Mud as an energy source

The soil lamp uses the chemical reaction between copper, zinc, and slightly moistened mud to create enough electrical current to power an LED lamp.

Source

AirBike

Human Powered Flight

The Airbike offers the hang glider or paraglider pilot the ability to pedal their way to new horizons.

Source

HoloTV

A team of researchers has developed a type of 3D TV system called “holoTV,” which works a bit differently than a standard holographic TV system.

Source

Spin Battery

Researchers at the University of Miami and at the Universities of Tokyo and Tohoku, Japan, have been able to prove the existence of a "spin battery," a battery that is "charged" by applying a large magnetic field to nano-magnets in a device called a magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ).

Source

A phase-change material

A phase-change material changes from a solid to a liquid as the temperature in the environment changes from cold to warm.

NASA used changes in ocean temperature to make a phase-change liquid that turns sloid and then melts and thus generates electricity.

Source

MIT's batteries fully recharge in seconds

MIT engineers have developed a type of high-speed tunnel for transporting electrical energy through lithium iron phosphate, a well-known battery material. The discovery may yield lithium ion batteries that fully discharge and recharge in seconds, rather than hours, making batteries lighter, more powerful, and finally suitable for the all-electric vehicle that can be recharged in the same amount of time it takes to refuel the tank today.

Source

MIT

Wolfram Alpha Search Engine

A new search engine — called Wolfram Alpha — differs from conventional search engines in that users can ask questions using natural language and the search engine uses "knowledge models" to bring you the right answer.

Source

Cleaning Up Space Debris

Lasers and Water Guns.

Using aging rockets loaded with water to spray orbiting junk. His idea is that the extraterrestrial shower would gradually knock refuse down toward the atmosphere, where it would burn up, as would the launcher. The water would turn to steam.

Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, a leading space research center, recently conducted feasibility studies into junk-zapping lasers and garbage-collecting rockets

Source

Batteries Charge In 10 Seconds

Developed by Gerbrand Ceder, a professor of materials science at MIT, it could be particularly useful where rapid power bursts are needed, such as for hybrid cars, but also for portable electronic devices. In testing, batteries incorporating the electrodes discharged in just 10 seconds.

Source

What a Map

A new mobile map service allowing users to create, find, and share maps on the web, and download those directly to the their cell phones as Java applications anywhere in the world.

What A Map

Tribler 4.5.2 is here!

Tribler, which is a joint research project from Delft University of Technology and the VU University Amsterdam, is a video aggregator that pulls in YouTube videos, Torrent downloads and other video file formats. Tribler layers on some personalization to help users find niche content in the sea of Net videos.

Source

Vectrix US

American Electric Scooter.

Source

Data-Density Increase

The density achievable with the technology "could potentially enable the contents of 250 DVDs to fit onto a surface the size of a quarter" says Ting Xu of the University of California at Berkeley.

Source

Berkeley University's View of Cloud Computing

"Cloud Computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and systems software in the datacenters that provide those services. The services themselves have long been referred to as Software as a Service (SaaS), so we use that term. The datacenter hardware and software is what we will call a Cloud. When a Cloud is made available in a pay-as-you-go manner to the public, we call it a Public Cloud; the service being sold is Utility Computing. … We use the term Private Cloud to refer to internal datacenters of a business or other organization that are not made available to the public. Thus, Cloud Computing is the sum of SaaS and Utility Computing, but does not normally include Private Clouds."

Sourc PDF

Claytronics

Intel and Carnegie Mellon University's goal is to give tangible, interactive forms to information so that a user's senses will experience digital environments as though they are indistinguishable from reality.

Source

Artificial corneas

Researchers at Stanford University have developed a new kind of artificial cornea, one that's "showing promise" in animal studies and could eliminate the need for cornea transplants completely.

Source

Bionic eye - Argus II

A 73-year-old British gentleman named Ron may once again be able to discern light thanks to a bionic eye called the Argus II. For 30 years he's been completely blind, but the Argus — which consists of a camera and video processor mounted on a pair of shades sending data to an eye-mounted transceiver — enables him to pick out things such as the white lines painted on a road and match socks.

"...the receiver passes on the data via a tiny cable to an array of electrodes which sit on the retina - the layer of specialised cells that normally respond to light found at the back of the eye. When these electrodes are stimulated they send messages along the optic nerve to the brain, which is able to perceive patterns of light and dark spots corresponding to which electrodes have been stimulated." BBC

Source: BBC with video

Project Eyeborg

EYEBORG-- The Two Week Trial from eyeborg on Vimeo.

Filmmaker Rob Spence lost an eye as a child, and now he's created the next best thing: a camera that fits onto his prosthetic eye.

Source

Cell Phone Displays Real 3D

Currently provided by KDDI Corp, the Wooo H001 is a flip top phone that doesn't look like anything overly spectacular. However, located at the bottom left of the keypad is a 3D button that activates the 3-dimensional abilities on the 3.1-inch liquid crystal display.

Source

Real Virtuality

At the Pioneer 09 science show in London on Wednesday, researchers unveiled a mock-up of a virtual-reality headset that will provide input to the five major human senses. Professor David Howard of the University of York, who's leading the project, observes that virtual-reality projects tend to focus on sight and sound. He said he's not aware of any other research group attempting to simulate sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell.

Source