgap measures, including network address translation (NAT) to let multiple devices share one IP address in something like the same way that an apartment building with one street address might have many subunits. IPv6's capacity also is vast enough to assign IP addresses to countless devices that don't merit them today--mobile phones, printers, cars, and the growing variety of other new devices in an increasingly network-aware world.



The EC-funded survey polled 1,500 companies, 58 percent of them ISPs, in 140 countries. The study also found that awareness of IPv6-related issues is strong, with 84 percent already possessing IPv6 addresses of their own or planning to request them.


The five regional Internet registries charge a fixed fee for allocating IP addresses, but that doesn't necessarily stay the same at Web hosting companies, ISPs, and others that sell the addresses to the actual customers.
"The demand curve goes from very low to very high one week after we run out of IPv4 addresses," Curran said.

The difficulties of adopting the next-generation Internet standard so far have outweighed its advantages, but one key part of the computing industry is showing signs of beginning the IPv6 transition in earnest: Internet service providers.

 

A total of 32 percent of ISPs offer IPv6 services to business customers today, according to a new European Commission-funded survey, said John Curran, chief executive of American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), one of the world's five nonprofit Internet registry organizations that collectively hand out Internet addresses and keep track of which numeric addresses are connected to which servers on the Internet.
That percentage, though, is increasing.
"Sixty percent intend to have services within a year. That's a huge step up," Curran said. "Within two years, it is 80 percent."

e's baffled what the remaining 20 percent of ISPs will do, given that the Internet is expected to run out of the current limited stock of IPv4 addresses in about that same time frame, making ISPs left behind the virtual equivalent of a home-building contractor with no empty lots left on the street. According to Internet service company Hurricane Electric, which monitors the IPv6 transition, there are about 203 million IPv4 addresses left, enough to last less than nine months.

Hurricane Electric's estimate is reasonable, Curran said, though it's hard to predict exactly given the inconstant decline. The five Internet registry organizations pull unused IP addresses out of the pool as needed in so-called "/8" blocks of 16.7 million addresses at a time, then it takes some time for them to allocate them to ISPs and others. Fourteen of the original 256 /8 blocks are unused.

Even after the registry organizations have handed out their last IPv4 addresses, it'll probably be another six months before the ISPs exhaust their supply, Curran said.

Stephen Shankland

Live Matrix aims to schedule the Web

A new service called Live Matrix, which comes out of private beta Monday morning, is attempting to solve the very large problem of organizing live events from all around the Web into one place.
These are not just Web events though--things like Apple event live blogs, online sales, or streamed concerts--but TV programs, auctions, and sporting events too.
In the same way TV listings work, users can cycle through upcoming events by "channel." These are broken down by genres like sports, entertainment, news, and shopping. Users are also able to create their own channels by "following" particular programming items.

The mechanism for finding new events is displaying how many users have saved any particular one; each event gets a little counter that looks similar to Digg's voting box, and some of the most popular events--both live and upcoming--get some limelight on the site's front page. Once you've found an event you like, you can then save it to your listings, schedule a reminder, or share to a social network:

To actually view content, the service jumps you off-site, which in my testing worked well for some things and not so well with others. For scheduled Web shows like CNET's live podcasts, it takes you straight to the program page, but other things like sports games did not always go to the right event. I also ran into problems with sites that required registration or a pay wall to view content, something that would have been nice to get the heads-up on, or filter out of the listings.

Fans of Clicker will no doubt be drawn to the site for some of its scheduling similarities, though Live Matrix has much broader ambitions at bringing together video content along with just about anything that's got a time and URL. While I think video is what most people are going to be angling for, the site has some serious potential for organizing just about everything else.

  

Josh Lowensohn

Demo's shifting focus: Businesses or consumers?

Instead of building fast with lots of servers, lots of customers, and hopes of revenue, many new start-ups--mindful of the recovering economy--are taking a downright old-fashioned approach: make money first, grow later.

Whether that will play out at the Demo conference, which begins in earnest Tuesday in Santa Clara, Calif., is debatable. But in recent months, the buzz-worthy start-ups have had a decidedly more traditional view than Web 2.0 heavyweights like Facebook and Twitter, founded just a few years ago with the principle that you build your audience, then you make your money.

There is, in fact, a shift every few years as start-ups change direction from the fast and loose (though potentially immense) consumer market, to that of businesses large and small. Whichever one is in vogue depends largely on who's doling out the money--be it investors or the end users. For a while, neither of these groups were willing to open up their wallets, forcing many start-ups to go back to the drawing board with their ideas.

Not too much needs to be said here about the merits of a good business-centric Web service; the Web offers the same kind of breakthroughs for a quick start, or cheaper overhead than traditional, in-house solutions. That's obviously an attractive angle for any Web start-up, especially with big contracts that bring the promise of long-term revenue or an exit to a bigger company.

On the flip side are the consumer services--the YouTubes, Facebooks, and the Twitters of the Web world. We know these names because they've reached the very top. Though just like in world of pro sports, there are an endless number of competitors ready to usurp, and that continue to do well, albeit on a slightly lower tier of popularity.

So which side of the fence does a company start out on? And can you change your mind once things get up and running?

In just the last couple of years there have been a number of companies that started out one way and eventually went another. Some might just call this survival, and in that way it's indicative of the environment they must survive in. One good example of that is storage service Box.net, which came onto the scene with a very flashy widget users could place on blogs or Web sites to share files with one another. This was back when companies would send you a press release about such things (note: some still do). Over the years the tool became more focused on its business users to the point where the newest product features almost always begin at the top before eventually trickling down down--its desktop file sync tool being one of the best examples of that.

It's the same story for Ning, which got its start around the same time as Box, though offered up a free DIY social network instead. The service was aimed mostly at users who wanted to create their own social networks with more control both over the look and feel and the feature set than could be found on larger social sites. Additional feature modules could be paid for, which brought extra features. The company went on like this for five years before killing off the free account levels, and requiring that users shell out for a paid plan by default.

GAMMA RAY 'RACE' PROVES EINSTEIN RIGHT AGAIN !!!

Timing is everything, especially to physicists seeking to unite the mechanics of gravity with the quantum world of particles.

So when the opportunity came to measure if gamma rays of different energies traveled at the same speed, a team of physicists stepped up to the challenge.

At stake was nothing less than a foundation of modern physics -- Einstein's theory of relativity, which posits that all electromagnetic radiation travels at the same speed, whether low-energy radio waves, high-energy X-rays or gamma rays, or any wavelength in between.

A violent explosion 7.8 billion light-years away gave scientists the unique opportunity to punch a hole in Einstein's theory. NASA's Fermi Gamma Ray Telescope detected many gamma ray photons from the 2.1-second long burst, including one that was a million times more energetic than another.

Scientists wondered if the higher-energy photon might have arrived in the telescope's detector slightly later than its partner due to quantum-level entanglements in space that a less energetic photon wouldn't even notice.

"Some quantum gravity theories predict that the higher energy photons are more affected by the quantum nature of space-time and will travel more slowly than lower energy photons," said Stanford University's Peter Michelson, the lead scientist on the Fermi Large Area Telescope.

Michelson says it's kind of like the difference between a car and an ant traveling down a dirt road: The car isn't impacted by the pebbles and the rocks, whereas an ant has to go around every obstacle in its path.

After a journey of more than 7 billion light-years, however, the gamma ray photons arrived nine-tenths of a second apart on May 9, 2009 -- not enough of a lag to account for the theorized quantum effects.

"Einstein, at this point, wins again," Michelson said.

That's not to say that a theory of quantum gravity doesn't exist.

"It's a theory that would unify all the forces of nature," said Mario Livio, an astrophysicist with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md.

"What Fermi has done here is push us to our limit," he added. "This only tells us where are the dead ends. It doesn't necessarily tell us where the correct way is."

The research was presented during a three-day symposium in Washington D.C. to highlight results of the telescope's first year of operations.(credit: discovery channel)

Want to print in 3 dimensions?

• The process is similar to an inkjet printer, however, the "ink" is powder and a bonding agent.

 

•  Printing in layers, the machine builds up the object in three dimensions.

 Some of the gadgets engineers come up with are just cool. We’re going to check out one of them. Printing in three-dimensions. Today, on Engineering Works!

 
Most of us have home computers these days, and they’re all connected to desktop printers. Hit the print key and out comes that report you needed for work or a barbecue sauce recipe from the web. Easy.

 
That was then. "Now, a new kind of printer is taking printing into three-dimensions, not just flat on a piece of paper. These printers print out solid objects, usually in plastic. There aren’t many of the printers around yet. Technology geeks and hobbyists own most of them. They use them to make stuff like jewelry, toys, tools or kitchen appliances."

Tonight Show host and classic car collector Jay Leno even has one. His mechanics use it to print out car parts that they can’t buy any longer. They send the plastic models to machine shops to get real metal parts made, cheaper and faster than custom-designed parts.

 
The 3-D printers are starting to catch on. You can buy them in some electronics stores or directly from the manufacturers. Prices run from $750 for a desktop kit model to $27,000 for Leno’s refrigerator-sized unit. So far, it’s definitely a niche device, but enthusiasts are sure that someday we’ll be printing out things we need, not just fun stuff.

 
We can’t print out a ride home, but we’re still done. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu    

"SOUND BULLETS" COULD BLAST SUBS, CANCER

• An ordinary office toy has inspired a whole new acoustic weapon: "sound bullets."
• Sound bullets could destroy submarines and annihilate tumors.
• The damage such concentrated waves of pressure could create would be devastating.

An old toy has inspired a powerful new weapon that could destroy submarines or annihilate tumors.

Using a modified version of Newton's cradle, a series of stainless steel balls suspended by fishing wire, scientists from the California Institute of Technology have created a powerful weapon for soldiers and doctors known as a "sound bullet."

 

 

"The beauty of this system is that it's just a bunch of ball bearings that we control with weights," said Chiara Daraio, a professor at Cal Tech and co-author of a new Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesarticle. Yet by varying the pressure on the ball bearings, the scientists can dramatically amplify and focus sound waves to make them "extremely destructive," according to Daraio.

 

Newton's cradle is an old toy, but the Cal Tech scientists, including Alessandro Spadonia, have adapted it for a hot new field of science known as metamaterials, which includes the Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak. Metamaterials are usually difficult and time-consuming to create.

For their study, the researchers lined up 21 rows of stainless steel ball bearings in an area the size and shape of a laptop computer, with weights attached at the ends to vary the pressure on each row. Then the scientists dropped a small ball about eight inches onto the ball bearings. Using a high-speed camera and a pressure sensitive material, the scientists watched the pressure waves focus on a single spot several inches away from the metamaterial.

The simple set up belies the power of the new metamaterial. Not only did the scientists focus all of the sound waves onto one specific area; they also amplified those waves more than 100 times than what any other metamaterial had previously produced. Those numbers could easily go higher, said Daraio.

The sound waves Daraio and Spadonia manipulated were too high pitched for human ears to detect. Properly adapted to audible sound, the new metamaterial could turn a normal sentence into a split second ear drum rupturing explosion.

If these sound bullets were actual bullets, the metamaterial would be like transforming hot lead projectiles into rocket propelled grenades, all converging on one place at one time. The damage such concentrated waves of pressure could create would be devastating.
 

"Like normal bullets, sound bullets can travel through air. Unlike normal bullets, sound bullets can also easily travel through liquids and solids. Sound bullets could be used by the military to create submarine melting waves of pressure or shock waves powerful enough to destroy caves otherwise untouchable by conventional weapons."

Sound bullets won't just destroy large objects. Daraio says that powerful, focused sound waves could obliterate hard kidney stones or destroy cancerous tumors without any damage to surrounding tissue.

Other, less destructive applications are also possible, said Daraio. Focused sound waves could let engineers see weak bridge supports or future potholes in roads.

Military or medical use of the new metamaterial is still years away, said Daraio. Yet the simplicity and effectiveness of the sound bullet makes it a "significant development," according to L.B. Freund, a professor at Brown University who was not involved in the research.

"People have focused sound waves for a long time," said Freund. "But if you want to do anything with a sound wave, what you can do is determined by the intensity of the sound wave."

Now that Daraio and Spadonia have found a new way to create these powerful sound waves, the potential range of applications for sound bullets is huge.

"The research has opened a new way to developed applied devices, and was done by young researchers in a very creative way," said Freund.