Look at this: The first 4K laptop, Toshiba's Satellite P55t, coming soon

PCWorld - Open your pocketbooks, 4K fans, Toshiba's first Ultra HD laptop is headed your way next Tuesday. The Tokyo-based electronics maker just announced that the Toshiba Satellite P55t will hit U.S. store shelves on April 22, starting at $1,500 for the base model.

For all that cash you'll get a 15.6-inch laptop with a quad-core Intel Core i7 processor (no word on the specific model), up to 16GB RAM, an AMD Radeon R9 M265X discrete graphics card with 2GB RAM, and a 1TB hard drive. Other niceties include Windows 8.1, four USB 3.0 ports, backlit keyboard, SD card slot, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, HDMI out, and some brand name speakers from Harman Kardon.

But the big feature for the P55t is the laptop's screen resolution, which is 3840-by-2160 with 282 pixels per inch. Astute 4K fans will note that Toshiba's new clamshell is using the Ultra HD version of 4K and not the 4096-by-2160 resolution favored by the film industry and available on some external monitors.

In addition to its Ultra HD resolution, Toshiba's laptop earned Technicolor Color Certification, promising more natural-looking colors and "true-to-life imagery." Toshiba is also bundling a free copy of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 to take advantage of all that 'glorious Technicolor.'    Read More

First Artificial Red Blood Cells Made

Forbes - Artificial red blood cells good enough to be transfused into patients have been developed for the first time. Scaled up to industrial levels, the breakthrough could lead to factories producing virtually limitless supplies of cheap blood – technically called erythrocytes – for use in the world’s most common life-saving medical procedure.

“We have made red blood cells that are fit to go in a person’s body,” said Marc Turner, medical director at the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service, who is leading the £5m ($8.5m) project funded by the Wellcome Trust. “Before now, we haven’t really had that.”

The announcement is the latest in the relatively new field of regenerative medicine, which has already seen the development of artificial skin, liver, bone, cartilage and blood vessels, though not always in useful quantities.

The new source of supply could consist entirely of Type O negative blood, which can be transfused into any patient. This is currently quite rare, as only 7 per cent of donors have Type O negative.   Read More

This Tiny Telescope Will Be The First Moon-Mounted Webcam

Ever since humans looked up, we've been obsessed with gazing deep into the seemingly infinite cosmos. We've got plenty of telescopes both on Earth and floating around it that are staring out into the abyss, but the ILO-X is going to be perched on the moon. And you'll be able to use it right from your computer. 

A joint venture between International Lunar Observatory Association and Moon Express, the ILO-X has been in the works for a while, but now its form is finally complete. Sometime in 2015, it'll be the first private telescope to land on the moon with all its discoveries piped right back to our terrestrial Internet. And that's just the beginning; the plan is to eventually have an entire remote-controlled observatory at the moon's south pole, but you've got to start somewhere. 

The ILO-X is a tiny little sucker, about the size of a shoebox, and its camera has a mere 6.4-megapixel resolution. But the goal isn't to be the best telescope out there. The aim is to be a lunar telescope anyone can use. The 'scope's Internet-based control system was already tested here on Earth, and so now the only step is to get that souped-up webcam on the moon.     More

First Quadruple Rainbow Picture

Photograph courtesy Michael Theusner, Applied Optics


NatGeo - Blink and you might miss them, but these two colorful smudges (center) form the second half of the first quadruple rainbow to be caught on camera, validating years of claims that such phenomena could exist, a new study says.

“[It's as if] the natives are telling you that there’s this creature in the rain forest, but they only have stories,” said Raymond Lee, a professor of meteorology at the U.S. Naval Academy, who recently published a study in the journal Applied Opticsdescribing the conditions under which a tertiary rainbow should be visible.

Lee’s research inspired some scientists to try to snap photos of the elusive vision, resulting in this picture, taken June 11 near Bremerhaven, Germany. “When you finally succeed in capturing it in photography, that’s a thrill,” Lee said.

And while “quadruple rainbow” might call to mind a stack of four arcs, only two rainbows can be caught in a single frame, because of the way light reflects and bends within raindrops.                          

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