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Bionic Eye: Spy

August 9, 2008 – 7:04 pm
esearchers have announced a technological development they say will improve the functionality of digital cameras and other imaging  products. Yonggang Huang, a professor at Northwestern University, and John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have created a lens they said was inspired by the human eye. In addition to enhancing digital camera technology, the eye-shaped lens could have an impact on many devices, Huang said. "Camera technologies can benefit directly from these advances. We believe, more generally, that many new application possibilities will emerge from the ability to integrate ... optoelectronic devices onto curved surfaces. Bring electronics to the human body in the form of advanced biomedical devices is one broad area of possible application," he told TechNewsWorld. Before the technology can be used in something like an optical prosthetic, however, other issues must also be resolved. "We would like to explore the ability of these types of approaches for implantation into the ...

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Food Waste to Generate Electricity

July 13, 2008 – 6:37 am
But while our leaders wrangle over quotas for greenhouse emissions over banquets at lavish summits, there are remarkable individuals who are doing their small bit to prevent our planet from peril. Take Nigerian civil engineer, Dr Joseph Adelegan for instance. He firmly believes that the world's future fuel demands can be met through renewable energy. And he is using increasingly innovative methods to achieve these results. Three years ago Adelegan won plaudits for his "Cows to Kilowatts" project, which used effluents and waste products from abattoirs to produce cooking gas. The project was a winner of the prestigious 2005 Supporting Entrepreneurs for Environment and Development (SEED) International Awards. It is still going strong and being used to provide cooking fuel for nearly 6000 homes in Ibadan, southern Nigeria. Adelegan tells CNN there are now plans to roll it out across most of Africa, including Zimbabwe, Kenya and Egypt. This time he's back with another groundbreaking idea to ...

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Microsoft Need Help for Another - Yahoo Bid

July 5, 2008 – 7:15 pm
Unable to strike a deal on its own, Microsoft  Corp. reportedly is hoping to snap up Yahoo's online search operations with the help of News Corp. and Time Warner Inc.The latest twist in Microsoft's convoluted courtship caused Yahoo's shares to rise more than 3 percent in Wednesday's sinking stock market, even though the chances of a deal getting done still seemed remote. If nothing else, the enthusiastic reaction to the unconfirmed report in The Wall Street Journal served as another reminder that investors want Yahoo to pursue a different path than the one mapped out by Chief Executive Jerry Yang. And that could be bad news for Yang, who started Yahoo as an Internet directory 14 years ago. Unless he can sway shareholder sentiment before Yahoo's annual meeting Aug. 1, Yang could lose his job in a boardroom coup being attempted by investor Carl Icahn. Recognizing Yahoo's vulnerability, Microsoft is trying to recruit News Corp., ...

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Gates Time to Reboot

June 30, 2008 – 2:31 am
REDMOND, Wash. —  On his final full day at Microsoft Corp., Bill Gates went on stage to reminisce with his longtime friend Steve Ballmer, and neither man could hold back tears as Ballmer handed Gates a large scrapbook as a farewell present. Gates, who is stepping back to focus on his philanthropy, sat with CEO Ballmer in a Microsoft conference room and meandered through moments in Microsoft's history. They stopped to get in a few good digs at IBM Corp., whose first personal computers were loaded with Microsoft's DOS operating system before IBM adopted its own operating software and their relations strained. "They went off with OS 2, we were left with good old Windows, and sure enough the David versus Goliath story came out with the right ending," said Gates, eliciting laughter from the crowd of 830 Microsoft employees. Gates, who founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975, admitted that Microsoft has faltered ...

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North Pole May Be Ice-Free This Summer

June 27, 2008 – 8:52 pm
For the first time in recorded history, the North Pole may be free of ice this summer, according to apublished report Friday. The unique prospect of sailing in open waters at the North Pole during the minimum ice cover in August and September has about a 50-50 chance of becoming reality, says one climate scientist's prediction holds true. "The issue is that, for the first time that I am aware of, the North Pole is covered with extensive first-year ice — ice that formed last autumn and winter," Dr. Mark Serreze, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center  in Boulder, Colo., told The Independent newspaper in London. "I'd say it's even odds whether the North Pole melts out." One-year ice is highly vulnerable to melting during the summer months, and satellite data over recent weeks has shown the rate of retreat to be faster than last year, when there was an ...

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Recycling comes full circle

June 27, 2008 – 8:45 pm
It has long been seen as the emblem of a throwaway society but the ordinary plastic bottle is about to take on an unlikely role as recycling paragon, with the launch on Thursday of a new reprocessing facility in east London. On a previously derelict site on the outskirts of Dagenham, sandwiched between the roaring A13 and the Thames, the final components are being placed into giant machines which will soon form the cutting edge of recycling in Britain. The Closed Loop recycling plant claims to be the first in the world to take both milk bottles and clear drinks bottles and turn them back into food-grade plastic.Once it is up and running, the £13m facility aims to help create a continuous cycle by enabling manufacturers to use recycled plastic from the UK in their food and drink packaging. "Essentially the consumer buys their product, say, a bottle of Coca Cola. If they ...

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Gadget Controls You Can Wear (Japan)

June 26, 2008 – 10:33 pm
  YOKOSUKA, Japan —  Rolling your eyes to turn up the volume of a portable music player and tapping your fingers to turn on a DVD player are among technologies Japan's top mobile carrier is testing for "wearable" gadgets. In one version, sensors and chips inside headphones detect electrical current produced by movements of the wearer's eyeballs, says Masaaki Fukumoto, executive research engineer at NTT DoCoMo. "We are working on a cell phone of the future," he said at a suburban Tokyo research center.     The new technology may also enable cell-phone cameras to read bar codes used in Japan to get product information, download music and coupons when the user simply looks at the codes, researchers said. Fukumoto showed a wearable cell phone shaped like a ring about the size of a ping-pong ball. When a wearer sticks his fingers in his ears, the sound travels as vibrations through his bones and into his ears, where ...

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Nintendo DS to Learn English (Japan)

June 26, 2008 – 10:26 pm
TOKYO —  The Nintendo DS isn't just fun and games anymore for English students at Tokyo's Joshi Gakuen all-girls junior high school. The portable video game console is now being used as a key teaching tool, breaking with traditional Japanese academic methods. A giggly class of 32 seventh-graders used plastic pens to spell words like "hamburger" and "cola" on the touch panel screen — the key feature of the hit console — following an electronic voice from the machine. It's a sort of high-tech spelling bee. When the students got the spelling right, the word "good" popped up on the screen, and the student went on to the next exercise. The first five students to complete the drills were awarded colorful stickers. "It's fun," said Chigusa Matsumoto, 12, who zipped through the drills to get her sticker. "You can study while you have fun."

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Meteorite could hold solar clues

June 26, 2008 – 10:03 pm
A rare type of meteorite that could hold clues to the birth of our Solar System has been bought by London's Natural History Museum. The chemistry in the Ivuna meteorite is thought to contain information about the conditions that gave rise to the Sun and planets 4.5 billion years ago. It landed in Tanzania in 1938 as one 705g stone, since split into samples. Pieces from the UK sample, the largest in any public collection in the world, will be removed for study. Most Ivuna samples are held in private collections, or by the Tanzanian government. It is a so-called carbonaceous chondrite. It contains dust granules that may have been part of the cloud of material that came together to form our Solar System. Unlike most rock found in our stellar neighbourhood, it has not been altered by major heating sometime in its history and, as such, gives researchers a remarkable view on the past. Dr Caroline ...

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Fossil fills out water-land leap

June 26, 2008 – 10:01 pm
Scientists say a fossil of a four-legged fish sheds new light on the process of evolution. The creature had a fish-like body but the head of an animal more suited to land than water. The researchers' study, published in the journal Nature, saysVentastega curonica would have looked similar to a small alligator. Scientists say the 365-million-year-old species eventually became an evolutionary dead end. Counting digits About one hundred million years before dinosaurs began to roam the Earth, Ventastega was to be found in the shallow waters and tidal estuaries of modern day Latvia. According to lead author, Professor Per Ahlberg, from Uppsala University, Sweden, this creature had the head of a tetrapod, an animal adapted to live on land. The body, though, was fish-like but with four primitive flippers. "From a distance, it would have looked like an alligator. But closer up, you would have noticed a real tail fin at the back end, a gill flap at the side ...

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