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Sci-Tech

Years Of I-phone Innovations Meant Big Expectations For Newest Models

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Have things changed in the past 5 years? Take a look at this article from 2014 and let us know via the comments section below.

In the summer of 2007, Mike Lazardis, co-founder of BlackBerry, got an iPhone to check what’s inside. He pried it open and was shocked on what he saw: BlackBerry wasn’t competing with a phone, he thought, it was competing against a Mac. Lazardis was recalling that moment in an interview with The Globe and Mail, hinting about the months leading to the fall of RIM.

Such is the iPhone’s disruptive story: it put the computer in our phones and made them smart. Suddenly, we could buy and play music in our phones, surf the net via wifi, run desktop-like OS, and, the best defining factor of a smartphone, download apps. We do all that without a keypad (to BlackBerry’s shock). No, Apple didn’t invent these technologies, it innovated them. Over a decade earlier, IBM had Simon, the world’s first smartphone.

In the infographic prepared by our creative team we highlighted the key features in each iPhone launch since the first generation phone came out in 2007. Some features are truly innovative (A series chip, Siri, App Store) and some are unabashed embellishments.

So what’s in store for future iPhones? We can get some clues from Apple patents registered with the U.S. Trademark and Office. Apple is developing an audio jack to double as a headphone jack, plus an audio transducer that doesn’t need a grille to emit sound. That means future iPhones can be totally enclosed or water-proofed. Another patent talks about combining motion analyzer, scenery analyzer, and lockout mechanism to detect if you’re driving and disable Messages Apps. With the increasing text-induced car accidents, expect this feature sooner than later.

Yet another patent indicates that Apple is cooking an intelligent Home Page that brings up the app you need for specific scenarios like when you need to show an electronic ticket in an airport or an e-coupon at a counter. The patent uses location-based signals and tracks user data patterns like calendars, emails, notes, etc. to predict when to bring up the app.

But let’s not talk about the future; rather, let’s see what iPhone users want today. For the Silo, Alex Hillsberg.

iPhone6 Predicted

iPhone6 PredictediPhone6 Predicted

 

Supplemental- Are Apple products made ethically?

Earth

Sugar Battery Set To Power Phones, Tablets And Other Devices

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Catalyzing Commercialization Sugar could some day be used to power smartphones, tablets, and other electronic devices thanks to a recent breakthrough by Blacksburg, VA-based Cell-Free BioInnovations, Inc. It might seem strange to use an ingredient found in cupcakes and cookies as an energy source, but it’s not, as most living cells break down sugar to produce energy. And, interestingly, the energy density of sugar is significantly higher than that of current lithium-ion batteries.

Working under a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Science Foundation, a research team led by Y-H Percival Zhang, Chief Science Officer of Cell- Free BioInnovations and an associate professor of biological systems engineering at Virginia Tech, has successfully demonstrated the concept of a sugar biobattery that can completely convert the chemical energy in sugar substrates into electricity.

As reported in the January 2014 issue of Nature Communications, this breakthrough in sugar-powered biobattery can achieve an energy-storage density of about 596 A-h/kg — an order of magnitude higher than the 42 A-h/kg energy density of a typical lithium-ion battery.

A sugar biobattery with such a high energy density could last at least ten times longer than existing lithium-ion batteries of the same weight, drastically reducing how often users need to recharge their electronic devices. This nature-inspired biobattery is a type of enzymatic fuel cell (EFC)— an electrobiochemical device that converts chemical energy from fuels such as starch and glycogen into electricity.

While EFCs operate under the same general principles as traditional fuel cells, they use enzymes instead of noble metal catalysts to oxidize the fuel. Enzymes allow for the use of more-complex fuels (e.g. glucose), and these more-complex fuels are what give EFCs their superior energy density. For example, the complex sugar hexose can release 24 electrons per glucose molecule during oxidation, whereas hydrogen (a fuel used in traditional fuel cells) releases only two electrons. Until now, however, EFCs have been limited by incomplete oxidation, releasing just two to four electrons per glucose molecule.

“We are not the first who proposed using sugar as the fuel in the biobattery,” says Zhiguang Zhu, a senior scientist at Cell-Free BioInnovations. “However, we are the first to demonstrate the complete oxidation of the sugar in the biobattery, enabling our technology to have a near-theoretical energy conversion yield that no one has ever reported.”

Zhang and his team constructed a synthetic catabolic pathway (a series of metabolic reactions that break down complex organic molecules) containing 13 enzymes to completely oxidize the glucose units of maltodextrin, yielding nearly 24 electrons per glucose molecule.

We put specific thermostable enzymes into one vessel to constitute a synthetic enzymatic pathway that can perform a cascade of biological reactions the sugar, converting it into carbon dioxide, Zhang says. Unlike natural catabolic pathways for the oxidation of glucose in cells, the designed synthetic pathway does not require costly and unstable cofactors, such as adenosine triphosphate (ATP), coenzyme A, or a labile cellular membrane. The researchers used two redox enzymes that generate reduced nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NADH) from sugar metabolites. NADH, a reducing agent involved in redox reactions, is a natural electron mediator that carries electrons from one molecule to another. They also used ten other enzymes responsible for sustaining metabolic cycles and an additional enzyme that transfers electrons from NADH to the electrode.

This new synthetic pathway enables the biobattery to extract the theoretical number of electrons per glucose unit and thereby use all the chemical energy in the sugar. This, the team reports, represents a significant breakthrough.

In addition to its superior energy density, the sugar biobattery is also less costly than the Li-ion battery, refillable, environmentally friendly, and nonflammable. While researchers  continue to work on extending the lifetime, increasing the power density, and reducing the cost of electrode materials for such a battery, they hope that the rapidly growing appetite for powering portable electronic devices could well be met with this energy dense sugar biobattery in the future. For the Silo, Zhiguang Zhu, chief scientist at”The Sweet Battery Project”.

This technology was funded through the America’s NSF Small Business Innovation Research Program.