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Designer carbon provides longer battery life

Energ2’s nanostructured carbon anodes can boost lithium-ion battery capacity by 30 percent
April 2, 2013

HybridBatteryEnerg2

EnerG2 has developed a carbon anode that improves the storage capacity of lithium-ion batteries by up to 30 percent without requiring a new battery design or a different manufacturing process, MIT Technology Review reports.

EnerG2’s new lithium-ion battery anode is made of a form of carbon in which the atoms have a disorganized, amorphous structure, compared to the crystalline structure of graphite, the material normally… read more

Topics: Electronics | Energy | Nanotech/Materials Science

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A Kinect-powered depression detector

April 2, 2013

sim_sensei

Using a Kinect depth camera and some ingenious computer vision algorithms, SimSensei can diagnose whether you’re depressed or not with 90% accuracy, MIT Technology Review reports.

The system uses an interactive digital avatar to conduct a verbal interview with the person being screened for depression.Skeletal polygonal overlays map the depressed human’s posture, gaze direction, and even “smile level.”

Topics: Biomed/Longevity | Cognitive Science/Neuroscience | VR/Augmented Reality/Computer Graphics

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Blue Waters, one of the world’s most powerful computers, opens for research

April 2, 2013

Blue Waters has been configured to solve the most challenging compute-, memory- and data-intensive problems in science and engineering. It has tens of thousands of chips (CPUs & GPUs), more than a petabyte of memory, tens of petabytes of disk storage, and hundreds of petabytes of archival storage. (Credit: NCSA/University of Illinois)

Blue Waters, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, was formally declared available for use today at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

Blue Waters, a partnership among NSF, the State of Illinois, the University of Illinois and the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation, is capable at peak performance of nearly  12 petaFLOPS (12… read more

Topics: Biotech | Computers/Infotech/UI | Environment/Climate | Physics/Cosmology

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Robotic jellyfish could one day patrol oceans, clean oil spills, and detect pollutants

April 2, 2013

Robojelly (credit: Virginia Tech)

 

Virginia Tech College of Engineering researchers are working on a multi-university, nationwide project for the U.S. Navy that one day will put life-like autonomous robot jellyfish in waters around the world.

Uses of the robot jellyfish could include conducting military surveillance, cleaning oil spills, and monitoring the environment.

The main focus of the program is to understand the fundamentals of… read more

Topics: AI/Robotics | Survival/Defense

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Mapping the ‘fountain of youth’

April 1, 2013

Tibolium_castaneum_TERT_structure

University of Copenhagen researchers and an international team have for the first time mapped telomerase, an enzyme with a rejuvenating effect on cell aging.

This is one of the results of a major research project involving more than 1,000 researchers worldwide, four years of hard work, DKK 55 million from the EU, and blood samples from more than 200,000 people.

It is the largest collaboration project… read more

Topics: Biomed/Longevity | Biotech

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Smell-o-Vision is finally here

April 1, 2013

smelling_screen

Smell-O-Vision was a system that released odors during the projection of a film so that the viewer could “smell” what was happening in the movie.

Now the “smelling screen,” invented by Haruka Matsukura at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology in Japan and colleagues, makes smells appear to come from the exact spot on any LCD screen that is displaying the image of a cup of coffee,… read more

Topics: Computers/Infotech/UI | Entertainment/New Media | VR/Augmented Reality/Computer Graphics

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Bitcoin hits $1 billion

April 1, 2013

bitcoin

Bitcoin, the world’s first open source cryptographic currency, has set a new record for itself as the price listed on the largest online exchange rose past US $92, IEEE Spectrum reports. With nearly 11 million Bitcoins in circulation, this sets the total worth of the currency just over one billion dollars.

Bitcoin is a digital currency that runs on a global peer-to-peer network… read more

Topics: Internet/Telecom | Social/Ethical/Legal

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Huge online attack exposes Internet’s vulnerability

April 1, 2013

(Credit: iStockphoto)

It was the largest online attack ever reported. Over the course of the past week, servers belonging to an international non-profit company called The Spamhaus Project, which fights email spammers, were inundated with up to 38 gigabytes of traffic each second, New Scientist reports.

The attackers exploited open domain name server (DNS) resolvers, faking their own IP addresses, replacing them with the address of the target. This… read more

Topics: Internet/Telecom | Survival/Defense

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TED removes TEDxWestHollywood license: ideas that have ‘failed to gain scientific acceptance’

April 1, 2013

Ex-TED

TED has removed the license of TEDxWestHollywood for their planned “Brother, Can You Spare a Paradigm?” event, says the TEDxWestHollywood blog.

The takedown was only a couple of weeks before the April 14 event (and after they had spent more than a year preparing), the blog says.

In an email to Suzanne Taylor, the organizer of TEDxWestHollywood, a representative of TED outlined the objections: “And when… read more

Topics: Human Enhancement | Innovation/Entrepreneurship | Physics/Cosmology | Social/Ethical/Legal

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Swarming robots could be our future servants

April 1, 2013

Swarming robots push object (credit: University of Sheffield)

Researchers in the Sheffield Centre for Robotics, jointly established by the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, are programming a group of 40 robots.

The researchers have demonstrated that the swarm can carry out simple fetching and carrying tasks, by grouping around an object and working together to push it across a surface.

The robots can also group themselves together into a single… read more

Topics: AI/Robotics

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Making robots mimic the human hand

April 1, 2013

robot_changes_tire

As part of a national research project to develop low-cost artificial hands, the Pentagon has released a video of a robot that can change a tire — almost, The New York Times reports.

In the video, the two-armed DARPA-funded robot uses a tool to remove a tire from a car:

The goal of the program, now in its third phase, is to develop robots… read more

Topics: AI/Robotics

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Domestic drones and their unique dangers

March 31, 2013

AR Drone 2.0

The use of drones by domestic U.S. law enforcement agencies is growing rapidly, both in terms of numbers and types of usage, blogger Glenn Greenwald writes in The Guardian.

A short summary of Greenwald’s comprehensive article:

  • The belief that weaponized drones won’t be used on U.S. soil is patently irrational. Police departments are already speaking openly about how their drones “could be equipped to carry

… read more

Topics: AI/Robotics | Social/Ethical/Legal | Survival/Defense

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The touch-screen generation

March 30, 2013

touch-screen generation

Young children — even toddlers — are spending more and more time with digital technology. What will it mean for their development?

The Atlantic magazine explores this trend in its cover story, “The Touch-Screen Generation.”

Topics: Entertainment/New Media | Social Networking/Web

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Apple’s new iPhone? Wraparound display, no buttons

March 30, 2013

appleiphone-newpatent--620x358

According to patent application 20130076612, just filed by Apple, a potential smartphone design could include a full wraparound display, have no buttons.

A flexible display panel would be configured to display content at any portion of the gadget’s frame, ZDNET reports.

The use of AMOLED and a conical shape for the flexible panel could offer users “an illusion of depth perception [...] mimicking a… read more

Topics: Computers/Infotech/UI | Internet/Telecom

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A new way to freeze molecules for quantum computing

March 29, 2013

ucla_cooling_molecules

Chilling molecules to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, the temperature at which they can be manipulated to store and transmit data in quantum computers, has proven to be a difficult challenge for scientists.

At higher temperatures, molecules rocket around, bouncing into each other and exchanging energy. Any information a scientist attempted to store in such a chaotic system would quickly become gibberish.

Now,… read more

Topics: Physics/Cosmology | Quantum

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