http://phys.org/electronics-news/ en-us Phys.org Phys.org provides the latest news on electronics, robotics, hardware, electronic gadgets and science technology. Updated daily. Best Buy is recalling 5,100 replacement batteries for the MacBook Pro due to a fire risk. http://phys.org/news290887353.html Electronics 2013-06-19T20:00:02-07:00 Los Angeles' school system, the second largest in the United States, is ordering iPads for all its students, handing Apple a major success in its quest to make the tablet computer a replacement for textbooks. http://phys.org/news290887005.html Electronics 2013-06-19T18:56:55-07:00 Chinese telecoms giant Huawei will launch a new smartphone on Tuesday to better compete with high-end rivals like Apple and Samsung overseas, a company official said. http://phys.org/news290748871.html Electronics 2013-06-18T04:50:02-07:00 Honda Motor and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) have jointly developed a remotely controlled survey robot that will conduct on-site surveys on the first floor of a nuclear reactor building at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station of Tokyo Electric Power Company, Inc. (TEPCO) and help discern structures in high and narrow areas. This newly-developed survey robot will begin working inside the reactor building on June 18, 2013. http://phys.org/news290676956.html Electronics 2013-06-17T08:50:02-07:00 Samsung Electronics announced today that it has begun mass producing the industry's first PCI-Express (PCIe) solid state drive (SSD) for next-generation ultra-slim notebook PCs. http://phys.org/news290676013.html Electronics 2013-06-17T08:20:34-07:00 Attaching a platform to a high-rise building to evacuate people in an emergency, or creating a landing stage for an aircraft on uneven terrain - these are just two areas in which flying robots could have a huge impact - potentially saving lives. http://phys.org/news290673867.html Electronics 2013-06-17T08:20:01-07:00 A Chinese supercomputer is the fastest in the world, according to survey results announced Monday, comfortably overtaking a US machine which now ranks second. http://phys.org/news290671269.html Electronics 2013-06-17T07:01:16-07:00 Thanks to its legs, whose design faithfully reproduces feline morphology, EPFL's 4-legged 'cheetah-cub robot' has the same advantages as its model: It is small, light and fast. http://phys.org/news290626066.html Electronics 2013-06-17T00:10:01-07:00 (Phys.org) —Robots playing air hockey can play strategically as a result of work by researchers in Japan at Chiba University's Namiki Lab. The system they constructed consists of an air-hockey table, a Barrett four-axis robotic arm, two high-speed cameras, and an external PC. This is not the first air hockey playing robot. Back in 2008, for one, there was the Nuvation Air Hockey robot that grabbed admirers. This was an industrial robot equipped with an optical sensor programmed to follow and react to a moving object. The differentiator with the Namiki Lab robot is that this one is able to strategize playing against its human opponent. Professor Akio Namiki and his group have designed a robot that can shift its strategy based on the opponent's playing style. The robot isn't just playing but is making its plays specifically against the opponent in any one game. http://phys.org/news290491367.html Electronics 2013-06-15T06:30:01-07:00 Microsoft and Sony offered new details this week on the game consoles they will start selling before the holiday shopping season. The Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 will join Nintendo's Wii U, which came out last year, in vying for shoppers' attention and dollars at a time many people are turning to phones and tablets for gaming. http://phys.org/news290444032.html Electronics 2013-06-14T15:54:56-07:00 Clear your kitchen benches - a design proposal for a wi fi/bluetooth tablet that does away with recipe books, shopping lists, guesswork, kitchen scales, anxiety about balanced meals and, possibly the telephone, has won the Graduate of the Year Awards in Queensland in Industrial Design. http://phys.org/news290411791.html Electronics 2013-06-14T06:57:23-07:00 A toy helicopter created from cannibalised smartphones was among the main attractions at a huge toy show in Tokyo on Friday, where producers were targeting the young and the young-at-heart. http://phys.org/news290405306.html Electronics 2013-06-14T05:09:45-07:00 Samsung Electronics today announced the launch of the Samsung GALAXY S4 zoom, a powerful new device which combines the stylish heritage of the latest GALAXY S4 smartphone with advanced photographic capabilities. http://phys.org/news290328496.html Electronics 2013-06-13T07:48:28-07:00 Facebook on Wednesday started processing data through its first server farm outside the United States, on the edge of the Arctic Circle in Sweden. http://phys.org/news290253786.html Electronics 2013-06-12T11:03:12-07:00 AMD today unveiled its most powerful member of the AMD FX family of CPUs, the world's first commercially available 5 GHz CPU processor, the AMD FX-9590. These 8-core CPUs deliver new levels of gaming and multimedia performance for desktop enthusiasts. AMD FX-9000 Series CPUs will be available initially in PCs through system integrators. http://phys.org/news290242859.html Electronics 2013-06-12T08:01:14-07:00 Sony insists that the game console war is far from won, despite its PR launch triumph over Microsoft this week, as gamers scramble to get their hands on the next generation devices. http://phys.org/news290231923.html Electronics 2013-06-12T05:10:01-07:00 Microsoft on Monday fired a shot in the looming videogame console war with the announcement that its new champion - Xbox One - will launch in November in 21 countries. http://phys.org/news290147499.html Electronics 2013-06-11T06:20:01-07:00 Sony's new-generation PlayStation 4 console scored an opening skirmish triumph over Microsoft's Xbox One on the eve of the Tuesday start of premier E3 videogame conference in Los Angeles. http://phys.org/news290147261.html Electronics 2013-06-11T06:00:01-07:00 Sony is giving gamers their first look at the PlayStation 4—and it's a rectangular black box, just like all the previous PlayStations. http://phys.org/news290146879.html Electronics 2013-06-11T05:21:30-07:00 Microsoft has its head in the cloud with Xbox One. http://phys.org/news290090157.html Electronics 2013-06-10T13:36:04-07:00 (Phys.org) —How is this for bragging rights in the always-on title grab for the world's fastest supercomputer: China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer, aka Milkyway-2, recently measured at speeds of 31 petaflops (30.65) out of a theoretical peak of 49.19. The kicker is that it was not even running at full capacity. The fastest result was only using 90 percent of the machine. The stats come from a five-hour Linpack test using 14,336 nodes and 50 GB of memory of each node. (The Linpack benchmark is a measure of a computer's floating-point rate of execution. It is determined by running a computer program that solves a system of linear equations.) The numbers were revealed by University of Tennessee professor Jack Dongarra, who introduced the Linpack benchmarks, and who helps compile the biannual Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. http://phys.org/news290067415.html Electronics 2013-06-10T07:40:01-07:00 Lovers of physical keyboards, BlackBerry hasn't forgotten about you. The Canadian company's Q10 smartphone, the second phone running the new BlackBerry 10 operating system, began rolling out to U.S. carriers this week. http://phys.org/news289823394.html Electronics 2013-06-07T11:30:09-07:00 Microsoft's upcoming Xbox One gaming console will be able to play used games, clearing up a worry among gamers and video game retailers such as GameStop, which trade in used games. http://phys.org/news289819934.html Electronics 2013-06-07T10:32:26-07:00 It may not be able to carry the clubs like a caddie but a new "smart watch" can help a golfer find his range on the course, and its makers are taking a swing at the global market as part of a new trend in wearable computing. http://phys.org/news289803802.html Electronics 2013-06-07T06:20:01-07:00 Google chief Larry Page assured investors that privacy fears about the company's coming Internet glasses will fade as people incorporate the eyewear into their lives. http://phys.org/news289803764.html Electronics 2013-06-07T06:02:53-07:00 As a child, I watched "The Jetsons" on TV every Saturday morning. I wasn't as enamored of the flying cars as I was the push-button home automation. http://phys.org/news289712168.html Electronics 2013-06-06T05:00:01-07:00 The wearable computing craze went to the dogs on Wednesday with startup Whistle introducing a smart pendant that tracks physical activity levels and sleep patterns in canines. http://phys.org/news289666929.html Electronics 2013-06-05T16:40:01-07:00 Modern BlackBerrys with physical keyboards are now available in the U.S., months after the touch-screen versions went on sale. http://phys.org/news289666248.html Electronics 2013-06-05T15:50:54-07:00 (Phys.org) —Engineers in the Coordinated Robotics Lab at the University of California, San Diego, have developed new image processing techniques for rapid exploration and characterization of structural fires by small Segway-like robotic vehicles. http://phys.org/news289664448.html Electronics 2013-06-05T15:40:01-07:00 In the past month, Google has been handing out the first editions of its much-anticipated Glass wearable computer devices to a select group that was chosen to be the first to try it out. One of them was avid bicyclist and science-fiction writer Margo Rowder, who was invited to pick up the high-tech eyewear at a Google office in Los Angeles. All those selected to buy the glasses must pick them up at a Google office and go through what some say feels like a Google initiation. http://phys.org/news289644530.html Electronics 2013-06-05T12:20:01-07:00