Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

A droplet of water suspended on an iPhone camera acts as a magnifying lens. I’ve engineered a fair number of inexpensive DIY camera hacks. This one is by far the cheapest: it’s free! Simply place a drop of water on the phone’s lens, carefully turn the device over, and the suspended droplet serves as a liquid lens

(PhysOrg.com) -- A Cambridge team have built a semiconductor chip that converts electrons into a quantum state that emits light but is large enough to see by eye. Because their quantum superfluid is simply set up by shining laser beams on the device, it can lead to practical ultrasensitive detectors.

Japanese researchers have demonstrated a scissors-type trilayer magnetoresistance device that is promising for narrow readers of ultra-high density hard disk drives (HDD). This device uses an antiferromagnetic interlayer exchange coupling of two Heusler alloy ferromagnetic (FM) layers separated by a thin silver layer. Since the magnetization of the two FM layers rotate around each other like scissors due to the antiferromagnetic coupling, the device is called a scissor-type MR sensor.

Millions of pacemakers have been successfully implanted in the past half century to regulate erratic heartbeats , but the electrical leads, which connect the device to the heart, complicate the surgery and increase infection risks. The heart's continuous and vigorous beating also creates strain on the leads and can damage them over time. [More]

A team of researchers from the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia's iTEAM in Spain has created the first, tunable broadband radio frequency (RF) photonic phase shifter.

(PhysOrg.com) -- One of the most difficult problems for designing mobile devices is finding a way to minimize the size of the device while simultaneously maximizing the size of the display. To get the best of both worlds, researchers from the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology in South Korea have designed and built a prototype of a seamless foldable display that folds in half without a visible crease in the middle.

A real-life version of the tracking devices seen on detective shows, the Garmin GTU 10 lets you keep tabs on prized possessions. The waterproof GPS transmitter, which is roughly the size of a cigarette lighter and weighs 1.7 ounces, comes with a case, a carabiner ring, and an adhesive strip for attaching it to objects—a briefcase, say, or a dog collar

John Blackstone reports on an artificial retina that could restore partial vision to the blind may soon be approved by the FDA. Then, Erica Hill talks to Dr. Jennifer Ashton about how the device works and how it could change the lives for people with certain types of blindness