Battery dead in the middle of a phone call and you left your charger home, or worse, you’re on a camping trip. Sound familiar?
No prob, just grab some nanosilicon powder, mix with water, and zap: instant hydrogen fuel to generate recharge current — thanks to University at Buffalo researchers, who have discovered that super-small particles of silicon react with water to produce hydrogen… read more
More than 100 patients or handicapped users have voluntarily participated in the development of non-invasive brain-machine interfaces developed by researchers in the European TOBI (Tools for brain-computer interaction) research program.
The technologies include:
Functional electrical stimulation
Voluntarily control movement of a paralyzed limb, using a brain-computer interface.
From EEG signals, the computer senses the desired movement and sends electrical signals to the correspo9nding… read more
Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed elastic, self-healing electrical wires.
“Because we’re using liquid metal, these wires have excellent conductive properties,” says Dr. Michael Dickey, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper on the work.
“And because the wires are also elastic and self-healing, they have a lot of potential for use …… read more
An experimental technology called molecular memory could store data in individual molecules has been developed by an international team of researchers led by Jagadeesh Moodera, a senior research scientist in the MIT Department of Physics and at MIT’s Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory,
The technology promises a 1,000-fold increase in storage density over hard disks, which are approaching a million megabytes of… read more
Researchers at the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) have created a way to store data in the form of DNA — a material that lasts for tens of thousands of years.
The new method, published in the journal Nature, makes it possible to store at least 100 million hours of high-definition video in about a cup of DNA.
There is a lot of digital information… read more
A nonprofit called Common Crawl is now using its own Web crawler and making a giant copy of the Web that it makes accessible to anyone.
The organization offers up over five billion Web pages, available for free so that researchers and entrepreneurs can try things otherwise possible only for those with access to resources on the scale of Google’s, MIT Technology Review reports.… read more
Know people who are changing the world? Encourage them to apply for The Tech Awards 2013, a program of the Tech Museum, San Jose, CA.
Categories: Environment, Education, Young Innovator (under 27), Health, Economic Development.
Benefit: cash prizes of $75,000 and $25,000 awarded in each category; access to mentors, funders, media, former laureates.
Deadline: May 1, 2013
An unmanned vehicle designed by Military Transportation University of the PLA (MTU) recently won top prize in the fourth Future Challenge, a contest for intelligent vehicles, China.org.cn reports.
The vehicle, a third-generation prototype named “Fierce Lion 3,” completed a 114-kilometer journey within 85 minutes, with a top speed of 105 kilometers per hour, making itself China’s first unmanned vehicle to pass a freeway test.
Third party… read more
The European Commission has selected the two research proposals it will fund to the tune of half-a-billion euros ($650 million U.S.) each, after a two-year, high-profile contest, Nature News reports.
The Human Brain Project, led by neuroscientist Henry Markram at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, plans to simulate the human brain in a supercomputer. (See “Brain in… read more
By carefully controlling the shape of water droplets with an ultraviolet laser, a team of researchers from Australia and France has found a way to coax silica (silicon dioxide) nanoparticles to self-assemble into highly uniform silica wires, hair-like slivers of silica.
Such silica microwires could enable applications and technology not currently possible with comparatively bulky optical fiber.
The international team describes the research in a paper… read more
To honor Aaron Swartz, a contributor to the Open Government book, O’Reilly Media has posted the Open Government book files for free for anyone to download, read and share, says co-author Laurel Ruma on O’Reilly Radar.
The files are posted on the O’Reilly Media GitHub account as PDF, Mobi, and EPUB files for now here: github.com/oreillymedia/open_government.
DARPA’s planned Phoenix program is intended to develop and demonstrate technologies to cooperatively harvest and re-use valuable components from retired, nonworking satellites in geosynchronous orbit (GEO) at greatly reduced cost.
Today, when a communication satellite fails, it usually means the expensive prospect of having to launch a brand new replacement communication satellite. Many of the satellites that are obsolete or have failed still have usable antennas, solar… read more
At CES, Intel demoed its latest big idea — “perceptual computing,” MIT Technology Review reports.
With perceptual computing, Intel envisions a new kind of interface for devices that will let users switch fluently between keyboards, trackpads, touch screens, voice commands, and gestures — or use several modes of interaction at once.
Perceptual computing is Intel’s attempt to keep laptops relevant in a consumer-tech landscape… read more
For 25 years, Scottish science fiction writer Iain M. Banks, author of the Culture Series, has been writing about a utopian post-scarcity civilization managed by artificially intelligent drones known as Minds, and preoccupied by artificial intelligence, games, and interactions with other civilizations.
In the latest novel published in October, The Hydrogen Sonata, a civilization known as the Gzilt are making preparations to Sublime — in… read more