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Google’s forthcoming wireless virtual reality headset is purportedly in the works. With this new VR headset, users will no longer need a smartphone, PC or gaming console for it to provide a VR experience. (Photo : Justin Sullivan | Getty Images)

Google is reportedly developing a wireless virtual reality headset. The more advanced form of the company’s cardboard viewer will soon not rely on a smartphone, PC or gaming console to make it work – this makes it the first of its kind in the VR field.

The Wall Street Journal, citing its unnamed sources familiar with this matter, says that the company is currently working on an all-in-one VR headset which could likely come out before the year ends.

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At Vanderbilt University scientists are building an artificial kidney that they envision will one day will be a standard of care over dialysis. The device consists of a silicon nanotechnology filter chip and embedded living kidney cells that would work together to mimic the functionality of a healthy kidney. The end result is expected to be about the size of a natural kidney, small enough to be implantable and powered by the body’s own blood flow.

The filter component has tiny pores that can be individually shaped to perform a specific task. These filters would sit in a series, each one performing a different filtration step. Between the filter slices there would be living kidney cells that perform tasks that the man made components are not very good at, including reabsorption of nutrients and getting rid of accumulated waste.

Here’s video with Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Dr. William Fissell, the lead scientist on the research:

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This time, there is a very serious news about virtual reality as Google Inc. is said to be getting ready to unveil a new-fangled smartphone headset.

According to The Financial Times, the new headset will succeed Cardboard, and would be featuring much better sensors, lenses, and a more solid plastic skin.

It’s said the product is the like of Samsung’s Gear VR since it will use a smartphone to display as well as most of its processing power. The only difference is that the current Cardboard VR headset is just a cardboard headset like its name with an inserted smartphone, while the new one will be coming with an extra motion sensor for adding whatever the phone places out.

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No source of energy is perfect and one of the traditional drawbacks of solar energy has been that it’s tough to generate new power when it’s dark outside. However, SolarCity announced this week that it’s taken a big step toward fixing this problem by agreeing to use Tesla’s 52 MWh Powerpack lithium-ion battery storage system for its massive solar power project that it’s building in Hawaii for the Kaua’i Island Utility Cooperative (KIUC). SolarCity, of course, is chaired by Tesla CEO Elon Musk so the decision to go with the Powerpack is pretty convenient for both companies.

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SolarCity says it believes that its collaboration with Tesla will produce “the first utility-scale system in the U.S. to provide dispatchable solar energy, meaning that the utility can count on electricity being available when it’s needed, even hours after the sun goes down.” To be clear, using the Powerpack won’t completely eliminate the need for non-solar resources at night since it’s projected to feed up to 13 megawatts of electricity onto the grid, which will only reduce the amount of power used by non-renewable sources.

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Rapidly advancing robot appendages are in vogue lately, and they’re going to change how we do everything.

When it comes to robot design, there are the pragmatists and the biomimetics. The pragmatists will design a robot that efficiently carries out its designated function without much worry about what the finished product looks like. As long as it can complete its repetitive task day-in and day-out, who cares about the cosmetics? An industrial robot arm that holds a welding torch, for example, isn’t much of an “arm” at all, but rather something that could easily be mistaken for a sci-fi villain.

But the biomimetics school of thought aims to duplicate a lifelike quality in its robots. Consider the Replicants of Blade Runner, robots so lifelike that they are routinely mistaken as biological humans. They are fiction, however; contemporary robotic technology has to overcome all kinds of challenges in order to move like a human and exhibit convincing fluid motion.

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MIT has developed a quantum computer design featuring an array of superconducting islands on the surface of a topological insulator that they’re experimenting with to process 0’s & 1’s — if they are successful; this could possibly get us within a 5 yr window for QC platforms.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have developed a quantum computer design featuring an array of superconducting islands on the surface of a topological insulator.

The researchers propose basing both quantum computation and error correction on the peculiar behavior of electrons at neighboring corners of these islands and their ability to interact across islands at a distance.

The system can characterize the state of a quantum bit as a zero or a one based on whether there is an odd or even number of electrons associated with a superconducting quantum bit, but the underlying physical interactions that enables this are highly complex.

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