Prototype

As well as the super-thin, next-generation TV’s we’re all looking forward to, organic light emitting diodes, or OLEDs, also hold great potential as a light source. They are extremely energy efficient, dimmable, can produce many different colors, emit light over an extended area and the light they produce is diffuse and non-glaring. The thin, flat nature of OLEDs also makes it possible to create light sources in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. However, until now, the physical characteristics of OLEDs have meant they have had to be powered from low-voltage direct current (DC) sources. Philips Research has now developed the first ever OLED module that can be powered directly from a mains electricity supply. Read More

One of the problems with harvesting sunlight and converting it into stored energy is that the sun’s rays can be highly destructive to many materials, leading to a gradual degradation of many systems developed to do just that. Once again, researchers have turned to nature for a solution. Plants constantly break down their light-capturing molecules and reassemble them from scratch, so the basic structures that capture the sun’s energy are, in effect, always brand new. By imitating this strategy MIT scientists have created a novel set of self-assembling molecules and used them to create a photovoltaic cell that repairs itself. Read More

If there’s an interesting aspect to the rise and rise of electric mobility devices, it’s the number of companies that were once associated with vastly different fields which are now investigating the arena of electric bicycles. At SinoCES in China last month we saw a white goods manufacturer proudly showing a new range of electric scooters alongside its new range of washing machines. At IFA today we spied yet another big name on two electric bicycles – 107 year-old German electronics company Telefunken. Read More

When Gizmag paid a visit to the Paris Green Air Show in June, there was one craft on display that seemed to steal the show. The Green Cri aerobatic electric airplane hadn't even left terra firma, yet was surrounded by eager onlookers for much of the time it was there. Now the four-engined prototype has returned to Le Bourget airfield for its maiden flight in the sunny skies above Paris. Read More

Adopting a new, highly automated and reconfigurable approach to hardware acceleration, researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) have come up with a way to harness the unused silicon real estate in smartphones – the so-called "dark silicon" – as special-purpose processors dynamically optimized to perform the most common tasks in an efficient way. Read More

End-stage renal disease, or chronic kidney failure, affects more than 500,000 people per year in the U.S. alone, and currently is only fully treated with a kidney transplant. That number has been rising between five to seven percent per year and with just 17,000 donated kidneys available for transplant last year the waiting list currently exceeds 85,000, according to the Organ Procurement and Transplant Network. Those who can’t secure a kidney for transplant are left reliant on kidney dialysis. An expensive and time consuming process that typically requires three sessions per week, for three to five hours per session, in which blood is pumped through an external circuit for filtration. In a development that could one day eliminate the need for dialysis, researchers have unveiled a prototype model of the first implantable artificial kidney. Read More

Sony continued to build out its entire 3D ecosystem at IFA in Berlin last evening when it showed a number of new 3D capable devices, including plans for a 3D IPTV network, a new 3D Home Projector (VPL-VW90ES) and three new network-capable, 3D-ready AV receivers. The biggest hoohah from the media though was undoubtedly a 3D VAIO laptop prototype which will become available in spring 2011, only six months from now. Read More

Over 800 skimmers were deployed in the Gulf of Mexico during the summer of 2010 to help clean up the Deepwater Horizon leak; however, it is estimated that these skimmers collected only three percent of the surface oil. Researchers at MIT have devised a system, called Seaswarm, consisting of a fleet of vehicles that may make cleaning up future oil spills both less expensive and more efficient than current skimming methods. A robotic prototype created by the researchers could autonomously navigate the ocean surface using cutting edge nanotechnology to collect surface oil and process it on site. Read More

Earlier this month we took a look at Recorded Future, a company that uses information scoured from thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to make predictions about the future. Now, Yahoo’s Barcelona research lab has created a similar prototype news search engine called Time Explorer. It creates timelines based on search queries that not only provide a way to check the accuracy of past predictions, but also allows users to view predictions that are yet to occur. Read More