Honda & Top Gear UK Build Lawnmower With 130 mph Top Speed

Top Gear UK is well known for its ludicrous activities, whether it’s their plan of building a food blender with a V8 engine or sending a Reliant Robin as a space shuttle Top Gear have always lived up to their “ambitious but rubbish” tagline. Recently they came up with an idea to spice up the humble lawnmower that would break speed records while managing to clean up grass, so instead of fooling about they decided to call in some expert assistance. Soon Honda answered their call and sent in their Team Dynamics to get cracking. The team started with a Honda HF2620 mower fitted it with a VTR 1000cc engine and steering rack from a Morris Minor....

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Amazon India Launched - Should Flipkart And Other E-commerce Sites Worry?

While regular browsing and surfing on the internet, I came upon something fascinating. With an interest in window shopping and preparing a wish list for things I would like to buy later, I linger around online shopping portals frequently. The best part of online shopping portals is that you could right away compare the prices of a single product in various other portals and buy it from the one that offers you the cheapest price. I generally order things from Flipkart and books from Infibeam. I never trusted ebay, in reaction to all the terrible experiences people have had. And sometimes the biggest among these players, Amazon. This online...

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Printed Electronics Made 10x Efficient With New Process

Researchers at Stanford University have developed a better way to control the flow of ink during the electronics printing process. The new method allows fewer defects in the end-product and also improves its overall electrical efficiency. Printed electronics is used to create lightweight & low-cost solar cells and also in manufacturing flexible electronics screens. However, the big problem with current methods is that the efficiency of these products is far lesser than than traditional electronics products. New process developed at Stanford is called FLUENCE aka fluid-enhanced crystal engineering. The research team expects that this new...

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High Frequency Sound On Plant Matter To Create Biofuels - Iowa State University

Iowa State University researchers are employing high-frequency sound waves to break down plant substances for creation of bio-fuel. The research includes pretreating a wide range of feedstocks like witch grass, corn stover, and soft wood with constant ultrasound, thus enhancing the necessary chemical reactions needed to tansform the biomass into high-value biofuels and chemicals. All these findings shall be presented at the 21st International Congress on Acoustics (ICA 2013) being held from June2-7 in Montreal. The researchers discovered that they could substantially up the efficiency of removing lignin (the substance that binds cellulose...

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Mahindra Verito Vibe Launch Tomorrow. Price Expected To Be Rs. 5.30 Lakh

Indian car maker Mahindra is all set to launch the new Verito Vibe tomorrow. The price of the car is expected to be about Rs. 5.3 Lakh ex-showroom in Delhi for the base varient. Looking at the teaser, it appears that Mahindra Verito Vibe is a compact saloon. It'll be a smaller (<4m) modification of the company's flagship sedan Verito. The company is expected to enter competition with the likes of Maruti Suzuki Swift, Ford Figo, Nissan Micra and others. The car is expected to be made available with Diesel engine at the launch and no Petrol varient has been planed. We'll only have to wait for official word on this tomorrow. Because...

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MTS Duet In India For INR 4,799 - A Dual SIM Budget-Friendly Smartphone

Mobile TeleSystems or MTS, the wireless voice, broadband Internet, messaging and data services company headquartered in Delhi, India is here with a new product of its own. The MTS Duet is a Dual SIM smartphone that supports CDMA as well as GSM networks. The company says that this is its 'strategy to offer greater choice' to users. Powered by a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, the MTS Duet features a 3.5-inch (8.8cm) display with capacitive touch screen that has a HVGA resolution of 320 x 480 pixels. As you can see the price cut has lead to a this low-end feature look of this smartphone. The budget-friendly piece is running a top a Android...

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Lensless Camera Created By Bell Labs Never Goes Out Of Focus!

Image processing has undergone many innovations with time, which has always boosted up the quality. But it has always followed the same principle that it works on, that is, using a lens to create an image and a recorder to capture all the photons. Though the way these captured photons go through imaging has drastically changed with better and efficient algorithms, a new technique may bring in a revolution. The people at Bell Labs, New Jersey are calling it 'Compressive Sensing', which means that the data taken from the images are not much different from each other, but only have fractional changes in their measurements and are redundant. With...

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Saker S-1 - The Mach 0.99 Personal Jet With Operating Cost Of $2/Nautical Mile

If you are a busy businessman who doesn't want to wast time (and don't mind spending money to save time) then you might just look at the beautiful beast called Saker S-1. It's military jet inspired personal jet that aims to reach 0.99 aka almost equal to the speed of sound. The company says that it will cruise at a speed of Mach 0.95 and reach the top speed of Mach 0.99. This two seater plane will shave an hour off a 1500 nautical mile flight (approximately 2778 km) as compared to its closest competitor. The Saker S-1 is designed to take off and land on runways as short as just 1500 ft. It can climb at the rate of 14,000 ft/min and have...

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World's Thinnest 500 GB & 1 TB HDDs Launched - Seagate & Western Digital

Looks like we've a war of the hard disks. Seagate recently announced the world's thinnest 500GB HDD that is just 5mm thick. The ultra-thin HDD looks like SSD and costs just $89. In the meanwhile, Western Digital too announced a 500GB HDD with very similar specs as that of Seagate. It's likely to find place in the new machines from ASUS and Dell. What's more interesting is that Western Digital has just announced another 'world's thinnest' 1TB hard drive that is just 2 mm thicker than its younger brother, at just 7mm. The company claims that it features StableTrack which secures the motor shaft at both ends to reduce vibrations during...

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Asus Brings Intel Haswell Processors To Laptops & Desktops

Intel recently announced their 4th-Generation Core Processor codenamed Haswell and PC makers are already making news about including them in their upcoming systems. Among them Asus has announced their next desktops and all-in-ones which would be housing the Haswell chips right before Computex trade show, which is to be held at Taipei. The other companies include Cyberpower and MicroCenter. At Computex, other PC makers are expected to display their new PCs including the major manufacturers like Dell, Acer and others. The Haswell chips add about 10 to 15 percent increase in their performance compared to the previous 3rd-Generation Core Processors...

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Yahoo Chucks 'Classic Mail', New Upgrade Mandatory

From today, June 3rd, Yahoo will get rid of its "Classic" Mail once and for all. In fact, beginning this week Yahoo! Mail will no longer support older versions. It's either the new, upgraded version of Yahoo Mail or no Yahoo Mail at all. The company has sent out emails informing its users of the same and has notified them of the pending upgrade. Until now, Yahoo had allowed its users to continue using the old versions of the Mail even though the webmail interface was redesigned sometime around last year. But, it seems that this upgrade is more concerned with the refurbishing of the company's goals than the technical up-to-dateness. With the...

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Cisco Predicts Major Global Internet Traffic Surge by 2017

At its seventh annual Visual Networking Index, Cisco suggested the possibility of a drastic increase in the global internet traffic. According to the company, a growth rate of 23 percent is expected between 2012 to 2017. This dramatic burst isn't supposed to last but will be enough to aggregate to 1.4 zettabytes (ZBs) of global traffic by 2017. That amount alone is greater than the history of internet from 1984 to 2012 (1.2 ZB). Cisco predicts that by the year 2018, almost half of the world's population will be online. The surge in online activity could be attributed to more users, users connecting more devices, growing network and broadband...

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Acer Iconia W3 Tablet Launched - Tech Specs, Price & Availability Here

Just a couple of weeks back, the tech specs of Acer Iconia W3 tablet were revealed on the company’s Finnish site. And now, ahead of the Computex 2013 showcase event, Acer has launched this Windows 8 featuring 8.1-inch tablet. Acer's Iconia series has been a hit. Coming pre-installed with Microsoft Office Home & Student 2013 (that includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote), the Iconia W3 belongs the price tag of €139 (approx. Rs. 10,200 in India). The trend of having a keyboard that attached to the tablet, that was popularized by the Microsoft Surface is now being carrying forward by Acer. So, the tablet comes with an optional full-size...

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3D Printing In Space @ Zero Gravity In ISS

3D printing experiment is being done in the space under zero gravity conditions at the ISS. If the experiment is successful, we'll soon see a new era of manufacturing parts in the space. 3D print will use extrusion additive manufacturing that builds objects layer by later from polymers and other materials. NASA and a California based firm 'Mad In Space' have joined hands to begin the experiment in the next year. It'd be the first 3D microgravity experiment to be carried out in the International Space Station. One of the aims of the experiment will be to test the technology to reduce cargo weight and volume. In future, the astronauts...

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Acer Liquid S1 Phablet - The 5.7" Jelly Bean At €349 In Asia & Europe

Alongside the Acer Iconia W3 Tablet, the Taipei based Taiwanese manufacturer has also launched a first-of-its-kind phablet called the 'Acer Liquid S1'. Designed to be your companion in travel, the huge 5.7" HD (1280 x 720 pixel resolution) screen is supposed to help you increase your productivity levels on-the-go. A 'mobile wireless office' is how Acer describes its self-proclaimed phablet. And if or not rightfully so, this smartphone-tablet combo has support for dual SIM cards and is running over the latest Android 4.2 Jelly Bean. Powered by a quad-core 1.5 GHz processor, Acer thinks, and we try to believe, that the phablet's battery sustains...

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ARM Cortex-A12 CPU & Mali-T622 GPU Aim At 580 Million Mid-Range Devices

The budget-restrained techies have got something really exciting to look forward to. ARM, the mobile processor design giant, is foraying into the mid-range smartphone segment where they've kept a selling target of 580 million devices by 2015. To tone up that segment of $250-$350 prized smarts, the company is developing the ARM Cortex-A12 CPU design that houses future chips to look after your processing requirements while ARM Mali-622 GPU and ARM Mali-V500 video processor shall cater to your graphic needs. The basic aim for designing these chips into the mid-range devices is to expand all content creation work like video editing, adding special...

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ASUS Unveils G10 and M51 Desktop PCs With Built in UPS and Portable Battery

Continuing our Computex coverage, we have ASUS debuting its two Desktop PCs G10 and M51 with fourth generation (Haswell) Intel Core i7 processors, NVIDIA GeForce GTX graphics. But the feature that makes these features standout is the ASUS Power Pack. The ASUS Power Pack is a removable battery that acts like a mini UPS for the PC providing 25 seconds of power backup and after the 25 seconds it automatically deploys hibernate mode to save the user session. This Power Pack can also be removed from the desktop to act like a portable rechargeable battery pack for smartphones and tablets. For enhancing the gaming experience the G10 has been equipped...

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IIT Madras Develops 'Eye PAC' Software To Help Eye Doctors Work Faster In India!!!

India's leading engineering institute IIT Madras has a Healthcare Technology Innovation Centre (HTIC), a unit of the Research and Development, that has come up with a new affordable eye screening technology called 'Eye PAC' that helps ophthalmologists do their work faster. Up till now, patients with eye problems had to spend a whole day at the hospital for just the screening. With what they've developed here, the process takes just five minutes. Eye PAC is a software that extracts clear information from eyes and in turn help screen a large number of patients and send only the needy ones for further treatment. Thus, the eye doctor can focus...

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Aakash 4 Specifications & Features Draft Is Ready!!!

Aakash 4 specifications & features list is ready and and the draft describing the same is soon to be submitted to the Government for approval. J Satyanarayana, secretar of Department of Electronics & IT informed the PTI. The government is already rolling up sleeves for the fourth generation of the Aakash tablet while the fate of Aakash 3 isn't clear yet. J Satyanarayana further said that the tablet specifications are beging finalised keeping the cost factor in mind. "We should not add so many features that the cost will go beyond", he said.  With that in mind, what can we expect in terms of hardware and software from...

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Motorola Tatto To Replace Your Passwords For Secure Authentication

Motorola thinks that humans are wasting a lot of energy & time in remembering & typing passwords. Motorola has a fix - using body tatto or an FDA approved pill which will allow authentication without you having to do anything extra. The technology will eliminate the need of entering passwords to authenticate yourself with various computing systems - be it your personal computer, your electronic home security, your phone, tablet or wristwatch. Speaking at the D11 conference, Regina Dugan who was the first female head of DARPA showed off a tattoo on her arm - which by no means is your ordinary tattoo.  The stick-on electronic...

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