War casualties are typically kept behind tightly closed doors, but one company keeps the mangled pieces of its first casualty on display. This is no ordinary soldier, though—it is Packbot from iRobot Corporation.
Tech
BERKELEY, CA – The pinhole camera, a technique known since ancient times, has inspired a futuristic technology for lensless, three-dimensional imaging. Working at both the Advanced Light Source (ALS) at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and at FLASH, the free-electron laser in Hamburg, Germany, an international group of scientists has produced two of the brightest, sharpest x-ray holograms of microscopic objects ever made, thousands of times more efficiently than previous x-ray-holographic methods.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- In a revolutionary leap that could transform solar power from a marginal, boutique alternative into a mainstream energy source, MIT researchers have overcome a major barrier to large-scale solar power: storing energy for use when the sun doesn't shine.
Until now, solar power has been a daytime-only energy source, because storing extra solar energy for later use is prohibitively expensive and grossly inefficient. With today's announcement, MIT researchers have hit upon a simple, inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy.
Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have devised a way to squeeze light into tighter spaces than ever thought possible, potentially opening doors to new technology in the fields of optical communications, miniature lasers and optical computers.
PASADENA, Calif.--Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have turned science fiction into reality with their development of a super-compact high-resolution microscope, small enough to fit on a finger tip. This "microscopic microscope" operates without lenses but has the magnifying power of a top-quality optical microscope, can be used in the field to analyze blood samples for malaria or check water supplies for giardia and other pathogens, and can be mass-produced for around $10.
The information technology industry consumes as much energy and has roughly the same carbon "footprint" as the airline industry. Now scientists and engineers at the University of California, San Diego are building an instrument to test the energy efficiency of computing systems under real-world conditions – with the ultimate goal of getting computer designers and users in the scientific community to re-think the way they do their jobs.
OAK RIDGE, Tenn., July 28, 2008 – Insight from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, commitment from two Michigan companies and funding from the Department of Energy have led to the commercialization of a lightweight urban transit bus with double the fuel efficiency of conventional hybrid buses.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – July 28, 2008 – Applied scientists at Harvard University in collaboration with researchers from Hamamatsu Photonics in Hamamatsu City, Japan, have demonstrated, for the first time, highly directional semiconductor lasers with a much smaller beam divergence than conventional ones. The innovation opens the door to a wide range of applications in photonics and communications. Harvard University has also filed a broad patent on the invention.
A team of researchers at Princeton University's Materials Research Science and Engineering Center has observed electrons moving through a crystal of bismuth metal behaving like light.
This discovery, supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and detailed in today's edition of the journal Science, could lead to new kinds of electronic devices.
In science fiction stories it is either the inexhaustible energy source of the future or a superweapon of galactic magnitude: antimaterial. In fact, antimaterial can neither be found on Earth nor in space, is extremely complex to produce and thus difficult to study. In order to nevertheless track down the origin of material and antimaterial in the universe, a European research group is measuring the power of the electrical dipole moment of neutrons, which represents a measure for the different physical properties of material and antimaterial.
Data breaches are a recurring nightmare for IT managers responsible for securing not only their company’s confidential data, but possibly also sensitive information belonging to their clients, such as social security numbers or health or financial records. To help managers safeguard valuable information most efficiently, computer scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are applying security metrics to computer network pathways to assign a probable risk of attack to guide IT managers in securing their networks.
Troy, N.Y. – Since the idea of using DNA to create faster, smaller, and more powerful computers originated in 1994, scientists have been scrambling to develop successful ways to use genetic code for computation. Now, new research from a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute suggests that if we want to carry out artificial computations, all we have to do is literally look around.
Austin, TX July 22, 2008 — Hurricane Katrina helped University of Texas professor, Alexis Kwasinski, formulate a new plan for the U.S. telecom system: a de-centralized power architecture that would have kept the lights and phones on in New Orleans. Kwasinski maintains that a microgrid-based power plant with its own local power sources and independent control would be more dependable, efficient, and cost effective than traditional telecom power systems. Microgrids would also be a quick and inexpensive way to include renewable energy sources for both existing and developing systems.
The inventor of the nickel metal hydride (NiMH) technology used for building batteries for countless portable electronic gadgets and now hybrid gas-electric cars believes the hydrogen economy is already upon us.
In a paper published in the current issue of the International Journal of Nuclear Hydrogen Production and Applications, Stanford Ovshinsky, Chairman and CEO of Ovshinsky Innovation LLC, based in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, explains that we already have the means for making the hydrogen economy realistic.