Is China Beating The U.S. In Clean Tech?

Credit: Technology Review

From The Technology Review:

The president of NRDC points to a growing investment by China in energy technologies.

China could beat the United States in a race to deploy clean energy technology that can reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, said Frances Beinecke, leader of a leading environmental group, speaking this week at MIT.

"I just got back from China, where there is tremendous investment in the clean tech sector," said Beinecke, the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). "They have a national renewable energy standard, a national efficiency standard, and China will build more of everything--more coal, more nuclear, more renewables--and they'll invest in more efficiency than any other single country in the world."

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Electron Microscopes Powered by Quantum Mechanics Could See Through Living Cells

Butterfly Wing Under an Electron Microscope MIT and NSF

From Popular Science:

Electron microscopes are great and all, but the problem is that you can't use them to get up close and personal inside a living cell without killing it. That might change, however, as scientists are working to use quantum mechanics to overcome this obstacle.

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The Next Generation Of Stealth

A cloaking device is made of copper rings, each surrounded by 10 layers of meta-material. (© Duke Photography www.dukephoto.duke.edu)

Now You See It, Now You Don’t -- Air & Space Smithsonian

Blinding us with science: the next generation of stealth.

Look down a long stretch of highway on a summer afternoon and in the distance a pool of water seems to wait for you, glistening under the hot sun. It’s only an illusion—Mother Nature’s version of a practical joke. The difference in density between the asphalt-heated air near the surface and the cooler air above acts like a lens, bending light waves as they pass from one layer to the next to reflect the blue sky and hide both the blacktop and any vehicles at the far end of the road behind a shimmering curtain.

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My Comment: The technical geek inside of me loves stories like this one .... makes you wonder what the ultimate limits to stealth are.

Future Is TV-Shaped, Says Intel

From BBC:

The world's biggest chip maker predicts that by 2015 there will be 12 billion devices capable of connecting to 500 billion hours of TV and video content.

Intel said its vision of TV everywhere will be more personal, social, ubiquitous and informative.

"TV is out of the box and off the wall," Intel's chief technology officer Justin Rattner told BBC News.

"TV will remain at the centre of our lives and you will be able to watch what you want where you want.

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3D TV: Now Leaping Out Of The Cinema And Into A Living Room Near You

SPY KIDS 3-D: GAME OVER

From The Daily Mail:

We've only just got used to high-definition TV and now the technology industry is moving the goalposts again - 3D is being trialled by a number of TV makers and the BBC has said it may even broadcast part of the London 2012 Olympics in the format.

Here, Rob Waugh explains the competing home 3D technologies and answers your burning 3D questions.

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How Last.fm Inspired A Scientific Breakthrough

From The Guardian:

I first saw Mendeley pitch two weeks ago – now it is on the way to changing the face of science.

The music radio site Last.fm is one of the great ideas from the UK during the first dotcom boom. Users can listen to their own songs and other tracks recommended by Last.fm's algorithms based on their tastes, including iTunes, and those of friends. It could easily have been a one-trick pony. But now a few academics have applied its serendipity to scientific research. Why can't researchers, instead of waiting anywhere up to three years for their papers to jump all the hurdles, be part of a real-time market place – a fusion of iTunes and Last.fm for science?

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A 360-Degree Virtual Reality Chamber Brings Researchers Face To Face With Their Data

MULTI-DIMENSIONAL: Researchers interact with their data, which can be streamed live, using 3-D glasses, special wireless controllers, and sensors embedded in the bridge's railings. (Gesture control and voice recognition are in the works.) © JOANN KUCHERA-MORIN

From Scientific American:

Scientists can climb inside the University of California, Santa Barbara's three-story-high AlloSphere for a life-size interaction with their research.

Scientists often become immersed in their data, and sometimes even lost. The AlloSphere, a unique virtual reality environment at the University of California, Santa Barbara, makes this easier by turning large data sets into immersive experiences of sight and sound. Inside its three-story metal sphere researchers can interpret and interact with their data in new and intriguing ways, including watching electrons spin from inside an atom or "flying" through an MRI scan of a patient's brain as blood density levels play as music.

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Dual-Screen Laptop On Sale By Christmas

One of the first photos of the gScreen Spacebook Photo: GIZMODO

From The Telegraph:

The world's first truly dual-screen laptop, which will allow computer users to multi-task while on the move, is due to go on sale by the end of the year.

The pioneering PC, known as the Spacebook, is the brainchild of Alaska-based technology firm gScreen.

While growing numbers of office workers – especially in the financial industries – use several desktop monitors to track many programmes and information sources at the same time, no manufacturer has yet released a portable equivalent.

The gScreen Spacebook will boast two 15.4 in screens which can slide away to fill the space of a single screen when the laptop is being stored or transported.

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10 Profound Innovations Ahead

From Live Science:

Today's world looks increasingly like the future. Robots work factory assembly lines and fight alongside human warriors on the battlefield, while tiny computers assist in everything from driving cars to flying airplanes. Surgeons use the latest technological tools to accomplish incredible feats, and researchers push the frontiers of medicine with bioengineering. Science fiction stories about cloning and resurrecting extinct animals look increasingly like relevant cautionary tales.

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Forget Plasma And LCDs: How The 3mm-thick, Eco-Friendly OLED Is The TV Of The Future

The Sony XEL-1 is currently the only OLED TV on the market and priced at £3,500.
The screen is just 3mm thick

From The Daily Mail:

Once they were a must-have for every living room. But LCD and plasma TVs could be about to go the way of the cathode ray tube.

A new generation of super-slim screens will revolutionise home entertainment, according to the makers.

The OLED sets boast the thinnest TV screen created. At its narrowest point it is the width of a pound coin. And technological advances make the image far sharper than on LCD and plasma screens.

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The New Generation DVD That Can Hold All Of Your Movies On Just One Disc

Different dimensions: Scientists are creating a DVD disc that can hold thousands of hours of film - but it could take up to 10 years before it goes on sale

From The Daily Mail:

A DVD that can store up to 2,000 films could usher in an age of three-dimensional TV and ultra-high definition viewing, scientists say.

The ultra-DVD is the same size and thickness as a conventional disc, but uses nano-technology to store vast amounts of information.

Scientists believe it could be on sale in five years and say it will revolutionise the way we store films, music and data.

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Powerful Ideas: Fusing Atoms Just Might Work

Artist's rendering of a NIF target pellet being struck by multiple laser beams, which inside compress and heat the target to the necessary conditions for nuclear fusion to occur. Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Department of Energy

From Live Science:

This occasional series looks at powerful ideas — some existing, some futuristic — for fueling and electrifying modern life.

Solar power captures sunlight to create renewable energy, but recreating the sun on Earth holds even greater energy potential. Nuclear fusion — the power source inside the sun — will be attempted in new and soon-to-be-built facilities around the world.

"Fusion is a carbon-free and a virtually limitless supply of energy," said Ed Moses, project manager for the Department of Energy's recently commissioned National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Livermore, Calif.

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Thin And Rich

This is Your PC on Slimfast: Courtesy Toshiba

From Popsci.com:

A new set of chips gives super-slim cellphones the power of laptops.

Think of Toshiba's TG01 cellphone as the world's smallest PC. It powers 3-D games, plays high-definition movies, and smoothly runs many programs at once, a combo few other phones offer. Yet it's less than four tenths of an inch thick — 20 percent thinner than an iPhone — thanks to Qualcomm's Snapdragon system, which packs several previously separate chips into one case the size of a dime.

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Another Step Closer To The Medical Tricorder.

William D. Richard (left) takes an ultrasound probe of colleague David Zar's carotid artery with a low-power imaging device he designed. David Kilper/WUSTL Photo

Cell Phones Display Ultrasound Images -- Future Pundit

Another step closer to the medical tricorder.

Computer engineers at Washington University in St. Louis are bringing the minimalist approach to medical care and computing by coupling USB-based ultrasound probe technology with a smartphone, enabling a compact, mobile computational platform and a medical imaging device that fits in the palm of a hand.

I see this as part of a trend that amounts to a sort of democratization of medical testing. While this instrument at its current stage of development still requires an expert to wield it that won't always be the case. Small stuff costs less. It just has to become more powerful and more able to analyze images to discern what they mean without human expertise.

One way ultrasound for the masses could work is for the images to be sent via 4G and other faster wireless networks to a server. Then the server could do the computational heavy lifting to explain the medical significance of the stream of images.

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Printed Supercapacitor Could Feed Power-Hungry Gadgets

From New Scientist:

A supercapacitor – a device that can unleash large amounts of charge very quickly – has been created using printing technology for the first time. The advance will pave the way for "printed" power supplies that could be useful as gadgets become thinner, lighter and even flexible.

Advances in electronics mean portable gadgets are shrinking in size but growing in their energy demands, and conventional batteries are struggling to cope.

Batteries are slow to recharge because they store energy chemically. By contrast, capacitors, which are common in electronics, are short-term stores of electrical energy that charge almost instantaneously but hold little energy.

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Access Any Hard Drive From The Internet

PogoPlug: courtesy Cloud Engine

From Popular Science:

Using a tiny server crammed into a wall wart, the $100 PogoPlug turns any hard drive into a network-attached storage device

PogoPlug, available in North America as of today, is a cheap, straightforward, single-purpose device that aims to transform network-attached storage into an appliance. It combines any old USB hard drive with your existing Internet connection, and then, voila: everything delicious and convenient about network-attached storage is now within reach.

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Sounds Good: The Flat Loudspeaker That Is As Thin As A Sheet Of Foil

The speaker is so thin it resembles a sheet of tin foil

From The Daily Mail:

A groundbreaking new loudspeaker that can be printed on and used as a wall poster has been developed by British engineers.

The lightweight and flexible speakers are less than 0.25mm thick and could also be concealed in car interiors or ceiling tiles.

They were developed by the University of Warwick spin-out company, Warwick Audio Technologies, who plan to start selling them later this year.

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The Tech Behind 3D's Big Revival

Left: James Cameron on the set of his 3D epic Avatar. Right: An NFL Films cameraman captures last season’s San Diego—Oakland game using a stereo­scopic camera rig built by 3ality. (Photograph by Associated Press)

From Popular Mechanics:

3D has been around for a century, but only now are we seeing 3D in Super Bowl ads and in big Hollywood 3D releases like Coraline and Monsters vs. Aliens. So what has convinced Hollywood that 3D is finally ready for its closeup? The short answer is that technology has finally caught up with the concept.

Hollywood is buzzing about 3D. Dreamworks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg has compared it to the introduction of color. Director James Cameron delayed the release of his stereoscopic epic Avatar in part to give theaters more time to convert to 3D capability. A dozen or more stereoscopic films will be released in 2009, and more than 30 movies are in production. But stereoscopic films are not a revolutionary concept; in fact, audiences have been paying for them since The Power of Love in 1922. The golden age of 3D was in the 1950s, with a brief resurgence in the 1980s. Each time experts heralded the format as the next big thing in filmmaking, and each time, the surge quietly subsided.

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Televisions 'To Be Fitted In Contact Lenses Within Ten Years'

Channels could be changed by voice, making remote controls a thing of the past

From The Telegraph:

Televisions could be fitted into contact lenses within ten years, according to analysts.

The sets would be powered by the viewer's body heat, according to Ian Pearson, a so-called "futurologist" who has advised leading companies including BT on new technologies.

Mr Pearson told the Daily Mail he believed that channels could be changed by voice command or via a wave of the hand.

Meanwhile "emotional viewing" could be another development in television technology, according to a report commissioned by the technology retailer Comet.

A "digital tattoo" fitted to the viewer would pick up on the feelings of characters on screen and create impulses causing them to feel the same way.

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