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Alt-week 8.4.12: buckyballs, bosons and bodily fluids
Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days. Remember when we told you last week that we live in a strange world? Well, we had no idea what we were talking about. Seriously, things are about to get a whole lot weirder. High school is certainly a head-scratcher, no matter how old you are, but the mathematics of social hierarchies can't hold a candle to the mysteries of the buckyball. And, if the strange behavior of the familiar carbon molecule isn't enough for you, we've got an entirely new molecule to contend with, while the once-elusive Higgs Boson is getting us closer to unlocking the secrets of the universe. It's all pretty heady stuff, which is why we're also gonna take a quick detour to the world of human waste. This is alt-week.
Lenovo's IdeaPad S200 / S206 netbook gives a choice of Intel and AMD innards, arrives in June for $349 and up
While we don't expect to see that many netbooks announced in two thousand twelve, we're not surprised to see some of the usual suspects releasing a few token models. Lenovo just introduced the IdeaPad S200 and S206 -- the same 11.6-inch mini, essentially, except the S200 comes with an Intel Atom N2800 Cedar Trail CPU, while the S206 packs an AMD C60 dual-core chip. Either way, this 2.9-pound laptop has 2GB of RAM, USB 2.0 and 3.0, HDMI, an SD / MMC reader and a two-cell battery promising a relatively modest four-plus hours of juice. Both can be configured with a 500GB hard drive as fast as 7,200RPM, though for whatever reason the Intel model in particular is also offered with a 32GB SSD. Whichever chip maker ends up winning your dollar, you'll have to wait until June, when the two are expected to go on sale for $349 and up. Sean Cooper contributed to this post
IDEO constructs RFID turntable, hearkens back to mixtapes of yore (video)
Once upon a time, you could touch your music -- or at least caress a 7- or 12-inch vinyl disc -- but these days the cool kids stream MP3s (and OGGs, and APEs) off the internet. However, design studio IDEO recently decided to see if they could get back in touch with their audio roots, and -- taking a page right out of the industrial design treatise I Miss My Pencil -- they built the above machine. To put it simply, what you're looking at is a box filled with specially-angled Arduino Pro Mini boards constantly searching for RFID tags on top, and a set of cards each with two RFID tags, with each tag representing one song. When you drop one on the turntable, it begins playing within a second, thanks to the clever array of Arduinos underneath, and you and your High Fidelity soulmate can leave multiple cards on the table to create an impromptu mixtape, or, presumably, flip one of the "cassettes" to play Side B. It's a good thing IDEO isn't selling the device and packs of cards, because we're afraid we'd be compelled to collect them all, and our poor wallet doesn't need any more heartbreak. Don't miss the video below!
