DJ Hero Review
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Green Wavelength's radical departure from conventional wind turbine design Green Wavelength unveils bumblebee inspired wind turbine
Subaru WRX STI TRAX Subaru WRX STI TRAX hits the backcountry
The Opera camper trailer has every conceivable luxury: electrically-adjustable beds, hot a... ‘Opera’ luxury camper trailer hits a high note
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Dario Borghino


Top Articles by Dario Borghino

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RESEARCH WATCH

Spider webs hold the key to stronger bioadhesives

By Dario Borghino

15:45 November 6, 2009 PST

A study on the glue that holds spider webs together brings us closed to producing bioadhes...

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

PERSONAL COMPUTING

ASUS P7P55D-E Premium motherboard supports USB 3.0

By Dario Borghino

18:26 November 4, 2009 PST

The Asus P7DP55DE-E Premium will be the first motherboard to support  USB 3.0.

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

HEALTH AND WELLBEING

Nanosized drug delivery systems take a leap forward

By Dario Borghino

19:03 November 3, 2009 PST

After 24 hours, the cancer cells have taken up chimeric polypeptide-chemo combination (sho...

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

ELECTRONICS

Tilera unveils Tile GX100, the 100-core general purpose processor

By Dario Borghino

17:31 November 1, 2009 PST

Thanks to a new bus architecture, the Tilera Tile Gx processor family can cram as many as ...

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

RESEARCH WATCH

New spintronics breakthrough paves the way to faster computing

By Dario Borghino

19:30 October 29, 2009 PDT

Researchers have achieved all-electric control of the spin of electrons in a major breakth...

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

TELECOMMUNICATIONS

Google to feature Twitter updates in search

By Dario Borghino

17:35 October 26, 2009 PDT

Google's latest deal promises to bring even more real-time data to Web searches

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

RESEARCH WATCH

Newly developed nanomaterial could boost data storage density and cars' fuel efficiency

By Dario Borghino

18:00 October 25, 2009 PDT

Lead researcher of the new material, Dr. Jagdish Narayan

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

PERSONAL COMPUTING

Acer releases 3D laptop

By Dario Borghino

05:22 October 24, 2009 PDT

The Acer AS5738 comes with a 3D screen, 3D glasses and software to project your media and ...

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

RESEARCH WATCH

Plasmonics breakthrough promises faster computers and communications

By Dario Borghino

17:14 October 21, 2009 PDT

Plasmonics devices could soon make dreams of light-speed data processing come true

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

ELECTRONICS

Next-generation TMOS displays closer to mass production

By Dario Borghino

16:26 October 21, 2009 PDT

By using fewer layers and a simplified structure, TMOS displays are much more energy-effic...

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

PERSONAL COMPUTING

Acer delivers its first touchscreen notebook and updates the Timeline series

By Dario Borghino

07:39 October 18, 2009 PDT

Acer's Aspire 5738PG is the company's first touchscreen notebook and combines high-end spe...

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

CAMERAS AND IMAGING

Memory chips could lead the way to gigapixel cameras

By Dario Borghino

17:51 October 14, 2009 PDT

A Dutch research team used memory chips to create affordable high-resolution image sensors...

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

RESEARCH WATCH

MIT's one-way road for microwave light makes efficient lightwave circuits closer

By Dario Borghino

19:13 October 13, 2009 PDT

MIT researchers have found a way to make light travel  one-way without reflections in a lo...

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

PERSONAL COMPUTING

Belkin’s Easy Transfer Cable for Windows 7 makes upgrading smoother

By Dario Borghino

05:11 October 10, 2009 PDT

Belkin's Easy Transfer Cable makes upgrading to Windows 7 easier by transferring your data...

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

PERSONAL COMPUTING

Mouse 2.0: Microsoft's multi-touch mouse prototypes

By Dario Borghino

05:01 October 10, 2009 PDT

The FTIR (Frustrated Total Internal Reflection) mouse

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

PERSONAL COMPUTING

Kingston releases MobileLite Flash card reader, reloaded

By Dario Borghino

03:24 October 10, 2009 PDT

The MobileLiteG2 portable Flash card reader only requires one free USB port on your PC to ...

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

RESEARCH WATCH

Speedy communication takes a quantum leap towards reality

By Dario Borghino

18:15 October 7, 2009 PDT

An entangled state of six photons can form a quantum bit that is highly resistant to noise...

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

RESEARCH WATCH

Femtoseconds lasers will help formation flying in space

By Dario Borghino

14:26 October 6, 2009 PDT

The X-Ray Observatory set for launch after 2020 might be the spacecrafts to use femtosecon...

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

RESEARCH WATCH

'Time telescope' speeds up optical transmission by 27 times

By Dario Borghino

22:17 October 4, 2009 PDT

The time telescope could speed up optical communication by over 27 times. (Photo: Wikimedi...

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

RESEARCH WATCH

Better control over nanotube growth promises important advances in electronics

By Dario Borghino

02:12 October 3, 2009 PDT

Researchers have found that using argon or helium during the nanotube growth process can i...

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

ELECTRONICS

New advances in excitonics promise faster computers

By Dario Borghino

16:44 October 1, 2009 PDT

Excitonics could provide us with faster computers and better communication speeds - except...

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

HEALTH AND WELLBEING

Diamonds could soon be used to probe living cells and drug molecules

By Dario Borghino

18:41 September 30, 2009 PDT

When hit by green light, nitrogen impurities in diamonds become fluorescent and emit a bri...

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

MOBILE TECHNOLOGY

SurroundSense uses your phone's sensors to figure out where you are

By Dario Borghino

17:02 September 30, 2009 PDT

SurroundSense uses your mobile phone's sensors to figure out where you are and is particul...

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

PERSONAL COMPUTING

Cyber 'ants' patrol PC networks against computer worms and other threats

By Dario Borghino

00:46 September 29, 2009 PDT

Even though individually unintelligent, digital ants exert highly intelligent group behavi...

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

RESEARCH WATCH

Glass casting meets the digital age: 3-D glass printing method developed

By Dario Borghino

17:25 September 28, 2009 PDT

Vitraglyphic allows for much faster and cheaper manufacturing of high-precision glass prot...

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

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