Lenovo loves its red mousing nipple, Apple digs its aluminum and IBM adores those light pulses. Nearly two full years after we heard this very company touting breakthroughs in science thanks to a nanophotonic switch , in flies a similar technique from Yorktown Heights that could “greatly further energy efficient computing.” As the story goes, gurus at IBM have figured out how to replace electrical signals that communicate via copper wires between computer chips with tiny silicon circuits that chat using pulses of light
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IBM keeps light pulse bandwagon rolling, uses ‘em for chip-to-chip communication
Piezoelectrics are nothing new — though most applications, they’ve proven to be far more theoretically useful than practical. Still, the technology is starting to move in a direction that could prove more applicable to everyday situations — and a new piezo material recently developed could really get the ball moving. Called PZT, it’s made of nano -sized fibers of lead zirconate titanate, which are applied to thin (and we mean thin) ribbons of flexible silicone rubber
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Scientists to bring piezoelectrics and rubber together to form flexible, wearable energy harvester
You’ve been up nights, we know, and now Microsoft has finally ended your torment: the long-promised Facebook application is now available for download to the Zune HD. Go wild, but not too wild , alright everybody?
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Facebook app now available for Zune HD
We’ve seen plenty of cockamamie rocket stunts in our day, but there are still few things cooler than an amateur project that reaches for the stars. To this end (and for some free advertising) Sony’s announced the imaginatively named Rocket Project, wherein eight high school science students will be selected to receive Vaio CW-series laptops which they’ll then use to design and build a twenty-five feet tall, 500 pound rocket capable of reaching the stratosphere (at least theoretically). Qualifying designs must also incorporate a Vaio Z-Series (Intel Core i5) laptop to control the rocket, and a Vaio F-Series (Intel Core i7) as mission control for the launch.
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Sony’s Rocket Project helps students reach the stratosphere, unloads some Vaios in the process (video)
Solar cells are cute and all , but let’s be real — these things are far too inefficient for mainstream use.
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Caltech gurus whip up highly efficient, low cost flexible solar cell
Oh, nanotechnology — your wonders never cease. Boffins at Imperial College London have been able to use live nanoscale microscopy (a technique called scanning ion conductance microscopy) in order to see the surface of the cardiac muscle cell at more detailed levels than those possible using conventional live microscopy. Without getting too gross on you, the new process could lead to improved designs of beta-blockers, the drugs that can retard the development of heart failure
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Newfangled nanoscale scanning technique could improve heart health
Pinky and the Brain don’t get nearly the respect they deserve, but then again, neither do the lab coat-wearing boffins who make great strides behind sterilized doors to bring us one step closer to mass laziness . The latest development in the everlasting brain control saga takes us to the University of Washington, where a team of researchers are carefully studying the differences between doing an action and simply imagining the action.
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Thought-control research brings mental channel changing ever closer
When researchers at the University of Oxford needed to precisely sync high-speed video with high resolution stills, they had a hell of a time finding an off-the-shelf solution that worked with any degree of accuracy. Instead, the crazy kids hacked together a home cinema projector and a consumer-level digicam to split every frame of video captured by the camera into sixteen frames (albeit with lower resolution)
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Digicam hack simultaneously captures stills and high speed video on the cheap
Hey, now, this is some great news, right? The trouble-plagued Large Hadron Collider looks to be doing a bang up job in some of its primary tasks.
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Report: Large Hadron Collider producing tons of awesome collisions
It’s good to know that even huge inanimate objects appreciate the need for a work-life balance. After a nice winter hiatus , Switzerland’s Large Hadron Collider is coming back online soon, set to resume smashing protonic beams at one another with the force of 3.5 trillion electron-volts (TeV) per beam, or 7 TeV in total
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Large Hadron Collider schedules holiday for 2012, full 7 TeV power for 2013
