3 Americans Share 2009 Nobel Physics Prize (07/10/2009)
STOCKHOLM — Three scientists who created the technology behind digital photography and helped link the world through fiber-optic networks shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday.
Charles K. Kao was cited for his breakthrough involving the transmission of light in fiber optics while Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith were honored for inventing an imaging semiconductor circuit known as the CCD sensor.
Discovery Brings New Type Of Fast Computers Closer To Reality (29/09/2009)
Physicists at UC San Diego have successfully created speedy integrated circuits with particles called “excitons” that operate at commercially cold temperatures, bringing the possibility of a new type of extremely fast computer based on excitons closer to reality.
Top 10 Accidental Inventions (25/09/2009)
Penicillin
If you have ben living under a rock for the past 80 years or so, here is how the popular story goes:
Alexander Fleming did not clean up his workstation before going on vacation one day in 1928. When he came back, Fleming noticed that there was a strange fungus on some of his cultures. Even stranger was that bacteria did not seem to thrive near those cultures.
Penicillin became the first and is still one of the most widely used antibiotics.
The virtues of biochar: A new growth industry? (09/09/2009)
Biochar could enrich soils and cut greenhouse gases as well
CHARCOAL has rather gone out of fashion. Before the industrial revolution, whole forests disappeared into the charcoal-burners’ maw to provide the carbon that ironmakers need to reduce their ore to metal. Then, an English ironmaker called Abraham Darby discovered how to do the job with coke. From that point onward, the charcoal-burners’ days were numbered. The rise of coal, from which coke is produced, began, and so did the modern rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
An Intelligent System Helps Elderly Or Memory-impaired To Remember Everyday Tasks (31/08/2009)
A team of researchers from the University of Granada (UGR) has created a system with Artificial Intelligence techniques which notifies elderly people or people with special needs of the forgetting of certain everyday tasks. This system uses sensors distributed in the environment in order to detect their actions and mobile devices which remind them, for example, to take their keys before they leave home.
Robots to get their own operating system (12/08/2009)
THE UBot whizzes around a carpeted conference room on its Segway-like wheels, holding aloft a yellow balloon. It hands the balloon to a three-fingered robotic arm named WAM, which gingerly accepts the gift.
Cameras click. "It blows my mind to see robots collaborating like this," says William Townsend, CEO of Barrett Technology, which developed WAM.
The robots were just two of the multitude on display last month at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in Pasadena, California. But this happy meeting of robotic beings hides a serious problem: while the robots might be collaborating, those making them are not. Each robot is individually manufactured to meet a specific need and more than likely built in isolation.
Clean Fuels Could Reduce Deaths From Ship Smokestacks By 40,000 Annually (15/07/2009)
Rising levels of smokestack emissions from oceangoing ships will cause an estimated 87,000 deaths worldwide each year by 2012 — almost one-third higher than previously believed, according to the second major study on that topic. The study says that government action to reduce sulfur emissions from shipping fuel (the source of air pollution linked to an increased risk of illness and death) could reduce that toll.
Electronic screens as thin as paper are coming soon (26/06/2009)
The crucial technological development happened recently at the Flexible Display Centre at Arizona State University. Using a novel lithographic process invented by HP Labs, the research arm of Hewlett-Packard, and an electronic ink produced by E Ink, a company spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the centre’s researchers succeeded in printing flexible displays onto long rolls of a special plastic film made by DuPont. To make individual screens, the printed film is sliced up into sections rather as folios for magazines or newspapers would be cut from a printed web of paper.
Asia and Europe seek solutions for controlled waste management. (29/05/2009)
Waste disposal is creating a serious problem in many cities in Asia.
The need to organise waste management systematically and to communicate the message to the local people demands considerable awareness raising, good networking and a lot of patience. With the EU project ISSOWAMA (Integrated Sustainable Solid Waste Management in Asia), ttz Bremerhaven, together with 21 partners, is planning to develop a practicable model and implement it on site. The project was officially launched on 11 and 12 February in Bangkok.
U.S. astronauts install batteries for Hubble (19/05/2009)
A pair of
