How Much Screen-time is Too Much?

Astonishingly enough, Oxford University scientists found no relevant evidence for a connection between so-called screen time and well-being among adolescents...

In addition to your passport and driver's licence, also an application on your phone with which you could quickly and securely prove your identity, and offers even more privacy options? TU Delft has — together with the Netherlands Identity Data Agency (RvIG), IDEMIA (the current producer of Dutch passports) and law firm CMS, as part of the Dutch Blockchain Coalition — developed a first prototype for a digital stamp that potentially could serve this purpose in the future...

Mobile devices such as smartphones are currently protected from improper use by a password, swipe gesture and fingerprint or face recognition (with increasing levels of security). These measures alone do not provide a sufficiently high level of security. A new biometric security system is under development that combines a fingerprint pattern together with a scan of the blood vessel patterning in the finger...

According to the US National Toxicology Program, radiation emitted by cellphones is safe for humans, according to recent studies in rats and mice...

Spectrometry, the analysis of visible and invisible light has many applications. Every material and every structure has its own ‘fingerprint’ when considering the absorption and reflection of light, and can therefore be identified spectrometrically. Accurate spectrometers split the light using a prism or grid into different colors (frequencies), which are measured individually. Very accurate measurements are only possible multiple tens of centimeters after the splitting, when the different wavelengths are no longer overlapping each other…

In some products circuit board real estate is extremely limited and every square millimetre that can be freed up is valuable. Smartphones are an example of such products, which is why the new L20G20IS 2-axis gyroscope from STMicroelectronics, targeted at smartphone camera stabilizer applications, is a great leap forward: it liberates a whopping 1.29 square millimetre compared to its predecessor L2G2IS.

At a price of less than 100 euros, a reasonably equipped smartphone seems to defeat all attempts are designing and building the above modules from scratch and building them into every new application you have in mind. Not surprisingly, a vast proportion of projects I get to see from engineers contributing to Elektor Magazine employ a smartphone, usually for its display functionality and/or its touch screen as part of a user interface (UI) through Bluetooth or WiFi. Knobs, dials, meters, sliders … why go through the trouble of drilling and soldering and even purchasing parts if you can have the entire UI on single device, in your hand, battery powered, wireless, and totally reconfigurable through software only?

Although taste is subjective most people like slick graphics, which is why smartphones and smart watches come with full color, high-resolution displays, and why graphics designers can make a living from icon design for mobile device applications. The problem with nice graphics, however, is that they require a lot of computing power and energy, and place a heavy load on the usual small batteries of portable gadgets.

Researchers at Queen's University's school of Mathematics and Physics in Belfast together with Stanford University, the University of California, California State University and the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan have succeeded in developing new, dynamic hybrid materials that not only conduct electricity at unprecedented speeds, but are light and durable and can be easily produced in large conventional semiconductor plants...

Most of the time simple solutions are the best. “Keep it simple, stupid” or KISS is a well-known but often ignored design principle. Not so for this project which consists mainly of clever wiring and a bunch of connectors. What can you do with it? Not only does it allow you to get out of the wallwart phone charger mess by providing inputs for several plug types but it also lets you easily attach a volt- and ammeter to see what's happening -- and why. Hide it all in a sturdy little box and what you have is a handy adapter & test tool.