New generation wireless mouse

A new generation of wireless computer mouse has been introduced at the CeBit computer show in Hanover.
The Swiftpoint Slider, designed by Christchurch inventor Grant Odgers, is a wireless magnetic mouse which would work without a battery and is designed to slide over the keypad of a notebook computer.

The mouse will turn the computer itself into a mousepad as it is tracked by electromagnetic sensors fitted under the computer’s keyboard.

Along with the mouse, Odgers also unveiled the Swiftpoint Triped, a version of the device that works on the same principle but is designed to substitute the pens used with tablet computers.

It was Canterbury University associate professor Andy Cockburn, who performed trials on a prototype built by Odgers in 2006 and claims that the Slider works better than one might imagine.

“I was a little bit sceptical about it, but when you look at the design of pretty much all laptop keyboards, the keys are flush. You would think it would catch, but it doesn’t — these devices do actually glide very smoothly,” stuff.co.nz quoted him, as saying.

Cockburn said that tests on one of Odgers’ prototype in 2006 showed that his mice were 20 to 30 per cent more efficient than the usual notebook touchpad.

Parents get just 15 mins

A new survey has revealed that parents spend an average of only 15 minutes together in a day.

The poll conducted over 4,500 people revealed that the time spent together while relaxing, chatting or having sex counts up to less than 10 days a year, reports The Sun.

They spend five minutes together in the morning and 10 minutes at night before going to sleep. About an average number of parents would get in a babysitter once a month for a night out. On the other hand only once in a year are they able to spend a single night away from home without the kids.

Two thirds of couples in the poll admitted they were sad at the lack of quality time together.

New dimension to Universe

The Universe is made up of three dimensions of space and one of time, it is known. Now, a team of researchers at Virginia Tech University is searching for the possibility of an extra dimension.

“The idea we’re exploring is that the Universe has an imperceptibly small dimension (about one billionth of a nanometre) in addition to the four that we know currently.

“This extra dimension would be curled up, in a state similar to that of the entire Universe at the time of the Big Bang,” lead researcher John Simonetti said.

The researchers are planning to set up an eight-metre wavelength Transient Array radio telescope to search the sky for these radio pulses from explosions up to 300 light years away from Earth.

e-mails waste office time

e-mails have joined the cigarette and the humble coffee runs as the latest threat to workplace productivity.

Researchers have carried out a study and found that e-mails have gone from being a useful office tool to a curse that actually takes up huge amounts of work time, ‘The Daily Telegraph’ reported.

According to the researchers, the average employee now spends an estimated 90 minutes to two hours a day wading through hundreds of messages, much of which is basically spam and junk mail.

The study by the Radicati Group has found that worldwide email traffic has hit 196 billion messages a day. It is predicted to reach 374 billion per day by 2011.

“Employees are now so deluged with messages that emails have become a broken business tool in urgent need of fixing. There’s been no innovation to separate the junk letters from the real ones,” Jason Preston of the Parnassus Group, a social media consultancy, said.

Ethanol from plants

Researchers have developed a process that would be able to convert large volumes of all kinds of plant products into ethanol and other biofuel alternatives to gasoline.

Developed by University of Maryland professors Steve Hutcheson and Ron Weiner, the process might be able to
convert plant products from leftover brewer’s mash to paper trash, into ethanol and gasoline.

According to President of the university C D Mote, Jr, “It makes affordable ethanol production a reality and makes it from waste materials, which benefits everyone and supports the green-friendly goal of carbon-neutrality”. Known as the Zymetis process, it can make ethanol and other biofuels from many different types of plants and plant waste called cellulosic sources.

When fully operational, the Zymetis process could potentially lead to the production of 75 billion gallons a year of carbon-neutral ethanol.