ATMs soon to defend themselves from robbers

ATMs (Automated Teller Machines) are soon to be armed with a mechanism that sprays hot foam of chemicals in the face of the attacker or robber who is trying to open it  unauthorizedly.

Researchers of ETH University at Zurich are currently working on this and they've developed a film that will react when it is damaged. Two films with different chemicals are placed on top of each other and when they are damaged or subjected to an impact, the layers between them gets destroyed and the chemicals mixes. This triggers a reaction that produces oxygen, heat and water  vapor  foam with high temperatures reaching 80 degrees.

Wendelin Jan Stark, a professor at ETH's department of chemistry and applied biosciences said that this is less expensive and can be applied to all ATMs. He said that this mechanism spray the robbers and existing banknotes, so that it will make the cash useless even after it if robbed and it can even be traced.

This new tech is very useful as the number of ATM attacks are increasing quite fast these years. This is not only suitable for ATMs but also for things like cash transportation vehicles and all.

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Storedot offers new 30 second phone charging tech

Israel based StoreDot showed up a device that is made of biological structures at Microsoft’s Think Next conference. Their tech claims to charge smartphone battery in matter of seconds. Imagine, a dead phone gets full-charged in 30, 40 seconds! That sounds cool!

They used a Samsung Galaxy S4 at the stall to demonstrate in which the dead battery was charged to full power in just 26 seconds. In this demo, they’ve attached a small boxy thing with the battery pack.

This battery uses tiny nano crystals and they are referred as “stable, robust spheres” by StoreDot. They are 2.1 nanometers in diameter and are made of peptide molecules. These batteries are around 30-40% more expensive than the traditional battery technologies and some say that its charger or something like that will cost very high. However the product will be twice as expensive as the current batteries in the market when it comes.

The battery now is just a prototype and they say that it will take upto three years for their entry in commercial markets.

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India's ISRO plans a mini Hubble Telescope for space

It seems like India's Indian Space Research Organisation is joining the club of top space exploring countries such as the US, China and few European countries. These years, the ISRO is planning and launching many projects like this for the space exploration and all. They've launched a Mars exploring orbiter named MOM (locally Mangalyaan) and are planning for an indigenous space capsule to carry man to space.

Now they are making another interesting one. They said that they are developing a mini version of the big Hubble Space Telescope of NASA/ESA. They also said that it will be called 'Astrosat'.

"Astrosat is nearly getting ready and it would be unique with three aspects — UV rays, visible and X rays. Even Hubble does not have this aspect. Though Hubble is big, Astrosat will be a small one." - Kiran Kumar, Director of Space Application Centre, Ahmedabad

From this, we get that they are saying that this is something unique and/but smaller than Hubble. The optics of Astrosat will be just 300mm in diameter while the Hubble has a gigantic 2.4m diameter one. ISRO chairman said that this satellite will be launched sometime next year. They are also working on a satellite to study the Sun named 'Aditya' whose mission would be announced in three to four years from now.

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