Thursday, April 30, 2009

A real invisibility cloak

Unlike previous such "cloaks", the new work does not employ metals, which introduce losses of light and result in imperfect cloaking. It's made from silicon.

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Numerious Black Holes in Milky Way

Astronomers suspect that hundreds of medium-sized black holes are roaming loose in the Milky Way. These rogues, according to a new study, are the orphaned central black holes of the many smaller galaxies that the Milky Way has swallowed over its billions of years of existence. If one of them is discovered, it could provide important clues about the evolution of our galaxy.

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Chinese Stem Cell Medicine

"In China's Guangdong Province there's been 'almost miraculous' progress in actually using stem cells to treat diseases such as brain injury, cerebral palsy, ataxia and other optic nerve damage, lower limb ischemia, autism, spinal muscular atrophy, and multiple sclerosis. One Chinese biotech company, Beike, is now building a 21,500 square foot stem cell storage facility and hiring professors from American universities such as Stanford. Two California families even flew their children to China for a cerebral palsy treatment that isn't available in the US. The founder of Beike is so enthusiastic, he says his company is exploring the concept of using stem cells to extend longevity beyond 120 years."

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Internet Brownouts

Internet users face regular “brownouts” that will freeze their computers as capacity runs out in cyberspace, according to research to be published later this year.


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GE's 500GB holographic storage discs

GE has developed a micro-holographic disc that's the same size as present-day CD, DVD and Blu-ray discs. Instead of the two-dimensional surfaces used for Blu-ray's 50GB, holographic storage uses three dimensions to store digital data. These discs can store 500GB of data by using holographic light patterns to densely pack three-dimensional data.

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Paper Flexpeakers



Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute: An effective range of 500Hz to 200KHz leaves an awful lot of lower frequencies lacking, but perhaps someone will invent a paper subwoofer one of these days.

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Sending emails through the Earth

Hidden photons are a class of particles predicted by so-called supersymmetric extensions to the standard model of particle physics. Unlike normal photons, hidden photons could have a tiny mass and would be invisible because they would not interact with the charged particles in conventional matter. This means hidden photons would flit through even the densest materials unaffected.

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Trash Energy

"Trash will move from being a liability to an asset, providing a clean source of energy that can be used right where it is produced," says Stuart Haber, the company's CEO.



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IST Energy

Quantum Computers

Quantum computers have arrived at last, experts say – but instead of replacing standard computing methods, they are complementing them.

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Humanity's carbon budget


Humans must not inject more than 1 trillion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere in total.

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Predicting the future

Real-time web search – which scours only the latest updates to services like Twitter – is currently generating quite a buzz because it can provide a glimpse of what people around the world are thinking or doing at any given moment.

The latest research from Google, though, suggests that real-time results could be even more powerful – they may reveal the future as well as the present.

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Could the net become self-aware

In engineering terms, it is easy to see qualitative similarities between the human brain and the internet's complex network of nodes, as they both hold, process, recall and transmit information. "The internet behaves a fair bit like a mind," says Ben Goertzel, chair of the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute, an organisation inevitably based in cyberspace. "It might already have a degree of consciousness".

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Gel that moves

A chemical gel that can walk like an inchworm, or looper caterpillar has been demonstrated in a Japanese robotics lab. The video shows the material in action. It was created in the Shuji Hashimoto applied physics laboratory at Waseda University, Tokyo.



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Sunday, April 26, 2009

What's going on?

Left-handed spiral galaxies dominate northern skies.
And right-handed ones are more common in the south, according to a new survey. This alignment points directly towards the mysterious cold spot in the cosmic microwave background, which was discovered in the southern hemisphere in 2004

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Thought Control

Honda has developed technology that enables humans to direct robot movements through thought. Although it is still in the embryonic stages with no practical applications for the foreseeable future, researchers are mulling some far-out possibilities, such as driving a car without a steering wheel.

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Face Mining

"Accurate face recognition is coming," says Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition, a face recognition start-up spun out from Carnegie Mellon University.

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Super Sunglasses


Researchers have developed a material that almost instantaneously changes from clear to dark blue when exposed to ultraviolet (UV) light, and it just as quickly reverts to clear when the light is turned off. The new material, one of a class called photochromics, could be useful in optical data storage as well as in super-fancy sunglasses.

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Friday, April 24, 2009

Peugeot Electric Car


Peugeot announced a contest for budding car designers asking them to "Imagine the Peugeot in the Worldwide Megalopolis of tomorrow." By all accounts, the contest was a success with over 2,500 entries. Carlos Arturo Torres Tovar, a 27-year-old designer from Columbia, has been named the winner, which comes with the prize of seeing his Peugeot RD concept design come to life as a full-size clay model, a check for 10,000 euros and an Xbox 360 game console.

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Fart Power

Yes, some college students have captured our imaginations again. A new electrical farting machine could improve fuel cell technology by turning C02 in the atmosphere into methane.

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Self-Healing Plastics


Department of Chemical Engineering/Product Technology, University of Groningen, Nijenborgh 4, 9747 AG, Groningen, The Netherlands.

Inspired by the phenomenon of self-healing in biological systems, the synthesis of man-made self-healing polymeric materials has become a newly emerging paradigm and a fascinating area of research.

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Thursday, April 16, 2009

Solar Energy to become bigger

Gartner has predicted that the photovoltaic market will grow at a 17 percent compound annual growth rate between 2008 and 2013.

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Virus Battery


MIT researchers have used a genetically modified virus to assemble materials for an energy-efficient battery, which they say could be used in hybrid cars.

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Biometric - Ear Noise

Scientists at the University of Southampton have developed a system that can authenticate your identity by eliciting and listening to specific sounds emitted by your ear. The concept is based on otoacoustic emissions (OAE), which are sounds emitted by the mammalian inner ear in response to an audio stimulation. Their existence was first demonstrated experimentally by David Kemp in 1978 but, since then, the noises have not found an application beyond testing for hearing defects.

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Computer-Human Interaction

MIT -- Imagine being able to check your email on any blank wall, simply by drawing an @ sign in the air with your finger, or being able to check the time by using that same finger to draw a circle, which produces the image of an analog watch right on your wrist.

See Video Here

The future of Robots



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Sunday, April 12, 2009

The end of Moore's Law

IBM researcher says Moore's Law at end or close to it.

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TV is changing


Is the way TV is now brought to your home going to change? Once there were only three network channels. Then, Cable and satellite TV emerged, which expanded to hundreds, now thousands, of channels. Internet and network providers really kicked things into gear. Cellphones made it even crazier. Throw in Netflix, Xbox and PlayStation 3 streaming, along with Roku, Amazon Video on Demand, Apple TV, Blockbuster MediaPoint, Vudu, Zvbox, Boxee, and XStreamHD, and it's just plain nuts. TV is getting complicated, and everyone, particularly the networks, are scrambling to keep up. Will it go the way of printed newspapers?

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Flat light bulbs


AGFA-Gevaert NV and IMEC of Belgium, and Holst Center, Philips Research and TNO of the Netherlands announced that they have prototyped a 12 x 12cm flexible OLED lighting panel by using highly-conductive transparent resin electrodes in place of ITO (indium tin oxide).

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Megnetic flying micro-robots

A research team lead by professor Mir Behrad Khamesee manipulated magnetic fields to levitate and move a robot weighing less than one gramme around three axes.

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Wednesday, April 8, 2009

The Neurostep

The Neurostep is a pacemaker-like device implanted inside the thigh. It uses nerve cuffs to sense and stimulate nerve activity in the paralyzed leg, allowing greater mobility for those suffering from neurological disabilities such as stroke, multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injury or cerebral palsy. It has been engineered to integrate with the body’s natural sensing and stimulation network and designed to closely mimic specific functions that have been interrupted or lost due to disease or injury.

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Biochar

University of Georgia researchers have created a machine that turns organic trash into charcoal-like pellets farmers can turn into fertilizer. Gasses given off during the process can be harnessed to fuel vehicles of power electric generators.

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3D HDTV remote surgery system


The da Vinci® Si™ system sports high definition 3D video and an array of other gadgets that come with fashion and ownership value similar to a family Rolls Royce sedan.



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The Wave


The car is meant to be an affordable electric vehicle for commuters — it can get up to 170 miles on a charge. It starts at $34,000.

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The PUMA


A motorized wheelchair? I like the concept!

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Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Fusion Power Research

When scientists at the U.S. National Ignition Facility fire up their 192 lasers for a nanosecond or two, blasting 1.8 megajoules of ultraviolet energy at a deuterium and tritium target, we'll see if fusion power is created.

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Flat, flexible loudspeakers


UK engineers have developed a new speaker technology. Flat, flexible loudspeakers, or FFL, have been fine-tuned using layers of flexible laminates and are about the size of a standard piece of paper.

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LLNL