A startup called TenKsolar, based in Minneapolis, says it can increase the amount of solar power generated on rooftops by 25 to 50 percent, and also reduce the overall cost of solar power by changing the way solar cells are wired together and adding inexpensive reflectors to gather more light. TenKsolar says its systems can …
NEC and Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology have reported separate development of 100 terabit per second over a single optic fiber. At the Optical Fiber Communications Conference in Los Angeles last month, Dayou Qian, also of NEC, reported a total data-sending rate of 101.7 terabits per second through 165 kilometres of fibre. …
A leaked Qualcomm presentation shows single/dual and quad core Snapdragon mobile chips at 2.5 Ghz by the end of 2011. The MSM8270, MSM8930, MSM8960, and APQ8064, all based on the future Krait architecture, are expected to be as much as five times faster than their predecessors in raw CPU power and four times faster in …
wafer holds many individual microrobots. Each robot consists of a body (about 100 micrometers long) and an arm that it uses to turn. Several of these robots can be controlled at once. Credit: Igor Paprotny Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and Duke University have shown how to use a single electrical signal to …
Researchers have been examining the diverse behaviors of caterpillars to find solutions for the new generation of search and rescue soft robots. Despite their extreme flexibility and adaptability, current soft-bodied robots are often limited by their slow speed, leading the researchers to turn to terrestrial soft-bodied animals for inspiration. Some caterpillars have the extraordinary ability …
New technology employs organic light emitting diodes, or OLEDs, tiny thin films that create light in response to electrical current. But making OLED displays that are much bigger than a smart phone’s has been problematic. While they consume less power overall, a serious burst of current is needed to fire up each pixel. Transistors that …
“The basic idea – low-cost, low-tech, incrementally self-improvable housing.” When Vijay Govindarajan and Christian Sarkar issued a challenge to the corporate world to help design highly scalable housing to replace the world’s slums, we didn’t know the response from the HBR.org community would be so immediate and passionate. Support, suggestions, and links to similar work …
China announced plans to build a 60-ton space station, made up of three capsules, and develop a cargo spaceship to transport supplies. It is to be completed around 2020. The 18.1-meter-long core module, with a maximum diameter of 4.2 meters and a launch weight of 20 to 22 tons, will be launched first. The two …
The band structure of graphene with its two valleys is shown in blue and red. Valley-based electronics, also known as valleytronics, is one step closer to reality. Two researchers at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) have shown that the valley degree of freedom in graphene can be polarized through scattering off a line defect. Unlike …
China has released more preliminary results from the 2010 census * The population of the 31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities and of servicemen on the mainland of China was 1.340 billion. * The population of Hong Kong was 7097600 persons. * The population of Macao was 552300 persons. * The population of Taiwan was …
Schematics of a typical LSCO-LCO heterostructure used to fabricate EDLT devices. For clarity, the polymer electrolyte (or the ionic liquid) is not shown; we just show the anions adsorbed to the film surface and the cations attracted to the negatively charged Pt gate electrode. Like atomic-level bricklayers, researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) …