Diablo 3 was officially unleashed on gamers at midnight. Were you one of the hardcore fans waiting in line for it? Did you stay up all night to get your D3 fix? Guess what? Somebody already beat the entire game.

The upcoming Tron: Legacy prequel animated Tron: Uprising, Disney has released the whole 30-minute of first episode “Beck’s Beginning” online, for FREE! The series premieres Thursday June 7 on Disney XD channel, which is not the same Disney channel in Malaysia. Here are the synopses:

“Beck is a young mechanic living in Argon City, a growing metropolis in a far off corner of the grid that has just been occupied by General Tesler, a henchman of the notorious Clu. After his best friend Bodhi is ruthlessly derezzed by Clu's army, Beck seeks justice for his lost friend and launches a crusade against the regime. His rebellion captures the attention of Tron, the greatest warrior The Grid has ever known, who sees the potential in Beck and trains him to be his successor. Labeled with the moniker of The Renegade, Beck sparks a revolution to fight for the freedom of The Grid.”

P/S : This video is blocked in certain regions, including us ! (Watch it, if you know how :evil-grin-emoticon:)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=hjbwVzJR8w4

Carbon nanotubes have promised some incredible advances in power efficiency, but one of the most promising (and most realistic) is boosting the capacity of lithium-ion batteries by a factor of two in the near term, and eventually by five. Suddenly, your electronics that last all day will be lasting all week instead.

Lithium-ion batteries use anodes made of graphite to store charge. Graphite works fine for this, but only a sixth of the carbon atoms are able to hang on to a lithium ion, which makes for an inefficient energy density. Using something like silicon, on the other hand, gets you four lithium ions binding to every one silicon atom, boosting energy density by up to 10 times. Superb! Wonderful! Fabulous!

So where's my lithium-silicon battery, huh? Problem is, when silicon atoms suck up lithium ions like that, they swell up to four times their initial volume and the entire battery pack expands. It shrinks again when you discharge it, but this expansion and contraction rapidly causes permanent damage to the battery and renders it useless. Bad times.

Like almost every other problem, this issue can be solved with nanotechnology. Researchers at SLAC (the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, now called the Stanford National Accelerator Laboratory or SNAL, I guess) have made a silicon battery anode out of custom-designed double-walled silicon nanotubes coated with silicon oxide. As this nanotube anode charges up, the silicon atoms in the nanotube start to expand, but the silicon oxide coating forces them to expand inward into the hollow center of the tube where they can't do any damage. This solves the entire problem, and testing has shown that batteries with this technology inside can easily survive 6,000 charge/discharge cycles with 85% capacity remaining.

The big hurdle now is to find a cheap and efficient way to manufacture the nanotubes, but Stanford has already licensed the relevant patents out to a company (founded by the researchers themselves) called Amprius, which has a "near-term goal" of producing a battery with double the energy density of the batteries that we're all using right now. Additional research into high capacity nanotech anodes should boost that density figure to an increase of five times, but that's probably a bit father off. And anyway, wouldn't you be more than happy with having all of your electronics last twice as long as they do now? Sure you would!

--Dvice

The Lightning Gun, or Tesla Gun, is a video game staple, but it's also a real thing that you can build for yourself with enough know-how and a well-equipped local hackerspace. Rob Flickenger shows the world how to create a hand-held weapon that shoots lightning bolts, from scratch. As Rob says: you pull the trigger, and lightning comes out the front.

As Facebook prepares for its initial public offering in a few weeks, it has just announced plans for its own App Center. The center will allow the online service with over 900 million members to generate new forms of revenue and add an additional social dimension to the popular online platform.

IKEA is moving into "hybrid furniture" with its new all-in-one UPPLEVA range. Integrating a home entertainment unit with AV equipment from Chinese manufacturer TCL, the UPPLEVA comes with a full-HD, smart LED TV, a combined Blu-ray, DVD, and CD player, and a 2.1 sound system featuring a wireless subwoofer - all operated by a single remote control.

The idea behind the UPPLEVA (the Swedish word for experience) is to rid a home of all the wires that are an inevitable part of owning multiple devices. How much of a problem you view this as will likely determine your level of interest - as will the price of 6,500 Swedish kronor (around US$955).

As the video below shows, the customer chooses the size of TV that's right for them (between 24- and 46-inches) and the frame that suits their style. They then choose the piece of furniture that they want to have in their house, subject to self-assembly, naturally. The customization options available (as seen from 1:50 onwards) are impressive, with sizes, units, and colors to suit the majority of mainstream tastes.

While it's a fairly elegant solution, there is a glaring issue with an all-in-one system such as this: what happens when the technology moves on to something new? The television included at launch isn't 3D-capable, for instance, despite the fact 3D is rapidly becoming a standard feature in all new TV sets (regardless of the level of interest the average consumer has in the feature). IKEA may well offer a solution to this in the future, whereby you can replace individual components ... although this would seem to defeat the purpose of offering such an all-in-one system.

The UPPLEVA range will first be available in IKEA's home country of Sweden, as well as France, Germany, Italy, and Poland, in June 2012. The rest of the world will follow by the middle of 2013.




Source: www.gizmag.com




 

As the market for notebooks and Tablets go higher every day, Dell has unveiled the new desktop for entertainment seeker folks with the new desktop lines. The new XPS 8500 and Vostro desktops are now powered with the latest 3rd generation quad-core processor and the latest discrete graphic. In addition, Dell is expending the laptop line-up with the Inspiron Special Edition 14R and 15R series for families, which available today in selected countries in Asia.

This is a small series of wigs made entirely out of LEGO bricks for a high fashion photo shoot by Elroy Klee. If fashion were graded like tests in school I would have been held back so many times I'd be taller than my bus driver. That said, I am gonna make my own LEGO haircut. Sure it might just be a LEGO pirate ship and all my minifigs glued to a crash helmet, but you can't just trust a bunch of LEGO blocks to protect you when you're being shot out of a cannon. "Who's getting shot out of cannon?" I AM -- why else would I be wearing the stupid crash helmet? "I thought you mom makes you because you're clumsy." Have you been reading my diary?

Taken and edited from Geekologie.