Tech
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Tech
Coal: The cool fuel for future jets
To power faster supersonic jets, scientists are developing coal-derived fuels that can absorb heat without breaking down at high temperatures.
- Tech
Liquid Logic: Tiny plumbing networks concoct and compute
By incorporating thousands of simple valves into microscopic networks of rubbery pipes and chambers, scientists have created fluid-manipulating microchips of unprecedented power.
- Tech
Ear to Traffic
Listen to the sounds of Web site activity, as massaged by statistician Mark Hansen of Lucent Technologies and translated into musical tones by audio artist Ben Rubin of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Intriguing audio samples offer hints of how aural cues might complement visualization techniques in data mining. Requires a Web browser with RealPlayer […]
- Tech
Future Tech
Science fiction and fact seem to mingle at this Web site, which provides entertaining glimpses of a variety of futuristic technologies, from wearable computers to electronic healing. Links lead to other Web sites that offer additional information. Go to: http://www.21stcentury.co.uk/technology/index.asp
- Tech
Pocket Sockets
Keenly aware of user frustration with the short-lived batteries in cell phones and other portable electronics, researchers are rushing to work out the bugs in tiny fuel-cell power plants that will be as small as batteries—but last a lot longer and be refuelable.
- Tech
Electronics in the Round: Mixing plastic and silicon yields form-fitting circuitry
Investigators used ordinary integrated-circuit fabrication techniques to pattern arrays of silicon-based transistors onto a flat, deformable sheet of plastic.
- Computing
Writing faster with your eyes
A new method for gaze-operated, hands-free text entry is faster and more accurate than using an on-screen keyboard.
- Tech
Micromachine runs on nuclear power
Radioactivity creates electric fields that wiggle a tiny lever.
- Tech
Shrinking toward the Ultimate Transistor
Scientists demonstrate transistor action in an atom—or two.
- Tech
Software bugs cost big bucks
An epidemic of software errors in industrial computer programs is costing the United States $60 billion per year.
- Tech
Voltage from the Bottom of the Sea: Ooze-dwelling microbes can power electronics
Some types of bacteria living in seafloor mud can generate enough electricity to power small electronic devices.
- Tech
Putting squish into artificial organs
Artificial organs and tissues may someday feel more like the real thing if a new, rubbery polymer supplants mostly stiff materials available today for tissue engineering.
