Eden.fm

Source: Yahoo News

US researchers have created a nano-fiber textile that harvests energy from movement, paving the way for clothing that could one day power an iPod or other wearable electronic devices, according to a study published Wednesday.

Using the same mechanical principle as a self-winding watch, but on scale measured in billionths of a meter, tiny nano-generators can scavenge “wasted” energy from sound waves, vibrations, or even the human heart beat.

The fibers, developed by a team of scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology led by Zhong Lin Wang, are covered with pairs of zinc oxide nanowires that produce tiny pulses of electricity in response to friction.

Source: Dailytech

Stanford University researchers design the first GHz chip using carbon nanotubes

Carbon nanotubes are being used in all sorts of research thanks to their strength and much higher electron mobility. Scientists are looking to carbon nanotubes as a replacement for copper wire in circuits, seen to be a bottleneck in future chips.

Source: BBCNews

UK scientists hope to mend shattered bones and damaged cartilage using a patient’s own stem cells.

They are developing a “bioactive scaffold” to protect the stem cells and encourage them to grow into bone or cartilage when placed in the body.

Source: BBCNews

Humans and machines would eventually merge, by means of devices embedded in people’s bodies to keep them healthy and improve their intelligence, predicted Mr Kurzweil.

“We’ll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons,” he told BBC News.

CHALLENGES FACING HUMANITY
Make solar energy affordable
Provide energy from fusion
Develop carbon sequestration
Manage the nitrogen cycle
Provide access to clean water
Reverse engineer the brain
Prevent nuclear terror
Secure cyberspace
Enhance virtual reality
Improve urban infrastructure
Advance health informatics
Engineer better medicines
Advance personalised learning
Explore natural frontiers

The nanobots, he said, would “make us smarter, remember things better and automatically go into full emergent virtual reality environments through the nervous system”.

Source: physorg.com

If you could hold a giant magnifying glass in space and focus all the sunlight shining toward Earth onto one grain of sand, that concentrated ray would approach the intensity of a new laser beam made in a University of Michigan laboratory.
“That’s the instantaneous intensity we can produce,” said Karl Krushelnick, a physics and engineering professor. “I don’t know of another place in the universe that would have this intensity of light. We believe this is a record.”

The pulsed laser beam lasts just 30 femtoseconds. A femtosecond is a millionth of a billionth of a second.

Such intense beams could help scientists develop better proton and electron beams for radiation treatment of cancer, among other applications.

The record-setting beam measures 20 billion trillion watts per square centimeter. It contains 300 terawatts of power. That’s 300 times the capacity of the entire U.S. electricity grid. The laser beam’s power is concentrated to a 1.3-micron speck about 100th the diameter of a human hair. A human hair is about 100 microns wide.

Source: Dailytech

A new study has some humorous comments at Mac owners’ expense, but reveals some serious market trends.

Mac users and Mac-loving analysts often use phrases like “the halo-effect” to explain increased sales of Mac computers and OS X due to iPods and iPhones. Now, the stock market site The Street has created a humorous video analysis that offers up a new explanation for this and more commercial phenomena — the “snob”-effect.

Sources: Dailytech BBCNews Kotaku

After days of intense speculation, Toshiba today officially announced that it will exit the HD DVD business. According to the press release, Toshiba decided after a thorough review of its overall strategy it will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders.

Source: Dailytech

A new research study has created a synthetic photosynthetic complex which has a net efficiency of 0.3 percent

Source: Newlaunches

 LCD TV’s were the past, OLED TV’s are the present and Laser TV’s will be the future. Mitsubishi Japan has already developed an experimental 65 inch Laser TV which uses 3 color Laser for illumination. The experimental model is rather thick at 10 inches (app 25.4 cms), surely the end when goes commercial will be much thinner. To make use of Laser technology ‘super wide angular optical engine’ has been developed which miniaturizes the optical system.

Source: http://firebox.com/index.html?dir=firebox&action=product&pid=2070&src_t=wnp

PowerMonkey is a sleek little gadget that provides hours of extra power for portable devices. Think of it as a back-up battery that, once charged, holds its power without leakage for up to a year

Source: Dailytech

Fujitsu Laboratories in Kawasaki, Japan today revealed its work on a new type of non-volatile ReRAM (Resistive RAM) that combines low power consumption with limited fluctuation of resistance value.

Source: Dailytech

South Korean scientists clone cat that glows red

Source: Dailytech

One of the new “young gun” telescopes is the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is scheduled to launch in 2013 as a replacement to the aging, yet venerable, Hubble. The telescope will be bigger than the Hubble, with a tennis court sized sunshield and massive mirror (6.5 m in diameter) that will unfold, once the telescope reaches its intended L2 orbit. The telescope is infrared optimized, but also offers strong capabilities in the visual light range.

Source: Dailytech

Researchers prove that neurons in the olfactory bulb are not fixed and slow responding but change on the fly to stimuli

Scientists have traditionally believed that the way our brains process smells via neuron connections in the olfactory bulb was dictated by the anatomy of the olfactory bulb and could only change slowly in response to stimulus.

Source: Dailytech

A group of researches has succeeded in using only light and sound to create a functional memory component that could be used in future optical computers.