Power Mat

                                         

The Power mat is a wireless charger for hi tech gadgets. You simply place your gadget on the mat to charge it.

It uses magnetic induction energy rather than electricity to charge devices and it works just as fast or faster than standard power adapters.

It can also charge multiple and different gadgets all at the same time.

 It's wireless, so no need to dig for pesky cables or search for hidden outlets. Just place your phone on a charging spot and tap to charge.

Water Clock

You fill it with water and it operates as any normal LCD digital clock - displaying the date and time in easy to read digits. The water powered clock doesn't require any batteries.

In fact, you can fill it with any pop or fruit juice, even coffee or beer and it will still work. A clear casing allows you to see your beverage of choice inside the clock.

Here is how it works

The secret is that the water clock is a battery.

Inside is an electrolyte cell with two metal posts.

An electrolyte battery or cell (see: organic battery also: baghdad battery) needs two dissimilar metals - one copper and one zinc - and a connection between them to complete a circuit.

When the posts are immersed in a liquid that conducts electricity (water) then electrons flow from one post to the other creating a current.

The electric current powers the clock. If you add fruit juice, or soda pop, it makes the liquid more conductive.

                               

Harvard cracks DNA storage

A bio engineer and geneticist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabytes of data — around 700 terabytes — in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times.

The work, carried out by George Church and Sri Kosuri, basically treats DNA as just another digital storage device. Instead of binary data being encoded as magnetic regions on a hard drive platter, strands of DNA that store 96 bits are synthesized, with each of the bases (TGAC) representing a binary value (T and G = 1, A and C = 0).

To read the data stored in DNA, you simply sequence it — just as if you were sequencing the human genome — and convert each of the TGAC bases back into binary. To aid with sequencing, each strand of DNA has a 19-bit address block at the start (the red bits in the image below) — so a whole vat of DNA can be sequenced out of order, and then sorted into usable data using the addresses.

Scientists have been eyeing up DNA as a potential storage medium for a long time, for three very good reasons: It’s incredibly dense (you can store one bit per base, and a base is only a few atoms large); it’s

volumetric (beaker) rather than planar (hard disk); and it’s incredibly stable — where other bleeding-edge storage mediums need to be kept in sub-zero vacuums, DNA can survive for hundreds of thousands of years in a box in your garage.

It is only with recent advances in microfluidics and labs-on-a-chip that synthesizing and sequencing DNA has become an everyday task, though. While it took years for the original Human Genome Project to analyze a single human genome (some 3 billion DNA base pairs), modern lab equipment with microfluidic chips can do it in hours. Now this isn’t to say that Church and Kosuri’s DNA storage is fast — but it’s fast enough for very-long-term archival.