MOVE OVER HYDROGEN, MAKE WAY FOR MAGNESIUM POWER

Magnesium burns as a white hot flame in fireworks.

•      Magnesium could work better than hydrogen in fuel cells.

•      There's enough magnesium in seawater to provide energy for 300,000 years.

 "When people talk about alternative energy, hydrogen often comes up. How about magnesium? We’ll see. Today, on Engineering Works! Listen to the podcast."

 

Magnesium is nifty stuff. Pure magnesium is a silvery metal, and you probably remember from high school chemistry that it burns with a hot white flame.

 

While a lot of research has already gone into using hydrogen to store energy, either directly as a fuel or as part of fuel cell systems, some researchers think we should be looking at magnesium as a way to store energy. Magnesium stores about 10 times as much energy as hydrogen. And there’s enough magnesium in seawater to provide energy for 300,000 years

 

Engineers at a Canadian company are working on a fuel cell that uses magnesium, air and water to produce electricity. An Israeli researcher has come up with a magnesium-based battery sort of like the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries we all know about. And a California researcher is working on a way to use magnesium to produce hydrogen for fuel.

All of this sounds good, but there’s a problem. It takes a lot of energy to purify magnesium to a form we can use. Maybe more than we’d get back. One researcher in Japan thinks he has the answer: solar energy to power a laser that would give us the almost 6,700° F. heat needed. We’ll see how that turns out.

Our magnesium power is somewhere in the future, so we’re done. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station.

 

How WiFi Works ?

If you've been in an airport, coffee shop, library or hotel recently, chances are you've been right in the middle of a wireless network. Many people also use wireless networking, also called WiFi or 802.11 networking, to connect their computers at home, and some cities are trying to use the technology to provide free or low-cost Internet access to residents. In the near future, wireless networking may become so widespread that you can access the Internet just about anywhere at any time, without using wires.

 

                               WiFi has a lot of advantages. Wireless networks are easy to set up and inexpensive. They're also unobtrusive -- unless you're on the lookout for a place to use your laptop, you may not even notice when you're in a hotspot. In this article, we'll look at the technology that allows information to travel over the air. We'll also review what it takes to create a wireless network in your home.

A wireless network uses radio waves, just like cell phones, televisions and radios do. In fact, communication across a wireless network is a lot like two-way radio communication. Here's what happens:

1. A computer's wireless adapter translates data into a radio signal and transmits it using an antenna.
2. A wireless router receives the signal and decodes it. The router sends the information to the Internet using a physical, wired Ethernetconnection.

The process also works in reverse, with the router receiving information from the Internet, translating it into a radio signal and sending it to the computer's wireless adapter.

The radios used for WiFi communication are very similar to the radios used for walkie-talkies, cell phones and other devices. They can transmit and receive radio waves, and they can convert 1s and 0s into radio waves and convert the radio waves back into 1s and 0s. But WiFi radios have a few notable differences from other radios:

• They transmit at frequencies of 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz. This frequency is considerably higher than the frequencies used for cell phones, walkie-talkies and televisions. The higher frequency allows the signal to carry more data.
• They use 802.11 networking standards, which come in several flavors:
  
  
  • 802.11a transmits at 5 GHz and can move up to 54 megabits of data per second. It also uses orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing(OFDM), a more efficient coding technique that splits that radio signal into several sub-signals before they reach a receiver. This greatly reduces interference.
  • 802.11b is the slowest and least expensive standard. For a while, its cost made it popular, but now it's becoming less common as faster standards become less expensive. 802.11b transmits in the 2.4 GHz frequency band of the radio spectrum. It can handle up to 11 megabits of data per second, and it uses complementary code keying (CCK) modulation to improve speeds.
  • 802.11g transmits at 2.4 GHz like 802.11b, but it's a lot faster -- it can handle up to 54 megabits of data per second. 802.11g is faster because it uses the same OFDM coding as 802.11a.
  • 802.11n is the newest standard that is widely available. This standard significantly improves speed and range. For instance, although 802.11g theoretically moves 54 megabits of data per second, it only achieves real-world speeds of about 24 megabits of data per second because of network congestion. 802.11n, however, reportedly can achieve speeds as high as 140 megabits per second. The standard is currently in draft form -- the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) plans to formally ratify 802.11n by the end of 2009.(by howstuffworks)

Sony 3D Camera

3d camera by sony

The Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-TX9 and DSC-WX5 are touted as the smallest 3D cameras in the world (and they are also affordable). In the past, 3D cameras were only affordable by those in the film industry or contractors who have money to burn. This is now no longer the case. Although these cameras do not support video, they are an amazing advancement of the whole 3D technology industry. They are putting 3D in the hands of consumers. Although getting that perfect 3D shot is not promised as an easy task with these cameras; the ability to do so with an ordinary digital camera device is something that should not be scoffed at.

Of course to take advantage of the 3D imagery that is shot via these cameras will require a 3D television. You also have the option of just shooting your shots with a 2D lens. The cameras have support for the various SD cards available on the market so storage will never be an issue. However, the real selling point for this camera is its capacity to shoot photos in 3D. Now you not only be able to support your memories with photos, but actually get close enough to full immersion in them to almost relive the moments!

layout of camera

Although 3D televisions are expensive, the technology to really utilize them is starting to catch up. It seems like 3D has made a massive jump from expensive fantasy into consumer reality overnight. The technology might have some kinks, but it is to be expected when anything new starts to take hold on the consumer market. I would be surprised if we don’t have affordable 3D video cameras available for consumer use in the next five years at the speed the industry is growing. However, having an affordable camera that takes 3D stills is something I never expected to see so suddenly.(by ram)

The Future of Wireless Handsets! (personally for Computer students).

As personal wireless connectivity is becoming more widespread and more complex, the ability to provide service on the many levels available to wireless users using a variety of devices is also rapidly becoming much more complex. To accommodate these challenges and to face a future where there are no barriers to access using a handheld device, engineers are investigating what measures are needed to create a "universal communicator," a device that is capable of communicating regardless of the connection options available to the user.

There are several options for personal wireless communication currently available through service providers. The majority of users connect via cellular connections: either using the GSM family of networks (GSM, GPRS, EDGE, UMTS), or the CDMA family of cellular networks (CDMA, CDMA 2000, 1xRTT, EV-DO, EV-DV). However, with the advent of wireless standards for WLAN and WMAN, deployment of these networks is steadily increasing in enterprises, public "hotspots" and even within homes. Although widespread deployment is still a few years away, these networking options are open to users now.

Additionally, various Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) technologies are emerging as well. Bluetooth is well on its way to becoming the most widely deployed WPAN technology in handsets and other devices -- with projections of nearly 300 million Bluetooth-enabled devices in the marketplace in 2007 ( WLAN and Bluetooth Update: Beyond the Hype, Forrester Research, June 16, 2003). Looking a few years down the road, Ultra Wideband (UWB) holds great promise as the next major technology for high-bandwidth wireless personal area connectivity.

Finally, a number of other wireless technologies are in the midst of being tested and/or deployed. For example, GPS is slated to ship in over 10 million phones this year, and several major device manufacturers are already shipping products with TV and/or radio receivers. Several operators and OEMs are also experimenting with including digital video broadcast (DVB) receivers in handsets, in some cases with GPRS used as a back channel to enable interactive data delivery (otherwise known as "datacasting").

Technology Challenges

Enabling such ubiquitously-connected devices poses numerous difficult technology challenges. These include:

• Multiple Radio Integration and Coordination: Building the handset (or other device) begins with the challenge of integrating multiple radios.
• Intelligent Networking -- Seamless Roaming and Handoff: Users will expect to roam within and between networks like they do with their cell phone.
• Power Management: As handsets and other devices evolve to run more rich applications, power management will become an even greater challenge.
• Support for Cross Network Identity and Authentication: Providing a trusted, efficient and usage-model appropriate means of establishing identity is one of the key issues in cross-network connectivity.
• Support for Rich Media Types: The addition of a high-bandwidth broadband wireless connection, such as a WLAN or some of the forthcoming UMTS or EVDV/O cellular networks, will open up new opportunities for the delivery of rich media to handheld devices.
• Flexible, Powerful Computing Platform: The foundation of a universal communicator-class device must be a flexible, powerful, general-purpose processing platform.
• Overall Device Usability: The final challenge inherent in building a mixed-network device is usability.

To address these challenges, Intel engineers are developing a suite of key client technologies that can enable transparent, ubiquitous connectivity, as well as an architecture that pulls that set of technologies together into a coherent whole. Intel has dubbed that suite of technologies and the associated architectural framework, Adaptive Communication Technologies (ACT). As Intel develops these building blocks, Intel will diffuse this technology either via Intel silicon and platforms, or through cooperative efforts with other industry leaders and/or application developers. 

The Prototype Concept

As a starting point for ACT development efforts, Intel has developed a first-generation universal communicator handset prototype. This prototype not only demonstrates the ability to successfully integrate multiple network access capabilities (in this case WWAN+WLAN) in a handset, but also demonstrates several key technologies and design principles that Intel believes are applicable to a larger class of universal communicator-class devices.

The universal communicator prototype demonstrates key usage models for mixed-network handheld clients, including:

• Simultaneous data and voice sessions
• Infofueling -- smart data transfers using best available network
• Rich media that scales across network connections
• 
  
  

  Voice (cellular and VOIP) across multiple networks

(posted by Roger Hurwitz and  Bryan Peebler. his article was originally published in Intel's Technology@Intel Magazine.)