Tech

A life cycle assessment of growing crops for fuel as opposed to refining and using fossil fuels has revealed that substitution of gasoline by bioethanol converted from energy crops has considerable potential for rendering our society more sustainable, according to a Japanese study published in the International Journal of Foresight and Innovation Policy.

At the CeBIT in Hanover, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the FZI Research Center for Information Technology will present innovations for our everyday life in the future. At the joint stand G33 in hall 26, a humanoid kitchen robot will move around, three-dimensional visualizations will open up new perspectives, and new algorithms will be presented to protect data in the cloud. The FZI House of Living Labs will present the interactive HoLLiE service robot and solutions for intelligent energy management.

ARMAR Robot Learns by Watching

At this time, wireless networks are able to brake just one bike, but in the future, the technical elements will be further developed to regulate entire trains as they travel over the lines. In view of that fact, computer scientists at Saarland University are designing mathematical calculations to check such systems automatically. The scientists will present their results at stand F34 in hall 26 at the computer fair Cebit. The trade show takes place in Hanover, Germany from March 6 to 10.

Athens, Ga. – Most convenience stores have a wide variety of chips, colorful candies and bottles of sugar-sweetened carbonated beverages. While shoppers can buy calorie-heavy foods wrapped in pretty packages in these locations, what they usually can't find are the fresh produce, whole grains and low-fat dairy products necessary for a healthy diet.

PHILADELPHIA -- The technological world of the 21st century owes a tremendous amount to advances in electrical engineering, specifically, the ability to finely control the flow of electrical charges using increasingly small and complicated circuits. And while those electrical advances continue to race ahead, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are pushing circuitry forward in a different way, by replacing electricity with light.

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- University at Buffalo engineers have developed a one-step, low-cost method to fabricate a polymer with extraordinary properties: When viewed from a single perspective, the polymer is rainbow-colored, reflecting many different wavelengths of light.

Used as a filter for light, this material could form the basis of handheld multispectral imaging devices that identify the "true color" of objects examined. An image of the material is available here: http://www.buffalo.edu/news/13214.

Cambridge, Mass. - February 23, 2012 – Engineers at Harvard have demonstrated a new kind of tunable color filter that uses optical nanoantennas to obtain precise control of color output.

Whereas a conventional color filter can only produce one fixed color, a single active filter under exposure to different types of light can produce a range of colors.

The advance has the potential for application in televisions and biological imaging, and could even be used to create invisible security tags to mark currency. The findings appear in the February issue of Nano Letters.

University of California, Berkeley, chemists are reimagining catalysts in ways that could have a profound impact on the chemical industry as well as on the growing market for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.

Catalysts are materials typically metals that speed up chemical reactions and are widely used in the synthesis of chemicals and drugs. They also are employed in automobile catalytic converters to change combustion chemicals into less-polluting emissions and in fuel cells to convert water into hydrogen.

Tomorrow's aircraft could contribute to their power needs by harnessing energy from the wheel rotation of their landing gear to generate electricity.

They could use this to power their taxiing to and from airport buildings, reducing the need to use their jet engines. This would save on aviation fuel, cut emissions and reduce noise pollution at airports.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Researchers at Oregon State University have discovered a way to make a low-cost material that might accomplish negative refraction of light and other radiation – a goal first theorized in 1861 by a giant of science, Scottish physicist James Maxwell, that has still eluded wide practical use.

Under a microscope, a tiny droplet slides between two fine hairs like a roller coaster on a set of rails until — poof — it suddenly spreads along them, a droplet no more.

Sometimes knowing that a new technology works is not enough. You also must know why it works to get marketplace acceptance. New information from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)* about how layered switching devices for novel computer memory systems work, for example, may now allow these structures to come to market sooner, helping bring about faster, lower-powered computers.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The condensation of water is crucial to the operation of most of the powerplants that provide our electricity — whether they are fueled by coal, natural gas or nuclear fuel. It is also the key to producing potable water from salty or brackish water. But there are still large gaps in the scientific understanding of exactly how water condenses on the surfaces used to turn steam back into water in a powerplant, or to condense water in an evaporation-based desalination plant.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 23— In order to build the next generation of very large supercomputers, it's essential that scientists and engineers find a way to seamlessly scale computation performance without exceeding extraordinary power consumption. It is widely agreed that the major challenge to scaling future systems will no longer be the CMOS (Complementary Metal–Oxide–Semiconductor) integrated circuit technology but rather the data movement among processors and memory.

To connect a laptop to an additional monitor, projector or even to a monitor wall, a special cable was required, until now. Researchers of the Saarland University's Intel Visual Computing Institute overcome this obstacle by linking computer and monitor via an 'Internet Service'. By this means, a screen's contents can be shifted freely to any terminal's display and even shown on large-scale monitor walls. The Saarland University's scientists present their results for the first time at stand F34, in hall 9 at the computer fair Cebit. The trade show takes place in Hannover from March 6 to 10.