Is Your Keyboard Bugged?

No, not that sort of bug, we’re talking about the type that gives you nasty infections. If your keyboard is anything like mine it’s probably crawling with gems, but that doesn’t matter, they’re my germs and we’ve got used to each other. One place where germs are unacceptable is in hospitals, where doctors can carry all sorts of nasties around with them, tap in your details on a keyboard, and then the next person to use it picks them up on their fingers, you get the picture. Read more

How One-way Mirrors Work

A one-way mirror is basically just like any other mirror, just that it has the ability of reflecting light on one side while on the other, it is transparent. Typical mirrors achieve a high degree of reflectiveness on one side, leaving the reverse opaque to optical light. This is done by covering the glass layer with a silvered coating. One-way mirrors, however, use half silvered surfaces in order to achieve a balance between reflectiveness and transparency, in combination with carefully adjusted amounts of light.

Practically, the silvered coating is only half of that of a typical mirror, meaning that it reflects half of the incoming light, leaving the other half pass right through. The concept is relatively similar to that used in lasers. Inside a laser, photons of light are being bounced between two mirrors, one with 100 percent reflectiveness and the other with 99 percent. Read more

Google Bubbling Under

Google has mapped the Earth and the skies, now, according to CNET News it is turning it attention to the briny deep. Provisionally dubbed Google Ocean, it’s a work in progress, now being developed by a team of eminent oceanographers. The idea is to create a 3D map of the sea floor and if the early indications and speculation proves correct users will be able to ‘dive’ below the surface of the seas and using images based on a mixture of sonar maps and satellite data and navigate their way through the watery environment, visiting shipwrecks and coral reefs.