News and other tidbits that Chad Cloman finds interesting enough to share
Toshiba is creating micro nuclear reactors that are capable of powering a single building (or a city block). They’re self-contained and totally automatic, and last for about 40 years.
Link: http://www.nextenergynews.com/…
(via engadget)
The latest issue of Popular Science magazine has the best of what’s new for 2007. Here are a few items that caught my attention:
Using GPUs to solve complex problems – Some problems require massive amounts of fairly simple calculations. Turns out that the large number of processing units in a GPU, sometimes over a hundred, is the poor man’s supercomputer. Here’s a related Slashdot article.
Commercial holographic storage is a reality – Holographic storage has been in the works for some time, but it looks like it’s finally becoming a commercial reality. Pretty expensive, though. Chad’s News, of course, has been on top of this subject for years.
No-stink, one-coat paint – No smell and no primer or base coats required. And it’s not that expensive either.
A sensor in the ear detects tongue motion to control a wheelchair – This sounds much, much better than blowing in a straw, although I’m not sure that 97% accuracy is good enough.
Internet2 is a dedicated, second-generation internet that allows members (universities and some government/industry) to connect at very high transmission speeds. Currently they’ve achieved 100Gbps, with the theoretical ability to reach 1Tbps. That really puts my 1.5Mbps DSL link to shame. I’m not sure if/when Internet2 will be opened for general use, but even if it is, don’t look for it to be available to residential users any time soon, since it requires a dedicated fiber optic connection as well as specialized equipment.
Link: http://arstechnica.com/…
It’s not every day you see someone -asking- to be hit in the head with a shovel. The linked video is for a compound named D3O, and there’s a bit more explanation here.
I saw a similar (but more impressive) video where they drop an egg 72ft onto an inch-thick gel pad. The egg was unharmed. The gel pad is made of BetaGel, part of a line of AlphaGel shock absorption products from the Japanese company GELTEC.
Link: http://www.breitbart.tv/…
(via digg)
It’s been known for some time now that using capacitors to store electricity would do away with a couple shortcomings of rechargeable batteries—the long charge time and limited battery lifespan. The problem is that current capacitor technology isn’t able to store enough charge. This may soon be coming to an end, as a company named EEstor appears to have developed a capacitor suitable for electric cars.
Link: http://arstechnica.com/…
Previously only in the domain of science fiction, IBM is doing some fundamental research into saving a data bit in a single atom and also into making an electronic switch out of a single molecule (thus replacing transistors). Right now it’s at the research level, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it out in the wild within the next decade or two.
For some time now I have been wondering why we can’t just directly create the stuff that we currently rely on nature to provide: oil, food, etc. These items are basically made from four very plentiful elements—carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen—and I see no reason why we can’t just combine the elements in the right manner to create what we need. A company named LS9 has made a step in the right direction. They have developed bacteria that take corn-based sugars and convert them to oil. (They hope to eventually use switchgrass instead of corn.) One neat thing is that gasoline created from this oil is free of contaminants, such as sulfur, that exist in natural oil.
Link: http://www.technologyreview.com/…
(via Slashdot)
This system reads vinyl records with a laser instead of a needle. It can handle fragile and even broken records. Developed for the Library of Congress to help preserve old recordings, I can see a modified version becoming popular with audiophiles.
Link: http://www.npr.org/…
(via Slashdot)
Scientists have created a computer program that cannot be beaten at checkers, once the number of pieces gets down to 10. (I guess you could win if you still had 10 or more pieces left.) The way they worked this out is neat. For every possible combination of 10 checkers or less, the researchers have pre-computed the next move to take—a move that has a certainty of not losing. If the opponent also plays a perfect game, it will result in a draw, but the scientists have proven that the computer cannot lose.
Link#1: http://news.bbc.co.uk/…
Link #2: http://www.nature.com/…
(via Slashdot)
Link #3: http://www.foxnews.com/…
(via Kim Komando)
US and Australian scientists have successfully tested a scramjet, attaining a speed of Mach 10. This technology has the potential to revolutionize international travel, should it ever make it to commercial use. I’ve read about suborbital flights in a variety of science fiction novels, and it would be neat to see it become a reality.
RFID chips keep getting tinier and tinier. These latest ones from Hitachi are thinner than a strand of hair, yet are able to transmit a 38-digit identification number. I believe RFID tracking technology will become ubiquitous in the next few decades, to the point where future generations take it for granted.
Thanks to Josh for this topic.
Link: http://www.popsci.com/…
Chad’s News has previously mentioned flash-based, solid state hard drives, but it’s worth noting that they’re continuing to decrease in price and rise in capacity. For now, they appear to be targeted only at laptops.
