There is something about wildlife photography that I love, When someone is able to capture the life of an animal or plant in a way that reflects our own lives, working, playing showing an emotion, they have my attention.
what Bence Máté has done here is truly inspiring, the hole on the leaf lets you see into their world, whilst the silhouette of the ants all different sizes shows some dark twisted version of that world.
Have a look through all the runner ups and young winners too! you may get inspired yourself!
The internet will soon be available in a galaxy near you as Nasa plan to trial laser powered space broadband. This broadband will be able to potentially send 100 Megabytes per second, a much better spead than Nasa’s current radio frequency which can only transmit 5 Megabytes per second. At the moment it take 90 minutes to beam back an image from Mars to Earth. The laser powered broadband on the other hand will take only 5 mintues. That’s one giant leap for the internet.
For this trial a satellite will be sent up with telescopes, lasers, mirrors, pointing and tracking systems and 2 modems bolted on board. The transmissions and data will be relayed to two different ground stations as shown on the photo below.
Canadian Harold Hackett has created his own social network in a more traditional fashion. Using bottle, paper and a pen, Mr Hackett has received over 3,100 replies from people from all walks of life and has created long term pen-pal s. Using the Atlantic ocean, Hackett sends out messages in bottles, hoping for a response and so far he has achieved a 64% return rate. Pretty impressive. I only manage probably a 30% reply rate on Facebook.
When I read this story I almost felt the need to do it myself; let fate determine who I should talk to instead of algorithms. There must be something almost magical upon finding a message in a bottle, something that I’m sure the new generation will almost never experience. I think I have only received one hand written letter in the last 10 years and that makes me slightly sad. However great I think the internet is, I find the hand written letter much more personal and special and hope for our sakes it lives on.
I wont say too much about this one, i'll let Simon Iddon explain the new range of cameras from Nikon.
If you have an interest in photography I think this video is a must, some very exciting new features that I am sure will shape the future of photography.
Google opened the doors to Google+ yesterday. Can the search engine giant rival the power of Facebook with 750 million users compared to it's own 25 million users? Only time will tell. The only thing for sure is that this will create social network war.
It is already rumoured that Facebook may unveil a complete re-design of the current website at Facebook's F8 conference. There is also talk of a potential new music service, launching Facebook into more of a media platform. If Facebook do decide to become more media focused then this could be seen as a direct retaliation against Google's encroachment on their social network empire.
Google has always been hungry to dominate the web whilst maintaining it's in-house motto "don't be evil" (meaning, not to be corporate big heads). It competed for years with Microsoft, it displays images from other websites which has upset quite a few people, it collects news from around the world using algorithms and links to related articles (upsetting the newspaper world), not to mention privacy issues regarding Google street view, the list goes on and on.
A lot of people have conspiracy theories about Google. I, however, think without Google, the Internet would not be advancing as fast as it has been in the past few years. And I would like to see it take on Facebook and win as they are the ones to really push social networking to the limits.
Yesterday Google bought out a potentially life changing app for the Samsung Nexus S offered on Sprint Nextel.
The app allows you to pay for things by simply tapping or swiping the phone, much similar to the contactless technology introduced a couple of years ago by Barclays.
Google are the first to launch this idea but not the only ones, Visa and American Express are also said to be launching similar products too. This will surely pave the way for faster more reliable ways of paying for products.
"In the future, our goal is to make it possible for you to add all of your payment cards to Google Wallet, so you can say goodbye to even the biggest traditional wallets," said Osama Bedier, vice president of payments at Google
This is yet another idea that makes our fast paced lives a little more relaxing, soon everything will be done through smart phones. But for people like me, who tend to misplace everything, it is a scary thought that your whole life will be on one little machine that can easily slide out of your pocket on the train.
3D Printing has been making the news a lot recently with some saying it will hail the death of mass production.
It has been around for some time but only now are big corporations taking it seriously and it is being used in manufacturing processes, taking away the need to outsource to as far away as China.
And it’s cheap, just look at what these entrepreneurs did and how much they managed to save -
Most astounding of all has to be the recent news of artificial blood vessels being made by a 3D printer, done by a team at Fraunhofer Institute in Germany. For years scientists have been creating ‘lab grown organs’ but have not been able to create the needed blood vessels for the organs. The team say it is especially promising and they will be revealing their findings at the Biotechnica Fair in Germany in October.
It’s not just plastics and metals either; there is a chocolate 3D printer under construction with many retailers keen to get their hands on them.
And don’t think the 3D printers is limited to small objects, it can also create large building materials.
I think businesses will find it hard to come to terms with the 3D printing revolution just the same as 'old' media cannot get to grips with 'new' media. It means the last 100 years of mass production is meaningless for the future of business. But wake up! It’s cheap and quick. Surely in this day of impatience that can only be good thing.
