The Senate passed a version of its 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act. It gives nanotech a permanent home in the federal government, putting the National Nanotechnology Initiative into law and authorizing nearly $3.7 billion over four years for research and development.
A virtual TV guide aimed at helping visually impaired people can switch channels at the command of the viewer.
The software chats to viewers about what they want to see, a computer linked to the TV uses voice recognition to accept their answer and then switches the set to the correct channel.
MIT researchers have crossed a robotic arm with the bottom half of a Segway to make a robot that can traverse hallways and open doors.
The researchers are aiming to give the robot the abilities to recognize whether it’s in a room or hallway, recognize and manipulate objects, take instructions, and learn.
Bill Joy talks about greedy markets, reckless science, and runaway technology.
Q: Whatever happened to the book you were writing to follow up the article?
Joy: I’ve written two manuscripts. The first was a wake-up call – that’s obviously not the book we need anymore. The second was prescriptive, and the problem is, I’m not satisfied with the prescriptions that I have. You don’t get two shots at… read more
The world’s lightest and smallest robot helicopter has been unveiled at a Tokyo exhibition by the Seiko Epson company.
The designers say the 70-mm-tall device could be used as a “flying camera” to enter earthquake-shattered buildings.
The supercomputing industry focuses on growth of performance in terms of speed and horsepower, but performance/space ratio has not kept up because of “Moore’s law for power consumption”– that is, the power consumption of compute nodes doubles every 18 months, says Los Alamos National Laboratory computer scientist Wu-Chun Feng.
“The current trajectory is slated to reach one kilowatt per square centimeter by 2010, which is allegedly as much power… read more
A Royal College of Surgeons report on the ethics and feasibility of face transplants has decided on a “wait and see” approach, saying the risks of immune rejection of the graft outweigh the potential benefits at present.
Critics of face transplant surgery also argue that patients risk psychological problems after surgery, since the patient is not likely to resemble either the donor or their original face.
Note: The… read more
Scientists at North Carolina State University are attempting to build the first transistor using a bottom-up, or molecular assembly approach.
“Our research will tackle two critical issues in future materials for advanced molecule-based information processing,” says Dr. Chris Gorman, professor of chemistry. “How to assemble and attach single molecules to electronic contacts and how to create electronic gain — the fundamental operating principle of a transistor — at the… read more
Researchers have made a breakthrough discovery about the behavior of bubbles and droplets in fluids. The finding could have applications in areas such as microcapsules for medical controlled-release applications and production of nanostructures.
The researchers noted that drops of liquid formed an extremely thin liquid thread that forms so slowly that there is enough time to solidify it into a filament or wire. By adding a prepolymer to the… read more
A Rutgers-led team has produced the first-ever measurement of the “heat of life” — the energies involved in DNA replication and synthesis.
The measurements can be used to construct a virtual landscape that traces the precise energy differences between correct and incorrect DNA synthesis. The differential energy signatures signal the presence of DNA damage, potentially repairable by protein systems inside the cell or specifically designed drugs administered from the… read more
“Smart helpmeets” are on their way: our homes, our offices, our cars and our clothes. They are meant to be aware, not dumb; proactive, not inert.
“Desks and doors, televisions and telephones, cars and trains, eyeglasses and shoes and even the shirts on our backs — all are changing from static, inanimate objects into adaptive, reactive systems,” wrote Alex Pentland, a pioneer in smart environments at the M.I.T. Media… read more
News-Images.com is a new service that displays pictures found in current news and reviews, allowing for a quick visual overview of what’s hot right now.
The first leg of National LambdaRail, the biggest, fastest network ever undertaken for scientific research, will go live this week.
The NLR is being created from 10,000 miles of unused, or “dark,” optic cable on the country’s backbone network. The project plans to use about 40 channels, each capable of transmitting 10 gigabits a second.
The NLR will also enable “extreme multimedia,” such as “real telepresence” or the… read more
IBM Corp. has built a supercomputer the size of a television based on microchip technology to be used in gaming consoles due out next year.
A prototype of IBM’s future Blue Gene/L supercomputer, it can perform two trillion calculations per second.
IBM vice president of technology and strategy Irving Wladawsky-Berger said that the supercomputer used 1,000 microprocessors based on PowerPC microchip technology, which will be the foundation of… read more
Craig Venter’s team has developed a new technique to build a living organism from scratch, synthesizing the complete genome of a small virus in just 14 days.
The ultimate aim of the project, funded by the US Department of Energy, is to create microbes with special properties, such as the ability to sequester carbon dioxide or consume toxic waste.
The speed of the technique means it could also… read more