1. NASA, GM take giant leap in robotic technology. These robots can work side by side with people, for example assisting NASA astronauts during hazardous space missions and help GM build safer cars and plants.
I won’t mind robots doing dangerous jobs but if they start building cars, won’t that be taking away bread and butter jobs and increase unemployment?
2. Ultra-precise quantum-logic clock puts old atomic clock to shame. The quantum-logic clock, which detects the energy state of a single aluminum ion, keeps time to within a second every 3.7 billion years. The new timekeeper could one day improve GPS or detect the slowing of time predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
6. What baby boomers want from technology. Boomers show a great deal of interest in purchasing consumer electronics, more than any other age group. Yet they are underserved by marketing initiatives, which mostly aim at younger people.
Japanese research and development firm Eamex has discovered a new way to increase the typical lifespan of a lithium-ion battery.
Eamex’s new battery technology will allow the batteries to sustain over 10,000 recharges over the course of 20 years, compared to the conventional 1,000 charge cycles.
The secret to the long-lasting lithium-ion?
Currently, the tin in the battery’s negative electrode weakens through continual recharging. The new design, however, calls for tin-coated resin that stabilizes the electrode and prevents deterioration.
Lithium-ion batteries are very popular within various consumer electronics because they tend to hold their charge when not in use, and have a high energy-to-weight ratio.
We can also put off buying new gadgets (like mobile phones) which usually have batteries lasting 2 years or less, after which the phone performance time dipped even with full recharge.
IBM has created graphene transistors that leave silicon ones in the dust. The prototype devices, made from atom-thick sheets of carbon, operate at 100 gigahertz–meaning they can switch on and off 100 billion times each second, about 10 times as fast as the speediest silicon transistors.
The transistors were created using processes that are compatible with existing semiconductor manufacturing, and experts say they could be scaled up to produce transistors for high-performance imaging, radar, and communications devices within the next few years, and for zippy computer processors in a decade or so.
Growing transistors on a wafer not only leads to better performance, it’s also more commercially feasible, says Phaedon Avouris, leader of the nanoscale science and technology group at the IBM Watson Research Center in Ossining, NY where the work was carried out.
Wow, at 100Ghz, you are doing everything at super-duper speed. That has great implications for video games and number crunching ability but I don’t know how long batteries can last when the computer is performing at this level.
With the introduction of graphene transistor, Silicon Valley may need a name change soon. More importantly, we can expect a new age of quantum computing to change the digital world as we know it.
How has the market reacted to Steve Jobs’s press conference on the iPad on 27 Jan 2010?
Well, some people are raving over the gadget but there are lots of Apple haters too. They believe iPad is just an “iPhone on steroids” and there is not much technological innovation to talk about.
Here are some videos to convince you Apple’s iPad is an epic fail…
Do you agree with all their comments? Let me know what you think.
I am not affected by their reviews though as I don’t consider myself an ardent Apple fan, so all the pre-launch hype didn’t affect me and I wasn’t that “disappointed.”
The Pentagon have outdone themselves this time as they plan for a crewless, automated frigate able to cruise the oceans for months or years without human input.
The new project is called Anti-submarine warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV), and is intended to produce “an X-ship founded on the assumption that no person steps aboard at any point in its operating cycle”.
The uncrewed frigate would have enough range and endurance for “global, months long deployments with no underway human maintenance”, being able to cross oceans largely without any human input - communications back to base would be “intermittent”, according to DARPA.
This frigate can free up human resources during its overt submarine tracking duty and is likely to save lives if ambushed by a hostile submarine.
There is also a decoy purpose - when the submarine attacks the frigate, it gives its position away and other manned ships/aircraft can respond by tracking down the submarine.
The new defense technology will give US navy a strong advantage but it is still early days to make the unmanned frigate smart enough to avoid other ships and abide by maritime laws.
I know Apple and Adobe aren’t on good terms but didn’t realize the battle has gone over to the dark side.
When Steve Jobs demonstrated an iPad at Wednesday’s tablet event, its Safari browser clearly did not support Flash. Adobe has published a blog post calling Flash the Apple iPad’s “broken link.”
And now Adobe’s platform evangelist Lee Brimelow has compiled an illustrative montage (partly screengrabbed above) in an effort to illustrate what the lack of Flash means for the iPad.
So Adobe has raised a serious question here… why would anyone want to buy a web surfing gadget which can’t display porn? Can’t imagine people giving up porn just because the gadget possess superior design, apps or functionality.
I hate to say this but porn really drives a lot of consumer technology innovation. What do you guys think?
Japanese venture firm WIN Human Recorder Ltd has developed a health monitor patch that can keep tabs on all your vitals.
The HRS-I is a small (30mm x 30mm x 5mm) lightweight (7g) device that adheres to your chest and relays the data it collects to a computer or mobile phone via wireless connection.
While the HRS-I only directly monitors electrocardiograph information, body surface temperature, and movement (via accelerometers), it can connect to sensors for heart rate, brain waves, respiration and many other important health indicators.
WIN is selling the HRS-I for around ¥30,000 (~$330) and providing monitoring software for around ¥10,000 (~$110).”
Scientists have known all along that fusion energy can produce vast amount of energy (like what happen in the Sun) but the conditions to create fusion energy are complicated.
Current nuclear power is based on fission, which operates through splitting large atoms, which creates radioactive nuclear waste. But the process of fusion releases clean energy when small atoms like hydrogen are squashed together into heavier elements.
Now, we are a step closer to producing fusion energy… using lasers. Initially, there were doubts about using powerful lasers because the “plasma” they create could interrupt the fusion energy.
However, an article in Science showed the plasma is far less of a problem than expected. The report is based on the first experiments from the National Ignition Facility (Nif) in the US that used all 192 of its laser beams. Along the way, the experiments smashed the record for the highest energy from a laser - by a factor of 20.
Siegfried Glenzer, the Nif plasma scientist, believes ignition (lab-controlled thermonuclear explosion) could happen this year.
This will definitely herald a new era in large-scale clean energy production. Cool!
There is no problem with web censorship in China, according to Bill Gates. That is tantamount to a slap in Google’s face. Now Microsoft has become the law-abiding citizen while Google is the outlaw who wants to challenge the status quo in China. Or at the very least, Google is “over-reacting.”
Bill Gates said: “You’ve got to decide: do you want to obey the laws of the countries you’re in or not? If not, you may not end up doing business there.”
“Chinese efforts to censor the internet have been very limited. It’s easy to go around it, so I think keeping the internet thriving there is very important.”
Poor Google, now it stands alone in the fight against a repressive government. It doesn’t help that no concrete evidence has been publicized to show that Chinese hackers carried out that cyber attack.
There are huge opportunity costs for Google if they missed out in this giant consumer market, even if they are doing very well currently with Q4 earnings meeting analysts’ expectations.
