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Dario Borghino
- Lithium-sulfur batteries could store triple the power of lithium-ion (14,216 Views)
- Quantum computer closer: Optical transistor made from single molecule (12,424 Views)
- Newly theorized active cloaking could achieve broadband invisibility (10,700 Views)
- Glass casting meets the digital age: 3-D glass printing method developed (6,178 Views)
- Mouse 2.0: Microsoft's multi-touch mouse prototypes (5,842 Views)
All Articles by Dario Borghino
Spider webs hold the key to stronger bioadhesives
15:45 November 6, 2009 PST
Spiders are remarkable animals: with over 40,000 classified species, they are among the most diverse known to man and can adapt to the most radical climatic conditions. The silky substance they produce to spin webs has been extensively studied and is known to rival steel in strength: a less-known fact, however, is that the "glue" that holds it all together is just as remarkable, and could soon become the key to producing stronger bioadhesives to replace petroleum-based products. Read More
ASUS P7P55D-E Premium motherboard supports USB 3.0
18:26 November 4, 2009 PST
Asus has announced the world's first motherboard to support the upcoming USB 3.0 standard, allowing data transfer rates approaching 600MB/s. It also includes the latest generation SATA, which will support transfer speeds of up to 6Gbit/s, and the company has also flagged a cheaper alternative in the form of an add-in card that will offer these two functionalities for motherboards of the same family and will be sold for under US$30. Read More
Nanosized drug delivery systems take a leap forward
19:03 November 3, 2009 PST
Blood vessels that supply tumors are more porous than normal vessels, makes nanoscale drug delivery systems a particularly attractive prospect. If properly engineered, nanoparticles can in fact get inside a tumor, targeting it precisely and allowing much higher drug dosages as they reduce side effects to a minimum. Two recent studies featured in the latest issue of the journal Nature Materials specifically address these issues and give us promising leads in the fight against cancer. Read More
Tilera unveils Tile GX100, the 100-core general purpose processor
17:31 November 1, 2009 PST
If you thought Intel's plans to embed eight cores in its high-end processors were a bit too out there, you'll find that the latest processor developed by semiconductor start-up Tilera is even more of an extreme. Packing 100 1.25GHz to 1.5GHz cores on a single chip, the Gx100 brings parallel processing to the extreme thanks to a new architecture that minimizes the bus bottleneck in today's multi-core processors. Read More
New spintronics breakthrough paves the way to faster computing
19:30 October 29, 2009 PDT
A team of researchers from the University of Cincinnati have achieved control of the spin of electrons traveling on a wire by simply regulating an electrical voltage. This is a major milestone in the brief history of spintronics, the emerging technology that uses the spin of electrons to store and manipulate digital information with much higher speeds and efficiency. Read More
Google to feature Twitter updates in search
17:35 October 26, 2009 PDT
Since it was founded three years ago, Twitter has quickly grown into a social phenomenon used by presidents and bloggers alike for breaking news, political protests, marketing and personal blogging, offering a unique real-time cross-section of today's society. In a recent announcement made by Google's VP of search products and user experience, Melissa Mayer, the search giant said it had reached an agreement with the microblogging service and would soon be able to integrate status updates with its standard search results. Read More
Newly developed nanomaterial could boost data storage density and cars' fuel efficiency
18:00 October 25, 2009 PDT
By manipulating matter at the nanoscale level, engineers from North Carolina State University led by Dr. Jagdish Narayan have developed a new material that could make it possible to manufacture terabyte memory chips the size of a fingernail, boost vehicles' fuel economy significantly and reduce heat dissipated by semiconductors, with applications ranging from spintronics to solar panel technology. Read More
Acer releases 3D laptop
05:22 October 24, 2009 PDT
Acer's latest laptop aims to offer something new to videogame and movie enthusiasts: equipped with a 3D screen and glasses, the AS5738 is specifically designed to deliver 3D multimedia and it's also capable of translating standard 2D media content into the third dimension. Read More
Plasmonics breakthrough promises faster computers and communications
17:14 October 21, 2009 PDT
Plasmonics is a promising emerging technology that attempts to put together the best of two worlds — optics and electronics — to achieve faster computation and communication by making optical devices significantly smaller. In recent research, a team of European scientists has solved a long-standing problem in this field by sending signals over a long distance in a breakthrough that brings this technology much closer to mass production. Read More
Next-generation TMOS displays closer to mass production
16:26 October 21, 2009 PDT
Uni-Pixel, a company based in Woodlands, Texas, has announced it is about to start mass production of a thin-film to be used in time-multiplexed optical shutter (TMOS) displays, a next-generation display technology that exploits retinal persistence in the human eye and promises significantly better performance than CRT, LCD and OLED displays with, among other things, great durability and dramatically improved energy efficiency. Read More
Acer delivers its first touchscreen notebook and updates the Timeline series
07:39 October 18, 2009 PDT
Up until now, touchscreen laptops have been one of two things — either low-resolution and lacking the horsepower to perform heavy tasks, or just too expensive. With the upcoming Aspire 5738PG, a multi-touch screen notebook sporting Windows 7 and some respectable specs priced at less than US$800, Acer is looking to bring a quality touchscreen experience within the budget of a wider range of users. On the same day, the PC giant also announced an update to its Timeline series with the addition of a 11.6-inch notebook and the transition to Intel dual-core processors on all existing models. Read More
Memory chips could lead the way to gigapixel cameras
17:51 October 14, 2009 PDT
Image sensors embedded in digital cameras are expensive, and issues with their circuitry limit the quality and resolution in the pictures they produce. Now a research group from the Netherlands believes a cheaper solution could be right before our eyes - the team's "gigavision" technique exploits the high light sensitivity of memory chips to produce inexpensive gigapixel sensors that perform very well, especially in extreme lighting conditions. Read More
MIT's one-way road for microwave light makes efficient lightwave circuits closer
19:13 October 13, 2009 PDT
Light normally bounces off obstacles in its way, and the part of the beam that is reflected back and captured by our eyes contributes to our perception of the world around us. However, every reflection dissipates a small part of the beam's energy, and can eventually weaken it significantly. A team of MIT researchers have developed an innovative waveguide that allows microwave light to travel one way only and without reflections, paving the way to much more efficient lightwave circuits and connections. Read More
Belkin’s Easy Transfer Cable for Windows 7 makes upgrading smoother
05:11 October 10, 2009 PDT
Upgrading to a new operating system is a notorious mess — you need to find all of your data and user settings (often spending hours doing so), burn them to a DVD or other support and then copy them all to the new OS. Belkin's "Easy Transfer Cable" for Windows 7, a USB 2.0 cable with accompanying software aims to make the whole process much easier by guiding you through the transfer process, automatically finding your data and settings and streamlining the transition from XP or Vista to the upcoming Windows 7. Read More
Mouse 2.0: Microsoft's multi-touch mouse prototypes
05:01 October 10, 2009 PDT
It's been over forty years since the first computer mouse saw the light of day, and the fact that its basic design hasn't changed all that much is a testament to the original. But that doesn't mean there's no room for improvement. A group of researchers at Microsoft has come up with five new experimental designs that tie traditional mouse functionality to increasingly popular multi-touch technology on a single device. Read More
Kingston releases MobileLite Flash card reader, reloaded
03:24 October 10, 2009 PDT
Kingston recently released MobileLiteG2, the second generation of its portable Flash card reader. The 18.9g plug-and-play unit shows up as two separate devices on your system to make it easier to transfer data between Flash memory cards using only one USB port. Read More
Speedy communication takes a quantum leap towards reality
18:15 October 7, 2009 PDT
Quantum computing is expected to revolutionize electronics over the course of the next few decades, but a number of outstanding issues still remain. One such problem is that "qubits," the basic building blocks of quantum information, are very fragile and can be easily destroyed when sent on a fiber optics cable, due to the surrounding noise. Working on this issue, a team from Stockholm's KHT University, led by Magnus Rådmark, has developed a new method for combining six photons to obtain a robust qubit that is resistant to noise and is, therefore, able to travel long distances without interference. Read More
Femtoseconds lasers will help formation flying in space
14:26 October 6, 2009 PDT
Theoretical work commissioned to the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) by the European Space Agency has recently concluded that lasers capable of generating extremely short pulses — known as "femtosecond comb lasers" — could be of great help in measuring the distance between two or more spacecraft to an accuracy of just a few microns, an essential component to formation flying space missions scheduled for the next decades. Read More
'Time telescope' speeds up optical transmission by 27 times
22:17 October 4, 2009 PDT
Most of today's telecommunication data is encoded at a speed of 10 Gbit/s, but researchers are constantly looking for new ways to push this limit even further. A group of researchers at Cornell University have recently come up with the "time telescope," a sophisticated system that can speed up optical communication by 27 times to an outstanding 270 Gbits/s by squeezing more information into a single flash of light and that, unlike previous solutions, does so in an energy-efficient manner. Read More
Better control over nanotube growth promises important advances in electronics
02:12 October 3, 2009 PDT
Researchers at the Honda Research Institute, Purdue University and the University of Louisville have discovered a way to systematically grow carbon nanotubes with either metallic or semiconducting properties, solving a long-standing problem in nanotechnology research and paving the way for the widespread use of nanotubes in electronics. Read More
New advances in excitonics promise faster computers
16:44 October 1, 2009 PDT
Much of today's research in electronics is geared towards obtaining faster computing and higher communication speeds. Researchers at UC San Diego are no exception, and have recently announced they have made another important step towards achieving exciton-based computation at room temperatures. Excitonics exploits the unique properties of excitons instead of the usual electrons, and promises much faster performance by interfacing more naturally with optical communications such as fiber optics. Read More
Diamonds could soon be used to probe living cells and drug molecules
18:41 September 30, 2009 PDT
While working on their long-term goal of achieving a true quantum computer, a team of researchers from Stanford University, the Joint Quantum Institute, MIT and Texas A&M University has recently discovered that tiny nitrogen impurities in diamonds make outstanding magnetic probes in the cellular and molecular scale, with important applications that could truly benefit medical research. Read More
SurroundSense uses your phone's sensors to figure out where you are
17:02 September 30, 2009 PDT
Smartphones use GPS locating for a variety of functions but mainly they're used on the road where their accuracy - only within 10m - is basically a case of 'near enough is good enough'. But try using one indoors. They don't work! Nor can they distinguish between two adjacent environments, however different. And 10m can make a big difference inside a shopping complex or multi-roomed office block. In a research jointly sponsored by Microsoft, Nokia, Verizon and the National Science Foundation, a group of computer engineers from Duke University is working on achieving better indoor localization using a combination of sounds, lighting and accelerometer data picked up by a mobile phone. They hope it will supplement the use of GPS systems, which most users know, have their limitations. Read More
Cyber 'ants' patrol PC networks against computer worms and other threats
00:46 September 29, 2009 PDT
In looking for highly efficient ways to solve complex problems, we've often seen researchers mimic the solutions found by nature over billions of years: smart fabrics inspired by pine cones, spectrum analyzers modeled after the human ear and powerful search-and-optimization genetic and evolutionary algorithms, to name just a few. The latest piece of news comes from Wake Forest University, where the group dynamics of ant colonies have inspired security software to fight computer worms and other threats. Read More
Glass casting meets the digital age: 3-D glass printing method developed
17:25 September 28, 2009 PDT
A team of engineers and artists at the University of Washington's Solheim Rapid Manufacturing Laboratory has revived an ancient Egyptian glass casting method and developed "Vitraglyphic," a technique to manufacture glass objects from fine glass powder using computer-aided design and a 3-D printer, paving the way for a significantly faster and cheaper method for artists, architects and designers to build high-precision prototypes. Read More
Jonathan Cole
- November 6, 2009 @ 16:15 UTC
