EETimes – Moore’s Law, the engine of semiconductor innovation for decades, is losing steam due to delayed introduction of next-generation extreme ultraviolet lithography. That was the verdict of experts at the 2012 International Symposium on Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography. EUV systems need light sources that are nearly 20 times more powerful than the ones used today …
Brad Templeton discusses how robot cars will change the design of cars. Big changes that will come about from robocars will come from how they free car designers from the constraints of human-driven cars which are the owner’s sole, or almost-sole vehicle. If one can hire a cheap specialized “robotaxi” (or whistlecar) on demand when …
Computer World – “autonomous vehicles” will be a reality for “ordinary people” in less than five years, Google CEO Sergey Brin said on Tuesday. He also said he thinks autonomous cars will be “far safer” than those driven by humans, and he envisioned a world in which office parking lots become a thing of the …
George Church has written a new book Regenesis. I have bought it and read it. It is a fantastic book and essential reading for anyone interested in the future of science and humanity. It is like a new Engines of Creation in the boldness of its goals but with near term objectives that already have …
WSJ – A high-tech overhaul to the nation’s air traffic control system is mostly on track to completion, but has yet to produce the benefits that airlines and passengers were told to expect, federal investigators say. Progress in moving from preparation to execution has been slow as the Federal Aviation Administration replaces its World War …
BBC News- American science fiction author Harry Harrison, who also created the Stainless Steel Rat series, has died aged 87. His 1966 dystopian novel Make Room! Make Room! also inspired 1973 film Soylent Green starring Charlton Heston. Harrison’s first novel, Deathworld, was published in 1960, while the first book in the Stainless Steel Rat series …
The fabrication process and the operation characteristics of a fully roll-to-roll printed resistive write-once-read-many memory on a flexible substrate are presented. The low-voltage (less than 10 V) write operation of the memories from a high resistivity ‘0’ state to a low resistivity ‘1’ state is based on the rapid electrical sintering of bits containing silver …
Computerworld – the expected price of the Google Nexus 7 tablet is $199, Google could be spending $130 to $210 for materials and manufacturing costs for each device, according to a preliminary estimate from IHS iSuppli. Google may announce the Nexus 7 at the start of its Google I/O conference tomorrow. In general, a tablet’s …
A simple three-step chemical reaction which could herald the introduction of new sustainable feedstocks for the chemical industry has been developed by scientists at The University of Nottingham. Scientists in the School of Chemistry have developed a recyclable system for converting carbon monoxide (CO) directly into more complicated organic molecules using depleted uranium. The research, …
BlackLight Power, Inc. (BLP) today announced a major breakthrough in clean energy technology, which experts agree holds tremendous promise for a wide range of commercial applications. The announcement comes on the heels of BlackLight’s recent completion of a $5 million round of financing to support commercial development of its new process for producing affordable, reliable …
Diginfo – This surveillance camera system can search through data on 36 million faces in one second. Developed by Hitachi Kokusai Electric, the system can automatically detect a face from either surveillance footage or a regular photo, and search for it. With this system, it’s assumed that faces are turning within around 30 degrees in …