As you may know, crafting a katana is a delicate process that involves carefully constructing a razor-sharp high-carbon edge around a soft shock-absorbent core. One day though, smiths and forging fires could be replaced by electrode-wielding mad-scientists, with the technology to selectively harden and soften metal at will. At least that's what we envisioned when we read about Jörg Weißmüller's breakthrough research in the field of nanomaterials. The German scientist discovered that by placing precious metals in acid he could create tiny ducts through corrosion. Once those channels are flooded with a conductive liquid, electrical currents can be used to harden the material and, if you change your mind about the brittle results, the effect can easily be reversed to make it soft again. The tech could eventually lead to self-healing vehicle armor or scratch-resistant cellphones -- but, really, we just want to zap our way to a high-quality samurai sword. Physorg
We'd pretty much given up waiting for broadcast 1080p, since other than some video on-demand services you'll generally need to stick to Blu-ray to tick that box, but around the end of March BBC HD changed all that. It's taking advantage of a part of the Freeview HD spec that allows the broadcaster to dynamically select between 1080p / 25fps and 1080i / 25fps transmission and the boxes are mandated to be able to output 1080p / 50fps. The reasoning for the decision is to provide better picture quality on material that was shot that way, unfortunately it's coming to light now because some HDTVs are having trouble handling the switch and causing an audio dropout when the format shifts, as mentioned by UK buyers guide What Hi-Fi. As if Sony didn't have enough to deal with, the overwhelming majority of complaints appear to center around its TVs and the company has promised more information in the next 7 - 10 days about a fix that will take care of the problem.
Comments
Post a Comment