The need for speed
Frustrated with how long it takes for your computer to boot up? That could change, say researchers who have made a breakthrough that could take the PC industry closer to truly instant-on capability for computer systems.

When will we reach an endpoint? The answer (after the jump) will surprise you

“When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.” – Niels Bohr, recipient of the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics
I’ve had this ongoing [...]

A four-finned rotor (center) floating on a pool of water spins when exposed to sunlight.
The sun is the most abundant source of renewable energy. But all the technologies that capitalize on sunlight, including photovoltaics and biofuels, require intermediate steps and infrastructure to turn the sun’s rays into something that can be used to perform work [...]

 
Scientists Use Tiny Organisms to Create Fuel, Viruses to Make Batteries
For millenniums, microbes have been a staunch technological ally. They have leavened our bread and cured our cheeses. Now, engineers are asking them to convert carbon dioxide into fuel and to build a new generation of batteries. Some of the smallest life forms with which [...]

This image show an experimental test of piezoelectric nanowires that harness a hamster’s wheel-turning energy into usable power. 
Power generated from flowing blood, simple body movements or a gentle breeze could one day be converted to electricity to charge iPods, cell phones and other personal electronic devices.

Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson host of the NOVA scienceNOW PBS program
From a half billion kilometers away, the message was powerful. In 1994, fragments of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet slammed into Jupiter. The earth-size fireballs ejected into space were captured and relayed back to be seen again and again in Internet replay. The message: we need [...]

Lithium-ion cells that use polymer electrolytes can be affordably packaged in compact, flexible pouches  
A new incarnation of lithium-ion batteries based on solid polymers is in the works. Berkeley, CA-based startup Seeo, Inc. says its lithium-ion cells will be safer, longer-lasting, lighter, and cheaper than current batteries. Seeo’s batteries use thin films of polymer as the [...]

 
Directional scattering of an incoming electromagnetic wave by oriented nanocups.
Researchers at Rice University have created a metamaterial that could light the way toward high-powered optics, ultra-efficient solar cells and even cloaking devices.

Smart bridges will know when they are in trouble 
From mundane traffic overpasses to marvelous feats of soaring engineering, bridges are something we tend to take for granted – until something goes wrong that is. A team from the University of Michigan is leading a five-year, $19 million project to engineer an intelligent infrastructure monitoring system designed [...]

 A sample of the new battery material.
Researchers at MIT have designed a new battery that can recharge devices about 100 times faster than conventional lithium ion batteries. The design could lead to electric car batteries that charge in 5 minutes (compared with 8 hours in today’s electric cars) and cell phone batteries that charge in [...]

Dry All The Time!

Sun Dry Swim has produced a swimsuit made of nanomaterials that repel water, so it never gets wet.  Water will just roll off of it, and it will be instantly dry, because technically it never got wet in the first place.

 
Operating rooms now have a new tool to work with
A new minimally-invasive option for treating liver tumors, called microwave ablation, is now available at UC San Diego Medical Center and Moores UCSD Cancer Center, the only hospitals in the region to offer this technology to patients.

 
micro-motors small enough to be injected into the human bloodstream.
A range of complex surgical operations necessary to treat stroke victims, confront hardened arteries or address blockages in the bloodstream are about to be made safer as researchers from the Micro/Nanophysics Research Laboratory at Australia’s Monash University put the final touches to the design of micro-motors [...]

 
Special tips on gecko hairs can grip and release.
Gecko feet have long been a source of inspiration to scientists striving to make superstrong, reusable adhesives. Now researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have found a new way to make such an adhesive grip and release as required, using angled microstructures. These structures mimic the tips of [...]

 
Images taken with a scanning electron microscope
Today, 150 years after Darwin’s epochal “On the Origin of Species,” many questions about the molecular basis of evolution are still waiting for answers. How are signaling pathways changed by genes and by the environment enabling the development of new species? Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental [...]

 
 
Ever since the 1966 Hollywood movie, doctors have imagined a real-life Fantastic Voyage  a medical vehicle shrunk small enough to “submarine” in and fix faulty cells in the body. Thanks to new research by Tel Aviv University scientists, that reality may be only three years away.

 
The ability of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to regulate the safety of dietary supplements using nanomaterials is severely limited by lack of information, lack of resources and the agency’s lack of statutory authority in certain critical areas, according to a new expert report released by the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN).

 
Donut shaped blood cells
By using nanoptical scanning probe microscopes, scientists are able to reveal the going-ons inside humans and animals with stunning clarity. Take the above set of donut-shaped blood cells – which have been treated with an antibiotic called phyllomelittin taken from the skin of a monkey frog – now decidedly more appetizing than [...]

 
Transforming your clothes into speakers sounds weird, but science is working hard to bring fiction to reality. Like most of the technological breakthroughs these days, this one also seems possible with the help of nanotechnology. Researchers at Beijing’s Tsinghua University noticed that sending an audio frequency current through carbon nanotubes resulted in good quality sound.

 
 The researchers at the University of Southern California
Researchers at the University of Southern California have created a a clear, colorless disk about 5 inches in diameter that bends and twists like a playing card, with a lattice of more than 20,000 nanotube transistors. It is capable of having high-performance electronics printed on it using a [...]

 
A microscopic bio-sensor that detects Salmonella bacteria in lab tests has been developed by an agricultural scientist.

Have you ever wondered how cyborgs brains would work, well research scientists are taking us one step closer to figuring that out. Research done by scientists in Italy and Switzerland has shown that carbon nanotubes may be the ideal “smart” brain material.

 
Retina
The idea of creating a bionic eye to assist people with seriously impaired vision is definitely exciting. But installing a silicon chip into a human eyeball to assist the retinas has some drawbacks, the least of which being that the chip itself can block light from falling on areas of the retina that are healthy [...]

 
 
A prototype device employs the same magnetic phenomenon used to write data to computer hard drives.
A new system for detecting cancer proteins uses the same magnetic phenomenon that lets computer hard drives read and write data. The Stanford University researchers developing the system hope that it will detect cancer in its earlier stages, when it’s [...]

Europa Does The Wave To Generate Heat
One of the moons in our solar system that scientists think has the potential to harbor life may have a far more dynamic ocean than previously thought.