Tue, Feb 16
Washington, Feb 16 (ANI): Princeton University engineers have developed power-generating rubber films that could be used to harness natural body movements such as breathing and walking to power pacemakers, mobile phones and other electronic devices.
The material, composed of ceramic nanoribbons embedded onto silicone rubber sheets, generates electricity when flexed and is highly efficient at converting mechanical energy to electrical energy.
Shoes made of the material may one day harvest the pounding of walking and running to power mobile electrical devices.
Placed against the lungs, sheets of the material could use breathing motions to power pacemakers, obviating the current need for surgical replacement of the batteries which power the devices.
The Princeton team is the first to successfully combine silicone and nanoribbons of lead zirconate titanate (PZT), a ceramic material that is piezoelectric, meaning it generates an electrical voltage when pressure is applied to it.
Of all piezoelectric materials, PZT is the most efficient, able to convert 80 percent of the mechanical energy applied to it into electrical energy.
"PZT is 100 times more efficient than quartz, another piezoelectric material. You don't generate that much power from walking or breathing, so you want to harness it as efficiently as possible," said Michael McAlpine, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, at Princeton, who led the project.
"The new electricity-harvesting devices could be implanted in the body to perpetually power medical devices, and the body wouldn't reject them," McAlpine said.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Revolutionary devices that will bring Internet access to driver's seat
Sun, Jan 10
London, Jan 10 (ANI): A new generation of computerised dashboard devices that will bring Internet access to the driver's seat are about to be unveiled.
The Wi-Fi-enabled gadgets, which are being developed by technology companies such as Intel and Google in conjunction with car manufacturers, will allow drivers to compose voice-activated e-mails on the move, call up restaurant reviews as they reach their destination and use 3D maps to navigate while their passengers watch movies.
The devices will go on display at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. However, motoring organisations have warned the so-called "infotainment" systems will distract drivers and increase the risk of accidents.
London, Jan 10 (ANI): A new generation of computerised dashboard devices that will bring Internet access to the driver's seat are about to be unveiled.
The Wi-Fi-enabled gadgets, which are being developed by technology companies such as Intel and Google in conjunction with car manufacturers, will allow drivers to compose voice-activated e-mails on the move, call up restaurant reviews as they reach their destination and use 3D maps to navigate while their passengers watch movies.
The devices will go on display at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. However, motoring organisations have warned the so-called "infotainment" systems will distract drivers and increase the risk of accidents.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Renault's new concept car unveiled
Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit on Monday inaugurated the Twizy Z.E. Concept, a new electric car from the stables of Renault, which will be out on Indian roads by 2011.This blue and white coloured car is a two-seater car, which works on the green technology principle.
Welcoming Renault's new car with enthusiasm, Dikshit said that Delhi roads would be much better off with electric cars as this."They are developing this new technology; Renault is introducing this at the automobile exhibition.They are still developing it. It is very beautiful to look at and they are saying it will take them one or one and a half year more to come out, then we will give as many incentives as we can to such cars to run on Delhi roads which do not contribute to the pollution." said Dikshit.
The twizy is classified as a quadracycle and does not need to comply with the full panoply of safety regulations. Since the car does not have doors it minuses the need of an air conditioner. The twizy is a rear wheel drive and weighs 420kg.
It is powered by a 15kW engine that Renault claim produces 20PS of power. The electric motor has range of 100kmph with a top speed of 75kmph. The four wheeled scooter is due for production in late 2011.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Hundred times faster, cooler computers on it's way
Toronto, Dec 16 (IANS) Indian-origin researcher Sanjeev John and his colleague Xun Ma of the University of Toronto have discovered new behaviour of light which could lead to cooler and faster computing. The two quantum optics researchers have discovered 'new behaviours' of light changes within photonic crystals that could lead to faster optical information processing and compact computers that don't overheat.
They discovered that by sculpting a unique artificial vacuum inside a photonic crystal, we can completely control the electronic state of artificial atoms (light) within the vacuum. This discovery can enable photonic computers that are more than a hundred times faster than their electronic counterparts, without heat dissipation issues and other bottlenecks currently faced by electronic computing.
Added Sanjeev John, "We designed a vacuum in which light passes through circuit paths that are one one-hundredth of the thickness of a human hair, and whose character changes drastically and abruptly with the wavelength of the light." "A vacuum experienced by light is not completely empty, and can be made even emptier. It's not the traditional understanding of a vacuum."
Ma said, "In this vacuum, the state of each atom - or quantum dot - can be manipulated with color-coded streams of laser pulses that sequentially excite and de-excite it in trillionths of a second. These quantum dots can in turn control other streams of optical pulses, enabling optical information processing and computing."
Said John, "This new mechanism enables micrometer scale integrated all-optical transistors to perform logic operations over multiple frequency channels in trillionths of a second at microwatt power levels, which are about one millionth of the power required by a household light bulb. That this mechanism allows for computing over many wavelengths as opposed to electronic circuits which use only one channel, would significantly surpass the performance of current day electronic transistors."
They discovered that by sculpting a unique artificial vacuum inside a photonic crystal, we can completely control the electronic state of artificial atoms (light) within the vacuum. This discovery can enable photonic computers that are more than a hundred times faster than their electronic counterparts, without heat dissipation issues and other bottlenecks currently faced by electronic computing.
Added Sanjeev John, "We designed a vacuum in which light passes through circuit paths that are one one-hundredth of the thickness of a human hair, and whose character changes drastically and abruptly with the wavelength of the light." "A vacuum experienced by light is not completely empty, and can be made even emptier. It's not the traditional understanding of a vacuum."
Ma said, "In this vacuum, the state of each atom - or quantum dot - can be manipulated with color-coded streams of laser pulses that sequentially excite and de-excite it in trillionths of a second. These quantum dots can in turn control other streams of optical pulses, enabling optical information processing and computing."
Said John, "This new mechanism enables micrometer scale integrated all-optical transistors to perform logic operations over multiple frequency channels in trillionths of a second at microwatt power levels, which are about one millionth of the power required by a household light bulb. That this mechanism allows for computing over many wavelengths as opposed to electronic circuits which use only one channel, would significantly surpass the performance of current day electronic transistors."
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Soon, Star Trek-style gadget to detect cancer
Mon, Dec 14
London, December 14 (ANI): Scientists are coming up with a new Star Trek-style gadget to detect cancers and other diseases.
A portable biomarker detector being developed by a team at Yale University will be able to identify signs of illness from a sample of blood within 20 minutes.
According to the researchers, the device will come in a size of a paperback book and equipped with a nanosensor so accurate that it can pick up a grain of salt in a swimming pool.
"Doctors could have these small, portable devices in their offices and get nearly instant readings," the Telegraph quoted Dr Tarek Fahmy, a biomedical engineer at Yale University, as saying.
He added: "They could also carry them into the field and test patients on site."
Professor Mark Reed, co-author, added: "Nanosensors have been around for the past decade, but they only worked in controlled, laboratory settings.
"This is the first time we've been able to use them with whole blood, which is a complicated solution containing proteins and ions and other things that affect detection."
Seemingly, the device will be similar to Dr McCoy's tricorder in Star Trek, which is used to scan living or nonliving matter to determine its molecular make-up. (ANI)
London, December 14 (ANI): Scientists are coming up with a new Star Trek-style gadget to detect cancers and other diseases.
A portable biomarker detector being developed by a team at Yale University will be able to identify signs of illness from a sample of blood within 20 minutes.
According to the researchers, the device will come in a size of a paperback book and equipped with a nanosensor so accurate that it can pick up a grain of salt in a swimming pool.
"Doctors could have these small, portable devices in their offices and get nearly instant readings," the Telegraph quoted Dr Tarek Fahmy, a biomedical engineer at Yale University, as saying.
He added: "They could also carry them into the field and test patients on site."
Professor Mark Reed, co-author, added: "Nanosensors have been around for the past decade, but they only worked in controlled, laboratory settings.
"This is the first time we've been able to use them with whole blood, which is a complicated solution containing proteins and ions and other things that affect detection."
Seemingly, the device will be similar to Dr McCoy's tricorder in Star Trek, which is used to scan living or nonliving matter to determine its molecular make-up. (ANI)
Monday, December 14, 2009
Virtual Computers
Mon, Dec 14
Throughout the computer industry companies of all sizes, from garage startups to Microsoft, are bracing for the possibility that their future will be in the hands of people like Sean Whetstone.
The head of computer operations for Reed Specialist Recruitment, an employment service with operations on three continents, Whetstone recently upgraded his company's 6,000 desktop computers. Chief information officers order new Dells or HPs all the time. But the computers Whetstone brought in for his employees aren't the traditional metal boxes that sit next to desks or under monitors. They are "virtual" computers. Each employee has a keyboard and a screen, but the processors making the calculations and deciding what color goes in each pixel are far away, inside a big computer at Reed's main data center in London.
Windows Through The Decades
In the science fiction staple of virtual reality, people live not in the real world but as ciphers inside a computer somewhere. That's analogous to what happens with the virtual desktops at Reed. To the user, Microsoft Windows looks just as it does coming from a PC. But the electronic desktop doesn't exactly reside on the desk.
Switching to virtualized desktops is often expensive at the outset because the networking software is complicated. But the maintenance costs are a lot lower. When something goes wrong--say, a computer has a software error--Whetstone doesn't need to send someone from tech support out to the employee's desk. Instead, a technician simply logs on to the main computer and tinkers with the program running there. Whetstone expects to save 20%, or $2.4 million a year, off his technology expenses.
Next year will likely be the start of a large upgrade for PCs as big companies switch to Windows 7, Microsoft's latest operating system. With an estimated halfbillion workplace computers around the world and $3 trillion spent each year on corporate computing, that ordinarily would mean a lot of purchase orders for big, brawny new hardware.
Desktop virtualization, however, threatens to break that pattern. Instead of spending $1,000 for a system with the latest Intel chip and a fast hard drive, a company might get by with a virtualized PC running on a screen, keyboard and network connector costing in all only $150. The corporate customer gets the promise of lower support costs plus the security and simplicity that come from having data in one carefully guarded place.
A burgeoning virtualization industry is pushing the technology as the next big thing in computing. Large tech companies like Microsoft and Cisco are bracing themselves in case it turns out to be just that. "In the entire computer industry, no topic is of greater interest right now than desktop virtualization," says Mark Margevicius, analyst at research firm Gartner. "Everyone, everywhere is asking about it."
Desktop virtualization is Act II of a tech shift that began earlier in the decade involving the servers that labor behind the scenes, running databases and hosting Web sites. While crucial to a company's operations, servers tend to be busy only in spurts, spending much of their time sitting idle. At the start of the decade, when a new breed of software made it possible to make one piece of hardware act as if it were several servers, companies embarked on a wave of server consolidation. By next year, estimates Gartner, half of all serverbased computing will be on virtual machines.
If virtualization can work for servers, why not for desktop computers, which outnumber servers by a factor of a hundred? That's the prospect exciting so many companies. Wyse Technology in San Jose, Calif. made computer terminals for places like call centers for 15 years. Four years ago the company switched its emphasis to virtualization-- meaning that it is ready to replace a sea of PCs at a company like Reed Specialist Recruitment with stripped-down keyboard/screen pairs (called "thin clients"). Sales are on pace to grow 40% this year to an expected $250 million.
Tarkan Maner, Wyse's voluble, Turkish-born chief executive, tells visitors that because of virtualization "the PC is dead, and PC makers are going to have to adjust their business models to deal with that fact." Maner puts his logos where his mouth is: Wyse company cars have a "No PC" sign emblazoned on their doors.
Wyse thin clients cost from $50 to $200. Maner says they might be free one day, given away as part of package deals for service or software, as happens with mobile phones. He's on to something, because the real action in virtualization right now involves software. Two companies are fighting each other to become the Microsoft of desktop virtualization: 11-year-old VMware, which pioneered the market, and Citrix Systems, which is expanding rapidly to take advantage of it.
VMware in Palo Alto, Calif. grew out of the Stanford University engineering environs that also gave the world Google, Sun and Silicon Graphics. Its market capitalization of $17 billion alongside revenues of only $1.9 billion says something about Wall Street's expectations for its growth and profit margin. Citrix Systems in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. had its origins in the world of clerical computing. The company was founded in 1989 by an IBM software veteran and has revenues of $1.6 billion and a $7.2 billion market cap. The VMware-Citrix contest hasn't gone on long enough to handicap, though observers note that Citrix has the advantage of a close association with Microsoft, which watched with alarm as VMware grew to prominence in the data centers it wanted to own for itself.
A shift to virtualized desktops would affect everyone in the industry, not just the companies making the software that directly allows it. Every large tech company stands ready with new products, new services, new technology directions, in case it takes off. At Hewlett-Packard virtualization products were once considered niche offerings handled by a small, dedicated sales crew. Now, says Roberto Moctezuma, head of desktop solutions, all HP sales people have them on their rate cards. Dell says it takes a slightly different approach, preferring to talk about "flexible computing" for the benefit of customers unwilling to go the full virtualization route. Cisco sees the interest in desktop virtualization as validation of the emphasis it has been putting on networking. "We don't think everyone will virtualize every desktop on the planet," says David Lawler, vice president of the company's virtualization group. "But very clearly, a significant number of them will."
Right now, while they promise to reduce administrative costs, virtual PCs cost 50% more than regular ones because of the extra software companies need to license in addition to Windows. Gartner estimates that premium will need to be cut in half before virtualization becomes a widespread phenomenon. There is also the issue of performance. It turns out that some of the most trivial uses of computers--watching YouTube videos, for example--are among the hardest to replicate on a virtual computer, since intense graphics need to be transmitted instantly over the network. The big virtualization software makers, not to mention an ever growing roster of virtualization startups, are busy trying to close the gap.
Throughout the computer industry companies of all sizes, from garage startups to Microsoft, are bracing for the possibility that their future will be in the hands of people like Sean Whetstone.
The head of computer operations for Reed Specialist Recruitment, an employment service with operations on three continents, Whetstone recently upgraded his company's 6,000 desktop computers. Chief information officers order new Dells or HPs all the time. But the computers Whetstone brought in for his employees aren't the traditional metal boxes that sit next to desks or under monitors. They are "virtual" computers. Each employee has a keyboard and a screen, but the processors making the calculations and deciding what color goes in each pixel are far away, inside a big computer at Reed's main data center in London.
Windows Through The Decades
In the science fiction staple of virtual reality, people live not in the real world but as ciphers inside a computer somewhere. That's analogous to what happens with the virtual desktops at Reed. To the user, Microsoft Windows looks just as it does coming from a PC. But the electronic desktop doesn't exactly reside on the desk.
Switching to virtualized desktops is often expensive at the outset because the networking software is complicated. But the maintenance costs are a lot lower. When something goes wrong--say, a computer has a software error--Whetstone doesn't need to send someone from tech support out to the employee's desk. Instead, a technician simply logs on to the main computer and tinkers with the program running there. Whetstone expects to save 20%, or $2.4 million a year, off his technology expenses.
Next year will likely be the start of a large upgrade for PCs as big companies switch to Windows 7, Microsoft's latest operating system. With an estimated halfbillion workplace computers around the world and $3 trillion spent each year on corporate computing, that ordinarily would mean a lot of purchase orders for big, brawny new hardware.
Desktop virtualization, however, threatens to break that pattern. Instead of spending $1,000 for a system with the latest Intel chip and a fast hard drive, a company might get by with a virtualized PC running on a screen, keyboard and network connector costing in all only $150. The corporate customer gets the promise of lower support costs plus the security and simplicity that come from having data in one carefully guarded place.
A burgeoning virtualization industry is pushing the technology as the next big thing in computing. Large tech companies like Microsoft and Cisco are bracing themselves in case it turns out to be just that. "In the entire computer industry, no topic is of greater interest right now than desktop virtualization," says Mark Margevicius, analyst at research firm Gartner. "Everyone, everywhere is asking about it."
Desktop virtualization is Act II of a tech shift that began earlier in the decade involving the servers that labor behind the scenes, running databases and hosting Web sites. While crucial to a company's operations, servers tend to be busy only in spurts, spending much of their time sitting idle. At the start of the decade, when a new breed of software made it possible to make one piece of hardware act as if it were several servers, companies embarked on a wave of server consolidation. By next year, estimates Gartner, half of all serverbased computing will be on virtual machines.
If virtualization can work for servers, why not for desktop computers, which outnumber servers by a factor of a hundred? That's the prospect exciting so many companies. Wyse Technology in San Jose, Calif. made computer terminals for places like call centers for 15 years. Four years ago the company switched its emphasis to virtualization-- meaning that it is ready to replace a sea of PCs at a company like Reed Specialist Recruitment with stripped-down keyboard/screen pairs (called "thin clients"). Sales are on pace to grow 40% this year to an expected $250 million.
Tarkan Maner, Wyse's voluble, Turkish-born chief executive, tells visitors that because of virtualization "the PC is dead, and PC makers are going to have to adjust their business models to deal with that fact." Maner puts his logos where his mouth is: Wyse company cars have a "No PC" sign emblazoned on their doors.
Wyse thin clients cost from $50 to $200. Maner says they might be free one day, given away as part of package deals for service or software, as happens with mobile phones. He's on to something, because the real action in virtualization right now involves software. Two companies are fighting each other to become the Microsoft of desktop virtualization: 11-year-old VMware, which pioneered the market, and Citrix Systems, which is expanding rapidly to take advantage of it.
VMware in Palo Alto, Calif. grew out of the Stanford University engineering environs that also gave the world Google, Sun and Silicon Graphics. Its market capitalization of $17 billion alongside revenues of only $1.9 billion says something about Wall Street's expectations for its growth and profit margin. Citrix Systems in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. had its origins in the world of clerical computing. The company was founded in 1989 by an IBM software veteran and has revenues of $1.6 billion and a $7.2 billion market cap. The VMware-Citrix contest hasn't gone on long enough to handicap, though observers note that Citrix has the advantage of a close association with Microsoft, which watched with alarm as VMware grew to prominence in the data centers it wanted to own for itself.
A shift to virtualized desktops would affect everyone in the industry, not just the companies making the software that directly allows it. Every large tech company stands ready with new products, new services, new technology directions, in case it takes off. At Hewlett-Packard virtualization products were once considered niche offerings handled by a small, dedicated sales crew. Now, says Roberto Moctezuma, head of desktop solutions, all HP sales people have them on their rate cards. Dell says it takes a slightly different approach, preferring to talk about "flexible computing" for the benefit of customers unwilling to go the full virtualization route. Cisco sees the interest in desktop virtualization as validation of the emphasis it has been putting on networking. "We don't think everyone will virtualize every desktop on the planet," says David Lawler, vice president of the company's virtualization group. "But very clearly, a significant number of them will."
Right now, while they promise to reduce administrative costs, virtual PCs cost 50% more than regular ones because of the extra software companies need to license in addition to Windows. Gartner estimates that premium will need to be cut in half before virtualization becomes a widespread phenomenon. There is also the issue of performance. It turns out that some of the most trivial uses of computers--watching YouTube videos, for example--are among the hardest to replicate on a virtual computer, since intense graphics need to be transmitted instantly over the network. The big virtualization software makers, not to mention an ever growing roster of virtualization startups, are busy trying to close the gap.
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