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Take my taxi to the moon

Susmita Mohanty, the founder of India’s first private space company, Earth2Orbit, wants India to claim bigger piece of the space-launch pie.She is CEO of Earth2Orbit, which recently launched its first client satellite. An aerospace entrepreneur and spaceship designer, she has worked at NASA and Boeing,...

Glasses-free 3D screen lets you see the wider picture

Future displays may soon go even further. Researchers from the Institute of Informatics at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Brazil, Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and MIT have designed a screen that can compensate for bad eyesight, too. "It...

One Minute with Nicholas Negroponte

Can tablet computers "parachuted" into remote areas transform childhood learning, asks Nicholas Negroponte, the man behind One Laptop per Child You'll helicopter computers into remote areas so the children there can teach themselves to read and write. Where did the idea come from? One Laptop...

Tangible Media Group, MIT, Cambridge, MA USA

Smartphone add-on will bring eye test to the masses

HAVING trouble reading your cellphone's screen? If that's because you need glasses, your phone itself could be used tell you what strength lenses you need. Ramesh Raskar of the Camera Culture group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has devised a method of providing basic...

18th century Painters give Photographers new Perspective

Wide-angle lenses are great for taking dramatic photographs with a big scenic sweep, but they've got a big weakness too – they distort objects towards the edge of the frame. Now software can make wide-angled digital photos with perfect perspective, thanks to a secret of...

Embedded Electronics Bring Pop-Up Books to Life

Move over Kindle, there's a new type of electronic book on the scene – and this one's got pop-ups. The Electronic Popable book, developed by the High-Low Tech group at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, has electronic circuitry embedded in its pages that transforms...