February 7th, 2010
Report: Acts of space warfare likely by 2025
It’s no secret that the extension of military weapons beyond the atmosphere is a priority for space-faring nations that need to protect their increasing military and commercial assets in orbit. For instance, in 2001, a commission headed by then US Defense Secretary-designate Donald Rumsfeld warned about a possible “space Pearl Harbor” which led to the development of the Space Based Space Surveillance (SBSS) project.
Credit: Enjoyspace.com
But the concern over space supremacy runs deeper than threats of Russian anti-satellite weapons. A forecast published by the Military Space Transparency Project (MSTP) warns of a second arms race that can erupt if the international community doesn’t take steps toward a space treaty program.
“Given how easily information can spread about the globe today, it is inevitable that space warfare technologies will proliferate. Once one country sets its sights on space domination, other countries are sure to follow,” writes Matthew Hoey.
February 2nd, 2010
Japanese machine transforms office paper into toilet paper
Aptly named “White Goat”, a machine created by Oriental, Co. Ltd is one of latest offspring of the eco movement. According to sources, it uses 40 sheets of standard A4 office paper and water to make one roll of toilet paper in roughly 30 minutes.
If the novelty turns heads, so does the price tag. White Goat is set to go on sale this summer for $100,000. To break even requires 200,000 roles produced, which can take 11 years if operated non-stop, and that does not include the cost of operating the machine. For some corporate paper wasters, however, saving trees may be justification enough for such a machine, with or without the pro forma case.
As the video below reveals, the patent-pending White Goat operates by first cutting paper into ribbons with its built-in shredder. (Shredded paper can also be dumped into machine). The ribbons then move to a pulper where they dissolve in water and the resulting pulp is thinned out, dried, and rolled up into ready-to-use toilet paper which is dispensed from the opposite end of the machine.
(via DVICE)
January 29th, 2010
An organic transistor that mimics a brain synapse
For the first time, nanotechnology researchers in France have developed a hybrid nano-particle-organic transistor that can mimic the main functionalities of a synapse.
Credit: Mil-Tech.com
The NOMFET (Nanoparticle Organic Memory Field-Effect Transistor), as it’s known, is an organic device made of a molecule called pentacene (an organic semiconductor) and gold nano-particles. It exhibits the main behavior of a biological spiking synapse and can lead to a new generation of neuro-inspired computers, capable of responding in a manner similar to the nervous system.
As Mil-Tech reports, Dominique Vuillaume, a research director at CNRS (the French National Science Agency) involved with the project said; “Basically, we have demonstrated that electric charges flowing through a mixture of an organic semiconductor and metallic nano-particles can behave the same way as neurotransmitters through a synaptic connection in the brain.”
January 25th, 2010
Microsoft's 'Pictionaire' augments surface computing for real world objects
To designers, like IDEO’s Tim Brown, pen and paper is all you need for quick visual thinking and rapid prototyping. Even with advances made in tablet-computing and touchscreens, much is lost when transferring ideas from brain to hand to a glass screen with a stylus.
Recognizing this, researchers from Microsoft and UC Berkeley have developed an interactive table called “Pictionaire” that extends surface computing to support collaborative design teams. It essentially allows for the digitization of real world objects.
Pictionaire works by making digital copies of physical objects placed on the screen with a high-resolution overhead digital camera, allowing a user to manipulate real objects with the all the fun touchscreen interaction we’ve come to know.
When a users places, say, a sketchpad on the the nearly 6-foot table, the ceiling mounted equipment recognizes it by its size and shape, and projects a virtual “drag-off” handle onto the corner of the page. If the user swipes over the handle, the camera takes a digital snapshot of the sketchbook page and sends the information to the touchscreen so that a digital version of the page appears on the table. Read the rest of this entry »
January 20th, 2010
Researchers virtualize supercomputer
A collaboration between researchers at Northwestern University, Sandia National Labs and the University of New Mexico is helping to democratize supercomputers by removing them from the confinement of their specialized operating systems.
The largest-scale study ever involving the virtualization of parallel supercomputing systems has led to the successful virtualization of Sandia’s Red Storm supercomputer— the 17th fastest in the world — using an OS-independent virtual machine monitor called Palacios.
The team ’socialized’ 4,096 of Red Storm’s total 12,960 computer nodes into accepting a virtual external operating system — a leap of at least two orders of magnitude over previous such efforts.
January 19th, 2010
Korean robot maid upgraded to do laundry, use microwave
The prospect of a future that includes robot maids took an incremental step forward to reality. Korean scientists have created a domestic robot that cleans, dumps clothes in the washing machine and even heats food in the microwave. Just don’t expect it to do any of that speedily.
Standing over 4 feet tall and weighing 122 pounds, Mahru-Z (to the right in the image) has a human-like body including a rotating head, arms, legs and six fingers and is capable of “seeing” three dimensional objects and can recognize people and jobs that need to be done. It has the dexterity, for instance, to pick up a dirty shirt, throw it into a washing machine and push the buttons to get the laundry done, according to the engineers who developed it at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST).
January 17th, 2010
Texas scientists develop 'nanodragster'
Scientists at Rice University’s Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology are reporting the development of a “nanodragster” that measures only 1/50,000th the width of a human hair. The research may speed the course toward development of a new generation of futuristic molecular machines.
The vehicle (pictured above to the left) resembles a hot-rod in shape (right) and can outperform previous nano-sized vehicles. In fact, it was the same Rice team that developed the world’s first nanocar– essentially a 4 by 3 nanometer arrangement of complex molecules with buckyball wheels (spheres created with 60 carbon atoms) that made it behave like a vehicle. The tiny car scooted around a gold surface when exposed to heat or an electric field gradient.
The original nanocar developed by researchers at Rice University (Credit: Y. Shira/Rice University)
But it had some drawbacks. The scientists had limited control of the car’s movement and the nanoscopic resolution tools available at the time (2005) for studying the car’s range of motions and capabilities were also constrained.
The new hot-rod–about half that size of the nanocar–delivers a performance boost by addressing some of these problems. The front end has a smaller axle and wheels made of special materials that roll easier. The rear wheels sport a longer axle but are still made of buckyballs, which provide strong surface grip. According to the scientists, these changes result in a “nanodragster” that can operate at lower temperatures than a regular nanocar and possibly has has better agility, paving the way for better molecular machines.
Such nano-machines may one day be used to transport cargo such as drugs or for manufacturing computer circuits and other electronic components.
James Tour, Kevin Kelly and colleagues detail their research in; “Molecular Machinery: Synthesis of a “Nanodragster”, a report published in ACS’ Organic Letters.
January 12th, 2010
2010 tech predictions: a futurist roundup
Sure, you’ve already read enough tech predictions for 2010 and probably have some of your own. But there’s one subset of the tech community that makes a living prognosticating- futurists. So it’s worth a post to highlight a few thought-provoking and entertaining ideas from a few experts. (Note: I would’ve posted this a lot earlier but was in Brazil on vacation for the last few weeks).
Jump the Curve
#7: An amateur scientist using cheap supercomputers accessed through “the cloud” will make a major scientific discovery. Her discovery will have initially been dismissed by peer-reviewed journals but hailed by the growing number of “open-science” advocates.
#13: Hype surround algae’s promise as the “bio-fuel of the future” will grow hot after a breakthrough in the field of synthetic biology. Environmental advocates, however, will draw parallels between the advent of the “designer bacteria” (which is used to convert algae into fuel) and the creation of genetically modified organisms. The issue of “Frankenbugs” will gain traction in the media.
#19: A conservative state legislator will introduce legislation prohibiting healthy individuals (i.e. non-injured combat veterans) from using implanted brain-neural technology to control objects outside their body. The bill will die in committee but the author and other supporters vow to make it a campaign issue in 2010.
Read all of Jack Uldrich’s 2010 Technology Forecast & Predictions
Ross Dawson
1. Information Intensity
We will soon consume more media than there are waking hours, by virtue of multi-channeling at most times. Billions of people and places will be media producers, including video streaming from most points of view on the world. We are just at the dawn of an incomprehensible daily onslaught of news and information – some valuable, much useless.5. Culture Jamming
Remix culture will surge, with everybody taking and jamming up slices of everything and anything to express themselves, while intellectual property law fails to keep pace. Every culture on the planet will reach everywhere – the only culture we will know is a global mashed-up emergent culture that changes by the minute.9. Augmented Humans
More than ever before, we can transcend our human abilities. Traditional memory aids are supplemented by augmented reality glasses or contact lenses, thought interfaces allow us to control machines, exoskeletons give us superhuman power. Machines will not take over humanity… because they will be us.
Read all of Ross’ Top 10 trends for the 2010s: the most exciting decade in human history
December 24th, 2009
Scientists create world's first molecular transistor
Scientists from Yale University and the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea, have succeeded in creating the first transistor made from a single molecule.
Credit: Hyunwook Song and Takhee Lee
The team showed that a benzene molecule attached to gold contacts could behave just like a silicon transistor. The researchers adjusted the voltage, allowing them to raise and lower the molecule’s energy states and demonstrated that it could be used exactly like a traditional transistor at the molecular level. The team published their findings in Nature.
“It’s like rolling a ball up and over a hill, where the ball represents electrical current and the height of the hill represents the molecule’s different energy states,” said Mark Reed, the Harold Hodgkinson Professor of Engineering & Applied Science at Yale. “We were able to adjust the height of the hill, allowing current to get through when it was low, and stopping the current when it was high.” The result is similar functionality to regular transistors, but with a molecule a few atoms in size.
The work builds on previous research Reed did in the 1990s, which demonstrated that individual molecules could be trapped between electrical contacts.
While the new transistor is a scientific breakthrough, Reed conceded that practical applications such as smaller and faster “molecular computers”—if possible at all—are many decades away.
“We’re not about to create the next generation of integrated circuits,” he said. “But after many years of work gearing up to this, we have fulfilled a decade-long quest and shown that molecules can act as transistors.”
Remarkable yes. But is it the ultimate in electronic device miniaturization? Earlier this month, an international team from Finland and Australia reported the development of a single-atom transistor.
In recent years, engineers have been moving away from silicon to exotic materials such as graphene to slash transistor size, with 10 atoms the record last year. The molecular transistor reduces that figure down to the single digits, possibly just one nanometer in length.
December 20th, 2009
An LCD screen with multitouch and off-screen gestural control
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a working prototype of a bidirectional LCD (captures and displays images) that allows a viewer to control on-screen objects without the need for any peripheral controllers or even touching the screen. In near Minority Report fashion, interaction is possible with just a wave of the hand.
“This is a level of interaction that nobody’s ever been able to do before,” says Ramesh Raskar at MIT’s Media Lab, who created the prototype along with colleagues Matthew Hirsch and Henry Holtzman, as well as Douglas Lanman at Brown University.
The BiDI Screen, as it’s called, is based on LCD technology in which arrays of optical sensors are interlaced with a panel’s pixels to detect multiple points of contact with the surface. This enables touch screen interaction. But to get the screen to see the world in front of it, the researchers displaced the sensor layer of photodiodes behind the liquid crystal layer. The LCD screen works double duty, switching between display mode and capture mode in real time. In display mode, the LCD functions as normal with backlight and liquid crystals modulating to produce an image. When in capture mode the screen serves as a pinhole array to capture the angle and intensity of light passing to the sensor layer and the backlight is disabled. Read the rest of this entry »
Christopher Jablonski is a freelance technology writer. Previously, he was the manager of marketing editorial at CBS Interactive, delivering client solutions on BNET, ZDNet, and TechRepublic. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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