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Years ago, I remember hearing that there was a minute quantity of gold in certain television tuners or channel selectors ...

Taking another step towards creating devices that could be meshed with brain function to help those with brain damage, or perhaps one day, to improve on abilities, researchers at Tel Aviv University, led by Professor of Psychobiology Matti Mintz, have developed an adjunct to a part of a rat brain. The team, who will be presenting their results this month at a biotechnology meeting in the UK, has created a computer chip that is able to emulate one of the functions of the rat cerebellum. The cerebellum is the small odd looking part of the brain that looks like a...

Legacy Electronics, a high-tech contract manufacturer, has opened its new 40,000-square-foot headquarters in Canton, S.D., closing its San Clemente facility. Engle earlier explained the move: “California, unfortunately has become … a more difficult place to do business, a more costly place to do business, especially for manufacturers.

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, and one of the largest manufacturers of computer memory, Samsung, have created a new kind of flash memory that uses graphene—atom-thick sheets of pure carbon—along with silicon to store information. Incorporating graphene could help extend the viability of flash memory technology for years to come, and allow future portable electronics to store far more data. Chipmakers pack increasing amounts of data in the same physical area by miniaturizing the memory cells used to store individual bits. Inside today's flash drives, these cells are nanoscale "floating gate" transistors. Recent years have seen the...

A hair-thin electronic patch that adheres to the skin like a temporary tattoo could transform medical sensing, computer gaming and even spy operations, according to a US study published Thursday.

Police cars have been set on fire during a demonstration outside a police station in north London, according to witnesses. Tottenham resident, Maria Robinson, says the disturbance is linked to the fatal shooting of a man during a Scotland Yard operation on Thursday. Dozens of protesters have been gathering on the High Road in Tottenham.

A violation of one of the oldest empirical laws of physics has been observed by scientists at the University of Bristol. Their experiments on purple bronze, a metal with unique one-dimensional electronic properties, indicate that it breaks the Wiedemann-Franz Law. This historic discovery is described in a paper published today in Nature Communications. In 1853, two German physicists, Gustav Wiedemann and Rudolf Franz, studied the thermal conductivity (a measure of a system’s ability to transfer heat) of a number of elemental metals and found that the ratio of the thermal to electrical conductivities was approximately the same for different metals...

Korean researchers working out of the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology report in a paper published in Nature Materials, that they've been able to create a non-volatile Resistance RAM (ReRam) chip capable of withstanding a trillion read/write cycles, all with a switching time of just 10ns (about a million times faster than current flash chips), paving the way for a possible upgrade to flash memory cards. ReRam chips are non-volatile, meaning they can retain stored information in the absence of power and are currently made using a Ta2O5 (tantalum) film, the new chips developed by the Samsung team uses Ta2O5-x/TaO2-x...

A few years ago, Russ Apfel was looking for something to do. The semiconductor industry veteran had sold his chip design startup to Silicon Laboratories Inc. in 2005, then he worked for the company before retiring in 2008. Eventually, he started looking at the hearing aid industry. It made sense, because the devices' digital signal processor chips are firmly in Apfel's area of expertise. Apfel was surprised to learn that hearing aids can cost several thousand dollars. "I was appalled," Apfel said. "I couldn't believe how expensive they were." Part of the reason, he said, is that audiologist visits and...

A University of Pittsburgh-led team has created a single-electron transistor that provides a building block for new, more powerful computer memories, advanced electronic materials, and the basic components of quantum computers. The researchers report in Nature Nanotechnology that the transistor's central component -- an island only 1.5 nanometers in diameter -- operates with the addition of only one or two electrons. That capability would make the transistor important to a range of computational applications, from ultradense memories to quantum processors, powerful devices that promise to solve problems so complex that all of the world's computers working together for billions of...

Well, it's not enough that I have to put up with ongoing computer problems, now my radio is messed up. Several years ago I purchased a Sangean portable battery-operated radio from The Short Wave Store. It's one of those radios where the batteries are the primary power source (the AC adapter had to be purchased separately and is very large, heavy, and unwieldy). Unfortunately, for whatever reason, batteries no longer work in it. Now let's be absolutely clear about this: it's not the batteries themselves. Not only are they only three months old (and they're Energizer lithiums at that), but...

An anonymous email making the cyberspace rounds is so upsetting that its author was correct to hide his name. The “Changes Are Coming” email details the demise of our post office, our newspapers, check writing systems, books and music as we know them along with the end of Cable TV and network systems as now constituted. But the harshest caveat bearing down on America is our demise due to deindustrialization. The email reports that “Tens of thousands of factories have left the U.S. in the past decade alone. Millions upon millions of manufacturing jobs have been lost. . .the U.S....

BEIJING (AP) -- China said it is reducing the amount of rare earths it will export for the first half of the year by more than 10 percent -- likely to be an unpopular move worldwide since the minerals are vital to the manufacture of high-tech products.

The lightning rod for rapid fielding of directed energy (DE) weapons and advanced sensors will be the military’s next-generation jammer programs that exploit technologies like active electronically scanned arrays (AESAs) antennas and high-power microwave (HPM) capabilities, say senior U.S. government and industry officials at the 13th Directed Energy Conference. Radars on the Lockheed Martin F-22 and F-35, and Boeing F/A-18F and EA-18G, already have the potential to fire focused beams of energy as soon as funding is available to develop the necessary advanced algorithms. The U.S. Navy’s Next Generation Jammer program is expected to move AESA from radar applications to...

Iran has been able to smuggle advanced technological equipment to its uranium enrichment plant in Natanz via a complex smuggling route based in Dubai, the Sunday Telegraph reported on Sunday. According to the report, an Iranian company has purchased control systems from one of Germany's leading electronic manufacturers. The deal was negotiated with a Dubai trading company, which in turn sold Iran a range of electronic equipment for use at its enrichment facility, the British website reported. The report comes amid growing concerns that though Iran claims its nuclear program has only peaceful aims, Tehran is in fact working toward...

SAN FRANCISCO — When one of the most important e-mail messages of his life landed in his in-box a few years ago, Kord Campbell overlooked it. Not just for a day or two, but 12 days. He finally saw it while sifting through old messages: a big company wanted to buy his Internet start-up. “I stood up from my desk and said, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,’ ” Mr. Campbell said. “It’s kind of hard to miss an e-mail like that, but I did.” The message had slipped by him amid an electronic flood: two computer screens...

Iran is finishing up eight days of naval exercises. This is actually a publicity event, largely for domestic and foreign media. Among the highlights were a domestically made torpedo (which no one was allowed a close look at, to insure that it was new, and not an older American or Chinese model with a new paint job) and ten new helicopter gunships for the navy. These were actually U.S. made AH-1s, which Iran had bought in the 1970s. Photographers were allowed a close look, and the only thing new about these helicopters was the paint and Chinese electronics installed in...

As of April 2, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee (BCBST) had identified 998,422 current and former members whose personal information was included in the theft of 57 hard drives in October 2009 at the payor’s Eastgate location. As of the last update in January, BCBST estimated 500,000 patients' data had been breached. According to an update from BCBST, 550,873 notifications have been sent to members indicating that their personal information was included on the stolen hard drives. The total number of members includes an additional 447,549 current and former members recently identified in the Tier 1 category, meaning members’ names, addresses,...

When it comes to computer technology, thin is always in. It’s indisputable that the thinner, lighter, clearer, the better when dealing with the latest computer gadget. This keyboard is the epitome of the high standards expected of the technological version of the fashion industry. It’s based on image as well, that is, image recognition technology.

Sears says it will begin selling Samsung 3-D HDTVs next month, which will make it one of the first retailers to sell the new 3-D sets. Sears says two Samsung sets will begin shipping next month: a 46-inch, 3-D LED HDTV priced at $2,599 and a 55-inch LED HDTV priced at $3,299. They will be available at Sears stores in March. "The anticipation for the 3-D experience at home has been mounting, and we're giving our shoppers a competitive edge by being one of the first retailers to offer these products," stated Karen Austin, president, Home Electronics, Sears Holdings. Sears...