Maptor : The upcoming happening way of finding direction, if you are lost 

Getting lost, forgetting the roadmap to our destination will be more of fun than a cause of anguish, kudos to Maptor, a trendy pocket device which integrates a map and a projector that projects a desired map (map of the current location you are in) on a solid surface like wall, floor, palm or any flat surface. etc and smartly indicates your current location with a red arrow, with the help of GPS, already installed in it. GPS automatically downloads the appropriate map. 

This is conceptualised and designed by Jinsun Park and Seonkeun Park of Samsung Art & Design Institute, South Korea. 

It is made of a biodegradable plastic PLA(Polylactic acid) with a touchpad button to perform basic operations like zoom in and zoom out. There is a heat discharging hole that puts away the heat generated by the in-built projector while projecting the map. It is also accompanied with Bluetooth facility for transferring maps in to the device.   

Two major concerns about its performance is the readability of map in day light and the batter life. 

It is already in news for good reasons. Maptor backed a silver award at International Design excellence award, 2009 organized by Industrial Designer Society of America (IDSA). 

This device, being a smart way to get rid of the discomfort of folding and unfolding a paper map and forgetting directions, is definitely going to create waves in market.  

 Further, also check it out:

Pi : Its longest calculation ever by Japanese Super Computer

The new value of Pi is 2,576,980,370,000 decimal places long. T2K-Tsukuba System, a supercomputer at the University of Tsukuba, Northeast of Tokyo takes the credit of setting a world record for calculating the value of Pi to more than 2.5 trillion decimal places beating the previous record of more than 1.2 trillion places, set in 2002 by a team from University of Tokyo and Hitachi.

This supercomputer is comprised of 640  Quadra-Core AMD Opteron processors and processing speed of 95 Trillion floating-point operations per second. It took 73 hours and 36 minutes (including verification time) to calculate this value which is 8 times faster than the previous record(600 hrs for calculating 1.2 trillion decimal places).

Daisuke Takahashi, Associate Professor of Centre for Computational Sciences wrote the two programs for this calculation.

This is yet another step towards exploring the endless value of the geometrical constant and a way of testing the super computer.

Innovation at its best :

Why cant we create something like this !