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Technology

Technology — No Comments
30
Sep 10

Mighty morphing power phones!

Discovery News reports that a team of researchers at Nokia are working on reinventing the forms and functions of the mobile phone:

Dr. Tapani Ryhanen and a team of around 25 Nokia researchers are currently working on projects such as Nanowire Sensing, Stretchable Electronic Skin and Electrotactile Experience at Nokia’s research center — some pretty far out ideas that could have a lasting impact on the future of mobile phone technology.

[...]

“Right now, circuit boards are solid. The team at Cambridge, however, are working on a technology that’ll enable them to be flexible, creating something akin to ‘electronic skin’” revealed Nokia.

Read the full article at Discovery News.

3D printing revolutionizes prosthetics, creative manufacturing

The New York Times reports on advancements in 3D printing:

“It is manufacturing with a mouse click instead of hammers, nails and, well, workers. Advocates of the technology say that by doing away with manual labor, 3-D printing could revamp the economics of manufacturing and revive American industry as creativity and ingenuity replace labor costs as the main concern around a variety of goods.”

Read the full story at the New York Times.

Society / Technology — No Comments
10
Sep 10

New Scientist: TV networks to become social networks

New Scientist predicts television will go massively social within five years:

“Some people think of TV viewing as a solitary experience. But, says Marie-José Montpetit at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is developing an experimental social TV system called Nextream, ever since the birth of TV we have been talking to each other during broadcasts. And now we’re using online social networks in the same way. ‘The Twitter servers were brought down by the World Cup because people were exchanging views about it,’ she says.”

Read the full article at New Scientist.

Technology — No Comments
9
Sep 10

3D modeling with a laser backpack

Via abc7news.com:

“Researchers at UC Berkeley have developed a laser backpack that scans its surroundings and creates instant 3D models.”

View the video at ABC 7′s video archive.

Technology — No Comments
12
Aug 10

Plastic spintronics memory successfully demonstrated

Ohio State University reports that researchers at the institution have demonstrated the first plastic computer memory device that utilizes the spin of electrons to read and write data:

“An alternative to traditional microelectronics, so-called “spintronics” could store more data in less space, process data faster, and consume less power.”

[...]

“At this point, the device is little more than a thin strip of dark blue organic-based magnet layered with a metallic ferromagnet and connected to two electrical leads. (A ferromagnet is a magnet made of ferrous metal such as iron. Common household refrigerator magnets are ferromagnets.) Still, the researchers successfully recorded data on it and retrieved the data by controlling the spins of the electrons with a magnetic field.”

Read the full story at OSU’s office of Research Communications.

Military / Technology — No Comments
10
Aug 10

U.S. military planning to leapfrog Moore’s Law

BBC News reports on a new DARPA initiative to multiply the U.S. military’s supercomputing power by a factor of 1,000 with exascale computers:

“Darpa said its research project was needed to help analyse the tidal wave of data that military systems and sensors are expected to produce.

The research project, dubbed the Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) program, would attempt to create hardware that ‘overcomes the limitations of current evolutionary approach’.

That approach is characterised by Moore’s Law which says the number of transistors that can fit on a given piece of silicon will double every 18-24 months.”

Read the story at BBC News.

Culture / Technology — 1 Comment
7
Aug 10

An introduction to cyborg anthropology

An interesting webcast by Amber Case (from O’Reilly Media’s YouTube channel):

Environment / Technology — No Comments
5
Aug 10

New process makes solar power competitive with oil

Stanford Report shares news that a solar energy conversion process discovered by Stanford engineers could revamp solar power production:

“Called ‘photon enhanced thermionic emission,’ or PETE, the process promises to surpass the efficiency of existing photovoltaic and thermal conversion technologies.”

[...]

“Photovoltaic systems never get hot enough for their waste heat to be useful in thermal energy conversion, but the high temperatures at which PETE performs are perfect for generating usable high-temperature waste heat. Melosh calculates the PETE process can get to 50 percent efficiency or more under solar concentration, but if combined with a thermal conversion cycle, could reach 55 or even 60 percent – almost triple the efficiency of existing systems.”

Read the full story at Stanford Report.

Science / Technology — No Comments
4
Aug 10

Beam-pen lithography could transform nanofabrication

Northwestern’s Megan Fellman shares news that the university has developed a new lithography-based nanofabrication process:

“The technology could do for nanofabrication what the desktop printer has done for printing and information transfer, by rapidly and inexpensively making and prototyping circuits, optoelectronics, and medical diagnostics.”

[...]

“Like PPL, beam-pen lithography uses an array of tiny pens made of a polymer to print patterns over large areas with nanoscopic through macroscopic resolution. But instead of using an ‘ink’ of molecules, BPL draws patterns using light on a light-sensitive material.”

Read the full announcement at Futurity.org.

Government / Technology — No Comments
29
Jul 10

Google, CIA invest in future of Web monitoring

Wired’s Danger Room looks into investments by Google and the CIA’s investment arm into a company that is developing non-obvious relationship awareness with large data sets on the Internet … supposedly to thwart terrorism:

“The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine ‘goes beyond search’ by ‘looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.’”

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