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There's no doubt about it: foreign technology can whet your appetite. Super-lightweight laptops from Japan, feature-packed smartphones from Europe, and shiny, gotta-get-it devices designed in India, South Korea, and Taiwan are but a few of the items that currently reside on tech's cutting edge. But chances are you will never see those gadgets on store shelves here in the U.S. A trip to the typical U.S. electronics store suggests many Americans would gladly shell out some extra cash for high-end lightweight products. Smaller, lighter, and more-expensive laptops are occupying an ever-increasing amount of shelf space. Even if a larger percentage...

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--The airport of tomorrow might have virtual intelligence agents that check your bags, "smart dust" sensor networks that vet passengers heading through security and commuter pilots who fly the plane from a home office.That is, if Dave Evans' vision is to be believed. As chief technologist for Cisco Systems' Internet Business Solutions Group Innovations Team, Evans set the stage Tuesday for technology innovations that will help shape the future of airport travel here at the opening of the FAA/NASA/Industry Airport Planning Workshop. "This is a great time to innovate," Evans said as he delivered the keynote speech at...

Ainge targeted for grid stardom at very early age Tuesday, September 12, 2006 The Hillsboro Argus Stardom was predicted for Erik Ainge even before he touched a football. And at one point, there was consideration for Ainge to achieve his prep feats at another high school rather than Glencoe. A sports scientist named Jonathan P. Niednagel got the ball rolling when he told Ainge's parents that Erik had the realistic potential to be a National Football League star quarterback. Erik Ainge was a frail 10-year-old fifth grader when the story began, and Niednagel was working for Danny Ainge and...

Nintendo announced last night that the highly anticipated Wii will be released in the U.S. on November 19th at a launch price of $250. The Wii will be released just days after Sony plans to release the PS3. While Sony has said they will have a limited number of PS3's available for the holiday season, Nintendo assures they will have "far more available than their competitor". Link

If you had to choose between your PC, TV set or mobile phone, which one would you pick? That was one of the questions researcher Forrester posed to almost 4800 households in the US and, although the TV set still ruled the roost in most homes, the study showed that it was no longer the top gadget of choice among the young and prosperous. Forrester found that less than 20 per cent of the gen Y group (aged 18-26) ranked TVs top compared with the 37 per cent who rated their PCs as the most important. A further 27 per...

Magnetic resonance imaging no longer requires a roomful of equipment – including superconducting magnets that must be cooled to extreme temperatures. A multidisciplinary team from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, and the University of California, Berkeley, both in the US, developed a highly sensitive laser detector that produces magnetic resonance images at room temperature using low-power, off-the-shelf magnets. MRI works by measuring minute magnetic signals from atomic nuclei whose "spins" have been aligned using external magnetic fields. As different atoms react differently, this provides a unique way to image tissue inside the human body or analyse many other materials....

The software giant thinks it can make robotic engineering easier with a set of standards: its own of course Microsoft believes the demand for consumer, research, and military robots will grow significantly--and it wants to own the market. At the annual RoboBusiness conference this past June, the software giant released the first "community technical preview" of Microsoft Robotics Studio (MSRS). Now, in its second preview version, MSRS is both a product and the lynchpin of a new educational push: the Institute for Personal Robots in Education (IPRE). Founded by Microsoft Research, Georgia Tech, and Bryn Mawr College, the computer science...

In a surprise move, Linspire is now offering its CNR ("Click 'N Run") software service at no charge to its Linspire and Freespire Linux distribution customers. In addition, the company will soon be open-sourcing the CNR Client. CNR, previously a fee-based service offered at annual subscription rates of $20 for basic and $50 for premium ("Gold") access to new programs, had been the San Diego-based company main source of income. Now, however, according to CEO Kevin Carmony, Linspire is doing well enough from selling its higher-end products and services that it can afford to offer its basic CNR service free...

Zurich, Switzerland, (SPX) Aug 23, 2006 Scientists have unveiled a new technology that could lead to video displays that faithfully reproduce a fuller range of colors than current models, giving such a life-like viewing experience that it could be hard to go back to your old TV. The invention, based on fine-tuning light using microscopic artificial muscles, could turn into competitively priced consumer products in eight years, the scientists say. In ordinary displays such as TV tubes, flat-screen LCDs, or plasma screens, each pixel is composed of three light-emitting elements, one for each of the fundamental colors red, green, and...

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...