Future Car's Body is a Carbon Fiber Battery [Future Cars]

What if you could use carbon fiber as a battery? That's the idea scientists at the Imperial College of London are working on, aiming to build a car out of carbon fiber material that would not only function as a battery, but will be a strong and light substitute for the sheet metal on cars today.

Not only will it save weight and volume in a car, it would eliminate the need for wiring, letting engineers route electricity through the car's carbon fiber structure. The technology could be taken way beyond cars, also built into airplanes, cellphones, or anything that uses batteries. Just imagine a cellphone as thin as a credit card. Brilliant.

[DVICE]

Another Format Bites The Dust: Sony Discontinues Floppy Disks [Memory]

What, wait? Sony's been churning out floppy disks all these years? And 12 million were sold last year in Japan alone? I guess that's not enough though—as Sony Japan will cease selling them March 2011.
[Gizmodo via Akihabara News]

GM’s Awesome Augmented Reality Windshield [Driving]

We love technology that makes us feel like we’re living in the future. Case in point: General Motors has been working with several universities to develop a working next-generation heads-up display that turns an ordinary windshield into an augmented reality information dashboard.
Such a system can improve safety and advance knowledge behind the wheel, visually identifying important objects in physical space like road signs and the edges of the road you’re on in conditions of poor visibility. It can even bring GPS functions right into the dashboard by outlining the exact building you’re going to. Check out a demo of the system in action below.
The HUD windshield uses night vision, navigation and camera-based sensors to gather data relevant to your surroundings as you drive, and ultraviolet lasers project corresponding images onto the windshield surface. GM says to look for this system being incorporated into its vehicles in the near future.
Would you be excited to have an AR windshield in your next car?





Tags: AR, Augmented Reality, cars, GM, gps, technology, transportation
[Mashable]

In Case Self-Assembling Machinery Didn't Scare You Before... [Chips]

When chipmakers slim down their silicon, they need finer and finer tools to organize all that circuitry. With MIT's latest self-assembling chips, the detail work is handled by molecular strands that, freakishly, just know where to go.

Self-assembling chips aren't new, but up till now, people have used electron-beam rays to carve grooves where molecules get cozy. Electron-beam guns are damn expensive and damn slow. This breakthrough—which relies more than ever on molecules doing their own thing—will lead to a cheaper way to make the smallest physically possible microchips, and probably increase hard drive capacity and current chip performance in the meantime.

The news, published this week by MIT researchers Caroline Ross and Karl Berggren, is that they can now use an electron gun just to make "hitchin' posts" for the molecules to identify then wrap around. The trick? Using two separate kinds of molecule strands—described by Ross as spaghetti and tagliatelle, and by Berggren as DeNiro and Grodin in Midnight Run—that keep each other in line. Once the molecules are in place, a plasma charge dissolves one set, and turns the other set into glass crucial to processing. Berggren and Ross have shown they can fake a chip; their next step is to make a pattern that actually functions as a genuine circuit.

We've reached the limits of my understanding, but not my appreciation. This stuff will one day be used for making ever smaller microprocessors, but in the meantime can be used to streamline current chipmaking methods, and also to pack hard drive data in tighter. I'm relieved to hear there's still a need for someone to say where the posts go, but let's face it, with self-assembling chips like these, who needs ham-handed humans anyway? Queue the excitement—and paranoia.
[Gizmodo via MIT]

Storing Your Data For a Billion Years [Memory]

As concerned as we are about memory, we haven't done much to preserve it. Most of our hard drives don't last past 30 years. But soon, using diamond-like carbon nanotubes, even your Gizmodo comments could last practically forever.

The solution, discovered by researchers at the University of California, takes an entirely new approach to data storage. The proposed device would place a microscopic iron crystal inside a carbon nanotube. With the application of an electric signal of just a few volts, the iron nanoparticle moves back and forth along the tube, registering a binary '1' or '0' depending on its position, basically acting as data bits.


While it's a theoretical solution right now, the scientists who created it are confident that we'll someday see a practical application. And when we do, because of the project's nanoscale nature, we may be able to store 25 DVDs' worth of information on a postage stamp-sized storage device.

The prospect of billion-year storage is fascinating and a little terrifying. Do I want researchers ten thousand years from now combing through my drunken tweets? Actually: maybe. Because when our robot overlords comb through the records and find this post, they'll know that I've always been fully supportive of their cold, steely, logical reign. [Gizmodo via Science via Wired]

Tiny Sensor Listens For Shots and Identifies What Gun Shot Them (and Where) [Military]

This is the gear that gets our troops excited. Microflown Technologies' tiny sensor listens for the sounds of war by measuring particles in the air. Then it reports what weapon made the sound and where that sound originated.

The sensor uses a technology, developed by Microflown, called acoustic vector sensing. AVS heats two 200-nanometer wide platinum strips to 200 degrees Celsius and measures how passing air particles cool them down. From those cooling patterns, Microflown's proprietary software can determine not only what the sound is but also where it came from.



There are other technologies that can do the same type of thing, but they all have their own unique disadvantages: radar-based solutions are traceable; others require the deployment of large apparatuses, and some need multiple sensors to triangulate sounds.

Microflown's matchstick almost seems too good to be true, but several nations' armies—including the Netherlands, Germany, India, Poland, and Australia—are currently testing out the tech and seeing what they hear.

[Gizmodo via DVICE]

IBM ditches copper wires for chips that communicate with pulses of light [Processors]

There's some weird science going down at IBM: namely, ditching the copper that facilities electrical signals for information exchange on circuitry and replacing it instead with chips that can communicate using pulses of light. The whole shebang is called a nanophotonic avalanche photodetector, and IBM claims to have the fastest one in town.

Wait, avalanche? That's right — the term comes from the way the exchange of information builds as the silicon circuits do their thing, according to IBM:

The IBM device explores the avalanche effect in Germanium, a material currently used in production of microprocessor chips. Analogous to a snow avalanche on a steep mountain slope, an incoming light pulse initially frees just a few charge carriers which in turn free others until the original signal is amplified many times. Conventional avalanche photodetectors are not able to detect fast optical signals because the avalanche builds slowly.

The technology's main draw is the fact that it uses substantially less power than a setup that relies on copper and electrical signals, using a whopping 20 times. The example given by IBM is that if a traditional system uses 20-30 volts, the new system would get by with a AA battery, which is rated at around 1.6 volts. Check out a video explanation of the technology below.


[DVICE via PC World]

The Next Touchscreens Will Be Very Sensitive About How Hard You Poke Them [Touchscreens]

We've made the leap from resistive to capacitive touchscreens that are more accurate—and multitouchy—so what's next? Screens that feel how hard you tickle them.
One of several approaches to making that happen uses a quantum tunneling composite—quantum tunneling happens when you bring two conductors close together, but with an insulating layer still between them, and electrons jump between the two conductors. Peratech's way to do this is with a polymer that changes resistance as you apply force for the insulating layer, so that bottom line, screens using this tech can tell how hard you pressing on the screen, since the sensors are able tell within two micrometers of how far in the screen's bending.
While there's other tech out there for pressure-sensing screens, Peratech says their tech uses less power and is more sensitive. The first gadgets with Peratech's sauce is coming out as early as April, so we'll able to poke things with that much more intent. Though, I have a hard enough time hitting the right stuff on screen—now I'm gonna have to keep track of how hard I press?
[Gizmodo via MIT via Engadget]

TMOS displays: the next step after AMOLED-backed LCDs?

I believe that headline contains what’s known as a gaggle of acronyms. TMOS (time-multiplexed optical shutter) is a new display technology that claims brighter, thinner, longer-lasting, higher-resolution displays. Hey! I hear you giggling out there. “Yeah, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.” Okay, so extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I’d say their pitch is somewhere short of extraordinary, but if there’s anything to the technology, it really may just be all that they say. The company and technology have been around for a while, but they’re actually approaching the market at this point and you might want to know something about it before you start seeing the name pop up all over.

The idea is that by taking out as many layers of the display as possible, you reduce light interference (increasing brightness), power draw (better battery life) and component number (allowing for more pixels per square unit). But what to strip out? Uni-Pixel, the people behind TMOS note that instead of having three dots per pixel (red, green, blue in varying intensity), you could just have one, but with the dot changing color so rapidly that your eye only perceives the aggregate color. I’m not going to get all neuroscience on you here, but allow me to just say that there are biological reasons both for and against this technology, which I’m sure Uni-Pixel is aware of.

Micro-mirrors would direct light from side-mounted LEDs, which sounds clumsy to me, but they say it’ll result in refresh rates far above current displays’. They would also be simpler to manufacture, more durable, and more flexible. Anyhow, the engineering challenges are serious, but they say they should be able to put one in a product in 2010. Guess we’ll just have to wait!
[CrunchGear]

New Sharp LCD technology will save power, boost picture quality

Sharp Japan today announced [press release in English] the development of a new method that makes it possible to control the alignment of liquid crystal molecules in LCD screens with high precision. In practical terms, this means the new UV²A technology could lead to TVs that save energy and display pictures with higher contrast ratios.

The main idea is to use a special material that reacts to UV radiation. The liquid crystal molecules align in accordance with the direction of the radiation so that the screen can display dark blacks. Sharp says the the contrast ratio is enhanced by 60% to 5,000:1, compared with conventional LCD screens. The response time is even doubled, according to the company. The new technology also leads to a more efficient use of the backlight, which means you can save up to 20% energy when you watch TV.

Sharp says production of LCDs making use of the new system will begin in a Japanese plant as early as next month.

Only the suits stand between you and 100GB Blu-ray discs

Sharp (yes Sharp, I was surprised too) has developed an improved version of the current technology used to read and write Blu-ray discs. By changing the way the discs are made and improving the laser, Sharp has been able to increase the maximum capacity of the Blu-ray disc to 75GB and 100GB, from the current standard of 50GB.
What they’re doing is actually really complicated, but the gist of it is that they are changing the laser used to read the disc, and replacing the coating with a new aluminum oxynitride one instead of the old dielectric film. This will allow for the use of discs with three and four layers, as opposed to the standard two.
When will we see this new tech? It’s still unclear at this time. Sharp is currently working to get their upgrades approved by the Blu-ray Disc Association. We’ll let you know when we know more, but at this point there’s no ETA.
[via Blu-ray.com and Engadget]