Happiness ain’t all it’s cracked up to be

Happiness ain’t all it’s cracked up to be – life – 26 February 2010 – New Scientist

Grumpiness or sadness, on the other hand, produces more vigilant, outward-looking thinkers. “A negative mood produces a thinking style that is more detailed and attentive, and pays more attention to the demands of the external environment,” says Forgas.

Innovation: Bloom didn’t start a fuel-cell revolution

Innovation: Bloom didn’t start a fuel-cell revolution – tech – 26 February 2010 – New Scientist

The world woke up to an energy revolution this week thanks to the Governator-backed launch of Bloom Energy, a firm based in Sunnyvale, California, whose fuel cells rapidly gained huge publicity and created much excitement.

But that revolution is not one coming just from the so-called “Bloom boxes”, which already have high-profile customers like eBay and Google.

It’s one already being put into action by a suite of less-celebrated and more established competitors to the new company. Indeed fuel cells much like Bloom’s are already set to be installed in thousands of homes this year.

Zoomdoggle’s Amazing BuckyBalls in action!

YouTube – Zoomdoggle’s Amazing BuckyBalls in action!

HDDs, The Next Generation: Drives With 4KB Sectors On The Way

Conclusion – Review Tom’s Hardware : HDDs, The Next Generation: Drives With 4KB Sectors On The Way

The new WD10EARS drive delivers higher performance than its predecessor, the WD10EADS, at similar power consumption and slightly increased efficiency. Although the drive doesn’t perform well enough to be a suitable system drive for performance desktops, it delivers more than enough performance for storage and archiving applications or low-power HTPC systems.

Cell-inspired electronics

Cell-inspired electronics

(PhysOrg.com) — A single cell in the human body is approximately 10,000 times more energy-efficient than any nanoscale digital transistor, the fundamental building block of electronic chips. In one second, a cell performs about 10 million energy-consuming chemical reactions, which altogether require about one picowatt (one millionth millionth of a watt) of power.

Is the Ares to succeed the Mars?

Is the Ares to succeed the Mars? – BeHardware

The Ares is reported to be based on two 5870s, at their original clocks and come with 2 GB of RAM per GPU, or 4 GB in total. As the 5970 is at the same clocks as the 5850, the Ares should be able to outdo it in terms of performance. It should therefore be almost 30% better in 3DMark Vantage, which would make the Ares the most powerful graphics card on the market.

In itself, the card is likely to be enormous with an extraordinary cooling system made up of a huge copper block of 8 heatpipes and a 100mm diameter fan! Energy consumption is also likely to beat records as it looks as if it will have to be powered by two 8 pin PCI-Express connectors and one 6 pin.

512 MB 40nm DDR3 from Samsung

512 MB 40nm DDR3 from Samsung – BeHardware

After having announced its 256 MB 40nm chips last July, Samsung are the first to announce mass production of a 512 MB 40nm DDR3 chip. The density of these chips allow for the production of 16 GB DDR3 bars for desktop, 32 GB for servers and 8 GB for laptops. Running at 1.35v and 1.5v, they allow a 35% economy of energy in comparison to the old 50nm solutions according to Samsung.

Metoda Google de a face ştiinţă

Metoda Google de a face ştiinţă

Peter Norvig, cercetător la Google, s-a mândrit odată spunând că „Nicio persoană din cele care au lucrat la traducătorul chinezesc nu vorbea chineza”. Nu a existat o teorie a limbii chineze, nicio înţelegere, doar date (dacă cineva se îndoia de „experimentul camerei chinezeşti” a lui John Searle, aici avem dovada).

Nanotech May Tap Into Your Mind

Nanotech May Tap Into Your Mind : Discovery News

Torimitsu is working on creating a nano-scaled implant comprising a nano-electrode coated with an artificial membrane that mimics the receptor proteins found on the surface of brain cells, such as glutamate and GABA receptors -involved in increasing and inhibiting brain activity.