A device for simultaneously converting the sun’s light and heat into electricity

Researchers have demonstrated a new mechanism for converting both sunlight and heat into electricity.

A new type of device that uses both heat and light from the sun should be more efficient than conventional solar cells, which convert only the light into electricity.

The device relies on a physical principle discovered and demonstrated by researchers at Stanford University. In their prototype, the energy in sunlight excites electrons in an electrode, and heat from the sun coaxes the excited electrons to jump across a vacuum into another electrode, generating an electrical current. The device could be designed to send waste heat to a steam engine and convert 50 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity–a huge improvement over conventional solar cells. Read the rest of this entry »

Switch on the pumpset through your mobile

Everything today is just a phone call away and happens over the mobile. Here’s one such mobile that helps Indian farmers control pumps remotely.

Even a farmer can use a mobile to remote control pumps, thanks to Nano Ganesh, a mobile phone based application developed by Ossian Agro Automation.”The farmer can monitor and check availability of the power at the pump, can switch the pump on/off, and acknowledge the on/off status of water pump from any place. All he has to do is pick his mobile phone, punch a few keys and the control is in his hands,” says Santosh Ostwal, CEO, Ossian Agro Automation. Read the rest of this entry »

New Life for Old Tires

The process involves freezing old rubber and shattering it into small particles–resulting in new, low-cost materials.

Of the nearly 300 million tires discarded in the United States each year, more than half end up either as landfill or are burned for fuel in cement kilns and in other industries.

Lehigh Technologies of Tucker, GA, has developed a process for rejuvenating discarded rubber that could open up new recycling opportunities. If the company’s technology catches on, it could carve out a billion-dollar market for high-performance recycled rubber. Read the rest of this entry »

Accessing Medical Images on Mobiles

Sriram Kannan, has created a created a system for accessing medical images on mobile phones.

Globally, every five seconds someone goes blind from diabetic retinopathy, infant retinopathy of prematurity, eye can­cer and other diseases. The majority of these are preventable, if screened regu­larly. Read the rest of this entry »

A Solution to Help Farmers

Rikin B. Gandhi, 28, has developed a solution to help farmers adopt better farmer practices through locally produced videos of sustainable agriculture techniques.

Farmers in rural India now have something to smile about, courtesy Rikin Gandhi. An aeronautical and astronautical engineer from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S., Gandhi is the founder of Digital Green which disseminates targeted agricultural information to farmers at a reasonable cost using participatory video and mediated instruction. Read the rest of this entry »

Remote controlled system for power tillers

Remote Power For the Fields

A bachelor in electronics and communication from Visveswaraiah Technological University, Karnataka, Prajwal Kumar specializes in robotics and automation. He has recently developed a remote controlled system for power tiller. Farmers have to walk along with the power tiller to control its direction. However, now the electronics remote control device can enable the farmers to operate his power tiller without even getting into the field. It ain’t just this. His other inventions include tree-climbing and harvesting robots, paddy field weeding machine, industrial inspections robots, and an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). Read the rest of this entry »

Laser Security for the Internet

Scientist Invents a Digital Security Tool Good Enough for the CIA – And for You

A British computer hacker equipped with a “Dummies” guide recently tapped into the Pentagon. As hackers get smarter, computers get more powerful and national security is put at risk. The same goes for your own personal and financial information transmitted by phone, on the Internet or through bank machines. Read the rest of this entry »

A 50-Watt Cellular Network

Solar-powered base stations can link up remote rural areas.

An Indian telecom company is deploying simple cell phone base stations that need as little as 50 watts of solar-provided power. It will soon announce plans to sell the equipment in Africa, expanding cell phone access to new ranks of rural villagers who live far from electricity supplies.

Over the past year, VNL, based in Haryana, India, has reengineered the traditional technology of the dominant cellular standard, called GSM, in order to create base stations that only require between 50 and 150 watts of power, supplied by a solar-charged battery. The components can be assembled and booted up by two people and mounted on a rooftop in six hours. Read the rest of this entry »

Media Moves Online

Technology has torn down the walls between different communications media. Magazines produce video clips, while television news stations post written articles online. The technologies that are driving this media convergence are network connections, powerful mobile devices, clever interfaces, and easy-to-use software.

One of the most visible manifestations of the new technology is the rise of “we media,” or citizen journalism, which enables all kinds of people to post anything they want online (see “Mainstream News Taps Into Citizen Journalism“). Several companies, including TypePad, WordPress, and Vox, offer blog platforms that can be used as is or customized with plug-in software to support sophisticated media sites. Sites like YouTube and Blip.tv similarly make it easy to share video content. Read the rest of this entry »

Will 3-D Make the Jump from Theater to Living Room?

Glasses-free 3-D television is still a long way from the market.

Television manufacturers and content producers started out the year pushing 3-D television hard, hoping to ride the wave of success enjoyed by the 3-D movie Avatar. Though glasses-free 3-D is still some ways away, manufacturers hope to entice consumers with a flurry of products that make the best of the difficulties with bringing 3-D content to the small screen.

Producing a 3-D television that doesn’t require glasses is “impractical for the foreseeable future,” says Peter Fannon, vice president of corporate and government affairs for Panasonic. Read the rest of this entry »

China Details Homemade Supercomputer Plans

The machine will use an unfashionable chip design.

It’s official: China’s next supercomputer, the petascale Dawning 6000, will be constructed exclusively with home-grown microprocessors. Weiwu Hu, chief architect of the Loongson (also known as “Godson”) family of CPUs at the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), a division of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, also confirms that the supercomputer will run Linux. This is a sharp departure from China’s last supercomputer, the Dawning 5000a, which debuted at number 11 on the list of the world’s fastest supercomputers in 2008, and was built with AMD chips and ran Windows HPC Server. Read the rest of this entry »

An App so You’ll Never Forget

A language-learning application that’s already big in Japan is coming to the U.S. in the form of a new iPhone app. Smart.fm, based in Tokyo, says that the adaptive-learning algorithms behind its software can help users memorize all kinds of information.

Smart.fm is one of several companies selling software designed to help users remember. The company’s algorithms were inspired by research that shows people remember information more effectively they try to memorize it at key times, says founder and chairman Andrew Smith Lewis. Read the rest of this entry »

A Web Spider for Everyone

A startup uses PC idle time to crawl Web pages on demand.

As the quantity of information on the Internet continues to grow, so does the question of how to process it all and make it useful. A startup called 80legs, based in Houston, TX, is hoping that an inexpensive, distributed Web crawling service could help startups mine the Web for information without having to build the giant server farms used by major search engines. The company launched this week at DEMO, a conference in San Diego that showcases new companies. Read the rest of this entry »

Catching Fake Meds in a Snapshot

Two-dimensional bar codes could reduce drug counterfeiting in the developing world.

Researchers from New York University have proposed a system for authenticating and tracking drugs distributed in the developing world. The system, called Epothecary, would use cell phone cameras to read two-dimensional bar codes affixed to packages and assigned to distributors and pharmacists. The researchers hope the system can be used to prevent the distribution of counterfeit drugs through legitimate channels.

The World Health Organization estimates that more than 10 percent of drugs in the developing world are counterfeit. Some counterfeit meds contain the right ingredients in the right quantities, but others are substandard or even poisonous. Read the rest of this entry »

A Liquid Design for Cheaper Fuel Cells

A platinum-free liquid cathode could cut fuel-cell costs by 40 percent.

Platinum remains the best material for speeding chemical reactions in hydrogen fuel cells, although the scarcity and cost of this element keep fuel cells from becoming more affordable and practical. Most alternative approaches involve simply replacing the platinum in the electrodes. Now a U.K. company called ACAL Energy has overhauled fuel cell design to reduce the amount of platinum used by 80 percent.

In a conventional fuel cell, platinum is embedded in porous carbon electrodes. ACAL’s design replaces this with a solution containing low-cost molybdenum and vanadium as the catalyst. The resulting fuel cell works as well as a conventional one but should cost 40 percent less, the company says. Read the rest of this entry »

Mixing Solar with Coal to Cut Costs

A new strategy could reduce coal plant emissions and cut the cost of solar power.

A project that will add solar power to a coal-fired power plant could reduce the amount of coal required to generate electricity and dramatically cut the cost of solar power.

The approach, announced by Abengoa Solar, based in Lakewood, CO, and Xcel Energy, Colorado’s largest electrical utility, would make it easier for utilities in sunny states like California to meet impending state renewable-energy requirements. Read the rest of this entry »

Astronomers Turn To Omniscopes For Low Cost Observation

Omniscopes promise omnidirectional, omnichromatic astronomy at reasonable cost.

Astronomers want bigger and better telescopes. That’s understandable. But in the world of radio telescopes, there’s a problem looming. Greater sensitivity requires a bigger surface area and the cost for a steerable single-dish telescope grows with area faster than linearly. So really big dishes are just too expensive to build. Read the rest of this entry »

Hammers, Water, Lasers Make Deep Drilling Easier

The process of punching a well hasn’t changed in a century. The search for oil, gas, or water may extend more than 7 miles, but it’s still done with a tricone bit—three grinding cones angled inward and downward, with spinning teeth. This system is effective at crushing and shearing, but every time a bit wears out, engineers have to “trip” the drill: They bring the head to the surface, change it, and send it back down. A lot of drilling time is actually tripping time, which means a project’s cost goes up exponentially with depth. So researchers are developing replacement technologies to reach superheated water for geothermal power or stretch down to previously inaccessible fossil fuel. Here are a few ideas for parts that will be greater than the hole. Read the rest of this entry »

A New Language for Phone Networks

Researchers develop a better way to write applications for peer-to peer cellular networks.

Scientists love the cell phone. Researchers have used the ubiquitous device as a portable polling station, a tracking device, and a sensor. Now, computer scientists want to use mobile phones to exchange data without using the phone’s network, instead of communicating directly with cellular towers, base stations, and the occasional wireless network.

That’s the vision of a group of computer scientists who believe that spreading data virally could open up a whole new manner of applications on peer-to-peer mobile device networks, known more formally as “pocket-switched networks.” Such an ad hoc network–sort of a Sneakernet on steroids–could allow victims of a natural disaster to pass messages from one person to another even if the cell towers are destroyed. In another scenario, visitors to specific locations could have important information forwarded to them via the local folks’ devices. And groups of friends could poll each other on where to eat dinner that night, without using the Internet.

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Brilliant Solution: Inventor Creates LED Wrenches

Gone, at last, are the days of bribing your best friend with pizza and beer to hold your flashlight as you tinker (or fumble) with a wrench in the dark recesses of your car. Grab yourself a set of Hi Beam-Light Wrenches and you can use one hand to hold the wrench and the light, leaving your other hand free to hold anything else — including your beer.

San Diego gearhead and inventor Clifford Wright has come up with the brilliant idea of adding LEDs to wrenches, creating a tool that lets you see that damn bolt tucked up behind the starter. It’s one of those simple solutions to a frustrating problem we wish we’d thought of. Read the rest of this entry »

Look Ma, No Pen! Electrical Impulses Can Reproduce Handwriting

Someday, instead of typing your text message on a cramped iPhone keyboard, neuroscientist Michael Linderman says you’ll be scrawling your thoughts in the air.

Linderman and colleagues have figured out how to translate electrical impulses from muscles in the forearm and hand into written language. Using pattern-recognition algorithms and a technique called electromyography, the researchers can recognize and reproduce a person’s unique handwriting pattern from the movement of their hands. Eventually, they hope to create a fingerless glove equipped with electrode sensors that can automatically translate hand motions into digital or handwritten text. Read the rest of this entry »

Cleaning Coal

Converting coal to natural gas is our best strategy for limiting carbon dioxide emissions today.

The hot investments these days involve renewable-energy technologies that promise to generate electricity completely free of emissions, along with biofuels that promise to end global demand for coal and petroleum. Unfortunately, these technologies are not economically, technically, or logistically ready to be adopted on a large scale. Renewable energy will ultimately be a critical element of a more sustainable world. But if we have any hope of winning the battle against climate change, we must also focus on solutions that can have a bigger impact faster.

Burning coal is the single largest source of globalgreenhouse-gas emissions, and coal is not going to go away anytime soon. It is by far our largest energy resource–Illinois alone has more British thermal units (BTUs) of coal than Saudi Arabia and Kuwait combined have BTUs of oil. Coal now meets 50 percent of U.S. electricity needs, and its use in countries such as China and India is growing. Clearly, we need to find a way to use coal without generating harmful emissions, as an interim solution to one of the biggest threats to society. Read the rest of this entry »

How to Build Anonymity Into the Internet

A Cell-Phone Microscope for Disease Detection

A cheap smart-phone microscope could bring fluorescent medical imaging to areas with limited access to health care.

In a twist on traditional smart-phone accessories, researchers have demonstrated fluorescent microscopy using a physical attachment to an ordinary cell phone. The researchers behind the device say that it could identify and track diseases like tuberculosis (TB) and malaria in developing countries with limited access to health care, or in rural areas of the U.S.

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Protect Your Laptop Data From Everyone, Even Yourself

Last year, I wrote about the increasing propensity for governments, including the U.S. and Great Britain, to search the contents of people’s laptops at customs. What we know is still based on anecdote, as no country has clarified the rules about what their customs officers are and are not allowed to do, and what rights people have.
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$100 Laptop Becomes a $5 PC

Putting OLPC’s software on a USB drive gives old PCs a new lease on life.

The open-source education software developed for the “$100 laptop” can now be loaded onto a $5 USB stick to run aging PCs and Macs with a new interface and custom educational software.

“What we are doing is taking a bunch of old machines that barely run Windows 2000, and turning them into something interesting and useful for essentially zero cost,” says Walter Bender, former president of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project. “It becomes a whole new computer running off the USB key; we can breathe new life into millions of decrepit old machines.”
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Self-powered “infofuses” use chemical reactions to transmit coded messages as far as two kilometers

The data encoding these words was carried as pulses of light on its journey from my computer to yours. But, as new research demonstrates, using light to carry encoded alphanumeric messages over long distances doesn’t require computers, optical fiber, or even electricity.

By patterning flammable metallic salts on a nitrocellulose fuse, researchers at Harvard and Tufts University have encoded messages that can be transmitted without the need for a power source. When one fuse burns, the metallic salts along its length emit pulses of infrared and visible light of different colors whose sequence encodes, “LOOK MOM NO ELECTRICITY.” The system, described today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is inspired by chemical information storage in biological cells.

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Electronic Textiles Being Made: Nanotubes Come into Fashion

Textiles coated with carbon nanotubes form electronic sensors that look and feel like ordinary cotton.

Elegance is as important in scientific design as it is in art and architecture, chemical engineer Nicholas Kotov believes. Sitting in his austere office at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, he shows off a swatch of black cotton; in heft and feel it’s similar to a soft, lightweight dress shirt. But Kotov has transformed the fabric into a biosensor and an electrical conductor simply by dipping it into a solution of carbon nanotubes, antibodies, and a polymer.

Watch video >>

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Quantum leap in LED lighting

QD Vision is using its quantum dots in LED lighting to produce more pleasing white light.

Seth Coe-Sullivan flicks the switches on two desk lamps, and even from across the conference room, it’s immediately obvious which light the chief technology officer of QD Vision is there to brag about. The light coming from the lamp on the left is a harsh bluish white. The lamp on the right casts a warmer, more yellow glow. Coe-Sullivan holds a hand under each lamp. The hand under the bluish light looks pale and sickly; the other looks darker and healthier. The harsher light lacks wavelengths in the red end of the spectrum, so there’s no light to illuminate the reddish tinge that blood provides to human skin.

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Wanting a private conversation? Deploy the “cone of silence”

‘Cone of silence’ keeps conversations secret

IN Get Smart, the 1960s TV spy comedy, secret agents wanting a private conversation would deploy the “cone of silence“, a clear plastic contraption lowered over the agents’ heads. It never worked – they couldn’t hear each other, while eavesdroppers could pick up every word. Now a modern cone of silence that we are assured will work is being patented by engineers Joe Paradiso and Yasuhiro Ono of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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MIT Chemist’s “Solar Fuel” – A breakthrough technology for clean source of fuel

Sun + Water = Fuel

Tidal-Power System Hits Record Output

Marine Current Turbines’ SeaGen system quadruples the world tidal-turbine power record.

Tidal-power developments by British firms show this renewable power technology achieving impressive scale and continued design innovation. Bristol-based Marine Current Turbines (MCT) revealed last month that its SeaGen dual-turbine system achieved full power operation of 1.2 megawatts. MCT’s power peak is four times the global record for a tidal-stream system set by the company in 2004, according to U.K.-based renewables journal REFocus, and 30 times more than the output from the tidal turbines pumping electricity in New York’s East River.

To see these concepts in action, check out the animation below and Tidal Energy’s.Watch animation >>

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Mapping Disasters in 3-D

Imagine a building has collapsed. A team of first responders rushes to the scene and rapidly begins surveying the area for survivors. They draw makeshift maps of the area, so that incoming teams know what’s what. But newcomers don’t always understand the depictions and each minute is crucial to save survivors.

Watch Video >>

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Computer Program Self-Discovers Laws of Physics

In just over a day, a powerful computer program accomplished a feat that took physicists centuries to complete: extrapolating the laws of motion from a pendulum’s swings.

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Tiny Machines Convert Sunlight Directly into Work

Small watercraft made of nanostructured materials are propelled by sunlight.

This object, made of a composite of polymer and vertically-aligned carbon nanotubes, turns sunlight directly into work–in this case, movement across a pool of water. The white line traces the little boat’s progress starting from the bottom of the image. Each blue dot represents a 2-second time point. Credit: JACS/ACS

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Seawater: Our Only Hope for a Drink

Desalination of seawater has become a necessity, but it has to be done right.

As any globe will reveal, there’s no shortage of water on Earth. Unfortunately, over 97 percent of it is too salty for us humans to drink, and only a tiny fraction of what remains is in the rivers, lakes, and groundwater that we’re able to easily access.

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Open Source Hardware Hackers Start P2P Bank

Getting a business loan in this economy can be more difficult than landing a reservation at French Laundry in Napa, California. Now try selling the loan officer on an open source hardware project where the blueprints will be given away.

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Kenya Is On Call for Mobile Crowdsourcing

Cellphone entrepreneur Nathan Eagle has most of Kenya on call, waiting for a small job. Millions of them, in fact.

Eagle, an MIT research scientist who has been living and teaching in East Africa since 2006, hopes to enlist cellphone users in developing countries to perform small text-based tasks in return for micro-payments. Think of it as the mobile phone equivalent of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which pays humans to do such things as transcribe audio and tag photos. Read the rest of this entry »

Cheap, Durable Nonsilicon Solar Cells

An advanced dye boosts the efficiency of dye-sensitized solar cells.

Dye-sensitized solar cells could make solar power more affordable: they are cheaper to make than conventional silicon solar cells and can easily be printed on flexible surfaces. But there’s a catch: creating efficient cells of this type has required dyes made of the precious metal ruthenium and volatile electrolytes. Now researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have replaced both of these materials in a new kind of dye-sensitized solar cell that is not only highly efficient: it also promises to be even cheaper and more durable.

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How Twitter Could Bring Search Up to Speed

Some say that Twitter may be as important to real-time search as YouTube is to video.

When Twitter was introduced in late 2006, asking users to post a 140-word answer to the question “What are you doing?,” many criticized the results as nothing more than a collection of trivial thoughts and inane ramblings. Fast-forward three years, and the number of Twitter users has grown to millions, while the content of the many posts–better known as “tweets”–has shifted from banal to informative.

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Bypassing Windows with a Quick Boot

Presto loads a Web browser and other software in seconds.

Thousands of hours are wasted every year waiting for computers to boot up. A Windows machine can take a couple of minutes to get going and to shut down again. In extreme cases, the entire process can take as long as 30 minutes, according to people who’ve filed lawsuits claiming that their employers should pay for this boot-up and shut-down time.

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Lead Acid Battery: A 150-year-old technology looks to the future

LEAD-ACID batteries seem to have been around for ever. They were invented in 1859 by Gaston Planté, a French physicist, and have done sterling work over the decades starting car engines and powering slow-moving vehicles such as fork-lift trucks and milk floats. Compared with the newer energy technologies that are now sweeping the world, however, it has to be admitted that they look old-fashioned and a bit frumpy. These days the catwalk is crowded with nickel-metal hydride and lithium-ion batteries, showing off their ability to pack a lot of energy into a small space and deliver a steady current over a long period. The fact that these modern batteries are also lighter (lead is, after all, one of the densest elements in the periodic table) has made them the first choices for powering truly serious electric vehicles, as opposed to the ones that potter about warehouses and suburban streets.

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Metallised balloons may be the best way to make solar electricity

SOLAR cells are expensive, so it makes sense to use them efficiently. One way of doing so is to concentrate sunlight onto them. That means a smaller area of cell can be used to convert a given amount of light into electricity. This, though, brings another cost—that of the mirrors needed to do the concentrating. Traditionally, these have been large pieces of polished metal, steered by electric motors to keep the sun’s rays focused on the cell. However, Cool Earth Solar of Livermore, California, has come up with what it hopes will be a better, cheaper alternative: balloons.

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Microsoft New Search Service ‘Kumo’

Microsoft is testing a new version of its online search service internally under the name of Kumo.com, a spokesman for the software company said on Monday.

The service is not yet available outside the company, but may eventually form part of Microsoft’s attempt to catch up with Internet search leaders Google Inc and Yahoo Inc.

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Sharing Fingerprints : Hackers can manipulate outdated algorithms

Hackers can manipulate outdated algorithms to give two very different documents the same digital signature.

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Cloud Computing: Its Evolution Depends on Economics

The 20th century saw an incredible shift in access power, from literacy and the newspaper to radio and the telephone, from television and the satellite dish to the personal computer and the network.

Newspapers were originally fed on presses manually one sheet at a time. Telephones were once connected via legions of operators connecting callers (one at a time) with cables and plugs; and today computer networks are still managed by legions of manual administrators who configure network appliances and manage IP addresses as endpoints are added or moved or networks are acquired. Yet can cloud computing really take that pain away?

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Software-Defined Networking

Nick McKeown believes that remotely controlling network hardware with software can bring the Internet up to speed.

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Briton Invented iPod, DRM and On-Line Music in 1979

Today Apple is almost certain to announce, at the very least, a new, taller iPod Nano. But amidst the hype surrounding the “Let’s Rock” event, it’s easy to get so caught up in the iPod’s future that we forget where it came from.

The iPod was not invented in 2001 in Cupertino, California. It was invented in England in 1979, by “serial inventor” Kane Kramer.

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Keep Your E-mail Private, Secret and Secure.

Do you think of e-mail as a digital postcard or a signed and sealed letter?

Regardless of how you answered that question, if you’re not using an encryption tool to send your e-mail then your digital communiques are essentially postcards transmitted in plain text and available for anyone with the right skills to read.

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A Cheaper Solar Concentrator

Follow link: A new light-guiding optic combines low cost with high efficiency.

Nicolas Morgan holds up a square piece of clear, molded acrylic about a centimeter thick and shines a penlight directly at its flat surface. A green beam enters the acrylic and bends toward the center of the square. Morgan repeats the process at different points on the surface, and each time, the beam darts toward the center.

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Liquid Battery : Donald Sadoway conceived of a novel battery that could allow cities to run on solar power at night.