March 2012
216 posts
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Carbon Nanotube-enabled "Power Felt" Could... →
Researchers at the Wake Forest University Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials have developed an inexpensive thermoelectric materialthat could be a solution for powering small electronic devices, like cell phones.The new material can convert differences in temperature into electrical energy more efficiently and inexpensively than existing solutions.
As reported in the journal Nano...
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Superconductors for Whopping Wind Turbines →
(WIRE FOR WIND: Superconducting wire like SuperPower’s could make more powerful wind turbines possible.)
The U.S. energy agency devoted to big dreams and blue-sky ideas is funding research on something really big that could stir up that blue sky.
In September, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E) awarded US $31.6 million in grants to groups looking for alternatives...
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WatchPeter Diamandis: Abundance is our future
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Wikileaks and Anonymous Join Forces to Reveal How... →
The most recent bombshell of confidential documents dropped by infamous watchdog organization Wikileaks is already looking to have an enormous impact on our understanding of government security practices. Specifically, intimate details on the long-suspected fact that the U.S. has been paying a whole lot of money to have private corporations spy on citizens, activists and other groups and...
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Plants have a memory of pests that spans... →
In the age of industrial agriculture, seeds are often purchased in bulk from corporate growers that use heavy doses of pesticides. They then travel many miles to a farm where climate, soil and pest conditions are dramatically different. As a result, crops often encounter new ailments that never impacted first generation seed plants, which may have been protected from the most troublesome...
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February 2012
331 posts
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Schmidt: UN treaty a 'disaster' for the internet →
In a question-and-answer session at Mobile World Congress 2012 on Tuesday, Schmidt said handing over control of things such as naming and DNS to the UN’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) would divide the internet, allowing it to be further broken into pieces regulated in different ways.
“That would be a disaster… To some, the openness and interoperability is one of...
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WatchMozilla’s ‘modest proposal:’ Dump the smartphone OS
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Raspberry Pi retailers toppled by demand as $35... →
The Raspberry Pi foundation attempted to launch its $35 Linux computer on Tuesday evening, but the organization’s retail partners couldn’t cope with the massive demand. Two British electronic component distributors that intended to sell the product were unable to do so—their websites went down, succumbing to the stampede of eager enthusiasts who sought to purchase the...
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Tiny, Printed Solar Cells Set Efficiency Records →
Semprius modified technology that prints flexible electronics to lay down thousands of tiny solar cells the size of a ballpoint pen tip. The company’s tech uses low-cost lenses to make the sun focused on the cells brighter by a factor of 1,100, achieving a record 41% efficiency rate. The tiny cells occupy only one-one thousandth of the entire solar module area and can be printed by the thousands,...
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Sahara Forest Project pilot to be built in Qatar →
A project to make the Sahara Desert bloom has made a step closer to reality after a pilot project in Qatar won $5.3 million (£3.3 million) in funding.
The 10,000 m2 area site will house the green technologies that are hoped could be used on a large scale within the desert to establish vegetation and reverse trend of deforestation — the Sahara Forest Project. This is a collaboration...
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Spacecraft assembled for first private shot to ISS →
A private spaceship is one step closer to launching to the International Space Station. SpaceX’s Dragon cargo capsule and Falcon 9 rocket have been assembled in Florida, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted on Saturday.
The two will probably launch in late April on an uncrewed mission to test the Dragon capsule’s ability to rendezvous and dock with the station.
Observers will be watching...
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ProPep Surgical Issued United States Patent for... →
ProPep Surgical, LLC a privately-held, Austin-based medical device company, announced today the United States Patent and Trademark Office has granted the company a patent for a System and Method for Laparoscopic Nerve Detection (8,083,685). This is the first in a series a patents the company has filed or will be filing on their ground breaking ProPep Nerve Monitoring System, according to a...
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Bezos’ Blue Origin prepares to test unique system... →
Blue Origin, the space venture backed by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, is pushing ahead with development and testing of its New Shepard rocket, aiming to qualify the system for human spaceflight under NASA’s Commercial Crew Development Program.
The next big milestone will be a test this summer of Blue Origin’s unique method for aborting a launch, according to a Flight International story...
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IBM Busts Record for ‘Superconducting’ Quantum... →
Today’s quantum computers are no more than experiments. Researchers can string together a handful of quantum bits — seemingly magical bits that store a “1″ and “0″ at the same time — and these ephemeral creations can run relatively simple algorithms. But new research from IBM indicates that far more complex quantum computers aren’t that far away.
On Tuesday, IBM revealed that physicists at its...
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Foundation Medicine: Personalizing Cancer Drugs →
Starting this spring, for about $5,000, any oncologist will be able to ship a sliver of tumor in a bar-coded package to Foundation’s lab. Foundation will extract the DNA, sequence scores of cancer genes, and prepare a report to steer doctors and patients toward drugs, most still in early testing, that are known to target the cellular defects caused by the DNA errors the analysis turns up....
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Battery to Take On Diesel and Natural Gas →
Aquion Energy, a company that’s making low-cost batteries for large-scale electricity storage, has selected a site for its first factory and says it’s lined up the financing it needs to build it.
The company hopes its novel battery technology could allow some of the world’s 1.4 billion people without electricity to get power without having to hook up to the grid.
The site for...
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First Nanorockets Might Shuttle Drugs,... →
In the movie Fantastic Voyage, a crack surgical team is miniaturized inside a ship. Their mission: to destroy a blood clot in the brain of a Soviet-era informant.
Given the relatively vast distances covered inside the body, however, movie makers probably should have equipped the team’s vessel with rocket motors instead of wimpy propellers. Engineers have now designed nanorockets that would’ve fit...
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Prosthetics Breakthrough Might Fuse Nerves With... →
A replacement limb that moves, feels and responds just like flesh and blood. It’s the holy grail of prosthetics research. The Pentagon’s invested millions to make it happen. But it’s been elusive — until, quite possibly, now.
The body’s own nerves are arguably the biggest barrier towards turning the dream of lifelike replacements into a reality. Peripheral nerves, severed by amputation, can no...
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Why Mercedes Benz Picked Apple's Siri to Power... →
Mercedes Benz unveiled plans on Monday to use Siri, Apple’s virtual personal assistant exclusive to theiPhone 4S, to power its A-class electronics system called “Drive Kit Plus,” which will essentially let drivers access their iPhone apps while driving using voice commands.
“Drive Kit Plus” works alongside Digital Drivestyle, which is Mercedes-Benz’s app that...
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Ekso Bionics Sells its First Set of Robot Legs... →
Mark down February 14th, 2012 as the day when exoskeletons became an established medical therapy. Ekso Bionics, formerly Berkeley Bionics and creators of the HULCarmy exoskeleton, have delivered their first commercial lower body system to Craig Hospital in Denver Colorado. The Ekso medical exoskeleton supports the body while moving the user’s legs for them. In other words, Ekso lets paraplegics...
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WatchCoding club for kids opening in U.S.
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Report: Open source code matches proprietary code... →
The quality of open source code is on a par with proprietary code, particularly in cases where codebases are of similar size.
This was one of the key findings of development testing company Coverity’s annual Scan report. The company measured the quality of code by comparing defect density - the number of defects per 1,000 lines of code. The average defect density for the software industry...
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Driverless cars can be licensed in Nevada →
Nevada has become the first state to allow driverless cars to apply for their own drivers’ licenses.
The rules, which go into effect March 1, will make it possible for companies such as Google and Mercedes-Benz and maybe even General Motors to test their robot cars on Nevada’s 26,000 miles of road.
Just to be sure, two trained drivers have to be in every car, one of them in the front seat...
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Culturomics and the Google Book Project →
The study of the web has revealed no end of power laws in human behaviour and more recently, the data associated with mobile phone use has begun to reveal large scale patterns of human mobility and social intercourse.
Now the Google Book project triggered a new area of investigation. This program has scanned the contents of some 5 million books from 40 university libraries around the world....
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How Young Is Too Young to Learn to Code? →
When the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children under 2 spend exactly zero time in front of screens, what its members are concerned about is substitution — all the time those children aren’t spending acquiring new skills and language through one-on-one interaction.
Yet a new effort by researchers at MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten group will attempt to create a...
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Nokia Announces The 808 PureView And Its 41MP... →
I think it’s safe to say that the new 808 Pureview handset was a surprise to just about everyone here at Nokia’s press conference. Not only did Nokia manage to squeeze a 41-megapixel sensor (no, that’s not a typo) into a smartphone, they squeezed it into a smartphone that runs on the Symbian Belle OS.
In typical Nokia fashion, the 808′s downright crazy camera features a Carl Zeiss lens, and is...
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Nature Editorial: If you want reproducible... →
Modern scientific and engineering research relies heavily on computer programs, which analyze experimental data and run simulations. In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find a scientific paper (outside of pure theory) that didn’t involve code in some way. Unfortunately, most code written for research remains closed, even if the code itself is the subject of a published scientific paper....
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Telefónica working with Mozilla to build open... →
Mozilla announced today that it has partnered with mobile network operator Telefónica to deliver a complete mobile operating system built around standards-based Web technologies. They plan to bring the platform to market later this year on a prototype device that they are developing in collaboration with Qualcomm.
The new operating system, which is called the Open Web Devices (OWD) platform, is...
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An Open Letter to Chris Dodd (from Eric S Raymond) →
I can best introduce you to our concerns by quoting another of our philosopher/elders, John Gilmore. He said: “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
To understand that, you have to grasp that “the Internet” isn’t just a network of wires and switches, it’s also a sort of reactive social organism composed of the people who keep those wires humming and those switches...
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Optical memory could ease Internet bottlenecks →
Bits of data travelling the Internet have a tough commute — they bounce back and forth between optical signal lines for efficient transmission and electrical signal lines for processing. All-optical routers would be more energy efficient, but their development has been hindered by a lack of optical memory devices. Now, researchers have developed just such a device, paving the way towards a faster,...
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Thermal Storage Gets More Solar on the Grid →
(Abengoa is erecting more than 3,200 mirrored parabolic troughs at its Solana plant near Gila Bend, Ariz. When at full operation, the CSP plant will serve more than 70,000 homes. Credit: Dennis Schroeder)
Peak demand for electricity in the United States typically hits between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m., which doesn’t quite line up with the sun’s schedule. It’s fortunate that the sun is...
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MIT Researchers Able to Control Properties of... →
Researchers at MIT have developeda method by which they can control the growth process of nanowiresand thereby control the composition, structure, and even their resulting properties.
The MIT research team, led by Silvija Gradečak, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, followed the usual method of growing nanoparticles by using “seed” particles (metal nanoparticles), but in...
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Telefonica small-cell 4G could provide 100Mbps LTE →
At MWC, Spanish telecommunications company Telefonica will be deploying its first public test of an LTE network that it says can provide download speeds of 100Mbps and upload speeds of 40 to 60Mbps. Based on Alcatel-Lucent’s LightRadio cells — one version of which is pictured above — the network is supposed to not only improve speed and capacity, but also be cheaper to deploy than ordinary...
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Nanoscale Lasers Come In Out of the Cold →
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, reported in the journal Nature earlier this month that they have invented a new kind ofnanometer-size laser that requires much less power to generate a coherent beam than previous designs. This type of laser could finally make it practical to use light instead of electricity to send terabits of data between different parts of a computer...
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Schneier: government, big data pose bigger 'Net... →
As Bruce Schneier spent the past decade watching the growing rash of phishers, malware attacks, and identity theft, a new Internet threat has emerged that poses even greater risks, the security expert said.
Unlike the security risks posed by criminals, the threat from government regulation and data hoarders such as Apple and Google are more insidious because they threaten to alter the fabric of...
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Google as hardware company: Phones, tablets … and... →
We’ve known for a while that Google would be getting into the device business through its acquisition of Motorola Mobility. However, two items this week make it seem that the search giant’s ambitions in the hardware market go beyond what we’ve previously known, in potentially significant ways.
Overnight came the news that Google may be contemplating its own 7-inch Android tablet, to compete...
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The 5-Year Pipeline →
Early in 2007 (exactly 5 years ago), I wrote a paper that described all of the components of a fully integrated online learning system. Many pieces of the original architecture I predicted have already begun to take shape. Here is a quick assessment of the pieces that are still missing.
Rapid Courseware-Builder – Several sites are developing courseware builders, yet to date there is nothing...
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GOOGLE STREET VIEW GOES UNDER THE SEA →
Now that it’s conquered all seven continents, mapped the Amazon, some rivers in the United States, caves, the ruins of Pompeii and captured snapshots of naked women, Google Street View’s next expedition will turn its lens on the mysteries of the deep when it goes under the sea.
n a joint venture between Google, the University of Queensland and multinational insurance firm sponsor,...
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Network operators get serious about Wi-Fi →
The world’s cellular industry is coming to Barcelona Spain next week for Mobile World Congress. But one of the key topics will be an entirely different radio technology: Wi-Fi.
At MWC, you’ll be see a massive change in the industry’s thinking about this unlicensed radio standard, now a standard part of smartphones, tablets, gaming devices, and even cameras. Faced with soaring...
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Chemotherapy For The Planet: Geoengineering As A... →
Mount Pinatubo is a volcano in the Philippines that erupted in 1991, spreading 10 million tons of sulfur into the atmosphere. The impact on the local environment was horrific. But scientists later noticed that the acrid cloud deflected 2% of normal sunlight, and reduced worldwide temperatures by 0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit). The thinking behind the “Pinatubo Option”...
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One Way Google Might Crash Cable's Party →
While it doesn’t take much for Google to make headlines, this week’s news that it filed applications to operate a video service in Kansas City was much more than your average “Hey look what Google did” story. From the release of Google TVto its recent YouTube redesign to the way it’s been courting professional talent for its YouTube channels, Google has been steadily...
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Facebook's Top Cop: Joe Sullivan →
If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world and Joe Sullivan would be head of Homeland Security.
His actual title is chief security officer. The “terrorists” he’s up against include the “Koobface gang,” a quintet of Russians who unleashed a worm that turned Facebookers’ computers into enslaved bots; the spammers who flooded the site with violent and pornographic...