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Editor’s Note: I’m used to the occasional strange story. This is a games and technology focused site after all; but this might just take the cake.
Its a problem almost everyone has had, even if they don’t care to admit it. You know you have to go, but you just can’t. And the solution is usually some type of nasty laxative that either tastes horrible or has unpleasant side effects. But soon, instead of this less than dignified option, you will be able to turn to a tiny, swallowable engine that will get your colon back on the right track. Yes, you read that right.
The little capsule from researches at the Tel-Aviv Sourasky Medical Center is set to start vibrating six to eight hours after consumption, and will apparently err…double the weekly bowel movements of participants. The vibrations from the motor inside the capsule cause the intestine to contract and send your deliveries on their way. All without stomach pains and the unexpected…issues that laxatives can cause.
Of course, we don’t know when we might be able to ditch the Ex-Lax in favor of tiny edible motors, but I for one welcome our tiny new mechanical colon cleansing overlords!
While you may never see mix tapes or bands releasing their latest albums on cassette any more, the humble Cassette Tape still has a relatively quiet life serving as backup devices for industries with huge amounts of data to keep safe, but no immediate need to get to it later. This is because magnetic tape is still a surprisingly robust way to back up data – and now, Sony have invented a whole new method of storing data to tape which just made it even better.
Due to be discussed at today’s International Magnetics Conference in Dresden, Sony’s new method uses a vacuum-forming technique called sputter deposition to create a layer of magnetic crystals by shooting argon ions at a polymer film substrate. This lets the crystals pack together closer than any previous method to record to tape, reducing wasted space and increasing capacity within a smaller area.
Combine this with the small size of the crystals – just 7.7 nanometres on average – and the results are astonishing: the new tape can hold an eye-popping 148 GB per square inch, or the equivalent of three full-size Blu-Ray disks. Over a 60-minute tape, that equates to 185 TB of data.
But don’t expect to be using this tape to store your huge music collection any time soon – for one thing, you’ll probably find yourself rewinding and fast-forwarding the tape for DAYS. One of the reasons cassette tapes are mostly used for storing data that isn’t intended to be regularly accessed, is because tape is a linear storage method. Files are stored one after the other; so to retrieve a single file, the entire tape has to be ran through until the specific file needed is found. This process is likely to be thousands of times slower with the new tape’s huge level of storage – but that’s hardly a concern for the long-term, industrial-sized data backup performed by the world’s largest data centres, where storing data is paramount but very little is expected to be regularly accessed later. Sony also isn’t saying when or if this new type of tape is expected to hit the market, but assuming it’s only a matter of building the hardware and marketing it, then it’s just a matter of time…
The Indie Game Show with DJs Digmbot and PredictedCyborg Sunday night, 6pm til 9pm GMT, 1pm til 4pm EST.
Tonight on the Indie Game Show…
Elevate Entertainment!
Developers of small mobile platform games, having released them on platforms such as Android and Kindle Fire among others. Elevate are joining us tonight to talk about a game that will be releasing within a few days: Lumena – described as a ‘no-nonsense rhythm game’, as well as to take your questions from the IRC!
Yesterday Washington filed what is believed to be the first ever consumer lawsuit being brought against a company that has involved crowdfunding – specifically a case involving the Kickstarter campaign for a game which has failed to materialise in any donator rewards for the people who crowdfunded the project.
The lawsuit is being brought against Altius Management who, the suit alleges, has not made good on promises made to donators when getting them to fund the project in question: a set of limited edition playing cards called ‘Asylum Playing Cards’. The target of $15,000 was set and subsquently beaten when the Kickstarter came to a close in October 2012, the finishing total being $25,146 which is over $10,000 more than was asked for. The money is said to have been collected by Altius but over a year and a half later no backers have seen rewards and the last update to the campaign’s page having been made in mid-July. Some of the backers live in Washington though which has allowed the state to bring the lawsuit in question.
Although in a press release Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson stated that Washington will not stand for crowdfunder theft, he also reminded people that they needed “to be aware that crowdfunding is not without risk”.
Kickstarter have supported the action being taken, stating that they are ‘frustrated’ when projects like this where the campaign’s host seems to take the money and run happen; but also they hope that this won’t influence backers and people who want to run campaigns on their site as they have played a part in the funding of many games, books and all sorts of media in the past and hope to continue this.
