NASA and GM team up for Robot

After about three years of work, General Motors and NASA are showing off the next generation of an advanced robot that is said to be faster and more dexterous than previous attempts by the agency.

Robonaut2 or R2 appears to be a sleek humanoid robot and is shown writing, shaking hands and performing tasks, such as lifting weights and picking up an envelope. The two organizations say the partnership is about creating technologies that will help both the automotive and aerospace industries.

“For GM, this is about safer cars and safer plants. When it comes to future vehicles, the advancements in controls, sensors and vision technology can be used to develop advanced vehicle safety systems,” Alan Taub, GM’s vice president for global research and development, said in a statement. “The partnership’s vision is to explore advanced robots working together in harmony with people, building better, higher quality vehicles in a safer, more competitive manufacturing environment.”

GM can see using the technology in the assembly plants where it already uses robotic technology. The Detroit automaker also sees potential applications in vehicle safety systems.

Meanwhile, NASA wants to build machines that help humans work and explore space. “Working side-by-side with humans, or going where the risks are too great for people, machines like Robonaut will expand our ability for construction and discovery,” Mike Coats, NASA’s Johnson Space Center director, said in a statement.

The humanoid robot Robonaut was first designed and built by NASA in a collaborative effort with the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency a decade ago.

R2 has hands that do work beyond the previous scope of the earlier version.

GM and NASA have a long history together, including working together on the development of the Lunar Rover Vehicle used on the moon.

Microsoft and NSF Enable Cloud Research

Microsoft Corp. and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced an agreement that will offer individual researchers and research groups selected through NSF’s merit review process free access to advanced cloud computing resources. By extending the capabilities of powerful, easy-to-use PC applications via Microsoft cloud services, the program is designed to help broaden researcher capabilities, foster collaborative research communities, and accelerate scientific discovery. Projects will be awarded and managed by NSF. More details about funding opportunities are available at http://www.nsf.gov/dir/index.jsp?org=CISE.

Microsoft will provide cloud computing research projects identified by NSF with access to Windows Azure for a three-year period, along with a support team to help researchers quickly integrate cloud technology into their research. Windows Azure provides on-demand compute and storage to host, scale and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft datacenters. Microsoft researchers and developers will work with grant recipients to equip them with a set of common tools, applications and data collections that can be shared with the broad academic community, and also provide its expertise in research, science and cloud computing.

“Cloud computing can transform how research is conducted, accelerating scientific exploration, discovery and results,” said Dan Reed, corporate vice president, Technology Strategy and Policy and eXtreme Computing at Microsoft. “These grants will also help researchers explore rich and diverse multidisciplinary data on a large scale.”

Today, scientists are operating in a world dominated by data, thanks to increasingly inexpensive sensors and a growing trend toward collaborative data projects. Analyzing and synthesizing this mass of data remain a challenge. The goal of the new program is to make simple yet powerful tools available that any researcher can use to extract insights by mining and combining diverse data sets.

“We’ve entered a new era of science — one based on data-driven exploration — and each new generation of computing technology, such as cloud computing, creates unprecedented opportunities for discovery,” said Jeannette M. Wing, assistant director for the NSF Computer and Information Science directorate. “We are working with Microsoft to provide the academic community a novel cloud computing service with which to experiment and explore, with the grander goal of advancing the frontiers of science and engineering as we tackle societal grand challenges.”

Solid State Hard Drive

A computer, though it uses numerous parts in order to function, definitely needs an internal hard drive to function at all. A hard drive being probably the most crucial of all computer accessories is the device where the computer stores all its data as well as the most important operating system, applications and boot log.

Once upon a time, there were computers so old they didn't have any hard drives, in that age, men used to insert special disks encoded to run a program whenever they needed it. Now however, times have changed.

Every computer comes equipped with a hard drive that not only puts the operating system at the beck and call of the user, but also eliminates any necessity of doing unnecessary work by individually inserting a diskette for every application you want to run.

Although in ancient times, a hard drive diskette was actually a piece of paper with holes punched in it, the concept and technology of the hard drive has changed radically. Now a hard drive is actually a number of magnetic diskettes able to store almost 2 terra bytes of data, whereas once it was able to store only 1 MB's worth of data. That's 2,000,000 times more than previously possible.

Even nowadays, there are three different types of internal hard drives available, the older version, commonly known as the IDE drive, the relatively newer version, the SATA drive, and the cutting edge new technology the solid state hard drive. The maximum storage capacity of IDE being 80gb for commoners consumers, 2tb of SATA drive and 80 GB for solid state drives.

For those who do not know what a solid state drive is, solid state drive is the next generation of hard drive storage technologies, as different to SATA and IDE storage as they were to paper diskettes. Finally, by completely eliminating any and all moving parts in a hard drive, the powers that be have introduced a solid state hard drive, amply named because there are no moving parts like cog and wheels in this kind of hard drive.

A solid state hard drive has thus radically reduced any possibility of data being lost or read slowly or anything of that sort. However the technology is very much in its infancy, starting off as the USB's and now coming to full time internal hard drives, the technology is still new, hence the higher prices and the relatively lower disk space, but wait a few and soon you will have the very best of internal hard drives to use as your own.

3D Television : How does it work ?

With the worldwide release and success of James Cameron's 'Avatar', it seems 3D technology may be opening up a whole new dimension in home entertainment.

If you have been following the news, you'll know that 3D TV development is coming big this year. Several main manufactures are aiming at the 3D TV market. And what is really exiting is that they are not using the same technology. Different producers cme up with different ideas and solutions!

Coming to its working, It employs stereoscopic technology by using 3D active shutter glasses. These glasses allow you to see through only one lens at a time and create an image for each of your eyes. Your mind merges these two images and allows you to perceive depth, making the picture on the screen appear 3D.

The 3D experience is made possible by the LG Electronics special lenticular 3D-filter, which gives the viewers auto-stereotopic images and a real dynamic 3D experience! The filter works the same way that the holograms visible on modern passports and ID's. The 3D flter breaks the image and lets the eye watch several pictures at the same time. In the Flatron M4200D is every image actually a composition of 25 images overlapping eachother. When viewing the 3D TV screen at 3 to 7 meters the 3 dimesional perspective seems to be about 50 cm.

One thing is clear though, 3D television seems to be set as the future of home entertainment. The two big hurdles to overcome seem to be pricing of these 3D television sets (estimates roughly in the same region of high-end HD television sets - initially, at least) and secondly, getting the market audience to embrace 3D in their homes. Now judging by the success of the above mentioned movie 'Avatar', it seems consumers are hungry for this new entertainment medium.

It does also seem as if the content producing industry (the film and program makers) will eventually be leaning towards producing programming in 3D, with the announcement of Sony's 3D camera, capable of capturing high quality images at 240fps (that's frames per second) in early October 2009.

Interestingly enough though, as with all new technologies, 3D will be expensive at first, but will most likely become more affordable over time

Instant Battery from NanoTubes

At Stanford, nanotubes + ink + paper = instant battery

Those who are quick to dismiss paper as old-fashioned should hold off on the trash talk. Scientists have made batteries and supercapacitors with little more than ordinary office paper and some carbon and silver nanomaterials. The research, published online December 7 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, brings scientists closer to lightweight printable batteries that may one day be molded into computers, cell phones or solar panels.

“Power storage is one of the very important aspects of solving the energy issue,” comments Robert Linhardt of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. The paper-based devices show excellent performance.

That performance is largely due to paper’s porous nature: at the nano scale, paper is a tangled matrix of fibers. This vast surface area helps inks stick, says Yi Cui of Stanford University, coauthor of the new work. This holds true for carbon nanotube ink as well. When carbon-nanotube ink touches paper, the nanotubes “get caught very tightly to the cellulose,” says Cui, probably just via good old electrostatic forces.

The paper acts as a scaffold, and the carbon nanotubes act as electrodes that electrolytes in solution react with. This nanotube-paper combination offers a lightweight alternative to traditional energy storage devices that rely on metals.

By sandwiching a piece of untreated paper between two pieces inked with carbon nanotubes and then placing the layers in an electrolyte solution, the researchers made conductive paper that could be bent and rolled. When adhesive tape was applied to the paper and then pulled off, the ink didn’t peel off with the tape, a problem with other energy storage materials made with plastic films, the researchers note. Silver nanowires also made the paper conductive.

Calculations suggest that conductive paper coated with a kilogram of the carbon nanotubes could power a 40-watt bulb for an hour, making the paper more efficient than plastic-based versions of flat energy-storage devices. The scientists also used the conductive paper to collect current inside lithium-ion batteries and were able to power a light-emitting diode, or LED.

While previous work has used cellulose as a backbone for conductive materials, this demonstration is the first with ordinary office paper, says Cui. The next step is to take the technology to a larger scale, which might not be a huge hurdle, he says, since paper making and printing are well-developed technologies.

Organic Electronics on the way

Researchers from Stanford University have recently shown that it is possible to create electronics basing on organic materials. This novel demonstration might help engineers to design better digital displays, ‘electronic newspapers’ and other futuristic devices that rely on such improvements to existing technologies.

Electronic devices operate well only when all transistors and switches within them allow electrical current to flow easily. Up until now, the efforts to make organic electronic faced multiple failures due to the materials’ inability to transfer electricity. In this recent study, a team of scientists from Stanford University determined why some transistors made of organic crystals don't perform well. Moreover, several ideas were offered about how to make them work better.

The insight provided regards organic electronics’ inconsistency. The team discovered that the way boundaries between individual crystals in a film are aligned can make a 70-fold difference in how easily current, or electrical charges, can move through transistors. A better alignment might help improve transistors’ performance greatly, creating stability that is essential when creating devices for consumers’ use.

The field of organic semiconductors is mostly unexplored – although it has a high potential of becoming common in the near future. The reason is the cheap materials used, their flexibility, and the relatively simpler process of production (in comparison to traditional silicon chips). Applications such as computer display screens, digital signs or magazines made of "electronic paper" have been possibilities for more than a decade, but due to the aforementioned technological difficulties they were never realized.

While single organic transistors exist, no one has ever compiled a large amount into a fully operational electronic device. "You can make a single device that has high 'charge mobility,' but you really need to make thousands of them," said Alberto Salleo, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford and a senior co-author of the paper. "Most research groups report a high variation in that mobility. What we did here is try to understand what causes the variation."

Salleo belongs to a multidisciplinary team of researchers that systematically studied the subject of inconsistent transistor performance. Specifically, they focused on polycrystalline devices, which are the "grain" boundaries between crystals. According to the study, this ‘in-between’ area creates a possible path for electric charges, thus enabling them to follow through a transistor more easily.

The paper's lead author, graduate student Jonathan Rivnay, has chosen to grow crystals of an organic semiconductor called PDI8-CN2. It was synthesized at Northwestern University and Polyera Corp., using a unique process to ensure consistent alignment from crystal to crystal. Afterwards, multiple transistors were made, and in all of them the alignment process ‘calibrated’ the crystals towards the same direction. As a result, charges could flow through molecules, while the misaligned crystals created the boundaries of the channel.

The next stage was to link the boundaries’ properties to the molecular packing in the crystals, thus inducing the required molecular arrangement to create organic electronics. X-ray analysis, along information retrieved from extensive theoretical calculations, provided a clearer picture of the imperfections interfering with the creation of organic transistors.

"The problem of understanding defects in organic electronic materials including grain boundaries is very important for any device application," Rivnay said. "By better understanding what goes on at these boundaries, and how detrimental they are, improvements can be made at the chemistry end as well as at the design and fabrication end of the process. This way devices can be more reproducible and better performing."

The research was collaboration between several institutions and its funding came from multiple U.S. federal institutions, as well as the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. It was published online on November 8 in the journal Nature Materials.

World's Fastest Desktop Hard Drive

Seagate Corp. has recently announced the world’s first 2-terabytes hard-drive with full support for third generation SATA interface. It means that now computers could double the rate of data transfer, thanks to the significant bottleneck reduction. The new storage device, named Barracuda XT, is designed for desktop computers, and though it should enhance most users’ PC experience, it would especially benefit hard-core gamers.

The new 3.5-inch hard-drive spins 4x 500GB platters at 7200RPM; a large 64MB cache memory was installed in order to prevent bottlenecks. Moreover, it promises a sustained transfer rate of 140MBps (compared to 600MBps / 4.8Gbps possible), and mean time between failures (MTBF) of 750,000 hours; accordingly, its warranty is good for five years.

Unlike other high-capacity controllers the Barracuda XT is the industry’s first to feature a SATA 6Gb/s interface. This development was made to meet the demands of gaming, digital video-environments and other storage-hungry desktop computing applications. “Capacity and performance remain the defining attributes of hard drives for PC gamers, digital multimedia content developers and many other customers requiring high-end systems at home and in the office,” said Dave Mosley, executive vice president of Sales and Marketing at Seagate. “Seagate is meeting these requirements with the first 7200RPM desktop hard drive to combine 2TB of storage capacity with the fastest Serial ATA interface to date.”

According to Dr. Alan J. Armstrong, vice president of Marketing, Business Storage Group at Marvell, one of Seagate’s major partners, research has shown that early adopters are already willing to try the new product, alongside motherboards offered by Asus and Gigabyte.

“An expansion bridge integrated into the Asus P7P55D Premium helps achieve real SATA 6Gb/s throughput to support bandwidth-hungry applications,” explains Joe Hsieh from Asus, who works as corporate vice president and general manager, Motherboard Business Unit & Desktop Business Unit. Similarly, Tony Liao from Gigabyte, who is the associate vice president of Marketing, takes pride in the collaboration achieved: “Gigabyte has worked closely with our partners Seagate and Marvell in making the highly anticipated SATA 6Gb/s technology a reality.”

The new hard-drive is already in stores, ready for sale; its price is about $300. However, there are few compatible controllers that support SATA 6G. Luckily, this technology is backward compatible with SATA 1.5Gbps or 3Gbps, making the new disk more accessible for most consumers.

Flexible Solar - Awesome New Technology

There's definitely a huge push these days toward green, sustainable, renewable energy. Solar energy is becoming an exciting new development with a huge amount of personal application. The new photovoltaic solar panels coming out of the factories are ultra thin and light, and able to be rolled up and packed away, as opposed to the traditional silicon solar panels, which have always been heavy, bulky, and rigid. These new flexible sheets have a nearly innumerable amount of applications. Solar panels are becoming portable, meaning that a person could charge any number of electronic devices on the go without having to plug into the grid, which is a major plus for green, sustainable energy enthusiasts.

But there are added benefits. Amorphous, meaning shapeless, silicon thin-film solar cells can be manufactured at a cheaper rate than conventional crystalline cells primarily because they use less material than the traditional cells. Newer cells are only 1 micrometer thick. Older crystalline solar cells generally came in 150-to-200-micrometer-thick slices. Not only that, but solar cells are becoming more and more efficient everyday. The electric charge and voltage generated by the newest systems are many times more powerful than the old. The most modern cells, called triple junction cells are being mad with three different materials--amorphous silicon, amorphous silicon germanium, and nanocrystalline silicon. This gives maximum energy absorption because each of these materials is tuned to capture the energy in different parts of the solar spectrum. That kind of technology is brand new. Not only that, but it's also hitting the scene at a time when solar panels are becoming lightweight, portable, and affordable.

Those three factors are all coming together to create a technology that I personally believe will be the next big thing in the green energy movement. The only thing I can think of that could top it would be some kind of fold-up, portable wind energy device, which I can't imagine coming out anytime in the near future. But that would be quite the site to see :)

With this newest advancement in flexible solar panels, I expect solar energy to hit a new peak. With the green movement now in full swing and people more and more wanting to minimize their effect on the environment, I have a feeling that the new designs and technologies are going to revolutionize our thinking. It isn't even that solar energy production is efficient. It's the fact that people are wanting to take the welfare of the environment into their own hands. Knowing that you can buy a backpack for instance, that will generate enough electricity to charge your Ipod and your cell phone, is something that's never been heard of before. In my opinion, the future is going to be motivated by sustainability and self-sufficiency. And these are just the most recent developments. We're making newer, more cost effective, smaller sizes everyday! Current research and science are exploding around the idea of solar energy, and the advancements are really cool to read about.

But that's not all. There's just something that's almost exciting about generating your own power. It's like growing food in your own garden. Even powering your own lighting can be exhilarating. I remember the first time I used a hand cranked flashlight. There was just something almost magical knowing that hand powered energy was making enough of a charge to power the battery. I mean, when could a person ever go to a little grassy park and break out a laptop while lying in a field. It's true that with the latest advancements in lithium ion batteries, laptops can hold up to 8 hours of a charge, but most batteries have a limited shelf life and begin to lose efficiency very quickly. I'm not sure what the future is going to bring. But I'm very excited about the newest wave of flexible solar panels just hitting the market. I think we're going to start seeing a lot more of this kind of technology being applied for everyday use.