Tech Universe: Thursday 14 July

New Zealand and Australia are up against South Africa to be part of the awesome Square Kilometre Array telescope. Photo / Supplied

EYE PHONE: Cataracts are the main cause of blindness. MIT's CATRA project uses off-the-shelf components and a smartphone to help with diagnosis. The user looks into an eyepiece and responds to what they see. This could give people in developing countries ready access to low cost cataract diagnosis and help. Smartphone is such a misnomer.
MIT has more, and video of the similar Netra for eyeglass prescriptions is YouTube.

GENIUS EPLANE: The eGenius project at the University of Stuttgart created an electric plane that has both speed and range. A 56-kilowatt-hour battery pack powers a motor on the tail of a motor glider. In a recent test with two people aboard the plane flew at 160 km/h for around two hours - a total of 340 km. These electric planes are starting to look useful. Wired has more.

SKY LOAD: The Square Kilometre Array radio telescope that Australia and New Zealand are bidding to host will generate more data per day than the entire internet when it's up and running in 2020 - up to an exabyte (one billion GB) a day of raw data. New data centres will need to be constructed to handle the load. The SKA will be 10,000 times more powerful than any current telescope. Do they need their own undersea
cables too? has more.

CLAM ROCK: All high-tech was low-tech once. After all, we humans started by banging rocks together. An Australian Blackspot Tuskfish was photographed recently using a rock as a tool to open up a clam for dinner. Evidence of prior use was clear in the broken shells around its anvil rock. Can we be sure it wasn't a game of rock, clam, seaweed Spock? Wired has details.

- Miraz Jordan knowit.co.nz