Blogs

http://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotech/2030...

Australian researchers are developing a process that could lead to self-cleaning wool sweaters and silk ties.

Researchers at Monash University, in Victoria, Australia, have found a way to coat fibers with titanium dioxide nanocrystals, which break down food and dirt in sunlight. The researchers, led by organic chemist and nanomaterials researcher Walid Daoud, have made natural fibers such as wool, silk, and hemp that will automatically remove food, grime, and even red-wine stains when exposed to sunlight.

http://www.gcn.com/online/vol1_no1/45862-1.ht...

Two Energy Department labs are building a supercomputer that will be capable of executing more than one quintillion floating-point operations/sec, or one exaflop, the department announced this week.

Sandia National Laboratories and Oak Ridge National Laboratory are collaborating on the system. Congress has allotted $7.4 million for the project in fiscal 2008.

The computer will work on tough scientific problems, such as modeling how large numbers of particles interact with one another.

http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/02/22...

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/2024...

Technology Review presents its annual list of the 10 most exciting technologies.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7254078...

Gamers will soon be able to interact with the virtual world using their thoughts and emotions alone.

A neuro-headset which interprets the interaction of neurons in the brain will go on sale later this year.

"It picks up electrical activity from the brain and sends wireless signals to a computer," said Tan Le, president of US/Australian firm Emotiv.

"It allows the user to manipulate a game or virtual environment naturally and intuitively," she added.

http://www.physorg.com/news122534699.html

Solar cell directly splits water for hydrogenPlants trees and algae do it. Even some bacteria and moss do it, but scientists have had a difficult time developing methods to turn sunlight into useful fuel. Now, Penn State researchers have a proof-of-concept device that can split water and produce recoverable hydrogen.

http://www.physorg.com/news96732819.html

Global Research Technologies, LLC (GRT), a technology research and development company, and Klaus Lackner from Columbia University have achieved the successful demonstration of a bold new technology to capture carbon from the air. The "air extraction" prototype has successfully demonstrated that indeed carbon dioxide (CO2) can be captured from the atmosphere. This is GRT’s first step toward a commercially viable air capture device.

Wikipedia has been a huge success providing useful, user-generated information with no central censoring or editing but relying instead on the user community to review and correct information. Now CNN is trying to do the same for news.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/...

Human Culture Subject To Natural Selection, Study Shows

ScienceDaily (Feb. 16, 2008) — The process of natural selection can act on human culture as well as on genes, a new study finds. Scientists at Stanford University have shown for the first time that cultural traits affecting survival and reproduction evolve at a different rate than other cultural attributes. Speeded or slowed rates of evolution typically indicate the action of natural selection in analyses of the human genome.

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/02/15/tech-carbon-capture.html

Scientists have created metal-organic crystals capable of soaking up carbon dioxide gas like a sponge, which could be used to keep industrial emissions of the gas out of the atmosphere.

Chemists at the University of California Los Angeles said the crystals — which go by the name zeolitic imidazolate frameworks, or ZIFs — can be tailored to absorb and trap specific molecules.

An optical photograph of crystals of zeolitic imidazolate frameworks (ZIFs). The porous materials can be designed to soak up specific molecules, such as carbon dioxide, making them potentially useful to trap the greenhouse gas. (Omar Y. Yaghi/Science)
"The technical challenge of selectively removing carbon dioxide has been overcome," said UCLA chemistry professor Omar Yaghi in a statement.