I would have never expected Beavers as being deadly. Well, I guess you learn something new everyday. 

A fisherman in Belarus was bitten to death by a beaver, and all he was doing was trying to take its picture, Sky News reports. The man spotted the beaver while fishing with friends at Lake Shestakov, but as he approached to take a photograph, the beaver bit him on the thigh. The animal managed to sever an artery, and his friends couldn’t stop the blood flow.

There are no current details as to who he was. However, don’t forget that if they can bite through tree bark, they can bite through your flesh (ouch!). 

So put those cell phone cameras away, that beaver really doesn’t need to go on Instagram, it probably doesn’t even want to be there. 

No matter how calm they look, stay away. Here’s a video of how they typically attack people. Chances are, they may be rabid too.

Now I know why they named the show ‘Angry Beavers’. 

(Source: USA Today)

This news from Canon is incredible. They really improved their low light performance!



Check out their video on their site: 
http://www.canon.com/news/2013/mar04e.html

It works by magic. Here’s an explanation of their voodoo magic: 

The newly developed CMOS sensor features pixels measuring 19 microns square in size, which is more than 7.5-times the surface area of the pixels on the CMOS sensor incorporated in Canon’s top-of-the-line EOS-1D X and other digital SLR cameras. In addition, the sensor’s pixels and readout circuitry employ new technologies that reduce noise, which tends to increase as pixel size increases. Thanks to these technologies, the sensor facilitates the shooting of clearly visible video images even in dimly lit environments with as little as 0.03 lux of illumination, or approximately the brightness of a crescent moon—a level of brightness in which it is difficult for the naked eye to perceive objects. When recording video of astral bodies, while an electron-multiplying CCD,^*2 which realizes approximately the same level of perception as the naked eye, can capture magnitude-6 stars, Canon’s newly developed CMOS sensor is capable of recording faint stars with a magnitude of 8.5 and above.^*3

Thanks to Andrew Coutts for the find!

The European Union just invested $1.35 Billion to research graphene’s use. This isn’t a regular fund, this is insane. 

So what is it? It’s the ‘world’s strongest material’ that is also exceptionally thin, and an unbelievable conductor of heat and electricity.  

So what, right? Wrong. 

“Like iron or plastic or silicon, a lot of materials scientists think graphene is going to be one of those things that quite literally launches an era, like the Industrial Revolution or the Digital Age.”

It will be in everything from light and strong cameras, computers, cars, and so much more. 

“Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, first made graphene in 2004 at the University of Manchester, later winning them the Nobel Prize in Physics.”

This will be coming down the pipeline in 10 years. It’s going to happen.

Read more about it here: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-01/eu-invests-135-billion-developing-practical-applications-graphene

Let’s take a look at how fast our internet connections are now. 

Some people are currently at 12 Mbps, recently they’ve been a lot of upgradable options to jump to 30 Mbps and higher. For example. Verizon has rolled out Fios which goes up to 300Mbps. That’s a full HD movie in around 2 minutes or so. 

The google test connection which is based on fiber optics is now 1 Gpbs, so approximately 3 times faster than than the top tier connection available. 

Now comes a technological advancement that blows it all away. 

2.5 Terabits per second. That’s 2.5 Tbps. 2,500 times faster than even Google’s 1 Gigabit per second fiber optic connection. 

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/131640-infinite-capacity-wireless-vortex-beams-carry-2-5-terabits-per-second

American and Israeli researchers have used twisted, vortex beams to transmit data at 2.5 terabits per second. As far as we can discern, this is the fastest wireless network ever created — by some margin. This technique is likely to be used in the next few years to vastly increase the throughput of both wireless and fiber-optic networks.

In this case, Alan Willner and fellow researchers from the University of Southern California, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Tel Aviv University, twisted together eight ~300Gbps visible light data streams using OAM. Each of the eight beams has a different level of OAM twist. The beams are bundled into two groups of four, which are passed through different polarization filters. One bundle of four is transmitted as a thin stream, like a screw thread, while the other four are transmitted around the outside, like a sheathe. The beam is then transmitted over open space (just one meter in this case), and untwisted and processed by the receiving end. 2.5 terabits per second is equivalent to 320 gigabytes per second, or around seven full Blu-ray movies per second.

The future is about to get better exponentially. Get excited. 

What would we possibly use this speed for? Perhaps cloud computing which may be the future. Who knows, but I still want it.