Zero launches all-terrain electric bike – Video

TG Daily – Zero launches all-terrain electric bike

Santa Cruz, CA – A new electric motorcycle is the first to be suitable for any terrain, from city streets to dirt tracks, say its makers.

See it in action on Youtube

Researchers claim breakthrough in LED technology

TG Daily – Researchers claim breakthrough in LED technology

Menlo Park, CA – A new, highly-efficient light source has been developed that could one day replace incandescent and fluorescent light bulbs
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“Showa Denko is excited about this promising development. With SRI’s help, we expect to make this technology available to the lighting industry as early as 2010,” said Mr. Kyohei Takahashi, president of SDKK.

The high-tech mini-allotment from Nasa that allows you to grow your own fruit and veg

The high-tech mini-allotment from Nasa that allows you to grow your own fruit and veg | Mail Online

A ‘mini allotment’ designed by Nasa scientists to grow fruit and vegetables in space goes on sale today.

The gadget will allow residents of the smallest flats to grow their own food without a garden – or even soil.

The Power Plant Growing Machine uses hundreds of tiny jets to constantly spray nutrients on to the roots of plants. Scientists say this leads to far quicker growth than normal.

Evolution machine speeds up search for better bugs

Evolution machine speeds up search for better bugs – life – 26 July 2009 – New Scientist

If humans want to persuade microbes to produce vast quantities of fuels or pharmaceuticals, we may need to give evolution a helping hand. A new genome engineering machine that tweaks dozens of genes to create billions of unique strains in a few days does just that.

“This technique allows us to do some amount of rapid evolution,” says Harris Wang, a researcher at Harvard Medical School, who led the project along with colleagues Farren Isaacs and George Church.

“The general motivation behind what we’re trying to do is develop a set of techniques that will allow us to write into the genome of any organism with the same ease that we are able to read from the genome by DNA sequencing,” he adds.

Meet the man who’s flying from Land’s End to John O’Groats… by bike

Sky-high ambition: Meet the man who’s flying from Land’s End to John O’Groats… by bike | Mail Online

It looks far too solid ever to get off the ground. But if John Carver pedals really hard, revs up his little lawnmower engine and thinks happy thoughts… he is soon 2,000ft up in the air.

Then, give or take the odd rain shower, he stays up for two glorious hours, pootling along at 25mph and enjoying the fabulous views unfolding below.

His flying bike, or flyke as it is known, is taking Mr Carver on an epic 800-mile trek this summer, from Land’s End to John O’Groats, touching down to camp in fields along the way.

First Flapping, Two-Winged Aircraft Takes Flight

First Flapping, Two-Winged Aircraft Takes Flight: Discovery News

July 24, 2009 — The world’s first successful flight of a self-powered, rudderless, flapping aircraft has been achieved by engineers from AeroVironment.

The NAV, or nano air vehicle, operates by using two flapping wings, which also function as the rudder, elevators, ailerons and engine. With its two wings, the NAV is able to hover, move forward and backwards, and change its elevation. In flight, the NAV almost appears to replicate the movements of a hummingbird.

Revolutionary display with technology inspired by butterfly’s wings – enters production

Qualcomm MEMS Technologies and Foxlink Commence Operations at Dedicated mirasol Display Fabrication Facility – With Video

Qualcomm MEMS Technologies Inc. has developed the industry’s first direct view micro-electrical mechanical system (MEMS) display for mobile devices – a true technological innovation that offers low power consumption and superb viewing quality in a wide range of environmental conditions, including bright sunlight. The display works by reflecting light using interfoermetric modulation (IMOD) so that specific wavelengths interfere with each other to create color. The phenomenon that makes a butterfly’s wings shimmer is the same principle applied in Qualcomm’s mirasol displays.
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“LG looks for innovations like Qualcomm’s mirasol display that can give us a competitive edge and differentiated user experience our customers have come to expect,” said DooWhan Sang, vice president of LG Electronics. “With the display’s low-power capabilities, LG can see how our customers could be able to take advantage of sophisticated mobile applications for longer periods of time and view it across a range of lighting environments.”
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www.engadget.com
Inventec, known as a player in the navigation industry, will be releasing a smartphone in the near future.  Dubbed the Inventec V112, the handset will incorporate Qualcomm’s cutting-edge mirasol display which works with reflected light to cut the power consumption of image display.  Because it’s not working in color yet–though LG is working hard on this–Inventec will place the 1.1-inch bichrome display beneath the main screen, all overlaid with a touch membrane.  The V112 will run on Windows Mobile and feature GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, MP2 playback, messaging support and a 3 megapixel camera.

The 15 Coolest Cases of Biomimicry

The 15 Coolest Cases of Biomimicry

Those who are inspired by a model other than Nature, a mistress above all masters, are laboring in vain. – Leonardo Da Vinci

Biomimicry – The practice of developing sustainable human technologies inspired by nature. Sometimes called Biomimetics or Bionics, it’s basically biologically inspired engineering.

Core i9 is the new 32nm Gulftown moniker

Fudzilla – Core i9 is the new 32nm Gulftown moniker

Several partners and sources close to Intel have recently been known to address the upcoming 32nm Gulftown 6-core monster as Intel Core i9. This doesn’t come as much of a surprise, considering that the company is structuring its Core lineup to feature odd numbers, beginning with its dual-core lineup also known as Core i3.

As we’ve mentioned several times before, the 32nm Gulftown 6-core (or hexa-core) chip will launch in Q1 2010 as the first chip in the Westmere family, the successor to Nehalem. Intel Core i9 will appeal to a highly enthusiast market niche, as it is based solely on socket LGA 1366 and retains compatibility with the X58 chipset which isn’t going anywhere in the foreseeable future.

Humans Glow

Humans Glow

(July 22) – The human body literally glows, emitting a visible light in extremely small quantities at levels that rise and fall with the day, scientists now reveal.
Past research has shown that the body emits visible light, 1,000 times less intense than the levels to which our naked eyes are sensitive. In fact, virtually all living creatures emit very weak light, which is thought to be a byproduct of biochemical reactions involving free radicals.

Skin Cells Grown into a Mouse

Technology Review: Blogs: TR Editors’ blog: Skin Cells Grown into a Mouse

Two groups of researchers from China have independently shown that induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells–a newly-developed type of stem cell derived from adult cells–can grow into a fully formed mouse. The findings show that these cells are just as flexible in their fate as embryonic stem cells. The findings were published today in the journals Nature and Cell Stem Cell.

Rice, NCSU discovery could allow faster, smaller chips

Rice, NCSU discovery could allow faster, smaller chips – The Tech Report

Rice University and North Carolina State Universy scientists have developed a new semiconductor manufacturing technique that, according to them, could let firms like Intel “reach beyond the current limits of Moore’s Law as they make microprocessors both smaller and more powerful.”

The discovery essentially provides an avenue to circumvent the limits of doping—the act of introducing impurities into silicon.

YouTube – From DNA to Protein

YouTube – From DNA to Protein

How Evolution Can Allow For Large Developmental Leaps

How Evolution Can Allow For Large Developmental Leaps

ScienceDaily (July 21, 2009) — How evolution acts to bridge the chasm between two discrete physiological states is a question that’s long puzzled scientists. Most evolutionary changes, after all, happen in tiny increments: an elephant grows a little larger, a giraffe’s neck a little longer. If those tiny changes prove advantageous, there’s a better chance of passing them to the next generation, which might then add its own mutations. And so on, and so on, until you have a huge pachyderm or the characteristic stretched neck of a giraffe.
But when it comes to traits like the number of wings on an insect, or limbs on a primate, there is no middle ground. How are these sorts of large evolutionary leaps made?

YouTube – How DNA Copies Itself

YouTube – How DNA Copies Itself

Experimental diabetes treatment will inject humans with big cells

Experimental diabetes treatment will inject humans with big cells | Mail Online

An experimental diabetes treatment that will implant cells from newborn pigs into human volunteers is to be trialled from today.

The cells produce insulin that is very similar to human insulin and has the same effect of lowering blood sugar.

A New Zealand biotech company called Living Cell Technologies will take the cells from animals that used to live on the remote Auckland Islands.

Artificial brain ’10 years away’

BBC NEWS | Technology | Artificial brain ’10 years away’

A detailed, functional artificial human brain can be built within the next 10 years, a leading scientist has claimed.

Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, has already simulated elements of a rat brain.

He told the TED Global conference in Oxford that a synthetic human brain would be of particular use finding treatments for mental illnesses.

Around two billion people are thought to suffer some kind of brain impairment, he said.

“It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years,” he said.

Synaptics ClearPad 3000 Touchscreens Allow For 10-Finger Multitouch

Synaptics ClearPad 3000 Touchscreens Allow For 10-Finger Multitouch – How it Works – Popular Mechanics

Multitouch capacitive displays, such as those found on the iPhone and Palm Pre, typically max out with two-finger tapping. But a new next-gen display, announced Wednesday by touchscreen manufacturer Synaptics, should up that limit by a factor of five.

Scramjets promise space travel for all

Scramjets promise space travel for all – space – 22 July 2009 – New Scientist

ON A bright autumn morning five years ago, the space-flight community was turned on its head by a little teardrop-shaped spacecraft built in a small workshop in California’s Mojave desert. The successful flight of SpaceShipOne on 29 September 2004, the first of two flights en route to winning the $10 million Ansari X prize, seemed to usher in a new era of space travel – one in which space flight would be affordable, frequent and, perhaps most importantly, accessible to all.

End of the world postponed until Christmas

TG Daily – End of the world postponed until Christmas

Geneva, Switzerland – The long-awaited restart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been postponed until the winter of 2009. CERN attributed the delay to a number of technical difficulties, including vacuum leaks in two sectors of the LHC that had been cooled down to 80 K.