Motorola announces Project Ara, an open hardware platform with modular components ala Phonebloks. Was just about to hit the hay for the evening when this came through the wire. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure I’m not still dreaming in my onesie, but here goes. Revealed in a press release just moments ago is Motorola’s ambitious open hardware platform dubbed Project Ara. You heard right, according to Motorola, they want to do to hardware, what Android has done to software. How? By creating an open based modular smartphone platform. I’ll give you a few moments to pick your jaw up from the ground. Better? According to Motorola, each device will come with an endoskeleton or “endo” that holds all the different components together (see above image). The craziest part is that Motorola says they’ve been secretly working on Project Ara for over a year now. Motorola says the MDK (Module Developer’s Kit) will be released sometime in the next few months, where developers will soon be invited to start creating modules for Project Ara.
HP Memristors Will Reinvent Computer Memory 'by 2014' | Wired Enterprise. HP is two and half years away from offering hardware that stores data with memristors, a new breed of electrical building-block that could lead to servers and other devices that are far more efficient than today's machines, according to report citing one of the technology's inventors. As reported by The Register, at a recent conference in Oxnard, California, HP's Stan Williams said that commercial memristor hardware will be available by the end of 2014 at the earliest.
A company spokesman tells us that the company has not officially announced its plan for memristors. "HP has not yet committed to a specific product roadmap for memristor-based products," he said. "HP does have internal milestones that are subject to change, depending on shifting market, technology, and business conditions.
" But Williams' remarks indicate that the introduction of the technology has been pushed back. Previously, Williams had said that memristor hardware would arrive in the summer of 2013. Image: Wikicommons. HP pulls memory Missing Link from bottle of beer. More than 35 years ago, when the world assumed that circuits were crafted from three basic building blocks, a man named Leon Chua predicted the existence of a fourth. The capacitor, the resistor, and the inductor, he said, would be joined by something called the memristor. Today, scientists at HP Labs announced that this prediction was right on the money. After a good five years of work, HP Labs Fellow R. Stanley Williams and his team have actually built a memristor - a resistor that stores information even after losing power.
With this new electrical building block, chip manufacturers could reinvent modern memory technology, delivering machines that are far more efficient and that boot instantly. Naturally, HP is trumpeting this as a cure-all for all those data centers up in the cloud. Leon Chua's memristor wasn't much more than a math project. "He saw that there were patterns in those circuit equations, and in looking at those patterns, he noticed a hole," Williams tells us. Accelerator on a chip: Technology could spawn new generations of smaller, less expensive devices for science, medicine. In an advance that could dramatically shrink particle accelerators for science and medicine, researchers used a laser to accelerate electrons at a rate 10 times higher than conventional technology in a nanostructured glass chip smaller than a grain of rice.
The achievement was reported today in Nature by a team including scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University. "We still have a number of challenges before this technology becomes practical for real-world use, but eventually it would substantially reduce the size and cost of future high-energy particle colliders for exploring the world of fundamental particles and forces," said Joel England, the SLAC physicist who led the experiments.
"It could also help enable compact accelerators and X-ray devices for security scanning, medical therapy and imaging, and research in biology and materials science. " Today's accelerators use microwaves to boost the energy of electrons. Breakthrough: The World’s First Carbon Nanotube Computer. "'m just wondering that, with less and less electricity required to make these "switches" in a carbon-nanotube processor work, how vulnerable does it make them to being accidentally switched by the ambient, static electricity already in the atmosphere, like from thunderstorms or generated by household appliances, etc. " That is one of the reasons why you when you open your computer, you ground yourself first before touching circuit boards.
I assume these new circuits would be protected and shielded in the same manner as circuits made of silicon are now. And they'd be handled with the same precautions. The same goes for EMPs. The military has long worked on methods to shield silicon chips from EMP and resist and compensate for cosmic ray damage. I would assume the same methods would be used here. Engineerguyvideo's channel. Ring Could Log Users In to Houses, Phones and Website as Soon as Next Month. The need for more passwords that our feeble human brains struggle to remember can make it feel like we work for the machines instead of the other way around.
Wearable, and even embeddable, login storage has emerged has a possible solution. After Google researchers floated the idea of a USB stick or a ring that would generate login keys, it appeared the Web giant would lead the way. But a UK project recently closed a $380,000 Kickstarter campaign, promising delivery of 61,000 password-bearing rings in September. The company, NFC Ring, makes a simple silver ring with two near-field communication transmitters inside it, storing access information that can potentially be used to unlock phones, cars or houses or even to log in to websites. One transmitter faces out and stores information that the user may want to share, such as his or her contact information. Users won’t have to charge or update the rings because the transmitters are passive. Images courtesy NFC Ring. David Birch: Identity without a name. Stretchy battery drawn to three times its size.
26 February 2013Last updated at 11:39 ET By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News The team tested their battery by stretching it 300% while it powered an LED lamp Researchers have demonstrated a flat, "stretchy" battery that can be pulled to three times its size without a loss in performance. While flexible and stretchable electronics have been on the rise, powering them with equally stretchy energy sources has been problematic. The new idea in Nature Communications uses small "islands" of energy-storing materials dotted on a stretchy polymer. The study also suggests the batteries can be recharged wirelessly. In a sense, the battery is a latecomer to the push toward flexible, stretchable electronics. A number of applications have been envisioned for flexible devices, from implantable health monitors to roll-up displays. S for stretch "We have explored various methods, ranging from radio frequency energy harvesting to solar power," he told BBC News.
Willow Glass: ultra-thin glass can 'wrap' around devices. Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram. A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data — around 700 terabytes — in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times.
The work, carried out by George Church and Sri Kosuri, basically treats DNA as just another digital storage device. Instead of binary data being encoded as magnetic regions on a hard drive platter, strands of DNA that store 96 bits are synthesized, with each of the bases (TGAC) representing a binary value (T and G = 1, A and C = 0). To read the data stored in DNA, you simply sequence it — just as if you were sequencing the human genome — and convert each of the TGAC bases back into binary. To aid with sequencing, each strand of DNA has a 19-bit address block at the start (the red bits in the image below) — so a whole vat of DNA can be sequenced out of order, and then sorted into usable data using the addresses.
Soon you'll be backing up your hard drive using DNA. The application of data is rarely predictable. "Merit" is defined by the data's value in solving a particular quesiton or problem. Unless we can predict the future we have no way of assigning value (or lack thereof) to any data. I work in a non-profit and we always struggle with relatively basic things like how much personal or demographic information could/should we capture on donors or prospective donors so that we can better communicate with them in the future. Inevitably we end up with scenarios where we say "Man, if we had just started tracking that one thing 5 years ago this problem would be much simpler to solve". Hindsight is 20/20 so in my mind the answer is save everything. Vice versa, I have easily solved problems by reporting on and analyzing data using one simple piece that was likely obtuse and not immediately valuable to the people that started tracking it.
The next step, though, is to somehow collate and index the data so it is readily accessible. You've got a good point. 5D optical memory in glass could record the last evidence of civilization. Using nanostructured glass, scientists at the University of Southampton have, for the first time, experimentally demonstrated the recording and retrieval processes of five dimensional digital data by femtosecond laser writing. The storage allows unprecedented parameters including 360 TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1000°C and practically unlimited lifetime. Coined as the 'Superman' memory crystal, as the glass memory has been compared to the "memory crystals" used in the Superman films, the data is recorded via self-assembled nanostructures created in fused quartz, which is able to store vast quantities of data for over a million years.
The information encoding is realised in five dimensions: the size and orientation in addition to the three dimensional position of these nanostructures. A 300 kb digital copy of a text file was successfully recorded in 5D using ultrafast laser, producing extremely short and intense pulses of light.
Quantum Security Networking and Storage.