As I had been predicting for nearly a year, Ma of the KMT won the Presidential election. He won by 58 to 41 over Frank Hsieh of the DPP Ma’s vote total topped the 7 million mark, a point at which it would be mathematically impossible for him to lose, the commission said. The commission …
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) researchers lead a nationwide effort to make a bionic arm that wires directly into the brain to let amputees regain motor control—and feeling. By 2009, DARPA hopes to have a mechanical arm whose functionality is on par with a flesh-and-blood limb. DARPA Gives APL-Led Revolutionizing Prosthetics 2009 Team …
Up until now inkjet has been the favoured manufacturing technique of the burgeoning organic light-emitting diode (OLED) industry, but a growing number of companies and organisations are looking to roll-to-roll (R2R) manufacturing for making OLED displays. GE Global Research has reached a milestone in next-generation lighting, demonstrating the world’s first roll-to-roll manufactured organic light emitting …
The concept of a memory device based on self-organized quantum dots (QDs) is presented, enabling extremely fast write times, limited only by the charge carrier relaxation time being in the picosecond range. (from Applied Physical letters) [potentially one thousand times faster than current computer memory] For a first device structure with embedded InAs/GaAs QDs, a …
Angus Maddison provides an update view of China’s Economic Future in the “Chinese Economic Performance in the Long Run” tome written for the OECD. Angus Maddison now predicts: China should overtake the United States as the world’s biggest economy before 2015 [PPP] and by 2030 account for about a quarter of world GDP. [This is …
Researchers at Boston College and MIT have used nanotechnology to achieve a major increase in thermoelectric efficiency, a milestone that paves the way for a new generation of products – from semiconductors and air conditioners to car exhaust systems and solar power technology – that run cleaner. UPDATE:Info from the Technology Review on how this …
Michael Anissimov at Accelerating Future has an article where he promotes the World Transhumanist Association discussion topic: Is Star Trek a Fascist Society? I have seen the 726 episodes across 6 TV series and 10 (and soon 11) movies and many of the books, two Vegas rides, etc… Their continuing mission (not always successful) is …
Carnival of Space 46 is up at riding with robots My contribution was the premature report of room temperature superconductors. There is a new class of superconductors made under high pressure which could lead to room temperature superconductors. Centauri Dreams talks about David Brin’s speculation on eleven reasons for no contact with aliens (fermi paradox) …
Buckyballs (carbon 60) can be loaded with hydrogen up to a few times smaller than the pressure [up to 140GPa] when the hydrogen turns metallic (400GPa) This is a detailed computational analysis, they did not perform a physical experiment and there is as yet no clear strategy for performing the actual loading of hydrogen into …
NEC AND the Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed the technology for a ten-Petaflop supercomputer. The foundation of this beast is a network of optical interconnections between nests of chips. The Japanese government says it could be ready by 2010. The optically connected chips can talk to each other at 25 gigabits per second, so …
Stanford electronics researchers, lead by electrical engineering Professor Abbas El Gamal, are developing such a camera that makes a 2-D photo with an electronic “depth map” containing the distance from the camera to every object in the picture, a kind of super 3-D. They it built around their “multi-aperture image sensor.” They’ve shrunk the pixels …