A new type of flexible ultra-thin glass has been unveiled by the firm that developed Gorilla Glass, currently used to make screens of many mobile devices.
Willow Glass can be “wrapped” around a device, said developer Corning.
A prototype is as thin as a sheet of paper, and the company said that it can be made to be just 0.05mm thick — thinner than the current 0.2mm or… read more
The broadband technology WiMax has been added to a global standard for mobile devices, boosting its chances of becoming the preferred system for the next generation of high-speed wireless Internet access.
WiMax is capable of speeds of 70 megabits per second or more across an area of up to 40 miles. It’s faster than many fixed-line broadband connections today, which typically offer speeds of around 2 megabits per second.… read more
WiMAX, a technology that enables high-speed Internet access on mobile devices that is much faster than current cellular service, took its next step toward becoming a reality.
Phone carrier Sprint Nextel and wireless provider Clearwire today agreed to build the first nationwide mobile broadband network using WiMAX technology, a move that will soup up Web access on mobile devices should the network come to fruition in 2008 as expected.… read more
Researchers at Stanford University’s School of Engineering and the University of Delaware have used what they call the “most sophisticated weather model available” to meet many times the world’s total power demand by 2030 — in fact, enough to exceed the total demand by several times, even after accounting for reductions in wind speed caused by turbines.
In related news today, Lawrence Livermore and Carnegie Institute researchers have found… read more
Expansive dreams about renewable energy from wind power and other sources are bumping up against the reality of a power grid that cannot handle the new demands.
An Energy Department plan to source 20 percent of the nation’s electricity from wind calls for a high-voltage backbone spanning the country, but it would cost $60 billion or more and would be contrained by multistate regulatory restrictions.
There is enough power in the Earth’s winds to be a primary source of near-zero emission electric power for the entire world, but some scientists have been concerned they would substantially affect climate.
In related news today, Stanford University and University of Delaware researchers found that there’s plenty of wind over land and near to shore, using 4 million turbines, to supply 7.5 terawatts of power without significant negative affect on… read more
Harvard Medical School researchers have found that the brain protein plaques characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease can form extraordinarily fast, and seem to be the starting point of further degeneration in the brain–at least in mice.
The research helps settle a long-standing debate about whether such plaques are a primary cause or a symptom of Alzheimer’s, and may have implications for how the disease is treated.
A 3-D prototype controlled by a user’s gestures that lets shoppers learn more about what’s in a store display window when the store is closed has been demonstrated by the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute.
University of Melbourne researchers have shown in several large-scale studies that abnormalities of the blood vessels in the retina can be used to predict patients’ risk for diabetes, hypertension, stroke and heart disease.
The approach involves analyzing digital photographs of patients’ retinas and studying them to find narrowing or ballooning of the small blood vessels. Systemic diseases often cause changes in the eye that can show up as red… read more
At the Windows Phone Developer Summit in San Francisco Wednesday, Microsoft provided details on the upcoming Windows Phone 8 operating system.
It promises to provide deep integration with the Windows 8 operating system, meaning that the next generation of Windows devices, from PCs to laptops to tablets to mobile phones, should interact very nicely.
And the new “shared core” between Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 should provide… read more
University of Alberta researchers have developed a poker-playing computer program that successfully guesses whether an opponent is bluffing, wavering or playing his hands straight.
It records a player’s habits or biases as the game progresses and uses algorithms to mix that information with baseline probabilities, creating the effect of both reason and intuition. The program now defeats 90% of opponents.
Wings that redirect air sideways back and forth over the wings could cut airline fuel bills by 20%, according to research funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and Airbus in the UK.
The Institute for the Future has announced the winners of its BodyShock contest, a call for ideas to improve global health over the next 3-10 years by transforming our bodies and lifestyles.
The winners are Anjna Patient Education, for targeting free clinics and reaching out to socioeconomically disadvantaged patients; PLAY IT! SAY IT!, which proposes to use the existing communication functions of video game consoles (voice… read more
The Foresight Institute has announced the winners of the 2011 Foresight Institute Feynman Prizes for Nanotechnology Theory and Experiment.
The winner of the 2011 Feynman Prize for Experimental work is Leonhard Grill (Fritz Haber Institute, Max Planck Research School, Germany) in recognition of his pioneering and continuing work on manipulating and structuring functional matter at the atomic scale.
He has used scanning tunneling… read more
Supercomputer programs like IBM’s Deep Blue have demonstrated their ability to outthink human chess players. There is one game, however, where humans still reign supreme: Go. Yet here too their grip is beginning to loosen.
MoGo, a program developed by researchers from the University of Paris, has even beaten a couple of strong human players, using the Monte Carlo method, a form of statistical sampling. It is ranked 2,323rd… read more