The US Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) have assessed headlights on 31 ‘mid-sized’ cars and given only one of them a ‘good’ rating – a Toyota Prius with LED headlights. 82 cars were tested over all as some were tried with more than one headlight option. The rest were: ‘good’ (1 car) acceptable (11), …

LED headlights score top, and bottom, in US tests

Scientists at the University of Glasgow have created a very low cost gravity meter which could be used to monitor volcanic activity using commercial MEMS device technology found as accelerometers in smartphones. The result they says is a sensitive detector capable of measuring minute changes in gravity, and at significantly lower cost than a traditional …

Glasgow researchers build “smartphone” gravity meter to measure volcanos

Head over to Andy Workshop for a wealth of Gadget Master material, including how he built his own frequency counter (originally looking for a simple tool for another project, he was side-tracked into building one himself). Thus began the “Nanocounter” (see right). “I somehow managed to persuade myself that it’d be a fun and educational project …

Measure the accuracy of Andy’s Android-friendly frequency counter

In the coming decades the improvement and choice of land vehicle powertrain will mainly be dictated by emissions conformance which will mean a cost/performance compromise. This will result in popularity moving from conventional to pure electric as laws tighten and technology improves, writes Dr Peter Harrop, chairman, IDTechEx Pure electric is already the norm for …

Electric vehicle cost penalty may be decisive

IDT has added to its power management products with the introduction of a dual-phase digital power controller that can help customers optimize, monitor and control high-power supply systems. The second-generation ZSPM1363 digital PWM controller delivers high performance and excellent transient response, making it ideal for addressing the growing demands in the telecommunications, server, storage, FPGA …

IDT adds to power management portfolio

There was once an entrepreneur who named his company after a famous explorer. The explorer, said the entrepreneur, had thrown light on the Dark Continent and the entrepreneur’s business was involved in making lights for automobiles so he was throwing light on dark highways. After four years researching LEDs the company had a great success …

Fable: The Entrepreneur Who Saw The Light

Solar cells made from lead-halide perovskite cells could be improved following the discovery that photons are recycled within them. Perovskites photo-voltaics are new and fast-improving which, according to Imperial College last year, rose in efficiency from less than four per cent in 2009 to over 20 per cent, on par with traditional solar cells. Now a …

Perovskite solar cells reveal another advantage

A team of German thermal clothing designers have developed a way of controlling your body temperature using a smartphone app. Called Vulpés, the are offering the first thermo-regulating beanies and heated insoles on Kickstarter. Based in Lubeck, they have developed a mobile application to connect the Vulpés apparel to a smartphone which can be used …

Smart clothing heats head and feet with a smartphone

I’ve never been quite sure what a ‘platform’ is. The word gets used a lot – in fact it’s in nearly every press release I see – but I’ve always thought it a bit like ‘ecosystem’ – vague, woolly and bolloxy. However now there’s a book out which explains the platform concept rather well. Called …

Platforms

AWS CloudFormation has updated support for three services. You can now provision the following features using CloudFormation:

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) updated support

• Specify one or more transition rules for S3 buckets with versioning enabled. These define how S3 manages objects during their lifetime, such as automated transition of less-frequently accessed objects to low-cost storage alternatives and scheduled deletions.

AWS Lambda updated support

• Enable Lambda functions to access resources in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
• Publish a version of a Lambda function. Versioning allows you to better manage your in-production Lambda function code by enabling you to publish one or more versions of your Lambda function.
• Create an alias that points to a Lambda function version that you specify. An alias is a pointer to a specific Lambda function version.

Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) updated support

• Define the properties of Amazon Elastic Block Store storage volumes attached to your Amazon EMR instances, such as their configuration or whether they are I/O optimized.