Free Republic

The robots are on the move--leaping, scrambling, rolling, flying, climbing. They are figuring out how to get here on their own. They come to help us, protect us, amuse us--and some even do floors. Since Czech playwright Karel Capek popularized the term ("robota" means "forced labor" in Czech) in 1921, we have imagined what robots could do. But reality fell short of our plans: Honda Motor (nyse: HMC - news - people ) trotted out its Asimo in 2000, but for now it's been relegated to temping as a receptionist at Honda and doing eight shows a week at Disneyland....

A simple tweak to the way common silicon transistors are made could allow faster, cheaper mobile phones and digital cameras, say UK researchers. Devices with the modification have already set a new world record for the fastest transistor of its type. To achieve the speed gain, researchers at the University of Southampton added fluorine to the silicon devices. The technique uses existing silicon manufacturing technology meaning it should be quick and easy to deploy. "It just takes a standard technology and adds one extra step," said Professor Peter Ashburn at the University of Southampton, who carried out the work. "This...

Proponents of the new Ballistic Deflection Transistor technology say it will produce computers that are faster, more powerful, and more efficient at using power. Scientists at the University of Rochester have come up with a new "ballistic computing" chip design that could lead to 3,000-gigahertz — that's 3-terahertz — processors that produce very little heat.Marc Feldman, professor of computer engineering at the University, characterizes the design, the Ballistic Deflection Transistor (BDT), as radical. "There's a real problem for standard transistors to keep shrinking," he says. The BDT doesn't have a capacitance layer that becomes problematic at very small scales the...

Computer designers at the University of Rochester are going ballistic. "Everyone has been trying to make better transistors by modifying current designs, but what we really need is the next paradigm," says Quentin Diduck, a graduate student at the University who thought up the radical new design. "We've gone from the relay, to the tube, to semiconductor physics. Now we're taking the next step on the evolutionary track." That next step goes by the imposing name of "Ballistic Deflection Transistor," and it's as far from traditional transistors as tubes. Instead of running electrons through a transistor as if they were...

Hoosier Daddy? In Indiana Schools, It's Linux By Edward F. Moltzen, CRN 4:10 PM EDT Wed. Aug. 16, 2006 How's this for back-to-school fashion: More than 20,000 Indiana students are now Linux-enabled under a state grant program to roll out low-cost, easy-to-manage workstations, which are running various flavors of the open-source operating system. Mike Huffman, special assistant for technology at the Indiana Department of Education, said schools in the state have added Linux workstations for 22,000 students over the past year under the Affordable Classroom Computers for Every Secondary Student (ACCESS) program. And that could expand quickly with several...

WASHINGTON, Aug. 8 (UPI) -- Boeing and the U.S. Air Force say they have achieved major progress in the development of a system to use mirrors to shoot laser beams at missiles. In a statement Monday, Boeing said it and the Air Force had successfully redirected a laser beam to a target using their Aerospace Relay Mirror System, or ARMS. The demonstration, conducted recently at U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory facilities at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M., used a half-scale version of a system that ultimately could be packaged and carried to high altitudes on airships, long-endurance aircraft or spacecraft,...

He'd wanted to be the next Dhanraj Pillai, but the vista that destiny opened up for A Mahesh led to greener pastures in the world of technology. The 24-year-old from small town Tamil Nadu has created a software that will add considerable muscle to Vista, Microsoft's brand new operating system due for launch next year. In all probability, Vista will incorporate Mahesh's creation, which is an image browser, image editor, web browser, system tools and disk manager rolled into one. In fact, Microsoft has already validated and awarded the product BETA2 iBRO.NET a patent protection certificate. This means anyone may...

A new haptic device will be shown at the next SIGGRAPH. This virtual reality system, the Fingertip Digitizer, has been developed at the University of Buffalo (UB). It will interpret your hand gestures and will translate them for your PC, medical devices or computer games. According to one developer, the Fingertip Digitizer "will help bridge the gap between what a person knows and what a computer knows" and a commercial version should be available within 3 years. Read more… Here is the introduction about this new device developed at UB Virtual Reality Laboratory. UB researchers say their "Fingertip Digitizer," which...

SOMETIMES all it takes is a quick hug, and everything looks different. Now a shape-shifting lens has been developed that alters its focal length when squeezed by an artificial muscle, rather like the lens in a human eye. The muscle, a ring of polymer gel, expands and contracts in response to environmental changes, eliminating the need for electronics to power or control the devices. "The lenses harness the energy around them to control themselves," says lead researcher Hongrui Jiang at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US, where the device has been developed (Nature, vol 442, p 551). "This would be useful...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — When hurricanes, wars or other emergencies force authorities to respond, three essentials top their list of must-haves: water, electricity and refrigeration. Now, in a project funded by the U.S. Army, two University of Florida engineers have designed, built and successfully tested a combined power-refrigeration system that can provide all three – and, with further development, be made compact enough to fit inside a military jet or large truck. “If you’re in a forward base in Iraq, it costs you the same per gallon of water as it does per gallon of fuel,” said William Lear, a UF...

It's not easy to remove Microsoft's anti-piracy program, but it can be done Scot Finnie Today’s Top Stories or Other Windows Stories July 30, 2006 (Computerworld) -- Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) software is installed on computers running Windows XP via Microsoft's online update services. For most XP users, that means Automatic Updates, which Microsoft has worked very hard since Windows XP SP2 to make us run in full-automatic mode. WGA has already appeared in several beta versions, with slightly different behaviors, and Microsoft appears to be still actively developing this tool. For many people, the fact that the software giant...

In California politics, Silicon Valley executives used to be considered newbies, nerds or simply multimillionaires with too much time and money on their hands. No longer. Emboldened over the past decade by some success passing ballot propositions, a handful of the valley's most influential power brokers are once again aiming to use the initiative process to put their stamp on public policy in California. Two of the boldest electoral initiatives yet to emerge from valley interests will be on November's ballot: NetFlix founder Reed Hastings and Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist John Doerr are backing Proposition 88, an unprecedented statewide real...

New thin-film semiconductor techniques invented by University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers promise to add sensing, computing and imaging capability to an amazing array of materials. Historically, the semiconductor industry has relied on flat, two-dimensional chips upon which to grow and etch the thin films of material that become electronic circuits for computers and other electronic devices. But as thin as those chips might seem, they are quite beefy in comparison to the result of a new UW-Madison semiconductor fabrication process detailed in the current issue of the Journal of Applied Physics. A team led by electrical and computer engineer Zhenqiang (Jack)...

Physicists of the University of Bonn have taken one more important hurdle on the path to what is known as a quantum computer: by using 'laser tweezers' they have succeeded in sorting up to seven atoms and lining them up. The researchers filmed this process and report on their breakthrough in the next issue of the prestigious journal Nature (13th July 2006). In the experiment the research team headed by Dr. Arno Rauschenbeutel and Professor Dieter Meschede decelerated several caesium atoms for a period of several seconds so that they were hardly moving, then loaded them onto a 'conveyor belt'...

A new type of computer that mimics the complex interactions in the human brain is being built by UK scientists. The £1m machine, nicknamed the "brain box", will be constructed at the University of Manchester. The first of its kind in the world, it will be used to help researchers engineer fail-safe electronics.Professor Steve Furber, of the university school of computer science, said computer science had much to learn from biological systems. "Our brains keep working despite frequent failures of their component neurons, and this 'fault-tolerant' characteristic is of great interest to engineers who wish to make computers more reliable,"...

A pair of motorised roller skates that cancel out a person's steps could let users naturally explore virtual reality landscapes in confined spaces. The "Powered Shoes" were developed by Hiroo Iwata, Hiroshi Tomioka and Hiroaki Yano at the University of Tsukuba in central Japan. The shoes will be demonstrated at the SIGGRAPH 2006 conference on computer graphics and interactive technologies, which takes place in Boston, US, between 30 July and 3 August. Each shoe is mounted on top of a set of three motorised rollers and is connected by cable to a computer on the user's back. This computer controls...

BEIJING (Reuters) -- Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. have breached the Universal Declaration on Human Rights in colluding with China to censor the Internet, Amnesty International said on Thursday. The three publicly traded companies are ignoring their own stated commitments -- which in Google's case includes corporate motto "Don't be evil" -- and are in denial over the human rights implications of their actions, the group said. "All three companies have, in one way or another, facilitated or concluded in the practice of censorship in China," London-based Amnesty said in a report. "All three companies have demonstrated a...

Researchers at the University of Toronto have created a semiconductor device that outperforms today's conventional chips -- and they made it simply by painting a liquid onto a piece of glass. The finding, which represents the first time a so-called "wet" semiconductor device has bested traditional, more costly grown-crystal semiconductor devices, is reported in the July 13 issue of the journal Nature."Traditional ways of making computer chips, fibre-optic lasers, digital camera image sensors – the building blocks of the information age – are costly in time, money, and energy," says Professor Ted Sargent of the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department...

July 18, 2006 K Subrahmanyam, the doyen of Indian strategic affairs thinkers, assesses India-US relations a year after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Washington, DC A year has passed since the signing of the Joint Statement by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and United States President George W Bush. If it had been a routine Joint Statement between two heads of governments there would have been no need to review the progress achieved on it. It was not a routine statement, but the beginning of a global effort led by the US to reshape the international order by incorporating India...

Sydney, Jul 8 (ANI): An Indian born scientist in the US is working on developing DVD's which can be coated with a light -sensitive protein and can store up to 50 terabytes (about 50,000 gigabytes) of data. Professor V Renugopalakrishnan of the Harvard Medical School in Boston has claimed to have developed a layer of protein made from tiny genetically altered microbe proteins which could store enough data to make computer hard disks almost obsolete. "What this will do eventually is eliminate the need for hard drive memory completely," ABC quoted Prof. Renugopalakrishnan, a BSc in Chemistry from Madras University...