Last year I dropped my Satellite TV and switched to using the Nintendo Wii to view Netflix. I used the Nintendo Wii because it could hook up to an older TV that did not have an HDMI connection but the older component (Red, White, Yellow) connection. Devices like Roku can be used to connect TVs …
Official global poverty estimates are only rarely produced, and when they do appear, they are out of date by the time they are published. Thus, when world leaders met in September 2010 to assess progress toward reaching the Millennium Development Goal of halving global poverty, they had to rely on poverty data from 2005. By …
According to a report by the State Electricity Regulatory Commission (SERC), unused wind-generated electricity amounted to 2.8 billion kilowatt-hours in the first six months of 2010 due to insufficient transmission capabilities and grid connection. China needs extensive upgrades to its power grid to take advantage of the wind farms. Its wind-power resources are concentrated primarily …
The VStone company and the city of Osaka organized a robot marathon. The robots must complete 422 laps of a 100 meter course. The course is a full length marathon (26.2 miles/42.2km) and was scheduled for three days from Feb 24- 27 One of the robots won today. After 422 laps of a 100-meter track, …
An Advanced Lithium Ion Battery Based on High Performance Electrode Materials In this paper we report the study of a high capacity Sn−C nanostructured anode and of a high rate, high voltage Li[Ni0.45Co0.1Mn1.45]O4 spinel cathode. We have combined these anode and cathode materials in an advanced lithium ion battery that, by exploiting this new chemistry, …
Quantum antennae enable the exchange of quantum information between two separate memory cells located on a computer chip. (Graphics: Harald Ritsch) The Austrian research group led by physicist Rainer Blatt suggests a fundamentally novel architecture for quantum computation. They have experimentally demonstrated quantum antennae, which enable the exchange of quantum information between two separate memory …
An ion interacts with the quantum system and, at the same time, establishes a controlled contact to the environment. (Graphics: Harald Ritsch) University of Innsbruck – Quantum simulator accessible to the world Experimental physicists have put a lot of effort in isolating sensitive measurements from the disruptive influences of the environment. In an international first, …
Hybrid and electric cars that are lighter and have longer range. Laptops without a converter “brick” that plugs into the wall outlet. Solar panels that lose much less energy when they link to the electrical power grid. Those are some of the products that Transphorm, a Southern California startup that officially “emerged from stealth” Wednesday, …
The sharp, magnetized tip of the probe used in this study induces an answering field in the superconductor in a phenomenon called the Meissner Effect. The strength of the response at each point gave SIMES researchers new information about the superconducting state of the pnictide. (Image courtesy Lan Luan.) Researchers from the Stanford Institute for …
AMD reveals details of the Bulldozer chip The centerpiece of the “Bulldozer” module is its two tightly-linked processor cores. These cores share several high-bandwidth resources (such as the Floating Point Unit) to provide chip-multithreading (CMT) which efficiently executes multiple instruction threads in parallel. Bulldozer’s CMT provides a marked design improvement over current threading approaches which …
One robot called ATLAS, a humanoid with two arms and two legs, will climb and maneuver in rough terrain to achieve human-like agility. A second robot with four legs is called CHEETAH; it will sprint faster than a human, corner like a race car and start and stop on a dime. – Boston Dynamics, developer …