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Day 3 of IBM Impact 2010, the premier conference for Business and IT professionals. May 2-7, 2010 in Las Vegas, NV. Category:

Jesse Schell's talk about the future of game design as it invades the real world is just astounding. If you do experience design of any kind it'll be the most valuable (and entertaining) 20 minutes you'll spend all week.

ScienceDaily (Apr. 26, 2010) — Heating and squishing microalgae in a pressure-cooker can fast-forward the crude-oil-making process from millennia to minutes.

ScienceDaily (Sep. 6, 2010) - Plants are good at doing what scientists and engineers have been struggling to do for decades: converting sunlight into stored energy, and doing so reliably day after day, year after year. Now some MIT scientists have succeeded in mimicking a key aspect of that process.

"ScienceDaily (Aug. 31, 2010) - Two new groundbreaking scientific papers by researchers at UC Santa Barbara demonstrate the synthesis of nanosize biological particles with the potential to fight cancer and other illnesses. The studies introduce new approaches that are considered "green" nanobiotechnology because they use no artificial compounds."

ScienceDaily (Dec. 3, 2010) - Earth has run out of room to expand fisheries, according to a new study led by University of British Columbia researchers that charts the systematic expansion of industrialized fisheries.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 3, 2010) - Will we one day design and create molecules, cells and microorganisms that produce specific chemical products from simple, readily-available, inexpensive starting materials? Will the synthetic organic chemistry now used to produce pharmaceutical drugs, plastics and a host of other products eventually be surpassed by metabolic engineering as the mainstay of our chemical industries? Yes, according to Jay Keasling, chemical engineer and one of the world's foremost practitioners of metabolic engineering.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 3, 2010) - Africa can feed itself. And it can make the transition from hungry importer to self-sufficiency in a single generation.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 3, 2010) - IBM scientists have unveiled a new chip technology that integrates electrical and optical devices on the same piece of silicon, enabling computer chips to communicate using pulses of light (instead of electrical signals), resulting in smaller, faster and more power-efficient chips than is possible with conventional technologies.

ScienceDaily (May 22, 2010) - A major step toward being able to regulate nerve cells externally with the help of electronics has been taken by researchers at Linköping University and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. The breakthrough is based on an ion transistor of plastic that can transport ions and charged biomolecules and thereby address and regulate cells.

ScienceDaily (Apr. 16, 2010) - Solar power in southeastern Ontario has the potential to produce almost the same amount of power as all the nuclear reactors in the United States, according to two studies conducted by the Queen's University Applied Sustainability Research Group located in Kingston, Canada.

Powerful robots must know their limits to avoid injuring humans - and the only way to learn is from experience

Professor Andre Geim, who along with his colleague Professor Kostya Novoselov won the 2010 Nobel Prize for graphene - the world's thinnest material, has now modified it to make fluorographene - a one-molecule-thick material chemically similar to Teflon. Fluorographene is fully-fluorinated graphene and is basically a two-dimensional version of Teflon, showing similar properties including chemical inertness and thermal stability.

WASHINGTON - A black sealant sprayed on parking lots, driveways and playgrounds turns out to be the largest contributor to the rise of a toxic pollutant in urban lakes and reservoirs across America, according to a new U.S. Geological Survey study. Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/12/05/104742/american-urban-lake-pollution.html#ixzz17OXdgMmS

With the help of their 1.8 petaflop supercomputer, Jaguar, researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee are sifting through internet traffic in search of suspicions patterns that will lead police to the perpetrators of child pornography.

Full Videos of the Singularity Summit 2010 Talks

Engineers at Stevens Institute of Technology have developed a technique to optically modulate the frequency of a laser beam and create a signal that is disrupted significantly less by environmental factors, says Dr. Rainer Martini. The research provides for enhanced optical communications, allowing mobile units not tied to fiber optic cable to communicate in the range of 100 GHz and beyond, the equivalent of 100 gigabytes of data per second. Eventually, the team hopes to extend the reach into the terahertz spectrum. The frequency or amplitude modulation of middle infrared quantum cascade lasers has been limited by electronics, which are barely capable of accepting frequencies of up to 10 GHz by switching a signal on and off.  Marini and his team have developed a method to optically induce fast amplitude modulation in a quantum cascade laser to control the laser's intensity. Their amplitude modulation system employed a second laser to modulate the amplitude of the middle infrared laser, using light to control light. The current detector is only capable of detecting frequencies up to 10 GHz, but Dr. Martini is confident that a new detector will make the system capable of much higher frequencies. With an optical system that is stable enough, satellites may one day convert to laser technology, resulting in a more mobile military and super-sensitive scanners, as well as faster Internet for the masses, says Martini. Ref.: "Optically induced fast wavelength modulation in a quantum cascade laser," Applied Physics Letters, July 7, 2010.

Microsoft has posted an awesome new concept video with some ubercool new interfaces that could be here in five to ten years, estimates Kurt DelBene, President, Microsoft Office Division. That sounds a bit conservative. "All of the ideas in the video are based on real technology," he said. "Some of the capabilities, such as speech recognition, real time collaboration, and data visualization, already exist today. Others are not yet available in specific products, but represent active research and development happening at Microsoft and other companies." "Other companies" … hmm, some of the concepts look a bit like Nokia's visionary Morph concept tech  (see the video at the bottom of this post and our 2010 news item).

LEDsThe strange quantum state of entanglement isn't just challenging to think about, it's hard to create. This "spooky" phenomenon-in which two particles are linked, even if they're separated by distance-can be created by scientists in the lab using bulky lasers. But scientists published a study in Nature today in which they created a light-emitting diode (LED) that produces entangled photons.

"Machine translation could be good enough to obviate the need for a primary global language."