Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
We’ve seen autonomous ocean gliders before, but the team at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute has just completed the first successful run of a glider that doesn’t require its own power — instead, it uses the heat difference between the warm upper layers of the ocean and the colder depths to propel itself. Not needing an internal power source let the glider traverse the Virgin Islands Basin between St. Thomas and St. Croix at depths of 13,000 feet over 20 times when it was launched in December, and the team estimates that it could run for another six months if necessary. The ocean’s heat differential is a “virtually unlimited energy source,” according to one Woods Hole researcher — hmm, beach-charger, anyone?
[Thanks, Charlie]
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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
The über crypto-geeks in the house just raised all kinds of eyebrows with the announcement of Toshiba’s new physical random-number generator, which can pump out 2 megabits per second of random output in a 1,200 square micron circuit size. You’re a unique kind of person if this stuff gets your motor running — or if you actually need 2Mbps of random data on the go. May we suggest Kabbalah, or perhaps a game of Go?
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Filed under: Storage
Although we have hope that the format war is shuddering to a close, it’s probably still wise to hedge your bets just a little — and Plextor’s got you covered with two new SATA Blu-ray / HD DVD combo drives. The new PX-B920SA writes to BD-R at 4x speeds, DVDs at 16x, and CD-Rs at 40x, and reads HD DVD, while the lower-end PX-B300SA drops the BD-R capabilities and just writes to DVD and CD. Plextor says both drives will be available at the end of the month, but sadly we don’t have any pricing information.
[Via NordicHardware]
Read – PX-B920SA
Read – PX-B300SA
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