Sasuke Blog

     Funny thing is, it kind of looks like a Batman vehicle. Researchers at the University of Southampton have announced successful flight tests for a new kind of biologically inspired aircraft wing. Intended for use in tiny drones called micro air vehicles (MAVs), the design represents a fundamentally different kind of wing template for UAVs. If the artificial wings most closely resemble the wings of bats, that's entirely by design. The Southampton team built a series of computational models to mimic the physiology of bats, which are the only mammals capable of genuine flight. The wings aren't just vinyl flappy things, either. They're actually electrically active polymer membranes made to function like artificial muscles. The wings morph on their own in response to changing flight conditions, using different levels of voltage to optimize aerodynamic characteristics — on the fly, as it were. Such efficiency means the wings can potentially power MAV aircraft over much lon...

  There is a smartphone being developed that you can bend, and no, not like the iPhone 6 Plus. ReFlex uses a Flexible OLED display from LG, similar to some of the rollable screens recently shown at CES this year, allowing you to bend it at your will. It's the first flexible phone that combines bend input with standard multitouch capabilities, meaning you can use touch interaction like a typical smartphone as well as interact with certain apps by bending the phone. The research team from Queen’s University’s Human Media Lab uses the example of bending ReFlex to play Angry Birds and flip through a comic book. ReFlex’s hardware isn’t flexible though — it uses an Android KitKat board on the side of the display, so don’t think this phone is completely indestructible. “It’s the same architecture you would have in an Android smartphone,” researcher Paul Strohmeier told Mashable. To detect bending input, Strohmeier said the phone uses a strain gauge indicator to measure how much strain is...

    You wouldn’t think that an iPad in an airplane is a big deal, but when it’s used as part of flight control, it’s not only big, it’s verboten. Three months ago, Cobalt aircraft made a big splash when it introduced the Valkyrie Co50, a Canard-style five seater, with sexy looks and record-shattering speed. The Valkyrie Co50 can fly at up to 260 knots (roughly 299 MPH), significantly faster than other single-engine aircraft, which typically cruise at a max of roughly 242 knots. The plane stands at 30 feet long and 10 feet high, with a wingspan of 30 feet. Its unusual design, forward stabilizer and rear-positioned engine promised an usually smooth ride with, even in low altitudes, little-to-no-chance of a stall. According to Cobalt, 30% of fatal aircraft accidents are in low altitude stalls, a claim supported by the the Air Safety Institute's 2012 general aviation accidents study . The company quickly racked up a reported $50 million in orders for a $749,000 aircraft that won’t...

BARCELONA — This year's Mobile World Congress is a huge sea smartphones (yay!), networking gear (meh) and people wearing VR headsets (uh...), but in between all the suited-up business folks and sweaty, stinky reporters was one booth that had something really charming. At the Android Experiments tent (thankfully, located outdoors), Google brought out developers from its Creative Lab to show off a few of the weirder apps that people can create with Android. One such experiment was the IOIO. After you take a selfie, the image data is converted into triangulated coordinates for the triangle-shaped robot to plot out on paper. Armed with the plot points, the robot then gets to work drawing your special selfie portrait using its attached ink pen. Three minutes later, you've got yourself a line-drawn interpretation of your selfie: It's fun, geeky and I have to admit a little empowering. The whole reason for the Android booth, after all, was to promote how easy it is to work with t...

  No more guesswork. Microsoft HoloLens , the company's highly anticipated augmented-reality headgear finally has an official ship date: March 30th. This is good news for developers who started submitting applications to buy the $3,000 headset back in October of last year. Now, once they receive invitations, they can actually order the HoloLens Development Edition and see it shipped to them at the end of March. The company announced the delivery schedule in a blog post on Monday. It's the first concrete product-delivery information we've received since Microsoft first stunned the tech world with this seemingly out-of-the-blue device over a year ago. A full, standalone Windows 10 device, HoloLens combines the wearer's real world with a virtual one. It uses a combination of HD displays, see-through lenses and precise eye calibration to create a pretty powerful effect. Unlike virtual reality headsets from Samsung and Oculus, HoloLens is not fully immersive and has been cr...