Inkjets can make organic semiconductors. The plants costs $10 million instead of $1.3 billion for a silicon semiconductor plant. The inkjet organic semiconductor plants needs 50 people instead of 5000. The organic chip feature sizes are 10-100 microns instead of 65 nanomaters. The devices can come in a variety of sizes. Nanoident has built some …
Xiao-Gang Wen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Michael Levin at Harvard University have come up with a prediction for a new state of matter (string-net liquid) and even a tantalising picture of the nature of space-time itself. Herbertsmithite could be the new silicon – the building block for quantum computers. In theory, quantum …
Finding a propulsion mechanism that works on the microscopic scale is one of the key challenges for developing microrobots. Another is to find a way to supply such a device with energy because there is so little room to carry on-board fuel or batteries. Now a team lead by Orlin Velev at North Carolina State …
The top 30 cities have 16% of the GDP by PPP of the world. 9780 billion out of 61000 billion in 2005. They had 4% of the population. 261 million out of 6.5 billion. Price Waterhouse Coopers had a study of cities from 2005 to 2020 A 40 page pdf has some of the information …
Making a negative-index material that works for visible light is more difficult, because the building blocks have to be much smaller–no bigger than 10 to 20 nanometers. That’s now very possible to achieve, however, and several groups are working on it. If it can be done, these metamaterials could be used to increase the amount …
From MIT Technology Review, researchers have learned how to design the nanoscale features of materials to make them four times stronger without making them brittle. The new insight is the result of a significant improvement to an existing computer model that allowed researchers to, for the first time, simulate the complex mechanical behavior of nanostructures …
Wired looks at DARPA’s human soldier augmentation programs – Cooling hands helps endurance. The reason is that muscles don’t wear out because they use up stored sugars but because they get to hot. Cooling helps overclock the body. – Working to suspend injured soldiers through oxygen depravation. Mice were give a whiff of hydrogen sulfide …
The U.S. Department of Energy on Thursday announced it will invest $168 million in 13 solar technology projects in the next three years as a move to bring down the cost of solar energy. The U.S. government’s goal is to increase the photovoltaic solar power capacity from 240 megawatts to 2,850 megawatts by 2010. DOE …
Although these are some words of support, the issues will not be decided until next year when Dwave’s larger systems show that they provide speedup over classical systems for commercially interesting problems. NASA provides some validation of Dwave Systems quantum computer claims The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration confirmed Thursday that it built a …
Four 71-inch mirrors gathering light for Pan-STARRS would each be hooked up to what would be the four largest digital cameras ever built. The system would be able to survey the entire sky once a week, and would be able to detect asteroids as small as 1,000 feet across. They face opposition from environmentalists who …
The plastic-encased minibot, which measures 2 cm (0.8 inch) in length and 1 cm (0.4 inch) in diameter, can be maneuvered through the body by controlling an external magnetic field applied near the patient. While other types of miniature swallowable robots have been developed in the past, their role has mostly been limited to capturing …