New Scientist Tech, July 16, 2010 – A “racetrack” developed by Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea has set a theoretical new record for silicon chips: 20 times faster. It uses an atom-thick layer of lead added to the surface of a silicon block.

The development could allow silicon to compete with graphene, a form of carbon.

Technology Review, July 16, 2010 – A material with a novel nanostructure developed by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley could lead to lower-cost solar cells and light detectors. It absorbs light just as well as commercial thin-film solar cells but uses much less semiconductor material.

The new material consists of an array of nanopillars that are narrow at the top and thicker at the bottom. The narrow tops allow light to penetrate the array without reflecting off.

Nanowires and nanopillars use half to a third as much of the semiconductor material required by thin-film solar cells made of materials such as cadmium telluride, and as little as 1 percent of the material used in crystalline silicon cells. These structures also make it easier… more

Technology Review, July 16, 2010 – A new wave of smartphone apps combines speech recognition and artificial intelligence to help people carry out simple tasks on their mobile devices.

The latest such service, “SuperDialer” from Vlingo,  combines a user’s spoken commands with personal data (such as address book) and information online. The forthcoming Vlingo Answers will attempt to answer a user’s question, using search engines and other Web sources.

“Nanotube speakers” made from carbon nanotube sheets have been found to be able can both generate sound and cancel out noise — properties ideal for submarine sonar to probe the ocean depths and make subs invisible to enemies, according to a report in ACS’ Nano Letters.

Ali Aliev of MacDiarmid NanoTech Institute, University of Texas at Dallas and colleagues explain that thermoacoustic sound generation results from temperature variation in a carbon nanotube sheet that is produced by heating the sheet using an applied alternating voltage. A hot CNT sheet heats up surrounding air in the loudspeaker application, thereby inducing volume expansion and subsequent pressure waves over a wide frequency range, 1−100,000 Hz. Chinese scientists first discovered that effect in 2008, and applied it in building flexible speakers.

Aliev’s group took the next step,… more

Secretary of Energy, Nobel laureate and former director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) Steven Chu led the development of a technique that enables the use of optical microscopy to image objects or the distance between them with resolutions as small as 0.5 nanometers, an order of magnitude smaller than the previous best.

“The ability to get sub-nanometer resolution in biologically relevant aqueous environments has the potential to revolutionize biology, particularly structural biology,” says Secretary Chu. “One of the motivations for this work, for example, was to measure distances between proteins that form multi-domain, highly complex structures, such as the protein assembly that forms the human RNA polymerase II system, which initiates DNA transcription.”

Secretary Chu is the co-author of a paper now appearing in the… more

Rice University scientists have found the “ultimate” solvent for all kinds of carbon nanotubes (CNTs): chlorosulfonic acid, which can dissolve half-millimeter-long nanotubes in solution, they reported this month in the online journal ACS Nano. This is a critical step in spinning fibers from ultralong nanotubes, and a breakthrough that brings the creation of a highly conductive quantum nanowire closer.

Nanotubes have the frustrating habit of bundling, making them less useful than when they’re separated in a solution. Rice scientists led by Matteo Pasquali, a professor in chemical and biomolecular engineering and in chemistry, have been trying to untangle them for years as they look for scalable methods to make exceptionally strong, ultralight, highly conductive materials that could revolutionize power distribution, such as the “armchair quantum wire.”

The armchair… more

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University’s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences have found that mice that didn’t have any rods and cones function could still see — and not just light, but also patterns and images — using intrinsically photosensitive Retinal Ganglion Cells (ipRGCs) — special photosensitive cells in the rodents’ retinas.

“Our study shows that even mice which were blind could form low-acuity yet measurable images, using ipRGCs,” said biologist Samer Hattar, an assistant professor in the Department of Biology. The exciting thing is that, in theory at least, this means that a blind person could be trained to use his or her ipRGCs to perform simple tasks that require low visual acuity.”

Hattar’s findings also hint that, in the past, mammals may have used their ipRGCs for… more

A commercial brain fitness program from Posit Science Corp. has been shown to improve memory in older adults, at least in the period soon after training. The findings are the first to show that practicing simple visual tasks can improve the accuracy of short-term, or “working” visual memory. The research, led by scientists at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), is also one of the first to measure both mental performance and changes in neural activity caused by a cognitive training program.

In the study, healthy older participants trained on a computer game designed to boost visual perception. After ten hours of training, they not only improved their perceptual abilities significantly, but also increased the accuracy of their visual working… more

A new study by psychologists at University of California, Davis has found that Buddhist meditation can improve a person’s ability to be attentive and helps people do better at focusing for a long time on a task that requires them to distinguish small differences between things they see.

A group of 60 people took part in several experiments. At three points during a retreat, each participant took a test on a computer to measure how well they could make fine visual distinctions and sustain visual attention. They watched a screen intently as lines flashed on it; most were of the same length, but every now and then a shorter one would appear, and the volunteer had to click the mouse in response.

Participants got better at discriminating the short… more

A handful of forward-thinking biogerontologists has joined together to offer a new direction for aging intervention. Their commentary, published July 14 in Science Translational Medicine, presents the case for preventing what the scientists call an “unprecedented global aging crisis”—a sharp rise in the numbers of retired elderly in developing and industrialized nations across the world.

From both a humane and economic standpoint, a world with too many sick elderly has grim consequences and outrageous costs. It’s time to fund research for prevention, slowing, or even reversal of the biological damage caused by simply living, which manifests as age-related diseases such as Alzheimer’s, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.

Currently, senescence research receives only a slim morsel of the researching-funding pie. Of the entire National Institutes of Health $28 billion… more

As noted in our 2010 State of the Future (the 14th annual report from the Millennium Project, just published), the world is in a race between implementing ever-increasing ways to improve the human condition and the seemingly ever-increasing complexity and scale of global problems.

If current trends in population growth, resource depletion, climate change, terrorism, organized crime, and disease continue and converge over the next 50 to 100 years, it is easy to imagine an unstable world with catastrophic results. However, if current trends in self-organization via future Internets, transnational cooperation, materials science, alternative energy, cognitive science, inter-religious dialogues, synthetic biology, and nanotechnology continue and converge over the next 50 to 100 years, it is easy to imagine a world that works for all.… more

On June 12-13 of this year, Harvard University hosted the H+ Summit, organized by the nonprofit Humanity+ and loosely focused on the theme, Rise of the Citizen Scientist.

I attended and spoke at the Summit and enjoyed it very much; nearly every speaker had something interesting to say, and one came away from the conference with an excited feeling that the Singularity is, indeed, drawing palpably nearer each year. Ray Kurzweil’s keynote struck familiar and important themes about the near-inexorability of the drastic technological acceleration we’re now experiencing.

Stephen Wolfram connected the Singularity to deeper issues related to the nature of complexity and meaning — a critical perspective, in my view. In the bigger picture, all this technological acceleration is just another phase… more

Follow Osama’s Example–Shred Red Tape With Personal Tech

What Do Brooklyn’s Tea Lounge and Al Qaeda Have In Common? It’s time to kill bureaucracy. What do I mean? And what does this call for revolution have to do with the next generation of netbooks, Apple tablets and Google Phones? Not to mention with the Taliban and Al Qaeda?

America needs a productivity revolution to lead the world into the next half century. It needs the equivalent of the American System of Manufacture, the system of standardized, interchangeable parts the U.S. invented in government arsenals and watch factories from 1819 to 1850 and showed off at the Great Exposition in London in 1851, a system that wowed the Exposition’s organizer, Prince Albert, a system that multiplied the output of… more

Seeing Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland in IMAX 3-D (which continues as No. 1 in box office sales for the second weekend in a row), I thought that the Jabberwocky poem came from the original Alice in Wonderland, but it didn’t. It came from the sequel, Through the Looking Glass.

Recall that Lewis Carroll was a professor of mathematics at Oxford University before he was more well-known as the author of children’s stories. He deliberately dropped a lot of mathematical puzzles into the story, which seem to have been lost in the movie.

Nevertheless, the problem of inadvertently “leaving one’s door key on a table-top when drinking from the bottle of liquid labeled ‘Drink Me’ instead of leaving it on the floor or simultaneously holding… more