Carbon dioxide converted to electricity

(Credit: Comprehending the Climate Crisis)

As Earth struggles against the adverse effects of greenhouse gases, Bert Hamelers, Ph.D, and a group of researchers in the Netherlands have come up with an innovative idea to use carbon dioxide (CO2) to generate energy. According to the American Chemical Society, the researchers claim that harvesting of CO2 from power plants, industries and residences can produce 400 times the annual electrical output of the Hoover Dam. Hamelers also assured that generating additional electricity this way will be done without adding more CO2 to the atmosphere.
So how can electricity be harvested from CO2? To produce electric current, a combination of CO2 and water (or other liquids) are processed to create a flow of electrons. More information can be found here.

(Credit: Environmental Science & Technology Letters)

While this new concept has yet to be tested, and it remains to be seen how CO2 harvesting can be implemented on a large scale, the idea to convert CO2 to electricity is promising. For all you know, this could very well become the viable alternative energy source that brings an end to our global warming crisis.

Facebook reports $1.81 billion in revenue, 1.15 billion monthly active users

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Facebook saw its revenue grow year-over-year in its Q1 earnings reported in May, and that trend has continued for its second quarter. The company has just announced that it's pulled in $1.81 billion in revenue for Q2, beating analysts' expectations, while net income stood at $333 million. Of course, much of that money comes from ads: Facebook says that revenue from advertising now represents 88 percent of its total revenue, and that mobile advertising accounted for about 41 percent of its total advertising revenue for the quarter. Mark Zuckerberg highlighted that last bit in a statement, saying that "the work we've done to make mobile the best Facebook experience is showing good results and provides us with a solid foundation for the future."
In other numbers, Facebook also reported that it has 1.15 billion monthly active users as of June 30th, while its daily active users stood at 669 million. Mobile users were again its biggest growth area, with 819 million users actively checking in on their mobile devices each month (up 51 percent compared to the same quarter in 2012), and 469 million active on a daily basis. We'll keep you posted on any additional developments that may come out of the company's earnings call in the next hour.
Update: Zuckerberg and co. didn't have much additional news to offer during the earning's call, although he did comment briefly on Facebook Home, which he described as a "seed we're planting," and something to look at over the long term.

Google Translate homepage adds handwriting input, makes sense of your atrocious penmanship

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Mountain View's machine translation service does a pretty good job of sussing out the meaning of copy / pasted text from around the web, but what if you need to translate something you can't put your cursor on? Google's got that covered too: handwriting input. Users of the tool's mobile app have been able to manually write in characters for some time now, but the company has only recently implemented this feature on the Google Translate website -- making it easy to input text that falls outside outside of the standard standard roman character set. After scrawling your best Kanji-replica with a mouse, Google will offer users its best guess at the intended characters, which, when selected, drop into the translate box. Of course, don't blame Google if your writing illegibly sloppy. Check out the company's blog post

Tim Cook, Apple CEO, Drops Another Clue That Apple Wants To Take Over Your Car

Much of the attention paid to products that Apple may be developing has focused on the so-called iWatch, an Apple-designed television and, of course, the new iPhone.
But in an earnings call on Tuesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook emphasized just how crucial it is for Apple to build something for the car, offering perhaps a clue to a project the company is working on.
"Having something in the automobile is very, very important," Cook said in response to a question from an analyst. "It's something that people want, and I think that Apple can do this in a unique way and better than anyone else. So it's a key focus for us."
At its annual developer's conference last month, Apple announced iOS in the Car, a feature in its forthcoming mobile operating system that will closely integrate iTunes, iMessage, Maps and Siri in cars from a dozen manufacturers beginning next year.
But a recent patent filing shows that Apple may be focusing on something much bigger than just the marriage of your iPhone and your car: building the car dashboard of the future.
Earlier this month, Apple Insider reported that the company had been granted a patent for "a touchscreen-based telematics system," basically a customizable car dashboard and console. The system features a touch screen that could change in feel, so the driver could make adjustments to it without looking away from the road.
In the design, cameras in the interior of the car pick up the position of the driver's hand and project that image onto the windshield, effectively showing the driver what he or she is doing.
The patent filing also reveals that the in-car system would be equipped with sensors that allow the driver to, for example, increase the temperature using a hand gesture.
The filing, which Apple Insider notes is a continuation of previous patents Apple acquired, includes descriptions of heads-up displays, customizable knobs and switches, and a screen that can be operated by a "laser pointer or like device."
The filing describes the patent as "A revolutionary form of dashboard or instrument panel results which is stylistically attractive, lower in cost, customizable by the user, programmable in both the tactile and visual sense, and with the potential of enhancing interior safety and vehicle operation."
Car manufacturers have responded to the proliferation of smartphones, and the safety risks of distracted driving, by selling cars with systems that try to integrate technology more safely.
But Apple has shown that one of its biggest strengths is designing beautiful, intuitive hardware. Rather than just sending data from an iPhone to a dashboard designed by a car manufacturer, or to a system designed by Blackberry, it would make sense that Apple would build its own from the ground up. After all, Cook did say that when it comes to having something in the car, "Apple can do this in a unique way and better than anyone else."
"I think it's a natural extension from the phone to go into the car, just like it is for the TV and for the watch," said Brian Colello, a senior equity analyst at Morningstar. "Apple's expertise is a simple, sleek user interface. Siri, Maps -- all of that lends itself well for an in-vehicle dashboard."
While Colello emphasized that it's not clear how Apple would make money from such a system, "It could be a nice area of innovation."

Samsung starts making 3GB low-power memory for smartphones

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We hope you weren't just getting used to having 2GB of RAM in a smartphone, because Samsung is already moving on. The company is now mass-producing 3GB LPDDR3 packages whose 0.8mm (0.03in) thickness can accommodate most device sizes. The capacious, 20nm-class memory should also be quick when there's a pair of symmetric channels to keep data flowing. The first smartphones with 3GB of RAM should ship in the second half of the year; Samsung isn't revealing which phones will have the honor, but it's not hard to make some educated guesses.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced the industry's first mass production of three gigabyte (GB) low power double data rate 3 (LPDDR3) mobile DRAM, the highest density mobile memory solution for next-generation smartphones, which will bring a generation shift to the market from the 2GB packages that are widely used in current mobile devices.

The Samsung 3GB LPDDR3 mobile DRAM uses six of the industry's smallest 20-nanometer (nm) class* four gigabit (Gb) LPDDR3 chips, in a symmetrical structure of two sets of three chips stacked in a single package only 0.8 millimeters high. With a full line-up of package dimensions, Samsung's new ultra-slim memory solutions will enable thinner smartphone designs and allow for additional battery space, while offering a data transfer speed of up to 2,133 megabits per second (Mbps) per pin.

"Three gigabyte mobile DRAM will be adopted in the most up-to-date, high-end smartphones starting in the second half of this year − an initial adoption that will expand to most high-end smartphones worldwide next year," said Young-Hyun Jun, executive vice president, memory sales & marketing, Samsung Electronics. "We will develop a new 3GB LPDDR3 solution based on four 6Gb LPDDR3 DRAM chips by symmetrically stacking two chips on each side, which will boost smartphone performance to the next level by year-end."
With the increased mobile DRAM capacity, users can enjoy seamless high-quality, Full HD video playback and faster multitasking on their smartphones. Also, the new LPDDR3 speeds up data downloading and is able to offer full support for LTE-A (LTE Advanced) service, a next-generation mobile telecommunication standard.
Samsung's 3GB LPDDR3 DRAM connects with a mobile application processor using two symmetrical data transfer channels, each connected to a 1.5GB storage part. Though asymmetric data flow can cause sharp performance dips at certain settings, the symmetrical structure avoids such issues, while maximizing system level performance.
Considering that the current memory storage capacity for PCs is about 4GB, offering 3GB of DRAM memory on mobile devices should help most users enjoy PC-like performance, in narrowing the performance gap between PC and smartphone computing.
With the new 3GB LPDDR3 DRAM, Samsung is now offering the widest range of mobile DRAM densities (1GB, 2GB and 3GB), while providing the industry's first mobile DRAM based on 20-nm class process node technology. Samsung plans to continue to lead the growth of the mobile memory market, as it seeks to maintain unrivaled competitiveness in the premium memory sector.