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World's biggest floating wind farm is coming to Scotland
Just days after Danish energy provider Dong announced it had signed off plans to build the world's largest offshore wind farm comes news of another milestone in the UK's push for renewable energy. The Scottish Government has confirmed it has given consent to another Scandinavian company, Norway's Statoil, to build Britain's first floating wind farm. A park consisting of five 6MW turbines will be installed off the coast of Peterhead, eclipsing Japan's single 7MW turbine to become the world's largest offshore wind development.
Airbnb is floating a liveable house down the River Thames
If you happen to be in London this week, we recommend keeping one eye locked on the Thames. Airbnb is sailing a bright blue house down the iconic river to celebrate the passing of the Deregulation Act, which gives London residents permission to "share" their property for up to 90 days each year. Best of all, you can actually live in Airbnb's unusual floating home -- it comes with two bedrooms, a bathroom and a living room, as well as a small garden complete with lawn, trees and a dog kennel. Of course, this is just a publicity stunt, but it's a creative one that could brighten up London's iconic landmark. Airbnb is also letting a lucky few spend the night in the house this Friday, with just a few important house rules; no swimming in the Thames, no floating house parties and "no floating away." I wonder if that last one includes tying hundreds of colourful balloons to the roof?
Google's peculiar floating barge meets its maker
Remember Google's mysterious floating barge? Well, you probably won't for much longer, because it's met an untimely end. According to the Portland Press Herald, the search giant no longer has a use for the iconic four-story structure, so it's been sold to an anonymous "international barging company" and will be broken down for scrap. It's a rather damp end for the barge, which was set to become a high-tech showroom for inventions like Glass, self-driving cars and other top-secret inventions from Google's X lab, after it first appeared in Portland Harbor late last year. Google's yet to comment on why it's no longer interested in hosting tech-centric cocktail parties, but cost is likely the ultimate factor. It paid $400,000 in property taxes alone to moor the barge on the city's waterfront -- then there's also the small matter of retrofitting its 63 shipping containers into something that Californians would actually want to visit.
MIT designs a floating, tsunami-proof nuclear plant
What's the safest place to put a nuclear reactor? Offshore, apparently. A new power plant design concept from MIT envisions a facility built on floating platforms, moored in deep water several miles off the coast. This, the concept's creators explain, lends it several crucial advantages -- making it virtually immune to earthquakes, tsunamis and meltdowns. Big promises, to be sure, but the professors' reasoning actually makes sense: in deep water, tsunami waves aren't large enough to cause significant damage, and earthquakes are usually only felt if you're standing on the earth. Floating the reactor on the ocean also gives the plant access to easy, passive cooling, what MIT's Jacopo Buongiorno calls an "infinite heat sink."
Levitating superconductor floats within a magnetic field so you don't have to (video)
What happens when you douse a superconducting urinal cake with liquid nitrogen? We haven't given it too much thought, to be honest, though we're guessing it would look a lot like the "levitating" disc pictured above. Developed by researchers at Tel-Aviv University, this device is actually a superconductor hovering over a "supercooled" magnet. While locked within the magnetic field, it can rotate around a vertical axis, turn upside down or do laps around a track -- all thanks to a phenomenon that Tel-Aviv's physicists call "quantum trapping." We're not really sure what that entails, but we do know that the results are pretty incredible. Check them out for yourself, after the break. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Lost Pages of Taborea: Lions and tigers and bears, oh... mounts!
Summer is starting to wane, and the cold winds will soon be blustering through the city streets. Kids with chattering teeth and blue fingers will be sitting in front of stoves or fireplaces, rolling their eyes as grandpa proclaims that he had to walk to and from school barefoot through snow uphill both ways. While our grandfathers fantasize about the pride of hardships, we can slip off to the computer and live in our fantasy worlds that provide mounts to make traveling a bit more fun. Runes of Magic has a wide variety of mounts that can run, hover and float over water. Some of these mounts are more rare than others, like those seen only on holidays or during special fundraisers, while some are two-seaters. From the sleek and vicious to the large and powerful to the just plain wacky, RoM has a mount for all occasions. In this week's Lost Pages of Taborea, I go over the mounts that are available, their rarity, their speed, and some ways to give your preferred mount a boost.
Sony makes floating-head telepresence avatars a reality, Sean Connery digs out gun and red speedos
The real world just got a little more Zardoz thanks to Tobita Hiroaki and his colleagues at Sony Computer Science Laboratory, who've built a telepresence blimp that projects the operator's face across its meter-wide surface. The looming, translucent face can float about like any other blimp; an interior camera allows the user to see where it's going. The whole thing is ominous in a completely different way from, say, a tiny googly-eyed robot perched on your shoulder, but something about its nearly silent movements still gives us the creeps – and unlike the Anybots QB, it's not going to pick up your scone from the café. But if your dreams include having others bow before your god-like visage, you'll have to wait awhile, as the technology's still in its early stages. In the meantime, you can practice intoning "Zardoz is pleased!" while watching the video above.
Philips FloatingCushions headphones have you on cloud nine
Comfort is certainly the aim for Philips' new SH series headphones, and they certainly have a compelling case. The magic behind these lightweight cans is FloatingCushion, which is essentially just memory foam that seals nicely around your ears for both comfort and reduced audio loss. Simple, but seemingly effective. No word on whether these softhearted headphones will make it to the US, but according to Pocket-lint there will be six of these in total, four of which being a Bluetooth SHB9100 model, an over-the-ear SHP8000, and two folding compact SHL9000 variants (one with in-line remote and mic). Head over to the via link for some hands-on pics. %Gallery-118639%
One Shots: Happy Prestige refund day!
With Issue 13 hitting the live City of Heroes and City of Villains servers yesterday, many of the players who are fond of base building were immensely happy to see a refund of Prestige; the "cash" that allows players to buy more goodies for their base. (Or in some cases, larger bases!) Of course, the down-side to this is that base builders are still relegated to using magic desks during base building to float objects for now. Today we're showing off a screenshot taken by this blogger - who admits she's a total base-building fiend - having a quick sit-down break between stacking layers of desks to the ceiling. The mission creator in Issue 14 (and hopefully the items to help us float objects in bases easier) can't come fast enough for us!We love to see what people have done with guild housing, supergroup bases, and more! So if you've built up something cool, why not snap some screenshots of it and send that in to us here at oneshots AT massively DOT com! Add in a quick description of what we're seeing (or a longer one if you want to explain your cool building tricks) what game it's from, and your name. We'll show it off to our readers, and your work will get a larger audience than just your group of friends and allies.%Gallery-9798%
HTC patent guarantees there'll be no way to "close" your phone
There was a time when data was slow, screens where monochrome, and keypads were simple -- and that's the way we liked it. Now you've got QWERTY clamshells, virtual keyboards, e-ink, and everything in between, yet somehow, that's just not enough for HTC's wild tastes. The Windows Mobile champion (and Android champion-in-waiting) has recently filed a patent application for a screen attached to a keypad by a set of diagonal tracks, which allow it to move between a full QWERTY form factor and... shall we call it a "permanently-deployed slider." Interesting, we suppose, but probably a little awkward in the pocket and in the hand.[Via Unwired View]
Secrets of levitation cracked by Scottish researchers?
Try not to get too frenetic here, but a couple of gurus at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland have reportedly created an "incredible levitation effect by engineering the force of nature which normally causes objects to stick together." In layman's terms, the scientists have devised a way to reverse the phenomenon known as the Casimir force so that it "repels instead of attracts." Ultimately, the discovery could lead to "frictionless micro-machines with moving parts that levitate," and in theory, devices could be created to transport humans. Do realize, however, that individuals in this team have also "showed that invisibility cloaks are feasible," so we're not counting ourselves amongst the faithful just yet.[Thanks, James][Our readers have let us know that this article's headline bore some similarities to other articles on the same topic -- though purely coincidental, in the interest of further differentiating the post we've edited it to a small degree. -Ed.]
Dancing On The Water clock levitates time
True clock aficionados fully understand that their timepieces do more than tell them just how many grueling hours are left in the work day, and YUnoBI's Dancing On The Water design invites time tellers to gaze at its mirror-image rather than just glancing and looking away. The lacquered enclosure comes in black, red, and gray finishes, and shoots the current time up against a reflective back that purportedly gives off a "floating illusion." Furthermore, the red digits are displayed care of built-in LEDs, and while you may be eager to snap this presumed dust-magnet up as a crafty conversation piece, the ¥68,250 ($573) asking price just might stop you in your tracks.[Via TechDigest]
JVC's XA-AW33 floating audio system
We've seen floating audio toys before. But this a first to feature a "dying/fleeing coming king woman" jazz setting. Janky machine translation aside, the XA-AW33 floating mono speaker from JVC features an NXT flat panel speaker surface with an IPX7 waterproofing to keep up to 256MB of your MP3 and WM DRM'd audio files toasty dry. It even features a downward firing pale-blue lamp sure to make your jumbley bits appear even more borg-like. Hot. Yours now for ¥19,800 ($169) in Japan. [Via Impress]
Atlantic launches waterproof EGO floating speaker system for iPod
Considering your mind is probably more focused on that upcoming trip to the slopes than your thoroughly frozen outdoor pool, you probably aren't in any dire need of a floating iPod speaker system in the midst of January, but nevertheless, Atlantic's bringing it to you. Aside from always staying on the sunny side of whatever liquid it's in, the plastic shell also touts a pair of (presumably weak) stereo speakers and the ability to house your dock-connecting iPod. Reportedly, the device is waterproof enough to withstand pool parties and showers, and can supposedly operate for 30 hours on just four AA batteries. While the EGO has been floating around (ahem) briefly, the firm plans to officially launch it during next week's CES, but those eager to get their swim trunks on in the middle of winter can find one now for around $115.[Via TGDaily]
NICT and Kobe University team up to form "floating visual" 3D display
While making concrete slabs double as displays may prove useful when dressing up those otherwise drab skyscrapers, creating 3D-like images from real objects throws in a much-needed dash of geekiness. The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) and Kobe University have partnered to craft "a thin-panel type device which forms 3D images in the air." Although 3D devices have a less-than-stellar track record when it comes to overcoming the "gimmick" stereotype, this rendition looks to have a bit more potential than usual. This offering is made by forming a "100 μm-thick Ni layer" on a glass plate, and punching a bevy of 100 μm square holes in it; when objects (such as the toy ball pictured above) are placed below the table, a "floating visual" appears. Moreover, this rendition doesn't require viewers to look from certain angles or with certain lighting scenarios like many forms of holography oftentimes do, and the team hopes to eventually conjure a 3D image of a human "if they can substantially enlarge the device size" while keeping its current attributes in tact.[Via The Raw Feed]
